The entire cast should have a (whatever number)some
jadedcynic
To be honest, an olde timey ‘Hippie Free Love Commune’ might be something that’d help Danny, Ethan & Amber…and being gradually exposed to the aspect of *LOVE* that people would exhibit could be kinda therapeutic for Joyce (1. Sheltered upbringing and a virgin, 2. assaulted in one of her first close interactions with a potential…’intimate’ {my skin crawls to describe Ryan like this}, 3. in serious conflict about even seeing how others interact socially and sexually.)
Of course, they’d need to travel back in time about fifty years or so (gawd, has it been that long? I’m oooooooold… 🙁 )
Well, I guess there are always new asspects to explore …
Rowan Mikaio
I’m sure we’ve got a good arse-nal of puns. How long until we crack?
Psyme
I wonder if I could crack out a good one.
Tualha
These are some of the worst puns in the anals of history.
tyersome
Now that was a great ass crack!
I’d try to come up with another one of my asinine contributions, but if I don’t get some sleep soon I’m going to be too rump-led to go outside tomorrow …
Halloween Jack
Don’t worry–if we all work together, we’ll get to the bottom of this.
tyersome
Good job, you’ve exposed a bootyfull sunken treasure …
Two. Honestly, you either have a Y chromosome, or you don’t. Unless, of course, you’re actually a chicken.
Kelly
Biological sex != gender. Not even close sometimes.
Rycan
I was wondering what I was missing.
peasant
Even “biological sex” isn’t so easily defined solely through chromosomes since biology can’t be reduced to genotypes. During sexual differentiation you basically start out with a female base and it differentiates as male in the presence of a Y. Usually. But it happens procedurally, so you kind of have a scale, and there are a ton of pathways which can be broken or stopped on the way so you can land somewhere in the middle between the sexes. Now you can define Y makes a man and no Y makes a woman, but that doesn’t mean it’s biological reality, it’s just a distinction on a chromosomal level which doesn’t necessarily describe what phenotype you have. Intersex individuals can have unclear genetic, anatomic and/or hormonal sex. So in the end, even biological sex depends on our cultural interpretation of the facts. It’s super exciting. vuv I think in Germany intersexuality has legally been recognized two years ago, and people no longer have to give a sex on birth certificates and official papers if they are intersex to prevent surgery on children born with attributes of both sexes among other things. In combination with gender, there sure are a whole lot of options out there, it’s a magical world. ~ @ 0@
Rowan Mikaio
Gender is not determined by chromosomes, even though the two have a very high correlation. For example, Carla.
Rycan
Let’s leave Carla out of this. We know too little of Carla in this universe, and Walkyverse Carla isn’t a human.
neeks
Willis has stated that Carla is still trans, just not “trans-human”. It’s one of the reasons, if not the only reason, she has her own room.
I know about Klinefelter and Turner syndromes. The distinction I made works with those cases. With Klinefelter, there’s still a Y chromosome, so you’re considered male. Vice versa for Turner – no Y chromosome, so you’re considered female.
tyersome
Sorry, but it really doesn’t … chromosomes can undergo translocations that move parts around and there is at least one condition that results in XX individuals with all the ‘traditionally’ male parts … so you could apply that rule to them, but why would you want to?
Rycan
Ah, I stand corrected, then. Got it now.
…Maybe.
tyersome
No problem, I understand the desire to have some order and clarity … and simplification has led to huge progress in science … unfortunately biology is almost? never completely clear cut (and psychology appears to be much fuzzier) …
its quite fascinating really if you read down on that last link it turns out that a subset of the people with that condition don’t even have SRY (the ‘gene for maleness’) …
Rycan
I wouldn’t say simplification leads to progress in science; it just helps me tidy things up in my mind.
Kabo
Speaking more abstractly, sex is a phenomenon on the level of the phenotype (as opposed to the X/Y-chromosomes, which are part of the genotype) and is determined during the development of the embryo. In the typical case, the chromosomes are a causal precursor to sex determination, but like most biological processes this one can be disrupted.
