This is entirely to do with governments using the word gender because they're terrified of the word sex
they have no idea what the academic meaning is and, like most people, they assume gender = sex
While "the government", as a single, monolithic entity, may or may not know the difference, what percentage of the passport holding populace do you suppose knows the difference? Additionally, government entities are loathe to change official terminology. The idea of gender being different from sex dates back to 1955. National passports go back to the 19th century. I don't know when they started including gender on them, but I'm more than willing to bet it was before the 50's. I can only begin to imagine the sea of red tape that would be involved with replacing the word "gender" with the word "sex" on passports. And even if they wanted to and managed to get it done, you're left with the unwashed masses of people who reach a box on the passport application labeled "Sex" and get a blank look, then have to decide whether to write "Yes".
The reason that your gender is tracked on your passport is the same reason that your hair and eye color, height, and weight are on there. You could probably get most of them from the photo, but it's easier to have a bad/not-representational photo or to doctor the photo in a printed passport than to convincingly print up a whole fake document. And, nowadays (in some countries, at least), some or all of the data is stored on an RFID chip embedded in the physical passport book. Not that those are exactly hack-proof, but, but the point remains that having redundant identification data helps law enforcement agencies recognize you. It's not a governmental campaign to ostracize transgender people. They're either trying to be nice to transgender people or, more likely, are trying to make it easier for law enforcement agents who are having to deal with people whose appearance doesn't match their plumbing. Should they be concerned that the person going through the millimeter wave scanner who has a penis despite looking like a woman is in disguise? Do they need to ask which sex of officer is going to pat this person down? Yes, they could ask everyone, but have you been to an airport lately? It's not exactly a speedy process already, without introducing new questions and the opportunity for the pervy set of society to ask for opposite-sex pat-downs.
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acidlacedpenguinInstitutionalizedSafe in jail.Registered Userregular
I won't be happy until Meat Popsicle[] is an option.
but seriously, instead of having "gender: M[] F[] O[]" why not have " gender: ___________"?
Maybe. But large-scale changes would probably take a decade or more and would involve thousands of rapes of female inmates that wouldn't have occcured but-for the policy of allowing male prisoners to serve their sentences in female prisons.
Allowing thousands of new rapes to occur in the hopes of solving an existing rape problem is not a sound policy, IMO.
To play Devil's Advocate for a moment. Would the thousands of male on female rape cases introduced by allowing male/female commingling in prisons ultimately be worth it if in the end it resulted in policy changes that caused an overall reduction of rape of pretty close to near zero in the long term? Wouldn't that be a case of a small sacrifice being necessary for the greater good of preventing all from being raped in prisons as a form of extra-curricular punishment added to the system?
If the best you can come up with against someone who's patently ignorant is to yell back at him, "Yeah? Well there's BOOKS, and they say you're WRONG!"
Then honestly you're not coming out of this looking great either.
I won't be happy until Meat Popsicle[] is an option.
but seriously, instead of having "gender: M[] F[] O[]" why not have " gender: ___________"?
Because passports aren't about self-expression, they're about identification. If you leave it blank then either you have de-facto options in that only a certain range of responses are valid, or you make the form meaningless. If, one day, people start self-identifying their genders as "Orange", "QuasiMale", "Happy", and "Xylknek" and the majority of passport-handling officials don't know what the fuck those are then that field is essentially meaningless. A Chinese airport security guy doesn't need to know any English or anything about the Australian Gender Issues culture to know that "M" means 'male', "F" means 'female', and "X" means 'ask'.
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acidlacedpenguinInstitutionalizedSafe in jail.Registered Userregular
for the record, meatpopsicle was a joke.
@Delzhand
I'm actually right at this moment working on a form in a GUI that uses string-based text boxes. Magic.
anyway having "sex: (series of radio buttons)" would be infinitely better given that there's actually a finite amount of possible answers. Gender is becoming a moving target so (not being a person from the X[] category) I imagine having to suck it up and use the biological data would be less offensive than being a non-option.
Well, some things need to be cleared up here it seems...
I don't think I mentioned it here on the forums yet, but I'm transsexual. I'm a person for whom sex doesn't equal gender, and is trying to deal with that fact. But some terms mentioned in the OP need to be better explained.
Sex: physical state of the body. Determined by chromosomes, hormones, sensitivity to hormones, etc. Usually male or female, but not always.
Gender: A multifaceted term to describe your identity. It's very important to separate gender identity and gender expression.
Gender identity: how you see yourself and what you feel comfortable with. While it may be affected by culture, this is mostly biological. For transpeople, their sex is different from their gender identity. I was assigned male at birth, but my gender identity is female. Even in a world without gender roles or expectations, I'd still transition because to fix that disconnect. And while for most people man or woman is sufficient, for some it isn't.
Gender expression: how you express your gender identity. This is mostly cultural. It's how we present ourselves, how we act and interact with others, etc. In some cultures there are strict rules, and others they're more lax. It doesn't always have to match with gender identity (see crossdressers). Transpeople don't have to adher to strict gender expectations either. In most Western cultures, ciswomen can wear pants and tshirts if they want to. There's no reason why transwomen can't either.
So gender is not fully cultural, it has a biological aspect as well. If it was fully cultural, you wouldn't see transpeople in so many different cultures.
As for this law, I think it's a step in the right direction, and a step in the wrong direction. The letter in your passport refers ideally to your gender identity. An intersexed person who identifies as male would put 'M' in his passport, and his intersexuality would only be a matter for medical reasons. An intersexed person who feels ambigious can would out indicate that as well. People who aren't intersexed but are ambigious on their gender should be able to indicate that as well, but it seems they're not able to. There's also the fact people choose 'other' for different reasons, which one letter isn't able to explain.
So while I applaud this law for admitting there's more than male or female, it can be applied better.
Well, some things need to be cleared up here it seems...
I don't think I mentioned it here on the forums yet, but I'm transsexual. I'm a person for whom sex doesn't equal gender, and is trying to deal with that fact. But some terms mentioned in the OP need to be better explained.
