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[Helgoland]

If there's been a blanket ban on this sort of thread, please inform me and I'll lock it immediately.
RULES
0) Assume goodwill and sanity on all sides, and don't purposefully misunderstand others.
1) No sweeping general rants. Stick to a specific issue and treat it in detail. Put some effort into what you're saying - this is not a thread for three-line posts.
2) No outright discussions. Every post should be readable on its own, even if taken outside the context of this text. Clarification to the best of my ability.
3) Related to the above: No quoting other forumites. Period. It tends to take the focus away from the issue at hand and put it on what the other person has said, and that leads down roads I don't want to travel. Antsan's take on it, which I rather like.
4) Any sensible rule I've forgotten just now.

About this thread
This is a hot topic, and so I'll be moderating fairly tightly, or at least trying to. The thread will only be open while I'm online; since my schedule is kinda messed-up, timezone differences should pose few problems. And if you continue to violate the rules above after being told about it, I'll lock the thread until you go away.
I won't be joining the discussion myself, since that would be unfair for obvious reasons.



Well, here goes nothing...

[TD1]

Well damn.

Here we go again.

[TempAcc]

My gernder is potato.

[Helgoland]

Aaaaand I'll direct you to line 4 of the OP.

[Glowcat]

I'm sorry, but you aren't the person to make or run this kind of thread.

Also

0) Assume goodwill and sanity on all sides, and don't purposefully misunderstand others.

Kinda contradicts itself if you're assuming people are "misunderstanding" on purpose.

[AlleeCat]

Let's just... not... I don't even know what this thread is about, but if these threads usually get banned there's probably a reason for it.

[smjjames]

I'm not sure about a blanket ban on the subject, but discussions on this subject, feminism in particular, never end up going well.

[Bauglir]

People need to handle this like duck typing. When interacting with other people, you don't need to make sure that they're of type Boy or type Girl or whatever. It doesn't matter. Just make sure they have implementations of the methods you expect to call, and that these work in the way that your own behavior expects. For example, unless you intend to call thisGuy.fuck(me), you probably don't care whether it relies on Genitalia.penis or Genitalia.vagina, or indeed any other module. Moreover, construct your error handlers in a reasonable fashion - instead of throwing up a giant red warning and crashing the program (that is, your relationship with somebody), try to handle things a bit more gracefully. And keep in mind that you're the one throwing the error - you're not a standards organization, so you just kind of have to live with how everybody else does their thing.

Now, you can certainly implement your own methods and have them check particular attributes. If you want your makeFriends() method to ensure your target has no trans variable set to True, fine, although it's generally poor design and I'll call you kind of an asshole. But that's your own particular implementation, and not the way the entire system ought to work.

I make this post fully aware of the risk that the thread will be locked. I choose to be optimistic.

[Cheeetar]

If this is not a discussion thread and each post has to stand on its own... Why make the thread? People can individually make their own threads if they want to discuss something related to gender.

[smjjames]

I just noticed that the thread title is spelled gernder rather than gender.

[mainiac]

I was assigned a gender at birth but I dont seem to make much use for it.  Does anybody need an extra?

[Jelle]

Oh boy, I decide to start frequenting these forums again and there's a brand new gender thread, what a treat. 

My opinion on gender is...I hate the very concept. True there are significant psychological differences between the genders that set a general trend for each of the two sexes, but I do not see why this needs to be anything more than that. For starters this obsessive classifying and segragating of personality traits into neatly defined genders seems needlessly restrictive, narrow minded and frankly absurd. The social pressure to conform to one of these genders as imposed on an individual by society as a whole just compounds the absurdity of this binary notion of genders.

By extention I can't stand most discussions about what gender people associate with and whatnot. Discussing these things means you must first embrace gender roles, which in my opinion is toxic to begin with. By saying look here's two genders, this is how the male gender acts and does and this is how the female gender acts and does, you're effectively imposing the choice of one of two personality types you expect someone to conform to. Even if you're offering a choice of two, you're still telling people how to be rather than giving them the freedom to let them figure out for themselves who they want to be. I detest this pressure to conform (on things beyond gender too) and simply don't understand why people are so obsessed with controlling others this way.

Wow that sounded better in my head, still as bad with words as ever. I hope you get my general meaning.

[Helgoland]

Just noticed the spelling mistake in the title - fixed it. God how embarassing.

Clarification on the 'discussion' bit in the OP: It's okay to discuss in a loose sense - else the thread would be pointless, that's right -, but there should be no arguing of the type 'You're wrong there, there, and there'. Each post should have an idea that it develops, a point that it makes - each post should be interesting to read by itself, and not just as a response to another post.
Essentially I'm trying to prevent bickering and small-minded arguing - you know the type: The whole post that's being replied to is chopped up into pieces and each piece refuted in mindnumbing detail. Let's not have that.

[MDFification]

Am I the only one who's really, really annoyed by the whole transtrender thing? I just feel its denigrating to transgendered individuals. I don't think you are truly transgendered unless you have genital dysphoria.
Genders are just a bunch of social mores assigned to an individual, and associated with their sex/orientation. Some cultures have more than two, but I've never read about a culture that has a gender that can be more than one orientation or more than one sex (although some have genders that can apply to multiple sexes of the same purported orientation - for example, Igbo women who were sterile traditionally became men in the eyes of society and took female wives). If you don't want to define yourself as belonging to any existing gender, that's fine by me - I have no problem with people being non-binary. But claiming you're a special mystical gender that society doesn't recognize and then claiming you're trans strikes me as blatantly disrespectful to people who suffer much more than you just grinds my gears. Nobody innately feels that they are a potato, born with the wrong qualifiers to be that gender, because that gender isn't a gender.

tl;dr if your gender isn't present in your society, it's not actually a gender - you're just not conforming with your societies gender roles. I'm ok with you not conforming to your societies gender rules because your life =/= my business, but not with you claiming your identity is the same as people with genital dysphoria. Seriously, make your own identity, don't try to invade someone else's.

[4maskwolf]

Oh geez...

Yeah, Helgoland... are you really up to running this kind of thread?  Can you stay dispassionate and detached enough to maintain order in the thread above any personal opinions you may have?  Can you lay down the law on people on all sides of the debate, not just the side(s) you disagree with?  I'm not doubting your ability, but I'd like to know that you're up to the challenge of this thread before I post anything here related to the topic.