The place where there is a binary is assignation, though I believe that’s usually based on genitalia. So you get Designated Female/Male At Birth (DMAB/DFAB). It’s a harmful practice that does generate this false dichotomy. Sex and gender alike are more complex than binaries and a lot of people find them unhelpful concepts. Talking about a transperson’s ‘biological sex’ is weird and implies that, to use a fictional example, Jocelyne is a woman in a man’s body whereas actually it’s her body, so it’s a woman’s body, that was incorrectly designated male at birth.
tyersome
@Rorror: That is amazing …
… I wonder what would happen if all guys were born with that condition … maybe we’d be saner?
Rorror
We’d probably have less gender and sex based problems as society in general, at least. And equal toys for everybody! (We just need to make sure that there aren’t mass gene tests to determine whether a kid gets barbies or matchbox cars.) When everybody grows up together, there should be less prejudices.
As for the saneness: You seem to indicate men are less sane the women. I doubt this. And apart from the phenomena mentioned above, I strongly doubt the inherent insanities of human beings would be reduced by this.
Kabo
Daisy: I do not agree. Biological sex continues to be a valid category in many context. For instnace, if we didn’t have this category, the doctors who performed sex change operations wouldn’t understand what they were doing. We can’t simply deny biology because we dislike its harmful consquences.
Jalathas
That’s… really not even a little true. You can have a concept of what a penis or vagina looks like and how they work without correlating them to a concept of binary biological sex that, as we’ve had many examples of in this very discussion isn’t really in any way accurate. It’s not “denying biology”, it’s changing our understanding of it.
peasant
It’s a valid category because it helps us organize our lives, but biological sex isn’t defined through biology itself, but it’s a cultural interpretation of biological data. I kid you not, there legitimately is no such thing as a globally valid and independent definition of biological sex as dictated purely by biology without humans picking and choosing whether they want to define it on a genetic, an anatomic or a hormonal level (or maybe even something else). It’s not about denying biology. Our biology will always be our biology, but biological sex is subject to change throughout the years. For example, western countries are starting to officially recognize intersex as a third biological sex on birth certificates and passports since not every human can be defined as a man or a woman on a genetic, anatomic or hormonal level. There is no definition of biological sex I have ever seen which can clearly sort every person in the world into male and female, because the idea that only male and female can exist is a human construct, and not some rule set in stone by biology.
Additional sexes like intersex change absolutely nothing on the expertise or procedures of sex change surgeons since what constitutes as male and female primary and secondary organs has never been up for debate. They don’t give a rat’s bum about how we choose to define biological sex, and as mentioned before, anatomy can but doesn’t have to be part of it.
Sarah
There is, off the top of my head, 5
Cisgender – AKA boys who are born boys and girls who are born girls – 2
Transgender – boys who are born girls and girls who are born boys – 4
and Gender Fluid – people who are both boys and girls, it depends on how they feel – 5
I probably missed some, being Cisgender myself, but you get the gist
Disloyal Subject
As I understand it, there’s also:
Androgynous — people who’re neutral or apathetic, & default to their biological sex rather than matching it
For practical purposes, we might fall under cisgender, but it could be argued that we’re a subset of genderfluid. I admit to being pretty ignorant of this field, though.
I do not hold this opinion. I just heard about it the other day.
Rycan
I guess my confusion here is that we’re still using two classifications, although it’s been pointed out that there’s a murky middle as well (basicaly a ‘neither’ category). I thought the concept of being cisgender, transsexual, etc. was that your physiological gender was mismatched with your psychological gender – as opposed to being in a completely different category than males and females.
Ambitious
Pick a number between 0 and 1 (inclusive), multiply it by “male”. Pick a(nother) number (can be the same number if you want) between 0 and 1, multiply it by “female”. Add those together to get a possible gender. So there’s an uncountable infinity of genders.
