Acknowledging that there are differences of sex and giving them separate bathrooms is unfair discrimination? How does that make sense in your own head?
There are physical differences between races as well, like -for example- skin pigmentation. I'm not sure why separating people by sex is alright while doing it by phenotype is abhorrent. Shouldn't everyone get the same rights and be able to use the same facilities?
There are physical differences between races as well, like -for example- skin pigmentation.
Yes, and pointing out those physical differences are perfectly fine. "Black people have more melanin in their skin than white people do," is not a racist statement. Nor is "Black people have, on average, a greater chance of sickle-cell anemia."
When physical differences that are rooted in fact are pointed out, that's fine.
I'm not sure why separating people by sex is alright while doing it by phenotype is abhorrent.
Cause one group is one sex and the other group is the other. How is that not blindingly obvious?
Now, it's not fair to arbitrarily deny people things based solely on sex. That is sexism. However, making separate bathrooms, changing rooms, locker rooms, etc. for men and women is hardly comparable to creating a segregationalist society based on race.
Shouldn't everyone get the same rights and be able to use the same facilities?
THEY DO. That's why they both have bathrooms!
Urinals are insufficient for any restroom. How do you take a ***** in an all urinal bathroom?
You don't, but for non-*****-related purposes urinals are perfectly sufficient.
Why can't everyone be allowed to use both?
Practicality, and many would appreciate the separation of sexes in the bathrooms.
Hell, have you ever been in a theater during intermission?
I'm not sure why separating people by race isn't alright while doing it by sex is.
Cause one group is one [race] and the other group is the other. How is that not blindingly obvious?
Now, it's not fair to arbitrarily deny people things based solely on [race]. That is [racism.] However, making separate bathrooms, changing rooms, locker rooms, etc. for [whites] and [non-whites] is hardly comparable to creating a segregationalist society based on [sex].
Shouldn't everyone get the same rights and be able to use the same facilities?
THEY DO. That's why they both have bathrooms!
...
Why can't everyone be allowed to use both?
Practicality, and many would appreciate the separation of [races] in the bathrooms.
Hell, have you ever been in a theater during intermission?
Or
Quote from Not Highroller 2 »
Quote from Not Taylor 2 »
[Small Stalls] are insufficient for any restroom. How do [the physically disabled] take a ***** in an all [small stalls] bathroom?
[They] don't, but for non-[physically disabled]-related purposes [small stalls] are perfectly sufficient.
I'd assume you'd allow the physically disabled in a bathroom, even if some of the facilities were unusable by them, and they have another separate bathroom being used. Yet, you'd find the same activity by women objectionable?
Wow, so I asked you to justify how having separate bathrooms could possibly be comparable to racial segregation. Instead of justifying this, you just said, "IT IS!"
Forget trying to get a coherent argument out of you, which is difficult enough, now you're making me work to get something that's an argument at all?
No, freely offered, freely rejected. If you want anything you're saying to be taken seriously, actually create a coherent argument demonstrating how having different sex bathrooms is analogous to racial segregation.
Forget trying to get a coherent argument out of you, which is difficult enough, now you're making me work to get something that's an argument at all?
If your argument was literally used by people in the South -only with "race" instead of "sex"- then logically I don't see much of a difference between the arguments. Except one is "sexist" and the other is "racist."
Do you want me to look for clips of people making the same arguments in favor of racial segregation? "They aren't being denied anything." "Most people want it."
If your argument was literally used by people in the South -only with "race" instead of "sex"- then logically I don't see much of a difference between the arguments.
... So they're literally the same thing, except for that they pertain to totally different things?
Forget trying to get a coherent argument out of you, which is difficult enough, now you're making me work to get something that's an argument at all?
If your argument was literally used by people in the South -only with "race" instead of "sex"- then logically I don't see much of a difference between the arguments. Except one is "sexist" and the other is "racist."
Do you want me to look for clips of people making the same arguments in favor of racial segregation? "They aren't being denied anything." "Most people want it."
You have to justify that the replacement is warranted. Substituting terms isn't equivalent. Watch.
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Now, it's not fair to arbitrarily deny people things based solely on [age]. However, making separate [classrooms], [movies], [voting rights], [drinking rights] etc. for [adults] and [kids] is hardly comparable to creating a segregationalist society based on [age].
