Can We Discuss Sex & Gender / Transgender People?

[Emily Lake]

As if "males" (who are not violent/aggressive/abusive) should have to share space with the ones who are.

As if "males" was not a real word, it needs to be in "inverted commas".

I don't want to share a space with males who are violent/aggressive/abusive either. That doesn't mean I get to invade female spaces to get away from the violent males.

yep, another unisex convert.

Oh good gracious, there's a gif!

I am now scarred for life. Thanks Sigma, you've ruined unicorns for me.

 

[Emily Lake]

Unfortunately, we live in a culture that tends to shame men that are not seen as (straight) sexual performers.

I know this side of the issue pretty well because I am a queer person of male birth, and I grew up in a conservative area. The pressure to perform is actually pretty high. When I was only 11 years old, other boys would shove me in the direction of a member of the female sex and pressure me to act like I was interested in her, and I was very confused by this. One time, they demanded that I ask one a question that turned out to be obscene, and I just asked the intended victim, "I am very confused by what they said. Do you know what they meant?" and she turned and yelled at them, to my absolute mortification. I did not understand any of it.

I am not sure how it is in normal areas, but where I grew up, the pressure was pretty intense. It started alarmingly early.

It varies by location. I had the fortune of having very good parents who didn't press gender norms on me... but there's no escaping them. There was always pressure to conform to 'being a girl' and not 'doing boy things' as if there was something wrong with my dislike of barbie and my preference for hot wheels and tinker toys. I didn't run into quite the same situation as you did, but I agree that the pressure is ever-present and it starts at the beginning. Infants are treated differently depending on whether they're male or female. Every aspect of our socialization reinforces that message.

 

[Emily Lake]

What you're missing here is that the law isn't magical. Forbidding female-presenting males from using the ladies room doesn't actually stop them. A rape is only going to happen when there are few people around--and if there are few people around nothing is going to stop a man dressed as a woman from entering.

As for escaping from someone at their table--you're assuming the person they want to escape from is male. And that's not enough of a reason for ladies room to exist anyway.

What YOU'RE missing is that laws that ALLOW male-presenting males into the ladies restroom (by insisting that no treatment or presentation is required, only self-declaration) actually REMOVES the ability of women to even question or complain.

It makes it EASIER for predators to gain access, because they are now ENTITLED to be there in the first fucking place!

Think about this a minute. Laws that forbid pedophiles from hanging out near schools doesn't actually stop them if they really want to be there. Do you think we should remove those laws? I mean, really, what point to they serve? It's not like they prevent a motivated child predator from hurting kids, right?

 

[Emily Lake]

We don't see it as creating a gaping loophole. Rather, I think you have a false sense of security.

I'm going to ask you to really, genuinely, sincerely give this some thought before you answer.

Imagine a scenario where your wife goes to the local gym and uses the showers there after working out. A male-bodied person with a fully intact penis comes into the showers while your wife is there. That person looks your wife up and down, taking in her body while she's nude. That person strips off their own clothing, making their penis clearly visible to your wife. That person showers right next to your wife, and when they're done showering, they follow your wife out into the locker area, where they have a locker right next to your wife. They keep glancing over at your wife's body, and they keep angling themselves so that their penis is in clear view of your wife.

Now, lets provide two different rules to the situation. The first is a policy of trans inclusion, based solely on self-declaration. If a person says that they are trans, they are taken at their word. No questions are asked, no verification is required. There is no expectation or policy that the person identifying as transgender need to have any hormone treatment or surgery, or even wear feminine clothes or make-up. All that is necessary is a declaration of being transgender.

The second is a policy of predominantly sex-based separation in the showers and lockers, which allows for exceptions for people legally recognized as transgender with a clinical diagnosis. Under this policy, a person who passes very well will probably not even need to inform management that they're transgender, especially if they've had surgery. But a person who does not pass would need to provide supporting documentation.

Now, circling back to your wife in the gym showers and locker rooms... Which policy would you prefer? Which do you think she would prefer?

Neither policy actually *excludes* transgender people, you might note. But one of those policies gives your wife the right to challenge a person who is in the locker room who looks like they might not be sincere. The other policy denies your wife any right to challenge them, any right to complain. That policy makes your wife the person in the wrong if she feels uncomfortable with having a naked stranger with a penis near her while she is nude and vulnerable.

 

[Emily Lake]

1) You seem to be working on the guideline that looks male = threat. That has a very high false positive rate.

Yes, but the cost to me is incredibly, traumatically massive if I assume no risk and it ends up being a false negative.

Seriously, you want to talk about false positives and false negatives? Okay, but you're going to have to incorporate the risk involved as well. What is the cost of a false positive? The cost is that some random man might get his feelings a bit hurt because a random women that he doesn't know has avoided him in a place where they don't have any reason to interact anyway. What's the cost of a false negative? The woman gets raped and potentially killed, risks pregnancy, STD, and considerable physical and emotional trauma.

2) The threat generally comes from people you don't see, anyway.

Lol, no that's not true. Why are you assuming this to be the case?

Anyway, lemme ask you a hypothetical.

I have a box. In this box is a lollipop that you would like. There's also a small brown spider. There's a 98% chance that the spider is nothing more than a common house spider. No danger to you at all. There's a 2% chance that it's a brown recluse, which has necrotizing venom. If the spider is harmless (and the odds clearly favor that) you get a lolli that tastes good. If the spider is not harmless, you die.

Are you going to reach into the box and try to get the lollipop? Are you going to require that other people must also reach into the box and try for the lolli?

Because that's what you're doing. You're not proposing that YOU voluntarily take a risk that has an enormous downside to it. You're insisting that SOMEONE ELSE is obligated to take a risk that you yourself are not exposed to.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

It sounded to me like the real problem was the idea that physically unaltered male prisoners ought to be housed with female prisoners, and to me, that is something that I do not have the 25 years' experience in prison administration that I would really need in order to feel confident about addressing. Prisons are very dangerous environments, and I don't even want people that have committed actual crimes to be there if the administration does not take safety seriously. I think that, in a world with predominately mentally well-adjusted and largely law-abiding, mostly educated adults, I would consider the idea of gender desegregation as a distinct possibility in the not-too-distant future, but many people in prisons are from economically and culturally devastated backgrounds. I am sympathetic with the fact that they come from difficult backgrounds, but the management of those kinds of people is not something I would take lightly.

