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Message: <blockquote data-quote="wait whattt? :o" data-source="post: 75060" data-attributes="member: 564">Oh boy, those are a lot of questions. Only fair though, I asked you a ton too. Good questions too.No. I think sex and gender are two different things.I like to picture sex as a set of elements that are a) physical and b) biological.Gender, on the other hand, is a set of elements that references sex.In a sense, you could actually think of gender as a function. It takes in elements of sex as an input, and outputs social meanings, roles, and expectations that begets social pressure. What the content of the function is itself is subject to change throughout time and space.So, to me, sex is not flexible, but it is malleable to some extent. We do it all the time. Men who take steroids to manipulate their hormone profile to have more muscle gain or volume. Women who undergo cosmetic surgery such as breast implants and butt lifts. I want to make something clear though, I am not saying that sex at the fundamental, categorical level is malleable, but rather that sex-related traits (or traits associated with sex and therefore loosely part of sex) are malleable.However, gender is definitely flexible because it is reliant on the interpretation of society and the individual which is changeable. Heck, even individuals within the same culture at the same time could have slight (and, at times, stark) variations in their conception of gender. This is not new or peculiar. I am sure there are documented cases of variations throughout history, but I don't have the confident to back this up to be honest.Under the framework I explained above, that would be the case, yes.I'd like to make things clear: under my framework, a person cannot make a biological claim but they can make a gender identity claim as the framework outlined above allows for interpretation at the individual level.It is like with names. A person declares themselves "John". I accept it. I don't ask for their government name, or if their parents declared them as such, or if this is a name they just came up with on the spot. I accept they are John because they decided they are John. That's all it took.A real example of this was a guy I met in university whose name, in my language and culture, is feminine but in his language and culture, it's masculine. I wish I could remember what that name but he was a nobody honestly <img class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" alt="🤣" title="Rolling on the floor laughing    :rofl:" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f923.png" data-shortname=":rofl:" /> (joke). Anyway, I did not respond with, "You are clearly a man. I will not call you with that name because I only reserve it for women." I accepted it because, well, there is an interpretive layer to names as much as there is an interpretive layer to gender and I accept that there are variations across time and space.Now, of course, the analogy is not perfect. Names do not have an objective, physical substrate they rely on. At least as far I know. They are completely independent and solely built upon collective agreement. Gender, however, is built on the interpretation of a biological, physical substrate. Therefore, while it allows for self-declarations, it also allows for collective disagreements (that is, that society interprets differently).Yes, that is correct. The first statement is subjective. That is the point. My framework allows for interpretation (subjectivity) of gender at both the collective and the individual level.However, it does not allow for interpretation of sex at all, and therefore, your conception of femininity being about having a "penis and being tall and muscular and growing a lot of body hair" would not be allowed under my framework.I think the big discrepancy between you and I is that you consider sex and gender the same while I consider them separate but not totally divorced from each other since gender does rely on sex, at least referrentially.Using "the penis" to reinterpret or redefine femininity does not work because you are using the wrong reference class (the male sex). I strictly defined femininity as: "set of traits associated with the female sex." As such, redefining or reinterpreting femininity with male sex as the reference point is disallowed in my framework.Honestly, I think we both agree on both biological sex and the social & cultural variations in the social manifestation of biological sex (and sex-related traits).Where we disagree, I think, is what we want from the term "gender". You seem to want precision, robustness, and stability. As such, sex and gender are the same to you. It seems you want a categorical and/or ontological (I think that's the right word?) definition.I want description which obligates flexibility and subjectivity in order to allow for the variation that is seen in different societies and individuals. I want a behavioral and/or social definition.You want what it is, I want how it presents.Different groups have shared understanding because, at the end of the day, we are sexually dimorphic. We will use the male and female sex as the starting point. That is why we have the shared understanding we do while having variations such as "Well, my men are hairy" and "Ewww! Hairy men?" Those two exist just fine under my framework.Now, there are two critiques that are fair depending on your perspective. A) it allows for subjectivity, and b) it requires that the person is correctly referencing sex.That's fair. I allow for subjectivity because I want to account for variation.As for the fact it requires the person to correctly reference sex, my framework doesn't actually have a solution for this because it does not try to. I allow for human error, because societies are subject to human errors all the time. To describe society is to describe its errors too.edit: errors in word choice and/or grammar</blockquote>

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