Frack's reference post

People used to think that eugenics was an immutable, self evident, obvious science. It turned out that was socially constructed too

no body should be sure of anything! nothing is real!

except it's OK for Frack and her cronies to be really sure that medicating and operating on children who don't conform to societal sex stereotypes is A-OK, because after all, the stakes are really low eh?

Regarding heteronormativity, aside from the obvious that lesbian women and gay men are less likely to embrace gender stereotypes than trans activists, that last sentence sounds like queer theory again where families raising their own children is a bad thing...

People used to think that eugenics was an immutable, self evident, obvious science

Funny you should mention eugenics...........

My best guess is that Frack won’t answer the question because the answer will be stereotypes, personality and inner essences, which will then be followed up by all the same questions Frack has failed to answer, for example, why should children be encouraged onto a medical pathway just so their personalities aline with sex stereotypes etc, to which Frack will have no answer that doesn’t involve Frack admitting that Frack does thin children should be medicalised for having the wrong personalities to match sex stereotypes.

Frack doesn’t want to admit what Frack thinks, because it’s so fucking monsterous that Frack knows how it will look.

Come on Frack, own your shit. Either you believe that kids should be experimented on because their personalities don’t match sex stereotypes or you don’t. If your opinions are so unpalatable that even you yourself can’t defend them then that says a lot about you.

I don't understand why people keep asking me to define what I think gender and gender identity means. I already wrote a long post explaining my own view.

Did you? I must have missed that. Can you post the date/time of that post so that I can find it? And the thread title if it's not this one. Or better still just c&p it again here because lots of people seem to have missed it.

I clicked on your wiki link, which is the usual lengthy page. Worse still, the first sentence is Gender identity is the personal sense of one's own gender. I clicked on 'gender' to check which meaning of 'gender' they meant (see BarbaraStrozzi's post just before yours), and got another lengthy wiki page. Do you really expect people to plough through all that?

You asked us what the problem was with the concept of gender, and several of us managed to give you a reply in a sentence or two, or at the most a short paragraph. Why can't you tell us what you mean by 'gender' and 'gender identity' in a similarly concise way?

It feels like I've been reading for years and I still haven't seen a post from Frack which make sense. Please Frack, please for dimwits like me who lurk, please just say what you mean by gender. Please don't send me off on yet another link, please just say it, in your own words.

Oh so now heteronormative doesn't mean what it means either according to trans ideologists.

Stop changing the meaning of words and maybe the rest of us will have the first clue what you are blethering on about.

Hurrah for BarbaraStrozzi!!!! top post, thank you

And still Frack refuses to answer the question.

I’m not interested in what Wiki, the font of all bollocks has to say. Tell us in your own words, or C&P the explanatory post you keep on about, as I’m sure nobody here can be arsed to plough through all your other drivel to guess which one it might be.

Heteronormativity is not just about sexual orientation. It is the pressure to conform within a patriarchal system. This includes:

- being heterosexual
- not being transgender

I’d have thought that encouraging young people, many of them LGB, to change their bodies with surgery and drugs, in order to make them resemble the sex that matches their apparent gender and thus become straight, is as heteronormative as it gets.

TL:DR - there's "sex", "sex stereotypes" and "gender feelings", and using the same word for all of them confuses the hell out of everyone (which I suspect might be the point of the exercise).

Longer version

The big problem here is that gender is one of those words with multiple meanings (polysemous, since some people on here like long words). It gets used to mean:

1. A synonym for biological sex in people who are too coy to say sex;
2. In linguistics, as the gender of a noun (der die das in German);
3. In old school social sciences circa 1980s and 90s, as shorthand for the set of roles, behaviours, dress codes etc. that a given society sanctions for one sex or the other;
4. An internal sense or feeling, which some people report having and others do not, of being womanly or manly or something in between or none of the above.

A large part of the current clusterfuck arises from people systematically conflating (1), (3) and (4), because of the same word being used for all of them..

