Yeah “gender” is actually a theory of deconstructing the idea of culture - all the stuff lopped on top of sex and the baggage of all the world’s ideas of what it means to be male and female from the pseudoscientific aspects of outmoded or outdated disproven science to the effect of religion to the behaviours mimicked and taught between generations.

Gender is cultural.

Yet “sex” is also on a spectrum.

What modern discourse gets rather fantastically wrong to my mind is for trans people it is about sex characteristics. A trans woman doesn’t just want to be treated as a woman she wants to be a woman. For a lot this means the whole shebang from periods to childbirth. That’s not gender, those are sex characteristics. Her issue is she can’t access those aspects yet or, like other women, maybe she doesn’t want nessisarily everything. She’s also set outside the culture of womanhood, segregated from other women and denied community of her people socially - that IS gender.

From a philosophy standpoint - it is way more complicated than that.

Gender is sort of like a book genre. People made it up. It groups a bunch of ideas around physical sex that don’t really have anything to do with it directly. It’s sort of like stereotypes but it’s also an amalgamation of history and how people express. You can have a culture where gender has hard rules or soft ones. You can have a gender expectation what a culture rewards people of a specific sex for doing or punishes them for not doing. Gender expression where there is a way of culturally displaying gender to others based on a cultural idea of what those sexes represent and how people think they differ : clothes, the way you act and so on.

The thing is these things are all not set in stone. They are all just cultural baggage.

Sex is just the thing gender chooses as it’s centerpoint of creating all this fiction.

Well I believe we are living at a point where we have not really figured things out. We have pieces. Gender theory is being treated as a monolith of ideas that is dominated by a cis veiw of gender as genre.

This is incompatible with trans needs because trans people’s primary focus is physicality and are using the cis language of gender as technology to do something entirely different to change the way other people interact with their own physical nature.

So gender is bullshit made up by humans but to trans people its useful and nessisary bullshit

Not… Really? That’s a very culture and expression forward veiw of gender which as more questions get asked widely is seen as a very cis centric veiw of gender.

Like we haven’t really nailed everything down and a lot of Non-Binary people don’t like this take because a lot of them find it invalidating but the trans and cis aspect of gender are very different. The more we inquest into how the average cis person experiences gender the more we find the majority of cis people are all kind of “Non-Binary” they don’t feel implicitly like their role holds any super deep meaning and feel like if their body flipped to the opposite sex then that isn’t horrifying. The idea that cis people have a built in gender compass that aligns with a single set of sex characteristics is taking a trans lens and assuming that’s how it works for everyone whereas if a big room full of cis people actually talk to each other about whether they have any kind of innate feeling of being male or female aligned you start realizing that premise of actually having any massive non-cultural preference one way or the other just isn’t the norm. Cis people just don’t have to interrogate their gender the way trans people do.

Basically it’s like the brain’s most common configuration is it’s wired to accept whatever outcome of puberty and be flexible enough to adapt.

The trans aspect of gender (and a minority of cis people) is entirely different. We react to our sex characteristics intrinsically outside our control not as having neutral value but as having either negative or positive value. We are internally reinforced to react either with rewards like joy when our bodies are reflected back to us as matching our pre-settings oe punishes with stress, jealousy and depression when sex doesn’t align. Like a body expectation switch got stuck in one position and anything other is abhorrent.

For trans folk gender expression and cultural reinforcement is just a mirror that causes other people to reflect our bodies back at us. Gender expression becomes a tool like technology to communicate needs. Indeed a lot of trans people have issues with having to overperform gender not because they want to participate in the culture but because we are steering people to avoid seeing our bodies, scanning and verbally reporting back to us their physical assessment of our sex… that hurts us and so we have to perform the most readable cultural expressions of gender to get strangers to understand at a glance how to help avoid our poisons and to treat us in ways that hit the built-in reward trigger.

You can, kind of broadly for ease of understanding, categorize non binary into a few different types.

• Static identities vs fluid

• Absence of gender vs mix of gender

• Trans identifying and cis or ar least non-trans identifying

• Political or aesthetic versus psychological need

To explain absence and mix are basically what it says on the tin. For some people they want freedom from any cultural or physical gender aspects to the best that can be reasonably achieved or they desire a grab bag from both male and female cultural or physical phenotypes. This doesn’t always nessisarily look like or have perfect androgyny as a goal.

Static identities do not change over time. Often these folk either experience a desire for an absence of sex characteristics or see themselves as a simultaneous mix male or female or as a specific other category.

Fluid identities change over time. This could be daily, weekly, monthly or yearly. A fluid person might alternate only between agender (ie no gender) and a binary gender or experience the full spectrum of male to female. Their needs change over time.

