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Clan Forum => Debates => Debates archive => Topic started by: Mini Nub on January 03, 2019, 11:50:19

Title: Gender X
Post by: Mini Nub on January 03, 2019, 11:50:19
New York City now allows residents to select a third gender of X on their birth certificates
As of the first day of 2019, New Yorkers now have the option of selecting neither male or female on birth certificates in New York City.

Parents had already been able to select 'undetermined' or 'unknown' for newborns, but the new measure would allow adults to select 'X' on their own birth certificates.

According to the NYC Health website, transgender and gender non-binary New Yorkers will only need a notarized affidavit to affirm their gender identity for the change to the documentation.   

'Transgender and gender non-conforming New Yorkers deserve the right to choose how they identify and to live with respect and dignity,' said Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, said of the changes. 'This bold new policy advances the fight for equality and makes our City fairer for all people.'

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What's your opinion on so-called 'Gener X'? Is there really more than two genders or can you simply pick whatever gender you want to be depending on how you feel? Is it a mental health disorder?
Title: Re: Gender X
Post by: Only Lilly on January 03, 2019, 12:05:27
Im not sure what to think, I wonder if eventually there are no males or females, we could all be X
Title: Re: Gender X
Post by: Redtunnel on January 03, 2019, 12:10:07
That feeling when medical documents become social networking profiles
Title: Re: Gender X
Post by: Alaklondewen on January 03, 2019, 13:22:27
Quote from: Redtunnel on January 03, 2019, 12:10:07
That feeling when medical documents become social networking profiles

This.

I don't care what pronoun people want to use, but what about medical forms and identity issues and theft? 
Title: Re: Gender X
Post by: Nikkie on January 03, 2019, 13:56:01
I want it. X sounds cool af. 8)
Title: Re: Gender X
Post by: Gazzy on January 03, 2019, 15:19:16
So this is what happens when a meme goes too far.
Utterly silly. If you have male bits then you're a dude, if you have female bits then you're a chick.
If you do the swap of said bits then you're w/e bits and your apparent personality deems you are, but not X.

The only experiences I've had when it comes to transgender folk is when I work the doors.
When checking ID we check their sex if they think they're the opposite sex. We do this so men with bits that think they're female don't go into the girls bogs, and vice versa.
Will they need to make an X bathroom in NY with a urinal and a shitter and a tampon dispenser and a condom machine and fuck it a slot machine to go a log with it also?
Title: Re: Gender X
Post by: cahaya on January 03, 2019, 19:16:03
Quote from: Gazzy on January 03, 2019, 15:19:16
So this is what happens when a meme goes too far.
Utterly silly. If you have male bits then you're a dude, if you have female bits then you're a chick.
If you do the swap of said bits then you're w/e bits and your apparent personality deems you are, but not X.

Well... To be fair I don't agree with this. If someone has male parts but feels like a chick you should accept it. Because not everyone has the money for t a surgery (same way around, if someone has female parts but feels like a dude).

In my opinion everyone should be able to use the pronounces that they feel the most comfortable at.
Title: Re: Gender X
Post by: Amy on January 03, 2019, 19:23:34
Im all for transgender individuals, but I don't understand this gender non binary/conforming stuff. That side seems more like a political statement rather than anything to do with identity.

But each to their own. As long as people can be happy what does it matter.
Title: Re: Gender X
Post by: Caspafam on January 03, 2019, 19:31:12
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDeVLuAgOgg
Title: Re: Gender X
Post by: Krazy Golf on January 03, 2019, 22:41:20
This is a good thing imo. Germany has recently adopted similar and you can now have an 'I' as your gender on a German passport, meaning intersex.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/germany-intersex-third-gender-identity-passport-lgbt-rights-a8706696.html
Title: Re: Gender X
Post by: Powerless on January 05, 2019, 09:53:34
I'm torn on this issue.

I've spoken with professors at my university and old university about gender being on a scale rather than simply male or female. I've also spoken with them regarding gender as a social construct. From what I've heard, it's difficult to comprehend but I think I understand it. The reason we have such a problem with distinguishing between "sex" and "gender" is because we use the exact same terminology for both - "male" and "female." But if we had different terminology for gender that separates it as an entity outside of sex, then we could comprehend the idea of people having a range of different genders.

