From a purely surgical standpoint they are largely cosmetic - but that does not mean they are not life-saving treatments.
Besides which - we do pay for cosmetic surgeries all the time for prisoners. Burn victims get skin grafts - and they don't need those to survive, it just improves their quality of life afterwards enormously and greatly reduces the risk of PTSD.
In this case a psychiatric condition can be seriously detrimental to survival, and a cosmetic surgery can greatly relieve it. That counts as a medically valid cause for surgery. Interestingly we even recognise this in children. The standard treatment for transgender kids before puberty is hormones to delay the onset of puberty until they are legally of age (and physically mature enough) to have surgery. It's a lot easier to do the surgery on a body that has not yet undergone puberty and the hormone treatments are far more effective as well.
Do the former, and I'll at least consider the latter. Though there is a good reason why it isn't fair to do that to do that universally - since not all advocacy groups are alike. Some represent the views of all their members, some are top-down hierarchies. I would limit the capacity to influence policy to groups which are run democratically - by everybody involved. So corporations are out but cooperations are in. Some unions are out and others are in. PACS are mostly out, so are some special interest groups while others are in.
Unless the group can show a vote tally of every member and employee that they agree on the issue they are lobbying on - they don't get to lobby on it. Even a corporation would get to lobby on an issue - if every worker, shareholder and executive all participated in an anonymous vote and agreed to lobby the issue, and it must be one-man-one-vote, NOT one-share-one-vote.
Do you really think the average factory workers is in FAVOUR of the factory they work for lobbying to make it legal not to have fire escapes ?
Besides which - the attempt to 'dispell the myth' is just a typircal randroid attempt to divert the issue. So it becomes about a coroner's report instead of the part that is utterly true and actually important: that she claimed the link between smoking and lung cancer was a communist conspiracy. You don't want to talk about that part because it's 1) true 2) ridiculous 3) obviously ridiculous
And when you deal with those you have to admit that EVERYTHING she said meets was obviously ridiculous.
When a person with terminal lung cancer in the final stages dies of heart failure - only an idiot thinks it's NOT the cancer that killed her.
By that same reasoning - EVERYBODY dies of heart failure except the ones who take a bullet to the brain, in just about every other case the heart goes before the brain does (which is the official definition of dead).
>I will let people doing scientific studies that they are no longer allowed control groups then. Okay, seriously you need to stop with the reduction to the absurd - it's getting ridiculous, and this one is particularly pathetic. A control group is not a 'group' in the sense we were talking about at all anyway. It's merely a group the experiment is not done on - it's a group only in the meaning of 'more than one' and deliberately NOT chosen to have anything else in common (by choosing them randomly). Their SUPPOSED to share NO other traits but the one you're controlling on - which makes them, in the sense we were talking about exactly NOT a group. Which is ideal considering they are supposed to represent the population at large which doesn't have any.
>To my knowledge what's between your legs when you're born is often used, but failing that what chromosomes you have unless you are intersex. Have you seen cultures where brain scans are used as the primary criteria as to whether someone is male or female?
What the hell does cultures have to do with science ? It's what science tells us is the only accurate way.
>If gender is entirely socially constructed, and has nothing to do with sex, how is there any "misalignment" since after all, "gender" can mean anything, and has nothing to do with sex by your own admission. Because society pretends they are the same and categorizes your gender based on physical sex organs - which unfortunately is not a reliable way to ascertain *either* sex or gender.
>Either gender identity is based on sex, which is biological, or it is completely a social construct, in which case it has nothing to do with sex and nothing to do with mri's or any other physical trait. False dichotomy. Gender is an entirely social construct which is based on sex - but it's based on such an atrociously bad way of determining sex that the link is, in fact, utterly tenuous. Even so - social constructs DO exist in brains - they are nothing BUT brain developments, do you think anything you think does not have a physical representation in your brain. The mind is not some ephemeral nothingness, it's neural connections in a biological computer. And MRI's is the tool we have to view the program code. We can't see very deeply - it's not a hex editor (yet), more like running ldd on a binary - you can see what the program is linking too but not what it's calling from the libraries. But we can see that men and women brains link to a different set of libraries.
>You can't have your cake and eat it too. You can hold mutually contradictory views if they are only contradictory in the minds of the ignorant.
Churches are tax exempt as well. That does not make them public. All non profts are tax exempt. And there is not a single private corporation in the USA who does not get a lot of federal and state funding. If thats the definition you choose then the USA has no private sector and has been a particularly inefficient variety of full blown communism for at least 2 centuries.
>The ability to tell the difference between things is quite useful. If you are advocating the complete removal of telling people apart from each other that has serious consequences.
