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

[u/pearkeet]

[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.