Thread: President of the US of A

Originally Posted by gugi

As far as I know science and biology arn't quite clear cut on sex/gender as it is on human/nonhuman, though the later is also not simple black and white either.

To start with the easier one - if I remember my high school biology correctly the definition of species is based on the ability of producing fertile offspring. By this definition recent research would suggest that neanderthals are humans because they had sex with humans and passed their genes. On the reverse is speciation - not clear cut either.

As far as the biology of sex/gender goes, when our knowledge and understanding was more limited it was a matter of external genitalia. And hermaphrodites were unexplained phenomena and in many cases treated as animals.
Now, that we know about genes, DNA, and chromosomes things are not simpler - you have people with extra chromosomes, or with genitals that don't correspond to their chromosome set. All this is to say that the neat male/female classification isn't as simple as people want or have wanted it to be.
And in this context you can add psychology - some people identify as the opposite sex. The simplest solution to this, of course, is to treat them as sick/crazy/perverted/etc. and that certainly is the traditional approach. But the society has changed and plenty of people do not find this approach satisfactory anymore.

But, as I said, this seems to me yet another issue that is being blown out of proportion for purely political purposes. If gay wedding cakes had proven more effective I think that would've been the big social controversy instead. And if Obama thought a fight over it were more damaging to the left than to the right he'd have left it to get resolved the same way as the gay wedding cakes.

We can, and should, accommodate people with differences, just as long as those accommodations don't interfere with people who are different in other ways.

Maybe the gay cake thing was blown out of proportion, with culpability on both sides. And if you identify with a gender different, from that of which you were born, fine. But don't force others to go along with it, especially if they don't want to.

Maybe if everyone individually were a little more tolerant, the political opportunists would have less divisive fodder to dump on us.