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I have this partially-baked notion that gender has as much to do with the object of desire as with the centering of self. I'm not nearly prepared to explain that with anything like intellectual rigor, but it niggles at me.

As for me, I am male because I am male. An utterly tautological answer, but it seems foundational to me.

Wow, Jed, that is a neat question.

I think I know that I'm female because I've always been told that I am. Because my community sees me as female, and because the shape of my body says to my community: this is a woman-shape.

On the inside, I've never felt strongly female or strongly male. In dreams, when I'm aware of gender at all, I'm as often male as female.

I used to assume that everyone else felt neutrally-gendered on the inside, and that if we just changed society's association of body-shape to gender, then we could be free of all that nonsense. But I think I was wrong: some people clearly feel as strongly about their intrinsic gender as I do about my lack of one.

Before I remember understanding my own gender, I remember how people perceived my gender and the expectations of me because of that gender. Depending on the expectation, I either betrayed them or lived up to them.

Now, I understand my gender identity to be congruous with my biological sex characteristics. Even when I don't live up to gender expectations, I still consider myself to be a member of a gender which is identified by outward sex characteristics. However, there is so much about human biology that we don't understand fully, it very well could be that being my gender is formed by much more than just possessing certain outward sex characteristics.

This is a strangely well-timed question, as I just had a vasectomy the other day.

As a young man, I was not particularly strong or handsome or tough or good with tools or any of the things that mainstream media defined as male at the time. But I never questioned my gender identity. I had known from a young age that I was male and nothing really shook that sense of myself. Perhaps it was growing up in the age of "Free to Be, You and Me," where boys could be boys in a variety of new ways.

When I think about what formed my male self-image so early and so unshakeably, I would say first and foremost it was a strong, clear, and terribly embarassing and distracting attraction to women from a young age. I did not really know about homosexuality at the time - it was not part of my awareness or vocabulary - so there was no implicit comparison. It wasn't "I am a man because I am not attracted to other men." It was more like, "I am a man because I like women a WHOLE LOT, not just a little." In strongly lusting for women, I clearly identified myself as male. I'm sure this is a fairly common path to gender identity for heterosexual men. I was probably ten or eleven at the time.

But there were other factors involved as well, more subtle perhaps but just as basic. I have three brothers, no sisters, and throughout school always had my cadre of other boys who shared my odd interests and skills, so I had this continually feeling of belonging with other boys and men. I may have often felt isolated and alienated in school and in the world at large, but always for reasons that had nothing to do with gender identity. I had my brothers and male friends to fall back upon, to support me in their awkward, teasing, but welcoming ways.

I also did a lot of things that, at the time, I unconsciously thought of as male, possibly because the women in my life did not seem interested in those activities. This would include the general razzing and knocking down a peg of each other, the geeky interest in mathematics and fantasy role playing, the hours spent wrestling or climbing or generally showing off my physical strength and agility, as limited as it was at the time.

This is all to say how my identity was formed. What informs my gender today is not the same. I am a husband and a father, and no matter how enlightened I am, no matter how much equality I bring to my marriage, these roles are heavy with gender identity. I am the one who gives the bristly kisses (because of my beard) to the children. I am the one who maintains a level of reason and detachment when emotions rage about the house - which may be stereotypical, but which also appear to fluctuate with the hormonal cycles of my wife. I am called Papa ten times more often than my own name.

One bit of irony. My voice is rather in the high range, so that I am often mistaken for a woman on the phone. This used to bother me a lot, until I learned I could turn it to my advantage. "Is this Mrs. Katinsky?" "No this is Mr. Katinsky." "Oh, I'm so sorry, sir!" Once they've blundered your sex, bureaucrats and airline ticket agents are a lot more accomodating and will bend over backwards to make exceptions for you.

A combination of identification and desire, I think.

Whether through cultural training or hard-wiring, I have always identified with women as my primary role models: I have early memories of forcing my poor mother to comb through toy stores searching for Wonder Woman comic books and Princess Leia action figures. And I remember a real sense of dissatifaction when they proved nigh impossible to acquire. I'll settle for a male substitute if there's no really viable female alternative... and I like Albert Einstein and Carl Sagan just fine... but you should've seen me perk up the first time somebody mentioned Marie Curie. Or Mileva Maric. What's more, I feel a strange sort of despair whenever I hear stories of successful women researchers taken down at the height of their careers by breast cancer or mental illness. As if someone is attacking me, personally, taking away any possibility of true success or happiness. There will always be an unknown disease waiting in the wings.

And, well, I want to be a woman. I want to be the girl who beats all the boys at math; I want to be a woman who plays with model rockets. I want to play dress-up. I want to be prettier than I am. I want women and men both to notice me as a woman.

But... while I would say that this is all "deeply ingrained," I would NOT say that it is "rigid." Which is something that actually changed with attending WisCon and reading about Ben Barres' experience--after I came back from WisCon this summer, I did catch myself thinking things like: You know, if somebody granted me an extra hundred years of life, I think I'd like to spend a decade or two as a man. Just to see what it's like, you know... being allowed into the "old boy's club," not having to work so hard to keep people from assuming I'm the junior partner in everything. Though I never put in the time proving myself on the playground... I wonder if that wouldn't be an advantage, actually?

So. Not as rigid as I would have guessed even just a few years ago.

For those of us in the middle of the bell curve, the difference between gender and sex (and of course I'm speaking for myself here) is largely intuitive. Much like my esteemed colleague Mr. Lake, I am male because I am. Likewise I'm a mammal. I think that if I weren't near the center of the culturally expected norm, I might have a more nuanced opinion. Even in those instances when I have fastasized about being a woman, it has been a fantasy more than a serious consideration of identity.

What I mean by "being a man" -- that is to say what the *content* of that idenity is -- has varied throuout my life, as my comfort/discomfort with identifying with men-in-general, but my essential identity as a man is axiomatic and comfortable to me. My Kinsey rating is much the same.

I do believe that the structures of the body can be a different "gender" from the structures in the brain. In my case, they match up. Another way of saying this is that, in my experience, my gender is discovered and then rationalized, not invented.

I hope this makes sense (to someone other than me), but I think I know I'm female simply because I know that I could never be male and still have the same soul, for lack of a better word. I mean, I just absolutely cannot begin to imagine being male.

It has nothing to do with sexual orientation, as far as I can tell. Falling back on Clarke's idea of a scale, because nobody is truly 100% hetero or homosexual, I'd say that I'm about 60/40 hetero/homo -- very strong physical attraction to women as well as men, but not a lot of inclination to act upon it.

Shoot, that last comment was me -- I didn't mean it to be anonymous. Sorry!

Boobies. :) Seriously, though, how do I know I'm female--there's a couple of things. 1) I'm female 'cause I'm in this body--take me out of this body and I'm not sure how I'd define what's left of me. But 2) "this body" includes a certain level of estrogen/testosterone, and I am VERY sure I have never experienced the male levels of those hormones. That, I know from talking to guys. Testosterone is a truly funky thing. I was never an adolescent male. 3) And there's all sorts of feedback from the community that says I'm female. :) (i.e., I'm comfortable with a female role in society.) Of course, that community feedback might reflect the decision I've made and that I project, that I'm female, so this may be a chicken and egg problem (heh).