/
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Quote from Not Not »
Now, it's not fair to arbitrarily deny people things based solely on [education]. However, making separate [job titles], changing [job responsibilities],, etc. for [college graduates] and [non-graduates] is hardly comparable to creating a segregationalist society based on [education].
You're arguing that gender should be considered as meaningless as race. You can't get there just be finding and replacing key terms.
Gender is not a trait. It's a pattern of behaviour.
You missed the point completely. Whether it's a "trait" or a "pattern of behavior" is irrelevant - mere terminological sophistry. Whatever it is, if biological evolution has a hand in it, it is not constructed socially, because the biological evolution process vastly precedes the social construction process. Calling an evolved trait pattern-of-behavior a "social construct" is like calling The Lord of the Rings an "original creation of Peter Jackson".
No it doesn't. It's an optimization process that involves random events like mutations, climate changes and asteroid impacts.
Please read up on the concept of arbitrariness. It bears no close relation to randomness. A quality is arbitrary if it could just as easily be one way as another, if there is no relevant objective evaluative framework - no good reason - by which one might prefer a particular quality. For example, the meaning of the words "cat" and "dog" are arbitrary; they could just as easily be the other way around and nothing real would change. However, the fact that we have words for cats and dogs is not arbitrary. If we didn't have them, there would be a hole in our language that would hinder us in describing everyday experiences. Nor is it arbitrary that they have one syllable instead of fifteen - there's good reason to prefer shorter words over longer ones. And so on.
And evolved, adaptive traits are not arbitrary. Organisms have a trait because it improves their survival and reproduction chances. This is not to say that every trait an organism has is adaptive. Nonadaptive traits are arbitrary, and finding them is actually an important part of cladistics for reasons we don't need to go into. But finding them is also very hard, because evolution is constantly acting on everything, and it's really really sneaky sometimes. Think about so-called "junk DNA" - total misnomer, as it turns out. In biology, the rule of thumb should always be to assume that a trait is doing something for the organism, even if we haven't figured it out yet. Saying "it's evolved, so it's arbitrary" is the opposite of good sense. If it's evolved, it's probably not arbitrary.
Think of it this way: could we "easily" have evolved without eyes? Are eyes arbitrary?
When you also consider that the ideas of masculinity and femininity change depending on what the dominant culture is (for example, in Communist countries, femininity was disassociated from beauty and the home), it is clear that it is a social construct.
According to Taylor's quoted definition, the characteristics of gender "may include biological sex". Which tracks with how most people understand the concept. So if you wish to exclude biological sex from the discussion, you're going to have to be clearer in your definitions; you can't just assume people will read your mind and understand what you're talking about. And I'm not sure how much good excluding sex will do your case, anyway. Even beyond sex, many aspects of gender roles are not culturally arbitrary. If you tell me you've discovered a brand-new human culture without giving me any other information about it, I can predict, with a very high degree of accuracy, firstly that it will have gender roles (which is a significant finding in itself), secondly that they will be strongly correlated to biological sex (although this is true by definition), and thirdly that its masculine gender role will be associated with violence and its feminine gender role with childcare. That is a very basic pattern which is repeated over and over again all around the world. Do not miss the forest for the trees here.
Since it changes over time (women being given more rights politically and in the workplace, some names switching from male to female, blue and pink switching from male to female colors, women being allowed to wear pants instead of skirts), it is arbitrary.
Change over time does not imply arbitrariness. The mercury in a thermometer changes over time, but it is not arbitrary. If gender is arbitrary, it is for some other reason than this. Try again.
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Sex is the biological component of being male or female. If you have a Y chromosome you are male. If you don't you are female. Gender is the social component of maleness or femaleness, such as what clothes one wears and what name one has. The World Health Organization sums it up like this
Gender’ describes those characteristics of women and men that are largely socially created, while ‘sex’ encompasses those that are biologically determined. However, these terms are often mistakenly used interchangeably in scientific literature, health policy, and legislation.
Sex is the biological component of being male or female. If you have a Y chromosome you are male. If you don't you are female.
It's actually much more complicated than that. Most of the time, XY = male, XX = female. But there are XY females. There are XX males. There are people who are intersexed.
Gender is the social component of maleness or femaleness, such as what clothes one wears and what name one has. The World Health Organization sums it up like this
Gender’ describes those characteristics of women and men that are largely socially created, while ‘sex’ encompasses those that are biologically determined. However, these terms are often mistakenly used interchangeably in scientific literature, health policy, and legislation.
