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Re: [lojban] Gender vs. Sex. Culture vs. nature.
As someone who identifies as pansexual [1] and polyamorous, I find this
line of questioning both interesting and important. It's rather
disappointing to me that virtually no activity has happened on this thread
since it came up, despite the mailing list being generally active.
[1] For casual discussion purposes, you may treat this as bisexual - the
way I distinguish the two is outside of the scope of this discussion,
though I'll happily elaborate if anyone's curious.
Anyway, here's my perspecive on the gismu and examples you brought up, as
a non-fluent lojban newb who hopes lojban would prove superior to natural
languages in general, this aspect of communication/though included.
On Tue, 7 Oct 2014, Gleki Arxokuna wrote:
cinse = x1 in activity/state x2 exhibits sexuality/gender/sexual
orientation x3 (ka) by standard x4. Also: x1 courts/flirts; x3 could be a
ka <gender or role>, ka <attraction to a gender>, or ka <type of activity>,
etc.; (adjective:) x1 is sexual/sexy; x1 is flirted with/courted by x2 (=
cinfriti, cinjikca).
I don't know what the 'discussed in the past' pertaining to {cinse} refers
to, so going to this statement a bit blind here: To me, the x4 makes it
good, since it means the definition recognizes that claims about
sexuality/orientation/gender are almost always going to be limited to some
sort of subjective standard. To me this intuitively suggests that it would
be easy enough to disambiguate cultural/speceist/otherwise-biased-or-
skewed notions of what implies what gender/sex/attraction/etc, as when
discussing the examples you provided.
In fact, from the same consideration, every other word mentioned annoys me
precisely because they lack the equivalent of this one's x4.
On Tue, 7 Oct 2014, Gleki Arxokuna wrote:
fetsi = x1 is a female/doe of species x2 evidencing feminine trait(s) x3
(ka); x1 is feminine
On Tue, 7 Oct 2014, Gleki Arxokuna wrote:
ninmu = x1 is a woman/women; x1 is a female humanoid person [not
necessarily adult].
I find both of these to be rather unsatisfying, precisely because they
seem to be based on a partially-scientifically-informed, common-human-
experience-skewed notions of what sex (biological or otherwise) is.
The only way I can rationalize the definition of {fetsi} being 'good' is
if x3 is understood in context of x1. I.e. what's a "feminine" or
"masculine" (or neither) trait will be specific to the species (sidenote,
boundaries between genus/species/subspecies aren't even perfectly clear
and as I understand it are actually under some debate (the shorthand I
think is used most is that species are distinguished by their inability to
interbreed succesfully - but some pairings of different species can still
produce genetically viable and fertile hybrids, throwing a spanner into
those works). So that meaning only produces sentences which are true
in any real way when used almost tautologically.
To say that some x1 is {fetsi} of species of x2 because it exhibits trait
x3 is for me going to boil down to implicitly saying it is so by {some
arbitrary cultural standard/notion of what is meant by 'feminine' in this
context which I have to guess or ask for clarification}, at which point I
will personally reject the validity of any standard in that context
besides one defined by that species itself. E.g. being bigger and
stronger is only masculine if in that species that is typically a
thing that males display.
Okay, I actually admit that sometimes one can generalize by wider patches
than 'species' - there are many traits common to wider categories, e.g.
true for most sea-horses, true for most arachnids, etc. But either way,
the point is it's still circular: it's "feminine" in that species because
that given species or set of species to which it belongs typically has
that trait in their females - but how did we decide such and such was male
or female? In some sense we base it on the biology of who produces the egg
and who produces the thing that fertilizes the egg... which of course is
largely based on what we as humanity found to be common based on taking
our existing cultural notions and then figuring out where the underlying
differences were in us.
And then {ninmu} is even more fuzzy/blurred. As brought up, what about XXY
humans? What about intersex people who are XY or XX but still come out
with ambiguous or dual genitalia? Is an XYY or XYYY male more 'male' than
an XY male (evidence that I know of suggests that they are only slightly
so in some biological aspects, but mostly not really notably so)? I
suspect transgendered people will find words like 'ninmu' unhelpful and
problematic.
It seems to me that the notion of woman/female and man/male is something
that for most humans consists of almost entirely cultural baggage. There
are obviously biological differences between different sexes in most
species, but the supposed mental/cognitive differences are insufficiently
proven at best, and even the biological differences are only clearcut when
you don't start running into all of the cornercases. Which would be fine,
IF the definitions we had in lojban acknolwedged these issues by adding a
"by standard x#" to the word. But as is it's the same ambiguous blob
likely to draw in the same cultural and unfounded
associations/beliefs/baggage as woman/man in English.
