|
In order for this topic to stay open, keep in mind the following: - Understand the difference between sex and gender- Please be respectful to those involved, particularly the transgendered - If you post without reason, or do not add to the discussion, you will be met with moderator action - If you don't know which pronoun is appropriate please feel free to read the topic and inform yourself before posting. We're all for debate but this is a sensitive subject for many people. |
On April 04 2012 03:02 Deadeight wrote:
Doesn't matter if she was born male.
If she's competing to the standards of the contest (i.e. she looks hot) then what's the issue? Unless it's a contest where any cosmetic surgery is banned, which I could understand.
It does matter. It was stated in the rules of the competition that you must be born a female (sex, not gender) to compete, which she was not. Therefore she is ineligible.
|
On April 04 2012 03:02 Deadeight wrote:
Unless it's a contest where any cosmetic surgery is banned, which I could understand, I think it's the wrong decision.
cosmetic surgery isn't banned in these competitions?
|
On April 04 2012 02:59 KwarK wrote:
If you wish to discuss moderation of topics, take it to website feedback. If you wish to discuss why you think transgender women should be discriminated against, do so without falling back upon stupid misunderstandings regarding the meaning of sex and gender and try not to call her a "he".
I don't have any interest in whining to admins about moderation policies, it's a private site and you can do what you want. Nor do I refer to Jenna as a 'he'. It's been my position from the beginning that Jenna should be able to compete because being born biologically male isn't an advantage (hell, it's a big disadvantage, so props).
I'm just agreeing with someone else who says this thread is now worthless for anything on-topic. Here's your note at the top:
- Understand the difference between sex and gender
- Please be respectful to those involved, particularly the transgendered
- If you post without reason, or do not add to the discussion, you will be met with moderator action
- If you don't know which pronoun is appropriate please feel free to read the topic and inform yourself before posting. We're all for debate but this is a sensitive subject for many people.
Clearly though, this is not up for debate. I feel like that should be specified so people don't walk into bans for expressing their opinion. Maybe add a line:
- This thread is not for discussion of whether transsexual women are 'real women' or not
|
On April 04 2012 03:05 a176 wrote:Show nested quote +On April 04 2012 03:02 Deadeight wrote:
Unless it's a contest where any cosmetic surgery is banned, which I could understand, I think it's the wrong decision. cosmetic surgery isn't banned in these competitions?
It isn't banned.
|
Gender is a social construct. Anyone can identify with any gender, and they can change their bodies to better fit into that perception of gender. Sex, on the other hand, is a biological fact. Sometimes, however, it's not as simple as a male-female dichotomy. Anne Fausto-Sterling suggested in 1993 with a cogent argument that we should consider there to be at least five biological sexes. Each case can be very unique and sometimes hard to classify. For example, people probably know about the sex chromosomal disorders, such as XXY or XXX syndrome, which affect sexual features and development; however, most people are unfamiliar with other disorders that affect downstream genetic programs influencing sexual development, without actually manifesting as obvious sex chromosomal anomalies. So you could have a female develop with aberrant level of androgen activity due to inhibited production of other hormones, which might result in a more male-like female; one that is certainly more physically akin to the pure male sex than the pure female sex. In certain cases, such as the olympics, it seems justifiable to bar participants crossing these lines. The problem is, though, that it seems discriminatory, or that it's morally wrong. Does it violate human integrity? Maybe. But on the other hand, assuming you have a "she" gender of the type that is actually a more male-like sex (but without the obvious chromosomal disorder), whereby she has aberrant androgen expression, endowing her with extra strength not possible with less androgenic hormones on development, then you have a competitor who has a clear advantage over everyone else. Do you make the others with normal female-sex development compete against her, thereby violating the level of competition among them, and perhaps the integrity of the sport? Or do you deny the individual access to the sport, based on natural causes out of their control, thereby violating the integrity of the human? I'm inclined to go with the former.
I think they made the wrong choice
|
On April 04 2012 03:05 a176 wrote:Show nested quote +On April 04 2012 03:02 Deadeight wrote:
Unless it's a contest where any cosmetic surgery is banned, which I could understand, I think it's the wrong decision. cosmetic surgery isn't banned in these competitions?
