Your Gender Doesn't Matter (To Me) -- Moleculor

This has been something that has been bouncing around in my head for several months now. Every time I want to sit down and write it, the complex nature of it and the potential controversy it might spark pushes me towards other distractions. Like Skyrim.

So this is the something close to the fifth attempt at writing this. It will be a rough draft, and may not be perfectly accurate in word choice. In fact, word choice and the lack of common language around sex and gender is one of the problems that inspired this little bit of writing. I apologize in advance if I misspeak or contribute to confusion.

Without further ado.

I was raised in a very mixed social setting. Being a military brat, there was a significant amount of culture, race, and social mix in how and where I was raised. I lived in Germany, went to school with all sorts of various races and people from different backgrounds. I've only noticed how diverse things were in that setting after leaving that setting. Almost everyone out here is the same boring homogenous white conservative blah de blah.

The reason I bring this up is to point out that I was specifically and intentionally exposed to (at a very early age) the concept that a person's sex does not limit them in any way, shape, or form. That, in other than the biological, there were no differences between the two sexes.

However, one thing I was never exposed to until I was 18 or older was the concept that sex and gender were two different things. For me, growing up, sex WAS your gender, and gender WAS your sex. They were two words that meant the exact same thing. This was heavily reinforced by the concept of sexual equality. If there's no difference between the sexes other than the biological ones, how can there be additional differences between genders?

Turns out that's not the case for some people.

So I did some research. Turns out, for some, sex is the physical, and gender is the socially accepted stereotyping.

To clarify, sex is all about the physical: It's your genitals, whether you have a beard or the (in)ability to grow one. It's your skeletal structure, the timbre of your voice, your breasts or lack thereof.

Gender is "something else". And that's where I tripped over my first problem in understanding the concept. Gender was never clearly defined by anyone I talked to or listened to. I heard plenty about what gender wasn't.

Gender isn't your physical form.
Gender isn't your genetics.
Gender isn't your neurology.
Gender isn't your hormones.
Gender isn't your fertility/virility.
Gender isn't your behavior.
Gender isn't your job, clothes, makeup, hair.

So I ran around asking questions, trying to understand what gender is. I ask communities specificly for transgender people, mostly got responses that can be boiled down to 'Meh, I stopped caring about definitions' (which has interesting implications about how much these definitions actually matter) or confusion. Asked in sexuality groups, got more confusion and a few more reasoned responses, then asked in general communities and got confusion.

The few people who seemed to both understand what I was asking and care enough to try and help me work out a definition were enlightening, though the process took a few weeks.

Turns out, gender is the generally accepted social stereotypes associated with one sex or another. (So, gender CAN be all of those things listed above, but isn't necessarily any of those things.)

Which is a problem.

Why is this a problem? Well, it assumes that you and I share a common definition of what is "masculine" or "feminine". It assumes that the stereotypes in one area are the same as the stereotypes in another area. Hell, it assumes that your stereotypes (or mine) are somehow not offensive to me (or you).

Worse, this trips right into such things as "sexual orientation". For example, for me sexual orientation is about sex (otherwise known as "that which is physical") and sexual attraction is something that occurs in my brain and not on a checklist.

For example, I'm a straight male. A zero on the Kinsey scale. Traits that I identify as being physically associated with men, even if those traits are on someone who was born with female genitalia/genetics/whatever, turn me off. Likewise if I have the mental knowledge of traits strongly identified as being exclusive to the male sex (beards, cocks, etc) having been previously present on any person, no matter how attractive and female they may look now, I am also turned off. Sex and arousal is in the mind, and if a thing that is a turn-off is mentally associated with a person, that person is not a valid source of sexual arousal for me.

For others, sexual orientation is about gender. To paraphrase something someone on Reddit said: "A straight man goes out, hires a prostitute, takes her to a hotel, and proceeds to suck her cock" is a perfectly valid and totally logical thing for some people. To me, it makes no sense (and I'd go so far as to suggest that perhaps that's not a sexual orientation, but a gender orientation). However, this becomes a problem when one person says "My sexual orientation is straight", and they mean "with respect to my/their gender", and the other person assumes they mean "with respect to my/their sex". In that situation, communication has failed to occur.

This means that, currently, in the lexicon of gender, sex, and gender issues, one word can have multiple meanings, and no one is clarifying what they mean when they use them, which defeats the purpose of having words. Words are there to have a shared meaning so that concepts might be communicated. When the shared meaning vanishes, the word becomes useless gibberish. "Man" or "woman" might as well be "hurgifib" and "talagrandy", for all the useful information they communicate.

Which brings me right back to gender: Currently, people in favor of sexual equality and equal opportunity are working to make sure that people of different sexes can all do the same things. The closer we come to sexual equality, the fewer unique stereotypes exist around various genders. And genders are defined by stereotypes. Without them, gender ceases to exist. If we, as a culture, suddenly shift over into a world where men do things that are currently associated with "femininity", suddenly what it means to be "masculine" shifts into the "feminine". And at that point the definition of gender starts to break down from its already precarious position.

And, ultimately, we come back to me. (Because everything is about me!) For me, your gender doesn't matter. First, I'm a firm believer in sexual equality. One sex can do all the various and sundry things that the other sex can do. Hell, I grew up in a place with unisex public bathrooms! Sex is NOT a barrier to anything other than biology. Secondly, your chosen gender doesn't change any relevant information I have about you, other than whatever gender specific pronoun I use in conversation.

The only thing that anyone who has a chosen gender is telling me when they declare their gender is what pronoun to use. Nothing else.

Why? Because I have no other idea of what that particular gender means to them. They could say they're a woman, belch, pull out a cigar, light it up and puff on it, then write their name in the snow in piss, and not only is that their accepted definition for 'woman' (gender), but it's one I have no business arguing with.

But here's the problem: When your gender only means "which pronoun do I use" and nothing else, it becomes about as important to me as your favorite color. From my perspective it's not an identity. It doesn't affect whether or not I'm sexually attracted to you. It doesn't change the fact that you're still a person.

Your gender doesn't matter to me.