Maybe I’m down to, biological gender exists, social gender exists, but neither are relevant to anyone but themselves, their intimate partner, and a doctor if medical care is needed.
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Except… politically they are relevant to sports, bathrooms, insurance and some other random stuff.
I consider all of that irrelevant
People try to make them relevant. The same way they want to know if you secretly have butt sex at home and want to regulate it.
Anyway, I agree that gender dysphoria is defined as physical gender <> psychological gender. Likewise our concepts of beauty and sexuality depend a whole lot on “physical gender”.
But I wouldn’t say “physical-gender” has a lot to do with gametes. It’s more about appearances and/or hormones. But you could vaguely use the phrase “biological sex” to refer to this.
That said, I can understand why we might also just shut down the whole conversation, since it opens up bullshit like this.
Do you think it’s dishonest for someone to call themselves “mom” when they are not a biological mom?
As long as we have gender segregation, then physical and/or psychological gender are necessarily relevant.
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And you know how I feel about that.
I’ve thought about this. Upon reflection I think it’s not sports in general, it’s actually school based sports, mostly HS and college.
I recall the brouhaha around Renee Richards. Trans woman pro tennis player. Turns out they weren’t all that good anyways. Slapped around by the top female pros, basically. For pro sports, it’s going to take a heckuva lot more that above average body weight and testosterone to compete at the highest levels. Any trans woman that wants to compete in the Boston Marathon…be my guest. It’s no cake walk.
So we are left with school sports. And this is where it gets nasty. Do you want to go Spanish and do it by fractions? Or just the good ole American way…all in or all out. I cannot see any compelling reason to exclude them.
At the end of the day, to compete at the top in any level, the person will need a rare combination of drive, dedication, and genes/physiological advantages. Virtually all men recognize they aren’t going to be on the university BB team. Nothing wrong with that. If you’re 5’8" and can’t jump…well maybe something else. If you are tone deaf, perhaps a cappella isn’t for you.
I guess I’m saying that achievement and self satisfaction from sports is derived from the hard work and effort, not solely the result. Trans folks shouldn’t be discouraged from those.
I don’t want to wade too far into this conversation. Just that we do -have- gender segregation in various places/events, and that segregation implies people are thinking about some version of gender (physical and/or social). We can choose to eliminate rules, or make exceptions, or try to eliminate segregation entirely. But as long as there is some version of “women’s ______”, there is some gender stuff to worry about.
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Eh, like almost everything, it makes sense to classify… up to a point.
There are medical differences between various racial and ethnic groups. It’s important for doctors to recognize and be aware of these differences. (Testing an unborn baby for tay sachs makes a whole lot more sense if both parents are descended from European Jews than if neither parent is, for example.)
There are cultural differences between various racial and ethnic groups.
If you were a teacher trying to explain a math concept to a group of predominantly African American kids you might be more likely to pick a basketball example, whereas with a group of predominantly Hispanic kids you might be more inclined to pick a baseball example to illustrate the same concept.
That kind of stuff makes sense, IMO. Is the basketball/baseball thing assuming a stereotype? Yeah, I guess so. But it’s also cultural awareness.
There comes a point where it becomes harmful though. Like when doctors assume that African-American women don’t require as much pain medication as white women do during childbirth.
I find the concept that we’re not allowed to discuss sex at all to be… well… bizarre. It’s a thing that exists.
We all have different ideas on where classifying people by sex crossed the line from useful to harmful. I suspect most of us would agree that a doctor discussing the need for prostrate screening with patients ought to be classifying those patients by sex.
And probably most of us would agree that an HR department determining whether people may wear pants to work should probably NOT differentiate employees by sex.
But somewhere in between those two extremes lies a point where the classification by sex would cross the line from useful to harmful. And we certainly do not agree on where that line is.
But that is very different from saying that there isn’t a line and it’s all wrong or bad.
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The only thing bizarre is people in this thread bringing up the fact that there are biological differences between sexes, when no one on this forum, cis or trans, ever disputed that fact.
So bringing up various examples to seemingly counter an argument that was never brought up is completely disingenuous and is obviously trying to hint at a hidden, obviously offensive, agenda.
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I was responding to a post that was specifically discussing classifying.
I agree with you on the examples you gave, which concern race. I do think that race is a capricious choice of category. It did not really exist historically, and is only loosely tied to ancestry, as you point out. And it was pretty clearly motivated in part to support the powerful by justifying slavery.
What I find interesting is that I do not think this is true of gender. Sex as an inferred phenomenon, as opposed to an assumed definition, is about as real as anything in biology. And I think the models in biology roughly correspond to real things in external reality, as opposed to being tools used to predict things about an external reality.
And I conjecture that most of us seem to instinctively relate to each other on the basis of sex, although that relation is not reducible to sex. If this is gender, then it doesn’t seem to me to be inherently oppressive, although it is certainly co-opted for that purpose. So in this sense, I don’t think that gender as a classification is silly or arbitrary.
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I fear you missed my point. I apologize if I wasn’t clear. Gender exists on a spectrum.
If I were to tell you there is blue and there is red, all other colors can be thought of as merely shades of those two! Would I be wrong? You wouldn’t deny that there is red, nor that there is blue. And all those other hues are merely “in between versions” of those two ideals. (Just couldn’t resist the whole red/blue thing since we’re in Political). It’s a physical fact.
We could give all the other hues names, without denying the existence of red and blue in any way. Quite useful to do so, I believe. But what of gender. Is it useful to either pick M or F? I don’t see it as obviously so. It’s a social construct, similar to the race thing.
And let’s avoid the genetic disease road for racial differences. That leads to madness.
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Yeah, I guess I did misunderstand your point.
Certainly there’s a lot of variance with gender and sexuality. But for gender the lions share of people, including a lot of trans people, would say that they identify as male or female. There exist people at other points on the spectrum, but they are in the extreme minority.
And while that doesn’t mean that you can’t be a man or a non-binary person who, say, wears high heel shoes… for a person in the marketing department at a company that makes high heel shoes, there is probably some value in understanding that most of your customers are going to be people who identify as women. If you were devising an ad campaign, you’d probably either mostly or exclusively feature women in your ads.
Yes, this is called systemic discrimination. The only reason they would market it this way is due to antiquated concepts of gender. If you’re going the “but it’s the majority!” route, you run into civil rights issues real fast. Being in the insurance sector (in the US), this should not be hard to understand.
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Not being able to find the shoes you want is systemic discrimination? C’mon, that’s overboard.
I can’t find most shoes I want because my feet are wide. that’s not discrimination, overt or systemic. It’s shoes.
Maybe it’s an extreme example, but the underlying intent can certainly be discrimination. Many makeup companies have been roasted in the past years for not having a wide enough shade range for black people. Statistically speaking, why wouldn’t they do this? Black people is a small enough market to ignore entirely (and they’re also poorer), and makeup shades are incredibly hard to formulate to match different skin tones where even just with white people it’s hard to nail down the exact shade of your skin. But it’s discriminatory at its core.
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