Aren’t there skeletal differences that an anthropologist would point out?
The anthropologist might see skeletal differences but they’d also pay attention to the manner in which the subject was buried or what possessions survived with them that could also serve as clues of the subject’s identity in life.
You’re confusing sex with gender
I want a sex reveal party. Who’s having sex in the bedroom right now? Let’s find out!
Isn’t that basically what they did at weddings in times gone by?
Humans have sexual dimorphism, but it’s a cultural thing that women wear skirts and men drink themselves to death instead of talking about their problems (both of these are jokes btw. I have a friend who wore kilts quite often and my mother drank herself to death)
Also, genetics is tricky, there a plenty of examples of people who do not fall into one category or another for these sexually dimorphic traits. There are people who have genetics from both sex, as well and differences in hormones distributions will causes these traits to appear or not appear.
Is a huge grey area.
And … The gender is cake! 🌈🎂🎉
The cake is a lie
wildly based science posting
Actually, we should go the other way and have more reveal parties for other genetic traits, and elevate them to the same level of perceived importance as apparent biosex! Let’s have blood type reveal parties! Joint mobility reveal parties! Relative nose and eye position reveal parties! Relative limb length reveal parties! Roof of mouth topology reveal parties! Single nucleotide polymorphism reveal parties!
Oddly I think parties like this would be more beneficial to the child.
If my parents had thought to have a joint mobility party for me, then maybe my hip joint deformity would have been found in infancy, when it’s treatable, and not when I was 17 after years of being told I had “growing pains”.
Was this part of an actual thought, or…?
I’d love to go to that kind of party, where rainbow cake is served along with a slice of anthropological oration. But even though I’m gay (and therefore supposed to accept every odd idea that comes along, apparently), I’m not sure gender is a “social construct” alone. There are so many other things that can play into it including hormones and body image and psychological stuff - yet I still feel it was so much easier and breezier when we could just call ourselves men or women or he or she. *(not that I’m against people calling themselves whatever else they want).
Body image and psychological stuff still fall under societal influence rather than biological influence, and the hormones we produce are fundamentally a sex thing, not a gender thing.
Something being a social construct doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a tangible influence on how people feel, it just means that it isn’t based on intrinsic biological fact. What constitutes being a “man” or a “woman” differs between cultures and between people, it is often tied to biology because of societal expectations and association, but it doesn’t actually come from biology. Something like pink being a girl’s colour or women wearing makeup or men drinking beers instead of daquiris, those are all arbitrary performances people put on based on what society tells them men or women should do. Even the pronouns he/she were invented, some languages don’t have gendered pronouns by default like English does. None of that comes from biology, biology doesn’t tell us what pronouns we use or what we should wear.
Wow careful with that logical thinking buddy, we don’t like that here \s
Careful with them thar backslarshes, city boy, this ere is furwudslash country.
Oh! I’m going to present the following in good faith.
You’re referring to sex. Sex is biological, gender is a concept. Sex is related to your hormones and your healthcare and what’s in your pants, but the idea of masculinity or femininity being tied to specific behaviors or clothes is a social construct. (Gender.)
IE; I’m a woman. Very much a woman. Super secure in that. I’ve got all the parts, enjoy having them. When I go to the gym or when I drink my cousins under the table or when I work on a car, those things shouldn’t be tied to an idea of being masculine, because I’m not suddenly more masculine for doing them. I’m definitely still a woman the whole time. That’s the difference here, is that there’s a concept of gender which is different than sex.
Of course it’s not devoid of the effects of sexual dimorphism. It’s just that how one’s sex determines societal roles and stereotypes (a closer definition of gender), shouldn’t be so rigid and unmovable.
I agree we need to move beyond stereotypical old fashioned ideals of what is feminine or masculine, those have always been so narrow and actually many times were totally lies. I hope we can embrace sometime the idea that we’re all people with multitudes of possibility and behavioral traits, and we are all full of change and huge potential.
I motion we re-name them “genital reveal parties”
Yeah let’s reveal your child’s genitals… doesn’t have the same ring to it
Better yet, don’t even mention a child. Just invite all your friends to a Genital Reveal Party and see what happens.
Genital Reveal Party
Children welcome!
Giving gendered pronouns to a child too young to understand gender accomplishes only one thing, and that’s telling strangers what genitals the child has. It’s pedo bait and child abuse.
Hoho, I’ve been to plenty of those
I’m low key annoyed about the whole “it’s a social construct” to mean “it’s not real”. Social constructs are real as fuck and they can fuck you up good.
The economy is a social construct. Days of the week are a social construct. I still need to show up to work on Monday morning so I can give my socially constructed fiat currency to the grocery shop in order not to fucking starve.
Some people push it like that, but that’s not really what the observation is about. It’s meant to highlight that it’s not preordained. Life is mostly made up and we should learn to acknowledge that openly. Especially when aspects of that made-up-ness actively oppress people
I’ve socially transitioned and I can safely say it’s like going through a portal into a different dimension.
