This made me think of something hilarious.

Emo + Jayda = match made in ignorant heaven. Between them, they could offend and alienate the whole queer community! And just think of the kids they could have!

umm...who's Jayda?

I'm from RMIT, haven't even seen her and she already infuriates the fuck out of me.

Arright.

So far as I can tell, you think of gender in buckets. People fall into one bucket or the other. They're really big buckets, but you can't fall into both. You're in one bucket or another.

When we tell you that Male and Female aren't the end of it, you continue thinking in buckets. So, you think that if Male and Female aren't the only buckets, well, there must be a finite number of other buckets. You know, maybe 4 or 5 buckets, and if these buckets exist, well, surely we can describe and label them. After all, the male and female buckets are labelled and described!

What we are trying to get through to you is that gender has no buckets. Buckets are an inaccurate form of thinking. The variants of gender are wide and varied, and simple bucket systems just don't cut the mustard, seeing as Male and Female are not in opposition. That's right - you can be both male and female at the same time. No surgery required. It's easy to notice, since the behaviours that form "male" and "female" aren't in opposition either.

But, you might realise that, and decide that well, gender might be bucket-free, but that's confusing, so we'll just stick with sex. Sex has buckets. Two big buckets, labelled "dangly bits" and "jazoongas", and all we have to do is set the bucket criteria well enough that the real males are all on one side, and real females are all on the other side. Except that doesn't work so well either, for reasons I have described previously. People commonly fall out of these buckets. Sex is also a bucket-free zone. It's also a red herring - your dangly bits or jazoongas don't actually have much effect on what's going on inside your head, which is where gender really resides. You can be a man even if you're dangly bits are blown off by a freak mine (there was a castration mine in WW2 that did this. Didn't make them women). You can be a man even if your chromosomes are XX. The biology of sex is not particularly well related to the biology of gender (yeah, there is a biology of gender, trans-people kinda prove it...)

So, better to ditch the buckets entirely. A few better alternatives are this way, in various levels of complexity:

Gender Line: No buckets, just a smooth transition from Male to Female. A bit more sophisticated, works a bit better, lets you have men and women who don't quite fit the mold. Doesn't, however, let people opt out of both molds. Alas.
Gender Plane: Have separate lines for the Male Spectrum and the Female Spectrum! So, you can opt out entirely and be agendered, and also doesn't assume that the more male you are, the less female you are, and vice versa. A slightly better solution.
Gender Space: Doesn't deal with possible third-gendered people (They're out there - they exist). You can add a third axis, or start adding axes all over the place, but this start shutting down the usefulness of this visualisation.
Gender Rainbow: Stop thinking in numbers! Assign colors to various genders! A nice way of visualising a large array of possible gender variation.
Gender Tagging: Break it down, the Safe way! Instead of breaking it down to "Male, Female", start looking at everything that encompasses those genders, and just assign those particular tags to your gender identity. So, I'm {Male, Gay Male, Boy, Femme, Cross Dresser, Bisexual} - all parts of my identity, and describes it in a much more thorough way than "Male".

So, this helping you any, EmoAeden? I'm working on the pictures, you may have to wait until after the weekend though.

The only reason I've attacked him is because he outright descibed a definition of gender in which I no longer exist/exist in a way very insulting to me. I'd love to know how you'd feel if someone told you that you were 100% a women regardless of how you felt. I know I shouldn't let one person's comments get to me, but when I'm facing those comments from 90% of the internet forums I frequent, I'd at least like to know that the one queer forum I frequent has open minded and accepting members. It's sad to think that certain factions of the queer community don't believe in/discriminate against others. That was my main concern with this whole thing.

But you are!  Repeatedly!

And for once (that I can remember) I actually agree with one of Jarryd's posts.

Nope. Allowing Intersects and Unions lets you extend the use of static sets a little, but not enough to take into account the realities of gender. Part of the issue is that gender is a primarily personal construct - it's just not useful to attempt to build a prescriptive system of gender. In fact, it's rather insulting to do so, as you have been finding out the hard way. By far the superior way of dealing with gender is not to attempt to build a system to predict a person's gender without their input, but to attempt to build a system that allows you to take into account the personal variation that exists within the human population. In short, don't try to tell people what gender they are, because that's often quite insulting, even to cis-gendered individuals. Instead, learn to accept that the only person who can tell you a person's gender is that person.

I would recommend finding Kate Bernstein's My Gender Workbook as an excellent primer on gender and gender identity, as a way of expanding your mind on gender-related issues.


No, you're not, but you're doing it anyway. Your words have a level of meaning outside of your intent, and indeed the fact that you are not trying to be insulting but are doing such a bang-up job of it is part of the major issue here. Your attempts to foist a gender identity on those who have fought damn hard to have their own identity recognised are misinformed and, unsurprisingly, are going to cause extreme issues. Basically, stop trying to tell people what they are.That's really the core of it.