I go for hours at a time, even days, without reminding myself that I'm male. It falls well below being gay, and not even that would be in the ten words I'd choose to describe myself. Which makes me really wonder why some people feel obliged to bring up their "gender identity" every ten or fifteen seconds.
I go for hours at a time, even days, without reminding myself that I'm male. It falls well below being gay, and not even that would be in the ten words I'd choose to describe myself. Which makes me really wonder why some people feel obliged to bring up their "gender identity" every ten or fifteen seconds.
All this talk of societal gender expectations also makes me wonder ... if a few tens of millions of people just emerged from suspended animation; it seems to me that they're like those stranded Japanese soldiers who thought the war was still on decades after it ended. The whole "Ward and June Cleaver" gender role thing seems to have faded out decades ago. I mean, find a picture of Benazir Bhutto when she was living in America, wearing jeans even as she met the requirements of Muslim modesty. Wanna talk about oppressive societal expectations? Behold her elegance while meeting them.
It hit me reading your article above ... what is this really about? Those societal impositions are largely imaginary. Women can stay at home and do the Küche-Kinder-Kirche thing if they want to or they can drive trucks or terrorize an office. Men can wear makeup, and many do. So let's stop honoring these claims of oppressive social expectation, they are bullshit.
Pronouns? Forget about "they," not gonna happen, full stop. But ... when we are in the presence of anyone of whatever gender or pretense of gender, there is only one pronoun, and that is "you." We don't even have thou/thee anymore, more's the pity. I live my life in Vietnamese which doesn't even have pronouns but need to choose from among dozens of substitutes when I talk to someone, though at my age I can safely use "em" with just about everyone.
But the whole controversy is over the third person, how we refer to people *when they aren't even around to hear it*! JFC! And then it hit me that what is really underlying all this gender fad horseshit is not some social revelation or liberation, it's just plain self-consciousness. Anyone in the "trans" camp who isn't actually gender dysphoric is piggybacking to feel important, to get special attention. While most reviled minorities just want to be left alone, these minorities have long lists of demands for the rest of us to follow: "cis," "they," just for starters. They do NOT want to be left alone, they want each of us to be deeply involved with and attentive to each of them. Let me give the briefest and most succinct possible answer:
No.
Genuinely dysphoric people deserve our respect and understanding, at least the attempt. Non-dysphorics claiming the same don't deserve those, and "non-binary" is just an insult to our intelligence. Kicking a door that isn't locked. Don't want to conform to societal pressures (that don't really exist anymore)? Then don't. But anyone who mentions "my gender identity" several times per minute is going to find himself talking to air.
I've never met a "nonbinary" person face to face, the fad began after I left and Vietnamese don't do that stuff. But nearly every one I have encountered online or heard about sounds like a total pain in the ass.
Goths and hippies didn't turn every conversation around to being goths and hippies.
"I go for hours at a time, even days, without reminding myself that I'm male"
Haha, right?! One notable feature of trans and non-binary people is the sheer amount of headspace they devote to whether they're being perceived in the "right" way. It's actually kind of sad to watch. I see kids on YouTube consumed by whether they have enough facial hair or whether their behaviour "masculine" enough. Spending hours on their makeup and obsessing about their weight or their breasts.
In any other circumstances, we'd have no problem recognising this insecure, unhealthy behaviour for what it is. But when it's a trans person, we're supposed to believe all that insecurity is #stunningandbrave.
Have to disagree with you about goths and hippies turning conversations to being goths and hippies though. I consistently find people who build themselves around an "identity" to be pretty insufferable. Mainly because they end up building these echo chambers around themselves because everybody they interact with shares that "identity." I've never known a goth whose friends weren't 95% goths, for example.
Well I was a late hippie but I remember talking about politics and music all the time and never talking about how hippie I was. Goth and punk came after I had tuned out of youth movement and I was listening to classical and ambient. I know a lot of ex-punk and ex-goths and they seem to have come out intact. I was psychedelia, which was about finding meaning (we read books); punk was the opposite, "life is stupid." I could not be part of it and the music didn't do anything for me.
