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[LordBucket]

Would just like to reiterate that all of these issues will be going away soon enough. Look at any online game. It's both technically possible and socially acceptable to choose an avatar regardless of how closely it does or doesn't match your own biology or species. And it's largely socially acceptable to engage in relations between avatars more or less regardless.

Hypothetical situation using WoW as an example: biologically male, straight guy plays a female elf. Biologically female, straight girl plays a manly, masculine, male giant cow-thing. Cow-thing makes motions to bend the elf over and have its way with her, biologically male straight guy laughs and plays along in the submissive role. Everyone accepts this. This kind of thing happens regardless of the biology and sexual preferences of the actual human beings behind the avatars, and often, regardless of whether they even know the biology or preference of the other human being behind the keyboard. Knowing that sexy elf or manly cow-thing is "really" a guy or girl doesn't stop people from flirting based on the temporary identity.

Clearly, people are able to identify with, and accept the identity of, people's avatars.

But what can stop it, is portrayal failure. For example, plenty of straight guys will flirt with the female sexy elf they know is really a guy, and plenty of straight guys will play the role of the sexy female elf...because everyone is identifying with the avatars...but as soon as they all get on skype and hear male voices, the flirting stops. Why? Because they're no longer able to fully identify with the avatar. The voice is clearly male.

All that has to happen for all these issues to go away is for human beings to gain better morphological control of their avatars. Be they electronic, or flesh and blood.

That's going to happen.

Between virtual reality, augmented reality, and eventually nanobots able to change your entire body down to DNA (not yet, but probably within our lifetimes) ...it's going be very easy for people to assume any avatar they want, male, female, both, other, and human or not.

Gender issues have an expiration date. It's soon.

[scrdest]

You can't talk about gender issues like you know everything about them if you've never experienced them. I would be open to a thread where questions can be asked of trans people, but it's clear that pretty much everyone in this thread is talking out their ass.

First - tone down the aggression, not conducive to... anything, really.

Second - we have science threads where posters are non-scientists, we have religion threads with non-ex-religious atheists, so on, so forth. Being an expert, or even knowledgeable about the subject is not a pre-requirement, implicitly or explicitly, for a person to be able to express their opinion in the thread.

[MorleyDev]

I was thinking recently, say there was a...pill or something, that would reversible change your physical body to that of a male or female. No medical risks because magic, keep your current brain and thought processes, just get different bone structure, proportions and 'parts'.

Now, a lot of people may want to take that pill once to 'try it out', or no because they couldn't bare to lose their dangly or lack thereof dangly. And people with gender dysphoria would love the pill because it would let them bring their internal world inline with the external easily. I mean, when brain and meat body are outtawack: Meat body is just skin whilst brain is you, meat body is the one it makes most sense to bring innawack. Unfortunately we don't have a magic pill for this.

Personally, from what I've heard when this thought experiment arises: My default response seems to not be the usual one. Or at least not the one most people are comfortable exposing in a social setting. I'd imagine I would just treat physical gender as another item in my wardrobe. "Today I wanna wear the pink dress with the lady body, because it's sunny and I'm really feeling the pink dress and lady body mood today, but male body has scrawny chicken legs so really shouldn't wear a dress". Like, to me it's just skin. A meat container that moves the brain around and lets it interact with the world. But my brain is still male, female or male body.

But I would choose male over female most of the time because it's generally where I'm more comfortable, male would feel like my 'default' and female the 'change'. Now that may be inherent to my biology, or a social construct (always been male body after all), but either way gender dysphoria, as I intellectually understand it (having witnessed but never directly experienced), is often experienced as like being stuck in 'change' mode. The fundamental perception that you were given the wrong default setting.

[Phmcw]

Like you (talking to a hypothetical crowd of people, not necessarily even forumites here) understand that half the population fully and realistically expects to get payed 3/4ths of what the other half gets paid for the same jobs, soley because of gender?  That people with gender dysphoria undergo intense unhappiness for potentially their entire lives, because they identify as a different gender than the one that biology/society gave them at birth?  To say nothing of the countless gay, trans, or whatever people who get murdered every year because of who they are.  Or hell, the men who get raped, or experience any form of intense emotional distress, and then have to hide it around others.

