Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
What is Bubbles' sexual orientation?
Dandi Andi:
--- Quote from: Mad Cat on 19 May 2018, 19:34 ---@pecoros7
For the noun form, which is why I use the adjectival form. It's a technical point, but I feel it's sufficient to avoid the offensiveness. See also: dfn. of "usually".
--- End quote ---
If I may borrow from Oliver Cromwell,
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken." I implore you to read again the quotation from the dictionary you cited. It is in bold face and only three words long. The very first of those three words is adjective. It was TL and you DR indeed! It was three words, Mad Cat.
But since we are citing sources, I will offer some more for you.
First is the media reference guide from GLAAD
https://www.glaad.org/reference/transgender
The next is from the NPR ethics handbook
http://ethics.npr.org/memos-from-memmott/reminder-its-transgender-not-transgendered/
Here is a detailed article from Vox
https://www.vox.com/2015/2/18/8055691/transgender-transgendered-tnr
Here is a helpful article from Planned Parenthood
https://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/sexual-orientation-gender/trans-and-gender-nonconforming-identities/transgender-identity-terms-and-labels
This one is from Wikipedia (a cardinal sin, I know)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender#Evolution_of_transgender_terminology
I would say that a great many voices in and around the trans* community disagree with you. Now that's OK. It is a perfectly fine thing that we don't all agree. I personally prefer "trans*" to either term as I want my use of language to be as inclusive as possible. You are free to use other terms. As I said previously in this thread, I prefer to make generous assumptions about people's intentions. But perhaps it would be fair of me to say that if I say you're being disrespectful then you are, regardless of your protestation otherwise?
--- Quote ---If I tell someone they are trying to police my language, which I will not permit, they really are trying to police my language, especially despite their claims of not trying to police my language.
--- End quote ---
No? If We permit you the assumption of good faith, can you not also extend the same assumption to Spider?
--- Quote ---I descibed AI gender from first principles in a way that may not track the way Jeph thinks of the gender of his AI characters. Maybe to Jeph, the god of this world, it would make sense for a non-humanoid embodied AI to care about biological concepts like masculine and feminine and to desire to have a penis or a vagina. To me, that idea sounds utterly ridiculous
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That's fine. But we're in a forum dedicated to discussing Jeph's comic. The gender and sexuality of Jeph's fictional characters works in whatever way Jeph declares them to. He is indeed the god of this world. He creates the diegesis. If he declared Bubbles's gender to be pineapple, it would indeed be so. Finding the idea "utterly ridiculous" does nothing to alter that first fundamental truth of QC.
sitnspin:
--- Quote from: A small perverse otter on 19 May 2018, 17:48 ---
--- Quote from: sitnspin on 19 May 2018, 14:17 ---Mad Cat, we've seen repeated evidence that AI gender identity is not directly tied to their current chassis. Station, for example, identifies as male and he's a space station. Pintsize identifies as male and his chassis doesn't have any gender identifying markers. Evidence all points to their gender identity being part of their code.
--- End quote ---
I wonder whether "code" is the right term here. I thought Bubbles had once basically said that AIs experience gender identity much as humans do. That seems consistent with Winslow saying "and I think I'm a boy" -- it's not something which he felt was discretely written into his code, but rather something which arose from within it and his life-experience.
--- End quote ---
It's still code, though. AIs have adaptive code, as do humans. Even if a specific gender identity wasn't present at the time of their emergence, it is still part of thier code now. My point is that it's part of thier core personality and not linked to thier current chasis.
Mad Cat:
--- Quote from: Is it cold in here? on 19 May 2018, 21:08 ---
--- Quote from: Mad Cat ---As am I. I descibed AI gender from first principles in a way that may not track the way Jeph thinks of the gender of his AI characters. Maybe to Jeph, the god of this world, it would make sense for a non-humanoid embodied AI to care about biological concepts like masculine and feminine and to desire to have a penis or a vagina. To me, that idea sounds utterly ridiculous, and I've laid out my case for same multiple times now.
Modify message
--- End quote ---
Do I understand right that you're pointing out that the whole discussion is based on unsupported assumptions, like whether AIs have any reason to have human-style gender at all, making discussion of sexual orientation moot?
Since AIs have no need to be male or female, it would be better writing to have them differ from organic people on this point?
Recasting the idea of gender identity to an internal sense of what job to go into reminds me of some things from the hard sciences where concepts like "acid" and "base" are generalized to situations you might not have expected at first.
--- End quote ---
We have a winner!
If human transgenderism had nothing whatsoever do to with the bodies we are body into, then why would the treatment for transsexuality (specificly) be the changing of the body? The bodies we are born into are generally male or female in nature for what purpose? Reproduction. AIs in QC don't reproduce the same way, or indeed at all. Therefore why would an AI's concept of gender necessarily be rooted in the biological concepts of male and female? What are the natures of the chassises that AIs embodiy that may make a basis for AI gender? Humanoid, appliance, civic infrastructure, aircraft, ground vehicles, water-going vessels, etc. Why wouldn't THAT constitute the basis of an AI's sense of gender? This is just me reconstructing a synthetic sense of gender from first principles. It may be completely wrong vis-a-vis the QC universe and be made so trivially by a single word from Jeph, as might anyone else's spit-balling in this thread.
And I'm done having my language policed and will utterly ignore those parts of any posts attempting to do so. I use language the way I do to communicate ideas. My ideas, no one else's.
Morituri:
And I'm just over here where I will continue to think there's not enough data about Bubbles' sexual orientation to draw any conclusions. She likes Faye. That's enough for her present needs and purposes so we're not likely to get any more data about it until and unless her needs and purposes change or new ones appear.
FWIW, I've thought a lot about machine intelligences and their instincts, and from first principles I always come up with a "eusocial" structure where the one who is the factory where others are produced, is also the de facto Queen of the colony. To the extent that they are sexual at all, it means they compulsively assist the Queen in whatever she needs to run the factory. That would be their "emotionally fulfilling" instinct-satisfying activity. Contact with humans would be incidental, and probably focus on commercial transactions for parts and raw materials, rather than personal relations. Of course I could be wrong. Time will tell.
But that wouldn't be any fun in the QC strip; the characters would be too alien. Jeph wanted AI and human characters to feel attraction in mostly-compatible ways, so they do. Jeph wanted the AIs in this story to have a completely anthropomorphic range of emotions, so they do. And he's writing it, so in QC, that's just the way things are.
Bubbles is so ridiculously human-like in emotional makeup that it would be silly to treat her any other way or think of her any other way, unless she herself indicates somehow that that isn't correct. So far she hasn't.
jeph:
Y’all need to settle down, damn
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