LGBTQA+ issues

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Lur
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Re: Homophobia

Postby Lur » 2015-05-27, 12:17

hreru wrote:
linguoboy wrote:I don't agree, and increasingly US society is changing its views in this area as well. Nearly one in five women nowadays is childfree by choice. (That's twice the incidence of lefthanders!) Among college-educated people, it's considered a normal life choice, and increasingly a positive one (given concerns about overpopulation and resource exhaustion).

And I don't disagree with you in this, apart from the use of normal and natural. What if I said it this way? Reproduction is one of essencial features of living organisms and sexuality serves as a mechanism that should ensure it. Being attracted to the same sex rather than to the opposite one hampers this mechanism and weakens probability of sucessful reproduction, and in this way it might be considered unnatural.


The only way we can use natural in this context in a productive way is like "it happens". Other than that it's a meaningless "I'm not used to the idea".
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Re: Homophobia

Postby linguoboy » 2015-05-27, 15:08

hreru wrote:Reproduction is one of essencial features of living organisms and sexuality serves as a mechanism that should ensure it. Being attracted to the same sex rather than to the opposite one hampers this mechanism and weakens probability of sucessful reproduction, and in this way it might be considered unnatural.

[citation needed]

Like most faulty arguments involving reproductive fitness, this one commits the elementary error of confounding the survival of individual bloodlines with the survival of a breeding population. If every individual which could potentially reproduce does reproduce, the result is overpopulation, which can lead directly to destruction of habitat and extinction. Moreover, what does this say about bees, where all reproductive duties are concentrated in a single individual (the queen)? According to your argument, they must be the most "unnatural" beings in existence.

There's a huge body of research now on the contribution of non-reproductive individuals to natural selection, and a significant amount of that is concerned more narrowly with homosexual behaviour. You might want to familiarise yourself with some of it before once more advancing the same pseudoscientific argument in defence of your prejudices.
Last edited by linguoboy on 2015-05-27, 15:45, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Homophobia

Postby Tenebrarum » 2015-05-27, 15:41

hreru wrote:What if I said it this way? Reproduction is one of essencial features of living organisms and sexuality serves as a mechanism that should ensure it. Being attracted to the same sex rather than to the opposite one hampers this mechanism and weakens probability of sucessful reproduction, and in this way it might be considered unnatural.

What if I said that you better leave the question of what's natural or unnatural to nature, and restrict your puny, fragile, easily deceived human mind to distinguishing between naturally-occurring things and man-made things? Isn't that hard enough already?

(And we gays fall into the "naturally occurring" category, just so you know. To this day there's still no evidence to support the theory that we are engineered and manufactured by Skynet.)
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Re: Homophobia

Postby IpseDixit » 2015-05-27, 16:07

hreru wrote:Because you want too much. What does your full acceptance cover, how far does it go? For example, I was pretty shocked by a post by Lauren. It was her opening the "Share your art" thread, and I thought, telling I'm going to learn to draw and showing my first attempts of an absolute beginner?, why I'd never ... is this even possible? :shock: :lol: A not-to-do in my world. If I thought something similar about her being a transwoman (correct me if I'm wrong here) it would be transphobia, it would be oh so bad and I would be expected to be ashamed of it, while me thinking it's weird to publish the very first drawing experiment would have been but a funny episode if I'd written my opinion. At least I think nobody would be telling me I don't accept her artistic expression fully and it makes me the bad one. :para: But both the "it's weird" attitudes are based on the same principle, and might be of the same low intensity - as far as it doesn't involve considering the other one a second-class person it's okay to me.


Wut

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Re: Homophobia

Postby linguoboy » 2015-05-27, 16:12

hreru wrote:That is, in one particular point that's, however, crucial to me. (And it's this reason why I write here.) I always feel unwell when meeting an attitude I'd call "let's bring equality to the earth". Reading this passage in your reply to Yserenhart makes me feel uneasy, somewhat afraid even:
The effects are always mediated by perceptions of the target's perceived gender (and age, and race, and class, and national origin, etc.). Thus the causes are never either-or, they're always both-and. It's a combination of heterosexism and sexism and ageism and racism and classism that causes an individual to see two men of the same race and class but different ages together and assume a blood relationship rather than a romantic one...(Which is why I recommend an approach than involves making as few assumptions about the parties involved as possible.)

Leaving out the original point of your words now, I focus on how easily perception of age might be considered ageism, perception of race racism and so on ... as few assumptions as possible ... for me this is a vision of a very cruel and cold world, a world in which crossing a road without having checked for Roma presence makes you an insensitive beast, so nobody allows not to check.

I find your interpretation of my words frankly pretty bizarre. How you get from "don't leap to conclusions" to "a very cruel and cold world" is beyond me. Moreover, this discussion is now taking place at a high level of abstraction which muddies what "making as few assumptions...as possible" really means in practice. Let me give you another concrete example which I hope illustrates this:

When I visit my sister, we sometimes go out in public together with her children. She and I look a great deal alike, but I'm a little older. Her husband looks similar to me, too, as do their children. When we're out together, I imagine a lot of people look at me and my sister and see a married couple with their offspring. But they're wrong; I'm not a straight married man, I'm a gay married man. I'm not their father; I'm their uncle. They're not being malicious by making these assumptions. And statistics are in their favour. (The vast majority of the time, the man with them is their father.) But the result is still to "erase" my gayness and perceive me as something more in line with their own societal prejudices.

Of course, I do the same thing. I see a woman with children who resemble her physically and I assume they're her children. Often they are. But maybe she's an aunt or a friend or a neighbour who's just taking them for the day. Maybe she's a nanny or some other childcare worker. Maybe the kids aren't even all related to each other. Society does so much to reinforce the image of a heterosexual nuclear family that it causes us to see it even when it isn't there.

