#it isn’t a construct gender is a construct

[citricacidprince]

I don’t like people who say they instinctively don’t trust anyone who’s AMAB or presents as masc, not even letting that person prove their character and just assuming the worst of them from the moment they see them.

Why don’t you instinctively dodge this upper cut fuck head??? I’m blowing you up with my mind.

[seaglassdinosaur]

I know we collectively agree that Hiccup isn’t romantically inclined, and his getting married and having kids didn’t make sense in the epilogue, but consider: Hiccup getting married for political reasons.

It’s a marriage of alliance, which is recognized both by him and his partner, and they enter it without expectations of romantic involvement. Since they’re now married, they live in the same castle, spend time together, and Hiccup finds he really likes his spouse. They’re funny, get along with his friends, and has the same interests and values. They both probably speak multiple languages. She understands why Hiccup is so dedicated to making the Wilderwest better, and holds similar views. She’s a good politician (her job after all, was to be an ambassador). Hiccup likes spending time with them, and the feeling is mutual. They’re not in love, they have their own lives, but they’re dedicated to each other and eventually decide to raise children. They teach their kids how to train hawks and hunt with dragons, riding, history, the Languages, and all the necessary skills of their world. They’re not in love and they’re happy together.

[dearreader]

love having she/they/he pronouns cause it feels like i don’t have to worry about shit. call me whatever man i’m just a jester wearing dresses and my big black boots

[the-fallen-collective]

What my partner is saying is not made up

gender is not harmful, it’s oppressors that are harmful. Gender roles are inherently harmful, but gender roles should be abolished, not gender. Sex isn’t even strictly just 100% man or 100% women, both gender and sex are spectrum, and while sex lies more in science, both are constructs

There are also thousands upon thousands of sexualities, if you cannot handle that, you should not be speaking on account of queer people, especially not if you’re transphobic

And while men may not face oppression, misandry is still a real issue because men are hated and harassed for something they cannot control just like women are. Shifting the issue of which side deals with the most sexism won’t fix anything, as feminism is literally about gender equality on all sides. Shifting the hate to a different group will not solve any problems and historically has never ended well

hot take: misandry is bad

the feminist solution is not to Hate All Men and Kill All Men

that is bioessentiallism and also just preschool “boys bad! girls good”

radfem ideology is inherently harmful to all types of men, and intersects with transmisandry and transmisogony

[trashmouth-co]

I’m on a call with a friend and I’m low-key having a gender crisis, and I went “ I DONT WANT A DEEPER VOICE I JUST WANT AN ADOMS APPLE” “I WANT A SKIRT THAT GOES DOWN TO MY ANKLES AND AT THE HEM LINE THERES PENISES” and they said and I quote “I never expected to hear that, even from you”

[un-pearable]

species don’t exist — i mean, obviously, they do. but they aren’t objective. species are (as most things are) a cultural construction, a coalition of humans deciding where and when to draw what lines. constantly in debate: did you know paleoanthropologists are unintentionally incentivized to claim to have discovered entire new genera along the path of human evolution because they are more likely to generate media buzz and gain desperately needed funding. thousands of plants may be categorized together but a centimeter’s difference in skull thickness warrants an entire new genus name. we are more genetically similar to chimpanzees than they are to their fellow non-human primates, but due to the rules of Linnaean taxonomy humanity will never be collapsed into the same genus as them because the rules dictate that the older genus name prevails: humanity would never accept becoming Pan sapiens, especially not after it took decades for it even to be accepted that humans were a part of the taxonomy in the first place. even the most basic of criteria we’ve used in the past to decide where a species stops and starts continues to be debunked - fish from entire opposites of the world can produce fertile offspring. analogous evolution can find lines that split millions of years back creating critters that would be side by side in a disney cartoon. categorization is a eternal battleground of western scientific standards requiring universalized objective qualifiers vs. the futile efforts to recognize the unmeasurable amounts of nuance held in traditional ecological knowledge — versus the fact that, inevitably, it all boils down to a vast continuum contained within only a few percentage points of variation in the squiggly lines that tell the cells of everything on the entire globe how to eat

[d-parade]

Hi guys I’m now a disabled black man because I’m using labels that resonate most with me and other people cannot dictate that because it’s my own life and experience that you people will never understand. I already say retard and spaz, can I say the n word now?

