Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Neonivek]

The thing is Urist is that we aren't talking about Gender right now.

We are talking about whether Sex change operations do change your sex and if we should count is as doing so.

At least I think so. That was at least what I was talking about.

I can't speak for anyone else though. Did I completely misunderstand the conversation?

[4maskwolf]

The thing is Urist is that we aren't talking about Gender right now.

We are talking about whether Sex change operations do change your sex and if we should count is as doing so.

At least I think so. That was at least what I was talking about.

I can't speak for anyone else though. Did I completely misunderstand the conversation?

That's certainly not what I was talking about, but it is what you were talking about.

[Neonivek]

To me you can switch Gender on the fly if you wish. You are whatever Gender you say you are.

Though the fact that gender is so fluid now means that people need to re-evaluate what it means. Gender specific activities might need to be done away with altogether.

Yet I know this is an odd thing to bring up. I am not sure how they are going to do it... Given that we as a society build up how victimized women are... that the idea that someone with a "male parts" can just walk into a women's bathroom because he identifies as female, seems so contradictory to this constant paranoia.

I just don't see it being an issue that will resolve anytime soon, at least not with my current faith in humanity.

Personally they should just make all bathrooms unisex. Eliminates the problem immediately... and gender means so little, is so fluid, and has no actual integrity that logically what is the point of engendered bathrooms? Especially when you factor in sexuality.

But ultimately I don't know, I have no idea how things are going to resolve themselves.

[Bauglir]

Look, it's just two things.

1) Remember you're fallible. You can make guesses about other people based on what you do know, but you shouldn't reject facts based on your suppositions.
2) Don't project what's important to you onto other people. Not everybody has to be like you, so if something you give 0 fucks about turns out to be the very keystone upon which some other person's identity turns, why should you give a fuck about that?

You can take an engineering mindset if you want, just remember that good engineers are still empiricists. They aren't the sort to insist that their heuristics are universal after they accepted them on the premise that they're merely usually good. Shit, that's why I keep trying to couch this in programming terms. A shitty engineer is the one who insists the data is wrong because it doesn't fit the model.

[Urist Arrhenius]

Yeah, neonivek, I know we're talking about sex change operations changing sex, but some people have then said gender. If we can maintain our definitions it'll be easier to converse without talking past each other.

[ArKFallen]

The way we (my past and occasionally present self included) act about sex based on gender assumptions are so utterly malicious.
I live in the part of the USA's state of West Virginia close to Washington D.C. and have been repeatedly ridiculed for having long hair. People who come to my door either avoid using pronouns upon seeing me or identify me as female straight off. WTF are people doing using long hair as an identifier of women? If you can grow top hair it can get long! And facial hair, if your mum goes through menopause she will get a mustache and I know plenty of young girls who (would) have lighter ones (if they didn't shave)! Sewing, plenty of men do it! Especially the hyper-masculine survival types! You don't think something is manly or feminine? That's because you it doesn't match your personal definition and it is child's play to find people who (at least) slightly disagree and there are hundreds of millions of people in 1 country on this earth.

Hanlon's Razor would apply but when those people come forward they are shamed or the "exceptions that prove the rule" so the definition doesn't grow to include them or their disagreeing actions/appearances.

The first is outright considering your standards/ideas more important than living humans and putting them down might protect your ideas (for yourself anyway) but is certainly malicious.
The latter is misusing an old adage which actually means in modern speech "exceptions test the rule" as in they directly challenge it!

The latter is also clinging to an idea of a category and is in itself is harmless. But this is a category being used in everyday interaction with just about every person you meet. It is often the most basic descriptor and our brains don't store memories but descriptors used to recreate memories. By making sex and gender a synonym you place undue expectations on the people you are remembering when you interact again. Say if they then have "long" hair or brightly painted nails when they didn't before. This also is not their problem but you are putting yourself in a situation where your expectation must face their exception and you have already given yourself a precedent to favor your expectation with a mind that values consistency. I.E. you expect your son to be attracted to females and they are more gay than a parade. How does that often turn out in America again?

How people react to challenged expectations depend entirely on the person and the expectation. For Christian bible-thumps and a few actual believers being gay is the sort of thing to revile a person for. For high-handed athiests and some people who've had horrible encounters with theists being religiously inclined either means your are a simpering twit or evil incarnate. For what was probably a grand majority across the board (and still might be) not having sex and gender as a synonym is a thing to be disgusted by to outright loathe someone for.

If your categories are inclusive (based on certain things present) and you disagree whether some of the included should be you fucked up. If they are exclusive (based on certain thins not being present) you will find they are far less descriptive (not racist, not >=5ft, not >300lbs) and ridiculous amounts of them are required to be so. And if you are mix-and-matching them for your world view (black, white, neither) you are promoting an Us-Vs-Them mentality which is Bigotry's bread and butter. If you don't mind that last part may you have the wisdom of the Almighty, the perception of the KGB, and the love of Mahatma Ghandi so you don't become an oppressive hateful fuck.

