as small as a world and as large as alone, madeofpatterns: hemipelagicdredger: ratpoet: ...

4:37am July 22, 2014

hemipelagicdredger:

ratpoet:

when you say “nonbinary identities don’t exist BECAUSE SCIENCE”

all you’re telling me is that you don’t know what science is

science is a systematic attempt to describe the world. science does not define the world

if you were to go up to a scientist and say “there are things that exist in the word that science does has not yet adequately described, or described at all”

the scientist would be like “yeah i know, that’s why i still have a job”

I have nothing to add to the truth of this post.

also since when do identities have anything to do with science?

Exactly. A person’s gender identity is an identity based in a subjective impression of a subjective inner experience. It can’t necessarily be measured and it doesn’t have to be, in order to be real. I don’t experience gender identity at all, and I don’t need a scientist to tell me whether thats real or not. That’s my subjective impression of an already-subjective experience. End of story. There doesn’t need to be a scientific way of measuring it, and I’m not sure there ever will be.

Gender identity is something that’s already got so many factors feeding into it: There are factors coming from society, factors in how you were raised, factors in your neurology, factors in how you think about the world, factors in the stories you tell yourself about the world, all swirled together with even more factors that I can’t even name. How is science supposed to measure all that and then tell us who we are?

I am genderless because I say I am genderless. I am genderless because I don’t experience the gender identity that it seems like practically everyone else, whether cis or trans, does experience. This is subjective. Subjective experiences of the self are okay.

This is why I get so weirded out when people talk about how being plural can’t exist because science or whatever. I have friends that are plural. Being plural is a purely subjective experience of your inner mind. If your inner mind contains more than one person you are plural. If it doesn’t, you are not. I don’t understand how anyone can contest someone’s inner picture of themselves like that. Just because I don’t experience it doesn’t mean other people don’t. And there’s plenty of scientific research going back hundreds of years saying that many people do experience themselves that way. But again it’s a subjective experience, and you can’t tell someone that their subjective experience of self/selves is “wrong” because “science says so”.

I don’t fully understand gender, because I don’t experience it first-hand. But from what I can tell (when used in an identity sense rather than a sociological sense), it is highly subjective and highly individual to each person. It is something that is slightly different for each person, even cis people. It exists in nearly infinite variation. Which is good and beautiful and right. But people who exist outside of male and female are shit on even sometimes by other trans people, and nonbinary and genderless people both get a pretty impressive array of shit thrown at us. I’ve gone to the #agender tag (another word for genderless) and found it filled, at times, with nothing but arguments about how people without body dysphoria shouldn’t call themselves agender. I do happen to have body dysphoria but I have a hard time tying it to my lack of gender identity, as closely as many trans people do. And I don’t like the idea of talking about it to prove that I’m genderless enough, trans enough… a lot of what I experience with body dysphoria is intensely private and I don’t want it spread all over the Internet just because of some jerks who want to police the identities of all other trans people.

As far as I’m concerned, being trans is having a gender identity other than the gender you were raised as. Which can include lacking a gender identity at all. How much body dysphoria you have is not a measure of how trans you are, although it does go with being trans quite often. And yes, it’s very possible to be trans, to not have much if any body dysphoria, and to not be simply holding up tired gender stereotypes. It’s not just about whether you liked pink or blue as a kid, or legos versus dolls, pants versus dresses, etc. It’s about something you are inside, something that I have trouble understanding, but even from my genderless standpoint I can see that nonbinary identities are real whether the person has body dysphoria or not, and so are other gender identities that don’t always fit the mold, including things like gender-fluidity.

I will never, ever understand the desire to police people’s identities like this, to tell people they’re just faking something for attention just because you don’t understand it. I don’t understand what it means to feel you have a gender, should I tell all cis people and most trans people that they’re faking for attention? Didn’t think so. So don’t do the same to me. And don’t assume anything about my relationship to my body. Just because I’m private about some parts of it doesn’t mean it’s not there.