I am sympathetic with a person in an American prison that is transgender, and I take that person's health seriously. That is why I think that a person with that kind of healthcare-related issue ought to be closely supervised by everybody on their healthcare team, including wardens, healthcare workers, therapists, endocrinologists, prison administrators, and everybody that that person interacts with. Like it or not, being a transgender person in an all-male prison is a very complicated healthcare-related situation. I would want latitude given to experienced prison administrators and healthcare workers to figure out the best possible solution to that kind of scenario. I think it is insanity to settle those kinds of questions based on political polls.

The prison situation is different, there I'm inclined to go with the solution someone else proposed of trarnsgender-specific prisons.

I believe that there is a stronger argument for experimenting with total gender desegregation in contexts like, for example, one building at an Ivy League university, where they could be pretty sure of setting healthy precedents for the rest of society to follow. That is something that actually makes sense to try. I believe that the most enlightened and culturally invested individuals in the entire country actually would be able to take leadership on establishing a new set of norms. Even then, I'd poll the students on it.

I think the best approach is to make three bathrooms--men/women/any. See what happens. Remove any laws that interfere with permitting this. Nobody is forced to use a bathroom that doesn't match their presentation, no woman is forced to use a bathroom that might contain a penis.

I mean I half-jokingly and half-seriously call myself a communist, though I don't really adhere to the philosophy. I just kind of like to trigger complete idiots that don't have the abstract thought of a mentally handicapped hobbit. However, I think that the reason why communism went so badly, in Russia, was that Russia was really a terrible country in which to experiment with a major cultural revolution. Russia is culturally dysfunctional, and when you just put dysfunctional people into a new house, they wreck it just like they wrecked the last one. Russia really set terrible precedents for the development of that philosophy. Communism didn't ruin Russia, but Russia ruined communism.

Communism is inherently flawed by tragedy of the commons problems.

@Loren Pechtel is concerned about the false-positives that can occur due to men being called out for rape. Well, chemotherapy kills healthy cells as well as cancer. Tough titmouse, dude. If you don't like the chemotherapy, then get serious about fighting the cancer. Are you a fan of Adam Smith? If you are, then so am I! Adam Smith himself described the Diamonds vs. Water Paradox. We need deep reforms in the sexual ethics of both genders. The current system is creating an unhealthy dynamic that needs to be murdered. All of us need to be in on it. Just because we can't really stay on chemotherapy forever doesn't mean that the cancer isn't real.

The problem with your chemotherapy comparison is that people are individual actors. We are all being labeled rapists because of a tiny number that really are. Should we assume every Muslim we see is a not-so-smart bomb?

 

[SigmatheZeta]

1) You seem to be working on the guideline that looks male = threat. That has a very high false positive rate.

2) The threat generally comes from people you don't see, anyway.

You might as well tell a guy that has been mugged in the street that he doesn't really need to carry a pistol with him when he walks his dog. Even if you proved to him that the pistol did not really statistically benefit him, he would carry it, anyway.

The concealed pistol imposes no costs on anyone else. So long as he's taken the training and passed the background check to get it I don't care one bit. Mandating separate bathrooms imposes a substantial cost on people like you.

Solid point! Therefore, let's attack the deeper cultural ills that cause people to believe that the segregation is necessary. Let's eradicate that distrust.

If we are going to do it, I say let's do it right by starting that experiment in spaces where we can reasonably expect people to set positive precedents and provide reasonable feedback that can lead to new innovations we have not even thought of, yet.

For instance, women would have more options for where to change and feed their children if we normalized the presence of childcare facilities in buildings that had high enough occupancy and turnover to justify multi-stall bathrooms. That would also be an appropriate place for parents of all genders and sexualities to feed and change their kids, which objectively makes more sense. There would be no need to pass a regulation bill for this because businesses would just run more efficiently if female employees did not have to stop the show just to care for their children, and at public buildings, it would be common sense hospitality to offer to guests in a high traffic public building.

 

[SigmatheZeta]

It sounded to me like the real problem was the idea that physically unaltered male prisoners ought to be housed with female prisoners, and to me, that is something that I do not have the 25 years' experience in prison administration that I would really need in order to feel confident about addressing. Prisons are very dangerous environments, and I don't even want people that have committed actual crimes to be there if the administration does not take safety seriously. I think that, in a world with predominately mentally well-adjusted and largely law-abiding, mostly educated adults, I would consider the idea of gender desegregation as a distinct possibility in the not-too-distant future, but many people in prisons are from economically and culturally devastated backgrounds. I am sympathetic with the fact that they come from difficult backgrounds, but the management of those kinds of people is not something I would take lightly.

I am sympathetic with a person in an American prison that is transgender, and I take that person's health seriously. That is why I think that a person with that kind of healthcare-related issue ought to be closely supervised by everybody on their healthcare team, including wardens, healthcare workers, therapists, endocrinologists, prison administrators, and everybody that that person interacts with. Like it or not, being a transgender person in an all-male prison is a very complicated healthcare-related situation. I would want latitude given to experienced prison administrators and healthcare workers to figure out the best possible solution to that kind of scenario. I think it is insanity to settle those kinds of questions based on political polls.

The prison situation is different, there I'm inclined to go with the solution someone else proposed of trarnsgender-specific prisons.

I believe that there is a stronger argument for experimenting with total gender desegregation in contexts like, for example, one building at an Ivy League university, where they could be pretty sure of setting healthy precedents for the rest of society to follow. That is something that actually makes sense to try. I believe that the most enlightened and culturally invested individuals in the entire country actually would be able to take leadership on establishing a new set of norms. Even then, I'd poll the students on it.

I think the best approach is to make three bathrooms--men/women/any. See what happens. Remove any laws that interfere with permitting this. Nobody is forced to use a bathroom that doesn't match their presentation, no woman is forced to use a bathroom that might contain a penis.

I mean I half-jokingly and half-seriously call myself a communist, though I don't really adhere to the philosophy. I just kind of like to trigger complete idiots that don't have the abstract thought of a mentally handicapped hobbit. However, I think that the reason why communism went so badly, in Russia, was that Russia was really a terrible country in which to experiment with a major cultural revolution. Russia is culturally dysfunctional, and when you just put dysfunctional people into a new house, they wreck it just like they wrecked the last one. Russia really set terrible precedents for the development of that philosophy. Communism didn't ruin Russia, but Russia ruined communism.

Communism is inherently flawed by tragedy of the commons problems.