I'm pulling the most dramatic examples of course.  But the point is, those people, they aren't arguing that gender doesn't exist, or that no one cares about it any more.  Because they feel it, every day of their lives, as a fact of their existence.

This is filled with logical shortcuts.


First the "gender gap" is only one of those weird factor that statistically influence income. There is the heigh gap (tall peoples earn more on average), beauty gap, some psychological profiles are overrepresented at the top roles.... a bad start for any arguments.


Second, "hate murder" are a rather low percentage of murders, and not really a widespread problem at the moment. So yeah, that's bad, but pretty much as low as possible.

But the point is, those people, they aren't arguing that gender doesn't exist,

No their murderers are saying gender exist. They are dead, so they cannot speak, and I don't see why they'd say it exist if they could. 

It's exactly the same for race oppression : it's not the victims of hate crime that say that race exist, it's the perpetrators.

[TD1]

Saying "You're either male or female, get over it." is like telling a guy who just got shot "Quit crying, you big baby! I bet it doesn't hurt that much."

TL;DR: Gender is real, it has real effects on people's lives.  If you think it doesn't, there's a good chance you're one of the lucky minority who hasn't received any shit because of gender, which is fine, until the moment you presume that's been everyone's experience.

I want to reiterate this. This thread is seriously the equivalent of a bunch of white people trying to talk about black oppression. (Which I'm pretty sure also happened on this very forum.) This thread just needs to stop. You can't talk about gender issues like you know everything about them if you've never experienced them. I would be open to a thread where questions can be asked of trans people, but it's clear that pretty much everyone in this thread is talking out their ass.

Let me guess. Everyone is talking out of their ass... except for you? 
Either post something conducive to the argument, or at the very least stop saying "you are all disgusting people who talk shit." That is what you are saying. It is exceedingly rude.

[EnigmaticHat]

-snip-

I'm going to be blunt, you have no idea what I'm trying to say.  So instead of responding to you, I'll reiterate my post WITHOUT examples and maybe you can respond to what I said instead of trying to say my specific examples aren't real (which they are BTW).

This is the simplest way I know to explain it: if a person says something to the effect of "poor people just need to work harder", you don't need to ask if they've ever been poor.  You know they haven't, because they're so off base about how poverty works, that the chance they've ever actually experienced it is essentially null.  Maybe they're the one self-hating outlier, but more likely they just have no idea what they're talking about.

That's what it sounds like when people say "gender doesn't really matter any more."

[Bauglir]

Y'can talk about tone and rudeness and everything, and I encourage doing so, but you'd be better served in your quest to achieve productivity by actually addressing the claims she's making, and doing so in the manner you'd like the thread to proceed. Announcing a refusal to engage unless your standards for discourse are met is at once oxymoronic (your announcement is a form of engagement) and hypocritical (it fails to live up to your own standards, because it fails to contribute anything). With that in mind, I'd like to actually talk about the thrust of the argument.

See, she's got a damn fine point - there's a rash of people, whenever social justice sorts of things get brought up, who like to exclaim that they're not part of the problem because they don't care. This is a problem, because denying that a problem is relevant to you doesn't actually solve the problem. So, let me be clear about one thing - I mentioned duck typing earlier, which boils down to giving no fucks about how somebody is defined as long as they do the things you need them to do. I don't mean by this, "Oh, gender doesn't really matter." What I mean is, people need to accept that there's no Right Way To Do Things. Arbitrary definitions of gender should be allowed, including Null.

None of us are standards agencies. None of us have authority over anybody else. None of us are in a position to dictate definitions. Not me, not AlleeCat, and certainly not Th4DwArfY1. That means you don't get to tell people what does or does not matter. Gender doesn't matter to me. I'm a straight white cis-gendered well-educated American male, to list a whole bunch of labels I don't particularly care about, but have to keep in mind because a lot of people like to be assholes to people who don't have them. There are two boxes I don't check off on the Life Experience Lottery, and that's Christian and Exorbitantly Wealthy. So you can see, I'm not exactly qualified to say what matters to people who aren't that obnoxiously lucky.

