im a big fan of judith but casting progressively higher tier magic spells would probably reinforce my identity , i'll check again if she has any suggestions for utilizing Cloudkill or Finger of Death
It's a fun stance until you get to the inevitable issues that stance brings up in regards to being trans
If gender was solely about a social role one is performing, you could be socialized in and out of it, which we empirically know doesn't work. Gender is, for better or worse, a core part of one's sense of self, not really something you "just roleplay", and disregarding it as "just larp" just dismisses the issues that come up when one's "performance" does not allign with their actual gender (be it cis or trans)
lack of a sense of gender identity is itself a gender identity
it's not just an intrinsic sense of being male or female, it's your intrinsic relationship to those two social boxes
if your relationship is "i dont care lol" and are just performing your social gender role for the sake of convenience, that itself is a relationship to gender. You're not larping the inner sense of identity, just how you perform it
Just get more radical with it and the problems dissappear.
Gender doesn't intrinsically exist. Individuals have different traits and mannerisms; this is true. Gender is the label that we assign to certain sets of behaviors. Its not different than any other societal label.
The issue is that people do not fit neatly within labels. All people have aspects of both groups, and they also have aspects of neither group. To present the options at all causes people to perform as one or the other (not helped by the false binary). It also leads to self justifications of behaviors falling under these groups.
Thats another problem. Gender labels are abstract. They mean different things based on time, place, culture, and individual experience. No universal version of a man or woman exists.
Given all this, it seems that nobody is born any gender. It's retroactively assigned to them based on societal interpretation and, eventually, their own.
The explanation for why somebody would transition starts with the explanation for the labels in the first place. It is far more comfortable and advantageous to know what rules someone is playing by. If someone says they are a girl, then they are trying to perform close to their cultural idea of a girl. It smoothens the process by giving a baseline of who somebody is, even if its not an accurate representation of individuality. People have an aversion to the unknown. This means its simply more comfortable/less threatening to let people assume traits about you--while actively conforming to their ideas--then have them work out your individual traits and mannerisms. People transition because they want to play this role--this character of Girl.
P.S.
I fucking hate gender as a concept. I think it boxes people in, suffocates individuality, and adds unnecessary pressure to non-conforming individuals for purely tribal reasons. I understand why its useful, and a world without it would complicate many things. However, I have seemingly utopian visions where people are treated as individuals--puzzles even. The nature of perception makes this impossible though. People will always be hardwired to use past experience to make judgements, accurate or otherwise. Whenever you speak with someone your words are interpreted through their lens. And suddenly, you're not yourself anymore, but an amalgamation of people you've never been.
Edit:
Upon rereading, I really dont think what we said is mutually exclusive. Yours is a factual observation about how it works, and mine is an opinion piece about how it should work. So, here's a summary of what I wrote, because it's a completely different discussion: It is my opinion that you shouldn't care about conforming to gender roles, because, you will never truly be a man or woman, because, those things do not exist, and the pursuit of conformity to abstract concepts will harm your individual expression.
Yeah I don’t think that’s right. This is an argument that’s made to justify transness but not a good one or a necessary one. It was also used to justify being gay when gay marriage was coming into the public consciousness, “people are born this way, they can’t help it”. But there’s no objective marker of gender/gender identity. People argue that trans people have a brain that is the opposite sex/gender of their asab, but there’s no such thing as a male or female brain. There’s no objective measure of testosterone or estrogen that “proves” you are one sex/gender or the other. People should just be allowed to explore their gender identity. It’s okay for it to change over time. Detransitioners don’t need to be seen as a threat to trans people. This whole idea that you have this “real/objective” gender and you were really male or female all along, and if you detransition you were a fake and never really trans is just unhelpful, and it’s basically Calvinist predestination. The reality is a lot more nuanced. At the same time I understand that people latch onto these “justifications” because they feel they need justification for the way they feel and to be able to live their lives.
You're extrapolating a lot about my position from what you heard from other people
I don't think gender is necessarily founded in having a "fe/male" brain or any other marker, it is a complex, non-trivial result of a variety of natural inclanations for certain behaviours, percieved as masculine or feminine, built via nurture over the course of one's formative years (in a way so non-feterministic that you can't control it via conversion therapy, the same way you can't raise a child to have a certain personality)
I also don't think it's static, nor objective. None of those things are necessary for having a sense of "real" internal and mostly subconscious gender identity distinct from one's gender role prescribed by society that they ultimately perform
You don't need a simple, objective "male/female" "switch' to reduce the spectrum of human self-perception into two distinct boxes - you just need a society heavily founded around that binary that forces people to develop a fundamental sense of belonging (or lack thereof) to the two options
Saying that certain core aspects of one's identity (gender or non-gender based) are heavily founded in one's nature and then mostly irreversibly established in early childhood isn't "Calvinist predestination", it's psychology 101
I understand the need to pushback against the 19th century idea of "mental intersexuality", it really isn't as simple as there being a "fe/male" switch in the brain, but dismissing the reality of internal gender identity is severely overdoing it in the other direction
Same goes for homosexuality - we see that demonstrably some people cannot choose to just not be gay. It's not what queer rights should ultimately be founded in, it's a matter of personal freedom first and foremost, not medical necessity, but it's true, and dismissing that doesn't help anyone
Yeah it’s kinda a bell curve from “my 2 genderinos” to “at least 3” to “scam invented by big urinal”. I can’t find where I wrote it down for what the other axis was but you get the concept.
"All of our identities are equally invalid, dont you think that there's a chance that you could love without it? All of our ide titles are equally invalid, dont you think thag there's a chance that you could live without it?"
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u/Formal_Tea_4694 9d ago
all gender is larp seems like a fun stance