The problem is that we have not been taught how to weigh different ideas' merits and demerits. The scale is compassion with respect to how acting upon an idea affects human beings and the Earth, Herself.
Money is a tool for trade, but what is being sold and what is being bought?
A hammer can be used to build someone a house or bonk an innocent person on the head.
Seen through the lens of compassion, the good and the bad become obvious in all but the most extreme corner cases.
The world could use a few less people quarreling about their conflicting ideas, and a few more people seeking the intersection of what everyone thinks is good, and working in it.
> And I thought I recognized the name. I really do not understand how trans debate has come to dominate some online discourse.
Much of it is pushback against widespread ideological capture, and in particular the authoritarian idea that everyone else has to change and restrict their behavior to accommodate increasingly absurd and harmful requests from an overly demanding identity group.
What is the group demanding that is "over" what you would consider appropriate? How do their demands restrict your behavior?
Personally I've never noticed trans people and their push for rights & recognition having any impact on my life whatsoever. And I say this as a devout member of a rigorous and conservative religious tradition.
Many demands, but probably the most egregious is the insistence that males be incarcerated in women's prisons if they say they are women. Several states now have policy that enables this, and female prisoners have been sexually assaulted, raped and even impregnated as a result of this.
Is sexual assault in prison otherwise a particular concern of yours? I understand it's a massive issue affecting hundreds of thousands of incarcerated people, is activism on that broader issue how you came to be aware of this? Do you have a connection to any prisoner advocacy groups that have policy recommendations on this? I assume the sexual violence outcomes for trans women in mens prisons isn't very wonderful either.
I can't relate to the comic. like I said I have not really felt personally affected by trans people at all on any level ever.
But what is "female"? The Algerian boxer was born female, but has high testosterone due to whatever medical condition, which ruled her out of some previous competitions that had conditions around that. Do you want sports governing bodies to inspect genitalia? Do blood tests? Especially when it gets into kids' sports territory, this gets very iffy very fast.
“Female” is well-defined for 99.99%+ of the population (and for most non-human species too, in fact). For those with DSDs, a judgement call can be made. For example, a person with XY chromosomes and the 5-ARD DSD (who was raised as a female due to the appearance of their external genitalia) has testosterone in the normal male range and thus is likely to have an advantage over females, and thus should not compete in the female category.
Cases of genuinely ambiguous sex are vanishingly rare, and are nothing to do with trans identities which are differences of social gender that do not change the underlying biology.
The available evidence indicates that Khelif is actually male: two blood tests from two independent labs revealing an XY karyotype, a member of Khelif's training team describing problems with hormones and chromosomes and that Khelif has been on medication to adjust testosterone to within the female range, and a leaked medical report which describes Khelif as having the male-specific disorder of sexual development 5-alpha reductase deficiency (5-ARD).
This implies that Khelif is not female but is male, and went through male puberty, therefore having the male physical advantage in sport caused by male sexual development.
No, just erroneously assumed to be female and issued with identity documents stating this.
Same as has happened previously with other male athletes in women's sports, such as Caster Semenya who also has 5-ARD and also competed in the Olympics, back in 2016 in the women's 800m track event, winning gold. The silver and bronze medals were taken by males too.
Khelif does not identify as trans, and described such accusations as "a big shame for my family, for the honor of my family, for the honor of Algeria, for the women of Algeria and especially the Arab world."
> The Algerian boxer was born female, but has high testosterone due to whatever medical condition,
Imane Khelif has an X and a Y chromosome. She has 5-alpha reductase deficiency, which leads to the development of a pseudo-vagina and internal testicles. Crucially, though, the hormone levels are the same as typical males. In terms of upper body strength, red blood cell count, bone density, etc. Khelif is the same as other males.
She wasn't disqualified due to hormone levels. She was disqualified because the International Boxing Association's criteria for participating in the women's category is having a female karyotype (no Y chromosome).
> Do you want sports governing bodies to inspect genitalia? Do blood tests?
Chromosomes can be checked with just a mouth swab.
That's a potential option, but a lot of anti-trans folks wouldn't be happy with that either. It also doesn't solve the theoretical problem of fairness, since trans men on testosterone (who presumably compete in the 'open' category in your model?) might have significant physical advantages over cis women in some sports. I don't think there are any glib solutions to the issue of gender in sport. The current moral panic about trans people certainly won't go any way to help with solving it.
Another layer of complexity to consider. Some of those rules may need to change to enable full participation of trans athletes. I do not have a fixed view on what the rules should be. I'm just saying it's complicated.
