Oregon Court Allows a Person to Choose Neither Sex
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
They would look at us as moral degenerates. But despite this, our society manages to function quite well, roughly.
Correspondingly, we think our ancestors are the bigots.
Absolutely. 1966 was terrible in many ways compared to today, but it was a much better world to live in than 1916.
I don't think that's true at all. It's only true if "roughly" means "for specific kinds of people". I think that clause is necessary for the sentence to be true. And with it, we've contradicted the statement "our society generally functions well".
Is that really how we should judge it? I can imagine a society full of slavery functioning well according to some measure. Does that say anything about the morality of slavery?
Therefore it makes sense for the government to offically allow it, and if we allow people to change from male to female and female to male, why not either to no sex?
I think it's a shame that on HN people can't voice opinions like the one in that comment. To me the comment didn't seem bigoted, but seemed worthy of discussion.
Edit: the comment is no longer dead, at least at the time of writing this.
Emphasizing that being nonbinary is rare only serves to legitimize labelling it as other as something that's not normal and to draw boundaries - where they don't belong - that inevitably bring discrimination with them.
The comment may be "reasonably" worded but it's just a thinly veiled call to legitimize discrimination. A difference between that comment and "you can't be neither sex" exists only rhetorically but not in what's conveyed.
Is it normal?
Wouldn't it just make sense to let the person choose if they would like to be defined as their current sex or what they are transitioning to? So for example, if the person is MtF and they want the government to call them F, they can just ask the government to switch their sex status.
Having a "T" class doesn't make much sense since it doesn't really model what is happening. T is not in itself a sex, it's the representation of people transitioning from one sex to another. That inherently means it is not a state but instead it's a mutation.
Intersex people are not a fan of it for the most part and are calling for the practice to be illegal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex
What you are describing is transgender people which is not intersex people, however both could have an ambigous gender.
So really none of it is that ambiguous.
Do you think that none of this has to do with socialization? Should we avoid any potentially gendered toys/activities (that are masculine or feminine) lest we ruin the child's natural, inborn gender?
Or should we take the much saner approach and not try to categorize children based on ridiculous buckets of traits?
All that self-identifying with a gender does is perpetuate the harmful stereotypes that surround the socialization for children of that sex.
Intersex people may have an ambiguous socially ascribed gender, and are probably more likely than most to have unclear gender identity. (Given that gender identity, while obviously highly personal, is also clearly influenced by social cues, including both ascribed gender and social expectations about the relation between gender and physical sex traits.)
That's interesting, because of the numerous population studies in intersex people, this has never been one of the conclusions. Same sex attraction is more likely, however.
I think you have a misconception regarding intersex people -- their presentation aligns with their birth sex. I.e. if they are a female, they will have female secondary sex characteristics.
Reality is that species as a concept is an abstraction placed on nature. It works well for most cases. A cat is not a dog. A cat is not a lion. Pretty clear. But even without considering past species, we see instances such as ring species. Are they one species or not? And we see animals that can breed but who almost always have infertile offsprings.
In the same way, sex is an abstraction we place on our world. It works in most cases with a few errors. Incorrectly classifying a testosterone immune man as a woman, failing to classify someone born intersexed, failing to differ the XX from the XXX or the XY from the XYY, and sometimes failing to account for cases where the brain might not match the phenotype.
Sticking to our abstractions even in these cases is as I'll advised as sticking to programming abstractions when they leak, if not even more so.
(Bonus round: are there X and Y chromosomes or are those an abstraction as well?)
Your sex is something that is fixed and can be verified (as noted, with very rare exceptions). By this logic, your gender is your own decision. So I think sex has a better place in ID documents. Also I think having the biological sex on your documents can be useful medically - surely you want emergency responders / doctors to be able to tell your biological sex, for medical reasons.
No longer? Was it previously but isn't any more? What happened to make this so?
And why would gender have any function? Can't we just disregard it?
http://www.isna.org/faq/frequency
I agree with you that biologically, the majority of people are born with a well-definite biological sex. But the fact that there is an actual biological set of people that aren't XX or XY, however, means not even in birth is gender guaranteed to be deterministic.
"I think, therefore I am" lends itself to gender identity, for me, anyway. Biology isn't 100%, and identity is even less so. Let people be what they want. I don't see where non-sex-identifying is really troubling.
Edit: thinking about it more, is gender on documents used as one measure against fraud? Or as a way of protecting against potential sexual crimes? We have sexually separated things like bathrooms and prisons, and I wouldn't advocate for mixed-sex prisons (is there an argument for that I don't know?) so sexual identity and gender can't go away completely, right?
6 out of 10,000 babies are born without fully formed limbs. Is describing homo-sapiens as bipeds with four limbs no longer correct then? Where is the brink of acceptability for you?
I find disputing the notion that human beings are sexually dimorphic to be an overreach.
There are in fact arguments that transgender inmates should go to the prison that matches the gender that they identify with. This has (obviously) gone poorly a number of times so far. Another argument you can make is that self identification of gender skews statistics regarding violence by sex. For instance, even if 0.3% of men are transgender, given the huge disparity in violence by sex, you will see the differences start to narrow.
