Gender Roles

[Politesse]

I think I was a bit more vituperative to some of the other folks in this thread, lately, and I would like to apologize to Emily Lake in particular. My behavior was not appropriate.

 

[Jokodo]

Legislation based on "biological sex" can only be enforced by the involuntary violation of women's privacy and bodily autonomy. Without the cooperation of the accused, there is no way to "prove" that a person was born male or female, except by non-consensual exposure of their body, or non-consensual requisition of bodily samples.

This is some postmodern philosophical bullshit, Poli.

Humans are sexually dimorphic. At the end of the day, sex is defined based on the type of reproductive system a person has. But that's far from the only way to discern a person's sex. There are a plethora of secondary and sex-correlated traits that are obvious and apparent in the vast majority of cases. FFS, do you really think that nobody at all has any idea whether Jason Momoa is a male or a female? It's all just a guess in your mind? That's just downright rhetorical misdirection and intentionally misleading argumentation.

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.

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

...
You use a lot of technical language - sometimes I can follow, sometimes I can't
...

I'm honestly kind of at loss what that refers to in the particular post I linked. The only word that arguably constitutes jargon is "eusocial"/"eusociality", and I pretty much said it's probably not relevant to the human case, so skipping it and all its mentions doesn't take away much from my main point.

I specifically picked that post because I thought it was a fairly clear exposition of some of my main contentions, if I may say so myself.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

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?

The origins don't change the result.

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.

I'm sure you know what road is paved with good intentions.

(* 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.

I see the original AA as a fight fire with fire.

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.

I brought it up because you were claiming I support discrimination. I support equality of opportunity. Society used to be unequal, now it's unequal in the other direction.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

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.

And you're assuming:

1) The person writing the rejection is the person who made the decision. And that they're paying attention to male/female--I've had a CAT scan that called me female despite noting a bit of prostate enlargement (normal for my age) as an incidental finding.

2) That it's not the name itself that's an issue. Sharing a name with somebody sufficiently infamous isn't exactly good for your job prospects.

 

[Jokodo]

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.

And you're assuming:

1) The person writing the rejection is the person who made the decision. And that they're paying attention to male/female--I've had a CAT scan that called me female despite noting a bit of prostate enlargement (normal for my age) as an incidental finding.

2) That it's not the name itself that's an issue. Sharing a name with somebody sufficiently infamous isn't exactly good for your job prospects.

This is still ethnic discrimination, especially when somehow, that doesn't seem to be much of an obstacle for the Johns, Garies, and Samuels of the world.

And funny how they're apparently unable to recognise the gender of a name they recognised for its infamy.

Sometimes, when it quacks like a duck...

 

[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.

Oh my god what a load of empty-headed nonsense. Where to start?

1. Emily is not promoting "a Biblical view of womanhood". The Bible agreeing about some detail of a topic does not make that detail "a Biblical view". You might as well claim the public has every right to expect zoologists to shut up about artiodactyls and perissodactyls in a science class because distinguishing cloven hooves from non-cloven hooves is "a Biblical view". Get a grip.

2. The view of womanhood you've promoted, even claiming forensic specialists can't tell a dead adult human woman from a man by examining their complete skeletons, is not "that which scientific consensus defines".

3. A college science class is not some bloody madrassah where silent students dutifully copy down dictation from a certified-orthodox Koran scholar. It's a college. The public has every right to expect students to challenge what the professor says, make her prove what she took for granted, bring up facts that bear against the theories she propounds, and propose alternative explanations, even if the scientific consensus says those students are wrong. Prohibiting debate turns education into unscientific indoctrination even when the professor is right.

4. Yes, you bloody well can teach religious beliefs as facts. Professors teach all manner of religions as fact, from Marxism and Critical Race Theory to Gender Ideology. It's called "academic freedom". Look into it. The First Amendment has consistently been held to cover academic freedom at the college level -- what a government employee hired to teach elementary school students is allowed to say on the government's behalf to a government-supplied captive audience does not constrain what a college professor is allowed to say on the government's behalf to college students who chose to enroll in his class. The few court cases that have upheld restrictions on religious preaching at colleges have taken a narrow view of what counts as religious indoctrination. There is no court in the country that is going to rule that telling students H. sapiens doesn't have "true hermaphrodites" is in the same category as telling students they'll go to Hell if they don't accept Jesus Christ as their Lord.

And 5. You are proposing to shut Emily's views out of public sociology class on the grounds that her views conflict with the view defined by the consensus among sociologists. As far as I can see, what her views mainly conflict with is Gender Ideology. Pretty much every controversial claim Gender Ideology makes is derived one way or another from conflating "gender" with "gender identity". That is the "Fallacy of Equivocation". Any consensus sociologists may have reached that was derived from a fallacy does not qualify as "that which scientific consensus defines". It qualifies as Cargo Cult science.

