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[–]SnowAssMan[S] 8 insightful - 1 fun8 insightful - 0 fun9 insightful - 1 fun -  (6 children)

1- Identity is formed by nature & nurture. Self-Identification as the opposite sex is like identifying as a goth, or a video game character, or a Dungeons & Dragons character. It's role-play. Wanting to be the opposite sex isn't an identity. Certainly the mere wish of a person to be the opposite sex isn't evidence that that person is somehow the opposite sex on elusive some level. There is no difference between a man who wishes to be a woman & a man who identifies as a woman, since in any other context you'd claim the former man to be an "egg".

2- Oh, so at least you recognise that 'man' & 'woman' are each single-sex terms.

3- So it's inaccurate to say "sex & gender are not the same thing", which is an understatement, as the aforementioned mantra is the exact opposite of the truth. Sex & gender are literally the same thing.

4- What accounts for this? The evidence seems to point out that self-ID is BS. Their own actions misgender them louder than anyone's words ever could. Maybe we should instead of calling them "trans-womxyn", we should be calling them 'transgender men'. Maybe language should reflect reality, instead of an ideology that has been proven wrong.

You skipped 5.

6- I'm the one who told you that, I added that gay people's brains also resembled the opposite sex's, therefore this evidence means that either transgender people are gay, or gay people are transgender.

7- "cis woman" doesn't include all adult members of the female sex, since it excludes the ones who identify as transgender.

8- It's sexist appropriation to make single-sex terms unisex.

9a- You just confirmed what I said. Transgender identification transitions same-sex attraction into "heterosexuality", making homophobic conversion necessary to "gender affirmation".

9b- There is no evidence of anyone ever being "genuinely trans". Anyone engaging in appropriation should be pressured out of it. Should we stop discriminating against minstrels since they are obviously genuinely trans?

10- According to your standards? Does this ban drag queens & butch lesbians then? lol

[–]MarkTwainiac 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (5 children)

Sex & gender are literally the same thing.

Many of us on the GC side, particularly those of us who are second-wave feminists, or had our ideas shaped by second-wave feminism, disagree. We see sex as biology and gender as the cultural overlay consisting mostly of stereotypes attributed to and associated with each of the two sexes. In our view, sex = male/female; gender = masculinity/femininity.

In the US where I'm from, everyone used to use the word sex when we meant sex. We used terms like sex roles, sex stereotypes, sexist expectations, sex-coded dress, and sexism when speaking of what today is known as gender.

Gender as an anodyne replacement for the word sex only started to come into widespread use in the US over the course of the 1990s. I worked as journalist and editor in the 1970s and 80s (and after), and it was customary back then when writing for general audiences to speak of people's sex, not their gender - and to use straightforward terms like sex discrimination, sex crimes, sex prejudice, sex roles, the sex pay gap and sexism.

In the late 60s and early 70s, sexologist Robert Stoller started using gender to mean the inner feeling/sense that some people have and the outward presentation/affectation/performance that signal sex which some people are hung up on, but he did so solely in reference to the transsexuals he studied. John Money was the one who invented the idea that "gender identity" is an inner sense that everyone has, but his view was not widely accepted initially. None of the English language style guides from the 1950s through the 1980s, and from previous eras, that journalists and professional wordsmiths relied mentioned "gender" except in terms of grammar in certain languages like French - where all nouns are masculine, feminine or neuter.

The USA's paper of record, the NY Times, only started substituting "gender" for "sex" in late 1990 - and the switch was vehemently protested at the time.

[–]SnowAssMan[S] 8 insightful - 1 fun8 insightful - 0 fun9 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

There has always been overlap. Unisex can refer to androgynous fashion. Someone's facial features or figure can be described as 'feminine', even though what is meant is "biologically female-looking". And would you say a girl receives feminine socialisation? Even a masculine girl? Or would you say female socialisation? Gender has had two meanings for a long time now. Pronouns are masculine or feminine, but they are used to describe even male & female animals respectively.

You can't say "sex-identity" without people thinking you're talking about a person's sex-life, which demonstrates a further problem: what would happen to all the times you want to talk about sexual topics? Sexual is the adjective, but the noun is sex.

