We need new gender categories, while preserving the distinctness of "man" and "woman". I don’t mind using different pronouns—I’m happy to love someone with whatever language they prefer.
But I’d like to propose that deconstructing traditional genders is not only unnecessary, it’s harmful.
Not necessary
It’s not necessary because we’re free to create as many new genders as we’d like, while preserving the standard ones.
This is the transcend and include approach, as far as I can tell. The current approaches I’ve seen are either all transcend (reject the historical categories) or all include (reject the creativity and proof-by-existence of new genders).
I believe this will better honor the person who was misassigned a gender at birth, because their life experience is very different from someone who was assigned the gender they identify with. Eg: if I’m a trans-woman, I didn’t grow up with all the social pressures of being a woman, or going through a menstrual cycle, or whatever; I grew up feeling like a woman but getting the social pressures of being a man, going through the hormonal changes associated with male-body-ness. Which is a totally unique experience, that I will find more belonging and support from other people like me, not from trad-females.
Harmful
It’s harmful because the people who want acceptance into the traditional category are never going to get it. Eg: If i’m a trans-woman, I was assigned male at birth, and I probably have some male parts and hormones and stuff, so when I try to identify as a woman and join in those discussions and groups that are for
women
I’m likely to always feel outside, different, and to a certain group of cis-women, threatening.This further divides society and polarizes certain populations against including the reality of the trans-experience, which then polarizes the trans-supporters, which begets the vicious cycle.
Sex differentiation started around 1.2 billion years, so the male-female experience has ancient roots that are in our bodies and impacting us every single second. Denying this altogether is destroying massive chesterotn fences— denies tons of wisdom that is passed down not only culturally over the past 200,000 years, but instinctually for a billion.
What about bathrooms and sports?
Instead we can just have single stall bathrooms and locker-rooms. Or trad-male, trad-female, and a third for whoever of whatever gender, which is much larger than the trad lockerrooms and bathrooms. We can have a third category of sports—all gender. We’re creative, we’re growing, we have plenty of people to populate them and who will want to win, why stick with a binary?
I’m sure I’m missing something, and I apologize to the new-gendered people who I’m sure I’ve insulted or missed somehow. But, leaning in to potentially contentious convo…