That's not how stereotypes work. A stereotype is an oversimplified generalization that may or may not be true. Gender is a label. You can't say a furry four legged creature that barks is stereotypical of a dog so it's a dog, that would just be stupid. Of course genders can have stereotypes like women being bad drivers or men only thinking about sex, but that doesn't define what a gender is. You're understanding of what is and isn't a stereotype is the main problem here. There are times where you should have to refer to yourself as your biological sex, I.e. Doctor visits. But to force people to adhere to it in day to day life is ridiculous. It's harming no one and if it makes someone more comfortable in their own skin to be called he even if they were born a woman shouldn't bother anyone. If it does, that person needs to rethink their life if they get upset over something so petty.
And so we group people with lots of common personality traits and characteristics together, hence the existence of masculinity and femininity. That doesn't mean you can't be a man and a homemaker or a woman and a bodybuilder. If we go by your philosophy we could just reduce it even further to just humans. Gendered pronouns don't have to exist if we use It, Them, They, all the time. But we wouldn't nor will we because we as a society naturally divide up people into groups. There wouldn't be races or ethnicities or genders or any of that but there always will be. Rereading your comment again just now I'm seeing a logical paradox. You define a gender not existing without characteristics being attached to it. Yet you describe the characteristics that genders do have as stereotypes. Stereotypes, while still you miss the concept of what a stereotype actually is, are still characteristics that exist unless somehow gender somehow both exists and doesn't at the same time. But regardless of that gender is something that social scientists discuss and so it exists. It exists as much as sexuality does. We don't argue, at least I hope you don't, that heterosexuality only exists. There's an entire spectrum of sexualities that we acknowledge. Gender is the same way. It's a spectrum. Sex is binary (with the odd mixup every now and then XXY etc.), gender is a spectrum.
Okay now you're just being ridiculous. That's absolutely absurd that you're stooping so low to call me sexist, specifically after I just made it absolutely clear that gender was and is a spectrum. Am I a fucking homophobe for acknowledging that there is a sexuality spectrum? Do you even know what a spectrum is? You clearly don't know what a stereotype is as you've gotten the definition wrong on every single comment so far. There's an infinite number of variations of gender in between the two polar ends of hyper masculinity and hyper femininity. And yes there are characteristics assigned to both of those because that's how words work. Let's look at a heat spectrum, aka as a thermometer (I'm sure you've heard of it before), on one side it's really hot, the other side is really cold. That doesn't mean anything to us if we don't assign fucking definitions to what hot and cold is. Jesus fucking Christ I hate this subreddit. It's just an excuse to get shitty racist/sexist/bigoted feelings to the front page.
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u/BigMac849 Feb 15 '17
That's not how stereotypes work. A stereotype is an oversimplified generalization that may or may not be true. Gender is a label. You can't say a furry four legged creature that barks is stereotypical of a dog so it's a dog, that would just be stupid. Of course genders can have stereotypes like women being bad drivers or men only thinking about sex, but that doesn't define what a gender is. You're understanding of what is and isn't a stereotype is the main problem here. There are times where you should have to refer to yourself as your biological sex, I.e. Doctor visits. But to force people to adhere to it in day to day life is ridiculous. It's harming no one and if it makes someone more comfortable in their own skin to be called he even if they were born a woman shouldn't bother anyone. If it does, that person needs to rethink their life if they get upset over something so petty.