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This week’s Weekly discussion thread will be focused on Gender. Here is the definition we will be using so everyone can use the same terminology.

Here are some questions that should help kickstart things:

  • Why do you feel it started entering public consciousness in regards to humans about 15 years ago?

  • Was it needed?

  • Did it do what it was intended to do?

  • Are things better or worse now in that specific area?

  • Is there anything you do not understand or would like to discuss about the idea of gender?

  • ddrcrono@lemmy.caM
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    9 months ago

    I’m going to make a longer comment with some of my more personal thoughts later but the one part that caught my attention initially was the ~15 years part.

    Now I’m not going to be a stickler about precise time ranges but certainly in the 90s there were significant discussions about male/female gender roles.

    While discussions about trans/gender identity topics only really picked up steam in I would say the last ~7 years these sorts of things were pretty common discussions in feminist academic circles for quite some time even before that, so it’s likely that the discussion would have happened sooner or later, even if in a different way than it did.

    Last comment about timing - I suspect politics had something to do with it. More cynical analysis might say it’s been used as a wedge between the American right and left (as passion for fighting over, say, gay marriage has lessened) and there’s a cynical argument to be made that both parties actually want it to be a contentious issue because it helps then to differentiate and appeal to their base in different ways.

    Some equally cynical analysis from the left specifically associates the rise of gender as a topic (and several other social issues) as a way to distract the new left from economic issues (ex: occupy Wall Street, Bernie Sanders-esque stuff). While I don’t think most on the left would claim the aforementioned social issues are unimportant they would claim that they’re of secondary importance when a great number of people are struggling just to get by with the situation only slowly getting worse.

    I’ll make a separate post later on my personal feelings more on-topic.

      • ddrcrono@lemmy.caM
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        9 months ago

        One thing I would note is that it wasn’t all that uncommon for the women to handle the finances in my family, and it’s a thing I’ve heard is frequently the case. You also get a lot of situations where “officially” the man of the house is “in charge” but everyone knows who is really running the show. I think there was probably a lot more subtlety/nuance/individual variety than we give credit for. Then again my ancestors are largely celtic and if you know anything about celtic women…

  • Ace T'Ken@lemmy.caOPM
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    9 months ago

    I first became familiar with the idea of gender in High School in the 90’s. Unlike most, I have forestry credits as I was in boarding school and had some very… odd classes. We ran an apiary and made our own honey, kept and raced sled dogs, worked a restaurant we ran, ran a library, etc.

    We were tasked with taking care of a square kilometre of forest up in Northern Canada and, as such, had to learn about plant species native to the region. We learned about plant gender.

    Plants have a gender because they lack a biological sex; it was a different classification system. In regards to humans, however, the dictionaries (and people using the term) at the time used it interchangeably with the term sex. The only differentiation that I ever saw between the two was in dealing with plants OR academic papers involving humans that may have thought that “sex” was a dirty word, but even then they were discussing the same thing.

    Intersex humans were, at least taxonomically, an aberration and not a classification. Early on they presented and operated as whatever their dominant sexual traits would indicate and frequently did not deviate and there was little issue with this.

    But… even since the early 80’s when I was born, there was a wide berth in what it meant to be a man or woman. When people were talking about stereotypes, they seemed to be speaking about things that I’d seen in old TV shows from the 50’s and 60’s, not things I was familiar with in real life. That “housewife and single breadwinner husband” home shit was long past and seemed antiquated even then. It wasn’t BAD to be stereotypical or not, mind you, but other than a few farming households I knew, I never saw the “stay-at-home-Mom” dynamic. Every family had a different dynamic and people fit where they built themselves space to do so. I knew very few “stereotypical male” Dads or “stereotypical female” Moms other than on TV, and we all knew damn well that TV wasn’t true to life.

    When I witnessed feminist messaging start to get big in the 2010s speaking about this stuff like it was common, expected, and had to be destroyed, it was odd to me. It was like they were fighting with ghosts from days long past.

    I recognize that my personal experiences don’t match everyone, but I lived in Cincinnati, Edmonton, Calgary, Saudi Arabia, Kingston, Amsterdam, Thailand, Kentucky, and many more. The only place I witnessed what could be described as “traditional roles” was in Saudi, and even then it was only defined by a few laws, not the way people actually acted. I knew many friends that had their father completely cowed by their mother even in that insane theocracy.

    All that to say that gender in humans… doesn’t seem to have a purpose to me. Since gender can be fluid in humans, it is not at all worth categorizing in humans. It means, effectively, nothing. It’s like trying to categorize hair colour down to the hex code; it accomplishes nothing whatsoever.

