Does gender offend you?
Posted by davidmcnab 9 years, 1 month ago to Culture
In recent years, I've been seeing gender coming under sustained attack, of relentlessly increasing intensity.
People are now arguing that the very concept of male and female gender is restrictive, oppressive, discriminatory, and needing to be done away with.
The new PC-fashionable derogatory term is "genderist" (or "gender binary"), which is being hurled around with similar viciousness to the terms "racist" and "sexist" in the 1960s-80s.
I am happy and grateful to be male, and my wife is happy and grateful to be female. But we're starting to see an era in which we will be increasingly marginalised and ridiculed for honouring our natures.
It kinda shocked me the other day to see a female Facebook friend on social media, whining about the existence of separate "Boys' toys" and "Girls' toys" aisles in department stores. And another friend is saying she wants to tour around eastern Europe "as a man".
Meanwhile, some jurisdictions are now allowing births to be registered without gender.
How do folks here feel about gender? Personally, I do see some links between those attacking gender, and those attacking ownership and economic self-determination.
What are your thoughts?
People are now arguing that the very concept of male and female gender is restrictive, oppressive, discriminatory, and needing to be done away with.
The new PC-fashionable derogatory term is "genderist" (or "gender binary"), which is being hurled around with similar viciousness to the terms "racist" and "sexist" in the 1960s-80s.
I am happy and grateful to be male, and my wife is happy and grateful to be female. But we're starting to see an era in which we will be increasingly marginalised and ridiculed for honouring our natures.
It kinda shocked me the other day to see a female Facebook friend on social media, whining about the existence of separate "Boys' toys" and "Girls' toys" aisles in department stores. And another friend is saying she wants to tour around eastern Europe "as a man".
Meanwhile, some jurisdictions are now allowing births to be registered without gender.
How do folks here feel about gender? Personally, I do see some links between those attacking gender, and those attacking ownership and economic self-determination.
What are your thoughts?
Or worse, this recent case of a woman who felt it would be more "natural" to be blind, and convinced her psychologist to pour drain cleaner into her eyes: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/art...
First do no harm...
anyone???
A confused person can be controlled and manipulated far better than one who knows who he or she is. Clarity of reality is liberating.
Second, there is approx one in every 1,666 births are 'not XX or XY', so genetic sexual abnormalities happen relatively frequently. These people are all around you, and you do not even know it (and they may not either).
Thirdly, MYOB. This is the decision of the individual, not of the society. If someone wants to portray themselves as a particular gender - or as no particular gender, it is a bit out of line for a group of proponents of individual freedom insist that everyone else conform to their standards. Most people are genetically male or female and will naturally identify their gender with their genes. But if they don't, it is THEIR choice.
Lastly, I think there will come a day when you can change your genetic gender. This may happen within our lifetimes. So I think that gender may eventually be in the class of 'dye your hair red today'. It really does not matter if someone is intergender any more than if they dye their hair. (If they are prickly about it, it is because they are being a jerk as a person, not because they are intergender - anyone can be a jerk.)
Jan, XX
Probably we would use chimp or orang for improved athletic skills, though. They would be better suited to our existing physiques.
More seriously: regeneration. We actually have the gene that allows regeneration of body parts, we have just lost the mechanism that can turn it on
Jan
NOW you're talking!!! :D
Screw death (for those who don't choose it).
Bring on physical immortality!!!
This life is too damned interesting to clock out after a few lousy decades!
Let's meet to go wing-gliding on Io in another 40 years. Wanderers: http://io9.com/the-best-science-ficti...
Jan
Exactly!
So do PC control freaks.
That being said, I admit to being puzzled when confronted by a person who appears androgynous, and seeks offense if I try to avoid gender address, or even guess correctly about their gender. I guess some people want to be offended, as a means of somehow gaining a superior position when in fact they have low self esteem.
I have worked with transgendered persons (all male-to-female transitions), and I have to admit there must be some pheromone signals that trigger an alarm system. Even though I had congenial dealings with the transgendered as professionals, I felt distinct discomfort that had no basis in their behavior or appearance, Gender is a biological fact, not a preference.
But there are many "facts" of natural which we find perfectly acceptable to change, like hair color or birth defects. We don't scoff at the person who has surgery to fix a cleft palate, why would we treat someone who is, as they see it, born the wrong sex? One theory is that it is a difference between what a person's brain thinks their sex is and what sexual organs their body has.
Another thing to ponder on the same topic would be someone who is born hermaphroditic. Would surgery to remove one of the organs (likely the one that is less developed) be as offensive to you as a transsexual operation? What is the difference between the two?
Would you call a newborn a "man?" Man carries many more connotations than just the specifics of biology.
Just trying to keep this conversation precise.
Jan
XY = male
XX = female
I did not know if the inaccuracy was due to a typo or because you actually thought the reverse to be true, and I wanted to drop you a clue rather than make a big deal of it. Please see Wiki 'Sexual determination in humans': " Females have two X chromosomes, and males have a Y chromosome and an X chromosome. ".
Jan
My post was about trying to make distinctions between the term "man" and "male" but that can definitely get confused when in doing the genetics wrong. Thanks.
