This is why the idea of gender needs to disappear eventually. If we have it, we then need to label every single permutation of every expression. Maybe that’s fun for some people, but it’s definitely not fun for me.
To be clear I’m not saying you can’t be a woman or a man or whatever. I understand I have to pay that tax. But in 200 years maybe it won’t matter anymore because we’ll all just be people. And that seems nice to me.
That’s like saying we need to get rid of all color names since there are so many hues and shades. What are chartreuse and fuchsia? Better just get rid of green and purple since there are so many colors.
The difference is you don’t need to identify someone’s color or commit a social faux pas. Keep your color names, I just don’t want to have to figure out if you are green or lime green and address you as such.
It’s not necessarily a social faux pas to misgender someone, that’s a myth made up by conservatives. It’s a faux pas to intentionally misgender people.
Sorta like if you call someone Jeb and they correct you and say it’s Jed. It only becomes an issue if you insist on calling them Jeb.
Fair, but I don’t want every social interaction I have to be me messing up and apologizing to people that I have missgendered them. That sounds way more exhausting than current social interactions are for me, and I already find them exhausting.
I hear you saying you you would like a universal gender neutral pronoun. You rarely need to know someone’s gender when talking to them, just what pronouns to use.
Fortunately they/them works for this purpose, and is universally understood in English. It’s perfectly acceptable to refer to someone as they/them or their name when having a conversation not specifically about gender and preferred pronouns.
Not knowing someone’s gender has existed far longer than our modern understanding of the nuance of the concept.
I mean it wouldn’t be every social interaction. Not even a majority. Something like 2% of the population identifies as something other than their assigned gender at birth, and the majority of those are transgender individuals who make it very clear how they want to be referred to.
Understand that these people will continue to have the same gender identity whether you understand it or not. The alternative to apologizing to people when you misgender them is… not apologizing for it.
You do that already, and it’s even worse actually because everyone has an even more individual and sometimes difficult to remember thing about them you have to balance in a social situation. It’s called a name. You have to be told it, you can easily forget it, and it’s a social slight to call someone the wrong name. Right now gender expression feels uncomfortable to have to tell people because of the politisation and stigma pressed on it, but it doesn’t have to be anything different than asking for someone’s name to better address them.
Not really. Like with music, some labels are broader than others. “Oh you like rock? Rock & Roll, Glam Rock, Hard Rock, Metal?” “Oh what kind of Metal, Trash, Death, Symphonic.”
The broader terms existing does not negate the more precise terms and visa versa.
I think the broader argument tends to boil down to the fact that unlike music, which people can simply not engage in describing on a regular basis, gender expression is something that requires much more active participation by all members of a society, and that gender is not inherently separate from the rest of the human experience.
It’s already hard enough for some people to remember names, now imagine having to remember which of any number of thousands of neopronouns each individual person you know uses, for example.
Contrast that with their “we’ll all just be people” stance, which seems to just be a different wording of gender abolition, and you have a world where people simply express themselves as they are without having to increasingly sublabel.
It’s like how while people can have long hair and short hair, wear dark clothes and light clothes, have blue/brown/green/gray/etc eyes, be introverted or extroverted, have a large or small social battery, or experience and display any number of different characteristics, while not having to actually label those characteristics in general conversation or identification.
They’re simply traits within the human experience, but not traits that we have to outwardly label and display on a very frequent basis, unlike the way we usually talk about gender. This is especially important considering how every single human being experiences things even a little differently from one another, thus meaning that the number of sublabels is theoretically as large, if not larger than the current population of the earth.
I don’t deny that the labels can still exist, and be useful to people, but I think gender is often treated as if it has to be some sort of mythical separate part of the brain, independent from all the other variations in human experience, and thus it must have a separate label at all times, even while we don’t particularly care to label and identify with other characteristics that are also within the human experience, some of which have historically flowed between being considered very gendered or less/not gendered, such as assorted personality traits, length of hair, preferred social activities and groups, certain clothing, etc.
unlike music, which people can simply not engage in describing on a regular basis, gender expression is something that requires much more active participation by all members of a society
Does it though?
I really don’t care how people express as long as they aren’t dicks and fascists about it.
I might be caught off guard sometimes, like the legitimately cute trans with the very male surfer dude voice at the train station the other day, but that’s not the same as giving a damn about it.
I’d say so, yeah, but it does depend on your social circumstance, and of course broader cultures have different norms and linguistic styles too, so that can definitely impact it somewhat.
For example, if you’re referring to someone, you pretty much have to use their pronouns. That’s just how our language works, and it’s not exactly something you can easily avoid.
The broader argument around gender abolition typically doesn’t focus on the fact that society has to use the assorted gendered terms and traits though, I just thought it would be interesting to point out.