Or maybe those that take performance-enhancing drugs will just have to accept that their body modification choices preclude participation in competitive sport.
There are trans-identifying female athletes who don't take testosterone and compete in women's sports, recent example in the last Olympics being Hergie Bacyadan in women's boxing. There's no exclusion on participation as long as the same rules as for everyone else are followed.
Again, you’re just highlighting the fact that trans people’s bodies are very variable and that this is a complex issue. There isn’t a simple, obvious solution that everyone (currently) agrees is fair. The current rules around trans athletes receiving testosterone as part of gender affirming care are quite complex and variable. I don’t have a take on exactly what the rules should be. I’m just making the point that there are no easy solutions.
> There probably have been more instances of furore over a _potential_ trans athlete who aren't trans
Actually, most of those "potential" trans turn out to be actual trans. That college volleyball athlete has even been sued by her own teammate.
> It's a "problem" way overblown by anti-trans activists.
I get that there are many loud voices on this topic right now. But I rather having this right now then later down the road, where the right has become wrong and the wrong has become right.
> That college volleyball athlete has even been sued by her own teammate.
And there has never been a shred of proof of her being trans. Exactly my point.
> et that there are many loud voices on this topic right now. But I rather having this right now then later down the road, where the right has become wrong and the wrong has become right.
Yes, better for women with high testosterone to get death threats now for winning in the Olympics instead of thinking if this is really a problem.
Her body has both male and female characteristics. If she'd been raised as a man, you could make an equally meanspirited comment about her body with reference to one of its female characteristics.
The fact that she was raised as a woman in Algeria (a notorious hotbed of wokeness) should tell you something.
Also, while it is gross to pick over people's bodies like this, I have to point out that you omit to note that her testicles are internal.
You made your account 51 days ago and literally the only thing you've commented on since then is the anatomical details of this woman's body. What a strange and distasteful obsession. She has always been a woman and meets the criteria to compete as one under current rules (which long predate any changes made in relation to trans people).
Still a male pummelling female competitors though. Who is being excused in this through the spread of a considerable amount of misinformation, your earlier comment being an example of such.
You can find a list of trans athletes in women's sports here. I can't vouch for the site's accuracy or completeness, just providing a source for those who want to do further research.
These are still examples of males imposing themselves on what are supposed to be women's competitions. Every single one of these cases highlights an unwanted male intrusion.
Also, given that biological males dominate even for non-physical sports and esports like chess (talented women like Judit Polgar notwithstanding) or Starcraft, a biological male playing in a woman's-only league is a probably an unfair advantage even then.
I don’t really have a strong opinion one way or the other about your overall point, but I just want to point out for clarity:
Examples like Judit Polgar (who was around the top 10 players in the world at her peak) do indeed prove that chess is nothing like (physical) sports in this way. In physical sports like basketball, soccer, etc. the best women in the world can’t compete against even moderately athletic amateur men. A famous example is the fact that the US women’s national soccer team practices against young teenage boys (and routinely loses). In chess it would be like if the best woman was rated 1800 or something.
This isn’t meant to disparage women in sports — they really do have a categorically different kind of body from men, and pushing those bodies to their limits is just as impressive as it is for men. But they don’t appear to have categorically different kinds of brain, at least insofar as it matters for chess skill.
So what do the prisoner advocate orgs you work with have as a statement or policy rec? The one I volunteer with has decided that it's not effective to have a specific policy about such a small group until meaningful measures addressing sexual violence in prisons generally (which again affects hundreds of thousands or millions per year) have been attempted.
There are a lot of other orgs though and especially if you're in an area with a lot of trans people and it's a more active issue, I'm interested in what other groups have had to come up with. Like I said if the goal is preventing sexual violence I can't imagine that moving trans women into the mens prison is going to be effective either.
> Personally I've never noticed trans people and their push for rights & recognition having any impact on my life whatsoever.
Do you have young children? I don’t live in the USA, I live in Europe, but I have a very small baby and I already did. The daycare, just this year announced they aren’t going to be celebrating Mother and Father’s Day anymore. Instead we will have to celebrate a Parents day.
This is just a small thing of course, there are many other situations where it’s clear an agenda is being pushed over the general population. The only way I can see you never felt it, is if you don’t have children.
