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In Reply to: help me out here... posted by Jim Pearce on July 25, 2020 at 14:10:35:
Sexual orientation is not just homo and hetero, it's a spectrum.
Gender is not just male and female, it is also a spectrum. Gender is about masculinity and femininity, not what sex organs you have.
Even biological sex isn't black and white. The number of people born with ambiguous or intersex genitalia is small, something like 1 in 1000-2000. But there's more to biological sex than just genitalia. We were all born with different levels of sex hormones, for example. Consider Caster Semenya: born with female sex organs, but looks, sounds, and performs more like a male. If you consider all biological differences from nominal male and nominal female, the number of people who are biologically intersex is estimated to be more like 1 in 100.
Levels of sex hormones are also highly correlated with masculinity and femininity, but by itself that doesn't necessarily explain gender dysphoria.
There are also people who like to role-play the opposite sex. Gay men who cross-dress is the most obvious example. But that's different from gender dysphoria. Your post suggests that you are confusing the two.
To sum up, sex organs are different from gender which is different from sexual orientation. All three of these characteristics have bi-modal distributions, all three are correlated, and they all have biological causes. But none of them are strictly binary. The world isn't as simple as we were raised to believe, or as simple as you seem to want it to be.
The social construct didn't come from biology, it came from religion. All three of the world's major religions have been teaching that a penis makes you male and you should pair with a woman and a vagina makes you female and you should pair with a man. That teaching goes hand in hand with encouraging reproduction as a means to grow the religion. It pre-dated even the most basic understanding of biologically.
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Follow Ups
- The world is not black and white (2nd try) - Dave_K 07/27/2006:25:35 07/27/20 (1)
- Further evidence to support your premise(s)... - dark_dave56 06:58:49 07/27/20 (0)