Gender Roles

[Jarhyn]

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.

Sure sure, because black women are totally men, right? And men have been so incredibly oppressed throughout history, what with those uppity women not wanting to share their showers with them and all...

No, but they are a disadvantaged class that white women were afraid to see in their changing room. Like trans folks. The racists of your childhood didn't say "I hate blacks and that's why I want to discriminate against them". They said things like "I have nothing against Ne---s personally. We all know that racial admixture is dangerous and leads to violent incidents; I'm just trying to protect everyone, blacks included."

At least when the cameras were rolling.

But we cannot strip minority demographics of rights just because the demographic majority is afraid of them, even if those fears were founded in reality rather than ghost stories.

Well, we should be careful about saying fears founded in reality are not reasons to declare a thing not to be a right...

It's just the case here (and in general) that these fears are much like the fears of Reefer Madness: they are based on the lie that some random case study (that they still haven't been able to really produce) is evidence of trend despite the rarity of the cases they wish to make case study of.

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.

What concensus? There are literally billions of Englishes, one for each register a speaker employs in one situation or other. Shaming people for their dialect is a big red flag for linguists.

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.

You consistently use "I"/"me" to refer to yourself. Whatever sense you consider yourself quantity-ambiguous obviously doesn't reflect in your grammar. Why would you expect others to reflect it in theirs?

Because "I" is more clear than "we" since all of me is still me, but "we" does produce a vexing parse when I'm with people who aren't me. It's rare enough that people identify as quantity-ambiguous that there just hasn't been much of a will to generate a useful convention.

This is different for the anodyne they, in that there IS a consensus on that convention at least in general/common usage: "they" will be understood by whoever I say it to, in the way that I say it, outside the desire to be willfully obtuse as to the intent*.

The exception here seems to be that I won't be able to be understood in as quantity-ambiguous a way as I might like, in that people will assume a singular they from the context, when this singularity is not intended in the first place, though the ambiguity does help to avoid situations wherein I don't want to discuss quite how flexible my sense of "self" actually is, and what "we" I would be referring to when outright expressing a concept of plural identity would require explication that I would rather not.

Frankly, people tend to be more uncomfortable when those around them express a less recognizable concept of "self", and "they" has always struck me the least obtrusive option and the least likely to stand out and generate "targets".

 

[Politesse]

Well, we should be careful about saying fears founded in reality are not reasons to declare a thing not to be a right...

There's only so careful I'm willing to be on questions of civil rights and the equal application of the law. There were plenty of real cases of black men raping white women in the Jim Crow South. Cases true beyond a doubt. But you cannot penalize a population for the crimes of an individual, and expect democratic society to long endure. One criminal, one punishment, one prisoner. That must be our law. Not, penalties for a thousand if one commits a crime.

 

[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?

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.

Yeah, you have provided "answers" along those lines--all of which sound to me like trying to justify keeping the coloreds out.

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.

No. Affirmative action isn't like Jim Crow for the reason you state--the motivations. The action is still discrimination, though. And it's just as evil.

(* 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.)

While I do not exactly like AA of his time I do think it was probably the lesser evil and society was correct to do it.

It did it's job back then, it's done. Companies no longer had to worry about how their customers would feel about doing business with somebody that treated blacks as equals. The hidden force in the market was removed and market forces could finish the job. You can't maintain any substantial pay gap when your competitor will hire your people away if you try.

There are still individuals that discriminate and I have no problem with taking action against them if they are identified. However, there is no society-wide pattern of discrimination anymore and society-wide solutions should not be used. Disparate outcomes is not proof of discrimination! Especially as the more you dig into the details the more you find there are other factors at work causing disparate results.

 

[Jarhyn]

Well, we should be careful about saying fears founded in reality are not reasons to declare a thing not to be a right...

There's only so careful I'm willing to be on questions of civil rights and the equal application of the law. There were plenty of real cases of black men raping white women in the Jim Crow South. Cases true beyond a doubt. But you cannot penalize a population for the crimes of an individual, and expect democratic society to long endure. One criminal, one punishment, one prisoner. That must be our law. Not, penalties for a thousand if one commits a crime.

My point is that those fears weren't rooted in reality, they were rooted in a false perception of reality: there were as many or more cases of white men raping black women! Case study doesn't produce trend and I find it ridiculous to believe that any apparent trend was a function of race so much as culture and poverty.

