Latest hits: if gender is performative that means it’s fake and patriarchy doesn’t exist! I don’t know who Judith Butler is!
This is my first downdoot on a blahaj post post, or probably meme in general… I get it’s mostly just a joke, but still.
Cis people aren’t all fucked in the head or clueless, just like trans people aren’t. Allies are able to push for, or at least support trans rights, and unfortunately are a lifeline for trans folk that get shoved out of discussions for “bias.”
The “cis bad” memes just add to the lack of understanding, and force and “us vs them” mentality, based only on gender expression. It’s not even an optics thing… It just comes off as wanting to be a victim, before Mr Chadson or Ms Becky have been transphobic, or pushed for a bathroom bill, which almost demands a defensive attidude from them both.
Anyways, I have talked with people that are painfully unaware of how gender works/exists. Whether intentional or not, it is not a great time. I would dip out of the interaction ASAP, unless they are trying to understand or learn, which is kind of rare in most cases.
This meme says cis people are like babies and that I find them tiring, not that they are bad for being cis.
👍
-insert a good faith response to your bad faith, pedantic (at best) argument here-
Of course you’ll have a better time talking about gender with other gender enthusiasts. It’s like complaining about how normies can’t have a conversation with you about cars for as long as car enthusiasts could.
‘Gender enthusiasts’ is probably my second favorite euphemism for trans people now. The first being from an old lady who was trying to politely ask if a woman was trans and asked if she was “a woman by choice” 😂
I rather like the sound of “a woman by choice”, since it implies she is a woman, that it is a choice, and that the choice does apply. I’d be curious to hear opinions from trans people about that, but it seems very respectful.
Y’all overclock your gender?
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Undervolting, I’ve been told, can achieve similar, or sometimes better results, especially when paired with a less overclocked, but still higher gender clock speed…
For example: genderfluid, BUT only across the axis of gastrogenders. Agender also has potential, since in verbal conversation, it sounds dismissive, as if one is simply “a gender,” implying the other party should just guess.
Genderfluid, gendergas, gendersolid, genderplasma
My gender is liquid cooled.
“factory stock” vs. “aftermarket custom”
starts recording
Okay YouTube, this is my list of the TOP 10 genders of 2024! Tell me how many on this list you know about in the comments below. Leave a like and subscribe and let’s get into it. I’ll also be having a new video out soon about the best genders upcoming in 2025.
But before we get into todays video I would like to thank todays sponsor. This video has been sponsored by the Association of Gay Frogs
Number 15: Burger King foot lettuce
Love it. Relevant xkcd
Talking about trains with my fellow train drivers:
Talking about trains with those fucking idiot bus drivers who don’t know shit:
The fact that it’s an evenly split partisan issue with only 0.5% of the population being trans means that you have A LOT of cis allies. Like, statistically, you’re more likely to meet several dozens of understanding people than another trans person unless you actively limit your exposure of non-trans people.
There are probably some (not many but some) trans people who conform to binary gender identity beliefs, too, they simply want to be the other gender.
Except cis allies will stab us in the back the microsecond it’ll become slightly uncomfortable. We’re always on probation with them, and we have to be “the good, quiet, binary and unchallenging trans people” to deserve any allyship or support
If you’re going to be annoying about it, then people won’t like you. Imagine if you had a friend who used Arch Linux and that’s all that they talked about and then they said people who use Windows are literally Hitler and the second you say, hey maybe chill a little bit, they start screeching.
I believe you just need better friends or to lose a bit your bias.
I guess you need a therapist who is trans to help you work through that issue. Imagine living your life not trusting others on the basis of their gender identity. Couldn’t be me.
My therapist is a white cis heterosexual man, and I would trust him to walk through fire for his trans neighbors.
Lol I’m assuming the downvotes “prove” your own point to you, but this is a real pointless take if you can’t even provide examples.
It’s a shame you feel that way, but it might be the people you personally know. Look in most leftist circles. You’ll find a robust selection of true allies.
“That’s right! It goes in the square hole!”
I don’t remember this part of sex ed.
American sex ed fails again.
Americans get sex ed??
there are so many people out there who can not fathom that the world could in fact be more complex than the version of it presented to them when they were children.
The more I look into genders and try to understand it the less I understand. On the gender wiki (apparently gender is so complex it has its own wiki??) I was reading about ‘genderfae’ and ‘genderfoe’ kinda understanding it, kinda not. But when I got to the comments and I saw “gender ≠ pronouns” in the comments and I just gave up trying to understand anything 😭
I’m sure I’ll look into it more at some point but for a ‘3am browsing Wikipedia because I can’t sleep™️’ adventure I did not have the critical thinking for that level of thoughtWhen someone tells me their gender I nod and move on. I neither really care nor do I care to understand it.
