...or else a basic functioning understanding of the English language, or biology.Skids wrote:You don't need to be a 'gender expert' (please tell me, we don't really have these?!)to know there are males & females.
Anyone who thinks differently has obvious mental issues.
Firstly, it's simply not scientifically accurate that there are only males and females and that it's always obvious which is which. Approximately one in 1000 people are born intersex, which means they are either not identifiably male or female, or else that they possess substantial characteristics of both sexes. But the question of what sex actually is is somewhat more complicated: yes, it usually corresponds to what someone has between their legs. But there's a substantial amount of research that shows that a person born male can have an essentially 'female' brain, and vice versa:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/0 ... fferences/
Also see intersex conditions such as XY gonadal dysgenesis, in which someone's chromosomes and external appearance don't match up:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_gonadal_dysgenesis
But the most important thing to understand here is that, despite common misconceptions (mostly arising from people erroneously using the terms interchangeably), sex and gender are not the same thing. Anybody who uses the word gender to refer to the difference between genitals is using the word incorrectly: the term 'gender' is and has always been, since it was borrowed from linguistics and first used in the social sciences in the 1960s, an idea about socially constructed roles: things like masculinity and femininity. I repeat: 'gender' does not mean what you think it means, and it never has.
One can justifiably debate whether a transgender woman is biologically male or female in terms of her sex (again, see the studies referred to in the article above); but gender, in theory, has nothing to do with whether you were born with a penis or vagina. Rather, it's about what role you perform in society. In that sense, by identifying and presenting as women, trans women are quite reasonably nowadays considered to be women, because we recognise that gender is about more than just what's in your pants. You may think your dimly recalled biology classes in school taught you otherwise and that everyone else is crazy, but newsflash: you don't know nearly as much about the subject as you think you do.
(By the way, a note on the moderation of Culprit's post above: You are entitled to whatever view you hold on transgender and to argue anything you like on the topic, but what isn't optional in this forum is treating people with this condition with dignity. As such, misgendering someone by sneeringly referring to them as 'he' when they identify otherwise is extremely disrespectful and will be moderated, with repeat offenders warned.)
