Yep, it's also true for men. But it's hard to argue that the expectations and pressures placed on women aren't more restrictive in general. That's not to say that women can't still choose to ignore them, just that they have more to ignore. And yes, there are definitely pressures and expectations on men too. Theyβ¦
Yep, it's also true for men. But it's hard to argue that the expectations and pressures placed on women aren't more restrictive in general. That's not to say that women can't still choose to ignore them, just that they have more to ignore. And yes, there are definitely pressures and expectations on men too. They just aren't as limiting in most cases.
"I believe this contradicts the previous two sentences about it not being possible for You to control Your views about this"
Yeah, that should have been: "I try my best to *treat* everybody as an individual." Not *see* everybody as an individual. I see how that was confusing.π
I just meant that if I look at a woman, it's impossible for me not to see a woman. I can't make myself see a man or a "them" just because they tell me what their pronouns are. But as much as possible, I try not to let that influence how I think of or treat that person. I certainly can't do this perfectly, there are a thousand little bits of unconscious bias and social programming that affect my behaviour. But I do what I can as far as conscious behaviour goes.
The key flaw with the concept of "non-binary" is the idea that biases are based on how you "identify" instead of how you're perceived. It's the same mistake people make when they say they're "assigned" a sex at birth, rather than having their sex observed. You are what you are. You can't "identify" your way out of that. But you can choose your behaviour.
I think Laurel and I would agree that there should be as little pressure for men and women to behave in certain ways as possible. We'd all be happier without those pressures and expectations. I just don't see how changing our pronouns gets us there.
"A woman can wear pants a lot more easily than a man can wear a dress."
Haha, true. But I'm thinking beynd fashion options.
Men can apply for pretty much any job (with the exeption of nursing or being a nanny I guess), particularly well paying jobs, and be taken seriously. Nobody will think it's novel or weird or some kind of "feminist" statement that he's applying.
There's infinitely less pressure on men to consider their looks. Not that being good-looking is irrelevant for men, but it accounts for so much less of our "worth." It's not normalised that I should paint my face every single day to be considered acceptable for public consumption. I can wear pretty much whatever clothing I want (dresses aside) without being told I'm "flaunting" my body. I don't have to think about "covering up," or being considered (and treated like) a slut if I *don't* cover up.
Boys are almost universally given more freedom by their parents when they're growing up (which is a significant factor in developing confidence). No stereotypically over-protective dads threatening to pulverise any girl who touches his son. No lectures about maintaining his "virtue." At least for heterosexual men, there's no issue with expressing our sexuality at all really.
Even seemingly little things, like being treated as if you're too weak or fragile to handle yourself, must be endlessly frustrating when multiplied by a million different interactions.
As a man myself, I'm well aware that being a man isn't all toxic masculinity and patriarchy parties. I think the pressures men face are enormously under-recognised and under-empathised with by society today. Nor am I blind to the enormous advantages that come from being an attractive woman (although, again, that attractiveness brings downsides). But I think that for the average person, in many of the most important, material aspects of life, it's easier to move around as a man.
I just think they're restricted in different ways. Women are "allowed" more access to the softer side of the emotinal range. Men, more access to the more dominant, aggressive side. this suits some men and doesn't suit others. The same for women.
Yeah. OTOH, when men express emotions of dominance and aggressiveness, they're *castigated* because-a it. "Toxic masculinity." You ever heard-a "toxic femininity?" I haven't.
And the caring emotions women are famous for are sometimes DISrespected in a man. But not always, tho, so there is that.
Actual metrics in double-blind and peer-reviewed studies show that women are every bit as aggressive as men on average, and men are every bit as social as women. I didn't believe it either but the methods were open for stringent review.
One observation most consistent across decades in debates both F2F and in print: women seem much more inclined to treat disagreement, however polite, as attack.
That's interesting. And it doesn't surprise me how people treat disagreements different.
But that implies, AFAIK, that expression of aggressiveness amongst females is suppressed by social constructs, right? You're not saying when generally *express* aggressiveness as much as men, in these peer-reviewed studies.
Still makes me wonder why I've never heard-a toxic femininity.
