Quote from: DianaP on August 01, 2012, 06:44:59 AM
Well, gender is basically a social construct. People in the beginning of the human race split the population in two and established the distinction of male and female. Thus, as far as I am concerned, you're whatever gender you feel that you are inside.
A long time ago people began to notice that if you put certain people together, the population would begin to rise. It was determined by some that female students should be kept from male students in order that students could focus on their studies, saving child-birth for later when they were in a better position to support a family.
In today's modern Society people in the penal system tend to be separated in a similar manner. Also people who can get pregnant tend to desire intimacy and tend to be physically less strong than people who can cause pregnancy. People who can cause pregnancy tend to have a hormone in their bodies which tends to cause secondary sexual characteristics. So even if we can't see inside someone's pants we can often determine what is in someone's pants by their secondary sexual characteristics, which might be considered useful by some since it isn't always polite to look inside someone's pants or under their skirt.
Enters the modern day transsexual.
The rules have been changed, or have they? Society is still playing by the same old rules. And to Society it's a game, now more than ever. Society is honing it's skills to separate the boys from the girls. People know more about secondary sexual characteristics now than they ever did. They feel as though they must, in order to determine the boys from the girls. You may ask yourself, "Why does Society concern itself with such things, why won't Society simply accept that a woman was born with male parts?" "Why won't Society give that woman a break and accept her now that she has accepted herself?"
Because males who were born with male parts tend to believe that everyone who was born with male parts experiences life just like they do. Males who were born with male parts tend to believe that male parts are what make them who they are. It's called psychological projection and the only people who don't engage in psychological projection are the people who are aware of it and make a conscious effort not to engage in it, because somewhere along the line psychological projection was a survival mechanism and it's essentially instinctual and operates on a sub-conscious level.
But we are unusual. We are not well represented by numbers. We are the exception and life is short. It would be difficult to school the entire planet on how we experience life and the truth is that information of this nature tends to have almost no effect on Society except that Society will use the information so it can play the game better and sort the boys from the girls more easily. Because people only believe what they can feel, they only believe what they can experience. Anything people cannot feel or experience for themselves is just a theory, a useless string of numbers that doesn't mean anything and has no real practical application.
There is a old story about casting one's pearls to swine, sharing that which is meaningful and precious with unappreciative people who would defile it.
I found that the more I educated my oppressors, the more they oppressed me. The friend who lives on my block, all the time I spent educating him only reinforced his belief that I am a male pretending to be female. He told me recently that if he accidentally had sex with someone who transitioned how it would make him angry. Why do you think it would make him angry? It doesn't really matter why to me anymore.
The OP asked, when can we be considered our gender? I would say that you will be considered your gender when you change the rules and learn to play the game to win. Until then we can rely on people to be good sports most of the time and why wouldn't they be good sports? The house always wins, Society always wins whenever we play by their rules. They get to continue sorting the boys from the girls and we get to feel special or
accepted excepted.