Nope. You got names and faces - those are the only ways that don't have equally serious consequences to none. The difference between the horrible consequences of telling people appart in other ways, and the consequences of not telling them apart at all is that the former has happened many times throughout history while the latter is a purely theoretical risk.
>The ability to tell the difference between people with diabetes is a useful categorization that will affect the treatment of people... If you're a doctor ? Sure. Do *I* need to know if you have diabetes ? Even then diabetes only tells me you need insulin, it says nothing else about you. I can't even conclude you lived an unhealthy lifestyle since diabetes can also be genetic.
>categorization is not of itself bad in any way. It is simply there to convey properties of a group. That's exactly what it does NOT do. It conveys A PROPERTY of the group, it never ever conveys more than one. Which mean it's not a category to begin with - it's just a property, and that's all you ever needed to know.
>If the ability to discern the differences between people is so concerning for you, perhaps you should endeavour to get the government to outlaw giving people names or unique identifiers of any kind. I wish you luck with that. Reduction to the absurd was a fallacy I called out the last time you used it, it isn't less of a fallacy now - especially since it's so ridiculous that earlier in this post (before I read this part) I actually said that names and faces are useful to tell people apart.
See it's incredibly useful to tell individuals apart, it's always evil to tell groups apart because - in reality, there are no groups, there are never any real groups. The only legitimate time when identifying a group is anything other than pure evil is when you're practising restorative justice to undo the past evils committed when they were identified as a group.
>If the point is about biological sex and at what point stereotypical features determine the line between male and female that's a discussion that can be had. But you are on the one hand saying gender means nothing, and on the other that MRI's can determine the properties of this "nothing".
No, there are two things - gender and sex. MRI's can determine sex. Gender is something society constructs and assigns. However when sex and gender is misaligned this can cause severe stress for people, so they ought to be free to express a gender that matches their sex. Or doesn't. Or matches both. Different people have different mental needs, but since gender is purely mental - whatever they need to do satisfy their mental needs is fine by me. What the MRI's prove is that people who choose a gender different from the one society asigns them overwhelmingly do have a sex different from the one their genitalia matches. So no the point is not about sex or gender, it's about both - and specifically the fact that both are attributes of each person and how these attributes influence each other. That one is a biological attribute and the other a psychological one changes nothing.
>You are transgender simply if you identify as one gender, but socially have been perceived as another. So what ? At that point you entering purely into the realm of gender and since psychological things still have real health effects - why not let people do whatever makes them happy ? It's not hurting anybody else. All they ask is that you respect their identity. Nothing more.
> Given that, it’s not clear how anybody ever could be cisgender. Actually it's perfectly easy. The vast majority of people overlap sufficiently well with their assigned gender role to never (or at least extremely rarely - like once or twice in their whole lives) have any significant concerns about being perceived as, treated as and expressing themselves as that gender - and importantly they are never, ever discriminated against or mistreated over it.The minority for whom this is not true - experience maltrreatment and discrimination on a constant basis on top of the psychological difficulties from having a severe personal identity crisis. That is not an experience you could possibly begin to comprehend if you haven't lived it.
Ah yes, the republican's favorite false equivalence. Sorry but private citizens are not and never will be equivalent to private corporations or vice versa and literally NOTHING you conclude from assuming that can ever be anything but completely wrong. When citizens try to influence politicians - that's democracy at work and universally a good thing. When corporations, any corporations, try to do the same thing - that's plutocracy and universally an evil thing.
Nah, that story was overblown... no way in hell would Miss Piggy have said yes to sucking of David Cameron. She has standards... not high standards but higher than Cameron.
And like everything else they do marginally well... it's because they bought it. Every good Oracle product was developed by a company that wasn't Oracle.
VirtualBox represents one of the few cases where they bought something, kept it alive and managed NOT to royally fuck it up 3 months later. There are plenty of cases where they failed at that though. Many even from the same purchase that got them virtualbox. SunOS/Solaris is basically dead now. MySQL they screwed up so badly that the world is being taken over by a fork. OpenOffice - ditto, they started out owning the biggest office suite outside redmond, which SUN had steered well for more than a decade and in less than a year their terrible mismanagement got it forked... twice.
Then there is JAVA - the jury is still out on that one I think, but the google lawsuit spells ever greater trouble ahead. If I was somebody who developed on Java, I would be seriously rethinking that decision, you may actually be safer switching to C# and using mono !
It WAS Databases. It hasn't been in a long time. With open source DB's becoming ever more competitive Oracle's DB business has been shrinking for years - and they've been branching out into other areas for more than a decade now, with varying degrees of success.
Source: I'm a former Oracle employee who never even met anybody who worked on the DB products.
