An intersex person is typically assigned a gender at birth, but so is everyone else. Being intersex just means you aren’t biologically male or female (though I think this might also include people who have sex chromosomes that develop as though they were the other binary sex, but I’m not an expert). Most intersex people don’t typically know they are intersex, and thus they would count as cisgender so long as they identify as the gender they were assigned at birth and transgender if they do not. Thus, if someone had, say XY chromosomes, but was assigned female at birth, they would probably be cis if they identified as female.

However, trans can be a bit of a self-identifying label, and thus someone in that situation might just as well consider themselves trans. There’s a lot of different definitions for trans. Many non-binary people would consider themselves trans since they don’t identify as their assigned gender at birth.

Long story short, gender is complicated. Sex doesn’t change (put a couple asterisks here), but gender is super flexible (also asterisks here.)

The saying “you can’t butter a fly” is an idiom expressing that someone or something is too difficult to influence or manipulate. It’s rooted in the idea that butterflies, with their delicate nature, are virtually impossible to convince to do anything against their will, let alone “butter” them in a literal sense.

Should’ve cut to an insurance agent denying coverage based on the actuarial table.

It sucks way worse for all those people born in 1488.

Because they’re dead.

You keep going in circles. Whose safety? The fact that it is related to the bottom line DIRECTLY contradicts yourself, that safety is only a concern as related to the money, because the money is the only concern, and that money flows to the owner.

You can call my acumen bad, but I’m just using historically very successful businesses and their complete and utter neglect for worker, consumer, and environmental safety.

You did.

I tend to disagree with this, not that it’s entirely incorrect, but I think quality can’t be disregarded; can the product be made safely is another factor

Meritocracy was shown to be related to the ability to generate capital because capital is economic power and allows you to concentrate more power. Quality didn’t factor in because consumers buy bad products. Safety didn’t factor in because consumers buy unsafe products. The best childcare workers aren’t paid more than an average software developer because it’s not meritocratic for workers.

Exploding sugar mills are an example and literally not the crux of my argument. The same could be said about giving your workers coal lung or mesothelioma, but it’s easier to envision. You refuse to acknowledge that worker safety is not a concern unless it affects the amount of capital generated, and NONE of it is nepotism. Can you rebut that, or are you essentially ragequitting because you were wrong?

Nepotism doesn’t factor in in any explanation I have given because they would only factor in getting around equal access to materials, labor, production, or markets, or possibly skirting regulations. Your argument is “No, those instances of horrible working conditions were nepotism, even though there was nothing illegal or unfair about it.”

Unsafe working conditions are merely a cost-analysis in capitalism. If you make more than the costs of a decision, what is stopping capitalism from implementing those unsafe conditions if they are not illegal? Nothing. Capital-holders hold all the power and make the decisions, the workers do not, and that is the problem.

Who would work for Jeff’s sugar factory if Jeff’s sugar factory keeps blowing up and jim sugar factor understands the process and puts it nessisary safe gaurds

If Jeff somehow makes more money than Jim, why would Jeff ever stop? What makes you think Jim wouldn’t simply start doing what Jeff does? Ideally, exploding factories would be more expensive, but that isn’t always the case, so I ask again, what does capitalism do to disincentivize chasing profits at the expense of the workers or consumers or safety or the environment or the planet?

Apologies, I believe you might be confused, as I believe you proved my point succinctly: Money is the goal and the only thing a capitalist company truly cares about. You say safety matters, but you use the monetary concerns the business would incur if it failed to achieve these things because, well, the bottom line is the only thing that matters. The only way it would even be forced to do these things (besides the bottom line) is laws and oversight, since otherwise these risks are merely actuarial tables.

It doesn’t really matter if your sugar mills or sweatshops or factories explode if you make a profit. It doesn’t matter if your workers break their backs or inhale fumes or asbestos or coal dust or even die if you make a profit. At the end of the day, if it’s just a cost of doing business, what stops capitalism from doing these things besides if you make a profit? The only thing that would stop it is the law.

The system is inherently unfair to the workers as the only choice they get to make is whether they work for a certain company or not (technically, this is untrue, as capitalism can (and historically did) use slaves, but I digress.) Many workers could (and historically did) perform work that might kill them without their knowledge because the only one allowed to make decisions under capitalism is the owner, and if an owner chooses to focus on something that is less profitable like worker safety, another capitalist can (and historically did) take that spot and undercut that company out of existence.

Thus, capitalism incentivizes the bottom line.

Consumers do not care about safety, or else we wouldn’t buy oil or gasoline, and we wouldn’t buy clothing made in sweatshops. Companies follow safety guidelines because of fines or other punitive measures that could affect the bottom line, and you have to admit that the bottom line is the chief concern here, and not the safety of the workers of consumers. This is a problem that capitalism is forced to deal with with government oversight because it is a failure of capitalism.

Nepotism merely makes this failure worse, but the system would be an issue even without nepotism. Businesses can perform risk assessments to determine if ignoring guidelines would make more money than the cost of restitution would incur.

