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[Akroma]

remember when nature was so mean to only give the entirety of all mammals just 2 options of gender, male and female ?

what a horrible move, totaly insufficent


at least, that's what australia thinks:

http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2008/12/05/intersex-australia.html



nope, the new gender is not "hermaphrodite", which would at least be reasonable, it's "inter-sex"


backstory that is not shown in the article:

the entire arguement started when a trans-sexual, formerly men who decided to become female and somewhere midway, decided "nah, lets just stay that way", felt "opressed by the government", because official documents would require "it" to decide to mark male or female.

and true enough, doctors seem to be unable to properly identify "it's" gender, because "it" has no genitals at all, and no hormone level that would allow a clear identification


soooo, instead of doing like any other government would have done and saying "stop the shenanigans, your birth certificate sais you are male, and since your operations are not complete, you still are", they decided to take the suprising option to declare

"fine, you are neither. let's integrate a third option into all our legal processes, because there are totaly enough people to warrant for that, riiiight?"



so, there is now men, women, and...dunno  intermen ?

discuss

[Siquo]

This paves the way for robotic citizenship! I applaud the Australian government for their foresight, of which they have shown little in the past few years! 

[Huesoo]

Australia fails again, please try capitilization please.

[Solifuge]

I roomed with an FTM for a year, and through knowing him got to learn a lot about gender and identity that I never really thought about before. I'm not going to take offense to your wording of the article, but I am going to point out that you're being rather inflammatory from the get-go.

I also have a friend who is gender-neutral. We use "Hir" and "Se" as pronouns, which are permutations of the male and female pronouns from English. Other languages have gender-neutral pronouns, but the English "It" has a really negative connotation, dehumanizing things: for instance, if you call a dog or a baby "It" rather than "Him" or "Her" it sounds derisive, as though they were just things.

Anyway, I am all for instituting a standardized "Not Male Or Female" option on questionaires and such. Believe it or not, a lot of people don't fit into either category, and living in a society that doesn't recognize the differences between Gender and Sex, and how it is an anologue continuum, rather than two clean options, is really hard.

[Jreengus]

I also have a friend who is gender-neutral. We use "Hir" and "Se" as pronouns, which are permutations of the male and female pronouns from English. Other languages have gender-neutral pronouns, but the English "It" has a really negative connotation, dehumanizing things: for instance, if you call a dog or a baby "It" rather than "Him" or "Her" it sounds derisive, as though they were just things..

Try he, it is gender neutral as well as masculine in the same way that man can mean male or simply human, since it comes from men originally being "wapmen" and women being "women" eventually the wap was dropped from the beginning of wapman and we get man and woman.

[Blacken]

I also have a friend who is gender-neutral. We use "Hir" and "Se" as pronouns, which are permutations of the male and female pronouns from English. Other languages have gender-neutral pronouns, but the English "It" has a really negative connotation, dehumanizing things: for instance, if you call a dog or a baby "It" rather than "Him" or "Her" it sounds derisive, as though they were just things..

Try he, it is gender neutral as well as masculine in the same way that man can mean male or simply human, since it comes from men originally being "wapmen" and women being "women" eventually the wap was dropped from the beginning of wapman and we get man and woman.

++

"He" is the gender-neutral and gender-nonspecific term in English, and the people who want to change Chicago Style to such messes as "he or she" should be found under the nearest person's front bumper.

[Rooster]

Go Australia!
I like transsexuals.

If somebody considers himself a woman in a man's body, then they're screwed.
Society will shun them if they behave like they want to behave (It's like, there's freedom, and there's supposed to be (sic!) tolerance. What are those people thinking? That they can be whoever they wanna be? Shut up and make my a dinner woman!)
You shouldsee some transsexuals. They're not bad people.
The change was something not affecting people that are unrelated, so it's not harmfull. Similar case, homosexual marriage doesn't hurt anybody and yet, there are many obstacles to equal laws such as this.

[Vector]

Try he, it is gender neutral as well as masculine in the same way that man can mean male or simply human, since it comes from men originally being "wapmen" and women being "women" eventually the wap was dropped from the beginning of wapman and we get man and woman.

... No.  I'm female and have been referred to as "he" in real life by some people who kept on forgetting I was a girl (to the point of trying to knee me in fights), and it is not gender-neutral at all.  If I were gender-neutral myself, I think I'd be far less okay with it.

Hell, to be honest, I used to wish I was male/vaguely considered myself leaning in that direction when I was a little kid (nowadays I mostly end up saying "gender is confusing, so I'll just go by sex and be done with it"), but I still don't like the male pronoun.  It has connotations, expectations, and so on.  No matter what its linguistic background is, it means something else nowadays--as with many other words.

... </rant>

"He" is the gender-neutral and gender-nonspecific term in English, and the people who want to change Chicago Style to such messes as "he or she" should be found under the nearest person's front bumper.

