Gender

[magpie]

What are you talking about.

File gender under "you are what you are" in my quote. By choices I meant behaviors, like doing good deeds. Taking pride in who you are is such a narcissistic waste of self-encouragement. "I sat on my ass today being ME, good job!" *pats self on back* "Maybe tomorrow I can be ME twice as much! Nyeee!"

You must have a really easy life.

 

[Mustafa]

My chick would be a bio male.

God does forbid homosexual liaisons (with males).

I added "i want to become one myself". I'm tired of being a man. Autists and Aspies are more men than usual men, so ... I've accomplished alot. I want to transform to a female and get a chick with a dick. What does your God say about lesbians?

 

[AphroditeGoneAwry]

I haven't accused you of being a hater or anything (intentionally), I'm sorry if you interpreted it that way.

Yes, my feeling trans isn't a choice. Choosing to feel comfortable and take pride in that and take action to start HRT, however, is a choice. A good choice, I think, that will make me so much happier and my life feel more worthwhile.

Many on this forum think that. And they are wrong. I am all about the spectrum of feeling-emotions, identity, and using what you have been given, including feeling-emotions stemming from experiences and nature.

However, just because you can feel, emote, or think about something, does not mean you should. Hence actions can sometimes lead to bad choices.

 

[Yama]

Many on this forum think that. And they are wrong. I am all about the spectrum of feeling-emotions, identity, and using what you have been given, including feeling-emotions stemming from experiences and nature.

However, just because you can feel, emote, or think about something, does not mean you should. Hence actions can sometimes lead to bad choices.

Yeah, actions can have bad outcomes sometimes. But I'm seeing a therapist right now to ensure that I'm going to make the right choice. I'm fairly confident about what I want to do, because I know it will make me happier.

 

[AphroditeGoneAwry]

I added "i want to become one myself". I'm tired of being a man. Autists and Aspies are more men than usual men, so ... I've accomplished alot. I want to transform to a female and get a chick with a dick. What does your God say about lesbians?

You cannot transform to being a female in your physical body for realz. Because God wants you to be a bio male or female, whichever you were born to be.

As a midwife, what would you trans folk have me say to new parents? "It's an apparent boy!!! But remember, that might not be how your child manifests in his self. He might be a transbabygirl!"

 

[Yama]

As a midwife, what would you trans folk have me say to new parents? "It's an apparent boy!!! But remember, that might not be how your child manifests in his self. He might be a transbabygirl!"

You can just say that the sex is male or female. It's up to the parents and the child after that point as the child grows up to figure out whats their gender is. The child will most likely be cis. However, it's on the parents to figure out how to help their kid if when they're 4 years old the kid goes "I think I'm a girl." So you don't really need to worry about that as a midwife, since it's much farther down the line.

After all, sex is biological and for medical purposes; gender doesn't matter that much when you're fresh from the womb, nor could the infant know or communicate that.

 

[Mustafa]

You cannot transform to being a female in your physical body for realz. Because God wants you to be a bio male or female, whichever you were born to be.

As a midwife, what would you trans folk have me say to new parents? "It's an apparent boy!!! But remember, that might not be how your child manifests in his self. He might be a transbabygirl!"

OK i agree with you. I have been "broken" now. Before i was wild and didn't do the secret habit, i LOVED women. But this equality shit is messing with my mind.

Thanks for putting me back at track.

 

[ChocolateMoose123]

As someone who acquired a sense of logic and intuitiveness prior to the SJW shit-show that millennials have been subjected to, I have a pretty simplistic approach to gender. There's two of them, and ideally they match your sex. Unless they don't. Which is fine.

You are what you are and it can't be helped, therefore there's no sense taking pride in it.
You do what you do because you choose to. That's where you should earn your pride.

I am inclined to agree with you at face value. In fact, the trans issue doesn't bother me. IMO, it's an extreme plastic surgery. Only, they have to pass psychological testing.

I think a lot of plastic surgery should have this done as well. You know, those chicks who get quadruple D cup breasts, or fill their face so full of fillers they look disfigured? They should have had psychological testing and passed screening before being put under the knife, too.

But society doesn't care about them. No real anger there. Maybe pity? Incredulity? Why is that? Why aren't we outraged about that?

We just care if you want to be a chick that was a dude and be on your way. Idk. It's all a big, whatever. If it isn't hurting anyone (including oneself) and you pass the psych evals then I don't see an issue.

If it is a religious objection? Don't see that point as everyone is responsible for their own salvation so not my place to judge. I'm gonna worry about me, you do you.

As for the "pride" they speak about? That is due in part by not being accepted, matter of factly, by the general public.

It is in reaction. If I were looked upon as strange for being straight and that being the minority, I think it is only natural that I have an inclination to counter the negative with a statement of positive.

That's all that is.

 

[á´…eparted]

That social constructs are evil is not a point that needs to be made. Gender, however, seems to have been a negative force in human history. And though people may put themselves in boxes, what kind of boxes they even put themselves in change, as in, the premise that those boxes pertain to.

Since you bother making that distinction: In what sense do you mean real, and which ones qualify as real?

But that's the very point of a master category. If it wasn't something you could draw instant conclusions from without knowing the person, there'd be no reason for it to exist at all. There isn't a happy, innocuous middle ground. You don't keep track of these boxes, or you make assumptions about everyone in them. Basically, it's like how it's bullshit any time someone tells you the gender and race boxes you check on forms don't make a difference. They will tell you that legally it's not supposed to, but actual data shows it does. The check box always matters, and if it didn't, why would it exist?

My concern is over what is perhaps some confusion about this idea of validity, or realness. I don't want any chains on the things associated with gender. All of the typically gender associated behaviors are things I think everyone should be able to do in whatever way they want, and they shouldn't even have to point to any archetypes to rationalize or justify it. When people make a discreet list of acceptable categories, that typically leads to some sort of reification, those are then considered the real ones, typically in a sense that goes beyond social construction. Problems ensue.