[realist-fortheloveofwomen]

Please be so fr rn. Some people are born without legs, I suppose we can’t say humans are bipedal because of this small percentage of the population?

What is your point in this discussion. There is still only male and female body parts, you know there is no third gamete. Sex is a biological reality and so is intersex. Intersex is a biological reality.

The other person likely meant “evolutionarily designed”, like how humans are “evolutionarily designed” to have eyes and ears, but some people can still be born deaf and blind. This definition would mean that for intersex individuals, the person would overwhelmingly have a body designed to support a uterus (female endocrine system, ovaries, female pulmonary system) and then for men, this would mean they would have a body to support a penis (male endocrine system, prostate, etc).

If sex doesn’t matter, how do men know who to catcall? I thought it was this super ambiguous hard to define thing! How do the men know who to oppress in Afghanistan? Why don’t the women just all claim to be intersex?

You know sex is an important category. Arguing over semantics with intersex is pointless. Women are oppressed based on their sex, not a “woman feeling”. Go in a male prison if you think your identity is so much more important than biological reality.

Also- the 30k claim is a bit dodgy. Yes, all of those people are intersex, but for most of them it won’t be as ambiguous as the citations you cited. As I said before, intersex comes in all sorts of variants and majority are still classifiable as male or female. A woman with a large clitoris isn’t a man, a man who skipped male puberty is still a man, a man with a micropenis is still a man, a woman with a scrotum is still a woman; etc. So, true “hermaphroditism” is extremely rare hence the case studies you sent me that are of individual cases, and my point wasn’t “they can’t be born with both genitals” it was that ONLY ONE set of genitals would be able to function at BEST, which funnily enough is what your studies showed.

Humans are sexually dimorphic creatures. Literally open your eyes. Sex is a material reality and SO IS INTERSEX!

Since you keep hammering at our definition - what is your definition of woman? How do you plan to protect women-only spaces, bathrooms, changing rooms, prisons, etc?

It’s genuinely baffling how gendies just make up random scenarios that have never fucking happened once. Like I could bring up statistics and personal experiences that prove trans women retain a male pattern of sexual violence (and violence in general) and they’ll stamp their feet and be like “BUT NOT ALL TRANS WOMEN” . When they can’t even name a single event of a radfem brutalizing trans identified males. Radfems do not wish violence upon trans individuals. We just do not believe in “gender”.

I also think their comment on intersex reveals some insight into the way these people view bodies. Because if you research, intersex women literally cannot have a penis. They can grow something similar to testes, but that’s it. An intersex woman could have an enlarged clitoris that APPEARS like a penis, but would have an entirely different function.

This is the same argument they have for intersex men, who sometimes can have “holes” but they don’t lead anywhere. They don’t have a uterus. This line of thinking “well, it LOOKS like this, therefore, it IS this” is so prevalent in their community. An intersex male has a micropenis and didn’t have normal male puberty? Well, he’s basically a woman!

And they don’t see how misogynistic this is. The equivalent would be noticing a woman who went through anorexia and therefore ‘skipped’ puberty and has a flat chest is now a man.

Lastly even if there was a magical intersex person that had both functioning male and female genitals (never been found, this literally cannot exist in the human body due to conflicting hormone amounts needed for both sets of genitals to function), a male could still not identify as a woman. Because a woman is not an identity. Just like how I can’t “identify” as intersex.

Women with a beard and deep voices and clitorises that appear like penises… are still women! Women who have gone bald are still women. Women who are extremely thin or obese are still women… etc etc

[marcelinestreehouse]

Hey just a reminder to everyone

YOU ARE VALID

I often see people that are for example pan or bi think they aren’t valid because they aren’t dating someone of their own gender, but it’s just a horrible sentiment put on by people who have no clue what the hell they are talking about. Love who, and how you want. YOU ARE VALID!

