I need to vent frustration.

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Qtw, Dec 3, 2016.

  1. Qtw

    Qtw Phantasmal Quasar

    NOTE! i am not going to be insulting. please read my entire post at least TWICE and slowly to ensure you understand.
    i say this since i have the problem of reading too fast and i mess up the context.


    I am upset with a certain group attention seeking people who drag us down a bad path in society.

    these people also hurt the reputation of another group who do not seek attention but have a one thing in common.

    i am upset with transtrenders.

    i am NOT upset with the real TRANSGENDER people. they are fine.
    its the people who make up "genders" for attention and to feel special.
    being trans or "cis" is not an optional thing. its like being gay or straight. you do NOT get to choose it.

    there are only two genders. male and female. agender as in genderless is more akin to not caring.
    i am probably in that catagory. not caring about my gender.

    and i know for a fact that these people are making it up. how?

    well for trans people its basically a wrong brain in the wrong body.

    males and females have different brain structures.

    a person born male could have a female brain structure.
    thus making the person transgender.

    now onto why i have a problem with transtrenders.

    they HARM the reputation of REAL trans people.
    real trans people typically do not want special treatment or attention.
    they just want the body they feel they need and to be called as such.

    if you want to be called a she if you were born male or vice versa... i will oblige.
    HOWEVER! i will not call you anything else. i do not care for any other pronoun.
    anything other than he or she defeats the purpose of pronouns.

    pronouns are meant to make a conversation flow more easily without having to refer to the persons name each time.

    back on topic...
    these transTRENDERS obviously just want to feel special and make this stuff up.
    they harm the reputation of REAL trans people who more often than not do not want constant attention OR special treatment.

    if you want to feel special...DO SOMETHING SPECIAL! do something uncommon that is noteworthy.


    Last bit.
    i just needed to vent this out. i know real trans people who find this stuff anger indusing.
    im not trans though. i might be "agender" but thats just because i dont care about how i look.
    i dressed as a girl once to see what it was like. i felt nothing. neither comfort or discomfort.
     
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  2. BigEaredKittens

    BigEaredKittens Master Astronaut

  3. StaRustler

    StaRustler Aquatic Astronaut

    I thought this was starbound...
     
  4. Bonabopn

    Bonabopn Fluffiest Squirrel

    Nope, this is the off topic section of Chucklefish Games Forums. c:
     
  5. Hi! Regardless of your personal beliefs about gender, within our community, if someone requests that you call them by a pronoun you aren't used to, it is respectful and kind to oblige.
    It takes very little effort on your part, and it makes that person feel more comfortable. Where's the harm in that?

    If you aren't sure about someone's gender, note that "they/them" is a perfectly good gender neutral pronoun. :)
     
  6. Qtw

    Qtw Phantasmal Quasar


    im fine with the he,she, and they pronouns. im just saying im not cool with anything made up.
    and the effort isnt hard...its just the harm it does to real trans people.

    the vast majority of trans people do not want attention like that. i know of a couple of people who are trans and hate the pronoun game.

    i'll just use they for everyone.

    anyway i didnt post this to argue with anyone. just needed to vent that out to calm down.
    and i figured a nice calm community would be best for that.
    since noone in my family cares about anything i say. anything politics or current events. they pretty much just say 'well its not affecting me or anyone i know so i don't care'.

    not going for sympathy here...i just drone on. sorry.
     
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  7. Kiama

    Kiama Tentacle Wrangler

    [I'm really sorry for how long this ended up being]

    Qtw you seem like a lovely person and your concern is sweet but I don't think you need to get worked up about this, for three reasons.

    1. Perspective.

    Here are some actual quotes from when I let people know that I prefer feminine pronouns (she/her as if that needs elaborating):

    My mum: '...this is offensive to me (your mum), God made you a gorgeous young man, as Psalm 139 says you are fearfully and wonderfully made, and God chose to make you a man - and father to your son - and husband to your wife.'

    My dad: 'Our son chose to make his comments public probably to provoke more than anything... our concern is for our son and we will gladly disagree with [supportive friends] in order to challenge our son to consider the nature of his comments that are focused purely on self without reference to his responsibility to his extended family...'

    My brother: 'We are who we are when we're born, we can't change that.'

    Initially my parents and brother told me they wouldn't talk to me on any platform where I was defined as a 'she' unless and until I went back to being a 'he'. This was a year ago and they started talking again but ever since my family has gone out of their way to somehow refer to me being masculine at every opportunity.

    My wife broke down on multiple occasions when realizing this could mean our sons grow up cut off from my family. And being in an asian country (although this is hardly unique to Asia), I would be jeopardizing my job, which is just about paying for a family of four, to express my feminine side publicly.

    I know that there are trans people who are bothered by contrived pronouns but to be totally honest, if I caught myself getting worked up about it, I would only have to remember the last year to get a grip of myself. Why would I spend a moment being annoyed by people who are doing nothing whatsoever to hurt me? I suspect most of us have enough intentionally inflicted and circumstantially inevitable pain that we don't take offense when we don't absolutely need to.

