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queenshulamit asks:
1. You mentioned you had one parent. Is that the usual state of affairs? Also, do Silphian children know who was pregnant with them?
2. Does surrogacy exist in Silphium?
3. Is there an activist movement for sex dysphoric Silphians? And child free Silphians?
4. Are there taboos about incidentally revealing sex? Like, say, complaining about menstrual cramps? Or saying something gave you a boner?Also, why isn’t it a big deal to ensure that you have a spouse with right genitals for making a baby?
Silphians typically have two parents! Spouses marry young (usually by age 23 or 24) and have children quickly. While divorce among parents of minor children does exist in Silphium, it seems less common there than here– many of my friends’ parents are divorced on Earth, only a handful on Silphium. I think routine polyamory might help the situation. If your partner isn’t everything you hoped for but still a decent partner in childrearing, you can raise the children together, fall in love and (when your youngest child is in school) have sex with other people, and divorce when the children are grown.
Silphian children usually know who was pregnant with them; if nothing else, the fact that presumably that parent would then proceed to get pregnant with further children is a bit of a hint.
Surrogacy exists in Silphium and is far less marginal than it is on Earth. On Earth, people occasionally attempt to make surrogacy illegal or allow the surrogate to keep the baby in spite of her contract; on Silphium, neither is true.
There is an activist movement for infertile Silphians. The moderate end argues that people shouldn’t bully or mock others for being infertile, because they’ve suffered enough, and there should be government funding of infertility treatments. Some argue that you shouldn’t divorce your spouse just because they’re infertile. The idea that you can actually choose of your own free will not to have children is fairly extreme and occasionally accused of destroying civilization by Republicans. Activism for sex dysphoric Silphians is part of the drug legalization and harm reduction movements, and is mostly of the “well, putting them in prison isn’t going to help them get clean” variety.
There is a taboo about talking about menstruation except in fairly close relationships. I guess you could say that if you would be comfortable talking about sexual intercourse with a person, you’d probably be comfortable talking about biological sex with them. Yes, that means Tumblr is absolutely crowded with period cramp jokes. Because it’s taboo, jokes about people’s biological sex are common in comedies. Interestingly, there are multiple Silphian comedians who have been cast as both females and males.
The Silphian slang word equivalent to “boner” is sex-neutral.
Almost no one marries someone who hasn’t already been their lover; if you’re someone’s lover, you already know what shape their genitals are. There are some same-sex couples. Conservatives tend to disapprove of them, because you’re choosing to be infertile and you could just have same-sex sex outside of marriage. Liberals tend to be tolerant, because if someone would be a really good coparent for you and you have the money for a surrogate or a sperm donor, why delay childrearing until you find a coparent with the opposite genitals?
G asks:
Do the people who on earth would be *not* cis-by-default (so, trans or ‘strongly cis’) due to having sufficiently strong feelings about their own gender (to be clear, *gender*, not genitals, not gender role, not expression etc) exist on Silphium? I’d imagine it’s a struggle for them – are there any helpful movements etc?
What is the reason behind the sexual monogamy during childrearing years thing? Can your childrearing have breaks? Like, if I want to have children with say 10 years between them, would I have to be monogamous that whole time? And, on the other hand, if I thought I was done with having children and then some years later wanted another, could I ‘restart’? Do you have to have all your children with the same person?
I think it’s very likely that there’s not actually such a thing as a gender identity on Silphium. Gender identities are a thing that happens when the entirety of your society is gendered constantly for no reason holy fuck. In the absence of cultural ideas of gender, what would a gender identity even mean? An uncontrollable urge to run around telling people “I AM A THING SORT OF ASSOCIATED WITH THE MALE SEX BUT NOT NECESSARILY RELATED TO IT! ALSO THERE ARE PERSONALITY TRAITS RELATED TO IT BUT NOT NECESSARILY! IDK JUST USE THESE PRONOUNS FOR ME”?
On the other hand, I’m Silphian and I have a gender? Probably? I don’t know. Maybe it’s Earth germs.