Do you actually know that switching from "Mother's Day" and "Father's Day" to "Parents' Day" has anything to do with trans people? Without the context of your comment I would have guessed it was more about (1) trying not to upset children who have lost a parent, (2) trying not to upset or confuse children who've never had two parents around, and/or (3) trying not to upset or confuse children brought up by same-sex couples.
Of course you might consider any or all of those to be Stupid Woke Nonsense, but whether right or wrong, sensible or stupid, they're not about trans people.
And would you say that "everyone else has to change and restrict their behavior to accommodate increasingly absurd and harmful requests from an overly demanding identity group" and that a parents day has harmed you?
As a person entirely out of the "trans debate" it almost always seems to me like right wingers or anyone who is asked to change anything at all catastrophizes it beyond all sane response.
The mild "huh that slightly bothers me" and the "they are TRYING TO CHANGE MY CHILDREN!!!" seem to be conflated to the point of making no sense.
Going from "I noticed a trans person" to "this must be stopped!" makes no sense whatsoever.
I want to live my way outside of superficial constructs like gender. I do not want to be forced to accommodate people who think that gender identity is something relevant.
The current political climate sucks for agender people.
Some percentage of people do not strongly identify with any particular gender. I was assigned male at birth, I look stereotypically male, everyone assume I'm male and addresses me as such, but honestly, I don't care one way or the other and if I was female instead I doubt I would care. Let's say 50% fall here.
Another group of people strongly identified with one gender or the other, and can't imagine it being any other way. These people care deeply about gender because it is an important part of their identity. Let's say the other 50% fall here. Most of them are happy because they present as the gender they feel they are, and everyone treats them as such. In a small percentage, there is a mismatch and it makes their life hell.
I suspect the typical mind fallacy makes it very hard for most people to understand those that fall into the other group. And for those that are in the "happy with their gender" group to understand those in the "unhappy with their gender" group.
> Some percentage of people do not strongly identify with any particular gender.
I’m the same. But, and this is a huge but: it’s my privilege to be able to think this way. I know that there are people who simply isn’t allowed to do this.
The same thing with skin color. I don’t care. However, my brother has a darker skin tone, he simply cannot have that luxury to not care, because other people force him. For example, when he wasn’t allowed to buy stuff at the nearby bakery because of his skin. He had to move to a country where people care less, because he didn’t want to put up his kids to the same. (Btw our country of origin is Hungary)
This is not an argument. That your brothers rights are not respected does not say anything about your rights and whether you are morally right to enforce them.
I noticed that too, and not only that. I and my peers in school had words for it: "girl" for people that were just female, and "girl girl" for people who were female plus "extra ideas". Same for boys.
However. Cultural attitudes are propagated by people who's livelihood is frequent publishing. In that scenario, I think teams "what's to talk about?" and "it's not that complicated" are always going to lose to team "I've got a lot to say about this."
I want to live my life outside of superficial constructs like religions. I do not want to be forced to accommodate people who believe religion is relevant. The current political climate is challenging for areligious people.
I don't get to have this opinion because conservatives are censoring me and are always shoving religion down my throat.
Imitating conservative argument style is fun, you get to tell how you feel but then still get defensive when people say you hate other people based on their identity.
I think people should be left to do whatever they want.
But my son at age 5 asked me “Daddy do you think I’m a boy just because I have a penis?” This is because his woke kindergarten teachers started teaching this gender nonsense and that’s where I had to start teaching my kid about how all this was nonsense.
Where I draw the line is when I am told to lie to myself and my children that there is more than 2 genders and that a man is actually a woman if he thinks he is a woman. I refuse to do that and the fact that the activists have crossed the line into absurdity is where I fight back. I will not let my children grow up in an anti-science world like that.
What's the gender of someone born with XX chromosomes, two ovaries, a penis, and develops male secondary sex characteristics like a beard? Intersex variants are 1% of the population, it's as common as red hair. The strict gender binary is the anti-science view I'm sorry to say.
And again I say this as someone who is a member of a rigorous religious tradition that does not have any real flexibility about this. Nonetheless I've had to come to accept it because, as you say, the science.
> What's the gender of someone born with XX chromosomes, two ovaries, a penis, and develops male secondary sex characteristics like a beard?
Did you just make this up or did you have a specific disorder of sexual development in mind? Presence of two ovaries suggests it's a female DSD anyhow.
> Intersex variants are 1% of the population, it's as common as red hair.
This figure is controversial and includes conditions which most clinicians do not recognize as intersex, such as Klinefelter syndrome, Turner syndrome, and late-onset adrenal hyperplasia. The true prevalence is more likely between 0.01% and 0.02%.