That is...a really interesting question.

I don't know. It's just this inherent part of my identity, that I am a woman, even though my ideas of gender are a little less rigid because of my upbringing (with a father who worked from home and a mother who was a professional engineer, read Asimov, and taught me how to wield power tools). I don't consider myself a feminine woman -- I don't fit the social roles of "girl" a lot -- but womanness is rooted in my gut.

...y'know, I might have to think about this and report back.

Oh, oops, that was me. I don't know why it posted anonymous. :/

These are fascinating comments; thanks for posting them, and please keep them coming. (And btw, in case anyone wants to respond but doesn't want to post their name, posting anonymously is totally fine, as usual.)

A few responses follow. These are meant in the spirit of exploration and questioning, not meant to attack or deny anyone's comments or gut feelings or self-identifications.

Jay and a couple of others mentioned objects of desire. I've run into this notion before--the idea that one's gender is partly defined by who one is attracted to--but I still don't understand it. I know people who have all sorts of genders and all sorts of sexual interests, and I don't see any particular connection between the two. I imagine in the population at large there are bell curves, but (for example) I know a fair number of women who are mostly or exclusively interested in other women, but who don't in any way (even socially) consider themselves to be male. So ... any of you who talked about desire as a component of gender, would you be willing to elaborate further?

MoI and a couple of others mentioned the way society/community treats us. At Kriti, I heard a fascinating piece read aloud (from Voices of Resistance: Muslim Women on War, Faith and Sexuality) by and about a woman who looks fairly androgynous, discussing people's reactions to her appearance, their confusion and sometimes distress about thinking she looks like a boy even though she says she's a woman. (I gather that she's biologically female, but of course I don't know that for sure.) So societal expectations and pressures certainly relate to how we're treated--but those of you who feel that societal treatment is a component of gender, would you feel like your gender had changed if people started treating you differently? That's an honest question, not sarcastic; it may be unanswerable, but I'd be interested in hearing your speculations.

(Of course, a lot of who we are may be shaped by how people treat us when we're young--insert reference to Jed's favorite infant-gender experiment, in which adults gave "gender-appropriate" toys to infants dressed in colors associated with a given gender--so this societal-treatment thing may start so early that it wouldn't make much difference if it were to change later. On the other hand, some people (such as some/most trans people) do feel themselves to be a gender other than the one that society assigns to them.)

Matthew: Your vasectomy story is great--thanks for posting that. Interesting about attraction to girls helping shape your gender identity before you knew about homosexuality. Thanks, too, for the detailed further discussion--lots of food for thought, and sparks several things I want to say about my own gender identity later.

...Everyone else: great comments; thank you.

I think I'll post about my own gender identity as a separate comment.

but those of you who feel that societal treatment is a component of gender, would you feel like your gender had changed if people started treating you differently?

I certainly would feel that my gender had... shifted. Unless, perhaps, there were some obvious additional cues suggesting that the societal expectations for my gender overall were themselves shifting, and I was just being pulled along with the flow.

I would feel different if I were in some way singled out.

I don't conform to standard societal notions of maleness in a variety of ways. For example:

I'm generally not very aggressive or competitive or violent.

I'm not at all athletic, and I don't generally enjoy exercise.

I like talking about feelings. I like watching romantic comedies. I cry easily. The majority of my close friends are women.

Various friends and lovers regularly teasingly tell me "You're such a girl!" when (for example) I comb my hair and then immediately brush it.

I'm attracted to men as well as to women.

I suspect that I've never experienced the very high "male" levels of testosterone that (for example) Anonymous mentioned; for another example, I've talked with male friends who've said they were essentially unable to think of anything other than sex for a year or two during high school. Whereas I had sexual interests in high school, but they never really got in the way.

I often play female characters in roleplaying games, and write female protagonists in stories.

I'm usually more willing to ask for directions than my female friends are.

And it bothers me a little (and used to bother me quite a lot) when I notice myself conforming to various male stereotypes, such as taking an unemotional/problem-solving approach to being told about someone's troubles, or holding forth on topics I don't know much about, or avoiding commitment in relationships, or avoiding cleaning up messes. When I engage in those "male" behaviors, I don't have a sense that it's because I'm male; I feel like it's because I'm me, and that it's an unfortunate coincidence that they happen to be stereotypically male behaviors. It bugged me to be told that I was doing those things because I was male. (But in fact, it seems likely to me that many of those behaviors are socialized-male behaviors that I picked up while I was being socialized; I am certainly far from immune to the influence of my society. What really bugs me is when I get a sense that people are making gender-essentialist judgments, saying that all men behave that way as an unalterable matter of course.)

(Aside: I'm fascinated that Matthew saw geeky behaviors and interests as male--it makes total sense when you say it like that, but I think that to some extent our society tends to put geeky or sissy males into a special "not fully male" category. It's definitely not femaleness, but I think there's often a sense that if they were real boys, they would be out shooting squirrels and playing football instead of playing D&D and doing math problems. ...I suppose that most of my above comments could be summarized by saying that I'm a Sensitive New-Age Guy; that's another kind of maleness that I think society at large considers suboptimal.)

And yet, despite all that, I am quite certain, at a gut level, of my own maleness. I think that for me, part of what's going on is that I'm very definition-bound; I'm less rigid in my definitions than I used to be, but at the time when I learned "the definition" of maleness, it was a simple and uncomplicated one, having to do with primary and secondary physical sexual characteristics. I've never done a good job of meeting society's expectations of what a man is like, but I learned a definition of what a man (or boy) "is" so early that it's hard to shake, even after learning a lot more about how complicated gender really is. (I don't generally have so much trouble identifying trans friends as the gender they want to be identified as; I'm talking about these definitions mostly specifically as they apply to me.)

I've lost count of the number of times I've heard people say things like "raising boys is harder than raising girls, because boys are naturally so violent and active." That could have the effect of making me feel like I'm insufficiently male; but my sense of my own maleness is so strong that instead it makes me feel like those people's definitions are inadequate.

Regarding something Jackie said: I've been fascinated by the idea of simply and easily changing physical sex since I first encountered it in science fiction long ago--probably first in a Varley book. (Maybe even ever since my mother told me, when I was a kid, that if I kissed my elbow I would turn into a girl.) If I could change my body to be female and then (at some later time) change back, quickly and inexpensively and completely and without any hassles, I would do it in a minute. I would enjoy being a girl, as they say--but I would want to be able to switch back later, because I think I would probably think of myself as a male person putting on/roleplaying a temporary female identity.

I hope to post more about all this later, after more people have a chance to comment.

If I could change my body to be female and then (at some later time) change back, quickly and inexpensively and completely and without any hassles, I would do it in a minute.

