I was originally going to ask how many legal genders there should be, but I fail to see a compelling argument against 0.
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there’s no actual reason for having them, it’s just there because we’ve always done it that way and any sort of change is scary :(
It does help that legal gender makes it easy to oppress people, though. that’s very convenient.Not necessarily legal but tracking genders is extremely important for data analytics in almost every field. For example knowing certain diseases affects genders differently allows scientists to create better medicines or medicines that target different things. Like medicines that are specifically designed to be safe for pregnancy.
While true, thos doesn’t mean the state has to track the gender. It can be part of medical files. The state also doesn’t care about my blood type, which is also super important in some medical situations.
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When it comes to the “state” tracking sex demographics it can be very important when it comes to future planning for citizens. It can matter if you want to transition for example. The state can make long term plans based on that data to encourage an increase in facilities that can offer more support and services to those areas than need trans people.
Just tucking that information away in a medical file that only you and a doctor or two will see does nothing to make society better for trans people as a whole.
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Yep
We don’t. They’re entirely immaterial to a modern world.
The instant 2 atheists got married, it opened the door to people of any gender pairing to get married. Marriage is just a social contact between 2 consenting adults ahemwith tax incentives. Only religion dictated which genders are allowed to do what.
Conservative hand wringing over public restroom use is mitigated by making all bathrooms gender neutral. Easy fix.
What else? Pink is for whoever the fuck likes it, you salmon short wearing closeted frat bros. You do you. Blue is for people doing Frozen cosplay. I dunno, gendered colors are so stupid.
Those are good points. Genders and gendered colors always were inconvenient to me. I hate how women’s gym shoes are always shitty colors and I have to worry about people offended because of traditional gender roles. It’s annoying af.
Pink is not considered feminine in many countries. Also, marriage is not Christian. Hindus, muslims, Buddhists, pagans, and all kind of folks get married and have before Christians existed. It’s not one man and one woman. Massai warriors and Mormons have lots of wives.
Some amount of gendered colors is a useful social shortcut. When our children were babies, we painted the nursery green because that’s my favorite color, and otherwise didn’t bother much with color. However when we went out we tended to have some obvious blue to make it simpler to talk about our baby. It’s easier for someone to say “he’s cute” because he has a blue blanket, than to have the “boy or girl?” Discussion.
Similarly our dog has a pink collar because it’s easier for someone to say “she’s cute” rather than “boy or girl?” And have some random person checking her genitals. It’s only here on Lemmy where people get pornographic about mention of a dog where they don’t know the gender
It’s just a problem when it’s forced, or excessive, or becomes someone’s identity
Good point. Also babies don’t have different body types so I guess you can use whatever you want. Unlike when I see cool shoes but the women’s sizes a pink or shitty pastel colors while boys get cool stuff.
Well and even in the West, pink and blue didn’t used to be gendered like they are. 100+ years ago yellow was boys, light blue for girls. So the gendering isn’t even static, it’s as fluid as gender itself.
Oh wow. I had no idea. That’s fun to imagine. I guess it’s easy to adapt the mind to the idea.
I know it’s just a typo/autocorrect, but I seriously chuckled at “tax invectives.”
Thanks for the catch. I didn’t have my glasses so the blur of text looked like the right blur.
It’s extremely apt. I’m definitely going to remember it next tax season.
Hey, a constant point John Hodgeman makes on his judgement podcast is that long term cohabitation without the tax breaks is foolish. There no reason to give the state more money just to stick it to convention.
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Because conservative rich kids wear pink “ironically” as a flex that they’re rich, and therefore “manly enough” that they de-gender pink as a color.
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That conservatives use gender as a weapon at their discretion.
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It can’t. Their identity is wrapped up in the expectation that most people, like them, lack impulse control and can’t be trusted in any situation where genitals are involved. They think every horror imaginable is only seconds away from happening in every bathroom.
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Ok. I get the sex differentiation when needing medical care. What I don’t get is why we have to tell everyone else what gender we are. If you can do the job, what does it matter? If you are driving, what does it matter? You can change your appearance at any time. Now, I know that injuries can happen anywhere, but there are so many variables in appearance and dress that it seems pointless. Emergency services don’t demand sex identification before treatment. Doctors treat injuries not sex. Yes, there can be treatments that need this information, doctors do ask for a valid reason. I know I’m neurodivergent. I just feel like it’s not really my business whatcha got going on below the “packaging” in a non-having sexual relations soon kinda way. If I would like to have sex with you, I would then start with what I’ve got going on, then ask if you’re ok with that. I’ve always assumed the people I’ve had sex with were human, haven’t gone wrong with that yet. I didn’t decide to have sex with someone on what I think is under their clothing. Communication is key folks. I have made assumptions in my life, but a quick, kind correction is not going to ruin my day. Yes, I’ve made passes to persons who turned me down, who hasn’t? Didn’t slow me down. I’ve mostly worked in office situations, but I did have a few years driving tractor-trailers, even there, you really don’t know what the “packaging” covers. I think it’s just all just busy bodies poking their noses and prejudice into others people’s lives. They can just fuck off with that shit. So many want to bring up safety reasons, maybe we should start with stopping non-consent culture and supporting those who have suffered. Today’s culture explicitly supports non-consent culture. It’s disgusting. Sorry for the wall of text.
