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Gender exists the way color exists: in our minds, entirely subjectively, and culturally conditioned.

Let me explain.

You might be thinking "color doesn't objectively exist? Just look up and see that blue sky!" But here's the thing. Go back in time to the Bronze Age Levant, for example, and nobody would agree with you.

They didn't even have a *word* for blue.

You see this across ancient literature. The ocean is called "dark," the sky "black." There's no CONCEPT of blue whatsoever.

It turns out colors get named according to pretty predictable pattern as language develops over thousands of years.

Black and white are the first, but really all they mean is "dark" and "not dark." Then red. Then green and yellow. Then blue. So what's the point of saying this?

Naming colors creates color categories.

These colors are both identifiable as "red," yes? Even though they're different shades, wildly different shades, we recognize them as a single color category

But these? THESE are two *different* color categories, even though pink is just light red.

This isn't just a fun fact; my brain is conceptually primed to *distinguish* pink objects from red objects, but not bright red from dark red.

Society names colors as we need.

Black and white to distinguish dark from light.

Red to describe blood and injury.

Yellow and green help identify ripe and unripe fruit.

But blue?

Most people don't encounter a ton of blue day to day in nature.

Blue only shows up as a color at the same time blue paints and dyes start to show up, and suddenly there's a need to distinguish black from blue. And what's wilder, some cultures have a "light blue" cardinal color the same way we have pink.

So what does this have to do with gender?

Well, one, we take colors as givens of the world, but they're linguistic and conceptual structures designed to help us *navigate* the world. They're IDEAS associated with light frequencies.

If I had no word for blue, yes, I would still see things that I would call blue, but I wouldn't have any reason to conceptualize it as a category. The sky is black, in that imagination; dark at night, light in day, but always black.

Gender, like language and like color, is an invention. It's a way to conceptualize and understand sense data in a way that is broadly predictive.

The human brain is GREAT at prediction. It's the main thing it's designed to do; to help us see reasonably into the future based own the past. And gender -- as distinguished from physical sex!! -- is another predictive tool.

In THE SECOND SEX, Simone de Beauvoir (SdB) talks about how womanhood was constructed in prehistory as a form of property; consequently, it became necessary for the human brain to be able to distinguish at a glance what *social function* someone had.

It's why we invented uniforms, btw, and gender is a sort of uniform. You'll notice, for example, all of the things that get wrapped up in gender -- expectations of behavior, of dress, of interest, of hierarchy.

But this bifurcation of human *society* and *psychology* was not inevitable; we could just as easily have invented "genders" based on fertility. And in a cultural (non-developmental!) sense, even *age* is a kind of gender.

We didn't used to distinguish teenagers as a group; there were children, and there were adults.

BUT, in the twentieth century, it became necessary in Western society to identify this set of adolescents in a LARGER CULTURAL WAY: by recognizing them as a distinct group that was developing its own culture *and* to more effectively market to them.

The same shit happened with tweens.

And YES, there were people going around saying "What the fuck is a 'teen-ager'?? Kids these days!"

We just ACCEPT these divisions, these categories, because we LIVE them. Our brains use these structures to anticipate the world we live in and navigate it.

Race, too, is an invention, and our modern conception of it originated precisely to justify and perpetuate slavery.

None of this was inevitable. We are contingent beings living contingent lives in contingent societies that are the result of *twelve-thousand years* of increasing organizational and conceptual complexity. How we organize ourselves by gender is just as contingent.

I'm not saying gender doesn't exist. I'm saying it's an invention, a technology, the same way as this laptop, as this couch, as Twitter. It's *real.* It's just not immutable.

You can see the world in black and white or you can see it in color with the exact same eyes. How the system runs depends on its operating system.

"Man" and "woman" are just black and white. They did their job for a long, long time, but now human society is sufficiently distanced from "we must have babies right now" and of sufficient medical expertise that it's not enough.

Here's the fact: go to any time and place in human history bringing hormones and surgeries and you will have people LINING UP to make the switch. The reason we need words for this now is because we have the means to make it.

We do not need to reproduce to survive; there's billions of us. We don't need kids to till our fields. We don't lock women away in towers or gynaeceums, or proscribe them from public life. So the need for a hard, immutable distinction isn't there to quite the same degree.

And we have the means now that someone assigned one gender at birth can not only decide they *want* to be the other, they *can* be -- even according to our socially conditioned definitions!

But as we try to broaden the definition of woman, others are *also* participating in changing it.

We didn't know about XX or XY chromosomes until we did; we've been using that as a symbolic gender signifier for less than a century.

The way we articulate, understand, and define our bodies and identities in relation to the world is ever shifting, ever growing, ever reacting to new discoveries.

We didn't have a word for airplane until we had the means to build one. We didn't have a word for book until we started writing. We live in our heads, in imagined worlds of forms and concepts and categories -- cognitive shortcuts to making reasonable judgments.

Whether or not these are all the same color or not depends entirely on who's looking.

TL;DR - Nothing is real so calm the fuck down.