Be Not Defeated (by the rain)

Warning: May contain severe anxiety.

[benotdefeated-blog]

@venusintransit So blue represents sex characteristics. We know that the vast majority of males look a certain way and a vast majority of females look another way. So dark = male, light = female. The purple line represents the differentiation between sexes. The light lines from that one represent the trans/intersex/wibbly-wobbly area. This is probably way wrong, but from what I was reading there are those who are attracted to a persons sex (which includes secondary characteristics), with a person’s sex as an element of that sexuality, and those who’s sexuality rely on visual cues more so. So if someone is attracted to trans men and cis men, they would fall firmly on the black line. And if someone was attracted to females, they would fall on purple. And bisexual would cover all of it. etc etc It’s messy, and I think that the black liners would be minority sub-sexualities, but maybe? I also feel like it’s important to state that just because the purple line crosses into ‘male/female looking females/males’ it doesn’t mean you are attracted to them. Imagine a dot on the line to your preference.

[dearfeminists-deactivated201604]

Dear Feminists,

I keep hearing how all of you are talking about how Gender is just a human construct and there is no gender in nature and all that stuff so I decided to do some research into seeing where this came from. 

In the 1960s sexologist John Money first published his idea that gender was only a human construct in order to back this up he came up with an idea for taking a child who was biologically one gender and giving them sex reassignment surgery then raising them as the other gender in order to prove that gender doesn’t exist outside of our cultures perception of it.   He was able to test out this theory when he found an infant named David Reimer who’s penis was damaged during a circumcision accident.  John Money convinced Davids parents that their  sons penis was so damaged by the accident that he would never live a normal life as a man and they should just use surgery to make him into a woman.  

The parents agreed and they promised to raise David as they would raise a girl never telling him that he was actually born male and changing his name to Brenda. When David was six his parents started sending him and his twin brother to John Money for weekly therapy sessions In order to further instill female gender roles into David. John Money did this by forcing David and his twin brother to undress infront of him and act out sexual positions such as  David having to get naked infront of his brother and get down on all fours and his twin brother would get behind him and trust to simulate doggy style sex.   Dr. Money’s rationale for these various treatments was his belief that “childhood ‘sexual rehearsal play’” was important for a “healthy adult gender identity” David kept seeing John money until age 13 when he told his parents he would kill himself if they made him see John Money again.  

David despite the fact he didn’t know he wasn’t really born a girl never identified as a female he never acted feminine and would constantly tell people how he wished he was a born a boy even going in his teen years to demand people call him by male pronouns.  When David started to hit puberty his Daivds parents forced him to take Estrogen shots causing him to grow female breasts and Daivds depression worsened even more. Eventually  David Reimer committed suicide by shooting himself in the head with a sawn-off shotgun. His twin brother Brian also ended up committing suicide by  overdosing on antidepressants. John Money ended up using David as proof in his theory that gender is only a human construct after lying about the entire study and he ended up earning 65 honors, awards and degrees for his work despite the fact that version of Davids life he described in his study was a complete lie he created to push his own agenda and went against what David wrote in his diary and what Davids family, friends and everyone who ever knew David had said. 

So reminder to Feminists when you talk about how gender is a human construct the origins of this comes from a pedophile who drove someone to suicide to try and prove this, and then he just lied about the whole thing anyway.

[fugdamatriarchy-deactivated2018]

Jesus Christ

[jalopyrustbucket]

TL;DR - Gender is not a social construct.

[venusintransit-deactivated20160]

earthboundricochet –  this is really inaccurate in many ways (Money’s research started in 1950 and his seminal article was published in 1955, not in 1960) but i’m not going to cover everything. most importantly though John Money was not in any way ideologically similar to feminists.

John Money’s theory on gender was unlike that of any of the major “camps,” which is why essentially every camp has falsely equated the other to John Money by this point as a smear. both transgender activists and social conservatives have (falsely) equated feminist social constructivism about gender to John Money; trans-critical feminists, similarly, have (falsely) equated transgender ideas to John Money. and i’ve criticized it when the latter group has done it to.

if you can find and read his article ‘The Conceptual Neutering of Gender and the Criminalization of Sex’ he makes it clear he disagrees with all camps, and outlines why, but he disagrees with feminists most of all. he absolutely HATED feminists, who he even compares to Hitler. he makes it absolutely clear that his view is not the same as social constructionism about gender. and some of the first major critics of John Money’s theory were (radical) feminists like Janice Raymond.

he essentially believed that a person’s gender or “gender-identity/role” was a fixed intrinsic essence, but that this was formed during a critical period in infancy (and up to that point was mutable, and surgery, hormones could be used to shift things) rather than being either inborn, and after that point was immutable. even though a child could be given either G-I/R, this happens due to an innate biological capacity which to him is akin to a biologically hardwired capacity for language acquisition. he was not saying “gender was purely social.” he was the complete opposite of a “gender abolitionist” in the feminist sense, because to him not acquiring a stable and secure gender identity/role was pathological and maladaptive, and everyone should have one. like from my own research i’m convinced the entire point of Money’s theory is to NOT say “gender is a social construct” in the sense you’re thinking of. (and this idea did not “come from” his theory – the notion that masculine and feminine behavior are more reliably determined by a child’s sex of assignment and rearing than any physical aspect of sex was already known from intersex case studies before Money.)

so like, no – no side, including feminism, is “just like John Money” and it would be much, much better if ALL sides stopped making cheap shots and exploiting this tragic story and the machinations of this evil man for their personal and ideological gain.