Exactly my thoughts.
I’ll call you whatever you want, as long as it’s not too wacky.
It’s all good as long as you feel comfortable in your own skin. I couldn’t care less what you identify as, it doesn’t impact my life in the slightes.
You do you.
The gender wiki is a bit much for me. I think a lot of its articles need to get revised a bit.
FWIW I would consider regular Wikipedia a much better source to learn about transgender 101 topics, the stuff you’re talking about is really niche even within the trans community, haha
I see it as a heightened period of different people “trying shit out” when it comes to new gender identities. None of these are necessarily definitive norms that will define future society. As with any aspect of language and culture, it’s a part of an ongoing process of evolutionary change, adaptation, and discovery. Some might call it a church, some might call it a shifting paradigm, but it’s always going to be a bit messy and won’t necessarily make perfect sense right away.
Im a cis person(tho probably not the kind you meant) and i think talking about gender is pretty tiring. I think everyone has their biases and everything but you can make yourself a good person by trying to understand why you have those biasesa at least. And also gender is a prettt complex thing.
If you’re being open minded and respectful even if you don’t understand something (or disengaging if you can’t) then probably 99% of trans people, myself included, aren’t going to have any issue with your questions or contributions to discussions about gender
It’s the (usually cis) people who are at Gender 101 level engagement, think they’re at Gender 501 level engagement, and also want to understand and learn nothing who make this so goddamn tiring 🥲
lol no disrespect, but you did just say “be open minded and respectful” after posting a meme equating all cis people to idiot babies
Yes, you (general you) as a cis person should be open minded and respectful about trans people, because you don’t know shit about what it’s like to be trans.
But…my point was you can’t say “be open minded and respectful, you dumb, nothing-going-on-upstairs idiot toddler.”
Do unto others, friend. That’s my point. Be respectful, don’t talk down to people and maybe you’ll be able to find that large swath of allies available to you. Because they do exist. But not if you actively repel them. Example: you’re in 196.blahaj and your attitude is not making you friends. You’re turning one of he most sympathetic, understanding spaces against you with your attitude. Seems like that might be your problem in the bigger picture, too. Learn from that.
“Be as respectful of my confident ignorance as you want me to be of your lived experience” isn’t what I fuck with, not sorry.
PS; I literally can’t see downvotes and don’t care. Downvoting me is a pacification button on your end.
I’m…not the one downvoting you. You’re entirely missing the point. And entirely mischaracterizing me. I support you. I want to see you flourish and succeed. That’s what I’ve been saying. But you are shutting the door in everyone’s faces and saying “why doesn’t anyone want to be in this room with me?! They must be bigots!” No, you have to let people support you. You can’t turn everyone away and then blame them for not being on your side.
And that’s not even people not being on your side! It’s that they personally don’t like you—no offense. It has nothing to do with your identity. But if your perception is bent through that particular lens, then you’re seeing a lack of people around you, specifically, as a lack of support for trans people. And that is not what’s happening.
See what I’m saying?
Let’s be honest here, that’s a long way of saying “the vast majority of people couldn’t give a shit either way how I live my life but they just really really wish I’d stop talking about myself for a minute” 😂
Ah, the vegan effect. Tbh I hadn’t thought about it that way before.
I literally had a moment today where I had to explain to a coworker that some feminine presenting women can have xy chromosomes or swyer syndrome. That apparently jenga towered his cis male beliefs on gender.
I got hit with the exact opposite yesterday: “gender cannot be only performative because patriarchy exists and that would mean invalidating people hurt by it”
So tiring
So close yet so far, the entire point is that it’s performative and therefore millions of people were hurt for no real reason.
Can you please explain this in simple words to someone not knowing too much about how gender is ‘performative’ ?
I’m not a native speaker but I’m usually okay but new things needs to be learned :-)
A link is welcomed too ofc!
Stealing the answer because I’m nowhere near as articulate on this matter:
The basic (and simplified) idea is that gender–what we think of as masculine and/or feminine–is performed in the ways we act, speak, dress, move, etc. and doesn’t really exist outside of that performance. We learn how to perform this way from dominant culture and conventions–what someone might (incorrectly) call “normal male” or “normal female” behavior. But these “normal” qualities (and genders themselves) don’t actually exist–rather, we are all repeatedly mimicking them and are rewarded for doing so (or punished for not doing so). We merely impersonate the qualities we’ve been taught match the gender we’ve been told we possess (like females being demure or males being aggressive) until those impersonations (and gender itself) become belief and seen as something natural and assumed.
