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Rachel Dolezal

We are all animals born in a skin. Neurochemical imbalances and people's own self-loathing leads some people to make up all sorts of dumb bullshit to attempt to transcend their biological realities. They can't. It's that simple.
 
TheTwinAndreBen said:
We are all animals born in a skin. Neurochemical imbalances and people's own self-loathing leads some people to make up all sorts of dumb bullshit to attempt to transcend their biological realities. They can't. It's that simple.
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like living in Atlanta, for example
 
2&2 Slider To Leyritz said:
That is just stupid. Gender is not a social construct. You either have a dong or you don't. Age is not a social construct. There are biological attributes of age.

Sure you can feel like a different gender or a different age than what you actually are, but that doesn't change the underlying biology.

Is species a social construct as well? I think I am an eagle; I'm going to test my theory by trying to fly out my window.
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PhDeac said:
Sex is biological. Gender is not.
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2&2 Slider To Leyritz said:
Not per BSD's definition.
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I feel like I've had this same conversation recently with junebug. For most people sex and gender align (cisgenders), for some people they don't. The concept of gender would be redundant if it were the same as sex; so you either believe in the concept of gender or you don't.
 
myDeaconmyhand said:
I feel like I've had this same conversation recently with junebug. For most people sex and gender align (cisgenders), for some people they don't. The concept of gender would be redundant if it were the same as sex; so you either believe in the concept of gender or you don't.
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And just FWIW, I just pulled a random definition of "gender" that I think basically was the same as "sex."
 
TownieDeac said:
Not to get too metaphysical, but time itself is certainly a construct. It doesn't "exist." We artificially use the Earth's rotation and orbit around the sun to demarcate months, years, etc., but it doesn't exist in a physical sense. Unlike trees falling in the woods with nobody around, which make a sound without our acknowledgment (the variation of pressure propagating through matter as a wave), time is a property or characteristic, not matter.
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This.
 
TownieDeac said:
Not to get too metaphysical, but time itself is certainly a construct. It doesn't "exist." We artificially use the Earth's rotation and orbit around the sun to demarcate months, years, etc., but it doesn't exist in a physical sense. Unlike trees falling in the woods with nobody around, which make a sound without our acknowledgment (the variation of pressure propagating through matter as a wave), time is a property or characteristic, not matter.
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I will remember this the next time I arrive in an artificially constructed untimely fashion.
 
My point in bringing up age was to build a strawman to illuminate the slippery slope, which I usually don't like, but on which we have already begun slipping.
 
WakeandBake said:
My point in bringing up age was to build a strawman to illuminate the slippery slope, which I usually don't like, but on which we have already begun slipping.
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It is not a "strawman" argument if it impartially fits into the paradigm we've established. Nor, in my opinion, is "age" a good example of how these socially-constructed concepts are susceptible to a "slippery slope" argument.

It's like a bunch of posters just took Rhetoric 101, and they are super-pumped to apply the terminology they've gleaned from it.
 
How are we factoring in gravitational time dilation in with this "social construct" definition of time? If time doesn't actually exist, how can it be affected by gravity?
 
Sex, ethnicity, weight, height, and age are physical properties of humans. They can be pretty easily measured and are nearly universally agreed upon. Gender, race, political affiliation and the like are far more fluid and harder to define. Identity is a hodgepodge of both rigid definitions and fluid characteristics that change over time, among societies, and within a person's own mind and body.

Unfortunately, we don't get much opportunity to discuss these kinds of things meaningfully outside of academia (and those discussions are often stilted, confusing, and stuffy). So when some stupid story like Rachel Dolezal or Bruce Jenner is the best chance we have, and even then we don't have a very good vocabulary to talk about it, you get this thread as a result.

I think I find myself squarely between the social constructivist camp Ph and wakephan describe and the Junebug/ELC mental illness camp.

I guess I just try to be sympathetic and kind to humanity in all forms, even people I have a really hard time identifying with.
 
myDeaconmyhand said:
How are we factoring in gravitational time dilation in with this "social construct" definition of time? If time doesn't actually exist, how can it be affected by gravity?
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it's not a social construct, i never said that

it's just that it's a property relative to other properties, much like objects weighing less in areas of different gravity
 
TownieDeac said:
Sex, ethnicity, weight, height, and age are physical properties of humans. They can be pretty easily measured and are nearly universally agreed upon. Gender, race, political affiliation and the like are far more fluid and harder to define. Identity is a hodgepodge of both rigid definitions and fluid characteristics that change over time, among societies, and within a person's own mind and body.

Unfortunately, we don't get much opportunity to discuss these kinds of things meaningfully outside of academia (and those discussions are often stilted, confusing, and stuffy). So when some stupid story like Rachel Dolezal or Bruce Jenner is the best chance we have, and even then we don't have a very good vocabulary to talk about it, you get this thread as a result.

I think I find myself squarely between the social constructivist camp Ph and wakephan describe and the Junebug/ELC mental illness camp.

I guess I just try to be sympathetic and kind to humanity in all forms, even people I have a really hard time identifying with.
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"Weight" isn't a physical property. Object B's weight is the symptom of the gravitational force of object A on object B. A classic case of projection of values onto each other. Thanks a lot, science.
 
Since we're talking about humans on Earth, I can probably use mass and weight interchangeably, but fine, mass.
 
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