Bring on the motorized vehicles, then.  It's a lot safer to just kill people we don't like, right?

Walk away from the computer and think for five minutes about what you're saying, and where you're saying it.

[Supermikhail]

I want to embarrass myself, maybe. I'd like to be a neutral, and specifically not in the gender sense, but in the sexual, or biological one. I think it's kind of cool, and sci-fi, and also, I believe a lot of violence is driven by sexual hormones, and without sexual hormones I would be a higher being!

On that note
_{He's the one who likes
All our pretty songs and he
Likes to sing along and he
Likes to shoot his gun
But he knows not what it means
When I say yeah...}
And nobody will get it...

Go Australia!

[praguepride]

I think "intersex" is a fair and descriptive tone. The issue with hermaphodite is that it's a specific kind of affliction that doesn't apply to every intersex. That's like calling everyone who's black "African" whether they're from Africa or not.

There's things like mosaiscm (I forget the spelling) but basically they're both and neither. Their sex organ was never defined by birth. So they're not male or female, they're both and neither. Hermaphodites are both, they've got an inny and an outy.

Mosaicism has a lump that kind of goes in and kinda goes out at the same time? I don't really know.

Anyway, in the olden days, those kinds of people were treated as freaks and were forced into a gender. Hermaphodites had something cut off/sewn up, and mosaicis (whatever sp?) were converted into one or the other. This leads to ALL sorts of gender crises.

hell, i remember watching a dateline about a guy who had his penis burnt off due to a power surge during an electrical circumcision. So his family tried to raise him as a girl. He wasn't a guy anymore, they'd snipped the burnt lump off and used estrogen to surpress his testosterone, but he definitely wasn't a girl.

he eventually got an artificial penis made and put on testosterone boosters to get back to "normal" (hence why he's a he) but the point is that with modern understanding of the differences between gender and sex, there should be a place for people who don't fit traditional norms.

In most survey's I've seen, it's Male, Female, or Other which I'm fine with, but "ALLY' type programs are

LGBTI - Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transexual, Intersex - clearly distinguishing all the different kinds of "unusual" alignments.

edit: To bring it back on the OP's rather ignorant opening, nature gave us many different spectrums, but society pressured us to conform to only two extremes for the longest of time.

As I mentioned, the US and many other nations have a third option of "Other" on most surveys. Hell, most companies etc. have that as well. Australia should wake up and join the rest of the world.

Or do you think this progress in civil rights is a step in the wrong direction? Maybe blacks should still be slaves, indians should be hunted for sport, and Australia should just be a dumping ground for criminals, eh?

edit 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(genetics)

[Solifuge]

Here's an exercise for cisgendered folks (your social gender matches your biological sex). If you're alone, say out loud what your gender is: "I am Male" or "I am Female" respectively. How does that feel? Probably like nothing; it's true. Now say the opposite: "I am Female" or "I am Male". Did that feel different? Probably felt a bit silly, because to you it isn't true.

If you've ever been mistaken as the opposite sex before, you probably know how it feels when people get that wrong; it's embarrasing, frustrating, and can seriously mess with your self-esteem. Imagine if you got that feeling every time anyone referred to you by your outward sex? That's what happens to transgendered people all the time. On top of that, what if any time anyone referred to you by any pronoun at all, be it He or She? That's what happened to my friend all the time, and se just had to deal with it. Se only recently came out too, and hir family is still trying to understand.

It's not an easy thing to get your head around, within cultures that give expectations to men or women based on their sex.

[Cthulhu]

I was at a restaurant with my mom once and the waiter (To whom my back was turned) called us "ladies."  I laughed about it, and was only bothered to the extent that I knew I needed to get a haircut sooner or later.

[Jackrabbit]

This country can be so backward and forward at the same time I keep getting vertigo.

[Creamcorn]

In the end, aren't you still held back by the gender you were born as?

Other than that, I have no problem with either genders, so long as we don't run out of either of the two (or three or four); you know, for procreative reasons we can't have everyone suddenly declaring they're neither genders.

[Jreengus]

Try he, it is gender neutral as well as masculine in the same way that man can mean male or simply human, since it comes from men originally being "wapmen" and women being "women" eventually the wap was dropped from the beginning of wapman and we get man and woman.

... No.  I'm female and have been referred to as "he" in real life by some people who kept on forgetting I was a girl (to the point of trying to knee me in fights), and it is not gender-neutral at all.  If I were gender-neutral myself, I think I'd be far less okay with it.

Ok let me get this straight, some stupid people made some mistakes and thought you were a guy. From this you have concluded that the English language is invalid and everyone should ignore the basic rules of it?

If people mistake my pet for a bat does that mean that we shouldn't call the wooden stick you hit things with a bat? Because this is effectively the argument you are making here, that you were hurt/annoyed by people making a mistake and using one meaning of a word so the other meaning is invalid.