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Whatever, Let's Have A Goddamn Blog Thread, But Try And Keep It Reasonable

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Slick:
Linked to from that article: A man did not get pregnant.
I have a friend actually presently undergoing hormone therapy in preparation for becoming a man. Sometimes I stumble on how to refer to him/her but generally I am pretty thrilled for her (I still think of her as a her, presumably eventually I will think of her as a him). If someone identifies with a gender which is not that of their birth, that is their business and I don't like the kind of dismissive tone in that article towards sex-changed people, but I agree with the sentiment that it's not really big news that this person is pregnant again.
Still, with nothing but happy congratulations on their family, there are more important things out there and it's not nearly as big a deal is the headline makes it sound.

tania:
there is a difference between sex and gender (sex referring to biological characteristics and gender referring to social constructs) and while i do agree with the point the article's making, the dismissive tone does bug me as well because there is that difference that most people don't really seem to acknowledge. biologically, this person is technically female but that doesn't mean the fact that he now identifies as male needs to be trivialized to the degree that this article did. regardless of his biological sex, the fact that he identifies as male and also had a child is frankly an absolutely remarkable societal achievement towards promoting acceptance of transgender individuals.

a friend of mine is also in the process of transitioning from female to male and initially he got heaps of comments from my friends along the lines of "well, you keep calling him a guy but he's not REALLY a guy, he's still got girl parts." in this case i ignored it and politely explained the situation cos i know most of them has never dealt with a transgendered person before. in terms of sex, he's female but in terms of gender he's male. since gender is the social construct, it's what everyone should be referring to him as. there are lots of other ways in which this gets all wishy washy and more black and white than it really should be, like how some states will not change your legal sex if you are transgender unless you get the genital surgery, even though there are quite a lot of trans individuals who really don't want genital surgery for their own reasons. i think it's neat to think about gender identity in terms of multiple dimensions instead of just the biological one.

Slick:
I've had sex vs. gender explained to me a few times but usually forget the difference. I think of 'her' as a 'her' because when I met 'her' she was a 'her'. She's been projecting male for a good long while now.
The whole business of hims and hers throws me for a loop because I usually just want a simple factual statement that doesn't have to deal with the nuances and subtleties of gender and sex. Usually I'll just use their name instead of a him or her.

Side note: While reading on sex reassignment surgery, I crossed Billy Tipton's page. I found the first two paragraphs (all I've read) hilarious because clearly the author(s) could not decide to use a him or a her and consequently 'Tipton' appears way too many times.

öde:
A widely accepted gender-neutral pronoun would be super.

tania:
experience tells me that the best thing you can probably do in any scenario with someone who's transitioning is to just ask them what they'd like to be referred to as. kind of awkward but probably a lot more polite than just making your own assumption, which might be a lot more upsetting depending on how sensitive a topic it is for them.

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