The trans discussion is separate to this anyway, as it involves individuals without any DSDs who demand that others treat them as if they were the opposite sex.
Yeah it's approximately as hypothetical as all the cases of trans athletes we're apparently taking seriously in this thread. Eg greater than zero known cases but likely no one commenting here has ever encountered either phenomenon in the course of life.
Intersex are not 1% of the population. That figure comes from a study that included women with Turner Syndrome and PCOS, as well as men with Klinefelter Syndrome as intersex. Even a layperson would have zero trouble classifying the sex of said people if they saw their body.
> Leonard Sax, in response to Fausto-Sterling, estimated that the prevalence of intersex was about 0.018% of the world's population,[4] discounting several conditions included in Fausto-Sterling's estimate that included LOCAH, Klinefelter syndrome (47,XXY), Turner syndrome (45,X), the chromosomal variants of 47,XYY and 47,XXX, and vaginal agenesis. Sax reasons that in these conditions chromosomal sex is consistent with phenotypic sex and phenotype is classifiable as either male or female.[4]
It highly depends on your definition of trans. Some estimates place the rate of trans people at ~1.2%. If 1 in 10 trans people are athletes, then that'd be about 6x more common than intersex.
Speaking for myself, in terms of policy this issue wouldn't even crack my top 100. But in terms of electoral politics? I think the evidence is pretty good that it had a lot of salience in the last election. Many swing voters who broke for Trump have said that gender and/or trans issues were a big factor for them. Something like a third of Trump's closing ads were about this topic and Kamala's campaign checking a box that they were in favor of sex change operations for criminals became a huge talking point.
As someone who cares deeply about a lot of separate issues that Trump will be terrible on, I wish progressives would STFU on this topic and stop stabbing their party in the back. Treating trans people with dignity and respect should go without saying, but some of the left wing rhetoric on this issues goes too far like when they deny that there is any biological difference between men and women. A lot of the efforts on the left look more like virtue signaling and fighting for the sake of it, rather than trying to achieve better real world outcomes.
Judges are not infallible, and the judge being a woman is irrelevant since she does not represent all women.
I think it is reasonable for a woman to want a shared nude space to be free of people with penises, regardless of what that person identifies as, for simple logistics reasons of not being able to be sure if someone is being deceptive.
Nah that isn’t the problem. If that happened to my kid they would get back up and shove the other kid over.
The problem is maintaining the integrity of sports and competition. Only an uneducated person would ever try to argue that “the best women’s college basketball team would beat the best men’s college basketball team” even 1 out of 100 times.
Amusingly, in my experience, it was the girls in coed soccer that were doing the knocking down. For a few seasons, they were bigger than the boys, and they could more easily use their hips to check people off the ball without drawing fouls.
Has yours? As far as I can tell there are no trans student athletes in my state at any age or competitiveness level. There are several active anti-trans organizations that consider this an issue but no specific cases of it locally for me to assess or be affected by.
as a parent of a child athlete this is always a silly argument. Kids in sports get knocked down all the time! Sometimes pretty hard! I feel like people who clutch their pearls on this stuff either don’t have kids, don’t have kids in sports, or aren’t the parent who actually shows up to the games.
On a personal level, linguistic imperialism. For all the rhetoric spewed regarding the impacts of colonialism and cultural imperialism and fervent calls to decolonize various aspects of society, the whites spewing that very same rhetoric have found a way to launder their own modern brand of imperialism into gender diversity and inclusivity by inventing and then imposing new language on that of other ethnic minorities: "Filipinx." This word shows a shocking ignorance of basic facts of Tagalog that it can't be construed in any way other than racist: there is no letter "x" in Tagalog, and the grammar of the language is already genderless. This point becomes readily apparent if you are conversing with a native Tagalog speaker who uses English as a second language, as they will readily confuse the pronouns "he" and "she" in everyday speech, the concept of gendered pronouns being, quite literally, foreign to them. Is this transphobic bigotry?
The Philippines has already undergone multiple rounds of colonization over centuries, leading to the slow-motion eradication of their native language as Spanish and especially English have overtaken it to the point where many Filipinos cannot even speak pure Tagalog any more [0]. Hasn't the western white already colonized the Philippines enough? First it was, "your pagan religion is immoral and barbaric; here, read this Bible." Now, it's, "your transphobic language is bigoted and uninclusive; here, take these pronouns." How about obeying Starfleet's Prime Directive by leaving other cultures the fuck alone?
