[ID: a screenshot of a comment from reddit, with no username visible. The commend reads: This doesn’t make a ton of sense to me either. Setting aside the question of whether gender/sex is assigned or observed at birth, the gender I was assigned at birth was ‘boy.’ The gender I have now is ‘man’. Boys and men have different gender roles, and few adults identify as boys anymore. From this standpoint, every adult has a different gender than the one they had at birth. End ID]
Framing “girl” and “boy” as separate genders from “woman” and “man” is such an amazing take. it’s a framework that accommodates and explains so many trans experiences. Some trans people never were their AGAB. Some feel like they were their AGAB, but that that changed (usually when puberty hits, which is when you start “becoming a man/woman”. The accepted societal path is that girls grow up to into women, and boys grow up into men. But some girls grow up into men, and some boys grow up into women. This guy was a boy who grew up into a man, which generally works out pretty well for people. Some boys and girls grow up into people who aren’t men or women, even! It’s like this random cis guy skipped right over transgender 101, 102, 201, etc. and stumbled directly into Transgender Nirvana.
The distinction between boy/man and girl/woman as societal genders is evident once you start understanding gender as an intersectional phenomenon. A boy of color who is forcibly assigned the incongruent role of “man” by institutions like the police has his very identity fundamentally undermined and a whole different set of societal expectations thrust upon him compared to what a boy-assigned-boy does. A disabled woman who is assigned an identity of “girl” through infantilization is barred from interacting with the world the way that women-assigned-women do.
Beyond just age, there are other lines along which the gender binary is revealed to actually be an amalgamation of multiple distinct social genders. “Frigid woman,” for example, has historically been treated as a separate gender phenomenon from “mother,” wherein mothers are “real” women and “frigid” women are failures who are barred from accessing true societal acceptance as women. Even among women who do fulfill the societal expectation of childrearing, the roles of “mother” and “grandmother” are different, and people fitting those roles will have very different experiences navigating the same world, both on an internal and an external level.
In cultures where there is high stigma against alcoholism, “alcoholic” is practically a removed gender from “man.” And when you consider the relationship that stigmatized perceptions of alcoholism have with traits like parenting ability, impotence, ability to work, aggression, attraction, etc, the link between consumption and gender becomes quite evident!
And it really wasn’t all that long ago when the functional framework for queer attraction within sexology was to understand homosexuality as a third (bio)sex assignment. Being gay and being trans used to be one and the same; “attraction to/has sex with men” was a core requirement of the “woman” gender and “attraction to/has sex with women” was a core requirement of the “man” gender, such that what we think of as a gay man of today would have been just as effectively conceptualized as a woman back then, and vice versa. The first known use of the word “bisexual” was to refer to somebody “possessing characteristics of both sexes,” ie somebody who could perform relationships with both men and women, ie somebody who could perform as both a man and a woman. The concept of gender being something distinct from attraction has only been a mainstream concept for a handful of decades now.
Basically, if an anthropologist with no bias towards binarism looked at how human society behaves, they would see quite a lot of genders, even among people who the binary system currently considers to be cis. They would see boys, girls, partnered mothers, single mothers, partnered fathers, single fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers, twinks, bears, dykes, femmes, working women, homemakers, alcoholics, asexuals, manual laborers, white-collar workers, and so many others.
A poststructuralist lens specifically would tell you that all the lines in the sand are arbitrary, whether that’s the binary or any other taxonomy we come up with around any other criteria. At the end of the day, categories are what we use to try to make sense of the world, but challenging the supposed innateness of those categories through intersectional analysis is important and necessary work. The fact that the gender binary is so easy to deconstruct via the intersection of age demonstrates how flimsy of a model it is for describing real human diversity.
