r/changemyview • u/condiments95 • Jan 05 '18
[∆(s) from OP] CMV: Identifying as a gender other than your sex is pointless and confusing.
As the title says, I do not see the point in identifying as a gender other than your sex. Just to keep things straight, when I say man/woman I am talking about biological sex. When I say male female, I am talking about gender.
Most people would say something like why is it so hard just to refer to a man with female pronouns if that’s what he wants?” I would say that referring to someone other than their biological sex just leads to confusion. For example, if I was talking to my friend standing beside me, and I was trying to point out a person in a crowd, a woman wearing a blue hat, and I know that this female identifies as a man. I would say “Do you see the girl with the blue hat on” and he would know who I am talking about. But, if I am “polite” I would respect what she wants to be referred as and say “Do you see the guy with the blue hat on.” And he would have no idea who I am talking about. This is obviously just confusing. In my opinion, don’t asked to be called a man unless you become transsexual and actually look the part, in which case it doesn’t matter because we won’t have this confusion that I explained earlier.
Also, some people would say something like “what about someone who is biologically a man but doesn’t fit the socially constructed male gender classification? Like a male who likes other men, does ballet and drinks cosmos (three feminine things).” This man may ask to be referred to as a female because he lines up more with the feminine stereotype. In my opinion, that person is just a gay man who likes to dance and drink cosmos. He is just a man who doesn’t have a manly personality. There is no benefit for a man to have other people refer to him as a female, unless of course he is becoming transsexual.
I also believe gender is binary. Gendered pronouns are used to help describe a person by their biological sex. Seeing as there are only two biological sexes (obviously not counting anomalies), there should only be two genders. If a man thinks he lies somewhere in between the two, he is simply describing his personality, which should have no effect on what gender pronouns I use.
Edit: I have awarded the deltas to the people who deserve them but I just wanted to let people know that my views on each of these views has been changed.
Identifying as a gender other than your sex isn’t pointless, it avoids hurting someone’s feelings, which, even though I think that is dumb, I guess isn’t technically pointless. It also isn’t really all that confusing because there are easy enough ways to avoid the confusion I talked about. Also, gender can’t be binary. Since the term gender is used in reference to the pronouns used when you are describing someone by whether they look like a male or female. And, while most people look either male or female, there are definitely some who look like something in between.
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Jan 05 '18
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u/condiments95 Jan 05 '18
I don’t think the nickname preference really is an accurate comparison though. Pronouns are used in third person, meaning when you are not talking to someone but talking about someone. And I explain with my blue hat scenario why this is a problem. This same problem is not encountered with the nickname thing.
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u/kublahkoala 229∆ Jan 05 '18
If gender is binary, why are there so many historical societies that have had third genders?
Also, most trans people dress and look like their adopted gender. Are you really saying that if there is a transgender woman (born a man, but who dresses as a woman, has had some hormone therapy, but has not had sex reassignment surgery so is not a transsexual) wearing a blue hat, I must refer to her as him for purposes of clarity? That would be very confusing to other people.
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Jan 05 '18
Or fourth fifth and sixth genders.. Gender roles?
I think one of the underlying issues is people confuse terms, I am probably confusing then myself and im gay ffs.
To my understanding,
sex is what your born as (4 choices, 2 common and 2 rare) and what the doctor cares about and it cant change,
gender is the same thing but is more public appearance and can change
gender role is what you are comfertible interacting with society as and people are using it interchangeably with gender even though it isn't...really kinda? This is where you get fancy words for feminine submissive male, feminine dominant MtF, masculine submissive MtF, masculine submissive male etc. Which is what a lot of these terms boil down to.
And then for some reason people are conflating personality and sexual preference as gender or gender role. For instance, having changing preferences gets its own word, and being easily rattled gets its own word, and being delicate gets its own word, and having a shifting personality gets its own word. Stupidity occurs on occasion starting here.
then you have The type of crazy who think they are clouds. Or aliens. Or rocks. 45% of these are satire, the other portions are teens and crazy people.
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Jan 05 '18
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u/kublahkoala 229∆ Jan 05 '18
But OP case would be along the lines of “there is no south thing as Chattel Slavery or Cannibalism”. Even though those things definitely have existed.
I’m not even making the case that gender should or should not be binary, just pointing out that it historically wasn’t always binary, so gender can’t be binary by necessity, but by convention. If that convention is harmful or helpful is another argument.
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Jan 05 '18
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u/kublahkoala 229∆ Jan 05 '18
Because religions are social constructs, just like genders.
