Honestly I can see it. Working in male dominated workplaces for so long (I am trans but they didn’t know that) taking any kind of physical or procedural shortcut, or ask for help even if it was common practice would cause my coworkers to assume that I couldn’t do it things the regular way or make them treat me as less competent even if I had done it alone or the more physically demanding way where they could see at some point in the past.

The general assumption of guys is that women are less capable and they don’t change their minds easily. There’s a big difference between regular competence and the sort of self protective over performance of competence which is nessisary to get a lot of cis guys to actually realize their assumptions are bullshit and to stop treating women like they are precocious children.

Usually doing one big thing that shatters their preconceptions does the trick. I once, in frustration at being treated like a china doll demonstrated I could lift a 200 lbs coworker and walk the length of the warehouse with him on my back. But doing that only creates me as an “exception to the rule” and they will resume that behaviour with all of my female coworkers.

If you aren’t given a chance to prove yourself capable in one big flashy way that gets the guys to shut up it can cause all manner of disordered overwork practice as you have to constantly perform for an audience of the disbelieving in small ways and hope they figure it out that they are being assholes.

I feel like so much of it comes from really not doing the work to understand. It doesn’t help that With trans issues people get flat out lied to and because there’s nobody on hand to say reality check stuff like : "What the fuck do you mean ‘The uptick of trans men is causing a wave of hysterectomies in a mass sterilization plot’ … one of the largest reason for temporary detransition is for pregnancies. Also STOP TALKING ABOUT PEOPLE LIKE BREEDING STOCK. " You get a rolling problem where the disinformation is layers deep and they only trust the sources who are financially rewarded for saying the bullshit- because they believe so hard that everything is a conspiracy and have this backwards perception that if only a tiny handful of people in a field are saying something that contradicts a varitable mountain of concensus then that thing is automatically somehow more believable…

I feel like having someone in your family who opens your eyes to the realities because of the immediate demonstratable contradictions of observed reality makes sense. These people caught in transphobialand have by and large been duped. They were ignorant and a bunch of people took advantage of that for financial and political gain. While I can see how not being immediately empathetic isn’t great I dunno if I am as mad when observing from the angle of these people just being kind of dumb enough to be played.

An interesting thought… I was always a bookworm and absolutely devoured books as a child. But it’s definitely true that I have the full imagination suite running in my head. 3D environments and objects, picture, sound, even little echoes of smell, touch and taste…I probably wouldn’t find fiction as engaging without that trait. But is me having that because I was given the opportunity to develop that skill early? My parents read to me quite a lot when I was small after all… Or is it just entirely innate?

The whole thing about school is that it isn’t generally great at personal tailoring and in some instances there’s some ethics around kneecaping students by just funneling them into what’s easy and closing off avenues that they might find engaging or need to engage with later. If you decide to not learn language skills and you later decide you want to go to University you are just kind of screwed. A certain amount of basics is just training you to play the game. Brains are also a develop and use it or don’t have it and lose it situation. What is actually being asked when a kid is given a memorization task for instance is less about them being able to cough up that specific fact later and more about the mental process of forming that neural connection so you can apply it later. If you don’t train the ability to memorize a memory remains weak. It’s in part why different generations appear to have different mental strengths and weaknesses characteristically. A mind needs to train individual processes and tweaks in school programs are always trying to optimize. Some people have natural gifts in certain areas but if they never are given application to need them they underdevelop.

Your experience in school is also pretty typical. The average kid can only pay strict attention to something for about their age in minutes. Bored and annoyed is just sort of what happens regardless. More modern approaches factor this in and include more regular refresh breaks for young people… but the classical default is basically to just keep a class doing a thing for long periods while their student’s individual brains cycle in and off task and accept a certain amount of student unhappiness as just a casualty of the process.

I think it’s a lot more black and white being trans than people realize and I have my own pet theories about what gender euphoria /dysphoria is that I observe as being two independent factors.

Half of the problem I think in reaching people is that the vast majority of cis people don’t have an observed internal gender preference. We are trying to build empathy with something we as trans people assume they have too - but maybe only a small minority of cis people experience it. I don’t think we actually understand cis people, we just assume a bunch of things about them using trans people as a false opposite.

Thing is… If I am correct, the assumed massive earth shaking regret of what would happen if a cis person went through gender reassignment… Is they might just adapt and be fine.

I have pointed out to people before that trans women athletes in practice tend to not outperform all women in the sport. The data we have puts them as no more competitive as women with naturally high testosterone and depending on sport can actually be at a disadvantage…

But there’s another underlying assumption. You assume your athlete went through masculinizing puberty first and then a female puberty second. If you skip that first step then you don’t see major differences of frame, weight distribution or muscle mass.

