"Gender"

[subllibrm]

Just so we are clear, when a baby is born they are either a male or a female. This is known as their "sex".  As that child grows, they will display many different characteristics, two of which are masculine and feminine. These distinctions are known as "gender".  A female may have masculine characteristics and a male may have feminine characteristics. Neither situation changes the basic fact of their sex. Personality traits do not define our biological state.

I post this because I clearly remember the debates about changing government forms to say gender rather than sex.  As with most of the moral/social/cultural changes over my lifetime, those who warned that this change carried trouble with it were pooh-poohed by those who promoted the change. While claiming they had no "agenda" they pushed hard for what they said was merely an innocuous adjustment to our common language.

Words matter.

 

[T-Bone]

Not a settled matter...though it is clearly moving toward your description.  Clearly language evolves...which is why we must always clarify what we mean by what we say. Words only have meaning... until they no longer have meaning.  Here's a little something from Merriam-Webster

Are gender and sex the same? Usage Guide
Noun
The words sex and gender have a long and intertwined history. In the 15th century gender expanded from its use as a term for a grammatical subclass to join sex in referring to either of the two primary biological forms of a species, a meaning sex has had since the 14th century; phrases like "the male sex" and "the female gender" are both grounded in uses established for more than five centuries. In the 20th century sex and gender each acquired new uses. Sex developed its "sexual intercourse" meaning in the early part of the century (now its more common meaning), and a few decades later gender gained a meaning referring to the behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits typically associated with one sex, as in "gender roles." Later in the century, gender also came to have application in two closely related compound terms: gender identity refers to a person's internal sense of being male, female, some combination of male and female, or neither male nor female; gender expression refers to the physical and behavioral manifestations of one's gender identity. By the end of the century gender by itself was being used as a synonym of gender identity. Among those who study gender and sexuality, a clear delineation between sex and gender is typically prescribed, with sex as the preferred term for biological forms, and gender limited to its meanings involving behavioral, cultural, and psychological traits. 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. But in nonmedical and nontechnical contexts, there is no clear delineation, and the status of the words remains complicated. Often when comparisons explicitly between male and female people are made, we see the term gender employed, with that term dominating in such collocations as gender differences, gender gap, gender equality, gender bias, and gender relations. It is likely that gender is applied in such contexts because of its psychological and sociocultural meanings, the word's duality making it dually useful. The fact remains that it is often applied in such cases against the prescribed use. Usage of sex and gender is by no means settled. For example, while discrimination was far more often paired with sex from the 1960s through the 20th century and into the 21st, the phrase gender discrimination has been steadily increasing in use since the 1980s and is on track to become the dominant collocation. Currently both terms are sometimes employed with their intended synonymy made explicit: sex/gender discrimination, gender (sex) discrimination.

 

[Smellin Coffee]

What do we do with the other 1.7% of the population that is born intersex?

The percentage of born intersex folks is nearly as common as those born with red hair...

 

[ALAYMAN]

What do we do with the other 1.7% of the population that is born intersex?

The percentage of born intersex folks is nearly as common as those born with red hair...

With the frequency that you are prone to the exaggerated edges and boundaries of such discussion it makes me wonder if you are serious, or trolling the fundies a little bit SC.

Anne Fausto-Sterling s suggestion that the prevalence of intersex might be as high as 1.7% has attracted wide attention in both the scholarly press and the popular media. Many reviewers are not aware that this figure includes conditions which most clinicians do not recognize as intersex, such as Klinefelter syndrome, Turner syndrome, and late-onset adrenal hyperplasia. If the term intersex is to retain any meaning, the term should be restricted to those conditions in which chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex, or in which the phenotype is not classifiable as either male or female. Applying this more precise definition, the true prevalence of intersex is seen to be about 0.018%, almost 100 times lower than Fausto-Sterling s estimate of 1.7%.

https://isna.org/faq/frequency/

 

[Smellin Coffee]

What do we do with the other 1.7% of the population that is born intersex?