Then there is the fact that practically no child will ever hear the word sex or be allowed to use it of they do, but they will more than likely hear 'gender'. Sex is taboo in our culture, biological sex is taboo to the trans-cult, so any feminist who agrees to only refer to the male & female sexes collectively as 'sex', is complicit in making a person's male or female status obscene.

I don't know what's stopping feminist theorists from just using the terms female vs. femininity, rather than "sex & gender". It eliminates most language issues & makes the theory more accessible to regular people.

[–]MarkTwainiac 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

Pronouns are masculine or feminine, but they are used to describe even male & female animals respectively.

But in grammar, gender isn't just about pronouns. It's about nouns - the words for all living things and inanimate objects. And ascribing nouns a gender in the grammatical sense was because of their association with sex. Ships, for example, were seen as female, not as feminine.

The pronouns she and he are called feminine or masculine in the grammatical sense, but they are used to describe animals that are female and male respectively. I've never heard anyone describe animals as feminine or masculine. Though nowadays I imagine some genderists probably do this.

You can't say "sex-identity" without people thinking you're talking about a person's sex-life

No need to say "sex identity" when just "sex" itself will do. Such as in the questions that get asked of pregnant women all the time: Do you care what sex the baby is? Do you know its sex? Do you want to know the baby's sex before it's born?

what would happen to all the times you want to talk about sexual topics? Sexual is the adjective, but the noun is sex.

This is just silly. Lots of words have multiple meanings. Humans are easily able to distinguish which of the different meanings applies in any given sentence/statement by the context.

For example, when people discuss whether COVID-19 came from a bat or a lab, everyone knows that bat there means an animal, not the device used to hit a ball in cricket or baseball, and that lab means a facility where science is done, not a kind of dog. When someone says, "that's a novel idea or theory" no one thinks it means the idea or theory comes from or is related to fictional works of literature.

Speakers of English have no trouble instantly getting the different meanings of sex in the titles of such well-known books as The Second Sex, The Joy of Sex, The Dialectic of Sex and Sex and The City. Nobody has a problem understanding the difference between the word "sexual" in the title of the 1970 Kate Millet book Sexual Politics and the 1982 Marvin Gaye song Sexual Healing.

When a physician or sonographer asks a pregnant woman, "Do you want to know the baby's sex?" it's clearly understood by all that they're not asking the mum-to-be if she wants to have sex, nor are they referring to her baby having sex. Similarly, it's clear as day to all in that situation that the word "baby" in that specific context refers to the fetus the woman is gestating, not to herself as when her lover or a man might say, "hey baby" to her.

My passport, birth certificate and other documents, and those of my kids, say "Sex" before the M or F or Male or Female. No need to say "Sex Identity." Throughout history billions of people have filled out tons of forms in the course of our lives that had lines or boxes saying simply "Sex" not "Sex Identity" - and yet somehow we knew to fill in, check off or circle Female or Male, or F or M. Only 12 year-olds look at a form that says "Sex" and respond by filling in, "Yes" or "You Bet, just say when and where."

Since you brought up the term "sex identity": I believe the phenomenon of having a chosen "identity" that bears no relation to reality is a bunch of bollox, but if people are going to "identify as" the reproductive class that they are not, or pretend that they can identify out of being a member of a sex class, then I think the term "sex identity" would be better. Because that's what people are doing. The mantras TWAW and TMAM mean that people are identifying as the opposite sex and insisting the rest of the world play along.

I don't know what's stopping feminist theorists from just using the terms female vs. femininity, rather than "sex & gender". It eliminates most language issues & makes the theory more accessible to regular people.

Feminists of the first and second-wave type have always spoken in terms of sex vs sex stereotypes. That's worked fine and is very clear. I don't see any utility or benefit to your idea, which to my mind is suggesting that feminists should limit the scope of what we discuss to only one side of the fence, as it were. Female is not a substitute for sex; female is one of the two sexes, so half the convo. Similarly, femininity is not a substitute for sex stereotype; it just refers to one kind or section of sex stereotypes.