Where this stings is that laws are forcing people to go through that first puberty regardless of the wishes of the paitent, the patients families, the paitents doctors and the concensus of the medical associations of those doctors… And then the government sits back and demonizes those people based on their physicality as a logistical social problem for the rest of their lives and ostracizes them based on this logic.

Athletes squew young. If you allowed through trans athletes who went through the transition process young enough or looked at sport with trans populations and statistically assessed whether any excessive advantage was afforded and allow in those instances where none was found you could solve for any statistical stand out issues within a decade…

But no, we are having this inane conversation because it suits some government parties to make people feel that trans people are a threat or a problem that must be stopped and that there is zero reasonable inclusion policies.

It isn’t that there’s tons of trans athletes… It’s that even at fairly low levels of sport there are currently more options available to people with disabilities to participate then there are of people of intersex and trans backgrounds. In a lot of cases tracking performances of trans athletes they aren’t dominating. There’s stories of transfem athletes who regularly sit around getting 15th place but after coming in first one time the entire sporting becomes hostile to trans people.

In civil rights discussions there’s a concept of rights of participation. The concept being that being barred from social, political or recreational spheres creates outsized harms on the ability to make the advantageous connections others are given free access to and creates classes of segregation.

There’s also a catch 22 situation. If someone opts to go through a trans puberty instead of a natal one there is no meaningful difference to speak of between the physicality of trans athletes and cis ones. If forced to stay inside their original sex segregated sport not only are trans people being being told in no uncertain terms that society does not accept their new status regardless of parity, they essentially become isolated inside the sporting body. Either you have someone whose body is feminine placed in a sport with only cis males to be compared to or you have a masculine body placed inside a group with all cis women and both will be framed out of being taken at all seriously inside the entire body of that sport. A lot of trans people can’t participate in sport not because they aim to be picked for any of the social leg ups excellence in sport provides… But for any of the regular benefits of just participating.

It creates a fair sting to have a government force your choice of initial puberty that neither you or your doctors and parents thought was a good idea… and then sit back and watch the rest of society constantly punish and isolate you for going through that puberty by then treating you as a logistical social problem for the rest of your life.

Segregated sports based on a demographic like that isn’t as trans affirming as you would think… My gut reaction as a trans person is about the same aversion I imagine a person of color would experience if a white person tried to put forward a “People of Color sport league”.

Ditching us all into a new category like we’re quarantined in sport away from other athletes because we’re implicitly not cis… Isn’t something I would appreciate.

You are halfway there. Those examples you gave define constructs but a lot of these things are not what philosophy uses to define social constructs. Scientific taxonomy constructs and linguistic constructs are things but they are fairly useless in discussion surrounding social constructs because while different cultures might draw the line differently around what exactly constitutes a “chair” vs say a “stool” or some such that’s more of just a linguistic boundry. Its basically always a thing you sit on.

Philosophy uses a bunch of different ideas labeled as different forms of construct to break down the idea of how different types of categorization or subjection happen… but when they start talking about “social” constructs they are specifically talking about categories of human interactions with something that have incredibly variable different potential contexts based on culture. It also requires things which are included or excluded from those category for not entirely practical reasons. Philosophy uses this to talk about how social categories are subjective creating or allieving tension between different cultural groups.

Food is actually a good example. There are a lot of things culturally considered food and non food items despite those items all having nutritional value and being safe to consume. In our increasingly cosmopolitan world a lot of expansion has happened to increase the size of the category. Like raw fish was not considered a food item by a lot of people when and where I was growing up. Now sashimi is everywhere and no one bats an eye. Digging for another example mice are technically edible but even raised and slaughtered cleanly very few would consider them valid as food. Whether what I put on your plate is deemed an disgusting insult or a delicious delicacy is really in the eye of the beholder and has caused a number of historical diplomatic and cultural issues around other cultures veiwing each other as inferior.

Just because something is a construct does not automatically make it a social construct.

Food is a social construct. For a social construct to exist you have to have a social category with shifting goalposts based on different context and cultural factors that are not rigidly defined. Like “Fat” - what is considered fat for a person is based on context. A supermodel is fat for being 5’9 and 145lbs but we would call a constructiom labourer skinny as fuck at those same dimensions. Each culture constructs it’s own version of what defines “fat” which is different and distinct from something than the medical guidelines for obesity or an expectation of reasonable health. “Fat” is in the eye of the beholder and represents overlapping cultural circles with varying degrees of consideration of what is excluded from the category.