If you don't find this top-down imposition and control of language disturbing, I suggest you review your Orwell.
On a more abstract level, "the group's" intolerance of dissenting opinion and academic inquiry, especially when such inquiry shows its positions to be internally contradictory. Take for instance Rebecca Tuvel's paper In Defense of Transracialism, published in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, which argues that "considerations that support transgenderism seem to apply equally to transracialism." [1] Rather than judge this assertion on its merits and attempt to defeat it rationally, the community demanded the paper be retracted, the author was pilloried for her hateful language and dangerous ideas, and there were multiple departures from Hypatia's editorial team.
I believe both "Latinx" and "Filipinx" were introduced by queer people of the respective ethnicities, not white Anglos. Basically every culture on earth has deep seated views on gender that don't match reality, and a strong reactionary response when that's interrogated from within the community.
Philosophy as a field has very little to contribute to basic object-level facts -- this is the whole reason science ("natural philosophy") split from traditional philosophy back in the early Renaissance. This isn't something you can reason out within your brain, this is entirely evidence-driven. There is a tremendous amount of evidence for transgender people and next to none for "transracialism".
> I believe both "Latinx" and "Filipinx" were introduced by queer people of the respective ethnicities, not white Anglos.
This kind of cultural ignorance is highly insensitive. I would suggest that you refrain from making assertions, without corroborating evidence, about other cultures and matters that you have no experience with.
My lived experience, as a Pinoy, speaking with other Pinoys, both here in the west and in the Philippines, is that very few people, especially amongst the older generations, have ever heard of Filipinx; of those who have, nobody respects the term as valid, and indeed many regard it as colonialist.
From an opinion piece in The Philippines' newspaper of record, the centre-left [0] Philippine Daily Inquirer [1]:
The practice of gender-neutralizing all gendered words began in the 1960s with the purpose of supporting gender equality. Though we may see Filipinx as
something to be celebrated for its obvious acknowledgment of gender neutrality borrowed from the Latinx and Chicanx communities in the United States, we
must resist such adverse essentializing of our identity.
If we use Filipinx here in the Philippines, many people would probably react in shock at such a strange word, and would immediately resist such naming.
Absurd as it may seem, these Filipino-American digital natives prove once again the naming power of the American establishment to co-opt identities in their
own sense. Haven’t we learned from history? The Philippine revolutions, the massacres, the campaigns for sovereignty, our fight to wield the Philippine flag
and sing the national anthem? To legitimize Filipinx as gender-neutral is to efface and silence Filipino as gender-neutral.
What could be more gender-neutral than the Philippine languages themselves spoken by our fellow Filipinos?
We, the Filipino virtual community, have to resist this Western hype and instead empower our languages in the Philippines. We are all Filipinos. Our
concerns are deeply rooted in our social realities than in the post-postmodern neutralized revision implied by Filipinx.
The media is replete [2] with [3] other [4] examples of how poorly this term is received overseas, despite its adoption by a small subset of the western Filipino diaspora. Take this interview conducted by VICE with "Nanette Caspillo, a former University of the Philippines professor of European languages" [2]:
While it is intended to promote diversity, the word instead sparked arguments about identity, colonialism, and the power of language.
Right now, most people in the Philippines do not seem to recognize, understand, relate to, or assert Filipinx as their identity. Therefore, “the word
[‘Filipinx’] does not naturally evoke a meaning that reflects an entity in reality,” [...]
“Filipinx has not reached collective consciousness,” Caspillo said, perhaps because fewer people have heard of and relate to the new term.
> This isn't something you can reason out within your brain, this is entirely evidence-driven.
This just sounds like a justification for tolerating double standards and self-contradiction, to the tune of "rules for thee, and not for me."
> There is a tremendous amount of evidence for transgender people and next to none for "transracialism".
Beyond the question of Rachel Dolezal's transracial identity as discussed in Tuvel's paper, there is also the recent Canadian headline regarding a self-identifying Indigenous group that has received tens of millions in federal cash [5]. Is this group Inuit, or is it not? Who decides? Would you, in their words, "want to take food out of the mouths of our people? Why would you want to hurt our people and our communities?” All because you refuse to respect their self-identification and long-documented history as an Indigenous people?
I said queer people of the respective ethnicities, not residents of the Philippines. I am aware that this comes from mostly queer people in the diaspora, but that doesn't take their ethnicities away.