Me too. In fact, I'd happily swap, and we could have all kinds of adventures :) I so wish swapping gender were as easy as changing shoes.

See, I wouldn't be interested in switching genders except as an actual identity switch.

What I want to know is, how do you know what the choices are?

I'll ditto what Daniel (bram452) said.

As for how we know what the choices are, I think we learn them from adults when we're young. For many people, there's never a reason to question that classification or our place in it, similar to the way that there isn't a reason to question where we fall in the mammal/reptile/etc. taxonomy.

A couple of things, if I may...

I have always felt myself to be male, without question. On the other hand, the occasions I have worn women's clothes (about half-a-dozen, all performance-related in one way or another), I have felt quite comfortable (except for the shoes). I like to hang around with women, much more than with men, and in fact was somewhat miffed, recently, when I wasn't invited to a "girl's night out", before realizing that, you know, penis. I am straight, mostly; I find about 80% of women in my age group attractive, and only around 10% of men. I've never had any significant sexual contact with a man. I have lots of "man" attributes: I like to argue and win arguments, I am goal-oriented, I am a poor housekeeper, I like watching sports, etc, etc. I have a handful of "woman" attributes: I am fussy about clothes, I gossip, I giggle,

Another thing: I am now raising a boy and a girl. The boy is a baby, and the girl is five years old. After chatting with the parents of the children in my little girl's kindergarten, I have decided to follow the usual pattern: every difference between my two children I will attribute to fundamental, inherent differences between the sexes, and further will assume that those differences are universal. Therefore, girls don't spit up as much as boys. Boys grunt a lot more than girls do. Girls like to be held close, and boys like to have room to wiggle. Boys like to lie on their backs, girls like to ride in swings. Girls don't like to wear hats, but boys will put up with them.

Oh, one more thing: you may not have heard about Christine Penner, the the LA Times sportswriter who was until recently Mike Penner. I don't know if this story made the rounds of people-interested-in-gender, but it sure made the rounds of people-interested-in-sports-journalism. Oddly enough, most of the response I saw ranged from "cool" to "enh", expressed in a range from sensitive to vulgar. Very, very few vituperative and nasty responses. Which, I suppose, says more about where I go to read about sports than it does about sports fans, but still.

Thanks,
-V.

It all feels very tied to the body for me. Because my upper body is weaker than the average guy's, I end up asking men to help me lift things, or open jars. Because I'm shorter, I ask them to reach stuff down from tall places. Because society has conditioned us to believe women are beautiful and worth gazing upon, I am aware of the effect my clothing and appearance can have on those around me, and sometimes dress to accentuate it. Because my skin is softer than most men's, some men desire it. Because I can easily be overpowered during sex, it feels easy and natural to slide into a more submissive/receptive role at times. Because I can be raped, I am more cautious about walking alone at night than I would otherwise be.

Because I can get pregnant, I have been far more careful about contraception than I would be otherwise. Because I am currently very pregnant, I feel more fragile in my body and at the same time fiercely protective of the baby.

I think if I were a more athletic, taller, stronger person, I would feel at least somewhat less 'female' than I currently do. Which would be just fine with me, and even something to be desired, but sadly, laziness apparently trumps that desire most of the time.

If I had no body (uploaded to the machine), I don't think I would feel gendered for very long at all, except in memory of my embodied days. Which is interesting, since most of the time I do feel very female.

I'm physically male, but I identify as neuter whenever I possibly can. I don't much like being male, and I don't want to be female either. Hmph.

I love this discussion! A few follow up comments.

My wife worked in early childhood development and one of the things I have learned from her is that the current research clearly shows that 95% of the differences we attribute to boys and girls are societal, not biological. (See Jed's comments about the studies done with infants dressed in gender-signaling colors). This socialization begins before a child is even born, and plays out in posture, language, and a hundred nuanced ways. Few people knowingly hold a baby boy and call him a "Pretty little lady" or a baby girl and call her a "strapping young lad." Even the way babies are held is different based on perceived gender. It isn't about testosterone or estrogen. Boys may have more muscle mass - that's a biological trait - but they are not necessarily more aggressive. Most of that is learned. So say the researchers who study this sort of thing. What amazes me is how people who consider themselves educated and accepting of modern science have a VERY difficult time believing this. Another fascinating thing is the few biological sex-based traits for which is evidence - boys develop musical rhythm at a younger age, girls tend to have a stronger constitution as babies, etc.

The other thing I wanted to point out is that having a male or female body might seem like a an arbitrary and objective standard for gender, but it is not. My identity as a male is based very much on my assumptions and patterns of thinking, on what I believe it means to be male, but which may have nothing to do with my body per se. Those assumptions and patterns are my own and can be very different from anyone else's.

By way of analogy, normative Judaism has a clear standard for who is and who isn't a Jew. If your mother was Jewish or if you convert, you are a Jew. That's it. This is an external, objective litmus test, but even this is not accepted by everyone. Many Jews refuse to accept it. If you're conversion was performed by a Reform rabbi, an Orthodox rabbi will not consider you to be Jewish, but that same rabbi would consider the son of a Jewish mother to be Jewish even if he ate pork, drove on Saturdays, and had a Christmas tree in his house.

Likewise, there are external definitions of gender, but everyone accepts, inculcates, or choses (consciously or not) their own definition and measures themself against it. Thus I can say that adolescent geekiness is part of my male identity even though this isn't a traditional male trait in our society and even though there are adolescent female geeks.

The more I think about it, the more I think that I don't often think of myself in a gendered way. I had thought that I think of my self as female, but (at least at the moment) I'm not sure that's true. There are ways that I behave that are socially conditioned by my physical sex (caution about walking around at night by myself and so on), but the traits that I think of as being me are not ones that I specifically think of as feminine. This may have a lot to do with my tendency to not think of most (if not all?) personality traits as being gendered--I've known aggressive women and shy men, and so on.

I tend to think that the differences between men and women (as physically defined) are slight compared to the similarities. I actually wonder sometimes if this attitude is related to my sexuality; I'm bisexual, and I tend to think of myself, not as being attracted to both men and women, but as being attracted to specific people.

As an aside, I do have a little extra interest in the question of gender at the moment from watching my 2 1/2 year old son and the way people interact with him. I can't count the number of times people have explicitly used his fascination with trucks and other machinery as a validation of their ideas about gender roles. He really is fascinated by machinery (there's a fairly strong strain of that in my family, and not just for boys).

I'm getting more and more irritated by the people who smugly tell me that Theo's proof that trucks really are a boy thing. I'm quite prone to remarking that I liked trucks when I was little and that my son is also of flowers, butterflies, and wearing purple. He particularly likes purple dump trucks. He also likes cooking (pretend and real) and having tea parties. Furthermore, none of the boys in Stephen's family have ever been particularly interested in trucks. (Theo's interest has rather bemused them, I think.)

A trans friend asked me to post a comment anonymously on their behalf, which I did, and then asked me to take it down, which I also did. I mention this because I try not to make changes to publicly posted pages without mentioning that I've made those changes.

