That's a good trailer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42ivIRd9N8E

Haven't seen the movie yet but pretty slick marketing. It also shouldn't be that difficult for people to articulate their beliefs. Of course the best part of this movie coming out is the screeching on twitter.

A clever trailer for someone who has no expertise in this area and wants to have their views reaffirmed because they're so fragile. One could do a similar movie about race and I'm sure you'd just as much of a cheerleader for that one. Apparently it requires a certain number of brain cells to understand that many of the identities that people hold very strongly are social constructs. Which means a woman is someone who believes they're a woman and is acknowledged by society to be a woman. Just like a white person is someone who believes they are a white person and whose community generally shares that view. Neither gender nor race can be defined entirely in biological terms because they are not biological concepts.

And as entertaining as it is to ask some random tribe whether there are more than two genders, such a concept does and has existed outside of the West. Thailand has a third gender. As does India. The Norse believed gender was fluid (Loki was both male and female, for instance).

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Originally Posted by Loki

A clever trailer for someone who has no expertise in this area and wants to have their views reaffirmed because they're so fragile. One could do a similar movie about race and I'm sure you'd just as much of a cheerleader for that one. Apparently it requires a certain number of brain cells to understand that many of the identities that people hold very strongly are social constructs. Which means a woman is someone who believes they're a woman and is acknowledged by society to be a woman. Just like a white person is someone who believes they are a white person and whose community generally shares that view. Neither gender nor race can be defined entirely in biological terms because they are not biological concepts.

And as entertaining as it is to ask some random tribe whether there are more than two genders, such a concept does and has existed outside of the West. Thailand has a third gender. As does India. The Norse believed gender was fluid (Loki was both male and female, for instance).

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Interesting, so your position is that gender is a social construct completely untethered from biology. Wouldn't it make more sense (if we must classify citizens this way) to then categorize individuals by sex as opposed to gender? We know biological differences certainly exist on the sex category, men are generally stronger, have greater bone density, intelligence more often falls on either extreme of the bell curve etc. Why have such a strange overlap if gender is completely divorced from sex? It is either that or make no distinction within the law for differences in sex at all. Coed sports, coed prisons, selective service for all citizens etc.

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Originally Posted by Lewkowski

Interesting, so your position is that gender is a social construct completely untethered from biology. Wouldn't it make more sense (if we must classify citizens this way) to then categorize individuals by sex as opposed to gender? We know biological differences certainly exist on the sex category, men are generally stronger, have greater bone density, intelligence more often falls on either extreme of the bell curve etc. Why have such a strange overlap if gender is completely divorced from sex? It is either that or make no distinction within the law for differences in sex at all. Coed sports, coed prisons, selective service for all citizens etc.

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Did I say it was completely untethered from biology? I said it couldn't be defined entirely in biological terms. Because both individuals who want to identify a certain way and society in general are going to take biology into account (and how much they take it into account will vary across time and space).

We know that some ethnic groups are taller, darker, etc. than others, but that doesn't make race any less of a social construct. The traits you mentioned aren't defining characteristics of gender. A man who's physically weak is still a man.

As for why use gender rather than sex: society cares more about gender precisely because society has a big role in defining it. People react to your gender far more than they react to your sex. So it's natural for people to want to be seen as the "correct" gender given how many social interactions depend on it (including in prison by the way; trans women don't fare well in men's prisons).