I think I have about three planned/half-planned posts. This one wasn’t part of the initial plan, but the idea came about later during the year. Mind you, I say ‘the idea’, but there is none as I am writing this introduction before writing the article not after. So I might touch on a few things, some generic, some personal, it’s probably going to be a little confused, give some controversial(-ish?) opinions, we’ll see.
I don’t even really have a starting point, though in a way it’s the whole ‘trans’-this and that and ‘lobbies’ and ‘oppressed minorities’ that lead me to touch on the subject.
And I think we have to make the distinction between genre and sex. And I’m afraid I’m going to be very ‘traditional(ist?)’ there and consider that, a few (very very few) hermaphrodites excepted (born so), I think sex is pretty much binary: you are born male or female. And should you decide to change (more on that later, I think), it’s for one or the other. But that ‘change’ is not something I get. Confused identity can work on so many levels (origins, nationalities, etc.), but I have to admit, maybe it’s my education, maybe it’s just what I feel/believe, physical alterations to one’s self make me slightly uncomfortable. Sure, plastic surgery has its use, be it after accidents or because you really don’t like the way you look, and an operation will make things easier from a psychological/self-point of view (and I know two people close to my heart who had had their nose re-done, and I never saw that as a big issue, and perhaps I’m just lucky that I don’t feel I have anything I’m too unhappy with, apart from baldness, occasionally I have wondered about hair transplant, but I’ve accepted it’s not a huge issue for me). Sex change seems a bit bigger and maybe less ‘natural’ as it has a lot lot more implications. Again, I wouldn’t judge, you’re free to treat your own body the way you want, even in a possibly destructive and consequential way. However, I don’t think it should be neglected that this is likely rooted in a HUGE identity problem and possibly root psychiatric causes that it doesn’t address. Again, I may well be talking bollocks, I’m here not talking about a topic I am familiar with or have studied, just my own perceptions. And so what I mostly object to is….the lobbies. The ‘I’m being oppressed’ mentality. Of course, all of this I only see through media and social media, the hysterical reactions being very much not limited to the ‘trans’ question. It’s also something I thought was mostly a topic in UK/US world, but is probably also a little more present over in France now. I’m not naturally someone inclined to ‘positive discrimination’, again that’s ‘old style’ but I prefer to think that the good will rise, and that in a world of intelligent people, leading by example should work, and being tolerant is the most important thing. Are the majority of people racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic? Quite possibly/probably. But a war won’t solve that. Education might. Leading, not fighting. But I guess it’s like in everything, I’m mostly a conflict-avoider, though I don’t consider it as so much of a weakness anymore. There’s too much ‘look at me/me/me/I’m being oppressed’ in the world. And yes I am aware, it is because there IS a lot of aggression and oppression. But if you are going to base everything on your own point of view, without trying to understand the other side and WHY they behave the way they do (argument valid for BOTH majorities and minorities), then you’re fucked and the world is only going to get more fucked too. (See I’m being super-generic despite the starting point….). It applies on so many domains (in fact, think of it, democracy is the rule of the majority, meaning the ‘minority’ will always lose….until they gain power and become the majority, which is meant to be achieve by presenting convincing arguments to the voting public, not forcing them through war and aggression….but yeah, these days, have you seen how much aggression and manipulation there is in so-called ‘democratic’ parties ?), so the fact that I’m using the ‘trans’ topic is just an excuse really. Because it also offers other problems. Unisex toilets/changing rooms? Women’s changing rooms open to ‘trans’? (or men’s changing rooms for that matter for people who have transitioned the other way? See I don’t know the topic, I see complaints have only been made in the other case, but it makes sense when you think of traditional genre (and this time I do mean ‘genre’ as you will see later)-based behaviours). You can see the problem. Because, haven’t you noticed: some people pretend/lie, etc. to abuse. So no, these don’t seem safe solutions (taking the concrete example of toilets/changing rooms as I have seen it mentioned a lot). Space is of course at a premium, and everything is money-driven in this horrible capitalistic world of ours, but ideally I’d say you need men/women/M->W/W->M (I’m absolutely inventing the last two which you can work out from what I said above) facilities. Yeah, that’s even more segregation. Maybe the future IS ‘unisex’ but that’s a long way away, and in a way, maybe too much of a ‘Solaria’ world off Foundation, a strange dystopia. Anyway, I’ll leave that here, and in no discussion am I forgetting that I am the most ‘privileged’ type of person in my local world: white middle-class male. I’m not joking, it IS true, and I know at many times it has made my life easier (partly also because unlike most of my brothers/sisters, I have not lived in Africa for any significant time, so was not exposed to being part of a minority that way).
