Because Im super fucking bored waiting for reset, and because SO many of you out there (and in the whole world, I was extremely ignorant to all of this before I took a simple class in college) are ignorant about this issue, Im going to teach you all the basics of gender. Its really fucking simple, and basically no one knows them.

First and foremost, Gender and Sex are not the same thing in any way.

Your sex is commonly known as what you are biologically. This is what most people think is gender, but it is not. The two most common choices for being asked what your sex is are 'male' and 'female.'

Your gender is what you identify as. YOU decide your gender. No one else has any say in the matter. The most common choices for gender are 'boy' or 'girl' or 'other'.

The term and concept of Woman is a SOCIAL CONSTRUCT. This means that 'woman' has no place in biology. Being a woman is not determined by what biology you have, but rather how you identify. In this way, if a person wants to change from woman to man to woman to man to woman to man, you have no say in the matter and they may do so as many times as they feel they need to do so -- although this is not normally the case.




I'd like to leave you off on a social responsibility note. The current Transgender non-conforming suicide attempt rate is ~42% ( http://www.vocativ.com/culture/lgbt/tra ... r-suicide/ ).

The normal US suicide rate is ~ .013% ( http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/suicide.htm ), with an attempt rate of 4.6% ( http://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/w ... -Final.pdf )

This means that transgender people are a little less than 10x more likely to try to kill themselves.

This isn't simply because they're transgender; this is because of the general ignorance in the population that causes transgender individuals to be ostracized, made fun of, and bullied.

Ignorance is a choice.

Sure.


Sure.


Nope, grab a dictionary.
OED defines 'woman' as 'adult female', the definition of 'female' specifically mentions the ability to bear offspring or produce eggs. The definition also uses the word "sex" instead of "gender".

However, tell me you want me to call you Susan instead of Bob, sure. Just don't expect me to stop calling you Bob straight away because I've been doing it all my life up until then.

TL;DR: The trans community need to come up with alternatives for "woman" and "man"/"female" and "male" to not have biological definitions.

/signed

wrong'uns

This may be true, but in the field of gender studies, a woman is not an adult female. Perhaps the dictionaries haven't caught up yet.

I hadn't thought of this, but here's the full definition on Google (which is the same as OED iirc):

Which actually covers this issue, because it's referring to the sex that has the ability, not the individual.


An alternative could be to remove the biology parts of definitions, however this could cause quite the headache for everyone else who use the words with their literal meanings (particularly for example, researchers).

This isn't a point I raise often (in fact, this is the first time I have). I generally go out of my own way to avoid confusion in these situations (as rare as they are for me) and avoid these words or specifically state whether I mean the biological or psychological.

Possibly, as getting new words into the dictionary can be quite a lengthy and annoying process (afaik). But until such time it just stands for potential confusion and clerical errors.

As I understand it, this is the case. Man/men and woman/women would be what the LGBT community and others define as a gender. If you look up gender in the OED, you will also find:



It seems to me that OED appears to be a little behind and conflicted as to meaning of sex and gender. Unfortunately I can't say that it's very much up to standard in this regard and the words' more "colloquial" meanings should be taken into consideration.

Typically when I choose to describe gender vs sex, I put forward this handy diagram: The Genderbread Person.

dear lord how did I miss this sweet sweet delicious thread?