Souseiseki wrote:Cekoviu wrote:i find it amusing that the person who thinks one can be a non-binary lesbian (or indeed non-binary) believes abolishing gender is a problem. take a look in the mirror, your rhetoric may be different, but the result is the same
can you provide an explanation for the origin of binary transpeople that does not also implicitly or explicitly open up room for the existence of non-binary people
every society over human civilization has had only two binary genders male and female, with a "third gender" being either representative of:
- trans women who are socially prevented from being women
- genderfluid people who switch between male and female
- effeminate men who social stereotype precludes from being men
- gay men
given that the clear norm for humanity over thousands of years is to not have actual genders that are not male or female, the clear baseline hypothesis here is that humans can either be male or female in gender (although this may be able to change). sex is manifested neurologically via certain structural differences that fall into male and female categories - note that it's been fairly well-demonstrated that transgender people, even before hormone replacement therapy, have at least some sexually dimorphic areas that align with their desired sex (in a statistically significant manner, this feature occurring more frequently than it does in cis people of the same original sex).
now, the following part is speculative but makes sense given what we know: given the dimorphism we see, at least one of those areas is likely to be the origin of the brain's 'expected sex' for the body, that of course generating gender dysphoria when the body's sex characteristics fail to match the brain's model of what they should be (and as a corollary, when other people recognize one's body as the incorrect sex and socially treat them as such). non-binary people aside from genderfluid people have not to my knowledge undergone neural research, so we cannot say exactly what's happening there (in particular, agender people would be an important group to study due to their total or near lack of a gender identity). but given that there is no evidence that non-binary people of X gender form a distinct neural cluster, i do not believe we have enough evidence to conclude with the degree of certainty that we can with binary trans people that their actual gender is a distinct one matching what they 'identify' as (of course, we should do research to see whether that is true rather than sitting on austrian book site wildly speculating, but it so happens that i'm not a neurologist and this is the best i can do at the moment). we can come up with a number of explanations for why non-binary identifying people identify as such if indeed there are no distinct genders other than male and female, such as:
- having a binary gender but being unwilling/unable to accept that one is fully binary for reasons of fear, wanting to feel unique, etc.
- there being a neural disconnect wherein the brain actually has distinct gender-forming regions but they fail to be activated or recognized for some reason (to my knowledge this hasn't been tested, but i'm willing to accept this as an intuitive likely possibility for especially agender people)
- having a binary gender but being gender-nonconforming and not realizing that doesn't mean you aren't your gender
what this means: non-binary people and their allies should be less hasty about proclaiming how gender is a social construct, you're valid no matter what your identity is, you can be gay or lesbian no matter what your gender is, etc.
what this doesn't mean: we should misgender non-binary people, we should prevent them from accessing medical care, we should consider this topic a closed book and not do further research, we should make non-binary people undergo conversion therapy
Posted: Tue Jul 21, 2020 9:12 pm
