LOL, letting the side down itchy

I wish I could say that it's the first time I've encountered it. Sadly it seems rampant. I blame iPads and Facebook. And the parents that enable them.

So, just ad hominem and red herring? K.

He pops in rarely. Probably doesn't like our current forums.

I'm not even going to pretend to understand the complexities of gender identity expression nor do I care, but I see this as making sense for Facebook. There was a demand for more flexibility in gender expression and Facebook answered the demand by making those choices available. It makes sense for a social networking site to make such a variety available, since part of social networking is putting your real life information out there so you can associate with people who you know and other like minded individuals. I don't see the harm in making those choices available for people to chose from.

I believe there is a separation between the mind and the body, and there are some things you can not chose. No matter how hard you try if you are not interested in something you are never going to form a true connection to it. The same applies in the biological sense. I imagine it must be hard to be in a body that feels wrong, why else would people go through a sex change? A sex change is a major transition and a choice that is never made lightly, it will affect everything and will likely make someone a social outcast. Friends, family, career, one's future romantic relationship.

It makes sense there is something hardwired in our brain that controls our experiences of the world and of ourselves. One can find cases of people reporting phantom limb syndrome or alien hand syndrome where it feels like there are pieces of the body that does not belong or extra pieces that are field but are not physically there. An outsider can report the limb does not exist or the hand really is a part of the body, but to the one affected the outside perception does not seem to be the truth. Something just feels wrong, and no amount of logic will convince these people otherwise.

Gender and sexuality is not a choice. What is a choice is how people to chose to express it and to what extent to pursue it. Facebook's gender selection is accommodating the demand for more options for people to express themselves.

That's the silliest comparison I have ever read, bravo.


And this isn't much better.

Seriously, there's nothing to debate when this is the response I get.

No, and also, you're an idiot (you're welcome). No one has ever checked my chromosomes. The vast, overwhelming majority of people is never going to have their XX/XY/other status checked. And yet, somehow, the overwhelming majority of people goes through life knowing themselves to be men or women. *That* is gender.

I'm partial to the term "barbarians" myself :3.

Seriously - since you're one of the few people here who seem to "get" what we're talking about, could you please cut everyone else some slack, and explain things where they are unclear? Hell - I don't feel all that up-to-date on the subject matter myself, but that merely makes me uninformed, not particularly hostile :|.

Level 1 :

Sex is biological. We have males and females (dicks versus tits). But when, in a society, we refer to male and female, we very seldom refer to that. We define men and women in accordance to many non-biological traits : voice (pitch but more importantly tone), physical attitudes (the way you move, walk, sit), and even activities, emotional attitudes, and all that. You can see this in expressions like "a real man" or "a real woman" : if you are not "a real man", or not as much a "real man" as this "real man over there", it's not because you lack a biological element that makes you less male, it's because you conform less to a whole array of behavioural elements that are attached to the idea of "male". When something is "manly" or "womanly", it's not because it defines you biologically (that is helps determining your biological sex - whether you have testicles or ovaries), it's because it defines you socially. You can be "more or less of a (real) man", socially, but not biologically. How come how come ? That is because of a mix-up on words. All these things don't refer to sex, but to gender. Gender is the social equivalent of sex. It's how societies define male/female beyond biology. It's how you sort all kind of attitudes into manly/womanly, male/female (yin and yang somewhat).

Making this distinction between gender and sex is very important, because their common sense liguistic confusion is dangerous. The confusion of sex and gender (the taking of gender too seriously) leads to high normative pressure, as it serves to define as "counter-natural" any transgression to it. That is : when a biological man or woman don't conform to whatever trait is being gendered in their society, they face the argument that they are transgressing some "natural order", or that they are "freaks". This can range from tastes (activities or interests that are deemed "wrong" for one sex) to, of course, homosexuality (liking one sex rather than the other is highly gendered) and various behaviours that are oh so highly disturbing to behold because they clash with the gender/sex expectations ("effeminate" male behaviour, "tomboyish" females). And of course there is the question of feminism, where social roles are abilities are attributed to "natural functions", which are just gendered elements confused with biological determinism ("a woman? doing maths? hah!"). Plus, political rhetorics can play with that a lot, when refering to virility and questioning the testicles of, for instance, those who contest a specific conflict, etc...

None of this is extraordinarily revolutionary, as (I suppose) every one knows that when a man is considered "not manly enough", it is seldom a questioning of him having a penis. But the confusion is often strong enough in popular discourses for people to not escape this essentialisation (ie. saying that some trait is related to the unescapable "essence" of this category), and using different words keep things clearer. Also, it was necessary when, in cultural anthropology, you were forced to observe and relate the empirical reality of the relativity of gender categories : some human cultures sorting people into more than just two genders, or, more simply, "gendering" differently the behavioural traits, attitudes, etc, of people. Even observing our own societies through different epochs shows that the content of "genders" (as the social interpretation of what a "man" and what a "woman" are supposed to be) has varied a huge lot. Again, genders are very relative. They are the social constructions that one society builds around sex, at one time, in one region. And thus, they are negociable and contestable (yet generally enforced by a given society's norm and collective representation, and so deeply assimilated by its members, to the point where questionning them or being confronted to alternatives is a bewildering shock).