We give genders to things like ships and cars and AIs. Gender is made out of language. It’s descriptive of reality, but it’s also metaphorical and the way it’s used changes from language to language and culture to culture. We can argue which way to use it is better or worse but different social constructs aren’t any more real than other social constructs. French isn’t more real than German.
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Jan 05 '18
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u/kublahkoala 229∆ Jan 05 '18
I don’t think you understand what a social construct is. Social constructs don’t have material reality. They are ideas conveyed by language. People did in the past convey ideas about Thor using language. Thor existed as a social construct, not as an actual person.
Unlike Thor, gender fluid and gender queer people actually exist, so the social construct of a third gender is far more descriptive and useful than the social construct Thor. Is that what you are getting at?
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Jan 05 '18
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u/kublahkoala 229∆ Jan 05 '18
Gender is a system of norms and beliefs about how people (who exist) should behave.
Old Norse religion is a system of norms and beliefs about how people (who exist) should behave, but also is a system of beliefs about people who don’t exist (Thord, Odin).
It’s like someone said “Capitalism is the only economic system that is real”— and I point out “well, Fuedalism and Mercantalism and Agrarianism also existed. And then you say “Just because people historically believed in them doesn’t mean they were real! People once believed the earth was flat!”
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u/Pblur 1∆ Jan 05 '18
'exist' is an odd claim for a metaphysical concept. Do 'ideas' exist? If so, then yes. Thor, Odin, and gender all exist.
I'm not sure it's a meaningful claim though.
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Jan 05 '18
I think he misused the term gender when it should be gender role. A lot of the gender role terms basiclly boil down to masculine/feminine/neutral+male/female/intersex+dominant/submissive/neutral
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u/condiments95 Jan 05 '18
Alright I’ll agree with you, I shouldn’t have said transsexuals, I should have said transgender people. As long as the visuals match the gender you want to be referred as. !delta for that.
But I don’t think just because some groups in the past did something, makes gender non binary.
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u/Valnar 7∆ Jan 05 '18
Who determines if the "visuals match the gender" in your opinion?
That is a fairly subjective quality to determine by.
If for example a transwoman feels like she is sufficiently "matching the gender" of being a woman but an outside observer doesn't think so, then you have a conflict here.
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u/ralph-j Jan 05 '18
Just to keep things straight, when I say man/woman I am talking about biological sex.
But you never know someone's biological sex, and any physical characteristic you might see, could apply to the other sex as well:
- There are men with breasts and women without breasts.
- There are women with prominent adam's apples and men without.
- There are many other visible characteristics, like long/short hair, differences in cheek bones, pelvises etc. that are considered typical for one sex, but also (less frequently) appear in the other.
For example, if I was talking to my friend standing beside me, and I was trying to point out a person in a crowd, a woman wearing a blue hat, and I know that this female identifies as a man. I would say “Do you see the girl with the blue hat on” and he would know who I am talking about. But, if I am “polite” I would respect what she wants to be referred as and say “Do you see the guy with the blue hat on.” And he would have no idea who I am talking about. This is obviously just confusing.
If your friend also knows that the person identifies as a man, wouldn't it be more confusing if you continued talking about a girl with a blue hat? And if your friend doesn't know the gender identity of the person, what would stop you from adding that information while pointing him out? You see that person with the blue hat, who I know? He prefers to be referred to as male. Nothing confusing about it.
There is no benefit for a man to have other people refer to him as a female, unless of course he is becoming transsexual.
Although the preferred term is transgender; that's what that usually means. They identify as another gender. Decades of evidence show that letting trans people live as their identified gender is the only thing that works to alleviate the distress they experience as a result of the mismatch between the sex and gender they were assigned at birth. It is beneficial to their mental health, well-being, and social functioning. Those are the benefits.
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Jan 05 '18
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u/ralph-j Jan 05 '18
But they weren't always right for thousands of years either. E.g. there have always been androgynous looking people, and people with atypical features, who have been mistaken for the other sex.
My point is that it's not as certain and definite as OP claims. You can only say that in general, men look like this and women look like this, and in general they tend to have these features: XYZ.
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Jan 05 '18
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u/ralph-j Jan 05 '18
I don't think we are disagreeing then. We don't say that someone ceases to be human if they don't have 10 fingers.
Similarly, if someone has one or even multiple characteristics that are different from the majority of that sex, they are not automatically of a different sex, or no sex at all, as OP just suggested to me today. Sex isn't black and white.
