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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:
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Why do you feel it started entering public consciousness in regards to humans about 15 years ago?
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Was it needed?
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Did it do what it was intended to do?
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Are things better or worse now in that specific area?
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Is there anything you do not understand or would like to discuss about the idea of gender?
Because politicians who feed off of hating minorities needed someone new to pick on now that basically everyone is fine with gay people.
It was needed for them to get votes, since that’s how they function; Weaponizing hating the other in order to gain support.
Sadly, yes. Look at the polls.
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.
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.
I’m one of the downvoters, and I’d like to explain why. There’s a few reasons for my downvoting, and none of them have anything to do with disagreeing with you. Indeed I agree to some extent or another with the following:
Personally I think if you get wound up over transgender people (or non-binary (or assexual (or …))) you need to seek therapy. (Doubly so if you’re afraid of them!)
I downvoted because the explanation is too facile, too cynical, and too one-sided. Gender is deeply embedded in every society in the world (with, as I noted elsewhere in this discussion, with the specifics of its expression varying wildly). It is to simplistically reductive to attribute the modern conversation about gender to just politicians looking for a cause. Because the very first question I’d have is “why did they pick this particular topic?” The answer is: it was already a conversation in process that they thought they could capitalize on, meaning you haven’t actually answered the question of why the conversation started.
Huh. See, the only places I knew it from early on was:
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.)
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.
I’m pretty sure that most members of the general public don’t really give a damn about the gender conversation today. Don’t mistake the loud voices of a shrill minority (right or left) with the opinions and beliefs of the majority.
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.
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.
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.
(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.
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.