发信人: roy_young(杨落伊)
整理人: roy_young(2001-05-06 15:22:19), 站内信件
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Sex is between your legs.
Gender is between your ears.
Sex is male & female.
Gender is man & woman.
Sex is biological and cross-species.
Gender is cultural and changes across time and place.
Examples:
Saying "males don't cry" would be wrong. They clearly have tear ducts.
Saying "men don't cry" would be right at some places and some times.
Saying "females wear hose" would be wrong. Being female has nothing to do with clothes.
Saying "women wear hose" would be right at this time.
Saying "males tend to go bald" would be correct.
Saying "males have short hair" would be incorrect.
Saying "men have short hair" would be correct.
Saying "males wear pants" would be wrong. Male don't come with clothes.
Saying "males have penises" would be right. That's the definition of male.
Saying "women wear makeup" is correct, they do at this time and place.
Saying "females wear makeup" is incorrect, because female cows don't.
Someone without developed breasts is probably male.
Someone without developed breasts making the choices of a woman is a woman.
Sex is anatomical difference based on reproductive organs.
Gender is the social notions we build around those differences.
Sex has remained unchanged though humans, and in fact across mammals.
Gender changes like the wind, with lots of different models.
Sex is natural, essential, enduring.
Gender is social, constructed, ephemeral.
It may feel like females/women have always done X, but it's a lie.
Not too long ago women never:
wore pants
worked outside the home
had the vote
cut their hair
swore
played high school sports
Their sex didn't change, but the manifestations of their gender sure did.
That's why males are males, but men are made.
Sex is biology.
Gender is the choices we assign based on biology.
Woman born male is someone making the choices of a woman born with a male sex.
She is not female, or making female choices, simply choices that we associate with females, and there is a difference. Female choices are menstruation, for example. Woman choices are how to control and capture that flow -- something that has changed over the years.
Gender is transient, in the mind.
Sex is permanent, in the body.
We don't understand sex completely. Some is in the genes, some in the hormones, some in brain anatomy. The differences between the sexes at a deep level are not understood, but we think we know enough by looking at someone's crotch.
That's why we can't talk about genetic females, but only anatomical females. We don't look at their genes, only their crotch. For all we know, the predilection to transgender is genetic too. We may find that the brain anatomy of transsexual women more closely approximates the anatomy of males than females, and in fact they have discovered one facet of this to appear to be true in post-mortem examinations of a few people in the Netherlands.
That's why crossdressers are never MTF, male-to-female, because they only female themselves on the surface, with padding and makeup. They don't change sex, they change gender, so they are man-to-woman.
That's why sex-changes appear to work, because changing the hormones & anatomy, the only bit of sex we can change, is enough to accept someone as the typical sex for their gender. MTF TS who are femaled appear female in the crotch, having a vagina, and that's enough for most, who don't check genes, brain structure or internal anatomy. As Dr Sheila Kirk says to MTF TS, "If your gynecologist can't tell you have a man made vagina, get a smarter gynecologist -- the differences should be obvious to an expert."
We don't know enough about sex differences -- sex & the brain, sex & the genes -- to declare that sex is simply binary, one or the other. In fact, the more we learn about sex, the more we learn that it is, like any other natural phenomena, on a sliding scale -- some are more male, more female than others. Even exterior anatomy can be indeterminate, as the intersexed remind us.
What we do know is that every culture has created a system of gender to manage breeding and family. Some are rigidly bi-polar -- two sexes/two genders in a hard link -- and some are not at all that way, allowing and encouraging individual variation. Bi-Polar ones are called heterosexist, encouraging coupling over community and having a focus on breeding, and in our case, consuming.
Males don't hunt. Men hunt, and today they don't even do much of that.
Sex is between the legs, gender between the ears.
Sex is what we are given, gender the societies we construct around it.
Simple?
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