Our sex should obviously not be a major part of our lives outside of, like, medical things. But our society forces gender on us as a set of roles, expectations etc. to follow based on our sex. So, ideally, there would be no gender, right?
But trans people throughout history have wanted to present as the opposite gender. This is in addition to cis people who oppose their own gender’s roles and do the opposite things. But trans people, obviously, go much further than any cis person does.
Is this because trans people want to actually be the opposite sex and for a long time being the opposite gender was the only possible thing? But now thanks to medical advancements they can get closer to that goal than any other time?
Why is this? Is it something in the brain, like with gay people? So, can you do a brain scan to see if people are actually gay or trans? Would that even help? Actually, I can imagine it helping in an ideal world, but in our fascist reality that will probably just end up genociding people. So, uh, scrap that.
Any essential books for reading up on all this stuff? Thanks
I read about how the brain scans today are probably very biased and that “male” and “female” brains might not even be a real thing. Wild.
the differences they observe are completely informed by the semantic categories they put on the groups of brains before they even start observing them. anything gleaned by looking at pregendered brains is going to reenforce biases that existed going in
i think i phrased that a bit too broadly. the categories that neuroscientists use are specifically contested & problematic; there isn’t argumentation against say, igneous rock being a meaningful category—but there are serious debates around how gender and sexuality should be conceived & the research that approaches from a heteronormative angle is going to be flawed from those incorrect assumptions