Women are excluded from medical studies and even medicines designed for women are trialed on men, anyway, so I would argue it wouldn’t make a difference medically, anyway.
I wouldn’t, due to biological differences in sex. I mean, not that I wouldn’t take drugs designed for women, but if you’re hemorrhaging blood or have a problem where certain medicines present contraindications with your biology, you’d want a doctor to know.
Primary care physicians need to know what conditions you might be susceptible to in the future, and some of these conditions are based on your sex.
I agree … ish
I think sex identification is useful for medical stuff, until it isn’t. If I was born with testicles, and I have a motorcycle accident that removes them. I don’t have testicular cancer. The bit here isn’t that I am “male” so I might have testicular cancer, the importance is “do I have testicles”.
Sex is an overall term that may align with certain likelyhoods, chances or diagnosis. But even then, it’s not a guarantee.
Anemia is the first thing on my mind, but I don’t have girl parts and fail to grasp the significance of that other than people telling me that it’s bad.
My first statement is about medical personnel asking valid questions about physical sex. Considering there are quite a variety of answers to this question, it’s most likely needed in your example. If you have had testicular cancer, it could have metastatic implications without actually having testicles at that time. I would hope that it would be caught before then, but I take your example to mean your testicles were removed in the motorcycle accident (I assume they are gone?) so you assume that you didn’t have, at the time of the accident, testicular cancer? Idk, seems to support my points. No ish involved.
We don’t.
Shelters for domestically abused women need to be female only.
do you think trans women count as female? do trans men count as female?
Who do you think deserves shelter from abuse?
Please explain why. Do you believe that all males are domestic abusers and that no women in same-sex relationships have ever been abused?
I volunteered at a shelter with my mother as a younger teen. Then overnight I went from someone who could reliably count cans of Habitant soup and diapers to someone who could not be trusted to know the address. My best friend at the time and his mother were victims of domestic violence. The inference hurt and still does 30 years later. So I would like to understand your position.
What??? I can, from personal experience, let you know that’s just bullshit. Do you think genitals at birth determines who receives domestic abuse? In fact, trans femme experience more domestic abuse by percentage. Should we shove trans femme into an all male shelter? There are more all male shelters by a large percentage in the USA, it’s difficult to get into an all female shelter. If they are there, it’s for a good reason. FFS. Terf talking points are ignorant.
I’m saying men don’t belong in women’s domestic abuse centers. I provided no definitions. You chose to jump to outrage.
You provided no definitions, just implications, because you’re too scared to stand behind your own beliefs.
Own your own transphobia, coward.
Little man spouting someone else’s ideas. Go away.
Weak attempt at insult, do better
Ahhhh, a troll. Ic, carry on trolling then.
Go rage someplace else.
(from our thread in Actual Discussion) It exists as you see it in this weird middle state now because gender used to be completely synonymous with sex (and for most people, it still is).
I first became familiar with the idea of gender in High School in the 90’s. Unlike most, I have forestry credits as I was in boarding school and had some very odd classes. We ran an apiary and made our own honey, kept and raced sled dogs, worked a restaurant we ran, ran a library, etc.
We were also tasked with taking care of a square kilometre of forest up in Northern Canada and, as such, had to learn about plant species native to the region. Doing that, we learned about plant gender.
Plants have a gender because they lack a biological sex; it is a different classification system. In regards to humans, however, dictionaries (and people using the term) at the time used it interchangeably with the term sex. The only differentiation that I ever saw between the two was in dealing with plants or heavily academic papers dealing with some very specific things.
Intersex humans were, at least taxonomically, an aberration and not a classification. Early on they presented and operated as whatever their dominant sexual traits would indicate and frequently did not deviate and there was little issue with this.
