#I’m like Lloyd but if he was bigender | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

elsskovv · 4 years

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i'm currently reading 'Loveless by Alice Oseman' and I have a LOT of issues with it. By the way, this isn't hate at all, I love everything else Alice has written. It's just that all I've seen is praise for this book and I completely disagree.

It implies that if you have not had your first kiss and are still a virgin by the age of 18 (VERY YOUNG) then you are most likely asexual. Which is very wrong. Many people will not have a first kiss until they're much older and it does not mean you're asexual. This implication may lead her young readers to question things they don't need to question.

Implies that feeling nervous about sexual things (and even just kissing) makes you asexual. This is especially wrong, in my opinion, because Alice has a very young readership and knows this, meaning most of her readers are likely to feel nervous about these things, asexual or not.

The use of "latinx". Many real latinos find this word offensive. It's english-ification of the spanish language and if people understood spanish, they would know that latino already is gender-neutral. There doesn't need to be a bordeline english word, invented by english-speakers.

Teaching your young readers that thinking about certain things while masturbating makes them asexual. For example, the chapter 'Wank Fantasy' very clearly implies that you are probably asexual if you do not think about yourself while masturbating. Are you kidding me???

Many reviews on goodreads from asexual people say that they found this book made them feel even worse and as if something was wrong with them. However, I do appreciate the good impact this book might have on asexuals, I just think the cons it might have on other young people are far worse.

note: i'm now aware how my constant repetition of "young readers" sounds, like i'm doing the whole ~think of the children~ thing. but what i mean, is that this book puts them in a box, saying that they most likely asexual if they haven't done X but do Y, which i've never seen any other lgbt book do.

(These next problems are somewhat controversial and I am totally up to debate them.)

Asexual is not inherantly lgbtq, many lgbtq people agree with this. Being lgbtq means you are attracted to the same sex or are transgender in some way. Asexuals will never face the same kind of oppression (e.g. it's literally not illegal to be asexual ANYWHERE in the world). You can still love and accept asexual people without thinking they are lgbt, so the argument that we should let them in for just that reason, because we're supposed to accept people, is stupid. It's not bigoted to say they're not a part of the community. It would only be bigoted to think they were invalid.

Sunil having a go at the cis gay man for having a different opinion while invalidating his identity as a member of the lgbtq community felt a bit icky to me. Edit: after thinking on this, i've found a better way to word it. Cis gay men are one of the biggest demographics of the lgbt community and using it as an insult was not it. Specifically, even though I personally agreed with lloyd, grouping in his thoughts with ALL cis gay men was very wrong. Lloyd was only saying that bigender (bc it's literally the dumbest gender, come on) and asexual are not part of the lgbt community, which you already know my thoughts on, the only bigoted thing he did was call asexuality a "made up internet gender".

In fact, Sunil (I'm aware everybody loves him, so sorry) reminded so much of the kinds of people who will scream in your face and bully you for thinking the 1000+ genders are ridiculous and I kind of hated him.

#loveless #alice oseman #loveless spoilers #anti loveless #anti alice oseman

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mattandsaraproductions · 7 years

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Philosophy saves the science: some non-stupid comments on that Bill Nye episode

OK, so I know there’s been backlash against Bill Nye for the sexuality episode, and it’s both false (because bigots are lying about that episode twenty-odd years ago) and stupid (as conservatives are) and we want to support science and bow ties. Who doesn’t love science and bow ties?

But! That doesn’t mean there aren’t some problems with the presentation. Because I’m a philosopher, and I can always find implications and assumptions you didn’t notice were there. So: Bill Nye presents us with an abacus, and four different rows: sex, gender, orientation, expression. Across the top we have “M” on the left, and “F” on the right.

Now, to start with, it’s unclear whether the balls on the abacus are meant to represent individuals, or a spectrum. His helper guy shifts one of the balls when Bill mentions asexuality. But we’ve got “M” and “F” up in the corners, so this is just the Kinsey scale, and asexuality simply does not fit on that model. Likewise you can’t give a point on a continuum whose poles are M and F where someone who’s agender would be situated. Do we mark someone who’s bigender twice (you can’t put one data point on there twice though), or in the middle? – if the latter, does that mean they’re half man/half woman? No, because they may refuse that identification as horribly reductive and wrong. But it’s utterly unclear from the way everything is being framed.

Then there’s the fact that Bill is talking about sex (the bottom line on the abacus with poles M and F) while discussing chromosomes. Because he’s right – biologically, there aren’t two sexes. There’s an array of genetic arrangements. However, sex is no more “pure” a scientific category than gender is. After all, we sex-type babies at birth, but we don’t require a genetic test first. So even setting gender aside, we still group people into a binary, based on visual cues, that does not necessarily match a person’s genetic sex as determined by chromosomes. Furthermore, that (social rather than chromosomal) “M or F” sense of sex is a binary, rather than a spectrum. We might talk about chromosomal sex as on a spectrum, as I think Bill intends – only i) it’s not obvious to me that, say, XXY is in-between XX and XY (i.e. that anything else is relevantly “in-between,” except that we fallaciously think of this as a binary already; ii) given that, we need an argument for making XX and XY the poles, and iii) given that we do not sex-identify infants by chromosome, we need a reason as to why XX counts as female and XY as male. That is, we haven't been given a reason to link the two that isn’t spuriously depending on the binary. Hell, the International Olympic Committee makes (or at least did a few years back) women take hormone-blocking drugs if they have testosterone that’s “too high.” And these aren’t all going to be women whose chromosomes aren’t XX. It’s just a biological quirk, and one that the IOC takes issue with in determining who can compete under their restrictive categorization of sex.

And if each ball doesn’t represent an individual after all, but merely the variety of people who exist, then I’m left wondering what this abacus is doing setting up a continuum between M and F. Look, everybody talks about sex and gender and orientation as a continuum or a spectrum. But that’s handwavy, because defining it by those poles does not work. It’s a holdover from the assumption that sex, gender, orientation, and expression were all parts of the same thing, and all a binary. Those assumptions haven’t completely gone away, they’ve just found new life in talk of a spectrum, without defining what that’s supposed to be (absent covert reference/grounding to the binary). I’d submit that talking about this stuff like an electron cloud would be so much better than calling it a spectrum or continuum, but that’s a whole other post.

So Bill: If you design an experiment using this operationalization of the subject matter, you’re going to get some weird-ass results, because sex and gender and orientation and expression, this whole damn thing? It’s not out there in the world, waiting for us to find it. Nothing scientific ever really is. Our concepts are always part of how we do science, and never more so than when sciencing about sexuality.

And that, incidentally, is why you cannot do science without philosophy. Now go read philosophy of science (start with Helen Longino, then maybe Elisabeth Lloyd).

#bill nye saves the world #bill nye the science guy #bill nye #philosophy #gender stuff #orientation stuff #sexuality stuff

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