Board 8 > First baby born in Canada without assigned gender.

(+) Yeah! (+)

I think Kenri's trying to say that sexual characteristics (i.e. biological facts) are so intertwined with societal expectations, stereotypes, etc. that it's really hard to separate them out. Like as soon as you call someone a "man" you've invoked/referenced a whole lot of social construct baggage, even if you say "No I didn't mean any of that, I just meant the literal biological fact."

the rest is just semantics

imo
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Kenri posted...

StealThisSheen posted...

Like, I'm sorry, but I lost it at "Birds are just reptiles, maaaaan! It's society keeping them apart!"

i think most people are catching up on this one actually

lots of people are still surprised when you tell 'em fish is kind of an arbitrary category though

Yet another thing you were ahead of the curve on
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I don't think there's anything arbitrary at all in classifying birds and reptiles separately.
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if I order poultry and you give me a lizard I will be upset
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woodman posted...

Dancedreamer posted...

I'll never understand why people get upset over things that don't effect their lives one bit.

It's AFFECT YOU STUPID ASSWIPE

hey I found the only post in this topic worth reading
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I kinda get what kenri is going on about, but biology is a bad analogy because it's messy and not very static.

Instead use Geology!

So sex is basically like Sand and Silt. You can go to a beach and recognize sand or go to a river and recognize silt, but there's no clear defined line between them. There's no specific weight or grain size where sand becomes silt. This isn't really a problem 99% of the time because most people think they can tell the difference between the two.

But what do we do about the exceptions? Thats where we seem to get into shakey ground. My general attitude would be to say "fuck it" and flip a coin, but that doesn't lead to consistency.

So basically you have a bunch of sand-silt people running around being defined by other people instead of themselves because we created a lazy category system based on "Eh, we'll figure it out" I see the inherent problem, though I also appreciate the vagueness and non-rigidness of such systems (like how we got L-block into a character battle)
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The type of people who look at a bird and a reptile and say "well, that's basically the same thing" are the same types of people who look at a penis and a vagina and say "well, that's basically the same thing"
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How can sex be real if our genitals aren't real???
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Gatarix posted...

I think Kenri's trying to say that sexual characteristics (i.e. biological facts) are so intertwined with societal expectations, stereotypes, etc. that it's really hard to separate them out. Like as soon as you call someone a "man" you've invoked/referenced a whole lot of social construct baggage, even if you say "No I didn't mean any of that, I just meant the literal biological fact."

the rest is just semantics

imo

This is definitely part of what I was saying yeah. When I mentioned "implications we draw from sex" this was the kind of thing I was getting at.


SantaRPidgey posted...

So sex is basically like Sand and Silt. You can go to a beach and recognize sand or go to a river and recognize silt, but there's no clear defined line between them. There's no specific weight or grain size where sand becomes silt. This isn't really a problem 99% of the time because most people think they can tell the difference between the two.

And this is basically the other half.


SmartMuffin posted...

The type of people who look at a bird and a reptile and say "well, that's basically the same thing" are the same types of people who look at a penis and a vagina and say "well, that's basically the same thing"

I mean, it depends how you want to define things, which is kind of my point -- but I was specifically talking about taxonomy, and by the currently accepted taxonomy (AFAIK)*, birds and reptiles are all contained within Sauropsida, and the distinguishing characteristic between the two is basically "do they have feathers y/n". Like birds are the closest relatives of crocodilians; it's not like we're comparing plankton and gorillas.

That said, you can basically make a vagina out of an inverted penis and there are definitely cases of penis/clitoris confusion (especially in newborn infants) so *shrug*

*actually this might just be something some people are pushing for, idk, if there are any taxonomists on the up-and-up reading this topic I'd be interested in hearing which one they work with
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This is definitely part of what I was saying yeah. When I mentioned "implications we draw from sex" this was the kind of thing I was getting at.

The thing is that you can't really meaningfully gain traction with abolishing the biological fact-based classification. You can change societal expectations by making gender more important, but I don't think you'll ever be able to reduce the cultural baggage attached to sexes beyond a certain point. It's one of the bedrocks of human culture.
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In a certain sense "sex as a biological fact" is only like 50 years old, mainly coming about as a response to the increased use of "gender" as a distinct thing from sex. So like, in the 1950s we had terms like "sex change" and "transexual" that implied biological sex was pretty mutable! (Not that we don't still have those terms but they're fairly out of date now.)

This is simplified but if you're gonna call it a "bedrock of human culture" I'd want some scholarship to back that up.
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Kenri posted...

In a certain sense "sex as a biological fact" is only like 50 years old, mainly coming about as a response to the increased use of "gender" as a distinct thing from sex. So like, in the 1950s we had terms like "sex change" and "transexual" that implied biological sex was pretty mutable! (Not that we don't still have those terms but they're fairly out of date now.)

This is simplified but if you're gonna call it a "bedrock of human culture" I'd want some scholarship to back that up.

Do the differences between sexes inform cultural creations? Yes (this isn't even worth arguing about. Any other answer would be patently untrue, there are far too many works of all stripes that deal with this)

Do the differences between sexes inform social roles? Yes (also very obvious. This doesn't really need further backing though one could go looking for some if needed - the tendency to distribute duties by sex one way or another is extremely well documented. There's no one universal way this works, but there overwhelmingly more instances of inequalities where one gender is massively favored for certain duties over others than there is of equality across human history.)

