Isn’t that the whole point? It’s called “motivation.”
I think it’s more likely to be Ask Me Anything.
I was thinking AMA as opposed to AGONG. 
Speaking of figments of someone’s imagination…
Must be fake news, eh?
It is a genetic mistake in the sense that (1) it is statistically very unusual (2) it is disadvantageous to you personally and (3) it is disadvantageous to your genes, since they can’t be passed on.
(1) That’s neither here nor there.
(2) Probably but not necessarily.
(3) Who says?
Occasionally I encounter someone who I’m not quite sure is ‘小姐’ or ‘先生’. I have to pick one or the other because that’s the way the language works.
If you think about it, “little big sister” and “previously born” are both kind of odd. I say just make everyone 君. 
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They’re outliers. Three-sigma outliers. 98%+ of coalminers are men. In the UK in the 1980s it was more like 99.8%. That’s why the sentence is jarring. Using ‘she’ instead of ‘he’ is just bad writing. It’s the semantic equivalent of putting a comma in the wrong place - it interrupts the reader and makes him readjust the mental images that are forming in his (or her) head.
Only in America do women aspire to do things that are both pointless and dangerous. Back in the good old days we left it to men to make stupid decisions.
(1) That’s neither here nor there.
Statistics matter. Try asking an accident investigator.
The problem with redefining normal as “absolutely anything is normal” instead of sticking to “what is most common is normal” is that people come adrift. We used to be able to figure out whether we were male or female with some simple observations:
- Do I want to have a baby (as in, become pregnant)?
- Does having lots of body hair make me feel good or bad?
- Was I born XY or XYY (male), or XX (female)?
- Do I like wearing stereotypically male clothing or stereotypically female clothing?
- Do I have some dangly bits that the other sex doesn’t have?
These are not “social constructs” - apart from 3) they’ve been remarkably constant across all societies past and present.
Now we’re literally not allowed to ask ourselves these questions. So I can’t help wondering if some of the people who say they’re ‘gender-neutral’ are just unable to assess their own gender accurately, because society now tells them that both men and women should desire to be coalminers and astronauts, men and women can become pregnant, and it doesn’t matter what your genitalia look like - you can still be either male or female if you want to.
I’m not saying gender-neutral people don’t exist. It’s just that that particular balancing-on-the-point-of-a-pin occurrence seems unlikely in a species which has not evolved a need for gender-neutral members. More plausibly, they are male-leaning or female-leaning, and could pick a pronoun and public persona accordingly without feeling like a fish out of water.
Think of it this way: I’m in a profession which occasionally requires me to wear a suit. I could pout and whine and insist that I’m not a stuffed shirt, and I’ll turn up to meetings looking like a wino if I want to. Or, I could buy a really nice tailored suit and get that HR wench fantasizing about banging me on the boardroom table. The way you present yourself matters; even if something isn’t 100% “you”, sometimes the right thing to do is to consider other people. Stamping your foot and insisting on being an individual makes you look (weirdly enough) weak-minded.
(2) Probably but not necessarily.
The advantages, I’d say, are very few. For example one might be able to focus on one’s career instead of wondering how to get laid. That’s a highly dubious advantage IMO, though.
Just as people born blind are aware of the advantages of sight in only a theoretical way, I assume people born without gender aren’t aware of the advantages of having one. Reproducing yourself is one of the most fundamental animal drives that there is, and anything that hampers that (or prevents it) is surely a disadvantage.
(3) Who says?
Good grief, do I really have to spell out why this is true? Go and google the many forms of genetic and/or physical deviations from standard male-female biology. Most of them result in either functional sterility or problems finding a compatible partner.
True enough, and I’m sure some languages are like that. Most of them make the distinction. And the TL;DR version of my post above is that more pronouns make the situation worse, not better, because it just leaves you with more potential chances to offend.
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Aside from the “only in America” part being rank and utter bullshit for the better part of a century, if not more…
FIFY
Once again, you sound like you’re posting from some stinky desiccated Men’s Club in 1940s London.
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If you insist on putting completely unrelated words into my mouth, then I suppose that’s true.
My point here is that nobody should be coal-mining. It has no economic or social value. Why women would want to join in with men’s foolishness and think they’ve scored a victory by doing so is beyond me.