Political and Psychological are kind of another slider. For some Non-Binary represents a range of coping mechanisms to deal with gender euphoria or dysphoria. It can be a philosophy that is used to seek a sort of individual path, accepting a middle place ir an extremely nuanced situation where one’s birth gender is a problem… But the solution isn’t leaping to the full other side of rhe spectrum. For others Non-Binary can be a purely cultural third category. Gender abolitionists exist who find the repressive gender expectations they were subjected to did them harm. They might resent cultural gender rather than having any particular strong feelings about their bodies. Genderfuck or Genderpunk are outgrowths of movements that blend or subvert people’s cultural expectations. The establishment of pink and blue boxes is a prison and they want nothing more than to burn it all down.

Transness or “Non-trans Non-Binary” extends from this division. Non-Binary identities fall under the Trans umbrella in the LGBTQIA+ but not every Non-Binary person is comfortable claiming transness as a label. Sometimes it feels to some enbies like they are claiming stolen valor or that they don’t intend to physically transition so it doesn’t apply (though it’s worth mentioning that binary trans people also don’t require an intent to physically transition as a gatekeeping item that prevents one from being trans ) others are functionally more cis identifying because their issue is cultural and not physical.

It’s a very big tent of different people.

Point of order - non-binary people sometimes medically transition. We might not choose all the options to swap to a full binary presentation but target things which cause us duress.

Non-binary is under the trans umbrella though not every Non-binary person identifies as trans. There are political enbies or people who see their ambivalence towards gender and sex characteristics entirely as being an expression of a Non-binary experience while others experience the same euphoria/dysphoria to their natal sex characteristics that binary trans people do but desire more of an absence of all sex characteristics or a mix of male and female phenotypic traits.

Your statement in effect only describes a fraction of Non-binary people.

I know I already replied to you in another comment but I posted a big breakdown of how trans healthcare for kids actually works and isn’t as scary as people think. If you are interested just check my post history. I Included the actual less destructive nature of horomone treatment during puberty in regards to the total number, invasiveness quotient and surgeries experienced later in life. But surgery isn’t really a thing for trans kids.

A lot of what you are experiencing with trans discourse is a poisoned well. The issue of trans health care has been sold to the masses as being too quick, lead by the whims of the child, involving a lot of medically scary things that seem irreversible and it operates in a weird blind zone where people don’t really understand trans people’s biological capabilities well or their psychological dispositions.

In some places it can be good to step back and ask where your opinion is actually coming from because this is a very convoluted and non-intuitive branch of medicine for a casual outsider. Parents of trans people and young trans people themselves essentially learn decently advanced pediatric and endocrinology concepts as part of the basic consent process and as a parent of cis kids that is going to seem a lot more scary without an individual personal proof of psychological benefit you get from seeing a child develop.

Here is the very common trans parent scenario :

Your child who has had massive anxiety all their life, They have stress related physical symptoms, they have neurotic behaviours that appear as psychological disorders, they get sick often and are withdrawn from social groups and have a hard time making friends.

You discover your child identifies as trans and asks to go by a different name. You adjust, you change their hair and clothes. Almost immediately health conditions you didn’t know were related start to clear up, nervous ticks evaporate. They start forming better and stronger attachments to peers. They start showing more verve for life and pursuing hobbies and sports. The behaviour is so startling and overwhelmingly positive it is impossible not to link it to that choice.

It really is the case where the science and care plans aren’t super intuitive for someone just dipping their toes in this water. If you don’t have a trans kid then chances are good you haven’t seen the day and night psychological changes to thriving from not thriving that social transition brings. It’s a process and parents know their children. Parents, as a general rule, don’t sign onto things that seem scary unless they are convinced. A psychotic parent also would have a really hard time getting a cis kid through trans healthcare because there’s a panel of experts that check all the angles from school and home life to a lot of developmental markers. Doctors treat children’s long term outcomes as sacrosanct so the burden of proof of benefit is way higher than the average person knows.

If you got any questions feel free to fire away. I am a part of a block of citizen research by a group of trans people trying to gain a better understanding of what is actually going on in the heads of cis people regarding gender. There’s some stuff we’re beginning to sketch out as these two groups talking across each other both with improperly established expectations of what the other experiences.

We are a long way from publishing anything because a lot of us are rag tag academics due to us being kind of a minority but there’s something up. We may be verging on a way easier future explanation for what trans people are in relation to cis people and it could be particularly disruptive to some limited sections of the non-binary community.

This is actually one of the key things about cis versus trans psychological makeup. It’s kind of more useful to look at the majority cis experience as a sort of flexibility of sexual phenotype (- what looks or appears male or female). The majority of cis people are actually fairly fluid in their concept and Preferrence of not really gender - but sex characteristics and they mentally adapt to meet whatever gender expectations and circumstances they end up in usually as a path of least resistance.

