[ SECRET POST #4066 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #4066 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 26 secrets from Secret Submission Post #582.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

nayrt but wait, so you ARE saying society gets to define gender

Gender as a set of ideas is, in part, socially determined, yes. That doesn't mean that any individual person's relationship to that framework is determined by society.

So ye women of past who insisted on wearing pants instead of skirts, or sneaked into the army, or refused to have kids, or liked playing ball with the boys were all actually nonbinary since they didn't conform to societal expectations! Wow.

There's like 4 or 5 different ways in which I disagree with that

but most fundamentally, probably, is that taking an action that doesn't fit into the gender binary isn't the same as having a nonbinary identity

[(Anonymous)]

How would you define the difference between having a nonbinary identity and taking consistent actions that don't fit into the gender binary?

[(Anonymous)]

I think that, in general, an identity is something distinct from an aggregate of actions. it's a combination of self-definition and performance and persona and those kinds of things, in my mind - not to say that it's unrelated to actions and experience, but it is not just those things.

[(Anonymous)]

The claim that gender really is "socially determined" is pretty sad, considering previous discourse focused on how society doesn't get to define gender. That your presentation, hobbies, behavior, etc. has absolutely nothing to do with your gender.

How do you disagree with that statement, by the way? I'm just curious because you haven't offered a criteria to define male and female besides partially socially determined, which would suggest someone can be objectively "male" despite having female genitals if society determines they are more masculine than feminine. If gender is socially defined, why would someone claiming to be nonbinary do so (since they must acknowledge that it is up to society to define their gender)? If there is no tangible, objective way to define male and female, how could you define nonbinary?

[(Anonymous)]

What I said was that gender-as-a-social-construct is socially determined - the external framework - not the person's identity and relation to that framework. I don't think that any person's individual gender is or should be defined for them externally. I am certainly not saying that it is up to society to define anyone's gender. It's more that gender-as-a-social-construct is a background for all of our understandings of gender that we variously use or reject in defining our own identities for ourselves.

[(Anonymous)]

So, do you mean then, a person's understanding of their own gender comes from their understanding of gender in general, which has been influenced by external forces?

I could understand this, but not without the caveat that someone's understanding of their gender is likely to change and evolve as their understanding of gender in general changes and evolves - both as their perspectives naturally may change as the get older, and how society views men and women changes.

On the other hand, I also struggle to find this significant outside of personal soul-searching since there doesn't seem to be objective criteria to define it. If your understanding of gender volunteers society's expectations of gender roles, can your gender change if you travel to Saudi Arabia, or Japan, or Finland, or the moon - if the backdrop of external framework of a society's expectations of gender changes? Can you be a man according to Saudia Arabia and a woman according to Finland and is everyone nonbinary on the moon?

[(Anonymous)]

So, do you mean then, a person's understanding of their own gender comes from their understanding of gender in general, which has been influenced by external forces?

Yeah, I think that's pretty fair.

someone's understanding of their gender is likely to change and evolve as their understanding of gender in general changes and evolves - both as their perspectives naturally may change as the get older, and how society views men and women changes.

Sure, I totally agree, and I don't have a problem with fluidity here.

If your understanding of gender volunteers society's expectations of gender roles, can your gender change if you travel to Saudi Arabia, or Japan, or Finland, or the moon - if the backdrop of external framework of a society's expectations of gender changes? Can you be a man according to Saudia Arabia and a woman according to Finland and is everyone nonbinary on the moon?

Well, one, when I talk about society's expectations of gender, that's kind of an abstraction that I'm using to generalize across stuff like this. In reality, every culture and every time period has its own specific understanding of what gender is, and those understandings have varied hugely. So, yeah, there's great variation in terms of what the socially-determined ideas about gender actually consist of.

Second, it's not so much a question of just, like, you go to a new country, and suddenly that cultural understanding of gender determines how you operate. I would think of it more in terms of, what social understandings have influenced you on a personal level? What have you internalized and learned? It's not just the society you happen to be in. And even then, it can definitely still change over time and all of that.

But if you go to the moon, that experience is probably not going to dramatically change your understanding of gender. I mean, I assume. I don't know if anyone ever asked Neil Armstrong that question, so I can't say for sure.