#86:

Rock Lobster is nothing, nothing, compared to the B-52's version of Stairway to Heaven.

I have seen the belly of the Beast. Well, heard its stomach rumbling, at least.

--Devin

This is utterly inexplicable.

No one has mentioned "More than words" by Extreme. It was wildly popular on the radio, oh, some time in the nineties (oh, the forsaken, wretched nineties!) buoyed up the charts by teenieboppers who thought it was romantic.

Apparently it was written to get a girl into bed. And according to wikipedia, it also featured 'intricate guitar work'. But the howling disharmonic vocals, clunky by-the-numbers lyrics make this manipulative and cynical song the biggest piece of crap ever dealt before goatse.

--Devin

I'm waiting for the first lame 'frigidity' joke.

Oh, wait...sorry.

--Devin

Gads, I remember reading about these things when I was nine or ten. (We didn't have DVD spacers back then.) The version they had was so small the mousetrap formed the body of the car. I remember thinking 'won't the mousetrap just spin the wheels so fast it'll fall over?'

Sorry. Nostalgia spasm. Won't happen again.

--Devin

I've actually seen this one, on a car outside a church:

Priests do it with amazing grace.

Okay, it was a Unitarian Church, but it still counts.

--Devin

I, too, want to see this license before I get all hot n' bothered. It occurs to me, though, that there may be a very simple way around it: games company FooGames agrees to comply by the GSL, produces GSL-licensed products for D&D4, and then turns around and creates a subsidiary BarRPG that then does as it pleases.

I am not, however, a lawyer, so anyone who is can tell us whether or not this is a legal hack.

--Devin

I'm afraid, Noen, that unlike you I have no special insight into the mind of others. (I was taking a long-distance course in telepathy, but for some reason I never even received the syllabus.) I don't know why people believe what they believe - though sometimes I have ideas - and so I tend to take opinions I don't agree with seriously.

[QUOTE]
"The objection they are making is that biology, in this case, is destiny"

There is plenty of material in this thread, in the related thread as well as countless websites to help you understand. Please educate yourself
[/QUOTE]

I'm unsure of what you're objecting to here. Do you think I'm endorsing their point of view? Why do you think I need to be indoctrinated into yours?

As for people being "filth"...I don't know enough about Unfunny to dismiss him so easily, let alone to say that people like him are bigots and racists. I've met bigots and racists: I revile what they believe in, I find their mindset paranoid and simplistic, but I'm not going to deny some of them are nice to their mothers just because I need to demonize people I dislike.

When you say I'm asking the wrong questions, though, you sound a lot saner. What, specifically, do you think I should be asking?

--Devin

Of course, Takuan. Some of these problems have been pointed out before by others. And I shouldn't have used the word 'absurdity' when I don't always mean 'logical contradiction.'

First is 'how exactly is one to know what pronoun to use?' In most cases it's pretty obvious, and where it's not, a simple question will clear it up. So I don't consider this a very serious objection.

Second is the case of the pre-operative non-transvestite transgendered person. Imagine John, congenitally and anatomically male, knows he is a woman from puberty. It's pretty common, from what I've read. John hasn't told anyone about this feeling, or taken significant steps toward surgery or transvestism.

I think the linguistic consensus would be: John is male and that's that. He's a male that wants to be female. The female pronoun would be out of place and embarrassing for him - even if he were secretly pleased he'd have to feign indignation to repercussions from other males.

A third objection (and this one really seems to stick in some people's craw) is that the choose-your-own-pronoun system is vulnerable to hacking. Much as people would like to believe that is doesn't matter if you're black or white, male or female, it does. Just because it shouldn't doesn't mean it's not real. People could choose to redefine their gender legally to take advantage of affirmative action or health care benefits.

My real objection, though, is entirely linguistic. It's an example what's called the Humpty Dumpty theory of language: a word means what I say it means. Which raises the question of what I mean when I explain my meaning..you get the idea.

Aside from that, Humpty Dumptyism has destroyed many good and useful words in English; it's why I'll never use the words natural, feminism, democracy or patriotism when another one (or ten, or fifteen) will do. When you use words like these, people hear what they expect to hear. They're an impediment, not an aid, to communication.

This might seem like a pretty small objection, but I believe, like George Orwell, that the abuse of language kills people.

--Devin

(Ooookay, sorry, gonna cut down my message length real soon now. )

Takuan:

No, I don't concur. I don't think cultural relativism is relevant here, and I can't see why you do. Even if it were relevant, many of the characteristics of masculinity and femininity do hold across the species, because they're part of biology, not culture.

