In light of recent controversy and its handling, the twice-a-year FediForum unconference for April 1st and 2nd has been canceled by its organizer.
In light of recent controversy and its handling, the twice-a-year FediForum unconference for April 1st and 2nd has been canceled by its organizer.
I think your take is reductive. Gender isn’t about stereotypes. I’m sure that for many trans people, part of their trans discovery was not feeling like a stereotypical member of their sex, but there’s more to it than that. You can say that gender relates to a lot of things. Gender is ultimately an internal experience that means different things to different people, and isn’t necessarily related to identifying or not identifying with any given stereotype.
Bioessentialism in turn reduces people to genitals, and sort of refuses to address intersex people because something something “outliers don’t count”. At best it says sure, you can dress up however you want, but it’s super important that everyone know What You Really Are so they can put you in a box and appropriately segregate society.
It’s reductive if you see “stereotypes” as something simple. Imho, stereotypes are very complex (or perhaps another word would be “archetypes”, if the word “stereotypes” has too many secondary connotations for native speakers, maybe).
To me the “stereotype” (or “archetype”, or “social construct” like I pointed in my first comment) of a “woman” includes every characteristic or aspect that could make someone identify a person as a “woman”. Not all aspects might manifest in all women, the more aspects match, the more confidence the person would have to identify the other as a woman. Same for “man”, in fact, it could be a person matches both stereotypes/archetypes at an equal amount. Also there can be other gender stereotypes outside those two, because as long as you are using a word to describe a category of people you’d often have a complex set of properties that people would use to define whether it fits that category or not.
I agree that putting people in a box is just contributing to segregation, but I did not choose that, I’m just trying to understand how people are using the words other people invented. It’s almost inevitable, even the word “trans” is in some way a category, and there are even super and sub categories… like say “LGBTQ+” or “non-binary”.