I might not be as concerned about this if I were not seeing a upwelling of gender essentialism emerge among the very liberal activists and intellectuals who I would have expected to reject such things. Internal conflict is developing over LGBT issues and all that stuff resulting from a growing voice (though I do not know if it actually reflects a growing population) who take essentialist stances to be a part of accepting LGBT people and respecting their rights, vs the somewhat more established position of deconstructivism that rejects any intrinsic or natural idea of these things other than biological sex (and you could see Judith Butler and others for some interesting questions about how we even conceptualize that).

I mean, I'll be honest, the idea of removing gender all together is personal for me, because navigating the world without it would suddenly become much, much more difficult, and also reduce the pool of men I am attracted to. Another part of it then to me is, if we don't use gender to differentiate between male-female sex, then what do we use in place of it? Humans are not going to easily function without some sort of distinction, and without one, something will form in it's place.

By not real I mean something as other-kin. I do not believe someone genuinely feels they are actually a cat, or a dragon, or some other animal. That isn't your gender, that's something else, and I think it's unfair to lump that in. Other things such as saying your gender is red. That's not a gender, that's something else. I mean the far extreme examples of things that plainly have no connection to gender whatsoever.

I'm not quite as versed in this. What's the difference between essentialism, and deconstructionist? When it comes to gender, the whole idea, concept, and things people are pushing for are SO subjective, and have so much emotion tied to them with very little objective fact that I simply don't know what to make of it and get frustrated. My primary concern has been, and always will be, wanting to stop revolutionaries from pushing a revolution for personal gain, in a deamonizing way, or for the sake of having a revolution without considering consequences or thinking it all the way through.

The idea of "be who you want" and "gender doesn't exist" seem wholely incompatible to me. I don't see how they can fesably co-exist. How is that solved? I loathe the idea of forcing a solution where there is none. I genuinely, honestly, do not see a fair answer. Personally I want people to be who they want to be, and have no societal requirements for gender, but still allow people to subscribe to a personal gender as they see fit. The latter is still a problem though? Then how on earth to we let people be themselves? It's a catch-22. It seems to me like if there is no gender, then subscribing to a gender is therefore bad, even on a basic level. It's why this whole gender debate gets me so riled up. It's trying to mix oil and water, and refuses to add any emulsifer to let them mingle. It's like someone walking up to a broken cart and saying "yes that needs to be fixed, but you can't use wheels anymore".

I certainly don't dismiss issues of gender and sexuality.

Moving society to a place of understanding the truth about gender is a big prospect. There's probably only so much we can do, here and now, in a proactive fashion. I've talked at other times on the forum about how some very radical things concerning technology and the like may be the only way we completely get over it.

But it's still worthwhile that we try to move toward that, and I'm very skeptical of any supposed solutions, however well intentioned, that seem to root our understanding of gender further in archetypes, stereotypes, essentialism and naturalism.

Ah, this is the big distinction for me. I agree, stuff needs to change. I loathe the idea of fast rapid cultural change though. In a perfect world it could happen, but in practice it just doesn't. Move too quickly, and people balk and there is a risk of them taking over. You can't force everyone minds to change overnight, and if you do they NEVER will. It needs to be slow and incremental. To me shifting to remove gender as a concept in our own lifetime would just not work, yet it seems like some people simply don't care and THAT take serious issue with. It's why I avoid cultural revolutionaries (the ones actively leading it). This can be done, it just needs to be incremental.

 

[Magic Poriferan]

I mean, I'll be honest, the idea of removing gender all together is personal for me, because navigating the world without it would suddenly become much, much more difficult, and also reduce the pool of men I am attracted to. Another part of it then to me is, if we don't use gender to differentiate between male-female sex, then what do we use in place of it? Humans are not going to easily function without some sort of distinction, and without one, something will form in it's place.

You are saying something true here. We do not see the things upon which we actually determine sex. Most of the time, you do not see peoples' genitalia. If you use chromosomes as the basis, then you definitely never see those. So when we claim that we see someone's sex, we are actually seeing something we use as a proxy for a sex but is not a part of the definition, like a skirt. This has been referred to as sex category. If you've never read it, I'd suggest reading Doing Gender by West and Zimmerman. It's one of the most influential pieces in the field and it speaks to some of these questions.

So maybe you're saying that unless we're all naked (or in the case of chromosomes, pretty much screwed no matter what), we have you have something like the distinction between wearing a dress and not to quickly tell a part sexes. So, we come up with a set of conventions for things that are not actually a part of the definition of sex or even follow from sex, but will be culturally accepted as the things the sexes are supposed to do to distinguish them. At that point, you pretty much create gender (although you're more progressive in that you, at least, know that you just made all of this up for social purposes instead of believing it's biological). The problem is precisely that it is arbitrary, and it basically segregates behavior. The logic of this is that women should feel obligated to wear dressed, and men are not allowed to. Or maybe it's makeup. Women have to wear it and men can't. There's no particular practical reason these things should be assigned thusly, and it of course fucks over every man and woman who doesn't want to follow those rules perform those roles.

Secondary sex characteristics may not be enough to distinguish sexes alone (I do think voices are very frequently a give away). But what if it's not? Does that mean in a genderless world we wouldn't have those indicators to make it immediately obvious what sex people are? Perhaps not. Is that really so bad vs the alternative?

I'd like to live in a world where it isn't offensive or crazy to ask somebody what their sex is. And if we lived in that world, that would certainly remove a lot of tension. I'd rather be any a society where I was normal to ask, than one where you don't have to ask because we are all caged in bullshit roles. But maybe it's easier for me to say because I had a lot of experience confusing people about my sex.

And for your last point of the paragraph, I'm not sure I understand. Yes, there will be distinctions other than gender. There are already tons of other distinctions to choose from. I don't think taking gender out of the pictures creates some hazardous vacuum. And I'm not so sure that we actually need them.

By not real I mean something as other-kin. I do not believe someone genuinely feels they are actually a cat, or a dragon, or some other animal. That isn't your gender, that's something else, and I think it's unfair to lump that in. Other things such as saying your gender is red. That's not a gender, that's something else. I mean the far extreme examples of things that plainly have no connection to gender whatsoever.

I think other-kin are the logical conclusion of this kind of reasoning. It was inevitable.

