Please either engage with the arguments in my first comment in this thread or stop commenting. Repeating some variation of “there are two sexes and everyone who can’t be easily classified as one or the other is deformed and should be ignored” is just not good enough. And that seems to be all you and your brother are capable of doing.
I didn’t ban anyone, I’m not a mod or admin.
What I’ve been saying is simply that the statement “mammals have two sexes” is over simplified to the point of being wrong! Not only that, but this incorrect idea, that every human can be easily classified as belonging to one of two distinct, unchangeable sexes has tangible negative effects on real people. I probably should have called Kirby intersex-phobic rather than transphobic, as that’s more accurate, but I stand by saying he has some bigoted ideas and needs to do some self-reflection.
Through a weird quirk of federation, the entire exchange has been preserved on Hexbear, here
You were banned for very good reason.
I’m happy to keep talking to you, to help you understand how you’re wrong here, but you’re going to have to do some work too, because I can explain until I’m blue in the face, but if you’re not listening, then all the explanation in the world won’t help.
You need to start by rereading my first comment in the thread, the long one, and actually trying to understand what I’m saying, rather than brushing it all off. If you believe I’m “denying reality”, you need to point to specific claims in that comment and tell me why you think they’re false. Just repeating some version of “sex is straightforward, there are two of them, and people who can’t be easily classified as one of the two are deformed and should be ignored” is absolutely not good enough.
Edit: Sweet! Kirby got banned from lemmygrad for their obvious bigotry, making this comment entirely pointless, you love to see it, hell yeah!
Go back and read my first comment in the thread, the long one, and tell me which bits of it are “denying reality”.
Ok, thanks, this clears up your position!
You’re extremely fucking transphobic and need to work on not being like that.
Ok, so being born with ambiguous genitalia is a deformity in your mind? Do you think that infants born with ambiguous genitalia should undergo surgery to make their genitalia fit cisnormative ideals?
And I have to ask, just so we’re extremely clear, what do you, you personally, mean by “sex”? How do you determine who is male and who is female? What criteria are you using to sort people into these two categories?
So you’re saying gametes determine sex and anyone who doesn’t produce gametes has no sex. Cool. That’s fine, and a reasonable way to define “sex”, if we must do so.
Your definition of sex isn’t a common one, most people who care to try and define sex don’t like saying that people can have no sex at all, which is what you’re saying.
I clearly said in my comment that every human produces at most one of two possible types of gamete, so I don’t know why you spent so many sentences talking about a hypothetical third gamete, I’m well aware there’s no such thing.
I’m also going to emphasize, once again, that genitals don’t always match gametes and, furthermore, don’t always fit cleanly into either penis or vulva, lots of people are born with ambiguous genitalia.
the stuff we all have between legs, that definitely defines sex.
Ok, but like, it doesn’t. See this comment I made yesterday.
Edit: I’m actually going to copy the comment here, so no one has to click on a link to read it:
What do we mean by “sex”?
Do we mean chromosomes? If so, there aren’t two sexes, there are a whole bunch, look at the list on this Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_chromosome_anomalies
Do we mean genitals? If so, again, there aren’t two distinct sexes, instead it’s more of a spectrum between “this is obviously a penis” and “this is obviously a vulva”. In fact, infants with genitals that can’t be neatly classified as a penis or a vulva frequently have surgery forced upon them and these (completely unnecessary) surgeries cause all sorts of issues later in life.
Do we mean hormonal profile? Again, it’s not as straightforward as testosterone = male, estrogen = female. The endocrine system is wildly complicated and the ratios of sex hormones people have can vary wildly. A person’s hormonal profile is also extremely changeable, which is something shitty right-wingers don’t want “biological sex” to be.
Do we mean size of gametes? This is the only option that even remotely makes sense, because it is true that in humans there are only two kinds of gametes, small gametes (sperm) and large gametes (eggs). Furthermore, there has never been a case of a human who produces both eggs and sperm, every human produces at most one of the two. But lots of people are completely infertile, producing no gametes. So if by “sex” we mean the size of gametes someone produces, then there are a whole lot of people who are sexless because they produce no gametes.
But ok, size of gamete produced almost works as a definition of “sex”. So maybe we could look at the gonads in people who don’t produce gametes and make a determination of their sex that way. Well, it turns out that doesn’t work either, because there are people with both ovarian tissue and testicular tissue, and sometimes these tissues are even mixed together in the same organ (called “streak gonads”).
