Nebraska’s Republican Gov. Jim Pillen on Wednesday signed an executive order strictly defining a person’s sex.
The order notably does not use the term “transgender,” although it appears directed at limiting transgender access to certain public spaces. It orders state agencies to define “female” and “male” as a person’s sex assigned at birth.
“It is common sense that men do not belong in women’s only spaces,” Pillen said in a statement. “As Governor, it is my duty to protect our kids and women’s athletics, which means providing single-sex spaces for women’s sports, bathrooms, and changing rooms.”
I still don’t understand what business the government has defining sex. How is that in any way the government’s job?? If anything, it could be up to medical organizations, such as the AMA, if they had sound arguments. But, the government? I really try to at least understand everyone’s logic even if I don’t agree with them, but this is just so insane. I don’t get it.
That’s because there is no logic, the people that want the government to define sex have a purely emotional reaction to the very existence of trans people… and most things that don’t align with their narrow life experience and worldview
There’s no logic?
Just because you’re ignorant of the difference between sex and gender are doesn’t mean there isn’t logic…
Sex is very important for the single biggest thing that affects all of our lives, healthcare. Standardizing it literally saves lives.
Except the healthcare needs of trans gender people who have medically transitioned to any degree are often closer to their gender than their sex assigned at birth. The body chemistry differences between men and women are primarily affected by hormones. Unless you’re specifically looking at the organs that are different, you probably need to go by gender.
Again, why is the government involved instead of a letting a leading medical body. Did physicians have a large protest over the lack of a legal definition that is forced outside of medical settings, and the government heard their concerns based on rational logic and ethical medical standards? Does the government define eye color, cancer, gingivitis, premature birth, high IQ, major depressive disorder, and how organizations outside of the medical system can use those terms?
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ITT: Everyone conflating sex for gender…
It’s actually quite important. Your sex are what your chromosomes are, your gender is what you identify as.
Your sex doesn’t change, your gender does.
That’s literally the definition of it.
This is important especially for medical purposes, medication, surgery, emergency care…etc all has variations based on your sex, because different sexes are predisposed to different classes of problems and interactions. This also applies to REPORTING, reporting that a medication affects someone born female different than someone born male is an extremely important distinction.
Incorrect reporting literally costs lives.
It should to be standardized, just like everything else that has significant consequences on well being.
Politics are ruining what should be completed apolitical.
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Just a reminder if you are worried about your children being ogled by trans people in the “wrong” restroom: There are ten gays for every one trans person, so the likelihood of being ogled by people in the “right restroom” should be ten times higher. The solution is not to police who uses what restroom, but to design restrooms that don’t allow for ogling!
I swear, the only proof of a grand gay conspiracy I’ve ever found is the bathtub urinal. Walls, people, real walls, not plywood separators that have gaps between the doors and opening on the bottom.
Can’t wait for them to remember that trans men exist. There’s going to be a lot of shocked Pikachu Republicans when men who look like men show up in “women’s spaces” because they’re being forced to.
Wish I could be a fly on the wall to see that fucking awesome scenario.
But seriously, trans folks, you don’t deserve this bullshit and I hate that your existence is the controversy of the moment for Republicans. Be well and take care of yourselves <3.
I recall an article about that exact thing happening - a trans man had to use a women’s restroom because of the local red policy over his birth cert saying female.
People saw a man enter a woman’s restroom, and proceeded to beat the shit out of him.
It’s a feature, not a bug.
Don’t ever forget that for republicans, cruelty is the goal.
It’s designed to put trans people in an impossible position. Use the bathroom you want to and get brutalized by the cops, or use the bathroom you’re legally required to use and get brutalized by private citizens while the cops look the other way.
It’s also gonna suck for any cis women accused of being trans, and subject to invasive “verification”
there’s gonna be a lot of
shocked Pikachuviolent Republicans
Intersex is a thing.
ITT: Everyone conflating sex for gender…
It’s actually quite important. Your sex are what your chromosomes are, your gender is what you identify as.