I worked for Oracle, in the team that developed this. WIthout smearing my former employer too much... I would not advise anybody to choose Oracle cloud.
>Why were the words "male" and "female" used to describe these constructs then? Only one culture in all of history did that, and even there it's a fairly recent phenomenon. It comes from people mistakenly thinking that male is a synonymn for man and female for women. But it's not. You almost never get a female with a penis - but there are plenty of women who have penisses.
>Surely if a _new_ concept was made, _new_ words could be used for it and this whole crapshoot could be bypassed. The concept isn't new - like I said, only one culture in history ever did this conflation. The understanding of this issue, in our culture, is new.
>I think confusion and hatred were the goal of using that terminology. Who the hell are we trying to confuse or hate then ? And why ? What the hell could possibly be in it for a tiny oppressed minority in further igniting the hatred and confusion of a society that tortures and rejects them ?
>You see how a different word is used for a different concept and different categorization/description? You're the one who is using the wrong words (male and female) for gender, and then claiming everybody else did. The Western genders are "man and women" and nowadays we recognize some more. The 'male and female' are not genders, they are two of the sexes. You are using the wrong words and mistakenly accusing others of using those words when generally they do not.
>When the "new ideas" are by admitted by themselves as entirely socially constructed and don't necessarily have any bearing on reality, Now you're conflating the two thing AGAIN. Our ideas about the sexes has massively changed in the last 40 years - because those are real, biological things, and the science has hugely improved. However our ideas about gender are evolving in paralel. There is absolutely no reason abstract ideas must be static, we create them because they can be useful, but that also means we can improve them, it means some versions are more useful than others. Our culture's collective ideas about gender is changing, because the old ideas had serious deficiencies that caused harm.
>how can they ever be shown to be false if they are? Abstract ideas cannot be false. They can't be true either. All you can ever say about them is that they exist - but the only measure you can put them to is their usefulness. They don't have a truthfullness since they don't represent reality. They are merely mental tools - which are evaluated by how useful they are. Ideas about gender fall in this category. Ideas about real, physical things must be subjected to scientific scrutiny, falsification, experimentation and all that this entails. There a truthfullness element does exist. Ideas about the sexes fall in this category. You can often improve the utility of an abstract idea by letting ideas about reality influence it - this is why ideas about gender have to a large extent evolved in paralel with ideas about sex. As the science of the sexes improved, we expanded our ideas about gender since it meant there were concepts those ideas could not previously express.
>This is the problem, the concept of what is being spoken about is so vague, so devoid of meaning that it can mean whatever people want. Who cares ? Why is that a problem ? It makes ZERO difference to YOUR life which pot somebody pisses in. Unisex bathrooms are not crisis for society - I'm willing to wager you have one in your fucking house right now. If it has no impact on anybody else - how the hell can it possibly be a problem ?
>The use of male and female in such a way strips the words of conveying any actual meaning, Neither male nor female are used this way. "man" and "women" are used this way. Male or female are not genders, they are sexes. They are also not ALL the sexes that occur in the human species. What's noteworthy here is that they are the only ones that have names in English. But there are certainly scientific terminology for the others.
>, I don't agree attacking them electronically to possibly put other innocent lives at risk was the answer
Had that been the case - it would not get much sympathy, but it wasn't. The hospital does not need internet to keep patients alive, in fact under federal law a hospital cannot even get accredited unless all their patient care facilities are fully capable of functioning without internet. Knocking out their internet would not put anybody at risk whatsoever and the hacker knew this. All it DID do was knock down their donation page and cost them a bunch of money - which made a point.
When people desperately believe there is one true villain responsible for all of life's ills like libertarians do - a believe that has never been true anywhere about anything because nothing has ever been that simple - they will see that villain everywhere, even where he is conspicuously NOT the guilty party.
Or is the "nanny state" you refer to the courts ? Who made the mistake of listening to medical professionals ? You seriously would prefer we get rid of the court system ?
Sure, let's go back to settling disputes with brawls. That worked so much better...
>The idea that being male or female has anything to do with anything other than sex is an invention of the 60's.
So is the idea of pulsars, the idea of machines that do math, the idea of cars that keep working for more than 10-thousand miles, the idea of a quantized universe, the idea that black people are human beings and the idea that human beings can walk on the moon. Science improves. Knowledge improves. New ideas arrive and displace old ideas because they have stronger evidence. Though, your claim is only true of Western society, in other societies it was like that for thousands of years. Maori's for example have had three genders for far longer than they've had writing.