@Loren Pechtel is concerned about the false-positives that can occur due to men being called out for rape. Well, chemotherapy kills healthy cells as well as cancer. Tough titmouse, dude. If you don't like the chemotherapy, then get serious about fighting the cancer. Are you a fan of Adam Smith? If you are, then so am I! Adam Smith himself described the Diamonds vs. Water Paradox. We need deep reforms in the sexual ethics of both genders. The current system is creating an unhealthy dynamic that needs to be murdered. All of us need to be in on it. Just because we can't really stay on chemotherapy forever doesn't mean that the cancer isn't real.

The problem with your chemotherapy comparison is that people are individual actors. We are all being labeled rapists because of a tiny number that really are. Should we assume every Muslim we see is a not-so-smart bomb?

I would love to say let's allow Iran to make as many nuclear weapons as they want, but would that repair the damaged trust between Occidental and Islamic cultures?

 

[Toni]

Yeah, I really disagree. I really really do not want to be in a restroom with a male I don’t know. I really really really would not want to send my 12 year old daughter into a bathroom where she might be accosted by a strange man.

I realize this wouldn’t occur to you, Loren because you’re not that kind of guy. But if you had a 12 year old daughter, you’d spend at least the next 10 years of your life knowing that there are those kind of men out there.

Plus: women do like to be able to escape to the ladies to do hair, make up, escape for a few minutes from someone at their table. Finding some guy in the bathroom is not a nice surrise

What you're missing here is that the law isn't magical. Forbidding female-presenting males from using the ladies room doesn't actually stop them. A rape is only going to happen when there are few people around--and if there are few people around nothing is going to stop a man dressed as a woman from entering.

As for escaping from someone at their table--you're assuming the person they want to escape from is male. And that's not enough of a reason for ladies room to exist anyway.

I'm not 'missing' anything but you are.

I don't actually have a problem with a transwoman in a multi-stall ladies room at the same time I am.

Rapes in bars happen with a full bar just outside the door. Yes, I'm specifically referring to a rape that I have personal knowledge of. Rapes even happen in the street with a crowd watching.

I know exactly what I meant in my example: I'm specifically talking about women wanting/needing to escape a (male) creep. Or just needing a break from a situation. Most often, those who persistently are being creepy and won't desist are male. And most women prefer to adjust their clothing, fix their hair and makeup and yes, urinate, defecate and change a tampon in more privacy than having some man in audience, even outside of the stall, would provide. No one should be forced to feed their child while sitting on a toilet in a bathroom stall because that's the only place they can have some privacy.

Enough of the world is ordered around what makes men comfortable--and titillated. Women should get to have a space where they can feel comfortable as well.

I am thinking on a larger scale of comprehensive reforms in gender relations. If you think breaking down a few walls is not going to work under current conditions, then Lord of Ponies, I agree 100%. We need comprehensive reform in how the genders grow up thinking about their roles in society. I think that total desegregation might be a part of a better future, but we will cross that bridge when we get to it. That is the harvest. Soil needs to be turned, harrowed, and seeded.

I'm certain you're much younger than I am and perhaps you can see farther into the future than I can.

Humans are, in many ways, very tribal, even when they do not mean to be. I always knew I wanted to move away from where I grew up because I craved different, variety, diversity, new, old but new to me--among other reasons. But I also know that there is something special about being with just my siblings, as it is when my husband is with just his siblings. That getting together for a high school reunion, I found that I could enjoy people I didn't really know or like when we were in school together because there was a shared bond. A new co-worker joined my work unit and she was from a place geographically close to where I grew up and something in me just saw her as home in a way that no one in the place I've lived for most of my adult life does. I find that if I'm with just people who worked for my employer, there's also a kind of kinship. And a kind of kinship if I meet strangers who live in old houses where they raised their children, even if we just met. There's a kind of short hand, a way of being that in each of those situations and many more that changes how we relax and what parts of ourselves are relaxed and open. It's the same with groups of women, and groups of men and I'm certain, groups of transgender individuals, gay people, queer people and Asian people, Native Americans, black people, Catholics, Muslims, Arabs--name a demographic.

I prefer female gynecologists, not out of modesty or fear but because there's more shared empathy, details that are understood rather than requiring detailed descriptions and trying not to notice that the male doctor is slightly uncomfortable, even if he's obviously been in his profession for decades.

In a multi stall bathroom, I think that many/most women simply relax in ways that they don't if they are sharing space with men. I'm happy to share that space with trans individuals who are female presenting or lesbians, etc. That doesn't bother me at all. But I'd rather not be sharing space with, say, my date, or some male stranger or even my son or a male coworker while I attend to intimate needs. I can't really delineate how much of that is modesty and how much of it is simply wanting some private space where I don't have to even consider what some guy may think or say or do.

Whether we like it or not, women pretty often do censor themselves in some ways if even one man is present--even if it's a gay man, although less so in that case. I suspect men do as well but I don't honestly know that.

 

[Toni]

1) You seem to be working on the guideline that looks male = threat. That has a very high false positive rate.

2) The threat generally comes from people you don't see, anyway.

You might as well tell a guy that has been mugged in the street that he doesn't really need to carry a pistol with him when he walks his dog. Even if you proved to him that the pistol did not really statistically benefit him, he would carry it, anyway.

The concealed pistol imposes no costs on anyone else. So long as he's taken the training and passed the background check to get it I don't care one bit. Mandating separate bathrooms imposes a substantial cost on people like you.

Solid point! Therefore, let's attack the deeper cultural ills that cause people to believe that the segregation is necessary. Let's eradicate that distrust.

If we are going to do it, I say let's do it right by starting that exprriment in spaces where we can reasonably expect people to set positive precedents and provide reasonable feedback that can lead to new innovations we have not even thought of, yet.

For instance, women would have more options for where to change and feed their children if we normalized the presence of childcare facilities in buildings that had high enough occupancy and turnover to justify multi-stall bathrooms. That would also be an appropriate place for parents of all genders and sexualities to feed and change their kids, which objectively makes more sense. There would be no need to pass a regulation bill for this because businesses would just run more efficiently if female employees did not have to stop the show just to care for their children, and at public buildings, it would be common sense hospitality to offer to guests in a high traffic public building.

Please don't suggest that women need to feed their babies in a bathroom stall. Too often, that's their only option. It's much better for women to have access to a lounge with a comfortable chair and some privacy, whether it is to breastfeed or pump or even for some babies bottle feed. It can be difficult for some women to get their milk to let down in a less than private space and some infants, both bottle fed and breast fed, do not feed well with distractions around them.

That's without considering the health/hygiene issues! Which are very, very significant!

Not to mention that we'd never suggest that men have to eat their lunch on the toilet.

But yes to more family lounges! For feeding/changing of infants!