Yes, women now have ‘equal opportunities’ to fuck up the planet (or at least various bits of America) and die of lung disease. Well done. Give yourselves a pat on the back.
Come back at me with some logical reasoning rather than ad hominems and I’ll take your viewpoint seriously. Implicit in your post is an enormous dose of patriarchy: you’re assuming that whatever men do is the ultimate expression of humanity, and therefore women should aspire to do the same. What women choose to do, or consider important, is dismissed out-of-hand.
Yet, there are female coal miners eh? It doesn’t matter what was left to men when. Things are changing, and it doesn’t matter either for better or worse. A woman might be a coal miner and vice-versa
It is a genetic mistake in the sense that (1) it is statistically very unusual (2) it is disadvantageous to you personally and (3) it is disadvantageous to your genes, since they can’t be passed on.[/quote]
Statistics matter. Try asking an accident investigator.
“Statistically unlikely” does not equal “mistake”.
The problem with redefining normal as “absolutely anything is normal” instead of sticking to “what is most common is normal” is that people come adrift.
People come adrift?
We used to be able to figure out whether we were male or female with some simple observations:
- Do I want to have a baby (as in, become pregnant)?
- Does having lots of body hair make me feel good or bad?
- Was I born XY or XYY (male), or XX (female)?
- Do I like wearing stereotypically male clothing or stereotypically female clothing?
- Do I have some dangly bits that the other sex doesn’t have?
These are not “social constructs” - apart from 3) they’ve been remarkably constant across all societies past and present.
Are you sure they have? I don’t even understand some of them. What does wanting to become pregnant have to do with anything? Have people really always cared that much about body hair? Did people ever know what a gene was even? This is really random.
Now we’re literally not allowed to ask ourselves these questions.
I’m not sure why we’d want to ask those questions, but who says you can’t?
So I can’t help wondering if some of the people who say they’re ‘gender-neutral’ are just unable to assess their own gender accurately, because society now tells them that both men and women should desire to be coalminers and astronauts, men and women can become pregnant, and it doesn’t matter what your genitalia look like - you can still be either male or female if you want to.
Or maybe societies have tended (though not always from what I know) to hold people within strict roles, and when those strictures become less important or easier to ignore, people feel more free to express themselves as they see fit.
I’m not saying gender-neutral people don’t exist. It’s just that that particular balancing-on-the-point-of-a-pin occurrence seems unlikely in a species which has not evolved a need for gender-neutral members. More plausibly, they are male-leaning or female-leaning, and could pick a pronoun and public persona accordingly without feeling like a fish out of water.
Biologically speaking we only need the ability to reproduce which isn’t affected. You may as well say New York Jets fans are unlikely because we haven’t evolved a need for them. If you don’t like that analogy, a host of human behaviors potentially affect the likelihood to reproduce.
Think of it this way: I’m in a profession which occasionally requires me to wear a suit. I could pout and whine and insist that I’m not a stuffed shirt, and I’ll turn up to meetings looking like a wino if I want to. Or, I could buy a really nice tailored suit and get that HR wench fantasizing about banging me on the boardroom table. The way you present yourself matters; even if something isn’t 100% “you”, sometimes the right thing to do is to consider other people. Stamping your foot and insisting on being an individual makes you look (weirdly enough) weak-minded.
They pay you for that, and you can quit the job.
(2) Probably but not necessarily.
The advantages, I’d say, are very few. For example one might be able to focus on one’s career instead of wondering how to get laid. That’s a highly dubious advantage IMO, though.
It’s totally personal. You’re going to tell someone else what’s advantageous to them? I hope it’s really harming them or some kind of major advantage. Not seeing it.
(3) Who says?
Good grief, do I really have to spell out why this is true? Go and google the many forms of genetic and/or physical deviations from standard male-female biology. Most of them result in either functional sterility or problems finding a compatible partner.
Spell it out because I’m not getting it. People who can procreate can still procreate and people choose to do so or not for all kinds of reasons.
You seem to be making a mountain out of a molehill about this.
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The neither part is what makes a simple 4 state fail to accurately describe gender.
There’s a full spectrum of how people in the neither camp perceive and identify their own gender.
