Non-binary identities are valid

[Emily's Cat]

Sure, but the reason why a child's sex is recorded is for the purposes of gender

Also because it's medically relevant for pretty much the entirety of their lives. And because there is a difference in the necessary precautions taken by an adult when changing the diapers of a male baby; infants without penises very rarely pee in their parent's faces.

 

[theprestige]

Such as...

Asking another person if they have a spare tampon because you've had an unexpected "visitor".
Asking another person in the changing room for help undoing the back of a dress.
Deciding whether or not it would be socially acceptable for you to unzip and pee into the bushes with them close enough to see your wedding tackle.
Figuring our whether it's a good idea to talk about poop and farts with that person


I could go on, but hopefully you get the picture.

I mean, asking a transwoman if she has a tampon is just bigoted and abusive. You're basically reminding her that she's not a fully operational battle station or whatever. That's really insensitive and transphobic. You really need to stop assuming people have uteruses just because they look like cisnormative women.

The rest of your list is just plain sexism. You shouldn't care about the sex or gender or attack helicopter maintenance plan of the people fiddling with your dress or looking at your wedding tackle.

/sarcasm

More seriously, why do we have a social injunction against letting fart and poop talk cross the cisgender line?

Would it be bigoted for a woman to not want to talk about farts with a transman who presented as a man?

 

[Emily's Cat]

And you erasing their identity is not on.

If it's truly their identity, nobody else can "erase' is. On the other hand, nobody has any obligation to care about what someone else identifies as.

For a start, the appropriate term is "trans man" not "transman" - some people will get remarkably upset about that, so it is something you should take into consideration. And secondly, yes, the gender pay gap is one of those things that needs serious consideration in this "new" (not really) gender paradigm. Currently, it is not at all clear.

That's a remarkably silly thing to get bent out of shape about. I mean, really? Whether or not there's a space is something that needs to be considered so that people don't get upset?

And at the risk of sounding prickly... I'd really rather like to see the CURRENT pay gap adequately addressed before we start trying to add new special niches of pay gap into the mix.

 

[Emily's Cat]

You mean police officers, fire fighters and pilots, right?

FYI: In the US Air Force, all enlisted folks start out as "Airman", regardless of what they identify as.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Okay, I will be charitable and assume that you are merely ignorant of the way gendered job descriptions are disrespectful of nonbinary people, rather than malicious.

As a female person of the human persuasion, I can't decide whether to laugh or to cry at this statement.

 

[Emily's Cat]

How would anyone know what it's like to be their biological sex, for that matter? You can't distinguish between two sensory inputs if you can't experience at least one of them in isolation from the other. Unless you can change your sex you have no means to distinguish "these are the feelings that arise from being of sex A" from all feelings from other causes.

Call me crazy, but I'm pretty sure I can distinguish the feeling of a happy clitoris, an irritated nipple, or uterine cramps and appropriate designate them as sensory inputs unique to being a female human, even if I've never experienced blue balls or ejaculation.

 

[Emily's Cat]

It's up to every person to decide for themselves what it is like.

There are a lot of female humans out here who happen to have a lived experience that includes some common themes, and those common themes tend to be important to us as female humans.

If it's simply up to everyone to decide what gender they feel like, and not a whit of common ground to go on, then I, as a female human, think that's likely to set the goals of other female humans back by several decades.

 

[Emily's Cat]

At least partially. It is likely to be influenced by external factors such as the environment in which a person was raised. It seems likely to me that people who are raised in an environment where the gender binary is not strongly emphasised will have a less strong personal idea of what gender is.

It "seems" to you? Are you just hypothesizing here?

I was raised in a household with rather lax gender roles. I played with legos and blocks and tinker toys and matchbox cars far more than I played with dolls. I hung out with boys and climbed trees and played cowboys and indians and tried to make bows and arrows from sticks and string. We wrestled and fought and ran and called each other names, and made jokes about boogers and poop and farts. I detest pink, and I will choose trousers over skirts any day of the week.

But I have a rather clear understanding of my sex, as well as how the perception of my sex by other people (which is pretty much what gender is) has affected the course of my life, the barriers it has presented, and the challenges yet to overcome.

 

[d4m10n]

FYI: In the US Air Force, all enlisted folks start out as "Airman", regardless of what they identify as.

Not a particular fan of this practice, even after being around the USAF for nearly three decades. Actually, I sort of envy the Army for having more neutral terms.

My point, though, was merely that it doesn't demean firemen and policemen and postmen and congressmen to use such labels without spaces. Doesn't make them any less human or worthy of respect.

 

[Dani]

I've just read the first couple of pages, but some of you (D4m10n, Arthwollipot), seem to be defining non-binary gender in a way that could also be expressed as absence of gender.

So, instead of trying to imagine how that non-binary gender is like, we could just try to imagine how it is like if we render the concept of gender completely devoid of any information.

It looks more like a non category, and indistinguishable from what "human being" already defines, to me.

 

[JihadJane]

I've just read the first couple of pages, but some of you (D4m10n, Arthwollipot), seem to be defining non-binary gender in a way that could also be expressed as absence of gender.

So, instead of trying to imagine how that non-binary gender is like, we could just try to imagine how it is like if we render the concept of gender completely devoid of any information.

It looks more like a non category, and indistinguishable from what "human being" already defines, to me.

Indeed. Non-binary pretty much describes everyone. Very few people are comfortable with all the expectations society puts on them simply for being born male or female.

 

[Earthborn]

There are actually very few bureaucratic consequences for the sex listed on birth certificates.

There were quite a few until very recently; such as who one is allowed to marry.

Most of what you refer to gender arises completely independently of what's on the birth certificate.