Remember when McDonald's gave financial advice to its employees? If I'm trying to set up a Grand Unified Theory of gender politics, I'm doing the same thing. The company was rightly called crazy and borderline evil, for what, trying to help people? Yeah! Because that's what happens when you behave as though you've got answers to problems you've never so much as looked at. You tend to come off as a callous idiot.

But here's the thing we fast food giants tend to forget whenever we get criticized for this sort of nonsense - there's actually a shitton of things we can do to help, and plenty we can say to contribute. Mostly, they don't involve thinking of brilliant solutions off in our ivory towers. Mostly, they don't involve going out on righteous crusades. No, mostly, they involve listening. Mostly, they involve quiet adjustments. Mostly, they involve introspection and honesty. Mostly, they involve accepting that we make mistakes and need to fix them.

Mostly, they involve treating people like people.

-------

Feel free to quote me, and for the sake of honesty, I admit that I clipped an edited-in paragraph from the end that broke up the flow.

[Vector]

.

[TD1]

Y'can talk about tone and rudeness and everything, and I encourage doing so, but you'd be better served in your quest to achieve productivity by actually addressing the claims she's making, and doing so in the manner you'd like the thread to proceed. Announcing a refusal to engage unless your standards for discourse are met is at once oxymoronic (your announcement is a form of engagement) and hypocritical (it fails to live up to your own standards, because it fails to contribute anything). With that in mind, I'd like to actually talk about the thrust of the argument.

See, she's got a damn fine point - there's a rash of people, whenever social justice sorts of things get brought up, who like to exclaim that they're not part of the problem because they don't care. This is a problem, because denying that a problem is relevant to you doesn't actually solve the problem. So, let me be clear about one thing - I mentioned duck typing earlier, which boils down to giving no fucks about how somebody is defined as long as they do the things you need them to do. I don't mean by this, "Oh, gender doesn't really matter." What I mean is, people need to accept that there's no Right Way To Do Things. Arbitrary definitions of gender should be allowed, including Null.

None of us are standards agencies. None of us have authority over anybody else. None of us are in a position to dictate definitions. Not me, not AlleeCat, and certainly not Th4DwArfY1. That means you don't get to tell people what does or does not matter. Gender doesn't matter to me. I'm a straight white cis-gendered well-educated American male, to list a whole bunch of labels I don't particularly care about, but have to keep in mind because a lot of people like to be assholes to people who don't have them. There are two boxes I don't check off on the Life Experience Lottery, and that's Christian and Exorbitantly Wealthy. So you can see, I'm not exactly qualified to say what matters to people who aren't that obnoxiously lucky.

Remember when McDonald's gave financial advice to its employees? If I'm trying to set up a Grand Unified Theory of gender politics, I'm doing the same thing. The company was rightly called crazy and borderline evil, for what, trying to help people? Yeah! Because that's what happens when you behave as though you've got answers to problems you've never so much as looked at. You tend to come off as a callous idiot.

But here's the thing we fast food giants tend to forget whenever we get criticized for this sort of nonsense - there's actually a shitton of things we can do to help, and plenty we can say to contribute. Mostly, they don't involve thinking of brilliant solutions off in our ivory towers. Mostly, they don't involve going out on righteous crusades. No, mostly, they involve listening. Mostly, they involve quiet adjustments. Mostly, they involve introspection and honesty. Mostly, they involve accepting that we make mistakes and need to fix them.

Mostly, they involve treating people like people.

Er, my "behave yourself" comment was specifically directed at the post in which the sole points raised were "you are like whites talking about blacks" and "you are all speaking out of your asses."

Any valid points raised, I've tried to address.

[4maskwolf]

I'm going to speak from my experience, which apparently according to AlleeCat means that I'm not allowed to talk here, but whatever.

