2. Your mental feelings about your physical sex — Pfhorrest

I have spent what... 6 decades coping with conflicting feelings about my physical self, about how my sexual desire is manifested (given that I grew up thinking I was a pathological deviant and was sinking deep in sin). Plus I was unhappy about my body (not gender) and was something of a social outcast. This all got better once I got the hell out of town after high school and started college, but it still took like 25 more years to resolve all the crap.

Lots of ordinary men and women are conflicted about

1. their physical sex
2. their mental feelings about your physical sex
3. Social stuff about role and presentation that is associated with sex

not in the same way a trans person may be, but conflicted none-the-less. The issues are different, the expectations are different.

The way we are embodied vs. the expectations of the community in which we are located and the desires and delusions our selves can be difficult to square. Not everyone is so troubled, but enough are to call it a near-universal problem.

And no duh that most cis people don't have any particularly strong feelings about that thing, in the same way that white people usually don't have particularly strong feelings about their race. It's just not something that they're confronted with, not something that they have to think about; it's the invisible default. — Pfhorrest

This is just a plain bad analogy.

But you, being a ciswoman I take it, would probably not like the idea of being made male, I would guess? You may not normally think at all about preferring to remain female, because the question is never at issue, but if it were you would prefer to stay female, no? You wouldn't be completely indifferent if you somehow woke up a different sex one day; that's just something you don't ever need to worry about, so you don't think about it. Right?

That is not how it works. This is a question for a woman experiencing the symptoms dysphoria and confusion to discern whether or not ones feelings align with reality. This is for a confused woman that must introspect on her sex. There is no "if", that is just something you are making up. There was never an "if". This stuff is just made-up relatively new sheninangans. A small minority of people attempting to disillusion and gaslight everyone else!

It's not a "worry" just because "I haven't experienced it yet," it's not a worry because I do not have the potential for dysphoria it the first place.

This is same reasoning the people putting trigger warnings up all over the place use. They view things in this narrow lens that everyone is suffering from crippling PTSD (or have the potentiality to all suffer from PTSD - even without any existing prerequisites to so) It is purely irrational, and based off nothing at all but emotions gone wild. The cart is before the horse. People do not "prefer to feel like they do not have PTSD," some people do not have PTSD.

This isn't about me. — Pfhorrest

You are right. It is not about you, but to make berserk claims that imply that natural born females that do not shave their legs for a week, had their ovaries removed, that are infertile, or suffer from certain medical conditions (PCOS) for example, are CLOSER to males, is complete nonsense. And not a single natural born female with these conditions would agree with this; ditto for you waxing your chest making you closer to a "female".

And no one should play nice about it just because you are sensitive, this is absolute nonsense.

Sounds to me like you’ve got some kind of defensive denial going on where it makes you really uncomfortable that people are even talking about this subject. How about you do yourself a favor and stop talking about it. Let the well-educated adults have a productive conversation about philosophical distinctions without you getting your poor sensitive little girl feelings all hurt by hearing people talk about things that make you feel funny.

1. their physical sex
2. their mental feelings about your physical sex
3. Social stuff about role and presentation that is associated with sex

not in the same way a trans person may be, but conflicted none-the-less. The issues are different, the expectations are different. — Bitter Crank

Trans people suffer from gender dysphoria (i.e. a mental disorder). Comparing the two just to appeal to feelings is disingenuous and simply fallacious. This is like comparing someone that has delusional sense of self (e.g. "I am the smartest in the class today), with someone that suffers from delusional personality disorder. It's just nonsense, all around.

Oh I see now. Swan thinks trans people are all just crazy. Nice to know I can safely disregard everything else he has to say from now on.

@Bitter Crank, the site guidelines said you all don’t tolerate racists, homophobes, sexists, etc, which sounds broadly socially progressive to me, hence my impression.

Curious if that includes transphobes? Cause I’m usually the last to call for any kind of censorship but if Swan was unwelcome here I sure wouldn’t miss him.

You just said all trans people suffer from a mental disorder. I’m just taking your opinion at face value. You don’t want to look like a bigot, then explain yourself better.