Most people have all their children within a few years of each other, because it’s less hassle. There are fewer gaps in the primary caregiver’s career, and you don’t have to tell all your lovers twice that you can’t have sex with them. But it’s certainly possible to have two children and then decide ten years later you want a third; in that case, you’d stop being monogamous when the second child went to school, and start being monogamous again when you started trying to conceive the third.
It’s bizarre to think about not being sexually monogamous during childrearing! It’s really important to make sure that the spouses are concentrating their energy on their children, instead of on finding new sexual partners. You have your whole life to have sex, and you only have small children for a few years! Humans just naturally evolved to be sexually monogamous when there are small children in the house, that’s how we work. Earth has probably gone a bit far in expecting people to be sexually and romantically monogamous all the time, but there’s no sense in going too far on this sort of thing.
MugaSofer asks:
… if the Infamous Yam People of our Earth are any indication, Silphium had a lot more sex than we do, right? Like, vastly more sex?
>As a fantasy, it was healthy, but just like other harmful fantasies like rape and public sex, it had to be kept in fantasy.
Huh. Interesting. Silphium was against the more extreme end of kink, then?
[snip]
>When did a friendship become an “emotional affair”?
…what?!
Look, I didn’t invent the concept of emotional affair. It’s your stupid dimension, you explain it.
Silphian sex education seems remarkably kink-positive to me compared to Earth sex ed. It teaches that it’s okay to fantasize about whatever you want, but some fantasies are not okay to put into practice. Using sex hormones is illegal (unless you have a prescription, and gender dysphoria is not a recognized condition), and illegal things are obviously not going to be recommended by sex ed. Silphians are more horrified by hormonal transition than Earthlings, because it is voluntarily destroying your ability to reproduce. Hormonal transition is regularly used as an example of things you can’t validly consent to (the way that voluntary cannibalism is in conversations on Earth). They’re much, much less bothered by, say, masochism that leaves scars.
I mean, the biggest thing that sex ed talks about leaving in fantasy is any exchange of fluids (including oral sex and manual sex) without barrier protection outside of marriage. Most people are pretty strict about that. We all know someone who has HIV, and even with modern medication it’s not a way you want to live. But that’s not BDSM! In fact, that has sort of led to a push for more BDSM– sex you can have without necessarily using a barrier.
I have had about the same rate of new sexual partners before and after Silphium, but I was a little above average in Silphium and I am mind-bogglingly promiscuous here. I am less certain about sex. It seems plausible to me that Earth people have more sex with their spouses than Silphians do, and thus Silphians don’t actually have as much sex as might be implied by our partner counts. On the other hand, the Coolidge Effect is a thing.
Alex Godofsky says:
On Silphium, which professions (if any) are disproportionately male or female? (I recognize the practical difficulties in collecting this data, given the sensitive personal nature of the information.)
On Silphium, is there a pay disparity between men and women?
On Silphium, if such studies were performed and found significant disparities, what social or legal responses (if any) would be appropriate?
Oh, gosh, I don’t know! I mean, would you know off the top of your head which Earth fields are dominated by blue-eyed people? Or whether there was a blue-eyed/brown-eyed wage gap? (I mean, there probably is, because racism, but you know what I mean.) I mean, I can make basic assumptions– firefighters are mostly male, surrogates universally female– but I don’t know anything more complicated than that.
Silphian research into human sex differences is a somewhat boring and obscure field. The news coverage of sex differences is similar to how research about, say, height is presented on Earth. I imagine the idea of social remedies for disparities between different sexes would be laughable.
LTP asks:
So on silphium, does pretty much everybody who wants to have sex having sex? Is there anything comparable to the large population of people on Earth whom one might call “involuntary celibate” or “late-bloomers”?
Unfortunately, no one’s solved the problem of involuntary celibacy on Silphium either, but I think the situation is generally a lot better, for a couple of reasons.
Things are a lot easier for shy people, especially shy males, because there’s no expectation that one gender does all the initiating. But if you’re in a social group where everyone is shy, it’s perfectly possible that everyone is constantly having crushes on each other and refusing to initiate anything.
Sex work on Silphium is completely legalized and destigmatized. It’s out of the price range of teenagers, but once you’re an adult it’s pretty normal to hire an escort. I’d actually planned on becoming an escort once I graduated high school. My parents encouraged me, since I was planning to become my children’s primary caregiver, so I might as well wait to go to college until they were at school. Unfortunately, sex work doesn’t do a lot for people’s desire for romantic relationships, which is often just as powerful as their desire for sex.
