Your notions about what makes for a human is something that lives in your head. Which is fine; the world is a complicated place, and we can't represent it in 3 pounds of meat without simplifying.
But the mistake many people make with gender (and a lot of other things) is to try to reverse the flow, demanding that the world correspond to the mental model.
As a non-gender example, I have friends who are ethnically complicated. Sometimes people will just ask them, "What are you?" Even strangers on the street. By which they mean, "I am uncomfortable because you don't conform to my notions of race. Please put yourself in one of my boxes." Those people always look like assholes.
When I arrived in San Francisco 15 years ago, I used to worry about what gender people were. I was uncomfortable that they didn't fit in the categories I had inherited. Was that person "really" a woman? Eventually I learned that gender was much more complicated than I expected.
But I also learned that other people don't have an obligation to fit neatly into my prejudices. Now my take is practical: unless I'm intending to have sex with somebody, what they have in their pants is none of my business. English, alas, makes ignoring gender entirely impossible. So sometimes I am forced to ask, "Hey, what pronoun would you like me to use for you?"
By which they mean, "I am uncomfortable because you don't conform to my notions of race. Please put yourself in one of my boxes."
You seem to be assuming.
At least when I ask what background someone is, it's usually either:
- bewilderment. I'm mildly interested in the differences in morphology between ethnicity, so I get very curious when someone's ethnicity is completely ambiguous. I also get excited when I can successfully identify the ethnic background of people with a mixed background, which of course requires asking. "Your cheekbones look Native American; your nose & eyes look Swiss...?"
- an attempt to quickly sketch out an early mental model of that person, to understand them better. Does every asian kid have super-strict parents? Of course not! But it is a common theme, so it gets tacked on to the early mental model: "May have had strict parents?".
I'm assuming for a given individual, but I'm confident in the aggregate based on other data.
Yes, some people are legitimately curious about the great tapestry of ethnic diversity. (I'm one of them.) I think there are reasonable, polite ways to handle that. Walking up to strangers and demanding that they say what they "are" is not one of them.
But note that in both of your forks, you're trying to place somebody in a box in your head. In the first, bewilderment, you are uncomfortable because somebody fails to conform to your existing boxes. You may have a much more interesting and nuanced set of boxes than the average person. You may be much more polite than the boneheads I'm describing. You also surely understand that those boxes are a pretty artificial construct, and that it's not the job of people on the street to help you improve your set of boxes. But if you think about what goes on for people for whom none of those is true, I think you'll find it pretty easy to imagine their side of an encounter like this.
Watch out, here comes one of those ever-so-frightening generalizations...
Humans are a learning species. Everything we observe is converted by our brains into data to be filed somewhere, even if it's only temporary storage because we consider it unimportant. This attribute is nearly fundamental to sentience. Let's not get offended when someone wants to learn more about the people around them, and what makes them themselves. This, of course, doesn't justify walking up to someone on the street and invading their personal space and time, but it does mean your vendetta against mental organization and near-automatic pattern matching is misguided.
Quick, tell me about people who can't recall much information at all! No, wait, tell me about people who are vegetative or catatonic and therefore unable to process the events occurring around them and convert them into data! Tell me about people who have a failed mental organizational process! This, naturally, would invalidate all of my claims and finally prove me a bigot.
I am all for learning. But you don't get to decide what other people are going to get offended about.
People in minority groups are understandably sometimes sensitive about people in dominant majorities acting like the minorities are obliged to educate them.
I don't have any particular vendetta against pattern-matching. Being made out of meat, I do it myself. But if it isn't done with respect and politeness, it is at best negligent and at worst arrogant and self-centered. And I definitely have a problem with those behaviors, especially directed at people who already have a hard row to hoe.
The ethnicity is curious, because it seems like in the US there are a few, very distinct boxes, where people seems to be extremely concern to belong (in general, of course). Being "in the middle" seems confusing.
In other parts of the world (I am thinking South America in particular), where you can have similar mix of ethnic background, society seems to care less about "boxes" and the boundaries are way more relaxed. People seems not to be that interested in being classified into a distinct box and care less about it.
Your notions about what makes for a human is something that lives in your head. Which is fine; the world is a complicated place, and we can't represent it in 3 pounds of meat without simplifying.
But the mistake many people make with gender (and a lot of other things) is to try to reverse the flow, demanding that the world correspond to the mental model.
As a non-gender example, I have friends who are ethnically complicated. Sometimes people will just ask them, "What are you?" Even strangers on the street. By which they mean, "I am uncomfortable because you don't conform to my notions of race. Please put yourself in one of my boxes." Those people always look like assholes.
When I arrived in San Francisco 15 years ago, I used to worry about what gender people were. I was uncomfortable that they didn't fit in the categories I had inherited. Was that person "really" a woman? Eventually I learned that gender was much more complicated than I expected.
But I also learned that other people don't have an obligation to fit neatly into my prejudices. Now my take is practical: unless I'm intending to have sex with somebody, what they have in their pants is none of my business. English, alas, makes ignoring gender entirely impossible. So sometimes I am forced to ask, "Hey, what pronoun would you like me to use for you?"