You just said all trans people suffer from a mental disorder. — Pfhorrest

By this logic, you just said people with mental disorders must suffer from craziness! Not only that, but call me a "sensitive little girl," and continue to call me a "He/Him," ...! The true craziness knows no bounds, and it definitely has nothing to do with being "trans".

This thread is just ridiculous at this point. I'm done.

Mission accomplished.

Great OP! Always a good philosophical move to make a well thought out distinction. Still, I don’t find myself convinced by it because it disconnects ‘feeling’ from, shall we say, lived reality in a way I think is too artificial or ideational. In other words, I don’t think it’s all that simple to distinguish what you call bearing from gender.

For it makes it seem like as though bearing - feeling - arises ex nihilo, in a vacuum, or at least in the mode of a kind of natural spontaneity uninfluenced or uninflected by environment. But to want to feel like a woman (say), is at least in part to want to be treated like a woman, or aspire to ‘womanly’ things (dress, affection, sensibility), to be able partake in the gendering process which exists only at the level of the social and not at all wholly at the level of the psychological.

To decouple psychology from lived reality seems to me to make psychology poorer and not richer: feelings are as much ‘lived’ - acknowledged, celebrated, denied, hurt - as they are ‘merely’ felt. There are those who do not have - if I can use this loaded word - the privilege of being able to so easily say that they don’t care what others call them (sociology): their bearing may well depend entirely if not in large measure, on exactly that (passing, etc). So while I really like the introduction of the distinction, I’m not convinced it can do the work you’d like it to.

I like your tripartite schema. It makes sense to me, just empirically. It fits, it works.

Before I go into about the potential problems I see looming, a bit about me : White, cisgender, heterosexual male. Not classically (american) masculine - very much the opposite, really- but still, identifying as male.. I check all the boxes of a person who might not have a right to speak on this.

That said, I struggled greatly with body dysmorphia from late-elementary school til my mid-twenties. Very skinny, but thought I was fat. Was convinced that something was wrong and my face and body didn't have distinct outlines like other people. Obsessively worked out, and skin-pinched, and compared. Would leave parties when my sense of my physical sense of self started to melt like warm jello, dragging my psychological sense of self in tow. Never felt 'at home' in social roles, always felt like I was playing a role that didn't fit. (still essentially the same, but its cooled down a little, enough to punch in, punch out, and survive)

I don't offer that as a token of equivalence, or group membership. I just mean : This is the psychological point from which I understand this stuff, rightly or wrongly.

Ok, so, the potentially problematic stuff :

Sex speaks for itself, I agree with you there. Then: 'Sociological gender' originally comes from behaviors/attitudes/self-presentations that developed from the way cultures handled differentiation of sex. 'psychological gender' is a further turn of the screw, which deals with representations of sociological gender and our bearing toward them. (It's more complicated, of course, because it's not just representation, but the hypercomplex interplay of representation and lived gender roles.)

Call this the postmodern gender status quo. Sex, gender, gender representation. This is what we grew up with (I'm assuming you're a millennial like me.)

The novel thing with our generation is making explicit 'bearing,' as you perfectly put it.

The question is : should 'bearing' automatically entail recognition of the person as the thing they bear toward?

I say : No.

Let me qualify: If you have a bearing toward this or that and it works, then it works. I'm not saying we should enforce normative gender roles.

But. The reasoning is like this : The attractive, libidinal power - the thing that draws people, makes them bear toward this or that role - is the sedimented structure of last-generation gender roles. and their representations. Those didn't come out of nowhere. History struggled and shook its way to this distribution of 'roles.' They came about, rightly or wrongly, from a life-and-death struggle (so for instance the fetishization of '50s housewife as 'feminine' par excellence comes from WW2 and how america handles the aftermath.)

Gender roles are grounded in the 'real'. The struggle is what lends power to those roles. Divest those roles of the historical thing they're grounded in and everything gets less and less attractive. Representations of representations of representations.

