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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s not irrelevant to everyone. We have a phrase that allows you to omit them, but that doesn’t mean that everyone wants to do that.
Additionally, having the concept is needed for people to talk about their experiences and figure stuff out.
Their need to describe themselves in conversations that don’t involve you is perfectly sufficient reason to have the words.
“Confuses you” is not a good enough reason to invalidate a core part of people’s identity, particularly when it may have been hard for them to get things figured out.
It’s important to remember that gender is irrelevant, but only if it’s someone else’s. It can be aggravating to be told that something you worked hard to figure out doesn’t matter when it very much matters to you.
Rather, any conception of gender would arise from within, and be part of one’s self-identity, rather than a tool used by society to prescribe a role or identity.
That “prescribe a role or identity” is why it’s useful to get rid of. It leaves people with more freedom to form their identities, not less.
It can be aggravating to be told that something you worked hard to figure out doesn’t matter
I very much like the gender identity that I have; there’s nothing wrong with that.
I’m not invalidating it. You can have names for it. I don’t care. I just don’t want it to be socially required for me to know.
I don’t expect you to know what my favorite programming language is. So please don’t expect me to know what gender you are when it doesn’t matter for social interactions.
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.
Yeah today. But we know gender is a made-up category now. And already it’s starting to diverge. I can easily imagine 20 years from now there being like 50 different genders, and the amount of people who don’t associate with men or women will be much greater.
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.
Yeah but I’m okay with names. I’m not okay with genders. At a bare minimum to interact with people in society, you need to know a name, some kind of identifier. If I knew of a way around that I would suggest it. However, interacting with people in society does not require knowing their gender. At least now it doesn’t require it as it’s pretty clear that gender is a made-up category.
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.
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.
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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.
deleted by creator
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.
All we need are hex codes and rgb!
I’m giving this the #00ff00 light
My gender is 0xffffff
What if I want violet?
ee82ee?
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.
Yes, this is what I mean. I am fine with they/them. I don’t need to know anyone’s specific pronouns or gender.
But if no one needs to know anyone’s specific pronouns or gender, then why have it as a concept other than as a niche topic of discussion?
It’s not irrelevant to everyone. We have a phrase that allows you to omit them, but that doesn’t mean that everyone wants to do that.
Additionally, having the concept is needed for people to talk about their experiences and figure stuff out.
Their need to describe themselves in conversations that don’t involve you is perfectly sufficient reason to have the words.
“Confuses you” is not a good enough reason to invalidate a core part of people’s identity, particularly when it may have been hard for them to get things figured out.
It’s important to remember that gender is irrelevant, but only if it’s someone else’s. It can be aggravating to be told that something you worked hard to figure out doesn’t matter when it very much matters to you.
You are kind of confusing a systemic critique with some kind of personal attack against individual people.
From what seems like a decent enough article on Gender Abolitionism:
That “prescribe a role or identity” is why it’s useful to get rid of. It leaves people with more freedom to form their identities, not less.
I very much like the gender identity that I have; there’s nothing wrong with that.
I’m not invalidating it. You can have names for it. I don’t care. I just don’t want it to be socially required for me to know.
I don’t expect you to know what my favorite programming language is. So please don’t expect me to know what gender you are when it doesn’t matter for social interactions.
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.
Yeah today. But we know gender is a made-up category now. And already it’s starting to diverge. I can easily imagine 20 years from now there being like 50 different genders, and the amount of people who don’t associate with men or women will be much greater.
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.
Yeah but I’m okay with names. I’m not okay with genders. At a bare minimum to interact with people in society, you need to know a name, some kind of identifier. If I knew of a way around that I would suggest it. However, interacting with people in society does not require knowing their gender. At least now it doesn’t require it as it’s pretty clear that gender is a made-up category.
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.
Very optimistic of you. Oh well, I guess we need this kind of positive messaging in 2025.
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.
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.
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.
Thanks for this, I think your advice is the most practical for a variaty of situations.
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 defined by genetics
Gender is defined by you
Sex is what’s in your pants, gender is how you look.
This just reminds me of the shitpost of humans/aliens.
It was a “fancy” bathroom sign for men and women.