wait what

On all the other sites I use, gender is a tag and not a field that has only several responses. By making it a drop-down selection, it becomes an administrative choice which genders to include and not a user choice. As a writer, and I'm sure you've experienced this too, most stories should technically have "Multiple Characters" because even if it's two herms, it's "Multiple Characters." I've always been very annoyed at the fact that dropdown exists because it invites a committee to decide what should be in it and that's just not very helpful.

"Herm" is a selectable option again. I was wondering how long that would last since they'd grouped every "herm" under "intersex" when they changed the options and most intersexed people absolutely do not like being called "herms." Glad it's somewhat resolved. I hope this newest change sticks.

I'm so-so on it. If they want to actually clarify, they need to make it be physical sexes / genders only, none of the mental stuff. Main reason is because... let's be honest... people are only on here to fap. They don't care. They wanna see titties or dick and that's it.

I keep hoping more people will realize this. I've started putting Sex: (insert sex here) instead of Gender: (insert gender here) on my character bios. For gender, I put something like "non-binary" or "female" depending on how a character sees themselves. I'm going to employ this everywhere I can with my stuff and hope others pick up on it.

People on this site need to realize that for 99% of the population, Sex and Gender are interchangeable terms. Your mindset, in most if not all cases, is linked and heavily influenced to the hormones you receive inside your brain from those generated by either your testicles or your ovaries. Hell, Estrogen and Testosterone are linked to what areas of your brain develop and when. GENDER and SEX are terms that follow the mainstream, mainline average of how people behave in society, or at least they -used- to.

'Gender' as it is now, with all these exceptions, is the product of the research of John Money.

John Money is a pedophile. He happened upon David Reimer, who had his penis mutilated during a circumcision and thereby removed with his testicles. He had David dress as a girl. He had the parents give him dolls. He had the older brother imitate, then fully perform SEXUAL ACTS on his little brother. He RECORDED this all and submitted the pornography as 'research' when other researchers came across it.

David -never- was happy being raised as a girl. His body, his mind, told him he was male even though he was being raised as a female. His Gender and his Biological sex, as it is for 99% of the population, were intrinsically interwoven.

This abuse, disguised as research, caused him to blow his head off with a shotgun.

This abuse, disguised as research, is the entire baseline for the sex/gender division.

A harsh truth is that 'Normal' does exist. We were lied to, as kids, when we were told it doesn't.

I cannot comment on the ethical soundness of Gender Studies as a whole based on your example. Awful people have started many branches of research. I'm glad better protections are in place today than back when John Money was doing his research. I have a lot of compassion for David. I've felt distressed by being forced into gender roles that don't fit me, and if I hadn't been able to start truly expressing myself a decade ago, I would have shared his fate.

I'm non-binary. And by your calculation, I'd be in that 1%.

I agree that normal doesn't exist. A lot of what we consider "masculine" or "feminine" is a construct. In Taiwan, the ideal man is "wenrou" which is basically a man who is emotional and compassionate and thoughtful. Taiwanese male popstars are weepy and sentimental in their songs. It's quite amusing to compare their pop songs to ours because of this.

In Minnesota, the ideal man is also thoughtful, witty, and educated. In Texas, the ideal man has a swagger and a ranch to his name. Sure, there's details that most depictions of men share, but few of those details stand up to cross-cultural examination.

One of the most interesting things I've watched in the last month is an examination of how women were depicted in the movie Mad Max: Fury Road. Here's a link to the short series that was done on it. Link to video series.

Normal does exist, my friend. Normal is the average by which all other things are measured. If you have compassion for David's situation, then you need to have that same compassion for the rest of the world that has struggled through and continues to struggle through those same trials.

You have to consider in a society that which is 'proclaimed' to be ideal and that which is 'proven' in terms of ideal. An idealized man has a balance in all things between their emotions and their thoughts and their actions [ In your example, a Wenrou is capable of swift and decisive action when it is required ]. An overly emotional man is mocked, and with good reason, as being overly emotional means that a man will not think or will be effectively paralyzed in a stressful situation. He becomes a liability. An ideal man, no matter the culture, is an even-handed and protective figure, not someone that will fall apart.

The concept that an idealized man vanishes across cultures is blatantly false because all societies require strong men. and they require strong women as well. People of sound moral judgment and people willing to look at the truth. One such truth that -must- be accepted, however, and this is a truth by Gender Studies itself, is that the field is founded upon fundamentally horrible acts. Once THAT can be acknowledged, and thereby once people accept that the basis of Gender Studies is founded on the discovery that Genetics, Gender, and Sex are possibly much, much closer linked than we can likely imagine, then the discussions can begin in earnest and future discoveries can be made.