Generally speaking, it boils down to the second part of my previous point, which was that gender isn’t inherently that special compared to many of the other ways we interpret and express our own identities, and the category can theoretically expand to levels so broad that it simply doesn’t create much of a practical utility around consistently creating, using, and assigning sub-labels and further slicing up what we consider to be distinct categories into smaller and smaller pieces.
Additionally, gender abolitionists tend to just believe that by creating categories, you end up restricting what people are comfortable doing, and impose assumptions that could otherwise be more freeing to simply not have.
Anyone who currently uses any label, big or small, could still express themselves in a society that doesn’t choose to use labels, but anyone feeling restricted by the labels we use today would no longer have that pressure facing them, and could thus develop more independently and freely as themselves, rather than what any societal categories impose on them.
This is actually something I think is becoming more and more pertinent as the acceptance of trans individuals grows, because as I’m sure you’ve probably seen, a lot of trans people feel that they have to meet certain goals to simply be accepted as who they are, to the point that they can feel pressured by society into doing things like buying certain clothes they otherwise may not have picked, spending more time worrying about the way their face looks, etc, just to be accepted.
And with sub-labels, you end up running into the same problem, but at a different scale, where small communities, or even sole individuals, can end up locking themselves into choices about their looks/mannerisms/activities/etc because after defining something, it becomes easier to conform to it even if you change over time outside of that label.
Obviously I don’t speak for everyone here, and this is just my opinion, but I personally believe that a world with no labels, and much less limited avenues for free expression by every individual would be preferable to a world where it’s expected that you label yourself and put yourself in a box, a category that people can define you as, that may not fully represent you as a person.
I think it’s awfully optimistic of you to think 200 years would be enough to erase gender bias even if most of society went into it with good intentions. Categorizing is too deep an instinct. It’s easier for most people to add categories to the 2 most of us were taught as infants than to erase the concept entirely.
I suppose you could use they/them for everyone, to acknowledge the othergender aspects of them that may not be apparent or recognized by anyone including themselves.
Jokes aside, with no offence intended, how can I as a person attracted to breasts and vaginas, know what i’m getting into when I’m talking to someone. I don’t want to lead someone on but at the same time i don’t want to be led on.
or am i confusing sex and gender again? I’m honestly trying but i’m by no means fluent on the topic.
I’m so glad you said breasts!! Come with me on an exploratory walk:
Let’s say you fall for a woman. You’re getting intimate and she stops you to tell you something serious. See, she hasn’t been honest about her body with you. She hasn’t dated in awhile and didn’t know when the right time was to tell you, but she wants you so much that it can’t be avoided now.
She had her breasts removed for an unspecified medical reason. You thought she had a great rack, but those were prosthetics. Despite her biological circumstances he happens to identify with having breasts and prosthetics make her feel confident and normal.
Has there been deception? Have you been led on? I don’t think so, I think this was this just part of learning whether you’re compatible with someone. Only you know whether the absence of breasts is a deal breaker for you, and you get to decide freely in that moment.
Sex: not binary, a lot more confusing the more scientific you make it. Can absolutely be changed. It’s coming up on being an outdated term pretty quickly, if not irrelevant already. Probably the least understood term by 99.999999% of people.
Gender: binary exists, a lot of people exist outside of it, too. Also dynamic and fluid. It’s the role you play, socially. A lot of people think it should be eliminated. I’m personally on the fence on that. (Bonus: gender expression: is not the same as gender. Gender is who one is, gender expression is how one does it.)
SexUALITY: may be what you’re confused on. Is defined by the term sex, but generally refers to the sex of you and the sex of who you’re into. Which, if you go by what “sex” means, gets confusing really fast.
So stop worrying about labels, go with the flow, and since life is too short as it is, stop letting society tell you things that you like are acceptable, and if you find it pretty and it feels good and you aren’t hurting anybody AND there’s consent of all parties involved, GO FOR IT.
I think I’m forgetting stuff here, but the gist is to stop being afraid and stop judging and hating. Accept your ignorance, accept humility, and stop being afraid of learning. Nobody’s coming to get you besides the fascists and maybe the tankies.
Ok my morning dump is over gotta wipe have a nice day.
This is why the idea of gender needs to disappear eventually. If we have it, we then need to label every single permutation of every expression. Maybe that’s fun for some people, but it’s definitely not fun for me.
To be clear I’m not saying you can’t be a woman or a man or whatever. I understand I have to pay that tax. But in 200 years maybe it won’t matter anymore because we’ll all just be people. And that seems nice to me.
That’s like saying we need to get rid of all color names since there are so many hues and shades. What are chartreuse and fuchsia? Better just get rid of green and purple since there are so many colors.