And that, e.g., people who have Swyer syndrome (missing sex-determining-region-Y on the Y chromosome) are XY but more "female" in phenotype (and in development, with the usual course of treatment.)
> I wouldn't advocate for mixed-sex prisons (is there an argument for that I don't know?)
I'm not sure what the case against it is supposed to be; AFAICT, the main basis for segregation is implicitly (no one ever comes right out explicitly and makes this argument in full, but usually just makes vague handwaving toward sexual interaction and power dynamics that implies it without actually making an argument) based in the presumption that everyone is a cisgendered heterosexual, and that sexual drive and activity only occur with the availability of members of one's normally preferred sex, so that if you segregate by sex you avoid temptation for sexual interaction and associated power dynamics, violence, etc.
Second, "sex" in legal terms (for identity documents, etc.) is rarely necessarily tied to genitals or chromosomes, and more often is tied to a set of expectations about how the designated person will appear or behave. So even though the legal system uses "sex", what they're really describing is "gender".
Really? I would say genitals as a heuristic for your legal status is probably extremely accurate.
Are you denying that humans are sexually dimorphic?
There have been legal issues regarding intersex people being mutilated at birth, but that "edge case" has been sorted out.
Co-option does typically detract from their struggles. By using intersex people as a tool to push a political agenda you detract from the serious issues that surround their legal and medical troubles.
You can't pretend that the actions you take while pursuing a political agenda don't have positive or negative consequences. When equality in the case that you're advocating for comes at the cost of the groups you're purporting to help, or the groups that you use as part of your political narrative, then something is probably wrong.
! ! So you completely agree with us.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_gender
And of course we've got shit going on right now in the USA like http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-north-carolina-bathrooms... where that sexual dimorphism (thanks in some cases to modern science and in some cases to the the non-binary nature of human genetics) where that "di"-morphism (morphism meaning shape or appearance) directly contradicts the theoretical intent of some law or another.
"Third gender" is bullshit precisely because it tries to create a preexisting dichotomy that doesn't exist. I'm not a masculine caricature. My wife is not a feminine caricature. The people you meet day to day aren't walking gendered cliches.
I still maintain that genitalia are a very good heuristic for determining someone's sex.
So, what sort of legal things do you think require possession of a particular type of genitals? To paraphrase the memes about gendered toys, there's nothing I'm aware of in the legal system that's operated directly by a penis or a vagina.
And really when you get into it you'll find that the things people want this information for tend to be things that aren't all that great to do (read: discriminating against people on the basis of sex, or trying to use a discrepancy between reported "sex" and identified "gender" to discriminate or deny access/rights to things).
When you put it that way, it really becomes unclear to me why it should be there at all. If we're not describing what type of biological creature a person is, and simply how they can be expected to behave, it seems like we might as well write down if the person is ill-tempered or meek, and if he or she likes to dance the waltz or the tango.
Can you think of a reason why every single document about a person needs to note "what type of biological creature" they are? I'll give you a hint: there aren't a lot of good reasons for it :)
Regardless of whether or not we're documening sex, why document gender if it is only "a set of expectations about how the designated person will appear or behave"?
When I look at organisms, it's clear that there is a general trend, the larger the animal is, the more its life seems to be in "slow motion" compared to smaller ones. Its heartbeat, it's lifespan, it's reaction times, everything.
If this is generally true, then societies have lifespans measured in millennia. It's in an even higher degree of "slow motion".
That you look at it and think that it "functions well" because it hasn't fallen apart in 3 years is like a veterinarian examining an elephant just injured and 2 seconds later declaring "it's not dead yet".
Change for change's sake, imposed by angsty college-aged kids upset that all the worthy causes were fought-and-won decades ago.
Hardly. I'm a 90's kid and I already amazed by how far we've come. In the mid-90's, only about half the country approved of interracial marriage. The "liberal" position on LGBT rights was "don't ask, don't tell." Marital rape was still legal in a couple of states.
And there is so much left to do! E.g. Gay marriage is legal now everywhere in the U.S., but it'll be awhile before a church refusing to perform a same-sex marriage is regarded as aberrational as a church refusing to perform an interracial marriage would be seen today.
No, it wasn't. It was the Clinton Administration policy on LGB (but not actually T, which the policy didn't recognize at all, though this obviously had impacts on bi- and hetero-sexual transgender individuals in addition to the other specific issues they faced as transgender individuals) conditions of service in the military, which that administration took after being elected on a promise of taking the actual liberal position in that domain, which was full acceptance without qualification.
> but it'll be awhile before a church refusing to perform a same-sex marriage is regarded as aberrational
It's a strange sort of progress that wants to brainwash everyone to think/feel/believe as you do. This must be the "diversity" you're always harping about.
"Progress" doesn't mean accepting all beliefs. There is right and wrong, good and evil. "Progress" means figuring out which are the right and good values and inculcating them in the people.