So what are we left with? Nothing. There’s nothing to “sex”, it’s a meaningless term. Listen to any shitty right-winger try and define “biological sex” and you’ll hear them eventually say something like “a male is someone whose reproductive system is geared towards producing sperm”. But what does that mean? Fuck all, I’d say. What shitty right-wingers mean is “a female is someone who I think is a woman”. They’re all of them, to a person, talking about gender every time they say “biological sex”. They’ll deny it, but ask them about intersex people, or people with ambiguous genitalia or streak gonads, and you’ll get nonsense in response.
I’ve whiled away many a hilarious hour reading terfs (on ovarit, before it shutdown) arguing about which particular intersex people count as women. They never agree, there is no “party line”, it’s all vibes and always has been.
Hey, thanks for implying that I can’t read or think critically when the topic of China comes up. I really appreciate it.
I already read through the entirety of the deeply shitty RFA article you posted so that you couldn’t dismiss my criticism by saying I hadn’t read it. How many more deeply shitty articles must I read to satisfy you?
Will you do me the courtesy of reading an article about China that I suggest? Specifically, this one: https://redsails.org/china-has-billionaires/
You know, actually, maybe the article I just linked satisfies the brief. There’s a problem in China (there are billionaires) and here’s an article about that problem that I think is actually quite decent. In particular, note the copious citations. If you want to check for yourself any of the claims in that article, you can, because the citation is right there and will point you to where the claim came from. The citations in this piece are night and day compared to the “citations” (there weren’t any) in the RFA article you posted.
Are we doing this? On a fucking article from Radio Free Asia? Really?
Literally every single claim in that article is backed up by social media posts or, at best, is said to come from “the news portal Shuiping Jiyuan”. We don’t get any links to these posts or to Shuiping Jiyuan though. Some of these claims could be verified though, especially the ones about people who were arrested. The author of the article could probably find arrest records for these people, which I would count as good reporting. But no, we don’t get that. We don’t get translated arrest records, we get shit like this (the following is a direct quote from the article): “Some netizens posted on Weibo in support of Sijindesijin, whose handle translates as “silky silky.” RFA couldn’t reach Sijindesijin for comment or confirm the details of what allegedly happened and if the writer was detained.”
according to RFA sources and media reports
Oh yes, this is definitely a real thing that’s really happening. You can definitely trust Radio Free Asia to tell you the truth about China.
(I’m being sarcastic. This article, like so much from Radio Free Asia is extremely light on proof and heavy on innuendo. We’ve got a lot of “anonymous sources” and “anecdotal accounts” and not a lot of fact-based reporting.)
It’s pretty annoying to read the mailing list, I agree. There’s a very small hyperlink that says “next” that’s right below the message body. If you click that, you can read the next message in the chain. Keep doing that until you get to the end, and yeah, it looks like this was resolved and wasn’t actually malicious.
What the fuck kind of chart/graph is that?! It arguably gives less information than a simple sentence containing the two percentages.
I hate journalists so fucking much
Sure, that’s extremely fair! Those qt dependencies are no joke! How do you feel about Evince (apparently now called gnome document viewer)? It seems to be the standard gtk pdf viewer, but I’ve never used it, so I actually don’t know what it’s features are like. It’s a heavier application than mupdf (of course), but at least you don’t need to install qt to use it!
When zathura (my beloved) isn’t feature-rich enough for my needs I usually turn to okular. Sure, it’s kde, so if you’re on a pure gnome system you’re going to have to install a bunch of dependencies, but if that’s not a problem for you, okular is quite good in my experience!
Ok. Doesn’t sound like great world-building to me. There’s a reason I don’t like capeshit. But enjoy your crappy stories about a shitty billionaire and the unrealistic impossibly broken city he beats people up in.
Like, actually “good” billionaires
Hahaha, no such thing. How did they get their billions? 
Where did the billions come from? 
First of all, your comment is pretty ableist.
Second of all, these two distinct meanings you’re seeing aren’t so distinct, so I don’t at all think it’s a misunderstanding.
For an example that sits right between the two meanings you see as distinct, we can look at my struggle to finish my PhD. I should have quit 4 years ago with a master’s. I’d be in a much better spot economically, mentally, emotionally, basically in every way that matters. Sure, finishing my PhD was not as bad as staying in an abusive relationship or smoking a ton or partying way too hard way too often, but it’s closer to that than someone who believes “quitters never win” would like to admit. There are lots of times when it’s a way better idea to just quit while you’re ahead and do something more worthwhile that will actually make your life better rather than stick with something awful just because you don’t want to be a loser and quit.
Yeah, I already know you and your brother think intersex people are deformed and should be forced to undergo (entirely unnecessary, usually very invasive) “treatments” to better conform to your ideals. I’m saying that’s a fucking bigoted point of view and you and your brother should change your opinions of intersex people.