Shouldn't-be-hot take: gender is a social construct and a class. if you turn it into a law-backed custom title kindly fuck you. sometimes "deconstruction" is plain and lazy ignorance

make an effort people

good endgame: everyone slowly destructing gender as classes, forms that ask you for only pronouns next to the name with the possibility to add items. People trying to guess yours in person and reacting nicely when you correct them.

bad endgame: forms that ask you for a gender name, cis men putting memes in it because they get to be bored and idiotic at the same time, gender being turned into a brand new oppressive abstract social construct.

i'm enby and i find all of that purely masturbatory.

what i *need* is for people to stop coercing me into gender-specific things and assuming my name and pronouns without any easy way for me to tell them it's not. what i *really need* is proper healthcare and less obvious transphobia.

i don't *need* my gender to be fully described or understood by anyone. i just want them to use my fucking name

now of course if you're "cis enough" but not very cis either you may just not see part of this, and i imagine having someone forget a part of your tri-gender may be found offensive. here's a free issue-evaluation fix: they didn't murder you or use a wrong pronoun or name or forced you not to take your medication or forced you to wear some different clothing or forbid you to use the bathroom, it's quite a fine day i'd say.

@CobaltVelvet

Isn't it a bit fucked up to respond to people that others have it worse? Relativizing people's problem like this I don't consider constructive or friendly. You end up with a bottomless pit of it can always be worse and you still haven't helped anyone, just pushed their emotions away.

@webmind it's not so much about it being just worse for some, but very different: the point being i don't consider displaying your gender as much of a right, but as a social game mostly for privileged people. i don't care if they lose at it and certainly can't consider it an oppression, especially when i know people who died because they were forced to be a part of it.

@CobaltVelvet

Privilege outside of a tool to highlight differences of experience is still a sliding scale. Any objective definition or line of what is or isn't oppression is still negating the personal experience. One can always find someone who's been oppressed more, it doesn't make your oppression less. The game of who has it worse or better is no better than the usual rat race society keeps us busy with, ignoring that people are hurt and need support.

@webmind again it's not so much about who is it worse but who has it at all, and the kind of support those who don't bring us. it's too often negative and purposely ignorant all our practical problems.

@CobaltVelvet you can support people, promote support and show people about practical problems, without negating theirs.

Life will never be perfect and can always be worse. I don't have a good day because it could be worse, I have a good day because I manage to experience it as such. Some of my worst days have been over nothing, some of my best the same, while I felt ok when something horrid happened. Emotional experience is non comparable.

Sorry for the walls of text...

@webmind i think the point exactly is comparing practical issues because comparing emotional experiences is endless; transphobia isn't about having your feeling hurt and must not be summed or described by that.

@CobaltVelvet transphobia, the fear of trans and I suppose here the outcome of that.

Why would feelings not come into play? It's about hurting people. Whether that's physical or or not shouldn't matter.

@webmind whether it's a passionate hateful murder or not putting enough precision in a personal title is a huge difference honestly

@CobaltVelvet I'm certainly not saying they are the same. Just saying the experience is personal and non comparable and that making the comparison, by excluding, you are not helping anyone. Quite the opposite I'd say.

@webmind well you're the one insisting about experience, why? I don't and won't care about who has their feeling hurt the more and for whatever reason, and you're right it's non comparable; my priority always will be actions done against people.

people turning a movement for the survival of a group into a petty social game that supports the awful things we were fighting against in the first place

glorifying gender always hurt people, even if you make it rainbow-colored

@CobaltVelvet I don't understand how you can separate action and experience.

An action is wanted or unwanted, problematic or not, not objectively, but because of it's outcome. The experience of it.

Oppression is any action that causes someone to be oppressed. Independent of intent or scale.

What you care about or for. Is up to you, but I don't think it's useful, helpful or considerate to redefine terms to your personal preferences.

@webmind what am i redefining?

it feels so terrible to spend years trying to explain people i can be a girl and that not being a perfect girly stereotype is okay, and it's a spectrum and everyone can be anywhere on it in different ways

for then someday someone who will never do any kind of transition to "identify as" an object and declare it a gender.

*this* destroys everything we're working for and trying to survive. it's turning our education effort into an absurd joke.

@CobaltVelvet hmm you seemed to define what is or isnt oppression based on an arbitrary line.

I not sure I understand what you now refer to.

My take on things is suffering is personal, and I take people serious until it is clearly a joke.

@webmind

consider:
- i have the same problems as the contextual "them".
- i have more problems because of it

i am in a pretty good place to place that line.

@CobaltVelvet my argument is that that line is destructive. It has no good place.

@webmind people don't need gender, society created it and can destroy it.

if you want to abolish gender you need to break the barriers in society until it's meaning reflects that.

if you "hey let's make gender mean ANYTHING" society will just continue as is and pick a new name for it. and we're back to before people tried decoupling genitals and gender and nothing has changed, except people have a fancy useless abstract title added.

@webmind back to the point: you you really want a custom title?

i don't want it and certainly don't need it. I'll fight to *remove* gender from anything, not to have N labels instead of 2 like glorifying that thing will make anything okay.

@CobaltVelvet I don't do/like labels and think we agree there. Expressing identity is always an approximation and I prefer people to just experience me before they judge.

But I see the plurality of gender as a path towards talking about identity instead of binary genders. Not one I walk, but one perceive as going into a desirable direction.

@webmind i do right until the point where gender is compared literally to animal species or character traits or astronomical events. then it just becomes destructive nonsense to me.

@CobaltVelvet how is that destructive?

@webmind because it has nothing to do with gender and it doesn't make any sense to compare gender to it. i don't see what is accomplished by just fucking up the definition and making it include many unrelated things. we're not gonna get over gender by associating *more* things with it, even if people make many nice labels.

@CobaltVelvet my point is more it doesn't hurt.

It does have to do with identity and moves the gender debate there, what it is actually about.

@webmind well let's get to it then: it is mostly about two social classes with associated codes and people being assigned one at birth and trying to find the right relationship with each pole. I get being both, neither, or anywhere between; other than that it's, well, it's more like personality. gender is a very specific behavior of our society.