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 thatās fun for some people, but itās definitely not fun for me.
To be clear Iām not saying you canāt be a woman or a man or whatever. I understand I have to pay that tax. But in 200 years maybe it wonāt matter anymore because weāll all just be people. And that seems nice to me.
Not really. Like with music, some labels are broader than others. āOh you like rock? Rock & Roll, Glam Rock, Hard Rock, Metal?ā āOh what kind of Metal, Trash, Death, Symphonic.ā
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 donāt care how people express as long as they arenāt 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 thatās not the same as giving a damn about it.
Thatās 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 donāt need to identify someoneās color or commit a social faux pas. Keep your color names, I just donāt want to have to figure out if you are green or lime green and address you as such.
Itās not necessarily a social faux pas to misgender someone, thatās a myth made up by conservatives. Itās a faux pas to intentionally misgender people.
Sorta like if you call someone Jeb and they correct you and say itās Jed. It only becomes an issue if you insist on calling them Jeb.
Fair, but I donāt 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 someoneās gender when talking to them, just what pronouns to use.
Fortunately they/them works for this purpose, and is universally understood in English. Itās 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 someoneās gender has existed far longer than our modern understanding of the nuance of the concept.
Itās not irrelevant to everyone. We have a phrase that allows you to omit them, but that doesnāt 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 donāt involve you is perfectly sufficient reason to have the words.
āConfuses youā is not a good enough reason to invalidate a core part of peopleās identity, particularly when it may have been hard for them to get things figured out.
Itās important to remember that gender is irrelevant, but only if itās someone elseās. It can be aggravating to be told that something you worked hard to figure out doesnāt matter when it very much matters to you.
Rather, any conception of gender would arise from within, and be part of oneās self-identity, rather than a tool used by society to prescribe a role or identity.
That āprescribe a role or identityā is why itās 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 doesnāt matter
I very much like the gender identity that I have; thereās nothing wrong with that.
Iām not invalidating it. You can have names for it. I donāt care. I just donāt want it to be socially required for me to know.
I donāt expect you to know what my favorite programming language is. So please donāt expect me to know what gender you are when it doesnāt matter for social interactions.
I mean it wouldnāt 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 isā¦ not apologizing for it.
Yeah today. But we know gender is a made-up category now. And already itās starting to diverge. I can easily imagine 20 years from now there being like 50 different genders, and the amount of people who donāt associate with men or women will be much greater.
You do that already, and itās 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. Itās called a name. You have to be told it, you can easily forget it, and itās 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 doesnāt have to be anything different than asking for someoneās name to better address them.
Yeah but Iām okay with names. Iām 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 doesnāt require it as itās pretty clear that gender is a made-up category.
I think itās 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. Itās 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 iām getting into when Iām talking to someone. I donāt want to lead someone on but at the same time i donāt want to be led on.
or am i confusing sex and gender again? Iām honestly trying but iām by no means fluent on the topic.
Iām so glad you said breasts!! Come with me on an exploratory walk:
Letās say you fall for a woman. Youāre getting intimate and she stops you to tell you something serious. See, she hasnāt been honest about her body with you. She hasnāt dated in awhile and didnāt know when the right time was to tell you, but she wants you so much that it canāt 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 donāt think so, I think this was this just part of learning whether youāre 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.
I think if youāre interested in dating or sex, and you have preferences that are deal breakers. Ask for what theyāre equipped with.
Similar to how if youāre planning on dating someone today and if have sex is important to you. You communicate that. And ask them if they are asexual.
Itās perfectly okay to have deal-breaking preferences for these things.
Sex: not binary, a lot more confusing the more scientific you make it. Can absolutely be changed. Itās 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. Itās the role you play, socially. A lot of people think it should be eliminated. Iām 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 youāre confused on. Is defined by the term sex, but generally refers to the sex of you and the sex of who youāre into. Which, if you go by what āsexā 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 arenāt hurting anybody AND thereās consent of all parties involved, GO FOR IT.
I think Iām 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. Nobodyās 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 thatās fun for some people, but itās definitely not fun for me.
