Can We Discuss Sex & Gender / Transgender People?

[Emily Lake]

sex is the thing you need to consider when you wish to make babies

Or when you don't want to accidentally bleed through your pants because you forgot your period was coming up, or when you get self-conscious about your fifteen year old breasts because some old man keeps staring at them, or when you worry about getting date raped or having your drink spiked, or when you are a bit concerned about that inappropriate boner that popped up in class, or when you notice that there's a lump on one testicle, or when you have trouble peeing because of an enlarged prostate, or when you get an annual mammogram because breast cancer runs in your family, or when you worry about your salt intake because the males in your family have a history of high blood pressure, or when you suffer debilitating pain during your period because of fibroids or endometriosis, or when your swollen uterus irritates your sciatic nerve, or when you suffer hot flashes and night sweats from approaching menopause, or when you want to pee off the side of the road...

 

[Emily Lake]

You don't need to consider it at any other moment of your life.

Honestly, this is a privilege of being a straight(ish) male, Jarhyn.

Just because it doesn't matter to you doesn't mean that it doesn't matter to anyone else.

 

[Emily Lake]

No, words don't mean things.

 

[Emily Lake]

It would be nice if gender scholars could pinpoint the exact stage in the evolution of our species when all our innate predispositions and psychological adaptions shaped by millions of years of sexual selection were magically erased.

I blame it on Judith Butler, and the idiots who think that if they claim to understand her poppycock word salad that makes them seem smart and erudite.

 

[Emily Lake]

No, words don't mean things.

Got it.

This rather creates a problem for any conversation, much less an internet conversation.

But I have noticed that about your posting on subjects like this one. Words only mean what suits your agenda, nothing more and nothing less.
Tom

 

[Emily Lake]

The definitions we have are adequate: when someone says "I am a man" they say "you, person, treat me as you would any man". Same with "woman".

How should a man be treated? How should a woman be treated?

 

[Melange_Thief]

So, noting that the concept of a hard and fast definition is not really possible, we can instead build a model of the historical usage of the word "man" that has a solid central meaning and fuzzy edges: "Someone who is an adult biologically male human who behaves according to the norms for adult biologically male humans in the local culture is definitely a man, and additionally the word man may be used to refer to someone who fulfills most of those criteria."

What do you mean by 'most' of the criteria? Is being a human adult male enough for 'most'? Is behaving according to the norms in the local culture 'most', so that butch adult females could qualify as 'a man'?

When you called your dog 'old man', nobody balked at it because they recognise figurative use of language. But you are not claiming trans men should be accepted as men under figurative usage, are you? You think the definition of 'man' should change to include them, aren't you?

I do agree that I used "old man" figuratively to refer to him, and I definitely am not trying to say that trans folks are the gender they are in a figurative sense, so you have noted that accurately.

What I would say is that I actually think trans folks are already covered under the definition for their respective genders anyway, actually, but I didn't want to go on a whole tangent on how one does tests to work out the semantics of words and I didn't feel like that would be the way to maximally edify the person I was replying to on the questions they asked.

But for you, I'll try to summarize my semantic argument. The short version is something like this: I have a good friend who is a trans man, who I met long after he transitioned. Before my friend came out to me, it never occurred to me to describe him using anything other than the word "man" anyway, because I don't go around pulling down people's pants to figure out whether I should call them a man or a woman, and I've never seen anyone else try to do that either. So, at the very least all of the native English speakers who I know who know my friend were already using "man" in a non-figurative way to refer to a trans individual before any of them knew he was trans, and, speaking as a native English speaker who knows him, it feels just as deeply inaccurate to use any other word than "man" now as it did before I knew about him being trans. In semantics, that is empirical evidence that the word "man" covers a trans person in the speech communities I am a member of.

What trans-inclusive folks would argue is that a more useful definition going forward is something like this: "Someone who is an adult human and behaves according to the norms for adult biologically male humans in the local culture is definitely a man."

I very much doubt that's what "trans-inclusive" folk want. I would say that "trans-inclusive" folk would say "it doesn't matter what someone behaves like, what matters is how they identify, and how they identify is best determined by what utterances they make about their identity".

Your definition would also include many people who would not want to be called a man (and who currently nobody considers to be men), as men. According to your new definition, butch females who dress in a style typical of males, work in male-dominated fields, and have female partners who bear the children in their family would be men.

The butch women I know and my trans men friends and family still dress and behave differently, so I have to say that I do not find your scenario to be a compelling counterclaim. In any case, proclaiming an identity is a behavior, and proclaiming an identity as a man is an expected norm of adult biologically male humans that a butch woman wouldn't do, so a butch woman still would not fulfill the criteria regardless of their dress or employment. Still, perhaps using "identify as" somewhere in there might have been better, but I did after all specifically say "something like this" as a hedge because I don't want to claim that I am creating the ultimate perfect definition of "man". I'm conveying a general idea rather than calling down the True Meaning of the True Word Man from the Platonic Plane, so kindly allow for some wiggle room in how I word things.

Now, notice that no one who is definitely considered a man under the old definition is excluded in this one, so no one loses anything from using this as the definition of "man". The only real difference is that trans men definitely qualify under this formulation of the definition. So then, my question to you is, why can't we just use that as the definition of man in our everyday speech?

That is not the only difference, as I have pointed out.

But your question is shifting the burden of proof. Why should we change what we mean by the word 'man', to exclude some people who were previously included, and include some people who were previously excluded'? I can certainly detail some reasons why that change would be detrimental.

You haven't demonstrated that people who were previously excluded are now included under my proposed definition. You attempted to demonstrate that some people who don't wish to be included are included, but I have provided a rebuttal of your attempted counterclaim. As for reasons why you think it would be detrimental, I must confess I am deeply uninterested in hearing them. In my time as a lurker I have become aware of your opinion (and, dare I say, overly prolific postings) on the subject, and as such I'm afraid the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate that you're capable of a good faith discussion of these sorts of matters before we continue.

 

[Melange_Thief]

Very interesting post. Thank you for that. However, a drag queen does not conform to the norms of biologically male human. Yet, they would still be a man under the "adult human male" category. Under your definition, drag queens would be excluded from being considered men as they dress and conform to the norms of biologically female humans.

We can add a proviso about performance to my definition, it's no big deal. Regardless, if this is a problem for my definition, it's also a problem for what I suggested as the historical usage. But honestly the key thing to take away is that you can't make rigid mathematical definitions of words, they are inherently flexible and have fuzzy boundaries.

You using the term "old man" to refer to your dog matches the definition of "adult male" but not "adult HUMAN male" which is the definition of a man. if you just use the term "adult male" then an adult horse would be a man, an adult sheep would be a man, etc. etc. I don't think this is a good definition. This would get out of control. If I saw an adult horse and said, "Look at that huge man!" people would ask me why I am calling a horse a man.

I have to be honest: I don't think you read that section of my post very thoroughly. My point is that we absolutely can use words in ways that don't comport with the most literal definitions we use for them, and that whole system of language doesn't collapse when we do that. I was not attempting to suggest that "man" refers to adult males of any species. The utterance you bring up in context you provided would definitely confuse people, but if you were already discussing a male horse, and you said about that horse something like "he's the big man on the pasture", I doubt that any native English speaker would be confused.

I appreiciate your effort but as I said, your definition exclues drag queens from being considered men. They wouldn't be happy about this definition of man. You will have to try again. Like I said before, it seems basically impossible to come up with a definition of man and woman that includes trans men and trans women. I do think you made a great effort but it fell just short.

