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Article summary: "I care about gay rights because I'm gay, but I don't care about trans rights because I'm not trans." The author would probably take issue wit

Article summary: "I care about gay rights because I'm gay, but I don't care about trans rights because I'm not trans." The author would probably take issue with people assuming that his spouse is female. He wouldn't entertain for a second that it creates a burdon on other people to not assume he is straight as if such a thing is upending society's established paradigms of gender and sexuality. So why do we accuse trans people of being such a burden on us when they simply want to be considered by their self-identified gender?

yucky 4y ago
I think the issue is most people can understand what gay means, because it's a clearly defined thing. You don't even have to accept it "morally" to know that a man who likes men is gay. Gender identity is intentionally murky & vague. For instance, how many genders are there? How does one transition to/from genders that aren't male/female? I can't even find a coherent and consistent definition of genders. So at this point, it sounds like the new definition of gender is just...personality? So for most people there is nothing else to do than recognize it as such, and dismiss it as mostly nonsense.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  Gender expression is naturally fuzzy and murky, there's nothing strange about that. The problems start when people create an overlapping notion of "gender identity" aiming to try and put some bright lines on the inherent fuzziness of gender expression, only to confuse the matter even further. Now we're left with completely redundant descriptions like "genderfluid gender identity" which is both confusing and practically indistinguishable from what we used to more sensibly think of as expression.
  - mynameisnoone 4y ago
- leephillips 4y ago
  Exactly. I understand some meanings of the word gender: the grammatical meaning, and the concept of “gender role”, which is a set of expectations of society. But there are people now speaking of gender as some kind of innate quality, such that a person can be born in the wrong body, or something. Sometimes the only way to begin to make sense of their descriptions is to suppose they’re talking about an immaterial soul with its own sex. It seems to be all gibberish. But there also seems to be a political movement that behaves as though this gibberish contains meaning.

yucky 4y ago

I think the issue is most people can understand what gay means, because it's a clearly defined thing. You don't even have to accept it "morally" to know that a man who likes men is gay. Gender identity is intentionally murky & vague. For instance, how many genders are there? How does one transition to/from genders that aren't male/female? I can't even find a coherent and consistent definition of genders. So at this point, it sounds like the new definition of gender is just...personality? So for most people there is nothing else to do than recognize it as such, and dismiss it as mostly nonsense.

zozbot234 4y ago
Gender expression is naturally fuzzy and murky, there's nothing strange about that. The problems start when people create an overlapping notion of "gender identity" aiming to try and put some bright lines on the inherent fuzziness of gender expression, only to confuse the matter even further. Now we're left with completely redundant descriptions like "genderfluid gender identity" which is both confusing and practically indistinguishable from what we used to more sensibly think of as expression.
- mynameisnoone 4y ago
leephillips 4y ago
Exactly. I understand some meanings of the word gender: the grammatical meaning, and the concept of “gender role”, which is a set of expectations of society. But there are people now speaking of gender as some kind of innate quality, such that a person can be born in the wrong body, or something. Sometimes the only way to begin to make sense of their descriptions is to suppose they’re talking about an immaterial soul with its own sex. It seems to be all gibberish. But there also seems to be a political movement that behaves as though this gibberish contains meaning.