...I have more to say about all of these topics, but it'll take me a little time to put together a coherent posting. More later.

Hi, I came over here from Jay's LJ.

I think I have a biological sex (female) and a gender (female), and they happen to match.

I don't feel that gender is societally assigned. If it were, biology and gender would always match, as society expends enormous, unspoken and unrelenting pressure on children to assume the correct gender, based on their sexual organs. The existence of transgendered individuals seems to mean that that biology, not society, is responsible for the assignment of both sex and gender.

I'm not sure why the acceptance of transgender so hard in our society. Maybe the societal reaction is based on biology, as well. The first visual information we take in about another human being is "male or female," and people who confuse us make most of us uncomfortable to one degree or another. We stare until we "know," and then and only then can we turn away.

What is my gender? It's the sexed part of my identity. How do I know my gender? I have no idea. It's permeated me since the beginning of my days. I have always known I was a girl, and what a girl was, and what a boy was, and that we were different. I knew this long before I had a clue about the anatomical differences between male and female. For me, gender simply "is."

My gender is geek. And I'm happy with it.

I wouldn't mind smaller breasts, though.

What a complicated question. Well, lol, at least for me.

I don't think who one is attracted to is any clear indication of gender. That's preference, and it is a different issue.

I don't think one's physical parts is a clear indicator of gender either because lots of people identify as one gender physically but believe mightily they are the opposite gender in their heads.

I wonder if one's gender might be most clearly indicated by what goes on in your head while having a sexual experience? Let's say a sexual experience either alone or with someone you really trust completely, because otherwise I think your thoughts can be changed by concerns about what someone else might think of you. SO: when you are experiencing sexual pleasure free of immediate pressure to be anything but what you ARE . . .what do you see and feel? What do you think about? I wonder if that isn't the clearest indicator of one's gender.

It's a slippery concept, isn't it. I wonder how biologically pure anyone's gender really is. Surely it is influenced by so many things . . .I wonder if one's gender can change over time thanks to experiences and influences?

I knew that my parts made me a "girl," but not knowing what that was until I was four or five, or how that made me different, it was totally fine with me. Girl, boy, whatever, can I go out and play?

Once I *did* start to understand what "being a woman" was, once I started watching television and playing with Barbie dolls, I remember immediately internalizing the misogyny. I started to look at women with disgust. I wasn't one of those frail, girly people who only cared about make-up and shoes! I was BETTER than that! That wasn't *me.*

So the actual physical parts of me - the whole breasts and vagina thing - I never felt odd about that or had a disconnect between parts and self. People said certain parts made me a girl, and I was fine with that, so long as everybody was clear I wasn't one of those girls that everyone on tv looked down on and hated. Because who wants to be treated like a silly person?

On the one hand, I feircely did not *want* to be smaller and weaker, and on the other hand, I was getting all of these messages than unless I was thin and pretty and wore small shoes that no one would love me. And who doesn't want to be loved?

It wasn't until after high school that I stopped trying to meet those impossible expections. And, to be dead honest, the only way I was able to stop trying to squeeze myself into the gender mold was to say that I was OK if that meant nobody was every going to love me or be attracted to me. I figured I'd rather be lonely and happy than coupled and miserable.

The self-hate I went through as far as my physical body goes was (and is, I'm not perfect) directly linked to expected gender norms of how I am "supposed" to look and act because I have these parts, not to the actual parts. Whenever I fantasized about being a man, it was generally because I felt I would be able to have more freedom, more power, more confidence than I did in a woman's body, not because I really hated having breasts (also, I think, the idea of being a man made my occasional girl-crushes more socially acceptable, in my head).

So, I felt comfortable in my skin and identified as a woman because I had womanly parts, and I was OK with that. "Women have vaginas. Men have penies. The sky is blue. The grass is green (except when it isn't)." I could deal with those general categories, growing up (not so much, now...).

What I was uncomfortable about was what having those parts *actually* meant. The label, by itself, didn't mean anything to me. It was the culture that made it mean something.

I'm female, and I very much consider myself to be female, and I get quite disgruntled that because I have no interest in clothes, am into SF and math and such, know how to use a screwdriver, would rather talk about cool stuff I saw on the web than feelings, I'm sometimes perceived as, well, not entirely female.

As to *why* I feel so strongly I'm female, I suspect it's early socialization, but it might be biological/neurological. I don't assert much unless I'm *very* comfortable. I assume that I'm not supposed to do/be all sorts of things that women aren't supposed to do/be, even when feminism did a lot to turn that around years ago. (Feminism hit big when I was in high school.)

For me, the stereotypically male interests are trumped by my expected role in social/interactive contexts. (Physically, I'm unmistakably female.) Because I *feel* female, I want to be able to define all those male interests as being just as validly female rather than define myself as somewhat male.

A coworker once said she liked getting her period because it reminds her that she's a woman. I told her I KNOW I'm a woman, and that's a reminder I'd just as soon do without!

El

Stumbled in here courtesy of Jay Lake's LJ.

Absolutely fascinating topic!

There has never been any doubt in my mind that I'm female. I don't think pregnancy or breastfeeding made me feel any *more* female than I do anyway, though I could do without this whole menopause thing very nicely, thank you very much. Even though I'm hardly stereotypical, I'm very definitely a woman through and through. I tend to reject society's definitions of femininity. I am female. Anything I am, do, like, feel, whatever is feminine. I'm aggressive (and assertive, which are two different things ;-), I used to be physically strong and was always one of the furniture movers in the office. I'm decisive. I'm independent and detest having to ask anyone for help, but the arthritis has kinda impacted that. (I won't attempt to change the water bottle in the water cooler again - dropping one was quite enough.) I love to argue, but find fighting counter-productive most of the time. I value reason over emotion, but don't *de-value* emotion, if that makes any sense at all. Detest romance novels with a passion as most of the female protags are too stupid to live. I have no trouble identifying with a male character, but that's likely as much a matter of long practice as any underlying gender issues. Is the character intelligent? A good person? Prone to picking partners/lovers/friends who are also intelligent and good people? Does the right things for the right reasons? I'm there! :-) For movies I prefer adventure, SF, thrillers and some romantic comedies. I have no problem with porn, except that het porn focuses far too much on women who do pretty much nothing for me sexually. I much prefer images of men. Yes, wow, a woman who's visually stimulated, that's like, impossible! *sigh* I get *so* *very* *tired* of being told what I do and don't like simply because I'm female.