 

[Politesse]

1. Emily is not promoting "a Biblical view of womanhood". The Bible agreeing about some detail of a topic does not make that detail "a Biblical view". You might as well claim the public has every right to expect zoologists to shut up about artiodactyls and perissodactyls in a science class because distinguishing cloven hooves from non-cloven hooves is "a Biblical view". Get a grip.

If they're using the Bible's list? Like hell I'm going to accept that. Biology has advanced, and we must advance with it.

2. The view of womanhood you've promoted, even claiming forensic specialists can't tell a dead adult human woman from a man by examining their complete skeletons, is not "that which scientific consensus defines".

That's just a fact. At least as originally presented. You are, of course, misrepresenting what I said. And the very idea that you think working in a CRM lab for a year didn't give me more insight into forensic science than you got from reading some alt right websites is wild. Yes, most of the time we have a pretty good guess as far as sexing a skeleton. Never 100%, but a pretty good guess. Gender is another kind of question, as you and Emily pretend to understand one minute then forget the next.

3. A college science class is not some bloody madrassah where silent students dutifully copy down dictation from a certified-orthodox Koran scholar. It's a college. The public has every right to expect students to challenge what the professor says, make her prove what she took for granted, bring up facts that bear against the theories she propounds, and propose alternative explanations, even if the scientific consensus says those students are wrong. Prohibiting debate turns education into unscientific indoctrination even when the professor is right.

On this, we are in partial agreement. A college that is doing its job allows for opportunities to question and discuss matters of contention, and mine does. No one student has the right to monopolize my classroom, though; they are all paying to be there, handily at that, and most students are there to learn, not to argue politics. And I'm definitely not compelled to teach pseudoscience on any given topic just because it is popular outside the academy at the moment. Youo study law to learn law from lawyers, biology to learn biology from biologists, and theology to learn theology from theoogians. That's how the system is desgined, and the system has worked well for two hundred years, pushing the US and east Asia implausibly to the leading edge of most areas of academic research and pedagogy worldwide. If you think some bullshit rightwing pay-to-play "trade school" can give you an equivalent degree, you have every right to pursue one of those as well, it's your money. But public education isn't going to consent to being dismantled just because a vocal minority wants to be coddled.

4. Yes, you bloody well can teach religious beliefs as facts. Professors teach all manner of religions as fact, from Marxism and Critical Race Theory to Gender Ideology.

Fucking Orwellian double speak bullshit. Scientific consensus is driven by objective observation, not ideological conviction. If you feel it is wrong in some way, you are free to present your evidence to the contrary, and this sort of 19th century nonsense is indeed thrown at real scientists constantly. It is rejected because its hawkers can produce no evidence to support it, not because scientists are closed-minded.

Also, theories and facts are not synonyms. Let alone legal theories. Who the hell taught you the scientific method? I am quite certain that UC Davis does not teach its students that theories are facts.

 

[Bomb#20]

I have no intentions of getting involved in this flame throwing discussion, but ...
Have fun with your hate /s. ...

Kind of screwed the pooch on that one, didn't you.

 

[Politesse]

 

[Bomb#20]

I guess answering one cheap shot with another is fair enough, but I assure you that 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 or what they are allowed to be. No one ever granted Christian theocrat types (or atheistic fools who thoughtlessly and self-defeatingly enforce their cultural views) an unchecked right to police the social identity of others. They have done nothing to earn or justify such a role, and no one is ever going to volunteer to give it to them. Throwing science in the dustbin so as to make way for their unique cultural views on masculinity and femininity is not the role or purpose of a democratic government. They are free to do as they like within their congregations or in their kitchens, but not in a public sociology class.

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.

... As painful as it must be for you, no one has a right to opinion-coddling by others. ...

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. ...

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.

So by "No one has a right to tell someone else what they are" you meant telling someone else what they are is morally reprehensible and incredibly rude? So you agree it was morally reprehensible and incredibly rude of you to call Emily and me "atheistic fools who thoughtlessly and self-defeatingly enforce" Christian theocrats' cultural views? Pointing out your religion's assertions are false comes with no magical power to enforce. We are enforcing nothing but our own right to disagree with an aggressive religion, and the right to disagree with aggressive religion is plainly not a Christian cultural view. It's an Enlightenment cultural view -- one you and another poster here appear not to share. That we keep getting falsely accused of enforcing views for refusing to pretend you're correct, and keep getting accused of being morally reprehensible and incredibly rude for refusing to pretend you're correct, strongly indicate that you two think your ingroup have a right to have their opinions coddled to by others.