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4dddcq/eli5butlers_gender_performativity/
Thank you very much!
Very simple to understand too IMO.
So, in a nutshell, the assertion is that gender is entirely nurture and not nature.
Yeah, sorry, that is an extraordinary assertion and I’m going to need extraordinary proof.
Are there people for whom gender and sex don’t neatly match up, or even those for whom it is purely performative, sure.
But they are statistical outliers, and not representative of the majority experience.
People can be different then the statistical norm, and that’s ok, but to assert that this norm is entirely cultural is over the top self serving.
Gender is definitionally cultural. A person’s sex is nature, but the bundle of signifiers that denote gender (as well as which categories exist at all) are largely arbitrary and divorced from that, and vary greatly across time and place. Women wearing pants was unheard of a century or so ago, and would 100% be perceived as queer, nowadays it’s completely normal. There were times when dueling was a virtually mandatory rite of passage to being considered a man. There are also historical cultures with more than two genders, and it’s not as if people in those cultures were biologically different from others.
There’s nothing “extraordinary” about this claim.
Pants could also be exclusively feminine clothing, depending on the region and time period. Also, the colour pink used to be considered masculine (as we’re all shades of red).
What I’m saying is, you’re absolutely correct, and gender expectations are completely reliant on the culture factor.
There are clearly things that fall under physical differences. People with penises will always find it easy to stand up while peeing, and that affects how bathrooms are arranged. These things fall under their sex.
There are clearly other things that don’t fall under those physical differences. Men can have long hair styles, but western culture doesn’t usually go that way. That hasn’t always been true, it’s more common now than it was in the 1950s, and other cultures make entirely different choices for hairstyles between men and women. These things fall under gender.
Which means gender is performative by definition. You fall into society’s rules for gender, or you deliberately break them, but it’s never something encoded in DNA or anything. If it is, then it’s sex, not gender.
I had hoped that as we as a society realised that gender is performative, it would make gender and these arbitrary gender roles less and less meaningful, to the point of eventually being effectively erased. That people could just say “this is my personality” and be accepted without needing to wrap it into definitions and groupings.
However what seems to be happening instead (from my perspective and experience) is that people are embracing the performative nature of gender more strongly, albeit with new non-traditional genders.
As a specific example, it seems like having one pronoun for everyone regardless of gender, would be better than inventing new pronouns in addition to the traditional gendered ones.
Note that I am happy to learn/hear other perspectives, or how mine is flawed.
Even sex isn’t particularly cut and dry (Relevant Radiolab Episode). Here’s hoping technologically enabled transhumanism makes it all moot.
My understanding (and it could be incorrect) is that this is more of a definitional/philosophical thing.
Though you are more than welcome to read directly from the source Judith Butler who (to my understanding) first started this theory on gender:
https://www.amherst.edu/system/files/media/1650/butler_performative_acts.pdf
There’s certainly a non-performative part, I feel it inside of me. But when I’m looking at other people I can’t see that, I can only see the performance. Tbh I’m not very good at doing woman despite my internal sense of self. Most of the things people think of in women are not very appealing to me, so I don’t do them. And I think it’s fair to say a lot of those things, like wearing certain kinds of clothing, are definitely not nature, but arbitrary.
Basically, there’s two (maybe more) things going on here both called gender which is very confusing. I’m sure the internal feelings are very correlated to biological factors, but the other parts? No.
Forgot to add that male and female are not the same as man or woman. The former specifies the sexual characteristics of our species, but the latter is what we call the performance. See: drag queens.
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Well yes you are absolutely correct from a materialist standpoint. If you limit reality to material things, then truths are limited to material knowledge. Emergent properties such as subjective experience, society/culture, and ultimately meaning and meaningfulness are excluded from what is considered reality and truth, except for their material correlates. And this is why philosophers moved on from materialism because, while highly fruitful, it was ultimately insufficient in capturing all forms of knowledge.
I prefer a pragmatic blend of constructivist realism.
Except they didn’t move from it, but now I am tired lol
You want to make me even more tired than I already am?
Don’t take the bait then 😘
Edit I mean any time anyone makes a comment which makes you tired :3
If they’re questioning your model then just provide a good empirical reference to support it. Works for science.
