I think you could have been clearer on when you’re talking about physical sex and when you’re talking about psychological gender. Are you advocating the elimination of psychological Gender Identity, or the elimination of Sexual Dimorphism?
As someone who has already successfully hacked himself to become Agendered, it is my belief that the former is entirely environmentally caused anyway, and a deep cultural change is what would be needed to address it. However, while I would strongly advocate seeking a future in which each and every individual can have exactly the body they want and not be judged for their preference no matter what it is (or at least no more so than people are judged today on the color of their clothing), I do not think making humanity less than it is by taking away one of its features is an acceptable solution to anything.
As someone who has already successfully hacked himself to become Agendered
I aspire to be genderless and try to identify as such. What is the extent of this mind hack? How did it work? What is it like throwing out the concept of gender? How did you do it? So many questions.
Tell me your secrets!
himself
Theres something wrong here and I can’t quite articulate it. I am confused.
Edit: for your question, I’ll venture a guess that it’s about throwing out mandatory dimorphism, not about the psychological part, which is doomed anyway and not worth talking about. Also, I don’t think OP was trying to imply that postgenderism is about conformity.
Theres something wrong here and I can’t quite articulate it. I am confused.
I still use male pronouns simply because there is no gender-neutral pronoun in the language and I am physically male, and I don’t think it’s sane to include attachment(or unattachment) to a gender-pronoun in one’s self-concept.
What is the extent of this mind hack? How did it work?...How did you do it?
It wasn’t something I did in an afternoon or anything, so I’m not sure I can give useful instructions or explanations…
It began as a quest to identify and purge all of my Cached Thoughts that were sexist or had sexist connotations, not just about other people but also about myself. I discovered two things in doing this, first, that there is a LOT more sexism that goes unquestioned in our culture than I originally thought there was, and second, that in my own mind, without those Cached Thoughts there to complete the pattern, there was nothing intrinsically male(or female) left. I had dissolved my gender identity. Explained it away.
I’m not sure if this is something everyone could do, but it sure seems like it would be.
What is it like throwing out the concept of gender?
Subtle, but pervasive. You start to notice those little sexist Cached Thoughts in others, even those who self-identify as not-sexist. You start to notice little false beliefs about your own personality, things you assumed were there but aren’t, or things that are there but that you made excuses for. It makes knowing yourself easier, definitely. And spotting these assumptions in yourself helps you notice when you try to make similar ones about other people, as well.
I make myself think of myself as a human rather than as a man (that is, I deliberately do not think of myself as male, which was difficult to actually do at first, like breaking a bad habit); sex is a feature of the body no different than height or skin color. (height is a better analogy, because that has obvious physical consequences that are a lot harder to not care about if what you have isn’t what you want, like sex.), and gender identity was a bad habit which I broke. It can be a significant shift to one’s perspective.
Before anything else, let me say that I applaud and admire your self-hack. What I have to say below is merely an expression of some of my personal thoughts on this issue, and is not intended as any sort of attack on your self-identity.
there was nothing intrinsically male (or female) left. I had dissolved my gender identity. Explained it away.
What do you mean by gender identity, exactly? One might disclaim any explicit, verbally-endorsed gender identity, while still retaining the psychological traits that others would categorize as characteristically masculine or feminine.
For myself, I don’t consider myself to have a strong gender identity, and am somewhat repulsed by the idea that some part of my core essence is intrinsically male. Thus, it is sometimes tempting to think of myself as agendered or androgynous, but I find myself rather persuaded by intellectual arguments to the effect that it’s simply not true, that as a question of simple fact, my psychology is intrinsically male, and that this remains the case no matter how I choose to verbally self-identify.
Sex isn’t just one trait; it’s a bundle of correlations between traits, a cluster in a high-dimensional configuration space. If I know the shape of your genitals, I can make all sorts of probabilistic predictions about your other features. The fact that these predictions are probabilistic in nature and that there are many exceptions (some men are shorter than most women, some men are gay, some men have two X chromosomes, &c.) doesn’t change the fact that they are doing useful cognitive work. You can think of this from a minimum-message-length perspective: if you’re trying to describe an adult human male in a limited number of bits, and the recipient of your message already knows a lot of things about humans, you can shorten your message by saying that you’re taking about a man and then describing the specific ways in which the man departs from the human male average, rather than describing every feature of the man from scratch without making any reference to sex at all.