Finally, in response to your idealizations of men across the United States; I am sure that a landowner in Minnesota is viewed with a very high value, just as a landowner in Texas would be, because that is a combination of monetary and physical assets that can be pointed to to display worth.

I'm not going to look at a Fury Road video, considering that by the logic of the movie, the wasteland settlement with the reservoir didn't have a way of producing more water in exceptional quantities, so removing the stipends and allowing free access the protagonist has likely caused all their deaths. And this is just going by the introductory plot points, not including the fact that by unleashing a torrent of water into a community would make the bandits come a-knocking, especially after the CURRENT bandit militia gets wiped. :x

I respect that you have strong negative opinions about Gender Studies and that you have thought a lot about this stuff. Genetics and gender being more closely related than we thought is an interesting take.

I cannot attach it to what I know of different cultures. Overly emotional men are not universally mocked. In some tribal cultures overly emotional men are thought of as healers or to be in touch with the spirit world. Before the advent of farming, matriarchies were very common and women seen as having personal strength in much the same way we see that in men these days. Farming actually caused a gigantic societal flip.

About your mention of strength: If both strong women and strong men are needed and being overly emotional is undesirable, then I see an erasure of the difference in expectations society has for men and women.

This matches with my observation that women in my life are as emotionally stable and able to have clear judgement as the men. The men just hide their doubt and emotions more. And how I know they hide them is that the men who are very stalwart in the face of emotional circumstances tend to have sharp emotional deviations later on after the crises has passed. Anger is the most common emotion I see displayed when the stuffed emotions bubble to the surface.

It is interesting that it is more acceptable for a man in our western culture to get angry and hit something than it is for him to cry during a touching film. Repeated angry displays are a sign of emotional instability, not of strength. And yet, when I was learning how to be a man growing up, everyone around me was more shocked when I cried from hearing beautiful music than when I punched a wall.

Friends and family work so hard to teach young men how to "be a man." If it was genetics, that teaching wouldn't be as pervasive or necessary.

Note that there is a difference between 'emotional' men and 'overly emotional' men. Do the emotional healers allow their emotions to halt them from cutting away an infection? Does it promote an unease that keeps them from amputation that will ensure a life be spared? These are not men that are overly emotional, they are in tune with their emotions as most men are, but they are not broken by the weight of their feelings at any given time. An 'overly emotional' man, for this discussion, is someone that is unable to react to their surroundings as needed, just as an 'overly emotional' woman would be.

As for matriarchal societies being 'common', they were not. The primary large-scale populaces that developed matriarchal institutions were Rome, Greece, the Gauls, and the Nordic peoples. In all four, men were drafted as military and as raiders, which necessitated a backup power structure at home for when the males, which are not burdened by carrying life for an extended period, are not available to perform societal and legislative duties within a household or a governmental forum [and even in these cases, Rome, for instance, would not allow a woman to influence any vote due to her position -as- a woman]. Even if you look to Egypt, women were not treated with the same dignity or gravitas as men, though their fluidity in the social fabric was greater. Said social fabric does not indicate whether there is or is not a link between genetics, sex, and gender.

As for the strength of women and the strength of men, there are interpersonal differences between each and every person. The main flaws that allow people to be considered 'weak', however, which are considered universally negative as well, are the willingness to lie, the inability to rationalize alternative perspectives, and the inability to show mercy or -successfully- reintegrate an opponent. 'Strong' and 'Weak' in this sense have nothing to do with individual personality quirks, they have everything to do with the expectations you have from your fellow human beings, and what expectations exist for you in turn. It is for this reason that an Ideal Man or Woman does, in fact exist, as said Ideal falls outside the realms of an idiosyncratic level and, instead, falls upon how said man or woman interacts with and influences society. These traits are not linked to genetics or sex or gender, and do not indicate a link or a lack thereof between genetics, sex, and gender.

Regarding the observation of women and men possessing stability: Men and women process things on a different neurological level. The presence of adrenaline, testosterone, as well as cultural conditioning, means that a man delays or removes the emotional response within an immediate timeframe, encouraging non-personal decision-making. It is for that reason that many men commit to personal sacrifice within the heat of the moment, sometimes to their detriment and the detriment of others [which we have seen in the military where mixed-gender/sex squads have had their squad leads commit to more strategically risky acts or to more self-destructive strategies when the women of the group are in danger.]