But that's circular. If you specifically define "gender" as "the stuff society constructs around gender" then yes, you will find that much of gender is a societal construct because that's how you've defined the word.
But the fact is that this definition cannot be satisfactory, because there is a lot about gender that is NOT a societal construct. As I pointed out earlier, there is Gender dysphoria, in which people associate with a particular gender NOT because of any societal conditioning, but because of the way their bodies/brains are hardwired.
When you also consider that the ideas of masculinity and femininity change depending on what the dominant culture is (for example, in Communist countries, femininity was disassociated from beauty and the home), it is clear that it is a social construct.
According to Taylor's quoted definition, the characteristics of gender "may include biological sex". Which tracks with how most people understand the concept. So if you wish to exclude biological sex from the discussion, you're going to have to be clearer in your definitions; you can't just assume people will read your mind and understand what you're talking about.
I just added the World Health Organization's definition of gender and sex to the OP. Is that enough?
And I'm not sure how much good excluding sex will do your case, anyway. Even beyond sex, many aspects of gender roles are not culturally arbitrary. If you tell me you've discovered a brand-new human culture without giving me any other information about it, I can predict, with a very high degree of accuracy, firstly that it will have gender roles (which is a significant finding in itself), secondly that they will be strongly correlated to biological sex (although this is true by definition), and thirdly that its masculine gender role will be associated with violence and its feminine gender role with childcare. That is a very basic pattern which is repeated over and over again all around the world. Do not miss the forest for the trees here.
Go find me some brand new human cultures since the creation of birth control, then we can talk. Until birth control was invented, women were forced to have the feminine gender roles that we are familiar with because pregnancy stops one from many kinds of work. With women being able to control when they become pregnant and when they have children, the submissive and dominant gender roles and the association of women with idleness and beauty lose a lot of meaning.
Since it changes over time (women being given more rights politically and in the workplace, some names switching from male to female, blue and pink switching from male to female colors, women being allowed to wear pants instead of skirts), it is arbitrary.
Change over time does not imply arbitrariness. The mercury in a thermometer changes over time, but it is not arbitrary. If gender is arbitrary, it is for some other reason than this. Try again.
What I am trying to say is this. Is there any reason, other than society saying "because that is how it is", that a female can't be named John? Is there any reason, other than society saying "because that is how it is", that a male can't like pink? Is there any reason, other than society saying "because that is how it is", that males can't wear skirts and females wear pants. If there is not a reason for it other than "that is just how it works and that is just what we want, deal with it", then it is clearly arbitrary.
Until birth control was invented, women were forced to have the feminine gender roles that we are familiar with because pregnancy stops one from many kinds of work.
Sex is the biological component of being male or female. If you have a Y chromosome you are male. If you don't you are female.
It's actually much more complicated than that. Most of the time, XY = male, XX = female. But there are XY females. There are XX males. There are people who are intersexed.
Fair enough, but it is still clearly defined as being biological in all of those cases.
Gender is the social component of maleness or femaleness, such as what clothes one wears and what name one has. The World Health Organization sums it up like this
Gender’ describes those characteristics of women and men that are largely socially created, while ‘sex’ encompasses those that are biologically determined. However, these terms are often mistakenly used interchangeably in scientific literature, health policy, and legislation.
But that's circular. If you specifically define "gender" as "the stuff society constructs around gender" then yes, you will find that much of gender is a societal construct because that's how you've defined the word.
But the fact is that this definition cannot be satisfactory, because there is a lot about gender that is NOT a societal construct. As I pointed out earlier, there is Gender dysphoria, in which people associate with a particular gender NOT because of any societal conditioning, but because of the way their bodies/brains are hardwired.
If gender didn't exist, I think that gender dysphoria wouldn't either. Would people feel the need to associate with a different gender if gender roles didn't exist and nothing was viewed as masculine or feminine? I don't think so, because there would be no point in associating with a different gender.
Until birth control was invented, women were forced to have the feminine gender roles that we are familiar with because pregnancy stops one from many kinds of work.
Erm... That's not changed.
Yes, but what has changed is that women can have sex without losing the opportunity to have an independent life. You can't argue that gender roles are biological because it exists in every culture when they had a very practical purpose until very recently. It just means that every culture recognized that when women had very little control over getting pregnant they ended up being the ones who didn't work, which led to submissive/dominant relationships and established the concepts of femininity and masculinity that still exist today.
