So I think you can see why Al would not try super hard to unpack all that for the general when he’s at the end of his spoons after an exhausting day of social pressures, Brendan. (I’m joking about the tone, of course it feels bad when the big jock dehumanizes you to your friend and he doesn’t stand up for you.)

Are those *suicide attempt scars*!? O_O;

I see what you mean; I guess I was using the wrong terms, then. The reason I spoke the way I did because my trans friend told me that his sex is/was female but his gender was male-leaning (even if not entirely male on a binary scale), at least when he first told me he was trans. So I think/wonder if the usage of it is different amongst different people and different segments of people and communities; because I was just using it as he has taught me. He always talks about how gender and sex are two different things; he says that sex is what is on his medical forms and what his body “is”, but gender is who he really is. But this could just be a case of he was explaining it to me in a way my limited understanding would grasp at the time?

But even on a cultural anthropology level, I’m even more confused, honestly, since in my class (which ofc is not 100% accurate but at least covered gender as a societal construct and sex as a somewhat physical one) we disccused on several genders, such as how muxe are male “biological sex”, but muxe is gender.

So I’m a bit confused on what you mean by biological sex not existing, as I’ve never heard that being brought up in the LGBT community or with my friend, or in sexual/cultural anthropology classes. I mean, yes, it’s a random thing on a piece of paper, based on physical aspects and in many cases, whatever the doctors decide to go with because it looks the most right or whatever, but… Is that what you mean? Like because it’s just because the doctor going by what society says and therefore it doesn’t exist, or am I really misunderstanding you?

Again, I am not saying all or any of my sources on these are right, just explaining why I said what I did, the way I did. My friend specifically uses the term biological sex to explain trans to other people who don’t know what it is as well. I’m also not exactly knowledgeable on any of this so I’d appreciate help/corrections.

I also didn’t mean to say that how someone is raised influenced their gender, and I guess I don’t use nurture in the sense that is “commonly” used, so I made a mistake there and apologize for it. I more meant to explain how just because the two are biologically identical, it doesn’t mean their genders are or that their personalities and other aspects are. To me, nurture is anything someone experiences/thinks/feels after birth, aka, their hormones or whatever else influences us to identify the way we do about everything. So, again using the twins idea, to me, one identifying as male and another as a different gender would count as nurture instead of nature to me, because to me nature would just be their base DNA. But I definitely see where my phrasing could be considered harmful and is definitely misleading. Also please bear in mind that I could definitely be misremembering what my friend said, or misrepresenting him, or he explained it in a way that I would understand at the time using terms he might normally not have, etc. I just can’t know or speak for him.

Now that I’ve sat on it a bit, I’m wondering if the problem was that I said the word “match”, because it implies that someone who doesn’t have what I called their gender and sex line up is
mis-matched” and therefore “wrong”. But that wasn’t my intention at all. I more meant it in how I wouldn’t say a blonde matched a burnette. Or maybe just that I was using sex and gender as two things when it should be one because one of them shouldn’t matter? I am unsure…

I’m sorry if I offended anyone with what I said, or if I said anything harmful. It was not my intent at all.

i’d hate for all of my work to go fading in wind: a voice never heard.
so please go there.

failing that, i’ll re-try my post, on this site, by breaking it up into 2 or 3 parts.

let’s see what happens!

nommie, i’ll have to see you at ( http://ohumanstar.boards.net/ )

you’ll dance with me, there, i hope?

Volume One is at the printers now, and will become available for purchase in March. Just keep an eye on the posts and I’ll announce when they’re ready to go. Thanks for reading!

I would agree that Sulla being female doesn’t necessitate that Al is also female, but I think that it’s important to remember/understand that a person’s gender is formed by the time they are 2-3 years old. So it’s not really “nurture” that influences a person’s gender, at least not in the way we usually think about it. The actions of a parent towards their child before 2-3 years old has been shown to not have any correlation to that child’s gender. This also points out how the assumptions that some have that trans people are trans because of some traumatic childhood experience is completely off base (tangential: trans folks are more likely to have had a traumatic experience than cis folks during childhood, but this has been attributed to the greater liklihood of society to treat trans children poorly).
Similarly, it’s certainly not a purely genetic thing either. Identical twins sometimes have different genders. I’m sure if we did human cloning research we would find that clones similarly don’t necessarily have the same gender as their progenitors.
What this implies is that it is something that develops in the brain or brain chemistry as part of the formation of self-identification (around the same time as a baby learns to recognize themself in a mirror). This would mean that the development of gender is likely influenced by chemical balances (hormonal balances, if you will), but is specifically shaped due to stimula that we don’t yet understand.
Quick little caveat, too: it’s not that a person’s gender doesn’t “match” their sex; that is a very common misconception about trans people (and about the intersections of sex and gender). Trans people are assigned the wrong gender at birth, while cis people weren’t assigned the wrong gender at birth. None of it has anything to do with their assigned sex, and especially has nothing to do with actual “biological sex” (which isn’t something we actually ever discuss when talking about humans). It may seem like I’m splitting hairs over semantics, but those semantics are actually really important. Putting it in relation to “assigned sex” is quite exclusive of intersex people and of non-binary folks, as it assumes that “assigned sex” is based on something realistic to the human experience, rather than the fact that “assigned sex” is just as random and ridiculous as assigning a gender at birth.