Sex: physical state of the body. Determined by chromosomes, hormones, sensitivity to hormones, etc. Usually male or female, but not always.
Gender: A multifaceted term to describe your identity. It's very important to separate gender identity and gender expression.
Gender identity: how you see yourself and what you feel comfortable with. While it may be affected by culture, this is mostly biological. For transpeople, their sex is different from their gender identity. I was assigned male at birth, but my gender identity is female. Even in a world without gender roles or expectations, I'd still transition because to fix that disconnect. And while for most people man or woman is sufficient, for some it isn't.
Gender expression: how you express your gender identity. This is mostly cultural. It's how we present ourselves, how we act and interact with others, etc. In some cultures there are strict rules, and others they're more lax. It doesn't always have to match with gender identity (see crossdressers). Transpeople don't have to adher to strict gender expectations either. In most Western cultures, ciswomen can wear pants and tshirts if they want to. There's no reason why transwomen can't either.
So gender is not fully cultural, it has a biological aspect as well. If it was fully cultural, you wouldn't see transpeople in so many different cultures.
As for this law, I think it's a step in the right direction, and a step in the wrong direction. The letter in your passport refers ideally to your gender identity. An intersexed person who identifies as male would put 'M' in his passport, and his intersexuality would only be a matter for medical reasons. An intersexed person who feels ambigious can would out indicate that as well. People who aren't intersexed but are ambigious on their gender should be able to indicate that as well, but it seems they're not able to. There's also the fact people choose 'other' for different reasons, which one letter isn't able to explain.
So while I applaud this law for admitting there's more than male or female, it can be applied better.
I don't think most of that is very relevant to a passport or a passport-issuing authority.
Primarily they're going to be interested in 2 things:
1) What do they need to know to differentiate you from some other person in a line-up/going through a scanner/on a security camera/when trying to verify you are who your passport says you are if you don't look especially like your photo that day (or if your photo was damaged or something between your passport leaving your hands and entering theirs)?
2) In the context of civil-rights laws, segregated facilities, or medical needs, what do they need to know about how to treat you? Which is to say, what sex of officer should frisk you? Which detention facility do you go to? Do they need to warn you not to go into the scanner if you're pregnant?
Transgender people frequently look very convincingly like a member of their self-identified sex with their clothes on, despite having the wrong plumbing (assuming 'transgender' is the right term in place of 'transsexual'... the one where you haven't had surgery). With more and more such people in the population there is a valid, pressing need for your ID not to say "M" while your appearance is saying "F". But there is a whole panopoly of options out there, which are only going to serve to confuse matters for the vast majority of people since each option that isn't "Male" or "Female" applies to some single-digit number of people out of a hundred. If we reach a point where "Sexually Male But Appears Female" is going to be an accurate description for a statistically significant number of people that a passport-handling official encounters in the course of their daily work, then that would be a valid option to add. As it is, "M, F, X" means that, maybe, once a week someone working a desk in an airport will need to say "Your gender is listed as X. What do I need to know?"
And to @acidlacedpenguin regarding computer forms: It's easy to input text, but how would you write a SQL query to locate all blond, brown-eyed people between 5'9" and 6'1", between 180 and 210lbs, who appear male in security footage if there are people on record with genders like "male, man, M, dude, guy, boy, etc." (without even going into people who write in nonsense answers, inaccurate answers, or answers in non-English languages)? You can leave off the gender part of the query, but you've just doubled your number of records and vastly increased the noise in the data that has to be searched through to indetify the person in question.
Maybe. But large-scale changes would probably take a decade or more and would involve thousands of rapes of female inmates that wouldn't have occcured but-for the policy of allowing male prisoners to serve their sentences in female prisons.
Allowing thousands of new rapes to occur in the hopes of solving an existing rape problem is not a sound policy, IMO.
To play Devil's Advocate for a moment. Would the thousands of male on female rape cases introduced by allowing male/female commingling in prisons ultimately be worth it if in the end it resulted in policy changes that caused an overall reduction of rape of pretty close to near zero in the long term? Wouldn't that be a case of a small sacrifice being necessary for the greater good of preventing all from being raped in prisons as a form of extra-curricular punishment added to the system?
You can solve the issue of rape in male prisons without introducing the same problem into women's prisons.
I can understand the point that sometimes you need to make a problem worse so that people will notice it. But it's tough to support that approach when it would involve more people being raped, even short-term.
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You can solve the issue of rape in male prisons without introducing the same problem into women's prisons.
I can understand the point that sometimes you need to make a problem worse so that people will notice it. But it's tough to support that approach when it would involve more people being raped, even short-term.
How? I mean I really do agree that I think it's a bad idea and distasteful to just throw men and women together in prisons with no extra oversight/protection. I'm just really unsure, when considering the issue seriously, if we have any other effective ways to actually enact positive prison reforms right now.
If the best you can come up with against someone who's patently ignorant is to yell back at him, "Yeah? Well there's BOOKS, and they say you're WRONG!"
Then honestly you're not coming out of this looking great either.
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Deebaseron my way to work in a suit and a tieAhhhh...come on fucking guyRegistered Userregular
And to @acidlacedpenguin regarding computer forms: It's easy to input text, but how would you write a SQL query to locate all blond, brown-eyed people between 5'9" and 6'1", between 180 and 210lbs, who appear male in security footage if there are people on record with genders like "male, man, M, dude, guy, boy, etc." (without even going into people who write in nonsense answers, inaccurate answers, or answers in non-English languages)? You can leave off the gender part of the query, but you've just doubled your number of records and vastly increased the noise in the data that has to be searched through to indetify the person in question.
(gender like ('%m%') OR gender like ('%M%'))
AND gender not like ('%om%') AND gender not like ('%OM%') AND gender not like ('%ym%') AND gender not like ('%YM%')
That would probably correctly identify dudes 95% of the time and when someone bitches about the high error rate you can inform them that creating the form to allow a manual input of gender wasn't your horrible idea.
