Gender All the Things!
A downloadable game
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Oops... So many things in life are gendered: wearing pink or blue, working an office job, exercising, being emotional... No, no, it's not that too many things are gendered, it's that we missed gendering a bunch of stuff!
Gender All the Things! is a look at the absurdity of anything being gendered by gendering anything and everything! Gender your lunch, your favorite YouTuber, the bus you rode to work, and even this game using the handy dandy Genderizer 3000! It randomly intelligently assigns a gender to literally everything you see, do, wear, feel, and experience, including itself because we sure can't trust anything without a gender!
Made for the Nonbinary Bundle Jam!
In case you didn't notice, this is a parody of the ridiculousness of how much in life is gendered, and how we should just live our lives in ways that make us happy and not worry about if people think it's "too masculine" or "too feminine."
While I'm giddily happy about being a girl —I still grin so huge anytime someone calls me a girl or refers to me as "she"— I absolutely disagree with what society says is "girly" or "manly." And I felt like the Nonbinary Bundle Jam was the perfect time to express this in a silly little game :D
The goal is for you, regardless of your experience with gender, to randomly gender something and go "hey wait, that's wrong" and then realize just how stupid anything we do or wear or decorate with or eat being gendered is. If you're a man, maybe you'll be upset at the idea of your suit being feminine. If you're a woman, maybe you'll argue with your purse being masculine. Who knows what will make it click for you, but I hope it does! 🙌
PS: I still think dudes should try wearing a frilly dress or skirt just once to see how flowy and twirly they are! Wearing one of those is like wearing a trench coat for your legs, but even more reactive!
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This takes me back to learning Spanish in school and arguing with the teacher on why a chair is a girl feels like they just did this.
As a guy with guy friends we definitely have worn those frilly gothic loita skirts and just spun like a bunch of beyblades, including the hiting into each other part.
OMFG LOL that sounds like a hilarious, amazing time bouncing around in frilly skirts. It's funny, too, when I first transitioned I was like "dang goth girls are so cool... wait, I can BE a goth girl!" and yet you've dressed like one more than I have after 2 years of transitioning 🤣🤣🤣 I need to rectify that, thank you for the reminder!
And yes, Spanish was the language where I learned about gendering language too! Like uhhhhhhhhh why is a computer a girl? And a calculator? And a fridge is a dude?
- ✨Beth
if things and activities were not "gendered", why bother using them as gender defining attributes.
there is a social feedback loop i guess.
are you female because you like pink stuff or do you like pink stuff because you are female. and what about females that do not like pink very much.
and is pink stuff for females, because they like it, or do they like it because it is for them.
i wish there were an internal gender sense. but there is none and not even brain scans can distinguish between male and female brains. so hopping on that giant social feedback loop is what we have. gender does not exist if you are alone in a vacuum.
This is EXACTLY it. When I first transitioned, I LOVED pink stuff. I bought what I considered the girliest stuff I could, including some makeup and stuff. I started shaving my arms and legs.
After a few months, I realized how much of that stuff was just a mask to present more "female." And the whole point of being transgender, to me at least, has always been to be myself. So why the heck should I "be a girl"???
It really is impossible to turn that distinction off, it feels like. Even now, looking at people, my brain immediately decides if they're (probably) male or female. I don't verbally assume, but I sure decide mentally first and then have to shake it off, like "nope that might not be true!"
you might want to look up the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley it is a good explanation for many things you will see happening in this topic.
you used the term cognitive dissonance and that is what is happening in the valley of the graph and why it is uncanny. mixed signals. it makes people uneasy. the graph in the explanation is between living people and unliving puppets. but you can draw similar graphs for gender and anything else that can give mixed signals.
so i would see the desire to upgrade "the mask" by using and presenting girly things as trying to overcome the valley of mixed signals and be on the other side. we are not puppets after all and realize that we give off signals.
Oh wow, I learned about the uncanny valley way before cognitive dissonance (I used to be super into making video games so I learned about it with 3d art, not that I ever made anything 3d anyway), but I never considered that they're one in the same.
I love that so much too, about seeing typical-gendered stuff as another form of uncanny valley, and thereby being able to power through it. I 100% agree btw that realizing the signals are happening and that it's in our power for how we want to receive those signals is hugely important and necessary for growth... in all kinds of stuff, not just the weird things society teaches us.
