8 Bit Philosophy: Is Gender Real?

[FalloutJack]

I realize this is a philosophical conundrum, relating questions of perception and personal identity, but I feel the biology of the matter sort of answers it right off. Humans (and other lifeforms) reproduce with two beings combining their DNA to produce offspring. Humans might debate this, but many animals won't be. Gender kind of outs itself in nature.

That is why people often use sex to refer to the biology of it XX XY and use gender to refer to the sociology of it. Sex is a thing in nature, but the fluff we build around sex is entirely our own imagination. Like there is nothing in our DNA that says pink is a XX color, or that the Y hates long hair. That is all stuff that we made up for one reason or another. Gender is about as real as we want it to be in that respect.

But all that is about looks and preference and about how these aspects are universal. That isn't gender. Girly men and buff women do not the other sex make. When someone says they're a woman in a man's body or vice versa and they're serious about it, their appearance is only the surface of the issue they face. Their biology is what's important. To change genders, you need to physically alter parts of your body AND the body chemistry. If it's only the mentality your changing, then a man is still a man, but he's decided to go homosexual, say. Essentially, I saw this, and I imagined two dogs in heat during the lecture, and realized that the nature of the beast defeated the argument right off. It's an interesting topic, but I can't agree.

 

[Vanilla_Knight]

"Should the category of boys and girls even exist?"

These people can't be for real can they? Do others take this seriously when they gloss over the biological foundation that humans are sexually-dimorphic and that, yes, women and men are comparably different in many ways objectively through the lense of biological sciences? "Gender fluidity" has arisen out of the cultural creation of the distinction between sex and gender. "Gender is a social construct" is a statement in itself a social construct. One of the setbacks to this discussion is that in some camps people believe that identity > biological sex. That if one calls oneself a "male" they are male regardless of the more concrete facts.

My head hurts...

 

[Dollabillyall]

It's kind of sad to realise that while most 8-bit philosophy videos explain (partially or wholly) opposing ideas from several different thinkers this subject only gets the one thinker. Makes it feel like political propaganda more than philosophical debate.

 

[dreng3]

I think that's going a bit far. Consider what the evolutionary psychologist in the documentary you posted said about the hormones being controlled by the brain. It's really hard to separate the human brain from the human mind, as well as hard to separate the single human mind from the grouped human mind as seen in social contexts. I don't think it's so much that "Gender Roles" could be a falsehood as their reasons for existing and their modern relevance (or lack thereof) may not be what is commonly believed.

The issue is that hormones are produced by many things and interact in a complex soup. The liver, ovaries, testes and many other glands and tissues all produce or regulate the hormone levels in the human body so to say that it's all down to the brain is a little oversimplified. I agree that separating the human brain from the human mind is tricky, but ti's only tricky in the same way that separating a computer program from the hardware it's running on is tricky. You change the hardware in some way and that will heavily affect the program. The difference for humans is neuroplasticity where our "Hardware" is constantly shifting to create new memories and associations between them.

Then again, I've always preferred picking out the individual over the group but people do act differently alone than they do as a group which is why group psychology and sociology are separate to psychology.

However, maybe I was overdramatic, but I did couch my point with a "May be" since not proving something does not disprove that it exists, Newton thought that Light was particles, then everyone thought it was a wave for a good while, and now we know it's both. So a theory which seemed wrong can be proven right with evidence in time. I'm going to keep an open mind on this as much as I can but as far as my vision sees, the evidence for gender being more socially imposed than biologically determined in some way is not looking good.

Considering the content of the thread so far, let me know when that happens.[/quote]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the plasticity of the brain decreases as humans age doesn't it? Meaning that the formative years are actually just that, there are examples of how one hemisphere of the brain compensates if the other loses function or is lost entirely, however I believe that those examples all involve rather young people. This can easily encourage the interpretation that gender does indeed exist, however there is also hormones to consider. A hormonal imbalance might change the reactions we have to certain stimulus which could, hypothetically, be perceived as veering from common gender roles. I would probably conclude that gender does exist, and that it is both nature and nurture since the sexes are geared towards different roles in society ad those roles will invariably shape the individual. Sex would be a bit more vague seeing as physical attraction is almost entirely hormonal and chemical which makes it subject to greater fluctuations than something dependent on neuroplasticity.

But what the heck do I know, I only did a couple of classes on the stuff and follow what I perceive as a reasonable track of thought.

