There’s been ever so much … this is typing in a very awesome font, I should send a thank you note to the devs as it’s quite dyslexia friendly 🥰 … sorry, back to our regularly scheduled sentence … “debate” about gender and it’s infuriating.

First, I wanna say, bollox to anyone who thinks my identity or that of any trans/cis/enby/etc. person on this planet is up for anything like debate or discussion. Piss off, die, and rot in Hell … I couldn’t care less in what order.

“Oh gods and saints preserve us, Jaye’s swearing 🤬 again”

Yeah, well, it got old … well … I’d reckon it musta already been pretty old a little while ag—hold up, nah … Stonewall was 51 bloody years ago! So over half a century ago we RIOTED over people trying to deny us things like rights, respect, recognition, all that fun stuff. This is getting ridiculous.

So there’s a thing the a lot of “gender critical” folk (henceforth called “idiots”) like to harp on that amounts to we’re telling butch lesbians and femme gays they’re trans.

Well … okay, for starters you’re denying the existence of non-binary folk (blanket non … agender, bigender, whatever … you’re not strict m/f), it sorta breaks down with trans bisexuals, trans pansexuals, tran asexuals … it’s almost as if this whole idiocy movement might be rooted in generalised anti-lgbtqia+ hatred or something.

But alright … we’ll play along for a second. Sometimes in an effort to find a Gotcha moment, the idiots will warp the whole “gender is a construct” notion (while in the same breath engaging in the most grotesque gender essentialism EVER and that kinda crap requires gender NOT be a construct), but they acknowledge the concept in a roundabout fashion.

So, thought experiment. Quinn Mallory has rather inadvertently taken yours truly here onto a parallel Earth where she meets her double that, in this case, is her exact duplicate right down the the sub-molecular arrangements. However, in this world, all genderedness is inverted. “Girl colours” are “boy colours”, men wear dresses, makeup is masculine … the whole 9 yards (one day I ought to look up what’s so gorram important about 27ft).

Is my counterpart on this Earth-2 a woman?

Those tuning in for the first time should know some stuff:

• I’m a monosexual lesbian. I really have almost no interest in men whatsoever. I just can’t grok the aesthetics.
• I’m as attracted to women as I am not attracted to men. Tall, short, thick, thin, femme, not-as-femme 😝, trans, cis … doesn’t matter.
• I am extremely femme. Like I own only one bifurcated garment that isn’t a skort. And of the latter I own 🤔 3? 2? Few.
• I am, myself, trans.

So is my molecular copy also these things?

Ah, nurture or nature!

Idiots actually tangle the two up into stuff and nonsense because it’s the only way they can pretend to be using logic or even a neuron.

Nature: I am a woman. Full stop. My double, therefore, I can say with no uncertainty would be as well.

Nurture: would she reject the trappings of masculinity the way I do? I was a bit of a tomboy, I did like Tonka toys and … all that … but I mostly didn’t. I never went for sport, I don’t particularly like “masculine” scents, I abhor masculine jewellery … etc. But just as I tried to convince myself I didn’t like femme stuff to try to distance myself from the undeniable fact that I was a girl and did – indeed – enjoy some of the girly stuff (look 80s … I didn’t like SOME “girl stuff” because it was just daft).

So there’s the possibility that me-beta would be very femme by her standards and thus quite butch by ours. I do doubt this somewhat. My personal feelings are that she would be very butch by Earth-2 standards. She is my exact double and I’ve come to grips with my tastes and interests.

What she MIGHT not be is out.

See … she likes “guy stuff” mostly and can probably do without or just accept as quirks some of the Earth—2 femme stuff she might dig. If she can come to grips with the bodily dysphoria she may happily present and identify as male.

This seems daft, doesn’t it?

No, not really. It’s why I’m actually glad I’m not only quite binary in my gender, but also in my presentation and stuff.

See … here’s the thing. She’s a woman. What growing up as one where the sorts of things she likes are masculine, and her birth certificate lists her as male … she MIGHT just manage to suppress herself. She’s not a man, but will accept society deciding she is. Basically, for her, it’s just not worth the effort to argue the point.

