On Gender

If you read my first post, then you'll know by the end of this one that I'm endlessly obsessed with words.  They carry more weight than almost anything else we produce, just so long as they mean something by the end of it.  And there's a really important word in my life that doesn't seem to mean anything when I start to break it down.

Gender.

How can gender not mean anything?  One of the biggest and most defining ways I talk about myself is with the word transGENDER.  Not aligned, not the proper gender.  I'm the T (and the B) in the good old LGBT alphabet soup.  And I think I've come to the opinion that gender is just a useless word.

+Ashley Mardell posted some great videos a little while back where she invited gender variant people of all sorts to talk about different gender identities .  The video was very well produced and everyone spoke their minds extremely well.  However, it accidentally highlighted something about the way the trans community has been using the word "gender" lately.  It may as well be "smurf".  It could be used for anything.

Throughout the video people talk about coming to find their gender, the difference between gender identity and gender expression, the idea of being more than one gender, or switching between genders.  The definitions of these things stopped lining up a long time ago in this discussion.  These people are clearly seeing different things as meaning "gender".

Like, I'm a trans girl.  I was raised male, I like video games, I'm assertive, I'm confident, I'm overly focused and sometimes I get emotionally detached if I'm thinking too hard about something.  I love star wars, lord of the rings and magic the gathering.  I'm not a big fan of going dancing, I don't understand the desire for expensive purses, I don't find weddings to be particularly tear inducing and I have no desire to read smutty romance novels.

If you thought I was trying to point out that I like guy things despite being a girl, you're right.  But read that paragraph again, I never used any words that implied that I was saying that, you brought your own expectations into it.  You knew which 'gender' I was trying to imply with each sentence. But those are just a set of activities assigned in to specific gender roles in a binary system with mostly made up rules.

We can accept that as a kind of cultural shorthand, a categorizing way of building an expectation, but that breaks and starts to lose meaning when we break up the binary.  How does Kara from the video above work into that?  She's female because she says she is, but carries not even one behavioral or physical marker to show that.  Her gender is the ONLY thing that makes her a woman. Then we have multiply gendered people who aren't even in the middle but in many places at once. The shorthand rapidly becomes longhand.  

There's this idea, I think, that some people define their gender as kind of their...soul.  The kind of keystone for their personality, the filter that all other decisions have to pass through before they make it to action and thought.  Others see their gender as an in-born trait of their minds, something that creates a kind of community among like-gender people, and also defines their views, I think?

The problem is that this all tells me that gender means -

• A set of expressions that fit specific gender stereotypes 
• A word that one uses to describe the 'center' of their being
• An inner gauge of masculinity vs femininity that is baked into a person's mind at birth

I don't really get how all of these things can have a solid place, a single word.  I'm pretty binary though, so I would love to have someone describe gender to me in a way that makes all of this seem like something more than semantics.  Because right now I feel like some kind of gender bigot.