 

[Terminal Blue]

Yes, because David Reimer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer

What about David Reimer?

Are you telling me that if I take a person with no genitals who has to urinate through a hole in their belly button and will be relentlessly teased and mocked for it, constantly monitor and punish them for any form of behaviour which contradicts my deeply insulting view of femininity and force them to act out a submissive role in mock sex acts with their brother they might somehow develop the idea that being socially female is not something they want.

I'm sorry, I'm afraid I must stitch my skull together now because my mind has been blown. I mean, what could possibly have given them that idea?????

Obviously though, biology wins.. even though David Reimer actually had no testes and was therefore hormonally indistinguishable from a female-bodied person. It must be biology, right?

As an outsider to the whole notion, I find the endless search for "evidence" that what we do socially is the product of essential biological mandates to be somewhat.. neurotic, for want of a better word. Where does this need actually come from, what produces it, why are cases like that of David Reimer held up as paragon examples even when the basic facts of the case have to be altered to make them mean what people need them to mean, while the incredibly vast weight of gender ambiguity in the world around us goes ignored?

Jacques Lacan, who was one of Butler's biggest influences, suggested that preserving a stable sense of self requires us to reject the possibility of alternatives. To be male, we have to reject or cut out the possibility of us ever being female. This serves to conceal from ourselves the actual instability of our own identities by dodging any difficult epistemological questions about how we come to know our own identities in the first place, about how we actually arrive at the point of looking in the mirror and saying "I'm a man" or "I'm a woman".

If I ask the question "does gender exist" and someone answers "well, men on average tend to have better spatial awareness than women", that may or may not be true, but actually it isn't an answer to the question, because the question was not "do men (on average) have better spatial awareness than women", it was "does gender exist". To answer the question in that way relies on the preexisting assumption that it does, and that assumption is presumed to be self-justifying. Who are these men in the first place, why does the fact that they may or may not have better spatial awareness (on average) constitute the basis of a meaningful social distinction? In what way is that basis reflected in the conditions of emergence for the category of gender itself?

In my experience, people have a remarkable investment in not answering these questions.

 

[Ariseishirou]

It actually begins at birth, research has shown that newborns (So no subconscious conditioning) show statistically significant differences in behavior, with boys focusing on mechanical constructs and girls focusing on faces.

I know exactly which study you're referring to here (by Baron-Cohen) and the results have been thoroughly debunked by multiple sources. To start with, the study was critically flawed: it wasn't blind, and both the subjects parents and those performing the experiment knew the purpose, which infants were male and which were female, and the (intended) result. Baron-Cohen's own graduate students used the mobile, and analysis of his recordings showed that they - intentionally or otherwise - moved it faster and more vigorously for male infants. Secondly, the results have been widely misreported: it wasn't the case that female infants stared more at faces and male infants the mobile; both stared at faces more than the mobile, but male infants stared at the mobile slightly longer than female infants, which stands to reason, since the experimenters made it a more attractive object for the male infants (because they knew what outcome their PI, with his "male-brained" vs "female-brained" theory of autism, expected/desired). When asked to respond to these critiques of his experimental procedure, Baron-Cohen declined to defend his results, and instead slandered his detractors as "agenda-driven" and "feminists."

This is similar to the study that purported to show that young infants were "hard-wired" to prefer female faces as almost all infants did so; yet, when it was performed by young infants with primary caregiver fathers, they overwhelmingly preferred male faces (surprise, most primary caregivers of infants are women). The fact of the matters is that very young infants/newborns can't even distinguish between living and non-living objects (see: mirror neurons), to say that there are ingrained differences between male and female infants before even the most minute cognitive development has occurred is absurd and almost certainly agenda-pushing (see: Baron-Cohen, above).

 

[Terminal Blue]

David Reimer, his life and his death give us enough clues to conclude that gender is probably real.

How so?

Firstly, what is gender? Secondly, what is the basis of ontological reality? Thirdly, under what conditions could gender be observed as ontologically real? Fourthly how does David's life actually meet these conditions? Fifthly, can all theoretically consistent possible alternatives be eliminated?

 

[Terminal Blue]

2) Testosterone production begins in the brain. Hypothalamus releases a hormone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonadotropin-releasing_hormone which then hits the pituitary gland to sex organs. So your assertion that the subject was hormonally indistinguishable from a female is baseless.

