Quote:
Originally Posted by Lurikeen
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Well, let's see... how about starting with the bullshit of someone "trying to give meaning to the appearance of my external genitalia." Really? Hell, even from a strictly Darwinian approach meaning is given to "external genitalia" when we talk about the survival of the fittest. Some have definite male genitalia and others female genitalia. Have we become so post-modern in our thinking that the Genie of genitalia can fly around and assign sex to persons without any biological consideration?
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There's lots of crossover. Females can be born with a male reproductive organ and vice versa. So a sex organ doesn't necessarily define the gender. There's probably another method doctors use to identify the gender at birth, although it's sometimes tricky. Recent research shows the brains of males and females are only different when averaged. Otherwise, on an individual level, you cannot identify gender from a brain scan. I know females have more estrogen and males have more testosterone, but that might only apply later. All babies start out as female, so crossover isn't surprising.
Yet crossover doesn't mean we're not different. We can still readily identify gender after several years, with some imperfection inherent in it. Some will grow up and realize they don't feel male or don't feel female, but most won't.
Overall, what we're seeing is less and less reason for us to discriminate men and woman, or females and males. Why? Because we as individuals are more empowered than we've ever been! Men used to do most of the heavy physical labour and there was a lot of it! Domesticated animals and then machines put an end to that edge. And the male's brute strength gave them a defensive edge as well, but with guns and modern security systems, a educated and prepared woman is every bit as dangerous. It might be argued men also had an edge in spatial awareness, but modern technolgoy is increasingly making it mute. Any advantage in courage or propensity to engage a threat can be countered with medication and/or modern therapies.
Woman, on the other hand, were better with their hands, making them perfect for making clothes or cooking food and anything not involving heavy loads. They're also natural born teachers. They HAD to spend lots of time with the children. First was pregnancy. 9 months the baby is inside them and they can feel every kick and emotion. The pain at birth can be unbearable. Then they have to breast feed the infant for years and years. They use that time to learn about humans and themselves. This is what prepared them to be natural teachers. They were in the right position to be the first ones to teach the children how to speak and write so on because the husband was too busy flexing his muscles, swinging clubs and exploiting other men.
But even woman have had their traditional roles reduced. How? Mostly because of the modern economy, machines and modern technology in general. The modern economy has created day care centers and ever expansive schools, with fewer and fewer teachers needed, so daddy and/or momma can drop the child off somewhere else and do their own thing, no longer needing to be tied down to the children. For woman, that means she's not the teacher she used to be. She's disconnected from her children. Now the state owns the children and the husband and wife barely function as the head of the family. And of course machines can do lots of little things, so woman don't need to use their hands as much. Woman don't need men for protection or for labours. Men don't need woman for child care or teaching or cooking or for anything they might have handily done in the past. Neither needs each other and the results in society are we're identifying less and less with the male/female gender.
The genders are collapsing. It just doesn't make material sense anymore to care about whether someone is male or female. Thus any crossover is being looked at carefully and accepted and even encouraged. We're willingly killing the genders, for it's merely obeying the laws of conservation of energy. This is natural evolution.
EDIT: Life wasn't great back then. Men died all the time because, historically, men do the dangerous jobs and do the fighting. And woman oftne died during birthing a child. Most of the children died in pregnancy or didn't reach adulthood. So note I'm not romanticizing the past. It was filled with superstition, prejudice and early death. It was bleak, no doubt. And yet people made the best of every moment anyway, just as we always have. They were content, despite all of it. People being murdered or raped or cheated or abused then and now aren't happy about it, but people have always been essentially content.
I would not choose to go back to the past, despite all of the gender blurring today.