Those weren't fears founded in reality, they are founded in "belief" and "spin", in fever dreams of white anxiety and racism.

 

[Jokodo]

I don't know. But there's very little in there to reply to without writing a seventy page book about it. There are several assumptions in there that are inapplicable (for example, the assumption that an infertile male isn't male) and a whole lot of erroneous "ifs" that go from there (for example that a male with a penis to big to fit a normal female vaginal canal isn't a male, and that when he finds a woman with a canyon, he is magically turned into a male).

I didn't say any such thing though. I said that he's *infertile* and becomes fertile, which according to your logic, according to the exact argument you have used to bat intersex conditions from the discussion, seems to imply he was suffering a congenital disorder until he wasn't, without undergoing any intrinsic change.

That's actually even worse, Jokodo. A male isn't infertile if he can't find someone to breed with. Fertility is based on whether or not a person's gonads produce viable gametes.

And what is an inviable gamete if not one that cannot successfully combine with a gamete of the opposite sex? That's a property that can only be determined by looking at the population at large. An inviable sperm cell could be viable if only the ova of the female members of the species were a little different, and vice versa. An inviable gamete is defined by being incompatible with the other type(s) of gametes in circulation. That's *still* not an intrinsic property.

A blind eye can only be determined to be blind by looking at the population at large.

I actually missed this line in my earlier response. An analogy needs a certain level of parallelism to work. This is just not the case here. What you wrote here is plain wrong. An eye doesn't rely on other eyes to see, while a gamete does rely on other gametes to reproduce - we'd call it a spore otherwise.

The only way in which an eye can loose its basic function due to the properties of other eyes is that it'll stop working by virtue of ceasing to exist if another eye causes the immediate self-annihilation of the universe.

Now it's true that in humans, and pretty much only humans, eyes tend to be such that they aid other eyes in one of their secondary functions, that of determining a conspecific's gaze direction. We're rather unique in having such a visible sclera due to it being very white and presenting a large portion of the exposed surface of the eye next to a relatively small iris. In most mammals, including the other great apes, a secondary function of the eye seems to be to *hide* one's gaze direction, lest a direct a competitor to a good source you just spotted. In humans, a secondary function is to *show* it as to aid in teaching children about the world, or to communicate silently and efficiently in cooperative hunting. It's an interesting way in which our cooperative nature reflects in our anatomy. You can read more about this here: https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna15625720

I don't think we can call that the primary or exclusive function of the human eye, such that calling an otherwise unimpaired eye that's subpar at detecting the direction of conspecifs' gaze "blind", as your analogy suggests. An eye that fails at that job due to the structure of other eyes in the population still fulfils many functions. A gamete that fails to combine with other gametes however, is left without function.

 

[Jarhyn]

I think, rather, that "eye" -- like "woman" or "male" -- is a proximal concept (and also a cluster concept).

Is the electric eye of phone an "eye"? Seeing as it was assembled, which parts of the assembly must be just-so before it becomes an "eye"? Were I to begin assembling cells together, what kinds of cells would I need to use before it is an "eye"? How many? What structure would they have to have? What behavior wouldn't have to exhibit before it is an "eye"? Does an open pore with a nerve at the bottom suffice (a pinhole camera eye)? Does the nerve have to be specialized to detect photons or is heat enough? Does it need more than one of these? Does it need to be powered by DNA or would an RNA biology suffice? Is the pinhole camera using a silicon sensor an "eye"? Does the sensor need to be connected to anything for it to be an "eye" or can it be signaling out towards nothing capable of interpretation and still be an "eye"? Is the set of magnetic coils arranged to observe the resonant waves in a space to construct location data in said space an "eye"?

There is no real base truth to the concept of the "eye", other than the expectations someone has of the structure. Rather than there being some truth as to what is or isn't an eye, it's better to ask "how well does this function to derive location data of objects in space via photonic interactions?" Or "how good of an eye is it?"

The question of how fit something is as an eye can be asked of everything in the universe, and everything is merely proximal to the concept.

Really, when people say "eye", yet again they are relying on a cluster concept, a vague concept standing in for some other more precise question. When the artist says "I need to add eyes to this thing", they generally mean something very different from when the engineer says "I need to add eyes to this thing", and yet again different from when the doctor says "I need to add eyes to this thing".

