Flaws in your fucking logic

Monday, October 31, 2011

Flaws in your fucking logic

Sex and gender are different things. I don’t think animals would have genders or sexualities, either. I never said you wouldn’t know your sex, and I didn’t say “this is a fact”, I said “I think…”

I don’t even know what the tabula rasa model of development is,

It is what you just said. Tabula rasa means “blank slate”.

and I got my opinion from life experiences, so I don’t think that it’s because humans are above animals nor have no instinct - I think it’s because sexuality and gender are identities, which, like other identities, I’ve never seen a baby/toddler/little kid with.

If you mean your gender by “I always knew my sex”, then yeah, I would re-evaluate my statement, but if you mean your physical sex, or the physical sex you were/are supposed to be/feel is more correct for you, that’s different and I don’t really know much about that so don’t talk about how I think it might work.

I am talking about gender, and I am not talking about gender. Here is where language fails. I am talking about innate traits that become gendered by society once recognized by others. I was feminine before people taught me what a “girl” was. I liked feminine clothes before anyone taught me what a “girl” was. These were traits I already had, and which society takes and adds gender to. These inborn traits are not inherently gendered, but they are given gender by society.

This is saying something different than the socialization model, which holds that there are no inborn traits like these and that gendered preferences are taught. What I’m saying is that we all start off with inborn traits that are later attributed to a gender, which has lots of baggage that doesn’t line up with those inborn traits.

This is what I mean when I say socialized gender is a layer on top of natural inclinations. Gender is socialized, but the traits that these genders are built from are not a construct. The binary genders are an amalgam of traits that come naturally to some people and not to others; the socialization is in the artificial grouping of these traits, the enforcement of them, and instituting these artificial creations as natural. That does not make the underlying traits they are based off of a construct.

I am also talking about sex, and not about sex. Like gender, sexual identities involve things that are given a (constructed) sex. But the underlying aspects are still innate. I knew I was supposed to have a vagina before I knew there was a word for it. Actually, when I was very little, I didn’t even know I had a penis. I didn’t figure that out until I was about two. Before then, as far as I was concerned, I had a vagina. Does that have anything to do with the constructed category of “female”? No, but nobody’s body has anything to do with that category. I learned the category of female later in life; I knew what my body was long before.