 

[Emily Lake]

@Loren Pechtel, @Jimmy Higgins, and @Jarhyn have though. It's the people who insist that sex doesn't matter, genitals are not a problem, and that women should just shut up and accept the risk of having people with penises in their spaces, because hey, what could go wrong? They're the ones hand-waving away concerns.

It's the male born-and-raised people who insist that because penises have never been a problem for them, and because they wouldn't be concerned to have a naked female in their midst, that the same thing should apply to women. They're the ones who see to think that the statistics for rape and sexual assaults are irrelevant, and that women just be crazy hysterical overreacting and all that.

The "woman" sign will keep out the creeps but it won't keep out the actual threats. You have a false sense of security.

It sounded to me like the real problem was the idea that physically unaltered male prisoners ought to be housed with female prisoners, and to me, that is something that I do not have the 25 years' experience in prison administration that I would really need in order to feel confident about addressing. Prisons are very dangerous environments, and I don't even want people that have committed actual crimes to be there if the administration does not take safety seriously. I think that, in a world with predominately mentally well-adjusted and largely law-abiding, mostly educated adults, I would consider the idea of gender desegregation as a distinct possibility in the not-too-distant future, but many people in prisons are from economically and culturally devastated backgrounds. I am sympathetic with the fact that they come from difficult backgrounds, but the management of those kinds of people is not something I would take lightly.

I am sympathetic with a person in an American prison that is transgender, and I take that person's health seriously. That is why I think that a person with that kind of healthcare-related issue ought to be closely supervised by everybody on their healthcare team, including wardens, healthcare workers, therapists, endocrinologists, prison administrators, and everybody that that person interacts with. Like it or not, being a transgender person in an all-male prison is a very complicated healthcare-related situation. I would want latitude given to experienced prison administrators and healthcare workers to figure out the best possible solution to that kind of scenario. I think it is insanity to settle those kinds of questions based on political polls.

I believe that there is a stronger argument for experimenting with total gender desegregation in contexts like, for example, one building at an Ivy League university, where they could be pretty sure of setting healthy precedents for the rest of society to follow. That is something that actually makes sense to try. I believe that the most enlightened and culturally invested individuals in the entire country actually would be able to take leadership on establishing a new set of norms. Even then, I'd poll the students on it.

Cultural norms have substantially more control over people's behavior than laws, so when we are talking about cultural revolutions, I think we ought to be very serious about what kinds of individuals we want lighting the way. It sounds rosy and progressive and enlightened to say that "gender is so yesteryear," but there is a difference, to me, whether we initiate that kind of thinking among our cultural elites or among people that are likely to ruin it.

I mean I half-jokingly and half-seriously call myself a communist, though I don't really adhere to the philosophy. I just kind of like to trigger complete idiots that don't have the abstract thought of a mentally handicapped hobbit. However, I think that the reason why communism went so badly, in Russia, was that Russia was really a terrible country in which to experiment with a major cultural revolution. Russia is culturally dysfunctional, and when you just put dysfunctional people into a new house, they wreck it just like they wrecked the last one. Russia really set terrible precedents for the development of that philosophy. Communism didn't ruin Russia, but Russia ruined communism.

In the Nordic states, on the other hand, they did not just take the Communist Manifesto and make that into their holy law, but they quickly evolved the core ideas contained within it into a substantially more revolutionary system that really works substantially better than either traditional capitalism or a more orthodox interpretation of communism. Finland is one of the easiest countries in the world to start a new business, yet you can work as part of a trade union if you really want to. However, the Finnish already had reasonably strong cultural leadership. They were like that kid that if you threw them an iPhone, they would disassemble it and put it back together in twenty minutes, and they would casually tell you they jailbroke it for you. The Finnish, following similar suit, took the Communist Manifesto, dissected it, and appropriated what parts they actually wanted to use. It was a new idea, and they knew better than to take the first version of it to be a holy gospel. Furthermore, they have a long history of being educated blasphemers. They are going to be the first people in the world to turn sunlight and air almost directly into food. Wait, that's already happened:

Home - Solar Foods

solarfoods.fi

Granted, that's a marketing gimmick for being effectively a fucking algae-farmer, but let's not split hairs: that is fucking brilliant.

And please, let's not get derailed talking about either communism or algae-farming.

The point is that I am more excited than anybody about the idea of gender desegregation, but I would be just as alarmed as @Emily Lake if people came out, with sledgehammers in hand, and started knocking down walls between men's and women's sections of segregated multi-stall bathrooms in random places, not taking into account the cultural conditions of the places where they were doing it. Even though I think it's a worthy cultural revolution, there is a right way and a wrong way to do it.

In order to really change society, at a deep level, it is imperative that we be responsible about what norms and precedents we set for the next generation. Whatever mess we make today, it's going to be the mess that our generation's grandchildren are going to have to live in, not ourselves. What we already have is a mess. I do not want to pass on that mess to yet another generation. However, there is always the risk that you are going to make an even bigger mess by cleaning up the old mess incompetently.

I do not think that we ought to stay with the current system of gender segregation. I think that that system is partly to blame for the dysfunctional sexual ethics that also make some of us reluctant to change it. Sorry, @Emily Lake, but I don't think the right answer is to keep on throwing good money after bad like an investor that is trying to break even on a bad investment while walking away from more lucrative opportunities. I think that our current system is partly to blame for the dysfunctional sexual ethics that have created our current dilemmas and trilemmas, and we are dealing with a serious trifecta (I just had to do that alliteration) of being afraid to change the current system, not really having a clear idea of how to even start changing the current system, and having too many people determined to push for change without looking where the fuck they are going.

I also think that purity ethics, among the female sex, are just as much to blame as macho-ethics, among the male sex, for our current dilemmas, regarding gender relations. Think of it in terms of economics: Adam Smith--who is almost as much of a historical hero to me as Peter Kropotkin--presented us with the Diamonds v. Water Paradox.

“The things which have the greatest value in use have frequently little or no value in exchange; and on the contrary, those which have the greatest value in exchange have frequently little or no value in use. Nothing is more useful than water: but it will purchase scarce any thing; scarce any thing can be had in exchange for it. A diamond, on the contrary, has scarce any value in use; but a very great quantity of other goods may frequently be had in exchange for it.” (The Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter IV)

So, @Emily Lake, I think that the continued proliferation of purity ethics, among the female sex, is just contributing to this dynamic. They are enforcing a false scarcity at the same time that reactionary men are promoting fornication and adultery as a necessity for self-validation, and I see this as a serious problem.