Gender, by this reasoning, is the makeup of masculinity/feminity, clothes, hairstyles, speaking patterns, mannerisms, etc. that make up an individual. So, by using different terms other than "male" and "female" to describe the accumulation of these characteristics of a person, we could see how someone with a penis may have more feminine characteristics (such as wearing women's clothes, feeling more comfortable in our visualization of a typical "woman," psychologically identification, etc.) could be called something other than "male" or may feel comfortable or as though they can identify in a wide range of different "categories" which is when you hear someone identify is "gender fluid." This is why society came up with terms like "cis" to counter "trans" in order to help the understanding of the terminology being used, even though I still think that those terms don't help describe the social dynamics of the situation and how big of a part that language plays. We can only visualize and comprehend things that we have words for, so if we don't have wording or terminology for something, we can't imagine or comprehend it. Because the same terms, male and female, have been used for as long as we can remember, with no other terminology really being developed to challenge our standard way of thinking, we're limited to our perception of the association of gender and sex.

It's really hard to explain over messaging. I remember having a conversation with @Only Lilly about it on Discord before and I even struggled with it then but I think I can be a little better at it via voice. It's still a struggle and you have to come to a conversation about it COMPLETELY open-minded.

Anyways... I think the option was added simply so that the child doesn't feel that they are "forced" to feel as though they are the gender that they are assigned at birth without knowing what they interests, characteristics, and psychological development will be later on.
Title: Re: Gender X
Post by: Rune on January 05, 2019, 09:57:47
The world is slowly becoming even more dumb than it is.
Title: Re: Gender X
Post by: Miss Mudds on January 05, 2019, 11:06:23
The article is designed to implement adult decisions onto a newborn child that all it knows is how to cry, eat, sleep and poop.

Let babies be babies, grow and develop who they want to be in their own time, allow them a childhood, but give them the tools to make their own gender decisions later on in life, rather than shove complex labels onto them from the moment theyre born.

~Mudds
Title: Re: Gender X
Post by: DeltaDirac on January 05, 2019, 13:29:00
Quote from: Miss Mudds on January 05, 2019, 11:06:23
The article is designed to implement adult decisions onto a newborn child that all it knows is how to cry, eat, sleep and poop.

Let babies be babies, grow and develop who they want to be in their own time, allow them a childhood, but give them the tools to make their own gender decisions later on in life, rather than shove complex labels onto them from the moment theyre born.

~Mudds

If the gender X decision on the birth certificate is made just to delay the decision of gender and wait for the kid to make the decision themselves when they're adults, I'm fine with it. But I'm afraid parents who make this type of decision will do things a lot less reasonable, like hormone therapy or sex change operations on their kids still going through puberty. Childhood is a time when people rapidly change and I think society has a responsibility not to act as oversight.

Gender X on a birth certificate makes sense beyond the transgender conversation. XXY, XYY, and other genetic sex problems such as underdeveloped sex organs are not super rare.

I agree a lot with Powerless as well that sex is genetic, but gender is largely politics and social norms. In an imaginary world where men and women have very similar physical characteristics and dress the same and all that, asking someone to treat you as a female if you're a male doesn't make much sense. It's not that simple since a lot of norms have their roots in real physical and behavioral differences between males and females, but for me thinking of gender as political makes it easier to understand these discussions.
Title: Re: Gender X
Post by: Nimbus on January 05, 2019, 15:32:22
@Powerless you shouldn't sell yourself short. I found your post to be perfectly coherent and I didn't have any difficulty grasping what it was that you were trying to say. That said, I do have some dissenting views on some of the ideas that you presented in your post as well.

Part of what I view some of the tension surrounding the topic as stemming from is also related to terminology, but I feel like I have a slightly different take on it than you do. First and foremost, male and female and not gendered words. Dictionary definitions for both denote sex; not gender. Admittedly, from a linguistic standpoint, 'gender' has become a complicated term to distinguish from sex because modifications have been made to the definition of the word itself to accommodate the overwhelming number of people that misuse it. As a simpler illustration of this trend, the definition of the word 'literally' has been modified to include exaggeration so that statements like "My mouth is literally on fire." are technically accurate when a person is eating spicy food, where previously there would have to actually be flames coming out of the person's mouth. This does not, however, make the statement literal anymore than interchangeably using two loosely related terms - sex and gender - makes them the same.

