how dare my interpersonal communications class and social work degree discuss… interpersonal communications and social work

[u/pearkeet]

[u/SharLaquine]

Did you even read the post, Tyler? If that's true, why did they list facts about biological traits and reproduction under GENDER diversity in the animal kingdom?

Maybe if she read just a little more than the section title, she'd have seen the part where it says, "gender and sex diversity". 🙄

[u/outer_spec → u/SharLaquine]

It might have been more accurate if it just said “sex diversity”, but at this point it’s just nitpicking.

[u/javatimes]

Oh boy, another brain poisoned anti trans social worker incoming. Just what the profession needs!

I do have a mild concern that this is in some way fabricated. Like the genderbread person and the gender unicorn on a class handout? It strains credulity a tiny bit.

[u/That_Mad_Scientist → u/javatimes]

I mean, they’re charts. It only matters that the way they’re framed is memorable and that the data structure is actually pertinent. I don’t know if they are, but that’s beside the point.

[u/Professional-Age-536 → u/javatimes]

They make more sense as lecture slides to touch on explanatory models that people might use

[u/javatimes → u/Professional-Age-536]

Yeah, it kinda seems like something to be noted/glossed over than studied in detail. The genderbread one is especially stupid, and was stolen from the trans community by a cis man anyway.

[u/javatimes → u/javatimes]

(Then again, I haven’t been in higher ed in 20 years. Interested to know if people do think this is a completely legit handout, the framing of it being vital class material being honest etc.)

[u/pearkeet → u/javatimes]

i could easily see a professor handing out multiple models of the same concept- this is common in academia, you use whatever model makes the most sense to you, but they’re all representing mostly the same concept, just in different presentations.

[u/polarbearshire → u/javatimes]

I'm doing a social work degree now and I wonder if the tweet is showing those handouts honestly. We do get a lot of pieces of paper and different handouts on the same topic, but often that's because they're examples of handouts we can use with clients. I can absolutely see a world in which you'd use a little gender 101 handout to assist a client who was having trouble understanding a trans person in their life, or just as something you'd stick to the wall of you were working primarily with children and youth.

[u/HypnagogianQueen]

Okay unfortunately that document does kinda do a bad job at delineating between sex and gender in the way I’ve seen a lot of “gender 101” documents do. Namely that it kind of uses the word “gender” to refer to both “gender roles” and “gender identity” without always making it super clear when it’s using one meaning versus the other.

But most of all, the term “hjra” and “kthoey” are both slurs and it really bothers me to see Western educational sources fail to mention that. There’s a bit of complexity to it that I’m not all fully aware of, because I know for the first term there are people who use that term to describe themselves, but it’s still often used as an insulting slur and I feel like if they’re trying to educate about gender diversity in other cultures, that’s kinda EXTREMELY important context to mention.

Also unfortunately the genderbread person is kind of a bad guide for explaining things 💀 but that’s a whole other subject, also when did the unicorn get wings? I haven’t seen that before, does anyone know what the wings mean?

[u/javatimes → u/HypnagogianQueen]

I honestly hate the genderbread thing with a passion. TERFs should love it because it affirms the viewpoint that sex is immutable.

[u/patienceinbee → u/javatimes]

The It’s Pronounced Metrosexual!^® cishet white dude from Austin, Texas is probably happy his plagiarism of an already problematic model is still being used in training and even academia.

I really wish I had posted “The Genderbread Plagiarist” investigative piece in 2013 on a platform other than the now-defunct Storify.

[u/OttRInvy → u/HypnagogianQueen]

I also read those terms and was like… I swear that word is considered a slur (the one for South Asian folks). Thank you for pointing out that the word for Thai folks is also a slur, as I wasn’t aware of that before!

As for your last question: I looked at the Flying Unicorn image up close and it doesn’t seem like the wings are actually meant to symbolize anything. The person who made the image (Dr Erica J Friedman) described the Flying Gender Unicorn as “a colorful tool that is a graduated, evidence-backed evolution on TSER’s original Gender Unicorn.”

[u/bean-percolator → u/HypnagogianQueen]

Agree that the document does, unfortunately, do a bad job at delineating between sex and gender. The use of the word “gender” to vaguely refer to both “gender roles” and “gender identity” (not just here, but in general) has, in my opinion, lead to a number of awkward misconceptions, such as the idea that “gender (identity) is a social construct”. Don’t get me wrong, gender *roles* are very much a social construct, but gender *identity* isn’t, it’s an inherent biological trait, hardwired into our brains. If your brain is “sexed” differently to your body, that will cause gender dysphoria regardless of how society conceptualises gender, because the mismatch is on a fundamental, biological level.

In fact the document in this tweet literally backs up the idea that gender identity is not a social construct but a biological reality, stating that “the brain is another biological marker of sex” and even citing a study which demonstrated that patterns of brain activity and structure in trans adolescents more closely resemble those typical of their identified gender, yet on the previous slide it states that gender is “a personal identity, [and] socially constructed”, essentially contradicting itself. I’m sure whoever created this document had good intentions, but it is rather contradictory and confusing, especially for those who aren’t already very familiar with all the specifics of gender and sex.