We do not recognize the authority of progressivism to define what is morally reprehensible and incredibly rude for the rest of us. Who ever granted progressive theocrat types an unchecked right to police the views of others? You have done nothing to earn or justify such a role, and no one is ever going to volunteer to give it to you. Knuckling under to bullying doesn't count as volunteering. Trumped-up charges of misgendering* other people, trumped-up charges of promoting pseudoscience and trumped-up charges of insisting she is the sole voice of all "real" women do count as bullying. Emily did not do those things. You do not have a substantive reason to believe she did. You made those accusations because of her failure to coddle your opinions.

(* Back when men prosecuted women for midwifery, they should at least have had the honesty to name the prohibited act "competing with male physicians", and not "witchcraft". The accusation of "misgendering" is invariably a trumped-up charge. "Mis" is a prefix that means "wrongly". Telling the truth about someone's gender therefore does not constitute misgendering. If "trans allies" want to make honest charges against dissidents then it's on you to make up a truthful word for your made-up thought-crime. The claim that ascribing a gender to someone that's different from his or her gender identity qualifies as "misgendering" is a lie that went half way around the world before the truth got its boots on and the acolytes who mindlessly recite it are plainly only able to believe it because they systematically conflate "gender" with "gender identity". That is an equivocation fallacy.)

 

[Politesse]

you agree it was morally reprehensible and incredibly rude of you to call Emily and me "atheistic fools who thoughtlessly and self-defeatingly enforce" Christian theocrats' cultural views?

It was. I apologize.

 

[Janice Rael]

huh, I find gender essentialism, gender bigotry and transphobia to be morally reprehensible and incredibly rude. Hmm.

 

[Politesse]

huh, I find gender essentialism, gender bigotry and transphobia to be morally reprehensible and incredibly rude. Hmm.

Obviously.

But two wrongs don't make a right, as my mother always says.

 

[Bomb#20]

huh, I find gender essentialism, gender bigotry and transphobia to be morally reprehensible and incredibly rude. Hmm.

I find strawmanning to be morally reprehensible and incredibly rude. Hmm.

 

[Janice Rael]

huh, I find gender essentialism, gender bigotry and transphobia to be morally reprehensible and incredibly rude. Hmm.

I find strawmanning to be morally reprehensible and incredibly rude. Hmm.

You don't need to do things you dislike, Bomb-20.

 

[Bomb#20]

huh, I find gender essentialism, gender bigotry and transphobia to be morally reprehensible and incredibly rude. Hmm.

I find strawmanning to be morally reprehensible and incredibly rude. Hmm.

You don't need to do things you dislike, Bomb-20.

I quoted you strawmanning me. Feel free to try to quote me strawmanning you. Also feel free to try to quote me saying anything transphobic, bigoted against a gender, or expressing "gender essentialism", whatever the heck that is.

(Note: In case by "transphobia" you mean not obediently believing the unevidenced claims of so-called "trans-allies", also feel free to clarify whether you think saying Muhammad did not have a private walkie-talkie to God is "Islamophobia".)

 

[Janice Rael]

This is the Social Science forum, there is no need to quote you.

 

[Emily Lake]

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.

Clearly you didn't read what southernhybrid posted at all.

From an early age, E, as she prefers to be called for this story, hated wearing dresses, liked basketball, skateboarding, video games. When we met in May in New York City (New York, United States) at an end-of-the-year show for her high school speech team, E was wearing a tailored Brooks Brothers suit and a bow tie from her vast collection. With supershort red hair, a creamy complexion, and delicate features, the 14-year-old looked like a formally dressed, earthbound Peter Pan.

Later that evening E searched for the right label for her gender identity. “Transgender” didn’t quite fit, she told me. For one thing she was still using her birth name and still preferred being referred to as “she.” And while other trans kids often talk about how they’ve always known they were born in the “wrong” body, she said, “I just think I need to make alterations in the body I have, to make it feel like the body I need it to be.” By which she meant a body that doesn’t menstruate and has no breasts, with more defined facial contours and “a ginger beard.” Does that make E a trans guy? A girl who is, as she put it, “insanely androgynous”? Or just someone who rejects the trappings of traditional gender roles altogether?

This is the premise of the article - that behavior that doesn't sufficiently conform to stereotypes is reason to perform surgery on a person's body.

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.

No, it isn't. Not using blockers allows the body to achieve full development as a human being while preserving the OPTION of procreation. If, post puberty, an individual decides that they greatly dislike their body, they can undergo surgeries at that point to make their body mimic the external visual cues of the opposite sex.

 

[Emily Lake]

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?

Apparently the advocated approach is to force everyone else to mind-read a mismatch by trying to override everyone else's mental perception.

 

[Emily Lake]

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.

Is there something in the water that has caused all of you to completely forget how figurative language works?