I have taken to using "sex" and "sex stereotype" for 1 and 3 (or socially sanctioned sex stereotype, to underline that this is happening not at the level of individual sexist arses but at a society wide level, often so unconsciously that we don't even notice it). 4 - meh, the genderists can have it.

One of the problems I'm having with Frack's posts is they continually slide between meanings 1, 3 and 4, and I'm never quite clear which one they're talking about at any given time (or even if Frack themselves knows which one they're talking about).

(There is of course a whole separate issue of whether there is anything (3) and (4) actually correspond to. A thorough going libertarian who rejected class analysis might dispute whether socially sanctioned sex stereotypes actually make sense as a tool of political analysis. Someone gender critical like me would file "gender" in sense 4 in the same pigeon hole as "the soul", "Aristotelian essences" and "phlogiston", as something gallons of ink and terrabytes of data have been devoted to in discussion, but which don't actually correspond to anything out there in the real world.)

Perhaps frack means cisnormative ?

Shona

"Look look! Lots of words! One is a big word with hetro in them. I'll add it and hope it sounds plausible."

I'm joking, of course

In the context of this thread I'm assuming Frack means that most healthcare professionals have a default of assuming patients are not trans and that is a problem Frack wishes to change. However, I don't see how the word heteronormative fits in this as we're discussing gender not sexuality.

Frack, I’m not overly interested in what Wiki says gender is but I looked anyway, or I would’ve done if that link actually went anywhere.

I’ll ask you again, what do you understand the word gender to mean?

It’s a really simple question. I managed to describe what I understand it to mean in a single sentence.

yes lang, you get a signed copy of Gender Trouble and and all expenses paid trip to the Michel Foucault memorial naked sauna

I just want to problematise heteronormativity embedded in the medical establishment

Regardless of whether or not you agree with this aim could someone put it into English?

Is it something to do with recognising there may be a bias itowards heterosexual people and heteronormative people in medical treatment? And having recognised this, formulating policies to deal with the bias?

I just want to problematise heteronormativity embedded in the medical establishment.

I find the concept of young lesbians undergoing surgery to turn them into straight boys, and vice versa for young gay boys, highly heteronormative and problematic. But it’s thoroughly embedded in the queer establishment.

I win, right?!

yes lang, you get a signed copy of Gender Trouble and and all expenses paid trip to the Michel Foucault memorial naked sauna

I don’t like the terms FtM or MtF by the way as a. they centre sex, b. they centre binarism and c. many trans people don’t go from one binary to another.

Quite aside from the word salad aspects of this (it really is better to use plain English not academic waffle).

1 Hormones and surgeries are only about sex. Men and women have been free to wear whatever clothes they wish, wear make up or not, have long or short hair as they please, in the Western world for several decades now. Surgeries and hormones are not about gender presentation, they are about trying, fruitlessly, to change sex.

2 Sex is binary. There are only two, male and female, two sex chromosomes X and Y, two types of gonads testicles and ovaries, two sorts of gamete eggs and sperm.

3 No trans person goes from one binary to the other because human beings ca not change sex. After all the hormones and surgeries going the trans person remains exactly the same 100% male in MtF or 100% female in FtM they started out as. Do you really not understand this very basic point? It is all cosmetic, no one can change their sex, mammals just don't work like that.

(I even managed it without - I hope - breaking guidelines. I win, right?!)

Isn't this something to do with queer theory?

Yes. But I doubt Frack will admit it.

Given Frack's endless refusal to answer a simple question about puberty blockers in children and surgery in adults, I'll make a stab at the answer...

Queer theory asserts boundaries are bad and subverting them is good. The safeguarding of children involves boundaries about their medical treatment so we must subvert them and prescribe plenty of yummy puberty blockers. The boundaries women have with regard to XY people in their spaces are bad so we must subvert them and not insist that XY people have to have surgery in order to access those spaces or take on an XX identity.

I don't know why Frack can't just type that! It's not hard.

Genderists don't believe in boundaries.

There. A tl;dr version for free!