Gender Roles

[Jarhyn]

Bomb: In English, at least among the communities I run in, "they" is the pronoun that applies. "They/them/their" is what the consensus has landed on among those who wish to be able to express the idea of ambiguity. I have discussed several times and places why the singular isn't even strictly appropriate. I am quantity-ambiguous as much as I am gender-ambiguous.

As it stands, neo-pronouns, especially unsolicited ones, have a history of being used to mock people right here on these forums. So forgive me if I don't take your purpose of ignoring the offered pronouns in favor of your own as benign.

You have done nothing in this thread but whinge over the fact that language seems to you to be too changed (but nobody else beyond some people who are intent on pushing their own bespoke jargon).

Nobody here has such a conniption or issue over it*. It's not unclear or impossible. It does not create any need for a "vexing parse", because context is king here, and the most absurd part about this is that the most problematic part expressed by people with their thumbs up their ass over it are the people who object on account of the loss of the ability to force plurality into a statement, which, at least for my own sake, I also demand numerical ambiguity, and moreover I demand ambiguity over my ambiguity!

I do not want people to encode, from the address of me, that I am one person or many people. I do not want people to encode that I am male or female or that I am some third thing. If in modern English people start to use such pronouns other than "they" for the common unknown/ambiguous singular case, even then I would likely prefer they.

I don't know how to make this any more clear.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The vast majority is not the totality. The distribution is extremely bimodal but intermediate states do exist.

No, they do not. Not in humans. There is no third type of reproductive system that produces a third type of gamete. There is no reproductive system that has evolved to support the production of a sperg. There is no intermediate state of sex in humans, nor in any mammal at all.

Some secondary sex characteristics can be bimodal if you plot both males and females on the same axis without separating the population. On the other hand, sex itself is not bimodal. Sex is binary - male and female. That we might sometimes in extraordinarily rare situations have difficulty deciding which category an individual falls into without doing further investigation doesn't change that.

I do agree that gamete production is binary. However, we typically consider the primary sex characteristics to be more than just gametes.

And note that there's no big evolutionary problem with mental attributes not matching up with physical ones. Homosexuality simply doesn't have enough pressure to breed itself out (and might even be being selected for--later in the birth order increases the odds of homosexuality. It could easily be that once you've had some kids providing spare parents is reproductively advantageous.) Why would non-conforming gender breed itself out, either? Especially in times past where things were more about practical than desires.

Feelings and personality traits aren't sex.

Note the thread is about "gender".

 

[Jarhyn]

gamete production is binary

It's at least quaternary (two binary bits): sperm, eggs, both, neither.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

We were already accepting of transsexual people.

The problem we have now is different. The problem is that within the last decade or so, the entire paradigm shifted so that it's now based only on a person's declaration that they feel transgender. Now, we end up with people who are obviously male in female spaces - and they don't pass well, they're frequently not even trying hard to pass, and even more than that - they domineeringly demand that we MUST accept them without question. Now we're in a situation where LITERALLY any man on the fucking planet has been given free access to any female space and women are no longer allowed to question them or to tell them to leave. We're in a situation where any man at all can literally toss on some fucking lipstick, waltz into the female side of a nude spa with his dick a swinging... and if women feel uncomfortable with this, women are told that they're bigots who need to be reeducated and just accept that the dude with the semi sitting in the spa next to you is just as much of a women as you are.

Do you not get the problem with this? Do you not see the shift that has happened?

1) You think you knew the situation. And note that that applies to bathrooms, not changing rooms.

2) Basically what you're objecting to here is people not playing the role adequately.

What I'm objecting to is the gigantic loophole that this "accept whatever people say about themselves as unerringly always true no matter what" policy produces. What I object to is this policy that lets men do whatever the hell they want to do, over the objections of women, just because they want it.

I don't think anyone's asking for simply declaring themselves female. Rather, you have to go down to DMV and change your ID to female. That will weed out the bad actors you're worried about.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I guess answering one cheap shot with another is fair enough, but I assure you that my ingroup's liberty, democratic rule, and individual franchise sit at the very center of my political philosophy. No one has a right to tell someone else what they are... They are free to do as they like within their congregations or in their kitchens, but not in a public sociology class.

