all 22 comments

[–]MarkTwainiac 16 insightful - 5 fun16 insightful - 4 fun17 insightful - 5 fun -  (0 children)

You can put lipstick on a pig, kitten ears on a pooch or a parakeet, and dress up animals in all sorts of silly outfits ranging from frilly frocks to macho costumes like those of the Village People - and still animals wouldn't have "gender."

This inane, desperate effort puts a new spin on the old proverb "you can't make a silk gold lamé purse out of a sow's ear."

[–]lefterfield 15 insightful - 3 fun15 insightful - 2 fun16 insightful - 3 fun -  (16 children)

fits naturally with some traditional Indigenous ways of thinking about other animals and their relations with humans.

Riiiight. WHICH "Indigenous ways of thinking"? Some indigenous people considered owning livestock bizarre. These types always seem to assume tribal culture was a monolith across multiple regions.

But the whole idea of it is insane anyway. To have a concept of social gender an animal would need to have a sense of 'self.' There are very few animals that are known to have this. Cats and dogs don't seem to. We've barely scratched the surface of understanding animal communication in any species. What could this possibly reveal other than a lot of human assumptions and gender ideology?

[–]BiologyIsReal[S] 12 insightful - 3 fun12 insightful - 2 fun13 insightful - 3 fun -  (5 children)

Considering the same people think indigenous people lived in a gender utopia untill the white man introduced to them the concept of sex, I don't trust these claims.

I can only read the abstract, but I would bet the authors did enough mental gymnastics in this paper to win an Olympic medal. The whole idea is insane as you say. Animal behaviour may vary between the sexes, but that doesn't mean they have a concept of gender.

[–]grixit 7 insightful - 11 fun7 insightful - 10 fun8 insightful - 11 fun -  (1 child)

Considering the same people think indigenous people lived in a gender utopia untill the white man introduced to them the concept of sex, I don't trust these claims.

Columbus wrote exensively about the behavior of natives on Hispanola, especially the way they would sometimes split in two to reproduce, since their anatomy was totally unrelated to sex.

[–]lefterfield 6 insightful - 3 fun6 insightful - 2 fun7 insightful - 3 fun -  (0 children)

OMG, lol!

[–]lefterfield 7 insightful - 1 fun7 insightful - 0 fun8 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Completely agree. I wish I could read the whole paper if only to evaluate their claims, but I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say it's not worth the purchase price.

[–]BiologyIsReal[S] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

I'm curious about what kind of arguments they came, but I think I'll wait for the incoming critiques of the paper. I'm sure someone will have something to say about it.

[–]lefterfield 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Honestly if I had the money I'd see about buying a subscription to read it. It's so dumb that I am curious.

[–]PenseePansy 8 insightful - 1 fun8 insightful - 0 fun9 insightful - 1 fun -  (9 children)

fits naturally with some traditional Indigenous ways of thinking about other animals and their relations with humans.

Riiiight. WHICH "Indigenous ways of thinking"? Some indigenous people considered owning livestock bizarre. These types always seem to assume tribal culture was a monolith across multiple regions.

Yeah, and HOW do those espousing this fail to see that it's not just patently-absurd, but also... BIGOTED? What with all the ignorance, and condescension, and presumptuousness, and using REAL PEOPLE and their REAL CULTURES as... mere vehicles for trendy western bohemianism; politically-correct cartoon characters. They're just (conveniently enough) whatever SJW types want them to be. Oh, yeah-- THAT'S not racist! Isn't this simply the latest iteration of the same tired old "noble savage" stereotype?

Furthermore, where do they get the harebrained idea that "indigenous = WOKE"? Have never understood this. Like, the Comanche (who scared the shit out of pretty much everyone) were just mellow pacifists? Who probably kept track of how far they walked with a FitBit and shopped at Whole Foods? I guess these multi-culti nitwits have gotten so reflexively hostile to the western/white that anyone who ISN'T automatically becomes good, and, indeed, must necessarily side with THEM. Meaning share their values. Which I suspect would come as a GREAT surprise to pretty much every indigenous person ever.

Christ, the STUPID... it burns...