Having lovers helps; there are a lot of people you wouldn’t be willing to have as your one and only, but that you’d like to hang out with occasionally. And, hey, sometimes it turns out that once you’ve given them a shot they’re really cool and you want to be their spouse!
But ultimately the problem is, a lot of times, that there are people other people are mostly not attracted to, and that is very very hard to fix.
Lambert asks:
Given Ozy’s and Eliezer’s posts, I propose that our reality be named BDSM universe.
Hey! Silphium is totally accepting of BDSM. It is not accepting of choosing to become infertile.
Actually, Earth is really weirdly prudish about sex. Sex clubs get in legal trouble! How bizarre is that? In Silphium you had a couple in every city to cater to different tastes.
Thing of Things 
How do people become attracted to each other with out gender being obvious? Do people walk around in depressing grey sack cloth?
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Drat, forgot to ask this on the last thread: rape rates/perception in Silphium?
Oh, and how different is porn! I was going to ask about different kinds of sex work, but you already answered that …
>Look, I didn’t invent the concept of emotional affair. It’s your stupid dimension, you explain it.
Um, yes. Of course. I am absolutely from this dimension and not at all kicking myself for not making an April Fool’s confession.
>In fact, that has sort of led to a push for more BDSM– sex you can have without necessarily using a barrier.
BSDM specifically, or just fetish stuff generally? I can’t see anyone picking “pain” or “shame” as the best arbitrary thing to associate with sex so you can get your jollies more easily.
Oh, that reminds me; what kind of age-of-consent laws are there in Silphium? I get the impression they’re looser, but presumably not nonexistent…
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What did clothing look like in Silphium? What was formal clothing like?
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“I AM A THING SORT OF ASSOCIATED WITH THE MALE SEX BUT NOT NECESSARILY RELATED TO IT! ALSO THERE ARE PERSONALITY TRAITS RELATED TO IT BUT NOT NECESSARILY! IDK JUST USE THESE PRONOUNS FOR ME”?
But that’s what trans people are already saying… or rather, not usually explicitly saying… hence my whole argument that, once you start saying it explicitly, people are going to implicitly reject it as nonsensical and substitute the nearest sexist brain soup…
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Huh? The types of trans people you’re talking about just say “I’m a man” or “I’m a woman”. Ozy said that in a language that has no words for “man” or “woman” these simple sentences would be a lot longer and weirder.
Or do you mean that the idea of gender is nonsensical, and “normal” people always interpret “woman” as “XX, ovaries, vagina” and “man” as “XY, testes, penis”? Well, I used to think that way, but apparently both many people, both trans and cis, do have some sort of internal sense of gender — so we’re not making everyone dress and behave in certain ways 24/7 solely to broadcast medical facts about them (yay?).
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Right, this whole thing largely turns on an empirical question that I don’t know the answer to, namely, to what extent the general cisgender population is or is not cis-by-default. (And possibly at least one other empirical question, I’ll get to that later.) My objection is largely based on the assumption that the fraction of cis-by-default people, who I assume think more or less like me about this (again, more about this assumption later) is sufficiently high as to present an obstacle.
By the way, regarding the following:
so we’re not making everyone dress and behave in certain ways 24/7 solely to broadcast medical facts about them (yay?).
My mental model of a conservative — who believes in gender roles and etc. — isn’t that they just want people to broadcast these medical facts, but that these medical facts simply make certain things appropriate to them; that it helps to broadcast them is just a side benefit (seeing as most of the time their face and body shape already do this pretty well). That certain people are born to certain roles.
And I always assumed that the liberal position was simply the opposite — roles are (mostly) bad, birth and physiology are irrelevant. No mention of gender (in this sense) anywhere. I mean, to the extent that I have a coherent position anymore, that’s still the basis of it.
