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?
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(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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i don’t think i have this thing but i also, being trans, have absolutely no idea how such a thing would manifest if i had it