Defining Terms
OK, now, I still haven't read all of Mary Daly's book (but I'm going to, so there will be a lot more of this, I'm sure), but I suspect she and others like her are defining gender as a social construct and sex as a set of physical attributes. If I am understanding this correctly, she wants to end the social imperatives that are gender but still discriminate on the basis of sex. (Or is that on the basis of who has experienced male privilege due to their sex?).
As far as I can tell (and this is from my own observation, not from extensive study of gender theory), gender and/or sex-based differences are not entirely social constructs. I suspect that many of the cultural gender norms are based on observable hormonally-driven behaviors. For instance, I've heard a lot of talk about how men are not supposed to cry when they are hurt, either physically or emotionally and how women are allowed to cry over physical or emotional hurt, and how this is socially driven. However, I have only to look around me at people undergoing hormone replacement therapy to see how hormones affect emotional responses. What society does, in my opinion, is enforce and reinforce the average physiologically-based responses as the only proper normal responses for each gender. This, in my not-nearly-so-humble-as-all-that opinion, is where the problem lies. We need to let people be who they are inside. But wait, what determines who we are on the inside?
I asked my partner this morning a question that I'm sure many transwomen have been asked, "How did you know that you were a girl?" One wonders, of course, how I knew I was a girl. I'm not sure if I did know, or if I assumed I was one due to personal plumbing. I now find that I can slide between concepts of myself very easily, and that sometimes my perception of my own gender shifts with mood. What I've noted from my sweetheart, and from others, is that people have something internal that declares them to be a female, or a male, or a both, or a neither, despite any physical evidence or social conditioning. I feel quite certain that my beloved was socially conditioned to behave as a male, and yet could not fully accept this conditioning any more than I could be convinced to be quiet, or demure, or to sit with my legs crossed. Now, whether the internal something should be described as a soul, or a spirit, or a part of the brain (and these concepts are not necessarily mutually exclusive), seems irrelevant. What I find relevant is that such an internal idea of self exists and drives behavior. I will ponder my religious perspective on this in a later post.
Crossposted with editing to transfeminism.
As far as I can tell (and this is from my own observation, not from extensive study of gender theory), gender and/or sex-based differences are not entirely social constructs. I suspect that many of the cultural gender norms are based on observable hormonally-driven behaviors. For instance, I've heard a lot of talk about how men are not supposed to cry when they are hurt, either physically or emotionally and how women are allowed to cry over physical or emotional hurt, and how this is socially driven. However, I have only to look around me at people undergoing hormone replacement therapy to see how hormones affect emotional responses. What society does, in my opinion, is enforce and reinforce the average physiologically-based responses as the only proper normal responses for each gender. This, in my not-nearly-so-humble-as-all-that opinion, is where the problem lies. We need to let people be who they are inside. But wait, what determines who we are on the inside?
I asked my partner this morning a question that I'm sure many transwomen have been asked, "How did you know that you were a girl?" One wonders, of course, how I knew I was a girl. I'm not sure if I did know, or if I assumed I was one due to personal plumbing. I now find that I can slide between concepts of myself very easily, and that sometimes my perception of my own gender shifts with mood. What I've noted from my sweetheart, and from others, is that people have something internal that declares them to be a female, or a male, or a both, or a neither, despite any physical evidence or social conditioning. I feel quite certain that my beloved was socially conditioned to behave as a male, and yet could not fully accept this conditioning any more than I could be convinced to be quiet, or demure, or to sit with my legs crossed. Now, whether the internal something should be described as a soul, or a spirit, or a part of the brain (and these concepts are not necessarily mutually exclusive), seems irrelevant. What I find relevant is that such an internal idea of self exists and drives behavior. I will ponder my religious perspective on this in a later post.
Crossposted with editing to transfeminism.