But genre. Genre is different. You can be more or less male/female-gendered, by taste, life or else. Gender is definitely more of a ‘spectrum’ in that sense. Again I’ve not researched that so just heard of ‘non-binary’, and people choosing a pronoun or another or preferring to be called ‘they/them’. It’s funny, because historically, I always learnt that when you didn’t know someone’s genre (or didn’t want to disclose it, or thought that for the matter at hand, it was important to not specify, –and believe me, I think it is on a lot of topics, see all the stuff about NPD, mostly affecting males, but some people would use ‘he’ as a generality, which is likely to be an irritation to males who have been victims/targets of a NPD female, but I insist on ‘irritation’, not a casus belli or something to get angry about, it’s mostly understandable, in this world where a lot of people are trying to create another war between men/women (or male/female, not sure there….)– you used ‘they’. So I do use it a fair bit myself for generic discussion purpose rather than people who are non-binary. Anyway, I’m waffling on, but I’ll give you some examples from tests I did, where the results was somewhat surprising, but maybe not all that much to me. Sure, like personality tests, these sorts have their limits etc., but as an indication they can be interesting.
The first two are the same test I took at different times: the first in early March 2020, the second at the end of January this year (2023).
Fairly different in the ‘Masculine’ stake, I’m not entirely sure why. By the way, you will have noticed the M+F total is not 100% : this particular test about ‘Gender Role’ evaluates not your relative part of M and F, but where you stand in each M or F component. March 2020, just before Covid or rather just before the lockdowns, the Covid wave was already spreading. Not that this is linked. But see the not yet written page of Mental Health, the page about book and hints here and there, I think at the time, I was still too much ‘under someone’s influence’, a bit paralysed in my behaviours and lacking a lot of confidence in who I was etc, certainly didn’t feel like any sort of leader (things probably genderly still considered as masculine). I’m speculating really, just trying to understand how I went from 14% to 50%. But yes January 2023 was very assertive for me, didn’t end so well, but I think it does go some way to explaining the difference and me growing in ‘Male’ gender role. But obviously, the striking thing you will see, is that in both cases, I actually have a lot of the ‘Feminine’ gender role reactions. And that even grew from 68% to 78%, meaning that me becoming more ‘male’ in a way, was not at all at the expense of my ‘Feminine’ part. Again though, it’s not something obvious, I don’t dress like a woman, I’m not particularly effeminate, nobody would naturally think those figures are realistic for me. Yet, I very much think they are. It’s more about mentality/reactions/emotions. Maybe back to the ‘NF’ personality too in fact. But why or how? I’m not entirely sure. If I can make an argument for it, it would be that I was mostly surrounded by women in my childhood. My three nearest siblings are sisters, and with all the age differences in our family, I spent most of childhood/teenage with two of them. Also, during a part of childhood (probably not that long but still), my Dad was working in Paris so during the week, only my Mum was at home. Add that she always took care of me driving me to/from school, and somehow while communications wasn’t deep at any stage with either of my parents, I still always felt more comfortable (or comforted) in the presence of my Mum. So yeah, absolutely no idea if any of this, rather then our generic education is a cause for these figures, but the reality is (Ok I haven’t retaken this test a few months later) that I probably have more of a feminine part than people realise, and that trying to guess or estimate my reactions/motivations/inner feelings by using experience about men/male, might lead to a lot of wrong conclusions. Anyway, mostly talking shit, but there you are, all human beings have a male and female part, and that’s what genre is about, not sex. By the way, if you ask me about the ‘perfect’ human being there, they wouldn’t score 50% on each scale, but 100% on both the Masculine and