The hypothetical cannot work because I know you don’t identify as a brick therefore you could never convince me that you identify as a brick so I would never need to decide if that’s a choice I need to support or not.
People probably struggle to answer your question because you make such a piss poor job of asking it.
The crux of the matter is that nobody that you personally know in your lifetime will ever legitimately claim to identify as a brick or even as a different race, so it is a complete irrelevance. It will never affect you.
There is the possibilty that someone you know will identify as a different gender to their sex at birth. You personally will have to decide how you act on that information. So all your hypotheticals and what ifs don’t matter one iota if it all just boils down to you justifying being shitty to someone with gender dysmorphia.
Just want to say that gender identity issues are obviously a very real phenomenon.
Talking about identifying as a bird (the girl on the video) or a brick (even in jest to make a point) doesn’t seem like cricket to me. Nobody really sees themselves as a bird or a brick, so it obfuscates the proper issue in hand, and possibly lacks a little empathy.
It might not be common yet but didn’t a white American man insisted to be identified as a Filipino woman. He is part of a community who calls themselves Trans racial. Admittedly I don’t have personal encounter with them yet but it begs the question in reality, where do you draw the line on what you can self identify as? Like the Canadian father who not identify as transgender but identity as a 6 year old girl. Is that OK or acceptable? What is the line? I honestly don’t know anymore.
If we really are in the place where someone wants to say they are a bird, a brick, a six year old girl or a Filipino woman, my initial thought is that they should see a qualified therapist. If the therapist is convinced that it is a real thing, fine, they can take it from there. I can’t imagine that the quantity of people affected would be worth noting.
In all likelihood it is a piss take though, or some misguided way of trying to comment on the genuine struggles that some people have with their gender identity.
In the context of say identification of another race vs transgender, they definitely would be alot lesser in terms of number of them. But imagine just decades ago, there are also not many people coming out to talk about themselves as identifying as another gender and look where we are today. So I believe its more about people not daring to speak out then about themselves as a transgender. So I see similarities that people who believe they are transracial just are not speaking out as much as transgender rather than there are not alot of them. But say if we are talking generally about the feelings of people, what quantity is worth noting and what quantity is not?
Having said that, I understand what you are saying that people are claiming these examples as just a way to dismiss or ridicule people who identifies as another gender or pronouns etc…
The race one is less unlikely than you think. Quite a few ‘visually caucasian’ (for want of a better description) people in Australia identify as Aboriginal. Aboriginality depends upon cultural acceptance by an Aboriginal community so, if they are accepted as such, then they are Aboriginal and entitled to the various schemes etc open to reduce longstanding structural inequality experienced by Indigenous Australians. I personally find this potentially problematic if it becomes middle class welfare by stealth but if the identification is genuinely accepted then apparently this works fine.
Race is one thing, but nationality? Like the American man who says he is a Filipino woman. If he wants a Filipino passport now because he identifies as Filipino, would Philippines be discriminating if they refused? If gender can be self determined, why not age, race, and so on and on? And I am saying this not to ridicule but I do see all these playing out sooner or later so it’s for all to ponder how to move forward on this.
I’d imagine someone would have to go through a citizenship process as they currently do if they weren’t born in that country. As there is an existing legal process, I don’t think anyone would have grounds to argue otherwise. There would be no need to complicate the issue. This isn’t the Pandora’s Box that some eould have you believe. As said earlier, just somebody saying they are something doesn’t make it so. There are processes. Even someone changing gender isn’t legally recognized, at least in the UK unless they have completed specific paperwork.
They’ve just introduced a new law proposal in Germany. If passed, you can just go to a registry office and change your gender legally, without any further formalities. Minors over 14 need parental approval, but may be able to ask a court to overrule, if the parents don’t agree.
well, I’m getting pretty closed to declaring myself as a pastafarian…so there!
Pastafarian Prayer
Our pasta, who art in a colander, draining be your noodles. Thy noodle come, Thy sauce be yum, on top some grated Parmesan. Give us this day, our garlic bread, …and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trample on our lawns. And lead us not into vegetarianism, but deliver us some pizza, for thine is the meatball, the noodle, and the sauce, forever and ever. R’amen.
The more fundamental limitation of the analogy is that science has has not uncovered limitations of the brick/not brick dichotomy the same way it has with biological sex. What we all likely learned in school, that the specific pairing of the two sex chromosomes results in a specific set of reproductive organs, external genitalia, is actually more a heuristic than an immutable law. As a rule of thumb it aligns with the vast majority of our lived experiences and allows us to make good sense of the world. But there are people for whom we can identify clear discrepancies between their reality and this rule of thumb. Once you acknowledge that it is a very easy step to then acknowledge the near certainty that there are additional biological causes for someone’s gender to not fit into this neat and tidy rule of thumb for assigning biological sex.
This is the framework for the conversation about sex and gender. Analogies with people identifying as a bird, or any other thing for which there is no basis for that identification, don’t fit with this framework. Nor do any examples of people identifying with things they quite clearly are not undermine or argue against it. But then I think the majority of people who make those arguments know that to be true already. The reality is the world is full of shit that just is despite it not seeming so to us. I don’t feel time moving differently for different people, but GPS still works. My computer doesn’t give a shit that I can’t get my head around the idea of electrons existing as a wave function. the world has no obligation to make sense to us, and when we’re faced with a situation where it doesn’t, and your response to that impacts someone else’s dignity, and sometimes safety, you have a choice to make as to how you respond to that.
To be fair, Science has only discovered what it can prove. as an example, the Higgs Boson particle was theorized 30+ years ago but only proven at CERN recently.
there’s so much that humans in our infancy of the knowledge of the universe, just don’t understand. Spirituality and such are yet to be quantified, thus are only theoretical…yet we know that it exists, just not scientifically proven. and it may never be…
Absolutely. What you’re saying is we need to be able operate in a world where we cannot know all of the information. This is what heuristics are - rules of thumb that allow us to operate effectively when we don’t know all the information. A key part of that is being able to distinguish between something for which there is 0 evidence and almost certainly isn’t true vs something that is extremely likely true but just is not 100% verified. These two things are not the same…not knowing everything is not the same thing as knowing nothing.
With sex and gender we know enough to know that gender discordance IS real. You don’t always get a binary gender that aligns with what the sex chromosomes are supposed to dictate and/or what the reproductive organs suggest. We know several explanations for why this can happen. Based on the fact that we have to be able to operate in a world where we cannot know everything, we can quite comfortably accept there are also unknown exceptions to this rule of thumb. Meaning, there are going to be people who look to an outsider like a man, but are not binary male. Not being to identify the specific reason for this biologically is not the same as saying they have made it up.
So, how does all this fit with drawing analogies to questions over whether we can confidently identify someone as a human or a bird? Or a human and a brick? It’s surely obvious, but is there anything to suggest that the way we have collectively come to understand these categorization break down anywhere? Is there anything to suggest that in the absence of that we treat it as on the same playing field as sex-gender discordance? No, and of course not. So what we’re left with is just a silly analogy meant to trivialize the issue.
If for no other reason (twitter is a cesspit of shit anyway), that is enough to convince me to close my account. No way am I using anything that stands to make that cunt any money