Fair enough, but it is still clearly defined as being biological in all of those cases.
Are you implying that gender is not biological? Because this is not the case.
If gender didn't exist, I think that gender dysphoria wouldn't either. Would people feel the need to associate with a different gender if gender roles didn't exist and nothing was viewed as masculine or feminine? I don't think so, because there would be no point in associating with a different gender.
If you're saying that gender dysphoria would cease to exist in a scenario in which there were no culturally-instilled ideas about gender norms, then no, you are incorrect, because once again, gender dysphoria is in which a person is biologically predisposed to a particular gender.
As evidenced by the David Reimer case, a person's brain is hardwired for a particular gender. This is independent of sex (Reimer had undergone sex reassignment surgery to be sexed female) and independent of nurture (Reimer was raised female).
Thus, gender is not a societal construct. Societal gender norms are a societal construct, but gender is not.
Yes, but what has changed is that women can have sex without losing the opportunity to have an independent life. You can't argue that gender roles are biological because it exists in every culture when they had a very practical purpose until very recently. It just means that every culture recognized that when women had very little control over getting pregnant they ended up being the ones who didn't work, which led to submissive/dominant relationships and established the concepts of femininity and masculinity that still exist today.
Actually, there were societies of relative gender equality, and also matriarchal societies, prior to birth control.
Fair enough, but it is still clearly defined as being biological in all of those cases.
Are you implying that gender is not biological? Because this is not the case.
While I am implying that, what I meant in that sentence was that we are arguing about whether gender is biological or not. Arguing about what the biological definition of sex is is a little off topic since we both agree that it is purely biological.
If gender didn't exist, I think that gender dysphoria wouldn't either. Would people feel the need to associate with a different gender if gender roles didn't exist and nothing was viewed as masculine or feminine? I don't think so, because there would be no point in associating with a different gender.
If you're saying that gender dysphoria would cease to exist in a scenario in which there were no culturally-instilled ideas about gender norms, then no, you are incorrect, because once again, gender dysphoria is in which a person is biologically predisposed to a particular gender.
As evidenced by the David Reimer case, a person's brain is hardwired for a particular gender. This is independent of sex (Reimer had undergone sex reassignment surgery to be sexed female) and independent of nurture (Reimer was raised female).
Thus, gender is not a societal construct. Societal gender norms are a societal construct, but gender is not.
If gender didn't exist as a concept that had meaning then people wouldn't identify as the other gender because there would be literally no point in doing so. If all names, all activities, all groups, all ideas, all colors, all rights, all roles, all concepts, and everything else was all equal outside of biological differences, then what would be the differences between male and female genders? And if there was not difference, then how could one feel that they were in the wrong gender?
Yes, but what has changed is that women can have sex without losing the opportunity to have an independent life. You can't argue that gender roles are biological because it exists in every culture when they had a very practical purpose until very recently. It just means that every culture recognized that when women had very little control over getting pregnant they ended up being the ones who didn't work, which led to submissive/dominant relationships and established the concepts of femininity and masculinity that still exist today.
Actually, there were societies of relative gender equality, and also matriarchal societies, prior to birth control.
I know that, Blinking Spirit was saying that any society will have gender roles. I am just saying that gender roles and gender inequality came from women having very little control over whether they could work until recently.
If gender didn't exist as a concept that had meaning then people wouldn't identify as the other gender because there would be literally no point in doing so. If all names, all activities, all groups, all ideas, all colors, all rights, all roles, all concepts, and everything else was all equal outside of biological differences, then what would be the differences between male and female genders? And if there was not difference, then how could one feel that they were in the wrong gender?
This is a tautology. If the concept of gender didn't exist then the concept of gender would not exist.
One could just as easily say that if the concept of blue did not exist then the concept of blue would not exist. What's your point?
If you're trying to say that we could, as a society, remove the concept of gender, then once again you are incorrect, because gender is inherent in us physically in our minds' perception of ourselves, which has a very definite physiological component and therefore cannot be argued to be purely a construct of nurture.
I know that, Blinking Spirit was saying that any society will have gender roles. I am just saying that gender roles and gender inequality came from women having very little control over whether they could work until recently.
How does this lead toward your thesis that gender roles are arbitrary? You're just proving Blinking's point. Gender roles are linked to sex and are therefore not arbitrary.
