Oh Noez! What about Teh Menz? -Patriarchy isn't a dude's friend EITHER!

[The Johnny]

And its opposite isnt demeaning, it being "monogender".

I really like the idea of "bigender", i mean, who actually acts in ways only characteristic of one gender anyways?

[Faust]

WAIT so... "cis" and "trans" are both in reference to "gender role"...

ETA: like, i think the idea of "bigender" is a step forward; although it has a baseline assuming what roles are for each gender, it acknowledges the possibility of acting different roles in different situations!

Yes it should.
Also I like the idea of using bigender, but only if you also use littleender because the pointless classification reminds me of the war from Gulliver's travels over which end of the boiled egg should be cracked.

[tyrannosaurus vex]

This thread has inspired me to become an Enlightened Male.

To that end, I have decided to promote my wife to "Director of Kitchen Operations."

Now, be proud of me.

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

Vex, this thread makes me want to get a string of pearls and wear them when I vaccuum so I can be a rebel like June Cleaver.

[tyrannosaurus vex]

Vex, this thread makes me want to get a string of pearls and wear them when I vaccuum so I can be a rebel like June Cleaver.

PEARL NECKLACE HUH?

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

Vex, this thread makes me want to get a string of pearls and wear them when I vaccuum so I can be a rebel like June Cleaver.

PEARL NECKLACE HUH?

That's why Ward never punished the kids. 

[Juana]

So, we need to invent a new catalog of swear words. Resolved, then.

We still have

Shit
Fuck
Damn
Cocksucker
Motherfucker (assuming strapons are available)

Now, what about using terms in a positive light?  As in "This new reverse F wrench design is the tits"?

This whole line of conversation makes me so motherfucking angry that I'm not even going to read the rest of the thread (posting from page 20 here). Anybody who expects me to stop using any swear word or obscene phrase for any reason can just get bent in half at the asshole.

Not like they're getting bent over in half so that their asshole ends up folding IN on itself. Oh no.

The OTHER way.

I see why Roger got mad, if this was left unresponded to.
Does this mean you casually throw around "fag" and the N-word, then?

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

So, we need to invent a new catalog of swear words. Resolved, then.

We still have

Shit
Fuck
Damn
Cocksucker
Motherfucker (assuming strapons are available)

Now, what about using terms in a positive light?  As in "This new reverse F wrench design is the tits"?

This whole line of conversation makes me so motherfucking angry that I'm not even going to read the rest of the thread (posting from page 20 here). Anybody who expects me to stop using any swear word or obscene phrase for any reason can just get bent in half at the asshole.

Not like they're getting bent over in half so that their asshole ends up folding IN on itself. Oh no.

The OTHER way.

I see why Roger got mad, if this was left unresponded to.
Does this mean you casually throw around "fag" and the N-word, then?

I specifically didn't respond because it was a non-sequitur considering the rest of the conversation. It's someone who came late and picked up one partially-heard part of the conversation, and it's not my job to fill them in.

Knock yourself out, though. Better yet, tell him to read the rest of the thread so he actually understands the disussion.

[Juana]

Which will be shouting into the wind, let's be real.

I still need to catch up on the rest of this, though.

[Juana]

WAIT so... "cis" and "trans" are both in reference to "gender role"...

This entails no deconstruction of gender roles?

Shouldnt trans and cis both be thrown out the window?

ETA: like, i think the idea of "bigender" is a step forward; although it has a baseline assuming what roles are for each gender, it acknowledges the possibility of acting different roles in different situations!

They have nothing to do with gender roles. Gender roles are "women cook and clean, and men bring home the bacon and mow the lawn." "Cis" and "trans*" are over-arching umbrella terms regarding gender identity. They have nothing to do with societal expectations of a gender or how you live them out.
Also, "bigender" is a gender. They're people who identify as both a man and a woman at the same time (and there are more than two genders, Joh!).

[Juana]

Took me a bit long to catch up...

I just have a couple of thoughts I thought I'd share.

First, on the OP subject, there's one point I forgot to mention that I've thought about a lot and talked about with people. Basically, patriarchal patterns of courting dictate that the man typically make the first move. Aside from the fact that this leads many men to be overly aggressive in their advances, it also seriously bites for Nice Guys, i.e. men who aren't predisposed to advance courting. You're expected to do something you find difficult or odd and women will not typically actively advance on you if you don't. The whole way the two normative genders relate with one another - within a position of relative privilege compared to other gender/sexual identities – is totally out of whack and it sucks for everyone.

Second, even after all the shit here, I'm still glad I learned the "cis" terminology. It will allow me to refer to non-trans people as a group of our own rather than have to clumsily take trans people out of the equation. Sometimes a dichotomy is something you want to use in a discussion, and using it does not in any way preclude being aware of the more fine-grained reality. And better a lofty, detached-sounding intellectual word than one already laden with cultural connotations. What matters is how a word affects people, and most people haven't even heard this "cis" thing used once so it's not likely to offend or oppress people.

