I was watching pro golf coverage on the news and it seems so odd that men and women compete separately - same goes with pro bowling. Just seems weird to me that a game of skill is gendered when you can’t even raise an argument that someone might have an advantage because of what’s between their legs.
the same products. in an interesting inversion of the already well-documented pink tax, my father in law walks around with a packet of disposable wet wipes called “dude wipes” in his pocket. they’re the exact same as the baby wipes that my partner uses, but they’re in a black package with ‘manly’ lettering on it and they cost twice as much. he had never shown interest in this product, which has been available his entire life, before it validated his gender. after it validated his gender, he valued it at twice what the non-validating version sells for.
Chess is a bit weird in this regard.
The French language :)
And the German language! Mark Twain has a whole essay about it.
“Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in the distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this one has to have a memory like a memorandum-book. In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl. See how it looks in print – I translate this from a conversation in one of the best of the German Sunday-school books:
Gretchen: “Wilhelm, where is the turnip?”
Wilhelm: “She has gone to the kitchen.”
Gretchen: “Where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden?”
Wilhelm. "It has gone to the opera.”
Acceptable counter-argument: “The English language isn’t gendered enough.”
What do you mean by that? 🤔
My take on it is that English doesn’t have enough variety in gendered words, whether that means binary, non-binary, or neutral options. In which case…yeah, come to mention it, you might be onto a perspective I didn’t think of.
People ought to be have range in how they express themselves, and I’d suppose there isn’t enough. I had been in favor of increasing the range and popularity of neutral and non-binary terms for a while now. I still am, but I don’t think that has to be mutually exclusive with increasing the range of gendered options, either. Perhaps part of resolving gendering issues in language isn’t just providing more neutral options, but more gendered options. If someone wishes to identify with masculine or feminine labeling, I think they ought to be able to.
Or maybe another lens to this is that there are “gender neutral” terms that, through context and history, have come to carry a sort of implicit gendering to them. I’m not sure if that’s a challenge in linguistics or a challenge in how some people may think.
All an interesting way to frame this kind of thing that I hadn’t considered before. If you have your own details to this you’d like to mention, I’m sure it’d be insightful to read. My language experience outside of English only extends to Spanish and some beginning bits of Dutch, and I’m in dire need of brushing up on both 🫠.
Children are unnecessarily gendered! People should give them the opportunity to explorer their own relationship with gender without being assigned one.
Just heard an interview with a person who is intersex (meaning they were born with DNA and physical characteristics that don’t match). Intersex people are also caught in all the anti-trans legislation. The quote that stood out the most to me:
I think society understands at this point that sexuality is a spectrum. Some people are gay. Some are straight. A lot are in between. And society is also starting to understand that gender is a spectrum, that you’re not just a man or a woman, but there’s a lot in between there, too. What society hasn’t quite learned yet is that sex is also a spectrum. You’re not only male or female. Two percent of the world is born somewhere in between those two poles on that spectrum. src
Intersex people are also caught in all the anti-trans legislation.
That’s something I wasn’t aware of (and have the priviledge not to think about) - do you happen to know more about how they are impacted, or any good resources for reading up on it?
Just instinctually, it sounds like a conundrum for all anti-transgender legal ‘logic’. Those people are biologically not exclusively male or female (to my understanding, corrections welcome), so which part of “you have to be your rEaL gender” applies to them? Or is being born intersex just intrinsically criminal?
Sorry, I made the link to the source pretty small ;)
Alcohol is a pretty big one.
There’s the whole “drinking stuff that tastes like trash is manly and ‘puts some hair on your chest’” stereotype but bro, I’ll take a Seagrams Calypso Colada over something like a beer any day of the week. I want to enjoy the things I’m putting in my body.
