LGBTQ+ Rights Worldwide

If someone I trusted outed me behind my back, I'd find somebody else to trust.

In other news:

Israel and Manitoba allow trans citizens to change the gender on their identification without showing proof of surgery.

According to the article, only 27 countries require it now. I figured it would be more, based on how widespread trans prejudice is.

But how many countries allow a change of gender at all?

That is a good question, and one I wish the article answered, because I don't know.

This Wikipedia article has a nice map. That is actually a lot of countries.

YEAH! For once, Arkansas isn't wanking it up!

Little Victories!

Oh good, I wasn't the only one who thought that.

Garena removed that restriction from their LoL tourney

The idea of being "born as a gender" really needs to phase out at some point.

Along with the idea that gender is intrinsic.

We're sitting on that last one until the conservatives wrap their head around there being nothing wrong with choosing one that doesn't match your sex.

Gender not being intrinsic isn't the same as you choosing your gender. Gender is constructed with your identity dialectically with those around you and the context you live in. This isn't a conscious phenomena, but one that happens implicitly in your social interactions.

Also, sex isn't intrinsic either, but dependent upon the social constructions as to what constitute sexual characteristics.

edited 5th Feb '15 10:14:57 AM by deathpigeon

Ok, yeah, but that's probably a bit nuanced for the average Republican.

Also there's a fairly significant non-social component to the whole sex thing. The whole new-person-making thing, for starters.

Fair.

Sure, but those non-social components only constitute sex because of the social components. Get rid of the social components and those things stop being related and divided as they are. Sex relates to reproduction in as much as we have constructed it to relate to reproduction.

Well i live in fear of "what if you chose your gender" so yeah.

Someone probably could choose it....but they usually don't.

If that makes any sense at all

If anything I'd argue it was the other way around. Get rid of the social components and sex goes back to being a purely mechanical term like it is for everything else. And everyone is happier for it because you just dumped a hell of a lot of mouldy baggage.

Sex isn't purely mechanical for much outside of single celled organisms and that's hard to call sex. All animals have stuff that surrounds sex outside of the mechanical. What that is varries from species to species, but it's almost a universal thing past a certain level of complexity.

We're nowhere near understanding how plastic or deep-rooted this stuff is or what causes it. But while human sexuality and brain chemistry hits weird extremes in a minority of people and we could do to drop most of our expectations on the whole for the sake of not being assholes, we're pretty darn sure gender isn't completely societal or plastic either.

edited 5th Feb '15 11:16:10 AM by Pykrete

@Elfive: Right, and the mechanical aspects aren't sex without us there to group them into sex, and that's the social aspects. Without the social aspects, they are all independent from each other rather than divided dichotomously into two categories.

@Pykrete: It isn't very malleable, but I don't see how that case shows it's not societal. That case just shows that we don't have much control over how the dialectical constructions turn out, not that it's intrinsic.

If it was purely societal, then it wouldn't matter how malleable or not society was; Reimer would have just grown up in society as a girl none the wiser. That was the whole point.

Instead, his brain kept saying "yo, you're really the other thing", and he ended up with profound depression — which is something I'd expect transgenders to sympathize with.

edited 5th Feb '15 11:24:39 AM by Pykrete

But it's not that simple. The way that your individual nature and the people around you interact in the dialectical process isn't as simple as to expect simply taking off the penis of someone and raising them as a girl will make them a girl. It might work for some, given their own individual nature, and it won't work for others, also given their own individual nature, and the circumstances of how they do it come into play, too.

It's all a complicated process in which our unique, unsorted nature interacts with the societal categorizations and the ways other people treat us produce the individual's relation to gender.

So, yes, gender is a purely social (this is separate from societal, btw, because it's based on interactions with others more than society as a whole) phenomena, but, since this isn't a process in which the person being gendered is passive in, the individual, unique nature of the individual is a part of the process of construction. Gender is dialectical, not societal.

Studies have consistently shown both sexual orientation and gender identity to correlate to significant differences not just in brain activity, but in hormone receptors and brain structure and anatomy. A minority of individuals have shown greater natural fluidity than the norm, and neuroplasticity is a thing to a degree — but for the most part the list of things that can impact brain anatomy and nuclear receptors to that extent that a prepubescent girl starts feeling a phantom penis are pretty darn small, and I'd be hesitant to call any of them social or dialectical.

Right, because people's own unique conditions leads to the dialectical constructions turning out differently, as I've been saying from nearly the start. That doesn't mean that gender isn't constructed dialectically. That just means that, if the materials used in the construction tend to be similar, then they will usually get similar results. But, without engaging in the dialectical construction, then those material building blocks wouldn't result in any gender. They'd just be there without gendered categories confining them into their performative roles.

Nurture can tweak how you express what you've got, but nature hands you the package you get to play with. We are not born blank slates.

edited 5th Feb '15 2:32:41 PM by Euodiachloris

Tomorrow, Slovakia will vote on a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. Eastern Europe continues to move backwards in time...

And here we have not just one, but two of the typical homophobe's justifications for their actions: "THINK ABOUT THE CHILDREN!!1!" and "It's just my opinion. You just have to respect it even when I'm forcing it in everyone's faces."

edited 7th Feb '15 4:37:42 PM by AnimeBadger

The referendum failed due to low turnout, after gay rights activists encouraged a boycott. You need 50%+ turnout, and only 20% of people could be arsed taking time out their Saturday to fight teh evul homos.

Encouraging.

edited 8th Feb '15 1:27:57 AM by Achaemenid