Serious Gender Roles / Androgyny

Hello there,
I wanted to create this thread to talk about Androgyny and gender roles in general.
A while ago, Jaden Smith, rapper and son of the famous Will Smith, wore skirts multiple times, destroying gender roles.


What do you think of the androgyny? Are you an androgyn?

NO HATERS ALLOWED
 

TheValkyries

proudly reppin' 2 superbowl wins since DEFLATEGATE
There's not a separate word for that though. That's an intentional bastardized myth spread to invalidate androgynous or non-binary people's gender expression.

Also rich to force your concepts of proper gender expression onto others and then say "no backsies" if they want you to respect their identity.
 

Pyritie

TAMAGO
is an Artist
There's not a separate word for that though.
Then here's one for you: just fucking be yourself.

That's an intentional bastardized myth spread to invalidate androgynous or non-binary people's gender expression.

Also rich to force your concepts of proper gender expression onto others and then say "no backsies" if they want you to respect their identity.
Intentional by who? Invalidating who? How does me saying "just do whatever" affect anyone?
 

HailFall

my cancer is sun and my leo is moon
I mean gender is a very abstract concept and honestly something we impose onto ourselves. Men and women aren't actually different at birth neurologically, we just, for the most part, accept it when society says we're a boy/girl and then follow the "rules" imposed on you as to what you should be like because of your assigned gender. So in that sense one could say androgyny is more natural than masculinity or femininity.
 

Myzozoa

to find better ways to say what nobody says
is a Top Tiering Contributor Alumnusis a Past WCoP Champion
I don't and would not wear skirts, and would likely read a skirt adorned body as femme presenting, which says more about my perspective than it does about any relationship between gender identity and wearing skirts.

"I identify as androgynous, agender, and non-binary and prefer they, them, theirs, pronouns and will tolerate he, her, hers, his, him."

I have nothing to say about 'gender roles', I've little experience outside of patriarchy. To me, Gender presents an arbitrary and contradictory set of norms (rules, habits, procedures) that strives to regulate my body, but I will be critical about how gender is deployed allegedly 'on my behalf'.

It is not my choice to be androgynous, and I won't 'lose' my androgyny in any clothing. Neither is my androgyny somehow internal or invisible (pray). My body, my person, is androgynous. It is a material, historical, medical fact. I don't get to choose to not be androgynous. I don't get to choose to not (mis)perform an androgynous 'gender role'. I don't get to look in the mirror and see a healthy, happy body because a visual conception of health for an androgynous body does not exist, is that it is always unhealthy, too thin, too weak, too tired, too impaired. When I wear clothes, I actually move farther away from conforming to the expectations of the visual conception of health. My doctor has no recommendations and even believes that I'm not a smoker, thinks I'm fit af (im not, but shes looked at me naked and groped me, so who are you to argue with her?). But at the NA and AA meetings I take my clients to, because I dress similar to how crazy people dress, I'm sometimes mistaken for another addict, not a counselor, in part because in clothing it becomes REALLY obvious that I'm androgynous. Never femme enough for the femme clothing, never masculine enough for masc person clothing, never rich enough to get clothing made specifically for me, or tailored to fit me in a way of my own choosing. Not that I care. I dress weird, because it's not a choice for me to present normally. Thats normal.

I was given an androgynous name. I did not choose it.

I have always thought in my mind that I was androgynous, because this is what I learned from my experience of reality: that I was androgynous. This is confirmed in every moment of every day of every day of my life, in every interaction, in every uncomfortable situation of being gendered male or female and not identifying as either of those, as having the experience of living as passing as several different genders for long periods of time each and hating the expectations. It makes people hella uncomfortable nowadays, but I say that it's better now that theyre uncomfortable, than when I used to feel uncomfortable when being alternatively gendered male or female by whatever random person I was encountering, now I'm like, their laughable performance of 'cis-het' confusion (what could it be? it's not obviously a male or female? what will i do?)= my visibility, gg. Recognition is the misrecognition you can live with.
 
Last edited:

Cresselia~~

Junichi Masuda likes this!!
Is drag actually related to gender roles?
I thought gender roles is more like "mothers should take care of the baby, not the father" .

I actually don't mind guys wearing dresses or skirts or anything designed for ladies.
I know that many guys actually want to dress in Lolita clothing because Lolita clothing is just so pretty to them.

But if you mean gender roles, I'd argue that mothers are evolved to be more capable of caring for babies than fathers. That's because male humans used to hunt.
Mothers also bond better to the baby because the nipples cause secretion of certain hormones when the baby is suckling-- this is absent in males.
 
By gender roles I actually mean "boys shouldn't wear pink or nail polish" or "girls shouldn't play football or wear blue", things like that.
 
