What can someone self identify as though, can I self identify as a specific race, species, nationality, etc… where does one determine where to draw the line?
Clearly its going to be an issue that leads to some disagreement as it is open to ambiguity. If anything can self identify as anything would that be the middle path?
Obviously it has real implications in reality as well, like grants and shelters that go towards a specific demographics that are disproportionately disadvantaged. If people can self identify then it is obviously ripe for exploit, and how do we police that outside of the same witch hunts the anti-trans people are on, so how do we solve this one?
Short answer: By what the experts say, and they say transgender people should be treated as the gender they identify as. Period.
Long answer: A lot of PhDs did a fuckload of research over a century plus and showed that, yeah, gender is super fucking complicated and doesn’t map out to male/female based on your genitals at birth (let alone for the reason that, you know, maybe you might be born with a penis AND a vagina or ovaries AND testes or female chromosomes AND male genetalia, etc.), and if people get some simple gender affirmation, they live better and happier lives, and that applies to cisgender people, as well.
Easy answer: You can claim to be fucking anything you want. Who actually gives a shit? Let people be themselves if it don’t hurt anyone. What’s the problem with being a transgirl or a transboy? Why do we even have multiple bathrooms? That just seems to punish all sorts of people for no reason.
If you WANT to say transracial or transspecies or transnational is a thing, by all means do some research and prove it through studies and peer review. Until then, it is unlikely to be recognized the same way that transgender has because it has a lot of supporting evidence.
If you WANT to say transracial or transspecies or transnational is a thing, by all means do some research and prove it through studies and peer review. Until then, it is unlikely to be recognized the same way that transgender has because it has a lot of supporting evidence.
I want to play a game with you. You’re demanding evidence for something that some people have a lot of experience with, but most people don’t care to investigate. I wanna do the same thing.
I’ve decided that fish aren’t real. I want you to link a scientific journal article that says fish are real. Not one that presupposes the existence of fish in general, one that asks if fish actually exist and asserts an answer from evidence.
If you can’t prove fish are real, why should anyone have to prove otherkin are real?
Buuuuuuuut, if you really want scientific articles on otherkin…
I think you misunderstood, but I’m not presupposing otherkin isn’t a thing. I am saying it doesn’t have the same type of intellectual backing as transgender experience does, so it isn’t treated the same. I think that is unfortunate, even if there are studies done as well as expressed experiences, especially within indigenous peoples (and you could argue that is part of the reason fewer studies are done on it.)
I’m not really here to debate whether fish exist because I know fish exist and I can drive to most lakes and find fish in them and I can go to a few museums and see fish remains and I can go to pet stores and find fish for sale and I can go to a grocery store and find fish to eat. Doing that same thing with people and their personal experiences is much harder since it’s more of a personal experience and not, you know, a visible phenomenon, and so it’s going to be harder to convince people a personal experience is real if it’s not their experience and especially if it’s not a common one.
Au contrare. I can go speak to otherkin right now. In fact, I’m in conversation with one about how the cartoon Generator Rex uses nanites as a parallel to the AIDS crisis. Otherkin quite clearly and obviously exist. I see otherkin much more often than I see fish.
Now, most people see fish more often, because most people are boring, but that’s no reason for disbelief. The point is that there’s little point proving something so non-controversial exists. Nobody cares. You won’t get a research grant for something so irrelevant.
Asking people to provide research studies for this kind of thing is absurd. The only reason all these studies on trans people exist is because the media politicises our existence. When you treat otherkin the same way, you’re politicising their existence too.
well at least you’re trying…
but, let’s not equivocate gender and species (sorry furries)…. or race….
but, race and gender are social constructs. gender was redefined, in a scientific sense, by anthropologists, to reflect sex-attached roles in society, whereas biological sex refers to genitalia….
in humans at large, most cultures have at least two genders, attached to male and female sex. many cultures have more than two genders, and many cultures allow people to be any gender role they choose…
this ambiguity is WHY they needed a term for this other than sex.