Well, Finland is the most gender-equal country in the entire world, yet they have had co-ed saunas and bathhouses for generations. It's normal, there, for men and women to sit next to each other bare-assed in a dark wooden box full of steam, and to them, it's not a sexual thing. They are also the only country in the world that has figured out how to establish near gender-equality in the field of engineering, though. They figured out that the unequal representation of men and women in the field of engineering went back to the standards of education in the mathematics being designed to accommodate for the unique neurobiological advantages of boys, and they changed the way they taught the subject to also accommodate for the unique neurobiological advantages of girls. They have almost equal representation of the genders, in the field of engineering, in the same country that has some of the world's most casually libertarian sexual mores.

The idea that the problems, in gender relations, are somehow insoluble is a lie. It's one of the biggest lies in history.

I think that the place to start, with doing murder on that lie, is to do murder on our dysfunctional sexual ethics. We need to murder the part of macho-ethics where 11 year old boys are literally physically shoved at girls and commanded to be lewd, which is the shit that I went through and which I know is almost as disturbing to many straight boys. Murder it. The kinds of purity ethics where girls talk shit about each other for being perceived as sexually licentious also needs to die. Murder it with poison and fire. Kill it, kill it, kill it dead.

"Murder is forever," said the crow to his kinfolk. Crows of a murder mob predators together.

We are crows of the same murder, even though we were born different sexes. What led to you being sexually harassed or perhaps even raped, during your youth, led to me being put under intense pressure to become a part of that broken system, and when I didn't, I was beaten. Men of violence hefted me up around their shoulders and slammed my entire body down on hard asphalt in a wrestling maneuver that was designed for gym mats and is not even legal in respectable sport. If my muscles were not naturally more relaxed than most, then that maneuver could have snapped my spine and rendered me permanently paralyzed. I was living in a culture where the only way I wouldn't be called out as gay was if I proved my credentials as a straight man by harassing people like you, and when I wouldn't play in that role, I was made to fear for my life.

You have an ally in me, even though we might not always agree on solutions (which I hope we can amend, someday), and I believe that it is overdue for us to get serious about rethinking our sexual and gender ethics right through to the core. I would also agree with you that the right way is not to just unleash a bunch of maniacs to go and break down walls with sledgehammers. The cultural reforms are going to have to go deeper than just tearing down a few walls. The cancer is too deeply rooted to assume that we are going to get it into remission by just tearing down a few walls.

@Loren Pechtel is concerned about the false-positives that can occur due to men being called out for rape. Well, chemotherapy kills healthy cells as well as cancer. Tough titmouse, dude. If you don't like the chemotherapy, then get serious about fighting the cancer. Are you a fan of Adam Smith? If you are, then so am I! Adam Smith himself described the Diamonds vs. Water Paradox. We need deep reforms in the sexual ethics of both genders. The current system is creating an unhealthy dynamic that needs to be murdered. All of us need to be in on it. Just because we can't really stay on chemotherapy forever doesn't mean that the cancer isn't real.

I am saying, as a transgender woman, that we have to seriously rethink everything. Knocking down a few walls is not enough. Once I'm done transitioning, operation and all, I'm going to have to live with the actual reality of being a woman. I don't think that all of my problems are going to be fixed at once by knocking down a few walls, and I think that just blindly knocking down walls is not the right way to fight a serious cancer.

So, so much in there. It's a good thing I'm a fan of WoTs.

I largely agree with your philosophical points. And I definitely agree on not knocking down Chesterton Fences all willy-nilly.

In my view, the largest problem is one of gender roles and expectations. It's the socially reinforced recipe for 'how to be a man' and 'how to be a woman'. It's the enforced retribution that occurs when you step outside the bounds that someone else has defined. I also think that those gender constructs are intimately entwined (that has a nice alliterative ring to it) with violence against women as well as against homosexual people. It's all part of the cost of being gender non-conforming. And I think it needs to go. As you said, kill it. Kill it with fire.

In my view, the way to get there is to tear down gender. Destroy the constructs of what it means to 'be a man' or 'be a woman'. Work toward a society where a male can wear skirts and paint their nails and dance and be delicate and emotional without being considered any less of a man. I know I tend to discuss the confining roles placed around women, but that's because I can speak to that directly from experience. You've done a good job of bringing up the roles that box men in as well. My husband and I have had many discussion about them, and they're just as real, and just as confining for men as they are for women, even if they have different aggregate dynamics.

I'd love to have a society where mixed-sex spas, saunas, etc. were common place. Contrary to how @Loren Pechtel and @Jarhyn frame it, I am fond of men. Most of my closest friends are men. I neither hate nor fear men in general... just as I neither hate nor fear dogs in general, and actually rather like them. That doesn't, however, mean that it's somehow irrational of me to be on guard when an unknown pit-bull runs toward me. Chances are that they're friendly... but if they're not it's a world of hurt.

 

[Emily Lake]

I think the best approach is to make three bathrooms--men/women/any. See what happens. Remove any laws that interfere with permitting this. Nobody is forced to use a bathroom that doesn't match their presentation, no woman is forced to use a bathroom that might contain a penis.

There are no laws that prohibit this.

 

[Toni]

@Loren Pechtel, @Jimmy Higgins, and @Jarhyn have though. It's the people who insist that sex doesn't matter, genitals are not a problem, and that women should just shut up and accept the risk of having people with penises in their spaces, because hey, what could go wrong? They're the ones hand-waving away concerns.

It's the male born-and-raised people who insist that because penises have never been a problem for them, and because they wouldn't be concerned to have a naked female in their midst, that the same thing should apply to women. They're the ones who see to think that the statistics for rape and sexual assaults are irrelevant, and that women just be crazy hysterical overreacting and all that.

The "woman" sign will keep out the creeps but it won't keep out the actual threats. You have a false sense of security.

Bullshit. The woman sign makes it clear that any male (who isn't a child) is where he doesn't belong and would immediately put women on notice to have him evicted.

 

[SigmatheZeta]

Yeah, I really disagree. I really really do not want to be in a restroom with a male I don’t know. I really really really would not want to send my 12 year old daughter into a bathroom where she might be accosted by a strange man.

I realize this wouldn’t occur to you, Loren because you’re not that kind of guy. But if you had a 12 year old daughter, you’d spend at least the next 10 years of your life knowing that there are those kind of men out there.

Plus: women do like to be able to escape to the ladies to do hair, make up, escape for a few minutes from someone at their table. Finding some guy in the bathroom is not a nice surrise

What you're missing here is that the law isn't magical. Forbidding female-presenting males from using the ladies room doesn't actually stop them. A rape is only going to happen when there are few people around--and if there are few people around nothing is going to stop a man dressed as a woman from entering.

