![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Sticky Post: Gender and Gender Identity
Dec. 15th, 2020 09:51 pmI am not going to do yet another Gender 101 post here. There are already way too many reputable and responsible organizations with excellent pages that talk about gender and define gender-related terms much better and more comprehensively than I could ever do. They're pretty easy to find. If the one you find affirms that everyone's gender identity is valid, you're in a good place. Organizations that provide assistance and support for trans people are usually a good bet, because trans people and the people who want to help them are dealing with gender all the time, and can't help but think about it.
With so many different people presenting gender information, it's completely understandable that the views that are presented come from different places, and turn out to be more supportive of their own ideas on the subject -- often to the point where the definitions appear to be completely different. I'm not linking to any of them because, to me, it's most important that everyone understand gender the way that suits them best, and I don't want to impose my opinions on that process. This is my view of how I understand gender.
My own view of gender aligns well with Julia Serano's: gender identity is an emergent property of the physical, emotional, and cultural effects on a person's life. Which is to say that there is nothing about any of those effects that categorically determines someone's gender identity, but they all contribute to that person's understanding of their gender identity. And every person is their own sole authority on their gender identity: it is what they say it is, and the actions they take that, to them, align with their gender identity, support their assertion.
Here are some conclusions that I believe are important, that follow from my current view of gender.
A gender identity is a property of a person. Although it is frequently a static property, it need not be. And someone's having a dynamic gender identity does not invalidate them or their current gender identity. Someone's gender identity is visible only to the extent they choose to project it, and to the extent that those actions are recognized as affirming their gender identity.
Going along with this, saying someone "identifies as" a gender identity introduces doubt into that being their gender identity. "Identification" is something that is done, not something that just is. I interpret it as indicating that one person, observing someone, constructs a hypothesis that "identifies" the target of their observation "as" having a particular gender identity. The observations may or may not be meaningful, or interpreted correctly, and the hypothesis may not be soundly constructed. To what extent these apply strongly influences the accuracy of the hypothesis. So, for me, someone who says "I identify as a woman" is only saying, "Based on observing these things about myself [which are probably far from comprehensive] and my understanding of how these things relate to gender [which may well be fatally biased by the people they know and the culture they inhabit], I choose to guess that my gender identity is "woman" [perhaps because my gender knowledge declares that "man" and "woman" are the only valid genders]." Part of becoming gender-aware is realizing that one must validate such a hypothesis, for others and for one's own self, instead of just using it.
Similarly, the pronoun sets someone associates with themself are a property of that person, be they ones that were assigned to them that they have decided fit, or ones that they chose for themself because the ones they used previously no longer fit them. The pronouns may be contextual (mine are), or variable (Eddie Izzard was, until recently, a canonical example here), but they are not "preferences". They are as much a property of a person as their name, and deserve the same respect. Denying the validity of someone's name and imposing a different name on them has been used as a tool for personal oppression and cultural suppression. This is why I am very uncomfortable with people who will not use the name or pronouns someone asserts are theirs.
Presentation choices and medical intervention are not essential components of establishing someone's gender identity. Some people find these actions useful in support of their gender identity, while others do not. Deciding to disclose whether someone has received hormonal or surgical treatment in support of their gender identity is private and personal information, and not anyone else's to ask.
By way of wanting to find a way to more clearly identify the source of gender assumptions, I have repurposed a couple of terms that make it easier for me to describe some aspects of gender. Continuing the tradition of appropriating Greek and Latin prefixes in defining medical terms, I will often use the prefix "episio-" (Greek term meaning "loins"; it may be familiar to those who have come across the term "episotomy") to identify conclusions drawn from observing someone's crotch, and "morpho-" (Greek term meaning "form"; also seen in the biological term "morphology") to identify conclusions drawn from observing someone's body shape. (One could also use the already established "karyo-" to identify conclusions drawn from observing someone's chromosomes.) This means I can use "morphogender" to refer to the act of applying stereotypical associations of body shape with gender to guess someone's gender identity (which can then also be called their morphogender), describe the gender identity that is culturally assumed for a particular body shape as "morphonormative", or use "episiology" to refer to the assumptions that the appearance of someone's crotch is predictive of their gender identity. The assumptions of episiology are quite a bit like a now-discredited set that claimed that the shape of one's skull was predictive of their mental inclinations. And I hope that sometime in the future episiology will be discredited then to the same extent that phrenology is now, and am pleased by the congruence in terms.
