Sex

I have a little saying I always like to throw into the sort of conversations that lead me to this rant. By all means, please go around quoting it as much as you can. "Ah, the internet. Where the men are men, and the women are too." This statement (which isn't totally true, to be fair, roughly half the "girls" I've met both in internet land and in real life actually turned out to be female) is pretty much the only time I ever use the words "men" and "women" oddly enough. Usually I'll go with guys and girls, or male and female when that's grammatically practical. There's this weird new trend to actually refer to people these days as males and females though, which strikes me as somewhat dehumanizing. I also generally use the word gender instead of sex, but the latter is statistically proven to garner way more hits, and is more technically accurate in this context.

So anyway, most people generally content with just one term for sex/gender, and two possible values for it. This makes most people a very different group than most people I know. The bulk of such people can be sorted with just two groups, no problem, but there's a fair number who don't, and pretty much everyone I know has enough knowledge of the issues with that system to vehemently disagree with it. To cover all the bases of what people like to cover with the words sex and gender, we really have three variables to consider.

The first variable is pretty much, "What do you have between your legs?" It's the only physical one on the list, the only one that matters when it comes to reproduction, and the only one anyone who doesn't want to sleep with you should ever be asking about really. At that, just to determine what sort of specialized doctor you should see for things, and what sort of fixtures you should have in your public rest rooms. Let's call this one Sex, because as a noun at least, this is all this term officially refers to.

Next we have what I'm going to call Gender. This is pretty much what you consider yourself to be. The official definition of the term is kinda loopy, because it also applies to inanimate sexless objects, like books and chairs and whatnot. Makes perfect sense to the speakers of a lot of language, but english speaking types find it odd. Anyway though, for my purposes here, if you're say, an MTF transsexual, by these terms, your Sex is Male, your Gender is Female. Oh, and for the record, this one isn't just a bunch of hippie talk. There are actually physiological differences between male and female brains, and transsexuals actually don't have brains matching their naughty bits.

The final variable is Preference. This is what Sex you're attracted to. A lot of people confuse Preference and Gender, and I find that baffling. Just because someone likes girls doesn't mean they have the brain of a guy. It's possible to be physically female, mentally male, and attracted to girls, but it's far more likely to just be physically female, mentally female and attracted to girls. Then of course it's also possible to be, say, physically male, mentally female, and strictly into girls. The difference between this and just being the standard straight guy of course being those aforementioned differences in your brain, and the fact that you presumably have serious issues with what's between your legs.

All that said, there's something that always bugged me about transsexuals. This is the standard line you tend to hear on what it's like to be one (assuming for the moment that you're physically and mentally male): "Imagine if tomorrow, you woke up and you had the body of a woman. That's what transsexuals feel like every day." I find this really hard to believe. Were this to actually happen, I for one would be fairly freaked out that my genitalia had magically transformed while I was asleep. I mean, have you ever heard of that happening? That's a shocking sort of thing. The only way you could possibly feel that every day is if you were not only a transsexual, but also had some weird mental problems that lead to you forgetting every single instance when you would have made this discovery.

What should really be said here is that transsexuals feel the way you would if this were something that actually happened pretty often, and it had happened to you many years ago. Personally speaking though, I think that past the initial shock and all that, I'd honestly be OK with the whole thing. I totally accept that there are people born with minds that don't match their bodies, I just don't see that as being that big of a deal. Transsexuals seem to care about their sex a whole lot more than me, or just about anyone I know. Alternatively, we could be the freaks here... and I suppose in my case, there's a lot of evidence for it.

Let's go back to my three variables there. From the bottom up...

Preference: "No thanks." I am not in the slightest attracted to men. I am not in the slightest attracted to women. I am also not in any way attracted to hermaphrodites, corpses, small animals, corpses, Lovecraftian horrors, shoes, lawn gnomes, prime numbers, or anything else. I just flat out don't have any sort of libido, and I suppose not having physical compatibility concerns lowers how much I care about such things some.

Gender: Asexual. Honestly speaking, I don't REALLY identify with being male or female in particular. I also don't come off one way or another in text. People split pretty much 50/50 on whether they think I'm a guy or a girl if they don't have a name face or voice to go on. Online gender tests (I'll take any silly personality quiz you shove in my face) consistently peg me at 50/50, and as previously stated, I don't have hang-ups about any of this stuff. Heck, if you had some sort of magical sex change ray, you could zap me with it as much as you want. I'd rather like to borrow that in fact so I could abuse double standards to get free stuff, better pay and expanded feasible cosplay options depending on the situation.

Sex: ... Possibly hermaphrodite. Seriously. When I was born, the doctor flip-flopped on the matter, I get me some odd comments in physicals, and while I have never seriously compared what I have between my legs to other people, what's there doesn't quite match up with random comments I hear on such subjects. Then you have the secondary traits, where honestly I'm split down the middle somewhat. On the male side, we've got quantity of body hair (that runs in my family to quite a degree regardless of gender, but seriously folks, I have fur), we have size (I'm a big'un), and people who see me rarely think I'm a girl (of course, in fairness, being 2 meters tall and furry are spotted a lot sooner than any other obvious physical type things. Then on the female side, I don't seem to have an adam's apple, I have a decent sized pair of boobs (fat could potentially explain that one away, but they stick out a bit farther than my stomach does), and I have a decidedly female voice. I am the only member of my family who people always think is a girl on the phone. There's more evidence pointing one way than the other here, but as I understand it, that's generally the case. To be a hermaphrodite, you either have to get some weird hormonally imbalanced pregnancy (the most common), a fluke of cell division leaves you with an extra X chromosome (more common, leaves you mostly male), and then you've got "true hermaphrodites" that have TWO extra X chromosomes, which makes you really hard to sort one way or the other, but is exceptionally rare, as it requires a major fluke going on in the division of germ cells from BOTH of your parents.

So anyway, this is why I always let that whole "What gender are you?" bit just play itself out forever there. Takes too long to explain, and the answer isn't particularly satisfying. Unless you're into hermaphrodites/guys with boobs/big hairy girls who aren't at all into you I guess.

Oh, and if you want a more serious discussion of this sort of thing, the creator of a really funky comic also happens to have a page all about it, allowing me to use the following link gif that I find rather amusing: