Thermal
August Member
I already did, like six posts before yours.
Moderated Using wrong pronouns= violence??
- Thread starter d4m10n
- Start date
I already did, like six posts before yours.
No you ******* don't agree. Because it's gonna be so "Tee hee I said I was a dude not a man or a male or identify as this and YOU ACTIVATED MY TRAP CARD" nonsense.
You have a beard. You ARE a man, male, dude and any variation of it. There is no "Assumption of your gender role with sprinkles of what sex your soul is."
tyr_13
Penultimate Amazing
- Joined
- Aug 8, 2008
- Messages
- 18,095
Again, the point of contention is that for theprestige and d4m10n, if that 'she' turned and said that he was actually a 'he', that they would be justified in still referring to him as 'she'. They sometimes don't (to keep a job and not cause waves), but their claim is it's wrong to judge them for that even if they chose to not go with what he said about his pronouns.
I've further pointed out that even if you were trying to go with sex, you'd be wrong about that too 2/3rds of the time you thought someone was trans.
As was already said, no one (not even the college thing from the OP), is saying don't ever make provisional assumptions based on appearance. Your own objection was about taking someone's word for it. Not incorporating what the person says just isn't justified.
tyr_13
Penultimate Amazing
- Joined
- Aug 8, 2008
- Messages
- 18,095
My nephew would love it if his beard actually changed his sex but it didn't, even by your standards of gender and sex.
This basically just ignores the bell curve. Sure, there are some people with large gametes and XX chromosomes that might exhibit such features absent surgery and hormones. But the fact there is substantial overlap between the typically dimorphic features of human males and females does not mean that men are not on average 30% more massive than women, have significantly more muscle mass, larger chins, etc.
It does seem as though some folks want to talk about the extreme ends of the bell curve as though they are the norm. Or act like the fact that the bell curves over lap means no distinctions can be made. I'm pretty sure there's a logical fallacy that describes that line of argument.
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lobosrul5
Philosopher
Ugly <> Opposite Sex Facial Markers
Maybe you missed my point... so I shall spell it out, without my attempts at sardonic humor.
Men have sex with women they don't find attractive, quite frequently. Slapping mens faces on women won't put a stop to it.
Steve
Penultimate Amazing
Exactly this. There are several posters in this thread that are more integrated into communities that include trans and otherwise gendered people. The info that they have provided is valuable and interesting, but utterly irrelevant to anyone who does not knowingly have direct contact with those communities and persons. And in spite of the hairs being split here by some I still have confidence in my ability to correctly identify the sex of practically everyone I encounter. At least no one has ever had to tell me I was wrong.
d4m10n
Penultimate Amazing
Swing and a miss.
My claim is this: No one here has given an argument for why young Carl (I've just now remembered his name) having just arrived at UC Boulder from the rural backcountry, needs to change his heuristic for assigning pronouns from the very simple one which he learned down on the farm to one which maps on to something entirely subjective in the special case of modern human beings here in the West.
I'm not here to judge people who use the new heuristic, or to judge people like poor ignorant Carl who still think pronouns point to sex rather than gender because he hasn't yet been assigned any Judith Butler and has no idea that he even has a gender identity. I'm not here to preach to folks that one way is right and the other one is wrong, because I'm neither a linguistic prescriptivist nor a social justice activist. I don't even care what pronouns you use for me, personally. All that matters to me is that I can tell which pronouns are pointing to which nouns in any given flow of conversation.
If you want to moralize and judge and feel great about it, I'm not here to stop you. Enjoy yourself! Bask in sun of righteousness from your grandstand atop the moral high ground. The worst I'll ever do about it is let slip a tiny bit of sarcasm on rare occasions, such as now.
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Upchurch
Papa Funkosophy
I'm saying you have no information about whether someone is biologically male or female. You absolutely have information about whether or conforms with the male gender norm or the female gender norm.
I have no idea what you are talking about. Of course I agree that I'm a dude, which is the word you used. What kind of logical "trap" agrees with what you said?