With so many different people presenting gender information, it's completely understandable that the views that are presented come from different places, and turn out to be more supportive of their own ideas on the subject -- often to the point where the definitions appear to be completely different. I'm not linking to any of them because, to me, it's most important that everyone understand gender the way that suits them best, and I don't want to impose my opinions on that process. This is my view of how I understand gender.
My own view of gender aligns well with Julia Serano's: gender identity is an emergent property of the physical, emotional, and cultural effects on a person's life. Which is to say that there is nothing about any of those effects that categorically determines someone's gender identity, but they all contribute to that person's understanding of their gender identity. And every person is their own sole authority on their gender identity: it is what they say it is, and the actions they take that, to them, align with their gender identity, support their assertion.
Here are some conclusions that I believe are important, that follow from my current view of gender.
A gender identity is a property of a person. Although it is frequently a static property, it need not be. And someone's having a dynamic gender identity does not invalidate them or their current gender identity. Someone's gender identity is visible only to the extent they choose to project it, and to the extent that those actions are recognized as affirming their gender identity.
Going along with this, saying someone "identifies as" a gender identity introduces doubt into that being their gender identity. "Identification" is something that is done, not something that just is. I interpret it as indicating that one person, observing someone, constructs a hypothesis that "identifies" the target of their observation "as" having a particular gender identity. The observations may or may not be meaningful, or interpreted correctly, and the hypothesis may not be soundly constructed. To what extent these apply strongly influences the accuracy of the hypothesis. So, for me, someone who says "I identify as a woman" is only saying, "Based on observing these things about myself [which are probably far from comprehensive] and my understanding of how these things relate to gender [which may well be fatally biased by the people they know and the culture they inhabit], I choose to guess that my gender identity is "woman" [perhaps because my gender knowledge declares that "man" and "woman" are the only valid genders]." Part of becoming gender-aware is realizing that one must validate such a hypothesis, for others and for one's own self, instead of just using it.
Similarly, the pronoun sets someone associates with themself are a property of that person, be they ones that were assigned to them that they have decided fit, or ones that they chose for themself because the ones they used previously no longer fit them. The pronouns may be contextual (mine are), or variable (Eddie Izzard was, until recently, a canonical example here), but they are not "preferences". They are as much a property of a person as their name, and deserve the same respect. Denying the validity of someone's name and imposing a different name on them has been used as a tool for personal oppression and cultural suppression. This is why I am very uncomfortable with people who will not use the name or pronouns someone asserts are theirs.
Presentation choices and medical intervention are not essential components of establishing someone's gender identity. Some people find these actions useful in support of their gender identity, while others do not. Deciding to disclose whether someone has received hormonal or surgical treatment in support of their gender identity is private and personal information, and not anyone else's to ask.
By way of wanting to find a way to more clearly identify the source of gender assumptions, I have repurposed a couple of terms that make it easier for me to describe some aspects of gender. Continuing the tradition of appropriating Greek and Latin prefixes in defining medical terms, I will often use the prefix "episio-" (Greek term meaning "loins"; it may be familiar to those who have come across the term "episotomy") to identify conclusions drawn from observing someone's crotch, and "morpho-" (Greek term meaning "form"; also seen in the biological term "morphology") to identify conclusions drawn from observing someone's body shape. (One could also use the already established "karyo-" to identify conclusions drawn from observing someone's chromosomes.) This means I can use "morphogender" to refer to the act of applying stereotypical associations of body shape with gender to guess someone's gender identity (which can then also be called their morphogender), describe the gender identity that is culturally assumed for a particular body shape as "morphonormative", or use "episiology" to refer to the assumptions that the appearance of someone's crotch is predictive of their gender identity. The assumptions of episiology are quite a bit like a now-discredited set that claimed that the shape of one's skull was predictive of their mental inclinations. And I hope that sometime in the future episiology will be discredited then to the same extent that phrenology is now, and am pleased by the congruence in terms.