'Bearing' is in large part a bearing-toward those things that you feel best express you, those roles which would let you live your 'authentic' life. But those roles are birthed from struggle. You can't change your bearing - I believe that - but you also don't have an automatic right to be recognized as the thing you bear toward. Once identification becomes equivalent to recognition, the very thing that makes those things worth bearing-toward collapses. An insatiable hunger ensues. 'If I only I was recognized as what I feel myself to be I would be happy'. That's a mirage. If everyone is recognized as what they feel, the worth of that recognition disappears. Being recognized automatically as what you identify as makes the worth of recognition evaporate. The pull of those roles were based in early moments, living as a presexual being being molded in a real world. If there is no firm world, there is no pull.

And when that happens, and everyone gets to be who they want to be - the bad feelings sprout out somewhere else.

My big post will have to wait till the weekend when I can devote some hours to laying out all the social constructions of sex and gender, but I can squash the gender dysphoria myth quickly.

Not all people who fall under a trans umbrella have gender dysporia. Most might have a gender identification, that's to say they have a particular identity and what to be recognised by it, but this is not equivalent to dysphoria. Some bigender, genderfluid, genderqueer, etc., people are fine being identified as a gender people might assume. Just because one is a women, it doesn't mean one is not a man and vice versa.

Even if one is to reject being a man or women, it doesn't necessary mean dysphoria. Sometimes people aren't seriously bothered by their bodies or even others misidentfying them. The latter can just be an annoyance, rather than a deep disgust with oneself.

Finally, even those who do experience dysphoria, it ebbs and flows. It's a particular psychological state, not one's identity. The existence of a trans person is not equivalent to dysphoria, even amongst those who experience it.

That would imply hunter-gatherer societies have no social constructs, even though they're already a "society". I don't think that works. — Echarmion

But the comparison to money, which was a social construct that came with civilization, doesn't work either. The context is generally patriarchal societies defining roles women are supposed to occupy, subjugating them to the patriarchy. But if gender roles have always existed in human society, then that can't be entirely true.

Maybe it's just the philosophy podcast I listened to recently on feminism in which the guest speaker was talking about the feminist ideal of a genderless society, which to me seems to run counter to all of human history.

Are (many, most or almost-all) 'Trans' persons body-Idealists (i.e. genital-Subjectivists ... sexual reproduction-AntiRealists)? :chin:

To think of oneself as a female (sex) is to think of oneself as having certain physical characteristics. — Banno

"Female" isn't a matter of what one "thinks of oneself as". Either one has the junk or one doesn't. To wit:

One can "think of oneself as" a woman (Gender) - with or without (BDD?) the junk.

One can "think of oneself as" a woman (Bearing) - with or without (BDD?) the junk.

With the female junk, doesn't one's gender and/or bearing as a woman correspond to being 'a woman in fact'?

Without the female junk, however, doesn't one's gender and/or bearing as a woman (BDD?) not correspond to being 'a woman in fact' - excuse the smell of no true scotsman b.s. - but only 'a woman in style'?

My observation: Junk is a fact of the matter - a facticity of being meiotic eukaryotes (e.g. mammals (e.g. primates (e.g. homo [in]sapiens ...))); Gender & Bearing are, subsequently (though not consequently?), psycho-social constructs. How isn't this distinction fundamental - if not categorical - insofar as the latter presuppose the former ... like e.g. agency (predicate) presupposes the agent (noun)?

My point: Modding - augmenting - junk in order to align sex with gender and/or bearing expectations is, to the extent I've discerned, a technique (re: body morphing ... 'transitioning') for social inclusion; just as LBGTQI-phobic policies & shaming practices are techniques of social exclusion. In what possible world doesn't 'the efficacy' of the latter presuppose junk's (including Trans junk's) non-subjective materiality?

It can be: humanity might just have done patriarchal social construction throught its history. Just as money is a social construct which comes with societies with money, patriarchy is a social construct which comes with patriarchal societies.

This is just a plain bad analogy. — Swan

No, it's not. It's just an uncomfortable analogy, so you ignore it.

Great OP! — StreetlightX

It's good to know that some worthwhile thinking continues, albeit mired in the religious slop that makes up most of these fora.

The danger here is that the patriarchy can be justified on the grounds that humans evolved gender roles to be such. So then feminists who wish to abolish gender roles have to fight the grain of all of human history (and evolutionary psychology), and not just the past several thousand years.

It's one thing to say gender is like money, it's another thing to say it evolved with homo sapiens.

