the specter of cisgenderism

Neuroscience explains that there is no such thing as a male or female brain. even cis people who identify as either of the binary genders have no substantial correlation between their anatomy / genitals and their brain scans. To such a degree that to claim any single brain as being identifiable one gender or sex from another would be an extraordinary claim that would require extraordinarily convincing evidence to be considered scientifically justified. While much has been said regarding the nonbinary nature of anatomy (and more must be said) we should also discuss the nonbinary nature of the brain as being a social construct gender originates in the brain.

If I’ve lost you already then you may need to do some research, one or both of these links should get you up to speed:

• TEDxJaffa — Daphna Joel — Are brains male or female? ([VIDEO] this is someone who published a study showing that all brains are uniquely intersex*)
• Sex beyond the genitalia: The human brain mosaic ([TEXT] brains are nonbinary, according to an even more investigation)

So that’s the science of it, and if you were on board anyway hold on because we’re going to explore the implications for the rest of this post.

The idea that there are only two genders was never very popular throughout our earliest history but has gotten quite a cult following in recent mellenia, especially among occidental people groups. It was exported from occidentia through colonialism and these cultish ideas were forced onto people by the colonists even if their culture was not originally binary. Fortunately, despite the patriarchy’s violent and often lethal attempts to hold onto this false reality the understanding that gender is non binary is growing as we begin to discover the true nature of gender, and develop new words to describe our experiences, to describe how much our experiences differ from anything that could be called binary.

Neuroplasticity is the way in which our brains optimize themselves for the environment we are in, activities we do, perspective, thought patterns and more. It is the strengthening of neural pathways that are used or needed and the weaking of neural pathways which are not often needed or used. When you form or break a habit you are changing your brain structure through neuroplasticity. It’s the repetition that is strengthening those pathways. We also have strengthened pathways towards the environment we’re in, meaning we might be able to identify the sound of potential predator to avoid it if we have heard it a number of time. It’s the dopest shit that ever was.

This is why it makes perfect sense that both brains and genders would be nonbinary, because no one person has exactly the same environment, thoughts, experiences, actions, or relationships as one another. So no two brains will have optimized themselves in the same way. It’s an impossibility. It also indicates that gender fluidity is just as scientifically possible as any other gender experience, our brains are not lumps of rock, they are contiually updating themselves so we can think clearer, react faster, understand more, change behavior. Each one of us has a unique neurology and this results in us having unique personalities and unique genders.

bg no-rip reported

so if each person has a unique gender expression, and unique perception of their own and other people’s genders, what even are genders? you may have heard of the term social construct before. unfortunately many people hear it in a context of hostility and so they don’t actually spend any time imagining what it is. they reject the even learning what a social construct is. but the fact that a person’s brain and thus gender is unique means that only that person, who are the only ones who have experienced the uniqueness of their own gender who can determine what that gender is. no external test is able to discern it, not even a brain scan can as we are unique mozaic’s and have no distinguishable psychological difference.

as an analogy, for those with typical eye sight and can see the typical amount of colors, those colors are social constructs. this does not make them any less real to us, for many people colors have powerful associations, people choose colors when they choose where to live, or how to decorate where they live. many people have a favorite color, or bunch of colors. colors are meaningful. they’re just… imaginary. you see when we first learn our colors the visual representation we see correlates to certain light frequencies. and whenever we look at something of that frequency we should see the same visual representation of it in our vision.

but the visual representation in my mind might be completely different from the visual representation in your mind. we might all have our own unique perception of the frequencies, but because when we all point at a color we all have the same word associated to it we can communicate that to each other. that is a social construct, it is an idea, a concept, that is communicated socially, in other words anything you can imagine, if other people can imagine something recognizably distinct and you both agree to give it a name you’re good.

it’s even possible to have multiple different systems of social constructs. for example there are multiple systems of music, the one that is probably the most widespread in western music is the chromatic scale. pretty much all systems have octaves where a string that vibrates twice as fast as another is the same note as it (they sound the same to us). however how you split the space between them is not based on any material reason, there are mathematical reasons and aesthetic (eg harmonic) reasons for favoring one over the other but these are things we imagine not things we are observing in the physical world. and some people have had such strong associations between specific notes in the chromatic scale that they composed only in some keys and not others. who knows, perhaps we perceive sound differently and that’s why some keys appeal to some of us more than others.