Given that gender roles in some form have existed in every human society, given that there are clear evolutionary reasons to expect the existence of some psychological sex differences due to differing reproductive strategies, and given the experimentally-demonstrable fallibility of human introspection, I’m more inclined to interpret my personal feelings of disliking gender roles as more of a statement of values and of ideology than of my actually being ungendered in an empirically verifiable sense. I don’t think my mind feels intrinsically male from the inside—but it’s easy for me to say that, because I don’t know what it feels like to be female; any claim to androgyny that I might make could easily just be due to my ignorance of the real differences.
Thus, while I long for a transhumanist future in which people can self-modify to be whatever they want, and I celebrate and honor people’s rights to self-identify however they want, I tend to be respectfully skeptical of claims that a proper degendering can be accomplished with presently existing technology.
There is far greater psychological variation within each sex than there is between the sexes, is there not? Even if the space of all possible minds from XY-grown human brains and the space of all possible minds from XX-grown human brains do not perfectly overlap, I know of no evidence that suggests that the disparity is actually significant enough to be meaningful.
Is it even possible to reliably tell the difference between an XX brain and an XY brain just by looking at the structure of neurons? Has anything ever actually been found that was exclusive to one or the other?
There is far greater psychological variation within each sex than there is between the sexes, is there not?
It depends on what you’re measuring. Let me illustrate with a toy example. Consider some quantitative trait such that the trait value is normally distributed within each sex, and say that both distributions have the same standard deviation (call it s) but different means (call them x1 and x2). (Imagine two bell curves plotted on the same chart, partially overlapping.) We can measure the difference between the means in terms of s; this statistic is known as Cohen’s d:
d = (x1 - x2)/s
So if d is less than one, then there’s a sense in which we can say that the variation within a sex (as operationalized by the standard deviation s) is larger than the variation between sexes (as operationalized by the difference in means x1 - x2). But there’s nothing intrinsically special about d<1; if we chose some other way to operationalize the claim “more variation within a sex than between sexes,” we would get a different result.
As it turns out, d=1 is actually very large, as sex differences go: Janet Hyde reviewed a number of studies (PDF) and found d<1 for every trait measured except for throw velocity and throw distance (which aren’t even psychological).
Given that there is a large amount of overlap for every psychological trait measured, it’s tempting to conclude that there is there is therefore no such thing as psychological sex. Ultimately, however, I don’t think this inference is quite justified.
Why? Well, consider this diagram. In the diagram, if you look at any one particular trait in isolation, there is substantial overlap between groups, but if you look at the entire configuration space, the groups don’t overlap at all. I suspect this kind of phenomenon to apply to real-world psychological sex differences: the difference mostly isn’t in any one exclusive trait, but is buried in the correlations between traits.
If there were no psychological sex differences, you could learn any number of things about a person’s psychology, and yet still do no better than chance in trying to guess their physiological sex. But if there’s a statistical difference in some [ETA: statistically independent] traits, then as you learn more about a person, your probability of guessing wrong goes down exponentially. It might be an instructive exercise to explicitly construct a model and play around with the numbers a bit. Like, suppose hypothetically there were a sex difference of d=0.6 in ten different [independent] psychological traits, and consider a hypothetical individual who has the female mean value for all of these traits. The normal distribution peaks at a probability density of 1/sqrt(2pi) = 0.3989, and has a probability density of 0.3331 at plus-or-minus 0.6 standard deviations, so (if I understand the relevant math) we can predict that our hypothetical individual is female with probability (0.3989/0.3331)^10/(1 - (0.3989/0.3331)^10) = 0.86. Of course, this is only a model, and different choices of parameters will give us different results. What I like about this view is that we’ve reduced the issue to a quantitative one; the claim that there is such a thing as psychological sex can be interpreted as meaning that the probability of guessing a person’s sex correctly given adequate psychological information is close to one.
Is it even possible to reliably tell the difference between an XX brain and an XY brain just by looking at the structure of neurons?
I do not possess detailed familiarity with the neuroscience literature, but in my current state of incomplete information, my guess would be yes. See, e.g., this summary, which claims differences in white matter/gray matter ratios and in the relative sizes of different brain regions.
Has anything ever actually been found that was exclusive to one or the other?
