Nonbinary gender discussion

The answer is obvious: selective pressure from hats.

Nature decides what’s advantageous at the time. Dinosaurs are gone now, that doesn’t mean their mutations weren’t as good. They walked this earth far longer than us humans have. At one time their mutations made them advantageous. Changes to their environment made the mutations disadvantageous for long enough to wipe them out.

No mutation stays advantageous. The human’s standard of judging whether or not some life is more suitable on this planet is ephemeral in the scope of the planet’s history.

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:wall:

When Maggie happened, did you refer to her with male pronouns?

Of course it’s not normal. I object because you’re saying anything that isn’t normal is a mistake.

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.

It’s 2017, and women shouldn’t be astronauts, eh? You’d be a real hit at the Governor General’s parties. :grinning:

Julie Payette

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.

In other words, you can see your situation as an advantage or a disadvantage. When life gives you lemons, the sweet to sour ratio still depends on other factors.

You said you don’t know what intersex means in this case. Neither do I. So how would either of us know whether or not Erospooky君 can reproduce?

Perceive. This is exactly the problem. Perceive.
A human is born either with male chromosomes, female chromosomes or some mutation of said chromosomes. I am going to set aside the mutation because I believe this whole non-binary, etc thing stems from the majority of humans who have perfectly normal chromosomes. They are not faced with a biological abnormality and have to pick which to be. A normal human being has a biological gender.

Some humans for various reasons “feel” or “perceive” themselves as a different gender than what they were born as. This does not magically change their chromosomes. Nobody can change what they are biologically born as. Period. Full stop.

Fact: Gender is not a social construct. Nobody can change their physical gender. It is currently impossible.

How someone “perceives” themselves is a completely different story. You can perceive yourself to be anything you want. Different societies have different levels of tolerance for this. This tolerance fluctuates through time.

Someone who perceives themselves as something they are biologically not and demands that Earth’s entire population address them and treat them according to what is going on in their head is nuts.

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There are animal that “steal” the milk from the cows udders. I guess they know what they do, and I guess they like it.

You’re equating gender with physical gender. Everyone understands that you can’t change your chromosomes.

How someone “perceives” themselves is a completely different story. You can perceive yourself to be anything you want. Different societies have different levels of tolerance for this. This tolerance fluctuates through time.

Yes.

Someone who perceives themselves as something they are biologically not

Unless we’re going to past our chromosome readout on our foreheads and leave our genitals uncovered, what we are biologically has little to do with it. Again, the equivocation between biological gender and what people are talking about with gender today is implicit.

and demands that Earth’s entire population address them and treat them according to what is going on in their head is nuts.

Demanding this kind of thing is definitely the height of narcissism. You can’t expect everyone to bend to your preferences, or long established societal attitudes and practices to melt away or change overnight. Yet, we all have to get along somehow.

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I like this TV show, and I think it makes some valid points. Even better, I think that gender studies and the “researchers” related to them are very well depicted… they show their true colors.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5LRdW8xw70

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Yeah, but on the other hand…

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I was discussing a specific written convention: using ‘he’ as a neuter/generic pronoun. I was railing against the insistence of some modern commentators on using alternate 'he’s and 'she’s, or the clumsy ‘he/she’. Using ‘she’ for a hypothetical person who is unlikely to be female is jarring, as is using ‘he’ for a person unlikely to be male. Switching between the two for no apparent reason is unbelievably irritating.

That’s all it was.

I wasn’t suggesting that. I was referring specifically to gender abnormalities and the mechanisms by which they arise … which are failures of the normal mechanisms.

There are shades of grey here:

  • As per the discussion on lactose intolerance, an error can turn out to be a serendipitous one. It’s still an error, and errors are disastrous more often than not. It’s very rare that they turn out to be useful. Nature is pretty wasteful.

  • Some people are not “normal” by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s their very weirdness that gives them advantages. Nikola Tesla was several sandwiches short of a picnic, but the small part of his brain that was firing on all cylinders was incredibly good at its job. That’s been true of a lot of historical high achievers.

I never said they shouldn’t be; women actually make very good pilots and suchlike, not least because they can follow a checklist without their big sweaty egos getting in the way.