Standard male and standard female would be (1,0) and (0,1) respectively; “both genders” (1,1), “neither gender” (0,0), and “grey-gendered” (0.5,0.5) are all different things; you can be “very male and kind of female” (1,0.5) or the reverse; you can be “a little more female than male” (0.4,0.6) or “not much of anything, but slightly female” (0,0.1); and as I said, there are infinite possibilities.
And then this doesn’t take into account the interaction with biological sex. Is a (0,1) who was born male different from a (0,1) who was born female? Does it matter if the (0,1) who was born male has had any form of gender reassignment yet? Disloyal Subject’s comment on androgynous people who “default to their biological sex” suggests there’s at least some meaningful thing there, especially since that’s how I’ve often described myself: I have no reason to prefer being male to female, but I have no reason to prefer being female to male either, so I default to the one I was born as. But if you call me a (0.5,0.5) for having no preference, there’s still some difference between me an a similar (0.5,0.5) who was born and defaults to female; and if you say I’m a (0.6,0.4), there’s a difference between me, who is defaulting to biological sex, and an (0.6,0.4) who has an intrinsic, though slight, preference for being male.
Rycan
At what point do we stop talking about gender, and start talking about personality quirks, then? Otherwise, you could get rather carried away with that system. That, and how in hell do you measure somebody to be (0.4,0.1), for instance, and not (0.8,0.2)?
Note that at this point I’ve pretty much conceded my original position in a different debate; I’m just trying to figure out how this particular assertion can even function.
Tualha
Same direction, half the magnitude. Thus, gender is perhaps less important for person A. Note that it can be scaled all the way down to zero, where the agenders live.
Ambitious: the word “vector” is useful mental shorthand for the idea you’re describing.
Joseph
“Gender Vector” would be a great name for a zine about gender and sexuality…
Kabo
I don’t know if your way of arithmetizing this is necessarily very helpful. Personal identity, whether we are speaking of gender identity or something else, is not a magnitude, but your way of representing yourself in relation to the norms and institutions of your society. Society addresses you and asks: who are you? And identity is your way of answering that question. The circumstances in which society demands of you to produce an identity is not always such that free variation along a set of continuous dimensions is a possibility. To take a facile example: when you have to decide whether to use the men’s or the women’s bathroom, the choice is binary, and exclusive.
SgtWadeyWilson
There are ways to make the bathroom choice inclusive, but most of them get you into trouble. Loopholes and hypothetical troublemaking, huzzah!
For example: one might try demolishing the wall that seperates these so-called “rest” rooms, or use their silver tounge to get a very unconventional equality based rebellion to do so, depending on one’s skills. (This is likely close to the least probable method, since it’d be difficult to start, and even more so to finish.)
Don’t try this at home! The average home has unisex bathrooms, which are rarely situated beside each other, so it’d be kinda pointless. Don’t take this as permission to blame me for any bathroom related transgressions either, almost nobody will take “Sergent Wadey Wilson sent me here on a secret mission!” as a valid reason for anything.
Rorror
Depends on what type of person one is. Numerically approaching the genderstuff helped me a bit to understand my own and is easy to explain for many people. Currently I’m thinking about whether the topology of gender (yet to be properly defined) is metrizable. Less easy to explain, more fun and more interesting. Also thinking about: Maybe it’s even a (normed) vector space. And what could a scalar product be there?
Vincent
Me laugh at your petty genders! Me am too awesome to be contained by hu-man rules!
Rycan
That mean narcissists have their own gender?!?
/silly
Deanatay
Sure – you’re only attracted to yourself.
Disloyal Subject
That would be sexual preference, not one’s own gender.
Yotomoe
I have come to a point where I respect people who identify that they’re another gender but also don’t follow that particular set of beliefs. I will always see people as binary who now have the technology to switch between them.
