knightly the Sneptaur

  • 31 Posts
  • 1.33K Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 5th, 2023

help-circle
  • I’ll take this as a good faith question, and the short answer is that gender is a lot more complicated than that.

    Yes there are two archetypal roles involved in sexual reproduction, but even that isn’t so simple. There isn’t just one feature that defines male or female, but a combination of traits including chromosomes, gametes, anatomy, hormones, etc. In the real world, some folks are born with features that don’t all agree with one or another archetype. Intersex people aren’t common, about 1 in 2,000, but their existence proves that sex isn’t just a binary. There’s diversity to sex that requires a more complicated scheme to account for everybody.

    Gender, likewise, doesn’t follow the one-or-the-other model. Most folks are cisgender, but some folks have a gender that doesn’t agree with what people assume their sex is, or no gender at all, or a gender that doesn’t fit into the man/woman spectrum. It gets complicated quickly because gender is where sex and society intersect. Some cultures have different expectations based on gender, and some even have more than two recognized genders. That’s why we say “gender is a social construct”, because we all get to define for ourselves what it means to be a man, woman, or otherwise. And that’s also how gender is constructed, it’s a social project we all engage in collectively whether we realize it or not. Most just pass along the traditional gender roles that were passed to them, but those can change rather rapidly as society changes, like when clean-shaven faces became “manly” in response to WW1 soldiers having to shave so that their gas masks could maintain a good seal.