Gender isn’t assigned by the individual. Gender is assigned by parents, doctors, the community, and society broadly. Gender is an inherently social construction.
Social/cultural construction doesn’t mean that it has to be a collective construction.
Your gender is not different from something like… being a nerd, or being a fan of star wars. Someone might call you a nerd, but ultimately it’s up to you to embrace that label or not.
If someone says “John is a nerd”, and I ask John and he says he isn’t, then to everything that matters he isn’t.
And anyway, cultural things like gender, being a nerd, etc is absolutely unrelated to biology.
Social/cultural construction doesn’t mean that it has to be a collective construction.
It absolutely does mean that. We just live in this age of hyper individualism, where people attempt to atomize the individual from the collective, as though the individual is something wholly its own, but it isn’t. It’s not possible to separate the individual from the collective.
It’s not possible to separate the individual from the collective
Maybe you have a hard time having your opinion.
But it’s not fair to pin that on everywhere else in the world just because it’s like that for you. Lots of people have their own opinions, their own identities.
Just like, for example… EVERY SINGLE TRANS PEOPLE IN THE WORLD. They have a majority of the collective saying they’re of the genre they don’t identify with at all, and they have their own individual opinion separate from the collective anyway.
So you either:
a) have an extreme case of social anxiety and can’t muster the courage to have an opinion that differs from the collective, and thinks everyone else in the world is like you (having a hard time understanding that different people have different opinions is also a psychological problem that is not rare).
or
b) your prejudice/homophobia/genderphobia is leaking.
Social/cultural construction doesn’t mean that it has to be a collective construction.
Your gender is not different from something like… being a nerd, or being a fan of star wars. Someone might call you a nerd, but ultimately it’s up to you to embrace that label or not.
If someone says “John is a nerd”, and I ask John and he says he isn’t, then to everything that matters he isn’t.
And anyway, cultural things like gender, being a nerd, etc is absolutely unrelated to biology.
It absolutely does mean that. We just live in this age of hyper individualism, where people attempt to atomize the individual from the collective, as though the individual is something wholly its own, but it isn’t. It’s not possible to separate the individual from the collective.
Maybe you have a hard time having your opinion.
But it’s not fair to pin that on everywhere else in the world just because it’s like that for you. Lots of people have their own opinions, their own identities.
Just like, for example… EVERY SINGLE TRANS PEOPLE IN THE WORLD. They have a majority of the collective saying they’re of the genre they don’t identify with at all, and they have their own individual opinion separate from the collective anyway.
So you either:
a) have an extreme case of social anxiety and can’t muster the courage to have an opinion that differs from the collective, and thinks everyone else in the world is like you (having a hard time understanding that different people have different opinions is also a psychological problem that is not rare).
or
b) your prejudice/homophobia/genderphobia is leaking.
What’s it like, being from a planet with a hive mind?