"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 …
"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 𝘴𝘱𝘦𝘤𝘪𝘢𝘭 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.
"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 𝘴𝘱𝘦𝘤𝘪𝘢𝘭 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.