this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2024
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Idk who is that, and probably is a moron.
But it is a genuinely good question: "what's a woman?" "what's a man?" "what's gender?"
Not an easy question, with not universally accepted answer.
Honestly I think, as a cis man, cis people are probably very bad at answering the question.
humans tend ignore "harmony". When you walk through the field, do you look each blade of grass or at the cow? Do you feel "non-pain"? How could you possibly explain someone pain that doesn't know pain? Do you remember the last time, you sat next to your friend watching a show on tv, in the same detail, you remember the conflict/discussion that you had with them?
Generally we will remember and pay attention to the things that are "wrong".
If your gender is right for you, why would you pay attention? What would you even pay attention to?
If it is wrong for you, you feel the "pain", see the cow and remember the conflict.
Outside of a philosophy discussion, it's not a genuinely good question because it is irrelevant to our daily lives. In any way that matters to society, a woman is a person who says they are a woman. It's that complicated.
"Is irrelevant" and "should be irrelevant" are two different things. Fighting by saying the issues are not there—regardless of your actual opinion—has rarely, if ever, worked. It's the same as the "I don't see color" argument.
Also, why would we exclude philosophical discussion? The point is to make you think. I also don't know who this particular person is in the OP, but the question itself has no bias. Maybe this highlights our philosophical differences, but I firmly believe that understanding a system is the most crucial step to revolutionizing it.
If the question is so irrelevant, why do you even try to answer it in the same comment? Not only answering it, but also making it a fact. As if your opinion is the only one that matters and suddenly it's irrelevant when there's a different opinion.
My opinion is not the only one that matters. I'm not sure where you got that impression unless you think people should automatically agree with you for no reason other than you want them to when they do not.
I base my opinion on my observations on how the world works. I could be wrong, so feel free explain to me how it negatively affects in our society in any significant way if you don't define a woman as someone who calls themselves a woman.
If other opinions matter, then it is not an irrelevant question. Since it prompts people to tell their opinions.
You did not explain to me what I asked you to explain to me. I think you just want someone to fight with since you're clearly not discussing this in good faith and I'm not particularly interested.
I didn't answer your "request" because that has nothing to do with what I originally said.
If I wanted to get into an hours long conversation about gender I would've said something completely different. Got better things to waste my time on.
Then I have no idea even what your issue is? That I dare to think my opinion on something is correct? Isn't that how opinions work?
Can you tell me about one of your incorrect opinions?
So long as society feels it necessary to provide protections for women, the distinction has real consequences. Drawing a line anywhere is a tradeoff between inclusivity and effectiveness.
Taking the party line "high ground" stance of either conclusive self-determination or dodging the question entirely is why this question is so effective.
I'm sorry, is "conclusive self-determination" the wrong answer? Why?
Assuming good faith on the part of those involved, I don't see how inclusivity comes at the cost of effectiveness. Would you care to elaborate?
Assuming good faith, that's a hell of an assumption
Assuming I'm a bicycle, I'd have wheels.
Protections presuppose bad faith.
What protections? Give me some concrete examples of what you're talking about here.
Gendered bathrooms? It certainly does not require a lot of good faith to come up with this example.
That's a terrible example. Gendered bathrooms would still fulfil their function if anybody could use them regardless of gender, causing no measurable harm to anyone.
And your solution is what?
Not the person who you were talking with, but I think it's nuanced. Short term tradeoffs should be made for effectiveness, while long-term strategies should be relentlessly pursued for inclusivity.
E.g. as a man, I think that the women-only carriages in a lot of SEA countries are a necessary thing, but it has to be a short term solution with a healthier society should be always consistently pursued, for example with educational measures.
Honestly? I think that equal treatment should be afforded regardless of gender. I also know that opinion is wildly unpopular, and so long as society expects unequal treatment there has to be hard conversations and hard decisions made to support those structures. You can't have it both ways, and no amount of party-line fingers in your ears "wouldn't you like to know"ing makes that go away.
This would be nice if we lived in a vacuum an didn't have thousands of years of patriarchy built up...
I don't think it is that simple.
Women are treated different that men in many societies. In my country there are multiple laws that apply different to a person if it is a woman or a man.
If we are making legislative differentiation because those words, we ought to have them well defined and understand what we are meaning and why we say that a women gets X law applied that a man gets not.
If it is irrelevant it should be, at least, legislatively irrelevant. If it's meaningful we should be clear on what we are defining by woman (or any other gender that gets particular legislation applied for all that matters).
That without talking about the social importance of being a gendered society. I don't know any single society that is not gendered. Once again, if it is irrelevant then we should aim for genderless society. If it is relevant we should know and agree on what it is to be one gender or other.
Why do you think such legislation is necessary? In fact, what legislation are you talking about that requires gender to be taken into account?
I didn't say I thought it was necessary. It exists, that's just it.
Necessary or not, is, again. A very complex question.
I'm Spanish, from Spain/Europe. We have some laws made in favour of women. For instance, a special court of law that is only invoke in a case of a man hurting a woman he had a romantic relationship with. It's called "Juzgados de la mujer". We have also gender quota por power positions they have historically not being allowed to occupy.
This may seem logical, as there are thousands of women killed by their male partners
We also have, recently, a law that allows anyone to change their gender at any time, no questions, no prove requires to being trans to do so. You can just go to the civil office and change your gender.
This also may seem logical. As trans are usually prosecuted and can get denied a gender change if the civil official didn't like them.