I mean it’s a bit like saying software is just 1s and 0s. Ya great but I still need to run Krita to draw.
Babies do not have gender, because baby minds aren’t developed enough to understand that kind of social construct. A baby’s gender is both a social construct AND not real.
What bothers me is when people use that argument to advocate for replacing ‘constructs’ which evolved more or less naturally over tens of thousands of years, even before the dawn of civilization, with something deliberately engineered by individual humans. Is a cis-normative nuclear family the only way that it’s possible to live? Of course not, but it’s also what the vast majority of the population wants in their lives, which is why it’s the standard.
That’s what people do because they were told so.
God has an elephant head and loves pancakes?
Thunder comes from Thor hitting, … Clouds with his hammer?
You go to geaven/hell if you do this don’t…
…
It’s just what many peoples software run on, because that was how they were taught/indoctrinated from birth and they didn’t really have the need to break out of it. And well, if it works it might do it for them, the problem is they might think your life/lifestyle is the wrong way to live.
That’s what people do because they were told so.
Nah, man, I happen to think that women are amazing and the idea of living with a woman who loves me is pretty damn cool.
I’m not talking about love, but the artificial idea that when you found someone, then you must stay with them “forever” and other things christian marriage enforcing.
I’m not certain that I possess the linguistic ability to adequately express the full magnitude of my feelings on this matter. Sharing my entire life with this wonderful, magical, creature who loves me back, is exactly what pushes my buttons. Nobody has to enforce that upon me.
Sure, and that applies to LGBT+ too, and also if the fire vanes.
This is patently absurd. For one thing, the nuclear family itself is not currently what the vast majority of the population wants; if you look at the global population, both now and historically, the extended family is dominant. I might as well argue that children abandoning their parents and home is an unnatural construct, that’s replacing the ‘tribal’ way of living that was natural for humans for millennia. I could further argue that (since the nuclear family only became the most common type in the US in the 1960s and 70s), it was done in corporate interests to sell more cars and suburban houses, and that it is in fact YOU that is slobbering all over corporate cock.
But I wouldn’t make that argument, because it’s reductive and, frankly, a bit silly to let a narrative take the place of actually reading some sociological studies.
You might enjoy reading some analysis into how capitalism requires the nuclear family in some ways
Thanks – I’m familiar with some of Engels’ analysis on it, but will have a look at this. Seems interesting!
It’s a very interesting article. I broadly think its argument is sensible, but there’s a couple of places I’d offer some dissent:
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I think the idea of greater socialisation of child raising is framed as avoiding turning back the clock to a time when the nuclear family was stronger. I’d disagree with this framing of the suggestion; in many ways this is a return to tradition. Capitalism and the autonomy it represents has led to a loss of the kinds of community the author is describing. It has allowed the destruction of the ‘village’ in the idiom ‘it takes a village to raise a child’. There is now enough wealth for parents to leave the extended family and the local community to form their own, isolated nuclear family, which I personally think can be damaging for children’s socialisation.
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I think the author makes a good point about ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ as identies having the space to exist as subcultures with the greater autonomy afforded under capitalism, but I would take issue with the suggestion that queer identities are only able to exist as a result of capitalism. There are numerous examples of historical transgender and homosexual identities, not just behaviours (e.g. two-spirit people in Native American culture).
Overall I think it’s an interesting narrative and a good point about the distinction between homosexual behaviour and desires, and queer identity.
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That’s a huge strawman jk. We really just want the hets to stop trying to harm/kill people that are different from them.
TEH GAYS WANT TO DESTROY THE FAMILY is vintage homophobia and really needs to go jk.
We really just want the hets to stop trying to harm/kill people that are different from them
I know very well that this is what the majority of people want, but bad actors attempt to take advantage of the situation with bullshit, like DEI initiatives, which are really only thinly veiled plots to maximize profits that hurt people who just want to be left alone by weaponizing their lifestyles for political gains.
So DEI is DESTROYING TEH FAMILY now?
You need to l lay off the glue jk.
Why are you ending* every sentence in jk
That’s his name. I’m talking to him, zal.
Hah, wondered too, usually jk = just kidding :-)
DEI is a corporate initiative designed to restructure society so it can be more easily commodified and monetized, with a crudely drawn rainbow on it so that people will defend it like these corporate entities are somehow your friends.
Why is everyone obsessed with DEI all of a sudden? Is DEI the new thing to be mad at or something?
Did y’all move on from 15 minutes cities and political correctness?
It’s just one simple example of current corporate culture that most people will understand.
CORPORATIONS ARE NOT YOUR FRIEND
How come you’re defending something deliberately engineered by individual humans recently, right after saying that behaviour bothers you?
How convenient of you to ignore not only a much bigger chunk of human history than the last couple thousand years (if even that), and so so many cultures that aren’t the handful you’re familiar with, but also all of the vast systemic social man made influences that make it that way, like religion, patriarchy, and even capitalism…
TIL my dick is a social construct.
Gender ≠ Sex
