I was schooled/brought up to believe that ‘gender’ and ‘sex’ are the same thing, just different words for it.
If that has changed, then isn’t it due to cultural pressure to re-use the word ‘gender’ from it’s original meaning to a new meaning?
Words have meaning, even gender specific pronouns. It’s political correctness run amok to change the meanings based on outliers. People who alter their physiology to be different from how they are born are all well and good, but that doesn’t change the meaning of the words.
Maybe we should come up with some sort of proportional representation.
Like:
Man.75 to indicate that they are 75% man, with the decimal indicating whichever is the greater proportion. So it would be like Woman.51 indicating that they are 51% a woman.
If you can bear a child, you’re a woman. Period. By definition really.
OR IS HE ??!??!
If it requires a paragraph to explain to someone what you mean by gender, then the words have been debased into meaninglessness.
If we really wanted to talk about tolerance, we’d find ways to come up with words for people who do not fit within the baseline norms and accept them, rather than trying to change the established meanings of already existing words.
And why do you think that they feel like, and believe they are supposed to be a man ? Because of biology, the biology of their brain to be specific. It’s not a learned desire or a conscoius decision; it’s the way they happen to be wired. Which leads to . . .
If they are Napoleon Bonaparte’s brain in someone else’s body, yes.
The real problem here is that we have a mismatch between a person’s components. So, it screws up our standard definitions, and people blow it up into a bigger deal than it is. We have a person with a womb who is pregnant; no big deal. We have a person with a male-oriented brain that thinks of himself as a man and wants to be referred to as a man; also not unusual. The two just don’t usually go together, after all.
Huge strawman. When was the meaning of ‘gender’ changed, and when did it take a paragraph to explain it? Merriam-Webster does it in 11 words:
Note the word typically, and note that it’s not the sex, it’s some of the traits (physical traits are conspicuously absent) typically associated with the sex.
Can you agree with the first two sentences of post #39 now?
And in it, it doesn’t include a pregnant man. If a woman changing to a man can get pregnant they are not post-op yet.
Arguing a difference between sex and gender is not a distinction that most people make, and is therefore an attempt at changing the language.
Both biologically, and culturally/socially, pregnancy is a feminine attribute. So this is just an extremely manly woman.
A rose by any other name…
He is a female, biologically, but a man superficially, psychologically, socially, etc.
What I don’t get is why anyone would be surprised by a biological female getting knocked up? That’s the real stumper.
Assuming by ‘man’ you mean male human. Male seahorses get praggars,. So pregnant males aren’t unheard of biologically, or you have a different definition of ‘man’?
And XY chromosomes and lacking a womb is a male attribute. Is someone with androgen insensitivity, who has XY genes and lacks a womb male ? Despite having breasts and a female personality and appearance ?
The real problem here is insisting that some sort of neat black line separates the genders. ANY definition you come up with is going to result in absurdities if you insist it holds at all times with all people.
Well said.
astro, Lobsang, and mswas– I really just don’t get all this going on and on about biology trumps this or that. Who the fuck cares?? The headlines say “PREGNANT MAN” because this person would be insulted by being called a woman. God forbid you call him a man because it’s polite and makes sense on every level except the biological.
If you’re so attached to biology, where do you draw the line? XY = male, XX = female? What about all the XY women? Even though they’ve got breasts and a vagina, they can’t bear children, so does that make them men? How about intersexed babies that are genetically one or the other but physically ambiguous?
My point is, biology isn’t the end-all be-all in questions of gender, or even of sex. The cultural aspect is at least as important if not more so, so I don’t understand why people insist on clinging to biology. Yes, biological sex, more often than not, lines right up with gender. But when it doesn’t, who the fuck is anyone to say that it trumps the social aspect, which is the one that matters most in everyday life? How can the way someone’s physically put together be more important than the way they want to be treated?
Biologically male humans don’t get pregnant, because they can’t get pregnant. If I was talking about the Syngnathidae family you might have a point, but I’m not talking about seahorses, I’m talking about the differentiation between male and female humans as a point of lexical clarity.
As individuals we can assign arbitrary definitions to anything we choose, we can call ourselves anything we choose. The points of contention can occur when we say to others “It is my natural right and logical that I should be regarded as “this” thing, and you must agree and regard me thus.” This argument has about as much weight as the old saw from the 70’s self help & self discovery guides that “What’s 'true for me is true for me, and what’s true you is true for you.” While this point is objectively true, it’s authority is limited to the end of your nose unless you can make a persuasive argument that others should go along with that definition.
“Male” and “female” as definitional contexts do (IMO) have to contain some degree of differential rigor for the word to have to have any validity as a point of definition. Socially, as point of good form and good manners it’s entirely proper to call a biological man or woman who decides to physically transgender themselves by the sex they have chosen. If a biological woman chooses to begin the physical transgendering process to become a physical man, yet still chooses to conceive and carry a child to term I do have some degree of difficulty (as a matter of form) calling them a “man”. It doesn’t challenge my masculinity as others have averred it must for me to be so narrow minded, it just seems kind of stupid to demand that you must logically be regarded as a “man” who just happens to be getting impregnated and carrying a child to term. If that’s the direction you’re going to go fine, but if a definition begins to mean everything it will eventually mean nothing.
Oh noes! The sky is falling! :rolleyes:
What, do you think one day you’ll wake up and we’ll all be called by a single pronoun? Are you afraid that you’ll have a child and be legally unable to call it a boy or a girl until it’s of consenting age, and you’ll go “Damn it all, I should have NEVER called that pregnant transgendered person a MAN!” :smack:
Yes, we all admit it’s unusual and even disconcerting for our convenient little gender binary. Can we just move on to not caring now? Can we just admit some flexibility in terms for extreme cases? Calling a guy who used to be a girl and is having a baby a guy is not going to cause the entire gender/sex vocabulary system to crumble. The world will recover, I assure you. Come up with a better argument or just admit that you’re stomping your feet because it makes you uncomfortable.
Calling a seven-foot man a dwarf wouldn’t cause the OED to spontaneously combust either, but I’d feel equally absurd saying it, regardless of how earnestly the lil’ guy believed it to be so.
People are free to call themselves whatever they want, as far as I’m concerned. But if you tell me you’re a Bloody Mary, I’d better at least see a celery stalk sticking out of your head or I won’t feel obliged to play along.
Would it feel less absurd if he pointed out his twelve-foot parents to you ? Just because 7 foot is too tall to count as a dwarf in typical situations, doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t be the perfect truth in that one.
What about anatomical females with xy chromosomes? There’s also anatomical males with xx chromosomes. It happens naturally.
What about male with an xy chromosome set, male sex organs, but has had an artificially induced abdominal ectopic pregnancy implanted in his gut?
I think it boils down to our notions of gender. There’s a whole list of attributes we assign to each gender, thing is sometimes individuals don’t have the full set.
The definitions ARE cut and dry. We don’t define the norm by the abnormalities, we define the abnormalities by the norm. Gender is binary. Sure there is an axis with two poles, but the poles are pretty cut and dry, even if the in between is rather fuzzy.
No we’re afraid no one will be able to talk to each other with any reasonable expectation that the sounds they are making have a common meaning.