On Wed, 3 Nov 1999 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> I'm not sure that classifying people further is the answer. Reclaiming
> 'person' - or some other gender-neutral identification - might be an
> answer. But having studied stereotyping, I don't think that's quite an
> answer either - people stereotype because it's how our brains are wired.
> We categorise and classify instinctively. Sigh.
Heh...I recall having a discussion around 3-4 years ago with someone who
wanted me to memorize something like nine different genders (including
different ones for pre and post op transpeople, which struck me
as..erm..interesting, being of the mind that asking someone if they are
pre or post op is about akin to asking someone what their penis size
is...except that I don't mind if someone volunteers pre/post op status,
whereas I *really* don't want to know what your penis size is :) ) and
use them and it just all struck me as too complicated..I can't even keep
my *own* gender straight (and that was a lot more true back then, before I
had nathaniel and had *you are female* shoved in my face for nine months
:) )..fortunetly I haven't heard that idea since (I think maybe it was her
own, though she was acting as if it were a common thing, which was part of
what confused me)
to me, ideally, we'd chill out on the girl/boy issue and treat everyone
like individuals, but as of now, that's not really happening and I don't
know how to get from here to there..I was thinking on the plane about how
the human ability to generalize (i.e. to see a class of 'tree' as opposed
/this object with leaves/ and /that object with leaves/) gives us so much,
but screws us over with people
<shrug> this was going somewhere, but I forget where..oops
Vinnie
--
Reality is a formality, an agreed upon set of lies -- J.D. Catron
Obligatory pathetic website at http://george.he.net/~drachen
************
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.linuxchix.org