The scientific concept of nutritional substance is not how we always define “food”. Culturally people contest what is considered food vs non food items based on cultural factors. Like eating mice for instance does have nutritional value but there are a lot of people who would contest them as being a valid food item even if they were raised in clean conditions due to cultural adversions. “That isn’t food.” has been uttered in all sincerity by people encountering strange delicacies that their culture has taboos against eating beliving it dangerous, unpleasant or just categorically not something intended to be eaten. Thus “food” would be in part a sociologically constructed category.

As a Socialist that subscribes more to the historical strain of Saint Simone and Robert Owen that broke out and away early from Marxism to become the Chartist movement and the history of American non-Marxist socialism … I am often tired of how one note Tankies are. They seem obsessed with a sort of internal purity which denies a rich history of socialism other than Marx and Engles. Once one of them goes off about Stalinism or Maoism I basically just disengage because at that point they are basically so enamored with the aesthetics of communism that they aren’t going to be listening to anything. They want to be devout to the ideology while whitewashing the bloodstains of past failures. I understand a collectivist mindset is more or less what Marx aims to cultivate in his work but it seems often at the cost of tolerance of any level of apostasy.

The flattening of a mass of political thought into cardboard cuttouts to snipe at and sneering at the range of Socialism hybrids with No True Scotsman flavour condescension as political ideologies simply not complete worldviews in their own right has got me rather depressed in dealing with the average Communist on here. People in general often just seem to want to find something simple and easy to hate.

Not fully defanged yet. Queer can still be used as a pejorative just like if someone said “That’s so gay!” in the 90’s schoolyard usage to synonym for dumb, uncool or bad… We did however make it kind of harder to pull off as a lot of the time unless you make your tone or context explicitly negative it just comes across as using it in a neutral way.

Yeah a lot of cis people really reject the term. Some don’t like the way it sounds and wants to self identify with a word that they like more… A certain number stick to their guns in wanting to make sure that there is no word that is used for people who are not trans.

Sometimes they opt for wanting to be called “normal” without realizing that there is a value judgement implicit in that word. If you have a “normal man” and a “trans man” you are saying that transness is abnormal, pathologizing gender. You reach the same effect by omission of a word. If there is a man and a trans man then one of these things is assumed standard and the other the deviation.

Of course they don’t see a problem with this because under that model they personally don’t take on the psychological burden of constantly having to referring to oneself by terminology reserved for either the deviant or somehow inferior. To those unused to questioning their centrally held power the idea of just having a word to describe them in relation to others is seen as an oppression.

If enough people disliked the term cis they could band together and just come up with another value neutral word…That’s basically how we arrived at the less science centric terms for other sexuallities like “gay” as an example. “Homosexual” being a relatively new classification wasn’t exactly loved by the people to whom it was applied to beyond their consent as it sounded clinical. Other euphemisms had always existed but gay was purposely adopted as a synonym by the queer community.

I don’t think there would be objection from the trans community long as the term synonymous for cis was essentially was not trying to imply that it is somehow the default state of being.

Think of the potential slang we are missing out on!

Also the thing is just steeped in trans metaphor. Consider the agents deadnaming Neo throughout as “Mister Anderson” Ander being intended as the same word part as Androgens, Androgyny or Misandry… Mister Ander Son. The system keeps reinforcing his identity as Man man man.

Go listen back through Morpheus’s speech just before he offers a red and blue pill (back in the 90’s horomone treatments for trans women came in the form of little red pills)… It’s a sci-fi parable for gender roles and dysphoria. Of being forced into a system where oppression isn’t seen or heard or touched because almost nobody recognizes it. Only some nebulous but insistant feeling causes you to want to break free, to explore yourself.

And once you break free you no longer have the protection from the system. The system sees you as a threat. You must accept less resources and support outside of whatever small found family and resistance you gather.

Like all scifi parables some of it’s metaphor plays second fiddle to making the technical premise work from a narrative perspective…but whenever they start talking about the Matrix consider they are actually saying “The Bioessentialist construct of gender” and you can see a lot of the different facets behind deliberate creative choices.

There’s actually kind of a funny history behind the Eggplant emoji. Emoji are Japanese in origin and around the time they were taking off there was this Survivor like gameshow where one guy was confined to his apartment and he had to try and survive past the basics by applying for and winning sweepstakes items from various promotions from newspapers and magazines.

The participant’s shortened form name was Nasu - which means “eggplant” so since the guy started the challenge with literally nothing including clothes they put a little Eggplant over his junk in post. That became a Japanese cultural meme that translated over once emoji became more widely adopted.

You probably won’t see actual dick emoji in the actual set because emoji are an all ages access thing and exist on an international level. It’s actually kind of funny how different cultures use the same finite set. Like in China how the angel emoji is construed as “I’m going to end you”. One could see the things as becoming essentially a hieroglyphic set where they gain their own full individual linguistic meanings.