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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TheCosmicKid" data-source="post: 7438294" data-attributes="member: 6683613">I don't  doubt it. I'm not challenging you on the point, I'm just lingnerding out.I don't  really have any more comments about the Krill except that these words  make my science brain cringe. Somehow, even more than the mention of  actual-factual magic in the game. XDSure, but what aspects exactly are we talking about here, and how does this conflict play out?I'll  try to explain what I mean. Take sexual orientation. I know we're on  the same page that sexual orientation is absolutely, totally not the  same thing as gender identity. But it's also obviously an important  aspect of identity. And traditional society has assigned the "likes men"  aspect of identity to women. So, as you say, there is conflict between  society and people who like men and are not women. Most of  these people, however, are cis men, and object rather strenuously to the  suggestion that they are women or womanlike. The conflict, then, plays  out by challenging their society's assignment of this sexual orientation  to that gender identity, not by adopting that gender identity. And if  our eladrin likes men, and runs into conflict with human society over  it, they can say, "I'm a gay man."They can repeat this exercise for almost any culturally-gendered aspect of identity. Emotional disposition? There are tons  of quiet, sensitive men, regardless of how machismo values those  traits. If our eladrin is quiet and sensitive, they can say, "I'm a  quiet and sensitive man." Profession? The history of women's rights is all about busting up  the assignment of certain fields to men, and men also struggle to be  taken seriously in traditionally female fields. If our eladrin is a  nurse, they can say, "I'm a male nurse." Fashion choice? In the words of Eddie Izzard: "It's not a  woman's dress, it's my dress, I bought it." If our eladrin  likes dresses -- okay, this one is a little weird, because it's  completely culture-based, and they'd be accustomed to eladrin clothing  which is presumably unisex in our scenario -- but if they took a shine  to human dresses, they could say, "See Eddie Izzard."To get around to my point, the only aspect of identity I can see for which the fundamental problem is not  society being overly restrictive in assigning that aspect to only one  gender, but rather the aspect having a fundamental conflict with the  gender, is gender identity itself. There seems to be something in all of  us which says "I am a man" or "I am a woman" or something of a  nonbinary nature. And it must stand irrespective of any other aspects of our identity, or  what society has to say about those aspects. As we've seen, somebody  can be a cis man and still like men, be quiet and sensitive, work as a  nurse, and wear dresses. What's more, somebody else can be a trans woman  and still like women, be ambitious and competitive, work as a cop, and  absolutely hate dresses. All that matters is that the first  person feels he is a man, and the second feels she is a woman. And I  don't believe for a moment that when I say any of this I'm telling you  anything you don't already know. But I hope I've framed it in such a way  that you can understand why I think that the eladrin describing themself as a "woman" under the circumstances strongly suggests the presence of an underlying gender identity.Hmm. Fair warning: I'm running out of gas after the above and am not going to come to any conclusions in this paragraph, just thinking aloud. (Well, not aloud...) Speaking of different stories, there is no shortage of stories about  the parallel case, where sexists won't let a woman fight because she's a  woman. When (movie) Wonder Woman wants to fight for the Allies, she  plows through their resistance and does it anyway, as a woman. When  (movie) Mulan wants to fight for China, she disguises herself as a man,  but shows no sign of truly identifying herself as one and returns to  womanhood once the disguise has run its course. But in both these  stories, the protagonist had an existing gender identity as a woman, and  that's not prone to changing for the sake of expediency. Which makes  them not such close parallels to our human with no strong handedness  identity, or our eladrin without a gender culture. Or, wait... Diana of  Themiscyra is from a one-gender society, so gender roles can't exactly  have been a part of her upbringing. Isn't she basically what we're  looking for after all? And despite being an outspoken warrior and  leader, she emphatically does not become a trans man upon encountering  English culture where they see those as manly qualities. But on the  other hand, the Amazons are aware of men, and (more so in the  comics than the movie) define themselves oppositionally to "Man's  World", so maybe gender roles are still there in the background.  Nevertheless, they can hardly be an everyday thing. Hmm...</blockquote>

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