But some things to bear in mind: She is my MOLECULAR double. She still had utterly different experiences. She is absolutely a different person. How I know she’s a woman is that this is innate. I am a woman no matter how hard I tried not to be, and as far back as I can remember I knew this or knew that something was amiss in any case.

See … she might be femme … BY THEIR STANDARDS!! She would have been watching the world to understand how to be like those like her – the women – and ignoring the men. So while me-prime loves makeup, loves dresses, loves jewellery, etc she may very well NOT. She may find all of that as intrinsically distasteful as I do sport, and fart jokes, and stuff.

I decry gender essentialism then seem to embrace it. No. See, we imprint. Some more than others. Our society defines what is/isn’t one thing or another. In this same alternative Earth’s culture maybe 3-piece suits are Middle Eastern and Europeans are wearing thobes 🤷‍♀️. So what is impossible to separate when one is unable to stand outside of the parameters of the experience is what of our TASTES are nurture vs nature. My wife finds the colour green kind of blah, she’s also colour blind – this is probably nature. She hates femme colours – internalised misogyny coupled with a certain visceral rejection of gender (she’s enby), in a word, nurture.

So if I had to guess my counterpart might actually be quite into Earth-2 NASCAR 🤮.

Still, she would be trans. Out and butch, out and femme, closeted and contented enough to keep her head down and tough it out … any of these are equally possible but they none of them mean she isn’t a woman.

“But Jaye! Chromosomes!!!”

That’s sex. That is a whole other conversation that is also extremely complex. The very simplest answer is that “sex-chromosomes” were rejected almost immediately as A Thing by biologists at the time they were “discovered”. And still are. They do seem to play some mind of role, not even central, to what plumbing a person’s body will try to develop in utero. After that they don’t do much. What plumbing, and wiring, develops is chemically determined more than anything. Once the plumbing is installed they perpetuate whatever is going on (except when something else happens … biology is NEVER simple). The wiring is its own contractor. This, it seems, is coded for by maternal hormones somehow I don’t care to try to make sufficient sense of to explain, but appears to mean we are already gendering ourselves in the womb and getting ourselves revved up for that imprinting we’re thinking we might try to do.

That wiring can be incompatible with that plumbing. Trans doesn’t have to mean catastrophic systemic conflicts, but there’s a disconnect in any event. No one’s quite certain how non-binary comes along … either that’s due to the sociological aspect of gender or it’s a wiring version of what happens to the plumbing of some types of intersex anatomy 🤷‍♀️ I won’t pretend I know. Anyway, back to the simpler universe of strict binary for sake of discussion. The wiring for “female” comes with certain basic system requirements, as does “male”. So what happens is often a hormonal short out.

See … to compress a lot of stuff down into a few broad sentences: a female brain needs and wants oestrogen, a male one testosterone. Both need and want both, but the former can go almost entirely without T and the latter can almost do without Œ. In a trans woman, the oestrogen shortage causes psychiatric malfunction, in a trans man that lack of testosterone does the same. Just as it does in their cis woman/man counterparts … and with about the same percentage affected – for want of a word – strangely (women who are scrambled by oestrogen, men who really shouldn’t have T …).

This base wiring has built-in drivers. The brain literally has a map of the body in. Well … a woman has a map involving certain parts and a man certain different parts. Analogous tissues they may be, but they’re in different places and used differently (somewhat). When the diagnostic routines keep getting the wrong feedback from those tissues, and even more distressing feedback from the Eyes.io modules it … well … it gets bad.

This is how there’s no incongruity for cis folk, there is for trans folk, and I’ve never seen anyone articulate what is happening in non-binary-land so I have to say “ask them! I’m not the archduchess of queerdom.”

So, in true novelist fashion, I have expanded “trans women are women, trans men are men, and all them other folk exist too” into 1600 words. Go me.

This isn’t a debate. You come up in here trying to debate the reality and word of both my trans brothers/sisters/others AND the growing body of scientific data, I will mock you or block you. Ain’t nobody got time for that. And I don’t suggest coming at me to my face with that crap. I will absolutely be sarcastic, I will bless your heart, and damned if I might not break your punk ass face.

Cheers.