Your sex doesn’t change, your gender does.
That’s literally the definition of it.
This is important especially for medical purposes, medication, surgery, emergency care…etc all has variations based on your sex, because different sexes are predisposed to different classes of problems and interactions. This also applies to REPORTING, reporting that a medication affects someone born female different than someone born male is an extremely important distinction.
Incorrect reporting literally costs lives.
It should to be standardized, just like everything else that has significant consequences on well being.
Politics are ruining what should be completed apolitical…
And it looks like lemmy is just Reddit again, except at least on Reddit you can find an informed opinion before the bottom of the thread. This thread is completely devoid of critical thinking…
You didn’t say anything inaccurate, but you also appear to be missing the point almost entirely.
“It is common sense that men do not belong in women’s only spaces,” Pillen said in a statement. “As Governor, it is my duty to protect our kids and women’s athletics, which means providing single-sex spaces for women’s sports, bathrooms, and changing rooms.”
This isn’t about clinical reporting standards. This is about being able to regulate social settings based on sex instead of gender. By legally clarifying the definitions, there can be no confusion when they follow this up with banning male-sexed individuals from female-gendered bathrooms.
Umm… I hate to tell you this but this is propagating some pretty harmful misinformation…
The reactions to medications are actually more closely tied to the hormone balance and body fat distribution of a person than their sex. It’s a common issue in the trans community where birth certificates are non-updatable that a doctor will prescribe meds for a person’s birth sex but because they are fully transitioned through HRT they get the effects more common to their phenotype presentation. This means that treatment is more commonly in line with their gender identity because of their hormonal medication and other procedures like an orchiectomy that make a person more similar to where they transitioned to then where they transitioned from.
With trans paitents by and large the safer way to behave is to go with the “if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and talks like a duck… If you are in a pinch and can’t ask them for specifics because they can’t talk - treat them like a duck.” While a lot of doctors aren’t super well versed in trans specific healthcare it remains a huge problem inside the community for trans women particularly being dosed like cis men which often means they respond like cis women to a lot of different things which is on average a little more scary because meds often linger longer than is expected in trans women’s tissues just like cis women. Sometimes this causes some cascading problems.
Pharmacology wise the way trans folks react to different medications is still a bit of a frontier science… But dollars to donuts “just treat em like their birth sex and call it a day” is way too simplistic a take. The lived experience and often physical nature of gender do not stay nicely behind a cordon marked “politics”. Trans ignorance in healthcare can be very scary for someone whose endocrinologist has informed them what they should be given and treated like and then some hotshot resident could just decide to not listen should the trans person in question be placed in a position where they are in extreme distress and have to self advocate and educate the person caring for them on what may be the worst day of their life.
Yes, and we all know that was the intention behind this order. To protect people from incorrect medical reporting 🙄.
The people you’re seemingly mad at never wanted to make this political. Trans people are just people that want to exist. That’s it.
Your sex are what your chromosomes are
So we need to genetically test all babies at birth?
Otherwise, I don’t know how we would figure out the sex of the ones with Swyer Syndrome- XY but with female genitalia.
And assigning their sex as male at birth doesn’t make much sense to me.
One thing that exacerbates the problem is the values for gender and sex are reused. ‘Male’ can mean ‘I identity as male gendered’ or ‘my chromosomes are XY’ (choose one or both). If sex were consistently represented with different values (maybe as chromosomes XX, XY, others?), that might provide some clarity in good faith discussions. Finally, I’m not in medicine so YMMV.
Update: One thing I wanted to add: I also recognize that many discussions are ‘not’ in good faith and an informed participant will deliberately conflate the meanings of gender’s and sex’s values. Unfortunately, no recommendation can help a person whose mind is closed.
Edit: Added “Update”. Adjusted original comment’s casing.
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you’re making nothing but sense, but you’re getting a lot of hate for it. we should be able to talk about this stuff by now without having to combat an onslaught of angry commenters that didn’t read what you wrote.
