Rebecca R. Helm tweeted this insightful thread about the complications of classifying biological sex and how it’s not as black and white as many random people on the internet claim. Of course the people making these claims don’t have any actual scientific knowledge on the subject. They are operating on a Kindergarten Cop, “Boys have a penis, and girls have a vagina” level. But as anyone who’s read about the subject beyond a grade school level knows, it’s just not that simple:
Source: Rebecca R. Helm
(via: Geek Girls)
Regardless of your understanding of the science, or your personal beliefs, the biggest takeaway here should be that last line: Biology is complicated. Kindness and respect don’t have to be.
[Please keep transphobia and hate speech out of the comment section below.]
Interesting. What I’ve thought for a long time-there’s a range. It seems like it’s getting a lot fuzzier though.
I don’t need several hundred words to show the flip side of that coin. Just one movie quote.
“Boys have a penis, and girls have a vagina.” ~ Joseph, “Kindergarten Cop”, 1990
Haha, you’re literally the guy from the article intro: “..it’s not as black and white as many random people on the internet claim. Of course the people making these claims don’t have any actual scientific knowledge on the subject. They are operating on a Kindergarten Cop, “Boys have a penis, and girls have a vagina” level. But as anyone who’s read about the subject beyond a grade school level knows, it’s just not that simple…”
Do you question math as well? Over the course of your life, you first learn that only positive numbers exist. Then, you can suddenly have negative numbers! Then, fractions??? Or numbers that are not even fractions, like square root of 3? Wth are these? But at least that’s all, because everyone tells you that a square root of a negative number is impossible, right? WRONG, there’s i, the sqrt(-1)! Or letters in math???
But with math you don’t go back and say “well in kindergarten they only told me I can add and subtract!”, so why are you so adamant on kindergarten biology being fully, absolutely correct?
You could fuck up someone’s whole world by doing this to any other corporeal thing, like “That’s a car” … “How do you know? Define a car. Oh, cars drive down the road? This one isn’t, *opens hood* oops, this one can’t, so it’s not a car”…
Of course it’s a car, it’s just malfunctioning, damaged, defective, altered, or retired.
There will ALWAYS be outliers for any definition. Hell, the english language is SATURATED with them, in its rules… So the flaw is more likely than not in the ABILITY to describe these things.
When people slippery-sloped gender to its ultimate conclusion “There are really just 8 billion genders” the light went on: “Oh! You mean to use the word PERSONALITIES!”.
Well, whatever, There are two of them. The rightful hoodie owner and the hoodie stealer. I will not be taking questions on that.