Honest question, not a bait: How do you define gender? I have been pondering this for a year now, and I still don't have any idea what to think about it.
Two definitions depending on the context:
The cultural aspects of male and female as distinct from biological sex
Synonym for sex
Masculine = dominant
Feminine = submissive
This seems to be what the human population has believed over the course of history.
>>5316855
How do you know which of those aspects you fit?
>>5316846
>How do you define gender?
who cares I'm not a dictionary
>>5316862
Yeah, it seems to me that it really can be boiled down to top/bottom, dominant /sapphic, soft hands/rough hands etc. Like Time, gender is something we naturally understand but is sometimes difficult to describe. Most ppl prob have a bit of both, to varying degrees, but some attributes have more weight than others.
>>5316846
vague term that describes what someone "looks like" and/or "acts like" at first glance in terms of male and female
usually a synonym for sex
a thing that trans and "nonbinary" people have an abnormal fixation on
I think for people who know who they are, gender does not play much of a part in their identities -- people who make their gender their primary identity (for example, telling everyone you are genderqueer in your "about me" page on your online profiles) are boring people and probably mentally ill tbhfam
>>5316846
Cis male here. I define my gender by living it.
People interact with me, they take in my scruffy fashion sense and my laid-back way of talking and joking around and moving through the world, and they add these experiences into their inner portfolio labeled "masculinity" that shows them all the different ways that men can be men.
If you're a man and you don't like the way that men are "supposed" to act, you can help to change just a little bit by acting the way YOU think you should act. Same goes for women.
So the definition of gender is not static, but dynamic across time and variable across cultures. It is the gestalt of all the different impressions (positive and negative) that people give and take from each other.