Level 2:

All the above treated biological sex as the simple binary ground upon which gender is extrapoated, and to which different gendered traits, values, activities, etc, are attributed. Well, things are actually a bit more complex here. Because biological sex is not clear cut either when you look at the details. And as our culture functions on two social genders, biological sex is "thought" through these dual categories. Means that all the minoritary inbetween situations (for instance "intersex") are forced into one or the other of these social genders, to the point of surgical operations at birth. We build social realities in accordance to our perception of nature, but then we also bend nature to fit our social realities. And there again, you can see that our words and concepts mislead us, and blind us to some realities. It is a circular process, related to how, generally, societies construct their realities.

So, these both levels help us understand what is going on, in reality, on earth, when it comes to real people, empirically, on the subject of sex and gender. It goes against "common sense" (the local specific "common sense" of our society in particular), and shocks a lot of people who are so used to traditional views that they react with horror to anything that challenges them. But it's a field of study that, like all sciences, helps us to grasp the world better, and it has, ultimately, the social/political consequence of helping humans to understand each others better instead of enying each others existences, or forcing each others to hide in order to not be treated as "abominations" (here I use "abomination" in the sense of something not fitting in the pre-defined mental categories that we use to sort the world - an impurity). The more refined our vision gets, the more precisely we can describe the world an communicate, the most fair and inclusive we can make society. But it's a tough work, because when you start to actually observe people's sexual identities throughout societies and over the world, the basic "male/female" categories you've learnt as a child are just shattered into a million of crazy existing personal realities. And yes, they have to be taken in account.

And no, no matter what the bible says, it is not about the study of evil. :-/
You're just saying that a majority needs no specific word apart from "the default ones" because they are the majority.

So this is a perfectly valid comparison. Words such as "locales", "natives", "autochtons" should be suppressed from your dictionary.

I'm more familiar with the term "deviant", as in "one who strays from the path". I believe that's Ruth Benedict's term...
Now that I think about it - is it fair for a minority of people to demand the change of a given society's categories? The alternatives are, of course, for the deviants to remain pariahs, find a different culture, or change their own lives and conform. Not the most thrilling of choices, but is really justified to change what "normal" is to be "normal"? That's a normative issue, of course...
As a person generally perceived as eccentric, I can certainly see the temptation, but I'll personally settle for company of like-minded individuals alongside lukewarm tolerance of the general population.

They don't have to. Mental categories simply must adapt to increasing knowledge and understanding of the world, or else it's pure obscurantism. It means hanging onto outdated views of the world. Updating categories with scientific progress should be a spontaneous goal, by society as a whole.

And you have to make a distinction between statistical normality (a descriptive notion) and a judgemental, moralist notion of "normality" (normative use of the word). The problem is when "ab-normal" means "bad/evil", which is generally the case for the conservative fetishists of uniformity. Normality is not a value by itself, automatically warranting social pressures into conforming it. And those who make it a value automatically attribute negative moral values to any deviance from that statistical norm.

Also, I was referring more to the categorial monsters of Mary Douglas' studies on purity and danger. It's a specific sub-set of deviance, I'd say.

People should be able to define themselves as whatever they want to, it's not like it's anyone else's business.

And people who're really interested in this topic should read Telika's post.
Further examples to support what she's saying are how cultures in South Asia view genders (with there being a "Third Gender" etc.)

I know it's difficult to break out of notions imposed on yourself by society and norms for so long, but sometimes, it's just better to inform yourself and see things from other points of view.

People should really not follow sick theories and double-check where they come from.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Money#Sex_reassignment_of_David_Reimer

Uhm...what exactly do you want to say with that?

Certainly, but this would probably, at best, result in people agreeing that "gender issues are complex and far from the simplistic binarity derived from biological dimorphism"... and nothing more. There would still be cultures, customs, norms. A shared world-view would still contain pointers as to what is appropriate when, how courtship occurs, etc... It is also fairly obvious that there are very many possible ways for it to look. The question I am asking is - how do we decide upon one? If we stick to the current one, merely acknowledging the existence of people who live differently, then they are still the "others" as opposed to the "norm". We can't possibly include every gender-thingy anyone comes up with, otherwise societal rules will become unwieldy in their overwhelming abundance of special cases "X meets Y", with the implicit assumption that such cases are NOT AT ALL "special", but part of the nebulous mainstream. Occam's Razor seems to cut through this very easily. If most of the stereotypes and etiquette were to apply to an extremely narrow and unlikely set of circumstances, society would probably figure they aren't worthwhile, and treat them as exceptions to commonly accepted rules. This brings us back to the beginning - if bringing something into social awareness is in the interest of too small a group of people, it will probably not stick. If large swaths of people may very well live their lives in ignorance of gender XYZ that, say, 1 in 10 000 people belong to, they may declaratively acknowledge it as being perfectly separate and intricate, but can just as well not care about it in the slightest, not know it in the least; ignore it, stick to what they know and is relevant to their lives. Similarly - it's a lot easier to have a culture where people accept the existence of differential equations, than it is to have one where everyone knows how to solve them...

Well... duh. We call it Hume's Guillotine - from that which is one can never infer that which should be.
I guess an even more pertinent notion would be the "naturalistic fallacy".

I don't think it's even worth our time to consider such ridiculous a stance, at least here.