I don't know in what way passports are used in Australia, but here in the Netherlands they are also for general identification, not just for travelling. I'm going to a job interview tomorrow where some identification is asked for. The letter in my passport doesn't reflect my gender identity, so I have to dress as male to avoid embarassing questions and to not tank my chances. I want to be addressed as female in everyday life, and I want my identification to reflect that. I also need some papers that say that despite I'm female, I have some male physical traits. When the situation calls for, I'll show the papers, but otherwise not.
Oh, and I'm not really concerned with the sex of the officer who would be frisking me. I'm far more concerned with his or her GENDER. If I should be frisked I want it to be done by a woman, but I'm not interested in what her genitalia, chromosomes or hormonal values are.
@Delzhand
I'm actually right at this moment working on a form in a GUI that uses string-based text boxes. Magic.
When I got my passport I had to fill out a paper form. And gui design is different than information design. CptHamilton explains the issues there pretty well. I'm developing a site for an organ donation group right now (a group that actually has a legit need for sex), so this is something I'm actually dealing with currently (although honestly it's slightly different because once you die your gender is technically non-existant, if we accept gender as what you "do").
I can say that 99% of the actual issue is just that organizations would prefer to use 'gender' on forms because 'sex' has connotations. All of our gender-theory discussion is, to the people in charge, an edge-case not worth worrying about. It's not done of malice or to hurt non-normative people. (Yes, I know that's not to say that that non-normative people aren't marginalized by the practice)
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Deebaseron my way to work in a suit and a tieAhhhh...come on fucking guyRegistered Userregular
@Delzhand
I'm actually right at this moment working on a form in a GUI that uses string-based text boxes. Magic.
When I got my passport I had to fill out a paper form. And gui design is different than information design. CptHamilton explains the issues there pretty well. I'm developing a site for an organ donation group right now (a group that actually has a legit need for sex), so this is something I'm actually dealing with currently (although honestly it's slightly different because once you die your gender is technically non-existant, if we accept gender as what you "do").
I can say that 99% of the actual issue is just that organizations would prefer to use 'gender' on forms because 'sex' has connotations. All of our gender-theory discussion is, to the people in charge, an edge-case not worth worrying about. It's not done of malice or to hurt non-normative people. (Yes, I know that's not to say that that non-normative people aren't marginalized by the practice)
Also because the idea that 'gender' and 'sex' are two completely different things is fairly new, and the rate of adoption for new ideas in bureaucratic systems is approximately glacial. According to wikipedia the idea of non-physical gender came about in '55, meaning that even if it caught on really quickly in the academic community it probably didn't take off until the 60's sometime. So there are likely people working in passport departments of governments all around the world who have worked for those agencies since before gender =/= sex was even a thing.
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acidlacedpenguinInstitutionalizedSafe in jail.Registered Userregular
I wasn't aware people made their own passports. Sorry for offering a solution that couldn't possibly offend anyone that would require a little more effort on the receiving end. For example, you could smack them in the mouth when they handed in a passport application that listed their gender as "trollolol" Or you could have computer applications and then get the glory of a combo box/drop-down-list.
It's funny you should mention SQL since there's a 100,000+ entry backend to my GUI; though I'll concede that entries in that backend are managed.
If you'd rather applications be scantrons then we could accommodate up to so many distinct answers and risk leaving out some obscure group.
Using genitals as a measure of gender isn't a terribly helpful solution unless we start grabbing crotches as a form of identification.
Personally I think it's not a huge deal if gender isn't included on on IDs considering all modern forms of ID have a photo, height, etc. If you look exactly like the person the ID lists, nobody is going to ask to take a peek down your pants just to be sure, so why include it?
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Deebaseron my way to work in a suit and a tieAhhhh...come on fucking guyRegistered Userregular
I wasn't aware people made their own passports. Sorry for offering a solution that couldn't possibly offend anyone that would require a little more effort on the receiving end.
Dude, your solution shows a very "front end" mindset. Now, you can argue that Sex or Gender has no place on a passport (and I'll disagree on that point), but if it is on there, it should at least make sense. M/F/X accomplishes that a lot more clearly than "put whatever 30 characters you like".
Using genitals as a measure of gender isn't a terribly helpful solution unless we start grabbing crotches as a form of identification.
Personally I think it's not a huge deal if gender isn't included on on IDs considering all modern forms of ID have a photo, height, etc. If you look exactly like the person the ID lists, nobody is going to ask to take a peek down your pants just to be sure, so why include it?
Most modern IDs with chips have a plethora of information on it that makes superficial identifiers such as gender kinda pointless. When you can from the chip data see that the passport belongs to a person with blond hair, blue eyes, a certain height/weight and with feminine features then you don't need to check a little box denoting whether or not this person is biologically male/female or is a man/woman.
All you need to do is look at the person presenting the passport and compare their visible traits with what is stored on the chip.
I wasn't aware people made their own passports. Sorry for offering a solution that couldn't possibly offend anyone that would require a little more effort on the receiving end. For example, you could smack them in the mouth when they handed in a passport application that listed their gender as "trollolol" Or you could have computer applications and then get the glory of a combo box/drop-down-list.
It's funny you should mention SQL since there's a 100,000+ entry backend to my GUI; though I'll concede that entries in that backend are managed.
If you'd rather applications be scantrons then we could accommodate up to so many distinct answers and risk leaving out some obscure group.
Whether you use a drop-down/comb-box, a list of radio-buttons, or a paper scantron sheet doesn't matter. In all of those cases you're offering some number of options between 2 and N with N strictly less than every possible option. If you instead offer a blank space, as you suggested, where someone can type whatever they want then you're left with two options: define a list of acceptable answers or accept anything someone puts in. If you take the first option then you're in exactly the same state as having a list of options only with the user playing a "Guess the Word" game to figure out what terminology is acceptable. If you go with the second option, eliminating having a set of pre-defined genders G = {M, ..., F}, then you have to accept 'trollolol' as just a valid answer as anything else and it becomes a no more meaningful piece of data than adding a Comments field.