>I am very aware of those types, and would consider them "genetic abnormalities" rather than the norm, Who decides what's normal. This site is filled with people who were considered "abnormalities" for most of the last century and experienced a great deal of bullying and ostracising just because their interests lay in mathematics and engineering rather than sports. Even if you're right, that says nothing about how we ought to treat these people. We no longer call kids with Down Syndrom "foundlings" and leave them to die in the woods. We now try to raise them to live as close to a normal life as possible. Not so long ago "normal" only include white-skinned people (and even among those it didn't include "Irish" ones). Normal is only an aspiration if you lack the courage to be exceptional. Even if these things are genetic abnormalities, that doesn't tell us anything about how to treat them. These are, for the most part, genetic variations which have no major impact on your basic ability to function as a productive member of society. They aren't abnormalities that justify genetic screening even. All they need you to give is a little compassion. Hell XXY 'women' can and do have children for example. These are not lesser people. Just different people. A year ago, my then 1-year old daughter swallowed a peanut which went down the wrong hole and ended up stuck in her lung. She needed surgery (camera tube) to remove it. So I got to watch a video of the internal structures of my daughter's lungs and windpipe. The doctor mentioned that people usually have three connections from the main windpipe to the right lung. She only has two. I asked if this was anything to be concerned about. The doctor replied "Absolutely not. It makes no different to her ability to breath, it is just a part of the genetic variation that occurs within the human species - chances are you or your wife are the same. I only mentioned it because it's interesting to see the variation, not because it's meaningful". And I would put these people in the same category - just interesting examples of the variation that occurs within the species. There are genetic variations and mutations that can seriously impact people's health - and are worth learning to screen out. Cystic fibrosis and the like. These conditions do not fall under that category since there isn't a single health effect associated with them which cannot be entirely eradicated by just having a tolerant society.
The simple truth is - there is no such thing as "normal". Normal has a meaning if you're doing statistics, there is a "normal" distribution of test scores. If you're talking about people - it describes something which does not exist.
>The idiocy we want to stop is "my gender is pizza", "I am a man because I like beer" and things of that nature, basically the entire idea of gender. Why do you justify the potential reasonable last conclusion using a reduction to the absurd fallacy that clearly suggests the only reason you consider that is because you consider transgender people to be stupid or mentally deficient ? You undermined any chance of being considered reasonable by doing that. But lets pretend you were actually trying to be reasonable. Well firstly - even if there was a "my gender is pizza" person- what exactly makes them wrong ? Gender has no physical exist
There is no reason why an epigenetic effect cannot affect one twin and skip another. Epigeneitcs is a whole host of things other than genes that can affect development. They range from acquired but heritable traits through hormone-wash varation into toxsin exposure to gene activation triggers. Many could affect one fetus and not the other. Hormone wash variation certainly could and is considered a prime candidate for the cause of homosexuality.
Mere exchange makes trade - but trade does not equal capitalism. That oversimplification is always used by free market fundamentalists as a way to obscure the reality. The pretty picture they want us to have of a small town with two ice cream shops and the guy who sells the better tasting ice cream at a good price gets richer - that does not exist in reality. Capitalism like that stops existing the moment the town gets beyond a few hundred people.
At the level of multinational corporations you end up with entities that command resources as vast as most governments, but not answerable to either the citizens of society nor even the people who work in them in any way, dictatorships in other words. Able to shirk all laws because if you make something illegal somewhere they just go do the exact same thing somewhere else, somewhere there will be a government that will accept a bribe to let you do what you want to do - no matter how insane. Destructive whenever destruction saves money. Murderous on a scale unmatched by even the most brutal empires - because empires rarely get richer by killing people, but dumping your toxic waste in the drinking water saves you a lot of expensive cleanup and fuck the dead people.
The Adam Smith ideal does not exist in the real world and may never have existed at all. If it ever did, it got killed at the start of the industrial revolution. In Britain in the 18th century - about 50% of all children grew to adulthood. By the mid 19th century it was 10%. What the hell had pushed the child-mortality rate up from 50% to 90% in a century? One word: the industrial revolution. Those kids were literally being worked to death by the millions. 90% of them dead before the age of 10. They don't tell you THAT part when they are glorifying it though.
When you reward self interest indiscriminately - the worst possible behaviours, the most murderous, the most deadly, the most unconscionable are always and without exception the norm. Because they are always the ones that have the greatest self-interest rewards and if you reward self interest indiscriminately and without limit - then the kind of people who would do the most insanely violent things to other people, are the ones who inevitably end up in charge.
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From a purely surgical standpoint they are largely cosmetic - but that does not mean they are not life-saving treatments.
Besides which - we do pay for cosmetic surgeries all the time for prisoners. Burn victims get skin grafts - and they don't need those to survive, it just improves their quality of life afterwards enormously and greatly reduces the risk of PTSD.
