To insist that one feels more female, or more male, than genetics and hormones have made you is fine. We’re all God’s special little snowflakes and there’s nowt wrong at all with being desirous of difference from what we are.
It’s also entirely true that any and every human being is some mixture of male and female along the way. We’re made from the same basic blueprint, it is that genetics and hormones which bring out the differences. We can even argue, largely successfully, that there’s a spectrum and some of us have some bit toward one end of it and other bits of us to the other. Causing a certain confusion at times.
Then there’s when it all becomes rather amusing, as with Sam Smith here. I don’t doubt that he does indeed think this way but there is still that amusement:
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””] Sam Smith has come out as non-binary saying he feels “like a woman sometimes” and has considered having a sex change. He was speaking to actress Jameela Jamil about fame, body image and confidence. “I’ve always had a little bit of a war going within my body and my mind,” Sam said in the interview. “I do think like a woman sometimes, in my head. Sometimes I’ve questioned ‘Do I want a sex change?’ “It’s something I still think about, like, ‘Do I want to?'” [/perfectpullquote]The amusement? This is a male voice:
No, the difference is not just range. Timbre is different given thorax and so on. This is why there used to be castrati, the male voice even without the hormones is still different.
Then there’s the delightful point that Sam Smith has a beard – showing male secondary sexual characteristics – and is at least beginning to get male pattern baldness. That “male pattern” there being something of a clue.
Smith can think and insist that he’s whatever he wishes to be. Absolutely his right to do so. But there’s little doubt that he’s male.
It’s not a spectrum. ‘Spectrum’ has connotations that there is an equal spread along the entire range, or perhaps even that it follows a Gaussian distribution. Whereas for sex, 99.9% are concentrated at one or other of the two ends, with a tiny minority of unfortunates stuck in the middle.
‘U-shaped distribution’ is probably what you’re looking for.
Sam Smith had not thought about being a woman at all, until his agent pointed out that he needed the publicity….
What does ‘think like a woman’ even mean? All I can come up with are really sexist stereotypes and I’m sure Sam doesn’t mean that. Whilst I’m sure there are some genuine cases of sexual dimorphism, I do wonder how many of the cases are people who have a really strong personal expectation of how a ‘man’ must think/behave and because they don’t fit their own expectation they conclude that they must be part female (or vice versa) rather than perhaps historic perspectives where a ‘tom-boy’ was just a girl who happened to like doing more ‘manly’ activities, rather than… Read more »