I think it must be exhausting for teenage boys and men to constantly be subjected to 'gay policing': Having to watch everything you say, do, wear, or consume [media] because it/YOU might be 'gay'. Michael Kimmel describes it in his book Guyland. I know one of the reasons why we see vaginas in non-porn movies but very rarely dicks is because male viewers will be highly discomfited if they see a dick in a non-porn movie) and worry that they're gay, that someone saw them watching the scene and suspect the watcher might be gay. Seriously? You don't know what's coming, you see a sex scene with a dick in it, even just a flaccid one, and you think you're gay for watching it? Or that the guy next to you might be gay because he didn't immediately look away like women do at the Braveheart evisceration scene?
Then there's all the emotional stuffing and burying that has to be done to not be 'unmanly' (i.e., 'womanly'), i.e., don't you DARE try to talk about it with your friends, because they're all too busy pretending everything's fine, nothing matters, nothing ever hurts you. So men bury their pain with drugs and alcohol and toxic masculinity, because they're no more allowed to be their true selves than women. Or non-binary whatevers.
"I think it must be exhausting for teenage boys and men to constantly be subjected to 'gay policing': Having to watch everything you say, do, wear, or consume [media] because it/YOU might be 'gay'."
Hmm, I imporant to distinguish between gendered expectations and just blatant homophobia though. Yes, men are less "free" to express emption and affection with each other, that's a gender thing. But if you're "worried" that you're gay because you saw a penis in a non-porn context, a) you're a homophobe and b) you're probably gay.
"The key flaw with the concept of "non-binary" is the idea that biases are based on how you "identify" instead of how you're perceived."
Disagree. The flaws are twofold.
1) male and female are not social constructs, they are fundamental to the higher phyla of both plant and animal kingdoms, deeply embedded in language and culture. They *are* binary, and intermediate sex is a fantasy.
2) the term itself is a deliberate insult to the majority who correctly see male and female as binary, implying that we are in some way simpleminded, incapable of nuance and obedient to a society that strives to fit people into little boxes.
And the desperation to believe; calling out the few viable developmental defects as other genders, never mind how rare they are.
"They *are* binary, and intermediate gender is a fantasy."
Say it with me Chris; "Male and female" refer to sex, not gender. Yes, there is no intermediate *sex* I'm not even sure how many non-binary people are claiming that there is. They're just redefining "man" and "woman" to be exclusively about gender expression, and saying that they aren't either because they don't "identify"with the gender stereotypes related to men and women.
Don't get me wrong, I think this is nonsensical on any number of levels, but we should represent their position accurately.
As for non binary being a "deliberate insult," I don't think I'll ever understand why you find this concept quite as offensive as you do or seem to feel so personally implicated by it. If we hadn't arrived at the ridiculous position where I might actually face some kind of legal or disciplinary action for refusing to call somebody "they," I wouldn't care even a little bit if they did so amongst themselves or if they shunned me because I refused to play along.
In fact, I'd be quite happy to be shunned by people who are so deeply confused and utterly self-absorbed.
I forgot, sorry; all my life I have used "psychological/biological gender" for the distinction you named and "sex" for the horizontal hokey-pokey and only rarely used "sex" for biological gender. And you are the first, and so far the only one, to correct me on that. But I'm not looking for an argument nor is this the hill I want to die on, so, "okay."
But for the record, I have seen claims that a man who put on a dress fifteen minutes ago and sniffs "I'm a woman now" really is one and only by pressing really hard can you get the one making the claim to concede that he doesn't have a uterus.
But you answered your own puzzlement. I find the concept as offensive as I do precisely because people can be fired for using correct English, counselors can be fired for telling a teenage girl that she isn't "trans" even if it's the fashion right now, teachers being fired ... well. And then there is "they" and all the people telling me garbage about how it's been around since the 17th, the 14th, even the 11th century. And then there is the fact that gender roles (in your preferred sense) are so variable even within families to say nothing of across millennia and continents.
Yes I find it offensive af and, to condense all the above, because it is absurd, and such an enthusiastically embraced absurdity.
Not to mention, the NB people are the nastiest and most vicious people I have ever run into, and that includes right wing trolls.
Glad to end on an agreement, as in your last paragraph. Back on Medium, I spent an hour seeking and blocking everyone who might tempt me to write anything about this nonsense.
I am a programmer but I do technical writing in almost every job since most programmers can't write at all, and I have dreaded being asked to rewrite to gender neutrality. I would find ways to circumvent the generic he, which I have no problem with, but if ordered to use "they" I would have to quit.
"all my life I have used "psychological/biological gender" for the distinction you named and "sex" for the horizontal hokey-pokey and only rarely used "sex" for biological gender."
