(no subject)

[strange_aeons]

lilairen has been noodling at axis-systems of <noun> orientation definition, where <noun> is variously political, sexual, relationship, and now gender. Except 'gender orientation' is a nonsense phrase. You know what I mean. Anyway, she asked me to noodle at it too, so I have, and quite incoherently at that.

Sex (male/female): By my definition, sex is exclusively biological. It still manages to be complex enough that I'm vaguely contemplating expanding this into more than one axis, though into what axes exactly I'm not sure; at the moment this axis is determined by a person's genes, their hormones and their actual bits — all of which traits are closely linked, anyway. I shouldn't need to explain the poles of the axis to anyone. Falling between those poles (though tending to cluster near them) are the intersex, the transsexual (here defined as post-op), the on-hormones, and the like. Morphology has greatest weight.

Gender Identification (male/female): Gender — again, by my definition — is a social construction that has its basis in sex but can and often does operate independantly of it. It is not quantifiable (I'll get to the quantifiable things below); it is not based on stereotype or observable traits or anything but the feeling of the gendered party, the way zie views zirself and, in some large percentage of cases, wants to be viewed. Like the sex axis and the Kinsey scale, it doesn't have a point in the middle that is 'neither'; it has a point in the middle that is 'equal parts both', and at any point the percentages of either will add up to a hundred.

Gender Intensity (very strong/not at all): This one shouldn't require much explanation. People who are not gendered indicate it on this axis. It's possible for someone to be, say, not at all female, but only faintly male.

Butch/Femme: And I break my pretty axis-heading scheme, because I don't know what else to call this one. It is arguably not necessary, but I think it encodes information that's useful to have around. What it is not is presentation, which is an axis I'll get to in a moment. It's ... where one falls in the spectrum of gender-coded stereotyped behavior, deliberately or otherwise. It's independant of gender, more or less, though it is difficult to be completely female, completely butch and not regularly taken for a raging bull dyke whether such is the case or not.

Presentation (male/female): I said I'd get to it. Actually, this is another one that may need to be modified by an intensity axis. It's also another one that should be fairly self-explanatory. Presentation is what one does to get the register biscuit to refer to one by the correct honorific ('ma'am', 'sir', 'uh, uh, uh'); it may vary widely in intensity and even moreso in technique. A large majority of people don't have to try at all, having obvious secondary sexual characteristics and identifications to match.

Presentation Dysphoria/Euphoria: So much for my scheme. This is the cognitive consonance or dissonance caused by the way one presents. Someone who is gendered male but presents, usually for reasons of closetedness, as female may experience a great deal of dysphoria. Or might not; some people don't, really. At the other pole there are the people who present exactly the way they want to and enjoy it thoroughly.

Sex Dysphoria/Euphoria: As above, but with 'sex' wherever I used 'present', and grammatically correct. This is the cognitive consonance or dissonance caused by one's sex. Someone who is gendered male but has internal genitalia may experience ... et cetera.

Sex Identification (male/female): What one thinks of one's body as being; not quite collapsible into the above. It's a strange, complicated thing that I'm not sure about including, but after talking to Darkhawk about it (and mutating her idea a bit) I think it's useful information. People with phantom penises, with slightly scrambled genitalia that they think of as female, people who forget their bodies don't actually look like that when they aren't paying attention, would have values for this different than their values for sex.

And I think that's it. A Code for this stuff could be an amusing thing to have around and I may try to scrape one together if I ever get this to something resembling a final form; the Code format has a lot of useful features, not the least of which being that it could be put together such that it would allow people to specify gender identifications not in the male/female spectrum (one of the most common of these online being, as Darkhawk points out, 'geek').

I know I'm tired, because I spelled it 'feachers'.

Comments

[oneironaut.livejournal.com]

That's a really good solution for a problem that had been nagging at me, too. I'm comfortable using +/- for the euphoria/dysphoria axes as well as the intensity one, so it won't be too many befuddling new characters (and, hopefully, m, f and b won't be needed elsewhere).

[kiya]

The original geek code used x to indicate female, y to indicate male, and z to indicate nunya/other. We could do something similar. Possibly with smalls for sex and bigs for gender-presentation, or smalls for gender and bigs for sex, depending.