#/ self

[stacksattack]

Grup 🐛 ☝️

[erotic-tinaa]

dark girl in a dark world <3

[josos24816]

I think the trend ppl find themselves clueing into unconsciously is that the marker "woman" is just so grossly broad as to be meaningless. it doesn't say anything about who u are, what u like or dislike, what causes u support, how u engage with or perceive the world. it doesn't say anything about your relationship to your own sex, sexuality, gender, nothing. what does it actually meaningfully tell you about a person?

I think it’s an unfair demand to ask “woman” to convey that amount of information. It’s a rather rigorous demand to place on any label that someone uses. Labels mean different things to different people — that doesn’t make them meaningless, and the fact that yours and my labels don’t necessarily agree doesn’t make their usefulness zero.

which is that im not sure if a "taxonomic" understanding of gender is actually one which can account for such things as multigender ppl or trans ppl who change their gender.

I’m sorry, I’ve tried writing a response to this point, and I don’t know how. I’ve realized I don’t really understand what even @tpwrtrmnky meant by the “taxonomic” category of woman.

the moment one decides to categorize themself as x, that is the moment of gender transition, insofar as "gender-transition" means something like "linguistic reclassification". or at least that element of it, but it is kinda about the linguistic use-case

Agree 100%. At the end of it all, I think that’s largely what we are playing with when talking about gender and other “identity” terms. It’s a linguistic game*, where language as a pointer to a concept — even (especially) multiple things at once — is what allows each category to be loosely defined.

At the same time, because words are just pointers to ideas, they exist at multiple levels of reality: what it means to you, what it means to your social circle, and what it means societally, are often different. They also have different demands. (E.g. You could easily define a new word and use it for yourself. With some effort, you might get some friends using it. But it’s a different story entirely to get gen-z–level adoption, where you can expect strangers to understand your meaning (almost) perfectly.) The more compatible your labels are with the broader social reality, the less friction you’ll have.

Which is why even if we claim that gender is about self-expression of identity, that’s kinda just at the local level? Because it also has elements in how others perceive you, which is why the claim to being a man/woman/(whatever category) has less friction if you also present in ways that are congruent with what others expect of those categories.

It also means that if you change your gender every day, you can believe that you are 100% that gender, but others (including me) might settle on believing that you are somewhere in-between, because that is a lower-friction conception of you than the one where I have to re-draw my mental representations every day. And we don’t have to agree 100%. (Although you might prefer it if I do, if only because your internal conception of identity is in constant negotiation with the higher levels of social reality.)

*Btw I’m using the word “game,” but I don’t mean to imply it’s any less serious. I just mean that linguistics is an area where multiple individuals interact together, so we can’t ignore the interactions and their effects.

does this also necessarily mean that every time you doubt your x-ness, your x-hood, you actually are y again for a moment?

Sticking with your linguistics theory, it seems like this last question is a return to the more rigorous binary. (Or, even if you have more than 2 categories, it seems you’re still making discrete “bins”.) Discrete just doesn’t work well to conceptualize something as fluid as language.

We switch between linguistic representations all the time, often without realizing it, and rarely claiming that only one is the “true” representation. If you apply this approach to your hypothetical scenario, with gender as a continuum, it becomes something closer to a probability distribution. Just don’t collapse things into discrete “bins” and I think the paradox resolves itself.

"Trans women are actually women for real, not in a metaphorical sense, not in a "anyone can be anything" sense, but genuinely actually make more taxonomic sense to classify in the category of women than any other group you could classify them in" is a position you'll find is pretty radical even in queer spaces

[space-tacular]

good morning sluts

[iamniscalo]

your fav librarian 🤓

[brutalrules]

💀

[psykopathy]

Before party!

[gingeremo]

💀🥀

[3000s]

might shave my head bald tonight

[stacksattack]

whagt if it was all a dream

[space-tacular]

Please…can we have some more booty?

mwuah

[comfortzonelol]

Does this count as a belated greeting???

[copafaced]

❄️❄️❄️

[wren13]

💫 monday morning 💫

[xxxtouchmexxx]