Unless you can demonstrate that sex differences in the hypothalamus (which themselves have to be produced prenatally in this case) are capable of compensating for the absence of functioning testes, it really isn't. "Female" is a spectrum, not a fixed point. Some women produce a relatively large amount of testosterone (through excercise, for example), it doesn't magically cause them to develop a male gender identity. If gender identity is essential, it must therefore be linked to something essentially different between men and women.

I will concede that it wasn't a completely serious point, just a reflection on the ludicrousness of some of the "god of the gaps" thinking requires to sustain essentialism. The need to appeal to unknown and unobserved features of biology which must exist even if they're invisible is pretty weird, to be honest.

As for snark, I apologize. That is something I could stand to improve on.

 

[Ariseishirou]

As in, do sexual features influence what societies consider to be a "masculine" and "feminine" behaviour? Oh, almost certainly. Are but are they also influenced by society, and are many aspects of gender entirely performative (especially those which differ across societies - e.g. in American society women are perceived to be more "group-oriented" whereas in Japanese society women are perceived to be more "individualistic", the commonality in both cases being that the opposite is the ideal, and the feminine =/= the ideal)? Yes. Clearly.

There's honestly not even that much debate about this anymore, in scientific circles. There is no "is it nature or nurture?" - it's obviously both. "To what extent" of each is the question, at this point. The influence of both has been demonstrated beyond doubt. The only debate you get in terms of "no social influence, it's all genetic" or "no genetic influence, it's all social" is either the extreme feminist or anti-feminist factions, or people shirking honest debate in an attempt to strawman their opponent into one or the other. (E.g. "I don't think that's sufficient evidence that (insert behaviour here) is genetically 'hard-wired' as you haven't ruled out social factors" -> "Oh? So you think ALL gender is NURTURE, do you?!?!?" and vice versa).

 

[Dalrien]

It seems i'll have to start refering to people by sex instead of "gender" which has become a ridiculously convoluted term for the sake of making people who don't conform to stereotypes more comfortable with themselves.

No, the purpose of that is to allow for a distinction in a conversation, you moron.
This whole issue is ridiculously convoluted because reality and the human-condition are just that.

Im wondering what sort of response you want from me, a part from insulting you.

 

[Terminal Blue]

There's honestly not even that much debate about this anymore, in scientific circles. There is no "is it nature or nurture?" - it's obviously both.

I'm not so sure that's obvious, or rather, I think the question you're answering is not exactly the same as the question being asked.

What I think we can't be in doubt on is that bodies exist. Sometimes they are different to each other and sometimes they are the same. But this doesn't necessarily entail preexisting conclusions about precisely what the existence of bodies means.

Butler's point is not really "is nature or nurture the real basis of gender", but rather "is there a real basis to gender at all?" Pick any two human bodies and you will find an astonishing range of both "natural" and "nurtured" differences between them, irrespective of whether they are of the same "gender" or not. The point is, therefore, why this classification system and not others? Why look at human bodies, which are all astonishingly different from each other, and decide that these differences are socially meaningful. Why do we assume that the categories of sex and gender remain fixed and stable constants even as we recognize the substantive content of those categories varies across space and time?

Furthermore, if gender is something that "exists", then how do we know it exists? We don't all carry around a personal laboratory and team of sexual difference researchers ready to prod and probe anyone we meet. The problem with all these "scientific" justifications of gender is that they tend to assume that gender can be generalized beyond the conditions under which it is observed. As if a researcher can make a statement about male and female behaviour and suddenly that behaviour becomes part of the definition apparatus by which we all live and identify gender in the real world. Actually, it's easier to make the reverse claim.. How does a researcher know that his or her female participants are female before he or she has done the research? The answer is obviously that there is a way in which gender is lived which precedes the nature/nurture debate altogether.

 

[nomotog_v1legacy]

I realize this is a philosophical conundrum, relating questions of perception and personal identity, but I feel the biology of the matter sort of answers it right off. Humans (and other lifeforms) reproduce with two beings combining their DNA to produce offspring. Humans might debate this, but many animals won't be. Gender kind of outs itself in nature.

That is why people often use sex to refer to the biology of it XX XY and use gender to refer to the sociology of it. Sex is a thing in nature, but the fluff we build around sex is entirely our own imagination. Like there is nothing in our DNA that says pink is a XX color, or that the Y hates long hair. That is all stuff that we made up for one reason or another. Gender is about as real as we want it to be in that respect.

