h a l f b a k e r yNumber one on the no-fly list
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Is there room for ECHS* too ... ? |
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*Evil Collective Hegemonising Swarm |
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You can't have H, it's already taken. |
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Can't we just Assimilate it ? |
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A means Asexual, apparently. So, no, you can't have that
either. I don't make the rules. |
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Well that's your problem, not ours. We want it, and if anyone wants to try and take it off us, they'd better be prepared to fight for it. And we have guns. Big, big guns ... |
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H for Half (although someone proposed H for heterosexual) |
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What about U for un-imprinted/un-orientated? Or should that be Y? |
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I agree that the acronym, which I know as QUILTBAG, is too
long, which is why I use GSM - Gender and Sexual Minorities. |
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All very well, apart from the small detail that GSM is already in widespread use to denote "Global System for Mobile communication" ... |
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There are lots of ambiguous TLAs. Bacon, Lettuce and
Tomato. GSM pre-dates that. It's from the '60s. |
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Presumably, once we've included the full A-to-Z it'll encompass everyone and we can just return to using "people". |
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T - Trans (no star nowadays, so both Tucute and Truscum
plus that mythical being the transvestite) |
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It annoys me. It needs to be short and stable. |
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Yes, but why is an acronym needed at all? I'm not generally interested in anyone's sexual/gender orientation, and if I am interested in the orientation of a particular person, it's no use giving them an acronym that embraces every possibly sexuality and gender. |
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To take an analogy: I don't normally care what someone's profession is. If I do care about one person's profession, I want them to tell me "I'm a chartered surveyer", rather than "I'm a member of the CSMWH* community." |
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(*chartered surveyors, metalworkers and horticulturalists). |
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In other words, why on earth does anyone think it necessary to have a special acronym for all gender/orientation combinations? |
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Because it's so much easier to nurture an irrational prejudice against someone you can stick a tidly little label on. |
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// A - Asexual and Allies // |
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... and Aliens and the Assimilated ? |
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//why on earth does anyone think it necessary to have a special acronym for all gender/orientation combinations?// |
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quite - in fact the suggestion to add H for Heterosexual is an opportunity to use a convenient, well understood, pre-existing word: people. |
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What about "P" ? That could stand for "Politicians", who are obvious and easy things to hate. |
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What's more, they're totally undeserving of any sort of tolerance, understanding or sympathy; "Acceptance" consists of a lamp-post and a length of hemp rope, rather than breaking all their limbs with pickaxe handles, extracting their eyeballs with a blunt spoon, then stuffing them into a damp Wicker Man so that they slowly char to death over a period of days. |
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That would confuse the meaning of buying P. |
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As far as I am aware (which is usually not very if I can help it), the entire spectrum of people with disabilities has yet to empower themselves with a full set of acronyms. Sooner or later, they'll wake up to the fact that the gender spectrum is claiming all the good letters, and they'll be fighting back. It's not going to be pretty. |
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// why is an acronym needed at all? |
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This is a question worthy of your further investigation. |
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... or "YFI" as it will no doubt henceforward be known. |
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" People who do not belong are frequently called "Normative." |
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Thanks, [LimpNotes]. That is true, but do you have to rub it in ? |
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I kind of dig the local native two-spirit take on the whole gender topic. [link] |
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That's available to some people who have a certain cultural
heritage but not, for example, to people of WASP origin.
What's available to me is my Scottish/English white
Protestant cultural heritage. |
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True. In a way it's nice to be removed from any cultural biases and be able to weigh any new concept you come across on its own merits. |
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...and with that thought I'm going to bed. |
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[MB], there's certainly a question of whether there's a
unified set of interests. For instance, the idea of same-
sex marriage only seems to serve the agenda of those who
believe marriage is a good thing, and possibly wealthy gay
men who want that final badge of acceptance in polite
society, as it were, when the rest of us are often pretty
sceptical about it. However, there's also the problem of
divide and conquer. |
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Why's it needed? Because there's an unfolding and
refolding process, is how I see it. So in a sense I agree -
approach the alphabet and fold it up again, but it's a
process. It doesn't happen instantly. |
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But, two good things about GSM: |
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Firstly, it's shorter, because having an acronym eight
letters long is inelegant and ostentatious, and draws
attention to something which should just be a short
initialism like BME (which is also annoying to me BTW but
then I'm probably not BME myself, at least in England). |
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Secondly, it's descriptive rather than evaluative.
