I see both of them said fairly often and am confused.

  • AcidSmiley [she/her]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    Sex is a spectrum, too (or maybe more of a mosaic), gender isn't the same and it is necessary to break down gender further.

    If you want to explain 100% of people's gender experiences, you need to do what Comrade Leslie Feinberg outlined in Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue and differentiate between gender role /gender performance = gender as a social construct and as a way to perform gender in society on one hand; an external, social dimension of gender so to say.

    And on the other hand, you have gender identity which means gender as part of your self, as a psychological constant that shapes how you view your gendered relations with the rest of society and your biological sexual characteristics - this is the internal dimension of gender.

    People normally do not notice this split because for most people, sex, gender role and gender identity more or less align from birth. But when you're trans, and when you realize that you're trans, it either becomes very obvious that the trans experience can only be explained this way, in a 3-dimensional model, or you end up lost and confused thinking that your transness is largely tied to your gender performance being different from your AGAB and you become ContraPoints.

    A lot of the discourse around transness that isn't entirely bad faith genocide justification bs but honest confusion boils down to this. To people going with the Butlerian two-dimensional sex/gender model that only explains cis experiences and very easily leads to transphobic kneejerk reactions when you're a gender non-conforming cis woman who thinks too hard about what being trans means.

    • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I've been quoting you a lot when talking about this to well meaning liberals. I've been mentioning frequently how gender can't be understood as simply performance, but also identity and presentation. It does seem to make the gears finally turn in some heads

      • AcidSmiley [she/her]
        ·
        2 years ago

        You can't imagine how glad it makes me to hear that :cat-trans:

      • D61 [any]
        ·
        2 years ago

        She made a video that, if I'm being charitable, was trying to make the point that gender is self identity and performance within society that are different but linked things but it came off as her saying that gender was just performance and Contra got drug for it.