Having realised this, though, I began consciously trying not to project my own prejudices onto strangers. What do I see? I see a woman with young children, that's it. No reason to assume more than that without positive evidence (such as one of the children calling her "Mommy"). I used to begin anecdotes with, "I saw this woman and her son today and the son said..." Now I say, "I saw this woman with a child today and the child said...". Why leap to conclusions about their relationship based on nothing more than superficial factors like age and sex? If the person I'm speaking to wants to extrapolate a relationship from that, that's on them.

Remaining neutral in this way doesn't mean I'll be surprised to find out that they are mother and child. It doesn't mean I can't still start from the working assumption that this woman is responsible for this child (and we're not dealing with something like a kidnapping situation--not that these aren't mostly carried out by natural parents anyway). If it's really necessary for me to have more information in order to interact with them, I can ask for it. I'm still free to speculate in describing them to others, e.g. "I think she was his mother." I just need to be clear--in my own mind and with others--that these are layers of interpretation I'm adding to the bare facts which I witnessed.

Why is that so hard? How does it lead to a "cruel and cold world"? It's just rational thinking, logical positivism applied to daily experience. What's to fear from more of that?
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Re: Homophobia

Postby md0 » 2015-05-27, 22:35

Some of the weirdest encounters with heterosexism tonight.
I was shocked to witness that within a radical group a non-straight member's voice is steam-rolled by straight comrades. Most enraging of all is that they tried to take the turn to speak from them and give it to me, another non-straight person but who recently haven't spoke about political issues that affect his identities directly and who's generally thought of as the geek, and not as the fag.
And as soon I back up the belief that dismantling straightness is a political fight connected to our other fights, then I'm also losing their attention.

I have to be very vague obviously, but anyone who shares the experience can understand.
Anyway, tonight was truly unexpected, and it was a wake up call for me, I need to be vocal about all my identities. As for the other person, I honestly do not have the emotional capacity to handle this, seeing them reduced to tears after that treatment by a space considered (and boasting to be) safe, and begging me to tell them that it was not what happened tonight and that it was just their misunderstanding. But I noticed it, and other people noticed it.
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Re: Homophobia

Postby Lur » 2015-06-01, 9:54

I-m way too aware of that phenomenon at this point.
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Re: Homophobia

Postby IpseDixit » 2015-06-16, 12:10

I was wondering whether it'd be more interesting if this thread became a broader LGBT thread where we can also discuss other things besides homophobia...

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Re: Homophobia

Postby md0 » 2015-06-16, 20:54

Wouldn't that overlap with both the Random Sex Thread, and the Random Romance and Sexuality thread?
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Re: Homophobia

Postby IpseDixit » 2015-06-16, 21:23

meidei wrote:Wouldn't that overlap with both the Random Sex Thread, and the Random Romance and Sexuality thread?


LGBT issues go beyond discrimination, sex and romance. What if someone wants to talk about coming out, gay pide parades, the legal situation in their country, sex reassignment surgery, LGBT activism in general and the like?

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Re: Homophobia

Postby md0 » 2015-06-16, 22:15

Hm, I think I would post most of those under RR&S. But specialisation is not bad, you can create a 'LGBTQ+ café" style of thread.
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Re: Homophobia

Postby vijayjohn » 2015-06-16, 23:24

IpseDixit wrote:LGBT issues go beyond discrimination, sex and romance.

But the "Romance, sexuality, and such" thread is more than that, too.

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Re: LGBTQA issues

Postby Johanna » 2015-06-24, 22:25

admin

As you can all see, we renamed the thread since it came to discuss so much more than homophobia, so feel free to talk about orientation and gender in any form from a political and cultural perspective here.

If you want to keep it on a strictly personal level there are other threads for that. Also if you want to keep gender issues separate.
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Re: LGBTQA issues

Postby IpseDixit » 2015-06-25, 12:08

Great :)

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Re: LGBTQA issues

Postby Патрислав Андреевич » 2015-06-25, 22:42

What do the Q and A stand for? Because I suppose not "Questions and Answers." :lol: Guessing Q has something to do with queer, but wasn't it derogatory?

IpseDixit

Re: LGBTQA issues

Postby IpseDixit » 2015-06-25, 22:53

Патрислав Андреевич wrote:What do the Q and A stand for? Because I suppose not "Questions and Answers." :lol:


A stands for "asexual" and Q for "queer".

Патрислав Андреевич wrote:Guessing Q has something to do with queer, but wasn't it derogatory?


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queer#Reclamation

Патрислав Андреевич

Re: LGBTQA issues

Postby Патрислав Андреевич » 2015-06-25, 22:54

IpseDixit wrote:
Патрислав Андреевич wrote:What do the Q and A stand for? Because I suppose not "Questions and Answers." :lol:


A stands for "asexual" and Q for "queer".

Патрислав Андреевич wrote:Guessing Q has something to do with queer, but wasn't it derogatory?


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queer#Reclamation

Thanks!

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Re: LGBTQA issues

Postby IpseDixit » 2015-06-25, 22:57

You're welcome ;)

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Re: LGBTQA issues

Postby linguoboy » 2015-06-26, 14:37

My Facebook right now is a disco inferno of rainbows, equality flags, and animated gifs of drag queens.
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Re: LGBTQA issues

Postby Prowler » 2015-06-26, 20:44

linguoboy wrote:My Facebook right now is a disco inferno of rainbows, equality flags, and animated gifs of drag queens.

What about all those people saying that it's further proof that Obama is a an un-American terrorist trying to destroy the moral fabric of America? Have you seen any of that?


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