The percentage of born intersex folks is nearly as common as those born with red hair...

With the frequency that you are prone to the exaggerated edges and boundaries of such discussion it makes me wonder if you are serious, or trolling the fundies a little bit SC.

Maybe a tad bit of both. Some things in life (not just gender-related) are not as binary as we make them out to be.

 

[Ransom]

Just so we are clear, when a baby is born they are either a male or a female. This is known as their "sex".  As that child grows, they will display many different characteristics, two of which are masculine and feminine. These distinctions are known as "gender".  A female may have masculine characteristics and a male may have feminine characteristics. Neither situation changes the basic fact of their sex. Personality traits do not define our biological state.

I don't see why this theory still has any traction. The sexologist who first made the sex/gender distinction was John Money in the 1950s. In the late 1960s, a baby boy, Bruce Reimer, had had his genitals mutilated in a botched circumcision. Money suggested to his parents that he be surgically altered to resemble a girl, and then raised as one. Since (according to his theories) gender was a product of nurture, rather than nature, Bruce would in fact be a girl (whom his parents renamed Brenda).

Of course, it didn't work. Around the time he reached puberty, "Brenda" realized he wasn't actually a girl, despite not knowing he had been born a boy. He had the reassignment surgery reversed and began calling himself David. Unfortunately, ultimately, as the result of the abuse he had suffered at the hands of his parents and Money, he took his own life about 15 years ago. Bruce/Brenda/David Reimer was a test case for John Money's theories. By rights, they should have been completely discredited. Nature won over nurture.

There are a fraction of a percentage of persons (intersex people) who are genuinely sexually ambiguous. They are statistical outliers. If sex and gender genuinely existed along a spectrum, then intersexuality would be the norm rather than the exception, and so-called "cisgender" men and women would be the outliers at the extreme ends of the spectrum. In reality, of course, the opposite is true. The Heinz 57 varieties of "gender" touted by Facebook, Tumblr, and other sites reflect a person's behaviour, not their traits. Behaviour is not a gender, and it is stupid to pretend otherwise.

 

[subllibrm]

Just so we are clear, when a baby is born they are either a male or a female. This is known as their "sex".  As that child grows, they will display many different characteristics, two of which are masculine and feminine. These distinctions are known as "gender".  A female may have masculine characteristics and a male may have feminine characteristics. Neither situation changes the basic fact of their sex. Personality traits do not define our biological state.

I don't see why this theory still has any traction. The sexologist who first made the sex/gender distinction was John Money in the 1950s. In the late 1960s, a baby boy, Bruce Reimer, had had his genitals mutilated in a botched circumcision. Money suggested to his parents that he be surgically altered to resemble a girl, and then raised as one. Since (according to his theories) gender was a product of nurture, rather than nature, Bruce would in fact be a girl (whom his parents renamed Brenda).

Of course, it didn't work. Around the time he reached puberty, "Brenda" realized he wasn't actually a girl, despite not knowing he had been born a boy. He had the reassignment surgery reversed and began calling himself David. Unfortunately, ultimately, as the result of the abuse he had suffered at the hands of his parents and Money, he took his own life about 15 years ago. Bruce/Brenda/David Reimer was a test case for John Money's theories. By rights, they should have been completely discredited. Nature won over nurture.

There are a fraction of a percentage of persons (intersex people) who are genuinely sexually ambiguous. They are statistical outliers. If sex and gender genuinely existed along a spectrum, then intersexuality would be the norm rather than the exception, and so-called "cisgender" men and women would be the outliers at the extreme ends of the spectrum. In reality, of course, the opposite is true. The Heinz 57 varieties of "gender" touted by Facebook, Tumblr, and other sites reflect a person's behaviour, not their traits. Behaviour is not a gender, and it is stupid to pretend otherwise.

I'm not sure if you are agreeing or disagreeing.  ???

 

[subllibrm]

Have any of you ever had the opportunity to work on a poultry farm? When determining the future use (or disposal) of a hatch-ling they "sex" them, not "gender" them.  ;D

 

[FSSL]

What do we do with the other 1.7% of the population that is born intersex?

