so i was trolling and arguing with some bigots online (hey i had some time to kill lmao) and i said something about gender and sex being two seperate things so one of them brought up john money who i had never heard of before. so i looked up john money and looked into what leftists and transgender people had to say about him. obviously the guy was a pos but the general consensus was that he was trying to prove gender was learned with the reimer case but was proven wrong and that gender is innate. which makes sense, reimer never knew he was born a man and had dysphoria from that so transgender people aren’t “socialized” wrong, that’s how they’re born. but what i’m confused about is isn’t gender a social construct and aren’t the social roles, etc, all learned so how would it be innate? like boys aren’t born liking the color blue, and so on and so forth. so is someone just born with a predisposition to be more likely to identify as a certain gender? is it a combination of nature and nurture? something else?
idk i feel like i get it but i’m simultaneously brain farting
piling on, gender is probably something that our brains do (unclear if agender is "none of these" or "none at all" due to labelling deficiency) but all the semiotics of it are constructed and subject to change like how pink, being a shade of red and red being manly, wasn't always "for girls".
Yeah I went back and read "isn't imagined" and wasn't satisfied with it. My point is mainly that because gender --or anything else-- is social, being social doesn't make it less real. Language exists whether we are speaking or not. And we dream in language, we express our deepest fears and desires in language, it can be scientifically studied, formalized and adapted. It changes the way we think. It has existed longer than we have any record of it, and it has changed dramatically over time, or even from culture to culture.
Language is social in a similar way that gender is, that (unfortunately) capital and money is. I think the way that capitalization has subsumed language and especially gender as well as every other aspect of our social reality, is a sign of the troubles we as a society experience with expanding the definition of gender, and subsequently language, to reflect a better understanding of our selves and a broader understanding of what it means to be human.
I think that reactionary tendency against gender/sexual freedom, is the idea that there is some force that moves history, some structuring of world events that isn't financial, and yet it is changing history and people and geography. There is a spectre; but rather than give it a name, terrorize it until it has been destroyed or sublimated. To the ruling class, any perceived change is a threat that merits violence.
Sorry I've been writing a ton, I'm a nobody I just have a lot of stuff I'm working out via writing in my life,