As for escaping from someone at their table--you're assuming the person they want to escape from is male. And that's not enough of a reason for ladies room to exist anyway.

I'm not 'missing' anything but you are.

I don't actually have a problem with a transwoman in a multi-stall ladies room at the same time I am.

Rapes in bars happen with a full bar just outside the door. Yes, I'm specifically referring to a rape that I have personal knowledge of. Rapes even happen in the street with a crowd watching.

I know exactly what I meant in my example: I'm specifically talking about women wanting/needing to escape a (male) creep. Or just needing a break from a situation. Most often, those who persistently are being creepy and won't desist are male. And most women prefer to adjust their clothing, fix their hair and makeup and yes, urinate, defecate and change a tampon in more privacy than having some man in audience, even outside of the stall, would provide. No one should be forced to feed their child while sitting on a toilet in a bathroom stall because that's the only place they can have some privacy.

Enough of the world is ordered around what makes men comfortable--and titillated. Women should get to have a space where they can feel comfortable as well.

I am thinking on a larger scale of comprehensive reforms in gender relations. If you think breaking down a few walls is not going to work under current conditions, then Lord of Ponies, I agree 100%. We need comprehensive reform in how the genders grow up thinking about their roles in society. I think that total desegregation might be a part of a better future, but we will cross that bridge when we get to it. That is the harvest. Soil needs to be turned, harrowed, and seeded.

I'm certain you're much younger than I am and perhaps you can see farther into the future than I can.

Humans are, in many ways, very tribal, even when they do not mean to be. I always knew I wanted to move away from where I grew up because I craved different, variety, diversity, new, old but new to me--among other reasons. But I also know that there is something special about being with just my siblings, as it is when my husband is with just his siblings. That getting together for a high school reunion, I found that I could enjoy people I didn't really know or like when we were in school together because there was a shared bond. A new co-worker joined my work unit and she was from a place geographically close to where I grew up and something in me just saw her as home in a way that no one in the place I've lived for most of my adult life does. I find that if I'm with just people who worked for my employer, there's also a kind of kinship. And a kind of kinship if I meet strangers who live in old houses where they raised their children, even if we just met. There's a kind of short hand, a way of being that in each of those situations and many more that changes how we relax and what parts of ourselves are relaxed and open. It's the same with groups of women, and groups of men and I'm certain, groups of transgender individuals, gay people, queer people and Asian people, Native Americans, black people, Catholics, Muslims, Arabs--name a demographic.

I prefer female gynecologists, not out of modesty or fear but because there's more shared empathy, details that are understood rather than requiring detailed descriptions and trying not to notice that the male doctor is slightly uncomfortable, even if he's obviously been in his profession for decades.

In a multi stall bathroom, I think that many/most women simply relax in ways that they don't if they are sharing space with men. I'm happy to share that space with trans individuals who are female presenting or lesbians, etc. That doesn't bother me at all. But I'd rather not be sharing space with, say, my date, or some male stranger or even my son or a male coworker while I attend to intimate needs. I can't really delineate how much of that is modesty and how much of it is simply wanting some private space where I don't have to even consider what some guy may think or say or do.

Whether we like it or not, women pretty often do censor themselves in some ways if even one man is present--even if it's a gay man, although less so in that case. I suspect men do as well but I don't honestly know that.

Oh, gay men are so clueless about women's lives, it is actually hilarious. They don't even think about gender the same way. Their sexual ethics just work differently: the one in the more "feminine" role is also less affected by internalized homophobia, so they tend to higher self-confidence. The more masculine-styled ones tend to be relatively bashful. The dynamic is topsy-turvy. I think our dynamics are generally more healthy, but some of us feel utterly lost when trying to understand straight people's issues. It is true that straight women often have less baggage and fewer assumptions in the way, when they are talking to gay men, but that lack of baggage comes from self-admitted ignorance. We have no choice but to take you at your word when you tell us that gender relations are a mess.

 

[KeepTalking]

I'm sorry this has happened to you. My son was attacked multiple times in the bathroom (at 14 and 15 years old) being told to "prove" he was a guy. He eventually dropped out of school from fear of being attacked. And he went to a LIBERAL school. People suck and fear what they don't understand and it peeves me to no end reading thread after thread from certain people on this board hating or questioning transgendered persons. MY SON HAS A RIGHT TO LIVE HIS LIFE IN PEACE. But I know society is NOT going to make it easy for him.

Nobody should be physically attacked, but your child is female and tried to use a sex-segregated space reserved for males.

Why did you find it necessary to add a "but" there?

It is as if you are in some way trying to excuse that behavior.

If I were trying to excuse it, I'd have said the behaviour was justified. I don't know what Playball40 means by 'attacked' - I assumed physical but perhaps not.

The events illustrate two things to me: people generally perceive the sex of others correctly, and that people treat male bathrooms as sex-segregated.

None of that tells me why you felt it necessary to add ", but" after "Nobody should be physically attacked". One usually only does so to point out some mitigating circumstance, and I don't think that your "but" should be considered a mitigating circumstance to being physically attacked.

If my sentence structure offends you, I don't know what to say.

It isn't the sentence structure that is offensive, but rather the meaning that it conveys.

 

[KeepTalking]

What you're missing here is that the law isn't magical. Forbidding female-presenting males from using the ladies room doesn't actually stop them. A rape is only going to happen when there are few people around--and if there are few people around nothing is going to stop a man dressed as a woman from entering.

As for escaping from someone at their table--you're assuming the person they want to escape from is male. And that's not enough of a reason for ladies room to exist anyway.

What YOU'RE missing is that laws that ALLOW male-presenting males into the ladies restroom (by insisting that no treatment or presentation is required, only self-declaration) actually REMOVES the ability of women to even question or complain.

It makes it EASIER for predators to gain access, because they are now ENTITLED to be there in the first fucking place!

Think about this a minute. Laws that forbid pedophiles from hanging out near schools doesn't actually stop them if they really want to be there. Do you think we should remove those laws? I mean, really, what point to they serve? It's not like they prevent a motivated child predator from hurting kids, right?

The distinction I think that is missing from the above is that those laws only apply to those who have been convicted of a particular crime, showing that they should not be trusted in those areas, rather than applying to everyone whether they have earned the mistrust or not.

 

[TomC]

The distinction I think that is missing from the above is that those laws only apply to those who have been convicted of a particular crime, showing that they should not be trusted in those areas, rather than applying to everyone whether they have earned the mistrust or not.