the Femine (just noticed by the way that the ‘Masculine’ is put first in that test, but no idea if it’s because I first answered I was a man (no idea if that was even asked), random, a remnant of misogynistic society, or completely indifferent, all i can say is it’s not alphabetical so not sure there’s a logic), which may be obvious to you, but I’m not certain. Definitely not a binary concept there. I have added the other test result too, taken from a different website (and nearly a month later on Feb 21, I was still partly battling a short depression there I think, but it’s irrelevant), and probably making other points. Or maybe it sort of just synthesises where you stand on the whole spectrum rather than just separate the M/F components. I mean about the red dot. Sure the questions were different, so me going back ‘down’ to 27% M but also lower 53%F than before, not sure if it’s significant, but once more I am more in the Feminine quadrant and so I don’t think that’s very much debatable, it goes some way to defining me. But yeah, that’s just where I stand, my ‘genre’, and yet I am very much a man, has no intention or leaning about a sex change and never have, so you can see how sex and genre are not the same thing. Obvious perhaps but, sometimes the public discourse is confused. I’m probably simplifying by entirely separating them though, because my results don’t mean I’d even consider not being ‘he/him’ as the terminology goes. Possibly that’s the difference about how you feel, etc. I’ve been grown and educated a ‘man’ so despite being more ‘feminine’ than ‘masculine’ (as per the tests, not me feeling it changes my identity), maybe my generation means I don’t feel gender-confused outwardly. And I talked about privilege earlier, and in my case, particularly given personality/caretaking (see elsewhere on this site) and genre ‘role’ as put above, being a man has definitely been a big advantage. Why? I’m fairly convinced that if I had been a woman with these characteristics, I’d have been abused a lot more and a lot earlier in my life. I’ve added the last one (dated from December 2020), again a different set of questions/results, which seems a lot more nuanced. But crucially, that one was a ‘total 100%’ type of result as you can see, so I think it comes from a completely different analysis/perspective so hard to compare with the other ones. It still puts me on the ‘female’ side, but just about. Actually, while I don’t remember the tests at all, the fact that this talks about male/female, not masculine/feminine, might go a long way to explaining the seemingly lesser imbalance (and obviously in this particular way of results, perfection/balance is 50/50). – also this particular test was about a lot of other things (God knows how many questions there were), you will have noticed it says 4 axes, so if you really must know, I scored a perfectly balanced and pleasant 50.0% Normal/Weird on the Personality Axis (not even 0.1% more one side and the other….which is weird, but again not that surprising), a probably very rooted in my own education but a lot more surprising to me (though remembering this was during Covid, I didn’t have much of a lifestyle and didn’t go out then….) 72.8% Traditional in the Lifestyle Axis, and a definitely not rooted in my education but probably more acquired 60.9% Left-Wing in the Political Axis.
One last thing I didn’t talk about, but is kind of a link/confusion about genre/sex, is sexual preferences. You could be heterosexual and homosexual, some (all?) of it is apparently genetical, and unlike sex change and unlike what a lot of people with my education think, I don’t see the problem/issue. It’s a taste. Des goûts et des couleurs on ne discute pas. You could be attracted to women, you could be attracted to men, or both (or neither, apparently). It’s completely natural. And you can question your own taste at one time or another. Have I? In theory, because I think and wonder a lot, whether it’s just an INFP thing or not, I don’t know) yes. But I’ve not felt any doubt, so I’m still standing in the same position there. And no I’m not trying to be cryptic, I’m just your random heterosexual bloke.
Have I covered all bases? Probably not, but I think I’ve pretty much written most of the things I wanted to write on this hot (or not) topic, and it was an interesting if clumsy exercice.