Saying "Filipino" or "Latino" is gender neutral is similar to saying that "he" in English writing is gender neutral. It is not an unreasonable stance from a purely descriptive standpoint, but the amount of sensitivity that comes if anyone tries to interrogate it indicates a deeper rot in the respective cultures.
Like — why is the default descriptor not "Filipina"? Why is it not "Latina"? Why is the gender neutral term the same as the male term? The answer is quite obviously the patriarchy.
(By the way, "Latine" is what the queer people of that ethnicity I know use. I think between Latine being a better grammatical fit and cishet feelings being damaged, Latinx mostly fell out of favor. And linguistic imperialism? Really? There is a far more fundamental and insidious reshaping of the territory to fit the map at play, which is to turn all of human gender and sexual diversity into a single male/female binary.)
> why is the default descriptor not "Filipina"? Why is it not "Latina"? Why is the gender neutral term the same as the male term? The answer is quite obviously the patriarchy.
It's easy to blame patriarchy, but is it the responsible? According to linguists, the answer resides in how gender was introduced in European languages from the Proto Indo European [1, 2]. The feminine genus, in grammatical sense, was introduced later as a specialization of the general "animated" category. Therefore, what later became masculine was used for all "general humans", and was left the default form when gender was not indicated. Example even in English (and other proto-German languages) where nouns are (mostly) not gendered: you have the word of "woman" as a specialization of "man", which does not indicate the male, but it originally indicated the "human being" [3]. We are talking about the dawn of European languages, so take these as educated hypotheses, but blaming patriarchy is a very modern (and unsubstantiated) view.
The need to use a gender (either masculine or feminine) as the default gender is a need in the lack of a neutral gender for humans. Other languages in the world, like Maasai, use the feminine as the "default" gender, others have a proper neutral-animated gender.
Having a neutral gender in Spanish would be great, because it removes ambiguity in many cases where the sex is unknown, but introducing it, especially in languages like Spanish or Italian where all nouns are gendered, is a _massive_ undertaking, which would shake the foundations of those languages and would require a lot of energy by all its speakers. Theoretically possible, sure (we can make up any language we like), but I don't see a minority of agendered people being able to move so much inertia.
So how to go about it? The "x" or other non-standard symbols are pointless because unpronounceable. The "e" can work in Spanish (won't in Italian), and only for some cases, example above all: "españoles" is masculine. Choosing masculine and feminine randomly doesn't work either, it causes confusion and can even sound sexist in certain contexts (I've tried it and found myself in that situation).
My personal take is to stick to the rule: "default" gender is masculine. It's just a choice, as it would have been if we chose feminine (also remembering that the grammatical gender has -in most cases- nothing to do with sex). However, I also try to avoid ambiguities, even at the cost of redundancy, and try to introduce variation as much as possible, still within the constraints of the rules.
Patriarchy is ancient! Yes it's quite fucked up that "woman" literally means "of man" — learning that in school was one of the things that radicalized me.
More than the actual policy prescriptions I'm interested in the reactions various cultures have when challenged on this. You get to see a rather extreme amount of emotional fragility, certainly a lot more than would be justified by a mindset of curiosity and openness. To me that is a pretty strong sign that something is deeply rotten in the culture (and I include my own culture here).
As I said elsewhere, I believe that scientific humanism is the most morally robust worldview in existence. I don't want to tell other people what to do, but I am going to live my life with moral conviction, and that includes saying what I believe to be true about other cultures.
The word “woman” never meant “of man”. It comes from the old English “wif mann” which means female person. Of course “mann” evolved to “man” but at the time it applied to either sex. “Wif” never meant “of”.
I just need to remind that (very) often languages evolve in ways that have nothing to do with the underlying societal structure.
This is my issue with lots of things being said about politics and language. Language is a tool. There is nothing patriarchal in "woman", nor in the use of the default "unmarked masculine" (this is the technical term) that is present in many languages. The unmarked masculine may even be interpreted in a matriarcal sense: the feminine has detached from the "general human" as someone "special", "more important" than the man. But these are all speculations that are all valid and all silly at the same time.
How we _use_ language is another story though. For example, using the masculine with the consequence (intentional or not) to exclude women from a job ad is definitely not acceptable. The unmarked masculine has the problem of being ambiguous, but the ambiguity can be solved (with the added cost of redundancy) by repeating the same words with the feminine or simply by specifying who the message is referring to (example: "madame et monsieur"). This is common sense, but it's worth reminding people to be careful about it. What is not common sense (IMHO) is to ask all speakers of a certain language to change a thousands years old morphology because someone misuses it, and not even providing valid alternatives.