Boys are boys and girls are girls most girls are into things considered feminine though years of evolution and boys masculine through evolution and masculinity was determined by traits that attracted women to mates like being durable enough to hunt, work in mines to provide for family etc. while men wanted nice fertile women with nice breasts and hips for better baby making and who could take care of the child while said man was out hunting.

Obviously men and women are interested in some things masculine and some things feminine but there is a general ruleset that affects the average male and female so you can't ignore it and shouldn't be discouraged but if you're genuinely deviant from the subject please go ahead nobody really will care unless you're being a cunt.
 
Boys are boys and girls are girls most girls are into things considered feminine though years of evolution and boys masculine through evolution and masculinity was determined by traits that attracted women to mates like being durable enough to hunt, work in mines to provide for family etc. while men wanted nice fertile women with nice breasts and hips for better baby making and who could take care of the child while said man was out hunting.

Obviously men and women are interested in some things masculine and some things feminine but there is a general ruleset that affects the average male and female so you can't ignore it and shouldn't be discouraged but if you're genuinely deviant from the subject please go ahead nobody really will care unless you're being a cunt.
This is terrible science, and in particular a stunningly bad and disappointingly popular misconception of human evolutionary psychology and genetics, as well as how biology works. Actually, it also just completely disregards the history of the world and many cultures as well, so chalk it up to terrible anthropology too. It's most of all bad biology (I'm not sure you understand how breastfeeding works, for starters, so it's embarrassing you can make that post) and not even a complete explanation for many less complex organisms and their mating rituals. Why then would you find something so simplistic adequate to explain a social construct like human gender?

It's a long argument, and it's part of what interests me about what I study (neuroscience and genetics, specifically I'm interested in biological determinism). I'll try to boil it down a little. Let's put aside the ontology of the human sexual model aside for awhile and deal with the physical claim that evolution is the sole determinant of sexual dimorphism, and this is the result of gender roles. At once we can question this, because

a) gender roles have evolved across different societies at different rates and not in a perfect correlation with the human phenotype, including division of labour such as hunting; so have beauty standards, which have not actually often favoured reproductive ability as a general rule nor had any scientific basis for doing so
b) sexual dimorphism in humans is not actually perfectly binary anyway; the human assignment of sex is more a system of convenience and description of reproduction with quite a wide variety of outliers that completely undermine it, historically outdated, and not objective in any form
c) there are many other considerations at hand in mate selection even among far simpler organisms, which have been studied by geneticists because evolution isn't perfect
d) natural selection acts upon phenotype, which means that the results of natural selection are a combination of genetics and environmental factors (you may think this supports your argument, but let's wait a little while); it's also not by 'design' and instead a result of statistical likelihood, so, again, evolution isn't perfect or comparable to intelligent design
e) evolution occurs on different scales to a species
f) your argument literally contradicts itself by supporting itself on the existence of sexual dimorphism; sex designation in humans doesn't have much to do with distributing traits optimally for gender roles (and for anyone interested, I strongly urge looking up the history of sex assignment at birth and science, and how it has dealt with intersex individuals)

Gender roles are a product of society; we can see the interplay of environmental factors here, and how, through the various processes of natural selection, they do indeed lead to evolutionary traits that promote general human survival. However, the 'nature' argument dramatically underplays the importance of nurture in explaining how society figures as one of those most important environmental factors, which necessarily has interfered with natural selection throughout human history. Human evolution is not random, and I'm sure you'd agree with me; that very fact inhibits the working of natural selection. Instead, culture interferes with things like access to '''''optimal''' (god that is sketchy) partners, mortality, disfavouring of traits that are culturally rejected but are perfectly viable and bias towards traits that are less viable and culturally preferred, division of labour, and literally itself. The perpetuation of gender roles has strong root in human behaviour rather than any sort of innate, hard-wired, neurological tendency because it has historically favoured or appeared to favour the power structures perpetuating them. Capitalism as a modern example is a strong factor in gendered division of labour and in marketing of social roles. 'Hard-wiring' of impulses itself is a thing that occurs and is reinforced developmentally through all forms of learning.

Now I can properly attend to the socialisation argument, which of course I was always going to make. If gender roles were transmitted evolutionary, for which there really isn't compelling neurological or genetic basis, then why would have different cultures had to fight so hard to instruct and socialise members of society to behave as desired? Is it perhaps because certain behaviours and impulses have origins in the environment or in development, as well as random genetic chance, which would be accounted for by evolution solely by your theory?

