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[Truean]

[Please do not quote; Not legal advice]

Biological terms have little if any relevance here, as can gender but your definitions are incomplete at best and do not match the situation. Much but not all of the population is described by them. Cutting those not described by it out of existence is unnecessary and cruel. This gets into complex chromosomal issues. XX, XY, XXY, etc. It is far more complex than a simple binary. However I have repeatedly advised the "youths" (insert memes here) to avoid saying "Destroy the gender binary." It works for the overwhelming majority of people and they won't part with it/that goal is unneeded and not practically doable in the short term (at least without massive pushback). What we can hope to achieve is a place for ourselves, as opposed to being erased.

I'd love to educate about endocrinology, chromosomes, intersex individuals, etc., but in some places it is actually becoming a crime to talk about these facts. That doesn't even touch the logical flaws about your "males produce sperm and females produce eggs" thing. Females go through menopause, so do they stop being female because of that? Do men  or women who are infertile not have what you call the characteristic of "sex" as "male" and "female" anymore? What about someone who has chemotherapy and can't after that? What about any number of situations and diseases, traumas, etc.? None of this holds water at some point, because what if some woman gets ovarian cancer and has those removed? Is she still "female?" That's a problem with your definition. Look up "Don't say gay law." That's just the tip of the iceberg, which as stated these laws are going to be wide ranging and will impact sport....

As for sports separation upon sex, it was always ill advised, but it happened. The argument to tradition and status quo, without more is unpersuasive for several reasons. First, even assuming for the sake of argument the status quo was valid, the conservatives have recently switched form staying the course with longstanding precedents to chucking those out the window, thus not upholding the status quo. Second, this argument, again without rational basis for it other than "that's just how it is" has been used historically to justify horrid prejudice against, women, blacks, Hispanics, gays, Irish, protestants, Catholics, and basically every group. The mere fact that a thing is, does not mean it should be and is insufficient without rational basis. Third, again false binary saying the only other option would be to end the split entirely.  One could introduce the idea of wrestling's "weight classes" based upon some performance characteristic. This was something very physical contact sports have known forever due to very obvious points concerning the difference between featherweight, lightweight, middleweight, and heavyweight classes to name a few. Doesn't have to be weight based, could adapt based upon the sport for something to divide based upon relevant characteristics and it would be "fair," which is allegedly the underlying concern... not prejudice... right? I don't care what is between your legs or chromosomes, anyone who has 100 lbs/body fat percentage and 5 inches of extra reach on someone else has a close quarters combat (cqc) advantage. The military has always known this.

The argument about breaking the law for her child is a false red herring and intentional placement into an engineered no win situation.
The line was "Parents rights! I know what's best for my child!" Except she was a parent and knew what was best for her child. There were laws and regulations integrating transgender children into activities, but those shouldn't matter. The new laws saying they can't play though... those ones should count. See the interaction between A.) Parent's Rights and B.) she broke the (new, wrong) law for her child?

This is an engineered artificial trap, because it will lead to no other outcome but parents of transgender kids being targeted along with the kids themselves, because they are parents of transgender kids.

As for puberty blockers, see? This is another solution that would deal with these alleged "advantage" issues, but everything is just "banned," "opposed, whatever because people are "against it, even though they understand little if anything about it. Similar to how the conservatives are all up in arms about an olympic drag show mocking the last supper. It was the Feast of Dionysus, not the last supper and if they counted the number of people they would've seen that. Doesn't matter, they're upset, facts don't matter and who really thought people could out classical art the French?

Also no, the laws absolutely do NOT prevent anyone from any of those things based upon puberty. It is based upon age. It is possible there may be some language barrier but no, not "puberty" "age." Even if your argument on "puberty" were assumed to be correct for the sake of argument (it is not), then ok, what if the person's parents and their doctor say it is ok? Because that's what happens with puberty blockers. This isn't something you buy at the gas station. You have to get a prescription from a physician who monitors you. The parents make the choice, but that somehow doesn't fall under "parent's rights...."
[Please do not quote; Not legal advice]

[McTraveller]

I think the discussion in sports is around if it's giving someone an unfair advantage. Which in sports is kind of funny, because the whole point is often to figure out how to get an advantage while staying "within the rules."  Like "we hired the best people" or "we had a larger budget" - these are unfair things that we tolerate.