The reason I went out of my way to give that long-winded explanation is because I don't feel like anyone is assigned an actual gender at birth; they're assigned a sex. Even looking at the definition of 'transgender' indicates that the individual in question's gender identity differs from the sex that they were identified as at birth. In this regard, I have to agree with @Gazzy and disagree with @cahaya . If you have male genitals, you're a male. If you have female genitals, you're a female. That isn't a social construct; it's anatomy.

I will concede @cahaya 's point regarding being respectful to a person whose gender identity does not line up with their anatomy, but I think we have differences of opinion on what being respectful amounts to in that case. I do not feel that an unwillingness to bend to an attempt at mandatory behavior modification (the notion that we should use a person's preferred pronouns) is disrespectful. 'He' and 'she' both contain the sex terms male and female in their definitions, so calling someone that has the corresponding genitals 'he' or 'she' is accurate. This would effectively be the same as saying it's disrespectful to accurately distinguish between any two things, be it red and blue, cats and dogs, cars and trucks, etc.

I will agree that gender is more of a spectrum than a binary, but even doing so takes some legitimacy out of the argument itself. To say that gender is on a spectrum of masculine and feminine - and that everybody falls somewhere on the spectrum - would essentially mean that no two people have the exact same gender. So for people to be 'respectful' in that case, one would have to hypothetically be willing to learn all 7.5b+ sets of 'gendered pronouns' for the people on Earth if they were able to meet all of them. In the same breath though, if over the course of meeting all of those people you receive billions of 'he' and 'she' responses (although, again, I would argue those are not gendered pronouns), given the aforementioned fact that no two people will be at the exact same point on the spectrum, shouldn't everyone have different/unique pronouns that satisfy their placement on the spectrum? The logical answer is "Of course not.", but the functional answer in a spectrum-based reality is "Yes, they should."...

This is what makes a fair number of gender theorists question whether gender 'actually' exists. If it does, how do we feasibly allow for the infinite number of possibilities to be reflected in our language in a meaningful way? If it doesn't, what are we (not just 'we' on this thread, but the larger 'we' of society) arguing about? I don't know... It's a lot.
Title: Re: Gender X
Post by: Only Lilly on January 05, 2019, 15:51:18
I think we have to take into consideration that we are continually evolving and who is to say that out genitalia will not have to dictate our sexuality, we certainly not at that point but we are moving in that direction. 

Title: Re: Gender X
Post by: Nimbus on January 05, 2019, 15:59:24
Quote from: Only Lilly on January 05, 2019, 15:51:18
I think we have to take into consideration that we are continually evolving and who is to say that out genitalia will not have to dictate our sexuality, we certainly not at that point but we are moving in that direction.

While I feel like the Sex vs. Sexuality debate is a bit different, I definitely get where you're coming from. But it's because I agree that we're not at that point that I feel like it's unrealistic to try to classify 'using the incorrect pronouns' as verbal assault, especially when dealing with long-standing societal norms.
Title: Re: Gender X
Post by: ShaneGoesArd on January 05, 2019, 16:54:18
This whole argument fascinates me, and I must say that for the most part, I don't really get it. I get that people don't feel comfortable in their biological gender/sex, and therefore identify as the opposite, even going as far as transitioning. But I don't get the whole gender 'X' thing. I mean what other genders are there?

Looking up the definition of Gender gives me this.

Gender -

1. the state of being male or female (typically used with reference to social and cultural differences rather than biological ones).

2. GRAMMAR
(in languages such as Latin, French, and German) each of the classes (typically masculine, feminine, common, neuter) of nouns and pronouns distinguished by the different inflections which they have and which they require in words syntactically associated with them. Grammatical gender is only very loosely associated with natural distinctions of sex.

So looking at the first definition (the second deals with the linguistic definition) it seems clear that there are only 2 genders. But then you get into the whole intersex (previously known as Hermaphrodites) side of things. People born with 2 sets of genitalia or people who "do not fit the typical definitions for male or female bodies". How can they be tied to a specific gender? So I guess this is what Gender 'X' indicates. So based on that, having the option for Gender X available on Birth Certificates is a good thing.