No, that's just terrible evo psych postion committing a naturalistic fallacy.

And yes, we definitely have to fight against it, since it is our myth holding in place patriarchy. We're just fighting a human culture though, not our bodily existence at any time and place.

Where just fighting a human culture though, not our bodily existence at any time and place. — TheWillowOfDarkness

You mean all of human culture? I don't think abolishing gender roles is realistic. But they can be made more equal and diverse.

. Some bigender, genderfluid, genderqueer, etc., — TheWillowOfDarkness

You claim some Transgenders are this, yet haven't posed a meaningful distinction between "gender fluid, gender queer, and "bi gender," and Transgenderism while claiming that 'gender' and 'sex' can be divorced from each other, you also did not do so without referring to biological phenotypic sex-based attributes, the terms are ALL useless because they pose no meaningful difference from another if you recognize gender as independent of biological phenotypic sex attributes unique to the two sexes. This is literally all made up. It is based off nothing at all. The terms just all contradict each other or render themselves meaningless. If you can't pose a meaningful distinction between transgender and 'gender fluid', then why do transgenders answer their problem (and why should) we with biological augmentation (feminization of the face/genital removal, etc), instead of just remaining pre-OP 'gender fluids', why is it necessary they take the next step into transsexualism.

What OP is arguing is completely incoherent because he divorces gender from reality by splitting gender up unnecessary into a series of "parts" he claims to be all different, yet 'psych' and 'socio' gender isn't any less "physical" than "real gender". He has sailed the boat into the unknown.

The problem for me is you pose some kind of solipsismic thing by saying that "gender" is determined by what thinks while no existing references (without first recognizing sex-based phenotypical characteristics in the first place to "reject" or "accept"), yet the existence of "transgenderism" and the claims trans people make do not correspond with what you claim.

And iffff trans people do not directly confirm or say this, their actions demonstrate all there is to it by hormone treatment and biological augmentation to mimic female traits not 'woman' traits. Their actions say "transgenderism" is not determined by what they think, but by co-existing in an environment with other females to form ones identity around cohesively, it is determined by referencing the 'gender' expression of other females... not "I think I am a woman, therefore I am" .. or by what "society says" ... and if even if it did, why should this be addressed with biological augmentation?

This is why an ACTUAL "gender neutral" society (which is not possible as the social species we are) would cause discomfort in the transgender, because they will lack corresponding bodies to compare themselves to. So, no you cannot have a "gender neutral" society.

So either transsexualism is just a more technical term for transgender, or transgenders are just 'gender fluid people' aka males in skirts. And then we run into this problem as I said before:

P1: "Transition" denotespassing of all necessary attributes from one to another.
P2: All necessary biological attributes are 'fixed' at birth.
P3: Biological attributes cannot be 'changed' without artificial intervention/frequent injections (i.e. lacks necessary attributes) or augmentation (mimicking), therefore static biological sex cannot 'change' if necessary attributes cannot transition.
P4: "Transsexualism" (and 'trans' - genderism) is therefore incoherent. QED.

Even if one is to reject being a man or women, — TheWillowOfDarkness

Now explain how someone can "reject" being a man or a woman, while Transgenderism being the contradiction it is demonstrates that this is just incoherent.

If we are going to accept that Transgenderism is a thing, then we cannot also accept coherently that someone can reject their gender entirely.

It is based off nothing at all but feeling. — Swan

!

The height and depth of human (and inhuman) experience dismissed. Cool! Feelings are sufficient for marriage, murder, the whole range of human activity. Feelings are not made up. Gender dysphoria is not a confusion, not a muddling up of concepts. It's a feeling, which is real. Not that I have experienced it, but I can perhaps imagine what it might be like.

The problem for me is you pose some kind of solipsismic thing by saying that "gender" is determined by what thinks while no existing references (without first recognizing sex-based phenotypical characteristics in the first place to "reject" or "accept"), yet the existence of "transgenderism" and the claims trans people make do not correspond with what you claim. — Swan

The grammar here (for example) renders your point obscure. I am in general having difficulty understanding your posts.

!