like, why would being born male mean you’re only allowed to like things from a particular set. Allowed to like playing in mud and a little fighting… not allowed to play with dolls (which is play socializing and why women are more emotionally intelligent)… boys aren’t supposed to like certain colors, or certain clothes… or music… or have particular mannerisms… or cry….
but these are all rules imposed by society, they’re not inherent to the biological sex.
so where do you draw the line? well, i’d start with: all social constructs you can be what you feel like you are.
race is a much more complicated social construct, given that america switched to race based slavery early on… but, race is completely constructed by society. there’s more genetic variation between african tribes than there is between “races” like caucasian and mongaloid or whatever antique racial term you want to use.
it’s just that we can quickly see a difference in regional adaptations (like skin color or eye shape).
in america, a half black person could act more like white culture or more like black culture and be somewhat accepted in either… in fact, white slave owners would commonly rape their own slaves in order to breed more slaves… and sell of their own children… every american black person (with a lineage here) is part caucasian, and vice versa…
irish, italians, and polish people used to be considered non-white but eventually became accepted as such… largely because you couldn’t immediately see a difference…
and race originally used to mean peoples that spoke different languages… like the spanish race and french race… it’s totally nuts….
race has been made real, as a social construct, but there’s no scientific basis for it….
Speciation begins when two different groups can no longer reproduce and create successful offspring… like say, pubic lice and head lice can reproduce and their offspring can reproduce but their claws aren’t good at grabbing either hair type, so they’re not successful and there’s two different species….
Race isn’t real, gender isn’t real… do what you want and enjoy yourself and just let other people enjoy themselves….
i’m just glad english doesn’t have gendered nouns like “oh a chair is female and a teapot is male”….
another confusing aspect with gender vs sex is the same word meaning different things in different contexts… like female gender vs female sex… but just default to calling people what they prefer and you’ll be fine.
some people will always be unreasonable but just try to be considerate and it’s all good….
oh and if someone insists that their “gender” is something invented like “dr@g0n fuck3r”, they’re a concern troll… (real example, spelled wrong to thwart searches).
No. Otherkin are valid. The social construct of species isn’t.
Asexual reproduction. Sapiens-Neanderthal hybrids. Tree grafting. Speciation is nonsense with no basis in empirical observation. The only reason it’s become an accepted paradigm in the scientific community is that the convenience outweighs the inaccuracy in a lab context. It doesn’t when we’re talking about otherkin. When we’re talking about otherkin, the cost of continuing to believe in the made up nonsense that is species is too high.
That’s really interesting about lice. I’d be curious how you deal with society trying to protect or enhance specific groups they deemed disadvantaged still, do we eliminate them and remove these labels entirely making then moot?
If politics includes the realm of persuading enough people and institutions to adopt or forget laws and standards, however moral of immoral they are, then rights of any kind are political.
Rights aren’t given in society for nothing. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights were created following WWII in which we saw the greatest political conflicts in the modern, technological age. Civil rights, at least in the US, have taken many acts as well as background political pressure to get to where we are today, and this institutionalizing of equal rights among American citizens only started after the US Civil War, the only civil war that country had ever experienced at that point.
politics are very involved in how a government will treat human and civil rights… but these rights are intrinsic to humanity, aka inalienable, and exist without governments.
You will agree that human and civil rights, such as the right to keep and bear arms, is not politics? If you disagree, why is your preferred civil rights not politics, but other’s preferred human and civil rights are?
not everything that a government can touch are politics.
politics involve how you decide what the government will do…
i dunno i explained it more in a different reply on this thread but ive got a lot of people trying to argue and i don’t want to keep repeating it…
Just wanted to say thank you. I never explicitly thought of it this way. Just that human and civil rights are important. I’m going to start framing it this way because it’s the truth.
I was at a loss as to what to do when a few of my friends were expressing support for Trump, knowing that he plans on cutting aid to Ukraine (as well as other fucked up shit).
human and civil rights aren’t “politics”
What can someone self identify as though, can I self identify as a specific race, species, nationality, etc… where does one determine where to draw the line?