I accept sexual dysphoria as a condition. It seems to be neurological in nature, it seems to involve issues of neurology that identifies one kind of physiology working with a body that possesses another kind of physiology. Other-kin are ridiculous in this regard, because it is impossible to believe that they are neurologically wired to cat physiology, and I've certainly seen no evidence of the kind. However, if someone does not have that kind of neurological issue with their actual sexual physiology, if they have actual issue with their biological sex, I don't think they have any business using the word trans. I emphasize that the distinction is in the feeling, as for various reasons, many people who have sexual dysphoria do not get sex change operations, but they still have that feeling, they still have that neurology. I'm saying that if you don't even feel like you'd want different sex characteristics, or uncomfortable with your current ones, you're not trans. You are just a person who doesn't want to obey gender roles, which is great! That's what I want to see, but it's not wanting to change from one real thing to another real thing, it's just disregarding one imaginary thing. You have can have no instrinsic, biological basis for wanting to be another gender as opposed to sex, then you can have such a desire to be a cat. But just like a desire to do things differently from society's gender norms if you want to, you can do things differently from what are expected of humans. You can cat things if you want to. Knock yourself out.

I'm not quite as versed in this. What's the difference between essentialism, and deconstructionist? When it comes to gender, the whole idea, concept, and things people are pushing for are SO subjective, and have so much emotion tied to them with very little objective fact that I simply don't know what to make of it and get frustrated. My primary concern has been, and always will be, wanting to stop revolutionaries from pushing a revolution for personal gain, in a deamonizing way, or for the sake of having a revolution without considering consequences or thinking it all the way through.

I've already written a lot, but I suspect this is one of the more important parts.

What I mean be essentialist is a couple of ideas. That there are specifically, and distinctly, some genders. More importantly, that the implication of being a gender is that one necessarily must have a bunch of other traits. In the oldest, simplest sense, it would have been that a person is either a man or a woman, a man is aggressive and a woman is passive, a mines hides his emotions and a woman shows them, and so and so forth. The idea that these particular categories exist, they have traits, and this is natural.

Now, the list in this OP is enormous. It's sheer enormity is such that it gives people far more wiggle room to do what they want than a traditional point view would. However, it's just expanding on the same fundamentally flawed idea and kicking the can down the road until it becomes, as I said, pointless. Tell me, what is the point of mention your gender or anyone else's, unless you think it states something more than a mere label? If you don't think being X means doing Y, if you don't think that having the gender of man means being less emotional, than what is the point of even using such a reference? That's what I meant about the check boxes on forms. It's impossible for me to maintain credulity one someone says "I want to use these boxes, but don't worry, I'm not going to use them to deny or demand traits from anyone". That is literally the only reason to have the box. If you say gender is gender is nothing more than a label you use for yourself, then it's useless. If gender makes assumptions about one's personality, then it is pernicious.

The idea of "be who you want" and "gender doesn't exist" seem wholely incompatible to me.

They strike me as mutually dependent. Gender is a cage. If it means anything at all, then it means removing peoples options for what they can be. No number of genders will ever allow as much freedom as not having them.

I don't see how they can fesably co-exist. How is that solved? I loathe the idea of forcing a solution where there is none. I genuinely, honestly, do not see a fair answer. Personally I want people to be who they want to be, and have no societal requirements for gender, but still allow people to subscribe to a personal gender as they see fit.

What would that actually mean? What would subscribing to a gender, in a world where there are no societal requirements for gender, mean? I cannot see how that would be different from saying your gender is red.

The latter is still a problem though? Then how on earth to we let people be themselves? It's a catch-22. It seems to me like if there is no gender, then subscribing to a gender is therefore bad, even on a basic level. It's why this whole gender debate gets me so riled up. It's trying to mix oil and water, and refuses to add any emulsifer to let them mingle. It's like someone walking up to a broken cart and saying "yes that needs to be fixed, but you can't use wheels anymore".

If you were completely, logically pure about what it means to let anyone do what they want, then technically I'm not letting that happen. But I'm saying is that the only form in which gender is not a restriction one people doing what they want to do, is a form in which it is so superficial that denying people the right to do it changes nothing. And really, if everyone considers gender some label they make up for themselves, like red, or Fheshfhgfsj, then I don't care, because at that point, gender in the practical sense and everything wrong with it would already have to be dead for this state of affairs to even have emerged.

Ah, this is the big distinction for me. I agree, stuff needs to change. I loathe the idea of fast rapid cultural change though. In a perfect world it could happen, but in practice it just doesn't. Move too quickly, and people balk and there is a risk of them taking over. You can't force everyone minds to change overnight, and if you do they NEVER will. It needs to be slow and incremental. To me shifting to remove gender as a concept in our own lifetime would just not work, yet it seems like some people simply don't care and THAT take serious issue with. It's why I avoid cultural revolutionaries (the ones actively leading it). This can be done, it just needs to be incremental.

We're talking about social change through the entire history of humanity. I don't think there's an objective basis for deciding what is incremental. If you say it needs to be taken slow, I can say we've been working on this for about 200,000 years, so I think we've been reasonably patient .

I don't personally see the use in broadly talking about incremental or expedient, or conservative and radical. I'd rather talk about in the actual details of cause effect. That's why I bring up the technology I was referring to. I've said elsewhere on the forum that the technological ability to completely conceive and gestate humans outside of another human body would do an enormous amount to undermine gender as a concept. If that happens, for whatever reason, it will change things a great deal. Something like that.


***Pardon for typos, and be wary of a missing word or the wrong word. I wrote this fast and I didn't proof read it.

 

[á´…eparted]

You are saying something true here. We do not see the things upon which we actually determine sex. Most of the time, you do not see peoples' genitalia. If you use chromosomes as the basis, then you definitely never see those. So when we claim that we see someone's sex, we are actually seeing something we use as a proxy for a sex but is not a part of the definition, like a skirt. This has been referred to as sex category. If you've never read it, I'd suggest reading Doing Gender by West and Zimmerman. It's one of the most influential pieces in the field and it speaks to some of these questions.

