ricecake

joined 2 years ago
[–] ricecake -1 points 1 month ago

Cool story bro.

[–] ricecake 1 points 1 month ago (4 children)

Yeah, you really didn't get what I was saying.

Read the context.

"Armed minorities are harder to oppress"

"True, but don't downplay how much the police will react when they encounter a legally armed minority"

"True, but consider the black Panthers, who were collectively armed to watch the police".

"True, but remember MOVE who were likewise armed as a community and the police dropped explosives on them and burned a neighborhood down. Escalation isn't necessarily worth it, and being a bigger threat might invite harsher violence rather than deter it"

"Oh, so you're saying you should just let people kill you" <- this is you

"No. I'm saying consider who you're arming against"

"You're being pedantic and not adding value"

...

Waco, move, and a large number of early labor movement actions are good examples of how weapons are good for community defense against the government.
Hence: Consider who you're defending against. Proudboys? Pinkertons? Your gun might give them pause and prevent their shit. The police? FBI? Army? They'll shoot you for open carrying; kill your family for shooting back; burn down you and your neighbors houses to get you to surrender. Then the courts will say the people who did it can't be held liable, make taxpayers pay the survivor some cash and sell your children's bones to a university as a museum display.

So yes, some black people justifiably would rather be harassed by the police than harassed harder and then killed.

[–] ricecake 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I don't think that reading of the who page tracks, and I kinda struggle to see how you got what you did from it.

Gender [categories] refers to the characteristics of women, men, girls and boys that are socially constructed.

Gender interacts with but is different from sex

Gender and sex are related to but different from gender identity.

Gender identity refers to a person’s deeply felt, internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond to the person’s physiology or designated sex at birth.

(As an aside, I feel like picking on an overview that explicitly acknowledges intersex individuals for not addressing the social construction of sex, while simultaneously being critical of it for addressing the social construction of gender is a bit nit-picky)

I really feel like there's this persistent conflation of gender categories and gender identity in your interpretation of what others are expressing, and an insistence that talking about social constructs is an endorsement of social constructionism as a whole.

It seems like we agree that the roles and attitudes we ascribe to gender categories are not objective, but socially constructed.
"Gender" is regularly used to refer to both the category and the individuals identity as being to some degree a member of that category, and it's expected that people know which is being referred to by context.

In your example involving race, I don't think that's a good comparison. In your example the person is saying words that generally minimize the importance of race while attempting to convey that they're not prejudiced. Critically, everyone agrees to what the words are referring to.
In the "gender is a social construct" case, I don't think there's agreement about what the word "gender" is referring to. The speaker means gender category, and the listener keeps understanding it as gender identity.

It's like if someone says "gender isn't a social construct" and I keep hearing them imply "women are naturally more differential and domestic, and men more forceful and outdoorsy", even once they explain they meant an individuals identity is more than social convention.

[–] ricecake 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I think there's a conflation of terms here. There's Big G Gender, and little g individual-gender-identity.

Genders are social constructs. "Girls like pink and ponies" is not tied to anything except culture.
Your gender identity however, is absolutely not a social construct. Otherwise people wouldn't be raised as one gender, live that way for decades and then figure out that the reason things have felt "wrong" is because they've been living a gender that doesn't fit.

The given examples were about gender identity, how that's correlated with biology, and how it's more than just how you present yourself to the world.

Conflating Gender and gender identity can lead to a lot of confusion.

[–] ricecake 101 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Accept "I have no idea" as an answer, and don't use it as an opportunity to push things in the direction you want.
learn to account for people being wrong, and don't punish them for it.

Engineers want to be accurate. They don't want to give answers that they're unsure about or just speculating.
Early in their careers they're often willing to, but that gets beaten out of them pretty quickly by people with deadlines. Expressing uncertainty often means the person interprets the answer in the direction they want, and then holds the engineer to that answer.
"It could be anywhere from 2-8 months I think, but we won't know until we're further into the design phase" is taken as 2 months, planned around, and then crunch Time starts when it starts to go over. Or revising an estimate once new information or changing requirements are revealed is treated as incompetence, even though more work taking more time is expected.

It's in the self interest of the engineer to be cagey. "I don't like to give estimates this early" is much harder to turn into a solid commitment than an earnest best estimate given the current known state of the project.

Similar for resources required or processes. Anything you don't say is unlikely to be held against you.

[–] ricecake 1 points 1 month ago (6 children)

Alright.

