Hey all,
So I'm looking to take an active step here to understand better some things that my straight/white/cis/middle-aged male brain has had a tough time wrapping itself around, particularly in the gender identity front.
I'm working from the understanding of physical sex as the bio-bits and the expressed identity as being separate things, so that part is easy enough.
What's confusing to me though is like this. If we take gender as being an expression of your persona, a set of traits that define one as male, female, or some combination of both then what function does a title/pronoun serve? To assume that some things are masculine or feminine traits seems to put unneeded rigidity to things.
We've had men or women who enjoy things traditionally associated with the other gender for as long as there have been people I expect. If that's the case then what purpose does the need for a gender title serve?
I'll admit personally questioning some things like fairness in cis/trans integrated sports, but that's outside what I'm asking here. Some things like bathroom laws are just society needing to get over itself in thinking our personal parts are all that special.
Certainly not trying to stir up any fights, just trying to get some input from people that have a different life experience than myself. Is it really as simple as a preferred title?
Edit: Just wanted to take a second to thank all the people here who took the time to write some truly extensive thoughts and explanations, even getting into some full on citation-laden studies into neurology that'll give me plenty to digest. You all have shown a great deal of patience with me updating some thinking from the bio/social teachings of 20+ years back. ๐
You know this meme?
This is essentially true because (we) trans people have to spend a ton of time into thinking about what gender and sex are. What may be helpful is thinking not about how trans or even queer people deviate from the norm but how sex, gender and sexuality work in general.
You may want to look into Judith Butler's revelatory "Gender Trouble" (or at least summaries of it) that was kind of the birth of Queer Studies and where they discuss how gender/sex are "performative" (not in the sense of literally performing but rather how it is repeated and maintained). Butler explains how the category of sex is not descriptive but instead a constructed one. Even a newly born baby is put into a constructed (made-up) category that doesn't necessarily reflect physical reality.
Sex as a physical reality actually crumbles the moment you have a closer look at it. Medicine has been trying to correct it by mutilating intersex people for ages now, trying to put them into neat categories. Like someone already said here in the comments, you probably don't know your karyotype, right? You just assume it. There are various factors playing into sex, like chromosomal, hormonal, genital sex (plus some more!). All of them can show variations.
How sex is constructed can be made even more clearly when looking at animals. Biologists have always been very eager to put animals into sexual binaries because they tried to replicate their own view of the 'natural' man vs woman binary. But this is far from true. There are some animals with two genders, but also some with three or more and there are some with only one. Intersex, "trans" and queer animals are very common among animals as well. E.g. there are female deer with antlers etc. Science has just been too busy with projecting their own 'truth' to realize this. In recent years we have been catching up though. There is this great book called "Evolution's Rainbow" where the author Joan Roughgarden goes into much more detail.
Another interesting point is that while it feels "natural" to us that there is a gender binary, this is actually a pretty modern view. Gender and sex as we know it have only been around for a few hundred years. Just like homosexuality and in response heterosexuality are very recent phenomena. Likewise, our concept of "love" is also a very recent invention and probably a product of the emergence of capitalism.
But you can see how the performative nature of sex and gender leads to scientists and generally people trying to impose/project sex and gender onto very arbitrary traits or phenomena. And by doing so, the perceive differences between sexes/genders is even stronger which leads to repetition of the imposition/projection. We probably cannot know how our species would express itself without these social constructs interfering.
So, that is why some people here in the comments gave you the wise hint not to try to rationalize gender/sex. Those are social constructs all the way and won't really ever make sense. Where does the feeling to be any gender come from? No idea! But it definitely is there (or not haha).