I'm a lousy housekeeper and a good cook. I've never had the patience for fiber work outside a brief time when I did some basic knitting. I used to work on my car before A. my hands gave out and B. they got more complex under the hood than I wanted to mess with. I'm technically and mechanically inclined, but not mathematically so (according to my grades). Though I do get the answers fairly intuitively from time to time - and I can reason my way through some basic stats without the actual formulas. I've got excellent communications skills and used to have some decent athletic skills, but nothing outstanding. I've been told I have a sexy singing voice. I dress for comfort over looks, detest shopping and wearing makeup and only wear the usual female accouterments (well, aside from a bra - too painful to even contemplate going without at my size unless I'm just sitting at home) when costuming is necessary (weddings, funerals, meetings with muckety-mucks, the occasional fancy occasion). I enjoy a good gossip as well as the next person. I like to paint my nails bright colors when they're "long enough". I don't dye my hair and often describe my hair color as 'tabby' these days. I keep getting hit on by lesbians (who, so far, have always taken 'no thanks, I'm straight' for an answer) and the last few times I've made a pass at a man he's turned out to be gay. (Yes, the universe *IS* laughing at me, why do you ask? ;-) Lucky for me, I'm happy being single. ;-)

Jed wrote:

Jay and a couple of others mentioned objects of desire. I've run into this notion before--the idea that one's gender is partly defined by who one is attracted to--but I still don't understand it. I know people who have all sorts of genders and all sorts of sexual interests, and I don't see any particular connection between the two. I imagine in the population at large there are bell curves, but (for example) I know a fair number of women who are mostly or exclusively interested in other women, but who don't in any way (even socially) consider themselves to be male. So ... any of you who talked about desire as a component of gender, would you be willing to elaborate further?

I'm not one of the people who mentioned this, but let me see if I can put my particular spin on it.

I'm a genetic female with obvious secondary sex characteristics and no desire to change them. My gender and my orientation are both entirely fluid. My awareness of both of them is reactive. I become aware of being in a woman-oriented phase when I see a woman and think "Gosh, she's hot". I become aware of being in a male/masculine phase when I try on a skirt and it feels wrong, or I look in the mirror and think it looks entirely out of place on me. (I'm quite aware, at such moments, that my body is pretty much static and only my perception is changing.)

Often, I will take gender cues from orientation awareness. I'll see a woman and not only think "Gosh, she's hot" but "Gosh, I'd like to [do xyz to her/do xyz with her/have her do xyz to me]". That adds nuance to the gynophilia. Being attracted to a woman from a female perspective feels very, very different from being attracted to a woman from a male perspective. Dominant and submissive perspectives feel different. Masculine and feminine perspectives feel different. The desire to be penetrated and the desire to penetrate feel different, and there are further nuances depending on whether I'm physically equipped to do what I want to do. For me, gender is a mix of all of those things and more.

Some days I pull on a skirt and realize that I feel female and feminine. Some days I feel male and feminine. Today I'm wearing a dress and leggings and I feel very much like I'm in drag. It doesn't hurt that my haircut can look either very "professional woman" or very "teenage boy", depending on how I style it. It's teenage boy today, to emphasize the contrast I feel between what's in my head and the clothes that I'm wearing. I don't feel particularly male today, but I certainly don't feel particularly female either. That's pretty common for me. I would feel different and perhaps be more comfortable in gender-neutral clothes (like a turtleneck and jeans, which I wear quite often), but today I felt like emphasizing the contrast a bit. I note that the point there is to mess with my own head, not with anyone else's. I'm sure I would register as female to anyone who looked at me, with very little hint of any sort of gender oddness.

Although I tend to spend a lot of time in the middle of the gender spectrum, there are times when I swing so hard to one side or the other that it strongly affects my sense of my physical self. It's uncommon for me to feel womanly, but it does happen (and is usually accompanied by either strong gynophilia, which contributes to my appreciation of my femaleness, or strong phallophilia, which makes me want to find five or six willing men and spend the day in bed with them). More often, though still quite rarely overall, I feel so male that it is downright disconcerting to realize that my equipment doesn't match up. Imagine waking up from a very vivid dream where you were in a body of a different sex, and that moment of disorientation where you adjust to being in your own body again. I get that for a day or two at a time. It doesn't even have anything to do with sexual arousal or function, though that can get very difficult; I experience it when standing or sitting, when taking a shower, when glancing down and being shocked to see breasts attached to my chest (and they do feel sort of tacked on at those times, or like odd benign growths).

It's worth noting somewhere in here that awareness of my body is not my default state. I tend to live in my head, and my libido is on the low to moderate end. My orientation shifts have to be fairly strong for me to notice them. I notice gender more, because I'm aware of how I feel when I get dressed every morning, but I don't pay much attention to it most of the time.

I wonder sometimes whether my experience of all of this would be very different if my "this feels weird" sense weren't so finely attuned, or if I didn't pay so much attention to it. If that sense were muted, I might wear skirts every day and think nothing of it. Gender fascinates me, though, and I enjoy playing with it enough that I'm willing to put up with the times when it plays with me.

I hope that sheds some light on at least one way that gender and orientation interact. I'm sure it's different for everyone.

(I too wandered here from Jay's LJ) This is really interesting. I am physically female, and pretty comfortable with that; if I lived in Iain M. Banks' Culture I'd probably give being physically male a try, but I like having my genitalia on the inside for the most part.
Conversely, I feel like my internal mental dialog isn't terribly strongly gendered. It's very easy for me to identify (maybe over-identify) with male viewpoint characters in books - until something occurs in-story to shake me out of it. For example, in Hesse's _Glass Bead Game_ I was merrily reading along, loving the description of the academy the main character is attending, and picturing how wonderful it would be to study there, when the assertion is made that no women are allowed there. Not only was my participation in the novel broken, but it was a week or so before I could go back and finish reading it, thinking 'Oh yeah, not about me after all' with a certain sadness the whole rest of the endeavor.
To try and sum up, I'm female because I'm in what I've been told is a female body; absent that physical constraint I think I'd be pretty androgynous.

[also here via Jay Lake]

Fascinating discussion, at least in part because of the participants.

Like someone who commented above me, I don't think that you can define gender by who you are attracted to. We have all kinds of evidence that people are attracted to a wide (!) range of bodies.

I believe that gender is societally imposed. I believe that it is imposed based on sexual characteristics: penis = rough play, no sympathy, blue. Vulva = frilly clothes, discussion of emotions, pink. That secondary sex characteristics (testosterone, thick skin, muscle vs estrogen, soft skin, beautiful beautiful curves) reinforce many of these societally imposed behaviours is to be expected, I think. After all, it seems likely to me that these imposed behaviours grew in part from secondary sex characteristics.

For me, I am male because I have a penis. I am very attracted to females, not at all to males, but if I were, I'd describe myself as male and homosexual or male and bisexual. In other words, in my mind, gender and preference are almost entirely independent. I can imagine being a woman, but I can't imagine not being strongly attracted to women: therefore, when I imagine myself as a woman, I must imagine myself as homosexual.

I can understand the frustration of transgendered people who don't like being confused with homosexual people. The two are not the same.

Have I mentioned that this is a fascinating discussion?

(ducking into pseudonymity)

So many interesting ways people have answered this question, and so many interesting ways to think about how I could answer it.

I identify pretty strongly with the sense of Jed's own narrative, plus or minus some significant bits of personal variation. When pushed on it, though, I just don't feel that sense of certainty he describes.