But even without “gender,” and even in the early 80’s when I was born, there was a wide berth in what it could mean to be a man or woman. When people were talking about stereotypes, they seemed to be speaking about things that I’d seen in old TV shows from the 50’s and 60’s, not things I was familiar with in real life. That “housewife and single breadwinner husband” home shit was long past and seemed antiquated even then. It wasn’t BAD to be stereotypical or not, mind you, but other than a few farming households I knew, I never saw the “stay-at-home-Mom” dynamic. Every family had a different dynamic and people fit where they built themselves space to do so. I knew very few “stereotypical male” Dads or “stereotypical female” Moms other than on TV, and we all knew damn well that TV wasn’t true to life.
When I witnessed third-wave feminist messaging start to get big in the 2010s speaking about this stuff like it was common, expected, and had to be destroyed, it was odd to me. It was like they were fighting with ghosts from days long past.
I recognize that my personal experiences don’t match everyone, but I lived in Cincinnati, Edmonton, Calgary, Saudi Arabia, Kingston, Amsterdam, Thailand, Kentucky, and many more. The only place I witnessed what could be described as “traditional roles” was in Saudi, and even then it was only defined by a few laws, not the way people actually acted. I knew many friends that had their father completely cowed by their mother even in that insane theocracy.
All that to say that gender in humans… doesn’t seem to have a purpose to me. Since gender can be fluid in humans, it is not at all worth categorizing in humans. It means, effectively, nothing. It’s like trying to categorize hair colour down to the hex code; it accomplishes nothing whatsoever.
Sex is a medically distinguishing characteristic and is easily definable. It adds clarity. I get why it needs to exist. It has value.
Gender? I don’t understand why it came to be used for anything as it hasn’t done anything other than stir basic culture war garbage.
This matches closely with my own experience.
Many users have mentioned medical reasons, but there are also a bunch of legal privileges that only one gender has. In my country,
- Some number of jobs (usually 33%) are reserved for women. Some states reserve a small number of jobs for transpeople / intersex / third gender people.
- Maternity leave > paternity leave
- Many government schemes are only for women.
- In a divorce, if the children do not have strong preferences for either parent, they are sent with the mother.
- At night, women cannot be kicked out of trains for travelling without tickets.
- Women can only be searched / arrested by policewomen.
- Religious accomodations, like Sikh men but not women having a right to carry knives in high-security areas.
- In Delhi and nearby areas, men are less likely to get sexually assualted.
Sounds like the problem is a lack of gender equality, which I suppose would in fact need to be fixed first.
Also a disturbing amount of sexual assaults, particularly around Delhi. (Men getting assaulted by women is rare enough that we haven’t had to make rules specifically for it.) During the recent protests a policeman harassed a female protestor after arresting her, despite the rule that only policewomen should arrest women. Now most police forces aren’t as bad as Delhi police, but that bar is underground.
So that people with an M on their passport can do obligatory military service
(Yes, I am salty about this, how’d you know?)
((Also I think that’s the only remaining way in which people with an M or an F are treated differently where I live so at least we’re making some progress I guess))
(((Oh also they need it to more effectively grope trans people at airport security)))
Denmark made the military service mandatory for women too this year.
I don’t know of any legal differences at this point.
There’s still plenty of differences but not from a legal perspective.
Like, maternity leave is longer than paternity leave, but that’s not due to gender, but rather who is pregnant. For instance if a lesbian couple has a child, only one of them can have maternity leave, while the co-parent gets the equivalent to paternity leave.
Also, men aren’t screened for breast cancer and vice versa for prostate check-ups. I don’t think that’s done on a legal basis though, it’s just a healthcare service aimed at different demographics. Anyone can request a prostate check or mammography and get it if the doctor finds it necessary.
Changing rooms at public swimming facilities are separated by gender, but they often also have a third room which is for families with small children, people with handicaps or anyone else who don’t want to or can’t use the public showers.
Also, men aren’t screened for breast cancer and vice versa for prostate check-ups. I don’t think that’s done on a legal basis though, it’s just a healthcare service aimed at different demographics. Anyone can request a prostate check or mammography and get it if the doctor finds it necessary.
“Miss, I can confirm you still do NOT have a prostate. Please, stop coming here. This is very inappropriate”
The important thing is not the legal genders, but that we can hate somebody we don’t know for something they haven’t done.
Because church and patriarchal society basically.
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This is part of my problem with bigger transitioning than I’ve already done. I’ve reached about the point where I’d have to get my DL sex changed to not run into various problems and I’m already super uncomfortable with how much the government knows about my genitals. None of that ever should have been the government’s business to begin with.
We have laws making it illegal to discriminate according to gender. If there are zero legal gender categories, there is no legal basis by which one can say discrimination has occured, so nobody can technically commit such a crime.
identification
Gender doesn’t help here. Or there would be no confusion over it in place of an image. The image provides more information and the gender marker is unreliable as an identifier even for cis people.
Procreation is a big part of human experience. So things kinda lead one from another.
