Mulling this thread over a bit and it feels like the cat-dog dichotomy is a bad example for a number of reasons, although I tend to agree that gender does work more like a M/F bucket in the vast majority of cases and the idea of a spectrum is more of a polite social construct.https://twitter.com/Aella_Girl/status/1434611666533199875 …
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The goal of the attempt at category assignment matters a lot to a discussion like this, and also whether you're discussing gender in the abstract or in the moment for a relevant interaction.
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Liminal Warmth ❤ Retweeted Aella
As she says, gender ends up being a combo of biological and social factors. Arguing about it in the abstract is kind of silly (from my PoV sometimes) because it's hard to divorce from context and you're often playing with words.https://twitter.com/Aella_Girl/status/1434611670891089931?s=20 …
Liminal Warmth ❤ added,
AellaVerified account @Aella_GirlGender 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/Show this thread2 replies 0 retweets 7 likesShow this thread -
Outside of ideological or political battles, 99% of the time someone is gonna bump into you and assign you "reads male" or "reads female" and treat you how they're gonna treat you dependent on all kinds of other factors beyond that initial read.
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And while it's true that it's hard to move buckets in a technical sense, it's absolutely possible to move buckets in a practical sense dependent on the interactions and the goals of the participants interacting (which is where the social aspects come in a lot).
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I think she's right that claiming that the buckets aren't "real" isn't very useful most of the time. That's an ideological argument you can go in circles around forever, because practically, they are real (in how people will snap-assign you gender if nothing else).
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But the gap between male-female for many types of interactions is significantly (potentially) smaller than the gap between cat-dog and more achievable, so it depends on the goals of the parties involved both individually and together.
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Unless you just happen to want to fight about how we use language.
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Replying to @liminal_warmth
For me personally, I suspect register people as male/female so I can track their relationship to me sexually (are they gonna try to bang me, are other men gonna try to bang her). Even if the situation is fully desexualized, it still feels like it matters?
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Replying to @Aella_Girl @liminal_warmth
like, theres lots of scenarios i've been in where males and females interact super androgynously in a lot of ways, but very few scenarios where i am not at risk at sexual interest from males. not professionally, not during times of trauma, almost not ever
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when i see someone, i peg them immediately as 'has a dick or not', which informs how i interpret the ways they treat me and the ways i should treat them so I send the correct signals. This feels basically totally universal, irrespective of most contexts, except mebbe gay bars
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Replying to @Aella_Girl @liminal_warmth
im also talkin like this is conscious, but i think most of it's subconscious and it's my theory for how i work, and I think my subconscious picks up on general presentation as opposed to specifically the dick thing; uses gender presentation as proxy for dick, sometimes inaccurate
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Replying to @Aella_Girl @liminal_warmth
(and in case i wasnt already clear, my subconscious brain appears to believe passing trans women don't have a penis, and passing trans men don't have a vagina, despite consciously knowing this is often incorrect)
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