Absolutely!

the birth certificate is still irrelevant to that for most things.

Which is why registering sex on birth certificates is unnecessary.

 

[d4m10n]

Non-binary pretty much describes everyone. Very few people are comfortable with all the expectations society puts on them simply for being born male or female.

If "non-binary person" includes nearly everyone, the neologism isn't exactly doing a lot of work.

At the beginning of the thread I asked what it means to say non-binary folks are "valid and real" and I assumed that the answer would prove to be found in some set of observables, at least wrt "real" if not "valid."

 

[Ziggurat]

Which is why registering sex on birth certificates is unnecessary.

Whether it is necessary or not wasn’t the question here. You claimed doctors assign gender. That is self-contradictory nonsense, and you have failed to defend it with any semblance of coherence.

 

[MisAndreG]

No. What you're saying there is that whatever YOUR criteria are, however YOU judge a person's race, that's the one holy pronouncement that determines it. More infallible than the Pope, even.

If it's YOUR decreeing that some guy is 100% in the black category, then it doesn't matter if some 100 million actual Bantu blacks think he's a half-breed. If YOU say it's binary, then apparently that settles it, there are no shades. You're THAT important, apparently.

Sorry, that's just flippin' stupid and delusional.



Except AGAIN, for the fact that a mere century ago someone even whiter than Rachel Anne Dolezal could actually be classified as black, if she had any blacks in her ancestry. So again, what you're saying is just that if YOU pronounce her to be 100% in one category, then that's it, that's what settles it definitively, that's all the test we need.

And again, that's just flippin' stupid and delusional.

Jesus Christ. One of the things I’m saying is I don’t care about what dumb ass ideological paradigm is in place that would class someone like Noah “half breed” or dolezal black, if you want to take the most uncharitable interpretation of that and say it’s MEEEEEE and MYYYYY criteria lol and call what I’m saying delusional and stupid that’s on you. But I’m done here.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Describe how it feels to have your blood type. Distinguish those feelings from how people with different blood types feel from having their blood types. Can you do it? The point is that if you have always experienced a state, for every instant of your existence, without ever having that state change or be switched off, you cannot distinguish which feelings you have are caused by that state.

This is absurd. You're essentially saying that the only people who can truly know what it's like to be a woman are males.

 

[Emily's Cat]

True-- but that suggests that what we think is caused by biology (or physics or chemistry) is actually created by social interaction. A male person who crashed on a desert island as an infant and grew up totally isolated from other humans might have an entirely different experience of being male as opposed to males surrounded by other males and females.

We won't know unless we can conduct some extremely unethical and probably physically gruesome experiments.

Um... I'm going to say that such a person might have a different concept of what it is to be a man, which includes all of the societal baggage that comes along with gender roles and how people treat you based on what they perceive your sex to be. But I would bet that if you put him in a room with other males of the human species, they'd have a fair bit of common experiences related to morning wood, ejaculation, itchy balls, etc.

 

[TragicMonkey]

This is absurd. You're essentially saying that the only people who can truly know what it's like to be a woman are males.

No, I'm not. That's an exceptionally ridiculous misinterpretation of what I clearly said: nobody can know what it's like to be their own sex because they cannot experience that in isolation from all other characteristics and inputs. I'm saying neither males nor females know what it feels like to be males or females, as distinguished from being everything else that they are as well.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Whipping out you primary sex characteristics can get you into a bit of legal trouble, even in the West.
People generally don't know your sex; they infer it from your gender presentation.

Okay, let's grant this as true. What do you think falls under the heading of gender presentation?

You can change sex. Though one cannot go from one end of the spectrum of sex all the way over to the other side.

No, you cannot change your sex. You can change the appearance of secondary sex characteristics, and you can surgically create things that mimic the look of genitalia. You can even surgically remove some primary sex organs. But you cannot actually change sex. A surgically created vagina is not the same thing as a real vagina, and it doesn't create ovaries and a uterus. A surgically created penis is not the same thing as a real penis, and it doesn't create testes that make sperm.

A person who implants horns into the top of their head doesn't actually "have horns". They have artificial things that look like horns stuck onto their skull, but they aren't actually horns. Saline implants aren't real boobs. A person who spends two hours a day in a tanning bed looks darker, but they haven't altered the natural level of melanin in their skin cells by one iota.

 

[Emily's Cat]

They assign gender, based on an observation of sex.

One could imagine a hypothetical society where gender is assigned based on an observation of a coin toss. In such a society there would be the genders of "heads" and "tails".

There's this persistent narrative that 'gender' is about ow a person feels on the inside... which makes it completely unfalsifiable, untestable, and nothing but an article of faith.

Gender isn't what a person feels like on the inside. Gender identity might be, if you assume that there's an innate essence that is completely separate from the body and magically confers a mystical property of "womanhood" or "manhood" that is also magically divorced from gender roles and societal norms of behavior.

Gender, in actuality, is the sex that other people assume you to be on a combination of attributes. Some of those attributes are socially defined - dress, comportment, behavior. But a LOT of those attributes are not socially defined, and are a direct result of the visible aspects of sex-linked physical characteristics: boobs, height, hand and foot size, adam's apple, pitch of voice, shape of jaw line, heaviness of brow ridge, shape of torso, shape of hips, shape of thighs.

If you put Dwayne Johnson in a ball gown, with professionally done make-up, and a top tier wig, and he practices walking in heels for months to get it down perfectly... Nobody is going to mistake him for a female. Every single part of his physicality oozes his sex. And every single person who sees him will assume that he is a man. They might assume he's a drag queen, but he will still be perceived as a man.

Wishing for other people to see you in a way that is different from how you actually look is just that: wishing. You cannot obligate other people's perception of reality to change based on your desires.