Now back to your real topic: There was some whodunit that I watched when I was a kid where the punchline was that an accused male would rather have been sentenced to prison for rape than be found innocent because he did not want people to find out that he "was not a man" - ie could not perform sexually. The response by the hero was, "You have no idea what 'man' means!"
I have a lot of quibbles about the neat (strong; adventurous) part of gender roles being traditionally assigned to the male, but I have no problems with the males having those attributes ( I just want females to have adventurous and strong roles too). So I agree that male does not = man.
Jan
XX is female. XY is male.
The Y chromosome is a massively cut-down version of the X chromosome, but with major genetic code changes which naturally express in the characteristics we have come to know as masculinity.
Once you are talking about gender roles then almost by definition you can no longer be precise because there is a very wide spectrum of roles that people fall into and move among through their lives. Classifying you as a specific one of these is inevitably limiting.
Hermaphrodites have the most difficult time, as operations often happen early in their life that reflect parental sexual preference rather than reflecting the reality of the dominant sex. If things are left unchanged, they're subject to being treated as a freak until they can make their own decisions. Like many other disabilities, the victims deserve help and empathy.
In my defense somewhat, though, the "you" was more of the plural meaning, directed at many of the commenters thus far.
You are mistaking "facts" and reality. The reality is that one can not alter their DNA, and their DNA is what constitutes reality. If one is born with an XY, they are male - regardless of any other trait or tendency. If they are born with an XX, they are female. Can they choose to undergo surgery to appear as something different? Yes. But they are not changing the reality one iota.
And what is really more important or more real? One's mind or one's DNA?
I would also point out that "importance" is a matter of subjective value. It is not an objective measure.
The truth of the results and the life of the boy came out from the family sometime in the 80's and further research confirmed that the psychologist had falsified much of his study and that the boy's life was hell. The entire study and the psychologist was completely discredited. But by that time, others had picked up the banner.
Most main line mental health professionals believe that sex dysphoria, similar to body part dysphoria (in which a part of the body such as a leg, arm, etc is alien and hated), is a mental problem, while transgenders believe they're trapped in the wrong body.
So yes, the use of gender to describe human sex offends me. It is nothing more than political correctness taken to extremes and is gobbledygook talk.
Also did not think gobbledygook was a real word so I checked.
Dictionary.com: language characterized by circumlocution and jargon, usually hard to understand
Examples:
- white is the color of mourning in China instead of black
- kilts
- men and women are acceptably topless in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa
So what exactly does one mean by acting like a man or a woman? It is necessarily restrictive to look down on a female for acting manly or butch or pursuing a goal that is typically considered "for men." The same goes for thinking less of a male who wears makeup, decorates, or acts feminine. This is in the same way one would be restrictive of a person to predetermine which field of study or vocation would be acceptable for him to pursue based on other genetic criteria such as race, hair color, or height (excluding the obvious examples of professional sports which for obvious reasons naturally ought to take things like height into account).
I do not find gender offensive in the least, but I do find it repulsive to predetermine for a child how he or she should lead their lives based on the sex they were born with.
It's also a free country for people who want to call themselves a gender different from their biological sex, including those weird new genders that I don't understand.
While I don't presume to tell transgendered people how to live, I do not yet understand it. It seems like they're saying they're born, let's say, a boy, but they always liked doing "girl things". I reject the premise that there are girl things. Suppose there's some activity, like playing with dolls, that girls enjoy much more than boys, even without parental encouragement/discouragement. Okay, that doesn't make dolls are "girl toys". If people just do what they want in live, without regard to group identity, they don't have to change groups. They don't have this awkward situation of comparing their biological sex with how people in that group are supposed to feel about things. How the individual feels defines what that individual ought to feel like.
The implication was that such External Judgment was The Only True Answer and that what the individual Being Judged had NO say in the matter, No Matter what They Thought or Felt.
Like saying "my evaluation of your reality is more accurate than yours..."
Fucking nonsense AND offensive. Especially, imnsho, for "Objectivists."
Maybe I took too many "personal growth" classes when I lived in California. Maybe I lived in California too long. Maybe the Socratic Method and Critical Thinking have failed me.
Maybe I'm 'right' after all...
After all, It's For YOU To Decide, right?
Bullshit, "Objectivists."
I'm just tired of hearing about it. I'd rather not know about anyone's sexual equipment unless one of us is trying to seduce the other.
As for the "denying reality" argument, I don't buy it. Talk to one of those people (I've known several) and they've thought through pretty deeply what they want to accomplish. The doctors who do these operations insist on thorough psych evaluations before they'll start -- because they're scared to death of lawsuits by someone who undergoes the change, regrets it, and decides it is the doctor's fault.
Gee, seems I've read something like this in the recent past.
Global Warming...excuse me...Climate Change is another of those issues that could readily have been described in Ayn Rand's works. After all, when satellite data shows actual temperature data, but that data is constantly rejected by some "97% of scientists"...is this not exactly the kind of thing described in Atlas Shrugged?
A is A...period.
Creating classes and groups of people and turning one against the other because of "supposed" minority status has been the modus operandi to date.