I'll admit I posted the 'no one took my post seriously' line partially because it didn't seem like you'd really thought much about my argument. (And there's nothing wrong with that; you don't owe me anything.) It seemed to me like an off-the-cuff, casual answer.

I'll assume that gender behaviour is at last partially culturally defined, sure. No big deal there, really. But the definition of 'gender is what you look like' still holds across cultures; different cultures may interpret your gender differently. If a man dresses in a skirt in England, people will assume he is trying to communicate a gender of female-true; once he goes to Scotland, though, he's just a guy in a bad kilt.

I am trying to answer the fundamental question that people like Unfunny et al. are asking (though they may not know it): by what right is one called a 'man' and 'woman'? The objection they are making is that biology, in this case, is destiny, and that a surgical operation or mere desire doesn't give one a right to be called male or female. It's in your genes, or genitals, or brain structure (they seem pretty fuzzy on this detail.)

I think it's a valid question, and it deserves an answer. I think, though, it's the wrong question to ask: the word 'right' immediately puts it in the moral sphere, and they're resorting to factual arguments.

But no moral statement can be proven, or even supported by reference to the natural world. You can't get an ought from an is. (If you disagree with me on this point, then I'll have to direct you to David Hume.)

So the "biology determines your pronoun" crowd is barking up the wrong tree. But no one seems to have answered their question on its own terms, so they just get all huffy and feel persecuted, which just makes them all the more stubborn.

However, the answer "you choose your own pronoun" leads to absurdities, as I pointed out before.

Which leads me to where I am now.

--Devin

@209

I don't quite understand what you're objecting to here. Different cultures will have different definitions of masculinity and femininity - and much bad comedy will be made based on the misunderstandings so produced - but my definition holds cross-culturally.

No one seems to have addressed my little offering seriously. I am sad.

--Devin

I have followed this thread with interest. As far as I can see, the contest between the self-righteousness and the overbearing seems to be pretty much a draw. I wasn't keeping score, exactly.

By way of introducing myself, I'm interested in linguistic issues. (This seems more germane than to give my sex, gender, sexuality, or preferred pronoun.) And this, I think, is primarily a linguistic problem. Who gets to decide how language, which is defined by consensus, is used?

On one side, I have to reject Humpty-Dumptyism: "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean- neither more nor less." If I were a man (whatever that means) and went around insisting that people refer to me as 'she', I'd just be wrong. We as individuals can't dictate what a word means unilaterally.

On the other, using a pronoun based purely on someone's genes or genitalia is pretty silly, too, since neither of these are obvious without close inspection.

So I am going to offer a fairly simple theory of gender that I think will annoy everyone in this thread equally: your gender is what you look like. It has nothing to do with your sexuality, and is related to your sex by correlation, not causation. It has everything to do with dress and hair style...and these are not trivial things, since they determine gender.

In this scheme, there are two different genders (male and female) which are not opposites, and five different gender terms:
* Male (having characteristics agreed upon as male)
* Female (ditto, mutatis mutandis)
* Mixed (having qualities of both, by quick visual inspection)
* Undetermined (e.g., of an animal whose genitals are not immediately obvious)
* None (e.g., the laptop I'm writing with.)

For practical purposes, most people are either male-false and female-true or vice versa. Some people might be male-true and female-true. But no one gets to dictate what pronoun gets used for them directly. Gender's something you have to earn.

I can foresee two objections to this theory. The first is 'What do I call someone when their gender-term is mixed, undetermined or none?' To which I reply, 'Make a guess, or use the term you prefer, given what you want out of the conversation.' If you want to piss a transgendered person off, by all means, call them by their sex-pronoun. If, on the other hand, you want a more civil style of communication, use the term they prefer. If you have to ask and they get offended, well, you can't please everyone.

The second is that judging a person's gender by their obvious physical features and style of dress (and judging is exactly what we're doing) is frivolous, or irrelevant. To this, I reply that what you display, be it obvious breasts or a suit and tie, is a form of communication, just like language.

Communication sometimes fails, and it's
generally a sterile pastime to try to blame either the receiver or the sender. Neither is in complete control of what message they send or how it's interpreted; a transwoman can't always hide her stubble, and if I see someone with long hair and delicate features I have every right to say 'she'.

Now, as for sex...I'd say that there are a whole bunch of those, what with the broad range of genetic variation. But as I see it, gender is as simple as breath mint/candy mint.

Not that that problem hasn't caused no end of trouble...