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Apple, Amazon, Google and More Than 50 Other Companies Sign Letter Against Trump Administration's Proposed Gender Definition Changes (cnbc.com)
Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google, and dozens of other tech companies have come together to condemn discrimination against transgender people in the face of actions President Donald Trump is reportedly considering to reduce their legal protections. From a report: The move is a response to an Oct. 21 New York Times report that the Trump administration is considering limiting the definition of gender to birth genitalia. "Sex means a person's status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth," the Department of Health and Human Services proposed in a memo obtained by the Times. If legislation were to move forward, it would jeopardize legal protections for an estimated 1.4 million Americans who identify as a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth, the Times said.
The statement from the companies, which have nearly 4.8 million employees, said diversity and inclusion are good for business. "Transgender people are our beloved family members and friends, and our valued team members," the statement said. "What harms transgender people harms our companies."
The statement from the companies, which have nearly 4.8 million employees, said diversity and inclusion are good for business. "Transgender people are our beloved family members and friends, and our valued team members," the statement said. "What harms transgender people harms our companies."
Rules should benefit 0.01% of the population, because they matter most. Everyone else should change behavior and culture and their understanding of nature and the world to make these 0.01% of people feel comfortable.
The rest of us can expect nothing in return for the effort to accommodate the 0.01% of people who matter.
If your sex defines your status then we don't have the equality we keep saying we have. Shouldn't we work more towards getting THAT in order and leave gender as simply a physical trait similar to 'has two arms'?
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
The government is changing (back) its definition for its purposes. The companies don't have to attentionwhore about it and can continue using their own definition for their own internal purpose if they want to.
Transgender is a lie. Getting surgeries, chopping off your weewee (optional of course) and taking hormones does not mean you're now a woman. It means you look like a woman (sort of, some cases are definitely better than others). Sorry my fellow liberals but I just can't get behind this trans movement. People with gender dysphoria should be treated for their mental disorder in a different way than sex 'reassignment'. Let's quit lying to ourselves and each other. Dudes are dudes and dudettes are dudettes. The only people with a legitimate case for benefiting from sex (re)assignment are those who were born with ambiguous genitalia.
In 2016, NYC had to release a list of 31 recognized genders, and even that wasn't enough for some, so they had to expand it even further.
How the fuck are you even supposed to put that on a form??
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Conservatives: "We want personal liberties, get the government out of our lives, freedom!"
Also Conservatives: "Thank god we have the Government telling people how they are allowed to identify themselves."
The government isn't telling people how they can identify themselves. They are setting down how people will be identified by the government. Since there are no mandatory federal IDs in the US, I'm not sure how much it matters to people who work for tech companies, not the government. Might be annoying for passports, I guess (though you won't get much sympathy for how other countries treat US citizens at the border, given the reverse).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
So we have...
Apple that basically uses slave labor in China to make money...
Amazon that abuses warehouse employees...
And Google that pays tens of millions to cover ups sexual abuse of employees..
Telling the reset of us how to be morally correct.
"We received a Letter Against today". "OMG, was it signed, too"? "Yes it was"! "Oh crap, we are screwed now"!
Why does the government need to assign/recognize gender now? Its not like anyone has more/less rights due to their gender. Women are now allowed to own property, serve in the military, etc. If the govt didn't bother recognizing gender, it would save a lot of time, money, and those arguments. And I honestly don't care who is using what bathroom. If some woman feels like a man and wants to use the men's room, I don't care. And if some man feels like a woman and wants to use the ladies' room, that's fine too. It still doesn't give them the right to molest or attack someone. And I honestly don't believe the current laws are what keeps most perverts from exploiting this now.
But I don't think the govt should recognize marriage either. Ending marriage recognition would end the debate over who can get married. Do whatever you want in your church, temple, or backyard shack. Make whatever legal agreements with whoever you choose. I don't care or need to know about it.
Sure, ending recognition of gender and/or marriage will complicate some other issues, but it would stop this never-ending debate over who is what and what should be allowed.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
"LGBT - Which of these letters has nothing in common with the others?"
