I am exactly one thing, a trans-woman. "Woman" is fine for a shorthand. Being a beautiful mutant is kind of rad, by the way.
Or....the opposite.
Hey now, I wanted to kill that joke!
I will admit that if there was an Onion article from about 15 years ago or so with the headline, "No one knows what a man or woman is anymore" it wold've gotten tons of laughs by you guys. But, now it's becoming a serious problem. We just need a definition, but I am afraid it can not be done.
Well, in some respects. We still get better life and health insurance policies.
Shhhhhhhhh. They'll hear you.
I think I need to be a teensy bit more explicit. Destroy gender, but acknowledge sex. And if that includes flexibility for different thinking styles, that's wonderful. Education should be adaptive.@Emily Lake I do think that deconstruction is not necessarily the best route. Finland actually conquered inequality by acknowledging the inherent neurobiological advantages and disadvantages of both genders, and they tailored their mathematical education more toward the ways that girls (and presumably gay boys, too, considering their underlying neurological similarity) tend to approach problem-solving. They still have some of the world's most secure engineering firms, but they just have more proportionate representation of the genders. The problem was that the old methods of instruction were designed around the natural inclinations of boys. They were not bad methods of instruction, but it turned out that girls could do just as well as boys when the methods of instruction were based more on their own natural behavior.
Also, Nick Haslam's research on essentialism regarding social categories actually suggests that we are better off acknowledging our natural differences but also being reasonable in regard to variations and overlaps. He discovered that entitativity was a more serious problem.
Good reading:
(PDF) Essentialist Beliefs about Social Categories
PDF | This study examines beliefs about the ontological status of social categories, asking whether their members are understood to share fixed,... | Find, read and cite all the research you need on ResearchGatewww.researchgate.net
For instance, "Women are statistically more likely than men to be _________" is occasionally (but not always) helpful.
However, "Women must _________ or they are not really women and don't count" is actually harmful. This is assumed entativity. It harbors the assumption that ALL women must adhere to a certain set of characteristics, and if they don't, they are not really considered to count toward how people perceive women.
Same with trans-women. It would be harmful if people said that I only counted as a trans-woman if I wore a dress, wore ruby-red lipstick, and demanded to use the ladies' room, regardless of my local culture and social circumstances. I actually dress unisex, though, and I really just avoid locations that don't have all-gender bathrooms, simply because I don't like feeling self-conscious. I'm still a trans-woman, though. I actually count in the tally. We can be any kinds of people, and there are thousands of different kinds of people.
The trans activists and gender ideologists will never allow that. They want gender to supplant sex and get more prominence, not less. Instead of abolishing gender, they want an ever-increasing list of genders and their associated neopronouns to dominate discourse, to take over ordinary dialogue between humans.
WTH? Dude, I'm happy to fix the prison system, and have it be more reasonable and humane. What you seem to be missing is that the thing you're showing as sarcastic is ACTUALLY REALLY HAPPENING. Prisoners in Canada, parts of the UK & Ireland, and some states, prisoners are requesting and being moved to female facilities solely on the basis of their self-declared gender identity. It's actually really already happening. So while I agree with your ideal state of fixing things, I'd like to halt what's going on right now. It's not a transmutation of a hypothetical, it's current reality.
Wow, talk about scaremongering.
I think I need to be a teensy bit more explicit. Destroy gender, but acknowledge sex. And if that includes flexibility for different thinking styles, that's wonderful. Education should be adaptive.@Emily Lake I do think that deconstruction is not necessarily the best route. Finland actually conquered inequality by acknowledging the inherent neurobiological advantages and disadvantages of both genders, and they tailored their mathematical education more toward the ways that girls (and presumably gay boys, too, considering their underlying neurological similarity) tend to approach problem-solving. They still have some of the world's most secure engineering firms, but they just have more proportionate representation of the genders. The problem was that the old methods of instruction were designed around the natural inclinations of boys. They were not bad methods of instruction, but it turned out that girls could do just as well as boys when the methods of instruction were based more on their own natural behavior.
