Trans people that transition do not do that to assume the opposite gender (at least as Gender is used today especially in the same circles), they are attempting to assume the primary secondary sexual characteristics of the opposite sex.
I never got a good explanation why transsexual was changed to transgender other than the fact that you can’t change your biological sex.
The whole sex vs gender debate is a literal mess. On one hand gender is a social construct if so transgenderism would never be an issue, if gender is so fluid and a “choice” then why convention therapy can’t work (I don’t think it can, and I also don’t think that gender / sexual orientation is particularly fluid or a choice).
Personally I started to look at sex or well sexuality as the social construct these days, it’s clearly a tool to form societal structures as seen in places like prisons for example.
Gender on the other hand for me is the heuristics that arise from biological constraints due to the (biological) sexual dimorphism of humans.
As far as “black” vs “African American” that seems to be an utterly American thing.
In the U.K. Black British for example is literally an acceptable way to call a black person, if they are black British that is since there are plenty of other black minorities in the U.K. like black Caribbean etc. I’ve never seen anyone saying African British.
> The whole sex vs gender debate is a literal mess. On one hand gender is a social construct if so transgenderism would never be an issue, if gender is so fluid and a “choice” then why convention therapy can’t work (I don’t think it can, and I also don’t think that gender / sexual orientation is particularly fluid or a choice).
I agree with the "it is a mess" part.
> Personally I started to look at sex or well sexuality as the social construct these days, it’s clearly a tool to form societal structures as seen in places like prisons for example.
> Gender on the other hand for me is the heuristics that arise from biological constraints due to the (biological) sexual dimorphism of humans.
For me it is the other way around. With animals, we're talking about the sex they have, not their gender. So to me it seems that "sex" is the term that describes the biological morphisms that arise from the expression of various reproductive strategies, whereas I've only ever heard "gender" to be used in human social or linguistic context (e.g. to different names for female or male individuals of a species)
Many languages don’t even have different words for sex and gender, Hebrew and German come to mind.
I also find sex as in the act to be quite different.
At least when it comes to male on male sex “sadomy” was complicated through history, it was used to show dominance even in societies where homosexuality wasn’t acceptable especially in adulthood - this is an example of a Japanese propaganda poster following the battle of Port Arthur https://imgur.com/a/t9RtebX
In general it seems that same sex sexual activity has more to do than just sexual orientation, it’s far more common in sexually segregated environments wether it being prison or boarding schools.
And it’s just as commonly used to establish an intimate human connection as it is to assert power.
However I don’t particularly see this as related to what we normally call homosexuality which seems have much more to do with proper sexual attraction and sexual mating.
There’s some more history and a bunch of bigotry involved, but that’s the core of it.
