Gender

 I'm increasingly concerned that we don't actually know what gender means anymore. People seem to think it's a political thing and talk about how gender was invented in the 1950s by John Money. However if we take the meaning of gender from the dictionary - in this case Merriam Webster - we can see that it isn't anything new. In fact, although it was potentially only identified during the 20th Century, we can see that it's probably existed for so long we accept it without thought.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that most of us have a gender before we have a sex, at least in chronological terms. By that I mean that we are slotted into male or female, boy or girl, from the moment of birth or even before with the improvement of ultrasound technology and the creation of things like gender reveal parties. We expect certain behaviours from people based purely on their physiology, and in many cases use it as a straightjacket. A study from 1976 conducted by John and Sandra Condry suggests that adult humans impose attitudes and emotions onto infants based on what biological sex they perceive them to be... in other words, by their gender. The idea of what constitutes a male or female human is so tied up in our language that its impossible to separate the meaning from the expectations the words carry. Man and woman don't simply mean "adult homo sapiens" they carry implicit meanings as well - around child bearing, violence, submission and dominance, and are tied deeply into patriarchy and our current hegemony. 

In fact, I would say that for 99% of our lives as humans we are only interested in gender, not sex, but we insist on confusing the two because they're presented to us as if they're the same thing. Because we think of these things as a binary, as a society, we struggle to navigate away from ideas and concepts that operate on an "on/off" mirror world where because we perceive one sex as being like X the other one can't be like that too. Which is, of course, a load of bollocks. Gender as it is used in conventional society is a "stay in your lane" ploy that works like one of Richard Dawkins' memes - not to be confused with the way we use the term now - where an idea is infectious and spreads through a population. He was principally using it to explain the success of religion, but it seems apt for gender as well. (We'll gloss over Dawkins' anti-Trans stance for now). Of course biology intrudes at times, but its always through the lens of gender, or the idea of what an adult homo sapiens is - and of course adult and homo sapiens are just as subject to these implicit meanings as man and woman so using those terms doesn't really help. 

My point is that we don't see the reality of biology, only the reality of the societal narratives, which is another way to say that we see nothing at all because like everything else humans do, that social narrative is based on concepts and stories. We're born into a trap, raised in it, and then told off if we turn around and declare it is a trap and we want to escape. While, as Simone de Beauvoir declared "one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman" but this overlooks the fact that the situation is rigged from the very beginning and that small humans live surrounded by cultures that infect their thinking and behaviour to the point that they might as well be different species. Looking at them from the outside, you'd not think that biologically male and female humans are 85% the same, you would think the difference was so much more significant. Admittedly, this division into blue and pink tribes (itself an invention, one you need only go back a century or so to see as culturally driven). 

The reason we cling so much to gender is based on a common misconception - which is that we are somehow smarter than other animals. The reality is that our heads are stuffed with socialisation information and we cling to what we've learned instead of thinking our way through things. A truly smart species would approach the issues we face differently, instead of clinging to the things they were taught at school. 

In conclusion, we need to stop seeing gender as something that's only prevalent because of the trans community and look at how it affects us in our everyday lives. We can cling to old, increasingly irrelevant, ideas, or we can move forward and embrace a world where we stop putting people in straightjackets. Let people be who they are, stop equating gender with rigid ways of behaving, and accept that most of what we think we know is pure fiction.