gender-sex thread for posterity

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i'm copying/pasting this here bc it'll be good to hold onto this for further development or thinking about it, challenging it etc. i typed this out to respond to jay @jdragsky who is an indie game developer and a sweet person

  • hi jay, thanks for your question! totally agree that it makes sense in MH for your identity to be grounded in aesthetic, and (as i said offhandedly in the post) that's more accurate to the word 'identity' than some inner truth or being
  • i don't like subjective or objective as descriptors because i think they're imprecise, especially when talking about gender, so if i may try to like rephrase your question to understand what you might be going for, and please correct me:
  • "can a subject's gender be squared into an objective categorization or system, or must it be?" i think that this question rests on gender being a possession of the subject qua 'true/inner self' or something like that
  • and sorry for the lingo but: i don't think it's proper or useful to identify gender as such, or an instance of gender, necessarily with the ideal ego of the subject. as a lacanian, i tend to think of gender as such as an objectivity
  • that is, gender as such is a symbolic system into which the subject is thrust and through which the subject is constituted in retrospect; going off de beauvoir, 'to be a woman is to become a woman', but
  • this being-becoming does not correspond to the subject's imagined ideal version of themselves: rather, it corresponds to the conflict between their ideal self and their symbolic, 'objective' position (their own gender, i suppose) in gender qua system
  • this understanding of gender as a symbolic position and system which constitutes and encroaches upon the subject is valuable to understand its unconscious effects on the subject, and its role in social reality as the categorization and subjectification of people
if i were not budgeting character count, i would replace the above instances of 'gender' with 'gender-sex' with respect to the mutual construction and reinforcement of sex and gender

needs further thinking on; need to read irigaray and perhaps de beauvoir, or butler's article on her

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