I’m trans and I actually agree with you. I don’t know the solution to make things fair, but I wouldn’t want to use a strong biological advantage over someone else.
I see it like if I’d been born with some identifiable and categorised physical advantage then I shouldn’t be competing against people without that advantage.
It’s debatable how big the difference is, however, and whether it’s a gap easily closed or not. My thoughts are that there could be an open category where anyone could compete on the understanding that there may be severe biological differences. There’s no easy solution :(
Edit: thinking about it, sporting competitions are more sex-catagorised than gender-categorised. I don’t think someone identifying as female with no physical/medical alterations from a biological male form should compete with biological females and I don’t think that should be controversial since the gender isn’t what people care about there. It’s the physical characteristics. In some sports that might provide an advantage, in some a disadvantage, but I do this it’s important to discuss! At that point, however, you’d be better ignoring gender and sex entirely and only categorising sports like ‘feather weight’ or ‘strong muscular development’ or something
I think the issue is that there is no such thing as a “biological woman”. Manhood/womanhood is an issue of gender, not sex, and gender is something that we collectively made up whose meaning varies from person to person and from culture to culture. The only person who is capable of saying “Person McFaceface is/is not a woman” is Person McFaceface.
Even if we were to interpret their comment to mean “sex”, that isn’t a simple binary yes/no kind of question. There is no single trait that determines maleness or femaleness, and lots of people have traits indicative of both sexes or of neither sex (or they were born that way then surgically altered shortly after birth), and sometimes those traits are so hidden and so internal that the person themself doesn’t know about it.
Biological sex is just a made up thing and there are no definitions that actually work universally for every human. Thats actually the scientific truth.
Read the whole thing just for you. I think you need to read the whole thing yourself. But I’ll boil it down for you, it’s 1 psychologist opinion that you could word (leaves that even optional) to differentiate between sex and gender. However also points out, most psychologists, don’t see it that way.
Except for the hundreds of millions of species of lifeforms for which male and female biological sex is not part of their biology. But what do PhDs know about biology? they just scientifically study the core tenets of life.
I like this article but I feel like it's missing a few things. It's missing some details about how normal male sexuality is demonized by the current sex negative culture. This includes simple things such as wanting to look at porn, wanting to masterbate and being attracted to multiple people. These are demonized into saying that men are pigs and this doesn't even fit the kink desires that most men get at puberty. This are completely demonized as some perverted desire especially those unmanly submissive desires. Even the as simple desire to be watched as a sexual being. This sex negative push drives great shame and anger especially towards those who can be viewed as a sex object. This drives a hate towards women and gay men who can dress sexy or slutty while the traditional manly man can't at all.
It’s good news for this place in the world and I hope other places in the world pay attention and make these medical marvels available to everyone. In the EU country I live in, you can have access to these kinds of drugs if you say you are a prostitute and you have to somehow prove you are a sex worker to get access to them. It looks like in Innery Sydney, Australia, they actually tried a different approach which made medicine available to people who wanted to protect themselves from accidental exposure. It’s really a no-brainer, medical professionals and politicians: Stop making people feel guilty about having some fun a screwing around with people of the same sex and start helping them protect themselves when they’re just a little too tipsy to think and have an “accident.”
Honestly with a million dollars you could just become a cis-passing trans girl and still have at least $800,000 left to spend, if not >$950,000. Or in other words, the button gives you a 1% chance of only you becoming a girl, versus a 99% chance of you and at least four others becoming girls, assuming that you spend the remainder of your wealth on funding other girls’ transitions. Though you could just as well spend that money on funding trans advocacy and medical research or other sorts of long-term investment.
From that perspective, the 1% chance seems like a loss. What does “become a girl” even mean? Are you transported into the timeline where you were AFAB? Are you transported into the timeline where you had a botched circumcision and your parents decided to raise you as a girl despite being told not to? Is your body just magically poofed into a cisfeminine phenotype? Is this the timeline where you transitioned MTF but did so before puberty? Is this just the same as transitioning MTF but now the folks who won the million dollars are sponsoring your transition? Is this the same as transitioning MTF but all of society has with a snap of the fingers unlearned all transphobia, getting rid of the social and material barriers to transitioning?
There are so many questions one can ask about this premise, like, “What would it mean for me to have been AFAB? Same zygote but with a random AR mutation? Do I keep my old memories from when I was a boy?”, or, “If I was circumcised, and have my genitals magically transformed, have my new genitals undergone type 1a FGM? What happens to my secondary sex characteristics?”, or, “If I’m magically transformed, is my ID also magically changed? Does God drop down some boxes of tampons and new clothes from the heavens above?”.
I would ask the maker of the button to write some very clear terms of service, because this seems like it could be a real monkey’s paw…
Everyone has something they can’t stop themselves from nerding out over - but often it’s hard to find people to talk to about it. So go ahead, share your interests, and tell us about them!
I live in the US. Sex, even just plain boring vanilla sex, is such a taboo topic. Everyone’s uncomfortable about it, and that sucks. I think it’s interesting, and fun, and there’s so many things to talk about from actual activities to social constructs and more.
Whenever it comes up, I nerd out the same way I would when talking about a game I am currently obsessing over.
I don’t think an imbalance necessarily means that we should automatically assume discrimination, for example there is a small correlation between sex and interest (men to objects, women to living things) which may account for some discrepancy in certain fields.
Hiring committees would depend but very often we see HR is majority female, and some studies show that female named job applications in certain cases may be more favoured even when the exact same application is given with a male name.