These idiotic concepts have been deployed with the goal of driving wedges between us. The goal without a doubt is to destroy America's greatest strength (E Pluribus Unum - Of many one). This has been the Communist/Fabian goal from the get-go. These concepts have been taught in public schools for almost 50 years now by a cadre of those who hate this country and will do anything in their power to destroy it. This is what has so ruthlessly created the left's national idiocy and the right's lack of pushback!
Perhaps, if and when people stop and think critically again, they will realize just how much they have been played for fools (or worse)! Gender politics is only one facet of the overall problem.
And on a side note, take your damnation talk and shove it you know where.
I'll give you a close to me example. Cerebral Palsy and Cleft Palate.
The seeking is over. Used to be we sent her uip to Children's Hospital in LA. Thanks to Obama and the crackdown on illegals which is bearing so much positive fruit and the second government and their very high priced passport books that's no longer possible. The Doctor's now come to us and that costs even more money. This time the operations ceased Seven in total needed and three to go to provide funding for better candidates.
But all that aside ......what's that got to do with someone who decides they want to be some 'thing' else? Shall we call them perthings or huthings? Can't say per-sons that's sexist. Can't say people it's ...i don't know what the objection is this time to that word. Instead we get rid of helsman and say helmer or helm no we get Junior Assisstant West Coast person in charge of wheels and tillers. Maybe things or thangs but not sweet thangs. pretty soon it will be sweet persons and we start over laughing again.
The kid is doing fine. She doesn't speak yet but she makes sounds that do for yes no hungry or I'm really pissed about something.
That's what about them. The government FAILED so as usual we had to pay for nothing and then go do the job as a family should ourselves.
Washington DC Kiss My Ass
What about sex and gender? Sex is biological, gender is about roles and expectations.
Please try to be precise.
I'm always astounded by alleged "Libertarians" or Ayn Rand 'followers' who seem to be flying those flags just below the Conservative Christian flag.
It seems that they ARE vain enough to think THEY 'have the right answers' and anyone who disagrees with them ARE 'Satan's Spawn' and will rot in hell in the afterlife (aside from no data to prove OR disprove that...)
And, for some reason, they DO seem to 'care' about this issue, despite their repetition that they don't, plus protests against 'others shoving their ideas down their throats' while to me, it appears that all the 'others' are 'demanding' is equal treatment under applicable laws and equal "rights" that should be enjoyed by everyone.
In the same vein, (not a drug reference, for pussies in the audience, btw,) if someone ELSE self-identifies as a gender or even 'inclination' which does NOT reflect their external reproductive apparatus, Why The Fuck is it Such A Big Fucking Deal to oppose Their Right To Do So???
Find me One logical path that does not have its roots in religion. I love the Socratic Method, I love being an atheist, and I am truly disappointed in the responses from so many people on this thread and related subjects.
I'm glad I supported the creation of the AS movies, but the general reaction and trends here when Religion or Sex(uality) is the subject here is Really Encouraging me to not participate any more.
I do appreciate the feedback from 'all sides' in this matter, and also appreciate the added impetus to change my mind.... about 'contributing' where contributions aren't welcome.
Cheers, all.
Now, if Evangelical Conservatives could let go of their prejudice towards anyone who's not Hetero Like Them, we might get somewhere.
I see strong similarities. [sorry.]
One of my "Laws" is "Don't trust ANY generalizations."
Yes, it's meant to be oxymoronic or self-referent, but I try to point it out to people who believe that their Generalizations Are The Same As someone else's Perceptions or equal to some Absolute Truth.
But not only is this nonsense promoted to go against the way things were created, go against traditional marriage, the Judaeo/Christian historical observations but to create more division within society and promote Alistar Crowley's, "Be what ever you will" there are no consequences, mindlessness.
Side note: it's easy to see that this crap is done on purpose and the stupid and perverse buy into it but I wonder how much of the solar/cosmic chaotic electromagnetic events, the reduction in our magnetic shielding, the rapid movement of our magnetic poles, might be playing a role in these sociological retardation's. These events do in fact play upon the brain.
Next, shame the men for the same reason (and their role in it). Get them to pity the plight of the poor berated downtrodden "weaker vessel." Get them to question their fathers, by focusing solely on the errors made by the few, not the victories and improvements of the many. Employ their natural sense of protectiveness and their desire to defend in getting them to change their perspective on sex roles... even while belittling them for being "programmed" in such an "obviously viscous and barbaric manner" and way. Attack the gender roles and you will eventually come to where we are today. Render them all individual actors, dependent, demoralized, sexless, role-less, and confused and you can make them do whatever you choose.
Yes. It's a conspiracy. A conspiracy authored by the Devil himself, who stands and cries "Equality!" even to his very maker.
The only solution is found in Christ The King. (For if there is not a Good King in Heaven who endows all men with certain unalienable righs, who loves us all and commands us to do the same... then from whence do we draw our grievance against the will of those who would oppress?)
I'm an atheist and your 'argument' and assertions have no meaning or influence on me.
But you're obviously well-glued to your beliefs and apparently enjoy sharing them, and I have no right to ask (or tell) you to stop.
People being individual actors free from others' notions of their role is something I strongly support.