Trump himself is far from so-con, so this is clearly political horse-trading.
I woudn't think this would be his priority either. I wonder what he's getting in trade.
Trump's a regular guy (in the sense of being common, coarse, etc.).
Sure, he has no coherent political philosophy, but he is a regular guy (which is what many elites actually dislike about him).
And like it or not, regular guys know the difference between boys and girls. Sure, they may pretend to go along with the mass hysteria, to keep their jobs and not be labeled social pariahs, but they know, in reality.
I don't give a shit if a man wants to live as a woman or vice-versa.
I don't care if someone wants to mutilate their genitals.
I don't care if someone wants to call themselves some newly invented "gender" and live a certain way.
What they do in the privacy of their own life is their own business.
But science says there are two genders. PERIOD. There is one other state, biological intersex, where the person has BOTH. But it's a mutation and rare to boot (maybe as high as 1.7%).
Also, the government should not be expected to subsidize these people's lifestyle choices in their documentation. Nor should someone be able to go back years later, cross things out, and scribble "Whatever!" in the margins.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
shhh, we're supposed to go a step beyond merely tolerating other people's delusions; and actively engage and foster them.
Civil rights act declared sex a protected class which comes with privileges, so it's a matter of government to define it. Marriage comes with privileges, again necessitating the need to define it.
Remove the privileges from sex/race/religion (ie. abolish the civil rights act and remove special tax exemptions for religions, instead just combining them with charitable organizations) and abolish federal marriage law and government can get out of it.
As short as a decade ago, it was really easy.
You have a pee-pee, you're male gender.
If you don't, you are female.
If you are one of the rare ones that don't fit in the first majority two categories, you fit into 'other'.
Now, whatever you want to call yourself, however you want to dress...that's up to you, but for filling out a form, pick one of the 3 choices.
That makes bookkeeping easy, and doesn't have a damned thing to do with how you dress or what you want to fuck in your daily life.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Not quite. The field of sociology makes a distinction between sex and gender. Sex is the simple biological part to which you refer: Male or female, and in a very small percentage of cases intersex. Gender is the social expression and recognition of sex, and it's a lot more complicated and flexible - gender is what determines how you should dress, which jobs you are expected to go into or to avoid, which restroom you can enter, and if you are socially allowed to carry a handbag. Usually sex and gender are in clear alignment, and everyone is happy - people know their place and how to behave. When they do not align, unpleasantness happens.
He hasn't built any walls
Yes but to be fair that's Obama's fault.
It'd probably avoid a lot of complication to just take that box off the form entirely.
But science says there are two genders. PERIOD. There is one other state, biological intersex, where the person has BOTH. But it's a mutation and rare to boot (maybe as high as 1.7%).
Insists that science says there are two genders. Immediately notes that science identifies more than two genders.
We already do have that distinction in the language: sex (which is biological and generally binary, albeit in very rare cases it can be slightly less binary), because that's what the word "sex" means, and gender, which can be whatever society wants it to be, because gender refers to the societal presentation of masculinity/femininity/whatever else. People sometimes confuse the two (such as in the summary, which claims that a sentence that explicitly says "sex" is talking about "gender").
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Science definitely does not say that. Science says it's complicated. Genetically we associate maleness with having a y chromosome, but there are XX people who are male by pretty much any other measure, and XY people who are female. Embryology tells us that sexual characteristics are strongly influenced by the hormonal environment in the womb, which is in turn influenced by all sorts of things. If you expand to other species, there's pretty good evidence that at least some cat mothers can influence the sex of their unborn kittens, and do so based on environmental stress. In other species sex might be assigned by things like the temperature. Some species, famously, can switch, even in adulthood.
In humans there was an idea that every fetus starts out female, then some develop male characteristics. Not surprisingly, it's more complicated than that. Every fetus basically has both sets of sex organs, and it seems that a complicated orchestra of hormones and signalling proteins is required to fully develop either set of organs (and suppress the other).