In this case a psychiatric condition can be seriously detrimental to survival, and a cosmetic surgery can greatly relieve it. That counts as a medically valid cause for surgery.
Interestingly we even recognise this in children. The standard treatment for transgender kids before puberty is hormones to delay the onset of puberty until they are legally of age (and physically mature enough) to have surgery. It's a lot easier to do the surgery on a body that has not yet undergone puberty and the hormone treatments are far more effective as well.
Do the former, and I'll at least consider the latter.
Though there is a good reason why it isn't fair to do that to do that universally - since not all advocacy groups are alike. Some represent the views of all their members, some are top-down hierarchies.
I would limit the capacity to influence policy to groups which are run democratically - by everybody involved. So corporations are out but cooperations are in. Some unions are out and others are in. PACS are mostly out, so are some special interest groups while others are in.
Unless the group can show a vote tally of every member and employee that they agree on the issue they are lobbying on - they don't get to lobby on it. Even a corporation would get to lobby on an issue - if every worker, shareholder and executive all participated in an anonymous vote and agreed to lobby the issue, and it must be one-man-one-vote, NOT one-share-one-vote.
Do you really think the average factory workers is in FAVOUR of the factory they work for lobbying to make it legal not to have fire escapes ?
Besides which - the attempt to 'dispell the myth' is just a typircal randroid attempt to divert the issue. So it becomes about a coroner's report instead of the part that is utterly true and actually important: that she claimed the link between smoking and lung cancer was a communist conspiracy. You don't want to talk about that part because it's
1) true
2) ridiculous
3) obviously ridiculous
And when you deal with those you have to admit that EVERYTHING she said meets was obviously ridiculous.
When a person with terminal lung cancer in the final stages dies of heart failure - only an idiot thinks it's NOT the cancer that killed her.
By that same reasoning - EVERYBODY dies of heart failure except the ones who take a bullet to the brain, in just about every other case the heart goes before the brain does (which is the official definition of dead).
>I will let people doing scientific studies that they are no longer allowed control groups then.
Okay, seriously you need to stop with the reduction to the absurd - it's getting ridiculous, and this one is particularly pathetic. A control group is not a 'group' in the sense we were talking about at all anyway. It's merely a group the experiment is not done on - it's a group only in the meaning of 'more than one' and deliberately NOT chosen to have anything else in common (by choosing them randomly). Their SUPPOSED to share NO other traits but the one you're controlling on - which makes them, in the sense we were talking about exactly NOT a group. Which is ideal considering they are supposed to represent the population at large which doesn't have any.
>To my knowledge what's between your legs when you're born is often used, but failing that what chromosomes you have unless you are intersex. Have you seen cultures where brain scans are used as the primary criteria as to whether someone is male or female?
What the hell does cultures have to do with science ? It's what science tells us is the only accurate way.
>If gender is entirely socially constructed, and has nothing to do with sex, how is there any "misalignment" since after all, "gender" can mean anything, and has nothing to do with sex by your own admission.
Because society pretends they are the same and categorizes your gender based on physical sex organs - which unfortunately is not a reliable way to ascertain *either* sex or gender.
>Either gender identity is based on sex, which is biological, or it is completely a social construct, in which case it has nothing to do with sex and nothing to do with mri's or any other physical trait.
False dichotomy. Gender is an entirely social construct which is based on sex - but it's based on such an atrociously bad way of determining sex that the link is, in fact, utterly tenuous. Even so - social constructs DO exist in brains - they are nothing BUT brain developments, do you think anything you think does not have a physical representation in your brain. The mind is not some ephemeral nothingness, it's neural connections in a biological computer. And MRI's is the tool we have to view the program code. We can't see very deeply - it's not a hex editor (yet), more like running ldd on a binary - you can see what the program is linking too but not what it's calling from the libraries. But we can see that men and women brains link to a different set of libraries.
>You can't have your cake and eat it too.
You can hold mutually contradictory views if they are only contradictory in the minds of the ignorant.
Tax breaks are federal funding too.
That would be illegal without some sort of non internet dependent backup.
Churches are tax exempt as well. That does not make them public. All non profts are tax exempt. And there is not a single private corporation in the USA who does not get a lot of federal and state funding. If thats the definition you choose then the USA has no private sector and has been a particularly inefficient variety of full blown communism for at least 2 centuries.
>The ability to tell the difference between things is quite useful. If you are advocating the complete removal of telling people apart from each other that has serious consequences.
Nope. You got names and faces - those are the only ways that don't have equally serious consequences to none. The difference between the horrible consequences of telling people appart in other ways, and the consequences of not telling them apart at all is that the former has happened many times throughout history while the latter is a purely theoretical risk.