More than that, do the differences between sexes shape the relationships between human beings? Yes (probably the most obvious thing on this list - the fact we require another human being of the opposite sex to reproduce before factoring in super costly and specific medical tech should also merit no discussion)

Until these things change there's a floor to how much you can minimize the importance of sex. Discount all technological advancements that change the rules of the game that is life and the interactions between sexes will remain a fact of human life no matter what else changes. It's a core characteristic of mankind, much like language or opposable thumbs. Can you imagine existence without those things? No? Then you see why it's such a basic fact of our lives that it shapes our culture regardless of whether we live in Murrica, China, a lost pacific island or Africa.
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Okay that's slightly different from what I thought you were claiming. If you're just saying "some conception of sex shapes every culture in some way" then I don't think there's a counter-example to disprove that, even historically.
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Most social constructs exist because of some biological aspect. The question is what is still necessary.
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Kenri posted...

and the distinguishing characteristic between the two is basically "do they have feathers y/n"

I really don't think that's the main or only distinguishing characteristic between birds and other reptiles.
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Yeah that's what I meant - I feel like even if we reached a point where humankind was capable of asexual reproduction, we could create new sexes, and generally were capable of radically broadening what the definition of 'humanity' is like, sex would still be an influence on every culture. And that's very very far away (minimum 30-50 years if we're being super duper optimistic, probably considerably more), so it just makes more sense to emphasize that gender identity =/= sex and that gender is more important everywhere outside of medicine, IMO.
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there is absolutely anatomical difference between a penis and a vagina
there is absolutely genetic difference between XX and XY
the existence of stuff like XXY does not somehow make the difference between XX and XY magically disappear

there might not be any meaningful reason to note this information on a birth certificate
(I'm not a medical doctor so I have no idea)

point being it's possible to be progressive without being anti-science

pretending there is NO distinguishing between XX and XY is being willfully ignorant.
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KanzarisKelshen posted...

Yeah that's what I meant - I feel like even if we reached a point where humankind was capable of asexual reproduction, we could create new sexes, and generally were capable of radically broadening what the definition of 'humanity' is like, sex would still be an influence on every culture. And that's very very far away (minimum 30-50 years if we're being super duper optimistic, probably considerably more), so it just makes more sense to emphasize that gender identity =/= sex and that gender is more important everywhere outside of medicine, IMO.

Sure. But you also have to understand that sex and gender are conflated on a huge scale every single day, so until they become distinct societally, the average person is going to treat their sex as equivalent to their gender (because we've already agreed that gender is more important).
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StealThisSheen posted...

I really don't think that's the main or only distinguishing characteristic between birds and other reptiles.

it's not. classes are huge. think of the difference between a human and a horse. those are both in class mammalia. you could reasonably expect them to be very different.

that being said birds = reptiles is not a decided fact anyway

it is a relatively new (20ish year) debate that still has no clear consensus in the scientific community
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MariaTaylor posted...

it's not. classes are huge. think of the difference between a human and a horse. those are both in class mammalia. you could reasonably expect them to be very different.

you trying to say Twilight Sparkle can't be my waifu?
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opposites attract

you should be fine
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MariaTaylor posted...

StealThisSheen posted...

I really don't think that's the main or only distinguishing characteristic between birds and other reptiles.

it's not. classes are huge. think of the difference between a human and a horse. those are both in class mammalia. you could reasonably expect them to be very different.

that being said birds = reptiles is not a decided fact anyway

it is a relatively new (20ish year) debate that still has no clear consensus in the scientific community

To be fair that's because we've only been doing substantial genetic testing for that long. The evidence is quite strong that birds are closer related to crocodiles than crocodiles are to other reptiles.

The only issue I've heard is if whether or not it is okay to have classifications for non-monophyletic groups.
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So if gender is a social construct, why are trans people "born that way" and why is it such an unforgivable insult to say that they chose to live as the opposite gender?
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Same reason cis people are "born that way" and it's such an unforgivable insult to say that they chose to live as whatever gender they are.
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You're dodging the question.

My parents chose to raise me male, and I'm fine with that and decided not to change
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and before you ask "well, when did you decide to be cis?", the answer is "I don't remember". Nobody does. It probably happened around the time my young brain comprehended the concepts of gender and self
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charmander6000 posted...

MariaTaylor posted...

StealThisSheen posted...

I really don't think that's the main or only distinguishing characteristic between birds and other reptiles.

it's not. classes are huge. think of the difference between a human and a horse. those are both in class mammalia. you could reasonably expect them to be very different.

that being said birds = reptiles is not a decided fact anyway

it is a relatively new (20ish year) debate that still has no clear consensus in the scientific community

To be fair that's because we've only been doing substantial genetic testing for that long. The evidence is quite strong that birds are closer related to crocodiles than crocodiles are to other reptiles.

The only issue I've heard is if whether or not it is okay to have classifications for non-monophyletic groups.

Is this any different than the "people are more similar to pigs than apes" thing?
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I feel like you've just answered your own questions, dude.
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