With regards for men striking things and being angry, that has never been acceptable in any community that I have been a part of, and can be regarded as one of the most dangerous myths of our time. Christian theology, in particular, makes it abundantly clear that it is not acceptable to raise a hand in anger, that any act of violence must be clearly, and calmly rationalized with love and mercy as a counterpoint. Even a -WAR- in its most political form requires the basis of love and protection in order to provide its justification. This is once again societal and subjective to your personal experiences and my own, therefore must be dismissed. If applicable, it does not indicate a link or a lack thereof between gender, sex, and genetics.

As for being shocked when you cry with beautiful music, yes, the surprise is something to be expected, it goes against the common idea that a man is stoic and, as such, will necessarily garner more attention than playing the societally accepted role. The question that has to be asked by those people, thereby, is whether, because you have stepped outside the boundaries of the societal game, something more has happened to you than the music provokes. You may be mistaking people being -shocked- at your emotional state as saying something more about society, about how it looks down upon others, when if you were to ask them you'd be more relieved to find that those around you feel concern for you, someone who is, in a relative sense, a stranger. These reactions indicate a link between societal expectations, and how sex and gender are linked in terminology and understanding.

And yes, people work hard to teach children how to 'be a man', just like girls are taught how to 'be a woman'. Going back to your previous situation presented: Breaking things is easy, it is base, and yet it is continuously taught in our civilization that it is childish behavior. Why? Because it serves no purpose except the act of destruction itself, and that destructiveness is found in both men AND women [as abuse studies indicate men and women are physically abused at the same rate, men simply do not report it]. That violence is so pervasive across both sexes [all three considering hermaphrodism on the rise in Japan] does not mean violence is a hallmark trait of one gender vs the other. This indicates that genetics determines baseline reaction to provocative stimuli, but that societal expectations even out the response between the two genders. The few results that exist indicate that MtF trans individuals are highly aggressive as a result of their transition, with lowered inhibitions, which in turn indicates there is a link between Sex, Gender, and Genetics.

In summary, the majority of these situations do not have a bearing on the core of our discussion. Most of these points are highly subjective or are refuted by data and historical record. Even so, the one point with data provided regarding violence rates, societal implications included, still point at a deep and direct link between Genetics, Sex, and Gender [nevermind that, until the Money study, Gender was not seen as a valid psychological term]

You have a much more nuanced view of this subject than I gave you credit for initially.

The averages under the bell curve for behavior vs sex are there, I don't dispute that. Due to societal expectations of men vs women, I've chosen not to take up either label. I feel continuing this discussion from where it is now will devolve into nature vs nurture. Genetics vs society, the people in one's life, and live experiences. And that just goes off the rails because everyone has been arguing about that since philosophy was invented. I'm on the side of culture. I think culture is why things happen and in the back seat is genetics. Not a driver, a passenger.

I was going to say more, but I feel the stakes are higher for you in this discussion than they are for me and I think it would be rude of me to keep prattling on when you're putting so much energy into it. I don't know what exactly is at stake. And I don't know how to see things from your perspective. I'm at a loss.

To summarize my viewpoint: I'm not on anything's side except the Truth. And by being on the side of Truth, I hope to, in what way I can, be helpful to others.

Everything has to be looked at, has to be analyzed, and has to be integrated. To state that genetics doesn't provide any influence is a... highly reductive point of view to say the least. It may make things easier in the short term, but what does that do for you if the culture should happen to shift to endorse the idea that genetics influences said culture.

This is just my opinion, but if you don't examine your thoughts, and you don't fully explore them, you leave yourself open to manipulation, to be used as a tool by other people that don't share your best interests.

I've been through a lot of situations where people have used my naivete to their benefit, or whom have used my heart as a means to deal me injury. I don't want that for you, or for anyone else, and as such I have a moral obligation to look into these matters as logically, and with as much data as I can, and to share my findings with you and others if you want them. I return, the Truth you find and bring to the table will help me form a more complete view of the world as well.

That is my perspective; the idea that the Truth helps everyone, not just one group of people at the expense of another.

Hope that helps.

I understand.

I know what it's like to be manipulated and have it ruin your life. I was effeminate guy growing up and my family, my friends, and people in church tried to get me to be a masculine guy. I didn't feel like a guy and at one point I thought I should transition. The moment I mentioned it, everyone in my life worked to convince me that I was a guy, not a girl and it worked. I never went through the proper steps to see if I should transition.

This was back in the early 2000's before the online gender extravaganza got going. I'd never even heard the word trans. I had a vague idea that it was possible to transition and felt so out of place in my body that I felt a need to explore what was possible to fix it. Everyone I had access to only offered discouragement. My psychologist tried to be supportive, but it was outside her experience and couldn't support me either.

Throughout that time, and several years after, I was clinically depressed with suicidal ideation.