To be fair, I think this is one of the many problems with conversations about this stuff. You're far from alone in having grown up treating sex and gender as synonyms. And the fact that they're not rarely mattered because we didn't spend so much time talking to people who nitpicked the concepts to validate their neuroses.
I push for precision not out of pedantry, but beacuse this innacuracy allows disingenuous people to more easily twist your words or claim "you just don't get it."
It's part of using language as weapon. To distinguish biological and psychological notions of gender is to insist that there is a need to do so. Just as with using "cis" when the topic is nowhere near "gender identity," the intention is to promote the false notion that humanity is bifurcated into the gender-congruent and incongruent. In real life of course gender dysphoria, itself a pretense that the old term, ending with "disorder," was inaccurate, is very rare, one out of tens of thousands of births, but as with immediate transitioning. the goal is to swell the ranks.
You don't even need to be dysphoric; just make the claim. Unhappy at home or school? Maybe you're "trans." Doesn't solve a thing but now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rr63Bexo8z8.
There's a lot of this going on, not just in "trans," but the activists are making the most strident demands, requiring us to pay special attention to them and memorize their myriad gender classifications and their damned pronouns.
GW Bush would use the word "believe" to lie on the podium; he could claim to believe the most implausible ideas but the word removed him from dishonesty.
But among the "trans" activists this is a power play. By changing the terms they can claim to speak for millions of people when in reality there are probably fewer than 10,000 gender dysphoric people in America; not enough to change the language over, and they aren't the ones demanding that.
Because unlike the activists, they just want to be left alone.
When did the idea that biological sex and gender are two different things. I'm old enough to have spent most of my life where that was not a concept.
There have always been effeminate men and masculine women, having nothing to do with sexuality. They were still men and women. It might be implicit that their thought processes aligned with those masculine/feminine traits but that changing gender was not a thing.
One man in 30,000, one woman in 100,000 is gender dysphoric. That would be about 5000 people nationwide. OK, giving some wiggle because the scientific criteria are very strict, let's allow the number to be ten times that. Around 50,000.
Right now the activists are claiming that something like 500-1000 the scientific number are "trans."
NUH-uh.
And they bare their teeth and snarl in rage at any suggestion that this is a medical condition. They assert that "trans" is part of normal human variation, like homosexuality and lefthandedness. Despite the fact that many dysphoric people feel excruciatingly uncomfortable in their own skins and that a lot of men (trigger alert) yearn to be castrated, the thought of which for other men, even the toughest men, evokes horror.
This is as much a disorder as Body Integrity Identity Disorder, those who want healthy limbs amputated. The latter is fortunately less common, but some of these people will lay a leg across the tracks before an oncoming train.
We should be compassionate and understanding as we can for those who are suffering from GID, but for godssake, we should not be encouraging people who don't have it ... to believe they do.
I'm left to wonder what the honest number would be without an internet. I often use the phrase "in real life" because I am more and more inclined to think it spreads ideas that would never spread without it. The things that metastasize it like a cancer are the desire to be seen as "a good person" through virtue signaling and wanting to be in the right clique like a bunch of high schoolers.
In the aviation industry, English is the mandatory language for technical manuals, change bulletins, etc. The fallout was π΄π±π¦π€πͺπ’π English where some words were not used because they could lead to a technical misunderstanding. Fortunately, technical writing in that industry is about things, rather than people where personal pronouns have no place so I wouldn't think it will become an issue.
Even in Japan, where people tend to be very insular about everything Japanese, almost all professionals read English; technicians, scientists, doctors. They recognize that their own language is ill-suited for discussion of logical topics, more suited to matters of deference (how low should I bow) than science.
Speaking of science, "The Missmeasure of Man" has shown me that I have been overly generous in my thoughts on scientists. I've thought that non-scientists who chant the word science are typically talking about their opinions on the meaning of data without much science where the opinion conforms to their world view. It turns out that scientists can be just as guilty. The crap that has been considered to be legitimate science is amazing, leading to the thought that it is not just a thing of the past as if we are a finished product. Thanks again for mentioning that book.
I have always been skeptical of a single number (IQ) saying too much about someone. Even in my youth when test results included breakouts of things like abstract reasoning, spatial relations, etc. seemed more useful in determining my strengths and weaknesses that I needed to work on, rather than something damning. That does not mean that I think IQ is completely meaningless, but the world is full of people who do just fine without high IQs.