So maybe you're saying that unless we're all naked (or in the case of chromosomes, pretty much screwed no matter what), we have you have something like the distinction between wearing a dress and not to quickly tell a part sexes. So, we come up with a set of conventions for things that are not actually a part of the definition of sex or even follow from sex, but will be culturally accepted as the things the sexes are supposed to do to distinguish them. At that point, you pretty much create gender (although you're more progressive in that you, at least, know that you just made all of this up for social purposes instead of believing it's biological). The problem is precisely that it is arbitrary, and it basically segregates behavior. The logic of this is that women should feel obligated to wear dressed, and men are not allowed to. Or maybe it's makeup. Women have to wear it and men can't. There's no particular practical reason these things should be assigned thusly, and it of course fucks over every man and woman who doesn't want to follow those rules perform those roles.

Secondary sex characteristics may not be enough to distinguish sexes alone (I do think voices are very frequently a give away). But what if it's not? Does that mean in a genderless world we wouldn't have those indicators to make it immediately obvious what sex people are? Perhaps not. Is that really so bad vs the alternative?

I'd like to live in a world where it isn't offensive or crazy to ask somebody what their sex is. And if we lived in that world, that would certainly remove a lot of tension. I'd rather be any a society where I was normal to ask, than one where you don't have to ask because we are all caged in bullshit roles. But maybe it's easier for me to say because I had a lot of experience confusing people about my sex.

And for your last point of the paragraph, I'm not sure I understand. Yes, there will be distinctions other than gender. There are already tons of other distinctions to choose from. I don't think taking gender out of the pictures creates some hazardous vacuum. And I'm not so sure that we actually need them.

You do make a good point, secondary sex characteristics do give away ones sex quite readily in the vast majority of cases. It's a big jarring when that's not congruent with the rest, but it can usually be sorted fairly quickly. I also 100% agree that it would be great where asking if ones sex is male or female (or a rare case of something inbetween) would not be a problem. Honestly I never ask because it's obvious usually, but I am afraid of offending someone by asking if it isn't obvious, and I am angry at the fact that it's even considered offensive to ask! Just do it politely. I can't blame people for being cautious though, because a lot of people then judge based off the answer in a negative manner which is complete BS. A parallel happens when people ask someone who is mixed race what their family origins are. I never ask, and it bothers me that I can't. I simply find that stuff really interesting, and I'm curious and want to know. Yet, a great number of people blunt say "what are you?" which is fucking rude, and they they go and judge based off that and act upon it. I mean... why do people have to be such fucks? My god. I'm so tired of having to bow my behavior when I do nothing wrong just because a lot of people are little shits. Then I get told I'm bad for feeling that way because of privelage? I can't win. I mean, I get it, I need to "suffer" because other people have it worse and experience a parallel for something else (race, sex, etc.). I really do, but I just don't feel like I can do any good without getting mad at the situation (which is unproductive). Hence, I have given this up 95% of the time, and leave the room, tune out, or refuse to answer when anything comes up, because on all sides someone has a problem with someone else.

What I mean by what I said in regards to a label vacuum is that something else will take over. It might not be bad, but it really is human nature. It's hard wired for humans to form groups, and in the absence of one, people will form another. If gender is removed, other types of groups will form beyond it, which could create it's own problems. I'm not saying it's a reason to keep gender (it isn't). It's more that the hopeful outcome will not be as perfect as envisioned, because ultimately something else will segregate people, and it can only be kept peaceful if there's enough unformity and education (which isn't going to happen well enough in our life time for sure). The result? They'll be some sort of new dividing line. It might have nothing to do with sex or a gender-like concept either, but likely paralleled.

I think other-kin are the logical conclusion of this kind of reasoning. It was inevitable.

I accept sexual dysphoria as a condition. It seems to be neurological in nature, it seems to involve issues of neurology that identifies one kind of physiology working with a body that possesses another kind of physiology. Other-kin are ridiculous in this regard, because it is impossible to believe that they are neurologically wired to cat physiology, and I've certainly seen no evidence of the kind. However, if someone does not have that kind of neurological issue with their actual sexual physiology, if they have actual issue with their biological sex, I don't think they have any business using the word trans. I emphasize that the distinction is in the feeling, as for various reasons, many people who have sexual dysphoria do not get sex change operations, but they still have that feeling, they still have that neurology. I'm saying that if you don't even feel like you'd want different sex characteristics, or uncomfortable with your current ones, you're not trans. You are just a person who doesn't want to obey gender roles, which is great! That's what I want to see, but it's not wanting to change from one real thing to another real thing, it's just disregarding one imaginary thing. You have can have no instrinsic, biological basis for wanting to be another gender as opposed to sex, then you can have such a desire to be a cat. But just like a desire to do things differently from society's gender norms if you want to, you can do things differently from what are expected of humans. You can cat things if you want to. Knock yourself out.

I completely agree. You basically put to words what I couldn't. Other-kin is the thing that comes to peoples minds readily and is the most easily made example.

I've already written a lot, but I suspect this is one of the more important parts.

What I mean be essentialist is a couple of ideas. That there are specifically, and distinctly, some genders. More importantly, that the implication of being a gender is that one necessarily must have a bunch of other traits. In the oldest, simplest sense, it would have been that a person is either a man or a woman, a man is aggressive and a woman is passive, a mines hides his emotions and a woman shows them, and so and so forth. The idea that these particular categories exist, they have traits, and this is natural.

Now, the list in this OP is enormous. It's sheer enormity is such that it gives people far more wiggle room to do what they want than a traditional point view would. However, it's just expanding on the same fundamentally flawed idea and kicking the can down the road until it becomes, as I said, pointless. Tell me, what is the point of mention your gender or anyone else's, unless you think it states something more than a mere label? If you don't think being X means doing Y, if you don't think that having the gender of man means being less emotional, than what is the point of even using such a reference? That's what I meant about the check boxes on forms. It's impossible for me to maintain credulity one someone says "I want to use these boxes, but don't worry, I'm not going to use them to deny or demand traits from anyone". That is literally the only reason to have the box. If you say gender is gender is nothing more than a label you use for yourself, then it's useless. If gender makes assumptions about one's personality, then it is pernicious.

Don't worry, I can be a wind-bag just as easily .

If that's essentialism then that's well... dumb? I mean there is no proof of that anyway, and there are plenty of day-to-day people that readily show it's a silly belief to hold. I mean, that's the exact thing people are fighting against, and are moving to show it's not a thing afterall.