LP
That’s actually not very respectful– if someone is nonbinary and you call them a binary gender, you are misgendering them, and that’s not okay, even if you don’t “follow that set of beliefs.”
mds
Yeah? I’m agender. What do you see me as? or could it be that you need to see my body before you can think up an acceptable gender in place of what I already told you I am?
I personally have been agender for as long as I can remember, in the same way that other people have been boys or girls for as long as they can remember. I don’t switch anything to anything. I just am.
Yotomoe
I’d probably see you as whatever your born with. Unless you were born the ultimate life form I imagine you’re one or the other. Now what you define yourself as is completely different. To me it doesn’t really matter cuz I try to treat people equally. I’ll just accept that that’s what YOU believe and not bring it up. I’m respectful but blunt.
David M Willis
Well, so long as you accept that if you say awful shit like this on my website again, you won’t get to post on it anymore. I’m fucking serious. I don’t care that you think you’re hedging some sort of imaginary middle ground and that by pawning off this “this is what I believe” crap that you’re immune from consequences, because in this subject there is no middle ground. There is not being a turd and being a turd. Don’t be a turd.
Yotomoe
I’m not trying to be awful…I’m sorry if I hurt anyone’s feelings. I want everyone to be happy and feel comfortable in their own bodies and I don’t want anyone to feel bad about that. I guess I phrased my point kind of mean but I think it’s a lot to ban me forever over. But it’s your call, I guess. I’m don’t really understand how these things work. But if I’m being so bad you gotta threaten me then I guess I’ll just have to keep some of my opinions to myself.
@Yotomoe: no hate from me if that helps, I personally hope you don’t get banned or leave, but again that probably doesn’t mean much. If you want to learn more about why what you were saying was considered offensive there has been a lively discussion elsewhere in today’s (well yesterday’s discussion section) that might be helpful?
I really only see you first by your username (Not helpful in this circumstance) then by your gravitar. So right now I see you as a girl, but if you were to change to a male picture, I’d see you as a male. Of course then you get something like “Amazi Stool” and you just become something random depending on whatever pronoun I happen to feel like typing at that moment.
If you wish to correct that behavior, alternate pronouns will be accepted! (And requested.) (Seriously, my pronoun system is insufficient, much like my Vespasian gas. It’s also malfunctional enough to have gotten me into an uncomfortable situation on one of these forums) (PLEEEAAASSEEE GIVE ME A NEW PRONOUN!!!! Between gender roles, nonbianary genders, Amazistool, transgenders, and gender neutral usernames, I’m constantly out of step when trying to talk to people!)
No Name
In English, “they” is slowly (re)gaining ground as a gender neutral pronoun. If your unsure, you can always use “they”. And then listen to all the Victorian grammarians complain about using a plural pronoun to refer to a singular person. Fortunately, they’re a dying breed, and I highly doubt there are any on this here forum.
There’s also agender (identifying as no gender), bigender (identifying as both male and female), genderqueer (generally nonspecific non-binary identity), neutrois (similar to agender), demigirl/boy (identifying partially as female/male but not entirely), etc.
358 thoughts on “Extra credit”
Jen Aside
“Uh… how MANY ‘others’…?”
Camachri
The more, the merrier!
Aischylos
The entire cast should have a (whatever number)some
jadedcynic
To be honest, an olde timey ‘Hippie Free Love Commune’ might be something that’d help Danny, Ethan & Amber…and being gradually exposed to the aspect of *LOVE* that people would exhibit could be kinda therapeutic for Joyce (1. Sheltered upbringing and a virgin, 2. assaulted in one of her first close interactions with a potential…’intimate’ {my skin crawls to describe Ryan like this}, 3. in serious conflict about even seeing how others interact socially and sexually.)
Of course, they’d need to travel back in time about fifty years or so (gawd, has it been that long? I’m oooooooold… 🙁 )
Plasma Mongoose
How many are there?
