Well, obviously it’s far more complicated than one bit; like most brain features, it’s built into the structure of the brain in a somewhat or totally distributed fashion, and through some developmental quirk, some or all of that structure develops in a way inappropriate to their DNA and physical layout. The more complex it is, the more I would expect genderqueer and nonbinary people to be common from increasingly nonstandard configurations of whatever that structure looks like as opposed to fairly limited values it could take on (at least the two).
Most trans people I know felt extremely uncomfortable with their sexual characteristics and assigned gender before ever hearing of the concept of a transsexual person; my ex-boyfriend jokes that he really should have figured it out sooner, given how he would devour literally any media that had crossdressing main characters, and he was raised heavily-Orthodox Jewish where the concept was not at all available. This is a pretty significant obstacle to it being a memetic phenomenon in all/most cases.
I would agree that it’s to some degree a memetic fad in the case of nonbinary/genderqueer people; definitely a number of people I know slide around somewhat on the gender spectrum in what seems to be a semi-deliberate act of protest against restrictive gender norms rather than particular pain at being called the gender they were raised as. But there are also nonbinary people whose beliefs are much more deeply held, and who feel intense, crippling emotional pain (i.e. are triggered) when referred to as their raised gender rather than their chosen gender. Generally these people find the opposite binary painful to a significantly lesser extent, which supports the idea that they might be physiologically/neurologically indistinguishable from binary trans people, but they’re definitely distinct from the weaker category of nonbinary identification. This is probably a necessary stopping point on the path to the inevitable death of socially-constructed gender.
In short, I think your position, while more reasonable than my past one, is mixing up a couple different phenomena and missing some data, and drawing broad, false conclusions as a result.
I read an article once about the hijra, a third gender in India. What surprised me at the time was that some hijra were adamant that they were not transgender in the western sense, seeing it as foreign and strange, whereas others would have preferred a binary transgender identity had it been available in their culture. So some strongly viewed hijra as what they really wanted to be, but others saw it only as a consolation prize because their culture didn’t include the concept of transitioning to the other binary gender.
I walked away from this thinking that the cultural component of gender can’t be overlooked. Gender is ultimately a compromise between the individual and categories provided by the culture. I can even imagine, that if one had two very different cultures and were able to completely replicate a particular infant, atom for atom, it’s possible in one culture they would identify as male, and in the other as female.
But there are also nonbinary people whose beliefs are much more deeply held, and who feel intense, crippling emotional pain (i.e. are triggered) when referred to as their raised gender rather than their chosen gender.
Yes, people tend to have that reaction when faced with something that contradicts some aspect of the identity they’ve adopted (for whatever reason). I’m pretty sure creationists, for example, have the same reaction to people arguing for evolution.
Well, obviously it’s far more complicated than one bit; like most brain features, it’s built into the structure of the brain in a somewhat or totally distributed fashion, and through some developmental quirk, some or all of that structure develops in a way inappropriate to their DNA and physical layout. The more complex it is, the more I would expect genderqueer and nonbinary people to be common from increasingly nonstandard configurations of whatever that structure looks like as opposed to fairly limited values it could take on (at least the two).
Most trans people I know felt extremely uncomfortable with their sexual characteristics and assigned gender before ever hearing of the concept of a transsexual person; my ex-boyfriend jokes that he really should have figured it out sooner, given how he would devour literally any media that had crossdressing main characters, and he was raised heavily-Orthodox Jewish where the concept was not at all available. This is a pretty significant obstacle to it being a memetic phenomenon in all/most cases.
I would agree that it’s to some degree a memetic fad in the case of nonbinary/genderqueer people; definitely a number of people I know slide around somewhat on the gender spectrum in what seems to be a semi-deliberate act of protest against restrictive gender norms rather than particular pain at being called the gender they were raised as. But there are also nonbinary people whose beliefs are much more deeply held, and who feel intense, crippling emotional pain (i.e. are triggered) when referred to as their raised gender rather than their chosen gender. Generally these people find the opposite binary painful to a significantly lesser extent, which supports the idea that they might be physiologically/neurologically indistinguishable from binary trans people, but they’re definitely distinct from the weaker category of nonbinary identification. This is probably a necessary stopping point on the path to the inevitable death of socially-constructed gender.
In short, I think your position, while more reasonable than my past one, is mixing up a couple different phenomena and missing some data, and drawing broad, false conclusions as a result.
I read an article once about the hijra, a third gender in India. What surprised me at the time was that some hijra were adamant that they were not transgender in the western sense, seeing it as foreign and strange, whereas others would have preferred a binary transgender identity had it been available in their culture. So some strongly viewed hijra as what they really wanted to be, but others saw it only as a consolation prize because their culture didn’t include the concept of transitioning to the other binary gender.
I walked away from this thinking that the cultural component of gender can’t be overlooked. Gender is ultimately a compromise between the individual and categories provided by the culture. I can even imagine, that if one had two very different cultures and were able to completely replicate a particular infant, atom for atom, it’s possible in one culture they would identify as male, and in the other as female.
Yes, people tend to have that reaction when faced with something that contradicts some aspect of the identity they’ve adopted (for whatever reason). I’m pretty sure creationists, for example, have the same reaction to people arguing for evolution.