I say yes please.

Oh my god. You are arguing with the damned dictionary. Are you seriously arguing that we, english speaking Americans are wrong because Indians from India have a different society?

What gender are you if you have a stick up your butt? Is that two spirited? Half stick, half ass? Transtickual?

Just..oh my god. If you have a beef with what Gender means, call Webster. I'm sure they'll be thrilled to finally have been contacted by the person who knows everything.

Calm down.

I actually meant that western culture only see male and female as the acceptable genders. I guess a slip of the tounge is terrible in a argument over semantics.




Just not true. The meanings of words in the English language can change based on location and culture.

I find this thread endlessly amusing.

Pft, if I weren't calm, I couldn't have come up with "transtickual."

my original plan was to be like you but then I found the argument interesting.

And Celina, everyone knows Noah Webster was a nut and it is his fault we spell everything different from England. Everyone knows the Oxford English Dictionary is where it's at.

No, I am arguing that the definition of gender that you are using is incorrect and discriminatory to some people. Gender is not tied to one's sex and if you choose to use gender to describe someone's sex you are wrong. The fact that other cultures do have gender which are not masculine and femine is evidence of this.

My gender is masculine. I was raised to be masculine in the western cultural-sociological sense.

You are correct, they have it mostly correct. What they fail to acknowledge is the fact that genders outside male and female exist:

gender

• noun 1 Grammar a class (usually masculine, feminine, common, or neuter) into which nouns and pronouns are placed in some languages. 2 the state of being male or female (with reference to social or cultural differences). 3 the members of one or other sex.

— DERIVATIVES gendered adjective.

— USAGE The words gender and sex both have the sense ‘the state of being male or female’, but they are typically used in slightly different ways: sex tends to refer to biological differences, while gender tends to refer to cultural or social ones.

— ORIGIN Old French gendre, from Latin genus ‘birth, family, nation’.

I just want to throw a dictionary at you. A thick one.

Like a good Texan would!!! LYNCH WHAT WE DON'T LIKE, RA RA RA!!! HOOK EM!!!

it's wierd. I can't tell if your somehow open minded yet hold on to some insane stereotypes or if you're just joking.

Texans use guns. Tyvm.

Just because this is the only post you've made that's worth a response, you get one response.

You are overly caught up in labels, and I believe it is a source of great confusion in your life. Most of us see in greyscales better than we give each other credit for. I do not feel any deep-rooted confusion over say, Celina (who is female and feminine and also shows a fair number of masculine traits) or Shiri (who is male and neither masculine or feminine) or Josun (who has a female player but handled masculinity well enough). They are, in fact, only one thing: that list has two women and one man, and normal people do not get caught up in an individual's "gender," mostly because the majority of the English-speaking world is beyond that.

You've dug up a rather disparate list to try to prove your point. The concept of "two-spirit" refers solely to flexibility in traditional gender roles and does little more than illustrate how woefully intolerant most Native American cultures were. The idea of a woman who could lead decisively or a man who could display deep empathy was such a baffling idea to them that it just had to be supernatural. In modern America, we call this "personality" or "talent," and we sure as hell don't dance around the bonfire and offer sacrifices because our society risks a woman becoming CEO. Likewise for anything coming out of India. These are the people who gave us the world's most ridiculous caste system, and it also extended to male and female roles. It's also worth noting that, even in this, Indians are biased--you rarely hear women spoken of as hijra, which is a huge part of the reason that most Westerners just use the term "eunich."

The modern examples aren't really any different. Transgender movements are a result of an opener attitude towards gender roles. You want to fill a male role? Great, go do it. You want to abolish the concepts of masculinity and femininity? I won't be there helping, but I won't stand in your way either. Transsexuality borrows from the same open attitude and the miracles of modern science - hijra, now with 50% less oppression and an operation that goes all the way! Intersexuality is so incredibly rare that, quite frankly, it doesn't count. Self-identify and move on.

There's another side to this, though. It's the side of the activists who, somewhere along the way, lost hold of reality. You're not much different than a racist African-American. You get some measure of tolerance because crappy things happened to people who are not you but could have been you, and because most of us acknowledge that the problem isn't entirely gone. You still get to wear the "bad person" badge of honor with Stangmar, though. You see, just like racist African-Americans, you're part of the problem. You create issues where there are no issues. You draw the wrath of sympathetic souls with your whining.

Normal people do not freak out over colloquial usages. Shiri can't tell the difference between a biscuit and a cookie to save his life, but we don't harass him except out of fun. Normal people also do not freak out over categories. I like snuggling in bed, cooking, flowers, and things that smell sweet. I like language more than math, I enjoy romantic comedies, and I played with more stuffed animals than trucks or superheroes when I was growing up. All the same, if I'm faced with a form that says Gender: M/F, I am not going to freak out about accurately describing how I fit into society, I am not going to be offended at the intrusion into my personal life, and I'm not going to scratch out "gender" and replace it with "sex" out of principle. I'm going to circle M. Why? Because that's what they wanted me to do.

Heh, that made me think of Hegwig and the Angry Inch.

/derail

edit: shoot, I forgot why I came here:



I think someone posted this pic before, but for the sake of this absolute failure of a thread, it can be tolerated to roam the Lusternian forums once more.

This was a pretty good revision read for my sociology exam on Wednesday.

In any case, from what I can recall (or, well, according to the lecture slides)..

Sex: biological, physical, and anatomical differences, including visible characteristics (e.g. genitals) and invisible characteristics (e.g. hormones and genes)
Gender: social, cultural, and psychological constructions that are imposed upon the biological differences of sex

So yes, if you want to be sociologically and academically correct, the argument that sex equals gender is, strictly speaking, wrong. But it's nothing that most people would care to be upset about, as many have demonstrated over the course of the thread. No one here is going to throw a fit or file a lawsuit just because someone else used gender instead of sex, and vice versa. I can see how it would adversely impact a scholarly dissertation if you treat them as synonyms, but the same just doesn't apply to colloquial, casual usage. Language is a social construct that highly dependent on context - I really doubt that whoever it was who asked about the genders of their horses was worried about whether he or she was using the academically correct word, or whether the horse, Estarra forbid, was going to be upset either way.

Gender roles (or stereotypes) aren't so delineated these days that people won't view you as a male or a female just because you claim, or exhibit traits of, a certain socially-constructed gender that happens not to be the same as your biological sex. If an innocuous question about gender on a form is going to trigger a lengthy introspective discourse about your socially-cultivated behaviour and whether you should write M down even if you're physically, biologically, and anatomically of the female sex, something is not quite right.

Xavius explained it much better, though.

Yes, I know, I should work on my writing. And those run-on, stream-of-consciousness sentences. Oh dear.

It's been a long time since I've seen a good trolling. It really is an art, but you made the mistake of dueling in a place that has Yrael, had Guido, and deals with all the other people.

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