The height and depth of human (and inhuman) experience dismissed. Cool! Feelings are sufficient for marriage, murder, the whole range of human activity. Feelings are not made up. — bert1

Yeah, no. No one is here is saying gender dysphoria isn't a feeling, doesn't exist, or whatever. I didn't say feeling was made up or insignificant, I said all those terms listed were pulled out of someone's ass because they felt a fart coming on. They then strangely decided to give the "fart" a name, but that doesn't erase the fact that all farts smell exactly the same, like shit.

And yes, jumping around making berserk claims about the anatomy of a colon based on nothing but farts is a real problem.

The grammar here (for example) renders your point obscure. I am in general having difficulty understanding your posts. — bert1

Yeah, yeah. Criticizing someone's grammar and "bad English" yet bad English is the world's most popular and UNIVERSALLY spoken and written language by anyone who isn't a grammar Nazi. I am far more annoyed by people that complain about "bad grammar" than those that complain about proper grammar. :lol:

You are being lazy.

Yeah, yeah. Criticizing someone's grammar and "bad English" yet bad English is the world's most popular and UNIVERSALLY spoken and written language by anyone who isn't a grammar Nazi. I am far more annoyed by people that complain about "bad grammar" than those that complain about proper grammar.

You are being lazy. — Swan

No, your posts really are difficult to understand. For example, I can't make any any sense of this: "The problem for me is you pose some kind of solipsismic thing by saying that "gender" is determined by what thinks while no existing references ...". And your first post in this discussion, as someone has already pointed out, was mostly gibberish.

You're the one who is being lazy. Write better or your posts will be deleted.

I always think it is interesting for someone who is transgender (or whatever else you want to call it) to have unique and particular opinions about gender. You also throw in words like cisgender, heteronormative, trans-exclusive and so on and your experience. It sets up a framework for which the reader will understand where you're coming from, which is that rather than listening to your opinion, we're hearing about dogma you've learned and feel enlightened by. I feel like you're here to enlighten people on an issue which is particularly personal to you, this is a bad set-up because it's a scientific issue.

The primary problem I have with your piece, besides its dogmatic undertones is that you've set up genders as social constructs or as a choice. This is mostly a scientific issue, especially among educated circles, A scientific claim needs strong evidence. This ties into a nature vs nurture debate on gender, My view is that the science points to nature quite strongly, I usually only hear "pragmatic" reasons for why if gender WAS socially constructed, we could change things to create a "utopia" where women and men are equal.

Even the idea of gender being a spectrum, is part of this notion that people are tied down by the oppressive narrative of gender. So a spectrum represents freedom from that oppression. It's the same with every speaker on this, there's no evidence, just ramblings on fairness, equality, freedom and so on but since it's simply not true, when I see evidence that discredits these ideas debunked or evidence that shows these ideas to be more than just hopeful, then I can rethink my position. There's room for reinterpreting gender performance but not actual gender as it's currently defined.

Thank you - I found your OP presents an intriguing perspective of which I am naively unfamiliar.

I am mid-40s, married cisfemale, raised Catholic and extremely sheltered, so it’s been a bit of a journey for me to reach my current perspective on gender and sexuality - which I thought was relatively comprehensive in acknowledging diversity. I now see that I may still have some learning to do.

I had fairly recently laid out my perspective on this: I saw gender and sexuality as a three-dimensional structure along three axes:

1. Genitalia and general physicality (ie. born physically male-both-female on a spectrum)
2. Gender identity (ie. socially determined gender roles)
3. Sexual preference (develops post-puberty)

To be honest, I thought that trans people had been ‘influenced’ by socially determined gender roles (particularly in relation to clothing choice) to match their physicality to the gender with which they identify socially. I thought that if children’s clothing were all gender-neutral and children were not identified by gender or referred to by gender-specific pronouns (big ask, I know) then perhaps people wouldn’t need to surgically alter their body in order to feel ‘comfortable’ with their body. They’d be free to identify socially with gender regardless of their physicality.

But I do recognise a distinction between interacting ‘as a woman’ with those around me (social gender), and being able to ‘feel feminine’ for no-one else except myself (bearing). So at the very least, what you’ve shared has led me to rethink my perspective.