As to whether or not it's a mental health disorder, I would say, a lot of trans people that I've spoke with or heard about do suffer from some form of MHD. whether that's caused by their gender identity crisis or the cause of it, who knows, that's a discussion for smarter minds than mine.

Now the question I have, and it's one that has been troubling me for a while is, ARE TRAPS GAY?
Title: Re: Gender X
Post by: Powerless on January 06, 2019, 03:38:51
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@Nimbus - I loved your post. Super interesting. Here's my take.

According to Oxford Dictionary, gender is defined as "either of the two sexes (male and female), especially when considered with reference to social and cultural differences rather than biological ones. The term is also used more broadly to denote a range of identities that do not correspond to established ideas of male and female."

So, finding a definition that includes terms outside the realm of just "male" and "female" is possible. And I agree with you for the most part that "male" and "female" are terms relating to the genitalia of a particular individual. If you have a penis or XY chromosomes, you're biologically "male" and if you have a vagina or XX chromosomes, you're a biological "female." The problem that I have is that these terms have also become synonymous with gender due to the constant association with the cultural standard appearance of a biological male or female. If a woman were to cut her hair short, where clothes that society deems as clothes for men, chose to wear no makeup, etc., people passing by could refer to her as a man or "him" or "her" or a "boy" or a "male." This obviously has nothing to do with her anatomy but because of her appearance or perceived gender.

And again I agree with you when you say we are assigned sex at birth, not gender. But because of misinformation, ignorance, or rudeness, people will use the terms "sex" and "gender" interchangeably and make it seem otherwise. An example of this would be gender reveal parties. They should be called sex reveal parties but because of terminology like this being used so interchangeably for the aforementioned reasons, progress is difficult.

I disagree with your statement that it isn't disrespectful to refer to someone with the pronoun you choose rather than the one you prefer. You state that "'he' and 'she' both contain the sex terms male and female in their definitions, so calling someone that has the corresponding genitals 'he' or 'she' is accurate" but ignore the fact that again, the terms "he" and "she" are typically referring to a person's gender or perceived gender, as I stated in the example above. The problem again is not having different terminology to refer to different things... the subject becomes confusing, people use terms incorrectly or interchangeably, and then it becomes so taboo to a culture to question long standing traditions, no matter how wrong they are, that people refuse to do so. I also think it takes an extremely open mind, a well educated person, and a person who has done their research on terminology, science, social science, etc. to even have a discussion about this topic which I don't think most people have (again, making this difficult).

It is possible to have a spectrum that includes areas where we do not have a terms for. This exists all over the world yet that doesn't delegitimize the idea of the spectrum existing. Happiness is a spectrum, yet two people who describe themselves as being "happy" probably don't fall exactly on the same point of the spectrum as the other person. We have many terms for certain areas on the spectrum too - glad, happy, ecstatic, etc., but you could easily argue that there are not nearly enough terms to accurately describe how people are feeling. This does not delegitimize the spectrum of feeling though; people will just choose an adjective that they see most accurately reflects what they're feeling. This can be the same as with gender. The reason you get a load of "him" and "her" answers as opposed to individual answers for all 7.5B+ people is because terms have not been created and widely accepted and these commonplace terms closely most closely reflect the individual's identity. As I stated in my first post, you cannot think a thought that does not have a word or words associated with it. If you've read 1984, this is shown through the government making the dictionary smaller and smaller every year. As they remove words from the public's vocabulary, they cannot think certain thoughts. If words like "rebellion" or "uprising" or any combination of words didn't exist, people cannot think those thoughts.

I think everything would be much more simple to understand if we would just come out with terminology to distinguish sex and gender and what denotes each. It would take some time for the public to adopt the ways of thinking, but I think it would help a lot. I also think it would be mocked a lot though as well.

For biological terminology, set rules such as:
If a person is born with XY chromosomes, they're referred to as ______
If a person is born with XX chromosomes, they're referred to as ______
If a person is born with a penis, they're referred to as _____
If a person is born with a vagina, they're referred to as _____
If a person is born with both a penis and vagina, they're referred to as _____
If a person is born without a penis or vagina, they're referred to as _____
If a person was born with a penis but transitioned to a vagina, they're referred to as _____
If a person was born with a vagina but transitioned to a penis, they're referred to as _____

And then there would need to be terminology to refer to different genders with COMPLETELY DIFFERENT words than those used to describe the biological terms above.