I mean, I don't see why *I* am the one who needs to fix it. I made a proposal, and you claim it came up just short. If you really wanted a definition of "man" and "woman" that included trans people, you could have easily added verbiage that excluded your drag queen scenario instead of offering that as a refutation of my definition. Regardless, I fully admit that my provided definition probably isn't the perfect definition to cover all possible scenarios. I'll do your job for you and touch things up with your objections (and Metaphor's too, since I'm already here):

"Someone who is an adult human and who, when attempting to act as their authentic self rather than in the context of a performance, behaves according to the norms for adult biologically male humans in the local culture, including affirmatively identifying as a man, is definitely a man."

Spoiler alert: This definition is also going to turn out imperfect in some way, and that will prove to be precisely as non-deadly to my overall points about the fuzziness of word definitions as past objections were, and there will still be exactly zero justifications at the end of the day for saying "We shouldn't use the gender words for trans folks that trans folks would like us to use".

 

[Metaphor]

But for you, I'll try to summarize my semantic argument. The short version is something like this: I have a good friend who is a trans man, who I met long after he transitioned. Before my friend came out to me, it never occurred to me to describe him using anything other than the word "man" anyway, because I don't go around pulling down people's pants to figure out whether I should call them a man or a woman, and I've never seen anyone else try to do that either.

But whoever has suggested pulling down somebody's pants? This red herring gets brought up repeatedly, but why?

So, at the very least all of the native English speakers who I know who know my friend were already using "man" in a non-figurative way to refer to a trans individual before any of them knew he was trans, and, speaking as a native English speaker who knows him, it feels just as deeply inaccurate to use any other word than "man" now as it did before I knew about him being trans. In semantics, that is empirical evidence that the word "man" covers a trans person in the speech communities I am a member of.

What makes you think they did not know this person was trans? I mean: you claim you didn't know, but are you generalising your experience to other people? Or are you claiming that people already include the conception of 'trans man' in their definition of 'men', so that's how they saw them already?

There are several posters here who appear to think the sex of a person is a mystery without inspecting somebody's genitals. Inspecting genitals is a pretty good way to observe somebody's sex and is generally sufficient, but it's certainly not necessary.

What trans-inclusive folks would argue is that a more useful definition going forward is something like this: "Someone who is an adult human and behaves according to the norms for adult biologically male humans in the local culture is definitely a man."

I very much doubt that's what "trans-inclusive" folk want. I would say that "trans-inclusive" folk would say "it doesn't matter what someone behaves like, what matters is how they identify, and how they identify is best determined by what utterances they make about their identity".

Your definition would also include many people who would not want to be called a man (and who currently nobody considers to be men), as men. According to your new definition, butch females who dress in a style typical of males, work in male-dominated fields, and have female partners who bear the children in their family would be men.

The butch women I know and my trans men friends and family still dress and behave differently, so I have to say that I do not find your scenario to be a compelling counterclaim.

Dress and behave differently how? How 'male typical' does a female have to be to be declared a man under your definition? Describe it in terms of your own culture.

In any case, proclaiming an identity is a behavior, and proclaiming an identity as a man is an expected norm of adult biologically male humans that a butch woman wouldn't do, so a butch woman still would not fulfill the criteria regardless of their dress or employment.

It has not been my experience that proclaiming an identity as a man is an expected norm of adult biologically male humans. What does it mean to do that?

Still, perhaps using "identify as" somewhere in there might have been better, but I did after all specifically say "something like this" as a hedge because I don't want to claim that I am creating the ultimate perfect definition of "man". I'm conveying a general idea rather than calling down the True Meaning of the True Word Man from the Platonic Plane, so kindly allow for some wiggle room in how I word things.

I am happy to do so. I was pointing out what I think is an obvious problem with your attempted definition.

Now, notice that no one who is definitely considered a man under the old definition is excluded in this one, so no one loses anything from using this as the definition of "man". The only real difference is that trans men definitely qualify under this formulation of the definition. So then, my question to you is, why can't we just use that as the definition of man in our everyday speech?

That is not the only difference, as I have pointed out.

But your question is shifting the burden of proof. Why should we change what we mean by the word 'man', to exclude some people who were previously included, and include some people who were previously excluded'? I can certainly detail some reasons why that change would be detrimental.

You haven't demonstrated that people who were previously excluded are now included under my proposed definition. You attempted to demonstrate that some people who don't wish to be included are included, but I have provided a rebuttal of your attempted counterclaim.

I am unconvinced by your rebuttal, because you merely said butch women don't act like 'men'. If you now wish to revise that and say 'butch women don't claim to be men', and have the proclamation be the only criterion for manhood, okay. You agree with my earlier claim that the (sincere?) utterance is sufficient.

As for reasons why you think it would be detrimental, I must confess I am deeply uninterested in hearing them. In my time as a lurker I have become aware of your opinion (and, dare I say, overly prolific postings) on the subject, and as such I'm afraid the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate that you're capable of a good faith discussion of these sorts of matters before we continue.

If you don't want to hear them then you don't want to hear them. I too am uninterested in engaging with somebody uninterested in engaging with me.

 

[Metaphor]

and there will still be exactly zero justifications at the end of the day for saying "We shouldn't use the gender words for trans folks that trans folks would like us to use".

This already begs the question: why are 'man', 'woman', 'she', etc 'gender' words? What makes them gender words and not sex words? I have not seen, in any medium, common usage of the term 'gender' to apply to humans before the 1960s. 'Man' and 'woman' are sex terms that have 'human' and 'maturity' as part of their definition. 'He' and 'she' are gender words for nouns (in languages where gendered nouns are a thing), but they were always words to describe sex for humans and other animals.

But more importantly, your claim (that there is no justification for the polite fictions of using sexed words for people to whom the sexed word does not apply) is unevidenced. I have engaged in polite fictions with trans people by using the pronouns of a sex they are not, but that is not the sole (or even main) demand of trans activists. Though you are also silent on the demands of neopronouns--of which there is a vast array. Are the neopronouns also all legitimate, and we have 'zero' reasons to not use them?

Trans activists demand we supplant sex for gender in nearly every conceivable situation. And the transformation of language is a step in that process: if you are treating trans women as women for language purposes, then they must also be women for all purposes.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Going back to the original question: How can they be independent when we see an obvious link? Remember what statisticians keep hammering: Correlation does not prove causation. The classic example is ice cream sales are strongly correlated with rape numbers. Does ice cream make people commit rape??

No, what's going on in most of these cases is that they are independent of each other but both are related to something else. (In the classic example, the weather.)

The human body is an absolute hodge-podge of rube goldberg engineering. I'm a software engineer--if someone were to propose a software layout half as crazy as the human body I would tear the proposal up after reading the first few pages and investigate why we had an employee like that in the first place.

The only reason we exist at all is that there is an awful lot of fault tolerance in biological systems.

In this particular case we have testosterone and similar hormones running around turning on a bunch of "male" systems and turning off corresponding "female" systems in the developing embryo. It doesn't always work right, though--sometimes systems aren't turned on properly. Lets consider a simple case where we have a decent amount of data on how things go wrong: Do you have a dick?

XX: No make-a-dick message is sent.
XY: The make-a-dick message is sent:
Swyer syndrome: The person is insensitive to all types of testosterone. The result is apparently female but likely with fertility issues.
5α-Reductase 2 deficiency: The person is insensitive to dihydrotestosterone but responds normally to testosterone. The result is they look nearly female at birth but will grow a dick at puberty.
Neither of these: born with a dick.