QUILTBAG is usually about serving the interests of people
falling underneath those initials, which I agree with to a
considerable extent although I also think certain
individuals build a powerbase there. Sometimes that
powerbase is also fine because it compensates for a lack
of power they have had in the past, but sometimes it has
its own momentum and ceases to serve the interests of
the majority of people. GSM traditionally includes groups
which are currently practically universally deprecated
such as paedophiles, and whereas I don't consider
paedophilia to be a good thing at all, the point is that
there is no connotation of approval or disapproval in the
acronym. It's more neutral. |
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I dunno. I think that if acronyms are used by people outside the acronym subset, to label those within it, then someone ought to say "Oh for fuck's sake get over it." |
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Conversely, if acronyms are used by people inside the acronym subset, to label themselves, then someone ought to say "Oh for fuck's sake get over it." |
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In 99% of situations, I am no more interested in your gender identity or sexual orientation than I am your choice of breakfast cereal. To be otherwise would be an unhealthy obsession. |
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Where do incest and paraphilias fit on your scale, [Limp] ? Just askin' ... |
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It sounds very like the Indian "caste" system - discriminatory, oppressive, unfair, inflexible and insidious. Very good, carry on. |
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It should be "</rant>", not "</end rant>" ... |
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<HTML_meta_pedantry>
I think you mean "</rant>" and "</end
rant>", otherwise it won't display properly on a
system which parses fake HTML tags
</HTML_meta_pedantry> |
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We know that. We were referring to the specific example in the annotation, not the general principle. |
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But you were using fake HMTL tags yourself, and thus
assuming the presence of a system which parsed those
tags, which implies the need to make your 'example'
tags non-parsable, as I suggested. I should really
get on and do some work. |
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I can only talk about my own stuff because I'm not anyone
else, and I'm not planning to continue this discussion, so
I'll say one final thing. If someone thinks a society in
which there are no gender role and image distinctions,
i.e. everyone is free to do whatever they want without
sanction or disapproval, would make gender dysphoria
better, they don't understand what it is. It would make it
worse. If it isn't obvious why it would make it worse, the
chances are you're confusing it with something else. |
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Gender is class, with women roughly corresponding to the
proletariat and men to the bourgeoisie. Gender identity
is not gender. |
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I just call it the Alphabet Community. |
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//I should really get on and do some work.// |
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//Gender is class, with women roughly corresponding to the
proletariat and men to the bourgeoisie.// |
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If I didn't know you better, [xix], I'd say that was a bit of an
existential cop-out, to position yourself neatly on the Right Side of
History. ;-P |
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Wait. On my phone display, that text emoticon just split itself
over two lines. How can I stop it doing that? Arg. |
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// and men to the bourgeoisie.// |
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Aristocracy, shirley ... ? |
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Let's add 'C' for cat and 'D' for Dog. And while we are about it
how about numbers... |
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And you've probably left those who already agree with you
going "yes!" and those who don't going "huh?", so I think
you've accomplished nothing unless you explain further. |
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P & V should do it...Penis - Vagina. Those that have both
items can still use this. P or V / P&V. |
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Reopening and weighing in on things I didn't before: |
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1. I don't know what this idea is. |
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2. I like GSM. (OTOH, one of my friends (one of the same ones referred to later) argued that because gender and
sexuality are spectra, there's no such thing as a minority. I don't agree with her on that.) |
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// What is clearly needed is a taxonomy of gender stereotypes. Akin to those found in biology. And a class
system while we're at it. Certainly homosexuals will find themselves at the top // |
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Surely they would find themselves somewhere on the sexuality taxonomy, not the gender taxonomy? |
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// Pronouns are not used when you talk to someone. They are used when you talk *about* someone. The
pronoun controversy is essentially: "when you talk about me, you must use the words I have chosen", which is
ridiculous. // |
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I agree that that is ridiculous, because it presumes a power over another person's speech that one doesn't have.