so when we say that gender is a social construct, we mean that we have a system of designating gender that many people have learned and so can communicate about. like sound, we might recognize when something sounds similar to something else, but how we divide up the space between those who are most different from each other is an entirely fabricated thing because biology and neuroscience indicates that no real distinctions exist. there are overlaps for sure but there are no binaries.

neuroplasticity slows down a bit with age but it never shuts down, so we are all unique and constantly changing in unique ways represented by physical changes in our brain structures, the same brain structures where the social constructs of gender are resident, that makes the idea of gender being a binary not only absurd, not only unscientific, but down right harmful when people lives are on the line because of science-denying extremist hate groups (eg: terfs, alt-right).

ok, so gender’s not a binary, the science checks out, we did the math, now that we have that sorted. i guess we’re done.

thanks for reading everyone! if you found this interesting you might also like my post about a free association model of gender called genre-

wait, what?

society gives zero fucks about the science of it?

( pictured above: types of headaches )

why are the cis?

have you ever gotten completely obsessed about something, fixed on it, and when given evidence to the contrary ignored it and believed what you wanted to believe until you have a rude awakening? or perhaps you are someone who reads books and doesn’t like watching movies made of books you like because you know it is not going to match up to what you imagined, and you spend most of your time watching the movie just trying to resolve the conflict in your mind between how you had imagined those people and how you are seeing them portrayed in front of you.

before the movie comes out you have no problem discussing specific characters and what you like about them, which you like most, which you find attractive even, but these are characters you have all imagined differently. however should any dispute arise as to the specifics of any physical appearance there is the text of the book you can go back to and descriptions to read and that settles any disputes. unless the text is ambiguous and then people will continue discussing it until the heat death of the universe (we’ll get back to ambiguity later).

so, for reasons that are beyond the scope of this discussion (as i don’t think we need tie ourselves down to any previous historic system of gender), there arose this idea that by tying gender to biology they could “have a more” [insert justification here].

oh, we need the strong men to hunt the dangerous animals and the weaker women to gather the berries, that is one example of a justification, yet it is artificial, because whoever was physically capable of hunting could do so, and even if that happened to be divided among people along genital lines (archaeology suggests this distinction is also not a sure thing), there is not stopping any of those people with similar bodies having a different gender. so this justification is a logical loop, it supposes that gender is biological and then declares that historical activities were gendered because of biology. is this some form of racism towards prehistoric people? the assumption that whatever their “job” would be would determine their gender? so all bankers should hook up with only soccer players, and musicians must only be attracted to baristas, like what kind of species do they think prehistoric humans were?

or, the need for infants lead to a system that made sure penises and vaginas were in the same bed as much as possible so that we get more infants. um, no dear, you can have penises and vaginas all day long in the same bed while those who own them have any array of genders imaginable. and today we even have birth control invalidating this “plan” further. so you have to first assume gender is biological before that statement even makes sense. and while we’re at it, if population is really a concern let’s have that discussion but it’s not because we already produce enough food for 10 billion people and simply neglect to give billions of people the food they need because distribution by capital is one of the worst possible systems imaginable. we would also make the planet too hot to live on by our own body heat before we used up all the space on earth with modern technology so there’s definitely enough space.

i could go on, but every single argument in favor of cisgenderism follows this pattern. it makes perfect sense as long as you have faith in the sacred truth that gender is biological, and that sexual characteristics are binary instead of on a spectrum themselves. You believe those lies and bam, suddenly you can tell exactly what gender someone is just by looking at their genitals. success! (/sarcasm … this is what the cis are actually doing wtf).

and this is why cis people hate it when you talk to them about the gender binary, or about gender being a social construct, or about transgender people wanting things to change. because they read in a book one day that peenor equals boy and veevo equals girl, and the book said that these are the two options so everything that doesn’t match up must be a disorder. maybe not even a book, maybe it was something they were taught as children. or maybe it was something that a fedora wearing frosted tips troll implied was funny to think and you just want to watch the world burn so you pick the worst possible opinions you can find on everything but that’s almost entirely a symptom of privilege in a highly unequal society.

but whatever the case may be, this myth has strong associations with it, stronger than colors or sounds, maybe on a level with smells? maybe stronger, people who believe the myth sometimes kill those who call it a myth so maybe stronger. some people base their entire identity on these distinctions, and base their conception of sexuality on them. and despite many transgender people loudly and clearly stating that their experience of being subjected to a life in a society that is possessed with this myth is horrible, despite our life expectancy being nearly three times lower, and suicide rates nearly three times higher (numbers vary from place to place, the trends are like that allover), there’s scientific papers, studies, activists, lawyers, there’s a lot of people communicating that this myth is harming and killing people (yes, really) and yet it persists.

