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pelmut wrote:Male behaviour is fertilising women and female behaviour is being fertilised, giving birth to babies and breast-feeding them; everything else is masculine or feminine behaviour and is much more flexible and interchangeable, depending on the individual's gender and the society they live in.

At the basest of levels, yes, that's accurate. I'd like to think that humans are a wee bit more advanced than that. Of course, I have been wrong before.

crfriend wrote:

Caultron wrote:If a man chooses against empathy, caring, and nurturing, surely he's a prisoner of his own device.

Or is it if he cannot think otherwise?

Such is being a prisoner of one's own device.

pelmut wrote:

crfriend wrote:As an observation, it's also worth noting that not only is language being redefined here, but the basic perceptions of what constitutes "male" and "female" behaviours are a moving target also.

Male behaviour is fertilising women and female behaviour is being fertilised, giving birth to babies and breast-feeding them; everything else is masculine or feminine behaviour and is much more flexible and interchangeable, depending on the individual's gender and the society they live in.

Well... let me just double back on a few thoughts I wanted to share earlier today.

It would seem as though you both are correct. At first I was going to say that prior to recently developed events regarding gender, traditionally males were of the male gender and females were of the female gender.

In fall fairness this is the way most traditionalist view it. It's easy to understand the confusion. I myself aim to be a trans-ally, and yet I find myself confused by all things gender all of the time, and I'm even trying to be fair. Your typical backwoods bigot will not give near as much understanding and sympathy. I myself was raised and taught that men act in certain ways, and women in others. Granted in my lifetime anyway, women did always seem to have more flexibility regarding their gender roles. Quite honestly, from what I recall growing up, a woman could basically do anything a man could, however a man must remain in his predefined gender role. I've often thought this was odd, and on many times it made me wish I was born a female so I'd have the freedom to choose.

However like many here point out, often time the bondage of the lack of choices extends no farther than our own minds.

So anyway, to get to my point, I was going to post how traditionally gender and sex were the same. I would prove this by digging out the oldest dictionary I own, which happens to be a 1974 " Websters New World Dictionary". However upon reading the definition of "gender" form a pre-internet source, I was surprised to what I found. Basically it remarks on two points or interest, "gender is not a formal feature of English", which seems to support my argument that it must be, at it's core, completely arbitrary. Finally the other point of interest is "in most Indo-European languages and in others gender is not necessarily correlated with sex"
Copyright 1974
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 74-5544
ISBN 60E 0-529-05189-3

Page 581 under gender defines it thusly:

gen.der
n. [ME. < OFr. gendre, with unhistoric -d- < L. genus (gen. generis, decent, origin, translating classification by which nouns and pronouns (and often accompanying modifiers) are grouped and inflected, or changed in form, so as to control certain syntactic relationships: although gender is not a formal feature of English, some nouns and the third person singular pronouns are distinguished according to sex or the lack of sex (man or he, masculine gender; woman or she, feminine gender; door or it neuter gender): in most Indo-European languages and in others gender is not necessarily correlated with sex b) any one of such groupings, or an inflectional form showing membership in such a group.
2. [Colloq] sex

So getting back to the original topic, regarding teens being gender-nonconforming, once again I come to the conclusion that these kids are attempting to build a world I'd like to live in! They are building a world where their gender is undefined and not bound by societal "rules".

Now here's a real brain buster for you...

In that same 1974 dictionary there was no listing for "transgender" (bummer). But there was one for "trans", it is:

trans
meaning: 1. on the other side of, to the other side of, over, across, through [transatlantic] 2. so as to change thoroughly [transliterate] 3. above and beyond; transcending [trans-sonic] 4. Chem. designating and isomer having certain atoms or groups on opposite sides of a given plan in the molecule.

SO... hypothetical:

Lets say a young boy was raised in the female gender since he was born and that's all he... or she knows. As a biological male, we'd conclude that this person is a transgender girl now right? But wait, the definition of "trans" is "on the other side of, to the other side of, over, across.... so as to change thoroughly"

As it's the only gender the child has known, and nothing has "changed", despite being a biological male, can we still call her "transgender"? But she's not a genetic girl... what is she then?? [0]

This is why this subject makes me head hurt.