As explained in my commentary above, I don’t think this question is as relevant as it first appears: it could be possible to classify brains by sex given a sufficiently large number of sufficiently large statistical differences, even if there is no particular feature possessed by all and only brains of one sex.
Aw. When I did the same thing, the male parts of my identity did turn out to be cached… but I couldn’t want to remove them. (I don’t know the mechanism that led me to absorb them, rather than the female equivalents, given that everyone including me thought I was a girl.) For example, I’m weak. I dislike being mocked for it, and I’d like to live in a world where men can be weak; but given that the norm exists, I want it to apply to me.
Do you mean not gendered, or null-gendered? Or something else entirely?
I hunger for details. When dysphoric I do a dissociatey thing where my gender gets pushed under the rug. If I could sustain a less bad variant of that, it might spare me a lot of trouble.
Agender means not having a gender at all; dissolving the entire category, not just occupying a neutral position within it.
What worked for me may not work for you, but what I did was carefully examine the pieces of my mind that were male and trace out how they got there. In my case, they were all simply Cached Thoughts I had absorbed from the environment, and never questioned before.
What does it mean to be agendered? Can you provide a specific example?
I’ve never respected gender roles; I’m a fairly androgynous (physically and behaviorally) male and I’m attracted to fairly androgynous females… but I don’t know how one would go about “dissolving” their hormones and genitalia.
As I’ve already explained to two other commenters, the first step was digging through my own mind for every piece of myself that was male and tracing how it got there. This took over a year to actually do, but all of those pieces turned out to be Cached Thoughts I had absorbed from the environment.
Another way to look at it, is that in social contexts a person’s body is a lot like a costume that comes with a role to play. I found that gender is purely a function of that role, at least in my case. I would hypothesize that dysphoria, at least in part, results from an individual having an especially clear concept of the body they wished they had, and subconsciously trying to play the role attached to that body instead of their own.
I had my own breakthrough when I learned to recognize and differentiate the role from myself and detach myself from it, so that nothing in my personality depended on my body(I could freely want a different body without it affecting who I see myself as). Ironically, I think role-playing in online games played a large part in my learning to do that.
Oh sorry I must have missed that. My mistake. Anyways, I agree that a person’s body is basically a costume or a shell and that there is often a role associated with that. However, how do you deal with the social aspect of being agendered? As far as my experience goes in the real world, you can tell people all you want that you’re without gender but if you look like a boy you’ll be treated like one. Whether you play that role or not.
I remember when I first started really passing and the world started treating me as a girl I would constantly worry about playing into the stereotypical role: should I be wearing make-up today, do I look okay, should I pretend to be bad at that? I quickly realized however that there was no point to transitioning just to conform to a new role again. So I simply stopped trying to play into any specific gender role and did what comes naturally. Since then I identify somewhat as a tomboy. I do what I like and I like what I do and I’ve never been happier. I would never want to go back to having a male shell however, the female body is by far the closest to my gender identity. Is that sort of what you’re aiming at?
However, how do you deal with the social aspect of being agendered? As far as my experience goes in the real world, you can tell people all you want that you’re without gender but if you look like a boy you’ll be treated like one. Whether you play that role or not.
You actually answer this yourself.
I simply stopped trying to play into any specific gender role and did what comes naturally.
I wouldn’t really proclaim my lack of gender identity in any case, unless the subject came up specifically. If the body you have is going to affect how people treat you, I feel that wanting a different body for the role it comes with isn’t addressing the problem so much as dodging it.
What I mean is, if I’m going to be treated a certain way just because of the body I have, it doesn’t matter to me (on the meta level) what that treatment is. I’m treated like a boy because I look like one, but to me, that isn’t any better or worse than being treated like anything else because I look like one. It’s a much deeper and more general problem than a person’s personality not meshing well with the role socially associated with their sex.
Granted, the body I have isn’t the body I would choose to have, but to me that now feels like something entirely unrelated to issues of identity. With the conscious recognition and isolation of the role, all possible bodies are equal so far as my identity is concerned.
I would never want to go back to having a male shell however, the female body is by far the closest to my gender identity. Is that sort of what you’re aiming at?