If only good empirical books on trans research weren’t burned by the nazis at the start of their regime and trans literature/research weren’t being banned in the U.S. by the GOP…
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I have published work in academia so I know from experience. Empirical evidence CAN be extremely biased depending on who is doing the writing. There’s a reason there’s a million (exaggerated, obviously I hope) studies showing that games are both good and bad, studies showing red wine both causes and prevents cancer, studies showing that the Brontosaurus wasn’t a real dinosaur but a misplacement of two different fossils, oh wait just kidding there was a new study that says it IS a real dinosaur. People are people, there’s no perfect study. When studying humans and their behavior, we only have theory that is constantly being rewritten. We have something called cronbach’s alpha that states that as long as data reaches 71% consistency or higher, it’s a valid study. All to say, you can’t always trust empirical evidence
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Science already supports the idea of different genders. A basic college biology course could tell you that. Forget “there’s only two genders” the “two sexes” thing is also a myth. Humans have two different kinds of sex chromosomes, x and y. We can have I BELIEVE up to 3 at a time? XX is typically associated with FEMALE and XY is typically associated with MALE unless of course you have de la Chapelle syndrome and your XX chromosomes make you develop a penis instead of a vagina. This is just one example of being intersex. Up to 2% of the population is intersex, 4 times more than the number of cops in the U.S.
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Gender being a science doesn’t mean boomers are open and willing to unpack their views of gender though. Unlearning things is painful, scientifically speaking. People HATE unlearning things. There’s lots of studies on cogitative dissonance, if you want to go read your empirical references.
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Sorry, I’m not taking homework assignments from you ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The fuck does this even mean lol
“Just write a thesis on why you’re right” no, lol
wah they don’t understand something I tell them
"Hey here’s a way to help them understand "
fuck you you’re not my teacher
I do not exist to educate people 24/7
Then you have no right to complain lmao, absolute child
Be nice. There’s no need to insult.
People aren’t required to teach you anything. Anyone educating during their free time is doing volunteer work.
So, when you quote something, the trick is to make it something they actually said.
If they’re questioning your model then just provide a good empirical reference to support it
Yeah I guess that’s more “do my homework for me”
No, it’s saying they don’t understand what you want them to understand and they need help in a concrete way, but this issue doesn’t actually impact them except in the form of threads like this, so they sure aren’t gonna go research it themselves because that’s generally how humans work. I think I captured that right.
Or perhaps, instead of treating people who are broadly on your side like dumb children who simply aren’t trying to meet you half way, acknowledge that you need a different framework for communication with them. Or don’t.
The other poster probably meant something along those lines
Or perhaps, instead of treating people who are broadly on your side like dumb children
This thread isn’t about them, glad to clear that up
The real problem is that studying human behaviour when it comes to gender/sex is inherently flawed as any attempts to isolate nature & nurture would be inhumane. Imagine raising a baby from birth to adulthood never having interacted with another human being just to see whether they portray the behaviours we associate with their gender / sex.
My personal opinion is that it’s probably a little of column A, & a little of column B. The higher levels of testosterone in the male sex would naturally lead to higher levels of aggressiveness. But the extent to which that would impact our daily behaviours is a huge unknown. Presumably it accounts for enough to be measurable but not enough to make a difference. But who knows.
P.s If you know more about this than me and have a study that disagrees with me please post it. Haven’t done my research as this isn’t something I think about day to day.
I think someone in the 1900s tried isolating a baby from human contact and it just died of stress.
That wouldn’t even surprise me. I know there is a guy that did some inhumane experiments and is almost universally hated but his studies are still cited because they offer insightful conclusions
A lot of insights in neuroscience and psychology come from tragic incidents rather than experiments. The function of various brain regions has mostly been deduced by studying people with traumatic brain injuries. What little we do know about atypical development in children comes from tragedy as well.
There was a case study of a neglected child who experienced nearly no human contact for most of her life, and she had severe developmental delays compared to everyone else. The doctors mismanaged her care to an absurd degree, but not intentionally. From what they did observe, she was mentally typical outside of her lack of human contact. Her progress mostly stalled because the system didn’t let her form meaningful relationships with parental figures. It’s a really sad story.
In terms of gender, significant insights have been gained by misguided attempts to treat people with atypical sexual development. Intersex children still regularly undergo “corrective” surgeries to make their genitals fit the male/female binary. Many intersex people come out as transgender, only to realize that their genitals were altered at birth in unnecessary ways.
The doctors have tried to compensate by studying prenatal hormones to more accurately assign genitals, but the whole thing is fundamentally flawed. So long as the genitals don’t pose a risk to the child’s health, the reasons for doing the surgeries are purely normative. They just want the genitals to fit a binary because having them exist outside the binary is “abnormal,” which they see as inherently bad.