We can also look at gender roles themselves; gender roles are literally not innate. They are incredibly flexible, relative, and vary from person to person, culture to culture, time period to time period, shorter than even human generations. As more and more behaviours and traits are discovered in humans, more things invented, etc., genders are typically assigned to them (usually in extreme confirmation bias, and that's the only time I'm going to use those two words -- if I were gonna shitpost I just literally would've responded with that phrase), which can't really be accounted for either by neurology or by the pace of evolution. So, your 'general ruleset' falls apart entirely because it's not at all general or universal! I'll use a quick and lazy example that most people have heard of: studies which show that, when divorced from gender roles, people considered to be women perform as well in mathematics as people considered to be men.

And finally I'm going to post the summary of my most controversial argument (and I am happy to discuss these in greater detail with people, by the way), which is that the assignment of sex at birth is itself a social construct anyway that itself interacts and is influenced heavily by cultural beliefs in gender roles (which is backed up by the history of medicine and somewhat anthropology). It is a circular argument. Since it's a lot of philosophy as well as science I'm not going to derail with it, but I think it's something interesting to consider, that your argument is fundamentally circular.

I have some reading material on this if anyone is interested, though I'll have to dig it out later when I'm not supposed to be doing stuff for school.
 

Pyritie

TAMAGO
is an Artist
the assignment of sex at birth is itself a social construct anyway that itself interacts and is influenced heavily by cultural beliefs in gender roles
I'm not going to get into the rest of your post but this part I strongly disagree with. Yes, things can get complicated when intersex stuff is involved, but for the overwhelming majority of cases, you can't see a newborn baby with a penis and go "yep this is a girl" or vice versa. At that stage in life, the concepts of "gender" and "gender roles" don't really exist yet (and won't start being an influence until they're like 4 or so years old), so the only thing that matters is biological sex -- does it have the potential to make a baby?

Once the child in question grows up and starts being self aware then it can start making its own decisions about what it wants to do with its life.
 
I'm not going to get into the rest of your post but this part I strongly disagree with. Yes, things can get complicated when intersex stuff is involved, but for the overwhelming majority of cases, you can't see a newborn baby with a penis and go "yep this is a girl" or vice versa. At that stage in life, the concepts of "gender" and "gender roles" don't really exist yet (and won't start being an influence until they're like 4 or so years old), so the only thing that matters is biological sex -- does it have the potential to make a baby?

Once the child in question grows up and starts being self aware then it can start making its own decisions about what it wants to do with its life.
I hope you see the flaws in this argument though

Not just regular infertile people as well as infertility caused by extra or absent x/y chromosomes etc. but human biological sex itself is made up of significantly more than your x/y chromosomes and your genitals and there's a fair degree of variance especially depending on what criteria you include

It's a weird concept

Reproductive compatibility is only one part of it and can only be hypothetically determined at birth

I'm not saying there isn't a difference, just that the existing model meets particular needs and is not an objective starting point
 

Pyritie

TAMAGO
is an Artist
Not just regular infertile people as well as infertility caused by extra or absent x/y chromosomes etc. but human biological sex itself is made up of significantly more than your x/y chromosomes and your genitals and there's a fair degree of variance especially depending on what criteria you include
Such as?

Reproductive compatibility is only one part of it and can only be hypothetically determined at birth
Well yeah, nobody's going to run fertility tests on newborns.

I'm not saying there isn't a difference, just that the existing model meets particular needs and is not an objective starting point
Is an objective starting point even possible? The closest I can think of is redefining sex to mean "can make eggs", "can make sperm", and "can't make either", although creating that last third group would open up a massive can of worms. I think the system we have right now is perfectly fine.
 

HailFall

my cancer is sun and my leo is moon
Ad hominem attacks can be valid, and this is a valid one. If you arent affected by x how can you say x isn't that bad?

Just so this post isnt entirely pointless, I'm gonna add this. Someone brought up/mentioned drag earlier. I think drag is thinly veiled transphobia. There's a difference between being gender non conforming and blatantly mocking trans people. Drag queens especially I've noticed have a tendency to be particularly awful, calling themselves transmisogynistic slurs like "tr*nny". Like im totally fine with men wearing makeup or liking traditionally feminine things or wearing "women's clothes" or whatever but drag is painfully obviously just "haha trans people are a riot aren't they".
 
Last edited:

vonFiedler

I Like Chopin
is a Forum Moderator Alumnusis a Community Contributor Alumnus
Honestly, it's more than a bit hypocritical to condemn people who dress is drag. I doubt very many are actually the way you describe them, and for many decades that was the only avenue for expressing trans thoughts that most were aware of.
 

HailFall

my cancer is sun and my leo is moon
Yes, there was a time where a concept of transgenderism didn't exist but that time has passed. Drag performance's entire platform is shock value and the idea that trans people are inherently laughable. Its not progressive at all. Drag performers exist because of transphobic ideas we're taught from the time we are young. The idea that men in dresses are somehow funny and/or entertaining is rooted solely in transphobia. Any kind of stigma drag performers face is again, a result of transphobia being present in this society. I will always prioritize the comfort of trans people over cis people's license (gnc or not) to do whatever they want without facing criticism. I don't see what's hypocritical about that.
 

