PS Maggie – thanks for your kind and reasonable reply.

If someone’s stabbed, do you imprison the sociopath, or ban knives?

Your analogy would be valid if 90% of knives were used to stab people, and yeah, in that case, ban knives. Also never mind, by that point civilization is dead anyway. Thankfully, right now most knives appear to be used to slice bread.

Less thankfully, the word “normal” is used, most of the time, to separate the “okay” people from the “not okay” people. 

We do get to redefine language — at least collectively.

Unless there’s 3.5 billion of you, no you don’t.

I’d say being able to be willing to take another’s life is a fairly sociopathic headspace by definition, but then I’m no psychologist.

But speaking of conflation, I hardly implied all sociopaths are murderous, did I? I merely implied all murderers were sociopaths.

Which from a certain angle (obviously not a clinical one) seems pretty valid to me. If you can walk around killing people, there’s some sort of pathology in your socialisation, no?

It’s basic etymology. Which is pretty much the crux of this digression. Surely people have the right to employ words in their most ovbious sense without people coming from whatever angle demanding their own special case be reflected in everybody’s general terms.

Everybody’s normal in some ways and abnormal in others. Different modes of abnormality are intrinsically associated with varying degrees of inconvenience, mitigated only by society’s willingness to go out of its way to accomodate it. I know about that; I had to watch a large amount of my potential glacially pissed away over thirteen years by an education childminding system that did absolutely nothing to accommodate any intelligence a couple of SDs above the mean. And society stands a lot more to gain by doing something about that issue than redefining words, I’ll hazard.

If you’re in a position where you find the general use of certain words harmful, by all means attempt to introduce a new word; I have no problem with that. But you better have a damn fine reason if you want to make any of the old words verboten.

FWIW, I’m not a sociopath myself, but I’ve had people in my circle of friends afflicted with it who were good people honest people, trying to deal with both their impairment and the damaged caused by people’s prejudice. And I think that might be a fine example of an “actual problem.”

(I’m still inclined to agree with you that Maggie committed no great sin.)

Yeah, I’m fine with using it in a statistical sense but otherwise, whether Kimmo there likes it or not, those connotations exist.  Normal equals good, right, fine, the way things ought to be.  Abnormal implies bad or wrong.  Individuals can choose to ignore those depths of meaning but they still exist. 

IME, and this is an Australian experience, people who’ve used the term in that sense are generally stupid and/or religious. As far as I was aware, normal pretty much only equals those things as far as the feeble-minded are concerned.

Of course, general usage is more likely to have been more thoroughly corrupted over the pond, where 1950s ‘educational films’ instructed youngsters in the dangers of non-conformism…

I wish it was possible to wave a magic wand and have no one persecuted for reasons of abnormality – whatever abnormality that is.  Don’t live in that world now, though, and we don’t get to redefine the language willy-nilly.  The meaning attached to
language is a shared thing. 

We do get to redefine language – at least collectively. How else did we arrive at this position? I’m merely advocating correction. The time is ripe to grind those oppressive connotations into the dust.

Normal still means normal, and nothing else. To say someone (let alone a bloody mouse, FFS) isn’t normal isn’t an insult, it’s (hopefully) a statement of fact.

If someone’s stabbed, do you imprison the sociopath, or ban knives?

Instead of moaning about statistical realities, maybe we’d be better off directing our attention to actual problems like those you mention… then we won’t have to tread on eggshells around those who’d have us tearing pages out of the dictionary.

That magazine was such a treasure.

*edit* sorry to see that this has become the thread topic. It was a great article and a fine piece of scientific writing for laypeople.

http://frank.mtsu.edu/~phollowa/5sexes.html

*crosses legs, folds hands over crotch*

http://articles.cnn.com/2008-11-18/us/lkl.beatie.qanda_1_pregnant-man-sperm-bank-nancy?_s=PM:US

Maggie, thanks for reminding me of that.

I wish it was possible to wave a magic wand and have no one persecuted for reasons of abnormality – whatever abnormality that is.  Don’t live in that world now, though, and we don’t get to redefine the language willy-nilly.  The meaning attached to language is a shared thing.

That said, I wouldn’t have corrected Maggie on the usage.  It wasn’t in a particularly awful context, in my opinion, and most other words would probably have seemed clunky or detracted from readability.  I suppose “unaltered” might have worked? 

Gender is a survival strategy eukaryotic species (multicellular colonies of them in our case) developed in the precambrian period as a way to combat bacteria, parasites, viruses and the environment.  There is also the benefit of DNA and mitochondrial refreshing.  We made up the rest.  That’s all. 

Nah, dude, that’s sex.  Or, more accurately, that’s sexual reproduction.  We could totally have sexual reproduction without having what we think of as biological sexes, or with more than two.  Or whatever – we could be like the people of Winter and go into kemmer once in a while.  We could also have sexual reproduction without gender.  I’m a huge fan of the ability of many species to mix the genes up in hopes of coming up with something better, I really am, but that’s not the same thing as gender.  Or even sex. 

I’ve always disregarded those connotations like I disregard any conformist propaganda – don’t let a pack of small-minded fuckwits ruin a perfectly good word.

There is no value judgment associated with proper use of it, and complaining about it in a scientific context, for crying out loud, is exactly the sort of crap that gave political correctness a bad name.

Shame, Maggie, for apologising.

I catalog this along with a couple other “secret” factors that had lead to male dominance such as:

The male need to identify progeny as their own (now irrelevant due to DNA testing) – leads to control of women, and property

The male need to be fully aroused to reproduce (this is the irony of having to get convincingly excited or else die [generatively speaking], also increasingly irrelevant albeit less rapidly) – leads to rampantly reinforcing sexualized identities of women

Who knows what else is out there?

Btw, in case you are the macho police reading this, I’m a straight cis-gendered macho man that just happens to know things. As it turns out it knowing things doesn’t make you different from who you already are. Another surprise perhaps.

Is “late onset” transitioning a product of learning to accept yourself or are thre biological factors?

I’m not quite sure what you’re asking here, but I am pretty sure it’s outside the purview of this particular research paper. Like I said, we can’t read a whole lot into this paper when it comes to humans. Other than to just say, “Hey, biological sex is more complicated than we give it credit for.”