Gender as personality type?

[DrillQuip]

Is it appropriate to think of a type of gender as a personality type? Like how being an introvert or an extrovert are personality types. Or is that not right?

I understand that sex is your physical description and gender is more psychological. But reading through the topics on the board it seems like sometimes they are so intrinsically connected its not worth making the distinction.

I call myself gender-fluid, because I see my interests, personality traits, and appearance as a fluctuating mix of stereotypical feminine and masculine traits. My personality is both feminine and masculine. But I dont see myself as male and female. I am physically female and accept it. Is this the right way to categorize myself or am I mixing things up here?

[suzifrommd]

I dont see myself as male and female. I am physically female and accept it. Is this the right way to categorize myself or am I mixing things up here?

My quick answer is that whatever way feels best to you is the way to categorize yourself.

I'll speak about my own experience (the only thing I can competently talk about). I am physically male and (reluctantly) accept that because doing something about it would be far more complex than anything I want to be involved with.

So I act male when the male aspects of my personality seem to want it and female when the female parts of me seem to want that. It leaves me feeling that I don't comfortably belong to any classification, but I can live with that, since just being ME isn't (at this point in my life) so bad.

Help?

[Edge]

Personally, I do not believe that interests, personality traits, or appearance have anything to do with gender and I don't understand why anyone would.
Gender, to me, is hard to describe, but it's more like an intrinsic sense of being whatever gender(s) one is.
I'm genderfluid/bigender/whatever and I do see myself as both male and female. However, my personality does not change with my gender. It does change just because that's what my personality is like, but it doesn't change at the same time as or according to my gender.

[Emerald]

Is it appropriate to think of a type of gender as a personality type? Like how being an introvert or an extrovert are personality types. Or is that not right?

Indeed, gender is a matter of psychology, temperament, a facet of one's personality.

I understand that sex is your physical description and gender is more psychological. But reading through the topics on the board it seems like sometimes they are so intrinsically connected its not worth making the distinction.

Indeed your understanding is correct. 'Sex' refers to the physiological, biological, anatomical (male/female/intersex/etc.). 'Gender' refers to the psychological, social (masculine/feminine/androgynous/etc.). It is well worth making the distinction between the two terms.

I call myself gender-fluid, because I see my interests, personality traits, and appearance as a fluctuating mix of stereotypical feminine and masculine traits. My personality is both feminine and masculine. But I dont see myself as male and female. I am physically female and accept it. Is this the right way to categorize myself or am I mixing things up here?

Of what you've written about yourself in this paragraph, I think you and I have much in common.

-Emerald

[Edge]

Edge:
Your saying its more of a gut feeling then anything else?

When your personality changes and gender changes, how do you experience that? I think I understand what you mean, but I'm curious to know more. It sounds kinda neat.

For me, yes, it is a gut feeling. When my gender changes, it sometimes takes me a bit of time to sort out what I feel like because it is confusing (getting less confusing now though). When I am male, I get dysphoria, I want a male body, I want to be referred to with male pronouns and stuff like that, and I think of myself as male. When I feel female it's pretty much the same except I don't get dysphoria. When I feel both at the same time, it's hard to describe. Kind of like a duality except there's only one of me?
My personality changes according to how I'm feeling mostly (independent from gender), but also who I'm around (due to shyness). Technically, it all stays the same. The aspects that are more prominent switch and they mix and match. To use clothes as an example, one day I may dress like a dandy, the next I may dress in jeans and a t-shirt, the next I'll wear something different, and so on. Im pretty used to it since I'm like this naturally.

[Sephirah]

I hope you don't mind me sticking my nose in here, but this is a very interesting thread.

Gender, to me, is hard to describe, but it's more like an intrinsic sense of being whatever gender(s) one is.

This is particularly interesting, as it's how I also think of gender, quite seperate to personality traits.

To use an analogy based on my own feelings: Your body is a temple. Or, to be more accurate, a house. Your sex is the building itself, the way it appears to the outside world. Your personality is the interior decor, masculine and feminine rooms, filled with the accoutrements of the things you like to do which are associated with either.

To me, your gender is the architect who designed the house. The one with the blueprints. Shouting that it's wrong, wrong, all wrong. The building doesn't match the blueprints, that's not how it was meant to be built! Someone hired cowboy builders who couldn't read and they totally misread the blueprints.

