Yes, I agree, that’s essentially what I was saying before.
Some people seem to think what makes a man or a woman is purely biological (or like you said, “anatomy”), whereas others think the distinction has more to do with what’s understood as a “social construct” (or like you said, “behavioral cues”).
So, in the comment you were replying to I was taking the second interpretation, that’s why I was saying it’s defined by social/behavioral traits.
I agree. But this also applies to all social/behavioral labels.
Not all pizza-lovers are the same, not all left-handed people are the same… etc.
The question is: what is it that makes a “man” be considered different than a “woman”?
What do those 2 men, who are different, have in common that makes you still call them “men”?
Sorry, I was just agreeing with what you said in your second paragraph. Because it makes complete logical sense what you said there. So the “of course you would” was just a reaffirmation of what you described yourself, not a mandate over what you should feel.
Also, I do experience gender, just the same way as I experience color, taste, pain, happiness and all other experiences. I tried to explain it when I gave the example with “green” before. I experience green… what I don’t know is if “what it feels like” to experience green for me could really be identified with “green” beyond the social understanding I have from my interactions with other people when we see green.
In an island of men (not women) you would be exposed to the same different external behaviors and preferences associated to the archetype that you do not identify with, so of course you would feel a difference.
These external behaviors and preferences you perceive as different is what I was referring to with archetype/label/stereotype/pick-your-word.
The experience you describe requires interaction with other people who you (and society) categorizes as “girls” and “boys”.
Without this interaction with this external categorization: would you have been able to find anything was “different”?
I feel that in order to have something feel “different” you need to have something to compare it to. Something you can perceive from others and that thus it must be reflected externally and not just something purely internal at the level of qualia (otherwise you wouldn’t be able to compare it). So this is what I meant by archetype/label/stereotype/pick-your-word. That thing you felt was different which you perceived when comparing with other people outside of yourself.
I don’t know, I would not say that I knew automatically when I was born what’s the difference between “man” and “woman”. Of course I have had clear feelings and preferences about a variety of topics, some instinctive and well defined, ever since I was born. But I don’t think that’s determined by a label. They clearly can fall into a particular label, but only “after the fact”.
To me, “man” and “woman” can’t be labels that go beyond the social/behavioral because I don’t know what it feels like to be a man anymore than what I know it feels like to be a woman… I only know myself, I can’t possibly compare what I feel to what others feel, because those feelings are a “qualia” that cannot be simply be transmitted with words.
And without communication to compare and reference, I could not judge whether what I feel is “man” or “woman” at the level that you choose to do it. To me it’s logically impossible to set a gender at such a deep level.
An analogy would be how I can never be sure that other people experience the same thing I experience when we both see and point to the color “green”. “Green” is a construct based on our common understanding of the experience a particular wavelength that is emitted by an object we are pointing to. But the label “green” cannot go beyond that external consensus, because what I experience when the impulses caused by that wavelength reach my brain could perfectly be different than what you experience when that same wavelength causes yours.
We might even agree on what are the wavelengths that we call green, based on our own internal experience, because the experience I feel when seeing green might be similar every time I see green (and the same will happen for you)… but that does not mean that we are both having the same experience, it could be that what you experience as blue I experience as green and that what you experience as green I experience as blue, and yet every time we would agree on calling the same wavelengths the same way, because we would have learned to call them that way.
So it would be meaningless to say beyond any social agreement that I deeply think that this color should be “green” only based on my experience alone, because it would not be any different from saying that this color should be “blue”… the only thing that makes us both agree on calling a particular color experience as green and not blue is the social understanding of that experience matching a common external pattern we both agree on, and that we each match it with our respective (and possibly different) subjective experiences (qualia) when we see that color.
But the identity that I’m describing with that label, that exists at a level below social norms, and below stereotypes, even whilst being influenced by them.
Ok, then I see we are talking about different concepts. I was talking about the label itself. To me “woman” or “man” are just labels, they don’t define what I am and don’t affect in any way the image I have of myself.
By your definition I’m neither a “woman” nor a “man” because I don’t personally feel like I should box myself in an identity to fit any particular definition of a label.
However, I’ll be perfectly ok with boxing myself in one particular label so other can better understand my behavior and the language they use.