I said most women don’t want to be astronauts. If you don’t believe me, go conduct a straw poll among your male and female colleagues. Of course, you might be of the opinion that women don’t know what’s good for them, and it’s up to men to enlighten the poor dears as to what they really want?

Quite so. And we all deal with our own sweet-to-sour ratio as best we can, without insisting that everyone else should compromise their ratios for ours.

In this instance it doesn’t matter, because almost all the possible variants result in either a drastically-reduced dating pool, mechanical sterility, or simply no desire to mate and reproduce. Without knowing any further details, I’d say there’s an 80% chance Erospooky cannot have kids, or will choose not to. Pity he/she/it has disappeared. Did I do that?

Or, like you, being somehow mystically gifted in intrinsically knowing what all women feel…
:roll:

I might not know what they feel, but I can see what they do, and I can listen to their stated reasons for their decisions. And how on earth did you get from ‘some’ to ‘all’? Why do some people have so much trouble visualizing a bell curve?

Seriously, I don’t think you realise how condescending your views are towards women. If some particular woman wants to be an astronaut, it’s no skin off my nose. But I’m utterly appalled by the idea that what men do is the gold standard for behaviour and that women should attempt to emulate it if they want to be accepted as proper human beings.

Men do a lot of f’ing ridiculous stuff, and sometimes it’s the job of women to sort them out. Never read Lysistrata?

How many men want to be astronauts? And I don’t mean boys in kindergarten answering what do you want to be when you grow up? :man_astronaut: :woman_astronaut: :alien:

I’ll write more later.

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I don’t. I tried drinking my own pee before, and let’s just say once was enough. And that loss of bone density thing…

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Thirsty? Lost in the Andes? Some arcane bovine fetish-ritual?

There is no ‘changing social reality’. The proportion of male coalminers changing from 99.8% to 98% is not some incredible victory for female liberation.

All the women I know have a huge aversion to hard manual labour and big scary machines, while men (mostly) like them. The makeup of the workforce reflects that. As it always has.

My observation wasn’t that trivial. My point was that we all have some innate and timeless concept of what is appropriate male and female attire: if that were not so, you might only be able to determine two different types of clothing used by an alien society; you wouldn’t be able to say this was for women and this was for men. It’s very hard to pin it down to details - a fashion designer might be able to - but it’s there.

More importantly, men and women enjoy conforming to clothing stereotypes. It’s a critical part of their identity. Forcing people to wear unisex clothing is a well-known means of destroying individuality under repressive regimes.

Simply so that they can pick an appropriate mode of address :slight_smile:

Not yet, no.

A certain amount of removal of choices makes people feel comfortable. Up to a point. This has been well-studied. When people are given too many choices they get upset.

I probably could get angsty if I wanted. I’m, erm, not very male. I hate football, cars, and cricket. I get along better in female company than I do with men. I don’t like jumping off cliffs, or getting drunk and starting fights. I don’t have any particular desire to reproduce, which makes me “not normal”. OTOH I’m absolutely certain that I am male and enjoy being male. A lot. I do various things that define me quite clearly as male. However, if I listened too hard to too much bullshit, I might start asking myself stupid questions about my gender. I might think that, because I’m a bit off-centre, I need a new pronoun. Fortunately, I’m a reactionary old bastard and I don’t have time for such nonsense.

This is not denial. It’s a realisation that one’s identity depends to a large extent on others. No man, woman, or genderless person is an island.

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Not that lame old chestnut again, please.

We big stupid men would be so lost if we didn’t have their pretty wee selves waiting for us to get home after a hard day of running countries and corporations and armies and banking institutions, freshly made up and coiffed, with a roast in the oven and a dry martini all ready for us.

Wait, do you live in Bewitched???

Are you (a) Darren???


Because…cultural appropriation. :grin:

image

Let’s put aside the fact that sex change isn’t a rare thing in this day and age, you are saying when it is possible for people to change their physical gender with relative ease, then you would agree gender is a social construct?

So, basically, you’re agreeing that women who don’t piss their lives away running corporations, armies and banks are failing to live up to their potential?

Uhhhhhh, yeah, sure, Finno, whatever…