You missed the point completely. Whether it's a "trait" or a "pattern of behavior" is irrelevant - mere terminological sophistry. Whatever it is, if biological evolution has a hand in it, it is not constructed socially, because the biological evolution process vastly precedes the social construction process. Calling an evolved trait pattern-of-behavior a "social construct" is like calling The Lord of the Rings an "original creation of Peter Jackson".
If you see no difference between a trait and a pattern of behaviour, again, I can't help you. What do you expect from me? Spell it out for you?
Same for the social construction thing. Biological elovution plays a role in nearly every part of our lives and therefore also in some social constructs. If you think those things are incompatible you're just plain wrong. Just think of our biases and how they relate to the construction of social stereotypes.
And evolved, adaptive traits are not arbitrary. Organisms have a trait because it improves their survival and reproduction chances. This is not to say that every trait an organism has is adaptive. Nonadaptive traits are arbitrary, and finding them is actually an important part of cladistics for reasons we don't need to go into. But finding them is also very hard, because evolution is constantly acting on everything, and it's really really sneaky sometimes. Think about so-called "junk DNA" - total misnomer, as it turns out. In biology, the rule of thumb should always be to assume that a trait is doing something for the organism, even if we haven't figured it out yet. Saying "it's evolved, so it's arbitrary" is the opposite of good sense. If it's evolved, it's probably not arbitrary.
A trait only improves survival ect. given a certain environment. And since changes in environment are arbitrary the traits are also arbitrary in this context. I don't know what's so hard to understand about that.
Think of it this way: could we "easily" have evolved without eyes? Are eyes arbitrary?
Yes! Of course. There are some species that lost their eyes in their evolution because they started to live in an environment without light. Imagine an asteroid had hit earth and there would have been a nuclear winter on the whole planet and human being would have started to live underground. Given enough time and evolutionary pressure we would have lost our eyes. You might say that 'easily' doesn't describe this scenario very well, but stereotypes, gender roles and our other biases wouldn't have required a catastrophic global event to have changed. A minor climate change resulting in a different food chain could have made drastic changes in our behaviour.
Shouldn't everyone get the same rights and be able to use the same facilities?
THEY DO. That's why they both have bathrooms!
In my undergrad days, the Halls of Residence (on-campus student accommodation) had unisex bathrooms - no urinals, many stalls. At the time, I thought 'how efficient!', though most buildings I've been in since then have had segregated toilets.
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I am willing to bet my collection that Frozen and Solid are not on the same card. For example, Frozen Tomb and Solid Wall.
If Frozen Solid is not reprinted, you are aware that I'm quoting you in my sig for eternity?
... So they're literally the same thing, except for that they pertain to totally different things?
Right, one is segregate based on race, which is racist, while the other is segregation based on sex, which is sexist.
Urinals aside (which can even be in unisex bathrooms) I'm not sure how you can claim saying these toilets are for whites while these are for blacks is racist. But saying these toilets are for men and these toilets are for women isn't sexist. You're segregating people's toilets based on sex. How isn't that sexism when segregating people's toilets by race is definitely racist?
You're arguing that gender should be considered as meaningless as race. You can't get there just be finding and replacing key terms.
Brown v. Board of Education unambiguously states "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."[1] The only reason it doesn't apply to sexual segregation is because the fortheeth amendment specifies "male citizens." However, the basic logic that "separate facilities are inherently unequal" is true regardless of reasons for separate facilities. Different bathrooms -for example- are inherently unequal.
This is one of the reasons I think the Equal Rights Amendment would be a good amendment. The law should not be able to discriminate based on race or sex.
... So they're literally the same thing, except for that they pertain to totally different things?
Right, one is segregate based on race, which is racist, while the other is segregation based on sex, which is sexist.
Urinals aside (which can even be in unisex bathrooms) I'm not sure how you can claim saying these toilets are for whites while these are for blacks is racist. But saying these toilets are for men and these toilets are for women isn't sexist. You're segregating people's toilets based on sex. How isn't that sexism when segregating people's toilets by race is definitely racist?
You're arguing that gender should be considered as meaningless as race. You can't get there just be finding and replacing key terms.
Brown v. Board of Education unambiguously states "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."[1] The only reason it doesn't apply to sexual segregation is because the fortheeth amendment specifies "male citizens." However, the basic logic that "separate facilities are inherently unequal" is true regardless of reasons for separate facilities. Different bathrooms -for example- are inherently unequal.
This is one of the reasons I think the Equal Rights Amendment would be a good amendment. The law should not be able to discriminate based on race or sex.