It’s literally a carbon copy of reddit. the weird outrage just deflates all common sense.
Of fucking course. The law equally prevents the rich and poor from sleeping under bridges.
sMaLl GoVeRnMeNt
They just want it small enough to fit in your underwear.
Does this mean that if there’s a clerical error and your baby’s birth certificate lists the wrong sex, it’s illegal to get it corrected?
This reads a lot like the Indiana Pi Bill. Granted, that one never passed, but it’s a pretty old story: politicians think they know better than experts.
And now that our Supreme Court has thrown Chevron Deference out the window, that old story may have a different, much worse, ending.
Look at how they just forced the EPA to stop protecting over 60% of wetlands in the US. Look at what they’re doing with the FDA and mifepristone.
Bad times ahead.
“assigned”? How can it be assigned when it’s a natural state of being? That’s like saying the kids also get assigned hair color or eye color at birth.
They’re trying to co-opt language “assigned at birth” is a trans phrase
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Fair. As always I defer to what the individual themselves prefer when asked.
Funny thing, both of those can change too. I was blond when I was a kid, now my hair is brown, and when I’m old it’ll be gray.
You’re missing the point. If a kid is born and has brown eyes does the doctor “assign” his eye color? As brown? Or does he observe the eye color as brown?
Saying the doctor “assigns” the eye color could mean it’s up to the doctor to decide, when it really isn’t. The doctor can’t look at brown eyes on a newborn and say, “yup I’m going to assign that as blue”
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Because it’s not always one or the other. Sex and gender are far more complicated than just X or Y.
They’re not.
What about intersex folks? Or folks with mutations on their x and y chromosomes?
What’s not?
I see, even the simplest English sentence is confusing for you. No wonder you think the way you think…
No, I just want you yo be explicit about what you believe, because the argument goes in two directions. You’re either confidently ignorant, or you’re a bigot. If it’s the former, you might actually learn something. I don’t waste my time arguing with bigots, though.
Wut?
How is it that the US is moving backwards? I am struggling to understand this…
Death throes of a vacuous ideology.
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Another victory for Christianity
…there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one…
- Galatians 3:28
…when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, […] then you will enter [the kingdom].
- Gospel of Thomas 22
Victory? Meh, debatable.
Gospel of Thomas is not canon it is Gnostic. Not really Christianity. Also not even well written imo. Have you ever read that thing? It is tiny and too simple. I frankly expect better from the 2nd century especially given that the John Gospel predates it. I think the first time I read it I had it done in an hour.
You can quote Galatians but you should keep in mind that it was written by a man who thought the world was ending and everyone was going to become these sexless prayer robots. There would be no human gender because there would be no humans.
Like it or not Christianity is anti-LGBT, at least as long as they continue to use their Bible to be the source of what they believe.
It’s not Gnostic. That was a misinterpretation of the text for about 50 years after it was discovered which finally started to fall apart with Michael Allen Williams’ Rethinking Gnosticism in the late 90s.
As a result, the tautological dating of anything with a whiff of ideas considered Gnostic was also revisited, and the core of Thomas probably dates to the first century.
Personally I think there’s an excellent case for that core predating Paul’s first letter to Corinth even, and suspect it may even be Papias’ lost logia Gospel of Matthew. I’d guess the association with Thomas was a second century addition after the Gospel of John given the two times he is mentioned in the work are both associated with secrecy, which is internally conflicting with saying 33 as well as all the other sayings referring to two ears.
It almost certainly predates canonical Matthew and likely Luke-Acts as well given the nuances to some of the shared material.
While it is a short work, I think it’s probably one of the most incredible surviving texts from antiquity, though I agree that it’s fairly obtuse without the proper context.
The biggest “ah ha” in my researching it was realizing that it seems to have significant familiarity with Leucretius’s De Rerum Natura, a link that’s even more explicit in the records of its followers in Pseudo-Hippolytus’s Refutations V.
