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What is Gender?

1: GENDER IS A COMPLEX THING. Essentially gender is our internal relationship to societal concepts of masculinity and femininity.

2. GENDER EXPRESSION is the behavior attributes and symbols that indicate and perform one’s gender(s).

3. PART OF IT HAS TO DO WITH how you feel, part of it is how people see you, part of it has to do with expectations based on biological sex. Frankly, no definition of gender really gets all of what it is or isn’t. 

4. MANY PEOPLE IDENTIFY WITHIN the binary of man or woman, many have a fluid experience within the spectrum, and still many identify outside the spectrum of these two options altogether.

5. CISGENDER PEOPLE identify with the gender society prescribes them at birth based on external sex characteristics.

TRANSGENDER PEOPLE internally align with gender(s) other than those assigned at birth.

Even Biological Sex Is NOT A Binary

The terms “MALE” AND “FEMALE” are used to categorize the anatomical differences in our bodies, but everything we attribute to biological sex— chromosomes, horomones, sex-linked genes, and genitalia— all exist on a complex spectrum. We are taught that XX chromosomes means female and XY chromosomes means male, but someone with XX chromosomes can be born with a penis and someone with XY chromosomes could be born with a vagina. Other chromosomal combinations exist (including X, XXY, XXX), and many people are born with varying degrees of both ovaries and testicles. This diversity has come to be generalized as “intersex” (neither male nor female). Tragically, doctors in many parts of the world perform irreversible surgeries to assign a binary sex to children whose bodies don’t match traditional understandings of male and female anatomy.

//For a descriptive thread on why biological sex is not a binary, visit https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1207834357639139328.html 

Gender vs Orientation

BEING TRANS IS NOT THE SAME THING AS BEING GAY.

Who you are sexually or romantically attracted to is separate from your gender. Many people confuse the two.

“When I first came out as a lesbian in college, my friends assumed I must feel like a man on the inside because they couldn’t imagine two women loving each other.” “Growing up, everyone assumed I was gay because of my personality and how I dressed, but that was because they didn’t have the language for gender diversity. To them, everything queer had to be gay.”

Brief History of Gender Diversity

While most of the western world is only just waking up to the diversity and complexity of gender, many cultures around the world and throughout time have recognized transgender and gender nonconforming people, often giving them spiritual reverence.

Ancient Egyptians identified three genders, man, sekhet, and woman, as early as early as 2000 BCE. Other cultures acknowledge three, four, and even more genders.

THE MODERN EMPHASIS ON GENDER as a rigid binary is primarily the consequence of European colonialism: a Christianity of patriarchy and cis-normativity allowed European colonists to call other cultures primitive and justify violence against them along with other forms of theft and control.

The Importance of Pronouns and Names

There’s so many options for pronouns: he, she, they, ze, or even just using a person’s name, and more. THE WORDS WE USE TO GENDER PEOPLE MATTER.

Calling a transgender person by their birth name, or a previous name associated with an identity that is not authentic to them can be harmful. Often times trans people choose a name that aligns more with their identity. Their previous name is sometimes called their “dead name.” DON’T DEAD NAME PEOPLE.

Using a person’s chosen name and proper pronouns can REDUCE THEIR RISK OF SUICIDE BY 30%.

FUN FACT: the singular ‘they’ has been used as a gender neutral pronoun in English for many hundreds of years!

God is Not a Man

God is infinitely more complex than can be contained within human vocabulary and thoughts (see Isaiah 55:8-9).

THIS INCLUDES GENDER. God’s fullness includes woman, man, non-binary, and being outside of gender. The gender-diverse nature of God is reflected throughout scripture. In addition to masculine terms, God is repeatedly described as a nursing, protective, and comforting Mother who has born us from Her womb (Hosea 11:3-4; Deuteronomy 32:11-18; Isaiah 42:14, 49:15, 66:13; Psalm 131:2; Matthew 23:37; etc). Even Genesis 1:27 says all of humankind was made in God’s image (not just cisgender men).

In the Beginning

The Bible says that in the beginning, God created day and night, land and sea, birds and fish. But have you ever seen a sunset, or a beach, or a penguin? Well, trans and non-binary people are kind of like that. A BEAUTIFUL ARRAY OF DIVERSITY.