Honestly, asking ones gender on something seems silly, but at the same time it does still matter. Mainly because there is an unfair tilt between men and women (which has more to do with sex if we're being nit-picky on labels). My PhD adviser is the department chair of chemistry at my university, and we've talked about these sorts of things before. He's recently insituted a bunch of stuff on diversity benchmarks, and requires all factulty involved in hiring processes in any way (including accepting graduate students). As such, on applications these things are asked. Ultimately, everyone gets interviewed in person. You couldn't hide those things anyway because of it. As such it's used as book-keeping to help identify if biases are appearing (conscious or not) when votes are held or offers are proposed. Because of the way the world currently is, there is utility to asking. We're not yet at a place where we wouldn't ask yet. The only place that would preserve utility would be in medical situations, because sex (not gender) DOES matter on a medical level.

They strike me as mutually dependent. Gender is a cage. If it means anything at all, then it means removing peoples options for what they can be. No number of genders will ever allow as much freedom as not having them.

What would that actually mean? What would subscribing to a gender, in a world where there are no societal requirements for gender, mean? I cannot see how that would be different from saying your gender is red.

If you were completely, logically pure about what it means to let anyone do what they want, then technically I'm not letting that happen. But I'm saying is that the only form in which gender is not a restriction one people doing what they want to do, is a form in which it is so superficial that denying people the right to do it changes nothing. And really, if everyone considers gender some label they make up for themselves, like red, or Fheshfhgfsj, then I don't care, because at that point, gender in the practical sense and everything wrong with it would already have to be dead for this state of affairs to even have emerged.

I would agree they are mutually dependent, but at current I simply can not imagine a society pure enough to not have either, certainly not in our lifetime. It would take multiple generations to tease it out as the curmudgeons die off. I mean, in my mind I honestly can't envision a society that lacks a concept of gender; I have no idea what it would look like in regards to trends, dress, behavior. Partly because I am utterly convinced there would still be some delineators between the two sexes, and I feel like they would begin to self-straitify and diverse on their own over time. I mean, gender did appear organically. It wasn't like some said "we need gender!" It sort of just came about.

Regardless, this is a good point, without gender there is no restriction on what a person can and can't do, assuming everyone no longer understand what gender even is. More of what I was getting at was, for example, a woman wearing a delicate dress, make-up, and heels; fitting a "gender". Is that bad? Is it worse than a woman wearing jeans, t-shirt, and ball cap with short hair? By your initial statement it would suggest yes it is, because one promotes a gender stereotype. If we remove gender, but people still remember gender, things that reinforce that old memory would be seen as bad. I call that unfair and just creating the opposite problem that we currenltly have. Which, is why I say it's unsolvable on a short time scale. Gender needs to be forgotten as a concept, and that will take hunderds of years.

We're talking about social change through the entire history of humanity. I don't think there's an objective basis for deciding what is incremental. If you say it needs to be taken slow, I can say we've been working on this for about 200,000 years, so I think we've been reasonably patient .

I don't personally see the use in broadly talking about incremental or expedient, or conservative and radical. I'd rather talk about in the actual details of cause effect. That's why I bring up the technology I was referring to. I've said elsewhere on the forum that the technological ability to completely conceive and gestate humans outside of another human body would do an enormous amount to undermine gender as a concept. If that happens, for whatever reason, it will change things a great deal. Something like that.


***Pardon for typos, and be wary of a missing word or the wrong word. I wrote this fast and I didn't proof read it.

But you haven't been alive for 200,000 years , you're only 4 months older than I so no pulling the age card either .

Joking aside, I guess a difference between you and I is you tend to side towards the theoretical and apply it to practical, where as I sort of do it the other way around where I identify what is practical and apply theory to it. They both work and each had their drawbacks. That and usually tire of purely philosphical constructs that can't ever be tried or resolved (inferior Ti and all that jazz).

I think allowing humans to gestate outside of a body is a wonderful idea and I hope to see it in my life time (though I doubt we will). The problems is it wakes up the science ethicists that don't know what they're talking about where they go "but WHY?" and I say "Why NOT? Science: we do what we must, because, we can (to channel GLADoS for a second).

 

[Magic Poriferan]

Sorry for the delay. This is pretty long stuff and I've been preoccupied.

You do make a good point, secondary sex characteristics do give away ones sex quite readily in the vast majority of cases. It's a big jarring when that's not congruent with the rest, but it can usually be sorted fairly quickly. I also 100% agree that it would be great where asking if ones sex is male or female (or a rare case of something inbetween) would not be a problem. Honestly I never ask because it's obvious usually, but I am afraid of offending someone by asking if it isn't obvious, and I am angry at the fact that it's even considered offensive to ask! Just do it politely. I can't blame people for being cautious though, because a lot of people then judge based off the answer in a negative manner which is complete BS. A parallel happens when people ask someone who is mixed race what their family origins are. I never ask, and it bothers me that I can't. I simply find that stuff really interesting, and I'm curious and want to know. Yet, a great number of people blunt say "what are you?" which is fucking rude, and they they go and judge based off that and act upon it. I mean... why do people have to be such fucks? My god. I'm so tired of having to bow my behavior when I do nothing wrong just because a lot of people are little shits. Then I get told I'm bad for feeling that way because of privelage? I can't win. I mean, I get it, I need to "suffer" because other people have it worse and experience a parallel for something else (race, sex, etc.). I really do, but I just don't feel like I can do any good without getting mad at the situation (which is unproductive). Hence, I have given this up 95% of the time, and leave the room, tune out, or refuse to answer when anything comes up, because on all sides someone has a problem with someone else.

I pretty much feel the same way. The difference being that I'm not too iffy about the concept of being privileged, and I don't actually think it means anyone needs to experience suffering. That sounds to me like the fallacy of relative privation, which is not what should be taken from the concept of privilege. I do understand that a lot of people aren't great at articulating the concept, though. I think I've had some practice by coming from a white, blue collar part of the world, trying to explain to relatives how the concept of white privilege co-exists with white poverty in a completely non-contradictory way.

