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You bring up an important point with that question, what exactly is an immutable quality of the individual. Is the upbringing, cultural influences etc also immu

by lexs 8y ago

You bring up an important point with that question, what exactly is an immutable quality of the individual. Is the upbringing, cultural influences etc also immutable qualities or are you only talking about actual physical properties such as age, gender, skincolour etc.

IanDrake 8y ago
I would say the latter. People have escaped their upbringing, culture, and socioeconomic position. I’m not saying it’s easy, but it’s not immutable either. But I’ve never seen a woman become a man or a white person become a POC. So that’s pretty immutable. I’ll take examples from either category though.
- smt88 8y ago
  People have sex changes. Since race is a social construct and has no provable scientific reality, lots of people "pass" as other races depending on where/when they are being observed. Mixed-race people have always done this, sometimes by accident and sometimes on purpose.
  - IanDrake 8y ago
    Having a sex change doesn’t turn a man into a woman. There is no basis in science for that. If that were true, I could paint a tennis ball orange and eat it like a fruit. Race is not a “social construct”. If that were true, I wouldn’t be able to blindly tell your race via a dna test. Where does all this anti-science rhetoric come from? I guess global warming and evolution is a myth too?
    - sincerely 8y ago
      "race is a social construct" refers to the fact that the racial categories we place people in as a society do not have a strong relationship to the type of racial information available through biological testing.
      - IanDrake 8y ago
        Words are a social construct...so I’m not sure what your point is? Everything is a social construct then.
        sincerely 8y ago
        >Race is not a “social construct”. If that were true, I wouldn’t be able to blindly tell your race via a dna test. This statement is not true. The racial information which can be determined via a DNA test does not necessarily match up with what that person, or others, would consider their race to be. Saying "words are a social construct so you could mean anything" is not a good faith contribution to discussion.
        IanDrake 8y ago
        It is good faith. Words are a social construct. We as a society have constructed them to categorize the world around us, to describe things and actions. When you say race is a social construct because we may visually ascribe a person wrongly to a race seems pointless in an era of dna tests. The possibility of being factually wrong doesn’t suddenly make something a social construct. If I see bear cub from a distance and then find out it was actually a dog, it doesn’t mean I should shrug and say that a bear and a dog are social constructs, so I wasn’t wrong because these distinctions are fluid based on the social norms of our day. Why you seem to deny that science can blindly determine your ancestral origins (and thus race) with astonishing accuracy is beyond me.
    - VBprogrammer 8y ago
      It is not anti-science to allow people the freedom to determine their own gender. There is a difference between being a man or a woman and being biologically male or female. All it requires is a degree of enlightenment and perhaps empathy.
      - dragonwriter 8y ago
        > There is a difference between being a man or a woman and being biologically male or female. It's true that there is a difference between gender (and gender identity) and biological sex, but biological sex is more complicated than simple binary distinction, too, and done biological sex features correlate with gender identity better than those we have historically mostly relief on to set socially ascribed gender. Perhaps in the future, we can do a better job at first-impression gender assignment as well as avoiding blaming the victim when we get it wrong.
    - dang 8y ago
      Please don't break the HN guidelines by taking threads off on generic ideological rabbit trails. Once you get this far, the resulting flamewars are all the same. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: it looks like you've been breaking the guidelines by using HN primarily for political arguments. That's something we ban accounts for, because it's destructive of what this site exists for (i.e. intellectual curiosity). Can you please stop doing that?
      - IanDrake 8y ago
        Your bias is showing. How is it not political when someone else says a man surgically inverting his penis into his body cavity magically becomes a woman? But when I point out that the man still has the wrong chromosomes to be a woman, it’s somehow political? Who’s arguing ideology and who’s arguing science in this scenario? If that’s your idea of “intellectual curiosity” just ban me now. Please.
        rectang 8y ago
        For what it's worth, I've received constructive criticism from Dan in the past as well (and I thought about it when replying to you when I tried to bring us back to the main subject of bail). Dan's bias is not so easy to discern.
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      > Having a sex change doesn’t turn a man into a woman. Correct. The surgery aligns genitalia with gender identity; social norms have evolved to align ascribed gender with gender identity irrespective of genitalia, so even viewing "man" and "woman" as labels of ascribed gender rather than identity the surgery is largely beside the point.
      - IanDrake 8y ago
        I don’t think these social norms are as settled as you might think. The fallout of these new norms has yet to come, but it is coming. By fallout, I mean women are starting to realize that men identifying as women isn’t in their best interest. Feminist are already split on this issue. In the US, the state of Connecticut has biological boys who identify as girls competing in female sports and blowing them away, displacing biological girls on teams and soon in athletic scholarships. This throws well-intentioned gender based laws into chaos. Title 9 will be challenged as biological men displace biological women in sports at larger scales. The Olympics will be dominated and world records will be shattered by biological men in female gender events. Then there’s the guy in Canada that spent $50 to change his gender to female and saved $1,400 on his auto insurance. This era of self identification will end since sincerity is not an objective truth and can’t be measured. Or, another possibility, all laws attempting to promote equality between sexes and races will be made useless. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

by lexs 8y ago

IanDrake 8y ago

I would say the latter. People have escaped their upbringing, culture, and socioeconomic position. I’m not saying it’s easy, but it’s not immutable either. But I’ve never seen a woman become a man or a white person become a POC. So that’s pretty immutable. I’ll take examples from either category though.