Sometimes I feel like gender is an argument, one that I not only always lose but never really wanted to pursue in the first place. On the surface, that statement is funny for me to make because I have serious problems with the "all identity is performance" school of argument. The basis on which I lose, though, is not a performative point but when the interpellator points at my hairy shoulders and my squared-off frame and my testosterone-molded face and all the other things that mean I will never be able to pull off drag -- but not my genitals, because I could have a tentacled cloaca under my jeans for all you know -- and says, "see? Masculine. 'He.'" Like Anonymous-possibly-Leah said above, "Boobies."

I appreciate the distinction that the trans community has made between gender and sex, and the distinctions between the different ways of defining sex (genital, chromosomal, psychological...). I think they insinuate ways to talk about one's relationship to one's gender and one's sex beyond mere identification of. I may have gotten stuck with the masculine gender, but it always seemed like a club that would rather not have me; I might identify my gender as '(alienated) masculine'.

As much as being uploaded to a machine would trump biological constraints on gender, I would very much miss being embodied.

I started to get into the sex identification side of the question, too, but it got long and this is going to be far too long as it is. Suffice to say that I've heard the Varley-esque easy sex change referred to as "blowing the silver whistle" (possibly an Oz reference?). I would definitely blow the silver whistle, even if I didn't know what sex(uality) I'd end up with each time (transwoman? completely straight man? tentacled cloaca?). When I was younger, I was sure I would have accepted a one-way trip to female. This feeling should be noted as something different, though, than being trans.

Lastly (finally!), I think that this blog comment about gender presentation and sexual desire is an interesting point of reference for the link that some people here are tying between gender and sexual orientation.

Interesting points, Cranefly. And you reminded me of a transgendered woman I know who is also a lesbian. She was attracted to women when she was in a male body and is still attracted to women now.

I realized, too, there was something else I was going to add to my original tome. :-) Someone (Amy?) mentioned the 'if I could change sex at will and change back with no problem' thing. Yeah, I think I'd love to see what it would be like to be male for a while. I might hate it within moments, but I still think it would be a worthwhile experience... but only if I could change back when I wanted. My male friends might appreciate me not bugging them constantly with research questions. ;-) "But what does it *FEEL* like when you..." :-)

Well, there's physical/body plumbing maleness/femaleness, which is usually pretty obvious and not what you're talking about. And then there's the whole social identity/role stuff, which is murky and, for me, mostly about society's assumptions and impositions upon us. I am male because that's the role thrust upon me by society according to the dominant rules and stereotypes. Personally I don't care much about following these prescribed rules, but if you round me off to the nearest gender, I seem to be male instead of female.

Since I don't fit a lot of the societal expectations for stereotypical maleness, I went through a period of wondering if I might be transsexual, then I noticed I don't fit a lot of the societal expectations for stereotypical femaleness either. So whatever. I am therefore male since it makes life simpler and avoids bureaucratic hassles that would result if I wanted to say otherwise. :)

PS: Vasectomies were discussed in earlier comments; for me having a vasectomy had no relevance to my sexual identity. Many people seem to view reproduction as essential to their sexual identity, but I don't.

Many people seem to view reproduction as essential to their sexual identity, but I don't.

Me, either. (I'm seriously looking forward to my ovaries giving up the ghost. I've spoken sternly to them, but do they listen? ;-)

There was an article in The New Scientist late last year about the potential for men to be able to bear children (IIRC, it's an offshoot of the same research going into solving some women's problems with carrying to term, apparently). This is a great SFnal idea, of course, but what I found *really* interesting was, when discussing with some folks who I'd've thought would've known better, how quickly the idea was linked to transexualism. It never even occurred to me that a man implanted with an artificial womb and an embryo would be considered female by anyone. Would that mean that a woman post-hysterectomy was no longer female?

What a great question! I've never consciously thought of myself as one gender or the other, even while pregnant, breast-feeding, etc. I can second Elizabeth Bear's posting: my gender is geek.

Sorry, I was the one who made the (tongue-in-cheek, apologize for being crude) Boobies statement above. ;) This has definitely become a fascinating discussion.

I think we've definitely proved the point that male/female is not a dichotomy but a continuum, and possibly a multi-dimensional one as well (including but not limited to self-perception, self-identification, actual physique, objects of desire and the self-interpretation of that desire, societal demands and feedback and reassurance. Etc.).

I don't understand identifying geek as a gender, but I wasn't sure what that was intended to convey. Maybe that's another facet of Jed's (quite important) distinction between "what a man is LIKE" vs "what a man IS"? Geek is what someone is like? Juliabk and El seemed to hit on a similar distinction--they are female but hate being made to feel/told they are somehow less female because of their likes/dislikes/abilities/etc. On the flip side of that, I remembering thinking back in 4th grade or so that I was happy I was female, 'cause I could be smart and wear glasses and be awful in PE and still have friends, whereas boys' social standing was pretty clearly set by how good they were in sports. I didn't have the ability/likes/dislikes profile to be a boy, so it's a good thing I was a girl. :)

I agree with Maryann that if you uploaded me (and gave me free rein), I would quickly morph into something not quite recognizably stereotypically female (though I'd try that out for a while). But I doubt it would be recognizably male either. There are so many options and parameters to play with! (and we haven't even gotten into trying out 100 years as a tree... ;)

What I mean by gender=geek is something like this. Society imposes certain expectations and demands on you depending on whether they perceive you as male or female. But sometimes you don't conform to either. My predominantly male colleagues see me as female. Other people see a 'geek' who doesn't conform to their expectations or demands.

Gender doesn't play mmuch of a role in how I see myself. The only exceptions are when I am having sex, when I'm heavily pregnant, or when I'm giving birth. Then the fact of my feminity seems rather obvious. Rest of the time I'm not sure what feminity actually *means* and am anyway more interested in other facets of me.

If that is any help...

I have always had a strong sense of gender identity, from when I was old enough to know that I was female, despite the fact that I have never behaved in a stereotypically female manner, and I grew up in a place and time when I was constantly reproved for "acting like a boy" and being unfeminine.

The result, however, was not to make me question my identity as female, or to make me want to conform to ideas about feminity, but rather to make me think that everyone else was wrong about what femininity was: I was definitely a girl, and I liked climbing trees and catching lizards, therefore climbing trees and catching lizards could not possibly be the essentially masculine pursuits that everyone said they were.

Since I believed this at the age of seven or so, and I recieved little or no social support for it, I think that my conviction of femininity, strong enough to override what everyone else told me, must have been innate-- as much a part of my brain as my chromosomes.

elizabeth bear's pithy comment (#26) came in while I was still wallowing in my own loquacity. I like the idea of the 'geek' gender.

I do think that there's an aspect of gender (or at least gender presentation) that's about identifying yourself to the kind of people you want to attract. It serves sexual attraction at the core, but since (most of us) want to attract socially far more people than we want to sleep with, it would be a waste of a good signal system if it didn't advertise something to potential associates as well as potential lovers.

