Admin of lemmy.blahaj.zone

I can also be found on the microblog fediverse at @ada@blahaj.zone or on matrix at @ada:chat.blahaj.zone

  • 20 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 2nd, 2023

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  • So, much of gender is a social construct, but being a social construct doesn’t stop it being real. Society has a bias towards a gender binary, and that creates the social context in which we come to understand and experience our own gender. These social frameworks creates the lens through which we learn to understand ourselves.

    Lets say I grew up on an island full of men. I had never seen or met a woman, and didn’t have a concept of women. In that environment, my experience of gender would have been different. I’d still have experienced the discomfort, and disconnection, I’d still have experienced dysphoria, but it would have manifested very differently. I wouldn’t have identified as a binary woman in a world without women, and I wouldn’t have had the language to describe my experiences, but I’d still have had a discomfort I couldn’t address, and I’d still have known that I was different to the men around me in ways I didn’t have the language or the concepts to explore.

    But I didn’t. I grew up in country town Australia in the 80s, when societies bias towards a gender binary was strong. And my own gender is binary too.

    I do sometimes wonder what my experience of my own gender would be like if I’d have grown up in a different context, if society allowed space for genders that don’t have to fit a binary. Would I still be binary? The truth is, I don’t know. But what I do know, is that my experience of my own gender does fit on the binary, and knowing that, and thinking about it doesn’t change it, because however I got there, my gender isn’t a choice. It’s just who I am.



  • But my experience with being cisgendered is one of feeling like my spirit would belong wherever it was born to

    The few cases we have of cis people being medically transitioned in some way without their consent suggest that this simply isn’t the case, at least for many cis folk.

    Alan Turing and David Reimer are both examples of cis folk who were medically transitioned without their consent, one as an adult, one as a child, and both experienced severe dysphoria. They ultimately both took their own lives