because people have imagined a system of gender, and playing a song in a different scale sounds odd to them, they aren’t used to it, they mistake unfamiliarity for unnatural. they benefit from ignoring these realities. not only do they have to cope with less change by declaring fealty to the myth but by being in a harmonious position with it they can impact social pressure onto those who are not and take advantage of their discordance to “the norm”. they like the system they have. they have those strong associations and they don’t want to let go of them.

and yet, despite the monumental shift in thinking these people need to undergo to accept transgender people as valid, many of them manage it. they take the science into consideration and know that the binary imposed by cisgenderism is incapable of describing actual gender diversity and uniqueness. it is possible. and part of the reason I’m writing this is in the hopes that someone somewhere will be nudged towards science acceptance by hearing a unique perspective on things.

it is now later, time to talk about ambiguity

the discussion surrounding transgender people has been extremely valuable and important, but it should not have been made in the absence of a clear alternative. perhaps this absence can be explained by poor science, it’s only recently that neuroplasticity and the unique brains that it results in has been discovered, and even more recently that people born with penises and those born with vaginas had their brain scans compared and no significant link between anatomy and brain structure found. so we can be accepting and understanding of the discussion that has taken place over the passed decades. however it is time we started to seriously discuss an alternative to a gender binary and biologically associated genders.

those who are not familiar with the nuances might at first think that this discussion is already taking place en masse, it is not, however pockets of it do gain attention from time to time. for example people often share memes with declarations regarding the nonbiological nature of gender, memes about nothing being able to invalidate a person’s choice of gender identity. but if this discussion was universal i wouldn’t need to be writing all of this. there is much hope that as the discourse surrounding the concept of transgender expands some tipping point will be reached and the cis will finally “get it”. i find that to be dangerously naive. if we are looking for incremental improvements the oppressive class will never surrender its privilege entirely.

what we need is a clear, unambiguous, irrefutable, scientifically accurate, cohesive, and easy to understand concept of gender because many people will not let go of cisgenderism until we give them that. the only other option is to use coercion to force them to let go of it by threat. but we should aim to force them to let go of it by logic not threat because there are more of them than us (right now) and so we will come off second best from that endeavor. This is wildly different from saying people should be pacifists, violence in defense of yourself may be unavoidable, but if it is used as a tool of changing people’s minds rather than to protect the lives and liberty of those being attacked you make yourselves villains and reduce the stability and permanence of any ground you gain. in my mind there is no option but to dispel the myths people have regarding gender, not just beat them into keeping their true thoughts about it quiet until you turn your back.

at first i thought transgender theory was able to provide this unambiguous alternative to cisgenderism, people started talking about how gender is a spectrum, sex is a spectrum, your gender can be whatever you say it is, gender is a social construct. all of those things are true. the gender spectrum is hyperdimensional of course, and sex is an ambiguous term to begin with. but let’s have a look at an example of something commonly said on social media by radical left feminists.

trans women are women

i have nothing wrong catchphrases themselves but let’s see what potential meanings people might have of this.

• both cis women and trans women are women
• both cis women and trans women have equal right to use the identity woman and have equal claim to womanhood
• trans women and not cis women are women

now none of those statements can be said to be obviously wrong based on the words alone and not any extra information, but the first and last one are contradictory, so should anybody not have the specific extra information required to identify the correct interpretations from the incorrect ones. the answer is the 3rd statement by the way. but why does this ambiguity exist?

it’s my opinion that the ambiguity stems from the term transgender, while i fully support (and am one of) the people to whom it applies, i’m not convinced it is a word that is able to get the job done. i’ve already discussed how i think the linguistic inertia most people will experience will associate the word trans with transition before transgender (in this post if you’re interested). which subconsciously (or even consciously) manifests in the belief that gender is determined by a person’s biology and that a transgender person is someone who wants to transition. this is abjectly false but the word association our brains does cares not for fact checking. while it’s possible to actively engage in such fact checking and so change your word association, only the most socially responsible among people would do so out of altruism. giving them an unambiguous (and thus not the word transgender) concept of gender may tempt them to do this to alleviate their own cognitive dissonance borne from knowing they have obsolete understandings of the world.

there is of course nothing wrong with positive social pressure on people to adopt acceptance of scientifically possible gender (nonbinary), but perhaps that pressure can be more effective if we have a simple and cohesive gender model rather than an ambiguous one to apply that pressure towards mass adoption. i don’t really care which name we use for a scientifically possible gender model (although i do have a suggestion), what i care more about is that the word we use implies the model we want to use and that’s not what the word transgender does. transgender implies that such a change is necessary but not what we should be changing to. and so at a fundamental level even if you have all the right arguments and definitions to defend the “correct” understanding of transgender there are still going to be people who have an entirely different model of gender that they can plausibly advocate for taking advantage of the ambiguity of one not already being specified in the name.

lets dig a bit deeper into the definition of transgender

transgender: denoting a person who does not identify with their assigned gender.