So, if you don’t mind me repeating myself, I’ll make explicit once again the “brain soup” argument. They hypothetical person under consideration reasons as follows — OK, they don’t actually reason it out explicitly, but if they did, the thought process would resemble the following: A person has physiology and they have behavior. Part of the whole liberal project is only caring about behavior, not physiology. Another part is not straitjacketing said behavior into discrete roles, regardless of physiology. Clasically, feminism means fighting against sexism, which consists (at the least) of A. a particular type of discrimination and stereotyping based on physiology (i.e. based on sex, which is what “gender” refers to), and B. the fitting of everyone into male and female gender roles, even if not based on sex. But now we have people telling us gender does *not* refer to sex, or any aspect of physiology. If it does not refer to physiology, then it can only refer to behavior. Now I thought part of fighting against sexism was fighting against B., but here are all these people telling me that no, actually people *do* naturally fall into these two classes, which, remember, are not based on physiology, and hence must be based on behavior. Thus sexism of type B is actually right and good.
And, like, you can tell people that it’s not based on behavior either, but since now you are apparently talking nonsense — the category is based on neither physiology nor behavior, so apparently on nothing — they will resolve the contradiction with whatever happens to be floating around in their brain that makes this makes sense, which will probably consist of concluding that indeed it is based on behavior and type B sexism is right and good. It doesn’t matter how much you say it, the message isn’t going to get through.
Like, I can’t find it right now (maybe it was on Tumblr?), but I’m pretty sure Ozy themself said something to the effect of (I am heavily paraphrasing here since I can’t find it) “If gender isn’t about physiology, and it’s not about behavior, and it’s not about how people treat you, then what is it about?” This of course importantly differs from the above in that it has a third possibility! But y’know someone who is an individualist like me is not likely to consider “how people treat you” to be a legitimate thing to consider.
Which is the third empirical question this whole thing turns on — oops, I skipped the second. The second is what fraction of people are willing to accept “gender” as an unexplained primitive rather than insisting on reducing it (of those not already filtered out by the first question), and the third is (of those remaining) what fraction think such things as extrinsic factors and self-identification are within the domain of what may be considered here.
And of course I don’t have those numbers. But that’s the basic form of the argument, if you’ll spot me the numbers.
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I think there’s actually more than two different positions here. There’s a large inferential distance between me and cis-by-default people, but there’s also a large inferential distance between me and, say, trans people who don’t feel the need to make their bodies conform to their gender (I don’t mean nonbinaries; I mean “ladydick is awesome,” as it was memorably put elsewhere on this blog).
I have a strong internal sense of gender, and it is very much tied to sex, in both meanings of the term.
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@ Sniffnoy
Of course. It was a description of how I see it, not how they do.
I’m cis-by-default, and the exploration of sex and gender prompted by the trans rights movement has been good for me. And if we turn out to be the majority — even better! I have no wish to oppress any strongly gendered people, but let’s put gender in its proper place — among other special needs 🙂
To me, all feelings and all aspects of identity are results of brain function, which is certainly a physiological phenomenon.
Who’s saying that? The current consensus seems to be that there’s a lot of variety, which is consistent with what I’ve heard about other aspects of brain function.
Well, Ozy is a gender abolitionist. Of course they’re questioning whether gender makes sense at all.
I don’t understand. Surely you have some preferences?
For instance, I would hate to be treated the way new recruits are treated in the army, but some people apparently don’t mind it too much. I enjoy having my beliefs challenged in a friendly debate, while others perceive it as hostile or disrespectful.
Similarly, some people have preferences that align with certain gender roles.
And hey, if using their chosen pronouns to the best of my ability and paying slightly higher taxes to sponsor surgery is all I need to do*, that’s a way better deal than the rigid gender roles offered (or, rather, imposed) by traditionalists.
* letting people dress however they want is win-win — they get freedom, I get a more interesting environment
OK, here’s a freeform summary of how I think about this.
order of importance-to-me-being-myself:
“me” > brain > behaviour > hormones > genitals
traditionalists: Your genitals are of type B, therefore you must behave in ways X, Y and Z.
me: Actually, my genitals are rather peripheral to my sense of self. Please go away.
trans-inclusive SJ activists: If your brain would feel better in a different body or with different pronouns, that’s fine with us!
me: Aw, that’s so nice of you, even if I don’t need it right now 🙂
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@ Matthew
Wow, talk about completely opposite intuitions!