The first bright light out of this darkness was the discovery that I was attracted to both men and women. Intimacy with men gave me an outlet for feelings I'd had ever since I was in high school. I used to be nervous around men because I was attracted to them and didn't know what to do with those feelings. No one in the small town I grew up in was gay, no one had heard of anyone being gay or bisexual.

Instrumental to me figuring out I was bisexual was the furry community. I was able to explore my sexuality, I was able to write stories about fantasies I had, and I was able to connect with people who were going through similar experiences to mine.

The anxiety in my life decreased dramatically after I started dating men and found a husband to go along with the wife I already had. She was supportive in me seeking out a male partner and is still married to me.

That didn't solve everything. I still had this issue of me feeling not right in my body. So, I gathered information about reassignment surgery, HRT, and implants. What I discovered is that I liked my intimate anatomy far too much to put it under a knife, also it didn't fit how I felt. My sona is a herm for a reason, that's the anatomy I think I should have. I have no f*ing clue why. It's not something I can get to logically. Or any logic I use may as well have been made up.

I've always felt I should have a vagina, I've never felt that I shouldn't have a penis. Yes, this is unrealistic and strange, but accepting that I feel that way has given me great solace. Even if I want something that's near-impossible, just knowing that I want it and that it fits me and that I have ways to express it makes me incredibly happy.

Acceptance of my inner self and my sexuality has resulted in me being able to live without antidepressants or depression. Sure, I'd love to be an actual herm, but I accept that may never be possible. It's fine, I can write about them and have fun with my character and just be me even if "me" is a construct I've had to put together to satisfy the illogical needs of my psyche. In public, I take on whatever role is going to lead to smooth social situations. I've mastered acting like a man and learned how to express my femininity when it's safe to do so.

And here's where I agree with you that there's something about my genetics and gestation that probably put me in this intermediate space between male and female. I carry weight like a woman, I tone muscle like a man, I have wide hips and narrower shoulders like a woman, I have male genetalia, I respond to crisis situations like a man, and I am socially and emotionally very in-between.

All those tendencies you spoke of for the sexes, I'm a kaleidoscope of them.

Money's research these days has been pretty widely and rightfully discredited and no-one who seriously talks about the difference between sex and gender is basing their arguments off his awful garbage. The current consensus is that while gender and sex are often linked, there IS absolutely a social and cultural aspect to it as well. Research concerning sex and gender predate Money's by many decades. There was actually a pretty substantial body of work about trans people in the 1920s and 30s, both psychological and medical, but unfortunately a lot of this knowledge was destroyed by the nazis.

Even if you want to argue that Money formalized the idea that sex and gender be used as separate terms, the idea of that predates him by many centuries simply by virtue of the fact that when people would use these terms interchangeably you would inevitably get people talking about the specific biological functions of a sex and functions which are actually very obviously purely social and societal in nature. The ancient Greeks had a very different concept of what it meant to be a man in a societal context than, say, people in Victorian England. There are differences even between different classes in the same society. Despite sex and gender being used interchangeably, there's still a contextual difference when they're used to refer to biology versus when they're used to refer to social and cultural norms.

So framing the idea that it's possible to distinguish between these two as being at all recent is pretty disingenuous. As is conflating modern gender studies with Money's horrible crimes.

It is disingenuous to conflate differences between societies that did not exist during the same time period, without providing specifics and direct links to the present situation, as though that is evidence that you are correct. That is obfuscation, as is the claim that 'research was destroyed by the Nazis'. If such research has been destroyed, it has to be rediscovered, and it has to be retried and re-evaluated. Simply being destroyed by a culture that did hateful things does not give it a free pass without being closely observed and tested.

As such I'm not going to go into the reeds with you on a hypothetical.

You also seem to be misinterpreting my words, so I will restate and clarify them for you using language you may better understand: For 99% of the population, people with their specific biological Sex share a large amount of correlating mental traits, predispositions, and behaviors (Gender) that follow a trend. For that 99%, normal, every day discussion do not see a distinction between the two terms as the social CONTEXT will determine what they are referring to: Mental or Physical constructions. That context, especially dealing with surface-level relations (Where you're not dealing with someone for multiple hours each day), means that the basis of what to expect and what to deal with is based on your physical representation, how you dress and maintain yourself.

Context is always important, and provided research indicates that there is a possible strong link between genetics and the behavior of individuals on a societal level. Making the claim that I am conflating sex and gender is disingenuous and ignores the entire conversation I've had, above, with Zmeydros.

Context is always important, and Money's research is used, quite often, as the origin point of Gender Studies research, even today. The issue is that people don't use his name because they know that anyone who does research on his human testing realizes the methods that he used are unethical. If we are going to discuss a research subject, we have to discuss the entirety of it, not simply a piece here or there. The same logic applies with Eugenics. We have to discuss how it was applied to the Nazis, what their intent was, so we understand not simply what it is, but how it may affect our society on the whole.

