Both and neither
The lack of gender is your real gender.
Hey don’t yell at me! I’m just sharing the wisdom.
Our book is called Real Gender for two reasons. The first is to emphasize our conviction that the gender (or lack thereof) that one lives or feels authentically is one’s real gender, regardless of whether it matches the gender one was assigned at birth.
The lack of gender is one’s real gender.
That’s a universalizable claim, by the way. The lack of hair is one’s real hair. The lack of teeth is one’s real teeth. The lack of a brain is one’s real brain – as demonstrated by these two.
Is this there way of claiming that those of us who don’t have a gender identity have a gender identity so they don’t have to explain the apparent lack in what is supposed to be an allegedly universal trait? Too bad this doesn’t absolve them of defining what a “gender identity” is and where it resides other than as part of simple “personality”.
Things are so complicated now. I’m balding but not completely bald. Does that make me “interhair” or having a “Difference of Hair Retention” condition? If I buy a toupe am I “follically fluid”? When I wear a hat I can pass. If I get plugs, am I trans-haired? How do I keep track? WHAT AM II!!!???
@Your Name’s not Bruce?; #1
“Is this there way of claiming that those of us who don’t have a gender identity have a gender identity so they don’t have to explain the apparent lack in what is supposed to be an allegedly universal trait?”
Reminds me of those who claim that “non-binary” or “agender” are gender identities; don’t give them ideas!
I daresay I chuckled. Not so much brain as earwax, these two.
Imbresevic seems to think that not keeping the sex/gender distinction straight is an error, but it’s their foundational move. Lack of clarity is their real clarity.
Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t “trans realities” an oxymoron?
I have met Christians who assure me that I have a soul whether I “feel” it or believe in it or not. Guess the cult of genderism is having identity identify as a soul. Then they simply declare that we all have one.
It doesn’t even have to be that theological (except for the possibility of being born in the “wrong” body); I’ve yet to hear a definition of “gender identity” that can be clearly distinguished from plain, old “personality.” They want to take advantage of the ubiquity of personality without having to embrace its ordinariness, because “personality” doesn’t have all the magical properties they impute to “gender identity”, so we can’t have that.
Except actually I would think “personality” is more interesting rather than less. It’s more particular, more detailed, more about something.
The real thing is usually more interesting than the bullshit thing, which is a simplification of the real thing. Natural sciences illustrate that point over and over. Religious cosmologies have nothing on the reality of the universe, and this almost has to be true. The same is true for mystical conceptions of biology and chemistry and psychology and economics and mathematics and logic. Bullshit is a conscious human enterprise and can only be as complex as we can manage with our finite monkey brains, but the natural world is the sum of nigh infinite interacting, interpenetrating systems with neither direction nor simplifying impulse. Everything that is is the result of a totality of facts and processes beyond the capacity of any single mind to contain. It’s beyond the capacity of even eight billion minds. Arguably beyond the capacity of any mind, even that of a bullshit deity, because such a mind would have to fully understand itself in its own infinite complexity.
Oh I agree completely. My use of “plain old” or “boring” to describe personality is meant to be sarcastic. It’s just that “personality” is not special enough for genderists, and can’t be used for all the political games they wring out of “gender identity.” I think in normal times, the concept of “gender identity” would fall to Occam’s Razor, as it represents an uneccesary entity that tries to explain things that are already adequately covered by the concept of “personality”.
It’s similar to the special meaning genderists give “non-binary” for their own agenda, as opposed to the fact that everybody is “non-binary” in that nobody inhabits either extreme of their “Barbie-to GI Joe” gender “spectrum”, which is based on sexist, patriarchal stereotypes. If everyone is non-binary, then their concept of Non-Binary is superfluous. That would disappear their Extra Special, Precious, Oh-Look-at-ME, Gender Identity Version of Aren’t I so Much More Clever than Everyone Else who is so Stupidly Trapped in the Gender Boxes from which I’ve managed to Escape Because of My Extra-Special, Stunning, Brave, Precious Self. If everybody is NB (or nb) then the snowflakes can’t exalt themselves at everyone else’s expense.
I almost forgot: the genderists’ “special” sense of Non-Binary has the extra frisson of delusional impossibility supplied by their insistence that it means “neither male nor female.”