 

[Jokodo]

You never replied to this post of mine, or did you?

Gender Roles

I'm probably Europeansplaining as much as mansplaining here, but granted, I need to tread lightly here. I'm not saying doors remove all points of contention, but that they will take out much of the heat from that particular argument, and I fail to understand why anyone would think not having...

iidb.org

I don't know. But there's very little in there to reply to without writing a seventy page book about it. There are several assumptions in there that are inapplicable (for example, the assumption that an infertile male isn't male)

I think I need to hawk back to this misunderstanding here. I didn't say an infertile male isn't male. I said that an infertile male - whether technically infertile or "only" practically infertile by virtue of being unable to find compatible mates - misses the selection target for the male pole of attraction in an anisogamous species by as much as a hermaphrodite. If we can exclude those from the discussion of the nature of sex in humans and other mammals because they are "not an evolved phenotype" (which you seem to be using in the sense "not a selection target - everything in biology is the product of evolution), there is a whole lot of other phenotypes we should be excluding. Natural selection doesn't care why you don't pass on your genes, only whether you do.

 

[Politesse]

My point is that those fears weren't rooted in reality, they were rooted in a false perception of reality: there were as many or more cases of white men raping black women

Very true. But the problem with saying "we should only disenfranchise a large section of the population if you can prove that x is really happening" is that then, thousands of people lose rights every time a crime happens. Or is just alleged to have done. People are people, eventually there will be a Dreyfuss Affair or a Meeker Massacre to justify the next wave of atrocities. True or false won't matter, they just need well known. In a pinch, they'll just make something up and let historians sort it out. But the historians will judge against them. Punishing the many for the crime of one is bad law, no matter whether the crime is common or uncommon.

 

[Jarhyn]

My point is that those fears weren't rooted in reality, they were rooted in a false perception of reality: there were as many or more cases of white men raping black women

Very true. But the problem with saying "we should only disenfranchise a large section of the population if you can prove that x is really happening" is that then, thousands of people lose rights every time a crime happens. Or is just alleged to have done. People are people, eventually there will be a Dreyfuss Affair or a Meeker Massacre to justify the next wave of atrocities. True or false won't matter, they just need well known. In a pinch, they'll just make something up and let historians sort it out. But the historians will judge against them. Punishing the many for the crime of one is bad law, no matter whether the crime is common or uncommon.

No, I said "rooted in reality". That's what we're discussing here, when something is rooted in reality, rather than some make believe image of it. It's actually a remarkably high bar.

Arguments on simple case study are not "rooted in reality", they are unmoored from the reality of prevalence and cause. The most you can say from case study is "something happened", but literally everything that can possibly happen will, and so this doesn't say much. At best it can tell you something about how something can happen.

 

[Politesse]

No, I said "rooted in reality". That's what we're discussing here, when something is rooted in reality, rather than some make believe image of it. It's actually a remarkably high bar.

In neither of the historical cases I mentioned was the final scandal used to justify the degradation of rights actually rooted in reality. But if it takes 30-50 years for the truth to come to light, gross miscarriages of justice can occur, and if enough time passes, the truth will never be known to woke academics.

 

[Jarhyn]

No, I said "rooted in reality". That's what we're discussing here, when something is rooted in reality, rather than some make believe image of it. It's actually a remarkably high bar.

In neither of the historical cases I mentioned was the final scandal used to justify the degradation of rights actually rooted in reality. But if it takes 30-50 years for the truth to come to light, gross miscarriages of justice can occur, and if enough time passes, the truth will never be known to woke academics.

It was clear and apparent that the original arguments were not rooted in reality. Case study NEVER is towards such arguments.

Such case study bases are facially invalid.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The premise here is that if a person doesn't conform to a stereotype about what females should like (dresses and not basketball) then they're not actually females, regardless of their body. Furthermore, if they don't conform to those stereotypes, then they should undertake extreme medical interventions to force their body to look like the opposite sex?

The take away ends up being that if a girl doesn't behave "girly" enough, then that girl ought to cut her breasts off, rip out her uterus, and take hormones so she can look like a boy, and thus can avoid being shamed for not conforming to the "proper" role of a girl.

Huh? Nobody's saying a tomboy isn't a girl. And nobody's suggesting they should have surgery.