So I’m not a woman or a man, but the result of my behavior can be commonly classified as one… and that’s the only thing that makes me, commonly, refer to myself in public as one of those roles. But I’m not adapting my behavior to those roles… it’s the other way around: the roles are created to classify my behavior. People would commonly say I’m “cis” because the category that fits me best happens to be the same one that I was assigned at birth, but the category does not have influence over what I am… it’s the category the one that fits me, not me who fits the category.
To me, the words “woman” and “man” only make sense when linked to specific properties that the label is trying to find ways to describe as a group. They only make sense as stereotypes, they don’t make sense in a deep internal level because what I am is more complex than a set of specific behaviors and looks… the expression of my internal complexity might be classifiable after-the-fact (for example, you could say I’m a person who drives themselves by logic, sometimes a bit too much), but they are just external aspects and not something that goes much deeper than a set of behaviors I appear to present to the outside world.
It’s reductive if you see “stereotypes” as something simple. Imho, stereotypes are very complex (or perhaps another word would be “archetypes”, if the word “stereotypes” has too many secondary connotations for native speakers, maybe).
To me the “stereotype” (or “archetype”, or “social construct” like I pointed in my first comment) of a “woman” includes every characteristic or aspect that could make someone identify a person as a “woman”. Not all aspects might manifest in all women, the more aspects match, the more confidence the person would have to identify the other as a woman. Same for “man”, in fact, it could be a person matches both stereotypes/archetypes at an equal amount. Also there can be other gender stereotypes outside those two, because as long as you are using a word to describe a category of people you’d often have a complex set of properties that people would use to define whether it fits that category or not.
I agree that putting people in a box is just contributing to segregation, but I did not choose that, I’m just trying to understand how people are using the words other people invented. It’s almost inevitable, even the word “trans” is in some way a category, and there are even super and sub categories… like say “LGBTQ+” or “non-binary”.
Stereotypes are complicated… when I say “gender stereotypes” I don’t mean that there are only 2 stereotypes.
Is perfectly possible (in fact, it might be common) to have in mind different stereotypes for the word “feminine” and for the word “woman”… otherwise terms like “feminine man” or “masculine woman” would make no sense.
The stereotype of what’s a woman (ie, what makes people consider a person a woman independently of their lower bits) is not necessarily the same as the stereotype of a feminine person.
What I said is that for a trans, “gender relates to what stereotype (social construct) a person identifies with”. I did not say their gender matches a particular stereotype, but that it relates to it.
Someone who does not identify with a typical stereotype and believes that this makes them be of a different gender, is defining their gender based on whether they fit (or don’t fit, in this case) a specific social stereotype.
However, someone who does not believe gender relates to stereotypes at all would not see that person as having a different gender because that person’s gender (for those people) would be unrelated to whether they match (or identify themselves with) a stereotype or not.
Of course you (or anyone) don 't need to have surgery to conform to other people’s gender stereotypes. But I don’t think that’s what was implied here.
What’s “feminine”? is that not a gender stereotype? I don’t think there’s anything wrong about being a man that closer fits a feminine stereotype than a masculine one.
what they really mean is that “men are supposed to be one way and women are supposed to be another,” with the implication that someone isn’t a real man or women if they are not that stereotype
I think what they often imply is that for them gender is just a way to refer to male and female sex, and not really a stereotype. If someone is female/male then in their eyes they are a woman/man regardless of what they look or how they behave, because it’s not about social stereotypes for them. Even if a man looks and behaves like a stereotypical woman, it would not stop being “a real man” because for them gender isn’t about looks, behavior or feelings of identity.
However, the trans community sees gender as something that relates to what stereotype (social construct) a person identifies with, and this makes gender independent of sex, because you can identify with a gender stereotype that does not match the stereotype that you might typically associate with your biological sex.
Their instance has an individual identity they wished to protect.
If the intention of the separation were to prevent any interaction from anyone who isn’t an existing Beehaw user they would have closed the sign ups. But they didn’t do that (https://beehaw.org/signup is open).
The reason of Beehaw’s defederation has more to do with moderation hurdles, and how they don’t trust content coming from other instances, see Beehaws own statement about this: https://docs.beehaw.org/docs/important-questions-decisions-and-reflections/on-defederation/
Like I said: the way the federation works, it’s a moderation nightmare to be fully open. Not because as an instance host you wanna hide the content you have in your instance from the wider public, but because you have to deal with (host, mirror, cache and display along with your own content) content that is coming from a different instance which might not share your same moderation strategy.
I feel like the discussion assumes an individual users wish for seemless interactions is more important than the wish of other users to have the choice of non-interaction.
