I was watching pro golf coverage on the news and it seems so odd that men and women compete separately - same goes with pro bowling. Just seems weird to me that a game of skill is gendered when you can’t even raise an argument that someone might have an advantage because of what’s between their legs.
The French language :)
And the German language! Mark Twain has a whole essay about it.
“Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in the distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this one has to have a memory like a memorandum-book. In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl. See how it looks in print – I translate this from a conversation in one of the best of the German Sunday-school books:
Gretchen: “Wilhelm, where is the turnip?”
Wilhelm: “She has gone to the kitchen.”
Gretchen: “Where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden?”
Wilhelm. "It has gone to the opera.”
Acceptable counter-argument: “The English language isn’t gendered enough.”
What do you mean by that? 🤔
My take on it is that English doesn’t have enough variety in gendered words, whether that means binary, non-binary, or neutral options. In which case…yeah, come to mention it, you might be onto a perspective I didn’t think of.
People ought to be have range in how they express themselves, and I’d suppose there isn’t enough. I had been in favor of increasing the range and popularity of neutral and non-binary terms for a while now. I still am, but I don’t think that has to be mutually exclusive with increasing the range of gendered options, either. Perhaps part of resolving gendering issues in language isn’t just providing more neutral options, but more gendered options. If someone wishes to identify with masculine or feminine labeling, I think they ought to be able to.
Or maybe another lens to this is that there are “gender neutral” terms that, through context and history, have come to carry a sort of implicit gendering to them. I’m not sure if that’s a challenge in linguistics or a challenge in how some people may think.
All an interesting way to frame this kind of thing that I hadn’t considered before. If you have your own details to this you’d like to mention, I’m sure it’d be insightful to read. My language experience outside of English only extends to Spanish and some beginning bits of Dutch, and I’m in dire need of brushing up on both 🫠.
Baby, toddler & kids clothes…
Obviously neutral clothes: vests, t-shirts, shorts, trousers etc are grouped so often grouped into boy/girl - makes absolutely no sense.
Bathrooms. I see single person bathrooms with gendered signs all the time. It makes no sense. Not only that, I’ve experienced the single gender neutral bathroom at my local university, and it is easily one of the nicest public bathrooms I’ve ever used. There is a common area with sinks, and each toilet gets a well-ventilated little room, with doors that lock. Not only is the gendering unnecessary, it makes bathrooms actively worse than they could be.
Clothes. It seems crazy to me that men (and often masc presenting enbies too for that matter) can’t just wear a dress on a hot summer day without getting weird looks. Or just to feel pretty honestly. Why is something that’s about both practicality and self-expression so fundamentally restricted by what genitals you were born with in the eyes of society?
Also, speaking of clothes: lingerie. I have rarely ever seen lingerie designed for men, and even the one that exists seems not nearly as carefully designed as lingerie for women. This makes me sad, it feels like society does not want them to feel pretty and sexy and it’s also just unfair to everyone.
(I am focusing mostly on men / masc enbies here because I always had the experience that women wearing “men’s clothes” is waaay more accepted nowadays, but feel free to correct me and chime in with your own examples if you disagree!)
I agree that anyone should be able to wear any style of clothing, but I must admit that clothing typically needs different measurements for men versus women (hips, chest, shoulders). T-shirts and sweat pants are pretty neutral, but a busty bosom won’t fit in a men’s button down shirt and a little black dress will have too-tight shoulders on many men. There’s a fair amount of women’s-cut clothing that looks like men’s-style, but the reverse is sadly lacking.
I’m flat as a crepe when I bind but many men’s button down shirts still don’t fit me because the hips are too narrow. It’s not like I have wide hips either, I’m under 100cm at the widest point of my butt, but if they fit me in the shoulders, they don’t fit me in the hips. I can’t wear women’s button downs either because the chests are always too big and most of them insist on skipping the button between the neck and chest so the wearer has to show cleavage. Ugh. Little gendered things like that in sizing and construction are really bothersome when you fall outside of the binary.
