I think sexual behavior is one thing and gender is another. Sexual behavior is very complex and unavoidably so, I think. Gender is simple.
The statement that males have a male kayotype is true. The statement that males engage in only male heterosexual behavior is untrue.
It seems strange to me that anyone can contend that societies have a narrow definition of gender when societies have a vast array of often conflicting taboos they assign to biological gender. To a scientist, wearing a dress and having sex with men is no indication of gender. Societies take a different, complex, unscientific view.
Scientifically, we can identify the gender of an unknown individual from partial, skeletal remains decades old. What taboos was he likely to have accepted or denied? What was his sexual behavior? What role did he play in his sexual relationships? We would only be able to form a guess from clues about the society he might have belonged to and even then it would remain uncertain. Therefore, I think it's obvious that society is the place where the simple question of gender is made complex.
boddi
On 11/17/05, Arash <arash at riseup.net> wrote:
> boddi wrote:
>
> My first point was about male sexuality but the larger point is that
> you don't, in my view, create gender equality by muddying the very
> simple idea of gender until it has no meaning to Leftists.
>
> I've agreed with the general points you've made on this topic but here I
> think you're going overboard when you say gender is being muddied to the
> point of meaninglessness. The notion of gender as something apart from the
> sexes has a meaningful referent, the entire body of ways people express
> themselves in the terms of human sexuality (butch, femme, etc.), and this
> distinction has fairly old roots in anthropology so employing the term
> "gender" in this sense isn't unconventional or obscurant. I think the
> tendency of leftist literature on gender to deny biological reality
> undermines how relevantly it describes gender relations between actual human
> beings, but I don't think this makes the study of gender itself meaningless.
>
>
>
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