Second-wave feminists like me are not the ones who've created "language issues" by inventing unclear jargon; refusing to clearly define our terms; employing obscurant, ill-defined lingo and expressing our ideas in dense, impenetrable prose that's not "accessible to regular people." The genderists and queer theory crowd are the ones who have done that. It's their stock-in-trade, in fact. Incomprehensibility and gibberish are Judith Butler's hallmarks.

Genderists are the ones who've worked hard to sow confusion, and to make it appear that the word woman is indefinable, that women are "formless, limitless voids" and being a woman is an option for any man who claims to "identify as" or "feel like" a woman. Feminists of the second-wave ilk, or from that tradition, say that's malarkey. We say a woman is an adult human female.

[–]SnowAssMan[S] 8 insightful - 1 fun8 insightful - 0 fun9 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

I'm aware that words can have more than one meaning. One such word is gender.

Mainstream (99% of the population): gender = bio sex (99% of the time), sex = sexual intercourse (99% of the time) – basically, there are multiple meanings, but there is also a hierarchy of these meanings.

The trans cult has a better PR campaign than feminism does. It makes more sense to join forces with the mainstream, bc regular people don't get direct exposure to gender critical feminism, they've got to go through the mainstream filter first, & the trans ideology filter second, at which point you've lost most of them bc it's got too many layers of complexity to it.

You play into the trans cult's hands by saying "sex" in place of "gender", by helping them make biology obscene.

You really think masculinity is half the conversion within 2nd wave feminist discourse? Not even close. Masculinity is a pointless word anyway, it's like having a single word that describes every visible colour of the colour-spectrum put together, except pink. Men don't really have sex stereotypes holding them back, hence male-privilege: spared sex-based injustice. So if masculinity is just lack of femininity, then 'femininity' should suffice.

In English, the way in which the language is gendered (masculine & feminine pronouns & names) are directly describing biological sex.

I don't accept that it was 2nd wave feminists who made the distinction between gender & sex, or that Judith Butler popularised the replacement of sex with gender, or that John Money was the one who started using gender to replace sex. Do you know of a 2nd wave feminist work that defines gender as not sex, but sex stereotypes?

Stoller is the only one I've seen who calls the distinction between biology & social determinism sex & gender, respectively, but he seems to imply that this distinction is already in use (either way, some non-feminist seems to be the originator). Butler alludes to it, but she doesn't define gender as socially determined, instead she opts for a definition that has no substance. She thinks being a woman & being feminine are synonymous, but that bc the definition of femininity isn't always the same everywhere, she concludes that it doesn't exist, leading her to believe that 'woman' doesn't exist, it's just a self-determined performance, like an idea in the public domain. Neither GC feminists nor the trans cult seem to agree with either of these definitions though, so why does everyone jump to the defence of the distinction between sex & gender?

You may say you believe that gender is not male & female, but masculinity & femininity, but how did masculinity & femininity come to be known as "gender"? Was there perhaps already a close association between the word gender & the sexes? How did that happen? Apparently the OED defined gender as sex in the 19th century. So you claimed it's a modern invention to call sex gender, when in fact gender has always meant sex. So if we're going to go back to "the original" way of using these terms then gender would still end up as the correct term for the sexes.

Any use of gender to mean sex stereotypes, exclusively, is either pretty obscure, or pretty recent. I don't even really see how you being American, & a second-wave feminist, from the latter half of the 20th century, justifies the use of the word gender to mean sex stereotypes & not sex, bc I haven't seen any evidence to suggest that American second wave feminists from the latter half of the 20th century used gender to mean sex stereotypes exclusively & not sex.

[–]MarkTwainiac 4 insightful - 2 fun4 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

Just as you seem unable to grasp the difference between gender and sex, you don't seem to understand that there's a difference between the significance of terms & ideas put forward or referenced by specialists in rarefied academic fields and the journals/books/texts they wrote in the past that were little-read at the time and the significance of the language & ideas that at the very same era in history were in wide circulation amongst the general public and thus were used in the popular press and in everyday, ordinary parlance.