>The ability to tell the difference between people with diabetes is a useful categorization that will affect the treatment of people...
If you're a doctor ? Sure. Do *I* need to know if you have diabetes ? Even then diabetes only tells me you need insulin, it says nothing else about you. I can't even conclude you lived an unhealthy lifestyle since diabetes can also be genetic.
>categorization is not of itself bad in any way. It is simply there to convey properties of a group.
That's exactly what it does NOT do. It conveys A PROPERTY of the group, it never ever conveys more than one. Which mean it's not a category to begin with - it's just a property, and that's all you ever needed to know.
>If the ability to discern the differences between people is so concerning for you, perhaps you should endeavour to get the government to outlaw giving people names or unique identifiers of any kind. I wish you luck with that.
Reduction to the absurd was a fallacy I called out the last time you used it, it isn't less of a fallacy now - especially since it's so ridiculous that earlier in this post (before I read this part) I actually said that names and faces are useful to tell people apart.
See it's incredibly useful to tell individuals apart, it's always evil to tell groups apart because - in reality, there are no groups, there are never any real groups. The only legitimate time when identifying a group is anything other than pure evil is when you're practising restorative justice to undo the past evils committed when they were identified as a group.
>If the point is about biological sex and at what point stereotypical features determine the line between male and female that's a discussion that can be had. But you are on the one hand saying gender means nothing, and on the other that MRI's can determine the properties of this "nothing".
No, there are two things - gender and sex. MRI's can determine sex. Gender is something society constructs and assigns. However when sex and gender is misaligned this can cause severe stress for people, so they ought to be free to express a gender that matches their sex. Or doesn't. Or matches both. Different people have different mental needs, but since gender is purely mental - whatever they need to do satisfy their mental needs is fine by me. What the MRI's prove is that people who choose a gender different from the one society asigns them overwhelmingly do have a sex different from the one their genitalia matches.
So no the point is not about sex or gender, it's about both - and specifically the fact that both are attributes of each person and how these attributes influence each other. That one is a biological attribute and the other a psychological one changes nothing.
>You are transgender simply if you identify as one gender, but socially have been perceived as another.
So what ? At that point you entering purely into the realm of gender and since psychological things still have real health effects - why not let people do whatever makes them happy ? It's not hurting anybody else. All they ask is that you respect their identity. Nothing more.
> Given that, it’s not clear how anybody ever could be cisgender.
Actually it's perfectly easy. The vast majority of people overlap sufficiently well with their assigned gender role to never (or at least extremely rarely - like once or twice in their whole lives) have any significant concerns about being perceived as, treated as and expressing themselves as that gender - and importantly they are never, ever discriminated against or mistreated over it.The minority for whom this is not true - experience maltrreatment and discrimination on a constant basis on top of the psychological difficulties from having a severe personal identity crisis. That is not an experience you could possibly begin to comprehend if you haven't lived it.
Duels with swords are way more manly.
Ah yes, the republican's favorite false equivalence.
Sorry but private citizens are not and never will be equivalent to private corporations or vice versa and literally NOTHING you conclude from assuming that can ever be anything but completely wrong.
When citizens try to influence politicians - that's democracy at work and universally a good thing.
When corporations, any corporations, try to do the same thing - that's plutocracy and universally an evil thing.
Nah, that story was overblown... no way in hell would Miss Piggy have said yes to sucking of David Cameron. She has standards... not high standards but higher than Cameron.
And even then only *while* on their payroll. The day I resigned my job at Oracle I became one their most vocal attackers on /.
Nothing makes you hate Larry like having worked for the fucker...
And like everything else they do marginally well... it's because they bought it. Every good Oracle product was developed by a company that wasn't Oracle.
VirtualBox represents one of the few cases where they bought something, kept it alive and managed NOT to royally fuck it up 3 months later. There are plenty of cases where they failed at that though. Many even from the same purchase that got them virtualbox. SunOS/Solaris is basically dead now. MySQL they screwed up so badly that the world is being taken over by a fork. OpenOffice - ditto, they started out owning the biggest office suite outside redmond, which SUN had steered well for more than a decade and in less than a year their terrible mismanagement got it forked... twice.
Then there is JAVA - the jury is still out on that one I think, but the google lawsuit spells ever greater trouble ahead. If I was somebody who developed on Java, I would be seriously rethinking that decision, you may actually be safer switching to C# and using mono !
It WAS Databases. It hasn't been in a long time. With open source DB's becoming ever more competitive Oracle's DB business has been shrinking for years - and they've been branching out into other areas for more than a decade now, with varying degrees of success.
Source: I'm a former Oracle employee who never even met anybody who worked on the DB products.