However, what is NOT ridiculous is "when you talk about me, please use the words I have chosen". Complying
with that is simply being nice to the person. |
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On the other hand, I can see why one would want to be strong in their request for others to use their preferred
pronouns (as discussed below). |
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// As for mis-gendering. I don't see the big deal. I wear my hair long and have a sweet booty, so on several
occasions I have been mistaken for a woman when approached from behind. And when I turn, and after an
awkward exchange, the issue is clarified and quickly dismissed. I can understand how someone could make that
mistake, I'm talking seriously sweet booty here, and am comfortable enough with myself that my ego is not in
need of defense, so there is no offense. // |
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I (while being unlike you in that I look very male from all sides) agree for myself. I don't really care what
pronouns others use about me. Even "it" doesn't offend me. My friends like to consider me a robot, only half in
jest, and this is fine by me. |
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However, for someone who has a certain sense of what gender they are and a physical appearance that doesn't
necessarily match that in others' perception, can you see how it would be more of an issue when that they get
that all the time, especially on first interactions with people? And, pre-transition, that would have happened
literally every time, and not limited to first interactions. It would wear you down. |
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Transgender and other GSM people (the ones you notice as being such) are often not very comfortable with
themselves (yet). |
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Glad you like GSM. It does tend to pee a lot of people off
though. |
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I think there are two linguistic points to be made here: |
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The prefixes cis- and trans- should become prepositions,
and are often used as such. They simply mean "across"
and "this side of", and sticking them on the beginnings of
words infuses them with a kind of arsey force which they
needn't have. If I'm talking about cis platin (which is
normally one word), I'm not generally seen as making
some kind of major political point. I'm just referring to a
particular isomer of a pharmaceutical which is apt to be
used in cancer chemotherapy. |
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As for pronouns, having gendered ones at all, for any
reason, is an unnecessary bit of frippery in the English
language, again regardless of gender politics. Lots of
other languages do fine without them and we don't have
them for any other pronouns than the singular personal
ones. I strongly advocate for universal "it". One day,
there may be sentient robots and we may be visited by
genderless aliens. Why not get ahead of the curve and
bin "she" and "he" entirely? |
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//having gendered ones at all, for any reason, is an unnecessary bit of frippery// |
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I disagree. The distinction between "it" on the one hand, and he/she on the other, is useful because it distinguishes the two different types of things we are likely to interact with (objects on the one hand, and people on the other). |
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Amongst people, it is still true that male/female is the most widely-used and widely-useful coarse division (possibly equal to old/young). It is a straightforward and roughly even split that works without ambiguity for 99% of the population. The fact that it is difficult to apply for 1% of the population doesn't make it less useful for the rest. Dropping it would be like dropping the terms "car" and "lorry" because they don't work for vans. |
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It would be useful to have a gender-neutral pronoun to use for (a) the 1% and (b) cases where you don't know or want to specify the gender. To some extent, this vacancy is filled rather strangely by "them". ("If someone calls, tell them I'm out.") |
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We seem to manage fine without grammatical gender,
although having been close to bilingual in German, to me
there often seems to be a degree of ambiguity in English
which results from the lack of "colour coding" as it were
when people use several personal pronouns in a sentence,
and the same applies, I presume, to the majority of
European languages where gender is grammatical. My
perception of how it works in German is that it's
somewhat similar to our use of grammatically plural
nouns, so we do in fact talk about "trouserS", 'scissorS"
and "glassES", and there's a physical reason for us doing
so, but we would also be able to get along fine without
saying "they" for all of those. I've mentioned this
elsewhere on here of course, but given that there are a
number of European languages which don't have any
genders, such as Basque, Finnish, Turkish, Georgian and
Hungarian, and people manage fine using them, it doesn't
seem to me that it adds something whose loss would be
disastrous. Finland seems to be a perfectly standard
Western liberal democracy nowadays for example. |
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It isn't about us one percent so much as various situations
where we make assumptions, as with the well-known
surgeon example, and getting rid of those would be really
useful. I shouldn't need to know if my new GP is female
or male because it should be irrelevant to the
consultation. |
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Yes, well I manage OK without a helicopter, but would
like to keep my car. |
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My point was not that there is no need for non-gender
pronouns, but rather that they should be added rather
than have them replace existing ones. |
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Actually, come to think of it, we do already have a
perfectly serviceable non-gendered pronoun, namely "it".
