Gender?

I seriously don't know that I'm a woman anymore. I mean, I don't think I'm a man. And I don't really have it in me to tell other people not to be their gender. But...

I just don't know what I do in an average day that's womanly. I'm female, but that doesn't necessarily imply "woman." I wear dresses and skirts and such sometimes, but so do plenty of guys. I'm occasionally sort of frivolous, occasionally obsessed by "cuteness", and occasionally sort of shyly passive, but so are a lot of guys. And then again sometimes I love to wear cargo pants and stompy-boots and act assertive and aggressive and horny and use power tools and watch "Mythbusters." But so do a lot of girls.

So how the hell do I know I'm a woman? I sure as hell don't feel any deep-down "I just know it, I just do" sensations. And stepping onto dangerous ground--how do we know anyone is a woman?

Being genderless is often conflated with being sexless, which I decidedly (for either meaning of "sex") am not. But what then? What if I don't have a gender? How will we know what jobs I'm qualified for? How will we know who's supposed to lug 'em around if I have kids? Oh God, how will we know if I'm hot?

The last is somewhat legit--if gender doesn't mean anything, then why does orientation mean anything? And doesn't this kind of conflict with trans (and cis, for that matter) people who do seem to have a "I just know it" about their own gender? I totally cannot answer those questions.

I'm still going by "Holly." I'm still going by "she." Fuck, I'm still going by "woman" for everyday non-philosophical use. Those are mostly out of momentum and a desire to avoid getting treated weird. I'm still standing up for the rights of women, if only because I sure as hell can't stop the world at large from seeing me as one. Female rights, at any rate.

Sometimes I think--and see two paragraphs above for why I'm not going to push this, but I do think it--that the whole idea of having two personality types assigned to two biological roles, or even not assigned, is just a complete crock. People is. Beyond biology, I don't know that it's meaningful or in anyway useful to divide things down into two terribly ill-defined yet painfully stereotyped groups. People just is.