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Gender Fluidity:

The Eternal Norm

A few thoughts...

The concept of gender fluidity is as obvious as the sun is warm. Even without factoring in transgender, nonbinary, Two-Spirit, and other more contemporary gender-diverse identities and expressions, the fluid and malleable nature of human individuality has been observed and recorded in stone, on papyrus, in art, books, film, and memory throughout history.

When we use the word “tomboy” to describe a girl or young woman who doesn’t conform to feminine behavioral norms, we authenticate the existence of gender fluidity. In attributing the insult “sissy” to a boy who doesn’t conform to stereotypes of masculinity, we acknowledge and authenticate gender fluidity, while simultaneously trying to shame the ‘transgressor’ into more comformative behavior.

In the socially affirming (and archaic) use of the term “metrosexual,” we created space for male-identified, supposedly heterosexual men who were more fastidious about their appearance than was expected under the “real men don’t care how they look” archetype.

It seems to me that the problem patriarchy dominated societies have with gender fluidity (aka gender diversity) isn’t so much one of rejecting the abundant evidence of fluid expression within cultures shackled by constructed gender stereotypes. The objection is, instead, that these natural and increasingly visible transgressions of religious extremist misogyny interrupt and threaten the present and future maintenance of the patriarchy, which is entirely dependent on restrictive binary definitions of “who and what is a man?” and “who and what is a woman?”.

Embracing the reality of natural gender fluidity renders both of those questions irrelevant in the extreme, and by extension deconstructs the gender binary once and for all.

– Jenn Burleton

Multicolred drawing of a person in left profile

Why Gender Is Fluid

by Dr. Karuna Kapil

ONE SENTENCE TRUTH
Gender is fluid because humans are fluid systems. We are not stone statues with pre-etched lines. We are processes — unfolding, adapting, sensing, reorganizing, learning, unlearning, and becoming.
 
This is not theory for me. It is lived, felt, breathed. I have known the inner flow of gender long before I had the language to name it. And long before I had the courage to reveal it.
 
For years, I kept this truth folded inside — not out of denial, but out of fear as containment.
Fear became the vessel, not the silence.
 
I spoke only in rare pockets — spaces with soft hearts, open minds, and souls spacious enough to exhale. Tiny lanterns scattered across a vast ocean of humanity.
 
But the soul never closes, only the gatekeepers do.
 
And today, the gatekeepers step aside.
This is my naming.
GENDER IS PERFORMED - AND NOT PRETENDED
Every human “does” gender, moment to moment, through:
  • daily habits
  • gestures
  • posture
  • clothing choices
  • tone of voice
  • emotional expression
  • social roles
  • ways of walking
  • ways of speaking
  • how we inhabit space
  • how we respond to others
  • how we present the body to the world
These repeated micro-actions are signals, and society [people] read/s them as “gender.”
Not because we are faking anything — but because humans are meaning-making creatures.
 
Gender is learned through: imitation → feedback → reward → correction → repetition.
 
We are given scripts. We act them out. Others respond. The feedback is set up, and the loops shape us.
 
Your actions → people react → you adjust → you repeat → it becomes “your gender style.”
NO ONE IS BORN KNOWING HOW TO GENDER THEMSELVES
No baby knows:
  • how to cross legs
  • how to walk with hips or shoulders
  • how wide to sit
  • how soft or firm to shape eyebrows
  • how much space to take
  • how much emotion to show
  • when to speak, when to shrink
  • how to express anger
  • how to nurture
  • how to compete
We learn through:
  • mirror neurons copying behaviour
  • emotional safety signals
  • cultural maps
  • limbic patterning
  • reward and shame circuits
These become habits.
Habits become identity.
Identity becomes embodied truth.
BUT GENDER IS NOT JUST A SCRIPT
A script is the beginning, not the ending.
 
Once lived and repeated:
  • it becomes felt
  • it becomes hormonal
  • it becomes emotional
  • it becomes relational, our respective society responds to it - it becomes our relational identity
  • it becomes neural
  • it becomes embodied in our hormones, traits, emotions, and expressions
Just like language.
 
You weren’t born knowing a language. But now it lives inside your mouth, your breath, your thought, your sense of self. Thus, once learned, it becomes unmistakably real, felt, instinctual, and deeply personal.
 