I have no idea where this soul business came from. I have friends from my band who are male, men, dudes, but they are not "any variation of it" and neither am I.
Seriously, if it were only possible to be every variation possible of something, there are no variations.
Manger Douse
Master Poster
- Joined
- Mar 27, 2010
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Meaning that if you shaved the gendered conformity off of your face we would be unable to tell whenever you were male or female - yes or no?
Its the difference between an engineer and a mathematician. Mathematician can't be certain because there is slight chance they will be wrong an engineer can be certain enough for all practical purposes.
Edited by zooterkin:
<SNIP>
Edit for rule 0 and rule 12.
Edit for rule 0 and rule 12.
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Emily's Cat
Rarely prone to hissy-fits
I'm not sure if "seriously" has a lot of place in any of these discussions. From the very first post, it should have been met with "Seriously? This is silly." Because using non-preferred pronouns is not something that any sane and rational person believes is violence.
Emily's Cat
Rarely prone to hissy-fits
This is sort of a fundamental element that gets glossed over. And it's even deeper of a disconnect, it's a mixing of different meanings of the same word, with very different contexts.
On the one hand, there's personal identity - what we believe about ourselves, and what we want other people to believe and perceive about us. This is a desire, a wish - it's what we want to be viewed as, regardless of whether it's true. I want posters on ISF to see me as level-headed, rational, logical, compassionate, and reasonable. Those are elements of my personal identity, how I see myself. It happens to be a view of myself that has been reinforced by other people in the real world... but I'm also well aware that at least some ISF members do NOT perceive me in that way.
On the other hand, there's identification - the notable characteristics that distinguish one individual from another to a third party. These are the things that go into a police report, or you find them on your Drivers License - height, weight, age, hair color, eye color, etc. But it's also a fluid aspect, because it's contextually driven in most situations. If you're pointing out one person among many, the items on their DL probably aren't going to be the first things you think of to disambiguate an individual from a group. For example, if there's a group of football players standing in a room along with one very short and slightly built flute player... the speaker is likely going to say "the small person". If everyone is in uniform except the civilian, we might say "the one in the red shirt". If you've got one Sri Lankan standing with a bunch of Scandinavians, it might be reasonable to say "the brown guy", whereas if that same Sri Lankan is standing with a bunch of other Sri Lankans, a few Pakistani, and a Malawi, we might choose to say "The guy in the baseball hat" because that is the most efficient way to identify one among many.
Sex is very frequently an easy way to disambiguate, because in the overwhelming majority of cases, it's easily and quickly distinguishable. It may not be enough by itself, in a large group... but saying "the blond female in the red shirt" helps exclude the people not being referenced in a very efficient way.
In the vast majority of cases, pronouns are about identification, not about personal identity. They're about the speaker using efficient means to disambiguate the object of discussion from others. Pronouns are indicators of apparent sex. Our assessment of apparent sex isn't always going to be correct, but it's usually correct and it's useful. If a transgender person passes well, they will naturally get referred to by the pronoun they prefer - but that has nothing to do with their preference. It has to do with the speaker's perception. Buck Angel will likely get referred to as "he" because they pass well, and they are generally perceived to be male - even though that's a false perception. If Angel is standing in the presence of several natal males, however, there's a pretty good chance they get referred to as "the transman" because when there's a direct comparison, Angel's inherent femaleness is actually fairly apparent. The same thing goes with Laverne Cox, in the other direction - they pass quite well, and are likely to be referred to using "she" unless they are in the presence of several natal females... at which point the male markers are still pretty apparent.
In either case, however, these are terms of identification, not the subject's personal identity.
Emily's Cat
Rarely prone to hissy-fits
This doesn't even make sense. What are you trying to say, and why do you think this is some kind of a counter to my post?
Emily's Cat
Rarely prone to hissy-fits
Yes, I missed your point entirely!Upchurch
Papa Funkosophy
Only if I only conformed to one aspect of the cultural gender norm, but there isn't just one aspect of the cultural gender norm, so no, you would still have many aspects of my gender expression to evaluate which gender norm, male or female, I conform with.
