[Politics] Which gender do you most identify with?

[Cornwallboy]

Male. Hetrosexual. Meat eater. Lager drinker. Curry eater. Tory voter. Daily Mail reader.

 

[Harry Wilson's tackle]

Male. Hetrosexual. Meat eater. Lager drinker. Curry eater. Tory voter. Daily Mail reader.

That's an awful lot of genders. Absolutely top work

That'll be 'gender-expansive' then.

I salute your indefatigability.

 

[Cornwallboy]

That's an awful lot of genders. Absolutely top work

That'll be 'gender-expansive' then.

I salute your indefatigability.

Ha ha cheers Harry. Anything goes nowadays, so if people can identify as a cat I can identify as the above!!!

 

[The Clamp]

Male. Hetrosexual. Meat eater. Lager drinker. Curry eater. Tory voter. Daily Mail reader.

Ah, in that case may I usher you into our executive members lounge?
Campari, Sir?

 

[Cornwallboy]

Ah, in that case may I usher you into our executive members lounge?
Campari, Sir?

Nah mate, pint of lager. Cheers though.

 

[Harry Wilson's tackle]

Ha ha cheers Harry. Anything goes nowadays, so if people can identify as a cat I can identify as the above!!!

On a serious note, you and I, I suspect, are very fortunate. Gender never an issue. Albeit perhaps for different reasons.

Being an old git, when gender discussions became a thing, back whenever, 2007? (quickly checks wikipedia) my initial reaction was that some blokes are taking their desire to dress up in women's clobber a bit to preciously. I'm somewhat blind to race and sexual orientation, and spent the late 70s and early 80s in my formative years in diverse company, so I found the recent gender agenda somewhat baffling. However, since nobody is stealing money out of my purse or jumping the queue to the next covid vaccine on the basis of their gender declaration, I say declare away.

Where I work the bogs are all gender neutral. So it is all traps, not troughs. The only thing I have to say about that is "if you have a cock, please sit, or if you can't sit (them knees, innit), please wipe the seat afterwards. It isn't f***ing rocket science. This is not a performance art theatre, or a German piss fetish venue". I have to sit when I have a piss for reasons that would be too much information, so....

 

[DavidinSouthampton]

The thought process of some objectors has to be considered to really understand where they are coming from. The argument seems to be:

You cannot be any gender other than male or female because the existence of other gender brain patterns is not supported by evidential proof.
I am angry about you doing this because it conflicts with my belief system which is based on religious faith that is not supported by evidential proof.

As a religious person, my belief system does not dictate to me what to think about gender issues, and I know PLENTY of others who are similarly accepting/tolerant. Proper religion is tolerant and accepting.
And I would be absolutely certain that there are plenty of people who profess no faith, and even would talk about religion in terms of fairy tales who would dismiss summarily the whole gender business as woke.
I’m not sure whether you’re suggesting intolerance and religion in the area go together, but if you are, I disagree.

 

[DavidinSouthampton]

Me, I'm just a lawnmower.

I thought as much. It’s the way you walk.

 

[Sid and the Sharknados]

On a serious note, you and I, I suspect, are very fortunate. Gender never an issue. Albeit perhaps for different reasons.

Being an old git, when gender discussions became a thing, back whenever, 2007? (quickly checks wikipedia) my initial reaction was that some blokes are taking their desire to dress up in women's clobber a bit to preciously. I'm somewhat blind to race and sexual orientation, and spent the late 70s and early 80s in my formative years in diverse company, so I found the recent gender agenda somewhat baffling. However, since nobody is stealing money out of my purse or jumping the queue to the next covid vaccine on the basis of their gender declaration, I say declare away.

Where I work the bogs are all gender neutral. So it is all traps, not troughs. The only thing I have to say about that is "if you have a cock, please sit, or if you can't sit (them knees, innit), please wipe the seat afterwards. It isn't f***ing rocket science. This is not a performance art theatre, or a German piss fetish venue". I have to sit when I have a piss for reasons that would be too much information, so....