Other examples of politicised language can be found in the words that are used to signal virtue, or to offend, often completely changing the original meaning of the word to the point that it becomes a political slogan with no meaning at all. I have dozens of examples, including the same word "patriarchy", but I can also mention "fascist", "communist", "feminist", "violent" etc.
Some people enjoy this show, some use it as a very convenient way to bring attention to some topics (or themselves), others, like me, find it confusing and extremely tiring and a reason for disconnecting from politics rather than embracing it.
> I said queer people of the respective ethnicities, not residents of the Philippines. I am aware that this comes from mostly queer people in the diaspora, but that doesn't take their ethnicities away.
Adoption of new language imposed by whites upon the diaspora of an ethnic minority is different from that minority introducing the term themselves. The neologism "Filipinx" appears to have originated on dictionary.com [0] [1], with no Filipino spokesperson, residing in the Philippines, North America, or otherwise, publicly endorsing the term (quite the opposite). I invite you to provide sources to substantiate the claim that it was in fact introduced by Filipino diaspora. All I can find is a statement by one "John Kelly" [0]:
“Among our many new entries are thousands of deeper, dictionary-wide revisions that touch us on our most personal levels: how we talk
about ourselves and our identities, from race to sexual orientation to mental health,” said John Kelly, senior editor at Dictionary.com.
Ethnic minorities overseas in western culture are subjugated to the cultural dominance of whites and expected to adopt their lexicon or risk severe social censure; this is the essence of the definition of "systemic racism" as proposed by DiAngelo.
> Saying "Filipino" or "Latino" is gender neutral is similar to saying that "he" in English writing is gender neutral.
Tagalog is already ungendered. "Filipino" is ungendered. It is you who presuppose, based on Eurocentric linguistic norms, that "Filipino" is a gendered term and is assigned the male gender, and then from that presupposition conclude that the word "Filipino" is gendered and therefore patriarchal. This is an instance of begging the question, where you presuppose the very matter under contention. This is cyclical reasoning based on a predominantly white cultural worldview and linguistic background.
Some — mostly those who grew up in the Philippines — argue that “Filipino” is already a gender-neutral term because the Filipino language
itself does not differentiate between genders. Meanwhile, others — mostly from the large Filipino diaspora — say it is sexist, a holdover from
the gendered Spanish that influenced the country’s languages. [1]
> And linguistic imperialism? Really? There is a far more fundamental and insidious reshaping of the territory to fit the map at play, which is to turn all of human gender and sexual diversity into a single male/female binary.
You again expose your ignorance of other cultures with this comment. Bakla culture [2] in the Philippines has a very long and well-established history that predates Western colonization, and is already considered a third gender, already escaping the male/female dichotomy.
Stop imposing your white framing upon other cultures. That is in fact the definition of cultural and linguistic imperialism.
I'm not white. I'm Indian, and I also happen to be a trans woman. I'm fully aware of cultures with three traditional genders like my own -- I'm also deeply suspicious of them. The third gender is virtually always constructed to be transmisogynistic, to exclude trans women from womanhood. That isn't true binary-smashing gender diversity, that is merely "men", "women", and "we don't believe you're really women".
Traditional third genders also typically only have room for straight trans people -- there is no room for a queer trans person like myself. Even today you have a lot of clueless people wondering how someone can be both bi/gay and trans -- something about it breaks the cishet brain in a way I've never really understood.
Modern western progressive ideas about gender diversity are far closer to reality than any traditional culture's, because they're grounded in science and humanism. (This is not to say that they're perfect -- I have several specific criticisms of queer theory authors like Judith Butler.) I am quite proudly a scientific humanist and I believe it is the most morally robust worldview in existence.
This is the problem I have with the more militant trans activists. You’re trying to remove a meaningful distinction from other people’s thoughts. Regardless of the words you use, a biological male who identifies as a woman is not the same thing as a biological female.
Obviously no two people are the same. But there isn't some magical gap between cis and trans women that's categorically bigger than the gap between, say, white and Indian cis women. Women raised in different cultures are different -- women that are a different sex at birth are different.
You don't have to say that apples and oranges are the same. What's based more in religious/patriarchal ideas than in rational evidence is the belief that men are like apples and women are like oranges (or that men are from Mars and women are from Venus). There are some differences that the patriarchy magnified into a monstrous set of institutions (coverture! implied consent! vomit). We're on the path to slowly undoing it, but progress isn't monotonic that's for sure.