Here's another distinction that is commonly missing in this discussion.

1000+ generations of human sex selection has resulted in males being, over all, bigger and stronger and more violent and more prone to sexual assault than females. It's just a fact.

It's not irrational for women to want a man free place for personal business, especially if that business involves disrobing. Even just having a pee requires women in western clothes to nearly strip from the waist down. Rather a stark contrast to a guy, all we need to do is whip it out at a urinal. If we even bother with finding one, one perq of male privilege is "The whole world is my pissoir, if you don't want to see it then look elsewhere." We don't have to care about such things. The nearest tree meets my needs, usually.

It's very different for women, usually. As a result, women generally tend to have an extremely different attitude on the subject. Ignoring their concerns is not acceptable IMNSHO.
Most men are quite civilized on the subject, but enough aren't to pose a real and ongoing threat to women.
Tom

 

[SigmatheZeta]

@Loren Pechtel, @Jimmy Higgins, and @Jarhyn have though. It's the people who insist that sex doesn't matter, genitals are not a problem, and that women should just shut up and accept the risk of having people with penises in their spaces, because hey, what could go wrong? They're the ones hand-waving away concerns.

It's the male born-and-raised people who insist that because penises have never been a problem for them, and because they wouldn't be concerned to have a naked female in their midst, that the same thing should apply to women. They're the ones who see to think that the statistics for rape and sexual assaults are irrelevant, and that women just be crazy hysterical overreacting and all that.

The "woman" sign will keep out the creeps but it won't keep out the actual threats. You have a false sense of security.

It sounded to me like the real problem was the idea that physically unaltered male prisoners ought to be housed with female prisoners, and to me, that is something that I do not have the 25 years' experience in prison administration that I would really need in order to feel confident about addressing. Prisons are very dangerous environments, and I don't even want people that have committed actual crimes to be there if the administration does not take safety seriously. I think that, in a world with predominately mentally well-adjusted and largely law-abiding, mostly educated adults, I would consider the idea of gender desegregation as a distinct possibility in the not-too-distant future, but many people in prisons are from economically and culturally devastated backgrounds. I am sympathetic with the fact that they come from difficult backgrounds, but the management of those kinds of people is not something I would take lightly.

I am sympathetic with a person in an American prison that is transgender, and I take that person's health seriously. That is why I think that a person with that kind of healthcare-related issue ought to be closely supervised by everybody on their healthcare team, including wardens, healthcare workers, therapists, endocrinologists, prison administrators, and everybody that that person interacts with. Like it or not, being a transgender person in an all-male prison is a very complicated healthcare-related situation. I would want latitude given to experienced prison administrators and healthcare workers to figure out the best possible solution to that kind of scenario. I think it is insanity to settle those kinds of questions based on political polls.

I believe that there is a stronger argument for experimenting with total gender desegregation in contexts like, for example, one building at an Ivy League university, where they could be pretty sure of setting healthy precedents for the rest of society to follow. That is something that actually makes sense to try. I believe that the most enlightened and culturally invested individuals in the entire country actually would be able to take leadership on establishing a new set of norms. Even then, I'd poll the students on it.

Cultural norms have substantially more control over people's behavior than laws, so when we are talking about cultural revolutions, I think we ought to be very serious about what kinds of individuals we want lighting the way. It sounds rosy and progressive and enlightened to say that "gender is so yesteryear," but there is a difference, to me, whether we initiate that kind of thinking among our cultural elites or among people that are likely to ruin it.

I mean I half-jokingly and half-seriously call myself a communist, though I don't really adhere to the philosophy. I just kind of like to trigger complete idiots that don't have the abstract thought of a mentally handicapped hobbit. However, I think that the reason why communism went so badly, in Russia, was that Russia was really a terrible country in which to experiment with a major cultural revolution. Russia is culturally dysfunctional, and when you just put dysfunctional people into a new house, they wreck it just like they wrecked the last one. Russia really set terrible precedents for the development of that philosophy. Communism didn't ruin Russia, but Russia ruined communism.

In the Nordic states, on the other hand, they did not just take the Communist Manifesto and make that into their holy law, but they quickly evolved the core ideas contained within it into a substantially more revolutionary system that really works substantially better than either traditional capitalism or a more orthodox interpretation of communism. Finland is one of the easiest countries in the world to start a new business, yet you can work as part of a trade union if you really want to. However, the Finnish already had reasonably strong cultural leadership. They were like that kid that if you threw them an iPhone, they would disassemble it and put it back together in twenty minutes, and they would casually tell you they jailbroke it for you. The Finnish, following similar suit, took the Communist Manifesto, dissected it, and appropriated what parts they actually wanted to use. It was a new idea, and they knew better than to take the first version of it to be a holy gospel. Furthermore, they have a long history of being educated blasphemers. They are going to be the first people in the world to turn sunlight and air almost directly into food. Wait, that's already happened:

Home - Solar Foods

solarfoods.fi

Granted, that's a marketing gimmick for being effectively a fucking algae-farmer, but let's not split hairs: that is fucking brilliant.

And please, let's not get derailed talking about either communism or algae-farming.

The point is that I am more excited than anybody about the idea of gender desegregation, but I would be just as alarmed as @Emily Lake if people came out, with sledgehammers in hand, and started knocking down walls between men's and women's sections of segregated multi-stall bathrooms in random places, not taking into account the cultural conditions of the places where they were doing it. Even though I think it's a worthy cultural revolution, there is a right way and a wrong way to do it.

In order to really change society, at a deep level, it is imperative that we be responsible about what norms and precedents we set for the next generation. Whatever mess we make today, it's going to be the mess that our generation's grandchildren are going to have to live in, not ourselves. What we already have is a mess. I do not want to pass on that mess to yet another generation. However, there is always the risk that you are going to make an even bigger mess by cleaning up the old mess incompetently.

I do not think that we ought to stay with the current system of gender segregation. I think that that system is partly to blame for the dysfunctional sexual ethics that also make some of us reluctant to change it. Sorry, @Emily Lake, but I don't think the right answer is to keep on throwing good money after bad like an investor that is trying to break even on a bad investment while walking away from more lucrative opportunities. I think that our current system is partly to blame for the dysfunctional sexual ethics that have created our current dilemmas and trilemmas, and we are dealing with a serious trifecta (I just had to do that alliteration) of being afraid to change the current system, not really having a clear idea of how to even start changing the current system, and having too many people determined to push for change without looking where the fuck they are going.