The percentage of born intersex folks is nearly as common as those born with red hair...

We live in a day and age where some people believe that...
... DNA determines paternity
... but DNA cannot determine gender

 

[Ransom]

I'm not sure if you are agreeing or disagreeing.  ???

Agreeing, and commenting.

 

[Ransom]

Have any of you ever had the opportunity to work on a poultry farm? When determining the future use (or disposal) of a hatch-ling they "sex" them, not "gender" them.  ;D

Hardly seems fair not to let those chicks decide whether they are roosters or hens when they get older.

 

[Darkwing Duck]

I don't see why this theory still has any traction. The sexologist who first made the sex/gender distinction was John Money in the 1950s. In the late 1960s, a baby boy, Bruce Reimer, had had his genitals mutilated in a botched circumcision. Money suggested to his parents that he be surgically altered to resemble a girl, and then raised as one. Since (according to his theories) gender was a product of nurture, rather than nature, Bruce would in fact be a girl (whom his parents renamed Brenda).

Of course, it didn't work. Around the time he reached puberty, "Brenda" realized he wasn't actually a girl, despite not knowing he had been born a boy. He had the reassignment surgery reversed and began calling himself David. Unfortunately, ultimately, as the result of the abuse he had suffered at the hands of his parents and Money, he took his own life about 15 years ago. Bruce/Brenda/David Reimer was a test case for John Money's theories. By rights, they should have been completely discredited. Nature won over nurture.

This is an important story to anyone who is transphobic.
Transgendered people just want to be the person their brain tells them they are, not the person their genitals tell them they are.  Notice how damaging it was to the person in this story to refuse to let them be their real self and force them to obey their genitals.

 

[Twisted]

I don't see why this theory still has any traction. The sexologist who first made the sex/gender distinction was John Money in the 1950s. In the late 1960s, a baby boy, Bruce Reimer, had had his genitals mutilated in a botched circumcision. Money suggested to his parents that he be surgically altered to resemble a girl, and then raised as one. Since (according to his theories) gender was a product of nurture, rather than nature, Bruce would in fact be a girl (whom his parents renamed Brenda).

Of course, it didn't work. Around the time he reached puberty, "Brenda" realized he wasn't actually a girl, despite not knowing he had been born a boy. He had the reassignment surgery reversed and began calling himself David. Unfortunately, ultimately, as the result of the abuse he had suffered at the hands of his parents and Money, he took his own life about 15 years ago. Bruce/Brenda/David Reimer was a test case for John Money's theories. By rights, they should have been completely discredited. Nature won over nurture.

This is an important story to anyone who is transphobic.
Transgendered people just want to be the person their brain tells them they are, not the person their genitals tell them they are.  Notice how damaging it was to the person in this story to refuse to let them be their real self and force them to obey their genitals.

You sound as nutty as that lesbian that floats around here.

 

[FSSL]

This is an important story to anyone who is transphobic.
Transgendered people just want to be the person their brain tells them they are, not the person their genitals tell them they are.  Notice how damaging it was to the person in this story to refuse to let them be their real self and force them to obey their genitals.

The mind is a curious thing... people always follow their minds (not their genitals).

Those whose minds are ?forced? contrary to their actual nature are referred to as mentally ill.

We care for the mentally ill by PROTECTING them from life altering dangers. We should not be mitigating their bodies.

 

[Darkwing Duck]

This is an important story to anyone who is transphobic.
Transgendered people just want to be the person their brain tells them they are, not the person their genitals tell them they are.  Notice how damaging it was to the person in this story to refuse to let them be their real self and force them to obey their genitals.

The mind is a curious thing... people always follow their minds (not their genitals).

Those whose minds are ?forced? contrary to their actual nature are referred to as mentally ill.

We care for the mentally ill by PROTECTING them from life altering dangers. We should not be mitigating their bodies.