Just my thoughts right now. I'm not super educated on the topic and my positions may be different if I were more educated but these are my initial thoughts.
Title: Re: Gender X
Post by: Nimbus on January 06, 2019, 06:24:03
@Powerless I appreciate your taking the time to type out a response. There are a few things that you said that I disagree with, and some that I agree with as well.

The thing that I would like to point out first is an idea I tried to address in my first post, and you actually touched on in your response: I do not agree that the terms have 'become synonymous', they're just overwhelmingly misused. A person, or even a society, improperly using a word, however confidently, does not change its meaning. The definition that you offered up for gender even leads with 'either of the two sexes (male and female)'. So on the point of sex and gender being synonymous, I cannot agree.

I find it kind of amusing that you chose so-called gender reveals as an example of illustrating your point here. I actually exclusively refer to them as 'so-called gender reveals' or simply 'reveals' because, as you stated, they're actually sex reveals, so that was an interesting matter of circumstance, lol.

The fourth block of text you responded with is where I take the most issue with your response, namely in that you claim that I said something I didn't and that I feel like I did a poor job conveying what I meant in one other area.

I never said that I don't think it's disrespectful to refer to someone someone as a pronoun that 'I choose' as opposed to the pronoun the person prefers, so that's not a statement of mine that you can disagree with, lol. In fact, the only thing that I said I didn't find disrespectful with regard to using (the reason for italicization will be clarified shortly) pronouns when referring to another person was accurate pronouns on the basis of the person's sex. And I feel like you and I will have to largely disagree on this point, because again, you feel like it's a lack of more gender-specific terminology; I feel like the 'typically referring to...' comments you make do not change 'he' and 'she' from descriptors of sex to descriptors of gender by virtue of how commonly they're misused.

The point that I do not feel like I did a good job of explaining what I meant on was what I initially said doesn't amount to being disrespectful which was effectively not using a person's preferred pronouns. But not using the pronouns they prefer does not, at least for me, mean that I have to use any pronouns at all. Personally, in cases of a person demanding me to use an improper sex pronoun, I won't use any pronouns and will opt instead to use their first name in place of every pronoun that I would have used.

Moving on from there, I also never said that anything delegitimizes the existence of a gender spectrum. In fact, I led that section explicitly stating that I felt like gender was more of a spectrum. What I said was that acknowledging the reality of gender existing on a spectrum takes some legitimacy from the argument for the accommodation of gender pronouns.

But I do find it interesting that you chose to provide emotion specifically as another example of a spectrum because, again, it's ironic that it would be me you'd be having the conversation with when you made the choice. When I use 'feeling words' I rarely settle for a generic 'happy', 'sad', etc. options. I actively try to use the word that most closely fits exactly what I'm feeling, and if I'm unable to, I explain it.

For this particular point though, again, I feel like I failed to clarify a broader point that I was making that ultimately amounts to the fact that I sort of agree with you here. It makes my skin crawl that 'they', 'them', and 'their' have been have been adopted as would-be non-binary gender pronouns. Part of this is because, as I've stated, I don't view 'he' and 'she' as being gender pronouns. The other part is because, until somewhat recently, those were viewed as being plural pronouns. Not sure if you read my introduction post, but I cannot let myself accept an individual as being plural. Just can't do it, lol. The part that I agree with you on to an extent is that the 'closest to exact' ideal that I strive for isn't readily available in a lot of gender related instances (the areas of the spectrum we don't have terms for). But I don't think that means people should appropriate other terms and pretend that the mean something that they don't rather than helping our language to evolve and creating accurate terminology instead.

I have read 1984. It's on my all-time favorite books list. But I disagree with the notion that people are incapable of thinking thoughts that words don't exist for, especially given that rebellion was one of the central themes of the book. In fact, your explanation of areas of a spectrum that there are not terms for kind of rejects that concept as well.

I absolutely agree that more clearly defined terminology for sex and gender would be helpful moving forward, but I still maintain that people improperly using sex terms as gender terms presently does not just make them so.
Title: Re: Gender X
Post by: Powerless on January 06, 2019, 11:25:42
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@Nimbus - thanks for your post.