One system, two different documented failure methods in addition to the correct operation.

Given that we have a decent number of people who feel their mind doesn't match their body that strongly suggests to me that there is a separate system for how the mind works from how the body works.

(And I think it's even more the case with sexual alignment. I'm in the camp that doesn't think there really is such a thing as homosexuality--or heterosexuality. There is no internal concept of being attracted to the same gender or the opposite gender. Rather, it makes much more sense if there is an attracted-to-males system and an attracted-to-females system. A model with one control being heterosexual/homosexual and one being intensity does a much poorer job of explaining bisexuality and asexuality than two independent systems, one for attracted to men and one for attracted to women, each with an intensity control.)

 

[Generation55]

Going back to the original question: How can they be independent when we see an obvious link? Remember what statisticians keep hammering: Correlation does not prove causation. The classic example is ice cream sales are strongly correlated with rape numbers. Does ice cream make people commit rape??

No, what's going on in most of these cases is that they are independent of each other but both are related to something else. (In the classic example, the weather.)

The human body is an absolute hodge-podge of rube goldberg engineering. I'm a software engineer--if someone were to propose a software layout half as crazy as the human body I would tear the proposal up after reading the first few pages and investigate why we had an employee like that in the first place.

The only reason we exist at all is that there is an awful lot of fault tolerance in biological systems.

In this particular case we have testosterone and similar hormones running around turning on a bunch of "male" systems and turning off corresponding "female" systems in the developing embryo. It doesn't always work right, though--sometimes systems aren't turned on properly. Lets consider a simple case where we have a decent amount of data on how things go wrong: Do you have a dick?

XX: No make-a-dick message is sent.
XY: The make-a-dick message is sent:
Swyer syndrome: The person is insensitive to all types of testosterone. The result is apparently female but likely with fertility issues.
5α-Reductase 2 deficiency: The person is insensitive to dihydrotestosterone but responds normally to testosterone. The result is they look nearly female at birth but will grow a dick at puberty.
Neither of these: born with a dick.

One system, two different documented failure methods in addition to the correct operation.

Given that we have a decent number of people who feel their mind doesn't match their body that strongly suggests to me that there is a separate system for how the mind works from how the body works.

(And I think it's even more the case with sexual alignment. I'm in the camp that doesn't think there really is such a thing as homosexuality--or heterosexuality. There is no internal concept of being attracted to the same gender or the opposite gender. Rather, it makes much more sense if there is an attracted-to-males system and an attracted-to-females system. A model with one control being heterosexual/homosexual and one being intensity does a much poorer job of explaining bisexuality and asexuality than two independent systems, one for attracted to men and one for attracted to women, each with an intensity control.)

But this doesn't explain why there are trans women who don't mind having a penis and trans men who don't mind having a vagina. There are trans people like you say who hate their bodies and wish the body was different, but there are some who are fine with their genitals. Why is this so?

I still don't think you have explained the contradiction. I understand correlation does not equal causation as you said. However, the phrases "sex and gender are different" and "my sex and gender are the same" is still a contradiction that needs to be resolved.

For example, consider this convo:

Person A: My sex and gender are the same.
Person B: Of course. Sex and gender are the same thing.
Person C: My sex and gender are different.
Person B: Of course. Sex and gender are different.

You also (but not just you) also ignored my point about David Reimer. He had a botched circumcision that severely injured his penis. The psychologist John Money said, "Since sex and gender different, just raise him as a girl. It won't matter." It didn't work and he committed suicide later in life. This shows that sex and gender are the same thing. If they were different, he would've had no problem being a girl.

It just feels strange to say, "My gender matches my sex" as if there's suposed to a "right way" for it to be. But as I said before, trans people say there is no right way to be a man or woman. But by using the label "transgender" it implies that there is a right way to be a man or a woman. If sex and gender are different, there should be no way it should even be possible to utter the phrase "my sex and gender are the same."

Let me see if I can try to explain it better and more clearly. if someone says, "I have a penis but I wish I didn't and I'm a trans woman," this implies that a penis is supposed to be a man's organ. If someone says, "I have a vagina but I wish I didn't and I'm a trans man," this implies that a vagina is supposed to be a woman's organ. But, why are these organs supposed to be a man's or woman's organ if sex and gender are different?

Or to put it simpler which I just thought of: A baby is a born with a penis. What gender is supposed to "match" this penis organ? How and why do you know?

 

[Melange_Thief]

First, a note on quotes: The new multiquote thing is really nice! Though I'd like an easy way to get rid of quote pyramids somehow.

But whoever has suggested pulling down somebody's pants? This red herring gets brought up repeatedly, but why?

People keep bringing it up for two simple reasons:

1. Trans-skeptics posit that it's so utterly important to link the pronouns and gender terms one uses for a person with what sex chromosomes/genitalia they have that it's important to ignore a trans person's preferences when it conflicts with said chromosomes and/or genitalia.
2. People like my friend, who you would not consider a man but who nonetheless so closely resembles one such that all the people I know who know him have never once questioned whether he has the right downstairs equipment for the word man, exist and get treated as the gender they identify as rather than the one traditionally required to correspond to his genitalia.

If 1. is so important, then it must be imperative that 2. get resolved, and there's only one clear, if very intrusive, way to do that. Alternatively, if it's not so important to link pronouns to the dangles in one's pants that we must violate their privacy, then why do we need to make it an issue at all?

What makes you think they did not know this person was trans? I mean: you claim you didn't know, but are you generalising your experience to other people? Or are you claiming that people already include the conception of 'trans man' in their definition of 'men', so that's how they saw them already?

Without getting too deep into specifics, there was a straight, very Christian woman in our group who had pretty different ways of treating men and women, and belonged to a very conservative variety of the religion. She, uh, quite distinctly treated my friend as a man rather than as a woman. We didn't specifically discuss LGBT issues with her, admittedly, but other matters we discussed made it clear that she followed a fairly standard theologically conservative form of Protestantism so it was at least a fair assumption that she would not have been hitting on my friend if she'd thought he was trans.

If you don't want to hear them then you don't want to hear them. I too am uninterested in engaging with somebody uninterested in engaging with me.

And yet you did. (And here I am, unable to resist the urge to answer a handful of things you brought up in spite of knowing exactly how little this engagement is worth. [insert deep sigh here])

This already begs the question: why are 'man', 'woman', 'she', etc 'gender' words? What makes them gender words and not sex words? I have not seen, in any medium, common usage of the term 'gender' to apply to humans before the 1960s. 'Man' and 'woman' are sex terms that have 'human' and 'maturity' as part of their definition. 'He' and 'she' are gender words for nouns (in languages where gendered nouns are a thing), but they were always words to describe sex for humans and other animals.

I mean, so what? This isn't hard to work out on one's own. Anglophone societies didn't make a distinction between one's sex and the social role one was expected to fulfill based on sex, but then it turned out that one's ability to wear pants, among other such gender segregated stupidia, wasn't hindered by the lack of a penis or the presence of a vagina, so now we need some way of distinguishing between the actual literal physical differences and the random BS society arbitrarily assigned according to those. Let me be clear: The vast majority of, and possibly all, gender-based differences in our culture are, in my eyes, not things that should be determined by dangly parts and therefore, in my eyes, it's stupid to be emotionally attached to segregating such things based on dangly parts. The fact that some of my ancestors were too thoroughly plumbing the depths of their own intestinal cavities to realize that it's ok for skirt-like garments to clad non-Scottish penises as well as Scottish ones does not create some moral profundity to their inability to distinguish between gender and sex. I mean, certain of the ancients made no category distinction between the Sun, the Moon, and the planets; are we supposed to ignore, now that we can actually go to those places, that they're wildly and radically different things and not just lights going around the sky just because their opinion is older? I am being somewhat flippant here because I am rather tired of this thoroughly debunked notion that we should do things the same way people in the past did them because those past people did them that way.