What I mean by what I said in regards to a label vacuum is that something else will take over. It might not be bad, but it really is human nature. It's hard wired for humans to form groups, and in the absence of one, people will form another. If gender is removed, other types of groups will form beyond it, which could create it's own problems. I'm not saying it's a reason to keep gender (it isn't). It's more that the hopeful outcome will not be as perfect as envisioned, because ultimately something else will segregate people, and it can only be kept peaceful if there's enough unformity and education (which isn't going to happen well enough in our life time for sure). The result? They'll be some sort of new dividing line. It might have nothing to do with sex or a gender-like concept either, but likely paralleled.

It doesn't conform with the popular rhetoric, but I'm inclined to say there is potential justification for categories, discrimination, and intolerance. I've never opposed any of these things as abstracts ideals. Rather, I've always argued that many a popular focus, like gender, race, and sexual orientation, are horribly constructed categories and do not justify any prejudice. But the fact is, to have a concept of a Nazi, I must be putting people into some criteria based category, and you're dame right I would discriminate against Nazis, and not tolerate them. So, in other words, the fact that one category going away is replaced by a new one does not mean it won't be an improvement. I just want justifiable categories. And I wish people would at least actually understand what a categories really are.

I completely agree. You basically put to words what I couldn't. Other-kin is the thing that comes to peoples minds readily and is the most easily made example.




Don't worry, I can be a wind-bag just as easily .

If that's essentialism then that's well... dumb? I mean there is no proof of that anyway, and there are plenty of day-to-day people that readily show it's a silly belief to hold. I mean, that's the exact thing people are fighting against, and are moving to show it's not a thing afterall.

Honestly, asking ones gender on something seems silly, but at the same time it does still matter. Mainly because there is an unfair tilt between men and women (which has more to do with sex if we're being nit-picky on labels). My PhD adviser is the department chair of chemistry at my university, and we've talked about these sorts of things before. He's recently insituted a bunch of stuff on diversity benchmarks, and requires all factulty involved in hiring processes in any way (including accepting graduate students). As such, on applications these things are asked. Ultimately, everyone gets interviewed in person. You couldn't hide those things anyway because of it. As such it's used as book-keeping to help identify if biases are appearing (conscious or not) when votes are held or offers are proposed. Because of the way the world currently is, there is utility to asking. We're not yet at a place where we wouldn't ask yet. The only place that would preserve utility would be in medical situations, because sex (not gender) DOES matter on a medical level.

My concern is that the reinforcing of supposedly real categories encourages that essentialism, though. They may not be separable.

But in regards to using book keeping to detect discrimination, I am aware of this problem. It is a tight rope act. It is, to my mind, the fundamental problem at the center of all of these civil rights and discrimination issues. How do we repair the damage that has been done by people acting on their belief in this system of categories, while simultaneous putting an end to that system of categories generating future prejudice and therefore future damage?

Like, perhaps I shouldn't get into this, because it is a bit of a digression and also apparently a rather controversial opinion of mine. I think is race is racist. There is no non-racist concept of race. Race is a social construct that came into existence precisely as a way to rationalize oppressing large but specific groups of people (see stuff about the end of Catholic hegemony, conquest of the new world, Atlantic slave trade). If this is true, it puts all of us between a rock and a hard place. If you try to reject the concept out of hand, you try to be "color blind", then you will prevent yourself from acknowledging the unjust treatment and the material deprivation that still concentrates among people assigned certain racial categories, and be negligent to the problem. If you try to address those problems by drawing attention to racial issues, then you have to root your idea in a socially constructed system that is guaranteed to breed more prejudice. How do you get around this? I don't have a lot of answers, sadly, but I think it is important to recognize that as the problem, and getting other people to see it that way would probably be one of the first steps. Also, the term social construct keeps coming up, and I have to say it would really help if people could commonly understand what the fuck that is.

I would agree they are mutually dependent, but at current I simply can not imagine a society pure enough to not have either, certainly not in our lifetime. It would take multiple generations to tease it out as the curmudgeons die off. I mean, in my mind I honestly can't envision a society that lacks a concept of gender; I have no idea what it would look like in regards to trends, dress, behavior. Partly because I am utterly convinced there would still be some delineators between the two sexes, and I feel like they would begin to self-straitify and diverse on their own over time. I mean, gender did appear organically. It wasn't like some said "we need gender!" It sort of just came about.

Yes, people will have to die off. But people dying off alone won't make it happen either. That is unfortunately the typical pace of cultural change. Few people live even 100 years. You can hope, but not expect, to see everything change all at once in your life, but you and a succession of generations have to be strenuous in trying to make it happen for anything to happen at all.

I can imagine a world without gender. And I know it came from something, I've given a lot of thought to that. I think it was a byproduct of certainly physiological realities that were far more salient to people living as hunter-gatherers. I think an enormous part of its salience has already been lost, but its well known that abstract culture has a longer half-life than material culture. It dies hard. Some mixture of making physical sex difference even less relevant (back to the point about external gestation), active efforts to counter-program the inherited abstract culture, and unfortunately just a lot of passage of time, would be necessary in ending gender.

Regardless, this is a good point, without gender there is no restriction on what a person can and can't do, assuming everyone no longer understand what gender even is. More of what I was getting at was, for example, a woman wearing a delicate dress, make-up, and heels; fitting a "gender". Is that bad? Is it worse than a woman wearing jeans, t-shirt, and ball cap with short hair? By your initial statement it would suggest yes it is, because one promotes a gender stereotype. If we remove gender, but people still remember gender, things that reinforce that old memory would be seen as bad. I call that unfair and just creating the opposite problem that we currenltly have. Which, is why I say it's unsolvable on a short time scale. Gender needs to be forgotten as a concept, and that will take hunderds of years.

I get that response all the time.

No, there would be nothing bad about a woman wearing a dress. There would be nothing bad about what anyone does based on their sex, one way or the other. People might remember gendered habits, but I think there are root concepts. Eroding the foundation of gender as a concept undermines the basis on which habits like women wearing dresses and men not wearing dresses exists. In theory, you dig out the root and the rest follows, which you would want not because you cared about who was wearing a dress, but because you don't want people wearing dresses based on gender. Directly going after women for wearing dresses would completely miss the point and solve nothing. I cannot recall if I've ever seen anyone actually do that in the name of sex/gender progressive, however.

But you haven't been alive for 200,000 years , you're only 4 months older than I so no pulling the age card either .

