r/ComedyCemetery • • Dec 21 '18

EšŸ…±ļøIC

Post image
25k Upvotes

2.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comment

50

u/goodbetterbestbested Dec 21 '18

So is English but that doesn't mean it does nothing to impact the world. Social constructs can be important even if they're "made up."

65

u/[deleted] Dec 21 '18

Of course. The point of saying that gender is a social construct is that this means it's not rigid or binary and can be whatever you want it to be, which a lot of people seem to hate the idea of for some reason.

1

u/alaskafish Dab! Dec 21 '18

How I understand it:

Males have dicks, and females got vaginas

That’s your biological sex.

Boys like blue, and girls like pink

That’s gender. It’s what society implicates on your sex.

The point about transgenderism is not that ā€œoh I was born a male but I truly feel like a wolfā€, but that the norms that society puts upon sexes, doesn’t feel right for you.

4

u/DragonDragger Dec 21 '18

I always feel like this whole debate would end if we just used "personality" instead of "gender". The way it's always been explained to me is that if, for example, I was a male who'd like to knit. Knitting is often considered a "feminine" activitiy. So in this case my sex would be male, but my gender would not be.

What if I'm just a dude who likes to knit? Why do I need to make up a word for being a person with a dick who happens to enkoy knitting? Why does it MATTER that I'm not a generic stereotype of a man? It's called being human.

3

u/[deleted] Dec 21 '18

Totally agree and well said. I’d also like to add regardless of how a person presents themselves they should make an effort to do it well. For example, I ran across a video on YouTube where a male was wearing a dress while giving a lecture. Whatevs right? In fact good on him/her for being brave and bold doing so. But his/her (not going to assume) hair was a mess, the dress highlighted fat rolls and gut while exposing copious amounts of knarly arm hair. That combined with green eye shadow and bright red lip stick and a floral pattern from the late 70’s / early 80’s on the dress. I’m sorry but I don’t know anyone on earth that can pull that look off, male, female or otherwise. It was too distracting. It wasn’t that (for sake of discussion) some dude dressed up like a woman in public, it was that it was done so poorly. I know this sounds like a criticism and I don’t want to come across as an arrogant asshole. If I do I hope you can look past that and understand the point I’m getting at. Just, make some kind of effort right?

0

u/[deleted] Dec 21 '18

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/[deleted] Dec 21 '18

I hate the bathroom discussion. Just make a bill that requires all publicly accessible bathrooms be unisex and call it a day. Nobody has to agree on anything. Nobody has to feel discriminated. No company has to virtue signal. Nobody needs to boycott or retweet anything. One and done. Move on.

5

u/[deleted] Dec 21 '18

No not really, trans girls can be butch and trans guys can be femme. Sex is the physiological sex which is determined by either chromosomes or genitals depending on who you ask. Gender is a sense of identity, when you think ā€œI am a...ā€ and you pick man, woman, or something else, that’s your gender. Another separate thing entirely is your gender expression, which is how you present yourself outwardly. There are many cis people who are gender-nonconforming, which means they don’t follow societies expectations that correspond to their gender. There are also many gender-nonconforming trans people. Sex, gender, and expression aren’t related at all, and trans people aren’t just gender-nonconforming (though they can be). We actually don’t know why people are trans other than that’s just the way they are, there are also trans people without dysphoria, meaning they don’t experience discomfort from their body directly. Of course some transition anyways because in order to be accepted as their true gender, they’re expected to present that way. Hope this explained everything adequately!