And what's more, you are correct to note that "he" and "she" refer to grammatical gender in languages with grammatical gender. What you should learn now is that the fact that we have "he," "she," and "it" in English means that, in fact, English has grammatical gender too. That's right, all our nouns are gendered. All of them. It's just that the vast majority - BUT NOT ALL - of our inanimate nouns are neuter gender. Furthermore, it is thoroughly acceptable to use the neuter pronoun with babies and with animals, even animals whose gender we can determine easily (e.g. "I saw a buck in my yard, but it ran away when it say me" is a perfectly grammatical sentence in English). The word "ship" and words for countries are, at least in prestige varieties of English, gendered feminine, and yet I've yet to see a single ship's blueprint with the ship's vagina labeled. These are not patterns you would find if pronoun choice were conditioned based on sex, so all anti-trans arguments based on pronouns need to go pound sand already.

Though you are also silent on the demands of neopronouns--of which there is a vast array. Are the neopronouns also all legitimate, and we have 'zero' reasons to not use them?

Now, this comment here is literally the reason I bothered responding to anything you wrote at all because I have some things to say about neopronouns. I am not, in principle, against neopronouns. If someone can make a neopronoun that can catch on really easily, great! I'll jump right on board! I am, however, against neopronouns made by people who have no idea how pronouns work in speech. Pronouns are very frequently used bits of language, so they need to be phonologically simple and have obvious reduced forms (that's forms pronounced with unstressed vowels) that don't end up sounding like other pronouns. The neopronouns I've run into in my time here on Earth fail spectacularly at those tasks. For instance, some people have proposed "hir" as an object form of a new pronoun, but there's just no way to reduce that without making it sound exactly like "her"! Like literally, what was even the point of coining a gender neutral pronoun if it's just going to end up sounding exactly like a gendered one that already exists?! Or are we supposed to pronounce it as /hɪr/, with full stress, every time we say it? "Zir" is a little better, but spelling-wise it doesn't pattern well with the other pronouns (a problem it shares with "hir"), and something just feels unnatural about having a /z/ in there.

Having said that, I'm not positive neopronouns are actually solving an unsolved problem. "They" has a very long history of being used as a gender neutral pronoun for individual humans and is still used as such today, and using it for non-binary individuals just isn't a huge leap for me. It seems to me that the primary impetus for making a separate gender neutral pronoun from singular "they" is an erroneous belief that there's something bad about using singular "they", and there is very little I hate more than the stupid forms of grammatical prescriptivism we've inherited from folks with a hardcore Latin fetish. But even so, if someone can come up with a neopronoun that isn't pretty objectively a bad fit for English phonotactics, then I'm totally on board.

But of course, you weren't really asking if neopronouns were made by people with a grasp on how people actually use pronouns on a phonological level. You're trying to see if I consider it bigotry not to use them. My answer is: If you are not using them because you dislike the concept of non-binary people or the idea of not using a person's preferred pronouns, then that's a shitty reason to avoid them. Even if I run into someone who wants me to use "hir" for hir, even though that pronoun is objectively poorly designed for its intended function, I will make a good faith effort to use it.

Trans activists demand we supplant sex for gender in nearly every conceivable situation. And the transformation of language is a step in that process: if you are treating trans women as women for language purposes, then they must also be women for all purposes.

Sounds fine to me. Language is transforming anyway, we might as well change it in a way that makes it suck less for trans folks too.

 

[Metaphor]

(And I think it's even more the case with sexual alignment. I'm in the camp that doesn't think there really is such a thing as homosexuality--or heterosexuality. There is no internal concept of being attracted to the same gender or the opposite gender. Rather, it makes much more sense if there is an attracted-to-males system and an attracted-to-females system. A model with one control being heterosexual/homosexual and one being intensity does a much poorer job of explaining bisexuality and asexuality than two independent systems, one for attracted to men and one for attracted to women, each with an intensity control.)

Non.

Nobody is attracted to the same "gender". People are attracted to zero, one, or both sexes.

 

[Metaphor]

People keep bringing it up for two simple reasons:

1. Trans-skeptics posit that it's so utterly important to link the pronouns and gender terms one uses for a person with what sex chromosomes/genitalia they have that it's important to ignore a trans person's preferences when it conflicts with said chromosomes and/or genitalia.

Non. Pronouns are sexed, not gendered. You are begging the question.

2. People like my friend, who you would not consider a man but who nonetheless so closely resembles one such that all the people I know who know him have never once questioned whether he has the right downstairs equipment for the word man, exist and get treated as the gender they identify as rather than the one traditionally required to correspond to his genitalia.

I would not consider any female a man, no matter what they did to their bodies, because men are adult human males, and no mammal can change sex. And I doubt--very much doubt--this person closely resembles a man when naked.

Without getting too deep into specifics, there was a straight, very Christian woman in our group who had pretty different ways of treating men and women, and belonged to a very conservative variety of the religion. She, uh, quite distinctly treated my friend as a man rather than as a woman. We didn't specifically discuss LGBT issues with her, admittedly, but other matters we discussed made it clear that she followed a fairly standard theologically conservative form of Protestantism so it was at least a fair assumption that she would not have been hitting on my friend if she'd thought he was trans.

So, you have assumed (but did not confirm?) that your friend mistook him for a male?

But your own testimony works against you: your trans friend was so successful at passing that your Christian woman friend thought he was, in fact, male, and actually hit on them with that understanding, and that, had she known this person was female, would not have done so?

That very clearly indicates to me your friend does not consider trans men, 'men'.

This already begs the question: why are 'man', 'woman', 'she', etc 'gender' words? What makes them gender words and not sex words? I have not seen, in any medium, common usage of the term 'gender' to apply to humans before the 1960s. 'Man' and 'woman' are sex terms that have 'human' and 'maturity' as part of their definition. 'He' and 'she' are gender words for nouns (in languages where gendered nouns are a thing), but they were always words to describe sex for humans and other animals.

I mean, so what? This isn't hard to work out on one's own. Anglophone societies didn't make a distinction between one's sex and the social role one was expected to fulfill based on sex,

Well - they did - the concept of 'sex-role' exists.

but then it turned out that one's ability to wear pants, among other such gender segregated stupidia,

You mean: sex-segregated.

wasn't hindered by the lack of a penis or the presence of a vagina, so now we need some way of distinguishing between the actual literal physical differences and the random BS society arbitrarily assigned according to those. Let me be clear: The vast majority of, and possibly all, gender-based differences in our culture are, in my eyes, not things that should be determined by dangly parts and therefore, in my eyes, it's stupid to be emotionally attached to segregating such things based on dangly parts.

That's all well and fine, but you are still begging the question. I am a homosexual man, and I am homosexual because I am an adult human male attracted to other adult human males. Gender plays no part in my sexual orientation. Zero.

The fact that some of my ancestors were too thoroughly plumbing the depths of their own intestinal cavities to realize that it's ok for skirt-like garments to clad non-Scottish penises as well as Scottish ones does not create some moral profundity to their inability to distinguish between gender and sex. I mean, certain of the ancients made no category distinction between the Sun, the Moon, and the planets; are we supposed to ignore, now that we can actually go to those places, that they're wildly and radically different things and not just lights going around the sky just because their opinion is older? I am being somewhat flippant here because I am rather tired of this thoroughly debunked notion that we should do things the same way people in the past did them because those past people did them that way.