[0] Contemplate on that line and try not to read it too quickly. There is a lot of thought in the words and basically touches on a sentiment I toy with all of the time. [1]
[1] Why does it matter what she is?

"Aren't I going to be me?"
-Forest Gump

It does get confusing, there are at least 2 things going on; one being the freedom of choice of gender or being gender non-specific (non binary) and the other is challenging the gender stereotypes. So if we wear a cheerful skirt and top with high heels, people don't know which convention we are challenging. A friend will know, a new aquaintance will learn and it just doesn't matter what complete strangers think.

moonshadow wrote:SO... hypothetical:

Lets say a young boy was raised in the female gender since he was born and that's all he... or she knows. As a biological male, we'd conclude that this person is a transgender girl now right? But wait, the definition of "trans" is "on the other side of, to the other side of, over, across.... so as to change thoroughly"

As it's the only gender the child has known, and nothing has "changed", despite being a biological male, can we still call her "transgender"? But she's not a genetic girl... what is she then??

Simple: that child's sex is male and her gender is female - nothing has changed.

And as if all that wasn't confusing enough, tonight as I went to pick up Amber at work (she works at Subway, a sandwich shop) she told me about how some customers apparently assign gender to sandwiches.

Somewhat perplexed, I asked "what is a female sandwich?". Apparently chicken teriyaki is a girl sandwich. Anything with bacon is for men. Only in southwest Virginia....

So I asked "so you're saying if I order a sandwich without bacon... I'm a sissy?"

"Pretty much" she replied.

*sighs...* flat Earth, genderfied sandwiches, what the hell have I gotten myself into here???

So I wonder if I should be brave enough to put bacon on a chicken teriyaki sub.... I don't know guys... wearing dresses and skirts is one thing, but I don't want to push it too far!

A queer sandwich.

crfriend wrote:

pelmut wrote:Male behaviour is fertilising women and female behaviour is being fertilised, giving birth to babies and breast-feeding them; everything else is masculine or feminine behaviour and is much more flexible and interchangeable, depending on the individual's gender and the society they live in.

At the basest of levels, yes, that's accurate. I'd like to think that humans are a wee bit more advanced than that. Of course, I have been wrong before.

I'm not sure what you mean by "more advanced", I'm sure you weren't thinking of men and women exchanging their sexual abilities. Equally, a person's gender seems to be fixed for life, so it is only their gender expression or society's acceptance of it that can be vountarily changed. Hopefully society is gradually learning to accept people who want to do jobs/wear clothes/fulfil gender rôles* that were not traditionally associated with the apparent sex of their bodies in the past, so that is where the flexibility for advancement lies.

By being careful to use male/female and masculine/feminine and gender/gender rôle in accurate ways to describe what they really mean, we can make the fundamentals of sex and gender a lot less muddled - which will lead to fewer misunderstandings.


[*I intend these to be read as three independent actions with no implication of association between clothes and gender or sex.]

moonshadow wrote:Lets say a young boy was raised in the female gender since he was born and that's all he... or she knows. As a biological male, we'd conclude that this person is a transgender girl now right? But wait, the definition of "trans" is "on the other side of, to the other side of, over, across.... so as to change thoroughly"

As it's the only gender the child has known, and nothing has "changed", despite being a biological male, can we still call her "transgender"? But she's not a genetic girl... what is she then??

If her gender is different from the gender that would have been assigned to her on the basis of biological sex alone, she is transgender (or a-gender if she has no gender, or gender fluid if her gender varies uncontrollably from time to time).

Your example is an interesting one because there have been several instances where, because of ambiguous genitals, a male and masculine child was mistakenly thought to be female and was raised as feminine. The true gender of the child was not changed and continued to force its way through, until the mistake was realised and the 'girl' correctly re-designated as a boy and allowed to grow up in the masculine gender.

