Transcript: a 4 panel comic by Brooke Valley. A man is holding a sign saying “There’s only 2 genders”, Brooke walks in and says “Hmm?”, "You know, not only is that wrong and harmful… ", “It’s downright boring”.
Here’s a relevant Sartre quote from 1944:
“Never believe that [they] are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The [bigots] have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
It is indeed quite boring, because their methods haven’t changed much at all in almost a hundred years.
The depressing thing, is that it still works and that because so many people don’t understand history, we are likely doomed to repeat it.
Bits are only true or false, qbits are a spectrum.
I like qgender
So my dump uneducated question is: if there are only 2 genders is wrong, what is the right answer? I understand gender as universal social norms. Most socities are structured around male and female (some like india have itersex but i don’t know how much that counts).
I’m well aware who uses this argument and why. It is the wanne be scientific take to say queerness is scientificly wrong and mistakes should be corrected.
It’s an uncountable noun. You are asking a question roughly akin to “How many airs are there?” There’s not an answer because it does not have the quality of countability.
Gender is a social tool that has been used to group people or ourselves into categories based on characteristics related to sex. On some level, it has to be based on appearance because we don’t usually know what genitals somebody has or their medical history.
Just having men and women is a too simple version of the tool. People are complicated and varied and for many reasons sometimes don’t see themselves as belonging to either bucket or prefer other ones altogether.
Sure, but this is just the problem with brouth categories. Society still hasn’t solved that issue. Over all we still only have the outlined ideas of men and women, as unfitting as they might be to some.
Very wrong. Should be there’re.
theren’t would be correct
Removed by mod
Gender != Sex. And there are more than 2 sexes too, because, it turns out, intersex people exist.
Biology is exciting, and interesting, if you bothered to actually learn something about it.
Gender isn’t biology, and human biology is binary either.
Removed by mod
Regardless of what you identify, that is a whole other thing, the human body is quite binary (except from very few anomalies)
“The human body is binary, except when it’s not binary”
a subclass within a grammatical class (such as noun, pronoun, adjective, or verb) of a language that is partly arbitrary but also partly based on distinguishable characteristics (such as shape, social rank, manner of existence, or sex) and that determines agreement with and selection of other words or grammatical forms
Note that the definition says that biology informs, but does not define, gender. In fact, arbitrary is part of the definition. Further, dictionaries give us introductions to words, not a concrete and unchanging lexigraphical mandate
Gender != sex. It’s ok, thinking can be difficult.
gender noun
OPAL WOPAL S
/ˈdʒendə®/
/ˈdʒendər/
> [uncountable, countable] the fact of being male or female, especially when considered with reference to social and cultural differences, rather than differences in biology; members of a particular gender as a grouphttps://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/gender
gender
noun
uk /ˈdʒen.dər/ us /ˈdʒen.dɚ/
gender noun (PEOPLE)
a group of people in a society who share particular qualities or ways of behaving which that society associates with being male, female, or another identityhttps://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/gender
… In this dichotomy, the terms male and female relate only to biological forms (sex), while the terms masculine/masculinity, feminine/femininity, woman/girl, and man/boy relate only to psychological and sociocultural traits (gender). This delineation also tends to be observed in technical and medical contexts, with the term sex referring to biological forms in such phrases as sex hormones, sex organs, and biological sex
You’re thinking of sex (only not even, since intersex people exist), not gender. Gender is socially constructed
It’s not even true for sex. Intersex is a huge spectrum.
![Boring [CW: Transphobia]](https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/pictrs/image/f8e10eeb-053f-4b3b-a499-e75696b764ab.webp){kind=link}