"The Bell Curve" fished me in a bit in that they seemed to use sound methods (multiple regression) but I am not a statistician and the correlation factors they gave don't exactly relate to how I judged the quality of testing (Cp or Cpk) where 3 sigma (99.7% confidence) was required for flight critical functions. Obviously, "things" can have tight enough standard deviations for that where highly variable "humans" have a much broader bell curve. Until I read the book, I didn't realize what a low standard they used to draw their conclusions. Noise that would get you thrown out of an engineering review if you presented something that weak. "Science."
One of the biggest disappointments of my life was learning that intelligent people are every bit as prejudiced and bigoted as anyone else. If anything they have greater capacity to rationalize their prejudices.
On point one, a matter of biological fact: Intersex is rare in humans but not unknown, and a lot less rare than you might want to think. Because attitudes are changing, it may become less rare in years to come. In the past, medical staff worked hard to assign intersex babies to the "correct" gender and now they don't worry so much.
You can dismiss this as a "developmental defect" but it's rather too frequently viable for that to be scientifically accepted. Intersex in other species is also not as unusual as you seem to believe. Many plant species - some of them very much part of the "higher phyla" - have individual plants that are both male & female; in fact the majority of plants are like this.
Fungi are a whole different game: I learned about a slime mould (which may or may not be fungi, depending on who you believe!) that lived in a hay field I managed that had, I'm told, 16 different sexual forms & could only reproduce if all 16 were represented in a single host. Now that's a complicated sex life... And fungi constitute a huge proportion of the living creatures on earth.
On point 2: It's becoming more common for people to honestly not give a flying f where anyone else puts themselves on the continuum between male & female, or why. That really annoys the militant trans folk - I recommend it as an attitude for that reason if no other. Personally I see it as none of my business, and I'm supremely uninterested.
The wish to impose clear binary distinctions as absolute truth is a sad one, when applied to the real world. They are rare enough in philosophy and almost never useful in reality except as approximate generalisations. There are always exceptions and counterexamples.
"It's becoming more common for people to honestly not give a flying f where anyone else puts themselves on the continuum between male & female, or why. That really annoys the militant trans folk - I recommend it as an attitude for that reason if no other. Personally I see it as none of my business, and I'm supremely uninterested."
Total agreement.
Sorry if I skipped over the complexity of plant uh sexes but I didn't want to get into the weeds ... of pistillate and staminate. Of course I know that some angiosperms can bear flowers of both sexes and others like marijuana have distinctly sexed plants.
But intersex has pretty much no intersection with the "non-binary" movement except in the more dishonest arguments about it.
Anyone who has done anything electrical, plumbing, mechanical, etc., has used the word gender and gender changer for the binary physical attributes of connectors. Yes, they are things, but a human/animal sex attribute is understood even by children. This is probably why there is resistance to the separation of gender and sex which has a universal, world-wide understanding.
"You are what you are. You can't "identify" your way out of that."
>>> I thought that was put pretty funny.
"But you can choose your behaviour. I think Laurel and I would agree..."
>>> Yup, and I think You both *would* agree.
"We'd all be happier without those pressures and expectations."
>>> Weeeel, I find that's a tough one. I was just raised with pressures and expectations. Just generally to "do good." Treating people. Grades. Jobs. Marriage. Yeah, there's been times when that's been a bit overly uncomfortable. To minimize it: Sometimes *absolutely crushed* by the pressures and expectations. But it also made me resilient in times when I needed to be, so there is that.
"I was just raised with pressures and expectations. Just generally to "do good." Treating people. Grades. Jobs. Marriage."
Sure, but pretty much everybody deals with these pressures. These aren't gendered pressures in 2022. I'm not saying that we should live without *any kind* of pressure, that's impossible. And as you say, it builds strength and resilience.
But some pressures, particularly those placed on women, actually make it harder to build that strength and resiilience, because it makes it harder to fully explore and express your autonomy.
"True. Converse true also"
Yep, it's also true for men. But it's hard to argue that the expectations and pressures placed on women aren't more restrictive in general. That's not to say that women can't still choose to ignore them, just that they have more to ignore. And yes, there are definitely pressures and expectations on men too. They just aren't as limiting in most cases.
"I believe this contradicts the previous two sentences about it not being possible for You to control Your views about this"
Yeah, that should have been: "I try my best to *treat* everybody as an individual." Not *see* everybody as an individual. I see how that was confusing.π
I just meant that if I look at a woman, it's impossible for me not to see a woman. I can't make myself see a man or a "them" just because they tell me what their pronouns are. But as much as possible, I try not to let that influence how I think of or treat that person. I certainly can't do this perfectly, there are a thousand little bits of unconscious bias and social programming that affect my behaviour. But I do what I can as far as conscious behaviour goes.