- ✨Beth
hi! chiming in a native french-speaker nonbinary girl! i'm afab, i've always been a girl and i love being a girl, but i thought nonbinaryness was awesome and i wished i was nonbinary, and one day i realised hey that's what nonbinary means, i don't have to be one or the other of anything. i can be both. i'm nonbinary, i'm a nongendered blob and i'm a girl. it's great. i realise it probably feels different if being a girl was something you have to fight for in the first place, so it might not work for you as it did for me, but still, just throwing that out, it's an option, you could try it out.
and one of the things that helped me with that was, yeah, this experience. my native language is one of the ones that does gender absolutely everything. the table is a girl. my armchair is a boy. but only in my language -- i know that in German the table is a guy, and in Hebrew the genders of cutlery are swapped around compared to the French ones. gender is made up! grammatical gender doesn't have shit to do with biology or even societal role actually! in German and Dutch the girl is neutral gender!
I love that so much! It really felt like the first year, especially the first six months or so, after my transition were a huge fight for being a girl. Changing my name and gender took another several months and were full of anxiety about whether I had messed up any of the documents (luckily I didn't!).
But after that... gender is just... a thing that exists, you know? Like yeah, I love being referred to as a girl, but in my own head gender doesn't matter, life has so much more going on in it. I never cared I was a dude before my transition, and it took a long time to realize I could be trans and not constantly think about gender lol. I could just be comfortable in who I am.
I LOVE your discovery of being nonbinary AND a girl. That's so perfect! Maybe 2025 will be the year I'm a nonbinary girl too 🧡
And wow, I knew other languages gendered things (I took a few years of Spanish in high school and they also gender things), but didn't know it changed from language to language! I remember thinking, like... a fridge is female? A computer is female? A school is female? What?!?! Some fits our American gender stereotypes, but a lot doesn't, and even back then it was a cognitive dissonance thing.
And oooooohhhhhhhhhhhh I had no idea about a girl being a neutral gender in German and Dutch! That's really frickin fascinating and awesome! And super fitting of us both right now lol
- ✨Beth
yeah, that game is practially what native speakers of many languages do every day unconsiously and learners of that language curse about when learning it. and it gets worse if your look at other languages or even your own for some words.
french and german. la luna, der mond. (female) the moon, (male) the moon.
oh and there are some languages that use two and some that use three genders for nouns. and it is not about any attributes that will tell the gender. it is just the base form of the noun. it includes the article. like you would call "to talk" as the base form of the verb talking. german "die frau" is base form of (the) woman and the article carries the case of the noun. so you will encounter "der frau" as well. (der is male article, but also a flexed version of die). "die tasche der frau" is the bag of the woman or better that woman's bag.
grammatical gender is just that. grammar. it is a way of delivering the information about the case the noun has. english does not use an infleced case system. in german you need those, since you can order words around in a sentence without changing meaning. you usually cannot do that in english.
and because it is just grammar, you can also have words for persons that have a non grammatical gender and that word will not have the same gender as that person. it is just the grammatical gender of the word
fun fact, while speaking, if you accidentally used the wrong article you sometimes can save it during speech, by switching to a synonym for the word, that has the matching gender.
it sometimes is called neutral or neuter, but also it can be called literally "used for things" or "thing-like". it is not male,female, neutral. it is male-ish, female-ish, thing-ish.
so you cannot simply use "it" for nonbinary people in german. it would be an insult.
there are some neutral nouns for persons which just shows that grammar gender is just grammar. das genie for example. the genius. and of course das kind. the child. or das mädchen. the girl. das baby. the baby.
so if you refer to a person by a noun that has neuter gender, it is not an insult, if you use the "it" pronoun. which gets complicated, if there are several nouns with different genders you can use and did use in a longer text. trival example is a kid and it's name. (which would be a kid and his name in formal english. there are remnants of grammar gender in english after all). so if you talk about a kid named angela (a female name), but also refer to her as a kid you would refer to her as "it", till you introduce her name in the text.
and if you are not confused enough, some words have more than one correct gender. it depens on dialect or meaning. butter is encountered as female and male. ketchup as neuter and male.
Yes! Yes! All that!
And my native language (French) doesn't have a neutral grammatical gender, but then I learned some Dutch and German, as well as English with its "it" pronouns, which all made me really comfortable with the concept of separating actual gender, sex, and pronouns and grammatical gender. I know the use of it/its pronouns for a person, like you mentioned, is really touchy and loaded in English, but I jumped to claim it the minute I realised I was nonbinary (on top of also using they/them and she/her), because this feeling of being completely divorced from any gender at all, even grammatical. It gives me the same gender euphoria that Beth described above. Especially since it is impossible for me to get that in my native language.
