Embracing The Patterned Ambiguity Of Gender And Sex As More Or Less Social Constructs Can Grant You So

embracing the patterned ambiguity of gender and sex as more or less social constructs can grant you so much more precision in thinking about so many concepts in science.

like, if there was a study (and I'm just making this up as an example) showing women suffer from mosquito bites more than men do

you could do the ~"Gender Critical"~ thing and go "see!? mosquitoes get it!!"

OR

you could go "that's interesting" and start asking more questions, like:

is this data self-reported? controlled?

were they studying the women or the mosquitoes?

did the study use methods that would let you tell the difference between "being bitten more often" and "noticing bites more often"?

did the study include any trans people and were their results any different? if yes were they on HRT or not?

how similar were the men and women in aspects other than gender? do we know their social class, jobs, diets, blood types?

because in fact the study i made up just then could lead to a huge variety of conclusions. from my description above you can't tell the difference between studies that show:

mosquitoes are attracted to people with higher estrogen levels

mosquitoes are opportunistic and women spend more time near mosquito habitats for sociocultural reasons

every gender gets bitten about the same amount but men are socialised to pay less attention to physical discomfort so more of them don't notice minor bites compared to women (and by more we mean like 60-40, this is a bell curve thing)

we accidentally got heaps of women in the study that have the mosquito's favourite blood type and not so for the men, oops

mosquitoes are attracted to people with more x and y in their diets, which is currently mostly women for, again, largely sociocultural reasons

etc etc etc

you're just not going to understand actual Gender Science, and therefore reality, if you can't put "hmm, but what do they mean by woman this time" in your mental toolkit in a relatively neutral way.

HOLDS MY OWN HAND GENTLY. YOUR WORTH IS NOT DEPENDENT ON YOUR SKILLS OR YOUR TALENTS. YOU'RE ALLOWED TO FAIL YOU ARE ALLOWED TO SUCK ASS! YOU CAN GET BACK UP AND DO IT AGAIN! YOU CAN PRACTICE AND LEARN AND YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE THE BEST YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE PERFECT!!!!!!! ILY!!!!!!!

To illustrate this post by @mayahawkse I would like to visualize to you the difference:

A post in 2023:

A post in 2014:

A zoom out of the same post:

This is what a community looks like.

See how in 2023 almost all of the reblogs come from the OP, from their few hours/days in the tag search. Meanwhile in 2014 the % of reblogs from OP is insignificant, because most of the reblogs come from the reblogs within the fandom, within the micro-communities formed there. You didn't need to rely on tags, or search, or being featured. Because the community took care of you, made sure to pass the work between themselves and onto their blog and exposed their followers to it. It kept works alive for years.

It's not JUST the reblog/like ratio that causing this issue, it's the type of interaction people have. They're content with scrolling and liking the search engine, instead of actually having a reblogging relationship with other blogs in their community.

Anyways, if you want to see more content you like, the only true way to make it happen is to reblog it. Likes do not forward content in no way but making OP feel nice. Reblogs on the other hand make content eternal. They make it relevant, they make it exist outside of a fickle tumblr search that hardly works on the best of days.

If you want more of something, reblog it.

thought i’d also post all of them in one post too!!! i’m so happy w how they turned out :3 they’ve been. dogified:3

It’s Honkai Zoo Rail time again! Here’s part 2 of the future keychain set.