Little Boy Wants to Join the Girl Scouts

[Armads]

sapphi_snake said:

Armads said:

 

You have a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of gender.  Gender is not the same as a persons sex.  Sex regards what physical make up you are i.e. Male, Female, or Intersex (correct term for hermaphrodite).  From wikipedia: Gender Roles refer to the set of social and behavioral norms that are considered to be socially appropriate for individuals of a specific sex in the context of a specific culture, which differ widely between cultures and over time.

Regardless one's sexual reproductive organs are not the only factor in one's gender, gender covers fashion, interests, habits,  general outlook on life etc.  It has been shown that this outlook on life is caused by having an intersex brain. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20032-transsexual-differences-caught-on-brain-scan.html

Funny. Your definition mainly supports the ideea that gender is a social construct. If that's the case, then the ideea that a person can be transgendered is kinda silly, as it requires for gender to be biologically determined. Your definition of gender is kinda in contradiction with the whole 'intersex brain' thing.

Transgender is not a term concerning biology, but rather social roles, the origin of the word gender comes in the context of social roles.Before 1955 gender wasn't even used for anything related to sex or social roles (common usage was for grammatical categories) .  Gender is both a social construct and influenced by biological factors (society being made up of people is always influenced by biological factors). A man with an intersex brain will have a mentality that is partially feminine, thus he will express it by wearing clothes that are androgynous or feminine in nature or whatever he may do.  But what is considered masculine and what is considered feminine?  These are cultural so we can't even say what he would look like without proper reference.  In fact a man with an intersex brain may fulfill the social roles that define a 'man' in his society and possibly be transgendered in another.  All these studies simply implicate is that gender does not simply divide into man and woman as we know them today.