I worked for Oracle, in the team that developed this. WIthout smearing my former employer too much... I would not advise anybody to choose Oracle cloud.
>Why were the words "male" and "female" used to describe these constructs then?
Only one culture in all of history did that, and even there it's a fairly recent phenomenon. It comes from people mistakenly thinking that male is a synonymn for man and female for women. But it's not. You almost never get a female with a penis - but there are plenty of women who have penisses.
>Surely if a _new_ concept was made, _new_ words could be used for it and this whole crapshoot could be bypassed.
The concept isn't new - like I said, only one culture in history ever did this conflation. The understanding of this issue, in our culture, is new.
>I think confusion and hatred were the goal of using that terminology.
Who the hell are we trying to confuse or hate then ? And why ? What the hell could possibly be in it for a tiny oppressed minority in further igniting the hatred and confusion of a society that tortures and rejects them ?
>You see how a different word is used for a different concept and different categorization/description?
You're the one who is using the wrong words (male and female) for gender, and then claiming everybody else did. The Western genders are "man and women" and nowadays we recognize some more. The 'male and female' are not genders, they are two of the sexes. You are using the wrong words and mistakenly accusing others of using those words when generally they do not.
>When the "new ideas" are by admitted by themselves as entirely socially constructed and don't necessarily have any bearing on reality,
Now you're conflating the two thing AGAIN. Our ideas about the sexes has massively changed in the last 40 years - because those are real, biological things, and the science has hugely improved.
However our ideas about gender are evolving in paralel. There is absolutely no reason abstract ideas must be static, we create them because they can be useful, but that also means we can improve them, it means some versions are more useful than others. Our culture's collective ideas about gender is changing, because the old ideas had serious deficiencies that caused harm.
>how can they ever be shown to be false if they are?
Abstract ideas cannot be false. They can't be true either. All you can ever say about them is that they exist - but the only measure you can put them to is their usefulness. They don't have a truthfullness since they don't represent reality. They are merely mental tools - which are evaluated by how useful they are. Ideas about gender fall in this category.
Ideas about real, physical things must be subjected to scientific scrutiny, falsification, experimentation and all that this entails. There a truthfullness element does exist. Ideas about the sexes fall in this category.
You can often improve the utility of an abstract idea by letting ideas about reality influence it - this is why ideas about gender have to a large extent evolved in paralel with ideas about sex. As the science of the sexes improved, we expanded our ideas about gender since it meant there were concepts those ideas could not previously express.
>This is the problem, the concept of what is being spoken about is so vague, so devoid of meaning that it can mean whatever people want.
Who cares ? Why is that a problem ? It makes ZERO difference to YOUR life which pot somebody pisses in. Unisex bathrooms are not crisis for society - I'm willing to wager you have one in your fucking house right now. If it has no impact on anybody else - how the hell can it possibly be a problem ?
>The use of male and female in such a way strips the words of conveying any actual meaning,
Neither male nor female are used this way. "man" and "women" are used this way. Male or female are not genders, they are sexes. They are also not ALL the sexes that occur in the human species. What's noteworthy here is that they are the only ones that have names in English. But there are certainly scientific terminology for the others.
>It's like otherkin and wolfkin, peo
>, I don't agree attacking them electronically to possibly put other innocent lives at risk was the answer
Had that been the case - it would not get much sympathy, but it wasn't. The hospital does not need internet to keep patients alive, in fact under federal law a hospital cannot even get accredited unless all their patient care facilities are fully capable of functioning without internet. Knocking out their internet would not put anybody at risk whatsoever and the hacker knew this.
All it DID do was knock down their donation page and cost them a bunch of money - which made a point.
Private hospitals. Now part of the 'nanny state'.
When people desperately believe there is one true villain responsible for all of life's ills like libertarians do - a believe that has never been true anywhere about anything because nothing has ever been that simple - they will see that villain everywhere, even where he is conspicuously NOT the guilty party.
Or is the "nanny state" you refer to the courts ? Who made the mistake of listening to medical professionals ? You seriously would prefer we get rid of the court system ?
Sure, let's go back to settling disputes with brawls. That worked so much better...
>The idea that being male or female has anything to do with anything other than sex is an invention of the 60's.
So is the idea of pulsars, the idea of machines that do math, the idea of cars that keep working for more than 10-thousand miles, the idea of a quantized universe, the idea that black people are human beings and the idea that human beings can walk on the moon. Science improves. Knowledge improves. New ideas arrive and displace old ideas because they have stronger evidence.
Though, your claim is only true of Western society, in other societies it was like that for thousands of years. Maori's for example have had three genders for far longer than they've had writing.