smt88 8y ago
People have sex changes. Since race is a social construct and has no provable scientific reality, lots of people "pass" as other races depending on where/when they are being observed. Mixed-race people have always done this, sometimes by accident and sometimes on purpose.
- IanDrake 8y ago
  Having a sex change doesn’t turn a man into a woman. There is no basis in science for that. If that were true, I could paint a tennis ball orange and eat it like a fruit. Race is not a “social construct”. If that were true, I wouldn’t be able to blindly tell your race via a dna test. Where does all this anti-science rhetoric come from? I guess global warming and evolution is a myth too?
  - sincerely 8y ago
    "race is a social construct" refers to the fact that the racial categories we place people in as a society do not have a strong relationship to the type of racial information available through biological testing.
    - IanDrake 8y ago
      Words are a social construct...so I’m not sure what your point is? Everything is a social construct then.
      - sincerely 8y ago
        >Race is not a “social construct”. If that were true, I wouldn’t be able to blindly tell your race via a dna test. This statement is not true. The racial information which can be determined via a DNA test does not necessarily match up with what that person, or others, would consider their race to be. Saying "words are a social construct so you could mean anything" is not a good faith contribution to discussion.
        IanDrake 8y ago
        It is good faith. Words are a social construct. We as a society have constructed them to categorize the world around us, to describe things and actions. When you say race is a social construct because we may visually ascribe a person wrongly to a race seems pointless in an era of dna tests. The possibility of being factually wrong doesn’t suddenly make something a social construct. If I see bear cub from a distance and then find out it was actually a dog, it doesn’t mean I should shrug and say that a bear and a dog are social constructs, so I wasn’t wrong because these distinctions are fluid based on the social norms of our day. Why you seem to deny that science can blindly determine your ancestral origins (and thus race) with astonishing accuracy is beyond me.
  - VBprogrammer 8y ago
    It is not anti-science to allow people the freedom to determine their own gender. There is a difference between being a man or a woman and being biologically male or female. All it requires is a degree of enlightenment and perhaps empathy.
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      > There is a difference between being a man or a woman and being biologically male or female. It's true that there is a difference between gender (and gender identity) and biological sex, but biological sex is more complicated than simple binary distinction, too, and done biological sex features correlate with gender identity better than those we have historically mostly relief on to set socially ascribed gender. Perhaps in the future, we can do a better job at first-impression gender assignment as well as avoiding blaming the victim when we get it wrong.
  - dang 8y ago
    Please don't break the HN guidelines by taking threads off on generic ideological rabbit trails. Once you get this far, the resulting flamewars are all the same. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: it looks like you've been breaking the guidelines by using HN primarily for political arguments. That's something we ban accounts for, because it's destructive of what this site exists for (i.e. intellectual curiosity). Can you please stop doing that?
    - IanDrake 8y ago
      Your bias is showing. How is it not political when someone else says a man surgically inverting his penis into his body cavity magically becomes a woman? But when I point out that the man still has the wrong chromosomes to be a woman, it’s somehow political? Who’s arguing ideology and who’s arguing science in this scenario? If that’s your idea of “intellectual curiosity” just ban me now. Please.
      - rectang 8y ago
        For what it's worth, I've received constructive criticism from Dan in the past as well (and I thought about it when replying to you when I tried to bring us back to the main subject of bail). Dan's bias is not so easy to discern.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > Having a sex change doesn’t turn a man into a woman. Correct. The surgery aligns genitalia with gender identity; social norms have evolved to align ascribed gender with gender identity irrespective of genitalia, so even viewing "man" and "woman" as labels of ascribed gender rather than identity the surgery is largely beside the point.
    - IanDrake 8y ago
      I don’t think these social norms are as settled as you might think. The fallout of these new norms has yet to come, but it is coming. By fallout, I mean women are starting to realize that men identifying as women isn’t in their best interest. Feminist are already split on this issue. In the US, the state of Connecticut has biological boys who identify as girls competing in female sports and blowing them away, displacing biological girls on teams and soon in athletic scholarships. This throws well-intentioned gender based laws into chaos. Title 9 will be challenged as biological men displace biological women in sports at larger scales. The Olympics will be dominated and world records will be shattered by biological men in female gender events. Then there’s the guy in Canada that spent $50 to change his gender to female and saved $1,400 on his auto insurance. This era of self identification will end since sincerity is not an objective truth and can’t be measured. Or, another possibility, all laws attempting to promote equality between sexes and races will be made useless. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.