...
Look, this is really not that hard to understand. When you look at someone, you are not seeing their DNA or internal structures. Except in rare situations, you are not seeing their genitalia. You are not looking at any of the things that define their biological sex. What you can see, however, is their gender expression: how they dress, how they groom themselves, what their interests are, how they react in different situations, etc. With some range of effort*, one can present an androgynous gender expression or a non-conforming gender expression, all without necessarily even identifying as trans-gender.
The point is, when you look at someone, in most cases, you are not looking at the aspects of the that define their sex. You are looking at their gender expression and judging how it conforms to either the male or female norm.
* which is easier for some than others
Emily's Cat
Rarely prone to hissy-fits
I'll raise that analogy - I'm an actuary. I'm never actually right, but I'm almost always close enough to be useful.
Thermal
August Member
Lemme stop you right there. You surely get at some level that I am not either of those posters, and maybe you should take up any disagreement with the finer points of their arguments with ...them?
Context based, but generally they have a valid point. Sometimes it could be dehumanizing or at least rude as hell to do so. Sometimes not.
Like, if I were trans, and I knew people were supportive (or at least non adversarial) of me, I'd probably let it slide. I mean, a trans man knows they are biogically a woman. They really really know this, so I could see them "getting" people getting stuck on pronouns. Alternatively, if they constantly corrected me saying, "no you're not", then that's douchey.
But that is pulled out of your ass, especially when you carry it out to ten decimal places, as you did earlier. But to the point, I wouldn't care if I guessed "wrong". A pronoun is a sex based identifier, and if the recipient has knocked themselves out to "pass", good for them. I'd be justified in using the pronoun as I said, as a sex identifier based on the best knowledge that I had.
Dude, seriously, you are waaaaaaay behind on the thread. So far behind, that you are not aware of the opening discussion points and that the UC Boulder article has been edited to remove the very points we have been talking about, including the 'never assume anyone's gender' bit. I'm not kidding. Go check. Even the "violence" thing that sparked this whole thread has been quietly erased and rewritten.
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Emily's Cat
Rarely prone to hissy-fits
Christ on a swizzle stick, it's like you are intentionally trying to gaslight everyone into thinking humans are not sexually dimorphic. This is just plain silly.
When you look at a person, you sometimes see the cultural impositions placed on them as a result of their assumed sex... that is gender.
But you're also LITERALLY seeing the outcome of their DNA, the result of their biological sex, the consequence of evolution that led to a sexually dimorphic species.
FFS, if you shave your beard off, nobody is going to accidentally assume you're female and want to get you pregnant. This pretense in which you're engaging is both transparent and fundamentally insulting.
Sure, sure. We're judging how well those boobs conform to a socially created external norm. We're judging how well that square jaw line conforms to a socially created external norm. And if we were to change the norms... we'd never ever be able to tell that the chisel-jawed, heavy-browed, broad-shouldered, tall, large-handed, big-footed, deep-voiced, adams-appled, crotch-bulging person is male. Nope, it would be a complete mystery just because everyone in society now wears onesies and depilates every square inch of their skin.
<SMDH> You're pretty much arguing that the only way you identified your spouse as female is because they wore a dress that one time. Nothing else about them cued you in to their sex, and if they had cut their hair short, you'd have totally thought they were a male and incapable of creating offspring with you.
It's a dumb argument. You're not convincing anyone with this crap. I doubt you're even convincing yourself.
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theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
I thought you were going to forgo the attempts at humor.
"Slapping men's faces on women" is a figure of speech for "presenting a heterosexual man with another man, and expecting him to get sexually excited at the prospect because he sometimes gets sexually excited at the prospect of sex with a woman who happens to be somewhat ugly". I'm pretty sure you knew this, and I'm pretty sure you don't have any serious objection to the point actually being made.
---
Speaking of attempts at sardonic humor:
"If my preferred pronouns are giving you trouble, just think of me as a really ugly, sexually incompatible woman," said no transwoman ever.
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