Clearly its going to be an issue that leads to some disagreement as it is open to ambiguity. If anything can self identify as anything would that be the middle path?
Obviously it has real implications in reality as well, like grants and shelters that go towards a specific demographics that are disproportionately disadvantaged. If people can self identify then it is obviously ripe for exploit, and how do we police that outside of the same witch hunts the anti-trans people are on, so how do we solve this one?
Short answer: By what the experts say, and they say transgender people should be treated as the gender they identify as. Period.
Long answer: A lot of PhDs did a fuckload of research over a century plus and showed that, yeah, gender is super fucking complicated and doesn’t map out to male/female based on your genitals at birth (let alone for the reason that, you know, maybe you might be born with a penis AND a vagina or ovaries AND testes or female chromosomes AND male genetalia, etc.), and if people get some simple gender affirmation, they live better and happier lives, and that applies to cisgender people, as well.
Easy answer: You can claim to be fucking anything you want. Who actually gives a shit? Let people be themselves if it don’t hurt anyone. What’s the problem with being a transgirl or a transboy? Why do we even have multiple bathrooms? That just seems to punish all sorts of people for no reason.
If you WANT to say transracial or transspecies or transnational is a thing, by all means do some research and prove it through studies and peer review. Until then, it is unlikely to be recognized the same way that transgender has because it has a lot of supporting evidence.
I want to play a game with you. You’re demanding evidence for something that some people have a lot of experience with, but most people don’t care to investigate. I wanna do the same thing.
I’ve decided that fish aren’t real. I want you to link a scientific journal article that says fish are real. Not one that presupposes the existence of fish in general, one that asks if fish actually exist and asserts an answer from evidence.
If you can’t prove fish are real, why should anyone have to prove otherkin are real?
Buuuuuuuut, if you really want scientific articles on otherkin…
https://go.openathens.net/redirector/murdoch.edu.au?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.proquest.com%2Fscholarly-journals%2Fjackal-city-empirical-phenomenological-study%2Fdocview%2F2956849512%2Fse-2%3Faccountid%3D12629
https://czasopisma.uni.lodz.pl/qualit/article/view/8147
https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/252
https://doi.org/10.1525/nr.2012.15.3.65
I think you misunderstood, but I’m not presupposing otherkin isn’t a thing. I am saying it doesn’t have the same type of intellectual backing as transgender experience does, so it isn’t treated the same. I think that is unfortunate, even if there are studies done as well as expressed experiences, especially within indigenous peoples (and you could argue that is part of the reason fewer studies are done on it.)
I’m not really here to debate whether fish exist because I know fish exist and I can drive to most lakes and find fish in them and I can go to a few museums and see fish remains and I can go to pet stores and find fish for sale and I can go to a grocery store and find fish to eat. Doing that same thing with people and their personal experiences is much harder since it’s more of a personal experience and not, you know, a visible phenomenon, and so it’s going to be harder to convince people a personal experience is real if it’s not their experience and especially if it’s not a common one.
Au contrare. I can go speak to otherkin right now. In fact, I’m in conversation with one about how the cartoon Generator Rex uses nanites as a parallel to the AIDS crisis. Otherkin quite clearly and obviously exist. I see otherkin much more often than I see fish.
Now, most people see fish more often, because most people are boring, but that’s no reason for disbelief. The point is that there’s little point proving something so non-controversial exists. Nobody cares. You won’t get a research grant for something so irrelevant.
Asking people to provide research studies for this kind of thing is absurd. The only reason all these studies on trans people exist is because the media politicises our existence. When you treat otherkin the same way, you’re politicising their existence too.
well at least you’re trying…
but, let’s not equivocate gender and species (sorry furries)…. or race….
but, race and gender are social constructs.
gender was redefined, in a scientific sense, by anthropologists, to reflect sex-attached roles in society, whereas biological sex refers to genitalia….
in humans at large, most cultures have at least two genders, attached to male and female sex. many cultures have more than two genders, and many cultures allow people to be any gender role they choose…
this ambiguity is WHY they needed a term for this other than sex.