The key flaw with the concept of "non-binary" is the idea that biases are based on how you "identify" instead of how you're perceived. It's the same mistake people make when they say they're "assigned" a sex at birth, rather than having their sex observed. You are what you are. You can't "identify" your way out of that. But you can choose your behaviour.
I think Laurel and I would agree that there should be as little pressure for men and women to behave in certain ways as possible. We'd all be happier without those pressures and expectations. I just don't see how changing our pronouns gets us there.
"But it's hard to argue that the expectations and pressures placed on women aren't more restrictive in general."
A woman can wear pants a lot more easily than a man can wear a dress.
"A woman can wear pants a lot more easily than a man can wear a dress."
Haha, true. But I'm thinking beynd fashion options.
Men can apply for pretty much any job (with the exeption of nursing or being a nanny I guess), particularly well paying jobs, and be taken seriously. Nobody will think it's novel or weird or some kind of "feminist" statement that he's applying.
There's infinitely less pressure on men to consider their looks. Not that being good-looking is irrelevant for men, but it accounts for so much less of our "worth." It's not normalised that I should paint my face every single day to be considered acceptable for public consumption. I can wear pretty much whatever clothing I want (dresses aside) without being told I'm "flaunting" my body. I don't have to think about "covering up," or being considered (and treated like) a slut if I *don't* cover up.
Boys are almost universally given more freedom by their parents when they're growing up (which is a significant factor in developing confidence). No stereotypically over-protective dads threatening to pulverise any girl who touches his son. No lectures about maintaining his "virtue." At least for heterosexual men, there's no issue with expressing our sexuality at all really.
Even seemingly little things, like being treated as if you're too weak or fragile to handle yourself, must be endlessly frustrating when multiplied by a million different interactions.
As a man myself, I'm well aware that being a man isn't all toxic masculinity and patriarchy parties. I think the pressures men face are enormously under-recognised and under-empathised with by society today. Nor am I blind to the enormous advantages that come from being an attractive woman (although, again, that attractiveness brings downsides). But I think that for the average person, in many of the most important, material aspects of life, it's easier to move around as a man.
A tall and good-looking man will be hired despite being much less qualified, though I suppose there is an analogy for women. And *smile*
I was gonna say earlier, but decided not to:
A woman is less restricted emotionally than a man is, IMO.
I just think they're restricted in different ways. Women are "allowed" more access to the softer side of the emotinal range. Men, more access to the more dominant, aggressive side. this suits some men and doesn't suit others. The same for women.
Yeah. OTOH, when men express emotions of dominance and aggressiveness, they're *castigated* because-a it. "Toxic masculinity." You ever heard-a "toxic femininity?" I haven't.
And the caring emotions women are famous for are sometimes DISrespected in a man. But not always, tho, so there is that.
Actual metrics in double-blind and peer-reviewed studies show that women are every bit as aggressive as men on average, and men are every bit as social as women. I didn't believe it either but the methods were open for stringent review.
One observation most consistent across decades in debates both F2F and in print: women seem much more inclined to treat disagreement, however polite, as attack.
That's interesting. And it doesn't surprise me how people treat disagreements different.
But that implies, AFAIK, that expression of aggressiveness amongst females is suppressed by social constructs, right? You're not saying when generally *express* aggressiveness as much as men, in these peer-reviewed studies.
Still makes me wonder why I've never heard-a toxic femininity.
I think it must be exhausting for teenage boys and men to constantly be subjected to 'gay policing': Having to watch everything you say, do, wear, or consume [media] because it/YOU might be 'gay'. Michael Kimmel describes it in his book Guyland. I know one of the reasons why we see vaginas in non-porn movies but very rarely dicks is because male viewers will be highly discomfited if they see a dick in a non-porn movie) and worry that they're gay, that someone saw them watching the scene and suspect the watcher might be gay. Seriously? You don't know what's coming, you see a sex scene with a dick in it, even just a flaccid one, and you think you're gay for watching it? Or that the guy next to you might be gay because he didn't immediately look away like women do at the Braveheart evisceration scene?
Then there's all the emotional stuffing and burying that has to be done to not be 'unmanly' (i.e., 'womanly'), i.e., don't you DARE try to talk about it with your friends, because they're all too busy pretending everything's fine, nothing matters, nothing ever hurts you. So men bury their pain with drugs and alcohol and toxic masculinity, because they're no more allowed to be their true selves than women. Or non-binary whatevers.
