Things that make you go hmmmm

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/23/otag...

Why is this even a thing? 

They're going through a difficult period.

Salah choosing not to break his Ramadan fast for the Champions League final. That's pretty noble in itself, but very risky, and the thing that makes me go 'hmmmm' is wondering just how Liverpool will be affected by it.

Apparently last time he played in a fast, he was lethargic and got subbed in the 54th minute for Roma. Will Salah manage to find a loophole or will he be risking Liverpool's hopes?

"Saskia Rushton-Green, the freelance illustrator who designed the cover image of the gender-neutral person menstruating"

How can someone with a menstruating vagina be gender neutral? surely their physical gender is female. what gender they identify as is a separate issue?

It's a stain on the reputation of Otago Uni apparently 

Is it a monthly issue? The mag I mean. boom boom

Well he wont be as fast as usual if he's fasting

Yep, Hmmm....

In other news.....

Parents in Italy who named their now 18mth old girl Blu, have been ordered by the court to change it to a traditional girls name or have one imposed by the court.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5766997/It...

Oh for the days of "kids names by Zappa" to be back in fashion

So gender is just a made up thing?

Most things are. 

People often get confused between the two (sex and gender) because they overlap so much for the most part. Generally speaking people of a male sex identify as a male and do what society deems to be male activities and behaviours. But that’s not always the case. 

There probably needs to be new words for gender other than male or female? Or maybe it’s something that doesn’t need to be labelled at all? 

Even people who think they’re fighting for trans rights (usually on the internet) get confused between the two. The kind of people who get outraged that there are only male/female options a medical form - failing to grasp the concept that clearly a doctor would be enquiring about a patients physical sex, rather than their gender. 

Opening a can of worms that I’ll regret. But male/female sport is also interesting. Surely that’s divided that way generally because of physical attributes. Which would mean divided by sex rather than gender. But you see a fair few people calling for (and some sports accepting) people of a male sex to compete in female sports because their gender is female. I’m not sure that’s how it should be. But then I haven’t actually read into those cases very much, so am open to being wrong. 

Gotcha. So the "being with a vagina" on the cover of the magazine is female by sex but they believe themselves to be portraying a gender neutral being.

so what toilet do they use?

If i declare myself gender neutral can I use the womens changing rooms?

or is that a sex issue not a gender one?

Yea that's where we get issues. We might have someone with male genatalia, but they have felt like a female all their lives, so they identify as gender female, and want to use the female bathrooms. If that's all legit, I've got no issue, they clearly aren't doing anything dodgy, and to be fair they probably look and dress like a female, so wouldn't turn heads in the bathroom and cause people to worry. 

The problem is someone with sinister motives hijacking that process, as you point out ChchR. That's a travesty if it happens. 

I’d say bathrooms are clearly divided by gender rather than sex. They’re split based on behaviours - so people can generally feel safe in the bathroom etc. it doesn’t matter what junk you have as to what room you take a dump in. 

So I’d gender neutral people could use either bathroom. Lucky them!

Ideally you’d have seperate individual toilet cubicles that anyone can use, as some places do. But that’s not always practical space wise, so instead they’re divided into 2 gendered bathrooms which works well enough for the most part. 

The fasting ends half an hour before the game kicks off. Given the teams have whole teams of Docs, cooks and nutrition experts, they'll surely have an excellent plan in place.

From what I could find, there are very limited studies on this but the ones that have been done indicate that as long as they have maintained the right overall energy and nutrient intake, keep their training up and get good quality sleep, the are no substantial decreases in performance.

I really hope that's the case!

While I admire your passion for all things Liverpool, sadly I do not share it :D

I will be climbing a mountain and not watching the final 

Just like Liverpool!

Well sex is male/female very rare cases neither. Gender is man, woman, boy, girl, but also pangender non-binary etc... So you can be a male who identifies as a woman or female that doesn't identify as any gender.

If you are a person who identifies with having multiple/fluid/confused personalities you are labeled as having a mental disorder. Whats the difference between that an having multiple/fluid/confused gender identities?

Not having a go btw but maybe there's a mental component to all of this?

It's not really an issue of confusion (although confusion is probably almost an inevitable side-effect of this), but rather an issue of nature getting its wires crossed and creating incompatibility of the hardware and software for those individuals.

People used to say homosexuality was a mental illness as well.

I would disagree. Nature is a very skilled customer when it comes to evolving for its objectives. And there is only one objective: survival through reproduction. "Incompatibilities between software and hardware" just don't happen on this scale in any other animal at all. 