LiaHansen
however many we want
Jen Aside
I built my OWN gender out of BUTTS
Plasma Mongoose
OH NOES You gots the Butts Disease too. 😛
Tunaro
It will not stop spreading until we are all sucked up our collective asses.
Plasma Mongoose
That’s a cheeky answer. (_._)
tyersome
Bummer, all the good bun puns have already been used …
RK
The butt puns will never end! There will always be someone to bring up the rear.
Plasma Mongoose
I rectum so…
tyersome
Well, I guess there are always new asspects to explore …
Rowan Mikaio
I’m sure we’ve got a good arse-nal of puns. How long until we crack?
Psyme
I wonder if I could crack out a good one.
Tualha
These are some of the worst puns in the anals of history.
tyersome
Now that was a great ass crack!
I’d try to come up with another one of my asinine contributions, but if I don’t get some sleep soon I’m going to be too rump-led to go outside tomorrow …
Halloween Jack
Don’t worry–if we all work together, we’ll get to the bottom of this.
tyersome
Good job, you’ve exposed a bootyfull sunken treasure …
uh...
Sphincter
sps48
2.001
Plasma Mongoose
I cannot allow you to have that many Dave err Danny.
bolgverk
nice nagisa avatar
Plasma Mongoose
Kiitti! ^_^
Crazy Dina
… Look for my screw up. There were a ton listed recently.
Aeron
Depends on whether or not you’re asking Robert Heinlein.
Rycan
Two. Honestly, you either have a Y chromosome, or you don’t. Unless, of course, you’re actually a chicken.
Kelly
Biological sex != gender. Not even close sometimes.
Rycan
I was wondering what I was missing.
peasant
Even “biological sex” isn’t so easily defined solely through chromosomes since biology can’t be reduced to genotypes. During sexual differentiation you basically start out with a female base and it differentiates as male in the presence of a Y. Usually. But it happens procedurally, so you kind of have a scale, and there are a ton of pathways which can be broken or stopped on the way so you can land somewhere in the middle between the sexes. Now you can define Y makes a man and no Y makes a woman, but that doesn’t mean it’s biological reality, it’s just a distinction on a chromosomal level which doesn’t necessarily describe what phenotype you have. Intersex individuals can have unclear genetic, anatomic and/or hormonal sex. So in the end, even biological sex depends on our cultural interpretation of the facts. It’s super exciting. vuv I think in Germany intersexuality has legally been recognized two years ago, and people no longer have to give a sex on birth certificates and official papers if they are intersex to prevent surgery on children born with attributes of both sexes among other things. In combination with gender, there sure are a whole lot of options out there, it’s a magical world. ~ @ 0@
Rowan Mikaio
Gender is not determined by chromosomes, even though the two have a very high correlation. For example, Carla.
Rycan
Let’s leave Carla out of this. We know too little of Carla in this universe, and Walkyverse Carla isn’t a human.
neeks
Willis has stated that Carla is still trans, just not “trans-human”. It’s one of the reasons, if not the only reason, she has her own room.
RJ
(pssst… klinefelter syndrome, among other things)
tyersome
Even at the purely biological level gender is not exclusively binary … and with the effects of synthetic hormone mimics and disrupters we’re dumping into the environment and ourselves, this is something that is likely to become more common rather than less.
tyersome
Sorry, about the link fail … intersex …
Rycan
I know about Klinefelter and Turner syndromes. The distinction I made works with those cases. With Klinefelter, there’s still a Y chromosome, so you’re considered male. Vice versa for Turner – no Y chromosome, so you’re considered female.
tyersome
Sorry, but it really doesn’t … chromosomes can undergo translocations that move parts around and there is at least one condition that results in XX individuals with all the ‘traditionally’ male parts … so you could apply that rule to them, but why would you want to?
Rycan
Ah, I stand corrected, then. Got it now.