    2. We are all just human.

    I'll briefly outline my rough understanding of the whole sex vs. gender debate.

    Yes, there are two sexes. Yes, there are traditionally two genders in most societies. The former is mostly biological and the latter is mostly social but the two have probably created each other to some extent. This is obviously true with gender being biologically rooted - anyone who claims gender is 100% a social construct is being intellectually dishonest or just has no grasp of the debate - but is also true with gender creating sex as traits useful for distinct gender roles are selected by evolution.

    Both sex and gender are accidents of our planet's history. Unless you are religious, there is no transcendent authority insisting that there remain only two genders. If people think outside of the box enough to create new modes of existence, what's wrong with that really?

    To break down why some people think it's wrong, I'm going to make up a useful term if that's okay - the disphoric imperative. I literally just made that up. Then I googled it. Damn. Someone else thought of it first.

    And ironically they are using it in a positive way to outline the position I was about to attack. Exaggerated slightly, it is the idea that 'actual' trans people *must* transition to another mode of existence or they'll never find peace and when they commit suicide it will be the fault of everyone who tried to deconstruct gender rather than helping them physically transition.

    If you take this classic perspective, people calling themselves trans while being in less dire situations are obscuring from view the *real* trans people who need actual physical change as opposed to mere social freedom.

    This is rooted in the idea that you mentioned that there are male and female brains (in my experience I have found that what we actually believe is more accurately described as two kinds of ‘souls’ but I’ll skip that debate). A trans person is a brain in the wrong body and they are experiencing something so utterly traumatic that they must, must, must escape. And certainly, there are some people for whom that is the closest description, but the description itself is not backed by science, and it is very unlikely to be the best description.

    The science is that male and female brains are so alike that you can't tell which gender one is by looking at it. You can say that certain patterns are *slightly* more common in one gender than the other, but that means nothing for an individual. Gender is not entirely a social construct - it was not created entirely by society - but it *is* entirely socially *sustained*. The idea that there is a sort of human called 'female' and a sort of human called 'male' with some fundamental difference between the two is totally false if you believe we *are* our brains. We are as distinct as July and August. You can find patterns of differences between the two but in reality we are both a collection of days in the same season and the weather on any one day in one month could believably have happened in the next.

    The reality is that we are all just human. But as individuals, each of us has a preferred mode of existence - and it is entirely possible that we may be so repulsed by one mode of existence and so deeply associate that mode with the body of a particular sex that the classic 'disphoric imperative' way of thinking about trans people becomes sensible.

    This is all debatable of course and as such is my least compelling point, which is why it is neither first nor last. But to wrap it up, hopefully you can see how within my understanding it is essential to protect both those who need a physical change to achieve their desired mode of existence and those who mainly need a social change.

    3. Trying to understand yourself is scary enough without people questioning the credentials of whatever words and labels you use in the process.

    I passionately believe we need to not only allow people to understand themselves in ways we consider wrong, but to provide such an accepting environment that people feel allowed to admit when their understanding changes. That means not mocking or attacking even when refraining to do so makes us targets of those who think we are all just trying to be special. Yes, it hurts when people dismiss us, but we should never let them be the reason we hurt others.
     
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  8. Robyn626

    Robyn626 Space Hobo

    A reason people may be trying to make up new terms could be due to the inequality within the pronouns themselves?

    I had this discussion with another teacher in my school the other day (I teach english in Korea). Students here normally say your name and teacher (i.e. Robyn teacher) but a student yelled hey to me (which I don't mind, it got my attention and it was in english so meh.) But the teacher told him they should say Ma'am.

    When the students left I told the teacher Ma'am applies to a married woman (I am not married) he apologized and asked what do they call teachers in England.
    I told him I would want students to just say my name because that's who I am. (Like you I prefer genderless) But I told him that most students will say sir or miss. But then I remembered (and told him) that a lot of female teachers I speak to hate the terms sir and miss because sir has more power and so they feel they lose authority simply because they will be called miss, some even tell students to refer to them as sir because they are equal to their male counterparts.

    The only way to change this is either to change the terms and make new ones, or to go genderless (which people keep telling me is impossible.)

    I do not agree with you about their being a female and a male brain, there have been many studies proving this idea wrong and that we are infact all on a spectrum and the likely hood of being the stereo type of one gender is actually very very slim. (I am more on the male side which is how I ended up in a very male dominated field. I teach so I can travel but i'm a freelance sound designer and work with men only constantly.)

    But I am also not arguing with you or anything like that, just giving you more ways to think about it :) I know and realise you are writing to vent which is fair enough.
     
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  9. HueHuey

    HueHuey Parsec Taste Tester

    Is the whole prononun thing such a big issue?
    Here (arabic dialect), pronouns vary depending on where you are, and some use female pronouns for everyone, and nobody gets offended because we understand they are using them because it's how they talk.
    In my opinion it's also pretty understandable to be referred to as male/female by strangers even if one feels differently, because that's how they see you. They can't know.
     