(By the way, calling a trans woman, especially one who has medically transitioned, a "biological male" is both an HR violation and not rooted in evidence. It is really frustrating to hear your basic dignity being talked about by people who are as confident as they are ignorant. When I was still cis-presenting and didn't fully understand what my trans friends were going through, I didn't spout off my thoughts like a fool. I took the time to learn.)
Are you joking? There “isn’t some magical gap” between cis and trans women? Absurd.
And then you go on to say that there are no real differences between men and women, oblivious to the glaring contradiction between this belief and the entire phenomenon of transgenderism.
You can call me ignorant all you want; that doesn’t make it true.
I got banned from a leftist Discord that I'd spent years on discussing all sorts of topics, just because I dared to question some of the standard left-wing stances on trans issues.
I'd said something like, I don't think claiming an identity is enough, there has to be some sort of dysphoria. And then followed up with another comment like, if they want to keep the cock intact, then they're not actually trans women, as a genuine trans woman would want rid of it even if she couldn't afford the surgery.
This was enough to get me called bigoted and transphobic, and then permanently banned with no recourse, which surprised me because I'd disagreed with people there on the details of a few other topics in the past. Yet somehow this was too much.
It still baffles me how this is the one of the few issues that gets people on the left so riled up that they can't even bear to hear any dissent.
Well, in that case I guess they were lucky that their views were closer to reality than yours.
I know plenty of trans women who don't wish to have extensive bottom surgery. Given that you don't have expertise in the field and have basically invented your beliefs from whole cloth, I think you should revise them accordingly and take it as a learning experience about the value of study.
I did take the time to understand more after that, like learning that many trans people broadly agreed with the points I'd made but are now denounced as "truscum" by those who believe that gender identity and not gender dysphoria is fundamental to being trans.
Note also that these were the standard leftie views on trans back in the 1990s, which is when I first heard about it. My beliefs weren't invented from whole cloth as you state. At the time the common understanding was that gender dysphoria is such a debilitating medical condition that accommodating those rare individuals afflicted by this should be done to help them deal with it better. Sort of like how disabled people are provided ramps for access - it was the right thing to do to help a marginalized group.
Anyway my point was more about intolerance of dissenting views on this topic in particular. Being permanently banned from that Discord was an unpleasant surprise when I was just expressing a viewpoint that was previously how most on the left understood the issue.
On the plus side it did help me understand the perspectives on the other side better. I'd previously considered "terfs" to be nothing more than vicious bigots, but once I understood that the trans umbrella had been expanded to include those without gender dysphoria, including men that back in the day would have just been considered common transvestites and not transsexual at all, some of their arguments began to make sense.
Now I'm more middle-ground on the issue, which isn't a bad place to be. This also inspired me rethink other political stances that I had adopted without analyzing them too deeply. So overall I suppose being kicked out of this community was a good thing as it broadened my mind. It also helped me see first hand how political echo chambers are constructed.
No, it is a bad place to be! TERFs are wrong on the facts and wrong on the values.
You completely missed the reason transmedicalism fell out of favor. It's because doctors were given the power to judge if you were truly trans. The way it played out is that they had too much power and routinely abused it in horrifying ways. That is still the case in some medical systems like the adolescent care in Finland, where the doctors ask teenagers questions that if I were asked at that age I would be traumatized for life. It's sickening.
Modern informed-consent trans healthcare is patient-driven. It turns out that if you've put in the effort to seek it out, you almost certainly are trans. Cisgender people do not make a habit of seeking out trans care, because the act of doing so generally induces gender dysphoria.
Gender dysphoria manifests in several ways — anecdotally, distress at current hormone profile is by far the most common. A belief that bottom surgery must be required is not evidence-based, in the sense that it leads to worse outcomes. It is cis people's projection of their own internal insecurities about sex and gender.
(I do agree by the way that gender dysphoria and healthcare need to be recentered in these discussions. But we have a broader understanding of it than we used to, which is good.)
Anyway, you're welcome to find my GitHub and see all of the open source work I've done. It's work that is, among other things, saves several corporations 8+ figures in CI costs annually each. That only happened because I had a safe environment to transition in. If I hadn't been able to transition and be treated with respect, that wouldn't have happened. (More generally speaking, without trans people Rust wouldn't have happened either, and the IT world would be much worse off! In my experience, people in elite engineering teams fully understand this. TERFism is like Uncle Bob — it appeals mostly to mediocre minds.)
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