Uh huh. You now understand the ridiculousness of pageants.
|
On April 04 2012 03:24 FallDownMarigold wrote:
Gender is a social construct. Anyone can identify with any gender, and they can change their bodies to better fit into that perception of gender. Sex, on the other hand, is a biological fact. Sometimes, however, it's not as simple as a male-female dichotomy. Anne Fausto-Sterling suggested in 1993 with a cogent argument that we should consider there to be at least five biological sexes. Each case can be very unique and sometimes hard to classify. For example, people probably know about the sex chromosomal disorders, such as XXY or XXX syndrome, which affect sexual features and development; however, most people are unfamiliar with other disorders that affect downstream genetic programs influencing sexual development, without actually manifesting as obvious sex chromosomal anomalies. So you could have a female develop with aberrant level of androgen activity due to inhibited production of other hormones, which might result in a more male-like female; one that is certainly more physically akin to the pure male sex than the pure female sex. In certain cases, such as the olympics, it seems justifiable to bar participants crossing these lines. The problem is, though, that it seems discriminatory, or that it's morally wrong. Does it violate human integrity? Maybe. But on the other hand, assuming you have a "she" gender of the type that is actually a more male-like sex (but without the obvious chromosomal disorder), whereby she has aberrant androgen expression, endowing her with extra strength not possible with less androgenic hormones on development, then you have a competitor who has a clear advantage over everyone else. Do you make the others with normal female-sex development compete against her, thereby violating the level of competition among them, and perhaps the integrity of the sport? Or do you deny the individual access to the sport, based on natural causes out of their control, thereby violating the integrity of the human? I'm inclined to go with the former.
I think they made the wrong choice
I don't actually understand most of what you just said but I agree with your final opinion.
|
Well they reversed their decision and are allowing her to compete now.
|
I remember watching a documentary piece on how early some kids begin to associate with the opposite sex, there were children who just didn't identify with their own gender at a young age and from a birds eye view the moment their household accepted the fact of who they were it really became quite difficult to find some inherent trait that made a kid one thing when everything about them belied another(especially prepubescent kids who pretty much just are generally kids with the exception of whatever behaviours they learn and their genitalia which you never really see anyways ), and while the process of crossing genders was pretty damn tedious(something like a 10 year or longer process for a kid I think) one could argue that they had swapped their role long before they had the new equipment installed because they acted and were treated as what they understood themselves to be, female male gay bi whatever, and we are the product of our behaviour and appearance(which in many cases was easily altered in the case of males or females to suit the opposite gender even when they retained their privates(I remember hearing that a considerable amount of transgendered individuals don't actually bother removing their intimates, not sure where from though) :.)
That said there are cases where parents tried to raise their children as daughters or sons(when they weren't born as such), in which case regardless of body configurations the children have been know to outright rebel against the persona thats being forced upon them. I guess a lot of this boils down to the perfect cocktail of nature and nurture.
On a side note I think it's kind of funny how society makes a consistent effort to sort of break down the boundaries between what men and woman are and what they can accomplish and tries to make them out to be equally capable of anything, but is generally dead set on making sure that men stay men and woman stay woman. Yet as long as were so eager to preserve the idea of a man and a woman I also fear we preserve the negative and positive stereotypes and associations that tag along with these two iron clad understandings of gender. And by doing so we prevent ourselves from appreciating qualities in one gender because were so used to seeing them in the other, which is sort of exactly what happened here ) : maybe they just booted the fellow because rules were rules, but they did send out an unfortunate message.
I remember hearing a funny quote once, something along the lines of "tolerance is empty, tolerance is one bad day and conspiracy theory away from becoming hatred"
|
On April 04 2012 03:28 Slaughter wrote:
Well they reversed their decision and are allowing her to compete now.
Hurah for terrible social back lash!
|
|
|
On April 04 2012 00:51 Severedevil wrote:Show nested quote +On April 03 2012 23:29 danl9rm wrote:On April 03 2012 18:34 sharky246 wrote:On April 03 2012 18:16 Cyber_Cheese wrote:On April 03 2012 18:14 PanN wrote:On April 03 2012 18:12 qrs wrote:On April 03 2012 05:02 JOJOsc2news wrote:On April 03 2012 03:41 StimFesT wrote:
I seriously feel wierd when I look at the picture and know that she/he was born as a regular male. But she/he is actually beautiful Wow... stumbling over the he/she awkwardness in this post. She chose to be a woman, just call her her. He's a man who had surgery/hormone therapy; just call him him. No. He was born a female mentally, and is now female completely. You're an extremely rude and insensitive individual. I highly doubt you'd have the balls to tell this woman that shes a "man" to her face. This raises the question. Are people born male/female mentally, or is that a part of growing up? People aren't born male or female mentally. Kids before reaching puberty have no sexuality, that is, they are just boys and girls, physically only. At least that is what i learnt from a psychologist talking in a morning talk show. ahhhhhhahahaha. No one with kids, both boy and girl, would ever agree with that statement. There is no way. Children are trained from birth to obey gender norms. They're even color-coded so you don't accidentally treat a female baby like a boy or vice-versa.
Though the poster does not make absolutely clear whether or not he thinks gender is purely a product of nurture, I feel that this misconception is common enough to adress it, and relevant enough to the topic.
The evidence that gender identity has a factor of biological predisposition, is simply overwhelming. Just an example: Studies of italian hermaphrodites who were raised as though they belonged to the 'incorrect' gender show that almost all of these children naturally gravitated to activities normally associated with the other gender, and when they got older most of them would spontaneously declare that they were, or wanted to be, the other gender.
