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/
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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/
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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/
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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/
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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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I think most people who say “gender isn’t binary” aren’t trying to make the claim that there aren’t two clear recognizable poles within gender-space (although some might be.
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it also seems to me that a lot of trans/nonbinary/gender nonconforming people i interact with have definitely gotten into a third or fourth pattern clearly distinct from the two most common ones
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I have heard some people report this! I wonder if there's different ways we process gender; for me it's *extremely rare* to meet an enby I process as enby (tho less rare for me to meet a trans person I process as their preferred gender), and I know a *lot* of genderqueer ppl
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it’s possible that there’s a part of my brain that just processes people as male/female but that i’ve just stopped exclusively paying attention to that part of my brain when thinking about people’s gender?
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hmm. I think when i 'don't process people as enby', i'm imagining like... being in a group of ppl, and there's a female enby there, and i think a part of me is tracking sexual interest/competition in the group? and i view female enby as 'competition' in some very subtle way?
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or if they're a male enby then i process them as 'more likely to try to have sex with me', or something. Like some part of me is running a constant 'monitor the sexual landscape' thing and enbies get put into that by their birth gender. Do you not have this thing?
(i also think this is why my brain treats trans ppl differently; if they're a passing trans person i no longer process them in the original bucket quite as much, like a passing trans female i dont think is gonna try to have sex with me, and i see also as competition)
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