I've been proposing for a while now that that last property should get a new name different from "gender", and I propose "bearing". Part of that is because gender dysphoria and euphoria are all about this property, the psychological feeling of (dis)comfort in a particular kind of body, and the root "-phor" means "to bear". (And similarly, rather than "transgender", "cisgender", etc, as values for this property, we could use "transphoric", "cisphoric", etc: "bearing across", "bearing to the same side", etc.) Also because "bearing" makes a nice navigational metaphor with "orientation": if you imagine an abstract space of sex characteristics, and a person moving about in that space, their orientation is where in that space they're facing (the type of sex they're looking at), while their bearing is where in that space they're heading (the type of sex they're aiming to be). But also, perhaps as a transitional compromise, we could just disambiguate the word "gender" between all three of these things with qualifiers: "psychological gender" for bearing, "sociological gender" for the original sense of the word, and if we really have to, "physical gender" for sex. The important part, though, is just that we keep these three different things separate: enough people already are getting out the message that the physical and sociological are separate, but I think it would do a lot of good for everyone is we could also keep the sociological and psychological separate. — Pfhorrest

I enjoyed this, I like the phenomenological angle you're taking with 'bearing'.

The discipline of phenomenology may be defined initially as the study of structures of experience, or consciousness. Literally, phenomenology is the study of “phenomena”: appearances of things, or things as they appear in our experience, or the ways we experience things, thus the meanings things have in our experience. Phenomenology studies conscious experience as experienced from the subjective or first person point of view. — SEP on Phenmenology

To my understanding, what you're trying to highlight is the necessary role that one's embodiment plays in being trans, specifically a sense of conflict (or being ill-at-ease) with the (sex/gender) characteristics of one's body, and the necessary motion/change that must be done to resolve this conflict.

1. Your physical sex
2. Your mental feelings about your physical sex
3. Social stuff about role and presentation that is associated with sex — Pfhorrest

When explaining your list, you emphasised 2 as the thing you want to draw attention to. And 'bearing' is the concept you're using to spark discussion about it. It seems to me that part of being trans, as you put it, is a conflict internal to embodiment. Thinking about embodiment means trying to think about cognition and other mental processes as expressed in body movements and other processes. For example, people gesture when they talk to convey ideas, point when emphasis is needed; more examples might be that somatization happens and that psychomotor symptoms occur with depression. SEP characterises embodiment's theoretical thrust as:

Traditional accounts (of cognition) basically state that there are no computations without representations, and view cognition as successfully functioning when any device can support and manipulate symbols to solve the problem given to the system. Varela, Thompson, and Rosch introduced the concept of enaction to present and develop a framework that places strong emphasis on the idea that the experienced world is portrayed and determined by mutual interactions between the physiology of the organism, its sensorimotor circuit and the environment. Their emphasis on the structural coupling of brain-body-world constitutes the kernel of their program of embodied cognition, building on the classical phenomenological idea that cognitive agents bring forth a world by means of the activity of their situated living bodies. As the metaphor of “bringing forth a world” of meaningful experience implies, on this view knowledge emerges through the primary agent's bodily engagement with the environment, rather than being simply determined by and dependent upon either pre-existent situations or personal construals. — SEP

To my mind, your idea of 'bearing' seeks to draw emphasis to sensations of disaccord and accord with one's embodiment with regard to gender characteristics. Whether one finds one's groove in the comportments expected of their body is felt by their body. When one's bearing is different from one's 'orientation', as you've put it.

Thank you for the constructive feedback. I did say in my OP that of course all three of these things have strong connections to each other, and elaborated later that those connections seem to be:

- Physical sex strongly disposes psychological bearing (most people want to be the sex that they are)

- Psychological bearing strongly disposes sociological gender identity (most people want to be categorized along with people of the sex they want to be)

That second point seems to be the point you're making, so I think we agree.

I'm having a little trouble understanding you, but it sounds to me like you're thinking of psychological bearing as being a feeling about sociological gender, when I explicitly mean it not to be; that's what "gender identity" already accurately describes. The reason I'm coining "bearing" is so that we can talk about the psychological feelings about physical sex apart from anything sociological (though they are still strongly coupled most often, see above). For example (to avoid talking about myself again), a tomboy transwoman (some of whom I've met), a person born male who aims to be a masculine woman. They just want the physical body of a female; they're fine with the male social stuff they're already living.