I disagree with your statement about "improperly using a word, however  confidently, does not change its meaning." Word definitions are modified and change with time constantly. There are multiple words whose meanings have changed, or additional meanings have been added, based on their societal use. While yes, based on the previous definitions of these words, their uses may have been deemed "wrong" initially, that doesn't mean that once a definition of the word has been modified that those newer definitions can continuously be called wrong. Terms like "gay" and "cool" are more recent terms with changes/additions that most people would cite but a simple Google search will show multiple examples of word definitions changing DRASTICALLY over time (I did so myself... was actually quite interesting). I would still highly suggest you rethink the position that saying "he" and "she" is solely related to sex and not gender. When these terms became commonplace, the difference between sex and gender was also not commonplace, so because those two terms were used synonymously, so were the pronouns used to describe the people. As times have changed, I think it's quite probable that words have changed meaning as well. If the background of a word has been modified over time, then it's clear that the words from that background may have to be modified as well. The questions regarding gender on this complicated of a scale is definitely a new concept so simply stating that terms used during this new age of conversation are simply "misused" I think is a stretch.

I apologize if I misrepresented your statements. I must have read them incorrectly. Based on this post though, I agree with your reasoning for why you do it but disagree based on what I said above in that I don't think it's correct to say that "he" and "she" are exclusively sex-related pronouns. I also don't believe that it is any type of verbal abuse or anything to not use a person's preferred pronoun, although it may be rude. Freedom of speech is essential and no one should be forcing anyone to say anything.

When it comes to the spectrum I understand what you're saying, but because it seems that gender does land more on a spectrum, we have to deal with what we can regarding pronouns. Language can only go so far in such a certain amount of time.

"But I disagree with the notion that people are incapable of thinking thoughts that words don't exist for, especially given that rebellion was one of the central themes of the book. In fact, your explanation of areas of a spectrum that there are not terms for kind of rejects that concept as well."

I think you took my statement about this as way too face value. The book doesn't simply mean specific words removed from the dictionary, but phrases and terms being used together as well. Removing words like "rebellion" obviously isn't enough to stop someone from thinking about rising up against their government because they can do just that - think with the words "rise up against my government." The point I was making was that if our words are structured to form sentences in certain ways and that the only words we're able to add to those sentences are ones we've created to describe things then anything outside of what we dictate is a proper sentence structure with the proper words we've created is unthinkable. Because there are no words for you to think in your thoughts, you're unable to form thoughts about anything other than what the language you speak allows. This goes for both words and sentence structure, like I said. If the word "oppresion" was removed from language as well as any variation of the word or any combination of words that could express what oppresion is, they couldn't think of it. And even if ther are technically words that could express it, if they're taught to mean certain things and be structured in certain ways that woudn't allow that thought, it would be impossible. For example - the question "What does the color green smell like?" is grammatically correct, but because of the way our language is formed, the sentence is meaningless. If a language were to format words where the statement "My government is oppressing me" just simply doesn't make sense, although grammatically it does, the thought that that statement represents in our current language wouldn't be possible (the same would have to be true for any variation or word replacements that could mean the same). If you're into extremely in depth scientific discussions as well, specifically on things like the beginning of the universe and the physics around it, you see instances of what I'm talking about as well. Asking something like "What created the universe?" while seemingly a legitimate quesiton just simply isn't in terms of some scientific theories. The same is true for physics when it comes extremely complex calculations (way above my level of understanding). You'll hear those who study physics talk about calculations that can prove of something that exists but never be able to see or describe it in any way, possibly because we don't have the words to comprehend what it is that we're trying to describe.

To me, this was the point that Orwell was trying to make.

Again, I may have done a horrible job elaborating on my point. It's an EXTREMELY difficult subject to grasp and I even find myself lost in it at times. Hopefully I was coherent enough.
Title: Re: Gender X
Post by: Nimbus on January 06, 2019, 13:59:28
@Powerless - Again, I really think you underestimate your ability to explain what you're thinking.

