gender fuck or gender fucked (the politics of trans)

x-post to emil.y: yes, I agree. sorry for unnecessarily pissing people off further.

well tbf i don't know if what lorax was doing really merits hyperbolic expressions of hostility

just checking, crut: the guy who revived this thread with offensive bullshit is the one deserving of sympathy, and the people he offended are the aggressors? wow, go fuck yourself.

pity ≠ sympathy, imo

that's not what I meant, exactly. I was offended by what Lorax said.

also I don't think lorax was being aggressive so much as oafish.

i sometimes wish ILX were a bit more open to divergent positions where potentially controversial subjects are concerned, rather than tending to seeing disagreement as grandstanding challops at best, trolling, bigotry and/or idiocy at worst. otoh, i do not wish ILX were more welcoming of trolls, bigots and idiots, so maybe the present balance is the best of all possible worlds.

I'm sorry I can tolerate ignorance and obstinance instead of just shouting people down and expecting them to immediately understand & accept my arguments at face value. I don't think stupid people should fuck off and die.

i mean good for you but imo when a person opens up a conversation with an offensive stance on a sensitive issue, clearly without having done something as simple as a google search on the subject, and then discussing the subject as stoners might apparently discuss the possibility of DRAGONS STILL BEING OUT THERE MAN, you can't really hold it against anyone else for not tolerating it

I'll miss ILX. I just don't want to be the butt anymore

― we gotta move these refrigerators (CaptainLorax), Friday, June 15, 2012 6:39 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what percent gay are you if you're the butt

thing is i thought i was pretty nice about it in the first place? i was giving concrete answers because the questions he was asking HAD concrete answers that didn't need any further scienceing, but i wasn't trying to be an ass about it because i don't expect others to know much about transgender things. i don't think i was victimizing him. do i have to start using emoticons.

sorry guys, i think expecting people to patiently & politely suffer personally insulting opinions for the sake of fairness and open discussion is some serious backwards paternalistic bullshit.

there wouldn't have been a pile-on if lorax had left it as his original o_0 drunk ramblings, it happened because when people civilly corrected him he was like YOU ARE NOT LETTING ME EXPLAIN MY IMPORTANT THEORY ABOUT TRANS PEOPLE TO YOU which is a bullshit stance to take that totally deserves to be shouted down in the most obnoxious and insulting terms possible

great thread

if there's a discussion about sexuality and someone's first utterance contains percentages, unless they're reading some polling data it's just like, where do you even begin

did everyone just completely miss where Lorax hinted ominously of GAY ACTIVISTS or what?

fwiw i don't see how lorax's treatment here is any different from how he's always been treated. the guy made his bones here on some aspie/alex jones shit!

xp yes i guess i did! i read in a hurry. was mostly looking for the estela zing tbh.

i guess people just think we're being to hard on poor lorax because he's some sort of harmless bumbling buffoon who poses no real intellectual threat?

hint: he's not harmless.

if someone is 100% androgynous, ie. 50% male and 50% female, the greyest grey, then would they also be 100% bisexual?

you might say that sexual orientation and gender are two totally different things, and rightly so for the most part, but wouldn't you say that a 100% androgynous person is more male if they are attracted to females? or am I just prejudiced from heterosexuality being the sexual orientation norm?

these numbers have absolutely no relationship to anything real. what would "100% bisexual" even mean? someone who makes sure to have exact gender balance in all sexual experiences? it's all nonsense. this is just a math word problem in somebody's head. might as well be two trains leaving cleveland at the same time.

the only way lorax can be "defended" is along these lines, imo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurodiversity

change title to "itt a butt"

the only way lorax can be "defended" is along these lines, imo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurodiversity

honestly that's the perspective I was coming from

ok but accepting neurodiversity is not a free pass for people to act however they want nor does it forbid telling someone "hey this thing you are doing is not socially acceptable in this setting"

well yeah

"hey this thing you are doing is not socially acceptable in this setting" != "fuck off and die," which again is the post I'm referring to here

sorry guys, i think expecting people to patiently & politely suffer personally insulting opinions for the sake of fairness and open discussion is some serious backwards paternalistic bullshit.

eh, hardline conservatives would say something very similar about ideas they despise, though they'd likely choose different adjectives. a preference for tolerance and constructive engagement over flamewars is not necessarily "backwards paternalistic bullshit".

xp well you're making an awful big deal of one post

well, I'm also trying to explain myself to the people who told me I can go fuck off and die for "defending" lorax.