But with these two things in place we happened to had a big number of cis males, that are 100% cis, going to change their gender just to get "inmunity" to "Womens court". Also several cases of cis males changing their gender to get into womens quota required for some positions (for instance here there's benefits and sometimes is required that half of the directive positions are filled by women).
So we have a conflict here. At least I see a conflict. I don't even have the answer on what to do, as two of both things seem right to me (supporting a positive discrimination for a historically discriminated group and helping trans to be what they truly are). But cis males being able to break positive discrimination and mocking trans at the same time feels wrong to me.
And the ultimate question to this topic is "What it is to be a woman". For what I do not have the answer, but I would love to know.
And of course, in my book we all would be genderless, and there would be no discrimination. But my personal utopia is, sadly, not the world we live on.
When does the answer actually matter? Maybe in situations where sexual assault is a concern, like bathrooms, etc? In that case, just get rid of gender identity and distinguish based on if the individual has a penis or not.
I talked in other comments about the legislative implications. But here I would like to give a more personal one.
For instance, I would love to have the answer for myself. Because I have asked myself plenty of times "Am I a woman?", and that leads to de subsequent question "What it means to be a Woman?", "What I want to be is a Woman or is anything else?". I know that only I can answer that question. But I want to know why I have to make that question to myself. Why society considers "being a Woman" something? Because that question didn't came out of nowhere. It came because I, as a person who lives in a society with other people, see people who calls themselves man, woman or other things. And while trying to decide what I want to be, or what I already am, need to take what other people are into consideration.
Idk, if I'm explaining myself. I'll give a dumb example: Maybe I want to be an Astronaut, but before becoming an Astronaut I need to know what an Astronaut is. Because Astronaut is a profession in our society, and it can be defined. In this context is easy, because I would love to be an Astronaut because I would love to go to space. But, if I love to be a Woman, why is it? What is the "going to space" of being a woman?
Why base it on the existence or nonexistence of a penis? How do you enforce that? You're in a bathroom, ideally no one is seeing your genitals.
Just get rid of gendered bathrooms in the first place. A toilet doesn't care what shape of butthole poops into it
Is it a good question though? Even if we set aside the fact that it's a loaded question, what are we going to do with the information?
It has a similar character to the question 'what is a race?'. Information that people look a certain way is not particularly useful, on the other hand we feel it viscerally. If we don't stop to think we end up making unhelpful judgements.
Race, gender, nation states, money, the past and future, these are just concepts and if we confine ourselves to the domain of concepts we run the risk of mistaking them for our actual experience, out in the world. We stop listening and start assuming that our internal narrative is infallible, because it is.
I agree to an extend.
I would love to live in a word where all of that does not matter.
But for instance, imagine if we stop taking race into account in the USA (not American but I'm soaked in American culture). How would people know and being able to prove that some race is being discriminated against if the people does not have a definition on some people being part of one or other race.
I despise racial classification. Seems wrong, it works wrong as races are all mixed. But it can work against racism.
For instance, in my country, racial classification is ilegal. There cannot exist any registry on anyones race whatsoever. So black people here does not have statistical data to prove they are being discriminated against. They have a harder time fighting against racism somehow because their race is not allow to be recorded anywhere.
So I don't really know if, same as gender, I want to know people's race or not. Feels wrong, but also useful to fight against discrimination.
Very interesting and I would not have expected that outcome. In some ways the actions of avowed racists is easier to deal with. If our cards are on the table we can at least have a discussion. The racism that dwells in people and institutions who never admit it is incredibly corrosive.
Reading historical texts about eras where the concept of race didn't exist as we know it today is refreshing. I suppose they had other problems but the modern conception of race feels like a political tool and completely artificial. So too with gender, it's encouraging to see kids abandoning those outdated notions.
Man xy, woman xx.
Nah. That's just sex.
But there's been long proved that what we call gender is not 100% defined by sex.
For instance, our traditional gendered bathrooms. The concept does not work if we just take sex into account. As the reasons we have for segregating bathrooms in genders does just not work if people have a different presentation, external sexual characteristics or behavior, that it is traditionally assumed for one sex or the other.
To put intro crude words. Women that would like to have a women exclusive bathroom would really not be happy if someone walks into that externally looks and behaves, and even have the sexual characteristics of what they perceive as a man. It would not matter if that person would have XX instead of XY.
That's the extreme minority. To keep things simple let's just say xx one bathroom and xy the other. That encompasses 99.9% of bathroom usage. For the cases you are talking about I'm sure that person can figure out what bathroom to use for themselves and explain it to anyone that asks.
Well, yeah. And trans/nb/etc people are part of that 0,1%
Biology isn't that simple. A person can have one fewer sex chromosome, monosomy, one extra, trisomy, and many extra, polysomy. In fact it's starting to show that a significant minority of people have trisomy 47 (the name for having one extra sex chromosome) but live perfectly normal lives because those extra genes are suppressed. You could have an extra x chromosome and never know it, does that exclude you from being a man or a woman? Which brings up the topic of gene expression and epigenetics which is even more complicated. If you're looking at science to give you a certainty about sex and gender you're in for a long search.
That's the extreme minority. To keep things simple let's just say xx one bathroom and xy the other. That encompasses 99.9% of bathroom usage. For the cases you are talking about I'm sure that person can figure out what bathroom to use for themselves and explain it to anyone that asks.