If cats have 4 legs, but a cat loses one, does it make it not a cat? What if it's also got a bit of genetic mutation? What if it's a lot of mutation? What if it was brought up by dogs? How much catness can you strip away and still have a cat?
This is how I think about gender 1/
This is how I think about gender 1/
There's no answer on what makes a cat not a cat or not, but we can be 'more catlike' or 'less.' To jump from one bucket (cat) to a different bucket (dog, or some other new thing), you need a *lot* of changes to the structure and traits and associations entirely. 2/
And to be clear, I am *absolutely pro* attempting to jump buckets in genderspace, I just also think it's extremely hard to do, because there's a huge amount of traits to strip away. A 3-legged, mutant cat raised by dogs still registers to us as 'cat', tho a weird one. 3/
Gender isn't just a social construct, much as a cat isn't just catlike behaviors. Gender also *includes* social construct, much as catlike behaviors are part of 'catness.' Gender isn't just biology either, and it's also inextricably linked with biology. 4/
Gender is a 'recognized pattern', much like an animal species is a recognized pattern, or a tree, or a table, and it's nonsensical to ask which aspect of the pattern is the true core of the pattern. It's an accumulation of all the things, together, mostly. 5/
A 3-legged, mutant cat raised by dogs still qualifies to us as a 'weird cat' because the vast majority of what we recognize as 'cat bucket' *still applies to the weird cat*. It still has whiskers, and would respond to cat medicine, shares the genome, presumably meows. 6/
So I'm often confused when people are like 'intersex people prove gender isn't binary.' This feels like saying something like 'a cat that says woof proves that the cat-dog dimension isn't binary.' They're taking a single trait out of many and pinning the entire gender on that. 7/
Gender is absolutely, unequivocally binary right now. Maybe one day it won't be, much as maybe we could have cat-dog hybrids with enough advanced tech. But at the moment there are two recognizable, distinct patterns - male and female. 8/
And to restate - I am saying that gender buckets are hard to get out of, *not* that people shouldn't get out of them. I strongly support people's right to attempt to escape their bucket of birth, and I hope our tech advances to make this easier. 9/
I also disagree with the move some people make, in their efforts to escape their gender bucket, where they insist that the bucket isn't real, or that it's only defined by a few small things, or that we're hallucinating buckets that don't exist. 10/
I empathize with the motivation itself - being stuck in a bucket you don't want to be in can really, really suck, and leads to stuff like much higher rates of depression and suicide. But the answer here isn't denying bucket existence, it's helping people actually get out. 11/
And again to be even more clear, I do support small social moves to help people feel like their bucket is less obvious, like using preferred pronouns and names or changing gender categories on legal documents. I think this is relatively harmless and kind to do.
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