We have separate classrooms for children of different ages/grades too. We have separate classrooms for kids with various disabilities. Are you for uniting all those too? If not, you need to justify why this is the same while those aren't.
Note: I'm not saying they aren't, just trying to point out where the circles in this discussion are coming from.
Yes, my point is that you need to justify things. The find-and-replace game doesn't work on its own. Observe.
Right, one is segregate based on race, which is racist, while the other is segregation based on sex, which is sexist.
And the education example is segregation based on age, which is ageist.
Fundamentally though, all you have to do is show that it makes more people unhappy to have separate bathrooms for the sexes than to have everything be unisex. No matter what, someone's going to feel uncomfortable - whether it's a transgender person feeling awkward using a certain bathroom or a straight person feeling awkward surrounded by people of the opposite sex. Which option produces the biggest net gain?
If a law was enforced to make all bathrooms unisex, I have a hunch most people wouldn't care at all about the gender-splitting practice in a few generations. I haven't seen a compelling argument that it's a major issue worth trying to force through legislation on though.
Comparing to segregation of race isn't really equivalent. Men and women are in the same classrooms, are allowed to go to the same parks, drink from the same water fountains - it's only when an issue of nudity gets into the mix that separation is enforced. There's no "we don't serve you kind" going on here. There's no, "we don't want anything to do with your people, so go to a different school and live in a different neighborhood".
Let's apply this to locker rooms. I doubt many women would want men to be given full access. Especially with teenagers involved. Does the desire for privacy win out here, or the desire for full inclusion? Ideally, it'd be great if everyone had access to an individual changing room but that's not feasible.
And the education example is segregation based on age, which is ageist.
I don't really have an opinion on the whole toilet debate, since I don't care that much. I think unisex toilets work and the segregation is unnecessary at least in principle but there might be some difficulties in different cultures.
All I was trying to say is that the education example doesn't really fit as a counterexample because segregation in education isn't based on age but on the level of education, which is quite a good reason. It's always hard to compare all the different types of stereotypes but there are definitely many parallels.
My point was that simple "find and replace" isn't enough. I was trying to pick an obviously wrong example to show that the argument "look how easy it is to find and replace your arguments with arguments for racism" isn't actually meaningful.
Why can't everyone be allowed to use both? If there's a line in the womens room, why shouldn't they be allowed to use the mens?
Call me crazy if you want, but I have a feeling in 50 years time all bathrooms will be unisex.
When physical differences that are rooted in fact are pointed out, that's fine.
Cause one group is one sex and the other group is the other. How is that not blindingly obvious?
Now, it's not fair to arbitrarily deny people things based solely on sex. That is sexism. However, making separate bathrooms, changing rooms, locker rooms, etc. for men and women is hardly comparable to creating a segregationalist society based on race.
THEY DO. That's why they both have bathrooms!
You don't, but for non-*****-related purposes urinals are perfectly sufficient.
Practicality, and many would appreciate the separation of sexes in the bathrooms.
Hell, have you ever been in a theater during intermission?
Or
I'd assume you'd allow the physically disabled in a bathroom, even if some of the facilities were unusable by them, and they have another separate bathroom being used. Yet, you'd find the same activity by women objectionable?
Forget trying to get a coherent argument out of you, which is difficult enough, now you're making me work to get something that's an argument at all?
No, freely offered, freely rejected. If you want anything you're saying to be taken seriously, actually create a coherent argument demonstrating how having different sex bathrooms is analogous to racial segregation.
Do you want me to look for clips of people making the same arguments in favor of racial segregation? "They aren't being denied anything." "Most people want it."
You have to justify that the replacement is warranted. Substituting terms isn't equivalent. Watch.
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or...
You're arguing that gender should be considered as meaningless as race. You can't get there just be finding and replacing key terms.
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traitpattern-of-behavior a "social construct" is like calling The Lord of the Rings an "original creation of Peter Jackson".Please read up on the concept of arbitrariness. It bears no close relation to randomness. A quality is arbitrary if it could just as easily be one way as another, if there is no relevant objective evaluative framework - no good reason - by which one might prefer a particular quality. For example, the meaning of the words "cat" and "dog" are arbitrary; they could just as easily be the other way around and nothing real would change. However, the fact that we have words for cats and dogs is not arbitrary. If we didn't have them, there would be a hole in our language that would hinder us in describing everyday experiences. Nor is it arbitrary that they have one syllable instead of fifteen - there's good reason to prefer shorter words over longer ones. And so on.
