gender fuck or gender fucked (the politics of trans)

I think I'm only prejudiced in that the reason that I first entertained this theory of mine is because I was thinking about sexual norms. I have a theory and no answer; so I'm not gonna proclaim that gender and sexual orientation are NOT mutually exclusive. But I will lean towards NOT mutually exclusive because i feel like it

wouldn't you say that a 100% androgynous person is more male if they are attracted to females?

I would think a 100% androgynous person would be post-sexual.

someday I will finish reading The Cyborg Manifesto

....and any miniscule correlation would mean that you can't be 100% androgynous (or "genderqueer" or whatever) and be only attracted to one sex. you'd have to be 99.9% androgynous or less. to be 100% you would have to be bi-sexual

― we gotta move these refrigerators (CaptainLorax), Wednesday, June 13, 2012 9:55 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you don't know how statistics work do you

anyway, the late great moonship is otm, pretending that socially-constructed "understandings" of gender/sexuality are in fact v precise analytical tools needed to pathologize actual people is...not productive.

lorax doesn't know how anything fucking works, i am mystified that people are still engaging with this creepoid halfwit

i'm amazed that you get creeped out and testy this easily

i wouldn't want to be the guy who puts the extra scoop of sugar in your tea

http://www.kfs.org/~jonathan/witt/t7en.html

OK, you've just lit my touchpaper, opened my bullpen, yanked my bellrope.

whatever you wanna call it, I'm off

xpost

lorax i meant mutable in that a person can change their gender and sexual identification over time ... which i suppose you would answer with something like "we just don't have the SCIENCE to predict that a person will be born 73% gay, and therefore come out at 27% into their lifespan and be attracted to women 7 percent of the time"

to which i would reply that you seem to have equally strongly deterministic views of both science and human behavior

http://freethoughtblogs.com/nataliereed/2012/02/05/i-am-the-lorax-i-speak-for-the-gender-binary/

Weird ideas about trans people?

Staggering assumptions about bisexuality based on personal bias?

Lorax is Julie Bindel and I claim my £5.

i wonder if whisky explains bindel as well

it was quite dispiriting reading this actually, i know it's just drunklorax but you encounter that mode of pig-headed "I HAF AN IDEA ABOUT TRANS PEOPLE AND IT MUST BE RIGHT AND IF IT ISN'T I DON'T WANT TO KNOW" argument so often

oh my god i've only now seen bindel's latest gem

WCC have you seen it? it is kind of...beyond

Yeah that Bindel piece isn't so much beyond as backwards.

It's a particular piece of rad-fem ephemera from the 80s which was v v au current when I was adolescent and getting a sexuality and did me, personally, a lot of damage so it was just v v dispiriting to see it revived again. But since the evo psych crew are reviving antique notions towards gender roles I guess it's a thing. :-(

Thread is just, you know - straight White Cis dude demands "Science!" but wants science to look like the assumptions of SWCD's rather than the lived and stated experience of others.

I mean on a purely observational / anecdotal level it is oft noted that the percentage of trans, gender neutral, genderqueer people is actually much higher in the *asexual* community than in the general population but it's really hard to establish any kind of causation or even proper correlation on that one. But that is at least something based on talking to people and conducting informal headcounts, not drunken theorisation. It might just be easier for trans or genderqueer ppl to talk about or openly identify as such because they're already outside hetereonormativity and those questions get easier to ask outside that straitjacket.

i was hoping this would be one of those nice revives and it would be about the portrait of the chevalier d'eon the national portrait gallery just discovered

http://www.philipmould.com/admin/resources/1338997149stewartchevalierdeon2735inframe.jpg

Who says my idea only applies to trans people? Gender and sexual oriention covers just about everyone. Most of you are unable to interpret everything that I say and it's largely my fault for not dropping knowledge as fluently as wikipedia.

What I was saying last night was merely a theory that I found interesting. And I never said that a direct relationship between gender and sexual orientation would renforce heterosexuality or homosexuality (plus I never concluded that such a relationship even exists). Furthermore, both hetero and homo can be supported at the same time in a direct relationship. Imagine a cloud of data points that do not suggest a straight line. They could be parabolic, hyperparabolic... or two seperate lines or zig zags even.

If you don't get the idea of things I try to explain then by all means keep on complaining about something that you think I'm suggesting. But don't blame me for your interpretations. If you need to blame me for something, and it appears that some of you might, try blaming me for not explaining things very coherently instead of jumping to conclusions about what you think I'm saying.

thomp that looks like tim brooke taylor.

Lorax, stamping feet: it's not fair! You guys dismiss my ideas because you have miscast me as an idiot!!!

