I do think physical/genetic gender is both relevant and somewhat important from a social standpoint. for two reasons.
Firstly, you have reproduction, the "scientific" reasoning behind romantic relationships and the reason why men like certain features in women and vice versa.
Secondly, you have societal norms. While not always a good or bad thing they do exist, and must be taken into account regardless of how much you like or dislike them.
Changing societal norms, while entirely possible is also not always a necessarily good or necessarily bad thing.
As for the general concept of gender I think it has 3 parts.
- Genetic/initial physical: This is simply what a person was born as, it is possibly the least significant of the three but I can totally understand how anyone could care about it.
- Physical Current: Their current physical gender, can be different to Genetic/initial on account of surgery. usually important to people who fall under traditional sexuality definitions.*
- Social Gender: How the person "acts" often called masculinity and femininity. Usually important to people who fall under traditional sexuality definitions.*
*traditional sexuality definitions I consider to include "Straight/heterosexual" "Gay/homosexual" and "bisexual". "asexual" could be considered one but is sort of irrelevant to this discussion.
I myself am pansexual as I mentioned earlier, so gender is a bit irrelevant to me.**
Personally? I could care less about physical or genetic gender.** "male" and "female" are both potential partners for me as far as I care.
However, I do look at personality as a whole, that includes their physical and mental characteristics, their opinions and convictions about the world, and their history. While less important a persons history is somewhat significant still.
I consider myself more attracted to people with feminine personalities and female physiques, still attracted to people with masculine personalities and feminine physiques, but I am not close-minded to masculine personalities and male physiques or feminine personalities with masculine physiques.
More or less I simply find less people who are physically male that I am attracted to, to the point of it being an exceptionally rare occurrence, and even then I would have to also like their personality.
The combination of these two I think could have only happened with a couple of people I have met in person, both from back when I still was in my teenage "Dude, I'm so fucking masculine, dicks are gross, gay men are weird, omg tits" stage you could say.
Similarly regardless of how hot someone who is physically female is, I wouldn't date them if they were a bitch, or just didn't "mesh" well with me.
**When it comes to transgendered people I am entirely unsure how I would feel about that, I would have to be in that situation myself before I feel I could aptly offer an opinion here.
EDIT: fucking hell you people can post fast.
2. If they like it, who cares?
If someone is happy they're the way they are, don't fuck it up and tell them they should embrace the possibility of become a transgendered von Neumann machine in space. Time spent being obnoxious is time you could probably spend trying to raise awareness and make things better.
3. If you want society to change, stop pissing off the majority.
Wait a minute, I'm a straight white kid! I don't even know what I believe yet. Instead of fighting the majority (which is... becoming less major by the second), fight the attitudes. If you have a bunch of non-distinct gender people making a little closed happy group and acting supreme and open-minded and belittling the Mindless Hordes(tm) for not being tolerant of their own sex or whatever, that makes you look like jerks that we can't associate with. I try to accept as much as I can, but it gets hard when the people I'm trying to agree with are saying that "oh, you're too ignorant to understand yourself" or "stop the passive-aggressivity, you stupid perceptionless person".
I'd just to say I really like both of these points Goomba.
If a group is a minority and proceeds to do things which would be socially unacceptable for a majority member to do towards them, then it really just wedges the divide further apart.
I mean, take the example of a lesbian/gay couple who is making out rather aggressively in public, and somebody tells them to take it somewhere more private. If they respond by calling that person a homophobe or a bigot then all they have accomplished is leaving that individual with a poor opinion of the lesbian/gay community.
However, if instead they had politely apologized like any respectful straight couple would have done, and moved to a more private area, then that person would have likely been left with a great opinion of the lesbian/gay community.
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Topic: Gender and all it entails (Read 23120 times)