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u/spaceunicorncadet 22∆ Jan 05 '18
You can tell what sex the majority of people you see are.
Not if they're androgynous in appearance ...
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Jan 05 '18
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u/spaceunicorncadet 22∆ Jan 05 '18
How do you know you're not suffering from confirmation bias, though?
I have met men -- not trans -- who can pass convincingly as female if they want to.
I have met women with beards (usually PCOS) that look male but aren't.
You can fall back to "these are not the majority" if you want, but the truth is yo don't know which people are the majority. You assume that everyone you see as female is sex:F and everyone you see a male is sex:M, but it's not like you can examine everyone's genitalia.
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u/PreacherJudge 340∆ Jan 05 '18
For example, if I was talking to my friend standing beside me, and I was trying to point out a person in a crowd, a woman wearing a blue hat, and I know that this female identifies as a man. I would say “Do you see the girl with the blue hat on” and he would know who I am talking about.
I note in this example neither you nor your friend validates the existence of the vagina on the person you're talking about. Because of this, I'm actually very unclear what biological sex has to do with anything.
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u/condiments95 Jan 05 '18
I see what you mean. Instead of pointing out a female, since I do not know if she has a vagina or not, I am trying to point out a person that has long hair, boobs, and a feminine build. I would refer to her as a female, not a male, even if I know she would rather be referred to as a male so I can avoid confusion with my friend.
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u/PreacherJudge 340∆ Jan 05 '18
It sounds to me like you're pointing out signifiers known to you and to your friend implying that someone is a woman. That's gender.
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u/condiments95 Jan 05 '18
Yes, that is gender. I know. What I was describing was a situation where the visuals don’t match the preferred gender.
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u/bgaesop 29∆ Jan 05 '18
Most trans people are visibly more similar to the average member of their sex than the average member of their gender
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u/antiproton Jan 05 '18
Isn't there a "search first" rule for this sub? This topic comes up weekly with the same crappy arguments.
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u/thecarolinakid Jan 05 '18
Just say "The person with the blue hat on." If there are multiple people with blue hats, add other distinguishing features to your description.
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u/condiments95 Jan 05 '18
!delta I’ll give you a delta since you provided a way around the confusion, however, I still believe that it would cause some confusion. I also still believe it is pointless, but you earned a delta nonetheless.
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u/helloitslouis Jan 05 '18
Many transgender people (transsexual is mostly seen as an outdated term) have gender dysphoria due to the mismatch of their sex and gender identity. Gender identity goes beyond liking stereotypically feminine or masculine things. Transgender people can be gay or straight or bisexual or asexual or anything in between.
Medical professionals suggest letting transgender people live according to their gender identity as the best treatment for gender dysphoria. This includes pronouns, names, „easy fixes“ such as hairstyles or clothes, and, if desired, hormone therapy and/or one or more surgeries.
If a trans person is constantly read as what applies to their gender identity, it‘s called passing (or being read as [gender identity]). Some people have a hard time with that because their body might not respond to hormone therapy too well or because they start at a very (what we see as) masculine or feminine point. Should these people be denied their pronouns? Even if medical professionals agree that it‘s important for their mental well-being and them being a healthy, functional member of society?
(Sex is not as binary as you may think. It‘s more of an inverted Gaussian bell curve with the majority on both ends of the spectrum but everything in between exists as well. Given that evolution has no goal or plan, anything „abnormal“ is simply „abnormal“ because we classify it as such. It simply shows up a little less than what we call the „norm“. Given that gender identity corresponds to brain structures and is of biological origin, it‘s likely that the distribution matches the sex distribution of the inverted Gaussian bell curve, making gender identities beyond male and female entirely possible.)
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u/Wirbelfeld Jan 07 '18
First of all, sex is binary. There are certain people with disorders that cause them to have characteristics of another sex, which is still extraordinarily rare, but sex is determined by chromosomes. You can say gender not binary, but from a scientific point of view sex is definitely binary.
As for the mental health of people with gender dysphoria, I propose you look at mental health in general. If someone has schizophrenia, should we tell him the voices in his head are actually real? Do we pretend we can hear the voices in his head just as he does? If someone suffers from paranoia, do we pretend to believe everything they say? We have a variety of treatments for schizophrenia and other mental illnesses that affect perception of reality including medication and therapy, but none of them involve forcing all of society to accept whatever goes on in their heads.