It’s rather unfortunate that 先生 took on a male only status. The word itself means “senior” without a gender designation. Perhaps in the future people can all be addressed as 先生 in Mandarin. In the past, and in Japan and Korea, the honorific purpose of the word is maintained, and it is used to address medical doctors and teachers of all genders.
The same thing with second and third person pronoun 你 and 他. They were originally genderless but during the late Qing period, students who came back from abroad thought differentiating gender like other Indo-European languages would move Chinese closer to advanced cultures, and created 妳 and 她.
At least in spoken language they still all sound the same…
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You actually think that? It doesn’t matter if things are changing for the worse as long as they’re changing?
Gender discrepancies result either from hormonal miscalibrations during gestation, or genetic transcription faults and/or mutations. So yes, they are quite obviously “mistakes” in the usual sense of the word. As I said that doesn’t make the person any less of a person. Why are you keen to assume that it does?
Yes. Do some googling. It’s very interesting. For example, have a look at historical clothing or from unfamiliar cultures. With very few exceptions (children’s clothing, for example) you’ll find you can easily guess which item is for men and which for women.
I suspect you do, but it’s very right-on to pretend that you don’t.
Do you ever talk to women? Ask any mother why she wanted to have children. Now ask the same thing of fathers. You’ll get radically different answers that come from our reptilian brains. Differences like this are what define gender. If you deprive people of those definitions, you’re making things worse, not better. But perhaps that’s not important? We must change; we need not necessarily improve?
Oddly enough, yes. Again, GIYF. The details vary, but women have been concerned about minimizing body hair since time immemorial, and men have often had a thing about flamboyant facial hair.
Possibly, but it doesn’t seem to be doing anyone any favours, does it? That “freedom to choose” seems to be causing a whole lot of angst for all concerned.
Yes, and because of that they tend to get selected out.
Certainly I could quit the job. But you seem to have completely missed the point. I can view that “pressure to conform” either as an assault on my individuality, or as an opportunity to bond with others. In other words, I can either shoot myself in the foot, or I can engage with the rest of humanity.
I realise from previous posts you don’t like the idea of an objective reality, but if I had no arms and legs I’d clearly be at a disadvantage compared to people who do have arms and legs. While not having a gender might not be as extreme a disadvantage, I don’t see how you can argue that it’s entirely benign.
I was just giving one example of a fairly major disadvantage. People with any kind of gender discrepancy will have a terrible time finding an accepting partner; if that isn’t obvious to you, I can’t make it any clearer. Physical abnormalities, as I said, often result in sterility.
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If mutations are mistakes, then humans are a series of pretty shocking mistakes… Especially those of you who are lactose tolerant past adolescence, you freaks, you are all freaking mutants, just a mistake of nature!
I’d think mutation itself is neutral, and it’s we humans who labelled what don’t fit our social values as mistakes.
Lactose intolerance is neutral in countries that don’t drink dairy; therefore intolerance will persist at some level. In countries where dairy is a critical source of fat and protein, it’s an evolutionary disadvantage and will be selected out. It’s a matter of survival, not “social values”.
In this case, what is normal in one country is not normal in another.
However, in the case of people who have gender issues for genetic reasons, the error confers no advantage, despite tempogain’s protestations. Therefore it never becomes “normal”.
All mammals are lactose intolerant past adolescence except for some mutated humans (who are a minority by the way, us normal lactose intolerant people outnumbers lactose mutants). They also adapted to processing lactose by deciding to drink other animal’s milk. Think about it, it’s freaking wild. Delicious, but weird.
No, they’re not. They’re a minority in some locations and a majority in others, because of different selection pressures.
That’s not the way evolution works. The mutation would have arisen spontaneously. Those people who carried the mutation had a new food source (I imagine they tried it out of desperation) and a slight survival advantage, and they therefore reproduced that gene until it became normal.
This is BS.
Cats drink milk and they’re fine
Doggos eat cheese with no ill effects
Put a pail of milk in front of a cow, they’ll scarf it down like Caramel friggin M&Ms.
You may want to check your research, buddy.
They actually can’t.
Don’t do that to grown up cats.
If you insist on doing it, you’d better make sure you are the one cleaning that shit up though…
It’s merely a lactose mutant projection onto the cats. Of course you can keep doing that to generations of cats, and after a few hundred years of loose bowels, you’d get group of lactose mutant cats.