After all, it's a pretty clear pattern for some men to use their macho gender presentation as a way to bond with other men. Why shouldn't presenting as a geek have the same kind of multiple purposes?

Or am I making the classic mistake of reading humor too literally?

I love this question. As a cisgendered female, I've thought about it a lot when I'm thinking about trans issues - where does that inherent sense of wrongness or rightness re: gender come from?

Because I've never wanted to be a guy. When I was an adolescent, I wanted to be genderless for a while, but that's because dating was sucking for me and sexlessness seemed like an easy way not to worry about it any more, not out of any inherent rejection of femaleness. I never went the distance and wanted to be male.

And it's interesting, because if the were quick and easy sex changes available, I too would try one in a New York second. But just imagining it seems weird to me - it feels like my periodic attempts at liking okra. Every five years or so, I have a go at it, thinking "This time I will like okra" and every time I am disappointed. I feel like I'd get in guy form and be all, "Okay, this feels really whacked out."

But how the hell do I know I'm female? Most meaning is assigned by society - I don't like being female because I get to wear a dress (bleh), or dudes will pick stuff up for me (I lift weights!), or because I like men (because... no). None of that stuff applies to me. I sort of cringe at the idea of getting pregnant or having kids, and even though I'm fascinated by astrology and other symbol-systems, assigning women the role of the nurturer always rubbed me wrong. Anybody can be nurturing. My boobs do not make me more likely to nurture. Yet still I chirp merrily along, happy in my femaleness. It can't be because of the meaning assigned to the role by society, because I spend a lot of my time ducking those meanings, not taking pleasure in them.

For a long time I thought it was just because I'd been assigned that category and so glomped onto it from an early age, then just built my identity around it. But I read things written on the topic by transgendered folks, and they say they were in exactly the same situation, and felt like it was really wrong. So that can't be it either.

This 'knowledge' that I am the 'right' sex, and the concurrent certainty on the part of transgendered folks that they were born in the 'wrong' body, is the strongest argument I have yet seen for inherent gender differences.

One more thing: I have never felt that my sexual orientation had anything to do with my gender identity. That seems as completely separate a facet of my identity as a whole as does, say, my ethnicity.

Maybe what you folks need is another axis, or at least another term for things. Most of the conversation here has been about gendered behavior and gender presentation: do I climb trees, do I wear makeup, do I do these things to attract sexual partners? But that's not, I think, what Rachel means when she talks about an innate sense of being female.

Jed was very careful in his original post to use the term "transsexuality" rather than "transgenderism", so he's talking specifically about people who are convinced, despite all biological evidence to the contrary, that their "gender" and their bodily sex are different. And when I say "convinced" I'm talking about a group of people who, according to a recent UK survey, have a greater than 1 in 3 probability of attempting suicide at least once in their lives. People who, if they act on their convictions, face tremendous financial and social losses, and yet still come out of it saying that it was the best thing they ever did. So maybe what Jed was asking was, "how come they feel so strongly, where does it come from?"

I always figured it was my parents and, to some extent, television that told me what a boy was and that, therefore, as a boy, I was this and not that.

In high school, an idea that bounced around in my head was that I was actually a lesbian trapped in a man's body. I was attracted to women, but I didn't think that I felt it the same way that the guys in the locker room felt it when they talked about who they were "going to nail". Maybe if I'd been more interested in posing, I'd have gone along with it, and maybe they were just posing as well. I don't know. As it was, I liked the Indigo Girls more than I liked Aerosmith, which is really just a simple "sensitivity = feminine" mapping that I'd picked up from years of television or family life.

Today, my wife and I have a funky little mix going on. She assembles more furniture, and I fix more dinners. She's a rural-raised woman who's great at starting campfires and drives a truck. I'm a suburban boy who knows a lot of show-tunes. It works for us, because we're attracted to each other, unthreatened by each other, and complementary to each other's skill-sets, I think. (And we can both flex, too. The Damsel glams up fantastically to go to the opera, and I can lug around heavy crap when she needs manual labor performed.)

I know others have said it, and I know it doesn't sound particularly introspective, but my main gender identification as male comes from sexual interest in females -- and I can remember being interested in girls from as early as 3.

I'm certainly not in the least bit macho, or even particularly masculine. Gender tropes on both sides tend to bore me. Sport? Fashion? Fighting? Shopping? Meh. I almost always seem to test straight down the middle on those various net.cognitive gender bias tests. So really it's a case of dangly bits, check; like girls, check; male, check. I suppose, as I think someone else said, that really it just feels like the right identification for this body.

(re: Anonymous, post #45)

Ah. That's embarrassing. I thought the question was specifically about gender (as opposed to sex), since the question was phrased as, "how do you know your gender," not "how do you know your sex." But, true, Jed uses the words 'transsexual' and 'man' and 'woman', not 'transgender' and 'masculine' and 'feminine'. Jed, would you mind clarifying the question?

For me, part of knowing that I'm male was realizing that, as much ambivalence I felt about what I was born with, the underlying feeling was that of being stuck with it, not of strongly identifying with something different.

So maybe what Jed was asking was, "how come they feel so strongly, where does it come from?"

Actually, I think we've all be answering it fairly well. The sense I'm getting from most of these comments is that people have an innate sense of their own gender despite social programming or, in some cases, biological sex. It doesn't matter that I don't fit the social pattern for 'female', I *am* female. Rather than align male, and I do fall on the stereotypically 'masculine' side in a lot of ways - attitude, personality and interests, I'm not male. Those of us whose gender, sex and orientation align while our social aspects don't would count as the first level (or whatever the correct term would be) control group in this. The heterosexual female who played with dolls, wears pink and gets men to do all her heavy lifting isn't the right one to compare. She could simply be brainwashed by particularly overbearing parents and/or social group. Instead, take a look at the heterosexual females who don't conform socially and you've removed one level of 'interference'. If, in the face of bucking the social norms, we still identify as female (or male, for the men), it provides at least circumstantial evidence that gender identification is at least partially inborn. This is the kind of preliminary evidence (though I suspect it would need a larger group with more controls, but what do I know? :-) that gets scientists grants to study this stuff in depth.

Cranefly: not your fault, its the terminology. Many people use "sex" in this context to specifically mean biological sex. "Gender", then, means whether people see themselves as male or female. Gendered behavior is another matter entirely. It was a great leap forward for trans people when some psychologists started to accept that one could feel female without having to dress up and behave like a 1950s housewife.

My male or femaleness is mostly determined by the people around me. Their gender identity or presentation (not always the same thing) defines mine. So several of my female friends and colleagues make me feel very much not female, so do several of my male friends and colleagues. Several of my lovers (both male and female) have made me feel not female [by "made" I don't mean coercion, I just mean what I feel in the head when I am around them]. Only three people in my life intensify my sense of being female.

Mostly I feel rather neuter.