Similarly, experiments with blurring the gender roles in children by encouraging to partake in both typically male and female activities have largely failed, because children naturally prefer to play with members of what they percieve to be the same gender.
Gender roles are very persistent. Not only do children typically have a desire to assume the gender roles of only one gender, they seem to know which one is right for them. Even if they were were raised as the other. In fact there seems to be little to no correlation between upbringing and gender identity.
The idea that gender is a pure social construct was unfortunately quite popular not very long ago, even though there was alot of evidence to the contrary. This is thanks to extreme feminist, lef-wing and right-wing activist groups ignoring all evidence and common sense by putting alot of pressure on people who did not share their opinion.
Ofcourse, society does have an influence on what the gender roles are exactly. There is no reason men should wear certain clothes but not women. But certain patterns will always exist. Men will prefer to play and work with things, while women prefer to play and work with people. Men will prefer physical activities, while women prefer social activities. Additionally, The list of gender roles that are culturally universal is quite large. Gender is evolutionary baggage that can't be erradicated no matter how hard you try.
For coverage of the nature versus nurture debate I would recommend Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. It covers the topic of Human Nature and biological predisposition very intelligently and comprehensively, and has chapters on gender, I greatly value having read it. One of the best non-fiction works I've ever read.
|
On April 04 2012 04:05 Barrin wrote:
If anyone cares, I want to apologize if my words in the last thread offended anyone. Perhaps I can express myself more clearly and respectfully this time (I did want to express myself before but now I just want to clear it up).
If a person truly finds it within themselves to associate their self with the gender of 'female', this is fine by me (and vice versa of course, my longest standing friend is essentially of this sort btw). That is what she is, and everyone should call her a girl/woman. She should be able to do everything a woman does, like use women's locker rooms and bathrooms and be in female divisions of sports and be in beauty pageants, etc, etc.
But if someone were to go out of their way to ask me (a mere one person) if I think there should be a vague footnote of sorts written somewhere for a beauty pageant that a certain winning contestant was in fact not born with a vagina and accompanying organs, my answer would be yes. If a girl wants to have a sexual or yes even romantic relationship with me, she'd better let me know beforehand if she wasn't naturally born with a vagina/etc; and yes this is entirely relevant to my vote on the vague footnote so don't give me that.
If that makes me a bigot etc then I am truly sorry, because I actually try very hard not to be otherwise (and at risk of being arrogant am fairly successful at ^^). Again, I have no problem at all being friends with transgendered people, they're generally uniquely interesting from my experience.
I am actually legitimately curious and I do not mean to be confrontational at all. Why does it matter if she was born with the vagina or not?
I mean, if you were in a relationship with someone and you cared deeply for them and everything you understood about them was "woman" is the fact that their vagina came from a surgeon really a deal breaker?
|
I just realized something....
Her name is Jenna Talackova
...................genital lack of a.....
OH SNAP it's hiding in plain sight!!
As long as she's nor breaking any rules of the competition, i don't really care if she's in or not. BTW, she's not exactly back in yet. She needs to provide "the legal gender recognition requirements of Canada, and the standards established by other international competitions.”
|
|
|
On April 04 2012 04:18 Squarewalker wrote:
To those who think that gender is socially constructed; me and many others would transition even if we lived alone on an island, because it's not just focused on how others perceive us, but it's also very important to us not to be dysphoric about our bodies.
Imagine being trans this way: you wake up the next day as the opposite sex and stay that way for the entire rest of your life and people would see that as normal, and if you try to do anything to change back: you might lose your family, your friends, your job, your love life will be really tough, and you're put out to violence, discrimination and most people don't see you as and hate you for who you identify yourself as.
Also while it's good news that they let her back into the competition, in her place I wouldn't go back to there after that.
This is good perspective but gender is defined by plenty of authors and experts in sexology as being a social construct. If you truly lived alone on an island, having never been influenced by social whims entailed by living with other humans, you'd have no reason to think anything about your body as being male, female, or otherwise.
tl;dr maybe I'm reading you incorrectly, but this is not a sound argument against gender being a social construct.
|
On April 04 2012 04:22 FallDownMarigold wrote:Show nested quote +On April 04 2012 04:18 Squarewalker wrote:
To those who think that gender is socially constructed; me and many others would transition even if we lived alone on an island, because it's not just focused on how others perceive us, but it's also very important to us not to be dysphoric about our bodies.
Imagine being trans this way: you wake up the next day as the opposite sex and stay that way for the entire rest of your life and people would see that as normal, and if you try to do anything to change back: you might lose your family, your friends, your job, your love life will be really tough, and you're put out to violence, discrimination and most people don't see you as and hate you for who you identify yourself as.
