Dust said: My point was simply about my principles (and those of others) not aligning with the LGBT movement, and therefore not wanting to "fly their colors" so to speak. I should have worded it differently.
Maybe it's just my (almost) 70 year-old eyes, but I don't see the word "sorry" anywhere in there. Or are you one of those special people who are exempt from having to apologize for dissing people?
Dust said: other cultures have had places outside the two primary roles,
Get up to speed, they still do have and have had all along. And it's not just a few; it's MANY.
Spirou, your company should ask for their money back from whoever they paid to write that "training." There are so many errors in what you say was presented to you, I hardly know where to begin.
Perhaps here, it's not just "LGBT" for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered anymore. It's at least "LGBTQ," for Lesbian ... Transgendered and Queer. Often you will see "LGBTQ+" to include folks who know they're different, but don't feel comfortable with the other labels. Finally, sometimes you'll see "LGBTQ2S+." What's "2S," you ask? Two-spirited, the Native American recognition that some people have souls that combine what they considered masculine and feminine characteristics. Such people are nearly revered for their wisdom.
Which brings us back to Dust's contention that transwomen exhibit and promote the worst of the stereotypes. Really? Who? Have you ever met a transwoman that you're aware of?
Let me recommend the movie
Disclosure. It's available for free on Netflix. In it, a number of intelligent, articulate and in many cases breathtakingly beautiful women talk about the challenges they faced down and still face in their chosen professions simply because, generally on the basis of their genitalia, they were called "boys" at birth. By the age of 3 or 4 most of them knew better and had to struggle for years to get the people around them to catch up to that fact.
Dust also said he couldn't get on board with celebrating the Stonewall Riots because rioting is categorically wrong. Let me ask you, was the Boston Tea Party wrong? If that wasn't a riot, what was it? Certainly a well-organized riot, but a riot nonetheless. And, from a legal point of view more reprehensible because it was done with forethought and malice.
Even the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who dedicated his life to non-violence stated that riots are the voice of the voiceless.
But the annual Pride Parades don't celebrate rioting; they celebrate what those riots lead to. As Moonshadow said, what those riots lead to is greater recognition that each and every one of us is entitled to be who we genuinely are. That each and every person should be allowed to openly and honestly be able to express who they are and be respected, if not celebrated for it!
I facetiously said that the whole point of all of these categories is to get everyone so flummoxed with them they would shove all of the labels over the rail and, as Carl and a number of say you yearn for, get to the point where we stop judging people by their label and in fact give little thought to how we might categorize them, and not judge them, but accept them as PEOPLE. Period.
But we all know we're not only not there yet, we're not even close. There are too many yahoos, like my own brother, who talk about other men giving up their "Man Cards." Or start sentences with, "Real men don't ..." Everyone of us knows that "wear skirts and dresses" tops that list.
Dust, you asked me if exhibiting any one of a list of behaviors would qualify a guy as "non-binary." I first gave a facetious answer to that one too, but the system ate my homework. Good thing, humor and irony seem to be lost on you. I now have a better answer for you. Don't ask me, ask your closest "Real Men don't ... " Neanderthals what they think of any of those behaviors. If what you get back is that real men don't do that, then yeah, guys who do any of those things are non-binary. Because masculine and feminine, the two poles of Gender Identity are social constructs, anything in between, say a man augmenting his masculinity with something feminine in his character or behavior, is non-binary.
Dust also said he didn't want to broadcast a message, he just wants to be able to wear his skirts in public. Newsflash everyone! that
IS a message. And the message is that contrary to social norms, it's perfectly okay for a man to wear a skirt in public. A subtext is, "We really DO live in free countries where we're allowed to be ourselves. So now that you've seen I can be me and have people accept me; YOU can be you!"
It didn't take long after I started wearing dresses to church for people to come up to me to tell me how brave I was. At first that embarrassed me.
Brave? "Running into a burning building to save lives is brave. Wearing a dress? You've got to be kidding, half the world's population wears them and thinks nothing of it." But if so many intelligent people whom I respected said it was brave, I had to own it. For a little while, I felt I was almost obliged to put on my skirts and dresses so that other people could see they didn't have to hide their individuality anymore.
So, I agree wholeheartedly with Moonshadow, Pelmut and Faldaguy; we're given more license to wear our skirts than we were even 10 years ago because of the Pride Movement. And now, here in the US, they have recently obtained for us the legal right to wear our skirts to work.
They've stood up for us so it's long overdue that we stand up for them.