. @goblinodds Here's my take on gender if that's useful to you, apologies if it's half-baked or offensive.

(To others: I'm not an expert and am simply some guy, feel free to correct me or ignore) https://twitter.com/goblinodds/status/1277022214861262850

Gender, I think, describes the ways that we modify ourselves to advertise our sex and mold ourselves into a "perfect partner" for the opposite sex.

There is a constant argument about where sex ends and gender begins, in part because we are really good at modifying ourselves.

Sex: The human animal is a lil' sexually dimorphic—males are bigger on average w/ beards, females are small w/ breasts. More controversially, there may be typical (not universal) personality diffs: males like "things" (gadgets, trucks), females like "people" (dolls, tea parties)

(I am not actually science-educated to evaluate papers but this may be relevant: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19883140/ )

If that last part is true, the "little girls playing with dolls" thing is "sex" in that little girls tend to like dolls, and "gender" in the sense that little boys are shamed for playing with dolls (and gadget-oriented girls wind up with a lot of unwanted dolls)

It's also worth noting trans people's experiences switching to their chosen sex's hormone profile here: people with high testosterone experience sexuality very visually/aggressively & tend towards hookups, whereas the estrogen camp experiences it more subtly & tend towards LTRs

So why Gender? Before the time of high-speed travel & online dating, you had a limited pool of dating options, so you needed to change yourself to be maximally compatible. Gender is forcing yourself into a puzzle piece that is more likely to fit together with another puzzle piece

There's a purely aesthetic component (long vs short hair, bowtie vs lipstick, bubbly vs stern), and there's "gender roles" that determine how labor is divided: women are expected to cook and clean, men are expected to fix cars and mow lawns. "Blue jobs" vs "pink jobs"

Which jobs go to which gender shifts over time (gender is actively constructed at the community and society level), but there are practical limitations: males are needed for jobs that require physical strength, females need to be afforded the time and support to bear children.

This formulation of gender means that it's basically definitionally oppressive. But abandoning gender also turns dating/compatibility from a binary into an n-dimensional clusterfuck.

The solution is basically better online dating tools (bespoke microgenders for all!), but this is obviously in need of serious reform and is a hairy problem.

Artificial womb tech, along with the decreasing importance of manual labor, will truly be gender's downfall.

All LGBT+ are gender non-conforming to various degrees.

A big part of enby aesthetics boils down to sending out intentionally confusing mixed signals about gender (femme but bowtie, beard + lipstick), to perhaps signal the unwillingness to conform to other gendered expectations

"Top" vs "Bottom" in the gay dating world (and possibly in the straight world of tiktok teens if I understand correctly, could be mistaken...) is very gender-like. "Dom" vs "Sub" similarly.