Not quite; I don’t believe gender identity should exist at all. Rather, what I’m aiming at is the separation of preference-of-body and preference-of-role from each other as well as from identity. A question I once posed to myself was, if all the social connotations attached to each of the sexes were perfectly reversed, swapped, would that change what body you would choose to have? And I found that I could not give a simple answer. The question of body seemed straightforward, but my mind kept trying to attach something else that confused the answer, and that something turned out to be the question of role. Suddenly it was clear to me, on a gut level, that they really were separate questions, and that the question of role was effectively a question of environmental preference that just happened to be tangled up with this “gender” concept in our own society.
I think you could have been clearer on when you’re talking about physical sex and when you’re talking about psychological gender. Are you advocating the elimination of psychological Gender Identity, or the elimination of Sexual Dimorphism?
As someone who has already successfully hacked himself to become Agendered, it is my belief that the former is entirely environmentally caused anyway, and a deep cultural change is what would be needed to address it. However, while I would strongly advocate seeking a future in which each and every individual can have exactly the body they want and not be judged for their preference no matter what it is (or at least no more so than people are judged today on the color of their clothing), I do not think making humanity less than it is by taking away one of its features is an acceptable solution to anything.
I aspire to be genderless and try to identify as such. What is the extent of this mind hack? How did it work? What is it like throwing out the concept of gender? How did you do it? So many questions.
Tell me your secrets!
Theres something wrong here and I can’t quite articulate it. I am confused.
Edit: for your question, I’ll venture a guess that it’s about throwing out mandatory dimorphism, not about the psychological part, which is doomed anyway and not worth talking about. Also, I don’t think OP was trying to imply that postgenderism is about conformity.
I still use male pronouns simply because there is no gender-neutral pronoun in the language and I am physically male, and I don’t think it’s sane to include attachment(or unattachment) to a gender-pronoun in one’s self-concept.
It wasn’t something I did in an afternoon or anything, so I’m not sure I can give useful instructions or explanations…
It began as a quest to identify and purge all of my Cached Thoughts that were sexist or had sexist connotations, not just about other people but also about myself. I discovered two things in doing this, first, that there is a LOT more sexism that goes unquestioned in our culture than I originally thought there was, and second, that in my own mind, without those Cached Thoughts there to complete the pattern, there was nothing intrinsically male(or female) left. I had dissolved my gender identity. Explained it away.
I’m not sure if this is something everyone could do, but it sure seems like it would be.
Subtle, but pervasive. You start to notice those little sexist Cached Thoughts in others, even those who self-identify as not-sexist. You start to notice little false beliefs about your own personality, things you assumed were there but aren’t, or things that are there but that you made excuses for. It makes knowing yourself easier, definitely. And spotting these assumptions in yourself helps you notice when you try to make similar ones about other people, as well.
I make myself think of myself as a human rather than as a man (that is, I deliberately do not think of myself as male, which was difficult to actually do at first, like breaking a bad habit); sex is a feature of the body no different than height or skin color. (height is a better analogy, because that has obvious physical consequences that are a lot harder to not care about if what you have isn’t what you want, like sex.), and gender identity was a bad habit which I broke. It can be a significant shift to one’s perspective.
Before anything else, let me say that I applaud and admire your self-hack. What I have to say below is merely an expression of some of my personal thoughts on this issue, and is not intended as any sort of attack on your self-identity.
What do you mean by gender identity, exactly? One might disclaim any explicit, verbally-endorsed gender identity, while still retaining the psychological traits that others would categorize as characteristically masculine or feminine.
For myself, I don’t consider myself to have a strong gender identity, and am somewhat repulsed by the idea that some part of my core essence is intrinsically male. Thus, it is sometimes tempting to think of myself as agendered or androgynous, but I find myself rather persuaded by intellectual arguments to the effect that it’s simply not true, that as a question of simple fact, my psychology is intrinsically male, and that this remains the case no matter how I choose to verbally self-identify.
Sex isn’t just one trait; it’s a bundle of correlations between traits, a cluster in a high-dimensional configuration space. If I know the shape of your genitals, I can make all sorts of probabilistic predictions about your other features. The fact that these predictions are probabilistic in nature and that there are many exceptions (some men are shorter than most women, some men are gay, some men have two X chromosomes, &c.) doesn’t change the fact that they are doing useful cognitive work. You can think of this from a minimum-message-length perspective: if you’re trying to describe an adult human male in a limited number of bits, and the recipient of your message already knows a lot of things about humans, you can shorten your message by saying that you’re taking about a man and then describing the specific ways in which the man departs from the human male average, rather than describing every feature of the man from scratch without making any reference to sex at all.