Yeah people like to hang out with their self-affirming enclaves and one reason I feel to be such an ill fit in this world is that I never liked that. Gay culture got old immediately, hippie was already on its way out by the time I adopted it and though I kept the long hair a few years the culture was gone. When I came out of the marijuana haze the kids were all going for MBAs.
But I have never seen one as compulsively conformist as "trans." It's like you have to check in every day to keep up with what words and phrases to use and which are now anathema. And they're wearing out "transphobic" really fast.
"One notable feature of trans and non-binary people is the sheer amount of headspace they devote to whether they're being perceived in the 'right' way. It's actually kind of sad to watch."
>>> I hadn't thought about it in this way. *Everybody* seeks approval about themselves, right? But to make a whole career outta it? Yeah, that really *is* pretty sad.
>>> And I can see what You mean about people forming group identities like that. I might-a been like that myself, but that I was a something of a misfit and never happened on one.
There's one place where I would like to see pronouns go away completely: French! and I'll bet students of other Romance languages feel the same, because most of them have genderized nouns and adhere to the rule that if it's mixed company you use the male plural form. Gendered nouns are a *huge pain in the ass* to deal with, because not only do you have to remember the gender of everything, but adjectives are also genderized as are any form of past tense utilizing etre (to be) rather than avoir (to have). Adjectives and etre past tense also has to reflect plural or singluar forms of the verb which the avoir versions do not. De-genderizing French wouldn't eliminate the pluralizing problem but it would go a long way in making it easier to not sound like an idiot when speaking the language because you forgot or had to guess what the gender is of a noun you've never used before.
Oh, you would LOVE Russian. First foreign language I learned sp I could write to my grandmother .. six cases, nouns are masc/fem/neut/plural, yup plural in the singular like "pants." I love systematic shit and I read ahead in the book and at 13 I could *speak Russian* ... wish I had kept it up.
Vietnamese doesn't even have plurals, pronouns, or adverbs and grammar is all SVO, totally inverted from European languages. [You] want eat what? [I] want eat noodle. You can tell it's a really really old language, stripped down almost as bare as Chinese.
I've considered once I'm done with French, which should be in about 70,000 years at the rate I'm going, I'll try a new language, and for kicks & giggles I'm thinking about Arabic. Not because I have any particular need for it, but because studying a language way different from yours supposedly helps to stave off Alzheimers et all. It won't matter if I can speak it well or not, whereas I want to get better at French seeing as I live in Canada, even if on the English side.
If I learned Russian I could become one of the most hated people in my 'hood. My little town on the west end of Toronto is home to one of the biggest Ukrainian ex-pat communities...
My brother from a different mother and father used learning languages for his mind. I'm what my daughter calls a serial hobbyist wanting to learn about nearly anything new to me (I'm still a little kid). Continuing to use your brain is a big deal.
Thai people speaking English often sound like they are speaking Pidgeon (non-essential words are dropped), a sentence can (often does) have more than one verb, adjectives come after nouns.
Personal pronouns are chosen by the relationship to the person you are speaking to (someone younger than me would call me pee, of possibly uncle lueng) and referring to themself they might use their nickname.
Particles are nearly always tacked onto the end of a sentence (polite standard: krap for a male speaker, ka for a female speaker) but others can be used to change the "feel" without a need to rephrase the sentence. This is where gendering comes in, and it is always biology based unless things have really changed.
I mention that because grammar checkers constantly tell me to add unnecessary (in my opinion) words. But then you probably notice that I stick (clarifiers) into my writing and tend to run on sentences to create a coherent thought in a sentence.
I am in awe of people who are multilingual with good grammar. On one of my trips to Japan at a hotel "American night" cocktails and finger food event there were two stunningly beautiful hostesses. I asked one how long she had lived in America. She said she had never been outside of Japan. I remarked, "You speak perfect midwestern American English without accent. Where did you learn?" Her reply, "Oh, you flatter me. I learned entirely in a university." I just don't have the knack for that.
With my damaged hearing I am hopeless with tonal languages like Thai or Chinese. I said that. No, you didn't. Changing the tone of a syllable can turn something polite into an insult.