Joking aside, I guess a difference between you and I is you tend to side towards the theoretical and apply it to practical, where as I sort of do it the other way around where I identify what is practical and apply theory to it. They both work and each had their drawbacks. That and usually tire of purely philosphical constructs that can't ever be tried or resolved (inferior Ti and all that jazz).

I guess I would just refer back to the above remarks about change over multiple generations requiring individual effort never the less.

I think allowing humans to gestate outside of a body is a wonderful idea and I hope to see it in my life time (though I doubt we will). The problems is it wakes up the science ethicists that don't know what they're talking about where they go "but WHY?" and I say "Why NOT? Science: we do what we must, because, we can (to channel GLADoS for a second).

Yeah, well, in the mean time, I'll just have to settle for lab grown meat (which of course freaks out the same people who suspect that GMOs are dangerous). Baby steps.

 

[Masokissed]

 

[Masokissed]

Then git gud at giving 0 fucks and proceed to life's next challenge before you waste any more of your time.

Fight me IRL I STG. Fucking FIGHT ME. Leave my [MENTION=23583]21lux[/MENTION] alone.

 

[Coriolis]

I read in the book my therapist lent me today that only 20% of MTF transgender fully transition, and only 3-5% of FTM. This is mostly because of the high monetary cost since transitioning is not covered by insurance, but also because some transgendered individuals don't feel the need to fully physically transition. They have gender dysphoria, but not body dysphoria. In my case, I have mild body dysphoria as well as gender dysphoria.

How do you define gender dysphoria vs. body dysphoria?

So, you have 50 plus sum "definitions" of gender. Eh. I'm not so sure. More like, each person wants their own label. Doesn't change anything as there is nothing new under the sun.

How about: there is only male and female, but each human is some linear superposition of these two states, which of course results in an infinite number of possibilities. (How's that for genderless physics, [MENTION=3325]Mole[/MENTION]?)

My comment was more along the lines of people who not only identify a certain way but present (hopefully that's the right word) as such. Like, whatever masculine traits I may have, I'm still cool with peeing in the girls bathroom, and want "Female" on my drivers license. If a given identity makes a significant impact on how someone lives and gets along in society, then it should be supported and protected by the law so people can be who they are without bullshit.

I agree. I'm female, I look female, and that doesn't bother me. What does bother me is when someone extrapolates from that fact to say: because you are female you should do/feel/want/think X rather than Y. I want "female" on my license because it reflects my actual physiology, just as my actual height, weight, hair color, and vision are stated there.

Transsexuality is harder for me to grasp intellectually. I think a person's sex matters only insofar as the gender matters, because sex is more fixed than gender. I don't think anymore about being female than I do about having brown eyes, but that's probably a privilege of being cis? I could see hating having a female body if I knew I were a man. At the same time, there's all kinds of ways that what I look like and who I know I am don't line up, and I get a perverse pleasure out of that discrepancy and playing on those expectations.

I would say the reverse: gender matters only insofar as sex matters. I see gender as a social construct, which is indeed fluid and malleable. Sex is what is physiological, at least as we are using the term here. It has implications not just for physical attraction and reproduction, but for personal health and hygiene, how certain diseases manifest, etc. Gender is therefore important only to the degree that it is tied to that physiological reality.

For years, I have identified with being masculine, and having a masculine spirit inside me. I have always preferred presenting myself as 'masculine', but if I do ever decide to take HRT, I don't want to be defined by a label if that makes sense? I've never really enjoyed 'gender' labels because to me, gender is a spectrum and different people fall within different areas of this spectrum, and some (a lot) of people don't want to be labelled or tied down to 'gender identity labels'.

At the end of the day, we are all humans regardless of how we identify. We all share common interests, which form connections, and I think the main thing is that us as humans can get on well and feel connected within online communities without feeling the pressure to confine ourselves. We are all unique people, and we are all a part of this one community, which I am glad to say. We mightn't always agree, but to me, we are a big online family.

Yeah, that's all I really got to say. To me, 'gender' isn't what is important, nor defines me. What defines me more than anything is my character. Of course I am willing to accept people as they are, but I don't think 'gender' is the end all and be all of everything. For some people it is important to their identities, and I respect that, but to me there are more important things.

Very well stated. To add another layer, I identify with many things that are generally considered masculine, but don't consider myself masculine. OTOH, I don't consider myself particularly feminine either. If "feminine" is "like a woman", and I - a woman - am doing it, that is feminine enough for me. I would be more bemused than offended to be misgendered IRL, though, simply because I do look female, and am not bothered by that. I am sometimes misgendered online, and really don't care.

You are what you are and it can't be helped, therefore there's no sense taking pride in it.

There is even less sense feeling shame in it. Sometimes, it takes a good dose of pride to counteract the shame too many people are force-fed their entire lives.

You cannot transform to being a female in your physical body for realz. Because God wants you to be a bio male or female, whichever you were born to be.

So if God wanted me to have perfect vision, he would have made my corneas differently, and my glasses are thus an attempt to subvert his will?

I suppose all those folks coloring their hair are going against what God wants, too.

 

[anticlimatic]

There is even less sense feeling shame in it. Sometimes, it takes a good dose of pride to counteract the shame too many people are force-fed their entire lives.


So if God wanted me to have perfect vision, he would have made my corneas differently, and my glasses are thus an attempt to subvert his will?

I suppose all those folks coloring their hair are going against what God wants, too.

Glasses are like strap ons, and hair dye only affects a dead and discarded part of the body.

Maybe if you had your eyes surgically replaced with two buttholes the analogy would work better?

As for pride to counteract shame I don't buy it. No feeling has ever replaced another by force. Instead they mix into a gnarly funk like emotional BO and perfume.

If other people make you feel shame by telling you to feel it, maybe you just have some external loci of control issues to work on. Usually shame comes from the conscience- the RIGHT kind of shame, that helps prevent us from being assholes more than once in any given situation.

 

[Coriolis]

Glasses are like strap ons, and hair dye only affects a dead and discarded part of the body.

Maybe if you had your eyes surgically replaced with two buttholes the analogy would work better?

As for pride to counteract shame I don't buy it. No feeling has ever replaced another by force. Instead they mix into a gnarly funk like emotional BO and perfume.

