Typically what do you wish to be called is a lot less intrusive and offensive than other questions I will be asking

This post was edited by Skinned on Oct 30 2019 01:23pm

It's been clear to my why we're going in circles, you aren't seeing that you already agree with everything I've said.

My only claim has been that we haven't made pronoun determinations based on genitals since we stopped letting them hang out in the open, and that we've used secondary and tertiary sexual characteristics for hundreds if not thousands of years. You're saying it's only been that way for a decade, but I can point to literally every instance of social interaction you've made your entire life, every fictional character to exist that didn't have a dong, etc. to prove my point. You can say that 99.9% of cases correlate to genitals, but that's just not relevant to the point I'm making. You can say I'm wrong, but unless you sit here and truthfully tell me that you've been going around asking to see a dude's junk before saying "he/him" then I'm right.

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Oct 30 2019 01:28pm

EARLY in the conversation i said that we covered up, but that by using the pronoun of a sex you don't have to see what's under the person's clothes.

we started using gendered pronouns when gender was visually apparent (loin cloth era), and we kept using them in the exact same way towards the exact same people of the exact same sex.

clothes changed nothing, even as clothes changed. until 10 or so years ago in the mainstream, maybe the 70s or so on the fringe through drag.

if your entire point has been that people covered up, what does it prove? it certainly didn't change how we used pronouns for 99.99% of people that correlated to the genitals of said pronoun. i agree it's not relevant to the point you're making, because i didnt realize you were making such a moot point. tbh i thought you were aligning more with the progressive perspective, when instead you seem to have (long windedly) said not much of anything. at one point you mixed up nouns and adjectives. seems odd to be so elusive and semantic just to say "people put on clothes and we still knew what sex there were more or less without seeing their genitals". something literally no one disagrees with afaik, aka a strawman.

Yeah, all of this could have been avoided if you had just read my statements without trying to add on a bunch of extra baggage. It's been a long time since we've used genitals to determine pronouns, and the idea of man and woman haven't been directly replaceable with penis and vagina for about as long.

However, it's also worth noting that the relatively recent puritan ideas quenched a lot of sexual nuance that existed in the ancient world. There are plenty of examples of gender ambiguous, trans, etc. gods in the ancient world, and sometimes whole social castes and roles dedicated to similar individuals in that society. So the idea that there were no languages or society that accommodated the "anomalies" is also suspect since that information was actively suppressed until recently. An interesting example is Asushunamir in babylon, who was responsible for gender ambiguous people getting special powers. Fun stuff!

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Oct 30 2019 01:49pm

i'm not sure where in the conversation "determining pronouns" became important. but even if we remove genitals (and yes im going to keep using that phrase) gender pronouns were still largely determined by biology. more muscular people, with facial hair, hairy arms, taller, breasts, adam apple, etc. these are all biological aspects of sexual dimorphism that we use to determine pronouns on sight.

even in that case of clothes, when you catch a glance of say a women wearing the typical 14 year old skater boy outfit, the biological markers tend to break through. you notice their build is different than a 14 year old boy, their legs are hairless, their posture is different, etc. these things stand out to you instantly, before you're even aware of "what's off".

i think we got spun off on genitals because that's more fun to talk about, but my original post is this:





perhaps that's how we got on genitalia. i was simply using the penis and vagina to simplify so we didnt have to state all of the aspects of sexual dimorphism.

This post was edited by thesnipa on Oct 30 2019 01:58pm

Yeah, the issue I had with that post was " shifting the definition to identity, rather than the traditional practice of referring directly to their genitalia, is new." since the practice of referring to genitalia isn't the traditional practice. However, yes, generally the secondary sexual characteristics are well correlated with biology. I figured I'd just put in a snarky "ha ha, winnie the pooh has a dick" and you'd clarify by saying something to the effect of "yeah, you're right, it's based on his voice and his friends saying "he", not his genitals" and that would be it.