HailFall

my cancer is sun and my leo is moon
._. okay so like the point of that article is sometimes drag performers face stigma and therefore arent cis? Like cis is literally a label to describe people who are the gender they were assigned at birth. The arguments in that article were utter nonsense ngl. "Drag performer" is not an oppressed identity, violence against them is a result of them associating themselves so closely to trans people and is by extension a result of transphobia. Like honestly my number one issue is that people are taking fucking drag queens more seriously than actual trans women. Acting like cis people are the biggest contributors to trans people having basic human rights is utterly disgusting and is literally on par with that "macklemore is a gay icon" bullshit. Cis people are the reason trans people arent safe anywhere. Cis people are the reason cis people who act like trans people face violence. Drag queens get praise and support from the left simply for existing. Trans women are mocked and literally murdered on the fucking streets. Im probably not responding further after this because this is getting absurd.
 

vonFiedler

I Like Chopin
is a Forum Moderator Alumnusis a Community Contributor Alumnus
You're talking about people who are still, at least a good chunk of the time, gay. Not oppressed? Literally attacked just like anyone else in the LGBT umbrella for living their lifestyle?

Your logic is circular. It's "offensive" to say that cis people are helping the trans movement, but only YOU are deciding that they are cis. You've got room for 99 different gender identities, but drag ain't one?

It sounds like the real problem is that some elements of the LGBT community aren't gelling, which has been true. You're not helping by labeling others (you know, the thing cis people do) and then using that as excuse to act hateful toward them. Odd position to be in while feigning outrage.

"If the point of our community’s struggles have been to recognize and embrace diversity, reject the labels imposed on us and allow us all to embody our own unique identity, then the shaming and alienation of drag performers and the drag community must stop."
 
Last edited:

HailFall

my cancer is sun and my leo is moon
okay i really didnt want to respond to this but whatever.

You're talking about people who are still, at least a good chunk of the time, gay. Not oppressed? Literally attacked just like anyone else in the LGBT umbrella for doing living their lifestyle?
It should be clear i was talking about being oppressed for dressing in drag. Their "lifestyle" of mocking trans people contributes to transphobic violence.
Your logic is circular. It's "offensive" to say that cis people are helping the trans movement, but only YOU are deciding that they are cis. You've got room for 99 different gender identities, but drag ain't one?
Good lord I dont even know how to respond to this. No, drag is not a gender; it's an activity. A transphobic activity I might add. I'm not "deciding" that they're cis because literally, by definition, they are. No one responds "drag queen" when you ask them their gender. I honestly have no idea how this makes any sense at all to you.
It sounds like the real problem is that some elements of the LGBT community aren't gelling, which has been true. You're not helping by labeling others (you know, the thing cis people do) and then using that as excuse to act hateful toward them. Odd position to be in while feigning outrage.
What does this even mean lol. I never "labeled" anyone and there's nothing morally wrong with hating someone for contributing to an oppressive system.
"If the point of our community’s struggles have been to recognize and embrace diversity, reject the labels imposed on us and allow us all to embody our own unique identity, then the shaming and alienation of drag performers and the drag community must stop."
I will gladly shame and alienate people's identity as a drag performer because their entire platform is making a mockery of trans people. They don't deserve acceptance.
 
Do you have any evidence that drag contributes to transphobic violence, or is it just one of those things you have to accept at face value?

How do you explain all the drag performers who come out as trans later on? Is it acceptable to erase their identities by calling them cis because they've done something that you've decided is problematic? I mean, von's wrong re: calling drag a gender identity, but... you're absolutely labelling people, and not only that, you seem to be revelling in the chance to be a turd about random minority group because you've decided their form of gender non-conformity is inherently toxic, based on... I wouldn't even know. You've put forward no evidence and have basically just been blustering this whole time about things you seem to believe are self evident but really aren't. How many drag performers or people who love watching drag are involved with transphobic violence vs your stereotypical cishet dude who don't like no (BAN ME PLEASE) and thinks drag queens and trans women are synonymous due to his own ignorance? Do the former represent isolated incidents or a significant community-wide problem? Are rates of transphobic violence consistently lower in places that don't have drag? Does this research even exist, or did you think that reading a few posts on Tumblr about how much some people hate it was sufficient?

"Drag is what I do; trans is who I am." Monica Beverly Hillz: Trans-murdering cis drag queen, or pure cinnamon roll trans woman who would never do drag? You've made it clear it's one or the other.
 

Users Who Are Viewing This Thread (Users: 1, Guests: 0)

Top