In terms of school, I can attest that boys need to stop fucking around during class time and actually pay attention, but I’ve seen another study show that for the exact same work, public school teachers sometimes mark higher for a girls work.
The last point I would make is that there are quite a few female only grants and bursaries and aid programs, but there’s very few that outright exist for males.
That’s my two cents, but I understand your perspective as well.
I think Warren Farrell especially, and a bit of Leonard Sax as well have gone into this in more detail.
Unfortunately the mainstream feminist objection is that “men should just make their own support organizations” but the problem is sometimes the government won’t give them a nickel, which I find absurd.
This guy in Calgary Canada made a men’s domestic violence shelter, (shockingly women are first statistically to initiate domestic violence, which I didn’t know). This was around 2011 or so? But the local feminists at the time online were saying that he should not feel entitled to government funding and only women’s shelters should get government funding. I think he killed himself afterwards.
So it seems like when men do band together to make a support group, it doesn’t get the same amount of government support as a women’s group will.
I know a lot of languages have some aspects that probably seem a bit strange to non-native speakers…in the case of gendered words is there a point other than “just the way its always been” that explains it a bit better?...
[Shameless comm advertisement: make sure to check !linguistics, this sort of question fits nicely there!]
There are two main points: agreement and derivation.
Agreement: grammatical gender gives you an easy way to keep track of which word refers to which. Consider for example the following sentence:
The clock fell over the glass table, and it broke.
What does “it” refer to? It’s ambiguous, it could be either “the clock” or “the glass table” (both things are breakable). In Portuguese however the sentence is completely unambiguous due to the gender system, as the translations show:
O relógio caiu sobre a mesa de vidro, e ele quebrou. // “ele” he/it = the clock
O relógio caiu sobre a mesa de vidro, e ela quebrou. // “ela” she/it = the table
It’s only one word of difference; however “ele” he/itmust refer to “relógio” clock due to the gender agreement. Same deal with “ela” she/it and “mesa” table.
Latin also shows something similar, due to the syntactically free word order. Like this:
puer bellam puellam amat. (boy.M.NOM pretty.F.ACC girl.F.ACC loves) = the boy loves the beautiful girl
puer bellus puellam amat. (boy.M.NOM pretty.M.NOM girl.F.ACC loves) = the handsome boy loves the girl
Note how the adjective between “puer” boy and “puella” girl could theoretically refer to any of those nouns; Latin is not picky with adjective placement, as long as it’s near the noun it’s fine. However, because “puer” is a masculine word and “puella” is feminine, we know that the adjective refers to one if masculine, another if feminine. (Note: the case marks reinforce this, but they aren’t fully reliable.)
The second aspect that I mentioned is derivation: gender gives you a quick way to create more words, without needing new roots for that. Italian examples:
“bambino” boy vs. “bambina” girl
"gatto" cat, tomcat vs. “gatta” female cat
"banana" banana (fruit) vs. “banano” banana plant
"mela" apple (fruit) vs. “melo” apple tree
Focus on the last two lines - note how the gender system is reused to things that (from human PoV) have no sex or social gender, like trees and their fruits. This kind of extension of the derivation system is fairly common across gendered languages.
Addressing some comments here: English does not have a grammatical gender system. It has a few words that refer to social gender and sex, but both concepts (grammatical gender and social gender) are completely distinct.
That’s specially evident when triggering agreement in a gendered language, as English doesn’t do anything similar. Portuguese examples, again:
[Sentence] O Ivan é uma pessoa muito alta.
[Gloss, showing word gender] The.M Ivan.M is a.F person.F very tall.F
[Translation] Ivan is a very tall person.
Check the adjective, “alta” tall. Even if “Ivan” refers to a man, you need to use the feminine adjective here, because it needs to agree with “pessoa” person - a feminine word. This kind of stuff happens all the time in gendered languages, but you don’t see it e.g. in English.
Trans men enter Miss Italy contest to protest anti-trans ‘women from birth’ rule (sh.itjust.works)
More details: thepinknews.com/…/miss-italy-trans-men-trans-wome…
Routinely Greeting Six Neighbors Maximizes Wellbeing Outcomes (www.goodnewsnetwork.org)
QBittorrent is better though. (feddit.ch)
Men want to be sexualized more. They should talk to women about that. (medium.com)
HIV Transmission Virtually Eliminated in Inner Sydney, Australia (www.poz.com)
This my friend, is what we call a win-win (beehaw.org)
What topic do you LOVE to talk about, but rarely get to?
Everyone has something they can’t stop themselves from nerding out over - but often it’s hard to find people to talk to about it. So go ahead, share your interests, and tell us about them!
It don't matter if you're green or white (startrek.website)
‘There Was Definitely a Thumb on the Scale to Get Boys’ - Declining male enrollment has led many colleges to adopt an unofficial policy: affirmative action for men. (www.nytimes.com)
Paywall Removed
Like a boss (lemmy.ml)
What's the point of gendered words in certain languages?
I know a lot of languages have some aspects that probably seem a bit strange to non-native speakers…in the case of gendered words is there a point other than “just the way its always been” that explains it a bit better?...
8 September 2023 (sh.itjust.works)
We Know “NoFap” Is Misleading Men About Masturbation. It Might Be More Dangerous Than That. (slate.com)
18+ Date night, keep the love alive. Romance the pants off her/him i dont discriminate. (lemmy.ca)
[DISCUSSION] Bottoms (Spoilers) (www.comingsoon.net)
RELEASE DATE...
Bi Men Are Not Considered Attractive, New Study Says (bi.org)
From the article:...