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+--- Thread: Discussion Do you ever wonder if maybe we do kind of have gender identities, or at least experience “gender” of some kind? (/showthread.php?tid=961)
RE: Do you ever wonder if maybe we do kind of have gender identities, or at least expe... - Lemonade - Apr 21 2025
(Apr 21 2025, 6:16 AM)YesYourNigelQuote:More like if as an atheist I still used sinful to describe people.
How is GNC in any way a negative value judgement? That doesn't make sense.
Your atheism comparison checks out because GNC is defined as a rejection of a prescribed societal system. If there were no demand foe gender conformity, there would be no need to describe a lack of it, but that's not the world we live in, is it?
Honestly this reminds me of Christians who claim atheists secretly believe in God because calling oneself atheist ("godless") supposes that God exists.
I didn't say that it is negative. I said I don't like to use language that I don't see the value in. If I think of people as sinners and not sinners, then I still haven't fully removed myself from categorizing things based on religious values that I claim not to hold. I can discuss how other people view me as a sinner and how that has affected my life. Or whether or not I have committed sins as seen through a religious lens. But neither require me to adopt the concept of "sinner" in my own views.
Fwiw, I also don't love to describe myself as atheist. Not because it supposes god exists, but because is supports framing deity belief as the default state to compare yourself to. It is the dominant belief, sure, but I don't agree it should be the default.
I think it breaks down as a parallel because "non belief in a diety" is at least an objective claim. I do not believe in a deity. This doesn't require the participation of others because my belief or lack thereof isn't a social construct. I literally do not, and theoretically if brain scans could show thought you could verify my claim. Gender roles are so varied across culture and time. People can perform varying amounts of their gender roles at any given time. You can't put a percentage on how conforming to a role someone is. So at least when I say "I am an atheist" I know that I am making a specific claim.
Of course we can talk about the lack of performing gender roles. I never said otherwise. We live in a gendered society. I reject the entire framework. I said I don't like to consider myself gender non-conforming [adjective] when the truth is I don't conform to cultural gender roles [verb].
It's just a conscious choice that I try to make to keep myself from holding a genderist point of view because I believe language reinforces our understanding of the world. Discussing performing or not performing your gender role and the effects that has can be separated from thinking of people as gender conforming or gender non conforming. Gender conformity (or lack thereof) is not a quality I possess, I just so happen to live in a world where I am asked to act out a certain role because of my sex, but I don't.
Why would I size myself up on a scale I don't believe in and don't value?
RE: Do you ever wonder if maybe we do kind of have gender identities, or at least expe... - Newt - Nov 25 2025
(Apr 20 2025, 11:15 AM)Chernobog This subject has avoided my ire for too long. Being a woman is NOT important to me. I do NOT like being a woman. I don't even think female-only intellectual spaces like this are intrinsically valuable, but rather a condition of extreme, ubiquitous repression of female humanity. Female-only intellectual spaces exist not because men are inherently incapable of participating in them, but because thousands of years of patriarchal systems have discouraged them from choosing to think, to choose to see reality as it is rather than what they want it to be.
I have a hard time politely humouring these sentiments, especially in alleged feminist spaces. Their prevalence creates difficulties in letting, as an example, formerly trans-identified women have a voice; when "proud" women are the majority, anything less than shining positivity towards womanhood itself is branded "internalised misogyny". There is often an implicit expectation that those of us who might still have more cons than pros perform plenty of penance and self-flagellation for our blasphemous rejection of the grand yoni. Acceptance of our femaleness is not enough and our criticisms must be kept to a minimum, if they're allowed at all. We must aspire to be HAPPY to be female, and if we are not, it is somehow a signal of our allegiance with males, or at the very least a clear indicator something is deeply wrong with us and we are some sort of pitiable liability to the movement.
Saying there's something "special and different" about female homosexual behaviour in and of itself is a bit of a reach, too. We have no concept of loving women as a man. We cannot experience it. We may have a very detailed understanding of the hollow trappings of how men "love" us in a dehumanized, patriarchal sense, but that is reading the screenplay in its entirety to contextualise the character you have been cast to portray, which is NOT the same as fundamentally feeling love for a woman, as a man. It's not "special and different" because we're women and women are special and different, it's "special and different" because it's already so off-script that you might as well forget about the movie altogether.
The feeling of camaraderie among women (or any marginalised group) isn't simply because we're women, it's a recognition of another being's intimate familiarity with the same adversity as you, and our adversity is extreme and unnatural; even other mammals that form hierarchical social systems do not do so as rigidly, and with as much control over their environments. Men live in reality, too. They live in the exact same reality as you and I. If you don't believe in reality, then I guess there isn't anything to talk about, but the value in being among women is in our increased likelihood to recognise and value reality where men choose to ignore or deny reality. I'm not at all saying this isn't quite profound, but it's still ultimately circumstantial.
I don't really have anything to add except that you have perfectly worded exactly how I have always felt and the weird disconnect I can feel in feminist/female only spaces when people are saying how proud they are to be a woman and embracing their womanhood or whatever. Sometimes I have gotten called out for using female versus woman when I honestly have just never even felt offended at the use of female in place of woman.
While I care so much about 'women's issues', I also feel frustration that this is what we are calling addressing reality and major societal concerns like reproduction and childrearing. That the reality of this is ignored by the people who can ignore it and it can get labeled 'women's issues' like they're niche or womanly hobbies when we are literally talking about topics related to the future and survival of humans as a species. The worst things that have happened to me have almost exclusively been because I was a woman. I would not be here nor seek anything like this out were I born a man because there's very little chance I would be able to believe in reality like this without any first hand experience. It is the shared adversity but not the way the fetishists seem to think it works.
if I read this and knew that other women felt like this when I was younger, I would not have been swayed by TiFs around me who kept saying that I felt this way because I wasn't a woman. That a woman is someone who would be born into the same situation and be thrilled that they were born female. That the reason that being a woman is not important to me is that I am not a woman, but a different gender. That there's really two genders: the woman crowd and the default main characters. They aren't men, they are just people who don't have to concern themselves with the idea of gender whatsoever. Which is how I feel. And this utter lack of attachment to being a woman was high lighted as evidence that I must be a man then. Idk, I am rambling but your words really spoke to me. I hope future girls can see similar sentiments rather than pushed towards the only conclusions allowed by choice feminism and/or gender ideology on this.