In French, I can be a she the same way that Beth is a she (deliberate, conscious, that's our gender), or the same way that a table is a she. And in English, I can be a they the same way that a stranger with an unknown or irrelevant gender is a they, or I can be an it, the same way that a table is an it.
Genderrrrrrrrrrrrr
"It" is often an insult in English, too. In fact, a friend of mine uses "it/its" pronouns and says it has a hard time getting people to accept that because they don't want to insult it. But... those are its pronouns! It's a cyclical disagreement lol
And goodness... I love grammar, and this is a lot of really awesome data grammatically! So if I'm hearing this right, if say a hand is given a masculine reference, then even if you say "her hand" it would be masculine. That sounds a lot like how, for a long time, the person who delivered mail was "the mailman" regardless of their gender. The same for like "garbage man" and some others that I can't think of now, since they've mostly been rephrased (although a lot of people still use the old, gendered terms).
I also LOVE the idea of part of the euphoria over a pronoun is because it's NOT EVEN POSSIBLE in other genders. That makes it even more of an act of rebellion, even more special.
i am not sure if i understand. an article is not a pronoun. a pronoun is a word that it used instead of the noun. for the noun. pro noun. you could use the noun instead, like you might hear it in japanese anime, when children or odd characters speak of themselves "in the third person".
the article is part of the bare form of the noun in gendered languages. it is inflected accordingly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflection and stays with the word in many situations and in that bare form, article+noun, you will know the gender of that noun.
in german hand (die hand) is feminine, so i shall use foot (der fuss), which is male. the foot of a woman is always male, but you will only see the gender of the word for a body part by the inflection of the person's pronoun. in other words: you do not say "her the foot" "ihr der fuss". you inflect the pronoun. ihre hand. ihr fuss. her (female) hand, her (male) foot.
so the article of the noun foot/hand is telling the gender of the owner* and the gender of the body part. but sadly not in an unambiguous way.
* the owner being the noun - which can have a different gender than the person it is used to refer to.
regarding chosen pronouns:
i disagree that a person can or should chose pronouns. a person might "switch" genders and assume the role of the other gender and thus use that gender's pronouns.
i regard inventing or appropriating pronouns as on the same level as inventing or using a formal title. like king, lord, count, professor, doctor, sir, lady, queen, supreme ruler of the galaxy, president, village idiot. and i consider it socially unacceptable to use a title that was not given by society.
one should not get "identity" by the usage of pronouns. that is not identity. it is grammar. and grammar is supposed to convey meaning. and meaning in language is needed to be understandable by more than one person. what is the meaning of using the pronoun "it" or "they" or "xe"?
in german, selfusing "it" has no meaning, beside being an insult or telling people you have a big ego and want special treatment. even for babies you use gendered terms, once you know the name/sex of the baby. by using "it" one would not convey the meaning of not belonging to either gender. and there are only two, even in german. the third gender is lack of a gender by being unspecified, by having that gender in the bare form, or by being not applicable - which would sound like "it" would be the perfect choice, but unfortunately this is not so. the dehumanizing insult meaning of using "it" for a person is too strong a hurdle to use it. pity. would have been handy as there exists grammar for "it".
the usage of "they" in english for a single person sounds stupid and very wrong in my non native speaker ears. but the hurdle is lower, because there are some long established cases where it would be correct and of course it is not perceived as an insult. but those cases are scenarios where you typically would not even know the number of persons. it does not convey the meaning of unknown gender, it is conveying the meaning of an unknown person. using they for a known person makes no sense. also, if you use it as such, you can easily have a sentence where the reader will not know if you are talking about several persons or someone that approprated that pronoun.
i get why pronouns are important for people, but so are names and meanings of words and grammar. if it is important to someone to tell their chosen gender, they should just do so. and then use established pronouns that are fitting to their name. pronouns are supposed to be shorthand. if you overload them with gender re-affirmation, that shorthand-ness is gone and the meaning changes from simply being a substitute for a noun to a reminder of that person's chosen gender identity. (i was talking about non standard pronouns here)
i would prefer to not focus on gender/sex all the time in texts that have nothing to do with that topic. this is awful in german as well. there are people forcing the topic by using forced/constructed gender terms that are grammatically wrong and misleading. but this is the wrong way! we need to give gender less importance, not more. and citing it all the time, be it by using chosen pronouns or by using arbitrary constructed gender terms does give it a weight it should not have.
we (western free culture) live in a society where all people can do and like all things/persons. be they girly or manly, regardless of gender/sex. focussing on gender all the time is a step backward, not forward.