[–]MarkTwainiac 10 insightful - 1 fun10 insightful - 0 fun11 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

And about half a billion "indigenous people" are still living on earth today. Wonder how many the author interviewed./s

https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/indigenouspeoples#:~:text=There%20are%20approximately%20476%20million,worldwide%2C%20in%20over%2090%20countries.

And according to this UN report, life amongst the world's extant indigenous peoples in the 21st century isn't a sexual or gender identity utopia where everyone is equal and treated kindly. At all. And it's not just coz of the terrible influence of the dominant culture created by the evil white colonialists from Europe. In a lot of indigenous cultures still in existence today, girls & women are routinely mistreated in all sorts of horrific ways for reasons and traditions that appear to come from within their own cultures - many of which probably long predate the arrival of white colonialists in the age of European expansion that started 530 years ago.

https://www.un.org/en/ga/69/meetings/indigenous/pdf/IASG%20Thematic%20Paper_Reproductive%20Health%20-%20rev1.pdf

Edit: I should've added earlier that many centuries before the Europeans showed up, the indigenous peoples of much of Africa, the Middle East, west and south Asia and parts of Europe had already been overrun and colonized by Arabs/Islamists. I'm not saying that to suggest that what the Arabs and Islamists did was any worse than what the Europeans did either in the post-Columbus era or during the Crusades. I'm just mentioning it coz today critiques of imperialism and colonialism often suggest that white Europeans were the only colonizers/imperialists who conquered, exploited, enslaved and wiped out indigenous peoples and their cultures.

[–]VioletRemi 10 insightful - 1 fun10 insightful - 0 fun11 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Neck rings, foot binding, lip disks, FGM, and so on - none of that came from Europe.

[–]MarkTwainiac 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

From the UN report, with the caveat that I've replaced "sex" for "gender" where appropriate:

Discriminatory practices are also found within indigenous communities based on sex, HIV status, gender identity and sexual orientation and sex work. There is a tendency to blame and stigmatize women for HIV transmission, even in cases where women get infected as a result of sexual violence or abuse. Gender diversity, sexual orientation and sex work are often perceived as ‘alien’ to the community and the indigenous culture, which negatively impacts the ability to have a proper understanding of HIV prevention policies and results in the exclusion of certain groups within their own communities.

indigenous women often have limited participation in decision making in country level political systems, as well as in traditional decision-making forums.

The pervasive nature and high prevalence of sex-based violence in its diverse forms is one main factor explaining the multiple human rights deprivations many women, including indigenous women and girls, experience.

Sex-based violence, including physical and structural violence, may be perpetrated by states themselves against indigenous women on the basis of group membership or as part of ongoing colonialism and militarism. Violence is also perpetrated, often with impunity, within their own cultural context. This includes practices such as child marriage, forced marriage, domestic violence, acceptance of co-wives, bride price, widow cleansing, dispossession of property, limited access to land ownership and other forms of male patriarchal domination. Indigenous women are increasingly exploited as domestic, agricultural, or sex workers, and may have limited access to maternal and reproductive health services. In some countries, indigenous young women and girls, in particular, represent the most disadvantaged groups, their lives characterized by early marriage, limited schooling, frequent childbearing, social isolation, and chronic poverty.

the study provides good evidence from Latin America, Africa and South Asia and the Pacific on the higher prevalence of harmful practices affecting indigenous young women and girls (such as child marriage, forced marriage, and FGM/C).

Sounds like paradise./s

Also, the UN report did not mention a number of particularly heinous, misogynistic current customs found amongst some of the earth's indigenous peoples today: very high rates of femicide universally; very high rates of female infanticide and "passive murder" of girls under age 5 in some specific cultures; men in various indigenous communities in Africa raping young virgins supposedly in the belief it will cure the men of HIV-AIDs; the practice of "corrective" (gang) rape of lesbians (common in South Africa, but also practiced in some other places); the kidnapping of girls, then forcing them into marriage without the involvement of the girls' families (who traditionally have been the ones to force girls into marriage, usually for a price or coz doing so in some other ways would enrich and benefit families of origin); shaming, ostracizing and banishment of girls and women when menstruating.