And evolved, adaptive traits are not arbitrary. Organisms have a trait because it improves their survival and reproduction chances. This is not to say that every trait an organism has is adaptive. Nonadaptive traits are arbitrary, and finding them is actually an important part of cladistics for reasons we don't need to go into. But finding them is also very hard, because evolution is constantly acting on everything, and it's really really sneaky sometimes. Think about so-called "junk DNA" - total misnomer, as it turns out. In biology, the rule of thumb should always be to assume that a trait is doing something for the organism, even if we haven't figured it out yet. Saying "it's evolved, so it's arbitrary" is the opposite of good sense. If it's evolved, it's probably not arbitrary.
Think of it this way: could we "easily" have evolved without eyes? Are eyes arbitrary?
Change over time does not imply arbitrariness. The mercury in a thermometer changes over time, but it is not arbitrary. If gender is arbitrary, it is for some other reason than this. Try again.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Sex is the biological component of being male or female. If you have a Y chromosome you are male. If you don't you are female. Gender is the social component of maleness or femaleness, such as what clothes one wears and what name one has. The World Health Organization sums it up like this
http://www.who.int/genomics/gender/en/
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But that's circular. If you specifically define "gender" as "the stuff society constructs around gender" then yes, you will find that much of gender is a societal construct because that's how you've defined the word.
But the fact is that this definition cannot be satisfactory, because there is a lot about gender that is NOT a societal construct. As I pointed out earlier, there is Gender dysphoria, in which people associate with a particular gender NOT because of any societal conditioning, but because of the way their bodies/brains are hardwired.
I just added the World Health Organization's definition of gender and sex to the OP. Is that enough?
Go find me some brand new human cultures since the creation of birth control, then we can talk. Until birth control was invented, women were forced to have the feminine gender roles that we are familiar with because pregnancy stops one from many kinds of work. With women being able to control when they become pregnant and when they have children, the submissive and dominant gender roles and the association of women with idleness and beauty lose a lot of meaning.
What I am trying to say is this. Is there any reason, other than society saying "because that is how it is", that a female can't be named John? Is there any reason, other than society saying "because that is how it is", that a male can't like pink? Is there any reason, other than society saying "because that is how it is", that males can't wear skirts and females wear pants. If there is not a reason for it other than "that is just how it works and that is just what we want, deal with it", then it is clearly arbitrary.
Storm Crow is strictly worse than Seacoast Drake.
Fair enough, but it is still clearly defined as being biological in all of those cases.
If gender didn't exist, I think that gender dysphoria wouldn't either. Would people feel the need to associate with a different gender if gender roles didn't exist and nothing was viewed as masculine or feminine? I don't think so, because there would be no point in associating with a different gender.
Storm Crow is strictly worse than Seacoast Drake.
Yes, but what has changed is that women can have sex without losing the opportunity to have an independent life. You can't argue that gender roles are biological because it exists in every culture when they had a very practical purpose until very recently. It just means that every culture recognized that when women had very little control over getting pregnant they ended up being the ones who didn't work, which led to submissive/dominant relationships and established the concepts of femininity and masculinity that still exist today.
Storm Crow is strictly worse than Seacoast Drake.
If you're saying that gender dysphoria would cease to exist in a scenario in which there were no culturally-instilled ideas about gender norms, then no, you are incorrect, because once again, gender dysphoria is in which a person is biologically predisposed to a particular gender.
As evidenced by the David Reimer case, a person's brain is hardwired for a particular gender. This is independent of sex (Reimer had undergone sex reassignment surgery to be sexed female) and independent of nurture (Reimer was raised female).
Thus, gender is not a societal construct. Societal gender norms are a societal construct, but gender is not.
Actually, there were societies of relative gender equality, and also matriarchal societies, prior to birth control.
While I am implying that, what I meant in that sentence was that we are arguing about whether gender is biological or not. Arguing about what the biological definition of sex is is a little off topic since we both agree that it is purely biological.
If gender didn't exist as a concept that had meaning then people wouldn't identify as the other gender because there would be literally no point in doing so. If all names, all activities, all groups, all ideas, all colors, all rights, all roles, all concepts, and everything else was all equal outside of biological differences, then what would be the differences between male and female genders? And if there was not difference, then how could one feel that they were in the wrong gender?