Transness (and a small theoretical subset of cis people ) actually experience the opposite of this : sexual phenotype rigidity. It’s like there’s a setting in the brain dailed all the one to one side of the brain’s expectation of physical sex characteristics. Gender as a concept of “feminine and masculine” as categories of social expectations of behaviour and culture is kind of is just the performative baggage on top. What is really happening is almost 100% about the body’s characteristics and the reason social engineering is such a big deal is because language is a mirror. If someone calls you by the wrong name or pronoun that is actually mapping onto you perceiving your own body’s through someone else and you can’t control how the feedback makes you feel because you are rigidly stuck on an independent internal reward/punishment system. Disparity brings pain, matching the expectation brings joy. Nothing is neutral.

The “gender performativity” concept a’la Judith Butler is actually more in line with a cis person’s concept of gender than a trans persons and untangling the two is really difficult because there’s not as much backwards engineering what cis people are actually like to properly compare. I can tell you though after speaking to a lot of both cis and trans people about their experiences that this is actually more like two entirely unique theories of how the idea of “gender” works where “gender” is actually meaning two kind of related concepts but not quite 1 to 1. There’s a fundamental difference that lies deep under this thing.

So. As a heads up the number of kids who actually have surgery before 19 are very tiny. The only surgeries available to people over 16 but under 18 are non-destructive breast reductions. That’s also available to cis girls without issue. Breast augmenting is off the table because the breasts are still developing and outcomes are usually reduced in quality so that’s not a thing. Bottom surgery is usually the last thing and the average age for that is in people’s early 20’s and not all trans people opt for it because there are tradeoffs and some people are okay without. The standout here is usually hormones and I think there’s somr things people really don’t understand about this process.

Mostly it’s three things

1. They don’t understand how actually stable trans identity is and how unified the psychological markers are.

2. They think access is way simpler and directed by the child than it is

3. They aren’t aware of the actual monetary and physical cost of NOT using Horomone. Not talking psychological. Those are definitely a huge thing too but most people have been introduced to those concepts.

On the first count : Trans people aren’t subtle. There’s specific markers of behaviour , the way they conceptualize specific things is actually really different from cis people. If you are talking about gender theory it gets complicated because they are dealing with something that is incredibly different under the hood. Identify is also very stable. It is vanishingly rare to find a kid who doesn’t keep identifing as trans if they are past the one year mark. Usually the only changes you see to the co-hort is them identifing as a different type of transness between non-binary or binary trans and oftentimes the things they physically require don’t change.

On the second. It’s a panel of experts. No kid is making this decision alone. All legal guardians need to sign on and then you need to have a panel agree it’s the best long term choice. Here’s what that looks like

• Pediatric Doctor - Makes sure they are at the stage of puberty and the general health is at a point where blockers and maybe later hormones are a good fit.

• Social Services Worker - Makes sure there isn’t something hinky with the home environment and the family is in a position to make an informed decision .

• Trans specialized Psychology - Makes sure the identity has been stable and trial run at a social level and that all the markers of a trans patient make the child a risk if they don’t physically transition. They really try to hold off as long as they can.

• Endocrinologist - A specialist on horomones. Assesses the patient routinely to make sure there’s not any underlying issues. If a trans kid reacts bad to blockers or later Horomones then it stops.

So for the last part.

Trans adults who don’t go through horomones during the stage of their development end up needing more surgeries and more costly and invasive surgeries than those who were allowed to go through the process of developing through hormonal changes. As an example You don’t need breast reductions if you never develop that tissue in the first place. If you are on blockers and then later testosterone you develop as a male and you still have all the internal bits that if you change your mind later you can swap to estrogen and have perfectly female phenotypic breasts. If you are forced to develop breasts and then remove them later you remove all the inside features and there’s not really any takebacksies.

A lot of trans development looks like this. There are a lot of details and the issues when presented to the public don’t give all the information for the public to make a well informed opinion on trans health. It really is kind of a specialist medicine .

This is more a problem of city design than driver behaviour. Even when conscientious cars slow down to better perceive on streets designed for higher speeds assholes will pull dangerous maneuvers splitting attention and becoming more dangerous to pedestrians to get around conscientious drivers in the interest of getting to their destination at their expected time creating new and less predictable hazards.

For the meantime until this is systemically fixed it can be rolling the dice to step out during peak times of light transition like pre dawn or twilight dusk wearing particular shades of clothing. It is not strictly “carbrained” to take precautionary measures in a hostile system any more than it is “paranoid” to bring safety gear to a backwoods hike. You adapt for the environment you’re in not the one you hope to have.

Until real civic engagement creates better infrastructure and stricter limits for vehicles it is not victim blaming to say it’s a safety hazard or to treat it like we’re talking about rape. If you can’t be seen at the speed traffic that is tacitly endorsed by enforcement and culturally expected to move it isn’t directly someone’s choice to hit you. There is no selection process as they actively trying not to hit you and frankly I believe it weakens the argument to draw that comparison.