For me, genital surgery was one of the major roadblocks to trans acceptance. “They hate their completely innocent, healthy genitals, and then they get surgery, and it might go wrong, and even the best modern medicine is still so crude, and-and-and- :(” — went my approximate thought process.
These days, I’ve made peace with the fact that people are different. But I’m still happy to hear people express appreciation of girldicks and boycunts, as well as neopenises and neovaginas — other things bring equal, less genital hate = better world, according to me.
And here’s a rather personal question, so you don’t have to respond. What would your sense of gender be like if you were born with a micropenis?
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@Nita
I don’t think a strong sense of gender is necessary to make micropenis problematic. That just requires one to think sex is important (and presumably that pleasing one’s partner during sex is importnat.) I would be extremely surprised if the rate of depression among men with micropenis were not much higher than the rate of depression among men in general, even if they are all cis-by-default.
That being said, my intuition is that my internal sense of gender (previously explained here ) is prior to my physical body, and the effect of micropenis on me would be severe dysphoria, for reasons that should be fairly apparent from that link. If a way to reliably graft a functional extension were available, I would go deeply into debt to finance it.
(Speculating based on a hypothetical, though. I recently learned that I’m above the 90th percentile on that particular dimension, though I’d be more excited about this if it didn’t turn out that almost all of the variance is happening in the extreme tails of the 1st and 99th percentiles. That chart is incredible. If the cross-section of pornography I’ve been exposed to is any indication, it looks like a man with an 8″ member is as or more likely to be a porn star as a man over 7′ tall is to be in the NBA. Also, micropenis is blessedly rare.)
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You don’t actually have to have a normally sized penis to please your partner during sex.
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@Ozy
I’m unsure if you mean, “you can use methods other than penile penetration to please your partner” (true, but unlikely to make someone with micropenis feel better about the fact that they cannot do that when other men can), or “even a micropenis can please women in the standard PIV method” (false, at least from testimonials I’ve seen from people with micropenis complaining to advice columnists).
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Huh, interesting clashing intuitions here! To my mind, physical transition falls squarely under “none of my business, let people do what they like”; it’s purely the social aspect that bothers me — the insistence that I go putting junk in my ontology.
Anyway…
To me, all feelings and all aspects of identity are results of brain function, which is certainly a physiological phenomenon.
OK, I mean, yes, technically, duh. But I’m assuming most people assume a naïve mind/body split, at least when they don’t have to directly deal with things that break that abstraction.
Who’s saying that? The current consensus seems to be that there’s a lot of variety, which is consistent with what I’ve heard about other aspects of brain function.
So, yeah, I elided a bit here. Certainly, current consensus is that gender is not limited to male/female. But I elided that because it basically doesn’t change the conclusion; “Oh, so male means these behaviors, female means these behaviors, nonbinary means anything else”. Still very much not what we want.
On the other hand, perhaps you meant “Current consensus is that there is plenty of variety, behavior is not closely constrained by gender”. But that is precisely the message that I am claiming will not get through, no matter how much you repeat it, so long as you insist that gender is not about physiology.
(Btw, here’s a link to me making this argument earlier, just in case I stated it clearer earlier. Also the resulting discussion might be helpful.)
I don’t understand. Surely you have some preferences?
It’s not clear to me that this is relevant. I mean, yes, certainly, but I feel like I can talk about this in a framework that doesn’t require me to invent new categories of things that are disconnected from everything else. (Maybe I’m wrong about this?)
And hey, if using their chosen pronouns to the best of my ability and paying slightly higher taxes to sponsor surgery is all I need to do*, that’s a way better deal than the rigid gender roles offered (or, rather, imposed) by traditionalists.
* letting people dress however they want is win-win — they get freedom, I get a more interesting environment
OK, hold on, this is mixing together several things I think.
1. Letting people dress however they want is basic liberalism, to my mind. Similarly with surgery as I mentioned above. (Whether it should be government-sponsored is less clear, but I certainly don’t have a particular problem with it being so.) But the pronouns thing is not like these others. The other things essentially consist of me letting other people do as they please, but this consists of me letting other people determine what I’m going to do. (But then I guess maybe you’re taking a more consequentialist stance here?)