I know that, Blinking Spirit was saying that any society will have gender roles. I am just saying that gender roles and gender inequality came from women having very little control over whether they could work until recently.
Storm Crow is strictly worse than Seacoast Drake.
One could just as easily say that if the concept of blue did not exist then the concept of blue would not exist. What's your point?
If you're trying to say that we could, as a society, remove the concept of gender, then once again you are incorrect, because gender is inherent in us physically in our minds' perception of ourselves, which has a very definite physiological component and therefore cannot be argued to be purely a construct of nurture.
How does this lead toward your thesis that gender roles are arbitrary? You're just proving Blinking's point. Gender roles are linked to sex and are therefore not arbitrary.
If you see no difference between a trait and a pattern of behaviour, again, I can't help you. What do you expect from me? Spell it out for you?
Same for the social construction thing. Biological elovution plays a role in nearly every part of our lives and therefore also in some social constructs. If you think those things are incompatible you're just plain wrong. Just think of our biases and how they relate to the construction of social stereotypes.
A trait only improves survival ect. given a certain environment. And since changes in environment are arbitrary the traits are also arbitrary in this context. I don't know what's so hard to understand about that.
Yes! Of course. There are some species that lost their eyes in their evolution because they started to live in an environment without light. Imagine an asteroid had hit earth and there would have been a nuclear winter on the whole planet and human being would have started to live underground. Given enough time and evolutionary pressure we would have lost our eyes. You might say that 'easily' doesn't describe this scenario very well, but stereotypes, gender roles and our other biases wouldn't have required a catastrophic global event to have changed. A minor climate change resulting in a different food chain could have made drastic changes in our behaviour.
In my undergrad days, the Halls of Residence (on-campus student accommodation) had unisex bathrooms - no urinals, many stalls. At the time, I thought 'how efficient!', though most buildings I've been in since then have had segregated toilets.
Urinals aside (which can even be in unisex bathrooms) I'm not sure how you can claim saying these toilets are for whites while these are for blacks is racist. But saying these toilets are for men and these toilets are for women isn't sexist. You're segregating people's toilets based on sex. How isn't that sexism when segregating people's toilets by race is definitely racist?
Brown v. Board of Education unambiguously states "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."[1] The only reason it doesn't apply to sexual segregation is because the fortheeth amendment specifies "male citizens." However, the basic logic that "separate facilities are inherently unequal" is true regardless of reasons for separate facilities. Different bathrooms -for example- are inherently unequal.
This is one of the reasons I think the Equal Rights Amendment would be a good amendment. The law should not be able to discriminate based on race or sex.
We have separate classrooms for children of different ages/grades too. We have separate classrooms for kids with various disabilities. Are you for uniting all those too? If not, you need to justify why this is the same while those aren't.
Note: I'm not saying they aren't, just trying to point out where the circles in this discussion are coming from.
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And the education example is segregation based on age, which is ageist.
Fundamentally though, all you have to do is show that it makes more people unhappy to have separate bathrooms for the sexes than to have everything be unisex. No matter what, someone's going to feel uncomfortable - whether it's a transgender person feeling awkward using a certain bathroom or a straight person feeling awkward surrounded by people of the opposite sex. Which option produces the biggest net gain?
If a law was enforced to make all bathrooms unisex, I have a hunch most people wouldn't care at all about the gender-splitting practice in a few generations. I haven't seen a compelling argument that it's a major issue worth trying to force through legislation on though.
Comparing to segregation of race isn't really equivalent. Men and women are in the same classrooms, are allowed to go to the same parks, drink from the same water fountains - it's only when an issue of nudity gets into the mix that separation is enforced. There's no "we don't serve you kind" going on here. There's no, "we don't want anything to do with your people, so go to a different school and live in a different neighborhood".
Let's apply this to locker rooms. I doubt many women would want men to be given full access. Especially with teenagers involved. Does the desire for privacy win out here, or the desire for full inclusion? Ideally, it'd be great if everyone had access to an individual changing room but that's not feasible.
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I don't really have an opinion on the whole toilet debate, since I don't care that much. I think unisex toilets work and the segregation is unnecessary at least in principle but there might be some difficulties in different cultures.
All I was trying to say is that the education example doesn't really fit as a counterexample because segregation in education isn't based on age but on the level of education, which is quite a good reason. It's always hard to compare all the different types of stereotypes but there are definitely many parallels.
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