I am, from a romantic standpoint, a heterosexual male.  While I occasionally enjoy the company of other guys (when they're not just talking smack and telling tales of their sexual escapades), I'm only romantically interested in women, and am fine with that.  I don't look down on people who are different from me: I see our difference as one more thing to talk about, and that's good because I'm not a very good conversationalist.  I identify as male and was declared male at birth, and have never had any doubts about how I identify gender-wise.  With all that said, I find that in movies, anime, whatever, I tend to identify far more with female characters than male ones, and can draw more parallels to my own experience.  I find myself drawn towards roles where I help others, whether with homework or emotional problems, and often find myself solicited for advice on emotional subjects because people trust me not say something callous.  In general, I find myself completely unattached to male stereotypes and see them as a burden, identifying much more with the female stereotypes in many areas.  I think there are other guys like me at my school, who find themselves more drawn towards concern for others and emotional connection rather than the callous, sex-driven appearances most of the guys at my school put on, but the nature of society is that they have to put on a disguise to avoid ridicule.  I have the advantage that I am already an outcast, on account of my social awkwardness around people I don't know and my math-science proficiency (for reference, I was one of 5 people out of over 300 in my class who was finished with calculus (A, B, and C) by the end of my freshman year).  This gives me more freedom from judgement with regards to my actions, since I'm already judged for being who I am.

I refuse to say anything else on this thread, but suffice it to say you all would probably label me a SJW due to my views.

Edit: Reading over this, I realized I'm not making the point I'm trying to make very well.  Basically what I'm saying is that while I consider myself a male, gender-role and gender-stereotypewise I generally find myself far closer to the female end of the spectrum.  Unlike some other people like that, though, I'm already a social pariah, so people who follow such stereotypes don't proverbially crucify me over it.

[Phmcw]

-snip-

I'm going to be blunt, you have no idea what I'm trying to say.  So instead of responding to you, I'll reiterate my post WITHOUT examples and maybe you can respond to what I said instead of trying to say my specific examples aren't real (which they are BTW).

This is the simplest way I know to explain it: if a person says something to the effect of "poor people just need to work harder", you don't need to ask if they've ever been poor.  You know they haven't, because they're so off base about how poverty works, that the chance they've ever actually experienced it is essentially null.  Maybe they're the one self-hating outlier, but more likely they just have no idea what they're talking about.

That's what it sounds like when people say "gender doesn't really matter any more."

I have no idea of what you're trying to say either, actually. I really don't see any parallels between what you says and what I said.

Please feel free to quote me.

Here's what I don't understand. Hello everyone, I'm non-binary. To some of you, I don't exist. I am not sure exactly what you think I am instead--a very masculine woman? Someone in denial about my inner drive for passive nurturance or whatever other gender-essentialist thing is expected?

For me you're someone who's trying to see herslef through the "len of masculinity or feminity" and fail because you cannot be described by more or less arbitrary standards of behaviours that are half faked by everyone anyway.


"Manly men" are yearning to let their emotions go and "womanly women" often dream of freedom.


Peoples like to be told what to do, and hate/admire those who dare to break those standards. All those "proud straight American marines" would be chasing the boys's skirt and laughing at the unmanly men that only lays with women if they lived in the army that insipre many of their traditions aka the Roman legion.


You're a human being who wonder why the fuck she's supposed to love babies when what you like are mathematics. Well you don't have to, and a fair share of those "womanly mothers" secretly hate those children they didn't dare not to have.


That's the origin of the 60's revolution in Europe. At the time everything was decided for you : what you'd like, how you'd dress, who you'd love, and compliance wasn't optional.

[4maskwolf]

Phmcw: what he's saying is that by denying that a problem exists, you often unwittingly reveal that you are a member of a group who isn't affected by the problem.  Because to people who have lived that experience, who live that on a daily basis, the problem is all too real and apparent to many of them.

[AlleeCat]

Yes, because when I say almost everyone, I just mean everyone. Good job with that.

[Orange Wizard]

Okay. Who isn't talking out of their proverbial donkey?

[4maskwolf]

Okay. Who isn't talking out of their proverbial donkey?

Depends on what you consider their proverbial donkey.  I was talking about my own experiences.