It is (as a broadly liberal minded and left leaning man in my early 30s) quite alarming how easily I find myself cast as "reactionary dinosaur" in conversations about this.
It should go without saying that any discomfort I might feel in those conversations is insignificant compared to the feelings of people who are actually affected by this sort of thing.
I tend to think there should be men/women toilets as far as possible, mainly based on the moaning I've heard from women about all the piss and shit men manage to get all over the place. Strangely when I've been in the men's at the football this hasn't ever bothered me.

 

[ozzygull]

I thought as much. It’s the way you walk.

Yep! I know what I Like, and I like what I Know.

 

[The aloof gatekeeper]

When I went for my gender affirmation surgery I said I'd like to be two-spirit. They said sorry, we only offer male and female.

Bunch of amateurs.

 

[Cornwallboy]

On a serious note, you and I, I suspect, are very fortunate. Gender never an issue. Albeit perhaps for different reasons.

Being an old git, when gender discussions became a thing, back whenever, 2007? (quickly checks wikipedia) my initial reaction was that some blokes are taking their desire to dress up in women's clobber a bit to preciously. I'm somewhat blind to race and sexual orientation, and spent the late 70s and early 80s in my formative years in diverse company, so I found the recent gender agenda somewhat baffling. However, since nobody is stealing money out of my purse or jumping the queue to the next covid vaccine on the basis of their gender declaration, I say declare away.

Where I work the bogs are all gender neutral. So it is all traps, not troughs. The only thing I have to say about that is "if you have a cock, please sit, or if you can't sit (them knees, innit), please wipe the seat afterwards. It isn't f***ing rocket science. This is not a performance art theatre, or a German piss fetish venue". I have to sit when I have a piss for reasons that would be too much information, so....

Agree and totally like paragraph 2 and 3. I don't consider myself fortunate I consider myself a male because I am.

 

[Stato]

As a religious person, my belief system does not dictate to me what to think about gender issues, and I know PLENTY of others who are similarly accepting/tolerant. Proper religion is tolerant and accepting.
And I would be absolutely certain that there are plenty of people who profess no faith, and even would talk about religion in terms of fairy tales who would dismiss summarily the whole gender business as woke.
I’m not sure whether you’re suggesting intolerance and religion in the area go together, but if you are, I disagree.

I am talking specifically about a particular group of fundamentalist bigots from the US. They are at the forefront of the discrimination that is happening to trans people in that country and have been condemning LGBT people for decades and encouraging their congregations to do the same.

No offence intended to any other people who have religious faith. However, you'd find it hard to deny that all of the major organised religions have, to put it mildly, a pretty shoddy history in terms of their treatment of LGBT people.

 

[Knocky's Nose]

Two spirit made me laugh when I first heard that one... I've been that before, absolutely plastered on JD and Vodka.

 

[B-right-on]

A bloke.

Not Cis whatever that means and I can't be arsed to Google it. Just a bloke. Definitely not normal tho according to the Mrs.

 

[The Pilsbury Echo]

So after earlier identifying myself as a pencil I've decided to be something else as it's my right apparently...NO IVE NOT DECIDED TO BE A BIRO. After stripping down to absolutely nothing on, I'm going to be what was staring back at me in the mirror, a milk guzzling twix eating fat bald handsome love machine. Mrs E will no doubt not agree on the last bit but it sits right in my head.

 

[GT49er]

A bloke.

Not Cis whatever that means and I can't be arsed to Google it. Just a bloke. Definitely not normal tho according to the Mrs.

Absolutely fair enough. Bloke is good. I think I've decided to identify as semi-retired stud. There - that'll do me fine!

 

[Eeyore]

So after earlier identifying myself as a pencil I've decided to be something else as it's my right apparently...NO IVE NOT DECIDED TO BE A BIRO. After stripping down to absolutely nothing on, I'm going to be what was staring back at me in the mirror, a milk guzzling twix eating fat bald handsome love machine. Mrs E will no doubt not agree on the last bit but it sits right in my head.

