Okay, so this is a discussion of gender,
because I like talking about it.
It was going to be the post-lunch gender chat.
And it is, we are post-lunch,
but things happen, so it moved later and later.
So I'm Emma, and I like to think about gender a lot.
This really is a discussion,
and I'm going to say this one more time
so you've got many people who are being recorded.
It's an audio recording.
If you don't want your voice recorded, then let me know.
Or, when it says let me know, I mean, don't speak.
Have somebody else do your talking for you
just for as many years.
Okay, one more thing.
This is a discussion, which means that I will not be doing
all the talking, if nobody else talks,
it's going to be really boring.
And it means that I will cut you off
if you're talking too long,
and I will try and get as many different people talking
as possible rather than letting one person
go out and back and down.
Okay, I'm going to start off with two points about gender
that are ideas of mine just to get the discussion of talking.
There's a couple things I've been struggling with
in my thoughts about gender.
One is the fact that people are using the word gender
to describe themselves in a variety of ways
that are not, at this point, often not tied into
biological sex in any way.
People have been, you know, sometimes people will say
that their gender is pipette, for instance.
There's a very interesting site called the Gay Agenda Form,
actually, I mean, you can check out,
there's a long checklist of things you can gender yourself.
And that's one thing, it's really great,
the idea that people can think about their sexual identity
and how it interacts with the world
in a whole bunch of different ways,
but for me, that's not gender.
Gender is how your socio-sexual identity
ties into biological sex, whether it's an expression
of social norms of the biological sex that you have,
or the one that you don't have,
or you're not expressing biological sex,
or you're expressing both at once, you know, whatever it is.
For me, gender has to do with masculinity and femininity
and not dominance or submission
or whether or not you like puppies.
Those things are great,
and if they're what's most important
to your socio-sexual identity, that's great,
but I wouldn't call them genders, that's one talking point.
The other thing that I like to think about
is video gender being additive.
A lot of times, people have the feeling
that if you play up masculinity,
that means you're playing down femininity.
You can't apparently have both at once,
and that's something I have a big problem with.
As you might tell from looking at me, from about here up,
I look in my father's words like a 10-year-old boy,
and from about here down, I really don't so much
have the 10-year-old boy thing going on.
And I like that.
I really like being able to play up masculinity and femininity,
not to mention various different places
on the age spectrum, at the same time.
I think that gender should be able to be additive
and not necessarily subtractive.
Those two points that I have,
their ideas that I've got,
as the extent of this presentation.
Please speak.
I mean, I'm just here to point out
the additive amount of femininity versus masculinity
versus femininity instead.
One time, this is kind of a soft point I guess,
but no one person can be feeling more than one feeling
at one instant in a person's life.
Like, overall, you might be feeling conflicting things,
but at one time, you can only be feeling one day,
that's what I believe at least,
and that's my personal thought.
Like, overall, in my day, I might feel maximum feminine,
but at this very instant, I feel one way or the other,
and that compilation of those feelings,
I personally just tend to round to what I tend to feel more.
Like, if you have like one bad experience in a day,
or I see your day was amazing,
you're not gonna count that one bad day,
even though your day was like good or great,
so let's say I can feel 75% masculine, 25% feminine.
I personally, in your survey, I just would say
that you're feeling mostly masculine.
I, for one, would like to be able to say to the world,
right now, I feel 100% masculine and 100% feminine,
because those two things don't conflict for me.
The different things, and sometimes I feel one,
and couldn't imagine feeling the other one at the same time,
but there are times, especially,
and this is something I've been struggling with,
a lot of what I'm talking about when I talk about
additive gender has to do with gender expression,
and a lot of how I express gender
has to do partly with my body,
and just how I sit, how I stand,
how I think a lot of the times,
if I'm sitting kind of like this,
I'm probably in a slightly more masculine mood
than if I'm sitting sort of like this.
But also, just sort of expression as far as like
what I put on myself.
I like to wear suits and lipstick.
I like to add strong markers of both genders at one time,
and that's not an emotional thing,
that's a basically closing thing.
But for me, I think having both those things
that want to do really great things.
So that's something that I really agree with.
When I'm getting dressed in the morning,
and it's just me getting dressed,
I'm really into going out,
both masculine and feminine,
but one of the things that I find more striking about that
is when I walk outside my apartment,
and it doesn't matter what bit of a morning,
or how much I have that day, or how anything,
every single person always getting me as a woman
and I still get caught up in all these things,
and it's like, in that moment, like when that happens,
the whole gender thing becomes so much less,
like it becomes so much more complicated,
because it's not just about what I left at Austin,
or what I was feeling just a second ago,
it's now about genders not just what you feel,
genders such a huge factor in how people relate to you,
and that, and that's me, that I have.