The other thing that stands out to me about the UN report - like all such documents and press reporting on such matters - is the use of passive voice to avoid ever naming the perpetrators of these crimes against humanity. It's written as though sex-based violence, discrimination, exclusion and exploitation just happen sorta out of the blue like the weather, the change in seasons or natural disasters. Girls and women are repeatedly named as the recipients of sex-based violence, discrimination, exclusion and exploitation, but boys and men are NEVER ONCE mentioned as the people who are committing and concocting it all.

[–]VioletRemi 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

the kidnapping of girls, then forcing them into marriage without the involvement of the girls' families (who traditionally have been the ones to force girls into marriage, usually for a price or coz doing so in some other ways would enrich and benefit families of origin)

There is popular soviet comedy just about that, it shows it as "weird tradition" and not really shaming it. Woman is escaping that fate, thought.

It's written as though sex-based violence, discrimination, exclusion and exploitation just happen sorta out of the blue like the weather, the change in seasons or natural disasters.

UN women answered that "there no such thing as biological sex" - word to word as Amensty International. They have same (Stonewall?) manual for answers.

And if sex does not exist, then "it is impossible to say who is attacking who", even thought in 100% of cases it is men hurting women. But ofc "we don't know their gender identity, 0.6% of them can be other gender, so let's ignore rest 99.4%".

[–]BiologyIsReal[S] 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

I guess they don't have much, if any, contact with actual indigenous people, so it's easy to pretend they are brave saviors defending indigenous people's rights and culture despite the fact they know very little about them.

[–]MezozoicGay 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

This sounds very nazist (or racist?) - to think that those tribes and nationalities are too stupid to understand differences between men and women, and that they were too stupid to do anything until white europeans introduced them to such concepts.

[–]MarkTwainiac 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Yes, it's incredibly racist and condescending.

But the fact these racist eejits overlook is that no indigenous peoples in the time of gathering-hunting-trapping-fishing would have survived - nor would humans ever have invented agriculture and animal "husbandry" and domestication - without closely observing nature and coming to understand how all plants and animals reproduce, how/when young plants and animals develop and mature, and how other animals care for their young (and old and infirm) and behave more generally.

People, indigenous or not, who raise crops, work directly with animals, hunt, fish, trap and generally "live off the land" but have not had the opportunity to go to school know a lot more about biology including sexual reproduction than all the urban and suburban TRAs with PhDs in the "advanced" economies/countries of the world combined.

[–]BiologyIsReal[S] 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Yes, despite all their talks about intersectionalism, they are very racist.

[–]VioletRemi 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

What I've noticed "intersectional feminism" and "intersectionalism" in gender movement - do not understand what "intersectional" even means.

Intersectional feminism should be like this: There is disabled woman, poor woman and woman of color. They all have problems because they are women. However, each of them have their own additional problem because they are disabled but also woman, they are poor but also woman, they are of color but also woman. They have one main goal which is intersected by different problems, so intersectional feminism should be focusing on doing help to all women and deal with special cases of being treated differently - like it should be checking racism against women, not racism in general, etc.

Intersectional feminism nowadays: "We must solve all problems, racism for men, global warming problems for everyone, prostate cancer for men, and so on, everything!". And none of those issues is intersecting with each other in any way at all. They are all different issues with nothing in common.

So no wonder they are so racist, albeist and so on.

[–]BiologyIsReal[S] 10 insightful - 4 fun10 insightful - 3 fun11 insightful - 4 fun -  (3 children)

Everyone makes sure not to misgender their pets!/s

[–]lefterfield 12 insightful - 8 fun12 insightful - 7 fun13 insightful - 8 fun -  (1 child)

Oh man. Not only do I often misgender my cats, I fat shame one of them daily. I am a terrible, terrible person.

...He is fat, though.

[–]arcticbasket 8 insightful - 4 fun8 insightful - 3 fun9 insightful - 4 fun -  (0 children)

And then there's me - every time I tell my cat she's a pretty girl, I feel guilty and I have to follow it up with "smart girl."

[–]eddyelric 3 insightful - 4 fun3 insightful - 3 fun4 insightful - 4 fun -  (0 children)

Funny story - my mom used to misgender my cat as male until she got her fixed.