Also, Nick Haslam's research on essentialism regarding social categories actually suggests that we are better off acknowledging our natural differences but also being reasonable in regard to variations and overlaps. He discovered that entitativity was a more serious problem.
Good reading:
(PDF) Essentialist Beliefs about Social Categories
PDF | This study examines beliefs about the ontological status of social categories, asking whether their members are understood to share fixed,... | Find, read and cite all the research you need on ResearchGate
For instance, "Women are statistically more likely than men to be _________" is occasionally (but not always) helpful.
However, "Women must _________ or they are not really women and don't count" is actually harmful. This is assumed entativity. It harbors the assumption that ALL women must adhere to a certain set of characteristics, and if they don't, they are not really considered to count toward how people perceive women.
Same with trans-women. It would be harmful if people said that I only counted as a trans-woman if I wore a dress, wore ruby-red lipstick, and demanded to use the ladies' room, regardless of my local culture and social circumstances. I actually dress unisex, though, and I really just avoid locations that don't have all-gender bathrooms, simply because I don't like feeling self-conscious. I'm still a trans-woman, though. I actually count in the tally. We can be any kinds of people, and there are thousands of different kinds of people.
We aren't blank slates. Society has a lot of impact, in terms of conditioning behavior... but at least some of our behavioral tendencies are innate. We're a sexually dimorphic species, and behaviors are part of that. We absolutely know that some behaviors are genetically influenced - terriers dig, hounds bay, they've been bred for those behavioral traits.
What I'm really after is tearing down the confining and limiting aspects of external gender roles. Be adaptive and flexible with respect to tendencies... but don't use them to reinforce limitations.
The invention of a new term isn't a problem. Neither is refinement of an old one. That is, when it happens organically. Of course, new words that are in current widespread usage (like 'selfie') didn't require the State to enforce them by punishing people who it deems to have used it incorrectly. Contrast with the State punishing her own citizens by enforcing its ideological beliefs about pronouns.
I have already said, many times over many threads, that not only do I accept the use of 'they' singular, I will even engage in the polite fiction of using the wrong-sex pronoun for transgender people who want that pronoun. But I absolutely will not concede that an infinite number of 'genders' (thoughts in heads) is appropriate to replace sex (of which there are two in mammals, and thus humans have a sex binary). I absolutely do not care if you call yourself 'non-binary' or a 'demiboi' or 'demongender' or 'faegender' or any other mental illness you want validation for, and I will not learn or use your neopronouns like 'bug' or 'demonself' or 'xir', and it is unethical and nakedly narcissitic of you to ask.
.
Neopronouns between friends is like nicknames between friends. If you and your friends want to do it, go for your life. But don't expect outsiders to want to, or worse, expect them to use them and punish them if they don't.@Metaphor I have told you, the neopronouns that some of my friends occasionally use go back to the 1990's, and we originally appropriated them from science fiction literature that all of us, at the time, were reading or had already read, not as adults but as preteens that enjoyed reading sci-fi and who were just forming their first ideas about everything.
The idea must have spread to other communities, at some point, and we are just as surprised as anybody that the idea spread. It was only really popular on a handful of IRC chat servers and MUCKS, and you could have fit everybody that had heard about the idea in a single large executive conference room.
Weirdly, this idea that my friends and I used as a part of a geeky kid game is catching on with today's youth culture, and they are taking it substantially more seriously than we did. Well...kids...what are you gonna do?
It's not as new as you are making it out to be, though.
At least my friends and I didn't play with explosives
Well, that was back in the 1990's. It's had a lot of time to catch on in the youth culture, and it's been spreading a little farther than we expected.Neopronouns between friends is like nicknames between friends. If you and your friends want to do it, go for your life. But don't expect outsiders to want to, or worse, expect them to use them and punish them if they don't.@Metaphor I have told you, the neopronouns that some of my friends occasionally use go back to the 1990's, and we originally appropriated them from science fiction literature that all of us, at the time, were reading or had already read, not as adults but as preteens that enjoyed reading sci-fi and who were just forming their first ideas about everything.
The idea must have spread to other communities, at some point, and we are just as surprised as anybody that the idea spread. It was only really popular on a handful of IRC chat servers and MUCKS, and you could have fit everybody that had heard about the idea in a single large executive conference room.