"I think it must be exhausting for teenage boys and men to constantly be subjected to 'gay policing': Having to watch everything you say, do, wear, or consume [media] because it/YOU might be 'gay'."
Hmm, I imporant to distinguish between gendered expectations and just blatant homophobia though. Yes, men are less "free" to express emption and affection with each other, that's a gender thing. But if you're "worried" that you're gay because you saw a penis in a non-porn context, a) you're a homophobe and b) you're probably gay.
My observation is most are a), but I've not taken a poll or anything :)
I use βM.β like the French do, for Monsieur but ALSO for Madam and Mademoiselle EQUALLY. Thatβs just me.
TY for Your reply, M. Chardenet.
I'm afraid You have the right of it.
Merci beaucoup, M. T! :)
"The key flaw with the concept of "non-binary" is the idea that biases are based on how you "identify" instead of how you're perceived."
Disagree. The flaws are twofold.
1) male and female are not social constructs, they are fundamental to the higher phyla of both plant and animal kingdoms, deeply embedded in language and culture. They *are* binary, and intermediate sex is a fantasy.
2) the term itself is a deliberate insult to the majority who correctly see male and female as binary, implying that we are in some way simpleminded, incapable of nuance and obedient to a society that strives to fit people into little boxes.
And the desperation to believe; calling out the few viable developmental defects as other genders, never mind how rare they are.
"They *are* binary, and intermediate gender is a fantasy."
Say it with me Chris; "Male and female" refer to sex, not gender. Yes, there is no intermediate *sex* I'm not even sure how many non-binary people are claiming that there is. They're just redefining "man" and "woman" to be exclusively about gender expression, and saying that they aren't either because they don't "identify"with the gender stereotypes related to men and women.
Don't get me wrong, I think this is nonsensical on any number of levels, but we should represent their position accurately.
As for non binary being a "deliberate insult," I don't think I'll ever understand why you find this concept quite as offensive as you do or seem to feel so personally implicated by it. If we hadn't arrived at the ridiculous position where I might actually face some kind of legal or disciplinary action for refusing to call somebody "they," I wouldn't care even a little bit if they did so amongst themselves or if they shunned me because I refused to play along.
In fact, I'd be quite happy to be shunned by people who are so deeply confused and utterly self-absorbed.
I forgot, sorry; all my life I have used "psychological/biological gender" for the distinction you named and "sex" for the horizontal hokey-pokey and only rarely used "sex" for biological gender. And you are the first, and so far the only one, to correct me on that. But I'm not looking for an argument nor is this the hill I want to die on, so, "okay."
But for the record, I have seen claims that a man who put on a dress fifteen minutes ago and sniffs "I'm a woman now" really is one and only by pressing really hard can you get the one making the claim to concede that he doesn't have a uterus.
But you answered your own puzzlement. I find the concept as offensive as I do precisely because people can be fired for using correct English, counselors can be fired for telling a teenage girl that she isn't "trans" even if it's the fashion right now, teachers being fired ... well. And then there is "they" and all the people telling me garbage about how it's been around since the 17th, the 14th, even the 11th century. And then there is the fact that gender roles (in your preferred sense) are so variable even within families to say nothing of across millennia and continents.
Yes I find it offensive af and, to condense all the above, because it is absurd, and such an enthusiastically embraced absurdity.
Not to mention, the NB people are the nastiest and most vicious people I have ever run into, and that includes right wing trolls.
Glad to end on an agreement, as in your last paragraph. Back on Medium, I spent an hour seeking and blocking everyone who might tempt me to write anything about this nonsense.
I am a programmer but I do technical writing in almost every job since most programmers can't write at all, and I have dreaded being asked to rewrite to gender neutrality. I would find ways to circumvent the generic he, which I have no problem with, but if ordered to use "they" I would have to quit.
"all my life I have used "psychological/biological gender" for the distinction you named and "sex" for the horizontal hokey-pokey and only rarely used "sex" for biological gender."
To be fair, I think this is one of the many problems with conversations about this stuff. You're far from alone in having grown up treating sex and gender as synonyms. And the fact that they're not rarely mattered because we didn't spend so much time talking to people who nitpicked the concepts to validate their neuroses.
I push for precision not out of pedantry, but beacuse this innacuracy allows disingenuous people to more easily twist your words or claim "you just don't get it."
