For many modern liberals gender means "whatever you feel like you are." If you feel a certain way, then congratulations, you are that thing. Of course, this is all in the world of make-believe, so it's mostly white noise to me. It would also appear, and for the most part probably is, harmless, except that some of these role-players seem desperate to flaunt and make sure everyone else both acknowledges and applauds whatever fantasy they happen to have created for themselves, which greatly irritates me.

The definition of "gender" means the state of being male or female according to social or cultural assumptions. So gender is not defined by traditional gender roles, but whatever is the current set of cultural taboos. Someone might claim that cooking is feminine, but has to make traditional allowances for men who cook as an occupation, as a hobby, cooks for themselves or cooks out of necessity. There is no taboo in that case, so there is no gender to that behavior. Maybe a stronger taboo exists based on appearance. Some clothes, make-up and hair styles are considered strictly feminine and generally rejected for male styles, but the lines there are not strictly defined and not universal. I think it is important that we understand that gender is a social construct to see how poorly defined and flexible those assignments really are.

Gender begins in Biology. Males produce sperm, women produce eggs and bear children. Women also lactate. Ever since mammals were invented (what, 65-75 million years ago?) males and females have had different roles. This was an inflexible rule for all humans, up to very recently. Freud thought that "Biology is destiny." During the second wave of feminism, the idea that "Biology is not destiny" was put forward. This has become a contemporary article of faith. "Well, I can be whatever I want to be."

Coming out of the same time period as the second wave of feminism was the principle that "Nature bats last". Humans may load the bases, but... nature bats last. Man proposes, nature disposes.

Granted: there is nothing in biology that says evolution designed the well-dressed apron-wearing housewife in heels whose only job was to take care of the home, breed, raise children, and be her husband's sexual service. Before the first wave of feminism, never mind the second, women were performing a whole host of hard jobs that women in advanced economies aren't anxious to do: Carrying all the water a family would use--from source to home (maybe a mile or more, 1 gallon = 8 pounds), barefoot construction work, milking cows, spinning and weaving, cleaning, cooking, cleaning, cooking...

So: we know women can work, have hard muscles, and carry on.

Some among the third wave of feminists, especially, aren't seeking a liberation from the last vestiges of gendered limitation to unlock more resources for humanity. It's more like they are seeking a very individually interpreted "I am going to have it all" kind of fantasy. The single woman deciding to raise children alone (not because of necessity, but by choice) is an example of this narcissistic fantasy.

She can do this if she wants to, I suppose, but why would she? There is much evidence that children benefit from living in a family with male and female parents; that boys and girls have men and women to model appropriate gendered behavior. There is evidence (since the 1970s) that families with two incomes do better than families with only one income. Alas. Obtaining the benefits of father mother/male female role models and double income means that the liberated woman has to put up with this male who won't orbit in perfect sync with her, and who will be a "jerk"--not be her sycophant..

Where did women get this idea? Most likely they got it from men who viewed women as subservient bitches. Not a great model.

What the ontological status of gender is depends on who you ask. For some of the far-right, gender is practically synonymous to sex. You have a penis? Good, you'll be the muscles of the family, the one who goes to war, the one who votes, etc. You have a vagina? Good, you'll be the baby-maker of the family, the one who stays home taking care of the kids, the one who supports her husband, etc. For some of the far-left, gender is entirely different from sex. You wanna be a dude, or a chick, or neither, or both, or a tree, or a unicorn or a dolphin, you go right on ahead and be that!

The problem with the uber-conservatives is that they are trying to impose social expectations on sexes that are no longer needed, nor perhaps even moral. The female sex should be allowed to vote, the male sex should not be expected to volunteer for the military, etc. On the other hand, the problem with uber-liberals is that they are so focused on not offending anyone that they completely lose any legitimacy. If you think you're a unicorn, then we're going to need to start changing our definitions of unicorns to include those who look like a human but are unicorns in disguise. For these liberals, gender becomes something to experiment with, caused by an excessive amount of free time and comfort. I don't particularly have a "big" issue with calling yourself something silly like a unicorn, but as soon as you expect others to actually respect your new gender and give you all sorts of benefits for "being different", we're going to have a problem.