(cisgenderism does not make a distinction between sex and gender so as gender is more relevant to a discussion on gender that is sufficient for the definition).

this definition correctly points to the action which perpetuates the biologically associated gender binary, the assigning of a gender to an infant.

it fails to address the reason why that is a problem, fails to provide an alternative, and fails to communicate the inaccurate understanding of gender, again this may have been influenced by the limited understanding of neurology

the contributions made have been heroic and significant. but we are trying to move from the cluster boink we have now to something simple and cohesive and nostalgia and historical reverence aren’t going to get us there. a clear message that is scientifically accurate and which invalidates the justification behind assigning a child a gender at birth is going to be a much better path to a gender liberated society than complaining so much that people agree to respect your pronouns just to be “politically correct” instead of because they genuinely respect that your gender is valid. yes the action needs to be stopped and the term transgender is still useful in communicating that, but it can’t do that AND give people an alternative model as it is already negatively weighted away from such an action (the phonetical similarity to the word “transition” weights it towards the incorrect biological gender model).

not to mention that some people use the word trans to refer to an anatomical transition independent of a gender transition. similar to how nonbinary is a word intersex people have claim to as much as people referring to nonbinary gender do.

furthermore, a big problem with the term transgender is that it draws attention to the mistake that was made, letting a mistake define you, rather than something which would reaffirm in the positive your association to the gender you identify with. this is felt strongly by those with material conditions which prevent them from being able to explore transitioning. they need to be able to live in their current body, being reminded every time they identify themselves that they are victims makes this difficult. perhaps we need to listen more to people in those positions as being able to transition is definitely a privilege which can cause distortions in perception (as i myself have until i eliminate those distortions in regards to race).

for some people the desire to transition would dissolve if society stopped perceiving them along a biologically associated binary. as such removing the biological associations from gender can have a material impact in people’s lives even if they remain unable to transition due to other discriminations (eg: capitalism which is an ableist vector of discrimination). but others will still want to transition having not been given the option to do so at puberty and so capitalism is also an obstacle to gender liberation and should be opposed as much as the patriarchy. nevertheless, moving the discussion away from assignation itself and towards the busting of the myth that gender is biological will have more benefit than simply educating the cis and so i believe is worth considering.

what is an assigned gender?

an assigned gender is by definition mythical, an infant’s personality is nowhere near developed enough for it to understand the concept of gender and make an informed decision on the matter. so whatever an assigned gender is, we are already aware that it may not be correlated to a person’s actual gender right there. this gender has been assigned based on something anatomical so the distinction between it and another gender is mythical as we cannot predict a person’s future gender. furthermore there are gender roles associated with these assigned genders and the children are coerced by both parents, siblings, peers, extended family, friends of their parents, and the general public based on perceived identification of a person’s gender (signaled via clothing when a person is not naked).

and so not only has the fact that your gender has been assigned based after birth but it is continually presumed throughout your life and any attempt to dissociate oneself from the things considered appropriate for one’s gender role they are aggressively bullied into stopping. and as you can’t tell if a person is trans simply by sight (as there is literally no well to tell if someone is trans except by asking them), the plague of misgendering is not challenged by the terminology of the word transgender. however, the educational information regarding the non-correlation between anatomy and gender and the impossibility of a binary gender does challenge the plague of misgendering on more grounds than simply “it’s disrespectful”, but on the grounds that it is both disrespectful AND objectively disproven by scientific investigation and the testimony of many transgender people. correlating gender with biology leads to real harm and abuse of children and adults, this is much more important to communicate than whether a person’s gender was guessed correctly or not.

but the ambiguity does not stop there.