When nature "gets its wires crossed" in a way that lessens reproduction like this, either the species dies out, the individuals affected get naturally phased out of the gene pool, or the species evolves to deal with it. 

In our case, this is a new phenomenon, the species isn't going to die and the individuals are not going to get phased out of the gene pool, thanks to modern medicine, and we are not going to have the time to evolve to handle it, as that would take thousands of years, so it's a total blank slate. 

Nature has basically been removed from the equation. 

I don't think the gender issues of modern times have anything to do with nature, I think it's the modern living environment we've created. A young teenager feeling like he/she doesn't belong in his/her body, and that they belong to the opposite sex, is just not something that would have crossed the mind of the individual thousands of years ago. He/she would've been too busy worrying about how to survive, where their next meal was coming from, they never would have though hmmmm I feel a bit odd, perhaps I've been born with the wrong sexual organs. Now we have all this time on our hands, and a very unnatural environment to grow up in, we are pondering these things more and more. Our attitudes and discussions about sex are just so far removed from any other animal. To all other animals it's an urge, an itch to scratch, that is what nature provides, so that they reproduce. Before humans even get that urge, we are swamped with information and data about it, most of it produced with the objective of making money (another completely unnatural thing), to the point that by the time we hit puberty and get that urge, our thoughts about it are so far removed from that of the rest of nature, it's just not even close to natural. Nature didn't plan for this, and hasn't had to time to react. It hasn't crossed any wires - I think we have, as a society.

Now we have this issue, and large numbers of people feeling this way, we have to adapt, we have to evolve to include these people, they are a product of our environment. 

This issue is nothing new, it's been around since we as a species have been around, and of course it's all to do with nature.  We're in a different position now because we are scientifically advanced now to be able to address the situation in a more compassionate way (in some societies/cultures more than others) than in the past, but that doesn't detract from the fact that the situation arises in the first instance because of 'wire crossing'.

There are also homosexual dolphins and homosexual birds.

Homsexuality was rife in the Greek era, as were efiminant men.

Yep, and I think it's important here to note the difference between being gay, and having incompatible sex/gender set up.

As Denis O'Hare's character in American Horror Story: Hotel says, 'I'm not gay, I'm a girl'. Speaking of that AHS season, Lady Gaga - oooffft.

Interesting replies!

What is the evidence of this?

Very important. 

Homosexuality in some form is present in almost all species. 

I believe that is the real "crossing of wires" we get from nature. 

Plenty of examples in ancient Greek and Roman texts, most classics students would be aware of this. I have also heard of examples of this in ancient Egypt and the Americas, though I'm not familiar with those areas as much. Quick google search shows that it's been recorded across a whole range of cultures dating back to ancient times. So it's definitely something that's been around for a long time.

I studied classical history for two years, I learned all about the primary role of homosexuality in Roman and Greek societies, yet I never saw one single thing about people believing they had been born the wrong gender, and that their brain and thoughts were incompatible with their bodies and sexual organs they had. In those societies homosexuality (or more accurately, paedophilia) for males was usually a rite of passage. As a young man it was expected that you would be mentored by an older man, who was heterosexual and had a wife, and you would be expected to sexually service him.

Despite that, when you came of age, you were expected to be heterosexual, and to marry and have children. 

The problems a system like that causes is a whole new conversation, and is irrelevant here, as you've pointed out yourself - we're not talking about homosexuality, we're talking about gender dysphoria. 

I don't see any history anywhere of gender dysphoria being a widespread thing, until the late 20th century. What did you google exactly? 

I wasn't talking about homosexuality in the ancient times, but rather of the concept of the 'effeminate man' It is talked about quite consistently in the literature, with a fair amount of derision. In Greek times, it was a common insult for Persians. As an example of this in Greek-Roman times, the cult of Cybele attracted people who castrated themselves and took on a female personage.

Ancient Egypt (sḫt - sekhet) and India (hijra) recognised existence of three genders (male, female, and one which essentially accounted for the situation we've been discussing). This apparently existed among some Native American tribes in the pre-Western contact period (berdache).

Now obviously the way these people were thought and written about is quite different to today, but their existence throughout history is undeniable.

Also Fa'fafine in Samoan tradition.

Yes the existence of effeminate men throughout history is undeniable, I wouldn't deny it. 

But it's a massive leap to say that an effeminate man must suffer from gender dysphoria, and that that is evidence of gender dysphoria existing throughout history. That is no given at all. Ask any gay man with effeminate traits (and they are the group most associated with that), how many of them are going to say they have gender dysphoria? Some could, but I would guess that most won't. 

