Sapiogender

Oh, this is certainly something we've had trouble with. Gender... Always stops the mind from doing what feels natural, expressing what comes by intuition, limiting one from being a complete person.
Born as one, wishing to be the other. But still too perfectionistic to believe in any form of surgery. No, we would rather prefer to evolve beyond the whole matter of gender, instead choosing to be ourselves without boundaries.
But always, the limits. Always the knowledge that humanity cannot fathom the lack of gender in your mind. They fear what they cannot understand, so we become fear. In many ways.
Anyway, we despise it. Gender to be born with is one thing; it's the way human society melds it's inhabitants into stereotype-wannabes which is entirely unacceptable.

Why the emphasis, in the popular literature, on fantasy as a proxy for the orientation aspects of gender? Generally speaking, it doesn't hold up in the technical literature. Also, I would naïvely think that being raised in an orientation-coercive culture could lead to some severe mismatches with experiential orientation.

[From what I'm reading: persistent typical operant conditioning can work for reshaping fantasies, and does work on sensory cues for inducing arousal. That doesn't work on experiential orientation.]

Off-forum, lhexa asked how gender can be seperated from sexuality in the first place; which took me by surprise, as I have a fairly de-sexualized concept of gender identity.

So, weigh in. Is gender primarily a reproductive-organ (and brain's parsing of reproductive organs) thang? Or not?

Alternatively, am I making a mistake in phrasing the question this way, as opposed to thinking of the /whole body/ as sexual...

I'm trying to wrap my imagination around some "three-gendered" systems. Also, I have one or two that I would like to understand deeply enough to extrapolate its cultural effects.

The basic Earthly examples:

• Mammals with heat. I'm thinking the gender identity for a "woman" should be different in and out of heat.
• Beehive, or other social insect with a queen. The workers are particularly interesting. (I suspect their default gender identity is neither male nor female.)

Follow-up to the last post: how important is the external, displayed part of gender to you? Less so than mental conceptions of gender? More so? Or on about equal footing?

And, what would your gender display look like, if you could choose without regard to physical or cultural laws?

A person should not have to:

- Take hormones.
- Have top surgery.
- Have bottom surgery.
- Have a hysterectomy.
- Have electrolysis.
- Wear stereotypical clothing.
- Change their sexual orientation.
- Change the pitch of their voice.
- Change any aspect of their body, appearance, or mannerisms.

Merely to conform to society's expectations of their gender identity.

Okay, let's start with this question: how do you define your gender?

Is it the combination of masculine and feminine attributes in you? Or is it something on a more abstract plane, like 'the essential characteristic of one's soul'... a non-feminine, non-masculine thing, but functioning as a gender in the mind of its owner.

One of the things I'm interested in is the construction of nonhuman gender identities. How do they slot in to the frame of reference typically occupied by male/female? To give some examples, I've heard of mechanical, draconic, and alien genders.

It may be a quirk of the human mind that even in extreme dissociative states like identifying as another species, we still feel the need to assign a sex to ourselves...