I just bet my bit above about “gender” will raise some eyebrows, so…
Kind, sort, class; also, genus as opposed to species.
Gram. Each of the three (or in some languages two) grammatical ‘kinds’, corresponding more or less to distinctions of sex (and absence of sex) in the objects denoted, into which substantives are discriminated according to the nature of the modification they require in words syntactically associated with them; the property of belonging to, or (in other parts of speech) of having the form appropriate to concord with, a specific one of these kinds.
b. By some recent philologists applied, in extended sense, to the ‘kinds’ into which sbs. are discriminated by the syntactical laws of certain languages the grammar of which takes no account of sex. Thus the North American Indian languages are said to have two ‘genders’, animate and inanimate.
It might be related to one of mine, which is about sex rather than gender:
Not all people are XX or XY. They can also be XXY, XYY, XXYY and all sort of other combinations. However, despite the rumours, Jamie Lee Curtis is just XX.
Other stuff:
Evolution. Too obvious and important to leave out.
Christmas is not essential to happiness.
“Races” are social constructs, not biological ones. (There are biological factors which we assign social values to, but these characteristics are the result of varying environments in different parts of the globe, and do not vary together. Link to source)
All in all, it is healthier to be a vegetarian than a meat-eater.
Men can control their sexual urges. (Actually, I don’t know if this is a fact, but I’d think it must be.)
There are women who are XY and who are born with male anatomy.
People in the United States do not have the best way of life in the world bar none. (This is typically asserted by people who have never been out of the country.)
Labor unions can be awesome. They can be useless too.
Bats are not birds. Likewise, birds are not mammals.
Humans did not evolve from monkeys. (We evolved from a primate with characteristics of both current-day great apes and humans. Our common ancestor with monkeys lived at least 30 million years ago, IARC. That creature was not a monkey.)
No, being transgendered does not put you in a different category - most transgendered individuals do fit into the male/female dichotomy, just not into the roles prescribed them at birth.
So there. There’s one of my facts that I hear denied all the time. To be transgendered is not a gender identity. It is a situation involving one’s gender identity but it’s not a gender identity in itself.
What I think Oregon sunshine meant is this: gender is a spectrum. Most people (like me) are more or less neatly on one end of the spectrum or the other. Some people feel like they’re somewhere in the center. Some people feel like they don’t belong on the spectrum at all. Sex is physical, biological; gender is mental.
But if I were a woman trapped in a man’s body I would still be a woman. That in itself wouldn’t make me ‘the third gender’ or ‘other’ or ‘neither male nor female’ or any such crap.
It can be. It’s rare, but it happens. I know a few (well, about five that I can think of right now) people who identify as trans rather than as either gender. I’ve known others who identified as trans or third gender for a while before deciding on a full transition. Hell, I even know one child, now 12 years old, who vehemently claims not to be a boy or a girl, but something else. Most trans people do fit into the man/woman dichotomy, true, though not male/female because that’s about biological sex.
Hopefully this doesn’t violate the ‘no debate’ rule - it’s more a correction than a debate, much as a Electric Warrior’s post was.
It does violate that rule, because everybody believes that they are merely “correcting” the other person.
The correct thing to do in this particular thread, because it houses so many different beliefs that would normally be posted in Great Debates, is to post a response to the OP, and leave the others alone.
I would emend that to “The Law of Averages is often incorrectly applied in a fallacious way”. The law itself is a straightforward mathematical consequence of the definition of probability.
smack: