Gender fluidity

[Kulindahr]

Good observation for we are again returning to the matter of nurture, or nature....or, maybe a little of the two.

Black, and white conclusions never serves us well for the human condition is much complex than simplistic labeling would have us believe.

Since you addressed his statement, I'll add something.

My "religious conditioning", if it requires anything I remember from church or somewhere when young, consisted of how to play nice with others. My strongest memory is of wooden blocks as toys, painted to duplicate the appearance of two-pound and five-pound blocks of Tillamook Cheese (someone eccentric fancied the brand and donated the blocks as toys for kids). Next is trying to pretend I was happy pretending to be a lamb for a Christmas pageant with bad music and far too long for little kids.

Though the indirect religious conditioning would consist of the cultural aspect of a rural area; OTOH it's arguable how much of that was religious and how much was merely justified with religion. But as someone who refused to acknowledge myself as being sexual at all, my conditioning was probably skewed heavily in some warped direction.

 

[kallipolis]

^Ones socially engineered conditioning might well be as typical, or as atypical of the influence that our life's experiences imposes upon of each of us, there being no way to know whether we are the result of society's perceived understandings of normality, or of a genetically inherited behaviorial strain that incarcerates us into its cell of natural responses.

The wise man might well understand that we learn more about our self, the more we choose not to fit into a self imposed label of what we may, or not may not be simply to address the musings of society's black, and white view of how the human herd should live.

 

[LilBit]

Okay, it should have been "Gender isn't entirely physical", or perhaps "Gender is more than just physical".

No, it shouldn't have been. Sex is physical, gender is not.

 

[Kulindahr]

No, it shouldn't have been. Sex is physical, gender is not.

If that's so, then no one would ever be uncomfortable with the body they were born with.

 

[Pierresro]

Nt sure why anyone would even ask this question it is their business not yours or mine! Why not ask why people are gay!

 

[SaskGuy]

Species isn't physical either.
Right now I feel like being a vampire bat, so I think I'll go hang upside down somewhere and spread rabies. Anyone who calls me a human being is a violent bigot.

 

[luckynumbah7]

If that's so, then no one would ever be uncomfortable with the body they were born with.

How do you figure?

 

[luckynumbah7]

Species isn't physical either.
Right now I feel like being a vampire bat, so I think I'll go hang upside down somewhere and spread rabies. Anyone who calls me a human being is a violent bigot.

You can't even list how sex as a category is decided in the west so I wouldn't trust you to understand 'species' if there was an encyclopedia propped in front of your nose.

 

[tobymerwin]

1960s the cool kids (attention seekers) claim to be heterosexual.

1970s the cool kids (attention seekers) claim to be homosexual.

1980s the cool kids (attention seekers) claim to be bisexual.

1990s the cool kids (attention seekers) claim to be asexual.

2000s the cool kids (attention seekers) claim to be transexual.

2010s the cool kids (attention seekers) claim to be beyond sexual/gender fluid.

I can hardly wait to see what the 2020s have to offer.

OUTSTANDING reply, Rat! Exactly what I was thinking.

 

[pat grimshaw]

Too much eyeliner?

 

[pat grimshaw]

Sam Hashimi is very fluid about his and her gender and his and her name.

But is there one or two of them? Sam and Samantha and Charles are flowing in circles.

They spent £100,000 in 1997 to have male organs were removed but had it all reversed 7 years later.

 

[Latimer]

^
Did NHS pay for this idiocy? The State of California is now paying for "gender reassignment" surgery for prison inmates, just as the Feds are going to pay for one Bradley Manning to become a Chelsea.

 

[pat grimshaw]

Nt sure why anyone would even ask this question it is their business not yours or mine! ...

It's our business if our taxes are being used to pay for surgery one way and then used again for the surgery back again.

 

[medic1]

Pat, you know better than that. Gender fluidity is not about getting "bits" added, or taking away.

You can do better than this......

 

[mikey3000]

Then what is it? Everyone is saying what it ISN'T, but no one is saying what it IS. Science suggests that, basically there are two genders, and a rare few have extra genes that place then somewhere on the matrix between male and female, but how can it be fluid? Psychological change is one thing, but obviously physiological and chromosome change cannot be possible, can it?

 

[G-Lexington]

I can only tell you how I see it.

Like most parents, mine gave me a name when I was born. (Let's say it was "Larry".) And although I can't say as I ever really hated the name, I also never felt right with it. I can't tell you what's wrong with the name Larry. I've met others with the same name, and the name seemed fine there. But Larry just didn't..."fit" me. I never felt like a "Larry", if that makes any sense. During high school, I picked up a nickname among a few people. ("Lex".) And I really liked it. Far better than I liked my "real" name. So I tried to encourage people to start calling me "Lex" instead of "Larry".

When I got to college, I was more or less starting with a blank slate. And so I decided to just introduce myself as "Lex". So everybody in college called me that. A few learned my real name under one circumstance or another....and, to my surprise, most immediately seemed to intuit what I did. "Larry?! You're not a 'Larry'. No way. You're Lex." They didn't just find it surprising that I went by a name that wasn't my birth name - they found, once they got used to me as "Lex", that they didn't feel I was a "Larry", either.

A very few people are kind of jerks about it. Some people seem to delight in trying to figure out what my birth name was...and, if they find out, telling as many people as they can what that birth name is. "I call him Larry because that's his REAL name. LARRY. It's not Lex - it's LARRY." And of course, they can claim that they're not being jerks at all - they're simply being REAL. They're calling me the name my parents gave me. Isn't Larry my name? Why should they not call me that? But, come on - they're being dicks.

