What's so interesting about that?

[Nathan Karr]

To avoid derailing what is presently a perfect thread, I'm making this one.

Also, as someone who just finished a sociology class on sex and gender,

I believe in the differences between good and bad, male and female, and objective truth in general; it is disbelief in these sorts of things that is the drive behind postmodernism.

is an interesting statement when discussing objective truth.

Male and female are objective definitions. Some creatures can be both, or neither, or switch from one to the other. (So far as I know, all humans throughout history have been one or the other.)

male/māl/
Noun: A male person, plant, or animal.
Adjective: Of or denoting the sex that produces small, typically motile gametes, esp. spermatozoa, with which a female may be fertilized or inseminated to produce

fe·male/ˈfēmāl/
Adjective: Of or denoting the sex that can bear offspring or produce eggs, distinguished biologically by the production of gametes (ova) that can be fertilized by male gametes.
Noun: A female person, animal, or plant.

Now, I don't know what kind of sociology class you took, but I have a seriously hard time thinking that political correctness would have tainted it to the point that it would defy the above definitions.


A separate issue is gender, which is for words. In English, pronouns of a masculine gender are used for men or persons whose sexes are indeterminate; female pronouns are used for women; plural pronouns are used for groups, be they of singular or mixed sex.


Gender roles and gender identity are yet another pair of issues. While I think they have even less to do with what I was talking about, they might be closer to what other people inferred from my writing.

Gender roles are the simple idea that men should do one kind of thing (for instance, going to work) and women should do a different kind of thing (such as looking after the house). I don't mind them as much as some, but I think any idea of trying to enforce them or expect them is a little silly.

Gender identity is when someone whose objective physical sex does not match up with his percieved self-identity. Go ahead and call me all sorts of things, but I don't believe in humoring such people by using the wrong pronouns to describe them.

[Spoonweaver]

There are people who are born with both male and female sex organs. In some rare cases, both are functional.

[Baconlabs]

Quiero ir al tienda.

[Nathan Karr]

There are people who are born with both male and female sex organs. In some rare cases, both are functional.

Neat. Can you cite a source on this?

I'd leave it up to an individual who was such a case to choose which gender of pronouns to be referred to with, since a set of female reproductive organs would qualify him to claim female pronouns.

[The Wobbler]

What about people with both pouches AND bone sword growin out they back

[Nathan Karr]

Those are secondary characteristics, like boobs or beards on humans. Doesn't make you male or female, just gives a wrong indication.

[raekuul]

There are people who are born with both male and female sex organs. In some rare cases, both are functional.

Extremely rare, as having both tends to mean sterility.

[The Wobbler]

Those are secondary characteristics, like boobs or beards on humans. Doesn't make you male or female, just gives a wrong indication.

Do any of your pink monster people secretly have both?

[Bob the Hamster]

Biologically, gender is a spectrum. Most people do indeed cluster around the two extremes, but it is totally possible for people to be anywhere in the middle. The <a href="https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... ntersex</a> article gives a lot of information. Depending on what criteria you use, Intersex people make up between 0.1 % of the population on the low end of the estimate, and 1.7% of the population on the high end.

In badly oversimplified terms, gender is caused by hormones during development (mostly before birth, but also after birth too, and even very slightly into adulthood.) The main factor in controlling the hormones that direct gender development is genetics-- the XX chromosomes for women and XY for men, but that is not the only factor that can affect gender hormones. Environment, and diet are the other big(ish) ones I can think of.

There are also people who have other combinations of gender chromosomes, the most notable of which being XXY chromosomes, also known as "Klinefelter syndrome". Because the Y chromosome is dominant, these people are usually male, and when they are not infertile they would be fertile as males.

Gender identity as a social construct is where things get (in my opinion) even more interesting. But gender as a social construct also gets more subjective, so it gets harder to talk about it in a scientific way.

This subject is easier to talk about in human terms, and in narrative terms, so I draw your attention to the story of <a href="https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... ya">Caster Semenya</a>. She won a gold medal in the 2008 olympics, but some people criticized her because she looked mannish, and her female characteristics were not pronounced. The Olympic comitte raised a lot of controversy by taking away her gold medal and making her take "gender tests" to try and prove that she was genetically female.

I remember her story because my gilfriend at the time, Genny was furious about it. It made her so angry that someone who had been raised her whole life as a girl could be told that now she had to prove that she was. When I thought about it, it made me angry too. What if somebody asked me to prove my gender? My beard isn't good enough. Some women can grow beards (and with extra testosterone, I think almost any woman could grow a beard) Would I have to drop my pants to prove I was a man? How humiliating would that be? Who should ever have the right to force somebody to do that?

[Nathan Karr]

Those are secondary characteristics, like boobs or beards on humans. Doesn't make you male or female, just gives a wrong indication.

Do any of your pink monster people secretly have both?

In the current generation, no. And so far Rene is the only one listed as pink (I should probably fix that, though, since he's special enough for story purposes that he doesn't need to be uniquely colored).

[Baconlabs]

<a href="https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... ya">Caster Semenya</a>

Hoo, wow. That's really something. I guess she shaved her head for the 2009 Olympics and that's what confused the Olympic community, because I can't see anything else about her that could have been mistaken for male.
That's a little silly and a lot of wrong.

[Nathan Karr]

Yeah, she looks a bit more feminine than quite a few of the lady athletes I've seen.

[Skullduggery Studios]

Wow, what an interesting thread. Just to screw things up a little more, if gender is so definite, then what about transgender people? Are they defined as whatever gender they were before? Are they defined by whatever their body cells say their gender is? Are they not either gender? Completely genderless? Is that even possible?

[raekuul]

(Using El Goonish Shive as an example)

Say you have a guy who can change his gender at will. When he is morphed, do you continue to use his male pronouns since that's what he prefers, or do you use the female pronouns to fit the body that she's currently using?

[Bob the Hamster]

Some languages do not uses gender-specific pronouns, and some languages make gendered pronouns optional.

In English, there is no third-person singular personal genderless pronoun... "it" can't be used for people, and "they/them" has no singular form. But not all languages have this gap in their vocabulary.