ILX: correlation / causation. We have dismissed you as an idiot *because* your ideas are garbage.

The same data cloud example I just used is exactly why I was wrong about a 100% androgynous person having to be 100% bisexual given a direct relationship exists between G and SO. I started last night posing that line of thought as a question. I take fault in answering that question later in the night when I was taking up an antagnostic viewpoint - mostly for the sake of argument. Anyways, I'm at work right now, I'm going to put down my blackberry for a few hours.

Xp

You win. My thoughts are garbage and the idea of a direct relationship between gender and sexual orientation is uninteresting and therefore not worth sharing

But why are you posting to this thread if I've started such an uninteresting discussion

straight White Cis dude demands "Science!" but wants science to look like the assumptions of SWCD's

Very otm-y.

Lorax, if your ideas weren't meant to be understood as referring to trans people, maybe you could have tried posting them in a different thread. Say, one that didn't explicitly refer to the politics of trans in its title.

trayce: Charles-Geneviève-Louis-Auguste-André-Timothée d'Éon de Beaumont (5 October 1728 Tonnerre – 21 May 1810 London), usually known as the Chevalier d'Éon, was a French diplomat, spy, soldier and Freemason whose first 49 years were spent as a man, and whose last 33 years were spent as a woman. Upon death, a council of physicians discovered that d'Éon's body was anatomically male.

the eighteenth century was best at names.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jun/08/five-trans-role-models

i also did not know the legendary interplay designer/programmer 'burger' was trans

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/134614/the_burger_speaks_an_interview_.php?print=1

I've been holding off on this question for awhile, but I have to know. How'd you get to be called "Burger"?

RH: Remember when I told you I was flat broke? When we founded Interplay, we didn't pay ourselves much. We were starving. When I was at Boone Corporation, I was being paid twelve thousand a year. Slave wages. I was a kid; I didn't know any better. My entire life was get up, go to work, work until I'm too tired, sleep, repeat. Didn't have time for cooking, and I didn't have any money.

There was a place called Hamburger Stand. They sold 29 cent hamburgers. Since I spent most of my time at the office, I didn't want to walk over, buy a burger, and walk back.

So I'd buy a bag of twenty of them. Blow six bucks, get twenty burgers, go to my office, and put them in a drawer. I was too cheap to buy a refrigerator -- well, really too broke. Every so often I'd open the drawer and eat a burger.

I had an office mate who was a health food nut, constantly complaining about how I should eat right, exercise like he did. One day I was working all through the night. I didn't leave. It's the morning, and he comes in, sits across from me. I'm still working.

Around 3 p.m., I'm done. Burger time! I pull open the drawer, reach in, put the bag down, grab a burger, and start munching. Wasn't thinking anything about it. That's when my co-worker looks at me, looks back, looks at me -- and it dawns on him that the bag has been there for who knows how long. Those burgers are pretty firm.

He just loses it. He jumps up, his chair goes flying, he goes, "That burger is insane! That burger is insane!" He runs out. I'm sitting there like, "What's with him? Whatever." Then later Brian Fargo comes in and asks what I did to him. I didn't do anything. What's going on? My co-worker had gone to the restroom and tossed his cookies. That's how disgusted he was.

So then, the rumor started. "Did you eat any burgers lately?" So they started calling me Burger. I played along. "Okay, I'll get a burger. I'll eat a burger." Later on, unbeknownst to anybody, I had an issue with the name I was given at birth. So I would rather be called Burger than by that birth name. "Just call me burger." For the next twenty years, that was my name. Everybody called me Burger. Now my name is Becky. I finally shed the name Burger.

haha this revive is so hilarious and infuriating. surely all we need is conspiracy theorist methodology to investigate gender and sexuality! good work lorax.

In 1967 the CIA issued a memorandum calling for mainstream media sources to begin countering "conspiracy theorists". In the 45 years before this memo, the phrase "conspiracy theory" appeared in the Washington Post and New York Times only 50 times, or about once per year. In the 45 years after the CIA memo, the phrase appeared 2,630 times, or about once per week. The phrase "conspiracy theorist" wasn't used by these publication prior to the memo. After the memo came out these two newspapers have used that phrase 1,118 times. Of course, in these uses the phrase is always delivered in a context in which "conspiracy theorists" were made to seem less inteligent and less rational than people who uncritically accept official explanations for major events.

In many cases, W. Bush and his colleagues used the phrase conspiracy theory in attempts to deter questioning about their activities, activities that he was guilty of. Like flashing subliminal messages in his campaign advertisements. Or when his former company was linked to fraudulent Bank of Credit and Commerce International through several investors. After 9/11 Bush said in a televised speech "let us not tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September the 11th". It worked. The leaders of the 9/11 Commission, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, said "we were set up to fail". Hamilton went on to say that the Commission faced too many questions, too little funding, and too little time.