…Maybe.
tyersome
No problem, I understand the desire to have some order and clarity … and simplification has led to huge progress in science … unfortunately biology is almost? never completely clear cut (and psychology appears to be much fuzzier) …
its quite fascinating really if you read down on that last link it turns out that a subset of the people with that condition don’t even have SRY (the ‘gene for maleness’) …
Rycan
I wouldn’t say simplification leads to progress in science; it just helps me tidy things up in my mind.
Kabo
Speaking more abstractly, sex is a phenomenon on the level of the phenotype (as opposed to the X/Y-chromosomes, which are part of the genotype) and is determined during the development of the embryo. In the typical case, the chromosomes are a causal precursor to sex determination, but like most biological processes this one can be disrupted.
Rorror
Also I’m kinda surprised, nobody seems to have brought up my favourite sex-related phenomenon.
Daisy
The place where there is a binary is assignation, though I believe that’s usually based on genitalia. So you get Designated Female/Male At Birth (DMAB/DFAB). It’s a harmful practice that does generate this false dichotomy. Sex and gender alike are more complex than binaries and a lot of people find them unhelpful concepts. Talking about a transperson’s ‘biological sex’ is weird and implies that, to use a fictional example, Jocelyne is a woman in a man’s body whereas actually it’s her body, so it’s a woman’s body, that was incorrectly designated male at birth.
tyersome
@Rorror: That is amazing …
… I wonder what would happen if all guys were born with that condition … maybe we’d be saner?
Rorror
We’d probably have less gender and sex based problems as society in general, at least. And equal toys for everybody! (We just need to make sure that there aren’t mass gene tests to determine whether a kid gets barbies or matchbox cars.) When everybody grows up together, there should be less prejudices.
As for the saneness: You seem to indicate men are less sane the women. I doubt this. And apart from the phenomena mentioned above, I strongly doubt the inherent insanities of human beings would be reduced by this.
Kabo
Daisy: I do not agree. Biological sex continues to be a valid category in many context. For instnace, if we didn’t have this category, the doctors who performed sex change operations wouldn’t understand what they were doing. We can’t simply deny biology because we dislike its harmful consquences.
Jalathas
That’s… really not even a little true. You can have a concept of what a penis or vagina looks like and how they work without correlating them to a concept of binary biological sex that, as we’ve had many examples of in this very discussion isn’t really in any way accurate. It’s not “denying biology”, it’s changing our understanding of it.
peasant
It’s a valid category because it helps us organize our lives, but biological sex isn’t defined through biology itself, but it’s a cultural interpretation of biological data. I kid you not, there legitimately is no such thing as a globally valid and independent definition of biological sex as dictated purely by biology without humans picking and choosing whether they want to define it on a genetic, an anatomic or a hormonal level (or maybe even something else). It’s not about denying biology. Our biology will always be our biology, but biological sex is subject to change throughout the years. For example, western countries are starting to officially recognize intersex as a third biological sex on birth certificates and passports since not every human can be defined as a man or a woman on a genetic, anatomic or hormonal level. There is no definition of biological sex I have ever seen which can clearly sort every person in the world into male and female, because the idea that only male and female can exist is a human construct, and not some rule set in stone by biology.
Additional sexes like intersex change absolutely nothing on the expertise or procedures of sex change surgeons since what constitutes as male and female primary and secondary organs has never been up for debate. They don’t give a rat’s bum about how we choose to define biological sex, and as mentioned before, anatomy can but doesn’t have to be part of it.
Sarah
There is, off the top of my head, 5
Cisgender – AKA boys who are born boys and girls who are born girls – 2
Transgender – boys who are born girls and girls who are born boys – 4
and Gender Fluid – people who are both boys and girls, it depends on how they feel – 5
I probably missed some, being Cisgender myself, but you get the gist
Disloyal Subject
As I understand it, there’s also:
Androgynous — people who’re neutral or apathetic, & default to their biological sex rather than matching it
For practical purposes, we might fall under cisgender, but it could be argued that we’re a subset of genderfluid. I admit to being pretty ignorant of this field, though.
pumacatrun2
Another prominent one is agender – identifying as no gender.