I was wondering what happened that made this thread blow up, should have guessed it got Loraxed

100%

lol

twice-loraxed if you count my posts tbh

btw, for all that I'm usually the king of "stop comparing -isms, this isn't a competition" posts, the comments upthread about this whole argument being shut down even more brutally had it been about race are OTM

nothing Lorax said itt made any sense and was offensive in a non-hilarious way (though I admit I did laugh at "oh I don't care about that, I'm going to stick with my theory because I'm brilliant" for I hope obvious reasons) so I don't really know why it's worth getting bothered or upset by FOAD reactions

"a preference for tolerance and constructive engagement over flamewars is not necessarily 'backwards paternalistic bullshit.'"

please, condescenderizer, tell me more about how my reacting to bigoted ideas is harmful & disruptive, tell me what exactly my place is in this discussion

to express a preference is not to denigrate other preferences. your place in this discussion is up to you.

anyway, I'm sorry y'all.

i don't expect everybody to understand exactly WHY this is so offensive to me and WHY this makes me so angry but it is and it does

crut, i don't really want you to die :(

I know <3

it's offensive because it's like talking about IQ. the only use for putting multifaceted things like "sexuality" or "intelligence" on a scale does is enforcing hegemony.

delete "does"

Is the Kinsey scale offensive?

it's pretty reductive I guess?

i don't know if the kinsey scale is offensive but i have also not really been able to discern a use for the kinsey scale.

i think kinsey's big accomplishment was helping people realize that homosexual attraction was much more common than anybody realized.

the history of the stanford-binet test developed by terman etc is deeply offensive

"the intelligence of the average negro is vastly inferior to that of the average white man. ... The intelligence of the American Indian has also been over-rated, for mental tests indicate that it is not greatly superior to that of the average negro. Our Mexican population, which is largely of Indian extraction, makes little if any better showing."

terman measured his own IQ as 180 btw

make no mistake, the people who developed the idea of IQ did so primarily in order to create a metric for choosing which non-whites and lower-class whites would be forcibly sterilized

i think an understanding of the history of "quantitative psychology" is enough to make anybody deeply suspicious of what lorax is talking about

imo this sort of bell-curve type thinking should be verboten for any decent person, even as a lazy intellectual exercise

similarly things like "racial percentage"

But like, there are people with different internal, personal levels of bisexual attraction, right?

"bisexual attraction"

the problem is that this is actually multifaceted thing that you cannot reduce to a level or scale.

what if i'm bisexually attracted to black men and white women, vs someone who is bisexually only attracted to men with bitten fingernails and white women. which one of us is more bisexual?

the one in a band

I'm sorry, please ignore that

tbh i don't know much about sexuality so maybe i'll switch to something called "mathematical intelligence" which i know an awful lot about

so what's mathematical intelligence? are there people that are "better" at math than other people? sure, at least i think. but think about all the different ways you can be good at math ...

- being able to do quick arithmetic in your head (a learned skill)
- manipulating symbols correctly (a learned skill)
- persevering when doing math (an affective trait having to do w/ confidence)
- reasoning abstractly
- reasoning quantitatively
- constructing logical arguments
- understanding logical arguments
- reducing complex things to simple models
- using tools like calculators and spreadsheets
- finding patterns
- being able to understand spatial (2d, 3d, etc) transformations in your head

all of these are legitimate ways to do math, and none of them is necessarily linked to any of the others. and the american educational system basically only values the first three as far as standardized testing of math skills goes.

so while it may be appropriate to come up w/ ways to measure skill in each of these categories, we also have to remember that none of these categories are fixed categories, that a student's strengths and weakness in all of them are strongly related to the context of the problem and the setting (cf the million sof people who can do complex arithmetic w/ money or measures in their heads but not w/ numbers on a page labeled "math test") and also that any measurement of this is a single snapshot of a person at a single time and not necessarily indicative of their history or the potential or their future

and you really, at the end of the day, have to ask what constructive purpose is being served by measuring this stuff in order to separate people out into different gradations on a scale rather than seeing it in terms of open-ended potential