Huh, only ever met a few but TIL it’s common enough to have a name. You’re spot on in that I don’t think any where actually a part of any LTBTQ space, just very loud about the morality of language and such things.

Not a common thing to be sure, but I’ve come across a couple people who one might call ‘aggressively correct’ in the way they speak and expect others to follow suit.

Similar to the ‘person first’ language that’s started to be used recently 'a person with autism’c rather than an ‘autistic person’, but backwards Yeah, just maintaining that balance between sounding like a clinician describing a subject and something overly familiar/informal that might offend. Using that person first to say ‘a person who is a transexual’ would make it sound like a medical condition but take out the ‘a’ and it sort of works since it doesn’t make them an ‘object/things’…

It does get a bit frustrating in general use though, particularly when some people can get really upset quickly if you phrase things wrong.

Very neat stuff there. Some here have talked a bit about the neuro formations differentiating things, but he gives a nice condensed format for it.

On the whimsical side though since he used music from Super Mario in the citations it ended up making me wonder if mushroom people would have gender and sex, or just spores…

So I don’t know how old your parents are but I’m in my mid 40s. When I was a kid being gay was a punchline, Cpl Klinger on MASH tried to get out of the army on a mental illness grounds by dressing as a woman, and there where shows like ‘Bosom Buddies’ which I’ll leave you to look up again making fun of cross dressing, which in itself is a term I don’t hear anymore.

Given that history, the change to sex and gender being separate things, and not only that but they can change and merge over time, is a pretty rough thing to try and recognize. So depending on who they are I could see it as “I just don’t want to get into that”

There are certainly some though that use it maliciously, the ‘you will never be a woman’ crowd.

I regret that I have but one vote to give…

This makes for a lot of new considerations actually since I’m neither a doctor or a sports fan to keep up on such things in the least. It takes a lot of the chemical advantage issue off the table. One possible avenue would be to simple integrate the sports and let who wants to join.

As I’d mentioned in another place in the post, my thoughts are more with regards to mass-centric sports. Personally, I’m 6’3" and around 250 pounds currently, if I had the inclination to transition and then joined a women’s football league say (speaking in the American sense, not what we call Soccer) I’d be afraid of hurting someone, similarly with any other high contact sport like that. Obviously there are some particularly large women, a few of them have been in the WWE and similar ventures, but they’re rather the exception and weight classes exist in a lot of the types of sports that I think of.

Trans woman then? Sometimes the phrasing to specify is a bit clunky to me without going into some unnecessarily long descriptor.

It’s less the notion of it being spectrum based, but more in identifying the difference between the tangible/measurable things of the physical body, and those that are created of the mind and societies expectations. My understanding coming into this is that sex=physical / gender=emotional/mental/social, but some comments here have me questioning that understanding.

A lot of that does help, at least as a reminder in some cases of the mutability of things between different people. For myself (and plenty of others I’d guess) the fixation on binary association helps serve as a reference point if nothing else. Trying to describe something without some kind of anchor to relate it to, kind of has the feel of untethered ambiguity.

I think you also are misreading some peoples comments…

That would be part of it, or more aptly that a bit of the commentary on sex refers to it as a construct. When I think of constructs it brings to mind more the social expectations and acknowledged norms. While the notion of sex as being a binary thing might be taken as a construct in itself, how I’ve been approaching it is that sex is a set of largely fixed (short of external intervention) tangible and measurable traits, physical things. How we might interpret them is perhaps another matter. So some of it is I guess just a missed communication on some of what I’m asking.

I often wish I could shut off the rationalizing and analytical part of my mind, though at least I make active efforts to counter balance it with more free-form things in the off time.

Meh, it demanded a picture so it seemed to somewhat fit.

Well, those acting without bad intentions I guess would be better said. Haters gonna hate and all do those folks opinions are subject to the bin.

When talking about muddy it was more referring to physical vs mental matters just from a terminology standpoint. While sex is not a binary thing, the measures and markers you mentioned are all physical designations rather than social or psychological.

Yeah, never watch them but I hear of the ‘just asking questions’ frequently from a lot of the far right. Say something wretched and then a ‘just asking, but what do I know?..’ kind of disclaimer.

For me it’s coming from a place of just not knowing better, or processing late. I have a friend who’s Korean and at one point we started talking about new year celebrations there and I asked ‘so does that follow with the Chinese luner new year’ and only later realized that it probably sounded pretty presumptuous like ‘all is China in Asia’, when it really was just because it’s next door and I expect a big culture has influence on neighbors.

My body is a machine that coverts nutritional input into society challenging thought patterns, and sometimes small bits of energy I guess…

For some, the social aspect of gender is very important and for others, its not. For others, its much more focused about making their body match their brain’s expectations.

So with that would it be fair to say that there are different ‘types’ of trans then? IE: some that are fine with the hardware they where given but not with the expectations on their persona that go along with it?

A lot of these comments have also muddied my understanding of terms now which originally took on a neat physical/psychological = sex/gender split. Looking about the web that still seems to be the common delineation but like the range of people on the planet there are personal interpretations and flavors to such things too.

I get the suspicion that some of the more spirited discussions so far came with a tinge of suspicion that I’m one of the bad folks looking to invade spaces and sow discord, but that’s not the case. For me it’s not a question of acceptance, but really of understanding something foreign to me. I’m a hyper-logical type, does engineering things for fun, ‘feels-like’ for me could be pretty directly translated as ‘makes rational sense’ to the point where many get frustrated.

For purposes of conversing with people who don’t share the same life it is useful to have terms differentiating they physical and the psychological though. It seems recently that people have finally moved away from the ‘gender is what’s in your pants’ narrative when dismissing trans people out of hand, why muddy that when all the traits you mentioned regarding sex are physical markers?

Probably about as close to a direct understanding as I might get. Kind of puts me to a philosophical thought, if society didn’t have any kind of gender norms somehow, would that disquiet still exist?

Ok, to clarify I was speaking for me, not the larger media discussion.

Steroids in themselves are a synthetic testosterone so it seems fair to compare the differences between cis men vs steroid users and the levels found in trans women vs cis women. Not being familiar with HRT to know if it ever truly stabilizes things to a more typical level with what would be expected in cis women is a part of it.

By all means, if you can enlighten me on how long or if that ever happens I’d like to hear it. There’s a reason why I only noted this part as a passing thing though, because I didn’t want to touch off any nerves when trying to learn more. Figured it better for a later discussion.

Steroids or other enhancements are of course still a problem. The reasoning that they substitute chemical advantage over dedicated training and hard work is still sound though. To be fair it’s something of a one-issue and one-sided dilemma so far as I can think since I can’t think off hand of any particularly differentiating trait that’s so heavily influenced by hormones other than muscle mass. Most sports it wouldn’t make a hugely notable difference one way or another, trans or cis.

I think it’s more a case of regardless of gender, cis/trans or intersex that just trying to make things as competitively fair as possible is the goal. There are plenty of people of any gender that excel beyond their peers through natural talent and hard work. As mentioned I’m sure the prevalence is such a miniscule thing that it hardly counts as an issue, but a lot of sports of the type I’m thinking have weight classes for a reason. There are few women who would be suited to compete in boxing, weightlifting, wrestling or the like against someone well past 200 pounds regardless of their gender. Most other aspects of competition like speed, balance, coordination, endurance and such are pretty well indifferent to physiology.