And that's physical sex. Science supports the idea that gender is, if anything, even more complicated, and equally "real."
Yes, it is an objective standard...and one that does not follow science in any way. He has an objective standard on air pollution: more is better than less. He has an objective standard on health care: no one but he needs it. He has an objective standard on dictators: dictators good, democratic leaders bad. He has an objective standard for everything, they are just the particularly demented standards of a 12 year old.
In the mid 1970s, when I published the TriSexual Review, our kind were rarely discovered and poorly understood. Without the internet as a means to discreetly find each other it was rare for one of us to ever meet another. We were surely one of the smallest minorities on earth and that is possibly why the print publication failed after the first issue.
A clever researcher today could find us online. We, individually, discover the trisexual links only after exhaustive effort driven by extreme loneliness. We try scores of keywords that humans would probably never search for. There's no telling how many trisexuals out there have still not found our online home.
Because we are basically incompatible with normal human anatomy we are shunned in any attempt at sexual encounters. We could give some pleasure to both males and females, but neither are willing to engage once they see our unusual configuration of equipment. Sadly, even if humans were willing, it is unlikely that we would receive as good as we give. Only the luckiest of us will ever know the joy of connibulation with two of our own.
We've even been excluded from the LGBTQetc community; they think we are strange. It's not just that they already have a 'T' in their name; we don't have to use T, we would accept '3' for our part. No, they just don't like us crowding the ever growing list of letters or perhaps due to the fact that there are too few of us to contribute to their huge political action fund.
Which bathrooms do trisexuals use? Next time you meet someone who might be trisexual, engage in a thoughtful conversation. Demonstrate that you're not a hater, a bigot, a Trump supporter. If you seem like an open minded individual, it might answer the bathroom question for you.
...omphaloskepsis often...
Infact, the word "gender" was synonymous with "sex" up until the mid 1960's, in which feminists and "gender studies" professors started to redefine it as something different in order to further their ideas that gender was "socially constructed" in some way. We've all be duped. Gender isn't socially constructed and shouldn't be thought of that way. They were successful in their attempts to change peoples perception of the word.
To be fair, he said science, not sociology
a) That's sex, not gender. Sex is biological, gender is a social construct. Consider the "third gender" seen in some Southeast Asian cultures. It was only "really easy" a decade ago if you ignored anything except traditional post-medieval Western gender norms.
b) Sex is a bimodal distribution, not a boolean. You can get all kinds of weird things - XX phenotypes that are morphologically male, for instance. Or a whole spectrum of intersex types - how would you classify someone with a semi-functional penis, no testes, and ovaries?
The fact that it makes bookkeeping easier doesn't mean it's an accurate model of reality. Otherwise, we'd all be using 64-bit unsigned integers instead of names.
unless you define "regular guy" as somebody whose dad funneled millions of dollars through him when he was a kid to dodge taxes. Me? I'm a regular guy and I was lucky to get a couple books and a Nintendo from my Dad. I also don't go out of my way to be a jerk to transgender people to score cheap political points with my base. Go figure.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
So if someone is born biologically male, gets gender reassignment surgery because psychologically they're female, and now they feel like what they are is normal, the government is supposed to treat them as male anyway? What could POSSIBLY go wrong!? Or are they supposed to not get the surgery and 'pretend' to be a man their whole lives, even though they go through life feeling like they're living a lie?
America must be doing really shitty if the constituents who want this are statistically significant.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Again, as I mentioned, how you want to dress and who or what you want to fuck, is up to you, but has nothing to do with how you fill out the forms. If you have a dick, use the mens restroom, if a vagina, women restroom.
Easy peasy.....we're talking a VERY small minority of people in the world that have these issues.....why should the majority get all bent out of shape for this insignificant number of people outside the norm?
I really don't care what an adult does, or two consenting adults do....in private, but don't force the masses to cow-tow to them...there should not be special treatment for acting outside the norms. You shouldn't be persecuted for it, but you also shouldn't expect special and protected treatment in every day life either.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Skipped the chapter on reproductive biology, did you?