Aside from that, it sounds like you're maybe saying that wanting to be something doesn't make you that thing, and I have great sympathies toward that position and have argued for it in this context before. I think a lot of it comes down to whether "man" and "woman" really mean sexes or genders. I expect that most English speakers intend to refer to sexes by them, which is why people react to finding out a woman is a transwoman by saying she's "really a man". So from a descriptivist linguistics point of view, it seems like "man" does mean "male", and yes, wanting to be male doesn't make you male.

But if we accept the prevailing sociological status quo that "man" and "woman" refer to genders rather than sexes, then it's back to the "geek"/"nerd" analogy I made earlier: there isn't any reality to social constructs besides the acceptance of them, so in nominally disagreeing with someone's self-identification, you're not even putatively disputing a fact, you're just expressing non-acceptance of their self-image. So whether or not to recognize people as the things they identify as becomes a matter of politeness and kindness more than any kind of matter of fact.

Gender & Bearing are, subsequently (though not consequently?), social constructs — 180 Proof

Bearing as I've coined it is explicitly not a social construct. It's a psychological property, akin to orientation, that has no dependency on anything in society; it's just how you feel about your physical sex.

Thank you. :)

I don't think you know what you're talking about. I am actively going against "dogma" here and proposing that the current mainstream use of the concept of gender is a mixed up mess that needs to be teased apart and clarified. That you think words like "cisgender" are reflective of some kind of dogma just shows how uneducated you are on the topic. It's just a word. We need words to discuss these things.

Anyway, I'm not arguing that gender is a social construct. I'm pointing out the historical fact that the concept of gender was originally distinguished from sex explicitly as a social construct, for academic sociological purposes; specifically, to talk about how intersex children, who were not strictly male or female, were still socially categorized as "boys" and "girls" because our society categorized people into these two categories regardless of the physical biological facts; and later, to talk about how other societies have different such categorization systems that included third genders. Those are just the historical facts about the original use of the word "gender" as something distinct from "sex".

What I'm arguing is that that concept has been appropriated to talk about something else entirely, about things to do with trans people and such, and that we would do well to distinguish the concepts relevant to trans people (the thing I've called "bearing") from that older, sociological sense of the word "gender".

Glad I gave you some food for thought. Your three-dimensional analysis sounds pretty accurate to me for its part; I'm basically just proposing the addition of a fourth axis to it.

I'm glad you enjoyed it, and thank you for drawing attention to the connections between this and the topics of phenomenology and embodiment. I don't have any disagreement with anything you've said.


And maybe let's all just ignore Swan from now on.

↪fdrake I'm glad you enjoyed it, and thank you for drawing attention to the connections between this and the topics of phenomenology and embodiment. I don't have any disagreement with anything you've said. — Pfhorrest

I'm glad that it seems I understood. Given that bearing is psychological, and not reducible to feeling at home in the social role of a gender, what are the features of bearing that distinguish it from feeling at home in a social role? What additional information does bearing provide over and above dis/identification with a sociological idea of gender?

I guess I wasn't as clear as I thought I was before. Bearing is meant to be entirely about how you feel about your physical sex, independent of social role and presentation. The example I keep using is a transwoman tomboy: male birth sex, female bearing, masculine social role and presentation and such. So it's not about wanting to wear dresses and take care of children and whatever other feminine social presentation and role stuff; it's just about wanting to have a body shaped like a woman's body.

Most of the trans-exclusive communities, your usual cisheteronormative generally right-wing folks, just straight up equate sex with gender, and I don't think I really need to argue much against that view here, I hope, since it's just factually wrong — Pfhorrest

You've established political undertones from the very start of your post. Your use of terminology is not only unnecessary, but it's also argumentative and condescending, your claim is not even sourced. This set me against you from the start. However, I did not do you justice in my characterisation of your opinion. As you say, others have derailed you quite a bit and I lazily jumped to conclusions without giving your post a proper read but after rereading your post, it is as you say, I apologise. I think your argument has merit and the term "bearing" would go some way to helping people to talk about gender and people with gender dysphoria.