Given that gender roles in some form have existed in every human society, given that there are clear evolutionary reasons to expect the existence of some psychological sex differences due to differing reproductive strategies, and given the experimentally-demonstrable fallibility of human introspection, I’m more inclined to interpret my personal feelings of disliking gender roles as more of a statement of values and of ideology than of my actually being ungendered in an empirically verifiable sense. I don’t think my mind feels intrinsically male from the inside—but it’s easy for me to say that, because I don’t know what it feels like to be female; any claim to androgyny that I might make could easily just be due to my ignorance of the real differences.
Thus, while I long for a transhumanist future in which people can self-modify to be whatever they want, and I celebrate and honor people’s rights to self-identify however they want, I tend to be respectfully skeptical of claims that a proper degendering can be accomplished with presently existing technology.
There is far greater psychological variation within each sex than there is between the sexes, is there not? Even if the space of all possible minds from XY-grown human brains and the space of all possible minds from XX-grown human brains do not perfectly overlap, I know of no evidence that suggests that the disparity is actually significant enough to be meaningful.
Is it even possible to reliably tell the difference between an XX brain and an XY brain just by looking at the structure of neurons? Has anything ever actually been found that was exclusive to one or the other?
It depends on what you’re measuring. Let me illustrate with a toy example. Consider some quantitative trait such that the trait value is normally distributed within each sex, and say that both distributions have the same standard deviation (call it s) but different means (call them x1 and x2). (Imagine two bell curves plotted on the same chart, partially overlapping.) We can measure the difference between the means in terms of s; this statistic is known as Cohen’s d:
d = (x1 - x2)/s
So if d is less than one, then there’s a sense in which we can say that the variation within a sex (as operationalized by the standard deviation s) is larger than the variation between sexes (as operationalized by the difference in means x1 - x2). But there’s nothing intrinsically special about d<1; if we chose some other way to operationalize the claim “more variation within a sex than between sexes,” we would get a different result.
As it turns out, d=1 is actually very large, as sex differences go: Janet Hyde reviewed a number of studies (PDF) and found d<1 for every trait measured except for throw velocity and throw distance (which aren’t even psychological).
Given that there is a large amount of overlap for every psychological trait measured, it’s tempting to conclude that there is there is therefore no such thing as psychological sex. Ultimately, however, I don’t think this inference is quite justified.
Why? Well, consider this diagram. In the diagram, if you look at any one particular trait in isolation, there is substantial overlap between groups, but if you look at the entire configuration space, the groups don’t overlap at all. I suspect this kind of phenomenon to apply to real-world psychological sex differences: the difference mostly isn’t in any one exclusive trait, but is buried in the correlations between traits.
If there were no psychological sex differences, you could learn any number of things about a person’s psychology, and yet still do no better than chance in trying to guess their physiological sex. But if there’s a statistical difference in some [ETA: statistically independent] traits, then as you learn more about a person, your probability of guessing wrong goes down exponentially. It might be an instructive exercise to explicitly construct a model and play around with the numbers a bit. Like, suppose hypothetically there were a sex difference of d=0.6 in ten different [independent] psychological traits, and consider a hypothetical individual who has the female mean value for all of these traits. The normal distribution peaks at a probability density of 1/sqrt(2pi) = 0.3989, and has a probability density of 0.3331 at plus-or-minus 0.6 standard deviations, so (if I understand the relevant math) we can predict that our hypothetical individual is female with probability (0.3989/0.3331)^10/(1 - (0.3989/0.3331)^10) = 0.86. Of course, this is only a model, and different choices of parameters will give us different results. What I like about this view is that we’ve reduced the issue to a quantitative one; the claim that there is such a thing as psychological sex can be interpreted as meaning that the probability of guessing a person’s sex correctly given adequate psychological information is close to one.
I do not possess detailed familiarity with the neuroscience literature, but in my current state of incomplete information, my guess would be yes. See, e.g., this summary, which claims differences in white matter/gray matter ratios and in the relative sizes of different brain regions.
As explained in my commentary above, I don’t think this question is as relevant as it first appears: it could be possible to classify brains by sex given a sufficiently large number of sufficiently large statistical differences, even if there is no particular feature possessed by all and only brains of one sex.