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The surprising truth is that doctors are biased to believe that gender can be forced. It all comes back to persistent philosophical assumptions about identity that date back centuries.
- Descartes viewed the self as something fundamental, the first thing we could be certain of. In actuality, our sense of self can be wrong, as demonstrated by trans people who thought they were cis, only to learn that they hate being their assigned gender and love being another.
- Locke viewed human beings as blank slates that are shaped by our environment. While we are strongly shaped by our environment, case studies of separated identical twins show that many psychological traits are strongly biological, while almost all traits are a mix of both. If an identical clone with the same DNA as you is trans, the chances of you being trans are only ~50%
- We can be any gender and gender differences are purely cultural. Western philosophy has a strong bias towards believing in free will; that everyone is created equal and that we each have the freedom of self determination. We are rational beings that aren’t constrained by nature like simple animals that operate purely on instinct. These ideas are more reflective of what we want to believe and what is useful to believe.
The last case study I’ll mention is the case of the guy who was forcibly feminized and gaslit into believing he was a girl. After a botched circumcision that completely destroyed his phallus, David Reimer’s parents were told that they should just raise him as female. They touted “Brenda” as proof of gender being arbitrary, even as David began to insist that he was a boy. He was given estrogen and experienced crippling gender dysphoria as a result. When he was finally told the truth, he adopted a male identity.
Sadly, David committed suicide at the age of 38, going public with his story before then. Over the 3 decades that his false story was left uncontested, the view of his psychologist had dominated, doing irreparable damage to gender science. Afterall, if a cis boy could be made a girl, why couldn’t intersex and trans people just live as the gender they were told they were?
The truth doesn’t just undermine gender, but fundamental biases embedded in most people believe about the world. False ideas can be more useful that unfortunate truths, as believing in free will, believing in self determination, believing that things are just and fair helps the machinery ramble on. You’re more likely to succeed if you think you can, so believing we have control of ourselves is appealing.
Me frantically reading more Butler and Hooks so I’m not seen as a cis normie. /s
lol how was my comment removed for transphobia!? This mod team needs to get educated and needs to read, you’re a joke
Edit you know what, idc. If someone’s feelings got hurt, then I am sorry. An Internet forum is not the place to air out my grievances with post modern frameworks. I think queer people deserve better, that’s just my take.
1st, Ada is the instance mod, we have no control over who she decides to ban.
2nd, let’s look at your comment. “I think some post modern schools of thought have a danger of getting high on their own farts, and sometimes it’s important to push back so we don’t lose grip on reality.”
Defend this. Be more specific. Communication requires a mix of efficiency and effectiveness. Your extremely broad statements allowed the instance mod to “misinterpret” your argument due to it’s lack of effectiveness. A lack of specifics forces the reader to interpret your meaning. “Post-modern frameworks” or “post modern schools” can mean anything from critical race theory to anti-Marx criticism.
You’re right that the comment is broad. So I am not talking about any one academic field, like CRT or Queer Theory, but instead I was talking about the underlying philosophical frameworks like post structuralism and new materialism.
One grievance I have in analyzing some of the underlying frameworks is that there seemed to be a schism between academics, which started in the 90s, indicating that some thinkers where trying to re-insert idealist and structural binaries into new materialism, whereas it seems the goal for new materialism was simply to provide a framework for avoiding correlationism.
Here’s one text which validates what I am saying, https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057/s41286-016-0001-y.pdf
I have some other ideas on this regarding subjectivity, but let’s not get into that. But as far as anyone should be concerned, nothing I am saying is against queer people, minorities, or their rights and humanity.
I get where confusion can arise, so for my part I’ll just make sure to keep it clear. Tbh, I was sharing my perspective as a hot take, so it makes sense why someone would find it provocative. I don’t think there’s any reason to assume bigotry, though.
I’m not surprised that comment was pulled, I’d have also assumed bad intentions.
Since these moderation events often attract people like moths to a flame, consider this: those in LGBTG community spaces may seem a smidge jumpy as bigots often mask their bigotry with imprecise language. What likely is poor word choice in another community has a much higher chance of being thinly veiled abuse here. Cut the mods some slack and please try to use more precise language, especially about sensitive topics.
Okay I agree, but I maintain that that comment and any other ones removed weren’t thinly veiled insults or the like. If they were insulting to anything, it’s some niche philosopher somewhere and not necessarily to some distant and distinct application. I’ll keep it chill going forward. I mean, I just want to shitpost and not create headaches for mods.
I understand. I don’t intend to dogpile, just explain one aspect of why sometimes LGBTQ+ space mods seem so reactive. They often have to handle more than the average mod.