But all that is about looks and preference and about how these aspects are universal. That isn't gender. Girly men and buff women do not the other sex make. When someone says they're a woman in a man's body or vice versa and they're serious about it, their appearance is only the surface of the issue they face. Their biology is what's important. To change genders, you need to physically alter parts of your body AND the body chemistry. If it's only the mentality your changing, then a man is still a man, but he's decided to go homosexual, say. Essentially, I saw this, and I imagined two dogs in heat during the lecture, and realized that the nature of the beast defeated the argument right off. It's an interesting topic, but I can't agree.

You got to understand the divide between gender and sex here. or your going to be stuck. Normally they can be used interchangeably, but in this talk, you can't just swap between them.

Sex isn't that important. People kind of assume it is because they associate sex with gender, but I have never had a DNA test and I don't take my genitals out at work.. (Mostly ) Your sex barely plays into your day to day actions well your gender comes up may more form what you wear to whether people will give you their seat on the bus, to weather people will think it's odd when you talk about getting your nails done.

 

[Terminal Blue]

So you are arguing that since we don't know if this reality is "real" we can not determine if gender is "real", correct?

No, and I don't think it's particularly useful to ask whether or not reality is real.

What I am interested in is how we can know things, and if we're going to go around declaring something is real then we need to have a working standard for what constitutes "reality", under what conditions would any given phenomena be real or not real. In this case, that's actually very complicated.

So do you have evidence that, in this case, the subject was hormonally female or just your assertion that he was?

What does it mean to be "hormonally female?"

If by that you mean "was producing levels of androgens equivallent to that of a woman" then yeah, that's a pretty well observed consequence of someone losing their testicles. It's why men who do so generally take hormone supplements.

As for your contention that any effect of his own hormones must have been done prenatally well,

When bodies change, it's usually because they are told to change by hormones. That's why testosterone and other androgens are important, because they bond to the DNA in cells and tell the cells to start behaving differently. Without hormones, cells wouldn't be able to "talk" to each other, so this change could never happen.

Now. Where do hormones come from and why are they important to sex determination? Oh look, here's a chart which helpfully tells us!

Spoiler: Chart

You see. Men have cells in their testes which produce androgens, which then send signals to the rest of the body telling it to masculinize. This is the source of all "essential" physical differences between men and women.

But what happens if the testes are removed?

No more androgens (save those produced elsewhere in the body in organs which everyone has anyway)

Which means..

No further masculinization.

In regards to your spectrum; taken to its logical conclusion, that means we can in effect measure "femininity" and "masculinity" based off hormones.

Nope. We can measure maleness and femaleness based off hormones. That is one way of doing it. Sadly, it's one that doesn't actually work. On one hand, sometimes the receptors which receive androgens don't respond (a condition called AIS) and sometimes, for various reasons, people who are already physically masculinized experience sudden drops in hormone production (the most obvious being from losing their testes). It doesn't necessarily have any impact on their sex, their gender identity or their behavior.

And on the "god of the gap" by that same logic you use to dismiss the gender is biological one can do the same with your gender is social.

Except that "the social" doesn't really have any gaps. It's entirely present and visible. I go out and I see men and women going around being men and women, I don't see testes and ovaries, I don't see XX and XY, I see men and women. They have bodies, sure, but even those bodies are experienced in a way which is primarily social. We don't generally walk around naked, and even when we do there are particular social contexts, arrangements and rules.

We don't need biology to explain the social world. It may help sometimes, but we don't need it. The reverse is not true.

 

[Terminal Blue]

What about all the intersex people who get equally ineffectual genital reconstruction at a young age that never have gender identity issues? Roughly half of them will, yet roughly half of the people who experience the same ineffectual surgery will not develop the same gender identity incongruence even though their genitals are similarly disformed. Half and half, roughly the sex ratio of birth.

It wasn't my intention to present this as an inevitable conclusion of partial reconstruction. What I'm attempting to dispel more generally is the idea, commonly circulated, that Reimer was raised entirely unaware of being anything but a "normal girl" and yet somehow the magic of biology cut through it all and made him esoterically aware of the truth of his own gender identity.

Frankly, I think if there's a lesson to be learned from Reimer's story it's that the desire for normalization and to avoid the presumed stigma of "failing to perform" can actually be incredibly destructive and can end up reinforcing that same stigma.