Elmo, case in point, you are no better than awful politicians and deceptive media giants when you mean to belittle me with your conspiracy theory comment.

aaahahahahahaha

case in point, indeed.

so you're saying transppl did 9/11?

"Everybody called me Burger. Now my name is Becky. I finally shed the name Burger."
I hope this was said with a tinge of regret rather than relief, because Burger is an awesome name.

I first read that as "I finally sheed" (lost seussian word for becoming a female)

that burger story is disgusting

i feel like it must be fake. who the hell would put a piece of beef in a drawer and then come back and eat it tomorrow? i'm surprised they didn't die of e coli after the first week.

lorax i think what is offensive to many people is that you would reduce something so personal, complex and culturally overdetermined as sexual preference or gender orientation to cod-quantitative "data points"

I've never seen a fast food hamburger that wasn't rock hard and inedible after ~12 hours.

like your data points are not some bullshit survey like "rank your job satisfaction 1-5"

this is something that's been actively used to pathologize, oppress and marginalize groups of people even up to the present day

what's next, you're going to start an interesting "what if?" theoretical thread on physiognomy?

it's kind of weird that "burger" was the gender neutral pit stop, since the only burger role model around is mayor mccheese who definitely presents as male.

furburger

Have you ever seen a gendered burger?

lorax: it seems reasonable to ask whether biological gender, experiential gender and sexual orientation are related, and if so how; and beyond all that, how we might begin to answer or even examine such questions in the first place.

otoh, it's less than reasonable to simply assert an opinion without apparent theoretical or factual support while suggesting that those who believe otherwise lack adequate scientific support for their position. and once you've admitted that you failed to explain yourself coherently, you won't earn much sympathy complaining about the fact that you've been misinterpreted.

either get your posting together, or drop it.

The thing is, there have been academic attempts to quantify this kind of human experience as data, as far back as Masters and Johnson - The Kinsey Scale, the Klein Sexual Orientation Grid and there have even been attempts to map that onto different concepts of gender (and there's also been a whole history of this kind of thing being problematic for many reasons.)

The problem is not trying to take a scientific or even quantitative approach to human sexuality and gender - the problem is acting like a drunken fool on a messageboard without having even done the most basic of research.

Have you ever thought out loud some random theory? I do it all the time. You gotta start somewhere. Imagine a bunch of stoners in a circle sharing some crazy ideas. Then some nerd comes in and is like "you should shut your mouth because you haven't done any research". Is that fair? Is ILX a place where people can openly discuss ideas that pop into their head or should that idea be TSAed every which way before it can be uttered? Why say anything at all? Google would be a lot more informative than a bunch of strangers. I didn't come here posting questions in attempt at finding a universal answer. I came here to discuss the idea in itself. And no, I wasn't looking for a one-sided discussion.

XP to Contenderizer

"otoh, it's less than reasonable to simply assert an opinion without apparent theoretical or factual support while suggesting that those who believe otherwise lack adequate scientific support for their position."

And that is exactly what I thought when I got the answer to my question: "No, they are mutually exclusive" - a belief without apparent theoretical or factual support. At that point I took the opposite stance in hopes of opening the discussion.

The jig is up contenderiser. People share their editorial comments all the time. If they had to be labeled, opinions like the ones discussed last night might be described as a hunch or a belief. I'm not going to crucify someone for their beliefs or hunches, but I do like to discuss them sometimes.

"...and once you've admitted that you failed to explain yourself coherently, you won't earn much sympathy complaining about the fact that you've been misinterpreted."

I'm sorry that you thought I was complaining or looking for sympathy on that matter. What you call complaining, I call 'vocally' accepting that I'm incoherrent and wrong at times so as to better clarify myself.

"either get your posting together, or drop it"

I'm on the level. I'm sorry if you are upset because you think otherwise.

XP to Late the Great

"lorax i think what is offensive to many people is that you would reduce something so personal, complex and culturally overdetermined as sexual preference or gender orientation to cod-quantitative 'data points'"

Yes I need to remember that this isn't a group of stoners or data miners but a group of strangers. Also, if I was more coherrent innitially then maybe the open discussion would have taken us to better places.

If it's not too late I would like to give a shout-out to all my adrogynous home fryz on the east coast being all sexy with your pixie hairdos making me feel ill. Ah fuck it. It's too late

Imagine a bunch of stoners in a circle sharing some crazy ideas. Then some nerd comes in and is like "you should shut your mouth because you haven't done any research". Is that fair?

Yes.

It would also be fair to ditch debbie downer