It's part of using language as weapon. To distinguish biological and psychological notions of gender is to insist that there is a need to do so. Just as with using "cis" when the topic is nowhere near "gender identity," the intention is to promote the false notion that humanity is bifurcated into the gender-congruent and incongruent. In real life of course gender dysphoria, itself a pretense that the old term, ending with "disorder," was inaccurate, is very rare, one out of tens of thousands of births, but as with immediate transitioning. the goal is to swell the ranks.
You don't even need to be dysphoric; just make the claim. Unhappy at home or school? Maybe you're "trans." Doesn't solve a thing but now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rr63Bexo8z8.
There's a lot of this going on, not just in "trans," but the activists are making the most strident demands, requiring us to pay special attention to them and memorize their myriad gender classifications and their damned pronouns.
GW Bush would use the word "believe" to lie on the podium; he could claim to believe the most implausible ideas but the word removed him from dishonesty.
The study of manipulation of language to regulate thought predates Orwell and Newspeak; the study of this relationship is called the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/sapir-whorf-hypothesis
But among the "trans" activists this is a power play. By changing the terms they can claim to speak for millions of people when in reality there are probably fewer than 10,000 gender dysphoric people in America; not enough to change the language over, and they aren't the ones demanding that.
Because unlike the activists, they just want to be left alone.
When did the idea that biological sex and gender are two different things. I'm old enough to have spent most of my life where that was not a concept.
There have always been effeminate men and masculine women, having nothing to do with sexuality. They were still men and women. It might be implicit that their thought processes aligned with those masculine/feminine traits but that changing gender was not a thing.
One man in 30,000, one woman in 100,000 is gender dysphoric. That would be about 5000 people nationwide. OK, giving some wiggle because the scientific criteria are very strict, let's allow the number to be ten times that. Around 50,000.
Right now the activists are claiming that something like 500-1000 the scientific number are "trans."
NUH-uh.
And they bare their teeth and snarl in rage at any suggestion that this is a medical condition. They assert that "trans" is part of normal human variation, like homosexuality and lefthandedness. Despite the fact that many dysphoric people feel excruciatingly uncomfortable in their own skins and that a lot of men (trigger alert) yearn to be castrated, the thought of which for other men, even the toughest men, evokes horror.
This is as much a disorder as Body Integrity Identity Disorder, those who want healthy limbs amputated. The latter is fortunately less common, but some of these people will lay a leg across the tracks before an oncoming train.
We should be compassionate and understanding as we can for those who are suffering from GID, but for godssake, we should not be encouraging people who don't have it ... to believe they do.
I'm left to wonder what the honest number would be without an internet. I often use the phrase "in real life" because I am more and more inclined to think it spreads ideas that would never spread without it. The things that metastasize it like a cancer are the desire to be seen as "a good person" through virtue signaling and wanting to be in the right clique like a bunch of high schoolers.
In the aviation industry, English is the mandatory language for technical manuals, change bulletins, etc. The fallout was π΄π±π¦π€πͺπ’π English where some words were not used because they could lead to a technical misunderstanding. Fortunately, technical writing in that industry is about things, rather than people where personal pronouns have no place so I wouldn't think it will become an issue.
Even in Japan, where people tend to be very insular about everything Japanese, almost all professionals read English; technicians, scientists, doctors. They recognize that their own language is ill-suited for discussion of logical topics, more suited to matters of deference (how low should I bow) than science.
Speaking of science, "The Missmeasure of Man" has shown me that I have been overly generous in my thoughts on scientists. I've thought that non-scientists who chant the word science are typically talking about their opinions on the meaning of data without much science where the opinion conforms to their world view. It turns out that scientists can be just as guilty. The crap that has been considered to be legitimate science is amazing, leading to the thought that it is not just a thing of the past as if we are a finished product. Thanks again for mentioning that book.
I have always been skeptical of a single number (IQ) saying too much about someone. Even in my youth when test results included breakouts of things like abstract reasoning, spatial relations, etc. seemed more useful in determining my strengths and weaknesses that I needed to work on, rather than something damning. That does not mean that I think IQ is completely meaningless, but the world is full of people who do just fine without high IQs.
"The Bell Curve" fished me in a bit in that they seemed to use sound methods (multiple regression) but I am not a statistician and the correlation factors they gave don't exactly relate to how I judged the quality of testing (Cp or Cpk) where 3 sigma (99.7% confidence) was required for flight critical functions. Obviously, "things" can have tight enough standard deviations for that where highly variable "humans" have a much broader bell curve. Until I read the book, I didn't realize what a low standard they used to draw their conclusions. Noise that would get you thrown out of an engineering review if you presented something that weak. "Science."