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Exactly. Glad we are on the same page. So mutation isn’t inherently good or bad, right or mistake.
Humans prescribe those labels to some mutations because from their perspective and time point, certain mutations seem advantageous, or fits their value system.
Without that human judgement, mutations just naturally happens anyway. What makes a mutation successful or not depends a lot on the circumstances at the time, instead of what actually is good or bad.
Also whether or not an individual with a certain mutation can propagate or not doesn’t reflect whether or not its group can propagate. There’s a good chance that nonbinary genes have contributed to the survival of the human race. Take baldness for example, we would think it’s an useless and bad trait, but if it probably serves a purpose.
Don’t judge mutations is what I’m trying to say with my lactose mutant hate trope.
Humanity has essentially no say in the matter. Nature decides what’s “advantageous” and what isn’t. All that matters is that the gene survives. That boils down to who gets to mate and who doesn’t, and that boils down to some extremely primitive behaviour, not social constructs.
True, but I can think of no circumstances which would give a non-binary person an evolutionary advantage. Can you?
Possibly. A similar argument has been advanced for homosexuality. However, they will always be a minority because of the difficulty of reproducing.
I must admit that’s a funny one. One possibility is that baldness is inseparably associated with some other positively-selected trait; baldness itself might not be an advantage, but whatever-it-is that causes baldness might be.
You actually think that? It doesn’t matter if things are changing for the worse as long as they’re changing?
For the purpose of the question of whether we might use “her” in a sentence about coal-miners. It’s becoming more viable simply because it’s reflecting changing social realities.
Gender discrepancies result either from hormonal miscalibrations during gestation, or genetic transcription faults and/or mutations. So yes, they are quite obviously “mistakes” in the usual sense of the word. As I said that doesn’t make the person any less of a person. Why are you keen to assume that it does?
I have no idea why you think I am. But as you said, we don’t know what was meant by intersex.
It’s very interesting. For example, have a look at historical clothing or from unfamiliar cultures. With very few exceptions (for example, there was a fad for a while in England for dressing young boys in dresses) you’ll find you can easily guess which item is for men and which for women.
I’m glad I didn’t go googling to find that men’s and women’s clothing tends to differ in societies. Believe it or not, I realize this. What I don’t see is why other people’s supposed need to see immediately through clothing whether someone is male or female is important.
I suspect you do, but it’s very right-on to pretend that you don’t.
Go on deluding yourself; it seems to work for you.
Do you ever talk to women? Ask any mother why she wanted to have children. Now ask the same thing of fathers. You’ll get radically different answers. Differences like this are what define gender. If you deprive people of those definitions, you’re making things worse, not better. But perhaps that’s not important?
I don’t know what you’re talking about. Men can’t become pregnant.
Oddly enough, yes. Again, GIYF.
That, maybe I’ll look up. I might have thought our modern advertising and commercial paradigm has had a big influence.
Possibly, but it doesn’t seem to be doing anyone any favours, does it? That “freedom to choose” seems to be causing a whole lot of angst for all concerned.
Who says? You? Is your “angst” the issue?
Yes, and because of that they tend to get selected out.
Yet people don’t seem to see the need to come up with biological arguments about why they blah blah blah.
Certainly I could quit the job. But you seem to have completely missed the point. I can view that “pressure to conform” either as an assault on my individuality, or as an opportunity to bond with others. In other words, I can either shoot myself in the foot, or I can engage with the rest of humanity.
I think your analogy was flawed, hence my point. A job is something you essentially need to do in order to survive, and there is an imperative to fit in. Or, you can find another more suitable one. You don’t have the same choice about personal characteristics which may cause you to not fit in well with society. Denying one’s individuality for the sake of receiving human engagement is not such a blase matter as you suggest.
I realise from previous posts you don’t like the idea of an objective reality, but if I had no arms and legs I’d clearly be at a disadvantage compared to people who do have arms and legs. While not having a gender might not be as extreme a disadvantage, I don’t see how you can argue that it’s entirely benign.
I didn’t argue that; I don’t know if it is. Clearly it aggravates some people which can be a disadvantage. But unless we’re a society of automatons I don’t see how that this is a convincing argument. You could say the same about all kinds of things.