Frack's reference post

[FrackOff]

Hi All
I have been asked in various threads for references. I am starting a new thread as I've lost track of all the conversations. I wasn't going to bother as people usually don't want to read them but since one or two have said they really do want to read them with an open mind, here are a few.

Reidar Schei Jessen & Katrina Roen (2019) Balancing in the margins
of gender: exploring psychologists’ meaning-making in their work with gender non- conforming youth seeking puberty suppression, Psychology & Sexuality, 10:2, 119-131, DOI: 10.1080/19419899.2019.1568290

ABSTRACT
The past 15 years have seen the growth of puberty suppression as the prevailing approach to supporting gender non-conforming children and youth. Puberty suppression is considered to provide time for weighing up the pros and cons of medical transition. Research based on binary under- standings of gender has demonstrated that a carefully selected group of gender non-conforming youth benefit from physical treatment and gender transition, but the research that details how psychologists can best support young people during this time is limited. This is the gap addressed by the current research. The purpose of the present study is to explore the meaning-making framework within which some clinical psychologists and gender non-conforming youth approach discussions of puberty suppression. Five semi-structured interviews were conducted with clinical psychologists working with gender non-conforming youth. The data were analysed using thematic analysis. The results indicate that there is pressure on gender non- conforming youth, often coming from families, friends and mass media, to buy into heteronormative and binary discourses regarding gender and what constitutes a good life. The results also indicate that the participants deploy affirmative and exploratory therapeutic strategies in their work, in order to enable gender non-conforming youth to make informed decisions regarding puberty suppression. Participants emphasized the importance of therapeutic approaches that explore non-binary gender discourses, alongside the use of puberty suppression and other medical interventions that enable clients to fit more with gender norms. The therapeutic balance between affirmation and exploration may shed light on how both research within the binary tradition and critics of binary assumptions are in danger of oversimplifying the process of gender identity development. This research highlights the importance of understanding the complex negotiation of gender discourses that are in tension with one another.

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

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.

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.

Perhaps frack means cisnormative ?

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.)

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

• being heterosexual
• not being transgender

but also,

• sticking to stereotyped sex roles

It gives rise to
-sexism
-male domination over women
-an attachment to the heterosexual nuclear family as the capitalist mode of production

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. Then I additionally posted a link (which didn't work)

So sorry about the link. Here is the wiki again en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_identity

and as a link en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_identity

I didn't write it, but I do agree with it.

OK, that one works I think.
I am going to make the family some food now.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Hahahahahahahahaha my kids were once talking about famous people they'd like to slap, and they decided on Foucault because I talked about him too much.

Look, all these ideas are only tools to unpick meanings. Foucault himself said, don't listen to me! These are only ideas and we should avoid grand overarching discourses (like gender exists/gender doesn't exist/when it comes to our experience of our bodies, nothing else but biology is real).

The problem is people think there has to be a rigid framework for understanding the world. But we are dealing with people here. People are messy and complicated.

'Believing' in the social construction of gender (or sex roles if you like that better) isn't a dogma, it's just a way to try and understand why people do what they do.

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

I don't want children to be harmed, in any way, ever. I have worked my entire life for children's rights and children's voices to be heard. I think that sometimes parents are faced with the 'wicked problem' of having to choose between two very hard options.

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?

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.

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

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

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. 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?

and only some people thought eugenics was self evident. The political and medical establishment at the time did. The same class of people who are driving the current experiments on children in fact

plenty of others thought eugenics was dangerous nonsense

'Believing' in the social construction of gender (or sex roles if you like that better) isn't a dogma, it's just a way to try and understand why people do what they do.

You see Frack, this is a classic case of the way you are not listening to anything we say, and systematically conflating two entirely different versions of the word "gender."

No-one, and I quite literally (in the literal meaning of literal!) mean no-one on this board disputes that "gender" in the sense of socially sanctioned sex stereotypes is a social construction. That's one of the absolutely central tenets of any sort of feminism - liberal, radical, 2nd wave, 3rd wave.

Socially sanctioned sex stereotypes are at the heart of the problem we all wrestle with as women. They're culturally and historically variable, constructed, arbitrary and act to oppress women.

No-one on here is disputing that.

What pretty much all of us are disputing is "gender" in the other sense - the idea of "internal feeling of gender", and more specifically, whether that idea actually corresponds to anything (whether it's some sort of neurological state of being or Layla Moran's gendered souls which she sees when she looks into someone's eyes). One can be a theist about it (they really are "out there" in some sort of Platonic realm, or in the structure of the brain or whatever), agnostic (just don't know) or atheist (they're simply a belief that some people harbour to help them make sense of the world).

You have to be clear about both what you're talking about, Frack, and what your opponents are talking about. That's (remembering my days as a lecturer) the difference between scraping a third and a comfortable 2.1. At the moment, frankly, you're reminding me of those of my students who only just scraped thirds. And bloody hell, I'm having flashbacks to just how tedious it was giving them tutorials.

Not the lack of understanding - I can forgive people struggling with difficult concepts. But the sloppy thinking. And the failure to engage. That's just unforgivable in someone in academia. And trying to cover it up with po-mo word salad doesn't help, it just obscures your muddled thinking even further.

Frack is like a politician, unable to give a yes/no answer but blethers word salad instead.
So in the vague hope of an honest yes or no, do you Frack believe in giving children under the age of 18 puberty blockers?
The only answer required is either yes or no. Simples!

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

You're really not the best person to be invoking this particular topic. As you well know. How goady and offensive.

Frack

What I am trying to get my head around is that you do keep talking about gender stereotypes and gender presentation. You seem to be for children being allowed to take blockers to choose their own gender. I read into this that you must have strong views on what gender means to you.

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

This is nonsensical. Eugenics is not a social construct. It is a biological science. It is more than possible to breed human beings like dogs in order to produce particular characteristics. The point is that it is not ethical to do so.

One of the leading Nazis (I forget which) defined Naziism as 'applied biology'

The Nazis believed less in the existence of a super race but in the deranged ambition to produce one.