For something like running, basically what happens is if you don't put classes in place, there are some people that would just never make it.  The data shows that the best olympic athletes, the records for fastest times, etc. are all dominated by a particular demographic. In the Olympics, the fastest woman 100m dash time is a full second slower than the fastest man, I don't know how many non-first place men are faster than that, but 1 second is a long time in a sub-10-second race.

Some sports don't matter as much, this is true. For example, I don't think something like diving matters as much, because that is generally more about skill and form than a trait like strength or height.  Same thing like archery - gender doesn't matter at all for that (I don't know why that is subclassed; as a weak teenager I could pull a recurve bow capable of hitting targets at 90m, no reason for the earlier shorter distances for women).

Basically sports are inherently unfair: the fastest and strongest and often tallest usually have an advantage in any sport that is not purely skill based or is intentionally formulated for "small" people - but there aren't many sports where being small is better - I mean being a horse jockey is the most obvious one. Maybe tumbling or gymnastics where having a smaller size probably means you have a better strength to mass ratio, and reach doesn't matter?  If you have transitioned with chemicals, does that give you an unfair advantage compared to people who didn't take chemicals? It's kind of a mess really - isn't it by definition a type of doping?  I don't know what the "fair" take is there to be honest. Basically you just have to accept that some people are more physically capable than others.

Fun fact: historically yes, castrated males were in fact not considered men any more. Eunuch was considered its own thing.  I have to imagine there was a female equivalent but I don't know off the top of my head and I don't think I want that in my search history... But I don't think there was a distinction made for otherwise superficially physically functional but otherwise infertile. And I don't think infertile women were ever not called women, although they did suffer much stigma due to being barren.

Basically the argument boils down to what is more fundamental: inherent physical state or what you can do through willpower and technology.  This doesn't just apply to sexuality by the way, we also see it in climate politics, industry in general to be honest, and the like.  In other words: does might indeed make right?

[Jopax]

I have a vagina on my YT homepage.

Random stream from someone I've never head of before, transparent lingerie try-on is the title and the thumbnail is exactly what you'd expect, except it's rotated 90 degrees to one side for some reason.

What in the fuck is going on YT.

[pisskop]

Id make a joke about Alphabet missing youtube ad revenue the other day but that's the kind of thing that would probably happen if it were more effective.

Ive seen breasts and near-genitalia on YT, but mostly from foreign channels.


The trend towards showing softcore porn on Social media has been unsettling, perhaps its also creeping into YT.  Gotta get the views, right?

[Kagus]

https://www.theverge.com/24206847/logitech-ceo-hanneke-faber-mouse-keyboard-gaming-decdoer-podcast-interview

A subscription service to your AI-powered "diamond-encrusted" mouse, which apparently never needs to be changed out for another one because you're getting your AI updates for it through the subscription... Physical wear and tear be damned. It's a Rolex mouse. A Molex.

[pisskop]

So is this just an attempt to cram all the bestest buzzwords into one model?

Subscription, ai, eco-friendly ... And of course they can support the mouse forever, they'll drop it at some point, and who knows how usable it will be at that point.

Do laser-mice go bad?  Over-engineered mice would.  Subscription model for a mouse sounds good on paper, in practice it at best screws with their consumers and extorts money over time and at worst nobody wants it.

[hector13]

I’ve had my mouse 10 years and it still works fine. Just a cheapo wired laser mouse.

[Frumple]

At least in my experience, the laser part just kinda' lasts functionally forever. In all my years of using the things, the light part's never busted.

... the wires, though? If you don't take care of those fairly carefully they'll tear up every few years. Clicky bits will screw up occasionally, too, but it's significantly less common.

Not sure about wireless ones, 'cause I kinda' hate them and don't use 'em if I can avoid it, heh.

[nenjin]

For me it's always "hand chum" which after 4 or 5 years gets so deep in the mechanisms, you'd have to disassemble and reassemble it clean it entirely. Other points of failure are the left click and the scroll wheel.

For years Razer has been trying to force users to register an account to get drivers for totally unnecessary shit like "access your custom DPI settings from anywhere!" It's such nonsense.