Another thing to mention is if you are trans but still like clothes or, maybe makeup which is more commonly found in the gender assigned at your birth, WEAR IT!! DON’T LET ANYONE TELL YOU AREN’T VALID OR REAL. REMEMBER GENDER IS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT!

That’s all I have to say carry on.

(ps. If you don’t support 2slgbtqai+ individuals and are looking at my blog or this post, Tumblr is showing you this for a reason, I wish you the best of luck on your journey of finding out your queer. Just don’t be an asshole before you figure that out! :3 )

[samaspic31]

Rationally i know the friction i feel being back to being confronted daily to viewpoints and worldviews completely different than my own, sometimes completely divorced from statistic reality and deeply entrenched in mainstream biases and pernicious conservative rhetoric at uni (tho i can’t stand when it comes from professsors holding it as normal and neutral)(and it’s not like there are no divergences in my family or in my friendgroup), in dating, meeting new people, and on the internet, seeing art betraying biases i oppose to, sharing space with bigots is necessary to keep being grounded in reality.

On the other hand it feels like there are oceans of incomprehension between each and every person in this world, that i feel even while talking to or seeing art by people with extremely similar experiences as me, even with people with similar political ideas, the amount of bigotry to tackle in the world feels overwhelming, and im having constant paralyzing existencial crisis and worrying about environmental practices and structural inequality caused by capitalism and it’s. Not Fun.

There’s been many a study on alternative cultures and people joining them for merely shallow rebelious aesthetic reasons (hello to my friend’s « former punk » controlling dad spewing sexist victim blaming bullshit), and being alt doesn’t make you a good person, but man i wish some queer, vegan, punk and zero waste statements like « respecting people’s boundaries is crucial » « nobody gets to determine someone else’s gender » « gender stereotypes and language are human constructs people get to redefine for themselves, assuming someone to be any gender identity, or to have certain sexual roles because of their adoption of some socially gendered codes is bad » « gender and racial stereotyping in fiction feed irl discrimination and reflect on the author’s inability to question the world they live in (looking at you, comformist sci fi and fanfic writers obsessed with racist top and bottom headcanons) » « mainstream art seeks to reinforce capitalist ideals and the art financed through capitalism is enslaved to it » « cisheteronormativity flattens people who bow to it to unhappy stereotypes » « generalizations of entire groups are mere practical shortcuts, consquences of overly essemtialist thinking, and deny the diversity inherent to every human group » « people have a right to all harmless self expression » « people aren’t their governments » « destroying the environment is bad and we should do what we can to do as little as possible and reverse the damage of ultra capitalist urban lifestyles» « the western world being built on colonialism and continuing global exploitation through capitalism is bad actually, as is the average lifestyle being deeply wasteful » « racism and racial stereotypes bad » « you should get shit second as much as possible, make your own or pay well a craftsperson if you can » were baseline mainstream opinions and not shit that will get you looked at like an alien for saying out loud. Not that this isn’t still fringe for a lot of queer. Actually im tired of people’s political short sightedness in general

Like sure people grow and on average i want to believe less bigoted (although stats show in Europe the youth is more likely to believe someone caused their own poverty i know it’s cause some have not yet faced hardships getting a job but omg we are not making it out of the classist coalmine) but omg the amount of work to get to an ethical world, probably never in my lifetime, the moral rottenness of European islamophobia and zionism im witnessing daily, and the ticking clock of climate change. I feel like im going mad

[rosered-schneeweisschens-sis]

random little boy: are you a boy or a girl?

me (self-conscious but calm): i’m a girl.

little boy: cool, now i know a boy Sam and a girl Sam!

