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Is there a particularly widespread phenomenon of straight people calling themselves sapiosexual and then taking positions of influence in the lgbt community? I haven't really seen the term used beyond a few randoms on the internet so it seems like a bit of a distraction to me. And it's not like there's ever going to be a precise border of who's queer and who's not anyway, so unless they're significantly affecting the direction of the community in a significantly negative way I don't see much worth in spending time bothering about the occasional tiny settlement on the borderlands.
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Apr 19, 2022 09:31
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 01:32 |
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Miss Broccoli posted:its in the op I don't see how this contradicts my post, really. The first post of a thread in a dead forum, even a dead gay one, isn't a position of influence in the lgbt community.
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Apr 20, 2022 09:08
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Craptacular! posted:I consider myself gay and was supportive of the 2000s LGBT movement, but the whole "destroy the gender binary" aspect that has emerged in the 2010s hasn't really clicked with me. I admit up til now I have been, in my own head but not in public, one of those folks who thinks that because almost nobody saw these labels being used offline for the past thirty years before insular queer Tumblr communities, that they must have been incubated by online sociologists in those communities and have no scientific backing to them, and have been skeptical of it's validity because I didn't want to let touchy-feely Tumblrites define what truth is to me. I have a couple of points to make about this - first, when we're talking about a scientific backing, we should also ask what scientific backing the gender binary has. Sure, looking at people's bodies people's biological properties are generally bimodal and are usually (but also importantly not always) fairly close to two major clusters that you could call male or female. Now I could get into the list of intersex conditions - which is an important topic in itself - but that's not really the point I want to make at the moment. There's also the question of the various things that can be called "gender", e.g. what do people call me, how do I describe myself, what kind of social roles do I fit into - these don't really have a scientific basis. Sure, in the current way of doing them they are often based on a particular field of science, but the choice to make the specific biological question so important that it affects e.g. your pronouns is absolutely a social one. At some point society decided it was so important whether you had a penis or a vagina that it assigned people words to differentiate it when you talk about someone in the third person. We could have decided to give people different pronouns based on whether they're below or over 6 feet, or if they're right or left handed - these could still technically have scientific backing but it would still be completely a cultural decision. With the acceptance of the idea of trans people we can say, actually this societal decision is not working for us, and the trans rights movement is an acknowledgement that as a society we can change this decision and make a society that functions differently. Now there's different levels of this, you have the more "transmedicalist" side which (wrongly, imo) only rejects the idea of gender determined at birth but still requires trans people change their biology to be really considered trans. Then you have the acceptance of solely binary trans identities which still forces the two categories to be the only options but allows moving between them. Then there's the next step, which is to ask, if we can change this societal structure so that gender is no longer rigid, why stick to two boxes that a person must be in? Why not allow people to live outside them? It's not actually a scientific question, but a question of how we want our society to be built, how we want people to be defined and categorised (or not categorised!) So asking for a scientific basis for this is I think the wrong way of going about it. The other point I'd like to make is that if you want a scientific basis I guess the main thing to look at would be studies of the psychological benefit to people being correctly gendered and affirmed in their chosen identity - not sure if there are any studies specifically looking at non-binary people concerning this. But you could also just look at what non-binary people themselves say, which is that being misgendered etc. makes them feel like poo poo, and I don't think there's much cause to question that or any negatives to affirming their identities beyond having to add a few extra options to questionnaires here and there.
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Apr 26, 2022 02:13
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Craptacular! posted:The problem here is sexual orientation. How the gently caress do we square the people we select for intercourse when descriptors have lost their relevancy? I have sometimes heard the idea of "two sexes, many genders" but how that interacts with what people are attracted to is harder to classify. The quick answer, outlined in OP seems to be "labels are just labels", and to create other labels based on factors like intelligence. I guess on some level that worries because I have for years been arguing with the right that there is an actual physiological happening somewhere between genetics and endocrinology that makes people that influences sexuality. "Labels are just labels" is definitely freeing but seems to play into the hands of the people who call anything other than "man/penis + woman/vagina" a sign of moral decline and degeneracy that I wasted so much oxygen on twenty years ago, so stuff like furries and the intelligent-sexual people mentioned on the first page feels to me more like a kink or fetish that is independent yet compatible with sexuality. You can exclusively like furries with high IQs that identify as transwomen, if you like. So first off I'll say I don't think sapiosexuals are a particularly significant movement, they just get a lot of attention because it seems wacky to people, I don't think it's particularly necessary to think too much about at this point. "Labels are just labels" doesn't mean we need to abandon the idea of "a gay man" or "a lesbian" or something like that, it just means that their use can expand a bit and be a bit less rigid. There is no simple binary way to define a "man" or "woman" that is meaningful and applies to all people, so these terms already have a bit of fluidity on the edges. This also doesn't mean that we have to abandon the idea that sexuality is physiological, or the idea that it's not a choice. There is still some unknown process in the formation of the brain that makes it generally fancy some kinds of people but not other kinds, and there seems to be several big clusters of people who can be broadly categorised as "heterosexual" and "homosexual" and "bisexual" and other things, but we don't have to take that categorisation as a rigid discrete system that applies to all people in the same way. Additionally, the function in your brain that takes in what you know about a person and spits out how much you are attracted to them is an unknown, complex system that probably takes in all sorts of variables to come to a conclusion - your brain doesn't have a chromosome detector it uses to directly read other people's genome. The Kinsey scale was always a simplification of that process. This doesn't mean you can't go around saying "i'm attracted to men" or that it isn't ever useful to talk about "men" or "gay men" (and it doesn't mean you have to be attracted to everyone who calls themselves a man, either). Also I would question whether we should use "how will right wing chuds react" as a standard for how we should think of ourselves. To them we'll always be freaks, as that ezra furman song said
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Apr 26, 2022 14:16
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OwlFancier posted:I dunno, I don't think this is enby either because enbies usually seem to enjoy expressing a gender that isn't binary, rather than just being kinda nonplussed by the whole thing. This is absolutely a call for you to make yourself for what you think of yourself as, but there are a lot of different relationships to gender that get commonly included in the umbrella of "non-binary". For example there's agender and similar terms/concepts that have some things in common with how you describe your experience and is I think generally accepted as a way of being non-binary. To stress, I don't mean to force or pressure any label onto you, but there are definitely a lot of different ways of being non-binary or trans or queer or whathaveyou.