FIFY.

You evidently think you have a right to tell Emily and women who think like her what they are -- that they're 19th century schoolmarms and that they're a faith group. And so you do -- that goes with the whole First Amendment thing. Well, sorry to disappoint you, but your outgroup have free speech rights too. As painful as it must be for you, everyone has a right to tell someone else what they are -- that goes with the whole First Amendment thing too. And, while it's apparently offensive to the mindset of progressives who want academia to be their wholly-owned church, your outgroup are even allowed to openly disagree with you in a public sociology class. Progressives are a faith group; you are correct that faith groups should not be allowed to conduct the affairs of others.

Liberty-for-me-but-not-for-thee is a view that isn't "actually" liberal. Theocrats are not liberals and are rarely competent to recognize liberal views. "If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all." - Noam Chomsky

You think you have the right to tell good women that they have to accept colored women in their restrooms.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

It seems to me your analogy breaks down here. When I say I "went to Europe", that does not set my audience off searching for a city other than Paris. The whole reason saying "they" might set my audience off searching for a different antecedent is precisely because using "they" on a specific referential entity known to both hearer and speaker to be singular and male causes a grammatical mismatch, not just incompletely collaborative communication. That's not just based on my own grammatical intuition -- the Lagunoff dissertation you linked backs me up on this. Using "they" for such an antecedent is not English.

Self-fulfilling prophecy.

They is "wrong" because the referent is known to be male? The whole point of "they" is that they aren't male!

If the referent is know to be not male, the referent would be referred to as "she".

You're assuming the gender of the referent has been specified as male or female. Gender unknown applies until the referent is identified as male or female.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Sure that's true for all Englishes? There's a high 9-digit number of English native speakers and a low 10-digit number of second-language speakers with varying degrees of proficiency. Many of them code-switch between different registers and use different grammars for each. The number of Englishes currently spoken is thus well into the 10 digits. None of those Englishes were formed by suckling at the tits of Mother England, they were all formed by individuals (mostly kids) making their hypotheses based on the output of other Englishes. Where that output is ambiguous and the edge cases that would help distinguish between different interpretations rare in any corpus, there's going to be different grammars producing similar output. If I tell you to continue the series 1-2-4, an answer of -8-16 is just as right as one of -7-11 (1+sum([0,n]) vs 2^n), though one may feel more natural.

Never thought of it that way before, but yeah, there are on the order of E10 Englishes. "English" is the mode of them.

I could go on more about the "generic masculine". It's much more of a topic in discussions about German than for English, for obvious reasons: In German, you can barely state a person's profession without potentially implying something about their gender, as we have different words for "baker"[+m] and "baker"[+f], plus articles and adjectival inflection that depend on gender. So "an experienced baker" can be "ein erfahrener Bäcker" or "eine erfahrene Bäckerin" and it gets really awkward when you want to include them in one phrase ("ein(e) erfahrene(r) Bäcker(in)", and that still doesn't tell you which paranthesised suffix goes with which). Of course, it would be useful if "ein erfahrener Bäcker" was fully gender-agnostic just like its English equivalent. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case: at least for me "der beste Bäcker der Stadt" is ambiguous between referring to "the best baker in town, who happens to be male" and "the best male baker in town" - just like "die beste Bäckerin der Stadt", for which also my primary interpretation, in the absence of context suggesting otherwise, would be "the best baker in town, who happens to be female" rather than "the best female baker in town". So by that interpretation, "Bäcker" and "Bäckerin" are parallel in that they both have a gender feature which can be interpreted outside the scope of the superlative. I'm telling you, it's mess. You have no idea how lucky you got for only having to deal with singular "they".

And sometimes English does this. "Waiter"/"Waitress". Did we mug some language for that?

My wife is China-born. I'm sure you realize the headache gender words are for her. Please, English, mug Chinese! It has honest words, not our shapeshifters!

 

[Loren Pechtel]

For people with features that are not conformed completely to one mode or the other (arguably literally everyone), describing someone as one sex or the other will always be inaccurate to some degree.