I did not suggest we should do things the way our ancestors did just because they did them that way.

I am suggesting that sex and gender are different, and you have to make the case that gender should supplant sex where you want gender to supplant sex.

And what's more, you are correct to note that "he" and "she" refer to grammatical gender in languages with grammatical gender. What you should learn now is that the fact that we have "he," "she," and "it" in English means that, in fact, English has grammatical gender too.

Yes, I understand that. That's why some countries are 'she' and some are 'he', and sea-going vessels are 'she', and so on.

That's right, all our nouns are gendered. All of them. It's just that the vast majority - BUT NOT ALL - of our inanimate nouns are neuter gender. Furthermore, it is thoroughly acceptable to use the neuter pronoun with babies and with animals, even animals whose gender we can determine easily (e.g. "I saw a buck in my yard, but it ran away when it say me" is a perfectly grammatical sentence in English). The word "ship" and words for countries are, at least in prestige varieties of English, gendered feminine, and yet I've yet to see a single ship's blueprint with the ship's vagina labeled.

Sure: because sex and gender are different. Do you imagine you are imparting some knowledge I did not already possess?

These are not patterns you would find if pronoun choice were conditioned based on sex, so all anti-trans arguments based on pronouns need to go pound sand already.

False. Nouns in general don't have a sex but they have a gender. Humans have a sex and some humans have a gender, but noun usage in humans has always been sexed.

Though you are also silent on the demands of neopronouns--of which there is a vast array. Are the neopronouns also all legitimate, and we have 'zero' reasons to not use them?

Now, this comment here is literally the reason I bothered responding to anything you wrote at all because I have some things to say about neopronouns. I am not, in principle, against neopronouns. If someone can make a neopronoun that can catch on really easily, great! I'll jump right on board! I am, however, against neopronouns made by people who have no idea how pronouns work in speech. Pronouns are very frequently used bits of language, so they need to be phonologically simple and have obvious reduced forms (that's forms pronounced with unstressed vowels) that don't end up sounding like other pronouns. The neopronouns I've run into in my time here on Earth fail spectacularly at those tasks. For instance, some people have proposed "hir" as an object form of a new pronoun, but there's just no way to reduce that without making it sound exactly like "her"! Like literally, what was even the point of coining a gender neutral pronoun if it's just going to end up sounding exactly like a gendered one that already exists?! Or are we supposed to pronounce it as /hɪr/, with full stress, every time we say it? "Zir" is a little better, but spelling-wise it doesn't pattern well with the other pronouns (a problem it shares with "hir"), and something just feels unnatural about having a /z/ in there.

Well, I agree, but you haven't even touched the sides of proposed neopronouns. So, using your argument that we should respect pronouns, how do we determine how to (and if) we ought respect neopronouns?

(I am talking about neopronouns like 'bug', 'demonself', etc).

Having said that, I'm not positive neopronouns are actually solving an unsolved problem. "They" has a very long history of being used as a gender neutral pronoun for individual humans and is still used as such today, and using it for non-binary individuals just isn't a huge leap for me. It seems to me that the primary impetus for making a separate gender neutral pronoun from singular "they" is an erroneous belief that there's something bad about using singular "they", and there is very little I hate more than the stupid forms of grammatical prescriptivism we've inherited from folks with a hardcore Latin fetish. But even so, if someone can come up with a neopronoun that isn't pretty objectively a bad fit for English phonotactics, then I'm totally on board.

I use they often in certain context to refer to somebody of unknown gender. I don't have a particular problem with it, or indeed any polite fictions. But what about 'demonself'? Please note I am not making any of these neopronouns up.

But of course, you weren't really asking if neopronouns were made by people with a grasp on how people actually use pronouns on a phonological level. You're trying to see if I consider it bigotry not to use them. My answer is: If you are not using them because you dislike the concept of non-binary people

I don't 'dislike to concept' of non-binary people. "Non-binary" is a gender identity and is a thought in a person's head. That you have certain thoughts in your head doesn't bother me.

or the idea of not using a person's preferred pronouns, then that's a shitty reason to avoid them. Even if I run into someone who wants me to use "hir" for hir, even though that pronoun is objectively poorly designed for its intended function, I will make a good faith effort to use it.

That's good for you--but do you think I ought be compelled to use them? Or that I ought use them?

Trans activists demand we supplant sex for gender in nearly every conceivable situation. And the transformation of language is a step in that process: if you are treating trans women as women for language purposes, then they must also be women for all purposes.

Sounds fine to me. Language is transforming anyway, we might as well change it in a way that makes it suck less for trans folks too.

It sounds ludicrous and awful to me. That women play in sports against other females does not mean they ought play against other males who utter 'I identify as a woman'.

 

[prideandfall]

But this doesn't explain why there are trans women who don't mind having a penis and trans men who don't mind having a vagina. There are trans people like you say who hate their bodies and wish the body was different, but there are some who are fine with their genitals. Why is this so?

as i said earlier: being 'trans' is not a monolithic ideology, all trans people don't feel the same way about the issue.

so you've got some people who just want to act like they're another gender but not surgically alter their bodies, and you have some people who want to basically cosplay being another sex and will go to any lengths for the sake of their outfit, and many levels in between.

However, the phrases "sex and gender are different" and "my sex and gender are the same" is still a contradiction that needs to be resolved.

there are 2 distinct possibilities here:
1. you properly understand the terms defined in the sentence but the logic of the sentence is irrational.
2. you do not properly understand the terms defined in the sentence and thus you are unable to understand the logic.

in these types of discussions it's generally accepted that 'sex' refers to your physical anatomy, and 'gender' refers to the cultural norms attached to that sex.
thus another way to look at it, using terms that are similar but that i think highlight the difference:
"i am male but feel feminine" would be akin to "my sex and gender are different" - we're talking about the difference in one's physical traits and one's perception of their identity within the cultural sphere.

It just feels strange to say, "My gender matches my sex" as if there's suposed to a "right way" for it to be.

well, for all intents and purposes there IS a 'right way' that it's supposed to be - though that statement is a bit problematic since 'right' and 'supposed' sort of imply some kind of planned system.
your right arm is supposed to be on the right side of your body. your gender matching your sex is the way you're supposed to be.
if you grew an arm on the left side of your torso where the hand was reversed and the elbow went the other way and the shoulder socket went backwards, you could say you have a right arm on your left side without it being an inherent contradiction to the concept of arms or sides.

But as I said before, trans people say there is no right way to be a man or woman.

and those people are wrong, but insist on saying that because they can't mentally cope with the idea of their self expression *not* being everyone else's obligation to satisfy.

But by using the label "transgender" it implies that there is a right way to be a man or a woman. If sex and gender are different, there should be no way it should even be possible to utter the phrase "my sex and gender are the same."

but arms and sides are different, and you could have a correct arm on the wrong side (in theory) - it's basically the same principle.

But, why are these organs supposed to be a man's or woman's organ if sex and gender are different?

because sex is your physical reality and gender is the expectation for how your physical reality is supposed to dictate your personality.
they're not the same thing, but they also never have been.