[Orange Wizard]

exceptions that prove the rule

That is so incredibly stupid I can't even

[Mlamlah]

So i pretty definitely identify as a non-binary individual. I even try to forge it as a little piece of my online identity, though it's not actually that hard to determine my biological sex if a person wants to be nosy, it's just way more comfortable for me to not have to struggle online with the things i have to struggle with in RL on a daily basis.

For me, this is not a whimsical decision. This is not something i merely decided one day in order to create a more interesting persona, either online or in my personal social circles. I've always struggled with gender, not the genitals i was born with but rather with the expectations and identity it comes framed with. It is in our culture ENTIRELY unavoidable for the social expectations of other people to not effect you greatly as you begin to grow up, it is a large part of the development of our social skills to absorb a lot of that. Yet Gender has always been alien to me, an idea i've failed to fully absorb, not for lack of trying from my father and other important figures in my development as a person.

Into adulthood it can still cause me great discomfort to be called male, despite over two decades of attempts by my culture to help me internalize some of the most basic social concepts of our society. It's not my genitalia i'm uncomfortable with, i honestly don't give a fuck what genitalia i have, it is in fact a sexual fantasy of mine to be able to willingly switch back and forth between the types of genitalia.

So try to understand how laughable it is to encounter people who have not lived your experiences, who have not struggled to understand why they are not just a *normally* gendered person, and who yet are willing to tell you that they know better about your own experiences than you do. That you don't *really* feel how you think you do, just that you've been confused. For twenty odd years. If you can imagine that, you might understand why some here have attempted to tell others here that their opinion isn't as valuable, because... it straight up isn't. When a person lives with something, has worked to understand it both academically and personally, their whole life, and another hasn't of course it is the former who has more context. That isn't to say objective thought isn't useful... because it is, but that's what academia is for, a person who hasn't lived something isn't inherently objective because with them comes their own baggage and understanding of the world. So in this situation, on an informal discussion board, the people who have lived experiences have better context than the people who do not.

[DemonOfWrath]

Ok, but if you're telling people they aren't allowed to contribute to a discussion, I don't think you can also expect that they should care about the result of it. Being told you aren't allowed to try and contribute to a discussion because (reasons) simply makes it feel like the other parties aren't interested in actually talking about whatever issue is at hand, but just want to preach their own views about it to you and that the only way you're allowed to participate is to sit there and accept them as correct. And I really doubt that's an effective path to getting people to agree with your viewpoints, rather than see you as a pain in the arse, at least when it comes to those kinds of discussions with you.

That isn't to say there aren't times where it's a valid thing to do (I'm a physicist, and I'll definitely tell someone talking nonsense about physics to be quiet), but it's something that has to be done very, very carefully, and it almost never is, and often just comes across as a way to invalidate dissenting opinions, rather than actually addressing them (as an aside it's utterly infuriating when you see someone told to not contribute because of X, but someone else who fulfills X is conveniently ignored because they happen to agree with the person doing the shutting out, I see it happen a bunch offline).

[LordBucket]

In this thread, people who are members of a socially protected group lament how terrible it is that nobody understands their hardship.

"Hahaha, look at little short dude! Daww, such a cute little baby!"

Nobody cares.

"Hahaha, hey baldie, put a cap on you're blinding me!

Nobody cares.

"Hahaha, dude is like 30 and still a virgin! What a beta."

Nobody cares.

"Hahaha, faggot!"

BURN THE HERETIC!


"Oh, woe is me life is so terrible! You CIS people can't possibly understand what it's like to not fit in and have people be mean to you for no good reason!"


Consider your position very carefully before you become too attached to this idea that nobody can understand how hard you have it. Humans are often cruel. They rarely need good reason to express their cruelty. Even a thing as trivial as not wearing the socially expected clothing or wearing glasses or having a lisp, any number of things can result in ridicule and ostracism, and many of them are things that are not by choice and that don't easily go away.

The differences between your situation and that of others are:

1) It's not socially acceptable to ridicule people with gender issues. Oh, yes...it does happen. And when it does, others will step up and defend you. When was the last time you saw anybody defend a short guy, or a virgin, or any other not-socially-protected group?

2) In addition to other people being uncomfortable with you, many of you are not comfortable with yourselves. Many gays and transgendered and various other assorted "gender issues" people have a streak of self loathing. Not all, but many. And that is not anyone else's problem. It is "collectively" your problem. Don't blame it on us. The average person will step up and defend you when you're attacked. You personally struggling with something inside your own head is not our problem, and not our fault. I recommend you clean your own house.