Both are reasonable asks. If a community wants to control who is allowed to access, there should be moderation tools that limit interaction to anyone who’s not been approved. However, this is a different thing from straight-up disallowing in your instance access to all users that happen to have registered their account in a particular instance. I don’t see why the identity/account provider cannot be separate from the access management and content moderation.
In fact, I feel that it would make access control EASIER for Beehaw if all new accounts actually were accounts from other instances, because that would let them audit the person applying for access in a more reliable way than they do currently in their signup form (https://beehaw.org/signup ). They would be able to check the post/comment history of the user, how many years has it been an active member, etc. before deciding if the user should be allowed to post content in their instance, and it would be protecting them from malicious actors / bots that might be pretending to be someone else. It would also potentially allow to use tools to check automatically the user for common bad patterns, which could potentially minimize a lot the human work in moderation and make the process much faster and convenient also for the person applying, so I feel this is a Win-Win if anything, not an “X has priority over Y”.
I think granular access control for communities and some other things that are coming will help when it comes to moderation tools. But it still cannot avoid having to deal with all the content from other instances in the federation, since that’s something fundamental in how activitypub works. There would need to be a new separate protocol for decentralizing the user identity between instances that don’t federate their content. Maybe something like OpenID.
Is that really what people mean by it being easier?
In Bluesky you are asked to choose a “Hosting provider” when you sign up… it;'s just that it’s set by default to Bluesky and actually trying to set something else makes the experience of signing in much harder… so actually I feel Bluesky is the one for which the process is harder, if anything.
I can’t even get a direct url to the sign up page of https://bsky.app/ …but I can link https://lemmy.ml/signup
Nobody is being forced to seek an alternative Lemmy instance to whichever they found first. In the same way that nobody in Bluesky has to use Bluesky as their hosting provider or even choose to self host their PDS.
Nice! It also seems to be under discussion on lemmy’s github here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818
It does not have to be something mandatory…
I mean, there could be some form of “metacommunities”, something like being able to group multiple communities together in a “view” that shows them to you visually as if they were a single community despite being separated. Bonus points if everyone can make their own custom groupings (but others can subscribe to them… so there can be some community-managed groupings).
In theory you could have multiple “metacommunities” for the same topic still… but at least they could be sharing the same posts if they share communities. I feel grouping like this would be helpful because small communities feel even smaller when they are split.
I think reddit has something similar to that, multireddits or something I think they are called.
That’s the problem: the protocol pretty much requires explicit relationships between instances since they are forced to proxy/cache each other’s content. I think there’s too much responsibility on the instance… I feel it would be a moderation nightmare to host an instance with truly open federation (potentially even result in legal trouble!). So I totally understand why so many instances want to be conservative on who they federate with…
The ideal situation would be to be to be able to interact with third party instances directly (at least when the 2 instances don’t wanna agree on caching each other’s content), instead of having to use your home instance as proxy/cache… so the home instance would not need to have the burden (both legally and in terms of hosting resources) and it would just act as a way to identify the user, not necessarily as the primary content provider.
Potentially, using some sort of predictable hashing to get the same id across instances might also help in the detection of duplicate links so that they can be aggregated in a single place (sort of what was suggested at point 2 here).
I fear this could be too much of a breaking change though.
- A way to backup your whole user data and completely restore it on any instance you want. If an instance goes under, it should be possible to keep all subscriptions, all your posts, all your comments, and migrate them to a new instance.
This would be great… also even if the “restore” part were not possible (yet?) I feel offering a way to extract your data might even be a requirement for a server to be fully GDPR compliant (though I could be wrong on that, IANAL), reddit does allow you to download your data after all.
Yes, I agree with all that.
Social / behavioral archetypes can be complex and fuzzy, they might change with the society and with time. It could be that what we consider today as a “pizza-lover” might not be what was considered a “pizza-lover” in the antiquity, when Europe did not even have such a thing as a “tomato” and the word “pizza” might have been used for a completely different dish that today we would not call “pizza”.
This is why I personally think that the internal way in which I feel should be independent from the concept of gender role / gender expression… I am what I am… I’m not necessarily a “man” or “woman” in a universal and unequivocal social way, I’m just me. I might fit very precisely one of those labels now as generally they are understood… but who knows if I’ll fit the social label they’ll have in the year 4000… or if I fit the label from year -4000. Or the labels they might use in the planet Aldebaran 2.