[QUOTE=luverofJ!93;50229073]That's why your opinion isn't taken into account when people ask to be respected for the simple choice of following through with the identity they feel attached too. Gender dysphoria is a very real and complex psychological phenomena. Leave it to medical and psychological experts to assess and treat, and you focus on treating people how they hope to be treated. There ya go confusion gone.[/QUOTE]
My question is like, what other entity can you be identified as? There's just male or female. Anything else is just made up.
Could someone clarify? I apologize for seeming arrogant, but I just do not get it.
[QUOTE=redBadger;50229258]My question is like, what other entity can you be identified as? There's just male or female. Anything else is just made up.
Could someone clarify? I apologize for seeming arrogant, but I just do not get it.[/QUOTE]
Well, in terms of gender, there's agender, where you don't really identify as either and bigender where you identify as both, along with all the little side-genders that are used for specifics, basically.
Not sure what the deal with genderfluid is, though. I don't think I'll ever understand that.
[QUOTE=redBadger;50229258]My question is like, what other entity can you be identified as? There's just male or female. Anything else is just made up.
Could someone clarify? I apologize for seeming arrogant, but I just do not get it.[/QUOTE]
Don't feel bad about having questions, asking is the first step to learning.
Male and female are categories used to describe people based on their biological sex organs. The majority of people fall into those two categories where penis and testes = male, and vagina = female. There are all sorts of accompanying features that help differentiate, like deeper voices for male or developed breasts for females.
However in reality viewing humans only in two groups ignores that biology doesn't operate in simple dichotomies. There's an infinite variety of characteristics that people can have biologically. In some cases there are people who are born with both male and female genitals. In other cases there are males with very small penises but developed breasts etc etc. Look up 'intersex' and you'll see the many combinations.
The point is that even the biological categories male and female don't fully capture the wide variety of possibilities inherent in human biology. Male and female just tend to be the most applicable.
Keep in mind that that is just biological characteristics. [i]Gender [/i] is a social identity. So the terms Man and Woman are cultural ideas that people construct to interpret behaviors and actions of males and females. Different cultures have different understandings of what makes a man a man and a woman a woman. Some people have male genitalia, but identify with women as a gender, and feel that way so deeply in their psyche that their social existence being viewed as a male is torturous. Psychologists and doctors accept this as a mental disorder that is best remedied (as we think now) by gender reassignment surgery.
In summary, male and female are biological sex categories but don't capture all the fantastic biological diversity that exists in the human race. And even though for the most part we can categorize the majority of people within those two categories, there still exists a bewildering variety of cultural ideas about how males and females should act. Those cultural ideas form codes of behavior that define what men and women should do. Many people are deeply uncomfortable with the way those roles are enforced(i.e. women belong in the home, or men can't express emotions).
At the end of the day, we have to ask ourselves, does it really make sense to analyze and interpret someone based solely on whether they have a penis or vagina? Humans are human beings first and foremost. We are not our genitalia, so why do we need to rigidly uphold simplistic definitions of male/female which in effect shun anyone who doesn't fit the mold? Should a man who had his penis cut off feel any less a man than he feels? What about a woman who lost her breasts to breast cancer?
What about a man who felt his whole life feeling inadequate because they were always treated as a man but felt like a woman? Do we really need to mistreat people just so our silly categories are upheld?
Male and female (the human made concepts used to understand human biology) are essentially as made up as man and woman, boy girl, or what have you.
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