As I started to get to know a few trans folk, this whole thing is what kept popping up in my brain. The idea that something wasn't exactly right surrounding "who I technically was" and "who I felt I really was". The long time it took me to sort of come to grips with the idea, and the attempts to get people to "accept" this new aspect of myself. And the people who fight back against it, often with claims of "I'm just being real about who you really are". Obviously, feeling you don't have the right name is far easier to deal with than feeling you weren't born the correct gender. But I sense some vague parallels there.

I can't explain why I'm not a "Larry"...other than to say with great certainty that I'm definitely not a "Larry".

And because of that, when somebody says that they're trans, or gender fluid, or whatever else....I usually believe them. Do I think they're all correct? No, of course not. But if somebody wants me to call them male or female or both or neither, I haven't found any problem with that.

Lex

 

[Kulindahr]

Then what is it? Everyone is saying what it ISN'T, but no one is saying what it IS. Science suggests that, basically there are two genders, and a rare few have extra genes that place then somewhere on the matrix between male and female, but how can it be fluid? Psychological change is one thing, but obviously physiological and chromosome change cannot be possible, can it?

No -- science speaks of two physical sexes, which have to do with those genes. Gender has to do with a lot more, which likely has a genetic aspect but also a great deal to do with nurture. The genes that determine physical sexual characteristics plainly don't determine sexual attraction, and sexual attraction in turn does not determine romantic attraction. And it's the non-physical which has to do with gender far more than the physical.

How can the non-physical attributes be fluid? If they're genetic, then they can be fluid just as mood is, or food desires, or a number of other things that vary with the amount of daylight, outdoor temperature, fitness, amount of exercise, body fat ratio, age, and more.

 

[Kulindahr]

I can only tell you how I see it.

Like most parents, mine gave me a name when I was born. (Let's say it was "Larry".) And although I can't say as I ever really hated the name, I also never felt right with it. I can't tell you what's wrong with the name Larry. I've met others with the same name, and the name seemed fine there. But Larry just didn't..."fit" me. I never felt like a "Larry", if that makes any sense. During high school, I picked up a nickname among a few people. ("Lex".) And I really liked it. Far better than I liked my "real" name. So I tried to encourage people to start calling me "Lex" instead of "Larry".

When I got to college, I was more or less starting with a blank slate. And so I decided to just introduce myself as "Lex". So everybody in college called me that. A few learned my real name under one circumstance or another....and, to my surprise, most immediately seemed to intuit what I did. "Larry?! You're not a 'Larry'. No way. You're Lex." They didn't just find it surprising that I went by a name that wasn't my birth name - they found, once they got used to me as "Lex", that they didn't feel I was a "Larry", either.

A very few people are kind of jerks about it. Some people seem to delight in trying to figure out what my birth name was...and, if they find out, telling as many people as they can what that birth name is. "I call him Larry because that's his REAL name. LARRY. It's not Lex - it's LARRY." And of course, they can claim that they're not being jerks at all - they're simply being REAL. They're calling me the name my parents gave me. Isn't Larry my name? Why should they not call me that? But, come on - they're being dicks.

As I started to get to know a few trans folk, this whole thing is what kept popping up in my brain. The idea that something wasn't exactly right surrounding "who I technically was" and "who I felt I really was". The long time it took me to sort of come to grips with the idea, and the attempts to get people to "accept" this new aspect of myself. And the people who fight back against it, often with claims of "I'm just being real about who you really are". Obviously, feeling you don't have the right name is far easier to deal with than feeling you weren't born the correct gender. But I sense some vague parallels there.

I can't explain why I'm not a "Larry"...other than to say with great certainty that I'm definitely not a "Larry".

And because of that, when somebody says that they're trans, or gender fluid, or whatever else....I usually believe them. Do I think they're all correct? No, of course not. But if somebody wants me to call them male or female or both or neither, I haven't found any problem with that.

Lex

Wonderful illustration!

It brings to mind my classes in ballroom dance, and a couple of "misfits". These two loved the idea of ballroom dance, loved the music, but... didn't get it. They learned the moves, but it always seemed to viewers -- and felt to them -- mechanical, not natural. What fascinated me was that one was a fencer, who moved with grace and fluidity in that sport, but couldn't translate that into the same for dance. The other eventually managed to attain it in dance, but through a sort of back door: martial arts. Somehow something in the precise and controlled movement of the combat exercise tripped something else so that suddenly she came "alive" in ballroom as well.

We are far too complex to understand ourselves, and probably wouldn't gain that understanding should our lifespan increase by a factor of a hundred. But some things we just know, or "get", whether it's a name that fits, the flow of dance -- or gender.

 

[peeonme]

Then what is it? Everyone is saying what it ISN'T, but no one is saying what it IS. Science suggests that, basically there are two genders, and a rare few have extra genes that place then somewhere on the matrix between male and female, but how can it be fluid? Psychological change is one thing, but obviously physiological and chromosome change cannot be possible, can it?

Science might also tell you based upon physical evidence, a penis and a vagina... that the male should have sex only with the female.
The physical evidence can not establish sexual desires or sexual identity. The outward signs of a persons gender would tell us that in a certain percent of the population X number of people will be attracted to the opposite sex. Likewise, X number of people will in their
minds be in coloration with the body that they were born with.

Some people, myself included have strong desires for the same sex and at the same time find the opposite sex appealing, more so at some times than at others. I can fully understand how a person might feel male one day and female the next. I suppose that for some it is a frustrating ongoing battle. Just as much as one trying to decide if they are really gay when at time a woman seems sexy.

 

[mikey3000]

I guess then that I am unique in that I am a cis gender male who enjoys both sexes, no fluidity in my gender, but I'll still keep trying to understand