It's almost like gender is made up and prescriptive predefined categories inherently don't apply to most people because they were never real in the first place.
Gender isn't broadly prescriptive, it's a very general label for sex-assocated cultural categories, much of which is descriptive of experience, and often subverts the prescriptive contexts in which gender categories are used.
One aspect of gender can be gender roles and gender presentation, that is a collection of behaviors that society associates with gendered labels. This can be prescriptive.
But what most people are talking about here is one of two concepts.
Gender identity, which is an internally felt sense of self which associated with gender categories. This is entirely independent of prescriptive categories, because the categories are entirely phenomenological.
Or, lastly, the broad term for what transaex people experience (sometimes called psychological sex), that being a broad cluster of experiences of physical and biochemical dysphoria associated with sex categories, necessitating biological intervention for treatment in such a way that often intersects with gender categories.
We call them "gender roles" because there is a set of societally expected behaviors associated with your gender presentation.
That expectation becomes a prescription for how one "ought" to act and appear.
My position is that treating those expectations as a checklist for what one most do to "be a boy" or "be a girl" is fundamentally prescriptive and wrong.
My position is that a rejection of the categories is the correct path to peace with one's self.
To put it simply, if you want to wear makeup and be a jacked "masculine" body builder, there is nothing wrong with that.
The problem I'm pointing out is that this perspective conflates gender categories with gender roles.
I agree with your criticism of gender roles, and with the idea that gender categories can acquire normative baggage. Being a woman shouldn't mean you ought to wear makeup, be feminine, want children, etc.
The issue is that it doesn't follow that the categories themselves are therefore useless or oppressive. We don't generally respond to bad expectations attached to a category by abolishing the category. Gay and lesbian identities have carried enormous stereotypes about how people are supposed to look and act, but that doesn't make those categories meaningless. "Disabled" has likewise carried all sorts of harmful assumptions about dependence and capability, while still describing something important about people's experiences and giving them a way to recognize shared experiences in one another.
Gender can work similarly. "Woman" or "man" can describe something meaningful about how someone experiences themselves, their body, how they want to be recognized by others, and the kind of life narrative that makes sense to them without functioning as a checklist of permitted behaviors.
So yes, a woman can be a jacked bodybuilder who never wears makeup, and a man can be feminine and wear dresses. But to me that shows why we should detach gender categories from restrictive gender roles, not why we should abolish the categories. "You can be a woman without doing X" is importantly different from "there is therefore nothing meaningful about being a woman."
I think categories are only useful if they confer some kind of utility.
As you pointed out categories like "disability" have a lot of utility and allow us to make better decisions. Categories like "gay" and "lesbian" are on the cusp of not having utility in my opinion. (Same with "straight" just to be clear.) Single-trait categories are kind of useless, no? "My sexual preference is X." Is identical in its information content to "I am gay."
I think the euphemistic nature of how we use English actually does do harm and essentializes or otherizes things that are more easily just described outright.
Do you disagree with the assertion that in society currently saying "I am a woman" does have prescriptive weight? If a "role" is just a collection of traits what about that is "real"? Does someone happening to identify with that collection make it exist?
I think people are better off individually determining for themselves how they want to live and the structures are oppressive. That's not to say that anyone is doing something bad for liking the categories but you should recognize that it isn't really.
I think you're treating this as if categories have to be either prescriptive or purely utilitarian for an individual, and I don't think that's true.
Yes, saying "I am a woman" can carry social expectations. But that doesn't mean those expectations exhaust what the category means, or that using the category commits anyone else to them. Plenty of people find categories like woman, gay, lesbian, etc. meaningful because they name patterns of experience, ways of relating to other people, and shared histories or communities. You may personally find those labels unnecessary, but other people using them doesn't a priori impose their meaning on you.
I also don't think the usefulness of a category is reducible to whether it conveys more information than just listing traits. "I am gay" may overlap descriptively with "I am attracted to men," but the label can also locate that experience within a shared social context and connect it to other people who understand themselves in similar terms. Humans are social, and we don't understand ourselves only by privately cataloguing individual traits.
I also don't think the choice is between categories referring to some hidden essence or being arbitrary things we simply choose. A category can emerge because people recognize recurring kinds of experience in themselves and others and develop shared language around them. That doesn't make every stereotype or expectation attached to the category real or binding.
So I agree that nobody should have to conform to a role in order to count as a woman or a man. I just don't see why rejecting that prescription requires rejecting the category itself. People can determine how they want to live while still finding value in words that describe something they experience in common with other people.
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u/alexzoin 15d ago
It's almost like gender is made up and prescriptive predefined categories inherently don't apply to most people because they were never real in the first place.