The thing most people seem to be missing from this debate is what is the purpose of defining gender in society? With the SCotUS decision allowing same-sex marriages, there are no more legal barriers imposed by gender. About the only issue that remains is which bathroom or changing room people can use. Those in support of LGBT rights consider only the plight of transgender people, and thus come out against bathroom use restrictions based on physical or genetic gender.
But think about it - how does this affect non-transgender people? Why do we have separate male and female bathrooms? What purpose do they serve? It's not the transgender argument - so men can be self-assured in their masculinity by going into the men's bathroom, or women can have their sense of femininity reinforced by stepping into a bathroom marked women-only. The purpose of having separate bathrooms is simple - to make it harder for perverts to peep. Since the vast majority of the population is heterosexual, the vast majority of perverts are also heterosexual, with male perverts wanting to get into the women's bathroom (and I suppose a few vice versa). Imposing restrictions on bathroom use based on gender is a simple way to thwart them. That's the purpose of bathroom gender restrictions. Heterosexuals created separate bathrooms as a way to thwart perverts. They didn't create them as a tool to oppress transgender people, and you arrive at a baseless conclusion if you assume they did.
That's the trade-off here. Like most things in life, there is no solution which results in the best outcome for all. You have to pick the solution with the fewest drawbacks.
The bigger cost to society here is in the second case, since it defeats the entire reason we have separate bathrooms in the first place. So the best choice is to restrict bathroom use based on physical gender. Actually, the best compromise is probably to use apparent gender rather than physical gender. Most peeping toms are unwilling to cross-dress, while most transgender people are happy to. So allowing only people who look like women into the women's bathroom, and people who look like men into the men's bathroom yields the best overall outcome. Thwarts most of the peeping perverts, while allowing most transgender people to use the bathroom they feel they should. After that, completely enclosed single-toilet bathrooms are the next best option.
Again, as I mentioned, how you want to dress and who or what you want to fuck, is up to you, but has nothing to do with how you fill out the forms. If you have a dick, use the mens restroom, if a vagina, women restroom.
Easy peasy.....we're talking a VERY small minority of people in the world that have these issues.....why should the majority get all bent out of shape for this insignificant number of people outside the norm?
I really don't care what an adult does, or two consenting adults do....in private, but don't force the masses to cow-tow to them...there should not be special treatment for acting outside the norms. You shouldn't be persecuted for it, but you also shouldn't expect special and protected treatment in every day life either.
So, just to be clear, what you're saying is that restrooms should be provided as a service to _you_, but they shouldn't be provided to those other people who are different from you?
And, again, just to make things clear to me, you would prefer to have a person dressed as a woman come into the men's restroom to use the stall, versus having them go into a women's restroom to use the stall, or vice versa? When answering, keep in mind that they are dressed to look like a woman (or man), and like most cisgender people they would prefer not to have other people looking at their genitalia outside the privacy of their bedroom at home.
[Personally, it would make me more uncomfortable to have a man dressed as a woman come into the restroom to use a stall. Having a woman dressed as a man come in to use the stall wouldn't make me comfortable or uncomfortable, I simply wouldn't even notice, just like I react when a man dressed as a man does it.]
People with XX chromosomes can have normal male genitalia, including testicles. So your classification comes down to producing viable sperm. The male infertility rate in the US is around 9%. Since you argue there are only two sexes, those people are female?
I'm not sure you know what science is. Which wouldn't be terribly uncommon on the Internet.
Left handed people are a much larger minority and the egregious damage that right-hand bias clearly imposes on our lives doesn't for some reason foster champions of social justice to save us.
No, it's a sex thing, more than a 'plight of the minority' thing. An opportunity to be loud and brash, which is always a fun adventure.
No, that's a concrete, undeniable example of how fashion changes. A boy is still a boy whether he is dressed in blue, pink, yellow, green or any other colour and the same is true for a girl. You cannot change your gender simply by changing your clothes any more than wearing a saddle would make you a horse.