Also while it's good news that they let her back into the competition, in her place I wouldn't go back to there after that. This is good perspective but gender is defined by plenty of authors and experts in sexology as being a social construct. If you truly lived alone on an island, having never been influenced by social whims entailed by living with other humans, you'd have no reason to think anything about your body as being male, female, or otherwise. tl;dr maybe I'm reading you incorrectly, but this is not a sound argument against gender being a social construct.
Nowadays hardly anyone respectable would argue that gender is a social construct.
|
United Kingdom3482 Posts
On April 04 2012 04:22 FallDownMarigold wrote:Show nested quote +On April 04 2012 04:18 Squarewalker wrote:
To those who think that gender is socially constructed; me and many others would transition even if we lived alone on an island, because it's not just focused on how others perceive us, but it's also very important to us not to be dysphoric about our bodies.
Imagine being trans this way: you wake up the next day as the opposite sex and stay that way for the entire rest of your life and people would see that as normal, and if you try to do anything to change back: you might lose your family, your friends, your job, your love life will be really tough, and you're put out to violence, discrimination and most people don't see you as and hate you for who you identify yourself as.
Also while it's good news that they let her back into the competition, in her place I wouldn't go back to there after that. This is good perspective but gender is defined by plenty of authors and experts in sexology as being a social construct. If you truly lived alone on an island, having never been influenced by social whims entailed by living with other humans, you'd have no reason to think anything about your body as being male, female, or otherwise.
I'm really not sure either way. I can certainly understand the feeling that your body doesn't fit who you think you are (there are people who have this not related to gender). But trying to separate the social influence from the overall decision is basically impossible. Sure if a trans person was shipped to a island to live on their own they would feel like wanting to change but they have obviously been shaped a fair bit by the society they belonged to before. I'm not sure it's actually possible to say how much of it is internal and how much is social because the two end up being the same thing.
|
On April 04 2012 04:23 Crushinator wrote:Show nested quote +On April 04 2012 04:22 FallDownMarigold wrote:On April 04 2012 04:18 Squarewalker wrote:
To those who think that gender is socially constructed; me and many others would transition even if we lived alone on an island, because it's not just focused on how others perceive us, but it's also very important to us not to be dysphoric about our bodies.
Imagine being trans this way: you wake up the next day as the opposite sex and stay that way for the entire rest of your life and people would see that as normal, and if you try to do anything to change back: you might lose your family, your friends, your job, your love life will be really tough, and you're put out to violence, discrimination and most people don't see you as and hate you for who you identify yourself as.
Also while it's good news that they let her back into the competition, in her place I wouldn't go back to there after that. This is good perspective but gender is defined by plenty of authors and experts in sexology as being a social construct. If you truly lived alone on an island, having never been influenced by social whims entailed by living with other humans, you'd have no reason to think anything about your body as being male, female, or otherwise. tl;dr maybe I'm reading you incorrectly, but this is not a sound argument against gender being a social construct. Nowadays hardly anyone respectable would argue that gender is a social construct.
Nor would anyone respectable argue that it is a simple biological fact. Therefore, it has to stem from our own perceptions and interactions. Nitpick about using the term "social construct" if you want (I admit I'm appropriating the term to describe the subjectivity of gender), but at least agree that it's not a simple objective, biological fact. Gender is disparate from sex.
|
On April 04 2012 04:34 FallDownMarigold wrote:Show nested quote +On April 04 2012 04:23 Crushinator wrote:On April 04 2012 04:22 FallDownMarigold wrote:On April 04 2012 04:18 Squarewalker wrote:
To those who think that gender is socially constructed; me and many others would transition even if we lived alone on an island, because it's not just focused on how others perceive us, but it's also very important to us not to be dysphoric about our bodies.
Imagine being trans this way: you wake up the next day as the opposite sex and stay that way for the entire rest of your life and people would see that as normal, and if you try to do anything to change back: you might lose your family, your friends, your job, your love life will be really tough, and you're put out to violence, discrimination and most people don't see you as and hate you for who you identify yourself as.
Also while it's good news that they let her back into the competition, in her place I wouldn't go back to there after that. This is good perspective but gender is defined by plenty of authors and experts in sexology as being a social construct. If you truly lived alone on an island, having never been influenced by social whims entailed by living with other humans, you'd have no reason to think anything about your body as being male, female, or otherwise. tl;dr maybe I'm reading you incorrectly, but this is not a sound argument against gender being a social construct. Nowadays hardly anyone respectable would argue that gender is a social construct. Nor would anyone respectable argue that it is a simple biological fact. Therefore, it has to stem from our own perceptions and interactions. Nitpick about using the term "social construct", but that's what it is. It's not a biological fact. Gender is disparate from sex.
Actually the existence of gender roles are very much so a biological fact. It is an inescapable product of our biology as I have argued above.
|
|
|
|
|
|
EPT
