That does certainly sound like the most plausible explanation for how things got how they are. I am thinking I might advocate the view (if this ever comes up when I'm talking to a cis person; I have no idea the likelihood of this) that talk of gender and sex in non-humans is similar to how mathematicians will steal terms from elsewhere because they need some terminology - i.e., I will try to associate appeals to definitions from Biology to demean trans people with the sense of embarrassment one gets from misusing math jargon and oh Christ I didn't realize how this sounded until I typed it out. But, um, given my social circles, this isn't necessarily a bad way of shaming someone?
(If you're curious, the museum exhibit in question - which was about sex-the-act more than sex-the-kind - never talked about humans explicitly, but it clearly had the unstated goal of refuting ridiculous "sex in nature supports my sexist bullshit" claims by showing how incredibly varied sex in nature actually is.)
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Huh, Dreamwidth's spellchecker knows "trans" but not "cis".
Date: 2013-02-09 01:24 am (UTC)That does certainly sound like the most plausible explanation for how things got how they are. I am thinking I might advocate the view (if this ever comes up when I'm talking to a cis person; I have no idea the likelihood of this) that talk of gender and sex in non-humans is similar to how mathematicians will steal terms from elsewhere because they need some terminology - i.e., I will try to associate appeals to definitions from Biology to demean trans people with the sense of embarrassment one gets from misusing math jargon and oh Christ I didn't realize how this sounded until I typed it out. But, um, given my social circles, this isn't necessarily a bad way of shaming someone?
(If you're curious, the museum exhibit in question - which was about sex-the-act more than sex-the-kind - never talked about humans explicitly, but it clearly had the unstated goal of refuting ridiculous "sex in nature supports my sexist bullshit" claims by showing how incredibly varied sex in nature actually is.)