If other people make you feel shame by telling you to feel it, maybe you just have some external loci of control issues to work on. Usually shame comes from the conscience- the RIGHT kind of shame, that helps prevent us from being assholes more than once in any given situation.

People who feel they were born with the wrong sex address it in a variety of ways, from adopting dress and hairstyle associated with the other sex, to having surgery to correct their bodies. You are obviously missing the point, which is the idea of transcending the physical body we are born with. If it is wrong, sinful, or "against what God wants" for someone to change their body to address gender identity issues, then it is just as wrong to change it to address issues like poor sight, congenital heart defects, club feet, etc. or to have cosmetic surgery like breast reduction/augmentation or a nose job.

As for shame, a significant part of psychotherapy attempts to undo misplaced and harmful feelings of shame, usually induced by external forces, like abusive parents. As with changing a bad habit, it is easier to replace it with a good habit/feeling than simply to eradicate it, leaving a vacuum. Sure, the degree to which one internalizes shame pushed on them by others probably is related to one's locus of control, just like the ability to resist peer pressure. This internalizing usually starts when one is very young and more vulnerable to these influences. Children with the ability consistently to ignore peer pressure are in the minority, and are able to do so largely due to support at home, another external influence.

What you are calling "the right kind of shame" seems more like guilt, and rightfully applies to what we do, not who we are. Having a conscience that motivates us to recognize and correct our own wrongdoings is healthy and productive. Feeling shame or guilt simply over who we are is neither.

 

[Thalassa]

Honestly my original understanding of people identifying with another gender was usually due to either same sex preference, or defying a sex based gender role - for example, in the 19th century women living as men so they could be in the military, or perform "man" tasks or safely live alone...and of course drag queen or drag king in the gay and lesbian community.

I liked androgynous looking people as a child, I think as a child I thought they were creative or less threatening adults, if that makes any sense at all.

I think people should just be themselves in a fair society - whether they're a female who wants to be a house wife or a soldier, or a male who wants to be a go go dancer or a construction worker...this to me, on a strictly personal level, makes more sense than for example an article I saw about a trans woman who wanted to transition back to being a man because "being a woman was exhausting" s/he meant to say by putting on make up, wearing heels, etc...but none of those things make me a woman. I may have done those things for fun or entertainment or make money or fulfill a sexual role, but being a woman doesn't mean dressing like Sally Draper from Mad Men every day...so this challenges me a bit, when Trans women see being a woman "exhausting"...it's like are you a woman or you actually just a gay man who likes to dress up and wear make up on the weekends, which is totally a fine and valid thing to do.

I wonder about the many gender combinations, and what they actually mean. I know people can be a million different things - one of my long time friends is a Trans woman who has had a female partner for years, but also has had sexual relationships with men, but seems to prefer women intimately in romance or close friendship, and bonded and related to women and their perception and fears even when she still grew facial hair, I remember her empathy about predatory or entitled men and so forth. She usually wears a skirt to express her femininity, yet doesn't conform to any exhausting drag queen role, mostly doesn't wear make up or heels (she's tall anyway)...she's genuinely feminine but doesn't prefer men as long term partners, and I completely believe her when she says she's a woman.

So I understand that people can feel or be another gender without conforming to a rigid sexual stereotype and not be motivated by prior homosexuality when living as their birth sex gender role.

However, a part of me feels the concept is abused by fern gender or teddy bear gender or whatever. ..it's like if I started calling myself cat gender (who knows, maybe I would have if I had been born after 2000 and was in high school now)...but I don't really think that's real and it kind of anihilates the issues of people with real gender dysphoria. I think overarching attempts to normalize it or make it trendy aren't necessarily healthy for anyone - though it's fun to play with archetypes, one of the reasons I love Lana del Rey. ..but she stays in the bounds of feminine personas.

I don't think having a spirit animal or favorite hobby should be mixed up in gender politics.

I also have some mild qualms as a feminist, but I've done that to death in another thread, so I will leave that to rest for now.

 

[Yama]

How do you define gender dysphoria vs. body dysphoria?

Everyone's experience is different--literally. Gender dysphoria is a mixture of both nature and nurture. It is not identifying the the gender you were assigned with at birth. This can include the gender role as well (the "nurture" aspect of it). It may look peculiar to some, that I'm a trans man and yet I still like "girly" things and I'm not hypermasculine. Though that very much does not make my gender dysphoria any less real than anyone else's. Trans people experience gender dysphoria to differing extents I think, but the bottom line is that all of us are so strongly affected by it, that we can't just throw it on a shelf and forget about it without damaging ourselves psychologically. It's hard to accept at first, at least it was for me. I first identified as genderfluid before I began identifying as trans--all I knew at first is that I just wasn't cis. Eventually I realized that every day was a "boy day." And then I mulled on it for months. I wanted to be absolutely sure with myself at my core that the dysphoria I was experiencing was real and not the cause of something else. And once I accepted that, well, that was it.

Body dysphoria is related, but different. There are trans people who don't see it as necessary to transition. While gender dysphoria is more about the social aspect of it--of being seen as the correct gender, passing for it, being identified as it, etc. body dysphoria is more about the physical aspect--of feeling so uncomfortable in your own skin that you can't even look at yourself in the mirror, feeling trapped and unable to escape. I often have to suppress panic attacks at school when I feel like my binder isn't getting me flat enough. Body dysphoria I think is definitely more of a spectrum. And--since I vaguely remember talking to you about dysphoria shortly after I joined, nearly a year ago--things like wanting to be shorter or taller don't really count as body dysphoria, at least in the sense that I am talking about. That's more of a "Oh, if only I was, that'd be nice..." sort of thing, whereas for trans folk, it's more of a "If I can't live in the body I want/I identify with then I'm at a higher risk of suicide" sort of thing. That is causes panic, anxiety, and strong psychological discomfort.

Can provide clarification if necessary!

And remember, everyone's experience is different. Trans people experience dysphoria to varying degrees and in different ways. The above is my understanding/experience.

 

[five sounds]

If relating to a color helps you relate to yourself, go for it. I don't like to restrict myself to any gender norms, including being 'girly' when it feels natural.