I go for hours at a time, even days, without reminding myself that I'm male. It falls well below being gay, and not even that would be in the ten words I'd choose to describe myself. Which makes me really wonder why some people feel obliged to bring up their "gender identity" every ten or fifteen seconds.
All this talk of societal gender expectations also makes me wonder ... if a few tens of millions of people just emerged from suspended animation; it seems to me that they're like those stranded Japanese soldiers who thought the war was still on decades after it ended. The whole "Ward and June Cleaver" gender role thing seems to have faded out decades ago. I mean, find a picture of Benazir Bhutto when she was living in America, wearing jeans even as she met the requirements of Muslim modesty. Wanna talk about oppressive societal expectations? Behold her elegance while meeting them.
It hit me reading your article above ... what is this really about? Those societal impositions are largely imaginary. Women can stay at home and do the Küche-Kinder-Kirche thing if they want to or they can drive trucks or terrorize an office. Men can wear makeup, and many do. So let's stop honoring these claims of oppressive social expectation, they are bullshit.
Pronouns? Forget about "they," not gonna happen, full stop. But ... when we are in the presence of anyone of whatever gender or pretense of gender, there is only one pronoun, and that is "you." We don't even have thou/thee anymore, more's the pity. I live my life in Vietnamese which doesn't even have pronouns but need to choose from among dozens of substitutes when I talk to someone, though at my age I can safely use "em" with just about everyone.
But the whole controversy is over the third person, how we refer to people *when they aren't even around to hear it*! JFC! And then it hit me that what is really underlying all this gender fad horseshit is not some social revelation or liberation, it's just plain self-consciousness. Anyone in the "trans" camp who isn't actually gender dysphoric is piggybacking to feel important, to get special attention. While most reviled minorities just want to be left alone, these minorities have long lists of demands for the rest of us to follow: "cis," "they," just for starters. They do NOT want to be left alone, they want each of us to be deeply involved with and attentive to each of them. Let me give the briefest and most succinct possible answer:
No.
Genuinely dysphoric people deserve our respect and understanding, at least the attempt. Non-dysphorics claiming the same don't deserve those, and "non-binary" is just an insult to our intelligence. Kicking a door that isn't locked. Don't want to conform to societal pressures (that don't really exist anymore)? Then don't. But anyone who mentions "my gender identity" several times per minute is going to find himself talking to air.
Would you want to work with this girl? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFjUjSJplfs&t=2s Getting harangued every day? Exploding in rage and tears?
I've never met a "nonbinary" person face to face, the fad began after I left and Vietnamese don't do that stuff. But nearly every one I have encountered online or heard about sounds like a total pain in the ass.
Goths and hippies didn't turn every conversation around to being goths and hippies.
"I go for hours at a time, even days, without reminding myself that I'm male"
Haha, right?! One notable feature of trans and non-binary people is the sheer amount of headspace they devote to whether they're being perceived in the "right" way. It's actually kind of sad to watch. I see kids on YouTube consumed by whether they have enough facial hair or whether their behaviour "masculine" enough. Spending hours on their makeup and obsessing about their weight or their breasts.
In any other circumstances, we'd have no problem recognising this insecure, unhealthy behaviour for what it is. But when it's a trans person, we're supposed to believe all that insecurity is #stunningandbrave.
Have to disagree with you about goths and hippies turning conversations to being goths and hippies though. I consistently find people who build themselves around an "identity" to be pretty insufferable. Mainly because they end up building these echo chambers around themselves because everybody they interact with shares that "identity." I've never known a goth whose friends weren't 95% goths, for example.
Well I was a late hippie but I remember talking about politics and music all the time and never talking about how hippie I was. Goth and punk came after I had tuned out of youth movement and I was listening to classical and ambient. I know a lot of ex-punk and ex-goths and they seem to have come out intact. I was psychedelia, which was about finding meaning (we read books); punk was the opposite, "life is stupid." I could not be part of it and the music didn't do anything for me.
This, on the other hand, seems to be the quintessential "trans": https://medium.com/prismnpen/trans-reality-this-will-piss-you-off-5e45cad585ad
Can you believe Medium publishes stuff like that?
