8 ms·

I want to see a study like this on nonbinary and agender people.

• deleted 11y ago
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  • drdeca 11y ago
    I'm not sure how that would be accomplished. (That is, I'm not sure how you would control for that) Nor am I 100% on what you mean by "safe-space exposure", though I think I get the gist. edit: Also, I figure running such a study would probably be harder due to the smaller number of people in question?
  • tosseraccount 11y ago
    Nonbinary? Safe exposure? What are you people talking about?
    • mkrfox 11y ago
      I wrote a little thing to explain nonbinary: http://blog.mkronline.com/2015/11/nonbinary-gender-explained.html http://blog.mkronline.com/2015/11/nonbinary-gender-explained... As for safe spaces, it's to address the reality that minority voices tend to go silent when they don't feel safe. Some people in colleges and in political media have a twisted view of this concept, and it's got a lot of people angry.
      • tosseraccount 11y ago
        "Gender and sex made a cute couple, but it’s time to move on." oooh kay.
        • dang 11y ago
          You've been posting many comments that break the HN guidelines. We ban accounts that do that, so please don't do that. That means dropping the snarky swipes and posting civilly and substantively, or not at all. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
          • tosseraccount 11y ago
            Are you the super moderator that mass votes down stuff you don't agree with? I think you're not being a fair umpire. I'm fairly civil when it comes to discussion. I'll engage and cite science. I come back and cite my objections if there's a serious discussion. Seriously, I think you're way out of bounds. Not everyone buys into the "narrative". We should be allowed to speak. You'll note well that often a snark will lead to serious discussions. Don't dismiss it out of hand. IF you do, slap both sides. Plenty of cheap shots from other side that go unpunished.
    • drdeca 11y ago
      There exists a belief of a concept of 'gender' outside of a person's 'sex', which relates to how a person 'identifies'. (I think this might be about how a person 'experiences being themself', but I am not sure. I think the same term 'how they experience being themself' could also relate to the idea of 'otherkin', but again, I am not sure.). In some cases, a person's 'gender' will be neither 'male' nor 'female', in which case it is termed 'non-binary' (or, 'outside of the gender binary') (I am not entirely sure that this is sufficient for a person's 'gender' to be termed 'non-binary', as some genders are like 'demimale' or w/e, and I'm not sure if these are classified as 'non-binary' or not.). The term used was 'safe-spaces' and 'exposure to safe-spaces', not 'safe exposure'. 'safe spaces', to my understanding, refers to a area/location/space where people who have certain common beliefs (or experiences?) gather to be (temporarily) away from those who might have negative views of those ideas or of people who have had those experiences or something else like that. I think part of it might be like, defending one's viewpoint against the same criticisms (by different people) repeatedly can be tiring and stressful, when one is trying to discuss things related to that viewpoint, not the viewpoint itself. So the 'safe-spaces' are a place where a certain group can discuss things relevant to that group without being accused or insulted for it? Something like that. I suspect that http://existentialcomics.com/comic/93 http://existentialcomics.com/comic/93 is a reasonable representation of some form of the idea? I suspect that you arent really expressing confusion but are making a point, but I figured that I would give my incomplete understanding of the terms in question, in case I am wrong about that.
      • thelastguy 11y ago
        Basically, the theory is that somebody like Bruce Jenner, actually has the mind of a woman, but born inside the body of a man. More specifically, the theory is that, a normal man has a male mind inside a male body. A normal woman has a female mind inside a female body. But, somebody like Bruce Jenner, has a female mind inside a male body. The other cases are a male mind inside a female body, and a neutral mind inside a male or female body (aka, agender). This has huge implications. It means that your mind and body are two separate entities, biologically, and not a single entity. They work together most of the times, but at times, your body will fight your mind, as drug addicts will tell you. The mind wants to be clean, but the body craves the effects of the drugs, the body fights the mind, and eventually, the mind lose, and the body compels you to take the drug. This also implies that gender is not a social construct, but rather gender is biological. If your mind was born female into a male body, no matter what society teaches you, you will always know that you're female. Deep in yourself, you'll always identified as female, even though your body is male.