Regarding the utility of sex-appearance in identification... roughly 50 percent of the populace are one sex and roughly 50 percent are the other, with a rounding error number of Others out there. Obviously not all of the 50 percent on either side are going to follow sex-matched gender norms, but the vast majority are. Saying "we're looking for a brown-haired, brown-eyed Caucasian, 180lbs, 35 years old, 5ft 10in tall" either describes a male in the 50th percentile of the population or a female in the 95th percentile. If the person's photo is unavailable, inaccurate, damaged, or ambiguous having an F under 'gender' instead of an 'M' reduces the pool of likely suspects in a population of 10,000 (roughly the number of people who fly through London Heathrow daily, for example) from roughly 2750 to roughly 250.
On the subject of males in womens prisons getting their rape on, there are a few points that need to be clarified.
1. "Greater good" is neither great nor good, it is just a known evil someone is trying to justify, badly. Using "for the greater good" as your argument means you are bad, and should feel bad.
2. Womens prisons are places where they send women who break the law. This includes women who are in there for violent offenses, gang offenses, drug charges, and murder. Women in prisons are not delicate flowers. WHich leads to point three...
3. Some of them hypothetical fellas trying to get their rape on are gonna get shanked.
4. Slider continues to be a beacon of intellect and decency (this is sarcasm)
Before following any advice, opinions, or thoughts I may have expressed in the above post, be warned: I found Keven Costners "Waterworld" to be a very entertaining film.
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
I was attempting to imply that the approval of prisoner on prisoner rape came from society, and that society would object to the constant, preventable rape of women in integrated prisons and would eventually force the folks who run the prisons actually take the steps withing their power to prevent rape.
Maybe. But large-scale changes would probably take a decade or more and would involve thousands of rapes of female inmates that wouldn't have occcured but-for the policy of allowing male prisoners to serve their sentences in female prisons.
Allowing thousands of new rapes to occur in the hopes of solving an existing rape problem is not a sound policy, IMO.
Worse than allowing thousands of rapes while not caring?
Not solving 10000 rapes is better than not solving 20000 rapes. Both are awful, but one is clearly worse than the other.
Honestly though, a lot of the problem with prison rape is that you have effectively concentrated a huge amount of societies largest and most violent elements together in one place and combined them with a large group of people who have committed crimes which are non-violent, or who are less violent outside of their crimes.
The problem clearly should be addressed, but I think that (shockingly) there are actually worse problems in US prisons than it and that addressing the other problems would go a long way towards solving that.
Regarding the 'gender on passports' thing. You should set it up like this....
Male - Born a guy, or with a doctors note
Not disclosed - Anyone
Female - Born a woman, or with a doctors note
On the subject of males in womens prisons getting their rape on, there are a few points that need to be clarified.
1. "Greater good" is neither great nor good, it is just a known evil someone is trying to justify, badly. Using "for the greater good" as your argument means you are bad, and should feel bad.
2. Womens prisons are places where they send women who break the law. This includes women who are in there for violent offenses, gang offenses, drug charges, and murder. Women in prisons are not delicate flowers. WHich leads to point three...
3. Some of them hypothetical fellas trying to get their rape on are gonna get shanked.
4. Slider continues to be a beacon of intellect and decency (this is sarcasm)
Your point 3 is absurd. Yeah, some guys trying to take advantage are going to have problems. Conversely, a vastly larger percentage of women who try to fight back will be beaten and abused even further.
Saying "Put men in womens prisons, because who cares if the rape and abuse spreads" is like saying you shouldn't quarantine the sick because it would be fairer if everyone was sick.
On the subject of males in womens prisons getting their rape on, there are a few points that need to be clarified.
1. "Greater good" is neither great nor good, it is just a known evil someone is trying to justify, badly. Using "for the greater good" as your argument means you are bad, and should feel bad.
2. Womens prisons are places where they send women who break the law. This includes women who are in there for violent offenses, gang offenses, drug charges, and murder. Women in prisons are not delicate flowers. WHich leads to point three...
3. Some of them hypothetical fellas trying to get their rape on are gonna get shanked.
4. Slider continues to be a beacon of intellect and decency (this is sarcasm)
Your point 3 is absurd. Yeah, some guys trying to take advantage are going to have problems. Conversely, a vastly larger percentage of women who try to fight back will be beaten and abused even further.
Saying "Put men in womens prisons, because who cares if the rape and abuse spreads" is like saying you shouldn't quarantine the sick because it would be fairer if everyone was sick.
Hence point 1, there is no greater good. Putting men in womens prisons and saying 'Well, the rape of women will make people wake up! Its for the greater good!' is not good. Not only will you have rapes, but also murders. Making it even worse.
TLDR: I'm agreeing with you.
Before following any advice, opinions, or thoughts I may have expressed in the above post, be warned: I found Keven Costners "Waterworld" to be a very entertaining film.
Gender: A multifaceted term to describe your identity.
I stated, in the OP: "The term “gender’ refers to a kind of cultural construction of person types, usually defined in terms of masculinity or femininity." Gender is a social construction, a set of categories into which one is placed, or one places one's self.
I'm interested in your shift from gender as a term that refers to a thing to gender as a description. I'm further interested in your division of gender into parts.
Gender identity: how you see yourself and what you feel comfortable with. While it may be affected by culture, this is mostly biological. For transpeople, their sex is different from their gender identity. I was assigned male at birth, but my gender identity is female. Even in a world without gender roles or expectations, I'd still transition because to fix that disconnect. And while for most people man or woman is sufficient, for some it isn't.
How is this biological? I think we agree that sex and gender are different; sex has to do with biology (wangs, vaginas) whereas gender has to do with a feeling and social constructions. When you were born you were assigned the gender of male (i'm guessing because you had a penis) but you later discerned that you felt more comfortable in the socially constructed box of female. That does not seem to be biological, at least in the sense that biology has to do with wangs, vaginas, chemicals, etc.
I'm guessing that when you talk about gender identity, what you mean is that when you went to McDonalds as a child your parents got you the Happy Meal for boys, the one with the racecar, and you would have preferred the Happy Meal for girls, the one with the barbie. That doesn't seem like biology, to me. That all seems like social construction.