Yeah people like to hang out with their self-affirming enclaves and one reason I feel to be such an ill fit in this world is that I never liked that. Gay culture got old immediately, hippie was already on its way out by the time I adopted it and though I kept the long hair a few years the culture was gone. When I came out of the marijuana haze the kids were all going for MBAs.
But I have never seen one as compulsively conformist as "trans." It's like you have to check in every day to keep up with what words and phrases to use and which are now anathema. And they're wearing out "transphobic" really fast.
"One notable feature of trans and non-binary people is the sheer amount of headspace they devote to whether they're being perceived in the 'right' way. It's actually kind of sad to watch."
>>> I hadn't thought about it in this way. *Everybody* seeks approval about themselves, right? But to make a whole career outta it? Yeah, that really *is* pretty sad.
>>> And I can see what You mean about people forming group identities like that. I might-a been like that myself, but that I was a something of a misfit and never happened on one.
There's one place where I would like to see pronouns go away completely: French! and I'll bet students of other Romance languages feel the same, because most of them have genderized nouns and adhere to the rule that if it's mixed company you use the male plural form. Gendered nouns are a *huge pain in the ass* to deal with, because not only do you have to remember the gender of everything, but adjectives are also genderized as are any form of past tense utilizing etre (to be) rather than avoir (to have). Adjectives and etre past tense also has to reflect plural or singluar forms of the verb which the avoir versions do not. De-genderizing French wouldn't eliminate the pluralizing problem but it would go a long way in making it easier to not sound like an idiot when speaking the language because you forgot or had to guess what the gender is of a noun you've never used before.
Oh, you would LOVE Russian. First foreign language I learned sp I could write to my grandmother .. six cases, nouns are masc/fem/neut/plural, yup plural in the singular like "pants." I love systematic shit and I read ahead in the book and at 13 I could *speak Russian* ... wish I had kept it up.
Vietnamese doesn't even have plurals, pronouns, or adverbs and grammar is all SVO, totally inverted from European languages. [You] want eat what? [I] want eat noodle. You can tell it's a really really old language, stripped down almost as bare as Chinese.
I've considered once I'm done with French, which should be in about 70,000 years at the rate I'm going, I'll try a new language, and for kicks & giggles I'm thinking about Arabic. Not because I have any particular need for it, but because studying a language way different from yours supposedly helps to stave off Alzheimers et all. It won't matter if I can speak it well or not, whereas I want to get better at French seeing as I live in Canada, even if on the English side.
If I learned Russian I could become one of the most hated people in my 'hood. My little town on the west end of Toronto is home to one of the biggest Ukrainian ex-pat communities...
My brother from a different mother and father used learning languages for his mind. I'm what my daughter calls a serial hobbyist wanting to learn about nearly anything new to me (I'm still a little kid). Continuing to use your brain is a big deal.
Thai people speaking English often sound like they are speaking Pidgeon (non-essential words are dropped), a sentence can (often does) have more than one verb, adjectives come after nouns.
Personal pronouns are chosen by the relationship to the person you are speaking to (someone younger than me would call me pee, of possibly uncle lueng) and referring to themself they might use their nickname.
Particles are nearly always tacked onto the end of a sentence (polite standard: krap for a male speaker, ka for a female speaker) but others can be used to change the "feel" without a need to rephrase the sentence. This is where gendering comes in, and it is always biology based unless things have really changed.
I mention that because grammar checkers constantly tell me to add unnecessary (in my opinion) words. But then you probably notice that I stick (clarifiers) into my writing and tend to run on sentences to create a coherent thought in a sentence.
I am in awe of people who are multilingual with good grammar. On one of my trips to Japan at a hotel "American night" cocktails and finger food event there were two stunningly beautiful hostesses. I asked one how long she had lived in America. She said she had never been outside of Japan. I remarked, "You speak perfect midwestern American English without accent. Where did you learn?" Her reply, "Oh, you flatter me. I learned entirely in a university." I just don't have the knack for that.
With my damaged hearing I am hopeless with tonal languages like Thai or Chinese. I said that. No, you didn't. Changing the tone of a syllable can turn something polite into an insult.