"Arguably literally everyone" is massively false. 99.9998% of humans on the planet are unambiguously either male or female, and can be accurately described as such.

Look again--the referent is those who do not fall in your 99.9998%. (And I think that percentage is way too high, also.)

 

[Bomb#20]

I guess answering one cheap shot with another is fair enough, but I assure you that my ingroup's liberty, democratic rule, and individual franchise sit at the very center of my political philosophy. No one has a right to tell someone else what they are... They are free to do as they like within their congregations or in their kitchens, but not in a public sociology class.

FIFY.

You evidently think you have a right to tell Emily and women who think like her what they are -- that they're 19th century schoolmarms and that they're a faith group. And so you do -- that goes with the whole First Amendment thing. Well, sorry to disappoint you, but your outgroup have free speech rights too. As painful as it must be for you, everyone has a right to tell someone else what they are -- that goes with the whole First Amendment thing too. And, while it's apparently offensive to the mindset of progressives who want academia to be their wholly-owned church, your outgroup are even allowed to openly disagree with you in a public sociology class. Progressives are a faith group; you are correct that faith groups should not be allowed to conduct the affairs of others.

Liberty-for-me-but-not-for-thee is a view that isn't "actually" liberal. Theocrats are not liberals and are rarely competent to recognize liberal views. "If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all." - Noam Chomsky

You think you have the right to tell good women that they have to accept colored women in their restrooms.

Yes, of course I think I have that right. Who said I don't? Who here thinks anyone doesn't have that right?

 

[TomC]

Yes, of course I think I have that right. Who said I don't? Who here thinks anyone doesn't have that right?

What's really aggravating is people trying to conflate the two issues.
Women who want a male free space to do personal business in public venues is nothing remotely like racial segregation.
Tom

 

[Bomb#20]

No one has a right to tell someone else what they are or what they are allowed to be.

sorry to disappoint you, but your outgroup have free speech rights too. As painful as it must be for you, everyone has a right to tell someone else what they are -- that goes with the whole First Amendment thing too.

I've not said otherwise.

Yes, you have. And I quoted you doing so. And you snipped out that quote when you replied, so I've helpfully supplied it again. If you didn't mean it, that's great, but a poor reason to claim you didn't say it.

Emily has a right to be a bigot and even talk like one, but she does not have a "right" to have her opinions coddled to by others.

If that's what you meant by "No one has a right to tell someone else what they are", true, people who tell someone else what he or she is do not have a right to have their opinions coddled to by others. As painful as it must be for you, no one has a right to opinion-coddling by others. Whether an opinion gets coddled is up to the potential coddler, not up to the coddlee-wannabe. That too goes with the whole First Amendment thing. This applies even to the opinions of progressives and those ranked high up on your stack.

If she thinks her regressive views have a place in public fora, she is free to pursue that prerogative exactly as far aa that can get her, and she should be ready to face backlash. Which, I'm pretty she is. Honestly, I think she'd be disappointed if everyone just agreed with her.

Yes. Everyone who posts views should be ready to face backlash. Especially those whose views are as poorly thought through as yours are. Emily is not a bigot and does not talk like a bigot and you do not have an intellectually honest reason to think she does. Your opinion of her is plainly driven by your own severe case of religious chauvinism -- you systematically talk as though your ingroup have a right to have their opinions coddled to by others.

 

[Politesse]

No one has a right to tell someone else what they are or what they are allowed to be.

sorry to disappoint you, but your outgroup have free speech rights too. As painful as it must be for you, everyone has a right to tell someone else what they are -- that goes with the whole First Amendment thing too.

I've not said otherwise.

Yes, you have. And I quoted you doing so. And you snipped out that quote when you replied, so I've helpfully supplied it again. If you didn't mean it, that's great, but a poor reason to claim you didn't say it.

Emily has a right to be a bigot and even talk like one, but she does not have a "right" to have her opinions coddled to by others.

If that's what you meant by "No one has a right to tell someone else what they are", true, people who tell someone else what he or she is do not have a right to have their opinions coddled to by others. As painful as it must be for you, no one has a right to opinion-coddling by others. Whether an opinion gets coddled is up to the potential coddler, not up to the coddlee-wannabe. That too goes with the whole First Amendment thing. This applies even to the opinions of progressives and those ranked high up on your stack.

