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
what a great comment, thank you! in my head i was lumping gender identity and gender presentation together, i never really considered that these were two seperate things until now. if i’m understanding it right i guess a very simplified example of that would be how someone reacts to learned gender representation (like nail polish) is determined by their innate gender identity (reject or affirm)?
Yeah, i doubt i'd have the same reaction if nail polish was a dude thing in my culture. But as i've grown up with the notion that it's feminine, it can trigger gender euphoria in me, just as it was deeply dysphoric for me when i had to remove nail polish before the start of the workweek while i was still in the closet.
It was tricky figuring this out, it's hard to find yourself when your identity is that of a queer woman that often does not fit into societal notions of what women should be like. But reading Leslie Feinberg's Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink and Blue while my egg cracked helped a lot with this, as did having other queer women as role models to break up my stereotypes about what a lesbian can present like.