Gender expression: how you express your gender identity. This is mostly cultural. It's how we present ourselves, how we act and interact with others, etc. In some cultures there are strict rules, and others they're more lax. It doesn't always have to match with gender identity (see crossdressers). Transpeople don't have to adher to strict gender expectations either. In most Western cultures, ciswomen can wear pants and tshirts if they want to. There's no reason why transwomen can't either.
Why are you making a distinction between gender identity as self-conception, and gender expression as collections of actions and presentations? I can understand that, psychologically, one would maintain this distiction to maintain something like "I felt like a girl (identity) but i acted like a boy (expression)." but that seems to be confusing the issue. This isn't about how people act; this is about how people are. With respect to being we have:
Sex - biological, concerned with wangs, vaginas, and chemicals.
Gender - culturally constructed, pre-packaged, self-conceptions divided, usally, into masculine and feminine.
Dividing gender further into a self-conception and habits-of-action seems problematic. I'm guessing that you had a gender you felt, and a gender you acted. But why not say that your geunder is that primordial feeling, and the acts were just lies?
So gender is not fully cultural, it has a biological aspect as well.
Maybe I need to clarify my terms.
Biology: Things we can cut up and put into petri dishes, such as penises, vaginas, chemicals.
Culture: incorporeal, socially constructed, flibbity-floo and herpa derp.
Using genitals as a measure of gender isn't a terribly helpful solution unless we start grabbing crotches as a form of identification.
Also, there is the problem of genital ambiguity. Most people are born with either a penis or a vagina. Some people are born with something else.
But more importantly, if gender is used for identification, and if by gender we are talking about biological sex, then we would seem to need much more information than penis, vagina, or else. I mean, "has a penis" isn't very descriptive. Or, "has a penis" is just as descriptive as "has eyes". If we ask about eye color, shouldn't we ask more detailed questions about those biological traits by which a person could be identified?
Said another way, if this is a crucial piece of information used for identification, oughtn't these ID's list details of the penis / vagina / whatever in question?
No. No, no, no, no. This is a common mistake, but gender is is also partly biological. You yourself assign feelings to gender, not sex. Feelings have a biological origin: the brain. The feelings of dissatifaction with your body, the feelings of apathy, of 'wrongness' towards yourself have nothing to do with whether I wear pants or dresses. Some parts in the brains of MtF transsexuals are similar to female brains instead of male brains. However, we don't know enough to look at a brain and see if it's male or female, so all we have are feelings. That feeling of who you are and who you aren't, and how you express that in words, is your gender identity.
All that has nothing to do with pants or dresses, pink or blue, or what my Happy Meal was. All that stuff is how you express your masculinity or feminity, and is cultural. But if I put on a pair of pants, I don't suddenly become a man. I was an avid cyclist before my transition. I still am. I liked videogames when I was young. I still do.
Being transgendered is far more complicated than preferring pants or dresses. A simple distinction between sex=biological and gender=cultural isn't sufficient to describe or explain transgenderism.
I'd advise you to read Whipping Girl, by Julia Serano. It describes in much more detail on the differences between sex, subconscious sex, gender identity and gender expression. I know it helped me a lot.
If you want to wear dresses and drive monster trucks fine
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
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ShivahnUnaware of her barrel shifter privilegeWestern coastal temptressRegistered User, Moderatormod
I'd advise you to read Whipping Girl, by Julia Serano. It describes in much more detail on the differences between sex, subconscious sex, gender identity and gender expression. I know it helped me a lot.
This is an excellent book, and takes a lot of arguments I'd come up with independently and phrases them better than I could.
I agree partly. I'm fine if people want to wear dresses and drive monster trucks, but identifying myself as female instead of male made a huge difference to me. Ban gender roles and gender expressions, but not gender itself.
I was attempting to imply that the approval of prisoner on prisoner rape came from society, and that society would object to the constant, preventable rape of women in integrated prisons and would eventually force the folks who run the prisons actually take the steps withing their power to prevent rape.
Maybe. But large-scale changes would probably take a decade or more and would involve thousands of rapes of female inmates that wouldn't have occcured but-for the policy of allowing male prisoners to serve their sentences in female prisons.
Allowing thousands of new rapes to occur in the hopes of solving an existing rape problem is not a sound policy, IMO.
Since we're just spitballing concepts and not talking about their likelihood, the best way to end prison rape is probably to give felons the right to vote nationwide
I agree partly. I'm fine if people want to wear dresses and drive monster trucks, but identifying myself as female instead of male made a huge difference to me. Ban gender roles and gender expressions, but not gender itself.
ha nice url
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
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ShivahnUnaware of her barrel shifter privilegeWestern coastal temptressRegistered User, Moderatormod
I agree partly. I'm fine if people want to wear dresses and drive monster trucks, but identifying myself as female instead of male made a huge difference to me. Ban gender roles and gender expressions, but not gender itself.
I sometimes wonder how transsexuality would manifest and be treated in a genderless society (that is, one with no roles.)
It'd probably manifest as it does now, actually, just without other-sex- behavior and clothing wearing.
I agree partly. I'm fine if people want to wear dresses and drive monster trucks, but identifying myself as female instead of male made a huge difference to me. Ban gender roles and gender expressions, but not gender itself.
I sometimes wonder how transsexuality would manifest and be treated in a genderless society (that is, one with no roles.)
It'd probably manifest as it does now, actually, just without other-sex- behavior and clothing wearing.
That's actually a common question asked in gender therapy. If gender roles or expectations didn't exist in society, would you still want to transition?
And yes, yes I would. Because the most important matter is how I see myself, not how others do.
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ShivahnUnaware of her barrel shifter privilegeWestern coastal temptressRegistered User, Moderatormod
That's actually a common question asked in gender therapy. If gender roles or expectations didn't exist in society, would you still want to transition?
And yes, yes I would. Because the most important matter is how I see myself, not how others do.
That wasn't quite what I meant. I meant more, I wonder what the first sign that a child has a gender incongruous with their sex would be. I often hear about kids with penises wearing dresses and stuff, which would presumably not be weird in this society.