like, why would being born male mean you’re only allowed to like things from a particular set. Allowed to like playing in mud and a little fighting… not allowed to play with dolls (which is play socializing and why women are more emotionally intelligent)… boys aren’t supposed to like certain colors, or certain clothes… or music… or have particular mannerisms… or cry….
but these are all rules imposed by society, they’re not inherent to the biological sex.
so where do you draw the line? well, i’d start with: all social constructs you can be what you feel like you are.
race is a much more complicated social construct, given that america switched to race based slavery early on… but, race is completely constructed by society. there’s more genetic variation between african tribes than there is between “races” like caucasian and mongaloid or whatever antique racial term you want to use.
it’s just that we can quickly see a difference in regional adaptations (like skin color or eye shape).
in america, a half black person could act more like white culture or more like black culture and be somewhat accepted in either… in fact, white slave owners would commonly rape their own slaves in order to breed more slaves… and sell of their own children… every american black person (with a lineage here) is part caucasian, and vice versa…
irish, italians, and polish people used to be considered non-white but eventually became accepted as such… largely because you couldn’t immediately see a difference…
and race originally used to mean peoples that spoke different languages… like the spanish race and french race… it’s totally nuts….
race has been made real, as a social construct, but there’s no scientific basis for it….
Speciation begins when two different groups can no longer reproduce and create successful offspring… like say, pubic lice and head lice can reproduce and their offspring can reproduce but their claws aren’t good at grabbing either hair type, so they’re not successful and there’s two different species….
Race isn’t real, gender isn’t real… do what you want and enjoy yourself and just let other people enjoy themselves….
i’m just glad english doesn’t have gendered nouns like “oh a chair is female and a teapot is male”….
another confusing aspect with gender vs sex is the same word meaning different things in different contexts… like female gender vs female sex… but just default to calling people what they prefer and you’ll be fine.
some people will always be unreasonable but just try to be considerate and it’s all good….
oh and if someone insists that their “gender” is something invented like “dr@g0n fuck3r”, they’re a concern troll… (real example, spelled wrong to thwart searches).
No. Otherkin are valid. The social construct of species isn’t.
Asexual reproduction. Sapiens-Neanderthal hybrids. Tree grafting. Speciation is nonsense with no basis in empirical observation. The only reason it’s become an accepted paradigm in the scientific community is that the convenience outweighs the inaccuracy in a lab context. It doesn’t when we’re talking about otherkin. When we’re talking about otherkin, the cost of continuing to believe in the made up nonsense that is species is too high.
That’s really interesting about lice. I’d be curious how you deal with society trying to protect or enhance specific groups they deemed disadvantaged still, do we eliminate them and remove these labels entirely making then moot?
Everything is politics.
your mom is politics
Sure is!
If politics includes the realm of persuading enough people and institutions to adopt or forget laws and standards, however moral of immoral they are, then rights of any kind are political.
Rights aren’t given in society for nothing. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights were created following WWII in which we saw the greatest political conflicts in the modern, technological age. Civil rights, at least in the US, have taken many acts as well as background political pressure to get to where we are today, and this institutionalizing of equal rights among American citizens only started after the US Civil War, the only civil war that country had ever experienced at that point.
politics are very involved in how a government will treat human and civil rights… but these rights are intrinsic to humanity, aka inalienable, and exist without governments.
You will agree that human and civil rights, such as the right to keep and bear arms, is not politics? If you disagree, why is your preferred civil rights not politics, but other’s preferred human and civil rights are?
what are and are not rights is a matter of philosophy
why not? What definition of politics are you using
not everything that a government can touch are politics.
politics involve how you decide what the government will do…
i dunno i explained it more in a different reply on this thread but ive got a lot of people trying to argue and i don’t want to keep repeating it…
Just wanted to say thank you. I never explicitly thought of it this way. Just that human and civil rights are important. I’m going to start framing it this way because it’s the truth.
I guess you’re right.
I was at a loss as to what to do when a few of my friends were expressing support for Trump, knowing that he plans on cutting aid to Ukraine (as well as other fucked up shit).