That research is being rediscovered little by little, but you seem to choose to disregard it. It's also ridiculous to dismiss the magnitude of an event like the burning of the library of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, simply saying that well, if that research existed it should be done again, as if only data were lost instead of data and research on methodology and the like. It's not a small thing. It's like if someone purged most information on an entire branch of mathematics and people had to reinvent that stuff from scratch.

Your 99% statistic is also pretty dubious, and again you say that "For 99% of the population, people with their specific biological Sex share a large amount of correlating mental traits, predispositions, and behaviors (Gender) that follow a trend." which DOES conflate sex with gender to a large extent because many of those mental traits, predispositions and behaviours are social or cultural in nature. Those elements include things like blue being considered a 'masculine' colour, for instance, which is a quite recent cultural shift. And of course if someone is assigned male at birth based on the baby's anatomy, and then that baby is raised according to the prevailing social and cultural expectations of that sex and gender, with any deviation from that so-called norm being discouraged or punished, you're going to get someone who, in all likelihood, is going to outwardly adhere to those prevailing norms.

The fact that this system is self-correcting (for a given value of 'correcting') also makes it very difficult to collect accurate data on these things, since, again, deviation from these social and cultural 'norms' is discouraged and punished, even today. Suffice to say that in modern day that 99% statistic of yours is highly dubious even according the most conservative estimates, and that percentage is also sure to not be the same depending on which culture you sampled.

It's also not disingenuous at all to say that, even if the use of sex and gender to refer to two specific concepts today is recent, that this idea that biological sex and the social and cultural norms associated with it are two separate things. Boys are not genetically predisposed to like GI Joes over tea parties, for instance. The distinction between sex and gender is not an invention that didn't exist at all beforehand, it is a change in specific terminology to more accurately reflect a reality that has always existed. Like a distinction between certain colours. There's multiple shades of red, for instance, but you can more accurately talk about the specific differences if you talk about, say, their hex codes or whatever, or in a physics sense, the specific wavelengths of the light involved.

And again you focus on Money's research despite it being discredited by the exact same Gender Studies research you rail against, both for his grotesque methodology and because even beyond the awful things he did, his methodology was not in any way scientifically sound, and his entire premise and hypothesis being quackery.

I have disregarded nothing. I have stated there is no way to know what is or is not valid and it must be investigated. That means that I have given it due diligence and not blindly accepted it. Blind acceptance is no different than the mentality that gives us cults.

Regarding conflating: You are using the term incorrectly. Here is the definition -> https://www.merriam-webster.com/dic.....ary/conflation . Conflation would be if I said they are the same thing, completely. I have stated that they are, in all possibility, -functionally- the same for all individuals. This is not conflation, this is an observation of social dynamics, a correlation between two data points. I have also proposed the idea that genetics and hormones affects the development of the brain.

Regarding Sex / Gender biases and genetics: The Money study, which individuals point to as proof of mental constructions for gender, and they still do despite your claims, highly indicates that yes, Males have a predisposition for more active or aggressive play. These same predispositions are present in many, many other studies as well. Possibly it has to do with the phases which hormones cause development within the brain, but that research has been suppressed by the same methods you are using now; obfuscation and misdirection, claiming that society is at fault for expectations on men and pointing to a nebulous 'other culture' without indicating a specific.

Additionally, you are correct, the 99% figure is an abstraction. Looking at the latest poll of the population that is actively considers itself transgender, that would place the percent of the population that I am referring to as 99.4%. Thank you for nudging me to look up the correct statistic that we're looking at a portion of the population that is even less prevalent than my original estimate.

At this point you have taken my words out of context, twice, in order to push a false point that does not, in any way, represent my viewpoint or the ideas I have attempted to convey.

I will hide your next message if you remain unable to stay on point and have a discussion, a back and forth between our two points of view, without presenting obfuscation.

Your post has been removed for continuing to obfuscate, misrepresenting the discussion itself, and for not providing details on your claims which had been previously requested.

I think what particularly irritates me about this situation is the fact that most of these people have not done their research.

People with deformities in Rome and Greece were often Castrated. Intersex individuals were eunichs, and rendered as such from birth. The 'fluidity' they're describing when they reference Greece and Rome is that of a person that has never developed a sex drive and is locked, societally, into a servile role, unable to vote or fully interact with the rest of the populace.

But cyn... we know of all those prominient trans/deformed people in ancient rome like... well like....um.... it'll come to me... dont worry. Any second now.