Then again, when I saw Robin Hood the first time I told my mom I wanted to be Maid Marion so there's always that.
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While "the government", as a single, monolithic entity, may or may not know the difference, what percentage of the passport holding populace do you suppose knows the difference? Additionally, government entities are loathe to change official terminology. The idea of gender being different from sex dates back to 1955. National passports go back to the 19th century. I don't know when they started including gender on them, but I'm more than willing to bet it was before the 50's. I can only begin to imagine the sea of red tape that would be involved with replacing the word "gender" with the word "sex" on passports. And even if they wanted to and managed to get it done, you're left with the unwashed masses of people who reach a box on the passport application labeled "Sex" and get a blank look, then have to decide whether to write "Yes".
The reason that your gender is tracked on your passport is the same reason that your hair and eye color, height, and weight are on there. You could probably get most of them from the photo, but it's easier to have a bad/not-representational photo or to doctor the photo in a printed passport than to convincingly print up a whole fake document. And, nowadays (in some countries, at least), some or all of the data is stored on an RFID chip embedded in the physical passport book. Not that those are exactly hack-proof, but, but the point remains that having redundant identification data helps law enforcement agencies recognize you. It's not a governmental campaign to ostracize transgender people. They're either trying to be nice to transgender people or, more likely, are trying to make it easier for law enforcement agents who are having to deal with people whose appearance doesn't match their plumbing. Should they be concerned that the person going through the millimeter wave scanner who has a penis despite looking like a woman is in disguise? Do they need to ask which sex of officer is going to pat this person down? Yes, they could ask everyone, but have you been to an airport lately? It's not exactly a speedy process already, without introducing new questions and the opportunity for the pervy set of society to ask for opposite-sex pat-downs.
but seriously, instead of having "gender: M[] F[] O[]" why not have " gender: ___________"?
To play Devil's Advocate for a moment. Would the thousands of male on female rape cases introduced by allowing male/female commingling in prisons ultimately be worth it if in the end it resulted in policy changes that caused an overall reduction of rape of pretty close to near zero in the long term? Wouldn't that be a case of a small sacrifice being necessary for the greater good of preventing all from being raped in prisons as a form of extra-curricular punishment added to the system?
Because passports aren't about self-expression, they're about identification. If you leave it blank then either you have de-facto options in that only a certain range of responses are valid, or you make the form meaningless. If, one day, people start self-identifying their genders as "Orange", "QuasiMale", "Happy", and "Xylknek" and the majority of passport-handling officials don't know what the fuck those are then that field is essentially meaningless. A Chinese airport security guy doesn't need to know any English or anything about the Australian Gender Issues culture to know that "M" means 'male', "F" means 'female', and "X" means 'ask'.
@Delzhand
I'm actually right at this moment working on a form in a GUI that uses string-based text boxes. Magic.
anyway having "sex: (series of radio buttons)" would be infinitely better given that there's actually a finite amount of possible answers. Gender is becoming a moving target so (not being a person from the X[] category) I imagine having to suck it up and use the biological data would be less offensive than being a non-option.
I don't think I mentioned it here on the forums yet, but I'm transsexual. I'm a person for whom sex doesn't equal gender, and is trying to deal with that fact. But some terms mentioned in the OP need to be better explained.
Sex: physical state of the body. Determined by chromosomes, hormones, sensitivity to hormones, etc. Usually male or female, but not always.
Gender: A multifaceted term to describe your identity. It's very important to separate gender identity and gender expression.
Gender identity: how you see yourself and what you feel comfortable with. While it may be affected by culture, this is mostly biological. For transpeople, their sex is different from their gender identity. I was assigned male at birth, but my gender identity is female. Even in a world without gender roles or expectations, I'd still transition because to fix that disconnect. And while for most people man or woman is sufficient, for some it isn't.
Gender expression: how you express your gender identity. This is mostly cultural. It's how we present ourselves, how we act and interact with others, etc. In some cultures there are strict rules, and others they're more lax. It doesn't always have to match with gender identity (see crossdressers). Transpeople don't have to adher to strict gender expectations either. In most Western cultures, ciswomen can wear pants and tshirts if they want to. There's no reason why transwomen can't either.
So gender is not fully cultural, it has a biological aspect as well. If it was fully cultural, you wouldn't see transpeople in so many different cultures.
As for this law, I think it's a step in the right direction, and a step in the wrong direction. The letter in your passport refers ideally to your gender identity. An intersexed person who identifies as male would put 'M' in his passport, and his intersexuality would only be a matter for medical reasons. An intersexed person who feels ambigious can would out indicate that as well. People who aren't intersexed but are ambigious on their gender should be able to indicate that as well, but it seems they're not able to. There's also the fact people choose 'other' for different reasons, which one letter isn't able to explain.
So while I applaud this law for admitting there's more than male or female, it can be applied better.
I don't think most of that is very relevant to a passport or a passport-issuing authority.
Primarily they're going to be interested in 2 things:
1) What do they need to know to differentiate you from some other person in a line-up/going through a scanner/on a security camera/when trying to verify you are who your passport says you are if you don't look especially like your photo that day (or if your photo was damaged or something between your passport leaving your hands and entering theirs)?
2) In the context of civil-rights laws, segregated facilities, or medical needs, what do they need to know about how to treat you? Which is to say, what sex of officer should frisk you? Which detention facility do you go to? Do they need to warn you not to go into the scanner if you're pregnant?
Transgender people frequently look very convincingly like a member of their self-identified sex with their clothes on, despite having the wrong plumbing (assuming 'transgender' is the right term in place of 'transsexual'... the one where you haven't had surgery). With more and more such people in the population there is a valid, pressing need for your ID not to say "M" while your appearance is saying "F". But there is a whole panopoly of options out there, which are only going to serve to confuse matters for the vast majority of people since each option that isn't "Male" or "Female" applies to some single-digit number of people out of a hundred. If we reach a point where "Sexually Male But Appears Female" is going to be an accurate description for a statistically significant number of people that a passport-handling official encounters in the course of their daily work, then that would be a valid option to add. As it is, "M, F, X" means that, maybe, once a week someone working a desk in an airport will need to say "Your gender is listed as X. What do I need to know?"
