Conversation

Aella
@Aella_Girl
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/
22
223
Aella
@Aella_Girl
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/
1
50
Aella
@Aella_Girl
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/
1
Retweet
58
Likes
Aella
@Aella_Girl
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
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/
1
61
Aella
@Aella_Girl
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/
3
69
Aella
@Aella_Girl
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/
2
49
Aella
@Aella_Girl
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/
3
78
Aella
@Aella_Girl
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/
4
63
Aella
@Aella_Girl
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/
2
57
Aella
@Aella_Girl
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/
2
74
Aella
@Aella_Girl
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/
3
76
Aella
@Aella_Girl
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.
7
77
Sadriot
@Sadriot3
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
I'm not sure cat to dog is the same as male to female, but still human. That's an odd analogy. It's more like a stool and a chair. They're the same thing, except not. And there are differences, sure, but... Most people aren't actually clear on what they are.