Weirdly, this idea that my friends and I used as a part of a geeky kid game is catching on with today's youth culture, and they are taking it substantially more seriously than we did. Well...kids...what are you gonna do?
It's not as new as you are making it out to be, though.
At least my friends and I didn't play with explosives
I refer to my cat as "they/them" on here.
Smurfs did it first.
Now, let's imagine this person identifies as a "man". Or at the very least does not identify as a woman at all.
Is light a wave or a particle? What we call it isn't nearly as important as its behavior. All you are doing is complaining about labels labels labels.
You aren't asking anything, you are demanding that male and female labels remain rigid, when in reality, they aren't as rigid or as convenient as we'd prefer.
I'm not exactly certain why you think anecdotal information is particularly important.
I'm not certain, but I think it was forums that drove me to that, because you don't know automatically which users are what gender or sex or whatever.
Why? Why does crystal clarity of definition matter on this subject? Lots of words, especially important words, aren't totally clear. Some words have multiple meanings. Some are only vaguely defined. Some words have more connotation than actual definition.
Do you genuinely have chimerism? That's kind of awesome... well, okay it's awesome for me to meet a genetic chimera, not necessarily awesome for you, since it makes all sorts of things complicated.
FWIW, you have my sympathy. It's a heartbreaking event for anyone to go through, regardless of the person's identity. My spouse went through a lot of the same thing about a decade ago when one of his close friends committed suicide. The same "could I have done something?", the same anger, the same sorrow. Well, maybe not exactly the same, but close enough to understand what you're going through.
Not likely. However, the fact that I am transgender plus the fact that my mother's side of the family has giganticomastia plus the fact that polymorphisms in the gene that codes an important estrogen receptor makes it likely that I am literally a mutant. When I got my blood tested prior to starting HRT, my hormone balance was barely within the normal range.
Thank you. She just got released from the clinic feeling better.
First, what do you mean by "purity ethics"? The term has come up a few times, and I don't know what it's supposed to imply.
I said no such things.
Huh. I'm not entirely sure what you think you're supporting with that quote. But it's absolutely true that a rose (female human) by any other name (man) still smells like a rose (is a female). Changing the label of a thing doesn't actually change the thing. Calling a male human a woman doesn't actually make that male person transform into a female person. Calling a person a wizard doesn't grant them mystical powers to override the laws of physics. You could call me a chicken rump for all I care, I'm pretty sure I'm not going to sprout feathers.
First off, stop using disorders of sexual development as an argument for transgender people. They are not the same, they are not interchangeable. Let's take a brief side trip into Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID), where people identify as being disabled, frequently as being paraplegic or quadriplegic. Do you think it would be politically and logically appropriate to make the argument that "Some people are born without legs, therefore someone who identifies as paraplegic, despite having completely normal and functional legs, should be recognized and treated as if they were actually legless"? I think that would be an idiotic argument, as well as being rather insulting to people with actual physical disabilities. So please, for the love of all things noble and good, stop using DSDs as some "gotcha" in discussions about transgender people. They are not the same things.
That's better...
How I interact socially with the person I share a prison cell with? Odd line of questioning, but let's roll with it.
Male and female are pretty concrete concepts.
Hell, if they have a full on lumberjack beard and walk like a gorilla, but they want to be called a woman in all but those situations where sex matters, I'm perfectly fine with that. Anybody who wants to wear a dress should feel free to do so.
I assume that the foreshortening is context dependent? I would guess that if someone were talking about endometriosis and used the term "woman", there wouldn't be any confusion about whether or not transwomen were included. Similarly, I would suspect that you don't feel compelled to refer to "ciswomen and transmen" in that context, and could roll with the contextually appropriate "women" as the common term for a human female?
WoTs don't imply mansplaining. Otherwise, I think I'd be labeled a man.
Euphemistically a chimera, reference to the mythical critter. I only asked because I was recently having a discussion about chimerism with an evolutionary biologist, so I thought it would be a really interesting coinkidink to meet one!
Good, I hope she gets the support she needs to whether the storm.