People whose bodies are contrary to nature we help get better. Someone is born with the wrong number of chromosomes is not mentally ill, someone born with the wrong blood type is not mentally ill, sometime born with a tail is not mentally ill, someone born with the wrong genitals is not mentally ill.

 

[FSSL]

People whose bodies are contrary to nature we help get better. Someone is born with the wrong number of chromosomes is not mentally ill...

No. They are mentally challenged and require our love and attention. They are still male and female and recognize that they are.

...someone born with the wrong blood type is not mentally ill...

No one is born with the wrong blood type. They may have an incompatible blood type with the mother, but their blood type is not wrong for themselves.

sometime born with a tail is not mentally ill...

No. Everyone has a tail during their development.

...someone born with the wrong genitals is not mentally ill.

Those who want to mutilate the genitals opposite their genes are mentally ill and should not be allowed near our children.

 

[Darkwing Duck]

I don't think you understand current scientific understanding.
Transgender humans are those who are female but have male chromosomes (and this male genitals) or males with female chromosomes (and thus female genitals). This isn't antiChriatian. The Bible is clear that we live in a fallen world. I don't understand why Christians accept the medical science behind cancer treatment, depression, liver disease, etc. but can't accept the medical science that has shown that some people have the wrong genitals. Male and females have different brains, not just different reproductive organs.

 

[Ransom]

People whose bodies are contrary to nature we help get better. Someone is born with the wrong number of chromosomes is not mentally ill,

Unless they are. People with Down syndrome have an additional chromosome. They usually have mild to severe learning difficulties. Women with Triple X syndrome may also have learning disabilities.

someone born with the wrong blood type is not mentally ill,

No such thing as the "wrong blood type."

sometime born with a tail is not mentally ill,

Well, of course not. Everyone has a tail in the womb. Some people just don't lose it along the way.

someone born with the wrong genitals is not mentally ill.

Define" the wrong genitals." The number of people who are born with such ambiguous genitalia that they need a specialist to differentiate them is something like 1 in 2000. Disorders in which, for example, a woman is born with testes instead of ovaries are negligible. For the remaining 99.95% of humanity, their coupling gear matches their chromosomes.

So if the sex organs are a) healthy and functional, and b) consistent with a person's XX or XY chromosomes, as the case may be, and yet the person insists that they are the wrong sex, which is actually out of order, the body or the mind?

 

[FSSL]

I don't think you understand current scientific understanding.

The DSMV, used by medical professionals, provides the scientific description of individuals with gender dysphoria... they are considered as mentally ill.

Have been all along and continue to be.

So, yes, I understand current scientific thought.

My difference with a minor group of doctors is not the description... it is the treatment.

 

[Ransom]

I don't think you understand current scientific understanding.
Transgender humans are those who are female but have male chromosomes (and this male genitals) or males with female chromosomes (and thus female genitals).

Um, no, it's you that doesn't understand. You just described intersexuality: someone being born with ambiguous genitalia, male external genitalia but female internal reproductive organs or vice versa, or a variety of other congenital disorders. Intersex used to be called "hermaphroditism," but that was inaccurate because there's never been a documented case of a true hermaphrodite person that had both functional male and female gonads.

Transgenderism is when a person believes himself or herself to properly belong to the opposite sex, or to exist outside of the conventional sexual binary entirely, regardless of the physical condition of their bodies. Typically they have a mental disorder known as gender dysphoria or gender identity integrity disorder (I believe the latter may have fallen out of use).  Surgery and hormone therapy are often done to bring the body in line with the mind's perception, thinking this will bring body and mind back into harmony, but it's efficacy is debatable, as many transgendered persons who have opted for surgery continue to be very unhappy with themselves, even suicidal. Many people who claim to be transgender do not opt for surgery at all, and some even claim you don't have to have dysphoria to be transgender.

Judge for yourself whether a balding, bearded dude who has no interest in changing his appearance, but insists he's a woman and demands you call him "Chelsea," is suffering from a physical or mental disorder.