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:
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 confusing anything. It kinda seems like you’re reading something different into what they were saying.
They seem to be saying the ultimately misguided but best possible interpretation of “your gender doesn’t matter to me, so why is it something that comes up?”.Finding your own manner of gender expression and not having it pushed on you from outside doesn’t preclude having language to describe where you end up.
I know they weren’t saying “shut up about your gender, it doesn’t matter”. To someone who is working on finding themselves, or had to work hard to do so, the sentiment can come across that way. For all aspects of identity, people don’t want a “don’t ask, don’t tell” style tolerance in a void. They’d rather have the ability to express their identity, find community and so on.
As such, we need words to communicate these topics.
I very much like the gender identity that I have; there’s nothing wrong with that.
I’m happy for you! I am as well! I’m a little confused as to what that has to do with the bit you quoted though.
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.
You create the impression that you’re opposed to the concept when you say things along the lines of not seeing why it should be a concept.
I know it isn’t your intention to convey dismissiveness. That doesn’t mean that you’re not, which is why there’s a fair amount of pushback.No one expects you to know, and you can get away with always using gender neutral without any issues.
You are expected to show people basic respect even if you don’t get it and listen if they correct you. If I get your favorite programming language wrong and you tell me, it would be rude for me to keep referencing your passion for intercal or what have you.But I am intending to be dismissive, because you are not putting forth any arguments.
Ok, lets go back to the basics. Is gender a social construct?
If you say it isn’t, then you are enforcing the Man/Woman duality of gender that is linked to sex. This is transphobic and not linked to any science.
If you say it is. Then gender has value only to people who care about it. Just like programming languages only have value to people who care about that.
So in a fair and just world, if you say, people need to care about the gender of another person, then equally they should care about the favorite programming language, and so on and so on with everyone’s thing. So my question is, ok, where does this end? What constitutes which things need to be acknowledged during a social interactions and which things don’t.
My argument, is you can strip it down to just a name. That is all you need. This is the ideal we should work towards.
Do we drop pronouns and genders today? No, I have never claimed that. I specifically stated in my first post like 200 years from now, when we are all dead.
First, I was saying that you weren’t intending on being dismissive of people’s identities that they cared about, but thanks for specifically clarifying that you’re being rude.
you are not putting forth any arguments.
And you’re evidently weak in reading comprehension.
Gender is more complex than a binary. It’s not an inate thing, but it’s also not entirely a social construct.
As you brought up: transgender people. If gender were a pure social construct then they wouldn’t feel wrong with the gender assigned to them by society. Other parts of gender are clearly socially defined.
Even biological sex is more complex than a man woman duality and is partly mediated by social forces. (What biological properties matter for sex, and what variations of those result in being a different sex? Is an individual with xxy chromosomes male?)I never said you needed to care, I said you needed to be polite if you make a mistake, and that people often take offense to being told that things about themselves they feel to be important don’t matter.
You’re entirely correct that we could all interact with each other only referring to each other by unique identifiers and the “I” and “you” pronouns.
That’s an assinine conclusion though. It kinda glosses over the whole “people like to talk to each other and socialize” thing. People often like to discuss pointless things like “how they’re doing”, “their interests”, “their families” and “hobbies”.
You’re not obligated to care or engage in these discussions, but people will take offense when you tell them that you don’t care about their children because they’re irrelevant.where does this end? What constitutes which things need to be acknowledged during a social interactions and which things don’t.
I don’t know how to tell you how to have a normal social interaction. If you have difficulty keeping track of what to do in social situations like that you might consider talking to a professional. Most people are able to use context to determine what needs to be shared in an interaction and don’t have a hard rule or checklist.
Typically people start with basic biographical information, then some personal trivia to help bootstrap the stereotyping of what sort of person they are (I like to cook, I work in computer security, and I enjoy nature), and then information about how they fit into the social network (spouse, children, siblings, religious or social organization membership).gender has value only to people who care about it
And shockingly, a lot of people find their gender to be important to them, and don’t like being told it doesn’t have value. Which is why, as I said before, people are giving you a lot of pushback.
There’s resistance to the notion that the only details about people that matter are the ones that are needed for others to address them. It turns out that people have a notion of “identity” that extends beyond their name, and that beyond having that identity they would like to express it.I am glad I went back to the basics.
Gender is more complex than a binary. It’s not an inate thing, but it’s also not entirely a social construct.
No! It is just a social construct and by saying that you made yourself a whole lot of transphobic friends.
What it means to present as a man/woman changes over time. So there is no way gender can be innate to people.
If gender were a pure social construct then they wouldn’t feel wrong with the gender assigned to them by society.
Gender dysphoria is real but that doesn’t make gender not a social construct. If you want to be a woman and women wear dresses, you will want to wear a dress. If women wear hoodies, then you want to wear hoodies.
I never said you needed to care, I said you needed to be polite if you make a mistake.
Ok, from now on, every time you call me “deaf_fish”, I will tut tut you as say I think you mean “deaf_fish who likes the C programming language”. If you don’t remember to address me as such I will feel bad and it won’t be very polite of you.
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.