>I am very aware of those types, and would consider them "genetic abnormalities" rather than the norm,
Who decides what's normal. This site is filled with people who were considered "abnormalities" for most of the last century and experienced a great deal of bullying and ostracising just because their interests lay in mathematics and engineering rather than sports. Even if you're right, that says nothing about how we ought to treat these people.
We no longer call kids with Down Syndrom "foundlings" and leave them to die in the woods. We now try to raise them to live as close to a normal life as possible. Not so long ago "normal" only include white-skinned people (and even among those it didn't include "Irish" ones).
Normal is only an aspiration if you lack the courage to be exceptional. Even if these things are genetic abnormalities, that doesn't tell us anything about how to treat them. These are, for the most part, genetic variations which have no major impact on your basic ability to function as a productive member of society. They aren't abnormalities that justify genetic screening even. All they need you to give is a little compassion. Hell XXY 'women' can and do have children for example. These are not lesser people. Just different people.
A year ago, my then 1-year old daughter swallowed a peanut which went down the wrong hole and ended up stuck in her lung. She needed surgery (camera tube) to remove it. So I got to watch a video of the internal structures of my daughter's lungs and windpipe. The doctor mentioned that people usually have three connections from the main windpipe to the right lung. She only has two. I asked if this was anything to be concerned about. The doctor replied "Absolutely not. It makes no different to her ability to breath, it is just a part of the genetic variation that occurs within the human species - chances are you or your wife are the same. I only mentioned it because it's interesting to see the variation, not because it's meaningful".
And I would put these people in the same category - just interesting examples of the variation that occurs within the species. There are genetic variations and mutations that can seriously impact people's health - and are worth learning to screen out. Cystic fibrosis and the like. These conditions do not fall under that category since there isn't a single health effect associated with them which cannot be entirely eradicated by just having a tolerant society.
The simple truth is - there is no such thing as "normal". Normal has a meaning if you're doing statistics, there is a "normal" distribution of test scores. If you're talking about people - it describes something which does not exist.
>The idiocy we want to stop is "my gender is pizza", "I am a man because I like beer" and things of that nature, basically the entire idea of gender.
Why do you justify the potential reasonable last conclusion using a reduction to the absurd fallacy that clearly suggests the only reason you consider that is because you consider transgender people to be stupid or mentally deficient ? You undermined any chance of being considered reasonable by doing that.
But lets pretend you were actually trying to be reasonable.
Well firstly - even if there was a "my gender is pizza" person- what exactly makes them wrong ? Gender has no physical exist
The fact that she had terminal lung cancer had *nothing* to do with her heart failing right ? Now that's some serious reaching there...
There is no reason why an epigenetic effect cannot affect one twin and skip another. Epigeneitcs is a whole host of things other than genes that can affect development. They range from acquired but heritable traits through hormone-wash varation into toxsin exposure to gene activation triggers. Many could affect one fetus and not the other. Hormone wash variation certainly could and is considered a prime candidate for the cause of homosexuality.
Mere exchange makes trade - but trade does not equal capitalism. That oversimplification is always used by free market fundamentalists as a way to obscure the reality.
The pretty picture they want us to have of a small town with two ice cream shops and the guy who sells the better tasting ice cream at a good price gets richer - that does not exist in reality. Capitalism like that stops existing the moment the town gets beyond a few hundred people.
At the level of multinational corporations you end up with entities that command resources as vast as most governments, but not answerable to either the citizens of society nor even the people who work in them in any way, dictatorships in other words. Able to shirk all laws because if you make something illegal somewhere they just go do the exact same thing somewhere else, somewhere there will be a government that will accept a bribe to let you do what you want to do - no matter how insane. Destructive whenever destruction saves money. Murderous on a scale unmatched by even the most brutal empires - because empires rarely get richer by killing people, but dumping your toxic waste in the drinking water saves you a lot of expensive cleanup and fuck the dead people.
The Adam Smith ideal does not exist in the real world and may never have existed at all. If it ever did, it got killed at the start of the industrial revolution. In Britain in the 18th century - about 50% of all children grew to adulthood. By the mid 19th century it was 10%. What the hell had pushed the child-mortality rate up from 50% to 90% in a century? One word: the industrial revolution. Those kids were literally being worked to death by the millions. 90% of them dead before the age of 10.
They don't tell you THAT part when they are glorifying it though.
When you reward self interest indiscriminately - the worst possible behaviours, the most murderous, the most deadly, the most unconscionable are always and without exception the norm. Because they are always the ones that have the greatest self-interest rewards and if you reward self interest indiscriminately and without limit - then the kind of people who would do the most insanely violent things to other people, are the ones who inevitably end up in charge.