Judith Butler | Performativity and David Reimer

[atreestump]

Haha, I just wondered if gender is as abstract as that or can be or what exactly any of it refers to.

I thought its just a thing people say, that a male is a person with a penis generally, a female with a vagina or womb for womb-man.

I thought women typically have menstrual periods and bleed out of their vaginas and men generally are born with some sort of testacles and penises and both can be identified by certain traits that are biological.

Then there are cases of some kind of strange or unusual things, but also those who state that they are something else inside that doesn't match up with their birth genitals or sexual or biological traits, but may at times match up with their sexual preferences or something, like people saying "I am a hetero sexual woman inside so I am attracted to the opposite sex".


Biological traits are agreed upon as a way to define sex, which means that is a construct, there are many other factors, men and women's brains are different too which is usually explained because of hormones and various evolutionary factors. Many of the experiments that make these claims have never been reproduced by others, so it's still very inconclusive.

Biological sex really only has much use as a definition in terms of reproductive capabilities and in a legal and juridical sense. Biological sex is in terms of male and female, which is not the same as man and woman, masculine and feminine.

A gender is much more than what's between our legs, chromosomes and reproductive capabilities, but then, as you say, it can also sound so incredibly abstract that it starts to sound very Platonist indeed.
 

I have met many people who are homosexual who seemed to have an incident where they were molested by family members or sometimes others but there isca lot of resistance as well to the idea of something happening like that and many say they were very young while they first felt different.


I have too, but not all of them are homosexual due to abuse. When I was looking into male and female biology, an interesting study came up that showed homosexual men are not biologically in any way like a female. Often, natural science is thrown into the mix of identity politics to change laws, which is all good, but it is not always true - there is no 'gay-gene', never was and never will be. The fact of the matter is, some men like other men, it's been around for all time and especially the Greeks. It is only in recent history that we defined it as 'homo-sexuality', which was a medical term and not an identity as such, but that was what it became.

[Socrates]

Form seems to be the last thing of interest to this thing, it is more interested in something like transformation or destruction or change.


As @"thetrizzard" put it to me earlier -

It's only essential in the sense that 'forms' have become stable over time giving the appearance of being fixed when this is clearly not the case in reality...all is process, in flux

[atreestump]

http://www.feministcurrent.com/2016/08/10/coming-non-binary-throws-women-bus/