If she thinks her regressive views have a place in public fora, she is free to pursue that prerogative exactly as far aa that can get her, and she should be ready to face backlash. Which, I'm pretty she is. Honestly, I think she'd be disappointed if everyone just agreed with her.

Yes. Everyone who posts views should be ready to face backlash. Especially those whose views are as poorly thought through as yours are. Emily is not a bigot and does not talk like a bigot and you do not have an intellectually honest reason to think she does. Your opinion of her is plainly driven by your own severe case of religious chauvinism -- you systematically talk as though your ingroup have a right to have their opinions coddled to by others.

I was not suggesting that Emily was in violation of the law, just that what she's doing is morally reprehensible. I do not use my country's Constitution as a guide to personal ethical conduct. Yes, she has the legal right to misgender other people all she likes, and to promote pseuedoscience, insist that she is the sole voice of all "real" women, and all the rest. I will not be sending police to her house to arrest her, scout's honor.

What I did say is that she hasn't got any right to tell someone else what they are. What she's doing is not illegal, but it is incredibly rude at best, and abusive to the trans people she interacts with directly.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Yes, of course I think I have that right. Who said I don't? Who here thinks anyone doesn't have that right?

What's really aggravating is people trying to conflate the two issues.
Women who want a male free space to do personal business in public venues is nothing remotely like racial segregation.
Tom

Agreed, because there was at least agreement that blacks existed.

 

[Politesse]

Yes, of course I think I have that right. Who said I don't? Who here thinks anyone doesn't have that right?

What's really aggravating is people trying to conflate the two issues.
Women who want a male free space to do personal business in public venues is nothing remotely like racial segregation.
Tom

Agreed, because there was at least agreement that blacks existed.

I thought the whole conservative fantasy was that we "don't see color" anymore so it's always wrong to accuse a white woman of being racist? When they call the police on a black woman in the changing room at the country club these days, it's because she "looked shifty" and they "thought she wasn't a member", not because of her skin color, no, never that.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Yes, of course I think I have that right. Who said I don't? Who here thinks anyone doesn't have that right?

What's really aggravating is people trying to conflate the two issues.
Women who want a male free space to do personal business in public venues is nothing remotely like racial segregation.
Tom

Agreed, because there was at least agreement that blacks existed.

I thought the whole conservative fantasy was that we "don't see color" anymore so it's always wrong to accuse a white woman of being racist? When they call the police on a black woman in the changing room at the country club these days, it's because she "looked shifty" and they "thought she wasn't a member", not because of her skin color, no, never that.

Not quite my point. The problem I see here is that there are multiple discussions going on. There is the issue of boundaries for women only facilities and what rights do transgenders have to those verses what protections are available to women in those. It is a muddled issue, at best, that isn't an easy fix. Then people toss in hypotheticals of predators and it just derails. These same people do not take the hypothetical of gun violence to the same extreme.

Then there is the bigger issue. Do transgenders exist? That keeps popping up in here, and I find it remarkably blinded that people can think they don't. They are trying to use science and dictionaries to prove something that seems to be utterly false. This is a bigger issue as it aims at dehumanizing transgenders into some sort of freak category, which makes it easier to handwave their concerns, as they don't actually exist.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

..or maybe for the last 700 years or so there hasn't been much opportunity to recognize that the pre-scientific understanding of human sex and social development was pre-scientific, that the church's suppression of "third gender" and "gender atypical groups" as heresy was ill-informed, and that the entirety of only-two-gendered speech is itself a variety of newspeak designed or otherwise enforced to make it impossible (or at least difficult) to have certain discourse (as if it took George Orwell writing a book about it before anyone could possibly engage in such an activity, or that he was exclusively warning against progressives rather than conservatives).