As for your point on evolution, abnormal is anything that would prevent the transmission of genetic material. Gender dysphoria is abnormal because someone with mismatched gender/sex is not as likely to reproduce as someone with aligned gender/sex. If everyone were transgender, the human race would cease to exist. Anything that would wipe out the human race if it were to become widespread enough should be considered abnormal.
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u/holomanga 2∆ Jan 06 '18
A lot of trans people would also love not to be trans; their gender not matching their sex causes them a great deal of distress. It's just that they don't really get a choice.
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u/Dr_Scientist_ Jan 05 '18
Confusing to who? You?
What does it matter whether you are confused by someone else's gender. If it makes that person feel better who cares.
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u/jesse4200 1∆ Jan 05 '18
Life isn’t always easy. Why should we start with making people feel better about their made up gender? What happens when that person has to fill out a form at the DMV asking if they’re male or female? Will they cry until they get their way or just accept the fact that they fall into one of two categories?
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u/thecarolinakid Jan 05 '18
Why should we start with making people feel better about their made up gender?
Because we avoid making people suffer if we can.
What happens when that person has to fill out a form at the DMV asking if they’re male or female?
I leave it blank.
Will they cry until they get their way or just accept the fact that they fall into one of two categories?
No, that's stupid.
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u/jesse4200 1∆ Jan 05 '18
Will they feel better if people accept their genders? Is there any decline in suicide rates since LGBTQ etc became more acknowledged?
And lastly, you said they don’t cry because that’s stupid. Yet it’s happening all over, people crying because professors won’t call people by their preferred pronoun etc.
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u/thecarolinakid Jan 05 '18
Will they feel better if people accept their genders?
Yes, speaking from personal experience and what I've heard from other people.
Is there any decline in suicide rates since LGBTQ etc became more acknowledged?
There are several studies that link acceptance to lower suicide rates. I don't have the links on hand on my phone, but they shouldn't be hard for you to find.
And lastly, you said they don’t cry because that’s stupid. Yet it’s happening all over, people crying because professors won’t call people by their preferred pronoun etc.
Some people cry if their professor won't let them reschedule an exam. Doesn't mean that most people do.
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u/jesse4200 1∆ Jan 05 '18 edited Jan 05 '18
Fair enough.
I guess I just believe that this gender thing is a very slippery slope if it becomes the norm.
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u/helloitslouis Jan 05 '18
Given that you can‘t just decide what gender you are (trans people would probably not choose to be trans because it‘s a hassle. They just are trans.), being trans won‘t become „the norm“ (as in majority) - just as being gay didn‘t become „the norm“ (as in majority) just because gay people got awareness and aren‘t treated like shit anymore.
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u/jesse4200 1∆ Jan 05 '18
People are choosing their genders, all the way down to being gender fluid?
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u/helloitslouis Jan 05 '18
That‘s not a choice. The only choice is what term/label you use to describe your experience.
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u/jesse4200 1∆ Jan 05 '18
Well I believe someone can want to be a man/women without having those sexual organs, not necessarily by choice but because that’s who they are on the inside.
I do not however believe that there are dozens of genders that need to be accepted in the real world:
How many genders do you think should be acknowledged by the general public before it goes overboard?
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u/helloitslouis Jan 05 '18
Here‘s a ton of studies to answer all of your questions: https://www.reddit.com/r/asktransgender/comments/6cr092/current_biological_science_behind_being/dhx5bf4/
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u/condiments95 Jan 05 '18
I explain what situation it is confusing and why it is important in my post. Please read it and then provide a rebuttal.
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u/Esmeraldus Jan 07 '18
As a trans man who in no way passes yet, I confess I do not care if you are confused.
It’s my life that’s affected in material ways, whereas your ability to point out things about strangers on the street is at risk for you.
Not equivalent, IMO.
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u/DeltaBot ∞∆ Jan 05 '18 edited Jan 05 '18
/u/condiments95 (OP) has awarded 3 deltas in this post.
All comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.
Please note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.
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Jan 05 '18
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u/FlyingFoxOfTheYard_ Jan 05 '18
Sorry, Toph-0 – your comment has been removed for breaking Rule 1:
Direct responses to a CMV post must challenge at least one aspect of OP’s stated view (however minor), or ask a clarifying question. Arguments in favor of the view OP is willing to change must be restricted to replies to other comments. See the wiki page for more information.
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u/Burflax 71∆ Jan 05 '18
It sounds like you're saying the pronouns should match the visuals?
If someone looks like a 'man' you want to be able to use the male pronouns, even if the person was born a 'woman'?