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Non-binary identities are valid

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Ziggurat said:
Males have lower pitch voices, females have higher pitch voices. That difference is real and objective. The significance of this difference is subjective, but it is significant to a lot of people.
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I know men with higher voices than some women, and I know women with lower voices than some men. And I know enbies with both high and low voices.

Any why would it make any kind of sense to divide song awards up by pitch anyway?
 
arthwollipot said:
I know men with higher voices than some women, and I know women with lower voices than some men. And I know enbies with both high and low voices.
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And some women are stronger than some men. But men in general still have more strength and deeper voices than women.

Any why would it make any kind of sense to divide song awards up by pitch anyway?
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Some people care about the pitch of vocals. That preference is subjective, you certainly need not share it, but it's also not wrong.
 
PhantomWolf said:
All males have lower pitch voices, and all females have higher pitch ones? If not then it's not objective.
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Actually, it is, when you're not talking about general population employment, but about the best 1 in ten million -- or sometimes even best 1 in a billion -- in some particular aspect. Which really is what competitions are about. Regardless of whether it's sports, singing, whatever.

So, yes, if you're picking some random person off the street, some men run slower than some women. I mean, the guy could be an obese guy with asthma.

But that's not what you compare when you're running, say, an Olympic marathon. Then the men's champion ran it in 2:01:39, with most runners completing it between 2:02 hours and 2:10 hours, while for women it's more like between 2:15 and 2:25, with the world record being 2:14:04. They don't even overlap. The slowest guy (that actually finishes) in an Olympic Marathon will usually be faster than the fastest woman. And not just fastest woman in that competition, but most times it's faster than the fastest woman on record. Ever.

And I'm picking marathons as an example, because that's actually one of the categories where women are the LEAST disfavoured, on account of having some more resistance to muscle fatigue than guys.

The notion that every X must be better than every Y to have an objective difference is simply stonking stupid, idiotic, moronic, knuckle-headed, and a few other synonyms, when what you're comparing is NOT two random people off the street. When you're comparing samples that are already pre-selected to be at the far far right end of the bell curve, then the middle of the curves being offset from each other actually has a HUGE impact on what the chances are to actually find an Y better than an X. Because the chances to find an Y that is even equal to the best X, multiplied by the respective population, might just drop way below 1.

In the case of singers, the notion of a "better" is somewhat less clear, but again there are objective differences. Not just the pitch, which was already mentioned, but also timbre. Take it from someone who actually was trying to pass for a girl at some point, it's a lot harder to pull something that even remotely sounds like a feminine voice as a guy after puberty, than just deciding to use a different pronoun.

Furthermore, for better or worse, both appeal to different demographics, and looks are also a part of it. If you think that <insert random boy band> and <insert random girl band> even compete for the same demographic, you might well be mistaken. So deciding which is best isn't even apples to oranges, it's apples to golf balls.
 
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That said, it seems to me like if non-binaries are that offended by the existing categories, the most obvious solution would be to just get their own category.
 
Yes, but when you look at the distribution of winners, Grammies are also THE prime example for why you would want to keep such categories in other awards: https://www.statista.com/statistics/801259/gender-grammy-awards-nominees-category/

The CLOSEST it ever gets for the male vs female distribution is in the New Artist category, where it's 58% male vs 42% female (still a very high difference), dropping down to 75.3% male vs 24.7% female in the second most 'equal' category, namely Song Of The Year. That's nuts. It's the second most 'even', and it's already more than 3 male nominees for each 1 female. And then it goes all the way down to 92.4% male to 7.6% female in Album Of The Year, meaning more than 12 TIMES more males than females.

Just dropping the gender categories in all awards, just because some trolls play "offended" by their existence, means pretty much just pushing the females out. If every contest or awards becomes a case of odds being stacked against you more than 12 to 1 if you're female -- and actually more like 13 to 1 when you also consider the difference in population size -- is quite frankly neither fair, nor particularly encouraging for girls considering that career path.

At some point I'll have to say, basically, "screw you" to those trolls. What you identify as is entirely your own business, but that's the key word: YOUR business. Alone. Not everyone else's. Trying to use it as the newest excuse to try to squeeze women out of some domain is quite a different thing.
 