Leon
There is also an opinion that being a cyborg is a gender: http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/murphy20150128
I do not hold this opinion. I just heard about it the other day.
Rycan
I guess my confusion here is that we’re still using two classifications, although it’s been pointed out that there’s a murky middle as well (basicaly a ‘neither’ category). I thought the concept of being cisgender, transsexual, etc. was that your physiological gender was mismatched with your psychological gender – as opposed to being in a completely different category than males and females.
Ambitious
Pick a number between 0 and 1 (inclusive), multiply it by “male”. Pick a(nother) number (can be the same number if you want) between 0 and 1, multiply it by “female”. Add those together to get a possible gender. So there’s an uncountable infinity of genders.
Standard male and standard female would be (1,0) and (0,1) respectively; “both genders” (1,1), “neither gender” (0,0), and “grey-gendered” (0.5,0.5) are all different things; you can be “very male and kind of female” (1,0.5) or the reverse; you can be “a little more female than male” (0.4,0.6) or “not much of anything, but slightly female” (0,0.1); and as I said, there are infinite possibilities.
And then this doesn’t take into account the interaction with biological sex. Is a (0,1) who was born male different from a (0,1) who was born female? Does it matter if the (0,1) who was born male has had any form of gender reassignment yet? Disloyal Subject’s comment on androgynous people who “default to their biological sex” suggests there’s at least some meaningful thing there, especially since that’s how I’ve often described myself: I have no reason to prefer being male to female, but I have no reason to prefer being female to male either, so I default to the one I was born as. But if you call me a (0.5,0.5) for having no preference, there’s still some difference between me an a similar (0.5,0.5) who was born and defaults to female; and if you say I’m a (0.6,0.4), there’s a difference between me, who is defaulting to biological sex, and an (0.6,0.4) who has an intrinsic, though slight, preference for being male.
Rycan
At what point do we stop talking about gender, and start talking about personality quirks, then? Otherwise, you could get rather carried away with that system. That, and how in hell do you measure somebody to be (0.4,0.1), for instance, and not (0.8,0.2)?
Note that at this point I’ve pretty much conceded my original position in a different debate; I’m just trying to figure out how this particular assertion can even function.
Tualha
Same direction, half the magnitude. Thus, gender is perhaps less important for person A. Note that it can be scaled all the way down to zero, where the agenders live.
Ambitious: the word “vector” is useful mental shorthand for the idea you’re describing.
Joseph
“Gender Vector” would be a great name for a zine about gender and sexuality…
Kabo
I don’t know if your way of arithmetizing this is necessarily very helpful. Personal identity, whether we are speaking of gender identity or something else, is not a magnitude, but your way of representing yourself in relation to the norms and institutions of your society. Society addresses you and asks: who are you? And identity is your way of answering that question. The circumstances in which society demands of you to produce an identity is not always such that free variation along a set of continuous dimensions is a possibility. To take a facile example: when you have to decide whether to use the men’s or the women’s bathroom, the choice is binary, and exclusive.
SgtWadeyWilson
There are ways to make the bathroom choice inclusive, but most of them get you into trouble. Loopholes and hypothetical troublemaking, huzzah!
For example: one might try demolishing the wall that seperates these so-called “rest” rooms, or use their silver tounge to get a very unconventional equality based rebellion to do so, depending on one’s skills. (This is likely close to the least probable method, since it’d be difficult to start, and even more so to finish.)
Don’t try this at home! The average home has unisex bathrooms, which are rarely situated beside each other, so it’d be kinda pointless. Don’t take this as permission to blame me for any bathroom related transgressions either, almost nobody will take “Sergent Wadey Wilson sent me here on a secret mission!” as a valid reason for anything.
