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[Loud Whispers]

ptw these social constructs

[Jimmy]

I subscribe to Grampa Simpson's philosophy: "Whenever I'm confused, I just check my underwear. It holds the answer to all the important questions."

Australia still doesn't know whether we're going to get to see gay marriage laws passed. The fact that the majority of parliament attended church before getting sworn in doesn't bode well of course.

Still, it's gotta happen eventually.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Reelya]

If we let gays marry, then they'll start breeding, then before you know it, we'll be knee deep in clubs pumping out Kylie Minogue's greatest hits 24 hours a day. Do you really want to live in that future?

[Sheb]

IIRC, demisexual was invented on a quite terrible RP thread on some obscure forum in 2008, to mean something like "only sexually attracted to people I have a romantic attraction to". I have no idea how it evolved since then.

[Reelya]

Enough that in university courses you can get exposed to the concept of nano/pico/demi and what have you genders/sexuality. Personally, I haven't looked into the whole tumblr thing to have any opinion really, there might be good and bad ideas mixed up in there, who knows. But I know people are being exposed to the tumblr-style identity concepts in academic settings.

[Sheb]

Nanosexual? WTF?

[Reelya]

Nanogender.

But this is what I was talking about with the "overchoice" thing, linking back to research that excessive numbers of choices make people depressed, but also less satisfied with good choices, since the good features of choices you didn't choose get amplified, as well as any poor aspects of the choice you did choose.

With so many "XXXXgender" and "XXXXsexual" labels. That's just many more boxes than before. It's the opposite of tearing down the boxes. There are new boxes, and while it can be argued that they're not completely constraining, that they are vague and can be adapted to fit yourself, or you can find another label that fits better, well that's kind of a bullshit argument because broad categories like "male" and "female" do that already.

Just being devil's advocate here, but young people already have so many choices to make about their future, and there's empirical evidence that over abundance of choice in other areas reduces happiness, that I'm not 100% convinced that completely free-forming identity at a critical stage in people's development, then presenting them with dictionaries-worth of different possible identity labels is necessarily going to lead to an increase in people's well-being.

[alexandertnt]

I think its more just a case of young people trying to work out who they are. It can be a pretty daunting thing.

I don't actually know if all these choices are actually excessive. We are talking about human sexuality here, not a brand of laundry detergent. It doesn't seem unreasonable that there would be more than a few types of genders.

[hops]

As a cis person, I'd rather be unhappy with my shitty choices than society's shitty choices, thanks.

[Reelya]

The problem is that you're saying "as a cis person" there, so you've never had to give any thought to this specific choice we're talking about.

It's not just being unhappy, it turns into self-blame, which is not so great. Hurts how people see themselves. And nobody has really got down and looked into things enough that we can separate out the causes of self-blame and other self-harming thoughts, to decide which factors play into those. And an over-atomized society in which we float in a sea of choices, which nobody is willing to help us navigates. That's basically the modern reality. What percentage of Americans are getting therapy? It's gone beyond a joke.

If a transgender person is unsure of their identity and unhappy, it's perhaps too easy to just blame society for 100% of their unhappiness. Society didn't cause someone to have a female brain but be born with a penis after all. if they're unhappy having a wiener, then they're lucky society exists in the first place, and has created science which can change that. Maybe society is to blame for the whole problem, but I doubt it.

"Society sucks" is just an easy excuse for the more difficult problems of the human condition. And blaming everything on a vague concept like "society" perhaps prevents us looking at things any deeper. e.g. those specific feminists who claim the transgender issue will "disappear" when we overthrow the patriarchy. It's an easy answer to a complex problem, and it just sweeps real people's problems under the carpet while refusing to give it any deeper thought. Doing that is as bad as religion.

[Neonivek]

The problem is that you're saying "as a cis person" there, which means you've never actually had to make the type of choice we're talking about.

Well that isn't... exactly accurate.

It just telegraphs some of the choices.

[Phmcw]

The whole debate seems to stem from the over-importance given to one's sex in the first place.
Gender is obviously a social construct, since it's different across cultures. Just as obviously, men and women are different and similar.


If you don't get assigned strong gender-rôles and don't get them assignated to yourself, your sex won't be all that relevant.
At the same time, peoples crave identity and it's only logical that part of it would be build on something as obvious as sex.

[Neonivek]

If you don't get assigned strong gender-rôles and don't get them assignated to yourself, your sex won't be all that relevant.

Yeah... you see... That was the assumption for quite some time and what they generally found out is.. No, sex matters.

At least that is what they found out from the "send all children to sensitivity training" that schools did... Which was either to give children a healthy well rounded ability to think about their feelings and recognize them... Or a way to try to de-masculinize them... (It was both surprisingly)

Which is kind of the big problem with trying to be "Super Gender-Neutral" is that... It isn't Neutral it is anti-gender.

[hops]

I have made a choice to be cis, though. I have always been unhappy about how people see me as male, and on the forum I do prefer female pronouns, but I won't be asking people to call me female when they're in person and hearing my deep as hell voice and face to face with my male face. I don't actually subscribe to the concept of "x in y's body" and I'm more concerned about "why does it have to be permanent?" and the main answer is "we can't meaningfully change someone's sex yet", but the thing is, it doesn't hurt to be accommodating and support people while we wait for science to catch up with humanity's demand to be beautiful.

[Neonivek]

"we can't meaningfully change someone's sex yet",

I am so INCREDIBLY perplexed that this here is a political issue.

I've been considered sexist because I 100% do not believe sex change actually alters your sex except one exception... Something entirely based around an understanding of what a sex change is.

Yet... Why is it so important that I believe a sex change does this? Whenever I get people very passionate about this I can't help but feel like I am listening to someone who just so desperately wants something to work but is completely delusional to the extent that they have to make everyone take part in their fantasies because the reality of it all is too harsh.