A couple of good links re: gender issues.
So, theferrett has a great, to-the-point entry up about names, pronouns, and having some fucking respect for other people's identities.
Money quote:
The Sneer stems from the understanding that this name I have given is so ludicrous that it doesn't deserve to be taken seriously. Their goal, though they don't think about this explicitly, is to undermine my identity. In other words, "What you want is so stupid, I refuse to continue before I make you acknowledge that it's not a 'real' name." And to that, I say: fuck that.
The principle's similar with gender. When people start getting snotty and going, "Well, she's not a real man," then that's effectively a way of saying, "What he wants doesn't matter to me. What matters is that my conceptions of what gender is remain firmly intact; I know what a man is, and by attempting to venture outside that boundary of established stereotypes, he's become a joke. And I must force people to acknowledge that fakeness before I can continue.”
Right the fuck ON, dude. Thank you.
And in the comments, a link to this older gem:
Do you use Boy Words or Girl Words? Or the other words, but I can’t ‘amember them.
Go read that and feel a little less shitty about the world. If a three-year-old can get it, an adult can get it. It doesn't fuck kids up to be raised with more fluid ideas of gender than the ones we had forced on us. These kids will be fine, and the world will be fine. Better than fine.
I have a really complicated relationship with my own gender, in no small part because of the cultural climate in which I was raised (very either/or). I identify as female, and probably always will, but there's a lot more to me than that, and I wish I'd known that there were other options so that I could have taken a look at that at a much younger age.
I'd like to think that in the future, someone like me will be able to form their identity without having to choose from a binary so young, and will have whatever understanding of themselves they reach be respected by others. I'd love for the world to understand that there's a whole spectrum of combinations of gender and body and orientation, and, something I almost never see acknowledged: for some people, their identity is not fixed and actually changes back and forth. Bad enough having to explain that no, really, you ARE a "real" man/woman. Imagine if that identity changed from day to day.
Money quote:
The Sneer stems from the understanding that this name I have given is so ludicrous that it doesn't deserve to be taken seriously. Their goal, though they don't think about this explicitly, is to undermine my identity. In other words, "What you want is so stupid, I refuse to continue before I make you acknowledge that it's not a 'real' name." And to that, I say: fuck that.
The principle's similar with gender. When people start getting snotty and going, "Well, she's not a real man," then that's effectively a way of saying, "What he wants doesn't matter to me. What matters is that my conceptions of what gender is remain firmly intact; I know what a man is, and by attempting to venture outside that boundary of established stereotypes, he's become a joke. And I must force people to acknowledge that fakeness before I can continue.”
Right the fuck ON, dude. Thank you.
And in the comments, a link to this older gem:
Do you use Boy Words or Girl Words? Or the other words, but I can’t ‘amember them.
Go read that and feel a little less shitty about the world. If a three-year-old can get it, an adult can get it. It doesn't fuck kids up to be raised with more fluid ideas of gender than the ones we had forced on us. These kids will be fine, and the world will be fine. Better than fine.
I have a really complicated relationship with my own gender, in no small part because of the cultural climate in which I was raised (very either/or). I identify as female, and probably always will, but there's a lot more to me than that, and I wish I'd known that there were other options so that I could have taken a look at that at a much younger age.
I'd like to think that in the future, someone like me will be able to form their identity without having to choose from a binary so young, and will have whatever understanding of themselves they reach be respected by others. I'd love for the world to understand that there's a whole spectrum of combinations of gender and body and orientation, and, something I almost never see acknowledged: for some people, their identity is not fixed and actually changes back and forth. Bad enough having to explain that no, really, you ARE a "real" man/woman. Imagine if that identity changed from day to day.