  10. Kiama

    Kiama Tentacle Wrangler

    The degree to which pronouns matter varies from person to person obviously... I personally never make an issue out of being referred to by masculine pronouns. And I absolutely think that expecting everyone to remember is ridiculous. The problem is when people are explicitly using pronouns they know you don't want.

    Sent from my SM-N920L using Tapatalk
     
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  11. Pangaea

    Pangaea Forum Moderator

    This. The thing that annoys me is when someone expects you to know what they want to be called and then gets mad when you don't call them that. Even though they've never explained it.
     
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  12. null-a2

    null-a2 Guest

    While I can agree with you on the most part, and I do believe that we should call people whatever they want to be called, there has to be a line drawn somewhere. Or else, you get things like Bill C-16, which was a law passed in Canada.

    While you can argue that Bill C-16 will in fact protect everyone, in the bill, it's so vague that it can be interpreted by the law in a way that you can be found breaking it from just misgendering someone.

    Things like this are causes for worry, and does nothing but harm the reputation of those who actually are transgender. All of this recent "pronoun" nonsense is just causing a huge rift between people, and is damaging in the long run. If someone misgenders you on purpose, then yeah, they're a bunch of a-holes; there is no argument here - but where are you going to draw that line on what's considered a punishable offense? Because simply misgendering someone does not equal violence. You might as well pass laws to prevent people sh*t talking online - though if it did happen, I wouldn't be surprised at this point.
     
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  13. Surenu

    Surenu The End of Time

    Here's my take on the whole ordeal: If I meet you on the street and we may somehow end up talking to each other, I will call you by the pronouns I see fit because you can't expect me to read your mind. If you then politely request I call you by different pronouns, I will do my best to do so. If, however, you're an ass about it, I'll be an ass about it myself. There. Simple.

    On the forums this is different though because I have no credible basis to assume any gender, so you're sort of genderless to me until proven otherwise.
     
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  14. null-a2

    null-a2 Guest

    I know this is a little off topic, but I wanted to bring this up since you mentioned it. Being half Korean, a lot of the thinking there is deeply rooted in the culture. Korean's are very proud of their heritage, and for any drastic changes to happen there would take a long, long time.

    Respecting your teachers is paramount - I don't see a huge problem here. I was under the impression that women could be called sir as well. As far as female teachers not liking the term miss, forgive me but I've never heard anything like that before. I could be wrong however, last time I was in Korea was when I was about 11 years old.

    More on topic though, while there may be no such thing as a "female" or "male" brain, each brain biologically speaking depending on what body you're in will develop and release hormones according to what we generally accept to be male and female physique (i.e. men develop more muscle mass overall, women develop more curves to their bodies). As regards to you saying you're more "male", I believe is just how one perceives themselves. To me (no offense), if you have a woman's body, you're a woman. Regardless of what you do in life doesn't make you more "male" or "female" in any way whatsoever. That's just simply being unique as a person. For instance, I love guns but I still like to dress femininely. Would you say I'm more masculine, or feminine? Either way, I see myself as being a woman.

    A disclaimer though, I realize that trans people are a thing, and that we need to treat them with respect as any other human being on this Earth, but when you have people talking down to you for being "cis" - it makes you turn your head a bit you know?
     
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  15. Surenu

    Surenu The End of Time

    I think that's what the trans-trenders mentioned in the opening post do, honestly. I have a couple of friends in the LGBT+ community and guess what, my gay best friend makes the best gay jokes I ever heard. I can only speak from what I heard from my one trans friend, but trans people want to be respected and treated just like anyone else as far as I've heard, so really the key is treating them like decent human beings which shouldn't be that hard for us. That also means we can crack the occasional joke at them as long as it's not becoming systemic discrimination.

    I also just figured I actually broke that rule by referring to trans people as "them", whereas they should really be a part of "us".
     
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  16. null-a2

    null-a2 Guest

    Agreed. We're all humans, at the end of the day no one should really care about what you do with your life as long as it doesn't interfere with yours. But the "them" thing; as long as we're talking about a specific group (regardless of what it is), It should be fine. You're okay. Besides, if there is a group called LGBT+, you don't really have a choice.

    But yeah.. the cis thing, it's definitely not a LGBT+ thing. It's "trans-trender" hate rhetoric.
     
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  17. Surenu

    Surenu The End of Time

    First of all, let me commend you. I never had a discussion this calm about this topic, which is both cool about you and at the same time a sign how bad things have become.

    Then, yeah, the group thing, it makes sense. I'm your almost stereotypical cis straight white male, so a lot of groups are "them" for me, unfortunately, be it the LGBT+ community, muslims, foreigners etc. I tend to forget sometimes that I'm just as much "them" for them as they are "them" to me, if that makes any sense.
     
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