there is ambiguity regarding what an assigned gender itself is, while assigned genders and their corresponding gender roles and biological associations are fundamentally and indisputably different from the gender one might conceptualize free from biology, many people are still adamant that because they both use the same labels for their corresponding genders that they must be the same gender. the worst possible interpretation of the phrase “trans women are women” is that there is no difference between trans women and cis women, if there were no difference the words themselves would not exist. yet even in radical left feminist social media spaces there are people who take this interpretation as truth and as a result a person who has significant dysphoria and dissociation with the gender role and biological associations that their assigned gender represents, and yet be told that they are still cisgender simply because they do not wish to transition, or, wish to transition but not to change the gender identifying word from that which they were assigned.

these limitations on diversity are not based on the fact that gender and biology are not correlated, because there is no way for a person who is certain they are not cis but still have associations with the identity for non biological reasons they should be considered to have the same gender as the person who associations with that same identity but was not assigned it (regardless of them wishing to or achieving a transition of anatomy). but these people are not considered to have the same genders by many trans activists and this further causes dysphoria in those who want to feel like they have the same gender as those with another anatomy but have had their biology used to deny that. now they are being denied to have the same gender as others because of their biology unless you make the compromise of believing that genders oriented around biology, binarism and coercion are the same as genders oriented around affinity, nonbinarism, and free association. something many people are not willing to do. we want to define our gender free from biology and binary, as such we want to share gender identities with those of all different biologies, and nonbinarism implies the line between who does or does not qualify is largely up to those people themselves.

where do we go from here

there are the mythical genders based on biology but there seems to be mythical genders among the transgender community too, mythical because they attempt to correlate gender and biology which is unscientific. but instead of trying to gain incremental progress in society by trying to expand people’s options, or allow people to change options, or try to get people to stop trying to force options on other people including children, we should be looking for a revolutionary change, changes which sets aside existing definitions and associations and replace them with updated and scientifically accurate definitions and associations.

meaning i don’t even want to have the discussion on which biologies qualify for which gender identities, i want to utterly remove that narrative from existence by spreading awareness of its inherent inconsistencies. i want us to move away from a discussion about simply whether a person was misasigned or not, and onto the fact that this assignment was justified by oudated and obsolete scientific information regarding the possibility of gender being determined by anatomy. i want this acceptance of the nonbinary and nonbiology of gender to lead to the acceptance of intersex people. i want people who associate with femininity to use the same gender identity as me regardless of their biology without us having to include cisgender falsifications within the sphere of the gender we share.

doing this is not going to extinguish transphobia, but it will help towards that, we will need to accompany this with a strong advocacy for gender expression confirming biological transitions. every trans person who was not given the option to transition at puberty is owed a transition by society, that is only a fraction of what we are owed and those reparations should be made gladly, hopefully sooner rather than later, but definitely as a part of any socialist or anarchist revolution. not all of us will want to transition, but we deserve to be given the option. we cannot reclaim our childhoods and adulthoods but we need to recognize the ways in which we have been oppressed. these issues remain complimentary when we dissociate gender from biology, because we are affirming the desire to transition while also alleviating as much of the dysphoria as possible by removing biology from our conception of gender. we do this not because it’s a good idea though, but because a free association model of gender is true to the nonbinary and unique nature of our genders as products of our unique and nonbinary neurology.

when i say a free association model of gender is needed, i am referring to a model which embraces the unique property of a person’s gender, because gender’s are unique only the person who experiences them has authority over what it should be called, and if their expression has not already been associated with that gender it the associations simply expand to include the new expression. free association refers to the idea that people should be free to associate with things, even if only temporarily, and so a free association model of gender allows each person to associate freely with the gender they identify with and which only they can possibly be aware of.

we can categorically say that gender is not correlated to a person’s anatomy but we cannot categorically say that it is correlated to anything else either. while a free association model of gender allows anyone to identify with any gender, the nature of being within a new model does imply that all of those genders are not associated to biology, and so they would not be comparable to genders that are biologically associated even if those which aren’t have claimed the same gender identifying words or labels (like man / woman ).

so instead of trying to canonize a myth based on biology, or trying to canonize a half-myth based on mistaken assignment, we can have myth free gender which is based on free association.

my suggestion for this new gender model which is based on free association and free from biology can be found here :)

Much appreciate the attention you gave this text :3

want more?

i highly recommend squiggly boi the infographic meme novel i made about a fictional world of block people who have the terrible idea of putting themselves in boxes and how this affects those who aren’t box shaped (note: if you’re on mobile you may need to select the “view desktop version” button, not sure where else to host it at the moment).

You can also catch me on facebook if you want to chat, here.