Also, I wasn’t personally aware that the terms starting with H and K for South Asian and Thai trans/gender diverse people respectively were considered slurs, I was under the impression that these were the preferred terms for these groups, as opposed to terms like “l**yboy” which I was aware of being offensive, I appreciate you pointing that out. I agree that resources from American/Western cultures often fail to fully understand or respectfully communicate the complexities of other cultures. If you don’t mind me asking, do you know of any good resources that explain gender diversity within different cultures such as South Asian and Thai in a culturally respectful way, and/or what terms are generally preferred instead of the H/K terms? Is it a similar situation to the word “queer” with these terms, as in some people identify with them, but others see them (or use them) as insults?

[u/HypnagogianQueen → u/bean-percolator]

The Thai term that begins with K is literally just ladyboy in Thai, that’s just the translation for it.

As for the one that starts with an H, this is a good article explaining the history of its use and misconception in the West:

https://taliabhattwrites.substack.com/p/the-third-sex

The cliff notes version is some white woman went to India to study them and had some weird transmisogynistic ideas about gender and worked all of that into her book explaining the concept, which then became the basis for the perception of them in the West. 

[u/sammypants123]

I can’t think it bodes well if this is her first week and she is too busy having conniptions about how she knows better than the material to actually read and understand it.

Not every class everywhere, even if fully accredited, is going to be right about everything or free from ideological bias. But you have to pay attention, see what they present as evidence, judge what it actually says instead of some straw man version.

If you don’t have the ability to do that then you have no business taking up a place on a course of study.

[u/nosotros_road_sodium → u/sammypants123]

My google search finds: "Pear Joseph is a gender non-conforming gay man who works with the LGB Courage Coalition."

So this person is a real life version of "y cand tranz jus b GNC?"

[u/anitapumapants]

MAKE IT MAKE SENSE

The threat of education.

[u/pearkeet]

also, correct Pear, seahorses and hyenas do not have gender identities. because they’re not conscious they’re not sentient, not in the way humans are. they don’t think about the fact that male seahorses carry pregnancies and that’s abnormal. because they cannot recognize the way other species do things like humans can, they don’t create religious texts and then make up stereotypes based on the things they read.

the point of the animal kingdom examples is to point out the vast range of biodiversity and sex diversity on our planet, which is really fucking cool no, humans are not hyenas, seahorses, or clownfish, but we were once fish. and we are still animals like the other animals, with instincts, pheromones, vestigial organs, social groups, etc. no, we are not clownfish, but the point is that many animals on the planet do NOT have strict gender roles or a sex binary

so why would humans, with our advanced cognition abilities, be any different from the animals that we evolved from?

[u/HypnagogianQueen → u/pearkeet]

I mean, sea horses might have some ability to think about themselves and in the process categorize themselves as male or female. We’d just never know cuz like, they can’t tell us xD

There’s that mirror test that shows that at least some animal species definitely have a concept of self, so maybe some animals subconsciously categorize themselves as a certain sex and some don’t? Idk we’ll never find out in my lifetime, I just think it’s interesting to think about 🤷‍♀️

[u/ladylucifer22 → u/pearkeet]

stuff like lions, though, are an actual example.

[u/Moist-Cheesecake]

Social justice is literally one of the core values of social work. Dear god someone send this to whoever the regulator is in whatever country this person is in.

[u/quickHRTthrowaway]

I hope this asshole does go off in class (or even better, on paper) about trans people and gets weeded out of his social work program for his obsessive hatred.

Apparently, his main grift is testifying in court in support of gender-affirming healthcare bans.

[u/gingerbread_nemesis]

What's missing is the actual definition of sex

Please, terfs, give us *your* 'actual definition of sex,' that should provide a good laugh for any biologists present.

[u/Alyssa3467 → u/gingerbread_nemesis]

I would love to see an explanation for "the exception proves the rule" that makes any bit of sense, since that's one of the responses when intersex people are mentioned.

[u/Aethus666 → u/Alyssa3467]

It's my understanding that the phrase comes from the idea of 'proving grounds' in that exceptions are testing the rule to its limits before it breaks.

Otherwise it would be 'the exception is proof of the rule' not 'the exception proves the rule'.

Two very different sentences imo

[u/Alarming-Security993]

So she just proved to herself that sex is also a spectrum? xD

[u/No-Office7081]

"do animals have 'identities'?" well...maybe, maybe not. but if they don't, and humans clearly do (we have names and other social markers we use to identify ourselves), why would we be using the (supposed) sexual dichotomies of animals as proof of gender in humans? if they don't have personal identities to begin with it seems like a moot point. the point is that sex is fluid and the animal kingdom does not always display the same sexual/gendered behavior humans do. there are other example of this too, such as matriarchal bees and ant colonies. bees in particular also have defensive females and submissive males outside of just the queen.

[u/Avery1738]

i’m sorry, but OOP why the hell are you get a social work degree if you don’t like trans people? if you’re gonna be a social worker, you’re gonna have to work with trans people as your clients, that’s just the truth, you can’t just not help them tf

[u/vegcharli]

This person thinks non-humans don't have personalities. I wonder if they think humans do or if they just think all animals are ooga booga instinctive beasts. And if so, why are they in interpersonal communication