So when you look at a line like this:
Jesus said, “Whoever has come to know the world has discovered a carcass, and whoever has discovered a carcass, of that person the world is not worthy.”
- Gospel of Thomas saying 56
It’s useful to know that 50 years before Jesus was born a very popular work in the Roman empire was saying this:
To resume: I’ve reached the juncture of my argument where I Must demonstrate the world too has a ‘body’, and must die, Even as it had a birth.
- Leucretius, De Rerum Natura book 5 lines 64-67
De Rerum Natura was the only surviving book from antiquity explicitly describing ideas ranging from survival of the fittest to a relationship between uncertainty of quantized matter and free will. And the Gospel of Thomas is the only theological text in Christianity (or as far as I know outside of it in antiquity either) that was building on top of those ideas.
It can be read in an hour, but even after over four years now of it being my main research focus, I’m still surprised and impressed by what that short little document yields.
And yes, Paul thought the world would soon be ending. But the perspective in Thomas was that it already had long ago, which may give a bit more context for the comments in 2 Timothy 2:18 and 2 Thessalonians 2:2. I wouldn’t be so quick to assume that Paul in Galatians is writing such a similar phrasing before the other was composed. He had a habit of overlapping with Thomas, and in a few of those cases explicitly mentioned he was citing something else.
What a minute this isn’t fair. You can’t introduce original research and get on my case that I don’t subscribe to your theory. The consensus is that it is Gnostic. I see your argument that the consensus might be wrong but you can’t just assert that I am wrong. I do see your point that since it is so context independent people must have known the context and at the same time lacking other features of the myth hints that it predates the myth. So yeah it could be pre-Mark but that you can’t just assert that.
I don’t know if I agree that Paul used it since that breaks the traditional timeline of his conversion within 2-3 years of the crucification and it isn’t likely that someone could have written it during the ministry. The overlap could easily be that they were both using the same source.
This is all besides that point. Christianity doesn’t consider this canon so it doesn’t get to be used in an argument about what Christianity is about.
The consensus is not that it’s Gnostic and hasn’t been for nearly two decades now. Here is Princeton’s Elaine Pagels (author of Gnostic Gospels) on the topic in a recent email debate:
Both of your points are assumptions all of us, I would guess, were taught in graduate school. The earliest editors of “Gnostic” texts thought that they were dualistic, escapist, nihilistic, involving “esoteric ideas about aeons and demiurges,” as you yourself write. As my former teacher at Harvard, Krister Stendhal, said to me recently about these texts, “we just thought these were weird.” But can you point to any evidence of such “esoteric ideas” in Thomas? Anything about “aeons and demiurges”?
Those first editors, not finding such evidence, assumed that this just goes to show how sneaky heretics are-they do not say what they mean. So when they found no evidence for such nihilism or dualism-on the contrary, the Gospel of Thomas speaks continually of God as the One good “Father of all”-they just read these into the text. Some scholars, usually those not very familiar with these sources, still do.
So first let’s talk about “Gnosticism”-and what I used to (but no longer) call “Gnostic Gospels.” I have to take responsibility for part of the misunderstanding. Having been taught that these texts were “Gnostic,” I just accepted it, and even coined the term “Gnostic gospels,” which became the title of my book.
I agree with you that we have no evidence for what we call “Gnosticism” from the first century, and have learned from our colleagues that what we thought about “Gnosticism” has virtually nothing to do with a text like the Gospel of Thomas-or, for that matter, with the New Testament Gospel of John which our teachers said also showed “Gnostic influences.”
It used to be what scholars thought, but it’s one of the big recent instances in Biblical scholarship of “oops, our bad” and is now definitely an obsolete position, particularly by anyone specializing in Gnostic studies.
As for Paul’s use of it, I’m not saying he was reading it prior to his conversion, simply that he’s likely read it or become familiar with it by the time he’s writing 1 Cor given the overlaps, which given their nuances indicate that the core text was present in Corinth when he’s writing to them. I suspect it is the “other gospel/other version of Jesus” he’s chiding them for accepting in 2 Cor 11, as well as what was behind the schism in Corinth that 1 Clement was written in response to. So it’s not necessarily influencing Paul 2-3 years after the crucifixion, but more around 50 CE shortly before he’s writing those letters.