To be clear Iām not saying you canāt be a woman or a man or whatever. I understand I have to pay that tax. But in 200 years maybe it wonāt matter anymore because weāll all just be people. And that seems nice to me.
Not really. Like with music, some labels are broader than others. āOh you like rock? Rock & Roll, Glam Rock, Hard Rock, Metal?ā āOh what kind of Metal, Trash, Death, Symphonic.ā
The broader terms existing does not negate the more precise terms and visa versa.
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Does it though?
I really donāt care how people express as long as they arenāt 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 thatās not the same as giving a damn about it.
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Thatās 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!
Iām giving this the #00ff00 light
My gender is 0xffffff
What if I want violet?
ee82ee?
Actually no, thatās 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 donāt need to identify someoneās color or commit a social faux pas. Keep your color names, I just donāt want to have to figure out if you are green or lime green and address you as such.
Itās not necessarily a social faux pas to misgender someone, thatās a myth made up by conservatives. Itās a faux pas to intentionally misgender people.
Sorta like if you call someone Jeb and they correct you and say itās Jed. It only becomes an issue if you insist on calling them Jeb.
Fair, but I donāt 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 someoneās gender when talking to them, just what pronouns to use.
Fortunately they/them works for this purpose, and is universally understood in English. Itās 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 someoneās 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 donāt need to know anyoneās specific pronouns or gender.
But if no one needs to know anyoneās specific pronouns or gender, then why have it as a concept other than as a niche topic of discussion?
Itās not irrelevant to everyone. We have a phrase that allows you to omit them, but that doesnāt 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 donāt involve you is perfectly sufficient reason to have the words.
āConfuses youā is not a good enough reason to invalidate a core part of peopleās identity, particularly when it may have been hard for them to get things figured out.
Itās important to remember that gender is irrelevant, but only if itās someone elseās. It can be aggravating to be told that something you worked hard to figure out doesnāt 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 āprescribe a role or identityā is why itās 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; thereās nothing wrong with that.
Iām not invalidating it. You can have names for it. I donāt care. I just donāt want it to be socially required for me to know.
I donāt expect you to know what my favorite programming language is. So please donāt expect me to know what gender you are when it doesnāt matter for social interactions.
I mean it wouldnāt 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 isā¦ not apologizing for it.
Yeah today. But we know gender is a made-up category now. And already itās starting to diverge. I can easily imagine 20 years from now there being like 50 different genders, and the amount of people who donāt associate with men or women will be much greater.
You do that already, and itās 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. Itās called a name. You have to be told it, you can easily forget it, and itās 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 doesnāt have to be anything different than asking for someoneās name to better address them.
Yeah but Iām okay with names. Iām 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 doesnāt require it as itās pretty clear that gender is a made-up category.
I think itās 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. Itās 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 youād 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 wouldnāt 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 iām getting into when Iām talking to someone. I donāt want to lead someone on but at the same time i donāt want to be led on.
or am i confusing sex and gender again? Iām honestly trying but iām by no means fluent on the topic.
Iām so glad you said breasts!! Come with me on an exploratory walk:
Letās say you fall for a woman. Youāre getting intimate and she stops you to tell you something serious. See, she hasnāt been honest about her body with you. She hasnāt dated in awhile and didnāt know when the right time was to tell you, but she wants you so much that it canāt 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 donāt think so, I think this was this just part of learning whether youāre 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 donāt think there was any deception because she has been straight up and honest. I think youāve helped me to understand.
I think if youāre interested in dating or sex, and you have preferences that are deal breakers. Ask for what theyāre equipped with.
Similar to how if youāre planning on dating someone today and if have sex is important to you. You communicate that. And ask them if they are asexual.
Itās 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. Itās 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. Itās the role you play, socially. A lot of people think it should be eliminated. Iām 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 youāre confused on. Is defined by the term sex, but generally refers to the sex of you and the sex of who youāre into. Which, if you go by what āsexā 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 arenāt hurting anybody AND thereās consent of all parties involved, GO FOR IT.
I think Iām 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. Nobodyās 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 whatās in your pants, gender is how you look.
This just reminds me of the shitpost of humans/aliens.
It was a āfancyā bathroom sign for men and women.