2. Why do our only two options have to be “rigid gender roles” and “go along with people saying they’re whatever gender they want”? If these are even two disjoint options, because, to repeat myself, I’m worried that (contrary to what Ozy claims) the latter actually reinforces the former rather than tearing it down.
Anyway long story short you didn’t discuss this but my objection is largely to the insistence that I junk up my ontology with nodes that don’t connect to anything. Also maybe that I’m pretty separatist by inclination. I’d expand on one of those maybe but this is long enough as it is and the first I think is already pretty clear so I’ll leave off here.
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Hmm, I think the main difference is that you perceive the status quo as neutral and/or reasonable, while I see it as arbitrary, inconvenient and unjustified.
I am already being told what to do — if I want to refer to any particular person in English, I must guess at the shape of their genitals, hunting for clues in their name, body shape, hairstyle and clothes. Now, this is a fun game, but I don’t see why I should have to play it all the time.
My ideal society wouldn’t involve gender in grammar at all, so no one would have to classify random people by gender or memorize more than one set of personal pronouns. Do Finnish people or speakers of other genderless languages experience social dysphoria from a lack of gendered pronouns?
So, both multi-gender language and binary-gender language are inconvenient, but at least the defenders of multiple genders provide some sort of justification. “Please use feminine pronouns for me, other pronouns make me sad” sounds more reasonable to me than “that’s how it’s always been, so that’s how it should be”.
If I ever run into a bunch of those fabled aggressive custom-gender people who demand that I memorize 20 different sets of pronouns and scream at me for every mistake, I might change my mind about this. But that doesn’t seem very likely. I think it’s more likely that the proliferation of genders will eventually result in gender-neutral grammar, so I’m rooting for the snowflakes for now.
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Hmm, I think the main difference is that you perceive the status quo as neutral and/or reasonable, while I see it as arbitrary, inconvenient and unjustified.
I am already being told what to do — if I want to refer to any particular person in English, I must guess at the shape of their genitals, hunting for clues in their name, body shape, hairstyle and clothes. Now, this is a fun game, but I don’t see why I should have to play it all the time.
My ideal society wouldn’t involve gender in grammar at all, so no one would have to classify random people by gender or memorize more than one set of personal pronouns. Do Finnish people or speakers of other genderless languages experience social dysphoria from a lack of gendered pronouns?
On the contrary — I don’t see the status quo as neutral and reasonable; and I’m completely in agreement with you about the eventual goal. I just consider their alternative to be even worse. Now if it really is a path to gender abolition, then, well, OK, I’ll grumble and go along with it. But I’m not at all convinced of that.
Ultimately, the bit about pronouns is not actually that big a deal. And done differently I’d be behind it entirely! For instance, how about pronoun scrambling? Now that people have invented this technology of insisting that people refer to you by particular pronouns, why not turn it to other uses? (Well, unfortunately there are several good reasons why not; see paragraph “Also something I’ve considered doing”…) The straightforward one is all sorts of people just insisting on being referred to by gender-neutral pronouns, but again you could always go with scrambling. Just say that you want to be referred to with masculine/feminine pronouns without making any claim to be the corresponding gender. Better yet, mix it up! Flip a coin every so often. That to me seems like it would help break down the notion of gender — although due to some of the reasons linked above (with mutatis mutandis for neutral vs. scrambled), it wouldn’t work very well now.
But yeah, I don’t have a big objection to “Please refer to me by these pronouns; I know it seems silly but just go with it, OK?” (Which, of course, I do.) I have an objection to “I am this particular gender and this is a true definite fact, but it doesn’t refer to anything about my physiology or behavior, it’s just a free-floating meaningless fact which nonetheless is really important (but not in the sense that it’s useful information for anything) and which you must acknowledge.” I mean, if they would generally acknowledge up front that it may be meaningless or they don’t know exactly what’s going on but they have a preference anyway, that would be a big improvement; lampshading goes a long way, you know? But if instead you make a whole bunch of claims that together paint a picture that makes no sense, instead of admitting that you don’t really know what’s going on, well, it shouldn’t be a surprise that I am not inclined to accept those claims.
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