So, what's wrong with using "tell the doctor I'd like to see
it"? |
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What's wrong with that is that it doesn't differentiate
between a person and an inanimate object. In your
sentence, "it" could be either the doctor or a test result; it's
not clear without more context or explanation. But that's
not necessarily something that should prevent its usage. |
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Superficially, there appears to be some contradiction between
contemporary gender theory (in which gender is radically
contingent) and contemporary gender politics (in which gender is
absolutely necessary). However, there's not much visible friction,
apart from a few angry older feminists complaining about trans
women. |
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Let's suppose that this friction is contained politically, because of
a shared awareness of a common enemy, namely, square people. |
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What happens if The Revolution wins, and that enemy is
eliminated? |
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What happens if gender theory is proved right, and we enter a
future era where gender no longer exists - or, at least, the two
main existing genders no longer exist? Won't that leave gender-
dysphoric people in the same position as people convinced that
they are really werewolves, or unicorns? |
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I don't see why it would have that result. |
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... because, at present, you may have both a Y chromosome and a
strong sense that you are female, and you may wish to use the
girls' bathroom - but, in this future, there won't *be* a girls'
bathroom. Nor will there be girls' clothes, girls' toys, boys' toys or
boys' clothes. So, in this future, what will your strong sense of
being female mean, and what will you do with it? |
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"It" is excellent. Should be used all the time. |
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But if I feel strongly that I am female, how does that mean
that I feel strongly that I am a unicorn or a werewolf? |
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Well, in this hypothetical future, there would be no "female" (or
"male") just as, in the present, there are no werewolves. |
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In the present, believing yourself to be female is *not* like
believing yourself to be a werewolf, because, in the present,
"female" is a recognized category of real person and "werewolf" is
not. But, ex hypothesi, that could change ... couldn't it? |
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//I don’t think ‘it’ is suitable for humans.// Thus spake [IT] |
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"They" usually works, but some people don't like that it's
plural. I would be okay with a new pronoun, but
popularizing it would be difficult—see "ze" and related new
personal pronouns. |
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//some people don't like that it's plural.// |
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Those people are incurable pedants. Oh, and it should be "don't like the fact that it's a plural" or "don't like its being a plural". |
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Many things are potentially plural since they consist of
smaller parts. I've probably said this before but I always
think "bra" should be plural because it means we could call
an individual cup a "brum". Also, we could then call an
individual buttock a "bum" and the pair a "ba", which would
be nicely complementary, or perhaps complimentary. |
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There's a thing called something like morphological
libertarianism. Given the necessary technology, werewolves
might eventually be possible. But it's not about feeling one
is a particular gender. You are simply you and your
experience is not consciously gendered in the sense that you
don't live in a pink or blue world which you can step out of
and compare to someone else's blue or pink world. Gender
dysphoria has nothing to do with feeling one is a particular
gender. |
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Is gender dysphoria then a quite different thing from "being
trans"? I had assumed they were the same. |
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According to the dictionary, gender dysphoria is feeling that your personality is of a different gender to your body. |
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One thing puzzles me. There are people who are accountants but, in their hearts, are pirates. There are people who are bricklayers but believe they are hugely talented singers. There are people who live in Botswana who would like to live in, say, France. |
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There are lots and lots of people who are unhappy, in one way or another, with what they are. Yet we still refer to them as accountants, bricklayers or Botswanans. |
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Why, in particular, is it so important to have special nouns for every permutation of [is A] x [wants to be B]? |
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Yes, being trans is not the same thing as gender dysphoria.
There are two factions, referred to as tucutes and truscum.
Tucutes claim trans people needn't feel dysphoria. Truscum,
which is what I am, believe in Harry Benjamin Syndrome, for
which there is said to be no scientific evidence. |
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Dear cods! Is there no end to this nonsensical nomenclature? |
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I suppose the advantage is that, if everyone creates a name for their particular personality, we can dispense with actual names. |
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I have financial dysphoria. I reject the financial status imposed on my by circumstances, and I identify as wealthy. Now, can I use the first-class lounge, please? |
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So ... if you are a tucute, with a Y chromosome, then ... you
identify as trans but might not feel dysphoria. And, if you *don't*
feel dysphoria, this suggests you're *not* unhappy with your Y-
chromosomey body. But if you're not unhappy with the body you
were born in, then in what sense are you trans? |
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I mean, it sounds as if you'd be sort of meta-trans - born cis, but
wishing you were trans. |
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