Allow me to be the first to say it: "nonbinary" has nothing to do with "transgender."
Because gender is binary. People are male or female and while there are conditions like Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome the men who suffer from it are still men.
I have had it up to here with "nonbinary." Everything I have seen has convinced me that t…
Allow me to be the first to say it: "nonbinary" has nothing to do with "transgender."
Because gender is binary. People are male or female and while there are conditions like Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome the men who suffer from it are still men.
I have had it up to here with "nonbinary." Everything I have seen has convinced me that this is a fad to get attention; they are too strident, too angry, too fanatic. I think that just as transvestites piggybacked on gay political advances the "nonbinary" folk are piggybacking on transgender people, real ones.
And it annoys me how so many coddle this affectation. Medium will ban you without warning if you state a refusal to use that abhorrent singular they. Educators are called up on disciplinaries because a student complains about pronouns.
As if we don't have enough real problems.
Race on the other hand is a continuum. While we define three major races only some people fit squarely into one of them and then there is (sorry) interbreeding; there was a hysterical case a few years ago where a virulent white supremacist learned that he was genetically 13% black.
It seems insane that people fight against the reality of gender, as if concave versus convex genitalia are an artifact of societal uh rigidity.
"Everything I have seen has convinced me that this is a fad to get attention; they are too strident, too angry, too fanatic."
Yeah, this conversation doesn't actually touch on non-binary people, but I agree. "Non-binary" identities aren't identities, they're personalities (or perhaps due to a lack thereof). Their adoption is almost entirely about societal misogyny and good old-fashioned teen angst.
It's interesting how they've been folded into the trans community. And it will be especially interesting to see what happens in future with "transracial" people and "MAP"s. Once you insist that an internal sense of identity trumps *everything else*, you find yourself on incredibly shaky ground.
Sorry for the mini-hijack but I don't think you can talk about "trans" (why the foreshortening?) without "nonbinary" anymore.
I think they're corrosive and destructive; they adulterate the real issues around authentically transgendered people with their attention needs and if the Democrats run on bathrooms they're going to lose big.
We are living through an epistemological crisis on many fronts. Postmodernism left good people inhibited from even the most uncontroversial value judgments, the best lack all conviction; opinion and fact have merged. The deprecation of expertise, the uncritical acceptance of preposterous absurdities, a cowed press. We're in a lot of trouble.
And nothing signifies that trouble more than the claim that gender is just "society's little boxes." Even flowers have genders.
"And nothing signifies that trouble more than the claim that gender is just "society's little boxes." Even flowers have genders."
We've gone back and forth a few times on the difference between sex and gender so I'll just remind you that flowers have *sexes* (or sexed parts) not genders. When people say gender is a social construct, at least as "gender" is used in these discussions nowadays, they're correct.
I can see you want to fight this semantic battle 😁, but I don't think this is the hill to die on. The obfuscators thrive on imprecision. Indeed, it's the only tool they have to hide how ludicrous their ideas are. Being able to point out that while gender is a social construct, sex isn't (nor are they completely separate, almost all animal species exhibit gendered behaviour), makes it harder for them not to reckon with the argument.
I'm not sure if I direct quite so much of my ire at non binary people as you do. The most vicious and disingenuous people I come across are trans activists. Though we completely agree that whoever is most to blame, they're doing real harm to genuine issues faced by genuine transgender people.
So many social justice movements at the moment seem to hold the people they're supposed to be "uplifting" in utter disdain.
No Steve I don't want to fight any semantic battle on those two words. I just have a different lifelong understanding: gender as all matters—biological and psychological— of male and female and sex as a reproductive or recreational activity that humans usually perform in a horizontal position. But, agreed, this is not the hill I want to die on either.
The singular they, OTOH, I will resist to my dying day.
But I need less conflict in my life, not more, and aside from "they" and the nasty people and their screams of victimhood, I don't have a dog in this fight.
"I just have a different lifelong understanding: gender as all matters—biological and psychological"
Yeah, I get that. For pretty much any time until the past 10 years, it was perfectly safe (though not technically accurate) to use the words sex and gender interchangeably.
But today, this is the kind of semantic misstep that will be used to distract from the point. There are all sorts of issues today where linguistic precision is so important because the postmodernists love confusing/redefining words to hide the ridiculousness of their arguments.
Precisely. I'm a woman whose into football and knows how to shoot a gun - nonbinary? I'm a man who likes the piano and French poetry - nonbinary? It's bizarre to me for people to elevate gender stereotypes from 70+ years ago just to rage against the inutility of them. The reality is for most people over 20 years of age, everyone was "nonbinary" and it was just called "having interests". The most ridiculous of all the pseudo-moralistic fads (and there's a lot of competition there).
Except it's not just a rebellion against 50s societal expectations of behavior. It extends all the way to claiming that the *biological* definitions of male and female are fraudulent.
We are decades away from working dad/housekeeper mom, from football boys and dollhouse girls. The nonbinary rebellion is a lot nuttier than that.