And to @acidlacedpenguin regarding computer forms: It's easy to input text, but how would you write a SQL query to locate all blond, brown-eyed people between 5'9" and 6'1", between 180 and 210lbs, who appear male in security footage if there are people on record with genders like "male, man, M, dude, guy, boy, etc." (without even going into people who write in nonsense answers, inaccurate answers, or answers in non-English languages)? You can leave off the gender part of the query, but you've just doubled your number of records and vastly increased the noise in the data that has to be searched through to indetify the person in question.
I can understand the point that sometimes you need to make a problem worse so that people will notice it. But it's tough to support that approach when it would involve more people being raped, even short-term.
Rigorous Scholarship
How? I mean I really do agree that I think it's a bad idea and distasteful to just throw men and women together in prisons with no extra oversight/protection. I'm just really unsure, when considering the issue seriously, if we have any other effective ways to actually enact positive prison reforms right now.
(gender like ('%m%') OR gender like ('%M%'))
AND gender not like ('%om%') AND gender not like ('%OM%') AND gender not like ('%ym%') AND gender not like ('%YM%')
That would probably correctly identify dudes 95% of the time and when someone bitches about the high error rate you can inform them that creating the form to allow a manual input of gender wasn't your horrible idea.
I think that some of these 'X' people must be revolting against science, logic, or both.
Oh, and I'm not really concerned with the sex of the officer who would be frisking me. I'm far more concerned with his or her GENDER. If I should be frisked I want it to be done by a woman, but I'm not interested in what her genitalia, chromosomes or hormonal values are.
When I got my passport I had to fill out a paper form. And gui design is different than information design. CptHamilton explains the issues there pretty well. I'm developing a site for an organ donation group right now (a group that actually has a legit need for sex), so this is something I'm actually dealing with currently (although honestly it's slightly different because once you die your gender is technically non-existant, if we accept gender as what you "do").
I can say that 99% of the actual issue is just that organizations would prefer to use 'gender' on forms because 'sex' has connotations. All of our gender-theory discussion is, to the people in charge, an edge-case not worth worrying about. It's not done of malice or to hurt non-normative people. (Yes, I know that's not to say that that non-normative people aren't marginalized by the practice)
Try parsing a few million records of that table on the back end, where each record was entered by a different untrained person.
I think this person would identify as "X" in the new Australian system:
The concept of a "third gender" is widespread enough across the globe to merit its own "box", if we must have boxes for genders.
Also because the idea that 'gender' and 'sex' are two completely different things is fairly new, and the rate of adoption for new ideas in bureaucratic systems is approximately glacial. According to wikipedia the idea of non-physical gender came about in '55, meaning that even if it caught on really quickly in the academic community it probably didn't take off until the 60's sometime. So there are likely people working in passport departments of governments all around the world who have worked for those agencies since before gender =/= sex was even a thing.
It's funny you should mention SQL since there's a 100,000+ entry backend to my GUI; though I'll concede that entries in that backend are managed.
If you'd rather applications be scantrons then we could accommodate up to so many distinct answers and risk leaving out some obscure group.
Yes or no?
Done.
Personally I think it's not a huge deal if gender isn't included on on IDs considering all modern forms of ID have a photo, height, etc. If you look exactly like the person the ID lists, nobody is going to ask to take a peek down your pants just to be sure, so why include it?
Dude, your solution shows a very "front end" mindset. Now, you can argue that Sex or Gender has no place on a passport (and I'll disagree on that point), but if it is on there, it should at least make sense. M/F/X accomplishes that a lot more clearly than "put whatever 30 characters you like".
Would be pretty hard for an identity thief with no ovaries to fake having a set of ovaries.
Most modern IDs with chips have a plethora of information on it that makes superficial identifiers such as gender kinda pointless. When you can from the chip data see that the passport belongs to a person with blond hair, blue eyes, a certain height/weight and with feminine features then you don't need to check a little box denoting whether or not this person is biologically male/female or is a man/woman.
All you need to do is look at the person presenting the passport and compare their visible traits with what is stored on the chip.
Whether you use a drop-down/comb-box, a list of radio-buttons, or a paper scantron sheet doesn't matter. In all of those cases you're offering some number of options between 2 and N with N strictly less than every possible option. If you instead offer a blank space, as you suggested, where someone can type whatever they want then you're left with two options: define a list of acceptable answers or accept anything someone puts in. If you take the first option then you're in exactly the same state as having a list of options only with the user playing a "Guess the Word" game to figure out what terminology is acceptable. If you go with the second option, eliminating having a set of pre-defined genders G = {M, ..., F}, then you have to accept 'trollolol' as just a valid answer as anything else and it becomes a no more meaningful piece of data than adding a Comments field.
Regarding the utility of sex-appearance in identification... roughly 50 percent of the populace are one sex and roughly 50 percent are the other, with a rounding error number of Others out there. Obviously not all of the 50 percent on either side are going to follow sex-matched gender norms, but the vast majority are. Saying "we're looking for a brown-haired, brown-eyed Caucasian, 180lbs, 35 years old, 5ft 10in tall" either describes a male in the 50th percentile of the population or a female in the 95th percentile. If the person's photo is unavailable, inaccurate, damaged, or ambiguous having an F under 'gender' instead of an 'M' reduces the pool of likely suspects in a population of 10,000 (roughly the number of people who fly through London Heathrow daily, for example) from roughly 2750 to roughly 250.
1. "Greater good" is neither great nor good, it is just a known evil someone is trying to justify, badly. Using "for the greater good" as your argument means you are bad, and should feel bad.
2. Womens prisons are places where they send women who break the law. This includes women who are in there for violent offenses, gang offenses, drug charges, and murder. Women in prisons are not delicate flowers. WHich leads to point three...
3. Some of them hypothetical fellas trying to get their rape on are gonna get shanked.
4. Slider continues to be a beacon of intellect and decency (this is sarcasm)
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Not solving 10000 rapes is better than not solving 20000 rapes. Both are awful, but one is clearly worse than the other.
