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gingicat asked Any thoughts about gender?I'm kind of in the camp of "gender is what you make of it". The problem is that gender is also often what our society and the people in it make of you as you perform gender. And in some parts of the world one's safety is wrapped up in how well (or perhaps how normatively) you fit into typical gender brackets.
First off, I'm not a psychologist or a biologist or a social scientist or any kind of '-ist'. I'm aware I'm probably not fully and properly "educated" on this, kindly don't come for my throat if I'm wrong in your estimation of how I should think about gender. These are my thoughts and they are not necessarily neat, but they are mine and I'm working my way through them, sometimes on the fly. Please be kind.
Speaking for myself, I'm a cisgender woman who expresses characteristics that, in other cultures, and other times and places, would have me transgressing the boundaries of femininity. They're well within the boundaries of femininity in modern western culture now, but they used to not be. The thing is that in other times and places, I would be considered "un-womanly/feminine/female" for these characteristics. So our ideas of gender roles have shifted and changed, and now I fit into our society's general idea of femininity where I wouldn't have say, two hundred years ago. Which means that gender is a changing concept, and limiting people to roles by gender is...well, kinda limiting. Sure, carrying a child and giving birth is by and large done by people who identify as women, and people who identify as men by and large have greater muscle mass for their height, but so many behaviours and capabilities (particularly in our modern world) would seem to fall into the "we are human and it gets messy" bucket, and so we are human and it gets messy.
I am reminded of Terry Pratchett's dwarves, who all appeared male (at least to start with) but then it turns out about half the population was female, they...just look all the same and the gender they perform is understood (by other species) to be 'male'. Except then some female dwarves started wanting to appear like the females of other species and...
Sir Pratchett died long before the most recent highlighting of trans/non-binary in our societies, but he understood human nature - the desire to be oneself, the crossing of social boundaries, the concerns from society when those boundaries shift, the difficulty of society changing their collective (and individual) minds, and how to live in that uncertain and messy time and space.
In terms of dealing with people and gender on a personal level, I try to accept people where they are for who they say they are, even if that doesn't match the categories I expect.
Sometimes their being 'out of category' might make me uncomfortable, but I try to make sure that's on me and not on them. They're people. In my belief system, they're created by God with some of the characteristics of The Divine (same as me, same as you, same as all of humanity), and they should have the kind of respect that acknowledges that they're human, they're people, they have a right to exist and flourish in the same ways that I do - even if it is outside my customary conception of the world.
Obviously, after all this, I don't believe in gender roles. There are roles that are going to suit some people who ID as one gender which aren't going to suit some others. There are people who change up roles according to their time and stage in life, and the demands on their time and energies. As the primary breadwinner and the primary housekeeper in a two person household where one person has health and energy issues, I know this well. My roles in the household are not dictated by my gender but by the necessities of life, of my life, and of my relationship with my sister(s). So to me, people in a household doing what needs to be done without recourse to any notion of "gender roles"? That makes sense to me. And it also seems "fair" to me, even if the workload isn't "equal". I give what I can give to the household, she gives what she can give to the household. And it's still harder on her than it is on me.
I never got close to marriage or cohabiting with a man in a sexual relationship so I've never really been pushed into the "female gender role" in a household by someone else's need to "not be the female". I shared a house with three guys for 1.5 years, and then with two of the three for another 3 years, but I wasn't sleeping or romantically involved with any of them so the dynamic was considerably less gendered than it might have been in a romantic/sexual relationship. (Not to mention, I was very clear and defined about not being "the woman" in the house.)
Incidentally, they were good housemates, but I'd be curious to find out if they ended up being "good husbands" - by a modern woman's definition, anyway. Apparently men often "audition" for marriage in the role of 'boyfriend', but then once they're married, they go into 'husband' role and then 'father' role once the children come along. And the role of 'boyfriend' differs significantly from that of 'husband' or 'father', so, yes, the man whom those women married changed - he's no longer the 'boyfriend' and therefore in his head he doesn't have to do 'boyfriend' things. It's wild, y'all.
There are people who are going to be of one gender who do things or exhibit personality characteristics that aren't considered 'typical' of that gender. But atypicality is part of the wonder and weirdness of humanity. Yes, most of us are a morass and a mass - we fit into the generalities. And also, we are 'adjusted' by the societies, community, and people we live amongst - the act of existence as part of a larger whole changes us - whether to conform or to rebel. We are none of us 'pure'.
Societally, in liberal democracies, there's going to have to be space made for the existence and flourishing people who don't fit the 'mode', particularly in spaces regarding gender. But also, people who don't fit the 'mode' may need to live with the knowledge that the world cannot be perfectly formed so their lives will be as easy as if they had fit the 'mode'. My life as a woman of Chinese ancestry will never be as easy as it would have been if I'd been born white (or male). And although whiteness and maleness are not the 'mode' of our world, they are the 'mode' insofar as our society has been developed. That said, I can live as a woman of Chinese ancestry in (relative) safety and with the opportunity to flourish, which is not always granted to people who transgress gender norms. That's something which certainly needs work and rectification.
FTR, most of the people I know are cisgender, but I have a cousin who is transmasc (but supported in it since he was 5, and he's now in adolescence; I don't know what his parents are doing medically now that he's hit probable puberty, and IMO it's not on me to know) and a couple of friends who are NB and declared themselves so fairly recently.
I didn't grow up in a household with strict gender roles, particularly after my dad left. I've mostly held to the idea of 'soft complementarian' marriage through my younger life, which I now pretty much see as 'functionally egalitarian' (there's raftloads of discussion about this in reformed/Australian evangelical Christian spaces - but ultimately, what was promoted to me both in teaching and practically is 'functional egalitarianism'). And yes, most of the women of my acquaintance are the primary house-managers/child-raisers, but I think it's less a "this is women's work" kind of mentality than a "this is how the division of work ended up without significant pushback against cultural norms" thing. And so far as I can tell, the guys do a share of the work around the house. Is it an equal/fair share? I doubt it, but also: it's not my marriage.
So, uh, yeah. Just a few thoughts.
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