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What Is Your Gender?
- Thread starter NSNick
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Oscar, you've been watching to much of "The Fifth Element" 
I want to meet someone who is "Other" Is it a new creation?
I want to meet someone who is "Other" Is it a new creation?
I want to meet someone who is "Other" Is it a new creation?
Trans-gendered people exist, although why this was not an option puzzles me.
Still wondering why you are doing this poll.
Is it just to see a breakdown of who is on MacRumors?
Because they're still either male or female, even if they once were the opposite of whatever they are now. I don't understand what 'other' could be.
How is 'Other' valid, but 'prefer not to say' is not?
I'd say the opposite is true; There are two genders, male and female, there is no 'other', but there are people who would choose not to answer.
Yeah 'Other' should not be an option. I mean you are either male or female. There is no in between.
Glad I am not the only one who found this mistake strange.
very interesting
i know of people being born neither male or female and exhibiting characteristics of both sexes, but i never heard of the "inter" term
i think i met a true intersexual once who was very much like a woman but with a full beard
anyway, this is an interesting poll and the more who vote, the closer to the prediction of 90 percent males i predicted becomes clear
I know we've been though this debate before, and it's a subject I find really difficult to get my head around, but I just find it hard to accept more than two genders.
Maybe it's because I'm coming at it from a viewpoint of classification; I recognise male and female as the two genders, and while I've heard of and recognise some (by no means all) of the 'conditions' (please bare with me with some of the terms I might use here, none are meant to be offensive or derogatory to anybody, if they are it's a failing in my communication and not (i hope) in what I'm meaning to communicate...if that makes sense) in the article linked, I just can't see all those various 'conditions' as a single gender. Should each variance be a separate gender; Male / Female / CAH / PAIS etc. etc.?
I note both that many of the 'conditions' are recorded as disorders, and that there is also a modern political feeling that these various conditions should not be considered disorders.
I think it that humans are either male or female, I also think that there are medical conditions which are 'disorders' (I'm really searching for a better word than that) that make it difficult to fit a person into one of those two specific genders. I think however that a certain amount of responsibility should be given to the medical team at the birth to identify a newborn as male or female*, with whatever specific disorder they my have.
What happens after that I'm less sure of; should the medical team in consultation with the parents make a decision to surgically (or medically I guess) alter the child to 'bring into line' with the gender that it most closely fits? Should no action be taken, as there's nothing operationally wrong with the child? Is it best to let the child grow as they are and choose their physical attributes at a later date? or would that cause extra stress as the child grows up unable to fit in?
I struggle to understand how an intersex person must view themselves; male in female body, female in male or just as themselves with their body, which perhaps they're happy with and see no reason to change?
Whatever, I don't think how you feel about yourself defines your gender, it's medical fact you are male or female, either in the straight forward sense or a male with a disorder giving you female characteristics (or vice versa)
Make sense? Am I missing something blindingly obvious that makes me look stoopid?
*Alternatively, is there a need for any gender to be recorded? does it matter? should society be genderless?
Isn't that quote actually:
"gender identity is an individual's self-conception as being male or female, as distinguished from actual biological sex."
and attributed to the Encyclopedia Britannica?
Most IS people identify as male or female and most are assigned one gender or the other at birth depending on what fits best however they don't always get it right and IS people fairly often have to transition much like a transsexual does. There is no arguing over whether there are more than two physical sexes there simply are whether there are only two *genders* (as in mental gender, what one identifies as) is a completely different debate which I shall come to later on.
Historically doctors have always favoured making new borns as close to the female/male norm as possible as soon as is possible, parents were often advised to keep this a secret from their children until they are older if not forever to prevent an identity crisis and to have as normal a childhood as possible in their assigned gender role.
The trouble with this approach is that it results in kids growing up with b0rked genitalia and hormone levels completely in the dark as to what's going on, if they're lucky and happy with their assigned gender they're all too often very unhappy with the surgery performed upon them and if they're *very* unlucky and feel uncomfortable as their assigned gender they're outright *furious* as early surgery often results in difficulty in later surgery and lack of orgasmic function. There's a very slim chance that IS children are going to be happy with such a course of action thus these days it is thankfully becoming a more common practice to leave IS children as they are physically and raise them to start as the gender they most closely resemble but keep an eye on their development incase a mistake has been made.
There was a kid in my secondary school who transitioned from female to male at age 8 for this reason, no one knew and they fitted in fine.
As I stated earlier they usually view themselves as male or female, It is not medical fact that you are either male or female, their are many IS conditions that are not simply a case of being male with female characteristics or female with male characteristics.
To hark back I mentioned that whether there are more than two mental genders or not is debatable and here I'm going to be *utterly* brutal and a complete flamebait though this is my personal view on such things, thus it's probably completely wrong and it's definitely biased.
In my personal experience a majority of those who consider themselves genderless or generally inbetween or whatever are typically either attention seekers who just want to be a precious little snowflake or they are on the autistic spectrum and simply have such an alien personality that they don't feel they can identify as typical woman/men thus choose to live as a genderless "thing" to escape from societies social expectations of either gender. Some even claim to be "bi-gendered" which generally translates as "Multiple personality disorder suffering transvestite with delusions of validity".
With my nazi rant out of the way here comes the bottom line; In the end it really doesn't matter if someone fundamentally feels they can't live as male either female and thus feels they have no option but to openly identify as androgyne then fairplay to them, I can certainly empathise with such discomfort though only one side of it. If they're uncomfortable to such a degree that it's worth it to have to explain themselves to practically everyone they meet then who're we to deny them their lifestyle choice?
I won't however call anyone a made up pronoun, singular use of "they" suffices IMO, "ze, zer, zim" ect is retarded.