• Mia@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    2 months ago

    Look up intersex people and marvel at how loose the definition of being female is. People are born without a womb, mixed genitalia, any combination you can imagine. They’re still considered women. If one can get to such a state, or further, they should too.

    Look up the various studies performed on transgender patients showing how their brain is more aligned to that of females (or males, whichever way they swing), at a biological level.

    Look up how hormonal imbalances during pregnancy can cause such discrepancies. It’s not just a psychological thing, it’s a biological phenomenon that does appear in nature.

    Or don’t. You’re free to remain ignorant, just like you’re free to say whatever you like, but don’t act like the victim when you knowingly say something that’s considered out of line and face consequences.

    Facing consequences for your actions is nothing new, don’t act like it is. Work places and public spaces have had rules of conduct since the dawn of time; what is considered acceptable has shifted as society evolved. You may not like it, but that’s not going to change just because calling someone by their chosen name makes you uncomfortable. Would you consider being disallowed to call black people slurs totalitarianism?

    You are free to say whatever you want, just like people and employers are free to not want to associate with you for the things you say.

    • Dario@feddit.it
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      2 months ago

      Less than six hundred intersex people are known to have ever existed. It is an extremely rare occurrence. There is no single human being known to have both reproductive organs in a fertile state. Fertile intersex people can have at most one reproductive organ that can generate offspring. Truly bisexual living beings have been observed in the animal kingdom: amphibians, molluscs and reptiles, but no human case is known to science. Moreover, most of the few intersex people known to have ever existed show physical and mental features that belong to one of two sexes. Contrary to popular belief, such people are mostly not some sort of hermaphrodites. They look and think as either men or women. Human beings are born either male or female and even if some rare occurrences exist, that tells us that something went wrong during pregnancy. For example, human beings are born with four limbs, but sometimes, something goes wrong and a baby with three limbs is born. This rare occurrence does not invalidate the fact that human beings have four limbs just like the fact that human beings are born either male or female.

      In my country you can face consequences for calling racial slurs at a societal level or in specific settings, such as the workplace, but there is no law in place that directly tackles hate speech. In public, yelling racial slurs may upset someone and you can face consequences from people who oppose your manners, though in general no legal penalty can be levied for such behavior. I think this is the way it is supposed to be. It is a free country, after all. If people do not like you, society at large may isolate you. I do not want a government to take control of my mouth with laws limiting free speech the way they are doing in some parts of North America.

      As I stated in a previous comment, when interacting with a transsexual person, I address said person by the pronouns that match the “gender” that they purport to show off. That is, when dealing with a man who transitioned to look like a woman, I use feminine declensions. I believe that doing otherwise would be impolite. I think that basic respect for others is advisable and being friendly goes a long way but I still want to have the possibility to say nasty things, if a polite feedback is not enough to state my point - or even for humorous purposes, if that is what I want.

      The issue at stake is not to address men who appear as women or women who appear as men with the desired pronouns. This ideology is stretching things as far as making up an “inclusive” grammar with invented pronouns. My native language is highly inflected - we have nouns that are either feminine or masculine. Here we have marginalized left-wing organizations promoting a made up grammar that is so convoluted that even those who promote it can not manage to get acquainted with it. I do not dream of a government prescribing me to remember a made-up pronoun to refer to a specific person. There are laws in place that prevent the hiring process to selectively hire on the basis of sex and ethnicity, yet these groups are striving to push “diversity” at all costs, sometimes not on the basis of merit, but because they want spaces that look less heterosexual and less white.

      We do not know yet if this unfortunate societal shift is going to reverse. History has taught us that reversal is possible. I am an outspoken opponent of this whole woke ideology and there are sensible like-minded people out there who oppose this American-born ideology.