Race is a classification for your skin colour. It may be essentially meaningless in all practical and moral senses, but it is an actual biological characteristic. Just as gender is. I don't care what you believe, you can't just disagree with science. EVER. I'm an empiricist, I will fight you on that.
So Halle Barry is black because of her skin colour... and George Hamilton is white because of his skin colour. Nope. There are plenty of pale-skinned black people, plenty of dark-skinned white people. There are no genetic markers for "black" or "white". Read up on this stuff before you offer to fight people about it.
First of all, those examples are terrible if you wish to show that the skin colour can be different. Halle Beryy may be mildly black, but she is clearly still that colour. And George Hamilton is clearly white. And secondly, where did you get the idea there are no genetic markers for race? What do you think genealogy tests do? How do you think your skin colour is generated? There are genes or epigenes for every biological trait.
Seriously - read up on it. Just because there are genes for a biological trait doesn't mean there are genes that every person who would be classified by most as "black" or "white" have similar genes. Black people from Africa and black people from Australia might have similar skin tones, but surely you don't think they're genetically related? And white people - well, who are white people, anyway? People of European descent, generally, but what about people from the Middle East? Kurds, Iranians, Iraqis... white? brown? black? Or just defying the simplicity and inaccuracy of our racial classifications? Geneology tests tell you where your ancestors came from. They don't classify you as black or white or anything else.
Actually, Australian Aboriginal might be quite closely related to Africans. One of the maain points I find interesting is we know they came from elsewhere. Now, if the "Out of Africa" theory is right, they would have moved from African through Asia to here. And seeing as they only got here recently, they might well have large amounts of African still in them. I suppose you are right to some degree. Race gets a bit fiddly and irrelevant when you consider countries where white people can spring from a stereotypically non-white population. Such as Japan, China and the examples you mentioned. But this is really kind of a distraction from the topic, and indeed the side-topic I was discussing that this came from. Can we move on?
Sure, we can move on. After all, it wasn't really a derail - we just found out @Oscar Leigh was misinformed. (And ready to FIGHT about it!)
I wouldn't call it misinformed. You didn't really convince me with new evidence. You just made me realise things based on stuff I already knew.
Uh... Merriam-Webster: 1 a : a family, tribe, people, or nation belonging to the same stockb : a class or kind of people unified by shared interests, habits, or characteristics It's odd that you narrow it down to skin color and only skin color. That may be your view, but it's far from universal. Let's say that we get the exact Pantone color for a bunch of people. Let's say that a woman from mainland China and a woman from Wales have precisely the same skin color. They're the same race? Edited to add another definition: Gender: the state of being male or female (typically used with reference to social and cultural differences rather than biological ones). So I don't see why a person can't choose their own social/cultural gender.
Because gender is not a choice. Whether you experience gender dysphoria, the mismatch between gender and sex, is not your decision. Just as being intersex or genderqueer is not your decision.
I'm not following this. Your earlier post: Doesn't seem to be saying that it's not a choice, but that you don't want to allow it to be a choice, because...well, I don't see the because.
I'm saying that the reason I don't allow it to be a choice is because it isn't. In order to invent a label or us an established one, you must demonstrate there is some basis in fact. Gender and sexuality labels exist to categorize real experiences, not self-images created on a whim.
It's not. It's an internal experience that is just as innate as sex, only more difficult to define, show and test. But it's there.
And totally varies from culture to culture and time to time. In modern North America, women wear skirts and makeup. In lots of other places, men wear skirts, and often make-up. In Victorian times, pink was a "boy" colour and blue was a "girl" colour. But today we've reversed that, for...reasons. At some points in history, women have been considered to be without sexual desire. At other points, they were considered so lustful they couldn't be trusted to make logical decisions on their own. In some cultures, men are physically affectionate with each other, openly emotional, etc. In other cultures these men would be considered effeminate. The list goes on and on. Gender dysphoria can be a real thing without gender being biological. People can feel that their biological sex doesn't match the cultural expectations of their gender. It's not transphobic to point out that gender is a social construct, but it's reality-phobic to deny that it is. Seriously - you need to read more.
No, no, no, no. You miss my point. Gender stereotypes are not gender. Otherwise tomboys and effeminate men would be trans. I'm actually reasonably effeminete in areas. But I feel very comfortable with having a penis thank you. To repeat, gender is your internal sensation of what sex you should be, and it is bases on hormones and such. There is no social construction about it, only social constructs around it. I agree, the stereotypes aren't universally exact, there are some areas where it varies between cultures like colour as you said. But the stereotypes aren't what I'm talking about, your understanding of non-cus-gender is incorrect.
It's not my job to provide you with evidence, it's your job to READ MORE. What's your evidence for the "internal sensation of what sex you should be" interpretation of gender? Because... I don't think there's a lot of support for using the word that way.
I feel as if you're prescribing your own definition of gender. How do you balance your statement above with the dictionary definition?
I did find a link that supports that kind of definition... "Gender is an internal sense of being male, female, or other." at http://www.medicaldaily.com/what-difference-between-transsexual-and-transgender-facebooks-new-version-its-complicated-271389. Unfortunately for Oscar's argument, the rest of the paragraph is: "Transgender, unlike transsexual, is a term for people whose identity, expression, behavior, or general sense of self does not conform to what is usually associated with the sex they were born in the place they were born." So, in other words - they don't match the social construct.
Well then I don't like that definition. Again, it is more than wearing different clothes. I would define transgender person as someone who experiences, or did experience before surgery, gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria being discomfort with your sex in an innate, biological sense. And my reason for that idea is my understanding of gender dysphoria at a medical level. Perhaps my understanding is wrong, but I fail to see how you would distinguish transgender people who just really want to be a different gender without the element of something deep and essential.
Is this because you don't think cultural expectations are deep and essential? I mean, "gender is a social construct" doesn't mean gender is unimportant, or that it's easy to ignore. If you don't feel at home in the role assigned to you by the society you live in, that's a pretty significant issue, really. ETA: You may also want to be careful about pathologizing transgenderism. Gender dysphoria is a term used in the DSMV, but there are transgender people who don't believe they have a psychological disorder. (Homosexuality used to be considered a psychological disorder, too, in a less enlightened age). So just because the DSMV uses a term, it doesn't mean everyone who identifies as transgender agrees with the term, and it doesn't mean transgendered people have a problem in their lives, any more than gay people do. Transgendered people don't match societal expectations for the sex they were assigned at birth. Maybe it's a disorder, maybe it's just the way they are.