I am not sure I ever felt very female, but I also never felt any body dysmorphia either which as I have an hourglass shape is interesting I suppose. I perform gender at times: I flirt, I do the hetero thing with some men, but I find it astonishing how fast I/we move to me as non-sexual and I suppose that is part of it too. I have a very weak sense of sexuality. What I do have is complex and has trans as well as bi elements.

(over here from Jay Lake)

I classify myself as 'switch', on various axes: I'm attracted to both males and females, I like to take both roles in sex, and I think I would be fairly content living in either a male or female body. All of these vary greatly depending on how I'm feeling at the time, the phase of the moon, cosmic rays, et cetera.

It just so happens that I was born into a male body, but I think my gender identity falls somewhere in the middle - I have some very stereotypically male traits, but also some feminine ones too. If there were a solution that allowed me to quickly and painlessly switch back and forth - and, critically, would give me the external appearance for that sex - I'd go for it in an instant. However, I don't know whether I'd stay female - as much as there are times when I hate the sight and feel of my body, there are other times when I love that I'm six foot tall, broad shouldered, and look good in a trenchcoat.

As it is, though, without such a solution I'm stuck in this body: I don't feel consistently female enough to change, and even if I did I very much doubt I'd pass well (not to mention the medical and legal complications involved in switching), so I usually just pass my girly moments off as gay-man traits.

Juliabk: You've got it. I was thinking more of the people who are saying that sense of gender is socially determined, and those who are saying sense of gender is a result of who you want to sleep with. I'm wondering if the latter group think that gay men are "really" women and lesbians are "really" men.

I'm wondering if the latter group think that gay men are "really" women and lesbians are "really" men.

No clue about the folks here, though it's a viewpoint I've heard expressed. On the other hand, the individuals I've heard express it were hardly sterling examples of humanity. :-) I'm fascinated by the folks who find their gender defined by external forces. It certainly points up, as someone mentioned, the possibility that gender isn't as binary as we tend to believe. As a person firmly anchored in my own gender identity, it seems very odd, but I suppose it's no odder than than the idea that orientation is a continuum rather than an either/or proposition. I wonder, though, if they're really talking about their gender identity or just their personal expressions of gender. Once I realized it was the social definitions that were screwed up, I stopped stressing over not being 'feminine' enough. It was a life altering epiphany. Being female (for me, that is ;-) is all that matters. If society doesn't like everything that goes into my expression of femininity, society can go, well... do things to itself that I won't say in a nice polite blog like this. ;-)

Fascinating topic - sent over here from tacithydra's LJ.

From a very young age, I thought boys were lucky. They were usually bigger than girls (and I was a pretty tall girl) and seemed to have a general edge in society. In about '68 or '69, I read about transexuality in Life magazine for the first time. For some people, learning about transexuality was a life-changing experience. It didn't work that way for me, but I did find myself asking more questions.

Over time, I've come to the conclusion that there are three facets of gender, that are really quite separate but that many people merge:

biological gender
sex role traits defined by society
sexual orientation

From a young age I always identified as a female biologically. I never really had an issue with that.

During most of my life, I've tended to be aggressive, competitive, outspoken, interested in career, good at money managing... These traits have tended to be identified as "male traits," but I came to the conclusion that they aren't biological traits. So having these traits does not necessarily mean that I wanted to be a male biologically. As other women have mentioned, there are a few advantages with having your primary sexual characteristics stored in and very close to the body!

But it did mean that I often chafed against the way society defines female traits. In Western culture, sex role traits have been changing (thank goodness!), so a woman who prefers pants most of the time or a man who prefers to engage in child care isn't automatically assumed to be an oddity. At last year's Hugo Ceremony, I joked about dressing in drag that night, because I so rarely wear dresses.

Orientation is a third component, because even though homosexuality is more accepted, heterosexuality is still the "societal norm." Some people view orientation as a part of their gender, and I just do see it that way. I see gender, society sex role traits and orientation to be three different factors.

I know others have said it, and I know it doesn't sound particularly introspective, but my main gender identification as male comes from sexual interest in females...

Once I realized it was the social definitions that were screwed up, I stopped stressing over not being 'feminine' enough. It was a life altering epiphany. Being female (for me, that is ;-) is all that matters.

Spot on. I can find you trans women who are most at home in frilly pink dresses, and trans women who prefer to dress in greasy jeans and t-shirts with their heads stuffed under the bonnet of a car, not to mention some who will do both depending on how the mood takes them. All of them will say that they are "female", even their their chromosomes disagree.

Laurie: you might want to split that "biological gender" into two, because those people who Juliabk so charmingly calls hardly sterling examples of humanity will insist that biology is immutable tied to your chromosomes. What's in your genes (or your jeans) is not necessarily the same as what's in your head. And neither necessarily has much to do with what you wear, or who is in your bed.

I feel comfortable in my (female) body, which makes me think it (and the gender I'm assigned because of it) at least aren't wrong; I have no idea whether being male could feel right, too, if I lived in that body.

The social stuff, to me, is just social: I actually don't think men and women do inherently have very different personalities, though we're often trained into different behaviors based on gender; but there's really no behavior that's inherently male or female, and I feel like whoever I was, I could act like myself in this body, so long as the body itself felt comfortable.

It seems like a lot of people here really haven't actually thought about this, or still subscribe to a very binary and traditional way of thinking about sex and gender -- people who say they're male because they're attracted to women, or because they have male plumbing, or because they enjoy traditionally male activities? Please.

My gender identity is firmly female, though I'm one of the farthest toward the "100% gay" end of the Kinsey scale I know, I'm not feminine in the slightest, and I've spent all my life in male-dominated fields. By any of these narrow and traditional reckonings people put forth, they'd think I should self-identify as male, but I don't, not in the slightest (though I will admit to being amused rather than upset when someone calls me "sir"; generally if they realize their mistake they're far more embarassed than I am).

So how do I know I'm female? Well, after scorning the 'plumbing', it's going to come down to my comfort with that -- when I look in the mirror, and see a female-shaped person, it feels right. It's congruous with the image I have in my head of who I am, and seeing a male-shaped person would feel *wrong*. Some people, of course, have what they consider to be the 'wrong' plumbing and bodyshape; it's not that their gender is determined by what they see in the mirror, but by how what they see fails to match up to their own self-image. I also know people who identify as 'none of the above', though not well enough to know exactly what they could see in the mirror that *would* 'look right'.

An interesting book (not really related, other than the part I'm about to mention) is _Self-Made Man_ by Norah Roberts. Ms. Roberts spends some time living as a man, despite her gender identity being firmly female, in an attempt to see what male-only environments are like. The relevant bit is how the very same traits that make her a relatively butch woman made her a relatively femme man; almost universally, people thought there was something 'odd' about her male persona, but nobody ever guessed what it really was -- they all thought 'he' was gay. In short, the meaning of a gender trait isn't universal, even within one society -- what's percieved as a 'male' trait when I do it is percieved as a 'female' one when a man does it.

57 Anonymous wrote:
You might want to split that "biological