Brief Thoughts on Gender

“Masculine” and “feminine” provide a script that says, here are the social roles you perform, here are the family roles you perform, here’s the power and respect you get (or don’t), and here’s a grab-bag of gender-linked personality/hobby/skill things you get to choose from to finish filling out your character sheet in the RPG of life.

If that script and grab-bag work for you, then great. Enjoy. But do not make the mistake of thinking that the script is real.

What the script is, is convenient – and especially so for people who are, say, very attached to a “masculine” identity that just so happens to promise them power and respect as their due.

Sex is not gender. This is what we mean when we say that gender is a social construct – that these ideas of “masculine” and “feminine” just draw a direct line from sex to a prescribed set of behaviors, but that there’s no actual reason for that line. Humans made it up, largely to benefit men and to facilitate the organisation of large-scale state violence (see the song “A Girl Worth Fighting For” from Mulan, currently entertaining my four-year-old).

There is really no actual reason to think that your particular capacity for a contribution to human reproduction can, should, or must have anything to do with your social roles, occupation, skills, interests, power and respect, or what have you.

Basically, the gender binary that some people care about so much, is just a shortcut for making a bunch of life decisions – how to act, what to like, what to do – with a single defining choice.

So, if you want to do that, you can. But don’t imagine that everyone else is also supposed to do that.

Use gender to make those decisions for yourself if you want to. Don’t use it to impose the same decision on others.

It’s your lunch combo to order if you want it, but that’s all.