So, God created male and female, and we are no less beautiful, diverse, and wild than a sunset or a beach or a penguin. God created people with genders beyond male and female in the same way God created realities in between, outside of, and beyond these others. Trans and non-binary and agender and intersex: God created us. –Adapted from a message from trans pastor Asher O’Callaghan

To see the post in slide guide form, go here.

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On autochorissexualism, akiosexuality and lesser-known gray-ace identities

Keep reading

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“And there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty. I believe everyone who has been hard up has experienced it. It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs—and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it.” – Down and Out in Paris and London

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Hades to Hades:

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my favourite thing about the story of hades and persephone is that the story grew up with us.

i think most of us, when we were young girls ourselves, heard that first, most tragic version of the story: persephone, the innocent child of spring, who wandered into a dark, terrible place, and ate of a cursed garden. hades, meanwhile, was cast as a shadowy, grasping seducer, looming from the darkness: here he stood, the god of riches, of gemstones and bones, of cold, dead things, who wanted to snatch a little bit of sunlight for himself.

and then came the second version of the story, when we were older, not so much a change in narrative as it was of perspective: we heard about zeus raping leta, we read the way medusa was cursed for being raped by poseidon, we read about athena’s jealousy when she was outwoven by arachne, about hera tossing little hephaestus down a cliff because he wasn’t as beautiful as a god ought to be.

once more, we considered hades: the youngest of the trinity, free of spite and hatred and fits of rage, running an empire greater than his brothers’ together, with little ego and quiet efficiency. a god who only took one wife, only loved once, and then too: wholly, completely.

like something not out of a horror movie, but perhaps, indeed, a fairytale.

then the third turn, when we had grown older, acquired a veneer of cynicism, suffered boys who never grew to men, when we realized that the only way our sexuality would not be annexed was if we conquered it ourselves.

then came kore, the woman of spring, who found in hades a quiet, dark refuge, away from demeter’s wrath and hungry possession, away from the squabbles of those tiresome, reckless gods. the girl who fell in love with darkness. the goddess whose spirit was of renewal and rebirth, and still flourished in the heart of the underworld, the duality of her nature only serving to highlight her strength.

hades remained as he ever was, unchanging, like death itself. but persephone grew, acquired facets and beauty in her change, spring given form in metaphor and mythology.

hades and persephone grew with us. that’s why they’re powerful. that’s why they’re loved.

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the colder it gets outside the more fashionable and powerful i become 

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D. H. Lawrence, from Selected Poems and Writings; “The Lemon Gardens,”

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“I am not actually tired, but numb and heavy, and can’t find the right words.”

— Franz Kafka, from a letter to Felice Bauer written c. November 1912

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it’s just me and my four hundred unread books against the world i guess

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“Being the only female in what was basically a boys’ club must have been difficult for her. Miraculously, she didn’t compensate by becoming hard or quarrelsome. She was still a girl, a slight lovely girl who lay in bed and ate chocolates, a girl whose hair smelled like hyacinth and whose white scarves fluttered jauntily in the breeze; a girl as bewitching, and clever, as any girl who ever lived. But strange and marvelous as she was, a wisp of silk in a forest of black wool, she was not at all the fragile creature one would have her seem. In many ways she was as cool and competent as Henry; tough-minded and solitary in her habits, and in many ways as aloof. Out in the country it was not uncommon to discover that she had slipped away, alone, out to the lake, maybe, or down to the cellar, where once I found her sitting in the big marooned sleigh, reading, her fur coat thrown over her knees. Things would have been terribly strange and unbalanced without her. She was the Queen who finished out the suit of dark Jacks, dark King, and Joker.”

— Donna Tartt, excerpt of The Secret History

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from a 19th century bookplate..

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Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Fleishman Is In Trouble

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Penny Dreadful (2014-2016) created by Jon Logan

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Jenny Slate, from an interview Hozier on twitter  Chelsea Hodson, from Tonight I’m Someone Else

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this is my only good tweet

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From “Soft Spoken Spells: Poems for Your Inner Witch” by Nichole McElhaney