And the architect doesn't shut up moaning about how their masterpiece of design has been totally ruined until one fires the cowboy builders and hires a group of professionals, who set about changing the structure of the house to that which the architect desires. Adding a couple of extensions, changing the dimensions and proportions of the outer walls, and removing that totally out of place external waste disposal unit which Mad Marty picked up from a garbage dump somewhere and rammed in there thinking it would be a laugh. The blueprints clearly call for an internal unit, and while the plumbing is too integrated into the internal structure to be able to change, the architect will be satisfied, barely, with a splice job which allows this internal unit to perform the way it was designed to.

As far as the interior decor goes, it doesn't change. And the architect isn't concerned with it, it's all window dressing, as it were. Superficial. Rooms can be re-decorated on a whim. They're more concerned with the blueprints, the vision of what the house itself should look like based on their design.

...

Perhaps a tad contrived, but that's a close approximation of how I see it.

[eli77]

To me, your gender is the architect who designed the house. The one with the blueprints. Shouting that it's wrong, wrong, all wrong. The building doesn't match the blueprints, that's not how it was meant to be built! Someone hired cowboy builders who couldn't read and they totally misread the blueprints.

Is that all it is? Just the dysphoria of having a wrong body? So you don't have a gender (or lose awareness of it) if your house is built right, or fixed up? I would like to believe that... but it's not how most people seem to describe it.

And some trans folks don't seem to experience body dysphoria at all...

[Sephirah]

Is that all it is? Just the dysphoria of having a wrong body? So you don't have a gender (or lose awareness of it) if your house is built right, or fixed up? I would like to believe that... but it's not how most people seem to describe it.

And some trans folks don't seem to experience body dysphoria at all...

I don't know if that's all it is. That's just how it is to me. Maybe it's something else entirely. But for me, yes, I do lose awareness of it if I'm not thinking about it in a physical context. Like kidney function, I don't notice it's even there until something happens to draw awareness to it, like kidney stones or something. It doesn't cease to exist, I just don't think about it. During meditation, for example, where bodily sensation isn't an issue, neither is gender. It's just fundamentally accepted that I am who I see in my mind's eye, rather than something I have to consciously work on creating, and that's utilized to explore other things. A vehicle for perception, I guess.

I see it as my mental self-image, a blueprint, on a sort of primal level, and that's pretty much all. Call it the Mind, the Psyche the Higher Self, I guess there are lots of different names for it. Masculine and feminine, to me, are different. More akin to the balance of energies, Yin and Yang if you like, which influence the way I express myself, or things I like, but aren't tied to gender. I believe that everyone has that same balance in them. And in some, one is more prominent than the other.

I don't see it as anything social because my mental self-image would stay the same in the total absence of other people. And, if I'm honest, it kind of puzzles me how interaction with others can do that. I mean if that were the case then would I feel the need to transition considering I've been seen as, and treated like a male for the vast majority of my life? I don't instinctively feel that way. So, to my way of thinking, being accepted as, seen as, and treated as a woman does no more to make me feel like one than the years of being subjected to the opposite made me feel like a man. It's something other than that, something internal. I guess social conditioning can change the way you express yourself, shift the balance of masculine and feminine, in the same way that reading style magazines can cause someone to change the interior decor of their houses. But that's not the same, at least to me.

That's largely why my philosophy in life has always been: Don't try to be a woman, don't try to be a man. Just be yourself. Because through your higher self, the core of your being.. inside you already know who you are, even if you don't know that you know.

Others see it differently, and have come to different conclusions based on how they feel, and that's fine with me. I'm not trying to definitively categorise it or anything, just express how it's viewed through my eyes, in a way that enables me to make sense of things.

[ativan]

Yeah, sure. They are all separate and different things. But, like most everything in life, there are threads of association that tie all things together as a cohesiveness that brings a reasonable amount of sanity to ourselves. It's just that these threads are different, for different people. But again, it is the difference in how these threads are viewed and used, that make us individuals. Lifes experiences affect our personalities, our view of what our genders are, and our perceptions of who others are.

They are all different things, yet they are all used at the same time to define what each of these things are. It's not what these things are, that define our compassions, it's the recognition of the diversity of the threads that tie us together that do. It's our compassion that ties us together, that brings us closer or farther apart in any given situation.

