(We haven’t spoken before, so, hi! I subscribed for the writing-related talk, but this post is like an unexpected chocolate at the bottom of a box of toffees – it’s all good, but the surprise makes it better.)
I hope you don’t mind me throwing in my two cents as someone who identifies as genderqueer but who agrees entirely with your post re: gender as a social construct.
Semantic messiness seems to be a plague on gender/sex discussions in general – transsexual vs. transgender aside (which at least has a useful social function in defining those who intend to surgically alter their bodies and those who don’t), there’s a very harmful tendency to confuse sex, gender, and gendered behaviors. If gendered behaviors were gender, as some seem to take them as, everyone would be crossgender (or whatever term they preferred); which rather muddies the waters for those who experience their sex as dissonant but nonbinary, like myself, and thus want to label our genders – the social category based upon physical sex – as non-cis but also non-trans.
... In fact, now that you make the semantic issue explicit, I’m wondering if I really shouldn’t identify myself as “sexqueer”. Hmmm. Except that sounds like something the handkerchief code has a color for, eheh.
no subject
Date: 5 Mar 2010 09:04 pm (UTC)I hope you don’t mind me throwing in my two cents as someone who identifies as genderqueer but who agrees entirely with your post re: gender as a social construct.
Semantic messiness seems to be a plague on gender/sex discussions in general – transsexual vs. transgender aside (which at least has a useful social function in defining those who intend to surgically alter their bodies and those who don’t), there’s a very harmful tendency to confuse sex, gender, and gendered behaviors. If gendered behaviors were gender, as some seem to take them as, everyone would be crossgender (or whatever term they preferred); which rather muddies the waters for those who experience their sex as dissonant but nonbinary, like myself, and thus want to label our genders – the social category based upon physical sex – as non-cis but also non-trans.
... In fact, now that you make the semantic issue explicit, I’m wondering if I really shouldn’t identify myself as “sexqueer”. Hmmm. Except that sounds like something the handkerchief code has a color for, eheh.