    Sex is a medically distinguishing characteristic. I get why it needs to exist. Gender? I don’t understand why it came to be used for anything as it hasn’t done anything other than stir basic culture war garbage.

  • ddrcrono@lemmy.caM
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    9 months ago

    For a bit of context: I generally consider gender to be the social/cultural angle on males/females and sex to be the chromosome/physical body angle. (I can get into atypical chromosomes later if anyone wants).

    General thoughts

    I more or less am indifferent about the idea of gender. I think on one hand, some people are very firm about “This is how men should act, and this is how women should act,” in a traditional sense, while others, in a more modern sense can be equally inflexible in a different way. Ex: “If you exhibit these traditionally feminine or masculine behaviours you should change your gender identity to match them.”

    I don’t particularly empathize with either outlook as I feel that any person should do what 1) Makes sense in any individual situation, and 2) Should do what makes sense within their personal tendencies and abilities. For me personally, most talk about gender identity feels unrelatable in its entirety.

    That said, by default I recognize “male/female” as sex, and will default to that when talking to someone. If they have an ambiguous look about them or specifically request it, I’ll address them differently. Even if it doesn’t particularly mean anything to me, or can be counter-intuitive to my world-view, I will try to be considerate because I realize it means something to them.

    Regarding why we have gender stereotypes, and what genuine differences there are between the male and female sex: I think that because of typical physical differences in the sexes (pregnancy, breastfeeding, muscle mass, height, eyesight and so on) we’ve had a pragmatic division of responsibilities and specialization that tended to make sense along those lines in most cultures. (And it’s likely that this has been a two-way evolutionary balance).

    While I think some of the most clear-cut " on average" differences in men and women are in their bodies, the least clear are mental. In a very general sense it’s difficult to evaluate even hard physical things like brain shape/patterns and to be able to claim that culture/social upbringing within a society hasn’t affected those things in some ways. While I’m amenable to there being some differences in the mind, it’s difficult to say what adult brains without the influence of culture (and thus concepts of gender) would look like.

    Essentially, my view is that there are some inherent average differences between the sexes that lead to some different, on average behaviours, but that those differences aren’t so strong that we should be heavy-handed about telling people, particularly in a modern non-tribal society, how they should act, or how they should identify. We should let individuals do as they please without having to concern themselves about the idea of being a man or a woman in any way.

    I understand a lot of people probably don’t emphatize with my views, but that’s more or less what I think.

  • DerisionConsulting@lemmy.ca
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    9 months ago

    Why do you feel it started entering public consciousness in regards to humans about 15 years ago?

    Because politicians who feed off of hating minorities needed someone new to pick on now that basically everyone is fine with gay people.

    Was it needed?

    It was needed for them to get votes, since that’s how they function; Weaponizing hating the other in order to gain support.

    Did it do what it was intended to do?

    Sadly, yes. Look at the polls.

    Are things better or worse now in that specific area?

    It depends on the social circle. Trans issues have now become mainstream in the LGBTQ communities, where even 10 years ago, you would hear gay men making trans jokes.

    But also, other people are very boldly, and loudly spewing hatred.

    Is there anything you do not understand or would like to discuss about the idea of gender?

    Nope. It’s not hard. End of the day, let people be who they want to, and call them by the name they would like to be called.

    • Ace T'Ken@lemmy.caOPM
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      9 months ago

      Huh. See, the only places I knew it from early on was:

      1. Botanical texts
      2. Feminist papers

      I didn’t see it coming from the right, I saw it from the left, and most of the modern writing about it in humans was in feminist university papers. Then the rhetoric caught on in the 2010’s and THEN I saw a big pissy huff from the right over it.

      In fact, if you do a term search, you can find it nearly exclusively in North American left-wing papers prior to 2010.

      Are you able to show a push from right-wingers prior to that somewhere?

      (EDIT: I’m not the one downvoting you, I’m genuinely interested in your perspective on this and would encourage others to hear you out before they do so as well.)

      • DerisionConsulting@lemmy.ca
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        9 months ago

        From what I’ve seen, the people who are doing the talking aren’t the ones who do most of the down-voting.

        I don’t have references on this, it’s just my experience in the circles which I have spent time. I am gay, I have family who are “hand-out chick tracts and homeschool their kids” religious.

