https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cdsGFnNp6Q
Your definition of gender was something that resulted in there being millions of genders. It by definition misunderstood what gender is. Gender is socially constructed. It requires group construction and recognition. So, your gender can't be this micro unique way you feel on the inside. That's just who you are. Your definition made gender meaningless because you seem to be either misunderstanding or willfully refuting the whole social construction part. Which is the main part.
I know that some queer people are trying to put forward something like twenty genders. I don't believe in this personally, I don't think this experiment will hold up. I could say more about this but it's a distraction and it's irrelevant to the first principles/concepts/theories.
Sex is biological. Gender is psycho-social. Sex is what your body looks like and is made of. Gender is everything that has come to be associated with people of each sex: It's the behaviours, roles, decoration, attitudes that people peform. When some tend to be associated with females almost exclusively, and others tend to be associated with males almost exclusively, they sort of get conflated. The behaviours, roles, decoration and attitudes become like symbols that mean "female" or "male". Like how the colour red has come to be associated with stop and the colour green has come to be associated with go, such that in user experience design online, we use these colours for buttons. If we make a red button mean "yes" and a green button mean "no", people get very confused.
Because gender is a collection of things, by definition, any ONE thing can't be enough to define gender. A dress is not gender. A profession is not gender.
Biology is minimally useful. It decides very little about us. Our society is designed around GENDER. It's becoming less gender-oriented for sure. But it's always been essentially, "This is what women do, how women talk, how women dress, how women think, how women act, and this is how men are not that." We are raised to perform gender as an observable thing. Girls sit with our legs together. Girls laugh more quietly. Girls have long hair. You have sputtered to me, "These are just stereotypes!" Some things are stereotypes now because of how we're fucking up gender. But they used to be WHAT IT MEANT TO BE A GIRL. They are still the design blueprint for gender.
Sex used to be determined by genitals because it was assumed that genitals always aligned with our chromosomes. So, XX meant you got a vagina and a vagina meant you had XX chromosomes. Now we know this is not true. And it's not rare to have a mismatch. The known figures are already pretty common enough but it's even more common than we know because people can go their whole lives not knowing their chromosomes don't match. Some people find out once they're having infertility problems. So, what sex is someone if their chromosomes and genitals don't match? What breaks the tie? Gonads? Their hormones and how much body hair or breast tissue the hormone levels produced? Some people don't have gonads. Or, what if your chromosomes say you're female but your genitals say you're male and you feel male? Can how you feel tip the scale? What if your chromosomes say you're male and your genitals say you're female but you feel male? Can that tip the scale?
So, how do we know what sex someone is? If they aren't strictly male or female, they have to be intersex. So now we have three sexes. (And this has been widely recognized for thousands of years in many cultures, by the way. The Talmud recognizes eight genders.)
But there isn't even just one way to be intersex. Who gets to tell an intersex person whose genitals and chromosomes don't "match" what they are? If Person A has XY chromosomes and a vagina, but they feel male, wouldn't we say, "Well, that makes sense. They were originally designed to be male and something happened along the way. That's probably why they feel pulled towards being male."? And if another person has XY chromosomes but a vagina and feels female, we would say, "Well, that makes sense. They were observed to be female and raised to be and they identify more with their body."
We don't know how much our chromosomes affect how male or female we feel. We don't fully understand all the nuances of being intersex and how it impacts our feelings. We don't even know how many intersex people there are.
So, if the gender of intersex people is left to them to decide, which it must be since we can't tell someone what should determine their gender identity more—their chromosomes or their genitals or their gonads—that helps us to see how gender is constructed.
And since we let intersex people decide they are "women" or "men" and just live their lives that way, why can't we do that for trans people? Some intersex people have ambiguous genitalia. They have both an internal vagina and they have a penis. And the penis stands apart visually more, of course. They appear to be male without a scrotum. I don't think their penises get as large and I think (but am not sure this is always true) they don't ejaculate, but they do get erect. But if they feel female and look female otherwise, and live as female, that's okay, right? They can identify as women? Or are some TERFs of the mindset that intersex people should have to symbolize to the general public through a third gender that they're intersex? Or are they of the mindset that once someone has any amount of penis, that this makes them male and dangerous?
If you can allow an intersex person decide their gender identity, why can't you do this with trans people? Forget the "MEN AND PENISES ARE DANGER!" argument for now. Just pretend for now that it's not a thing. Because that's jumping ahead to a problem that is outside of this logic set-up. If the trans inclusion argument fails later because trans people are unsafe, fine, but right now it's irrelevant to this argument. Let's first see if the argument can advance with this logic.
If you can let intersex people decide what their gender is, and not force them to be "intersex!" everywhere they go as if it's some visible identity, and you can not care what their biological make-up is, you can do this for trans people, too.
Just as an intersex person doesn't become female—they always remain intersex—a trans person doesn't either.
Female does not equal "woman." Female is a biological category, gender is a psycho-social category.
"Woman" is the identity we interact with. It's observable. It's a collection of symbols. You don't have to perform or put on all of the symbols to message "woman" but you do need to use more than one or two because gender, by definition, is a collection of more than one or two things.
And it helps us imagine that some trans people might actually be intersex and we don't even know because hardly anyone gets their chromosomes tested.
There are these videos of people not knowing how to explain what a "woman" is and their inarticulation is served up as some sort of proof that there is no definition or that people who say it's not merely biology are stupid obfuscators. But there are also videos of people not knowing how to explain what the economy is. Or what freedom is. Or what love is. Some things are hard to explain for some people but that doesn't make them things untrue or nonsensical in their existence.
If someone stuck a camera in my face, I would say, "A woman is not the same thing as a female. 'Woman' is the gender. It's the gender performance we can see. It's the collection of symbols and behaviours we can see. 'Female' is the biology. We can't see it and sometimes despite all outward appearances, we're even wrong about it. Most females identify as women and visa versa. So when we make sweeping generalizations about a woman being able to get pregnant or something related to her biology, chances are we're going to be right. That's a coincidence. It's not because the two words mean the same thing."