Actually no, that’s not what they said. They said sure you can have green, but not everything has to be green, blue, or red.
Also, purple is a lie.
The difference is you don’t need to identify someone’s color or commit a social faux pas. Keep your color names, I just don’t want to have to figure out if you are green or lime green and address you as such.
It’s not necessarily a social faux pas to misgender someone, that’s a myth made up by conservatives. It’s a faux pas to intentionally misgender people.
Sorta like if you call someone Jeb and they correct you and say it’s Jed. It only becomes an issue if you insist on calling them Jeb.
Fair, but I don’t want every social interaction I have to be me messing up and apologizing to people that I have missgendered them. That sounds way more exhausting than current social interactions are for me, and I already find them exhausting.
I hear you saying you you would like a universal gender neutral pronoun. You rarely need to know someone’s gender when talking to them, just what pronouns to use.
Fortunately they/them works for this purpose, and is universally understood in English. It’s perfectly acceptable to refer to someone as they/them or their name when having a conversation not specifically about gender and preferred pronouns.
Not knowing someone’s gender has existed far longer than our modern understanding of the nuance of the concept.
I mean it wouldn’t be every social interaction. Not even a majority. Something like 2% of the population identifies as something other than their assigned gender at birth, and the majority of those are transgender individuals who make it very clear how they want to be referred to.
Understand that these people will continue to have the same gender identity whether you understand it or not. The alternative to apologizing to people when you misgender them is… not apologizing for it.
You do that already, and it’s even worse actually because everyone has an even more individual and sometimes difficult to remember thing about them you have to balance in a social situation. It’s called a name. You have to be told it, you can easily forget it, and it’s a social slight to call someone the wrong name. Right now gender expression feels uncomfortable to have to tell people because of the politisation and stigma pressed on it, but it doesn’t have to be anything different than asking for someone’s name to better address them.
All we need are hex codes and rgb!
What if I want violet?
I’m giving this the #00ff00 light
My gender is 0xffffff
Not really. Like with music, some labels are broader than others. “Oh you like rock? Rock & Roll, Glam Rock, Hard Rock, Metal?” “Oh what kind of Metal, Trash, Death, Symphonic.”
The broader terms existing does not negate the more precise terms and visa versa.
I think the broader argument tends to boil down to the fact that unlike music, which people can simply not engage in describing on a regular basis, gender expression is something that requires much more active participation by all members of a society, and that gender is not inherently separate from the rest of the human experience.
It’s already hard enough for some people to remember names, now imagine having to remember which of any number of thousands of neopronouns each individual person you know uses, for example.
Contrast that with their “we’ll all just be people” stance, which seems to just be a different wording of gender abolition, and you have a world where people simply express themselves as they are without having to increasingly sublabel.
It’s like how while people can have long hair and short hair, wear dark clothes and light clothes, have blue/brown/green/gray/etc eyes, be introverted or extroverted, have a large or small social battery, or experience and display any number of different characteristics, while not having to actually label those characteristics in general conversation or identification.
They’re simply traits within the human experience, but not traits that we have to outwardly label and display on a very frequent basis, unlike the way we usually talk about gender. This is especially important considering how every single human being experiences things even a little differently from one another, thus meaning that the number of sublabels is theoretically as large, if not larger than the current population of the earth.
I don’t deny that the labels can still exist, and be useful to people, but I think gender is often treated as if it has to be some sort of mythical separate part of the brain, independent from all the other variations in human experience, and thus it must have a separate label at all times, even while we don’t particularly care to label and identify with other characteristics that are also within the human experience, some of which have historically flowed between being considered very gendered or less/not gendered, such as assorted personality traits, length of hair, preferred social activities and groups, certain clothing, etc.
Does it though?
I really don’t care how people express as long as they aren’t dicks and fascists about it.
I might be caught off guard sometimes, like the legitimately cute trans with the very male surfer dude voice at the train station the other day, but that’s not the same as giving a damn about it.
I’d say so, yeah, but it does depend on your social circumstance, and of course broader cultures have different norms and linguistic styles too, so that can definitely impact it somewhat.
For example, if you’re referring to someone, you pretty much have to use their pronouns. That’s just how our language works, and it’s not exactly something you can easily avoid.
The broader argument around gender abolition typically doesn’t focus on the fact that society has to use the assorted gendered terms and traits though, I just thought it would be interesting to point out.
Generally speaking, it boils down to the second part of my previous point, which was that gender isn’t inherently that special compared to many of the other ways we interpret and express our own identities, and the category can theoretically expand to levels so broad that it simply doesn’t create much of a practical utility around consistently creating, using, and assigning sub-labels and further slicing up what we consider to be distinct categories into smaller and smaller pieces.
