“It’s pretty simple,” she said, shrugging. “You are what you feel.”

[oneirophrenia]

I'm usually not one to take an interest in so-called "gender issues" since 99.9999% of the academic conversation concerning "gender" concepts is meaningless treknobabble comprised of made-up words for made-up concepts. Hell, half the time, terms like "gender" and "sexual orientation" are bandied about aimlessly without any real definition of what these terms even mean: if no one can even pin down a reasonable definition of "gender," what's the point of even TRYING to identify something derived from it like "gender dysphoria?" But anyway....

This article on MSNBC.com, however, is one of the few insightful pieces I've ever read concerning the subject because it simply takes a look at androgyny as a pop-culture--a sociaological--phenomenon. It's not particularly detailed, but it's honest and straightforward, and it deals well with its subject matter via personal interviews.

Talk about "gender issues" MUST be pragmatic and down-to-earth, or it's all just airy-fairy theoretical bullshit. I say again: THEORY IS USELESS unless it adequately describes and predicts real-world interactions. Gender is a part of everyone's everyday life; in order to describe it properly, you have to pay attention to everyday life.

Comments

Re: Good point, but

[skunque.livejournal.com]

well, I may be giving too much credit to the authors, but perhaps the overall arch would be that gender identity and sexual orientation are not mutually exclusive or even independent, but not bound together. But granted, if that were the case, they could've kept with the tone and explicitly said so.

I thought the article was ok, but it could've been more expansive, at least to give a better frame of reference. The tone sort of put it on par with cell phone or pager trends, but descriptively, it seemed to capture the "middle ground" it was focusing on.

Re: Good point, but

[martygreene.livejournal.com]

I'm irked because, unless I missed it, the article doesn't even take the time to define what gender is. Defining what gender is, particularly in an article about the gender blur, is almost IMPERITIVE especially since the majority of people think gender = sex.

I agree with Jeremy, the article is pedantic and lame. It had potential to be good, but it utterly failed to say anything or bring up any good thinking points. It didn't even define it's terms. In my college english classes, this would have gotten a C-.

Re: Good point, but

[oneirophrenia.livejournal.com]

The only thing complicated about gender issues is the centuries of societal blather heaped up on them. In 99% of the human species, "gender" is a simple trait based on the most elementary physical distinction: male or female. Period. The scant handful of physical hermaphrodites and other such intersexed individuals are completely and utterly negligible because over the centuries they've been so statistically uncommon as to be irrelevant.

Now, as to what characteristics of dress, behavior, and so forth a society *assigns* to those base genders, male and female...well, that's when things begin to get complicated. Skirts are for chicks, right? Not if you're Scottish and wear a kilt. Women are supposed to stay at home and take care of the brats, right? Not if you're Eskimo. Different societies define the *concepts* of male and female differently, but beneath the clothing and the model roles, everyone still knows who's male and female, right?

Not anymore. Technology now allows people to physically reassign their phenotypical sexual characteristics--it can give individuals who are genetically female a wang, or convert a wang into a vagina-analog. Neurologists have found female brain structures in the hypothalami of some homosexual men, and male brain structures in the brains of some lesbians. Gender roles and identities never *used* to be complicated, because at base they were just interpretations of what obvious males and females were supposed to do or look like. Today...technology and a rapidly mutating global civilization are complicating things every time you turn around. Bishonen bois from Japan, dykegrrls from Germany. Imagery is blurring every day, and pretty soon technology will allow easy switching of physical sexual characteristics (though I don't think anyone will ever be able to GENETICALLY switch from male to female, because that would take such a grand-scale chromosomal/gene-level reconstruction as to basically strip the person's cells of their unique DNA and recreate them whole from a new genetic template, and even a transhumanist like myself can see THAT will be too much of a pain in the goddamned ass to do...at least until about 2080). Or complete removal of ALL sexual characteristics and the development of Neuts. Or...or even a hundred thousand different blends of hermaphrodite!

So a statement such as "It's pretty simple: You are what you feel" is, today, rapidly becoming THE simplest, and easiest, way of describing gender. How *else* could someone define a concept that is becoming so completely fluid?

(This is an awesome conversation, BTW!)