So gender is a set of personality traits and social expectations that traditionally depended on what sexual organs you possessed but now tends to be loosely associated with these organs.

What I would prefer, however, is if we just throw out the whole concept of gender. Does it really matter?! Some would argue it does - mostly because they're concerned about homosexual or bisexual relationships (girls need to act like girls, guys need to act like guys, it's all clean and pretty and a well-oiled machine...). They're concerned about keeping things the way they have been, despite there no longer being a need.

Instead, we should make it so that your personality and the way you act is motivated by who you wish to be associated with. Done deal.

I am coming to the at least partial conclusion that gender is based on the dominant linguist dialogues of the culture. How a language supports a point of view based current narratives which in our culture appear to be male dominated.

Since we can assume any gender we want, even a binary gender, gender's meaning in physical terms seems to be losing ground...with some holdouts, which I think are mainly tied to religious objections.

Bu what does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be a woman? Is there some set of behaviours or way of dressing that a biological male can man can engage in that will make his gender become female regardless of how he identifies? Or is your gender determined by how identify regardless of how you dress or the behaviours you engage in? They both seem equally absurd to me.

I agree. Your previous thread I what got me thinking about this.
I think we are the biological sex we born with and nothing will change this fact. However, we also ought to be free to dress or behave however we damn well please. In my opinion, the need to be have others recognize the specific gender you identify as only leads to absurd conclusions.

the problem with uber-liberals is that they are so focused on not offending anyone that they completely lose any legitimacy. — darthbarracuda

If uber-liberals learned how to become more offensive, would they then be more legitimate?

I would be happy to do an in-service for uber-liberals on how to be really unpleasantly offensive. Then they could gain legitimacy.

I have an egalitarian spirit, I feel that others ought to find me about as obnoxious as I find them.

By being more harsh (i.e. calling bullshit), and not promoting global tolerance and P.C, they would inevitably constrain the possibilities of identity.

Sex, in nature, isn't binary. It bimodal, with individuals spread out along a continuous line with just some peaks along arbitrary secondary sexual characteristics. This evolved over time out of the consequence of a selection process. Society tends to evolve along a similar bimodal selection process. It is constructed from taboos and mores about appearance and behavior partially determined by sexual roles and partially arbitrary. You get into some complicated dynamics between dominant and submissive group alignments. But nearly everyone grew up in similar societies, so we take our special rules as universal. Look out further, and you can easily find societies where western rules are reversed. Where the men put on heavy make-up and perform dances in beauty contests to be selected by women. There are cultures where men where "skirts" and men wear "pants". Sometimes there are explanations for variation, why, in one group, the women are the leaders and own all property and in another group, women are considered of lower value than livestock.

For example, to be a "man" in my society, means to be dominant and to avoid submissive roles and appearance. To avoid overt self-beautification or self-objectification. Make-up, feminine dress, complicated accessories are to be avoided. To be a woman is to be submissive and objectified, valued only her utility to men. That's the standard, but it is constantly being challenged and overturned over time, and maybe that's an evolved behavior too. Nature throws us a few "bugs" to keep the system from being less able to adapt.

Probably, the relationship between biology and social gender roles are about 50-50, just like nature vs. nurture. We can't reconcile social gender entirely by biology. How could we accuse someone who is one sex from taking on behavior and attributes of the other gender, unless we had the concept of something being "wrong". If gender were 100% biological, we wouldn't recognize any socially constructed rules. If gender were 100% social, we wouldn't recognize biological gender. We insist that the two must be correlated because we assume they are correlated. As society changes over time, we easily adapt to the new alignment. One of my favorite examples of this in history is that of high heel shoes in European culture. It was originally adapted from Persian archers, where the heels were used to help hold the feet in stirrups. It was then adopted by French nobility and was seen as exclusively masculine for a while. Women wearing high heel shoes were seen as straying outside social norms. Then they fell out of style and got adopted for different reasons.

All very good points.