The Samoan culture is very well known for effeminate men (fafafine), yet they are arbitrarily selected - usually the youngest son in a family with little to no daughters. So lots of effeminate men, but virtually none of them because of gender dysphoria. 

Even if we assume that effeminate males are evidence of gender dysphoria throughout all human history, where is the evidence for females? If this is nature crossing its wires, are they only crossed in males? 

There are examples of this too, but they are rarer. But I suspect that's largely because it's very difficult to find out much about women and their lives throughout history because of the nature of the historical record, rather than because this didn't happen. The example I mentioned above about Native American tribes also notes the existence of the other side of this coin (i.e. women effectively becoming men).

And I do accept that in some cases the effeminacy may not be much more than a characteristic of sexual orientation (rather than a gender identity issue), but overall the argument that it's nothing more than that is unconvincing. The examples I noted above include the acceptance of social and cultural roles that a gender role entails, and in a context where homosexuality isn't the taboo that it has been in recent history. In other words, this is more than sexual orientation, and it's more about gender identity. Of course, we haven't heard directly from those people throughout history because they haven't had a voice, or an opportunity to articulate their experience, until very recently. But the evidence of their existence is there, and we find out about them from people who held the pen, and enjoyed to deride them. There's a great quote from Juvenal about this that references the cult of Cybele, and clearly condemns such individuals on the basis of their gender identity rather than sexual orientation. I might look for it tonight.

Well this has been bloody interesting. I did quite a bit of reading last night.  

I've come around a bit to what you are suggesting EG. 

Especially when I read more about the ancient Romans, and the role of gender in their society. It was more than just a rite of passage (that's all I was taught!), it was basically acceptable for a male to be homosexual with other men, as long as you were the one doing the penetrating, rather than being penetrated. That really is quite an interesting fact, as it takes your assigned sex at birth out of the equation to some degree, and becomes about masculinity or passivity as your gender role, rather than sexual orientation. 

However the point I would return to is what I originally said, which I have gone away from as we've discussed the specific examples (which are actually all fairly modern in the sense of human history). I suggested that gender identity issues were a result of modern societal thinking i.e. as we moved away from being pure hunter-gatherers in tiny groups, working hard just to survive, we had more time to think about ourselves and our feelings, to converse and philosophise, and that gender become a subject of interest and debate, eventually resulting in the types of things we see now, and apparently also saw in some of these examples you cited. 

However it's not really a point I can back up as it can't be proven or even speculated about, given the total lack of historical record prior to the last few thousand years. I'm basically talking about evolutionary reasoning back in cavemen times, and there's nothing around to really go on. So I'm not going to sit here and claim that I'm right. 

I would say that this conversation has taken me from total conviction, to basically positing a theory, which I cannot prove.

However I bloody enjoyed it. I love learning new sh*t, and reading about things I don't know about, and this thread has been awesome for it over the last few months. I salute everyone in here who has had the control to debate contrasting ideas on sensitive topics, without getting emotive and abusive. It's actually rare to find these days. 

70% of American Football players are black 

Is it time to bring in a "diversity quota" to enable all other races to be fairly represented in that sport?

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-44240067

If not, why not? Some sort of reverse Rooney rule...

Interesting graphs about ethnic representation in the main American sports.

With NFL, what I would love to know is how the salary percentages are spread across ethnic/racial lines overall.

Personally I don't believe in "diversity quotas"

Let the best person have the job based on their individual merits rather than the colour of their skin or whatever.

So you thought Italy was a democracy? Think again,

In the latest elections people voted for change, voting in a euro-sceptic coalition. All good, democracy has spoken!

Afraid not: the Establishment vetoed the result and instead have appointed their own caretaker government and guess who is leading it: a guy who used to work for the IMF, ie a stooge working for the bankers.

So the elite/establishment like to give people the illusion they have some sort of say in the way their countries are governed but it would appear that the bankers will always have the final say.

The left and the right fight each other like rabid dogs, people squabble over issues like "diversity" and "inclusion"...meanwhile the elite 1% are screwing everyone and laughing all the way to the bank...literally.

Divide and conquer is working well

Something I can answer!

So as we know, men's sex chromosomes are XY, while women's are XX. Gender dysphoria almost always results as an imperfection in the Y chromosome, where the SRY gene isn't formed properly (the gene used to make your testicles, and the gene that prevents fallopian tubes/uterus from being formed). This results in feminine traits/behaviours, and in extreme cases Swyer syndrome where a genetic male is externally female. Obviously since girls don't have a Y chromosome, this can't happen in reverse.

Well that is interesting.

So we should basically only expect gender dysphoria in males? 

The patriarchy knows no bounds ;)