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    • PlotlyThrowaway 11y ago
      Great point. To be very clear, I am in no way affiliated with them. This throwaway was created to ask about a tool that was recently open sourced. To be fair to those awesome folks, I have deleted and will abandon and nuke this account from orbit (id est: remove pw from my list)
  • mkrfox 11y ago
    Nonbinary/agender people existed long before this goofiness on college campuses and in the clickbait farms of political media, and they'll still exist once both pass into history.
    • tomp 11y ago
      I doubt that. Gender as a concept was invented in the 20th century (by feminists, AFAIK), so by definition nonbinary/agender people couldn't exist before that.
  • Avshalom 11y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex#Population_figures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex#Population_figures To save you 5 seconds, around 3 million Americans.
    • nv-vn 11y ago
      Intersex does not necessarily mean agender/nonbinary. Intersex refers to the genetic sex of the person (i.e. like male or female), whereas nonbinary and agender refer to gender identification (like man or woman). An intersex person can identify as a man or a woman even though they're not technically male or female.
      • Avshalom 11y ago
        True enough, though I didn't really feel like someone making a snarky comment about safe spaces was going to give a shit about the gender/sex distinction so, given that if the study is credible it's probably about sex rather than gender, I went with that.
        • nv-vn 11y ago
          Yeah, although I think that a lot of people misjudged the original article because it used "gender" and "sex" interchangeably, as well as "man"/"woman" and "male"/"female" a lot.
    • jdjdhnxn 11y ago
      That's not a fact. It's a claim by the "Intersex Society of North America". "The Intersex Society of North America suggested that 1 percent of live births exhibit some degree of sexual ambiguity.[115]"
      • Avshalom 11y ago
        On the other hand two sentences later: "According to Blackless, Fausto-Sterling et al., on the other hand, 1.7 percent of human births are intersex.[116][31]" And if you follow those links the abstract actually says "as high as 2% of live births".
• omginternets 11y ago
  Gender theory is by-and-large a sociological theory, not a scientific one. It's extraordinarily difficult -- from an epistemological point of view -- to produce strong evidence for the claim that gender is orthogonal to sex. What this means, in practice, is that the selection criteria will be vague, which in turn is likely to produce massively varying results from study to study. I see why you're interested in this, but I think you're basing your hypotheses on a false premise: namely that gender theory is hard science.
  • mkrfox 11y ago
    I didn't state any hypotheses or claim gender is easily tackled by science. I expressed an interest.
    • omginternets 11y ago
      Well please excuse me for assuming your interest was based on some form hypothesis, stated or otherwise. What exactly are you looking for?
      • mkrfox 11y ago
        I expressed an interest. That's all. No judgement, claims, or assertions. I picked no nits and made no points. I value scientific exploration for its own sake. I don't need an agenda to wonder what we'd find. I look at the stars for the same reason.
        • omginternets 11y ago
          I think you misunderstand me (and I do apologize if my previous comment came off as disrespectful -- I've edited it to be a bit nicer). You're expressing interest in a potential study, which is nice, but my point is that the study you're proposing is infeasible because it hinges on a non-scientific concept. When I say that it's epistemologically difficult to find evidence for gender/sex orthogonality, I don't mean that it's a difficult study. I mean that it's difficult (if not impossible) to empirically observe gender (in the sense of "gender theory"), thus precluding any meaningful study from taking place. In other words: we could do the measurements you're propose, but then we have no way of knowing what it is we're actually measuring. Gender, as defined by gender theory, is inscrutable. So again, what are you interested in discovering? What do you see as the possible outcomes of your proposed study and what conclusions would you draw from those results? Maybe there's a better way of answering those questions, and maybe these questions are better suited for a different academic field (e.g. sociology).
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