Aw. When I did the same thing, the male parts of my identity did turn out to be cached… but I couldn’t want to remove them. (I don’t know the mechanism that led me to absorb them, rather than the female equivalents, given that everyone including me thought I was a girl.) For example, I’m weak. I dislike being mocked for it, and I’d like to live in a world where men can be weak; but given that the norm exists, I want it to apply to me.
I am upvoting a lot of these posts.
E Night- You are offering a wonderfully unique view on this issue and I would love to see you make a discussion post about it!
Do you mean not gendered, or null-gendered? Or something else entirely?
I hunger for details. When dysphoric I do a dissociatey thing where my gender gets pushed under the rug. If I could sustain a less bad variant of that, it might spare me a lot of trouble.
Agender means not having a gender at all; dissolving the entire category, not just occupying a neutral position within it.
What worked for me may not work for you, but what I did was carefully examine the pieces of my mind that were male and trace out how they got there. In my case, they were all simply Cached Thoughts I had absorbed from the environment, and never questioned before.
What does it mean to be agendered? Can you provide a specific example?
I’ve never respected gender roles; I’m a fairly androgynous (physically and behaviorally) male and I’m attracted to fairly androgynous females… but I don’t know how one would go about “dissolving” their hormones and genitalia.
As a trans-girl who more or less transcends gender, in what specific ways have you “hacked” yourself?
As I’ve already explained to two other commenters, the first step was digging through my own mind for every piece of myself that was male and tracing how it got there. This took over a year to actually do, but all of those pieces turned out to be Cached Thoughts I had absorbed from the environment.
Another way to look at it, is that in social contexts a person’s body is a lot like a costume that comes with a role to play. I found that gender is purely a function of that role, at least in my case. I would hypothesize that dysphoria, at least in part, results from an individual having an especially clear concept of the body they wished they had, and subconsciously trying to play the role attached to that body instead of their own.
I had my own breakthrough when I learned to recognize and differentiate the role from myself and detach myself from it, so that nothing in my personality depended on my body(I could freely want a different body without it affecting who I see myself as). Ironically, I think role-playing in online games played a large part in my learning to do that.
Oh sorry I must have missed that. My mistake. Anyways, I agree that a person’s body is basically a costume or a shell and that there is often a role associated with that. However, how do you deal with the social aspect of being agendered? As far as my experience goes in the real world, you can tell people all you want that you’re without gender but if you look like a boy you’ll be treated like one. Whether you play that role or not.
I remember when I first started really passing and the world started treating me as a girl I would constantly worry about playing into the stereotypical role: should I be wearing make-up today, do I look okay, should I pretend to be bad at that? I quickly realized however that there was no point to transitioning just to conform to a new role again. So I simply stopped trying to play into any specific gender role and did what comes naturally. Since then I identify somewhat as a tomboy. I do what I like and I like what I do and I’ve never been happier. I would never want to go back to having a male shell however, the female body is by far the closest to my gender identity. Is that sort of what you’re aiming at?
You actually answer this yourself.
I wouldn’t really proclaim my lack of gender identity in any case, unless the subject came up specifically. If the body you have is going to affect how people treat you, I feel that wanting a different body for the role it comes with isn’t addressing the problem so much as dodging it.
What I mean is, if I’m going to be treated a certain way just because of the body I have, it doesn’t matter to me (on the meta level) what that treatment is. I’m treated like a boy because I look like one, but to me, that isn’t any better or worse than being treated like anything else because I look like one. It’s a much deeper and more general problem than a person’s personality not meshing well with the role socially associated with their sex.
Granted, the body I have isn’t the body I would choose to have, but to me that now feels like something entirely unrelated to issues of identity. With the conscious recognition and isolation of the role, all possible bodies are equal so far as my identity is concerned.
Not quite; I don’t believe gender identity should exist at all. Rather, what I’m aiming at is the separation of preference-of-body and preference-of-role from each other as well as from identity. A question I once posed to myself was, if all the social connotations attached to each of the sexes were perfectly reversed, swapped, would that change what body you would choose to have? And I found that I could not give a simple answer. The question of body seemed straightforward, but my mind kept trying to attach something else that confused the answer, and that something turned out to be the question of role. Suddenly it was clear to me, on a gut level, that they really were separate questions, and that the question of role was effectively a question of environmental preference that just happened to be tangled up with this “gender” concept in our own society.
How has that made your life different?