Claudia Tyler-Mae
2 min readJan 16, 2021

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Unfortunately you just appear to be jumping through hoops to deny the relevance of gender.

For most people, I suspect including you, their gender is indeed an irrelevance as it's never been something they have needed to question. It's like having five fingers and a thumb. You don't for one moment think about how you can hold things, type, manipulate objects - or that the entire physical world around you is designed for people who have five similar fingers and thumbs. It's just an assumed constant, and one that you have never had to seriously consider.

Thus it is with gender. Most people have gender roles that exactly match their biological sex and the roles society expect of them. So they simply don't consider any other alternatives, or particularly have an awareness that the world treats them in a specific, gender related way.

Note that these are the same arguments about sexism, ablism and racism - it's fantastically easy to go around as a healthy, straight white male and think that the world is incredibly simple. For you, it certainly is.

That does not mean that other people don't have different experiences, where their sex, their race, their sexuality, their gender or their physical fitness doesn't form an integral part of their lived experiences.

I suggest that you consider what it is about those challenging different experiences that makes you sufficiently uncomfortable that you have to discuss them with strangers on the internet. Perhaps also consider whether you can genuinely "dispute gender's relevance" when your own gender has never been something that you personally have had to seriously question. That you are not aware of it does not mean it doesn't exist.

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Claudia Tyler-Mae
Claudia Tyler-Mae

Written by Claudia Tyler-Mae

Gender warrior, so long as the fight involves staying at home and comfortable undies.

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