There are, of course, many more cases where a child has had their biological sex correctly assigned but their gender (which is unknown at birth) has been incorrectly assumed to align with their sex. At about the age of five, the child becomes aware of its gender and tries to tell the parents. How the parents respond can make all the difference between a happy well-adjusted child being bought up in the correct gender and a miserable, confused, withdrawn child, being forced to live in a gender which aligns with its sex, having a higher than 40% chance of attempting suicide before adulthood.

moonshadow wrote:So anyway, to get to my point, I was going to post how traditionally gender and sex were the same. I would prove this by digging out the oldest dictionary I own, which happens to be a 1974 " Websters New World Dictionary". However upon reading the definition of "gender" form a pre-internet source, I was surprised to what I found. Basically it remarks on two points or interest, "gender is not a formal feature of English", which seems to support my argument that it must be, at it's core, completely arbitrary. Finally the other point of interest is "in most Indo-European languages and in others gender is not necessarily correlated with sex"

In the first instance, the dictionary is remarking on the grammatical structure of the English language. Unlike, say, French -- which is gendered -- English is not. In French, cats are "feminine" and dogs "masculine" by language attribution, and if it's important to distinguish between male and female cats, for instance, one needs to call it out (in English, that'd be "tomcat" and "queen"; similarly for dogs but the nanny-filter would intercept the word).

In this case, we're interested in the second definition which also happens to be flagged as "Colloquial" (usage), so we've got to be careful with that one as well.

A queer sandwich.

Now hat's strange. There's another word I want to take back for general use.

Caultron wrote:Such is being a prisoner of one's own device.

Even if there is no external frame of reference, or the external frame of reference has been knocked off kilter?

The point here is that independent thought is rather rare, and requires a truly open mind. This is not the same thing as what's colloquially known as "outside the box" thinking, and how much of the general population is likely to engage in such acts? If the frame of reference has been shifted such that the only people who are expected to exhibit emotional responses are women, how quickly will it become virtually impossible for men to display them. Somebody kicked the reference and it's now no longer where it used to be.

This is similar to the demise of the very useful terms "conservative" and "liberal", both of which are now considered, and used as, slurs. It now takes me five minutes of double-speak to convey my general attitude towards things where it used to be possible with a few well-placed words. If we lose the reference-points we're pretty close to rudderless.

pelmut wrote:I'm not sure what you mean by "more advanced", I'm sure you weren't thinking of men and women exchanging their sexual abilities.

Of course I wasn't. Humans are complex organisms and are capable of a very wide range of behaviours and techniques for solving problems. By pigeon-holing each of the two sexes into tight little boxes we rob people of much of what humanity is capable of -- and that's, in my opinion, criminal.

Equally, a person's gender seems to be fixed for life, so it is only their gender expression or society's acceptance of it that can be vountarily changed. Hopefully society is gradually learning to accept people who want to do jobs/wear clothes/fulfil gender rôles* that were not traditionally associated with the apparent sex of their bodies in the past, so that is where the flexibility for advancement lies.

Correct, but what happens if society starts using new and unfamiliar standards for judging someone else. Would it not be possible -- or even probable -- that what a little while ago would just have been a sensitive caring guy is now (unfairly) classed as trans-* because of prevailing opinion? Did he change in any way? Nope, he's still himself, but society (or at least some sub-segment of it) has reclassified him. Is this fair? Just?

moonshadow wrote:And as if all that wasn't confusing enough, tonight as I went to pick up Amber at work (she works at Subway, a sandwich shop) she told me about how some customers apparently assign gender to sandwiches.

Somewhat perplexed, I asked "what is a female sandwich?". Apparently chicken teriyaki is a girl sandwich. Anything with bacon is for men. Only in southwest Virginia....

So I asked "so you're saying if I order a sandwich without bacon... I'm a sissy?"

"Pretty much" she replied.

*sighs...* flat Earth, genderfied sandwiches, what the hell have I gotten myself into here???

So I wonder if I should be brave enough to put bacon on a chicken teriyaki sub.... I don't know guys... wearing dresses and skirts is one thing, but I don't want to push it too far!

A queer sandwich.

We have Subway in Australia, I discovered them years ago visiting Sydney looking for a train.
At least gender assignation for sandwches isn't Subway policy or advertising. I know a lot of selfconscious insecure males in Australia have those sort of fears and loathings and never ask for quiche.
Similar sort of thing happens with choice of cars here; Big 4WD's with oversized tyres are signs of masculinity. I drive Heather's Kei Jidosha around and then to thoroughly convince stranger's suspicions, I get out wearing a skirt and go into the shop carrying a purse "percy" which I find better than keeping coins in a pocket.