Third, I talked with a friend earlier about this a little, and I think an important distinction has been missing in some of this thread. I seem to recall someone already more or less pointing it out, might have been Rat. But anyway, the distinction is between culturally-conditioned self-oppression and interpersonal oppression. I.e., limiting/harming yourself because of ingrained cultural norms you are programmed to stick to, and limiting/harming others because of said programs.
I like where Roger was going with privilege only meaning you haven't been harmed in this and that way just yet. But isn't "privilege" as used in this context simply the difference between groups that are interpersonally oppressed more and groups that are interpersonally oppressed less? All groups self-oppress, some groups just also have other people oppressing them more. Privilege is about getting a bit less shit from others than some other group does.

Ultimately, it seems to me that self-oppression and interpersonal oppression are two sides of the same coin, and this is maybe something that goes right back to the heart of this thread's original topic. If you're busy stuffing your own life into a neat standard-issue box, you're likelier to expect others to do the same, and hence likely to oppress them for not acting like a standard-issue box resident. You can't truly stop being part of oppressing others while you are busy oppressing yourself in that same way. By following your White Man programming, you are both limiting yourself to a tiny box and taking part in policing literally all other people (your White Man peers included) to keep them in some box as well. If you see a box as the space in which life takes place, you're pretty likely to apply that principle to other individuals and to yourself at the same time.

Am I making sense here?

I gotcha! Excellent points.

[Placid Dingo]

So, we need to invent a new catalog of swear words. Resolved, then.

We still have

Shit
Fuck
Damn
Cocksucker
Motherfucker (assuming strapons are available)

Now, what about using terms in a positive light?  As in "This new reverse F wrench design is the tits"?

This whole line of conversation makes me so motherfucking angry that I'm not even going to read the rest of the thread (posting from page 20 here). Anybody who expects me to stop using any swear word or obscene phrase for any reason can just get bent in half at the asshole.

Not like they're getting bent over in half so that their asshole ends up folding IN on itself. Oh no.

The OTHER way.

I see why Roger got mad, if this was left unresponded to.
Does this mean you casually throw around "fag" and the N-word, then?

Glass houses here, you have 'retard' in your signature.

I know that that's been dismissed before on this site as 'something something, it doesn't actually mean intellectual impairment on the internet', but that kind of feels like we've going back to 'nigger means lazy ass motherfucker, not black person'.

I generally don't care too much about profanity, but I do watch myself when I know terms will upset people. But it seems to me we can't have a moral imperative to stop using some terms with connotations of prejudice, while embracing others.

[Juana]

Uh, Roger wrote the sig for me, actually. I dithered on whether to use it because of that (seemed kind of rude not to, in the end, so I went with it). But "retard" is a word I've used in the past but have pretty much stopped for that reason.

[Sita]

WAIT so... "cis" and "trans" are both in reference to "gender role"...

This entails no deconstruction of gender roles?

Shouldnt trans and cis both be thrown out the window?

ETA: like, i think the idea of "bigender" is a step forward; although it has a baseline assuming what roles are for each gender, it acknowledges the possibility of acting different roles in different situations!

They have nothing to do with gender roles. Gender roles are "women cook and clean, and men bring home the bacon and mow the lawn." "Cis" and "trans*" are over-arching umbrella terms regarding gender identity. They have nothing to do with societal expectations of a gender or how you live them out.
Also, "bigender" is a gender. They're people who identify as both a man and a woman at the same time (and there are more than two genders, Joh!).

I'm still not understanding this whole gender identity thing (when it doesn't pertain to if you have a penis or not).
If you don't come to the conclusion based on roles and what society expects of male or female, then how is it you feel like one or the other? How do you know that this feeling isn't just human?

[Juana]

Sex is what style of junk nature handed you at birth. Gender is what's between your ears. (Modern) Western culture only identifies "man" and "woman", which are explicitly associated with what junk you got (even though there are people who don't identify within those boundaries in our culture). Parts of Southeast Asia have "man", "woman", and "hijra". There's a culture somewhere with twenty-six distinct gender identities.

That's a more complex answer than PD seems to be interested in discussing (because oh god, SOCIETAL CRITIQUING! WHAT DO?), but I'll answer the best I can. Some people argue it's a societal construct (and indeed, the roles a gender is expected to fill *are* a construct) in that they're identities totally made by the society in which they live. I personally disagree and think that in some ways it's just how you feel. I don't feel like a woman (feminine pronouns are jarring) even though that's the construct I was raised to be. I don't feel like a man (although it's probably closer to how I feel right now).
Also, gender is part of the way you feel human.