        What I remember from people talking about gender roughly 15 years ago:

        -The Christian Heritage Party voting family members were bringing up scary trans people trying to trick kids and university students into being gay by dressing up like sexy women.
        -The friends of the guy I was dating at the time (White, cis, upper-middle class) would make trans jokes.
        -Someone at the hardware store referred to themselves as “transgenderist”, and let people know that they were fine with being called he/she/they or xir.
        -Some friends in university took gender studies classes
        -Most of my gay friends and female friends weren’t fans of “traditional gender roles”
        -The Christian Heritage Party family members were BIG fans of traditional gender roles

        But most of the guys on the job site wouldn’t be talking, or caring about gender. I am not actually sure that most groups in the general public would really be concerned with gender 15 years ago.

        • Ace T'Ken@lemmy.caOPM
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          9 months ago

          From what I’ve seen, the people who are doing the talking aren’t the ones who do most of the down-voting

          You’re definitely correct about that. Any sufficiently debatable thread here always gets downvotes within seconds of being posted, which means it definitely wasn’t read before voting. They try and establish if it’s on their side or not, and vote that way which drives me fucking bonkers.

          The rest

          Huh. I didn’t hear about it 15 years ago nearly at all. I’m straight, but I hung out with the weird kids which means that’s where the gay kids wound up frequently and were some of my best friends, which made people think I was gay as well which didn’t bother me in the slightest.

          To be fair, that was back when it wasn’t “transgender”, it was “transsexual.” I don’t know why it changed as it makes less sense this way. Transgender says “I changed my gender” which means… nothing because gender is so effusive and random. Even if it indicates change, then it changed from what to what? Does it mean you had surgery? Does it change daily? Who knows? Conversationally, it seems to only serve to mask things about a person rather than clarify them - even verbally it’s a useless term (and quite famously, Buck Angel agrees).

          And unlike some historical words, we didn’t replace worse terms, we just added a new one that made nothing better.

          Calling someone a “trans-woman / man” makes sense. You immediately get more information about someone. It’s constructive language. Transsexual would mean that you (visibly) changed your sex. Easy. We used this in the 90’s.

          Drag? Cool. Tells you a lot. It’s descriptive.

          If you study language, some really strange shit has happened over the last 20 years or so. Language via political pushes has happened way more often than any time I can find throughout recorded history. Left-wing language seems to have been pushed to obfuscate, and right-wing wording is pushed towards blame.

          I desperately want to know why it changed, but linguistically it makes zero fucking sense.

          • DerisionConsulting@lemmy.ca
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            9 months ago

            I am a cis dude, but I had asked a friend who is trans about why the term moved away from “transsexual”. She said that not everyone is able, or wants, to do the surgeries to change the sex organs, so “Transgendered” would apply to people that “Transsexual” didn’t.
            There was a point in her life when she was male (both in gender role and physical sex) and now she fits into the gender role of being a woman. To the best of my knowledge, she hadn’t done bottom surgery, so she technically hadn’t changed her physical sex.

            You then run into groups who say that people need to go through all the medical procedures before they are “really” trans, which opens up a lot of in-fighting. “Transmedicalist” is the non-derogatory term for this group. This hits a linguistical place where “trans” isn’t really meaning the pre-fix “across”, but is being used to describe people in the trans community.

            • Ace T'Ken@lemmy.caOPM
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              9 months ago

              (Please don’t read my comments as aggressive, because I’m not meaning them that way; I appreciate this discussion.)

              Yeah, so it expanded the group it applied to while making the term less functional.

              I get why they’d want the term (because then you’d fit in with a pre-established group), but I disagree that it should apply that broadly. I suppose that “transgender” would apply to that case you listed above for lack of a better term, because it still enforces some kind of binary on the behaviour, and I don’t really see there being a functional binary except in media.

              Words are wonderful and descriptive when you know how to use them and I’ve always felt that there is no perfect synonym for most. Broadly applying specific terms has always felt like a dumbing-down to me and I feel it only hurts discussion and understanding. I wish we created more terminology for edge cases instead of breaking specificity to apply to everything.

              • DerisionConsulting@lemmy.ca
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                9 months ago

                Most people I know who are not cis use “trans” or “trans/non-binary” as an umbrella term for “not cis”, and they generally don’t use either “transgender” or “transsexual”. This continues the “Trans meaning the group of people, and not specifically the pre-fix” school of thought, which I think is interesting.

                I think that English stopped being wonderful and perfectly self-descriptive once contronyms came into being. But it’s still fun to look up how/when/why words change over time. It can be a better look into culture than a lot of history books.