But no matter - adults can choose to do to their own bodies whatever they want, for whatever reason, albeit sometimes at their own expense.
What part of this failure to adhere to social rules about sex-based preferences and behavior justifies completely overriding the expectation of sex-specific spaces and services for everyone? What part of a young male human who likes dolls and pretty things instead of sports and play-fighting suggests that he should be entitled to use female spaces?

You seem to have a problem with distinguishing enjoying cross-gender things with actually feeling like you're in the wrong body. Those who feel they are in the wrong body will often like cross-gender activities but the set of people who like things from the other gender is larger than the set who actually want to be the other gender.

There is no hate in wanting to protect children from the long-term consequences of irreversible decisions, nor in wishing to reduce or eliminate social stereotypes that limit a person's expression on the basis of their sex, nor in wanting to expand expression while retaining the reality of sex.

Not using puberty blockers is also a irreversible decision.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

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.

No, I'm talking about a situation in which the referent's sex is known. That was the entire point that Bomb#20 was making - historically we have used a singular they when the sex of the individual being referred to is unknown, or when it's a hypothetical in which the subject could be of either sex. When the sex of the person being referred to is known, we have not historically used "they".

Using "they" to refer to a person whose sex is known, because they have a mental construct of themselves as something other than their sex, is a completely new idea that's only been around for a handful of years, and is only being demanded by a very small number of people who wish to force their linguistic desires on everyone else.

1) You're substituting "sex" for "gender".

2) You think you know. Doesn't mean you're right. People frequently misgender me, both because somehow people think my voice on the phone is female and because they are fooled by my name being rare and these days it's become trans. I usually only bother to correct them if for some reason it's relevant. Did the phone call earlier this week where I was constantly referred to as ma'am make me a woman?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

No, but they are a disadvantaged class that white women were afraid to see in their changing room. Like trans folks.

The difference here is that black women are women. Transwomen are male. You're arguing that males are like black women, and that males are disadvantaged because women don't want to relinquish our boundaries and let males into our sex-specific spaces and services.

And what are you going to do when the transmen show up in the women's room?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I'm getting tired of this argument. You seem to want to bluster disorders out of existence, and cherry pick the several back and forth exchanges we had which included far far more discussion about the deleterious nature of many DSDs that go well beyond just "many of them are infertile".

I don't see anyone trying to bluster it out of existence. Rather, the question is how to deal with it.

We have no ability to alter the mental perception. The result is similar to what happens with gay conversion "therapy"--a messed-up result that should not considered acceptable therapeutic practice.

Thus do we force them to live with the mismatch or do we do what we can to minimize the impact?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I think, rather, that "eye" -- like "woman" or "male" -- is a proximal concept (and also a cluster concept).

Is the electric eye of phone an "eye"? Seeing as it was assembled, which parts of the assembly must be just-so before it becomes an "eye"? Were I to begin assembling cells together, what kinds of cells would I need to use before it is an "eye"? How many? What structure would they have to have? What behavior wouldn't have to exhibit before it is an "eye"? Does an open pore with a nerve at the bottom suffice (a pinhole camera eye)? Does the nerve have to be specialized to detect photons or is heat enough? Does it need more than one of these? Does it need to be powered by DNA or would an RNA biology suffice? Is the pinhole camera using a silicon sensor an "eye"? Does the sensor need to be connected to anything for it to be an "eye" or can it be signaling out towards nothing capable of interpretation and still be an "eye"? Is the set of magnetic coils arranged to observe the resonant waves in a space to construct location data in said space an "eye"?

Yup. Common usage: "the camera's eye", although Google seems to think it's recently been in decline. I've also seen telescopes referred to as "the big eye". It disagrees with you on phone's eye, though--zero hits. And I've seen simple light level detectors referred to as electronic eyes.

 

[Bomb#20]

Should other people be expected to pretend that their perceptions are different from what they actually are? Should other people be prevented from stating their perceptions for fear of offending the person whose belief doesn't align?

 

[Bomb#20]

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.

Yeah, you have provided "answers" along those lines--all of which sound to me like trying to justify keeping the coloreds out.

Why do they sound to you like that? Did the black-supremacists create whites-only bathrooms to break the urinary leash that maintained their a-white's-place-is-in-the-home society?

But affirmative action per se is not racist*. Wanting to lift people up is not the same motivation as wanting to hold people down.

No. Affirmative action isn't like Jim Crow for the reason you state--the motivations. The action is still discrimination, though. And it's just as evil.