Let me tell you a story. It's a fun story. When I was 14 or so I met the boyfriend of a guy who worked for my father. They showed up as a couple together at an office party. We'll call them Adam and Bob. Adam was shy and embarrassed, and I suspect probably needed prompting to even bring his boyfriend to the party at all out of fear how others might react to it. Whereas Bob was unabashedly and enthusiastically flaming. I remember him very loudly and cheerfully proclaiming to the world at large how awesome it was to suck cock, and enthusiastically recommending it to everyone. Adam was so embarrassed he left.

But you know what? Everybody loved Bob. He was fun, he was funny, and most importantly, he was comfortable with who he was. And that made it very easy for everyone else to accept him.

Will that work in all cases? No. Will there will still be people who will be mean to you because of whatever personal issues they have of their own? Probably. But there isn't a lot you can do about that. What you can do is become happy with who you are.

Don't build an identity of victimhood out of your situation. That leads to an unhappy place.

[Mlamlah]

Well, i'm not saying those people shouldn't feel allowed to participate in discussion. What i am saying is those people should probably try to recognize that they probably arn't as reliable a source of information on a topic if their personal life includes only limited or tangential source of context and information about that topic, in comparison to people who live a reality day in and day out. When it gets to the point of someone saying, "No, you're wrong about yourself." which people more or less *have* done on this thread, that's when it starts to get really frustrating and, i don't blame people for getting angry or dismissive of people who start to talk that way without really good reasoning and context backing them up.

Edit: Lived experiences are contextual. Everyone has different experiences, different hardships, and needs to face different kinds of prejudices. But just because someone has faced harship, does not mean they understand the hardship of another person, that's a false equivalence. It's also laughable to compare the struggle of say... being bald in a culture that values hair, to something that can literally get you violently assaulted by people who have surely faced their own hardships, and yet do not understand yours.

[LordBucket]

So your particular flavor of victimhood is special and nobody who hasn't experienced it can possibly understand?

I reiterate my advice: don't build an identity out of that. It leads to an unhappy place.

[Mlamlah]

I'm not "building an identity" out of victimhood, i'm suggesting that those with no learned experience about a demographic's life experiences cannot speak with any authority about that demographic, because they lack the context to understand them. All i'm suggesting is that a demographic understands their own experiences better than those outside that demographic do, and therefore should have their own knowledge respected rather than condescended upon by those who lack either the academic objectivity of research or the learned context of lived experience.

[Phmcw]

I want to clarify my position here : I'm not, like lord bucket, denying that you don't fit the mold. I am saying that molds are a bad idea and that recreating one is a rather bad idea.

Without venturing into trans* stuff, which I'm not qualified for and, judging solely by its co-morbidity, isn't something I'd dare to speak of lightly, what I'm saying is that using "womanhood" and "manhood" as an universal norm was a bad idea, and adding "asexual" "agender" "bigender" won't fix it.

Same for gay and bi. History shown that for 80% of individuals at least (statistic pulled out of my ass but it isn't supposed to be accurate) , you'll fuck and be romantically involved with what society tell you to fuck and be romantically involved with.


I think that a big part of the problem is that peoples are confused by what statistics mean. I saw peoples saying that, because XXX demographic is YY% less likely to YY that mean ZZ for all of their individuals. For instance women are less likely to be strong then they shouldn't do some works.

Well no. Yes, you can make accurate generalisation, but that doesn't mean that individual will conform to it. In general, if it's multifactorial (like gender) every single individual will differ from the norm in some way. Therefore those generalisation are only usefull at first glance, and shouldn't be used neither to judge an individual nor yourself.


Yes, I'll expect any girl I meet to be much weaker than me (because it's reasonable) and I'll act according to that (because else I may injure them), no I won't be shocked/frustrated/sad/hurt in my manhood if it happen not to be true.

You don't fit the molds because the molds are a leftover of Europe's history. There is no reason why you should be ble to fit them, and those who do let go a big part of their individuality to fit in.

[Mlamlah]

I mostly agree with gender and sexuality being very difficult concepts to pin down, Phmcw, with it meaning more or less a different thing for everyone. Where i disagree with you is what that means for people. People can find it very rewarding and helpful to specify their own identity with terminology, even if the terminology itself applies to some pretty nebulous concepts that's really only a launching point for better understanding yourself and other people. I would be content to live in a world that was totally unconcerned with gender and whatever meaning that may have to people as individuals, but we do live in that world, and we kind of have to deal with it.
Exactly what gender identity is biologically, psychosocially and academically debatable, but it's still a part of people in this culture. It's simply that that means a lot of different things for a lot of different people, and distinctions do exist. I don't think we should ignore those distinctions because they are difficult to accurately define and understand.