Or to put it simpler which I just thought of: A baby is a born with a penis. What gender is supposed to "match" this penis organ? How and why do you know?

well "supposed to" in this case is a tricky one, because nothing created out of human social constructs is "supposed" to be, it just is.
a baby born with a penis will typically match the 'man' gender - if a thing typically happens, does that elevate the process to the level of 'supposed to'?
i guess it's kind of like how your car is *supposed* to start when you turn the key, but there's a ton of things that can happen to that process that makes it so that is not the end result of turning the key.
does that mean that cars aren't supposed to start when you turn the key?

 

[Melange_Thief]

Without getting too deep into specifics, there was a straight, very Christian woman in our group who had pretty different ways of treating men and women, and belonged to a very conservative variety of the religion. She, uh, quite distinctly treated my friend as a man rather than as a woman. We didn't specifically discuss LGBT issues with her, admittedly, but other matters we discussed made it clear that she followed a fairly standard theologically conservative form of Protestantism so it was at least a fair assumption that she would not have been hitting on my friend if she'd thought he was trans.

So, you have assumed (but did not confirm?) that your friend mistook him for a male?

But your own testimony works against you: your trans friend was so successful at passing that your Christian woman friend thought he was, in fact, male, and actually hit on them with that understanding, and that, had she known this person was female, would not have done so?

That very clearly indicates to me your friend does not consider trans men, 'men'.

She did not consider trans men to be men, yet she did consider an individual trans man to be a man. Almost as if, in her mind, being physiologically male isn't necessary for her to apply the term to someone if they fulfill other conditions. Almost as if the meaning of "man" is more complicated than simply being the right sex. Almost as if society didn't fucking collapse because of it.

wasn't hindered by the lack of a penis or the presence of a vagina, so now we need some way of distinguishing between the actual literal physical differences and the random BS society arbitrarily assigned according to those. Let me be clear: The vast majority of, and possibly all, gender-based differences in our culture are, in my eyes, not things that should be determined by dangly parts and therefore, in my eyes, it's stupid to be emotionally attached to segregating such things based on dangly parts.

That's all well and fine, but you are still begging the question. I am a homosexual man, and I am homosexual because I am an adult human male attracted to other adult human males. Gender plays no part in my sexual orientation. Zero.

Ok? From my perspective your statement here neither contradicts nor follows from what you quoted from my post, which is an indication to me that neither of us is really understanding what animates the other's concerns with regards to trans-related issues. This isn't criticism or snark, by the way, I just find it mildly interesting.

The fact that some of my ancestors were too thoroughly plumbing the depths of their own intestinal cavities to realize that it's ok for skirt-like garments to clad non-Scottish penises as well as Scottish ones does not create some moral profundity to their inability to distinguish between gender and sex. I mean, certain of the ancients made no category distinction between the Sun, the Moon, and the planets; are we supposed to ignore, now that we can actually go to those places, that they're wildly and radically different things and not just lights going around the sky just because their opinion is older? I am being somewhat flippant here because I am rather tired of this thoroughly debunked notion that we should do things the same way people in the past did them because those past people did them that way.

I did not suggest we should do things the way our ancestors did just because they did them that way.

I am suggesting that sex and gender are different, and you have to make the case that gender should supplant sex where you want gender to supplant sex.

You have yet to demonstrate that society should default to treating someone as the role society deems as assigned to a specific sex in cases where physical sex is irrelevant. And if that's not your position, then the amount of concern you have about trans folks is really, REALLY weird.

That's right, all our nouns are gendered. All of them. It's just that the vast majority - BUT NOT ALL - of our inanimate nouns are neuter gender. Furthermore, it is thoroughly acceptable to use the neuter pronoun with babies and with animals, even animals whose gender we can determine easily (e.g. "I saw a buck in my yard, but it ran away when it say me" is a perfectly grammatical sentence in English). The word "ship" and words for countries are, at least in prestige varieties of English, gendered feminine, and yet I've yet to see a single ship's blueprint with the ship's vagina labeled.

Sure: because sex and gender are different. Do you imagine you are imparting some knowledge I did not already possess?'

When you say things like:

Non. Pronouns are sexed, not gendered. You are begging the question.

and

False. Nouns in general don't have a sex but they have a gender. Humans have a sex and some humans have a gender, but noun usage in humans has always been sexed.

then you can't really blame me for thinking you didn't know that about how English pronouns work, can you?

Though you are also silent on the demands of neopronouns--of which there is a vast array. Are the neopronouns also all legitimate, and we have 'zero' reasons to not use them?

Now, this comment here is literally the reason I bothered responding to anything you wrote at all because I have some things to say about neopronouns. I am not, in principle, against neopronouns. If someone can make a neopronoun that can catch on really easily, great! I'll jump right on board! I am, however, against neopronouns made by people who have no idea how pronouns work in speech. Pronouns are very frequently used bits of language, so they need to be phonologically simple and have obvious reduced forms (that's forms pronounced with unstressed vowels) that don't end up sounding like other pronouns. The neopronouns I've run into in my time here on Earth fail spectacularly at those tasks. For instance, some people have proposed "hir" as an object form of a new pronoun, but there's just no way to reduce that without making it sound exactly like "her"! Like literally, what was even the point of coining a gender neutral pronoun if it's just going to end up sounding exactly like a gendered one that already exists?! Or are we supposed to pronounce it as /hɪr/, with full stress, every time we say it? "Zir" is a little better, but spelling-wise it doesn't pattern well with the other pronouns (a problem it shares with "hir"), and something just feels unnatural about having a /z/ in there.

Well, I agree, but you haven't even touched the sides of proposed neopronouns. So, using your argument that we should respect pronouns, how do we determine how to (and if) we ought respect neopronouns?

(I am talking about neopronouns like 'bug', 'demonself', etc).

Huh, I have to admit that those are even worse. Like I said, no one who's proposed neopronouns has done a single thing to make them actually work as pronouns (at least that I've seen). I think I see what they're trying to do, and there's definitely languages where pronouns work sort of like how the coiners of those neopronouns would like English pronouns to work, but A. I don't think anyone coining the neopronouns you cited even understands that they're trying to change how an entire word class works in English, which means they're unlikely to achieve it, and B. I'm frankly unaware of any situation wherein a word class in a language has changed from a very strict closed class to a very open class in the lifetime of a native speaker. Suffice to say, I am not sanguine that those neopronouns will catch on.

Having said that, I'm not positive neopronouns are actually solving an unsolved problem. "They" has a very long history of being used as a gender neutral pronoun for individual humans and is still used as such today, and using it for non-binary individuals just isn't a huge leap for me. It seems to me that the primary impetus for making a separate gender neutral pronoun from singular "they" is an erroneous belief that there's something bad about using singular "they", and there is very little I hate more than the stupid forms of grammatical prescriptivism we've inherited from folks with a hardcore Latin fetish. But even so, if someone can come up with a neopronoun that isn't pretty objectively a bad fit for English phonotactics, then I'm totally on board.

I use they often in certain context to refer to somebody of unknown gender. I don't have a particular problem with it, or indeed any polite fictions. But what about 'demonself'? Please note I am not making any of these neopronouns up.

It's telling that the person coining "demonself" can only distinguish the "-self" form from any of the other forms, which isn't exactly a hallmark of being an English pronoun. I don't recommend using it as the pronoun for any NB characters you write in a work of fiction, but there's still the principle of not-being-an-asshole should you run into someone who asks you to use that one.

But of course, you weren't really asking if neopronouns were made by people with a grasp on how people actually use pronouns on a phonological level. You're trying to see if I consider it bigotry not to use them. My answer is: If you are not using them because you dislike the concept of non-binary people

I don't 'dislike to concept' of non-binary people. "Non-binary" is a gender identity and is a thought in a person's head. That you have certain thoughts in your head doesn't bother me.

