Internal Gender?

[emberleo]

It's come up on a posting board I frequent the idea of internal gender. Not like that's new, or anything. In this context, it's specific to magical work, though, and a description was given that made me think

Comments

[emeraldpunk]

I spent yesterday trying to figure out how to say what you just said, while trying to explain to my sister why her "girl"ness confuses the Hel out of me.

Thank you :)

[emberleo]

Hmm...

Girlness sometimes confuses me, because I was raised with enough feminism, and enough "There's no guarantee of having a man around to do a man's job" in the household that I couldn't help percieving women who chose the traditional "passive" wife role, and the social girly "object" role as choosing to turn themselves into targets of abuse, and relinquishing their rights to equality, etc.

I've gotten past that to a certain degree by knowing folks like purplevenus who are VERY feminine, and sometimes play right into that girly-object role, and are even potentially willing to manipulate a man with it (which was the other No-No - that was a kind of dishonesty in my world *twitchtwitch*) if there's reason for that. But PurpleVenus clearly owns her own power, you know? And she's not dishonest or anything. Actually, watching her is one of the things that lead to my understanding that what I think of as "manipulation" is actually "manipulation + negative intentions", and that everybody - including me - uses the same tools for good and

[emeraldpunk]

No problem with the rambling. I do it too. :)
I was raised by feminists, but of a certain stripe. And because I developed early--REALLY early-- my father developed his own way of handling it, which boiled down to "if the man is stupid enough to give you things simply because you have big breasts, consider yourself the karmic lesson and let him." Of course, this was also a man who believed women ruled the world because they sure ruled men, and women were stronger, better, etc. I didn't so much get raised with feminist ideas as women are superior ideas. LOL But to my parents, "ladies" and "girls" were weaklings who refused to own their power. *shrug*

Wow

[purplevenus]

Wearing pants when I was a child was like murdering me. Cutting my hair, also murder! It's a wonder I survived. I despised all things "boy" or even "neutral". Beige was not my friend. Nothing that didn't scream "Feminine" was rejected. Not that this surprises you. Luckily I live in a society that accept that about me, or I'd be miserable.
So while I intellectually understand your POV, I don't emotionally undertand it. Even my inner warrior has her toenails painted.

Re: Wow

[emberleo]

*laughs* Wheras even my inner beautiful goddess sees no reason for toenail paint.

--Ember--

[psybelle]

I'll have to dig through some older writings, see what I can find... I had a bunch of stuff about how most of what people think of as gender is either social role or physiology, and yet there are aspects of gender that are neither (and we just don't have the vocabulary to deal with it yet). Unfortunately, I think most of that is on a dead hard-drive.

Personally, I joke occasionally about being a girl trapped in the body of a girl. Mostly, I'm a tomboy still, would love to have an athletic slim-hipped art-deco nymph body; but what I live in has an exaggerated hourglass shape with broad shoulders and a broodmare's pelvis... Definitely a high-femme dream, but when I dress in anything other than gender-neutral jeans and pullovers, it feels like I'm wearing drag.

[caprine]

I also feel like I'm in drag when I femme it up. Thus this icon: my inner drag queen, Bombshell McDivapants. For me, it's because I internalized as male in my late teens after sexual assault taught me that, in the mainstream culture, women are objects and men are agents. Objecthood sucked. However, I've never felt body dysphoria about my plumbing; just about the roles the culture offers. A choice between brutality and learned helplessness is no choice at all.

Right there with you...

[psybelle]

I'm rather fond of the plumbing I was issued, hate the social roles it implies... (Not that I'd rather change a tire than a diaper, just that I can do both with relative ease.) But at the same time, I get mistaken for male on occasion, have done some interesting energy-work in which I got some inkling of what it might be like to have an outie rather than an innie...

*grin* Guess I'm flexible in this respect, too....

[emberleo]

Hmmm, I guess I've always figured gender is, indeed, about the social rules we apply as a culture to folks with one or another physiology, plus a bit of biological instinct that has evolved to maximize reproduction.

I'm not sure what aspects of gender I would recognise as being totally outside that - I recognise aspects of gender... reflection? That is, things that actually aren't gender or gendered, but that we have reflected gender onto them because it's so pervasive within our own contexts?

Like my gendering of the alphabet.

--Ember--

[abhasana]

One person mentioned a kind of gender skin thing - wearing different gender identities in different situations, as one might wear a uniform appropriate to the job they are performing.That depends - greatly - on the person in question. Some people do pick up and put down gender like a costume or play with the outer form of it (clothing, mannerisms, etc.). Their internal sense of gender allows this and feels compatable. Other people can't because this putting on and taking off conflicts with their internal sense. Others struggle hugely with the need to communicate their inner gender sense with their outer expression, and find that it's not so simple as just putting on different clothes or speaking differently depending on circumstance or whim

[jenk]

for a long time I considered myself a woman-but-not-quite-exactly. It wasn't a problem, just a matter of finding the way of being a woman that was right for me

That really hit the nail on the head for me. At work I used to play down the feminine as much as possible so as to feel more comfortable being the only woman. I also found that being fat meant I was perceived as more masculine, which also affected how I presented myself.

I'm more comfortable being a woman now - and it shows. But still, if I'm out with a friend who is daintier and/or more femme than I, I will find my shoulders broadening and myself moving into a "protective" stance.

As for dating...I tend to feel more femme when I'm with a man, and more butch when I'm with a woman....

[abhasana]

Yup, I shift a lot depending on who I'm with, always have. I think this probably happens to a lot of people, but they never stop to think about it very much.

[eeyoredragon]

your tendency to assign gender to things such as letters, numbers, etc. is not surprising to me. several languages assign gender to words. such as latin, and the latin based romance languages

[emberleo]

Read again, though, because A is female ;)

You're definitely partially right, that straight, especially upright lines seem more masculine, and curvy lines seem more feminine, and I'm sure that's cultural.

What I figured last night chatting with wolfs_daugher about it, is that each figure gives me the impression of a snapshot of somebody's movement or posture, and then I pattern-match the concept to what kind of person would stand or move that way.

--Ember--

[emberleo]

Oh, didn't catch this:

something that takes being comfortable in not only ones own skin but in those of others.

That's just it - they're all our own skins, eh?

I'm not sure I can say I actually swap gender skins the way the original author may have intended it, but I CAN say that all of the roles and perceptions of self that I described in my stream-of-conciousness were MINE, from protective, butch surrogate boyfriend to mommy in long skirts to beautiful goddess that only the extra special get to see in very private, intimate environments.

Okay, I admit, super-girly isn't quite mine, but then I rarely go there. Still, I clean up nice as an Elegant Woman, so that's ok ;)

--Ember--

[eeyoredragon]

ok i new my point got confusled, hmmm how to word it better. and btw A is female but "kinda butch" so :P *lol