The point is going over your head by a mile about the positive/negative reinforcement Reimar experienced. He was punished for expressing non-feminine behaviors, so why would a child continue to express them if they were going to be punished for it? There exist plenty of women who are fine with expressing only stereotypical gender behavior, after all.

Again, my point is to counteract the notion that Reimer's upbringing was in any way a "normal" upbringing, or typical of that of his female peers even in the 1960s and 70s. Essentially, both Money and Reimer's parents projected their own deeply insulting and stereotypical view of femininity onto him and forced him to conform to it in the belief that he would eventually come to like it simply through repetition. We now know that doesn't work, it's stunningly obvious that it doesn't work, children have a much more dialectical relationship with authority than Dr. Money assumed, but this was the age of conservative psychoanalysis when noone thought twice about the idea that being a woman meant learning to tolerate powerlessness and humilation.

Plenty of people are exposed to sexual abuse from an older person of another gender, why don't all of those people express gender identity incongruence?

Well, for one, because unless you're going to take a radical feminist stance that all sexual abuse represents normalization, then sexual abuse generally does not occur as an explicit attempt to normalize gender appropriate sexual behaviour.

The closest we get today is probably gay conversion therapy.. which employs remarkably similar strategies as we know also doesn't work. In fact, the analogy is very relevant and telling. Money simply assumed that making Reimer a healthy girl would mean making him a heterosexual girl, and that developing submissive sexual desire towards men was somehow integral to the success of the project of making Reimer a girl. That's far more revealing of his psychology than it is of any deeper point about gender or human psychology more generally.

There's been a plethora of scientific evidence demonstrating physical differences between the brains of the two sexes, which is furthermore highlighted by transgender people tending to have brains physically more similar to the gender identify as then the cisgender counterparts of the same assigned sex, eg transgender women's brains are more physically similar to a cisgender woman's brain is than a cisgender man's brain.

What people don't realize, however, is that a) much of this research is contradictory, and b) quite a lot of it involves measurements which are arguably too small for modern instruments to measure.

The idea of neurological differences between men and women and that this can somehow shed insight into "abnormal" sexual or gendered behaviour has been an obsession since Victorian times. Victorians were utterly convinced that men and women's brains were so different that some early Darwinists honestly argued that men and women should be treated as separate species. As our understanding of the brain has increased, the proposed differences have shrunk and shrunk and shrunk but somehow never gone away. I don't use the phrase "god of the gaps" lightly, but it really is kind of scary in this case. The definitive proof that men and women are different, that all the ways in which we treat them differently are somehow vindicated by some essential difference between them, has always been just on the other end of the next microscope, the next anatomical study, the next hormone analysis. These differences have been "discovered" thousands of times, and then forgotten as they either fail to repeat or turn out to be less relevant than the expectations of sexual difference researchers require.

The real story is not the differences between "male" and "female" brains, of which there are a few, but our overwhelming similarity, both in terms of neurology and cognitive functioning, and how out of line it is with our constant, unshakable conviction that we must be irreconcilably different. How long are we going to hold on to that, how small do the "differences" have to get before we finally accept that they may not be as definitive as we all assumed they were?

There have been plenty of people without genital deformities who questioned their gender identity, even far back before transgender medical care really existed.

I'm not making some Marxist point about social control or normalization, here.

People need identity. Even identities which are persecuted or transgressive or painful are still preferable to not having identity at all. Lacan's point was that what really frightens us is not the possibility of being persecuted, but the possibility of being nothing, of losing what we think we know about ourselves. Identity is us inventing stories about ourselves to attempt to hide from ourselves the fact that we came into this world as squealing indistinct blobs without the ability to even distinguish ourselves from anything else. We build up a sense of who we are and more importantly who we are not as an ordering function to allow us to exist and feel secure, but the problem is that these things are just stories. They're fictions which we nonetheless can't live without.

Then you're not paying attention. We're pushing for more and more research of the brain every year, and we're getting more results every years.

Right, but that's not answering the questions.

"Is gender real?"
"Let's find out by doing research into gender!"

Do you see the problem. The possibility of doing research into gender already assumes that gender is real.

Again, we're back to this weird divorcing of gender from its own conditions of emergence. If the purpose of your research is to discover "gender differences", then how do you determine the gender of your sample when you haven't completed your research yet?