And there’s unique sayings or context in Thomas that fit parts going back all the way to the time of a historical Jesus.
For example, saying 81 doesn’t only parallel 1 Cor 4:8, it especially fits Pilate’s time because it was then that Tiberius, who inherited the throne, had abandoned ruling to party but didn’t relinquish the position to someone else. So “let someone who has become wealthy reign, and one who has power relinquish it” sounds a lot like a critique of dynastic rule and a call for Tiberius to pass the torch to someone that will do the job. It also sounds like the kind of thing that might have gotten someone killed by the Roman state.
Or the context of Leucretius as a foundation, present across Thomas, happens to fit one of the most well known parables. Look at Leucretius’s language in describing failed biological reproduction:
For a woman prevents pregnancy this way, resisting it, […] By doing this, she turns the furrow away from the straight and true Path of the ploughshare, and the seed falls by the wayside too.
- De Rerum Natura book 4 lines 1269-1273
The book elsewhere explicitly described the idea that only what survived to reproduce would multiply.
So you have the sower parable about randomly scattered seed that fails to reproduce when it falls by the wayside of a path, and only what successfully reproduces multiples. The Naassenes, following Thomas, claimed this parable was referring to the scattering of seeds like indivisible points that make up all things (almost verbatim Lucretius’s “seeds of things”). In Thomas, it immediately followed two sayings about how no matter if lion ate man or man ate lion humans would be the eventual result, and that the human being was like a large fish selected from smaller fish.
Yet in canon the saying is given a secret explanation about proselytizing. One that in Mark clumsily interpolates into a public speech at the shore (you’ll notice they never return to the shore after 4:20, but are back there in 4:35-36).
So one version of the tradition around what’s regarded as one of the most likely sayings to go back to a historical Jesus effectively has Jesus citing Leucretius’s metaphor in describing survival of the fittest, and the only other version from antiquity is instead saying that he explained this public saying in secret (at odds with John 18:20’s “I said nothing in secret”) and it was about proselytizing.
In parallel to this, you can see that Paul is first talking about sown seeds in relation to human bodies in 1 Cor 15:35-49 where he also discussed a first and second Adam (a core aspect of the later Naassenes’ beliefs), but then switched to discussing sown seeds in relation to proselytizing and collections in 2 Cor 9:6-10. (Here’s a paper exploring Epicurean influence on the opposition to the physical resurrection in 1 Cor 15, btw.)
Is all of Thomas dating early? No - there’s even evidence that parts of Thomas post-date other parts of it, such as 110 combining the adjacent 80 and 81. But there’s a case that parts of it go back much further than most people might think (in part because of terrible scholarship for about 50 years leading to misinformation regarding it).
Look I fully admit I am not prepared to argue about it’s dating. I have a copy of the Gnostic texts and it has it in it and I have only read it a few times, not studied like you have. There is no way I can even respond to this other than point out that it is not part of the bible and thus really not part of Christianity. You can argue that it should have but that decision is about 17 centuries too late.
My only real questions are how do you explain that it was in Greek and that Paul doesn’t mention it given this revised timeline. You point out the allusions but not a citation. Core Paul got his information from talking to people if he is to believed.
Good luck on your thesis defense, not like you will need it. This is way above and beyond what I expected to read today.
Two can play at that game.
In like manner also, those women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shame faceless and sobriety; not with braided hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly array; but (which become women professing godliness) with good works. Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression. Notwithstanding she shall be saved in childbearing, if they continue in faith and charity and holiness with sobriety.
1 Timothy 2:9-15
the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man
1 Corinthians 11:3
Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as it is fit in the Lord.
Colossians 3:18
Sure sounds like men and women are very different in Christianity to me.
Yes “Paul” could argue with Paul quite effectively.