Can confirm. Trying to boymode in the office has gotten more, uh, interesting as my chest gets bigger.
There is more to genedered events than meets the eye. On the surface, it can seem like trying to separate based on ability or potential ability that may seem unnecessary. I don’t follow golf so I can’t compare the best men’s and women’s golfers myself. However Chess is also has men’s and women’s leagues, and doesn’t need to separate on any physical differences between men and women. When it comes to events like Chess, US Chess started a Girl’s league to help draw and maintain girls playing the game to great success.
Having a separate women’s league can make sure that women see there is an oppotuntiy to play and lower that bar to joining, potentially reduce toxicity from a still otherwise male dominated event (this analysis has a gender breakdown for the India Chess Federation), and make sure that women win some of the prize money available incentivising players to play. However there are some like International Master Sam Shankland that believe that it would be better if there was just one league for everyone to compete in, incentivising everyone to improve to the highest level. There are some concerns about a skill gap between men and women, however there are statistical analysis showing that can be explained by having two vastly different sizes of groups being represented and ranked.
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SMBC has a great comic on boy vs girl toys. Super relevant to this conversation. I have had it hanging on the wall of my office as a reminder since my eldest daughter was born 16yrs ago.
If it were possible to turn off the patriarchy and all its sequela, I’d say everything.
However, in a world with ubiquitous oppression of women, it is essential for non-men to have exclusive places of refuge.
It’s kind of a catch-22 though because gender segregation helps keep the notion of meaningful gender difference alive.
Recently in my city’s university there was a computer seminar for free, only for women. No men allowed. So a friend of mine who is cyberdumb couldn’t attend.
So not so ubiquitous.
And don’t tell me that was fine, discrimination is wrong whoever does and receive it.
Having lived as a young woman, I don’t find it at all unreasonable to organize a class where women don’t have to worry about unsolicited advances or condescension from men. I had to leave a computer engineering program because of that kind of behavior.
There are soooooo many men who truly believe that women exist solely for the gratification of men and are otherwise inferior. Having a space where one can just learn and not have to worry about dealing with that bullshit is pretty damn valuable.
Yeah I think the general aim of these things is to increase the diversity of STEM, which has tended to be male dominated. I imagine that’s what the funding for these schemes is allocated for. Not being mansplained by some guys is probably a bonus
Soaps! I guess some men like to smell like timber and rocks or whatever but I’ll take a fruity scent all day every day.
Personally I love smelling of TITANIUM & CARBON AND THE GRADUAL EROSION OF MY ABILITY TO EXPRESS MY EMOTIONS AS I GROW FROM BOYHOOD TO MAN.
It makes me feel powerful.
Mmm heavy metal carcinogenic smell.
Eau de Weld
Children are unnecessarily gendered! People should give them the opportunity to explorer their own relationship with gender without being assigned one.
Just heard an interview with a person who is intersex (meaning they were born with DNA and physical characteristics that don’t match). Intersex people are also caught in all the anti-trans legislation. The quote that stood out the most to me:
I think society understands at this point that sexuality is a spectrum. Some people are gay. Some are straight. A lot are in between. And society is also starting to understand that gender is a spectrum, that you’re not just a man or a woman, but there’s a lot in between there, too. What society hasn’t quite learned yet is that sex is also a spectrum. You’re not only male or female. Two percent of the world is born somewhere in between those two poles on that spectrum. src
Intersex people are also caught in all the anti-trans legislation.
That’s something I wasn’t aware of (and have the priviledge not to think about) - do you happen to know more about how they are impacted, or any good resources for reading up on it?
Just instinctually, it sounds like a conundrum for all anti-transgender legal ‘logic’. Those people are biologically not exclusively male or female (to my understanding, corrections welcome), so which part of “you have to be your rEaL gender” applies to them? Or is being born intersex just intrinsically criminal?
Sorry, I made the link to the source pretty small ;)