The niche language used in the 1960s and 70s by specialists in narrow fields like sexology, and the sexology of transsexualisn specifically, and by grammarians prior to that, did not reflect the zeitgeist of the time. Just as even today, the gibberish-filled, obscurant writings and pretentious, performative, material-reality-denying ideas of Judith Butler do not represent the way most people who live in the real world speak, communicate and think even though aspects of Butler's jargon and half-baked theories float through and have wormed their way into the collective consciousness and wider culture like dust motes or virus particles.

If you want an idea about everyday speech, go to a library and look up the style guides used by English-language journalists and editors in the 60s, 70s and 80s. All the major news outlets had them - AP, NY Times, Newsweek, TIME, the networks, the BBC. You won't find any one recommending that "gender" be used instead of "sex."

Also, to get an idea of how people actually spoke back then, listen to/watch press interviews and radio & TV reports from the era.

I don't accept that it was 2nd wave feminists who made the distinction between gender & sex, or that Judith Butler popularised the replacement of sex with gender, or that John Money was the one who started using gender to replace sex. Do you know of a 2nd wave feminist work that defines gender as not sex, but sex stereotypes?

I think you have reading comprehension issues. I said gender was not a term widely used by second-wave feminists. I said most of us never used the word at all. We made a distinction between sex and the sex stereotypes, sex roles and sexist expectations that culture/society impose upon the two sexes - or what is now known as "gender" because that's the terminology that has come into use in the past 30 years. But second-wave feminists discussed these issues without resorting to the word "gender."

Also, I don't care that you "don't accept" what I am saying about the 60s, 70s and 80s and second-wave feminism. You weren't there. I was.

What I find remarkable is that you seem to think you are an/the authority on issues you don't seem very well informed about - and that you apparently believe your views have more validity than mine or anyone else who sees things differently to you just because your views belong to/come from you. I wonder why that is?

You play into the trans cult's hands by saying "sex" in place of "gender", by helping them make biology obscene.

What? That hangup/neurosis is theirs and yours, not mine. I've never depicted biology as obscene. That's on you & the POV you're defending.

[–]SnowAssMan[S] 7 insightful - 1 fun7 insightful - 0 fun8 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

If the word "gender" serves no purpose in describing sex stereotypes, since you say feminists never even used the word (since the term 'sex stereotypes' made it redundant), then why should it matter that I use the word 'gender' to refer to sex, in order to a) better differentiate biological sex from sexual intercourse, b) speak the same language as everyone else, whether colloquial or academic?

There is a chapter in the Female Eunuch called 'Gender', & it's not on "sex stereotypes", but like the OED, Germaine Greer isn't American, so it doesn't count, I guess?

Anyway, I did a Google Scholar search, customising the range from 1919-1985, confining the search to: "gender" -transsexual -identity -masculinity -linguistics resulting in about 76,800 results, as far as I could tell, gender was not referring to grammar or sex stereotypes in the majority of cases, but biological sex instead.

I asked you whether there are any American 2nd wave feminists who make the distinction between gender & sex, defining the former as "sex stereotypes". You didn't answer the question. However, I looked up Kate Millet's Sexual Politics, bc I remembered she had a useful glossary at the end of the book. She quotes Robert Stoller directly, using his distinction between gender (masculinity & femininity) & sex (male & female). So you could have used that example, except that, she says she agrees with Stoller & Money on gender identity being the result of gendered conditioning, which might have made the example too inconvenient for you to mention, presuming you still reject the aforementioned notion. So Stoller really seems to be the originator of the distinction you're referring to. It turns out Dworkin quotes Money on gender identity too.

What? That hangup/neurosis is theirs and yours, not mine. I've never depicted biology as obscene. That's on you & the POV you're defending.

Tsk, tsk, reading comprehension issues. Sex (the word, the connotation, the definition used in the majority of cases to mean intercourse) is obscene to the mainstream, biological sex (male & female) is taboo to the trans cult. Saying "sex" in place of "gender" helps the trans cult make biological sex obscene to the general public. I'm saying this for the third time in a row now.