700 years ago there was a lot of stuff where the most common case was believed to be the only case. Even in the time since great scientific minds have fallen into this. Galileo dropping his weights--actually only correct when the ratio of the mass being dropped vs the mass it's being dropped on is beyond the accuracy of the experiment. Drop a 1kg weight and a 10kg weight onto a 100kg mass (obviously, way out in space) and you'll see a difference. Newton--I'm sure most of us are familiar with Einstein's corrections. I don't know names but likewise, Einstein broke a bunch of understanding of how chemistry works. (The electron shells around heavy atoms are distorted by relativity. Without him gold would not be golden and our cars would not start because the battery puts out 20% of the power it really does.)

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Yes, of course I think I have that right. Who said I don't? Who here thinks anyone doesn't have that right?

What's really aggravating is people trying to conflate the two issues.
Women who want a male free space to do personal business in public venues is nothing remotely like racial segregation.
Tom

And why isn't it? They feel awfully similar to me.

 

[Jarhyn]

..or maybe for the last 700 years or so there hasn't been much opportunity to recognize that the pre-scientific understanding of human sex and social development was pre-scientific, that the church's suppression of "third gender" and "gender atypical groups" as heresy was ill-informed, and that the entirety of only-two-gendered speech is itself a variety of newspeak designed or otherwise enforced to make it impossible (or at least difficult) to have certain discourse (as if it took George Orwell writing a book about it before anyone could possibly engage in such an activity, or that he was exclusively warning against progressives rather than conservatives).

700 years ago there was a lot of stuff where the most common case was believed to be the only case. Even in the time since great scientific minds have fallen into this. Galileo dropping his weights--actually only correct when the ratio of the mass being dropped vs the mass it's being dropped on is beyond the accuracy of the experiment. Drop a 1kg weight and a 10kg weight onto a 100kg mass (obviously, way out in space) and you'll see a difference. Newton--I'm sure most of us are familiar with Einstein's corrections. I don't know names but likewise, Einstein broke a bunch of understanding of how chemistry works. (The electron shells around heavy atoms are distorted by relativity. Without him gold would not be golden and our cars would not start because the battery puts out 20% of the power it really does.)

And I can't stress enough that the go-to solution for this back in the day wasn't to change language or doctrine to reflect reality... It was to bury the counter-examples.

 

[Bomb#20]

Yes, of course I think I have that right. Who said I don't? Who here thinks anyone doesn't have that right?

What's really aggravating is people trying to conflate the two issues.
Women who want a male free space to do personal business in public venues is nothing remotely like racial segregation.
Tom

And why isn't it?

You've asked that in several threads, and been told the reason several times. Ladies' rooms aren't like racial segregation because ladies' rooms aren't a custom established by the matriarchy as a way to do personal business in public venues in a space free of the males oppressed by the matriarchy.

They feel awfully similar to me.

I know they do. They feel awfully similar to you for the same reason that affirmative action, as you've indicated in other threads, feels awfully similar to Jim Crow to you. But affirmative action per se is not racist*. Wanting to lift people up is not the same motivation as wanting to hold people down.

(* At least it wasn't the harm-reduction way MLK pursued it. These days an awful lot of AA proponents have a punitive attitude toward the whole topic -- they're at pains to tell us why white people deserve to be discriminated against. Those proponents are idiots and they're racists, yes; but the point is, their idiocy and racism should be laid at their door, not at the door of affirmative action itself.)

 

[Swammerdami]

Thailand recently became the 3rd country in Asia to recognize same-sex marriage. Yayyy! (The other two Asian countries are Nepal and Taiwan.)

There are three obvious transgenders I see regularly at the shopping center where I stop most days. One is the barista who serves me a large hot mocha, another works grocery check-out, a third is a food preparer upstairs who often sells me a fluffy catfish salad. That's just at that one smallish shopping place: Transgenders are ubiquitous here. I'm sure there is some discrimination but I've never witnessed it. And now they'll be able to marry!

One of the local police detectives when I lived in rural Thailand often wore ladies' clothing; the other cops sometimes flirted with her playfully. Maybe I did too when drunk!

Whatever its faults, Thailand is a place where you almost never see anger or irrational negative emotion of any sort. Prejudice is rare. If I compile a list of unpleasant interactions I've had here, almost every single villain would be a Farang.