Since this garbage fire thread is still going on, I'd like to throw in a couple more loads, as it pertains to leftist representation.
First, a small correction:
dtgreene: (I have even read of a case where an XY person got pregnant and carried a child to term!)
Impossible. Like, it's possible you've read about it, but it was fake. If it were true, it'd basically turn all of biology on its head. Non-XX people can get pregnant and produce viable offspring, but it requires a very specific complicated combination of chromosomes (not XXY, like 6 characters long and utterly batshit) that isn't going to occur in nature by chance until the heat death of the universe.
Now this is an example of something colloqualliy known as the horseshoe theory:
dtgreene: Furthermore, I could point out that studies have shown that the brains of transgender people match more closely with their identified gender than their birth assigned sex.
...this is good old biological essentialism, except the criterion is different.
devoras: Your mention of sociological is flawed, however, at least with those examples given. There are clear differences between men and women that can be seen very, very early on in life. Girls are more interested in people, while boys are more interested in things. That's where the dolls vs action figures comes in, and men are more aggressive and competitive, while women are more agreeable and supportive. Those aren't traits that are imposed on them by society.
devoras: That's not how it works. You can't change reality just by saying something is true. I can understand the idea that a woman might want to be a man, or that a man might wants to be a woman, and I have empathy for their position. But I disagree with the idea that a woman saying they want to be a man, magically makes them into a man. They're still a woman, whom we can have empathy for and can refer to as a man. But that still doesn't make them male.
dtgreene: It is not unusual (though not universal) for transgender people, even early in life, to show the behaviors of the gender they identify with, rather than the gender they were assigned at birth.
(I took the liberty of correcting a typo instead of making an obvious joke. How magnanimous of me.)
Again, gool old biological essentialism. And whose of us who know history know what biological essentialism leads to: women's options shrink while men can do whatever the fuck they want to do. It's hilarious to see two males with ostensibly different politics arguing about the correct way to tell women to gtfo to the kitchen and make sammiches.
What actually happens in the scenarion dtgreene described ranges from duh to tragic.
Example of duh:
a boy sees an awesome woman and for whatever reason decides he's going to be like her when he grows up. He gets told "nope, you're a boy" and starts adopting stereotypically girly behavior. (Keep in mind that a young Western child typically doesn't have opposite-sex peers -- his reference for how boys and girls behave is the terrible sexist media. Playmates are same-sex, and siblings have too much of an age difference.)
Example of tragic:
a girl does something interesting and gets told "nope, you can't do this, it's for boys, your lot in life is to sit pretty, be a victim, and pop babbies". She then decides fuck this shit, I'm going to be a boy then.
Neither is proof of biological essentialism. No one gets born with a love of cars or dresses. As I've said in one of the other threads on the subject, there are cultures where men wear dresses and women wear pants and that's what boys and girls gravitate to, respectively. IT was a woman's job when it paid fuck all. Cooking and child-rearing are stereotypical women's jobs, and yet most celebrity chefs and celebrity pediatricians are men. Fashion is horrifyingly sexist.
Many children get over it (the rather unfortunate medical term for it is "desist"), but some don't. Again, two very common scenarios for it:
- shitty conservative parents continue to harass the child, "no, you're a boy, dresses are for c**ts and f****ts"
- shitty liberal parents start championing the kid's brand new gender and the kid is afraid to disappoint the parents.
Re: OP:
BatteTech is indeed massively racist, but not in the way the OP describes. The actual problem is it presents a universe in which reverse racism is a fact of life: there's oppressive classist hereditary nobility and shit asking to be guillotined, and the main players are brown people and women. This is exactly the shit conservative propagandists spread: that egalitarian anti-racist, anti-sexist efforts are a ploy to institute oppressive dictatorships.