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HansMustermann said:
The CLOSEST it ever gets for the male vs female distribution is in the New Artist category, where it's 58% male vs 42% female (still a very high difference), dropping down to 75.3% male vs 24.7% female in the second most 'equal' category, namely Song Of The Year. That's nuts. It's the second most 'even', and it's already more than 3 male nominees for each 1 female. And then it goes all the way down to 92.4% male to 7.6% female in Album Of The Year, meaning more than 12 TIMES more males than females.
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Should it be even?
 
Matthew Best said:
Should it be even?
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Maybe not, but then in any other competition, if the situation is that uneven, you'd have different categories. Something where the deck is stacked 13 to 1 against you if you're X, whatever that X might be, is not something that works as a motivation if you happen to be an X.

In any case, the Grammys can do whatever the hell they want, but I'm hardly seeing any real reason for other awards to drop the gender categories. Between some idiot trolls playing offended and the real phenomenon that people are using such pretexts to try to squeeze women out of even more domains, I'll take the latter as the more pressing problem, thank you very much. Even from a purely utilitarian and gender-neutral point of view, the good of the many vs the good of the few, and all that.
 
HansMustermann said:
Maybe not, but then in any other competition, if the situation is that uneven, you'd have different categories. Something where the deck is stacked 13 to 1 against you if you're X, whatever that X might be, is not something that works as a motivation if you happen to be an X.
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But that's begging the question. For all I know you might actually have a better chance of winning if you're female - it depends on how many of each gender are actually competing.
 
Matthew Best said:
Should it be even?
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Seems to me that it's usually okay (morally acceptable) for private organizations to try to make competition more even, e.g. creating divisions for welterweight, bantamweight, featherweight, etc.
 
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Ziggurat said:
I don't care how anyone feels about themselves. But when you start trying to impose nonstandard pronoun usage on other people, you're well past how you feel about yourself, you're now insisting how other people act.
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I don't care how people behave behind closed doors, but when gays insist that I acknowledge their marriages and treat their marriage as real, they're now insisting how other people act.


...and, yet, 50ish years later, most of US society has managed to adjust their behavior and mindset without falling apart. Now, gender is going through a similar evolution in social understanding and acceptance. It's just a matter of time, really.
 
Upchurch said:
I don't care how people behave behind closed doors, but when gays insist that I acknowledge their marriages and treat their marriage as real, they're now insisting how other people act.
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I know you're making an analogy here, but marriage as a civil institution comes w/ hundreds of legal rights and responsibilities. Is there something comparable for non-binary identities?
 
d4m10n said:
I know you're making an analogy here, but marriage as a civil institution comes w/ hundreds of legal rights and responsibilities. Is there something comparable for non-binary identities?
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I'm comparing social attitudes and acceptance.
 
Matthew Best said:
But that's begging the question. For all I know you might actually have a better chance of winning if you're female - it depends on how many of each gender are actually competing.
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I'm not even sure what amount of comprehension problems or willing stupidity does one need to get from what we were talking, with statistical data provided, to the above. Considering that the numbers I gave you, yes, are exactly about what proportion make it into the competition.

In any case, and more importantly, you can't support a conclusion (e.g., "just do what the Grammies do and don't have gendered categories" from your message #589) by basing it on NOT knowing what the situation is (your "for all I know" quoted above.) That's a literal argument from ignorance fallacy, which is to say, stupid. If you don't know, then you don't know. You can't deduce what we should do about ANY given problem from just NOT knowing what the situation is.
 
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d4m10n said:
Okay, but you linked to legal history (laws passed, struck down, rewritten, etc.) rather than surveys of public opinion.
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Sorry, I didn't realize that was the contentious part of my post. I was using the assumption that legal acceptance of gay marriage was roughly correlated overall social acceptance. If that's too much of an assumption, here is a slightly narrower range of years (33) tracking social acceptance. I think it is safe to say that there wasn't any popularity swings in favor of gay marriage prior to 1987.

I am also assuming that social acceptance of homosexuality is roughly correlated to social acceptance of gay marriage, but I had a harder time finding specific data on that over time.

The point is, society can and does accept changes to its social constructs over time. Social acceptance of trans and non-binary identities, in my opinion, appear to be moving along the same lines as acceptance of homosexual relationships. More quickly than that, even.
 
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