#end the gender binary

[roomwithavoid]

trans people in sports/bathrooms

[vatt1vv]

I’m being a hater real quick. You trans women sy truthers have your fun I too enjoy imagining sy with tits…. HOWEVER it’s way too simple a solution to sy’s gender weirdness. He has way too much of a complicated relationship with gender for it to simply be ‘Teehee estrogen would save him’ break free from the gender binary embrace genderqueer sy

[arcticsart]

Clinical Trial

First time making digital art in years.

I might edit/finalize it someday.

[remnantglow]

so normal about the gender fuckery of the Polish murderbot translation (lie i am on the verge of tears)

[booabug]

tbh the way i got into this show when my egg was just cracking and now that im getting back to it im a very silly and soft and unabashedly loving man is sooooo blatant foreshadowing.

not to @ god but this writing is a little on the nose smh

[orcelito]

You know maybe I'm not "vaguely gender fluid" maybe I'm just bigender or something like. Pangender. I'm everything. I'm nothing, too. Maybe I still am genderfluid. But it sure does feel like I got multiples in me

[bitsofsciencelife]

As usual, my mind has been blown after watching a video essay from Alexander Avila about how "conservatives" invented gender, my world has shifted. I've come to the conclusion that this modern dividing sex and gender as completely separate and exclusive terms is bad actually and has damaged our ability to accept fully the lgbtq+ diversity, especially in the gender spectrum. Gender theory actually has transphobic, misogynistic, gender-essentialists origins.

Because if we understood from the get-go that biological sex is actually so much more diverse, we would find ALL gender identities a natural consequence of this diversity and not as a human construct only. For example, if we saw the way non-hetero sexuality could be evolutionary advantageous in human communities (maybe with the care of the young like it happens with other species) or simply a random natural variation; or how not rare being intersex actually is, how a lot of people don't even know they're intersex and they might live their lives without knowing it, how in trans people certain parts of the brain show very small gender differences that match their gender identity more than their sex assigned at birth (we don't know the cause tho, more research is needed and this might also be related to sexual attraction); how the ammount of queer people has stayed basically consistent throughout human history, etc. And that's just humans. The diversity in nature is insane. (Humans are part of nature, btw. It could also help us fight this idea that we're entirely separate to other animals when we're also animals. That superiority is not doing anybody good.)

If we knew how much nature and biology don't care about our gender norms and ideas, I think it would be easier for young queers and conservatives to see how this "gender thing" is not just "woke identity politics" or a new human social invention. When we understand that this wonderful diversity has always been part of nature and humans, it becomes easier for the general public to accept queer people.

Imho, sex education when it comes to gender should start by stating the fact that queerness is inherent to both nature and humans. This is not to say we shouldn't discuss gender discrimination, gender expression, or acknowledge that gender is a social construct as well, distict to each human society, but separating gender and sex into neat, barely related categories is not what will liberate us and it's not a good strategy to teach about queerness. It hadn't really helped us that much so far, tbh.

Speaking from experience, it was that fundamental understanding of how much sex in humans isn't binary or divorced from gender, that made me finally become an ally to trans people (and eventually accept myself as nonbinary too), when before I had been raised conservative and I had very bad takes on the subject, I can tell you that.

I'm not saying this will solve all out discriminatory problems, obviously not, but it might help a little, especially in sexed. Biology does NOT support binary gender essentialism, never has, never did. And conservatives have been mad about it for decades.

[the-casbah-way]

some people are not going to like this but there is not in fact a rigid red line between cis people and trans people and acting like there is isn't helpful for anyone

[kraviolis]

im god's strongest soldier bcus i've been headcanoning luz as a trans girl since before we even knew she was canonically bi

[proudfreakmetarusonikku]

genuine question but how is transfem and transmasc meant to be any more inclusive to nonbinary people than trans woman and trans man. bc like in my experience it’s just lead to people forcing nonbinary people to choose what binary gender they’re arbitrarily closer too and categorising them as one of two options depending on that. which like. my experience hasn’t lined up with what ive seen from transmascs or transfems. i don’t like describing myself as either. i'm agender, how are terms that are still incredibly gendered meant to make people like me more comfortable in the community.

[toastysol]

I don't get why everyone's surprised that the brotherhood use the correct pronouns with Dane. I think people have forgotten a major aspect of the fallout environment. The bombs falling destroyed conventional societal norms. This includes any political agenda to erase trans people from history and the future. Also this is fiction. The brotherhood of steel are not a conservative christian political party. They care about what they dub "abuse of technology", this includes the biproducts thereof. The only people who fit that category are synths and mutants who they view as abominations that need to be exterminated. If trans people even counted as abuse of technology (which they don't and shouldn't, as the technology used for transition is helpful and not hurtful), they would be so far down the list the brotherhood wouldn't care. Why would they care. It's really not a big deal imo. It's a big deal in OUR world, but not theirs. Not by a long shot.

[doctor-disc0]

As a trans person, I consider myself very lucky that my birth name is pretty gender neutral and thus doesn't give me dysphoria

[eta-volantis]

My gender goals tbh

[nellasbookplanet]

Mass Effect is this really interesting case study of male-as-default vs female-as-default in non human species, because they give us such prominent examples of both.

Turians, salarians, and krogan all have women, yet none are seen on screen until the third game, and even then we get like, one of each in minor roles. Less prominent species like hanar, volus and elcor all have male voices, despite hanar being canonically genderless and volus' gender being considered a 'mystery'. It would've been easy to include female voice actors to any of these, or have an alien with a typically "male" sounding voice be referred to by she/her pronouns (frankly that would make sense for elcor and krogan, but by the time we finally get a krogan woman she sounds just like an ordinary human woman). And this isn't even getting into referring to genderless aliens with neutral pronouns, which seems to never have occurred to anyone as an option (fair enough, they/them pronouns weren’t exactly mainstream in 2007).

But no. The idea of gender as removed from human defaults to male, either visually, vocally, or in terms of pronouns. Voices meant to sound genderless, such as Legion and the hanar, still have male voice actors. None if of this is ever in-game commented upon. It’s just How It Is. The only species other than human in which we see a fairly equal balance of men to women is the quarians, interestingly one of the most human looking aliens outside of asari.

With the all female asari however, not only are they designed to look explicitly human (which they then in-game try to weasel themselves out of by going 'but ALL species find the asari hot, not just humans!' as if we don’t all have eyes), we are also beaten over the head with it constanly. Every single bar you walk into, there are half naked asari dancers. You are constantly hearing background chatter about how hot they are. A genderless character coded as female HAS to be explicitly and traditionally hot, while anything removed from that defaults to male.

The closest we get to non-human looking women is the rachni queen (which I'm guessing is only because of the age old trope of the queen of an insect hive mind) and EDI before she is given a body (at which point we are again beaten over the head with 'non-human coded as female (EDI) has to be hot' vs 'non-human coded as male (geth) get to be actually removed from human').

[warmfuzzyanimal]

Its-using animals club!

Alas i feel your pain, especially when someone's go-to response is "isn't using it/its dehumanizing?"

right. like. it doesn't matter if you think it's dehumanizing. it's what i want to be called, and like my name, you'll call me by it / its or we will not be having further conversation.

to me, personally, that's like. kind of a huge part of the appeal? full respect to those living in the "it can be a moment, it can be the mountains or the sunset" because, me too! but also a massive appeal to it / its is i can easily sum my gender up as some kinda boygirlthing. it/its he/she. like an animal you don't know the gender of.