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/
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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/
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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/
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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/
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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/
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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.
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Unlike with the cat/dog thing though, every male, female and intersex individual has a long ancestry of both male and female individuals - the fact the features don't blend more often after so many generations is kind of a small miracle in itself.
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