h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

>>Much of these latest exchanges just seem to go along with what I have been saying

Perhaps the problem is either:

- You don't say it very succinctly and blunder into a lot of trouble.

- Your thinking is so disordered that you're not sure what you've said.

Either way - first you mentioned family breakdown in the context of a same sex couple (or possibly one in which one is transgendered - you don't seem to even know) in the same breath as family breakdown. Then when you were called on this, you said (to precis) 'Ah, but their daughter had problems. So it just goes to show!'). You should take responsibility for the fact that you are saying - whether you intend to or not (who knows with you?) that gay families are a problem.

Your 'Society's to blame' get out doesn't wash, I'm afraid. You're using your one, anecdotal experience of a family you don't seem to know that well to make bizarre inferences. These inferences lead you to perpetuate nonsense about gay families.

You're part of the problem, not the solution.

Hoovoloo

In your example "green" - to my mind- is not a quality but the name that we give to a colour therefore a noun: though not a "proper noun".

But I am grateful for any guidance in the relevant contemporary vocabulary now that Homosexual seems to be outmoded.

Perhaps when I have seen people on TV on things like Gay Pride marches who have seemed to use gay as a noun, the protocol is rather like black people being able to use the n word about themselves and others- but no-one else.

Cass

Gay Pride is using 'Gay' an adjective. Not really helping your case, there.

B

"Perhaps when I have seen people on TV on things like Gay Pride marches who have seemed to use gay as a noun,"

"We're the here, we're the queer, get the used to it?" - Don't remember that one...

Edward the Bonobo

Well you are probably correct in implying that I am wasting my time trying to communicate the body of understanding that it has taken me half a century plus to acquire and which other people have no reasonable cause to read properly..

But.. I only mentioned the couple in our locality (a) to show an example of at least some limited actual experience of what appeared initially to be a gay partnership- potential marriage, and (b) to explore the possibility of whether the long term ambition in this case was to be a gay couple- till death do us part, or to become a conventional male-female married couple.

And where have I said about girls "having problems".. The Mexican roots of the girl who could "go Aztec" on us was, like the global roots that so many of my pupils could bring into my classroom, a definite asset that helped everyone to a wider understanding of the world. As I knew on that Auschwitz day, many of the other pupils had been fortunate enough to have been sheltered and protected from the horrors of this world, and I would have been in deep trouble had I really done as she requested. "Inappropriate behaviour" in such a school as this one. Not one of my Front Line comprehensives.

But- on a day when the new commonwealth immigration figures have been released for last year- it is appropriate to observe that most of these people have chosen to leave aspects of their previous world behind and make the best of what the UK has to offer. This is what I hoped my wife would do when she came here from France, and our daughter-in-law from Croatia, from where she "escaped" during the break up of Yugoslavia.. "Black Dog Days" can haunt many people and we need techniques, or friends, or teachers, to help us to escape from them.

Cass

I think you should take some responsibility for the confusion your studied lack of clarity sows, rather than blaming others for not being able to keep up with you.

"In your example "green" - to my mind- is not a quality but the name that we give to a colour therefore a noun"

Cass: not a facetious question: is English your first language? It doesn't seem like it. Most primary school children in England could explain the difference between a verb, a noun and an adjective.

ALL words are "the name we give" to concepts. "Kill" is the name we give to the act of depriving something of life. Do you understand, however, that "kill" is a verb, not a noun?

Similarly, "green" is the name we give to a colour... and colour is a quality of something, a description of it, not the thing itself. Hence "green" is usually an adjective.

Of course, at times, "green" can be a noun. As in "They hae slain the Earl O' Moray, and laid him on the green." As in, on that wide open space in the middle of the village, that specific place, that THING that's being indicated. Why is that thing called "the green"? Well, because it's, er... green. The adjective. You see the difference? One requires an article, the other does not.

For myself, I'm satisfied that you're not being deliberately offensive. Rather, your grasp of the language you're trying to communicate in is so poor that your offensiveness is inadvertent.

Ed:
<<<My point is why variance from the polar, heteronormative male/female categories should be regarded as, to use papal language, 'objectively disordered'.<<<




I´m not a biologist, so maybe the words “genetic mistake” aren´t correct.
But it certainly is an issue that implies different medical domains. It´s perceived as a problem. A person feels as a man or as a woman, his or her sexual identity is in their mind, they feel so since they are children , and also feel that their body does not reflect their feelings. That´s what I call a mistake. Then they resort to a surgical op called “genital reasignation” to fix that problem, let´s call it problem instead of mistake if you want.