Lol, we are the Borg, we have been assimilated.

Ativan

[eli77]

Others see it differently, and have come to different conclusions based on how they feel, and that's fine with me. I'm not trying to definitively categorise it or anything, just express how it's viewed through my eyes, in a way that enables me to make sense of things.

That tends to be how I see it too. The more I reshape my house, the quieter the architect gets... It's becoming more and more exclusively an external thing - being gendered by others... which I'm not always that comfortable with, but isn't anything like the pain of the body dysphoria.

I dunno, it's strange. Gender always seems like ghosts and shadows for me.

[poptart]

It can certainly influence personality, but does it affect personality exclusively? No.

[Oriole]

Gender actually does affect your personality on a certain level.
Men are logical & women are emotional.

It doesn't mean that all men are logical and all women are emotional, but a vast majority fit in these two categories according to their gender. Doesn't mean because you're one of them you cannot be the other, but one side is always stronger than the other. It is nearly impossible to be neutral toward these two things.

I'm sure lots of you knows about the MBTI and if you do not I strongly recommend looking into it and taking the test.

If I take my type of personality for example, I am an INTP (Introvert Intuitive Thinking Perceiving) which is a personality type more common among males. My weakest function is Fe (Extroverted feeling) which is one dominant function among females. Even though my personality type is more popular towards males, I still consider myself androgynous (Both physically and mentally). The way I think doesn't really change the way I see myself as a person and I do not think that it should. I do not know if there's one of the 16 types that is more likely to be genderneutral though.

Male or female aren't personality type by themselves, but they can be hint to which one you are most likely to be.

[suzifrommd]

I strongly agree with you that men and women tend toward different personalities. (Note I say "tend." Statements that start "men are" or "women are" provoke counterexample).

It's a lot easier to notice if you don't fit into the traditional mold.

[Edge]

That's rather sexist.

[Jamie D]

Let's discuss the issues, please.

Gender is not the easiest subject to discuss, especially for those of us who are still finding our way.

[Oriole]

Sexism = Discrimination
I didn't not see any of that in this thread so far.

I still think that what I've said makes sense. These aren't rules or anything, it's just how things are most of the time but nobody is forced to follow the stereotypical roles of their gender by any means.
If we take in consideration how we evolved as a specie, we can clearly see these things are true.

Men mostly took care of the hunting while women mostly took care of the children. We simply are this way, we've been like this for a long time and we'll probably stay like this for a while as well. Even though jobs are less gender-oriented than before, and that is great, our genes simply makes us work this way (most of the time at least) and there is nothing sexist about this.

Sometimes I'd like to think that we're all born equal in every way, but it's not the case. Our genes play a huge role on our development and personality and some people are more logical than others, while some people are more emotional than others. There isn't one that is better than the other, because we need both in a society for it to work. I like logic more than emotions, but that is only a personal preference and it doesn't make me hate women for that reason.

[suzifrommd]

That's rather sexist.

I hope not. It's intended as an observation, not an indictment of either men or women.

I used the word "tend" because I agree it's impossible to pigeonhole men being some way or women being another. But I do notice tendencies - that there are characteristics I see more often in women than men and vice versa.

[Metroland]

DrillQuip,

I totally agree.  I always had this thought.  I feel that gender is just another variation in human beings.  I don't feel it is the one thing that things are centered around.

I even think that maybe some personality traits are gendered.  Maybe a personality trait can be masculine or feminine.

To use an analogy based on my own feelings: Your body is a temple. Or, to be more accurate, a house. Your sex is the building itself, the way it appears to the outside world. Your personality is the interior decor, masculine and feminine rooms, filled with the accoutrements of the things you like to do which are associated with either.

Sephira thanks for sharing this analogy.  It seems really interesting.  However I was wondering what if the building itself has a character of its own, a gender?  Not every building is similar to the other so what if starting by the building the architecture means something to everyone?

[aleon515]

I don't understand gender. I understand we have certain hormones and so on. I also know that factually men are generally better with 3d and visual spatial relationships and women tend to better with language. But aside from a few things like that... What exactly is not influenced by culture, etc. I mean the experiment has only been done a few times--- what happens if you rear a child completely outside those things.


--Jay Jay

[Edge]

what happens if you rear a child completely outside those things.

Meet me and my siblings. One is cis female, one is cis male, and one is fluid.