[ChairmanPoo]

.

. Both men and women are born unable to do either, and literally all of them eventually stops doing so without somehow transitioning to some kind of other option.
.

[Maximum Spin]

Re: the discussion as pertaining to sex in biological terms specifically, eg,

Male and female are biological terms. Males produce sperm, females produce eggs.

If males produce sperm and females produce eggs, does that mean infertile people are agender?

Menopausal females are no longer female?

Men who have had testicles removed to avoid dying of testicular cancer are no longer male?

This is, as basically always when folks try to go that route, just kinda' wrong. Both men and women are born unable to do either, and literally all of them eventually stops doing so without somehow transitioning to some kind of other option.

About your best route for biological essentialism is chromosome, but that "best route" is still intensely messy and practically leaves you with notably more than two categories and incredibly disparate expressions wildly detached from what we assign any particular combination as is (that's another way of saying it's a shitty way of categorizing things, incidentally :V).

The fundamental problem with the dual categories is biology is messy, and it doesn't actually work like our cultures' arbitrary designations do, heh. Trying to reconcile that just perennially doesn't work, in generally but especially for the folks on the margins.

I'd love to educate about endocrinology, chromosomes, intersex individuals, etc., but in some places it is actually becoming a crime to talk about these facts. That doesn't even touch the logical flaws about your "males produce sperm and females produce eggs" thing. Females go through menopause, so do they stop being female because of that? Do men  or women who are infertile not have what you call the characteristic of "sex" as "male" and "female" anymore? What about someone who has chemotherapy and can't after that? What about any number of situations and diseases, traumas, etc.? None of this holds water at some point, because what if some woman gets ovarian cancer and has those removed? Is she still "female?" That's a problem with your definition.

I just want to clarify that sex is extremely well-defined in biology because mammalian sexual development is "canalized", meaning that it is unable to develop ambiguously because of mutually exclusive systems. Male organisms are defined, biologically, as those organisms whose bodies are developed to produce sperm, regardless of whether they actually do in a given case, and female organisms are defined as those organisms whose bodies are developed to produce eggs. In mammals, that simply means that male organisms are those that can develop functioning testicular tissue and female organisms are those that can develop functioning ovarian tissue. For mammals, it is impossible to have both types functioning in the same organism, and, in the extremely rare case where neither is present, we can just look at the chromosomes to determine to which the organism is closer - which, for all mammals except monotremes, boils down to the presence or absence of a Y chromosome (or, specifically, an SRY gene). It's worth noting that different chromosome arrangements like X0, XXY, and XXX are not separate sex categories because the SRY gene functions as an on-off switch so its presence or absence is strictly binary. "Intersex", in turn, is an outdated term for people who definitely have one sex or the other, but whose sex may not be obvious from external observation due to developmental differences. It dates to a time when the underlying developmental process was not understood. These days the term "differences [or disorders] of sexual development", or DSD, is largely used instead in formal contexts.

This should not be taken to imply any position on social issues. I don't even want to get into that at this time of the morning when I can barely focus, and besides, it's not my business to say and I have absolutely no desire to cause any kind of upset for anyone. Please take the above in the manner of a strictly factual statement about the terminology used in modern biology, as it is intended.

Fun fact: historically yes, castrated males were in fact not considered men any more. Eunuch was considered its own thing.

That's very much a time and place specific thing... in fact, the only example I can think of where that's strictly the case are ancient Egyptian documents that refer to "men", "eunuchs", and "women" as three distinct categories. The more commonly cited case is India (especially a certain chapter in the Kama Sutra), but their third sex category, although often translated as "eunuch" by delicate English translators of past centuries, really has nothing to do with that concept at all.

eta: whoop, forgot the metadata

[Eric Blank]

you should remove that Truean quote

[Maximum Spin]

you should remove that [...] quote

I thought it over and realized it makes the most sense to remove all the names so no individual post can be pinned on anybody.

[Mech#4]

The quotes embedded in your post still link back to the original post. Better to remove them entirely I would say.

[Kagus]

You can set up quotes that don't link to anything.

Code: [Select]

[quote author=This one guy at band camp]"Bazinga"[/quote]

"Bazinga"