One of the biggest disappointments of my life was learning that intelligent people are every bit as prejudiced and bigoted as anyone else. If anything they have greater capacity to rationalize their prejudices.
On point one, a matter of biological fact: Intersex is rare in humans but not unknown, and a lot less rare than you might want to think. Because attitudes are changing, it may become less rare in years to come. In the past, medical staff worked hard to assign intersex babies to the "correct" gender and now they don't worry so much.
You can dismiss this as a "developmental defect" but it's rather too frequently viable for that to be scientifically accepted. Intersex in other species is also not as unusual as you seem to believe. Many plant species - some of them very much part of the "higher phyla" - have individual plants that are both male & female; in fact the majority of plants are like this.
Fungi are a whole different game: I learned about a slime mould (which may or may not be fungi, depending on who you believe!) that lived in a hay field I managed that had, I'm told, 16 different sexual forms & could only reproduce if all 16 were represented in a single host. Now that's a complicated sex life... And fungi constitute a huge proportion of the living creatures on earth.
On point 2: It's becoming more common for people to honestly not give a flying f where anyone else puts themselves on the continuum between male & female, or why. That really annoys the militant trans folk - I recommend it as an attitude for that reason if no other. Personally I see it as none of my business, and I'm supremely uninterested.
The wish to impose clear binary distinctions as absolute truth is a sad one, when applied to the real world. They are rare enough in philosophy and almost never useful in reality except as approximate generalisations. There are always exceptions and counterexamples.
"It's becoming more common for people to honestly not give a flying f where anyone else puts themselves on the continuum between male & female, or why. That really annoys the militant trans folk - I recommend it as an attitude for that reason if no other. Personally I see it as none of my business, and I'm supremely uninterested."
Total agreement.
Sorry if I skipped over the complexity of plant uh sexes but I didn't want to get into the weeds ... of pistillate and staminate. Of course I know that some angiosperms can bear flowers of both sexes and others like marijuana have distinctly sexed plants.
But intersex has pretty much no intersection with the "non-binary" movement except in the more dishonest arguments about it.
I think a lotta people are aware of intersex people. So, no, I don't agree that people wanna impose clear binary distinctions as absolute truth.
The problem comes when people don't wanna impose clear binary distinctions at all.
But if those clear binary distinctions aren't true, why would you want to impose them?
Generalisations are OK until you stumble across an exception. Isn't that the whole point of this discussion?
Real life is just complicated. Enjoy it. Play with it. Roll it about. It's what makes life fun.
I gave You a "like" because I agree:
"Real life is just complicated. Enjoy it. Play with it. Roll it about. It's what makes life fun."
Because the exception proves the rule. *Perfectly* clear binary distinctions aren't true. Clear binary distinctions exist.
Otherwise, a woman becomes incapable of defining what a women even is, right?
Anyone who has done anything electrical, plumbing, mechanical, etc., has used the word gender and gender changer for the binary physical attributes of connectors. Yes, they are things, but a human/animal sex attribute is understood even by children. This is probably why there is resistance to the separation of gender and sex which has a universal, world-wide understanding.
"You are what you are. You can't "identify" your way out of that."
>>> I thought that was put pretty funny.
"But you can choose your behaviour. I think Laurel and I would agree..."
>>> Yup, and I think You both *would* agree.
"We'd all be happier without those pressures and expectations."
>>> Weeeel, I find that's a tough one. I was just raised with pressures and expectations. Just generally to "do good." Treating people. Grades. Jobs. Marriage. Yeah, there's been times when that's been a bit overly uncomfortable. To minimize it: Sometimes *absolutely crushed* by the pressures and expectations. But it also made me resilient in times when I needed to be, so there is that.
"I was just raised with pressures and expectations. Just generally to "do good." Treating people. Grades. Jobs. Marriage."
Sure, but pretty much everybody deals with these pressures. These aren't gendered pressures in 2022. I'm not saying that we should live without *any kind* of pressure, that's impossible. And as you say, it builds strength and resilience.
But some pressures, particularly those placed on women, actually make it harder to build that strength and resiilience, because it makes it harder to fully explore and express your autonomy.
It depends on how You're raised, AFAIK, a lot more than what Your gender is.