You should write about it.

 

[Harry Wilson's tackle]

Just had an interesting chat with Mrs T about this.

Gender - does it matter?

Well if what I see when I meet someone and they look like a woman, can I assume they are happy to be treated as a woman?

If they aren't, if I say 'she'/'her' what then?

Only fair - they can say to me "'I prefer 'they'" or even "'he'".

Fine, I will remember that, and we move on.

I was an external examiner at a medical school last year. One of the other examiners was clearly born male but presented as female (in hairstyle and dress, but not in stubble, in nose, in jaw or in voice). They used a female name. That was sufficient for our communication. It would have been rude of me to inquire if they had a cock, if they ever had a cock, or if they planned to chop it off. Or indeed what gender they identified as, given that we used names to communicate, not "agent HWT, male, 65 years of almost unblemished heterosexuality" etc. I mean, Christ.

I do appreciate that this is momentous stuff for some, but really. I mean, really? Oh well.

 

[dsr-burnley]

I identify as male, I understand what cis means, and like some others here I probably couldn’t identify exactly what every option on the poll list is supposed to represent from a gender perspective. I don’t follow the thinking that cis is an insult, it’s there for those who want to use it, but I don’t use it myself.

A couple of years ago my daughter, just into secondary school and influenced by all the talk of multiple genders and the conversations being had at school, decided that she wished to be known by a different name, and no longer identified as female.

She told us what she wanted to be called and what her pronouns were, her mother and I obediently (with the occasional inadvertent slip at the start) called her by her new name. It wasn’t flawless, we messed up the pronouns on a regular basis at the start, but just as we were getting comfortable using the different name and pronouns, my daughter declared that she had decided to revert to her birth name and gender.

We didn’t discuss reasons at the time, but in a late night conversation a few weeks later my daughter told me that she had hoped that the change would act as a reset, as a way of reinventing herself and being a new person, but that we had still known who she was, and her school friends had still known who she was, and that she felt like she was still her and wasn’t really treated any differently at school. Her friends supported her and some other kids made jokes about it.

What’s important from my perspective is that she was given the space, time and support to try something. To me it’s an important lesson to learn that whatever you call yourself, wherever you move to, regardless of the descriptors you use to describe yourself, you will still be you. In my experience, you have to work that out for yourself, it’s not something you can be told and accept.

My honest feelings on all of this, are that the people who need this, need it. The rest of us can get along fine without bothering too much about it. I’ll always try to use the right pronouns as this is basic politeness, but I’m awful at names, so I do find custom pronouns pose an additional challenge. Vive la difference etc and best wishes to all, except for those who identify as Crystal Palace fans.



TLDR: - you dodged a bullet there.

This is one of the undiscussed problems. There's all the excitement about whether a girl who thinks she should have a boy's body should be allowed to be a boy, have boy names, use boys' toilets, etc., but do they ever ask whether it does any good? We could give our children no end of certificates to say they are boys (or any other gender we care to name), but it wouldn't stop the essential fact - their body is still female. If they're unhappy with their body, a certificate surely makes not a blind bit of difference. And if they're not that unhappy with their body so that a change of name is enough, then perhaps their problem was never so serious after all.

I would suggest a parallel with disabled people. If anyone is entitled to feel they are in the wrong body, surely disabled people are. And if we can give them operations or equipment to make them able-bodies, well and good - more than well and good in fact, it would be wonderful. But if all we can give them is a certificate to say they aren't disabled, though they still can't walk or see or whatever, then it's not a ha'porth of good. I would have thought the same is true of transgender children or adults - if they really are trapped in the wrong body, a certificate of change of gender can't really help. (An operation might, but for (I hope) obvious reasons is no use for children. (Castration of boys was abolished centuries ago as barbaric.)