Allow me to be the first to say it: "nonbinary" has nothing to do with "transgender."
Because gender is binary. People are male or female and while there are conditions like Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome the men who suffer from it are still men.
I have had it up to here with "nonbinary." Everything I have seen has convinced me that this is a fad to get attention; they are too strident, too angry, too fanatic. I think that just as transvestites piggybacked on gay political advances the "nonbinary" folk are piggybacking on transgender people, real ones.
And it annoys me how so many coddle this affectation. Medium will ban you without warning if you state a refusal to use that abhorrent singular they. Educators are called up on disciplinaries because a student complains about pronouns.
As if we don't have enough real problems.
Race on the other hand is a continuum. While we define three major races only some people fit squarely into one of them and then there is (sorry) interbreeding; there was a hysterical case a few years ago where a virulent white supremacist learned that he was genetically 13% black.
It seems insane that people fight against the reality of gender, as if concave versus convex genitalia are an artifact of societal uh rigidity.
"Everything I have seen has convinced me that this is a fad to get attention; they are too strident, too angry, too fanatic."
Yeah, this conversation doesn't actually touch on non-binary people, but I agree. "Non-binary" identities aren't identities, they're personalities (or perhaps due to a lack thereof). Their adoption is almost entirely about societal misogyny and good old-fashioned teen angst.
It's interesting how they've been folded into the trans community. And it will be especially interesting to see what happens in future with "transracial" people and "MAP"s. Once you insist that an internal sense of identity trumps *everything else*, you find yourself on incredibly shaky ground.
Sorry for the mini-hijack but I don't think you can talk about "trans" (why the foreshortening?) without "nonbinary" anymore.
I think they're corrosive and destructive; they adulterate the real issues around authentically transgendered people with their attention needs and if the Democrats run on bathrooms they're going to lose big.
We are living through an epistemological crisis on many fronts. Postmodernism left good people inhibited from even the most uncontroversial value judgments, the best lack all conviction; opinion and fact have merged. The deprecation of expertise, the uncritical acceptance of preposterous absurdities, a cowed press. We're in a lot of trouble.
And nothing signifies that trouble more than the claim that gender is just "society's little boxes." Even flowers have genders.
"And nothing signifies that trouble more than the claim that gender is just "society's little boxes." Even flowers have genders."
We've gone back and forth a few times on the difference between sex and gender so I'll just remind you that flowers have *sexes* (or sexed parts) not genders. When people say gender is a social construct, at least as "gender" is used in these discussions nowadays, they're correct.
I can see you want to fight this semantic battle 😁, but I don't think this is the hill to die on. The obfuscators thrive on imprecision. Indeed, it's the only tool they have to hide how ludicrous their ideas are. Being able to point out that while gender is a social construct, sex isn't (nor are they completely separate, almost all animal species exhibit gendered behaviour), makes it harder for them not to reckon with the argument.
I'm not sure if I direct quite so much of my ire at non binary people as you do. The most vicious and disingenuous people I come across are trans activists. Though we completely agree that whoever is most to blame, they're doing real harm to genuine issues faced by genuine transgender people.
So many social justice movements at the moment seem to hold the people they're supposed to be "uplifting" in utter disdain.
No Steve I don't want to fight any semantic battle on those two words. I just have a different lifelong understanding: gender as all matters—biological and psychological— of male and female and sex as a reproductive or recreational activity that humans usually perform in a horizontal position. But, agreed, this is not the hill I want to die on either.
The singular they, OTOH, I will resist to my dying day.
But I need less conflict in my life, not more, and aside from "they" and the nasty people and their screams of victimhood, I don't have a dog in this fight.
"I just have a different lifelong understanding: gender as all matters—biological and psychological"
Yeah, I get that. For pretty much any time until the past 10 years, it was perfectly safe (though not technically accurate) to use the words sex and gender interchangeably.
But today, this is the kind of semantic misstep that will be used to distract from the point. There are all sorts of issues today where linguistic precision is so important because the postmodernists love confusing/redefining words to hide the ridiculousness of their arguments.
Precisely. I'm a woman whose into football and knows how to shoot a gun - nonbinary? I'm a man who likes the piano and French poetry - nonbinary? It's bizarre to me for people to elevate gender stereotypes from 70+ years ago just to rage against the inutility of them. The reality is for most people over 20 years of age, everyone was "nonbinary" and it was just called "having interests". The most ridiculous of all the pseudo-moralistic fads (and there's a lot of competition there).
"It's bizarre to me for people to elevate gender stereotypes from 70+ years ago just to rage against the inutility of them."
This!!! THANKYOU!!!😁 How is this hard for anybody to see?!
Except it's not just a rebellion against 50s societal expectations of behavior. It extends all the way to claiming that the *biological* definitions of male and female are fraudulent.
We are decades away from working dad/housekeeper mom, from football boys and dollhouse girls. The nonbinary rebellion is a lot nuttier than that.