Additionally, gender abolitionists tend to just believe that by creating categories, you end up restricting what people are comfortable doing, and impose assumptions that could otherwise be more freeing to simply not have.
Anyone who currently uses any label, big or small, could still express themselves in a society that doesn’t choose to use labels, but anyone feeling restricted by the labels we use today would no longer have that pressure facing them, and could thus develop more independently and freely as themselves, rather than what any societal categories impose on them.
This is actually something I think is becoming more and more pertinent as the acceptance of trans individuals grows, because as I’m sure you’ve probably seen, a lot of trans people feel that they have to meet certain goals to simply be accepted as who they are, to the point that they can feel pressured by society into doing things like buying certain clothes they otherwise may not have picked, spending more time worrying about the way their face looks, etc, just to be accepted.
And with sub-labels, you end up running into the same problem, but at a different scale, where small communities, or even sole individuals, can end up locking themselves into choices about their looks/mannerisms/activities/etc because after defining something, it becomes easier to conform to it even if you change over time outside of that label.
Obviously I don’t speak for everyone here, and this is just my opinion, but I personally believe that a world with no labels, and much less limited avenues for free expression by every individual would be preferable to a world where it’s expected that you label yourself and put yourself in a box, a category that people can define you as, that may not fully represent you as a person.
This just reminds me of the shitpost of humans/aliens.
It was a “fancy” bathroom sign for men and women.
Very optimistic of you. Oh well, I guess we need this kind of positive messaging in 2025.
I think it’s awfully optimistic of you to think 200 years would be enough to erase gender bias even if most of society went into it with good intentions. Categorizing is too deep an instinct. It’s easier for most people to add categories to the 2 most of us were taught as infants than to erase the concept entirely.
I suppose you could use they/them for everyone, to acknowledge the othergender aspects of them that may not be apparent or recognized by anyone including themselves.
But you’d piss a lot of people off.
Then again, that might be a good thing.
My hope is that most of the pissed off people would be dead due to natural causes.
Personally, i wouldn’t be too pleased to take a bird home and find out she has a penis twice the size of mine.
Jokes aside, with no offence intended, how can I as a person attracted to breasts and vaginas, know what i’m getting into when I’m talking to someone. I don’t want to lead someone on but at the same time i don’t want to be led on.
or am i confusing sex and gender again? I’m honestly trying but i’m by no means fluent on the topic.
Sex is defined by genetics
Gender is defined by you
I think if you’re interested in dating or sex, and you have preferences that are deal breakers. Ask for what they’re equipped with.
Similar to how if you’re planning on dating someone today and if have sex is important to you. You communicate that. And ask them if they are asexual.
It’s perfectly okay to have deal-breaking preferences for these things.
Good question.
I’m so glad you said breasts!! Come with me on an exploratory walk:
Let’s say you fall for a woman. You’re getting intimate and she stops you to tell you something serious. See, she hasn’t been honest about her body with you. She hasn’t dated in awhile and didn’t know when the right time was to tell you, but she wants you so much that it can’t be avoided now.
She had her breasts removed for an unspecified medical reason. You thought she had a great rack, but those were prosthetics. Despite her biological circumstances he happens to identify with having breasts and prosthetics make her feel confident and normal.
Has there been deception? Have you been led on? I don’t think so, I think this was this just part of learning whether you’re compatible with someone. Only you know whether the absence of breasts is a deal breaker for you, and you get to decide freely in that moment.
Does that help?
I don’t think there was any deception because she has been straight up and honest. I think you’ve helped me to understand.
Sex: not binary, a lot more confusing the more scientific you make it. Can absolutely be changed. It’s coming up on being an outdated term pretty quickly, if not irrelevant already. Probably the least understood term by 99.999999% of people.
Gender: binary exists, a lot of people exist outside of it, too. Also dynamic and fluid. It’s the role you play, socially. A lot of people think it should be eliminated. I’m personally on the fence on that. (Bonus: gender expression: is not the same as gender. Gender is who one is, gender expression is how one does it.)
SexUALITY: may be what you’re confused on. Is defined by the term sex, but generally refers to the sex of you and the sex of who you’re into. Which, if you go by what “sex” means, gets confusing really fast.
So stop worrying about labels, go with the flow, and since life is too short as it is, stop letting society tell you things that you like are acceptable, and if you find it pretty and it feels good and you aren’t hurting anybody AND there’s consent of all parties involved, GO FOR IT.
I think I’m forgetting stuff here, but the gist is to stop being afraid and stop judging and hating. Accept your ignorance, accept humility, and stop being afraid of learning. Nobody’s coming to get you besides the fascists and maybe the tankies.
Ok my morning dump is over gotta wipe have a nice day.
Sex is what’s in your pants, gender is how you look.