How old is "old enough to understand?"

Old enough to tell you who they think they are.

Like, a six-month-old does not have a gender identity. That's just flat-out fact.

edited 30th Apr '15 2:56:19 PM by SolipSchism

This.

GUYS

GUYS I DID IT

I DID IT GUYS

I SENT MY FIRST MESSAGE TO A GIRL ON OKCUPID

edited 30th Apr '15 2:58:06 PM by Inhopelessguy

I know that much.

So if a kid is physically able to say "I'm a girl/I'm a boy/I'm not either" then you should accept it? Because I would agree with that.

Yea.

...

oh my god

i made typos

no

noooooooooooooo'

@Hopey: Nice. Good luck to you!

I don't think they need to be capable of writing a dissertation on the subject and identify all the social stigmas associated with gender or whatever. But if I had a kid, and that kid had a penis, I'd think of the kid as a boy. If that kid came up to me at age four and said he wanted to go out for Halloween as Princess Whatever-Disney-Movie-Is-Making-The-Rounds-This-Season because he would rather be a princess, it's probably time to sit down with him and see what that means, if anything.

Like, maybe he just likes Disney Princesses. If so, cool. I'm gonna be the badass dad that lets his cisgendered male son cross-dress on Halloween.

And maybe he is actually transgendered (or whatever trans word is the correct one here, I'm speaking from a place of ignorance, so give me a break) and identifies as a girl, in which case, cool, you are now my daughter, but you're not getting surgery until you're older, because I'm not that cool of a dad.

edited 30th Apr '15 3:02:07 PM by SolipSchism

WAIT

I DIDN'T MAKE TYPOS

YES

GUYS I AM SO EXCITE

I AM ONE STEP CLOSER TO MAKING BABBUS

yesgh

We're interrupting this thread for the most awesome thing ever. Please hold the fucking line.

Oh my god what I need this game.

It's 15 bucks on Steam. I'll buy it as soon as I have those 15 bucks.

Oh man.

I'm not sure I want to pay 15 bucks for that, but man. I want it.

@Hopey: Congrats! Looks like we're both having strokes of luck as of late.

I'm so glad that Finnish language doesn't have gendered pronouns Never have to see conversation about that

Same way words for human/man/woman are completely different so I don't have to hear conversation about how sexist it is that "man" is included in everything :p Well besides fireman and maybe few other job titles, but I think there are rather few of those these days

Last night I met with a girl friend of mine for the first time in five years. I remember having a huge crush on her back then. Then she told me she had a huge crush on me back then. If nothing else, at least I can feel happy for my 18-year old self.

You're 18+5 years old?

I assumed you were an ageless, formless being, who lived in the internet and solely subsisted on popular-culture references and memes.

And I bet the words like fireman (or its equivalent in your language) that do include the equivalent of "man" only do because they were borrowed from other languages. That's just a guess, though.

Probably. Fireman in Finnish is something like... Well, excuse me if I'm mistaken, but its pretty much "burnman" literally, but not exactly... Eh, people interested in languages can probably explain this stuff better

Granted, we do have words like waiter/waitress, but nowadays waiter equivalent is used most of the time, at least I can't remember last time I heard someone use waitress equivalent

edited 1st May '15 10:15:56 AM by SpookyMask

I think tarjoilijatar is antiquated.

If people are interested, the word for "firefighter" in Finnish is "palomies". There is no equivalent to 'fireman', but palomies can be translated as such - however, it cannot translate as 'firewoman' - because fire-woman is not a word in English.

Originally, any term with '-man' as a suffix was gender neutral. In fact, all job titles were (e.g. actor, waiter, steward) but then the French came with the Latin and Greek infused gender determiners that had never before existed in English and enforced '-ess' and '-ette' suffices.

They also brought things like 'dancer', which was a feminine word itself because it is an art and so the Americans in the 1800s added gender pre modifiers, but mostly just for 'male dancer' (the expectation that a dancer is a woman?)

Recently, even when job titles do have a suffix, because you are more likely to find a hostess than a host and a stewardess than a steward, and an usherette than an usher, the suffices have either stopped being used or you will find people adding 'male' to the front of the feminine form of the noun, because all nouns in English are neutral.

However, there is confusion with Mayor and Mayoress - because no matter the gender, the Mayor is always the Mayor and their partner and/or deputy, no matter the gender, is always the Mayoress. This, obviously, comes from when the Mayor could only be a man and only have a wife (who would be their deputy because old politics are no less ridiculous than they are now).

Then there's the titles like (Real) Estate Agent where there is no indication at all - but people will still specify the gender. If not by say "fe/male estate agent" then by "the estate agent's a wo/man" before a first meeting. There is no gender expectation or stigma like there still seems to be with dancer, but because people feel the need to prepare or at least inform others of the gender of a person before they meet.

The girl I asked out couldn't go with me this weekend, doctor's orders. So no date for me, at least not this weekend. :-/

Sorry about that, Kes.

-hugs-