Sex (specifically, xx and xy) is not as precise as we might like. Sex evolved to achieve xx with xy mating. That's all it had to do. It could be imprecise as it happened to be, as long as mating occurred. In the excessively brain-mattered humans, the imprecision of sex has caused all sorts of odd-ball things, high heels being the least of them.

By the way, WWI helped make high heels popular with non-elite women in the US. Soldiers who had seen prostitutes (whores, sex workers, stimulation enhancement technicians) in Paris wearing high heels, thought they looked sexy, and urged their wives back in Des Moines to get a pair, pronto. High heels make for a shapelier leg.

Marlon Riggs film, Tongues Untied (1989) -- about black gay men -- does a nice job with identity. Riggs and his several speakers delve into consciously making an identity as black gay men, apart from straight whites, apart from straight blacks, and apart from white gays--none of whose identity is appropriate for them, given their reality.

Winde Rienstra's "Bamboo Heel," 2012. Made from bamboo, glue, and plastic cable ties.
The designer states her shoes exist on the boundary of clothing and art object. (IOW, rubbish.)
(Brooklyn Art Museum)

It's changing a lot right now. I think its metaphysics are still under construction. We're witnessing 'world-making.'

The construction would go a lot quicker if those darn conservatives would stop trying to enforce gender roles that no longer apply.

I still don't think this answers my question as to what criteria need to be fulfilled in order to call oneself a man or a woman. Could I call myself, and demand others, call me a girl without changing anything about my appearance or behaviour? Or would it be necessary for me to change my appearance and behaviour to something that is more typical of most females? And if it is the later, doesn't that pose problems feminists who feel that "patriarchal" gender roles need to be smashed?

Assuming western culture, no I don't think you could get away with saying you are a girl without adapting to some appearance and behavior norms. Currently, the norms, and what they represent, are more important than what you say. You hit a lot of taboos even if you decided to change your appearance and behavior without claiming to be that gender. But behavior and appearance is a very complicated contextual mess.

Yes, it does create a lot of problems in feminism. You have to remember there are a lot of different forms of feminism, the one you appear to refer to who believe "gender roles need to be smashed", are probably quite disappointed with transgenderism. You can read a lot more here. But there is a lot more acceptance these days. I think there is paradox between wanting to overturn a deeply entrenched system, and having the freedom to define your own role. The transgendered may not be so much the victims of the system, but the tools to break down long-held assumptions.

shrug

Impatient utopianism is the hallmark of the left.

One need not expect utopianism to realize that some things are entirely vestigial and ought to be removed from society.

Sounds like it to me.

How so?

Let me speculate that both gender bias and racial bias come from the same source, they are implicit in the language we speak. That our attitudes, values we have are based on how language is being used and that cultural differences are implicit in language. The following from a joint study by a Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA & University of California, Merced, CA, USA published in Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 2010. Conclusion:

The results of the present study indicate that attitudes squarely
belong amongst those contents of mind that can be influenced by
language. Language, in this sense, is much more than a medium for
conveying preferences; it is intimately involved in constructing and
shaping their very nature.

I saw the following video and thought about how we converse in somewhat similar manner about gender.

The American leftists are so silly. They like to talk about gender neutrality, or even omitting gender terms from our language, yet they can't help from using gender terms when a woman is running for president. The woman-card is played continually, with claims that we need a woman president - as if that is the primary reason Clinton should be voted for, with leftists even saying that they are voting for her because she is a woman. The same thing can be said about race, with blacks promoting the race of other blacks when they are president but don't want race mentioned when a criminal is black.

Hollywood doesn't seem to want to give up gender terms either. They think it will help sell movie tickets by casting women in movie roles that were originally cast as men (Ghostbtusters). That is their selling point. The didn't bother trying to make a good movie, as they thought simply replacing men with women would sell tickets. The movie bombed. Hollywood does the same with race - casting blacks in roles that are white characters (The Karate Kid, Annie), when if some white guy was cast in the role of a black character, all hell would break lose. The movies bombed because no one wants to see a rehash of some successful movie in which the only change was the color of the skin of the main character.

The hypocrisy and double standards are blatant and Americans are getting tired of it.