So I don't know how other people relate to that.
What do you think?
The way you're talking about masculine and feminine
is categories, I feel like in society,
there are very much certain conventions
that go along with each of the categories,
and whether you're biologically,
you know, you can deviate in significant ways,
whether they be biological or how you recognize yourself,
or how people may get offended and even hurt you.
Like, it's, I find it very scary to actually,
the idea of just how people,
if they see you being, or if they think you're being,
even if you're not, like, oh, I'm biologically female,
but one couple of it wants to play,
and we thought I was trans,
because it was my chin, and they're like, we're trans.
They got very offended as I'm actually not,
I'm not gonna tell you, I'm silly.
I left very quickly, but I still felt physically
trans almost, especially with a guy.
Because you were not trans, or because they thought you were?
Because I didn't fit their idea of what a female
was supposed to look like.
Even if I'm just looking for something as silly as,
I did what I, you know, it's just a chin.
No.
But I, I don't know, I'm gonna give you,
I'd say it's first hand of the privilege that I had as,
you know, a woman who's usually presented stuff,
and that's a cloud, you know.
I've been reading articles about trans folks,
and what they were gonna say.
First, I think, I got up there,
and then I was, you know, back down.
There's a lot of danger that's actually, I find, a lot more
danger for people who are biologically male,
or who look biologically male.
Women have much wider range of things
that's acceptable for them to wear,
and that much, you know, it's sort of,
not only is it okay for a woman to walk out
in men's jeans, but it's okay for a woman to walk out
in basically full drag, and dress as a man.
And that's sort of like, oh, that's cool.
Whereas if a man were to walk out on the street,
and remain, you know, clearly biologically female,
in clu, sorry, clearly biologically male,
in clearly, you know, what society is female,
well, that's a really dangerous,
put himself in in most situations.
Yeah.
I think there was a point that you were making
about the fact that male drag on a female body person,
that privilege exists for the same time,
some of the effectiveness of it,
and actually speaking to people's perceptions
of your gender is lost.
It's just a girl dressing up rather than
actually changing that social security.
That's a really good point, it's a really good point.
By the way, I'm specifically not saying anyone's names,
I don't even want to name tags,
to help preserve everybody else's anonymity,
so rock on for getting a name that time,
but let's keep them unstated.
Well, and I'm glad you're talking about this last mention,
how, just to add to what you were saying,
how a woman becoming more masculine,
is seen as her claiming her power,
being autonomous, or as a male being more feminine,
is seen as being set down on the status ladder,
putting yourself on one down position
to remain a woman.
That's interesting, and especially given how hard it is
to, for some biologically male to actively express feminine,
it's sort of really ironic that it winds up
seeming like they're losing strength.
And I keep coming back to their interesting questions
between aesthetics and gender,
interesting questions between aesthetics
and, sort of, between presentation and aesthetics,
and it's much, physically, it's harder for a guy
to look good wearing feminine markers
than it is for girls.
You didn't have to buy a look good, is that wrong?
I don't know.
Yeah, well, I understand that's a dangerous
and highly qualitative question.
It's just subjective.
I think it's also a question of social conditioning.
I mean, it's been, I think, like, 60 years
that women have been wearing, you know,
relatively male clothing.
So, I mean, I think, to some extent,
it's just also we're used to which women
in a way we're not used to feminine values.
Or just women in pants versus men in dresses.
Yeah, well, it's also worth noting
that that wasn't always the case.
I would like to bring up that culture is incredibly true
and before the Second World War,
gay culture was very, very...
gay culture promoted the feminity
more than either less feminization that we have today.
And so, we completely switched that
spectrum in the gay community.
And, you know, that's worthy of note
in such and how it affects people not in the gay community
as well.
Feminine attire was more readily acceptable
in anything but a non-human way.
Actually, a long time ago, then it was 10 years ago.
Which, it's just mind-boggling.
I wonder how we got there, you know,
but it's certainly, which to back up
from the point that it is incredibly, I believe,
very socially constructed.
And certainly, it's such a great culture
to be constructed in terms of what aesthetics are
and how it was mapped to presentation.
And then everyone to upstairs.
The combination of presentation law,
which is really great, I don't think everyone
can use it and bring up really quickly
that, you know, a couple hundred years ago,
if you were a noble man, you wore heels
and hoes and silks.
And probably, of course, it is well.
Just because that's what you are.
So we live a very restrictive time in some ways
as far as what you are, our ledger in society
and otherwise one that's much, much freer.
Seems like we found out that there's pros and cons
for everybody about what they want to do.
Thank you.
Thank you.
