Posted: Jan 11, 2011 9:19 pm
sweitzen wrote:I am going to throw in my uninformed opinion that gender is, indeed, real, and one's biological gender may not match one's emotional gender. That seems to be the issue that too many do not understand. Really, it's just one symptom of the "if it's not my own direct experience, then it's not real" attitude.
But is it real for everyone, or only for those who say it's real for them?
Surely gender IS nothing more than "direct experience". Gender is defined, by groups such as the one Scot quoted above, as what a person themselves reports as being the role that they "identify with".
Which means that if I tell you that I don't identify with any gender role, then THAT is my experience. And you have no more right to tell me I have a gender than I have to tell someone they don't. (And I'm not the only person that feels this way).
When I think about it this is not so strange. There are plenty of psychological phenomena that people accept as "real", and which have been studied and measured and explored in considerable detail, without anyone thinking for a moment that everyone has them. Maybe the problem is not the idea of "innate gender" per se, but the assumption that it must be universal.