I think in the context of the thread it was pretty clear I was saying that you're unlikely to intimidate the police into backing down or to outgun them, not that you should just roll over in the face of any threat.

Be realistic about who that weapon is protecting you from, and who it's just making fill out more paperwork and earn overtime.

[–] ricecake 1 points 1 month ago (3 children)

I get that it can be frustrating to know a deeper and more nuanced definition of a thing and come up against people using a simpler, different or "hijacked" definition: I work in computer security and enjoy playing with machine learning. Most people get a very different impression if I say I do a lot of stuff with crypto and AI from what I mean. They hear finance bro and wasteful chatbots, and I mean user authentication, privacy and statistics.

A big point of friction I see is that it seems you're reading the words people say, interpreting them as though they're coming from the same background as you, and then responding in their terms.

If one more person tells me that "all gender is performance"

There is frustration that is generated by the "gender is just a social construct".

hour long lecture from an academic on how gender is actually just a social construct

The "performance" and "just" a social construct interpretations are what you're bringing, not the person typing.

Being told gender, that you had to struggle to find a way to make right, is reducible to how you were socialized or choose to act flies in the face of the existence of trans people and the difficulties they invariably have and is justifiably infuriating.
That the message is being given by people who very clearly, in both intent and action, believe the exact opposite should make it clear that there's a dictionary mismatch somewhere.
I feel like it stems from the belief that "social construct" implies "social constructionism".
Social constructionism is a specific theory involving social constructs , and acknowledging the existence of a social construct doesn't imply acceptance of that theory.

I don't think any reasonable person would argue that law is anything other than real by fiat of convention or collective agreement, but someone could easily disagree with the notion that scientific discovery is more about social convention than empirical reality.

Most people mean it in the sense that the WHO means it: https://www.who.int/health-topics/gender#tab=tab_1

[–] ricecake 6 points 1 month ago (9 children)

but also

Argument being that if you do those things, it can just make them come at you even harder rather than the alternative.

[–] ricecake 14 points 1 month ago

This doesn't even seem like the most egregious "weird warning".
Thinking you can use a pet urine cleaner for fibres on a shaggy dog isn't madness, it's just "nope, actually a skin irritant".

[–] ricecake 2 points 1 month ago (8 children)

You're putting far too much thought into what other people mean by the phrase, particularly in the context of a joke.
Most people are not referring to several different anthropological, sociological, and feminist theories/philosophies.

When you disagree with "gender is a social construct" in a casual setting, intentionally or not, you're conveying the statement "gender is innately tied to biological sex, there are precisely two, and trans people are invalid".

It's better to take the phrase as meaning "having a vagina doesn't mean you're a hot pink wearing pretty princess, nor does a penis imply you aren't. Gender is more complicated than a binary, and we're better off raising children as little people who tell us who they are than spending too much time being concerned that they only play with plastic figurines compatible with their genitals and playacting the right chores".

It's a joke about tricking people into attending an event usually focused on baby genitals, and then instead giving them cake that isn't coded to the babies genitals with a lecture about how they don't tell you as much about who this little person will be as people think.

[–] ricecake 19 points 1 month ago (10 children)

Results: Evidence that there is a biologic basis for gender identity primarily involves (1) data on gender identity in patients with disorders of sex development (DSDs, also known as differences of sex development) along with (2) neuroanatomical differences associated with gender identity.

Conclusions: Although the mechanisms remain to be determined, there is strong support in the literature for a biologic basis of gender identity.

That's not saying what you seem to be implying, and it's not contrary to what people mean when they say gender is a social construct.
Saying gender expression is not only performance is not really related to gender being a social construct.

What we define the genders to be is what is a social construct. The masculine gender encompasses a wide array of behaviours and expressions, as does the feminine. The behaviours and attitudes we assign to each gender is what's socially constructed. People tend to have a gender identity that matches their biological sex, and through acculturation we teach them the behaviors associated with each gender in our culture. Some people later realize that they're most comfortable conforming to a different gender than what matches their sex.

[–] ricecake 10 points 1 month ago (3 children)

The fun bit is that the word gender was pulled from linguistics into sociology exactly to try to make a less ambiguous situation.

It literally went "what if we talked about people having gender like the French talk about objects?” Much like people, a table is feminine in French regardless of if it has a penis or not.

Later, people decided to use gender as a synonym for sex and complain about using the word gender in a way that's ambiguous with sex.

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