It's not my incredulity I leveraged to make my point. It's social clout and tradition. Like in Thailand you have ladyboys there, it's a "thing", so sure it can be. But here, it isn't.
Kathoey (the term "ladyboy" is generally considered offensive) are no more common in Thailand than trans people are in many other countries. The reason why you think this is a "thing" in Thailand is because Thailand has a particular history with sex tourism, and because for a long time white people have specifically traveled to Thailand in order to pay for sex, including sex with kathoey.
That's not the only reason, but you are not doing yourself any favours if your goal is to demonstrate that this is anything other than personal incredulity. The fact that something is "a thing" to you doesn't actually matter. Trans people in other countries have a history and identity just as long-lived and socially relevant as kathoey do in Thailand, it's just less relevant to you because it's not being marketed to you.
Note that this is not to downplay the presence of trans sex workers in other countries or to present sex work as shameful, only to point out that the reason white people are familiar with the presence of kathoey in Thai culture is primarily due to sex tourism.
Also, I am willing to say that this social element is precisely why we managed to achieve so much progress and came to dominate all other life forms on this planet, so I'd expect some gratitude towards the thing that made our lives into those of people and not of animals.
I'm not sure where this is coming from, but you've misunderstood.
The reproductive behaviour of most animals is driven by simple sensory and chemical signals. Most insects barely have a central nervous system, and yet they manage to reproduce with each other by reacting to basic pheremone signals. Humans don't work that way. There's no hard evidence that human pheremones even do anything. From an evolutionary standpoint, getting humans to reproduce with each other is actually very difficult. We have to be persuaded into it, which is why our genitals have an enormous number of pleasure receptors. Unlike most animals our sexual behavior is mostly if not entirely learned, which can result in all kinds of outcomes like people being turned on by shoes (or tigers).
Animals didn't evolve sociality in order to reproduce, and reproduction is not the "purpose" of sociality.
I may surprise you, but america is a lot less gendered than where I grew up.
I'm not American. I know what grammatical gender is, and I also know it's different from social gender (although they have interconnected histories).
Though I think you can incorporate ANY look into one of masculinity or femininity, it's not like this one look is default feminine.
I think what you are attempting to say, and I agree, is that there is more than one way of being masculine or feminine. What I kind of wish you would take from that is that me wanting to be masculine or feminine doesn't necessarily align with your own ideas about what I might mean by that.
However, if what you mean is that the meaning of masculinity and femininity is completely indeterminate and noone actually notices or cares about these things, you're simply wrong.
Like for example, I have long ass metal hair, but to me that is just cool and old school epic, not feminine at all.
How would you make it feminine?
What is the difference between the way you would wear your hair long and the way a woman would that make one masculine and the other feminine?
For example, I imagine that you don't heavily condition or treat your hair to make it look soft, smooth or shampoo-ad glossy. I imagine you don't backcomb or curl it unless you're into a
certain type of metal. I imagine you don't heavily style or shape it. Maybe you straighten it sometimes, but I imagine you probably try not to make that obvious. These things would be an acknowledgement that the aesthetic purpose of your hair is to look
pretty rather than
epic. Now, maybe I'm wrong, I've met metallers who took a great deal of care over their hair, but it's a statement to do that, because it is more transgressive (for men) than just wearing your hair long.
I think you are an inherently very rational and thoughtful person, so you recognized reality.
You've been telling me the opposite.
I'm not not a woman because I have a penis, but because I'm non-binary. I'm not a man either, although I also think that at some point in my life I was. What I want to be, and what I have worked hard to become, is neither of these things. I can resemble both of them, I've been mistaken for both of them and I can enjoy things which are associated with both of them, but resemblance is not reality. What I want is to be free to express myself in whatever way I want
without having to buy into one of these two identities.
TERFs, the actual sincere feminist TERFs not JK Rowling and her child-murder-fetishist friends, would argue that the way to do that is to retreat completely into an identity based on your "real" sex. You can do whatever you want but you have to admit you're a man and that your
primordial spiritual essence comes from your penis. Unfortunately, those are also people who think that said primordial spiritual essence makes all men into necrophiliac rapists (you know,
symbolically, so we don't have to do any work to substantiate it). I reject this. I reject the notion that I have a fundamental spiritual essence, and I especially reject that it comes from something as stupid as my genitals. I'm not ashamed of my genitals, but they're a very small part of me (insert joke here). They symbolize nothing.
Other people I think fail to do what you did, and just focus on really really wanting to be what they're not instead of being introspective and figuring out how to be ok with what they truly are.
The thing is, I could so easily turn this back. I could argue that the reason you believe that your genitals contain the essence of "what you truly are" is because you're not introspective enough to have found a better answer.
Being trans, even binary trans, is fucking hard sometimes. Noone just wakes up one day looking like a perfect glamorous woman or hunky man and never gets clocked. Being non-binary is even harder in some ways because very few people are ever going to get it. At the end of the day, we all live at the mercy of a world dominated by cis people, and if cis people want to make your life miserable there's not much you can do about it. Noone becomes trans or non-binary because they haven't given it enough thought, kind of the opposite.