[aphextwintribes]

my toxic trait is harboring the deep autistic realization that nothing in our current manmade world is actually real or valuable in the “grand scheme of things” and genuinely thinking most of our problems could be solved if other people realized this too

[trashmouth-co]

“Sometimes I want a beard,but I won’t go on T, because I like my pretty voice, so fuck you fuck you for telling me to fit inside your gender binary!!!!!!”

[cairdine]

In the past fifty years, fantasy’s greatest sin might be its creation of a bland, invariant, faux-Medieval European backdrop. The problem isn’t that every fantasy novel is set in the same place: pick a given book, and it probably deviates somehow. The problem is that the texture of this place gets everywhere.

What’s texture, specifically? Exactly what Elliot says: material culture. Social space. The textiles people use, the jobs they perform, the crops they harvest, the seasons they expect, even the way they construct their names. Fantasy writing doesn’t usually care much about these details, because it doesn’t usually care much about the little people – laborers, full-time mothers, sharecroppers, so on. (The last two books of Earthsea represent LeGuin’s remarkable attack on this tendency in her own writing.) So the fantasy writer defaults – fills in the tough details with the easiest available solution, and moves back to the world-saving, vengeance-seeking, intrigue-knotting narrative. Availability heuristics kick in, and we get another world of feudal serfs hunting deer and eating grains, of Western name constructions and Western social assumptions. (Husband and wife is not the universal historical norm for family structure, for instance.)

Defaulting is the root of a great many evils. Defaulting happens when we don’t think too much about something we write – a character description, a gender dynamic, a textile on display, the weave of the rug. Absent much thought, automaticity, the brain’s subsconscious autopilot, invokes the easiest available prototype – in the case of a gender dynamic, dad will read the paper, and mom will cut the protagonist’s hair. Or, in the case of worldbuilding, we default to the bland fantasy backdrop we know, and thereby reinforce it. It’s not done out of malice, but it’s still done.

The only way to fight this is by thinking about the little stuff. So: I was quite wrong. You do need to worldbuild pretty hard. Worldbuild against the grain, and worldbuild to challenge. Think about the little stuff. You don’t need to position every rain shadow and align every tectonic plate before you start your short story. But you do need to build a base of historical information that disrupts and overturns your implicit assumptions about how societies ‘ordinarily’ work, what they ‘ordinarily’ eat, who they ‘ordinarily’ sleep with. Remember that your slice of life experience is deeply atypical and selective, filtered through a particular culture with particular norms. If you stick to your easy automatic tendencies, you’ll produce sexist, racist writing – because our culture still has sexist, racist tendencies, tendencies we internalize, tendencies we can now even measure and quantify in a laboratory. And you’ll produce narrow writing, writing that generalizes a particular historical moment, its flavors and tongues, to a fantasy world that should be much broader and more varied. Don’t assume that the world you see around you, its structures and systems, is inevitable.

We... need worldbuilding by Seth Dickinson

[steveyockey]

To be aware you might be trans but unwilling to do anything about it is to create endlessly bigger boxes within which to contain yourself. When you are a child, that box might encompass only yourself and your parents. By the time you are a gainfully employed adult, that box will contain multitudes, and the thought of disrupting it will grow ever more unthinkable. So you cease to think of yourself as a person on some level; you think not of what you want but what everybody expects from you. You do your best not to make waves, and you apologize, if only implicitly, for existing. You stop being real and start being a construct, and eventually, you decide the construct is just who you are, and you swaddle yourself up in it, and maybe you die there. There is still time until there isn’t.

This reading of TV Glow’s deliberately anticlimactic, noncathartic ending cuts against the transition narrative you typically see in movies and TV, in which a trans person self-accepts, transitions, and lives a happier life. Owen gets trapped in a space where he knows what he must do to live an authentic life but simply refuses to take those steps because, well, burying yourself alive is a terrifying thing to do. The transition narrative posits a trans existence as, effectively, a binary switch between “man” and “woman” that gets flipped one way or another, but to make our lives so binary is to miss how trans existences possess an inherent liminality.