A different thing is bisexual and homosexual people. They don´t want to change anything. Their bodies is not a problem nor their sexuality (except for those inside the closet, or those who suffer the despise of others)
Hope it´s clear now .

Casseroleon

Your assertion that the Polish soldier was "actually" a woman suggests that you define gender by external genitalia.

Incidentally, the following words are not synonyms: Intersex, Hermaphrodite, Transvestite, Transsexual and Transgendered.

Girl Three.

'K.

And there's an ongoing debate amongst transgendered people as to whether the issue is (as per Cass) one of having to be socialised into one category or the other with no options in between.

Like the way all women are meant to look like some fantasy idea of femininity, only writ large.

Reading Rising Tides comments and then reflecting back on "genetics", it's definitely a complicated issue and one cannot really "generalise". One needs to talk about "classes" of situations.

About two and a half years ago the womens 800 m world champion, Caster Semenya, was suspended from competing due uncertainties over her sex.

It was and still is often reported that there were "gender issues" but I suppose that would be erroneous since her mother and Caster Semenya always considered herself to be female. There was much discussion over this matter on the athletics board of 606, and a medical specialist in this field actually contributed to that discussion. I learnt quite a lot about the "intersex" condition and what is means to be attributed as a he or she.

Basically it seems that Semenya is genetically a male but biologically a female. Some form of "genetic defect" caused a failure of her body cells to respond to the chemical signals that would have caused her to differentiate properly into a male during development.

Anyway I think one needs to take care when generalising on this matter.

When I say biologically a female, I think I meant more female than male biologically. There is to some extent a biological continuum, between "male" and "female" when one takes into consideration the intersex condition.

All this biology is fascinating enough, but it's somewhat removed from the topic (topic drift? Here? whoda thunk it?) which was about people who are quite happy as men/women, they just want to marry someone of the same gender. Bringing actual gender identification issues into it is just muddying the waters unneccessarily. (Three double letters in one word... mmm tasty.) Isn't it?

"There is to some extent a biological continuum"

Hmm.

In the words of Ben Goldacre: "I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that." True fact.

But... there's a biological continuum between alive and dead. And there's a biological continuum between pregnant and not-pregnant.

It's worth not getting too politically correct about it and overstating the continuumity of it. I'm male. My g/f is female. On that continuum, we are at the polar opposite ends and there's a big, big gap between with really statistically fairly few people in it. That's not to minimise their experience, obviously, and I'm the last person who would proselytise an overly simplistic view of this bit of biology (or ANY bit of biology, or any bit of anything, come to that).

But you're kidding yourself and few other people if you don't acknowledge that as far as most people are concerned, blokes are blokes and chicks are chicks, and if you make it any more complicated than that you confuse and frighten them.

It is! It doesn't advance the argument to talk about gay men and women as a third (and fourth) sex. All were talking about is an aesthetic preference - and one that can change after a few drinks at that.

(that last in response to 153)

Cass,

<<I suppose my image of Spain is partly shaped by Dali's graphic painting of the Civil War, Picasso's Guernica, and Lorca's (?) "Blood Wedding".<<

A shame, really.

I advise you to visit Spain, or if you know a bit of Spanish, to read/watch/listen for instance, the official web of RTVE (the public radio and tv) Lots of programmes that can give you an idea of how much Spain has changed since the first half of the last century.

The change is also very remarkable if you take the year 1975, when the dictator Franco died after 40 terrible years of criminal fascism.
There are a lot of positive things about Spain , lots of achievements in all fields.

On the other hand, I´m not sure what you have understood about children of heterosexual Spanish families. In Spain and everywhere there are children who suffer abuses, there´s nothing particular about Spain.
My point was that the happiness of a child doesn´t depend on the sexuality of their parents.

Be fair, Maria. He might as well base his assumptions about Spain on a play and a couple of paintings. After all, he bases his opinions on the children of gay couples on one family he vaquely knows and a couple of TV travelogues.

"if you know a bit of Spanish"#

Be fair Maria. You're talking to someone who doesn't know the difference between a noun and an adjective, even AFTER they've been told they've got it wrong.