Moon, you would just confuse people driving the Dodge "truck", and getting out in a skirt - and then ordering chicken teryaki with bacon.
Ha ha, I love it.

moonshadow wrote:Amber... told me about how some customers apparently assign gender to sandwiches.

Somewhat perplexed, I asked "what is a female sandwich?". Apparently chicken teriyaki is a girl sandwich. Anything with bacon is for men. Only in southwest Virginia....

No, not only in your benighted part of the world. I remember reading an article a while ago about the problem of poor diet in the west of Scotland. In a nutshell, not enough veg (and too much fried food and alcohol). The reporter had interviewed a woman from a poor part of Glasgow who said that she never cooked veg for her husband: "I tried giving him some salad once and he wouldn't eat it. 'Take that away, it's woman's food. I want man's food'". By which he meant meat and chips.

crfriend wrote:...The point here is that independent thought is rather rare, and requires a truly open mind. This is not the same thing as what's colloquially known as "outside the box" thinking, and how much of the general population is likely to engage in such acts?...

(1) True, most people are rather normal.
(2) "Without deviation from the norm, no progress is possible." (Frank Zappa)

crfriend wrote:

pelmut wrote:I'm not sure what you mean by "more advanced", I'm sure you weren't thinking of men and women exchanging their sexual abilities.

Of course I wasn't. Humans are complex organisms and are capable of a very wide range of behaviours and techniques for solving problems. By pigeon-holing each of the two sexes into tight little boxes we rob people of much of what humanity is capable of -- and that's, in my opinion, criminal.

Yes, and we do that by linking gender to sex and restricting gender expression on the basis of sex.

crfriend wrote:

pelmut wrote:Equally, a person's gender seems to be fixed for life, so it is only their gender expression or society's acceptance of it that can be vountarily changed. Hopefully society is gradually learning to accept people who want to do jobs/wear clothes/fulfil gender rôles* that were not traditionally associated with the apparent sex of their bodies in the past, so that is where the flexibility for advancement lies.

Correct, but what happens if society starts using new and unfamiliar standards for judging someone else. Would it not be possible -- or even probable -- that what a little while ago would just have been a sensitive caring guy is now (unfairly) classed as trans-* because of prevailing opinion? Did he change in any way? Nope, he's still himself, but society (or at least some sub-segment of it) has reclassified him. Is this fair? Just?

That would be linking gender to behaviour (and probably sex too) and is absolutely wrong. However, there will be less overall damage done if accurate (but initially unfamiliar) standards are used, rather than sticking with the present muddled thinking that throws every non-conforming person into the same category. We are fighting hard to convince the ignorant public (and sometimes our own partners) that skirt-wearing men are not the same thing as transwomen, homosexuals, paedophiles, rapists, perverted peeping Toms or drag queens; educating people to understand the terminology and use it correctly, even if it is unfamiliar at first, has to be part of the process of achieving this.

I can't get my head round this topic.

pelmut wrote:

Wonderful Electric wrote:Gender is a social construct. A decade from now we will see that there was a gender revolution.

Strictly speaking, gender is how the individual feels they fit into society, it is an innate property over which they have no control and which they cannot change.

I don't see how both halves of pelmut's statement can be true. What if society changes? Say a boy born in 2010 feels he does not fit in with the current rules for boys: doesn't like sports, likes pink and sparkly clothing, is caring and considerate, etc. He can't be persuaded otherwise, it's part of his personality. Everyone says he's trans. But in 2020 an autocratic leader decrees that all sport is a waste of time so it is abolished, and all sportsmen, professional, amateur or armchair, must devote the time previously wasted on playing or watching sport to nursing, teaching, caring for the elderly, etc. And that everyone must wear pink. After a couple of decades and a good many summary executions by the anti-sport death squads, men get used to the idea. Our boy is now a perfectly normal man, but he hasn't changed one bit (unless he took a ton of oestrogen and got his nuts chopped off). His innate leanings are the same as ever, but his gender has (by p's definition) changed.

Equally, and slightly more probably, say it gradually becomes accepted that there are no masculine or feminine behaviours. There is still a range of personality types, preferred activities, etc. But they are all equally acceptable for men and women, albeit that some are still more common for men and others for women. How could anyone say that they had a gender at all, let alone one which did not match their sex?