Male and female are the things, you need tradition to establish other stuff as "things", you need to pass the test of time.
No you don't, that's obviously fallacious.
And even if you did, non-binary people have been around for decades. Your personal incredulity does not determine the nature of reality.
The reason we even have a social component to our lives or a social identity is a byproduct of our drive for survival through reproduction so it makes perfect sense to base your identity on the thing that you're trying to satisfy through being social in the first place.
The world is full of animals who live solitary lives and yet reproduce. Reproduction is actually one of the easiest parts of social life, so easy that you don't need to be a social animal to do it. You don't even need a central nervous system in order to do it. In fact, the capacity for abstract thought, language and social identity seems to make it
harder to reproduce, not easier. There are countless evolutionary advantages to being a complex, intelligent social animal. The ability to reproduce isn't one of them.
Not getting this basic thing is what makes me question if you actually have a normal range of emotions, because if you do you recognize that being in a particular mood is more about turning a dial like 10% higher on one part of your emotional range and having it be temporarily more dominant of a driving force, and not that this is the only emotion you have and everything else is erased.
Okay, so to try and explain it again. Identity and emotion are
different things. I'm not sure where you get the idea that anyone thinks otherwise. Emotions are gendered because the society we live in is deeply irrational and
everything in it is gendered, but that relates more to the expectations placed on people than the reality of their emotional states.
Now, because it's an issue close to my heart, I could point out that some people do have personality or identity disorders which means they lack a stable sense of identity, and for those people their identity might be heavily affected by their mood. Those people have very hard lives and deserve to be treated with respect, because they're still human beings like you even if they work a little differently sometimes.
But for me, no. My moods do not determine my identity. Furthermore, far from being constantly in flux, my identity is actually just as stable as yours. I am not a man one day and then a woman the next, I am always non-binary. Sometimes I feel like I want to be seen as more masculine (as more
like a man, not
as a man) and sometimes I want to be seen as more feminine (as more
like a woman) and I might express myself accordingly in order to be seen as such. But this isn't determined by my moods, it's mostly determined by how much I am experiencing gender dysphoria, because I do have gender dysphoria and while I don't subscribe to the idea that you can only be trans or non-binary if you have gender dysphoria, it's a big part of why I am the way I am.
We all have an internalized sense of who we are and how we would like others to see us. That's what identity ultimately is. It's not the same thing as your mood, although it can certainly make you very unhappy if the way you see yourself doesn't match up with the way others see you.
And I think we're talking about the same thing here but just using different words for it, that thing of wanting to be interpreted in such a way that people grasp as female is the thing I referred to as well, only I just used my own conception of a demure ladylike persona as the standard, instead of whatever it is you have in mind.
Again, I don't accept that being feminine, or even having a demure and ladylike persona (which I don't think is quite the same thing) is the same as feeling happy, or sad, or any other emotion. I think in large part masculinity and femininity are aesthetics, it's about what you look like. It's also about the position you occupy in a gendered society, the dynamics of your relationships with other people, which are not always heterosexual dynamics between men and women.
I am not a trans woman. There was a time in my life when I very much wanted to be a woman, but I am not that person and haven't been for decades. If I want to be feminine, it's not because I want to be a woman and it's certainly not because I want to live out your fantasies about demure straight women. I am literally none of those things, and I don't find them to be aspirational.
www.vox.com
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www.cnn.com