To be clear and summarize, I am saying two different criticisms for fetsi
and ninmu: fetsi, I claim, is flawed because there is no good default
standard for masculinity/maleness vs femininity/femaleness vs neitherness
for species in general, besides what is already defined as being that for
that species - so x3 of fetsi strikes me as useless and the entire word
unhelpful for precise discussion, unless it has an x4 like cinse does. On
the other hand, I claim ninmu is flawed not in its meaning itself, but in
the fact that the meaning will map so closely to typical man/woman words
for most people that use of the word will always be muddled with deeply
embedded baggage (and incidentally, an x2 like the x4 of cinse would also
help remedy this, in my opinion).
On Tue, 7 Oct 2014, Gleki Arxokuna wrote:
ganti = x1 is a/the testes/ovary/testicle/scrotum/balls/gonad/stamen/pistil
[body-part] of x2, gender x3.
I think this is okay, because it just basically means it's a sexual organ
producing the reproductive cells. I think the gender part is liable to the
same flaw as the meaning of fetsi though. By what criteria is an ovary an
ovary and a testicle a testicle? It gets back into the whole issue where
the very notion of gender is not cleanly defined, and I think is only
sensible when a standard can be specified.
On Tue, 7 Oct 2014, Gleki Arxokuna wrote:
Who are Annelida? Are they nakni or fetsi? They are hermaphrodites.
Some male mammals breastfeed their babies. Do they evidence fetsi3 this
way?
I would argue it ought not be so if it had to boil down to a yes/no,
because this fact inherently proves that breastfeeding is not an inately
feminine trait. I think this also perfectly demonstrates my argument that
fetsi should have a fetsi4 which would specify by what standard that trait
is feminine (then I imagine it would be trivial to say that they exhibit
fetsi3 by the standard of things-which-are-feminine-in-humans, but that
they don't exhibit fetsi3 by the standard of their-species).
On Tue, 7 Oct 2014, Gleki Arxokuna wrote:
Is ninmu bound to gender and fetsi to sex?
The boundaries between these two are fuzzy. Biological gender (aka 'sex')
is obviously strongly correlated with (and intuitively, likely has some
causal effect on) psychological gender - but I would argue that
psychological gender is virtually entirely sociologically conditioned from
birth, and a society less focused on drawing the distingtions most do
would yield way less defined psychological genders. Furthermore, I suspect
that if I were to say I am a {ninmu}, the fact that I am really in any way
a {fetsi} would make most people reject that claim. My perception is that
{ninmu} is roughly {fetsi} with fetsi2 filled as 'human', since fetsi3 is
to me intuitively broad enough that any sociological/cultural aspects can
go in it.
So my vote would be no - I think the distinction between biological and
psychological gender ought to be left to a slot clarifying specifically in
what standard/meaning of gender the staement means, which gets back to why
I think fetsi and ninmu (and all other terms which have gender/sex of any
sort at the core of their meaning) need such a 'by standard' argument.
On Tue, 7 Oct 2014, Gleki Arxokuna wrote:
What about people with XXY chromosomes? Are they semi-fetsi?
Is Conchita Wurst a ninmu? a fetsi?
I think this question is only resolvable conveniently if we acknolwedge
that there ought to be such a 'by standard' argument for both fetsi and
ninmu. Because as it stands humanity has no real consensus on this matter,
same as with all intersex humans or with gender in general.
Any hardcoded meaning on that front does a disservice to the language and
its ability to aid communication, I think.
On Tue, 7 Oct 2014, Gleki Arxokuna wrote:
Where is the border between allegedly cultural LGBT in humans and allegedly
natural behavior in animals like shown here: http://9gag.com/gag/aZP2zgz ?
(I enjoyed that little strip of explanations - knew most of it, but the
format was nice.)
Anyway I think this is just more of the same: humanity has no conclusive
answer currently. Either way I think the language ought to just let the
seemingly existing mechanism of specifying by what standard one means
something apply here, allowing this to be a 'runtime' consideration which
can be readily adjusted mid-convesration, rather than a 'compiletime'
consideration which is stuck rigidly forever (or worse, open to
interpretation like this).
Regards,
mu'o mi'e .aleksandr.kojevnikov. do'u
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