Then the "if" clause doesn't apply to you.

or the idea of not using a person's preferred pronouns, then that's a shitty reason to avoid them. Even if I run into someone who wants me to use "hir" for hir, even though that pronoun is objectively poorly designed for its intended function, I will make a good faith effort to use it.

That's good for you--but do you think I ought be compelled to use them? Or that I ought use them?

I mean, yeah, if they want you to use them it's literally no skin off your nose to use them, so you ought to use them in an abstract moral sense. Compelled to use them? In a legal sense, no, but you also don't deserve legal protections from social or employment consequences should your hypothetical commitment to causing pronoun-based anguish somehow backfire on you.

Trans activists demand we supplant sex for gender in nearly every conceivable situation. And the transformation of language is a step in that process: if you are treating trans women as women for language purposes, then they must also be women for all purposes.

Sounds fine to me. Language is transforming anyway, we might as well change it in a way that makes it suck less for trans folks too.

It sounds ludicrous and awful to me. That women play in sports against other females does not mean they ought play against other males who utter 'I identify as a woman'.

I'll agree that specifically in the realm of sports, it's at least a little more complicated than "let people play wherever they want," but to me that means something like "let's sit down with the data and find a good faith system that lets trans women can play women's sports". But everything I have ever seen out of the trans-skeptic community makes me believe that literally no one raising "concerns" about this topic (or any other trans-related topic) actually cares about actual, living and breathing trans folks who actually experience the consequences of trans-related policies more than their weird bugaboos about gender, sex, and the concept of transgenderism, so I'ma go ahead and stick with reflexively supporting the trans community on this one instead of trying to engage in substansive conversation on the topic.

 

[Generation55]

I'll agree that specifically in the realm of sports, it's at least a little more complicated than "let people play wherever they want," but to me that means something like "let's sit down with the data and find a good faith system that lets trans women can play women's sports". But everything I have ever seen out of the trans-skeptic community makes me believe that literally no one raising "concerns" about this topic (or any other trans-related topic) actually cares about actual, living and breathing trans folks who actually experience the consequences of trans-related policies more than their weird bugaboos about gender, sex, and the concept of transgenderism, so I'ma go ahead and stick with reflexively supporting the trans community on this one instead of trying to engage in substansive conversation on the topic.

What you just said there is a big part of why this discussion is very important. It doesn't feel right on a gut level to allow trans women to compete with cisgender women. In the Guinness Book of World Records in 2010, there was a transgender man named Thomas Beatie who became known as "The Pregnant Man" and went into the records books......and this is a real quote.....as ""World's First Married Man to Give Birth." Does this sound like a worthy headline? I can't imagine you guys actually agreeing with this quote as the same thing as a man actually giving birth. This is why we need definitions of the words. Do you guys agree with the Guinness Book of World Records here?

For example, if a trans women were to impregnate a trans man, I can write the headline, "Woman impregnates man." Is it really possible you guys can read this with a straight face and agree with it? This is why this subject is so important. It makes it seem like the words "man" and "woman" are losing all meaning. They can mean everything and nothing at the same time.

Can any of you guys try to explain this?

 

[Metaphor]

Without getting too deep into specifics, there was a straight, very Christian woman in our group who had pretty different ways of treating men and women, and belonged to a very conservative variety of the religion. She, uh, quite distinctly treated my friend as a man rather than as a woman. We didn't specifically discuss LGBT issues with her, admittedly, but other matters we discussed made it clear that she followed a fairly standard theologically conservative form of Protestantism so it was at least a fair assumption that she would not have been hitting on my friend if she'd thought he was trans.

So, you have assumed (but did not confirm?) that your friend mistook him for a male?

But your own testimony works against you: your trans friend was so successful at passing that your Christian woman friend thought he was, in fact, male, and actually hit on them with that understanding, and that, had she known this person was female, would not have done so?

That very clearly indicates to me your friend does not consider trans men, 'men'.

She did not consider trans men to be men, yet she did consider an individual trans man to be a man. Almost as if, in her mind, being physiologically male isn't necessary for her to apply the term to someone if they fulfill other conditions. Almost as if the meaning of "man" is more complicated than simply being the right sex. Almost as if society didn't fucking collapse because of it.

Except no, she did not consider that person to be a man. She mistook him for a man, and when she discovered he was not one, (when she found out your friend was female), she lost all interest in hitting on them.

If indeed she really considered your trans friend a man, finding out they were trans ought have made no difference to her.

wasn't hindered by the lack of a penis or the presence of a vagina, so now we need some way of distinguishing between the actual literal physical differences and the random BS society arbitrarily assigned according to those. Let me be clear: The vast majority of, and possibly all, gender-based differences in our culture are, in my eyes, not things that should be determined by dangly parts and therefore, in my eyes, it's stupid to be emotionally attached to segregating such things based on dangly parts.

That's all well and fine, but you are still begging the question. I am a homosexual man, and I am homosexual because I am an adult human male attracted to other adult human males. Gender plays no part in my sexual orientation. Zero.

Ok? From my perspective your statement here neither contradicts nor follows from what you quoted from my post, which is an indication to me that neither of us is really understanding what animates the other's concerns with regards to trans-related issues. This isn't criticism or snark, by the way, I just find it mildly interesting.

I segregate the people I will have sex with and the ones I will not, based on their 'dangly parts'. (Based on their primary and secondary sexual characteristics, actually, but 'dangly parts' usually correlates well enough). Are you suggesting that instead I should abandon my sexual orientation and base it on being oriented to a particular gender?

The fact that some of my ancestors were too thoroughly plumbing the depths of their own intestinal cavities to realize that it's ok for skirt-like garments to clad non-Scottish penises as well as Scottish ones does not create some moral profundity to their inability to distinguish between gender and sex. I mean, certain of the ancients made no category distinction between the Sun, the Moon, and the planets; are we supposed to ignore, now that we can actually go to those places, that they're wildly and radically different things and not just lights going around the sky just because their opinion is older? I am being somewhat flippant here because I am rather tired of this thoroughly debunked notion that we should do things the same way people in the past did them because those past people did them that way.

I did not suggest we should do things the way our ancestors did just because they did them that way.

I am suggesting that sex and gender are different, and you have to make the case that gender should supplant sex where you want gender to supplant sex.

You have yet to demonstrate that society should default to treating someone as the role society deems as assigned to a specific sex in cases where physical sex is irrelevant. And if that's not your position, then the amount of concern you have about trans folks is really, REALLY weird.

Society already does things to people according to their sex. Society segregates sports by sex, and intimate spaces. I also personally choose people I want to fuck based on their sex. That is, I certainly don't want to fuck every man on the planet, but I only want to fuck men. And men are adult human males.

Now: if instead you will allow my sexual preference but want me to say "I want to fuck only adult human males", well, I find that odd that I would have to change my language to suit some females who want to call themselves men.

That's right, all our nouns are gendered. All of them. It's just that the vast majority - BUT NOT ALL - of our inanimate nouns are neuter gender. Furthermore, it is thoroughly acceptable to use the neuter pronoun with babies and with animals, even animals whose gender we can determine easily (e.g. "I saw a buck in my yard, but it ran away when it say me" is a perfectly grammatical sentence in English). The word "ship" and words for countries are, at least in prestige varieties of English, gendered feminine, and yet I've yet to see a single ship's blueprint with the ship's vagina labeled.