I think I'm having some difficulty with reconciling some of the, at least seemingly, contradictory ideas that you've presented in the first block of your response. Namely, I am not altogether sure of whether you think the definitions of words actually matter. And while, at first glance, I could imagine my saying that coming across as an attempt at being difficult, I can assure you I'm being sincere. On the one hand, you posit that "... that doesn't mean that once a definition of the word has been modified that those newer definitions can continuously be called wrong.", and I would agree with that to an extent; that's why I conceded that use of the modified definition of 'literally' is accurate, despite the fact that I take issue with the way that people use that word. However, in your saying so and my agreeing with it, we have an implicit agreement between the two of us that definitions matter. To that end, deferring to the Oxford English Dictionary definitions of 'he' and 'she' (denoted as deference given that it's the dictionary source that you opted to use, and I'd likely have gone with a different one) include the terms boy, man, male, girl, woman, and female, none of which denote gender in their definitions (at least as they appear in the online version of the dictionary). This brings me to the 'other hand', as it were. You have effectively said that a person's use of a word cannot be deemed as 'wrong' if it's in line with the definition. You have also effectively said that a word is not being misused if it is not in line with the definition. I suppose I'm just curious when it is acceptable, in your opinion, to say that a person is, in fact, misusing a word. Because, as it stands, you've said that it's not misuse if the definition of the word has been modified, but that it's also not misuse if the definition of the word hasn't been modified.

A couple of minor points that I wanted to address from this section as well include that, 1) I do not hold the position that saying 'she' and 'he' are solely related to sex and not gender. Socio-linguistics make it obvious that this isn't the case. I have said, repeatedly, that the definitions of 'he' and 'she' are solely related to sex, and 2) I do not feel like it is accurate to say that I have 'simply stated that the terms used during this new age of conversation are misused'. The functional purpose of the word 'simply' in that sentence would suggest that I've done little more than just say it, and given that I have offered definitions, advocated for the evolution of language to be more inclusive/accurate, and we seem to be in agreement that sex and gender are in fact different, I do not feel that I've 'simply stated' anything of the sort.

Moving on, I can appreciate where you're coming from regarding the use of pronouns in relation to a gender spectrum, but again, I feel like this is a point of contention on which we're going to have to agree to disagree. You view 'he' and 'she' pronouns as being gendered; I do not. But if I was in agreement with you, I would argue that as of this moment, we have done nothing to advance our language in this regard. You and I have agreed about expanding terms used to differentiate between sex and gender and I don't feel like that is happening, least of all when we settle for attaching meaning to previously existing terms.

I do not feel like I took your statements related to 1984 at face value. I feel like I considered what you had to say about the subject and decided that I disagree. That sentiment, if anything, has been strengthened after you further elaborated on what you meant. The book itself, and indeed our language, illustrate the fact that we are able to conceptualize things that there are not words for. In fact, every word that we use originated from a concept that we did not previously have a word for.

I will say that I feel like the question "What does the color green smell like?" is a poor example of something that our language does not allow us to conceptualize. Reason being, our language does allow us to conceptualize it. Roughly 1 out of every 2000 people are born with synesthesia (for comparison, the rate for intersex people that are born is believed to be between 1 in 1500 and 1 in 2000) , allowing (at least some of) them to hear, smell, taste, and even feel (emotionally as well as physically) colors, along with a number of other ways in which there is intersectionality between senses. We did not previously have a term for people that could smell colors. Now we have 'synesthetes'.

I can't stress enough how much I have enjoyed this conversation. I honestly would not have expected for something this intellectually stimulating to come from an offsite Runescape clan forum =P That's not to say that I don't think people in the clan are smart. It just strikes me as a bit of an odd platform for such a discussion, lol.
Title: Re: Gender X
Post by: BuyMoreKeys on January 07, 2019, 12:31:37
Petition for @Redtunnel to add Gender X to consentus profiles  XD
Title: Re: Gender X
Post by: Nikkie on January 07, 2019, 13:40:59
Quote from: BuyMoreKeys on January 07, 2019, 12:31:37
Petition for @Redtunnel to add Gender X to consentus profiles  XD
+1
Title: Re: Gender X
Post by: btraill on January 28, 2019, 00:46:20
Someone who portrays my opinion/viewpoint well on this gender pronoun stuff. (Jordan Peterson):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtgKRpjVXSg&t