That's a bizarre thing to say. How about "Shooting someone in self defense isn't like shooting him to take his money, because of the motivations. The action is still killing, though. And it's just as evil."? And sure, there are the Penelope Worths and the Gandhis of the world who really believe that, but the way most of us see it, motivations are a critical determiner of whether an action is evil and to what degree.

(* At least it wasn't the harm-reduction way MLK pursued it. ...

While I do not exactly like AA of his time I do think it was probably the lesser evil and society was correct to do it.

So, not just as evil, even though it's discrimination. Ladies' rooms are an affirmative action program for women. And about the mildest form imaginable -- as Tom says, the men's room is right there.

It did it's job back then, it's done. Companies no longer had to worry about how their customers would feel about doing business with somebody that treated blacks as equals. The hidden force in the market was removed and market forces could finish the job. You can't maintain any substantial pay gap when your competitor will hire your people away if you try. ...

That's a perfectly legitimate argument and whether it's sufficient grounds to drop AA programs is a fair question. But the merits of race-based AA are off-topic in this thread -- they don't bear on the gender discussion because nobody here is telling you not to argue for gender-neutral bathrooms. The point is that equating ladies' rooms with whites-only bathrooms is a poor analogy, like equating self-defense with banditry. If you want to argue for gender-neutral bathrooms, argue about sex, not race.

 

[Bomb#20]

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

To this, on the other hand: the public has every right to expect science, not religion, in a science class. That is also a clause of the first amendment. The government does not and cannot endorse a Biblical view of womanhood over that which scientific consensus defines. You can teach "people in x group believe y", because that is a fact. You cannot teach those beliefs as facts. That is indoctrination, and the government is not supposed to take sides on inter-religious disputes.

I completely agree with you on this.

Yet you think I should be selling a pack of pseudo-scientific lies about sex and gender in my classroom? Come off it.

Nope. I think that what you're selling is a bunch of woo that is rooted in baseless belief.

I agree with your statement; I disagree with your assumptions about what constitutes religion. You seem to be teaching that an unverifiable and entirely subjective self-declared feeling of gender supersedes the objectively observable reality of sex. That's not science.

In all fairness to Politesse, none of us have actually been in his classroom. David Bohm had among the most heretical views on quantum theory of any physicist; he also wrote one of the most admired and widely used textbooks on it entirely from the orthodox perspective. It's perfectly possible that with his students Politesse sticks to the scientifically well-established subset of sociology, and saves all the baseless woo he's selling for his out-of-school discussions.

(That said, going by the level of capacity he's demonstrated here for telling science from religion, I share your skepticism.)

 

[Jokodo]

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.

No, I'm talking about a situation in which the referent's sex is known. That was the entire point that Bomb#20 was making - historically we have used a singular they when the sex of the individual being referred to is unknown, or when it's a hypothetical in which the subject could be of either sex. When the sex of the person being referred to is known, we have not historically used "they".

Using "they" to refer to a person whose sex is known, because they have a mental construct of themselves as something other than their sex, is a completely new idea that's only been around for a handful of years, and is only being demanded by a very small number of people who wish to force their linguistic desires on everyone else.

1) You're substituting "sex" for "gender".

2) You think you know. Doesn't mean you're right. People frequently misgender me, both because somehow people think my voice on the phone is female and because they are fooled by my name being rare and these days it's become trans. I usually only bother to correct them if for some reason it's relevant. Did the phone call earlier this week where I was constantly referred to as ma'am make me a woman?

I once knew a guy named Usama <Arabic_sounding_surname> who, when he was on the job market, got more than one rejection letter along the lines of "Dear Ms. <Arabic_sounding_surname>, after careful review of your application, we are sad to inform you we found an even more suitable applicant".

Tells you how carefully they did review the application when they never noticed the square face and 5-o-clock shadow in the photo on top of the CV (I think that's kind of a no-go in the US, but in much of Europe, it's very much expected to put a photograph in your CV). Also, this was a few years after 9-11, a certain namesake was quite notorious at the time. Apparently most people never realised Osama and Usama are variant transliterations of the same Arabic name and simply went by the final "a".

Makes you wonder if Arabic sounding surname + presumed female was enough for them to not even open the attachments, and certainly doesn't help the case that discrimination by sex and ethnicity is a thing of the past.