 

[Terminal Blue]

Welcome to quantum mechanics, where we both exist and don't exist.

Well, there are multiple possible levels on which a thing can be said to exist. If there weren't, I could say that unicorns exist because the word "unicorn" exists.

So you do admit that masculinization does happen. That before birth there is a physical change to make a fetus male. Which I do believe is an "essential" difference.

It's a difference.

As I've said several times now. I have no problem with the notion that bodies exist and are different from each other. But that isn't really an answer to the question of whether gender is real or not, it's merely responding to the question of what "causes" gender, which relies on us assuming that gender exists.

Furthermore, I would say that a difference can only be "essential" when it is definitive of a category, and I don't see how physical masculinization is definitive of maleness.

That is an extreme outlier.

But an essential definition has to be essential.

You can't have an essential definition which excludes outliers.

You have that backwards. Our "social" world is defined by our biology as is every species on this planet. Take a look at primates species. You have bonobo whose females have no clear estrus and chimps who do. These species have clearly different social worlds.

Do you have any evidence that bonobos experience a thing called "gender". Did the bonobos tell you about it?

There's a literal truth to what you're saying which I've never disputed, which is that the world is only ever experienced through the medium of bodies. However, gender is not bodies, in the same way that the word unicorn is not a literal unicorn. Gender is to do with the meaning of bodies, and that's something we can only experience socially.

 

[beastro]

My head hurts...

Yours isn't the only one that's hurting.

The more this postmodern bullshit keeps going on the more I await it's massive crash down, despite all the devastation it'll unleash on society.

 

[Callate]

I think it's fundamentally the wrong question, and sadly, one on which way too much energy and ire will be spent.

To give the short version (for once), it's far more important how we treat people who behave in ways regarded as not "traditional" to their sex.

Instead of trying to set or move the goal-posts for what constitutes "normal", we should ask what's wrong with not being normal. Take enough factors into account, almost no one is "normal"; I'm certainly not. At least half the strife regarding many social issues would go away if we just demanded a higher standard of proof for what constitutes doing harm.

Male and female are useful and real, and they're not going away just because it would be handy to believe the discrimination that occurs is based on factors that are actually illusory, arbitrary, and trivial. We have to engage that discrimination head-on, not try to loophole it away semantically. Particularly if, as it often seems to me, we're clinging to "normal" as insurance that we will be able to broadly discriminate in the future.

 

[Addendum_Forthcoming]

Or perhaps we can take the Beauvoir kind of opinion that people's personal identity exists outside a strictly scientific causal examination, given the infinite complexity that arises from being human? That maybe we should assume that existence precedes essence, and that the clumsy means by which we implement science to dictate the meaning of a person tends to miss the important facet that 1000 humans is actually 1000 different humans?

By all means, scientific examination matters in terms of health, but I doubt anybody here wants to live being constantly poked and prodded to determine how people should treat you in common society. You know ... basic liberty? Right to self-expression...? All those lovely things that we'd have less of if we continue to try to justify how a person is to be ... that tends to miss the very quizzical applications that maybe science belongs as a means to explain a phenomena, not as a means to justify personal prejudices.

You know ... like most scientists out there would agree.

After all, I'm waiting to hear the argument that humans have 46 chromosomes be transformed into; "all humans must have 46 chromosomes". Because then I'm not human. If you're using arbitrary numbers or goalposts to determine what someone is, then the real question is; "Why are you doing that?"

Perhaps most galling is the fact that people seem to ignore outlying examples of self and existence as if to try to argue against its existence of that oulier sense of self and existence that you are quizzically saying doen't exist... in which case; "Why are you doing that?" also applies.

 

[Dalrien]

Im wondering what sort of response you want from me, a part from insulting you.

Something along the lines of: "You are right, I'm a simpleton who's information on the subject consists solely of internet videos. I've never read an academic text on the subject, and never will. I like my simple worldview and am scared of nuance."

Jimmies were rustled this day.

 

[FalloutJack]

Snip

I'm sorry, but I believe the real problem here is that people want to separate the two. That's where you're stuck, making a big complicated problem about something that isn't. If you're a man and you decide to be a woman, putting on a dress and acting like a woman doesn't make you a woman. You might be mistaken for one if you're really good at it, but it isn't true. The truth is that you're just acting until you follow through.