Gender works exactly like that.
HORMONES DO NOT SHAPE GENDER - GENDER SHAPES HORMONES
The cultural myth says:
  • hormones → gender expression
But biology shows:
  • gender behaviour → hormonal states
Examples:
  • expansive posture → slight rise in testosterone, drop in cortisol
  • affectionate touch → increases oxytocin
  • emotional suppression → activates threat circuits, not “masculinity circuits”
  • social safety → shifts vagal tone and gender expression
This is embodiment in real time.
We “do” gender → hormones shift → gender feels real.
THE NEUROSCIENCE OF WHY GENDER FEELS REAL
Gender is not a costume.
Not a lie.
Not a theatrical performance.
 
It is a neural network etched through experience.
 
The brain makes gender feel real utilising:
  1. Mirror Neurons
    copy behaviours until they become your own.
  2. Predictive Processing
    builds expectation maps you begin to match.
  3. Limbic Circuits
    tie gender expression to safety or danger and which is then practiced as norm.
  4. Reward Circuits
    reinforce gendered actions that are approved and avoid those punished, etc.
  5. Sensorimotor Memory
    stores gender in muscle patterns, posture, movement.
  6. Hormonal Loops
    adjust to repeated behaviour, turning expression into identity.

Over time, the system says:

“This is me.”
 
Not because it was pre-programmed, but because it was lived.
Like accent.
Like personality.
Like love.
WHY GENDER IS FLUID
Gender is fluid because humans are adaptive systems, biologically and socially:
  • neural pathways shift
  • hormones respond to behaviour
  • cultural meaning evolves
  • inner truth deepens
  • trauma contracts expression
  • healing expands expression
  • relationships reshape identity
  • safety creates new freedoms
  • desire reorganizes the self
  • embodiment transforms over time
Gender is not a fixed biological script. It is an emergent pattern — arising from biology + culture + behaviour + felt sense + relational feedback.
 
Gender is fluid because the nervous system is fluid, and identity is a river, not a monument.
THE SIMPLE TRUTH
Gender is not “in the mind.”
Not “in society.”
Not “in biology.”
 
It is the meeting place of all three: a neurocultural-emotional phenomenon woven through lived experience. This is why gender feels real.
 
Because it is real — in the only place where reality lives: in the body, the brain, the nervous system, and the relational field.
HIJRA WISDOM: A THIRD NATURE / TRITIYA PRAKRITI
South Asia has always known what modern science is rediscovering.
Hijras teach that gender is:
  • a calling
  • a lineage
  • a community
  • a lived energy
  • a spiritual nature

They are not “men who are not men” or “women in disguise.”

They are Tritiya Prakriti [from India]— a third nature, an ancient gender lineage older than nation-states, older than colonial binaries, older than modern categories.
 
A living reminder that gender has always been plural, always been embodied, always been sacred.
MY FINAL DECLARATION For Me
Gender is fluid because life is fluid.
Because the self is not a statue — it is a river carving itself into new shapes across a lifetime.
 
We are processes, not objects.
We are becoming, not fixed identities.
We are fluid beings living in a fluid world.
And gender is one of our most beautiful expressions of that fluid humanity.
MEETING OF INNATE/ESSENCE AND LEARNED
Maybe we do not innately know how to gender ourselves.
Maybe there is an inner compass that predates language, predates culture, predates imitation — a quiet felt-sense that whispers:
 
This is me.
 
Maybe there is a pre-verbal, pre-behavioural, pre-social truth inside every human that recognises its own texture long before the world names it.
Maybe the body knows in ways the mind has not yet translated.
Maybe the nervous system has an orientation before it has a vocabulary.
Maybe the soul has a shape before identity has a performance.
 
This is the place where the collective field of humanity still has much to explore — the meeting point between the learned and the innately known. In fact the exploration is ongoing, in the truest of sense.
 
I cannot speak for everyone. But inside me, the truth has been unmistakable: there is an inner knowing.
 
A knowing that was always there — soft, persistent, alive, untouched by culture, waiting for safety to let itself be seen. Even when I hid it, even when I shaped myself to fit, even when I wore layers of caution — the knowing did not dim. It simply sat, steady, like a flame protected by cupped hands.
 
So maybe the real question is not: “Do we innately know our gender?”
 
But:
“Where does the innate end and the learned begin?”
“Where does the cultural shaping meet the soul’s own shape?”
“Where does the nervous system’s safety merge with the spirit’s truth?”
 
This is not a contradiction — it is a conversation. A place where biology, culture, memory, lineage, and inner essence meet and negotiate identity. And in my lived experience, whispered from the deepest chamber of my being: we do innately know. Period.
 
Everything else — the behaviours, the scripts, the feedback loops, the societal readings — these are tools the world uses to interpret what the soul already feels. The learning is the outer architecture. The knowing is the core.
 
And the work of our generation is to finally hold both.