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Apr 29, 2022 22:15
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CrazySalamander posted:I have always used they/them occasionally to refer to people of any type. Example sentences: This probably isn't doing much harm (particularly to most cis people) but I'd probably avoid this just to be safe when talking about a specific person whose pronouns you know that aren't "they". There are definitely people who this would hurt and there has been the occasional example of people doing this on purpose to be hurtful. For example, the UK-based website and discussion forum Mumsnet, which has gained a reputation for its wildly transphobic "feminism" subforum. Eventually the wild unmoderated bigotry was garnering it some negative attention and threatening its cushy sponsorship deals, so it made some surface-level moderation decisions and stopped users directly misgendering trans people and calling them slurs. The users mostly responded by using slightly more polite language in their hateful screeds and calling trans women "they" to specifically avoid gendering them at all. (The admins also banned calling anyone "terf" and "cis" at the same time, because the reasonable userbase of their feminism board keeps insisting they are offensive slurs, and why would they be wrong about that.)
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May 14, 2022 22:06
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it's a murky distinction nowadays as many transphobes will use TERF arguments and talking points because they're useful and they make it sound like they care about women, regardless of if they actually know the first thing about radical feminism of any variety
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May 23, 2022 13:26
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Timeless Appeal posted:Anyhoo, as the article mentions, this is actually mostly seen as a good thing amongst the queer community. But if you do a google search, you'll also see a lot of American sources making it sound like a good thing because the clinic is being shutdown. There's plenty of UK coverage doing the same of course, because our news media is chock full of terfs
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Jul 30, 2022 03:00
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It really was just taken as a proxy for everything to do with trans people. The shitshow of the scottish gender recognition reform is probably fairly instructive, as a general lesson in how capitulation from liberals can gently caress up legislation. The SNP, the slightly wishy-washy liberal governing party who still wants to seem progressive had passed gay marriage and seems to have viewed a slight change in gender change admin to have been an easy win to get some quick progressivism points. They do not seem to have been prepared at all for the TERFs and other assorted bigots to have seen it as the next battleground in the culture war and come in all guns blazing. Trying to square the circle of pleasing everyone, the SNP took the TERF's demand for debate and for their reasonable concerns to be heard at face value, they put through a bunch of consultations and watered down their proposals in the name of reasonable compromise (the original draft had non-binary recognition!), despite trans people repeatedly telling them from our own experience how likely it was that the transphobes would accept any compromise at all. Time drew out and the public debate became more and more toxic with very little done by most of the SNP to stand up for trans rights beyond a few mild statements and insistences that they were listening to the concerns of both sides et cetera. Multiple elected members of the SNP spew transphobia online with the leader doing nothing beyond one mildly reproachful video tweet saying being respectful is good. The terfs claim they represent a groundswell of public opinion, but when the SNP leader's predecessor starts his own party and makes abandoning trans rights a central policy plank the new Alba Party still fails massively. The election results in a sort-of-coalition between the SNP and the actually decent Scottish Greens, and gender recognition actually goes ahead after 5+ years of media nonsense, despite the Conservative party doing everything they can to bog the bill down in procedure. The bill passes the parliament by 69% (nice) but is still called controversial by the media because the media have been stoking the controversy. We see the face of the reasonable concerns and it is flashing a pubic wig to the gallery. Angepain fucked around with this message at 17:41 on Dec 23, 2022 |
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Dec 23, 2022 17:36
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 01:32 |
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she was shouting something like "if you won't be decent, neither will I!" they very much want to be the suffragettes, so I guess being rowdy and Shocking is part of it. and they've spent so long in their own echo chamber they don't realise how silly they look to the wider public, who does not in fact spend as much time as they do getting angry about trans people
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Dec 23, 2022 17:51
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