Our sex should obviously not be a major part of our lives outside of, like, medical things. But our society forces gender on us as a set of roles, expectations etc. to follow based on our sex. So, ideally, there would be no gender, right?
But trans people throughout history have wanted to present as the opposite gender. This is in addition to cis people who oppose their own gender’s roles and do the opposite things. But trans people, obviously, go much further than any cis person does.
Is this because trans people want to actually be the opposite sex and for a long time being the opposite gender was the only possible thing? But now thanks to medical advancements they can get closer to that goal than any other time?
Why is this? Is it something in the brain, like with gay people? So, can you do a brain scan to see if people are actually gay or trans? Would that even help? Actually, I can imagine it helping in an ideal world, but in our fascist reality that will probably just end up genociding people. So, uh, scrap that.
Any essential books for reading up on all this stuff? Thanks
gender is probably something your brain can do, and would still do if you were raised by wolves, but all the stuff we attach to gender is made up. we shouldn't be medicalist about it but affirming surgeries are probably way older than you think even in the western cultural context, and there's some weird stuff in this historical record about ancient practices that amounted to hrt.
idk if other agender people have a gender and can't recognize it due to a lack of cultural context, or if our brains aren't doing the electrochemical process that nominally produces gender. probably some of each, but i'm not sure it matters.
frankly i'm not sure how much the details of the inaccessible interiority of other people matters for anything, not just gender. we can only interact with it by proxy.