Rorror
Depends on what type of person one is. Numerically approaching the genderstuff helped me a bit to understand my own and is easy to explain for many people. Currently I’m thinking about whether the topology of gender (yet to be properly defined) is metrizable. Less easy to explain, more fun and more interesting. Also thinking about: Maybe it’s even a (normed) vector space. And what could a scalar product be there?
Vincent
Me laugh at your petty genders! Me am too awesome to be contained by hu-man rules!
Rycan
That mean narcissists have their own gender?!?
/silly
Deanatay
Sure – you’re only attracted to yourself.
Disloyal Subject
That would be sexual preference, not one’s own gender.
Yotomoe
I have come to a point where I respect people who identify that they’re another gender but also don’t follow that particular set of beliefs. I will always see people as binary who now have the technology to switch between them.
LP
That’s actually not very respectful– if someone is nonbinary and you call them a binary gender, you are misgendering them, and that’s not okay, even if you don’t “follow that set of beliefs.”
mds
Yeah? I’m agender. What do you see me as? or could it be that you need to see my body before you can think up an acceptable gender in place of what I already told you I am?
I personally have been agender for as long as I can remember, in the same way that other people have been boys or girls for as long as they can remember. I don’t switch anything to anything. I just am.
Yotomoe
I’d probably see you as whatever your born with. Unless you were born the ultimate life form I imagine you’re one or the other. Now what you define yourself as is completely different. To me it doesn’t really matter cuz I try to treat people equally. I’ll just accept that that’s what YOU believe and not bring it up. I’m respectful but blunt.
David M Willis
Well, so long as you accept that if you say awful shit like this on my website again, you won’t get to post on it anymore. I’m fucking serious. I don’t care that you think you’re hedging some sort of imaginary middle ground and that by pawning off this “this is what I believe” crap that you’re immune from consequences, because in this subject there is no middle ground. There is not being a turd and being a turd. Don’t be a turd.
Yotomoe
I’m not trying to be awful…I’m sorry if I hurt anyone’s feelings. I want everyone to be happy and feel comfortable in their own bodies and I don’t want anyone to feel bad about that. I guess I phrased my point kind of mean but I think it’s a lot to ban me forever over. But it’s your call, I guess. I’m don’t really understand how these things work. But if I’m being so bad you gotta threaten me then I guess I’ll just have to keep some of my opinions to myself.
Nine Quiet Lessons
Thank you, David. I appreciate what you did here.
tyersome
Wow this got really ugly …
@Yotomoe: no hate from me if that helps, I personally hope you don’t get banned or leave, but again that probably doesn’t mean much. If you want to learn more about why what you were saying was considered offensive there has been a lively discussion elsewhere in today’s (well yesterday’s discussion section) that might be helpful?
Crazy Dina
I really only see you first by your username (Not helpful in this circumstance) then by your gravitar. So right now I see you as a girl, but if you were to change to a male picture, I’d see you as a male. Of course then you get something like “Amazi Stool” and you just become something random depending on whatever pronoun I happen to feel like typing at that moment.
If you wish to correct that behavior, alternate pronouns will be accepted! (And requested.) (Seriously, my pronoun system is insufficient, much like my Vespasian gas. It’s also malfunctional enough to have gotten me into an uncomfortable situation on one of these forums) (PLEEEAAASSEEE GIVE ME A NEW PRONOUN!!!! Between gender roles, nonbianary genders, Amazistool, transgenders, and gender neutral usernames, I’m constantly out of step when trying to talk to people!)
No Name
In English, “they” is slowly (re)gaining ground as a gender neutral pronoun. If your unsure, you can always use “they”. And then listen to all the Victorian grammarians complain about using a plural pronoun to refer to a singular person. Fortunately, they’re a dying breed, and I highly doubt there are any on this here forum.
Crazy Dina
No wonder. (see above for reasons)
dreadedseamonster
There’s also agender (identifying as no gender), bigender (identifying as both male and female), genderqueer (generally nonspecific non-binary identity), neutrois (similar to agender), demigirl/boy (identifying partially as female/male but not entirely), etc.