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This week’s Weekly discussion thread will be focused on Gender. Here is the definition we will be using so everyone can use the same terminology.
Here are some questions that should help kickstart things:
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Why do you feel it started entering public consciousness in regards to humans about 15 years ago?
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Was it needed?
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Did it do what it was intended to do?
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Are things better or worse now in that specific area?
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Is there anything you do not understand or would like to discuss about the idea of gender?
From what I’ve seen, the people who are doing the talking aren’t the ones who do most of the down-voting.
I don’t have references on this, it’s just my experience in the circles which I have spent time. I am gay, I have family who are “hand-out chick tracts and homeschool their kids” religious.
What I remember from people talking about gender roughly 15 years ago:
-The Christian Heritage Party voting family members were bringing up scary trans people trying to trick kids and university students into being gay by dressing up like sexy women.
-The friends of the guy I was dating at the time (White, cis, upper-middle class) would make trans jokes.
-Someone at the hardware store referred to themselves as “transgenderist”, and let people know that they were fine with being called he/she/they or xir.
-Some friends in university took gender studies classes
-Most of my gay friends and female friends weren’t fans of “traditional gender roles”
-The Christian Heritage Party family members were BIG fans of traditional gender roles
But most of the guys on the job site wouldn’t be talking, or caring about gender. I am not actually sure that most groups in the general public would really be concerned with gender 15 years ago.
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You’re definitely correct about that. Any sufficiently debatable thread here always gets downvotes within seconds of being posted, which means it definitely wasn’t read before voting. They try and establish if it’s on their side or not, and vote that way which drives me fucking bonkers.
Huh. I didn’t hear about it 15 years ago nearly at all. I’m straight, but I hung out with the weird kids which means that’s where the gay kids wound up frequently and were some of my best friends, which made people think I was gay as well which didn’t bother me in the slightest.
To be fair, that was back when it wasn’t “transgender”, it was “transsexual.” I don’t know why it changed as it makes less sense this way. Transgender says “I changed my gender” which means… nothing because gender is so effusive and random. Even if it indicates change, then it changed from what to what? Does it mean you had surgery? Does it change daily? Who knows? Conversationally, it seems to only serve to mask things about a person rather than clarify them - even verbally it’s a useless term (and quite famously, Buck Angel agrees).
And unlike some historical words, we didn’t replace worse terms, we just added a new one that made nothing better.
Calling someone a “trans-woman / man” makes sense. You immediately get more information about someone. It’s constructive language. Transsexual would mean that you (visibly) changed your sex. Easy. We used this in the 90’s.
Drag? Cool. Tells you a lot. It’s descriptive.
If you study language, some really strange shit has happened over the last 20 years or so. Language via political pushes has happened way more often than any time I can find throughout recorded history. Left-wing language seems to have been pushed to obfuscate, and right-wing wording is pushed towards blame.
I desperately want to know why it changed, but linguistically it makes zero fucking sense.
I am a cis dude, but I had asked a friend who is trans about why the term moved away from “transsexual”. She said that not everyone is able, or wants, to do the surgeries to change the sex organs, so “Transgendered” would apply to people that “Transsexual” didn’t.
There was a point in her life when she was male (both in gender role and physical sex) and now she fits into the gender role of being a woman. To the best of my knowledge, she hadn’t done bottom surgery, so she technically hadn’t changed her physical sex.
You then run into groups who say that people need to go through all the medical procedures before they are “really” trans, which opens up a lot of in-fighting. “Transmedicalist” is the non-derogatory term for this group. This hits a linguistical place where “trans” isn’t really meaning the pre-fix “across”, but is being used to describe people in the trans community.
(Please don’t read my comments as aggressive, because I’m not meaning them that way; I appreciate this discussion.)
Yeah, so it expanded the group it applied to while making the term less functional.
I get why they’d want the term (because then you’d fit in with a pre-established group), but I disagree that it should apply that broadly. I suppose that “transgender” would apply to that case you listed above for lack of a better term, because it still enforces some kind of binary on the behaviour, and I don’t really see there being a functional binary except in media.
Words are wonderful and descriptive when you know how to use them and I’ve always felt that there is no perfect synonym for most. Broadly applying specific terms has always felt like a dumbing-down to me and I feel it only hurts discussion and understanding. I wish we created more terminology for edge cases instead of breaking specificity to apply to everything.
Most people I know who are not cis use “trans” or “trans/non-binary” as an umbrella term for “not cis”, and they generally don’t use either “transgender” or “transsexual”. This continues the “Trans meaning the group of people, and not specifically the pre-fix” school of thought, which I think is interesting.
I think that English stopped being wonderful and perfectly self-descriptive once contronyms came into being. But it’s still fun to look up how/when/why words change over time. It can be a better look into culture than a lot of history books.