Honestly though, a lot of the problem with prison rape is that you have effectively concentrated a huge amount of societies largest and most violent elements together in one place and combined them with a large group of people who have committed crimes which are non-violent, or who are less violent outside of their crimes.
The problem clearly should be addressed, but I think that (shockingly) there are actually worse problems in US prisons than it and that addressing the other problems would go a long way towards solving that.
Regarding the 'gender on passports' thing. You should set it up like this....
Male - Born a guy, or with a doctors note
Not disclosed - Anyone
Female - Born a woman, or with a doctors note
Your point 3 is absurd. Yeah, some guys trying to take advantage are going to have problems. Conversely, a vastly larger percentage of women who try to fight back will be beaten and abused even further.
Saying "Put men in womens prisons, because who cares if the rape and abuse spreads" is like saying you shouldn't quarantine the sick because it would be fairer if everyone was sick.
Hence point 1, there is no greater good. Putting men in womens prisons and saying 'Well, the rape of women will make people wake up! Its for the greater good!' is not good. Not only will you have rapes, but also murders. Making it even worse.
TLDR: I'm agreeing with you.
I stated, in the OP: "The term “gender’ refers to a kind of cultural construction of person types, usually defined in terms of masculinity or femininity." Gender is a social construction, a set of categories into which one is placed, or one places one's self.
I'm interested in your shift from gender as a term that refers to a thing to gender as a description. I'm further interested in your division of gender into parts.
How is this biological? I think we agree that sex and gender are different; sex has to do with biology (wangs, vaginas) whereas gender has to do with a feeling and social constructions. When you were born you were assigned the gender of male (i'm guessing because you had a penis) but you later discerned that you felt more comfortable in the socially constructed box of female. That does not seem to be biological, at least in the sense that biology has to do with wangs, vaginas, chemicals, etc.
I'm guessing that when you talk about gender identity, what you mean is that when you went to McDonalds as a child your parents got you the Happy Meal for boys, the one with the racecar, and you would have preferred the Happy Meal for girls, the one with the barbie. That doesn't seem like biology, to me. That all seems like social construction.
Why are you making a distinction between gender identity as self-conception, and gender expression as collections of actions and presentations? I can understand that, psychologically, one would maintain this distiction to maintain something like "I felt like a girl (identity) but i acted like a boy (expression)." but that seems to be confusing the issue. This isn't about how people act; this is about how people are. With respect to being we have:
Sex - biological, concerned with wangs, vaginas, and chemicals.
Gender - culturally constructed, pre-packaged, self-conceptions divided, usally, into masculine and feminine.
Dividing gender further into a self-conception and habits-of-action seems problematic. I'm guessing that you had a gender you felt, and a gender you acted. But why not say that your geunder is that primordial feeling, and the acts were just lies?
Maybe I need to clarify my terms.
Biology: Things we can cut up and put into petri dishes, such as penises, vaginas, chemicals.
Culture: incorporeal, socially constructed, flibbity-floo and herpa derp.
This doesn't seem to follow from anything.
Given your conception of stepping, i'd be interested to watch you walk up a set of stairs.
Also, there is the problem of genital ambiguity. Most people are born with either a penis or a vagina. Some people are born with something else.
But more importantly, if gender is used for identification, and if by gender we are talking about biological sex, then we would seem to need much more information than penis, vagina, or else. I mean, "has a penis" isn't very descriptive. Or, "has a penis" is just as descriptive as "has eyes". If we ask about eye color, shouldn't we ask more detailed questions about those biological traits by which a person could be identified?
Said another way, if this is a crucial piece of information used for identification, oughtn't these ID's list details of the penis / vagina / whatever in question?
No. No, no, no, no. This is a common mistake, but gender is is also partly biological. You yourself assign feelings to gender, not sex. Feelings have a biological origin: the brain. The feelings of dissatifaction with your body, the feelings of apathy, of 'wrongness' towards yourself have nothing to do with whether I wear pants or dresses. Some parts in the brains of MtF transsexuals are similar to female brains instead of male brains. However, we don't know enough to look at a brain and see if it's male or female, so all we have are feelings. That feeling of who you are and who you aren't, and how you express that in words, is your gender identity.
All that has nothing to do with pants or dresses, pink or blue, or what my Happy Meal was. All that stuff is how you express your masculinity or feminity, and is cultural. But if I put on a pair of pants, I don't suddenly become a man. I was an avid cyclist before my transition. I still am. I liked videogames when I was young. I still do.
Being transgendered is far more complicated than preferring pants or dresses. A simple distinction between sex=biological and gender=cultural isn't sufficient to describe or explain transgenderism.
I'd advise you to read Whipping Girl, by Julia Serano. It describes in much more detail on the differences between sex, subconscious sex, gender identity and gender expression. I know it helped me a lot.
If you want to wear dresses and drive monster trucks fine
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
This is an excellent book, and takes a lot of arguments I'd come up with independently and phrases them better than I could.
http://www.you.tube.com/watch?v=PvvMdCTA_os
I agree partly. I'm fine if people want to wear dresses and drive monster trucks, but identifying myself as female instead of male made a huge difference to me. Ban gender roles and gender expressions, but not gender itself.
Since we're just spitballing concepts and not talking about their likelihood, the best way to end prison rape is probably to give felons the right to vote nationwide
ha nice url
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
I sometimes wonder how transsexuality would manifest and be treated in a genderless society (that is, one with no roles.)
It'd probably manifest as it does now, actually, just without other-sex- behavior and clothing wearing.
That's actually a common question asked in gender therapy. If gender roles or expectations didn't exist in society, would you still want to transition?
And yes, yes I would. Because the most important matter is how I see myself, not how others do.
That wasn't quite what I meant. I meant more, I wonder what the first sign that a child has a gender incongruous with their sex would be. I often hear about kids with penises wearing dresses and stuff, which would presumably not be weird in this society.
Then again, when I saw Robin Hood the first time I told my mom I wanted to be Maid Marion so there's always that.