I also think that purity ethics, among the female sex, are just as much to blame as macho-ethics, among the male sex, for our current dilemmas, regarding gender relations. Think of it in terms of economics: Adam Smith--who is almost as much of a historical hero to me as Peter Kropotkin--presented us with the Diamonds v. Water Paradox.

“The things which have the greatest value in use have frequently little or no value in exchange; and on the contrary, those which have the greatest value in exchange have frequently little or no value in use. Nothing is more useful than water: but it will purchase scarce any thing; scarce any thing can be had in exchange for it. A diamond, on the contrary, has scarce any value in use; but a very great quantity of other goods may frequently be had in exchange for it.” (The Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter IV)

So, @Emily Lake, I think that the continued proliferation of purity ethics, among the female sex, is just contributing to this dynamic. They are enforcing a false scarcity at the same time that reactionary men are promoting fornication and adultery as a necessity for self-validation, and I see this as a serious problem.

Well, Finland is the most gender-equal country in the entire world, yet they have had co-ed saunas and bathhouses for generations. It's normal, there, for men and women to sit next to each other bare-assed in a dark wooden box full of steam, and to them, it's not a sexual thing. They are also the only country in the world that has figured out how to establish near gender-equality in the field of engineering, though. They figured out that the unequal representation of men and women in the field of engineering went back to the standards of education in the mathematics being designed to accommodate for the unique neurobiological advantages of boys, and they changed the way they taught the subject to also accommodate for the unique neurobiological advantages of girls. They have almost equal representation of the genders, in the field of engineering, in the same country that has some of the world's most casually libertarian sexual mores.

The idea that the problems, in gender relations, are somehow insoluble is a lie. It's one of the biggest lies in history.

I think that the place to start, with doing murder on that lie, is to do murder on our dysfunctional sexual ethics. We need to murder the part of macho-ethics where 11 year old boys are literally physically shoved at girls and commanded to be lewd, which is the shit that I went through and which I know is almost as disturbing to many straight boys. Murder it. The kinds of purity ethics where girls talk shit about each other for being perceived as sexually licentious also needs to die. Murder it with poison and fire. Kill it, kill it, kill it dead.

"Murder is forever," said the crow to his kinfolk. Crows of a murder mob predators together.

We are crows of the same murder, even though we were born different sexes. What led to you being sexually harassed or perhaps even raped, during your youth, led to me being put under intense pressure to become a part of that broken system, and when I didn't, I was beaten. Men of violence hefted me up around their shoulders and slammed my entire body down on hard asphalt in a wrestling maneuver that was designed for gym mats and is not even legal in respectable sport. If my muscles were not naturally more relaxed than most, then that maneuver could have snapped my spine and rendered me permanently paralyzed. I was living in a culture where the only way I wouldn't be called out as gay was if I proved my credentials as a straight man by harassing people like you, and when I wouldn't play in that role, I was made to fear for my life.

You have an ally in me, even though we might not always agree on solutions (which I hope we can amend, someday), and I believe that it is overdue for us to get serious about rethinking our sexual and gender ethics right through to the core. I would also agree with you that the right way is not to just unleash a bunch of maniacs to go and break down walls with sledgehammers. The cultural reforms are going to have to go deeper than just tearing down a few walls. The cancer is too deeply rooted to assume that we are going to get it into remission by just tearing down a few walls.

@Loren Pechtel is concerned about the false-positives that can occur due to men being called out for rape. Well, chemotherapy kills healthy cells as well as cancer. Tough titmouse, dude. If you don't like the chemotherapy, then get serious about fighting the cancer. Are you a fan of Adam Smith? If you are, then so am I! Adam Smith himself described the Diamonds vs. Water Paradox. We need deep reforms in the sexual ethics of both genders. The current system is creating an unhealthy dynamic that needs to be murdered. All of us need to be in on it. Just because we can't really stay on chemotherapy forever doesn't mean that the cancer isn't real.

I am saying, as a transgender woman, that we have to seriously rethink everything. Knocking down a few walls is not enough. Once I'm done transitioning, operation and all, I'm going to have to live with the actual reality of being a woman. I don't think that all of my problems are going to be fixed at once by knocking down a few walls, and I think that just blindly knocking down walls is not the right way to fight a serious cancer.

So, so much in there. It's a good thing I'm a fan of WoTs.

I largely agree with your philosophical points. And I definitely agree on not knocking down Chesterton Fences all willy-nilly.

In my view, the largest problem is one of gender roles and expectations. It's the socially reinforced recipe for 'how to be a man' and 'how to be a woman'. It's the enforced retribution that occurs when you step outside the bounds that someone else has defined. I also think that those gender constructs are intimately entwined (that has a nice alliterative ring to it) with violence against women as well as against homosexual people. It's all part of the cost of being gender non-conforming. And I think it needs to go. As you said, kill it. Kill it with fire.

In my view, the way to get there is to tear down gender. Destroy the constructs of what it means to 'be a man' or 'be a woman'. Work toward a society where a male can wear skirts and paint their nails and dance and be delicate and emotional without being considered any less of a man. I know I tend to discuss the confining roles placed around women, but that's because I can speak to that directly from experience. You've done a good job of bringing up the roles that box men in as well. My husband and I have had many discussion about them, and they're just as real, and just as confining for men as they are for women, even if they have different aggregate dynamics.

I'd love to have a society where mixed-sex spas, saunas, etc. were common place. Contrary to how @Loren Pechtel and @Jarhyn frame it, I am fond of men. Most of my closest friends are men. I neither hate nor fear men in general... just as I neither hate nor fear dogs in general, and actually rather like them. That doesn't, however, mean that it's somehow irrational of me to be on guard when an unknown pit-bull runs toward me. Chances are that they're friendly... but if they're not it's a world of hurt.

I like the way that kids have been playing with gender at gay-straight alliance meetings. They're coming up with ideas that we never would have considered only a decade ago, and while I do not believe that an adolescent's idea of fun is necessarily a completed template for revolutionizing our society, I think it is a solid start on rethinking millennia-old assumptions about "what must be."

 

[SigmatheZeta]

@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

www.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.

 

[TomC]

I like the way that kids have been playing with gender at gay-straight alliance meetings. They're coming up with ideas that we never would have considered only a decade ago, and while I do not believe that an adolescent's idea of fun is necessarily a completed template for revolutionizing our society, I think it is a solid start on rethinking millennia-old assumptions about "what must be."

Out of curiosity, since I'm sure we could do a lot better than we do, what ideas do the kids have that you consider a "solid start"?

Tom

ETA~Also, what do you mean by kids?~