You can try to understand your own unique gender for you
Ok, now I get it! At last I understand what is meant by “gender identity.” One Justin Hancock created a chart last year that explains it all.
You get to choose your gender your gender identity, whether you are a he/she/they or zie and you get to choose how you want to do your own gender. This is true no matter what body you may have, or what chromosomes you may have or how you feel about your body.
You can work out your gender by learning some more about different identities and seeing if any of those fit you, or you can try to understand your own unique gender for you. Hopefully you will find this useful.
Gender Scales
First of all have a look at these scales.
I did. I looked, and saw, and all was explained.
look masculine………………….Look feminine
rational………..emotional
tough………soft
takes charge…………takes part
independent…………sharer
head strong……….sensitive
active……….passive
outgoing…………shy
There you have it – that’s gender, and where you place yourself on that dotted line is your Gender Identity. We know which is meant to be which because of the helpful “masculine…..feminine” on the first line.
Now, you may have thought that all those adjectives (plus one pair of verbs + adjective) were simply more or less crude descriptions of personality, character, habits, and the like – but no no no, those are Gender Identifiers on a highly technical scientific chart of Gender Scales. Just plot your position on each line and then…um…I guess tell us in great detail what your position is on each, so that we will understand exactly, I mean exactly, what your Gender Identity is.
Nailed it.
It’s so simple now! My gender is:
1, 4, 5, 6, 6, 4, 7, 7
Maybe that should be my pronouns, too!
14566477/14566477/14566477’s
(What problem, exactly, is this intended to solve, again?)
So, with the possible exception of being rational, all those shouty transwomen who lead the way in protests appear to fall well into the masculine side according to those attributes.
Once again, they really do themselves no favours.
Jesus, this is offensive. By this metric, I am masculine and my husband is feminine. What a load of old bollocks.
Slightly off-topic but kinda relevant: Kamala Harris made an excellent point vis a vis abortion today at the Kavenaugh hearing, where she asked him “Can you think of any laws that give the government the power to make decisions about the male body?” He waffles and pretends to misunderstand the question. But the reasons I mention it here is: this works as a rhetorical device because of the ability to differentiate clearly on the sex of bodies in question. If she had had to use a clumsier euphemism, the point she was trying to make would have been utterly lost.
Same here. How masculine I am depends upon what it means to “look feminine”, which is ill defined and therefore useless. I have female sexual characteristics, long hair, and no Adam’s apple. I do not wear make up, wear pink two or three times a year at most, do not wear high heels, and wear a dress once in a while for kicks, because it makes everyone around me say, “Hey, you’re wearing a dress!”. But everyone I know easily recognizes me as female, because I am not androgynous in appearance. So am I feminine? Or masculine? Without a cool, easy to read chart to plot myself on, I can’t even answer that question. The rest are easy. They fall more to the masculine side, but not to an absolute degree.
Claire, maybe we should get our husbands together for a “girl’s day out”.
But, that kind of shit is so contextual for many people. Certainly me. I mean, I unquestioningly look more masculine than feminine, but in different contexts I can lean more toward one side of those scales than the other. more to the point, those contexts would not move all the sliders in the same direction. What a pile of horse shit that is. It’s just perpetuating the same old gender roles as patriarchy, but without the guts to be open about it.
iknklast, do Rob and I get an invite?
:-)
On the topic of identifying, there is a discussion at PZ’s about the most effective types of dieting. I an so tempted to leave a comment to the effect of the best way to lose weight being to identify as a slimmer person. If saying ‘I am a woman’ makes it so, then saying ‘I am thin’ ought to be as effective. Logically, claiming to be a thin person in a fat person’s body carries the same mind-body dualistic rationale as claiming to be a woman in a man’s body, and this way, the dieter has no need to change their eating habits.
But; I am not a troll; I am not a troll; I am not…
Jesusonapogostick, what the ??? does that make me? I look masculine, but I cry. People think I am a man, but I’ve been known to hug other men. My genitals are male, but my bladder is shy.
Great cartoon stolen from Pauline Pantsdown’s facebook.
Says it all.
Wait, we get to CHOOSE our gender identity? But I thought gender identity was innate and we’re born with it!?
Gee, now I don’t know what to believe. It’s almost like the whole concept of “gender identity” as touted by transactivists is incoherent.
I’m leaning toward accepting this proven.
How dare you? It’s definition-fluid is wot it is.
You’ll have to ask the husband. I refuse to mansplain to you gals.
Lady M. is just being cis-definitionist, and trans-definitionist exclusionary. Me? I’m non-binary definition, word-neutral definition trans-definitionist woke.
Heeeey, I resemble that remark!
How are some of these things even opposites? “Independent” and “sharer” for instance? Or did they pick the word “sharer” for one end of the scale and then struggled to find something positive to pair it with? I suppose not many people are keen to identify themselves as “selfish”
So, when the mother/midwife/doctor is “assigning a gender” at birth do they throw a dart at this scale and hope they hit the right spot for the darling newborn snowflake, or what ?
If gender identity is a matter of identifying where you fall on various sliding scales, presumably hardly anyone is ‘cis’? Does that mean the idea of ‘cis privilege’ goes out of the window?
As others have pointed out, some of those scales aren’t even opposites. I’m both ‘tough’ (I have to be, otherwise I would never be able to get out of bed again, or even face another day) and soft (you should see me around small people and animals). I’m independent (I’ve never ‘gone along with the herd’) and a sharer (I’d happily give someone else my most treasured possessions, if I thought they needed them more than I do). I’m headstrong and sensitive, like a lot of my friends.
But, most of all, I have the same capacity for being emotional as everyone I know, and which doesn’t change when I aspire to being rational. For example, it is rational to take a pet for its final journey to the vet when it is incurably ill and/or suffering; it doesn’t stop the owner from bawling their eyes out on the journey.
What’s that I hear? The whole world yelling “False dichotomies”? Yep. What’s more, based on stereotypes.
But even if these continua weren’t a bunch of false dichotomies, even if they didn’t match up so well with gender stereotypes, this whole thing would be silly: it still wouldn’t have anything to do with gender. Personality, sure. But gender?
Tiggerthewing, it’s all a bit like horoscopes and those meaningless “personality tests”. There was an experiment where they gave the same blurb to people after a fake test, and the participants said it matched them really well:
“You have a great need for other people to like and admire you. You have a tendency to be critical of yourself. You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage. While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them. Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others’ statements without satisfactory proof. You have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic. Security is one of your major goals in life.”
http://www.relativelyinteresting.com/astrology-and-horoscopes-debunked/
“Personality, sure. But gender?”
Rebecca Reilly-Cooper has been pointing this out (eloquently) for years. That’s not your gender, kids, it’s your personality. Don’t confuse the two.