Humans’ lives unfold in a constant state of becoming until death, but trans people are uniquely keyed in to what this means thanks to the simple fact of our identities. You can get lost in that liminality, too, forever trapped in a midnight realm of your own making, stuck between what you believe is true (I am a nice man with a good family and a good job, and I love my life) and what you know, deep in your most terrified heart of hearts, is real (I am a girl suffocating in a box).

And yet if you want to read the film as being about the dangerous allure of nostalgia, you’re not wrong. I Saw the TV Glow totally supports that interpretation, too! But in tempting you with that reading, the film creates a trap for cis viewers that will be all too familiar to trans viewers. Somewhere in the middle of Maddy’s story about The Pink Opaque being real, you will make a choice between “This kid has lost it!” and “No. Go with her, Owen,” and in asking you to make that choice, TV Glow is simulating the act of self-accepting a trans identity.

See, the grimmer read of the film’s ending truly is a nihilistic one. It leaves no hope, no potential for growth, no exit. Yet you must actively choose to read that ending as nihilistic. If you are cis and the end of I Saw the TV Glow left you with a gnawing sense of dissatisfaction, a weird but hard-to-pin-down feeling that something had broken, and a melancholy bordering on horror — congratulations, this movie gave you contact-high gender dysphoria.

In an infinite number of possible universes, there is at least one where I am still living “as a man,” embracing my fictionality, avoiding looking at how much more raw and real I feel when I “pretend” to be a woman. I think about that guy sometimes. I hope he’s okay.

Consider, then, my cis reader, that TV Glow is for both you and me, but it is maybe most of all for him. I hope he sees it. I hope he breaks down crying in the bathroom afterward. I hope he, after so many years locked inside himself, hears the promise of more life through the hiss of TV static.

Emily St. James, “I Saw the TV Glow’s Ending Is Full of Hope, If You Want It to Be,” Vulture. June 4, 2024.

[specialagentartemis]

man. People get so upset when you call things social constructs. Thinking that if you say something is a social construct that means it's fake and unnatural, and following that, that that means it’s bad. Something being a social construct means that it’s socially constructed. That’s it.

Money is a social construct. Weekends are a social construct. Vegetables are a social construct.

That doesn’t mean it’s okay if my paycheck is withheld or my rent is late. Doesn’t mean I don’t luxuriate in sleeping in on Saturday. Doesn’t mean the nutrients in tomatoes or spinach aren’t good for you.

What it means is that the way we think about things is socially constructed, and could be constructed a different way. Why do we base our society around money? What does value mean outside of money? What is “value”? The way we construct it isn’t the only possible way.

Why is a week a cycle of seven days, and five of those days are for working and two of those days are for resting? Could we organize our time differently? Should we? What would that look like? Other cultures don’t/didn’t have seven-day weeks with a five on-two off cycle. It’s not inevitable. It’s historically and culturally specific.

“Fruit” has a scientific definition but “vegetable” does not. Many parts of plants are culinarily defined as vegetables. Fruits (eggplant, avocado, tomato), stems (celery, asparagus), leaves (kale, lettuce), roots (carrots, potatoes, turnips)… all of these are culturally categorized as vegetables. And nutrition advice is based on this cultural categorization. Is a mushroom a vegetable? It’s not even a plant! Why do we categorize it this way? Why isn’t wheat or oats considered vegetables, but corn is, except when it isn’t? Could we categorize our plant-based food other ways?

Calling these social constructs doesn’t mean they’re bad or unimportant. It just calls attention to the fact that they aren’t inevitable. That they could be constructed in different ways, and that is worth thinking about, and thinking about the value we get in constructing things the way we do.

Gender is a social construct.

Romance is a social construct.

They are based on feelings, desires, and experiences, but how we name and categorize and express and act on them are fully culturally constructed. Other cultures do and have constructed these concepts in other ways. You can like the way we do it now. You can find it stifling. But the way we do it now is not the only, inevitable, inherent, real way. It could be done other ways, organized and categorized and conceptualized in other ways. And that’s not a bad thing either.