Sure: because sex and gender are different. Do you imagine you are imparting some knowledge I did not already possess?'

When you say things like:

Non. Pronouns are sexed, not gendered. You are begging the question.

and

False. Nouns in general don't have a sex but they have a gender. Humans have a sex and some humans have a gender, but noun usage in humans has always been sexed.

then you can't really blame me for thinking you didn't know that about how English pronouns work, can you?

I can certainly blame you. Pronouns, like he, him, and it, refer to sex in animals, and to gender in other things that don't have a sex.

Though you are also silent on the demands of neopronouns--of which there is a vast array. Are the neopronouns also all legitimate, and we have 'zero' reasons to not use them?

Now, this comment here is literally the reason I bothered responding to anything you wrote at all because I have some things to say about neopronouns. I am not, in principle, against neopronouns. If someone can make a neopronoun that can catch on really easily, great! I'll jump right on board! I am, however, against neopronouns made by people who have no idea how pronouns work in speech. Pronouns are very frequently used bits of language, so they need to be phonologically simple and have obvious reduced forms (that's forms pronounced with unstressed vowels) that don't end up sounding like other pronouns. The neopronouns I've run into in my time here on Earth fail spectacularly at those tasks. For instance, some people have proposed "hir" as an object form of a new pronoun, but there's just no way to reduce that without making it sound exactly like "her"! Like literally, what was even the point of coining a gender neutral pronoun if it's just going to end up sounding exactly like a gendered one that already exists?! Or are we supposed to pronounce it as /hɪr/, with full stress, every time we say it? "Zir" is a little better, but spelling-wise it doesn't pattern well with the other pronouns (a problem it shares with "hir"), and something just feels unnatural about having a /z/ in there.

Well, I agree, but you haven't even touched the sides of proposed neopronouns. So, using your argument that we should respect pronouns, how do we determine how to (and if) we ought respect neopronouns?

(I am talking about neopronouns like 'bug', 'demonself', etc).

Huh, I have to admit that those are even worse. Like I said, no one who's proposed neopronouns has done a single thing to make them actually work as pronouns (at least that I've seen). I think I see what they're trying to do, and there's definitely languages where pronouns work sort of like how the coiners of those neopronouns would like English pronouns to work, but A. I don't think anyone coining the neopronouns you cited even understands that they're trying to change how an entire word class works in English, which means they're unlikely to achieve it, and B. I'm frankly unaware of any situation wherein a word class in a language has changed from a very strict closed class to a very open class in the lifetime of a native speaker. Suffice to say, I am not sanguine that those neopronouns will catch on.

I don't believe they will catch on either, but that isn't my point. You stated earlier that we should 'respect' the pronouns that trans people want us to use for them, but you seem unaware of the myriad pronouns they are proposing we 'respect'.

Having said that, I'm not positive neopronouns are actually solving an unsolved problem. "They" has a very long history of being used as a gender neutral pronoun for individual humans and is still used as such today, and using it for non-binary individuals just isn't a huge leap for me. It seems to me that the primary impetus for making a separate gender neutral pronoun from singular "they" is an erroneous belief that there's something bad about using singular "they", and there is very little I hate more than the stupid forms of grammatical prescriptivism we've inherited from folks with a hardcore Latin fetish. But even so, if someone can come up with a neopronoun that isn't pretty objectively a bad fit for English phonotactics, then I'm totally on board.

I use they often in certain context to refer to somebody of unknown gender. I don't have a particular problem with it, or indeed any polite fictions. But what about 'demonself'? Please note I am not making any of these neopronouns up.

It's telling that the person coining "demonself" can only distinguish the "-self" form from any of the other forms, which isn't exactly a hallmark of being an English pronoun. I don't recommend using it as the pronoun for any NB characters you write in a work of fiction, but there's still the principle of not-being-an-asshole should you run into someone who asks you to use that one.

If I knew this person personally, I would not use their pronouns. These pronouns I have come across from various sources online. The person wanting to use 'demon' pronouns was an obvious adult human female, and I would use those pronouns accordingly.

But of course, you weren't really asking if neopronouns were made by people with a grasp on how people actually use pronouns on a phonological level. You're trying to see if I consider it bigotry not to use them. My answer is: If you are not using them because you dislike the concept of non-binary people

I don't 'dislike to concept' of non-binary people. "Non-binary" is a gender identity and is a thought in a person's head. That you have certain thoughts in your head doesn't bother me.

Then the "if" clause doesn't apply to you.

or the idea of not using a person's preferred pronouns, then that's a shitty reason to avoid them. Even if I run into someone who wants me to use "hir" for hir, even though that pronoun is objectively poorly designed for its intended function, I will make a good faith effort to use it.

That's good for you--but do you think I ought be compelled to use them? Or that I ought use them?

I mean, yeah, if they want you to use them it's literally no skin off your nose to use them,

Huh? Of course it is. Of course it is. To use female-sexed pronouns for a person who is obviously male is engaging in fiction. Even if you think I ought to do it, you cannot discount to zero the cognitive effort and reformation required of someone to do it.

so you ought to use them in an abstract moral sense. Compelled to use them? In a legal sense, no, but you also don't deserve legal protections from social or employment consequences should your hypothetical commitment to causing pronoun-based anguish somehow backfire on you.

So, if somebody in my workplace wants me to use 'demon' pronouns, I ought use them, or face the consequences?

Trans activists demand we supplant sex for gender in nearly every conceivable situation. And the transformation of language is a step in that process: if you are treating trans women as women for language purposes, then they must also be women for all purposes.

Sounds fine to me. Language is transforming anyway, we might as well change it in a way that makes it suck less for trans folks too.

It sounds ludicrous and awful to me. That women play in sports against other females does not mean they ought play against other males who utter 'I identify as a woman'.

I'll agree that specifically in the realm of sports, it's at least a little more complicated than "let people play wherever they want," but to me that means something like "let's sit down with the data and find a good faith system that lets trans women can play women's sports".

Why does it mean that? You are begging the question. Why should males be able to play sex-segregated sports against females, no matter what the males utter?

But everything I have ever seen out of the trans-skeptic community makes me believe that literally no one raising "concerns" about this topic (or any other trans-related topic) actually cares about actual, living and breathing trans folks who actually experience the consequences of trans-related policies more than their weird bugaboos about gender, sex, and the concept of transgenderism, so I'ma go ahead and stick with reflexively supporting the trans community on this one instead of trying to engage in substansive conversation on the topic.

Well, I will stick with adult human females who do not want to have males in their sports or intimate spaces. But my support isn't 'reflexive'--I've thought about these issues for a long time.

 

[Politesse]

(And I think it's even more the case with sexual alignment. I'm in the camp that doesn't think there really is such a thing as homosexuality--or heterosexuality. There is no internal concept of being attracted to the same gender or the opposite gender. Rather, it makes much more sense if there is an attracted-to-males system and an attracted-to-females system. A model with one control being heterosexual/homosexual and one being intensity does a much poorer job of explaining bisexuality and asexuality than two independent systems, one for attracted to men and one for attracted to women, each with an intensity control.)

Non.

Nobody is attracted to the same "gender". People are attracted to zero, one, or both sexes.

Well, that's a load of nonsense. That's not information you're even privy to when you're just out on the street looking for someone to date. We're highly dependent on how someone presents themselves - a component of their gender - in feeling attraction to them. Any trans woman can tell you that being hit on by straight men is a regular occurrence in their lives whether or not it is wanted.