Capitalism needs oversight to work fairly, but it doesn’t really need oversight to do what it does best: Make those with capital more capital. The system generates profit for those with capital, and that means it makes the wealthy wealthier (and that’s entirely by design.) You can argue nepotism causes the unfairness, but it doesn’t, since the profits feed back to the capital owners and not the workers by definition. Oversight is the only thing that can make it even close fair.

You should define what you think is capitalism, cronyism, and meritocracy, because you seem to have an answer in your head that you don’t wish to divulge.

Capitalism is the idea that those that own the means of production own the profits from them.

Meritocracy is the idea that those with skill will prevail over those without.

I will argue that capitalism IS meritocratic, but the problem is that that which capitalism holds in high merits is that which generates capital at the fastest rate. Good products do not necessarily earn more money over bad products faster. Capitalism only cares about the fastest acquisition of capital through whatever barriers are present. This means it inherently does not care about labor that doesn’t generate profit (immediately).

Those that hold capital get to choose what merits we look for. Software developers or teachers, which can make more money? Childcare workers or lawyers, which can make more money? We pretend like the difference in these jobs and their pay is skill, but we treat various labor differently because we assign a higher capital interest to some labor, like the ability to write a contract or write a program, and a lower capital interest to other labor, like taking care of a child or teaching someone valuable skills. We pretend like physical, emotional, and reproductive labor is less skillful than intellectual labor because it doesn’t make as much money for capital, but the truth is that only capital gets to choose what is high-skilled and what gets to be paid like it’s high-skilled.

Thus, while capitalism is meritocratic in a sense, it is not meritocratic for workers, and will always devolve into a class-based system by design. I could argue that by choosing what is worth more money, they create their own cronyism, but that is really more of a moot point.

Sexual exclusivity is not a prerequisite for all relationships. ENM is a relationship based on the concept of sexual and emotional non-exclusivity. That’s the entire basis of ENM. If you disagree, please explain what keeps these men in the relationship that they can’t leave.

Why do you blame women for these relationships? Men and non-binary people are also ENM, but you seem to think it’s exclusively women.

You know you’re wrong because you haven’t bothered asking why those men don’t leave the relationship if they think it’s cheating? If they were cheating, then you would be telling them to leave. But you don’t. Why not? Would you tell a woman to leave a relationship if she were being cheated on?

Seriously, why is it exclusively the woman’s fault and not the man’s? Is the woman holding something in the relationship hostage? Children? Money?

Then your issue isn’t with ENM. It’s with men (I should also note that this equally applies to women and nonbinary people, but we’ll ignore them for now) staying in an ENM relationship that they clearly do not want. Why are they staying in that relationship? It’s worth exploring that.

Is it loneliness? Is it dependency? Is it a fear of not being able to find another partner? These are issues that we don’t often explore and try to help in men.

I definitely am sexist, likely in ways I don’t even know. I am working to fix those biases as I encounter them. It is tough, though in this particular situation, I don’t see those biases, so I’m trying not to be inconsiderate. I think I am holding men, women, and non-binary people to the same standard in this case.

But you are directly holding women responsible for ENM relationships when they didn’t really do anything wrong. If a man did the same thing, would you have an issue with it? If you want a harem and tell everyone in the harem about it, what’s the problem?

I did ask because I wanted to know. I just thought they were reasons to come to a different conclusion. Societal and cultural pressures on men aren’t dealt with to the same level as women, and we do leave men to fend for themselves because many men learned a set of behaviors that were tolerated until they weren’t. And that change can feel unfair. I think we can express masculinity in a positive way, allow us to focus on positive character traits and not physical ones.

There was a sentiment that you were hurt by someone who was ENM, and whether that was because you tried ENM and didn’t like it or whatever, it did seem to be tacked onto your perception of women. I just thought I’d try and give another view of it, in the off-chance that you or someone else reading this needed some more perspective.

Gonna be honest with you, these all mostly sounds like toxic masculinity, which isn’t really dealt with well by conservatives, mostly because they don’t like critical thinking and all that.

a lot of “ethically non monogamous” relationships that are basically a woman gaslighting their partner into letting them cheat on them

Um, I actually think it’s the opposite? It’s not cheating if all partners consent. If you don’t want to date someone who is ENM, then… don’t? Most ENM people don’t want to date monogamous people! That’s why you tell everyone before you do it (that’s the ethical part.)

women are highly encouraged to support other women regardless of circumstances. A failure to do so is implied to be sexist.

I don’t see the problem here? Is it bad to support women, or is it that they somehow support bad women? Do men not do similar?

In general there is this default assumption that a man is nefarious, usually with some reference to true crime or “the implication”.

This has some truth to it, and while I understand that this is, indeed, a sexist take, it’s one that is perpetuated by a patriarchal culture. Men have unreasonable standards thrust upon them the same way women do, but the standards are not necessarily equal in how they affect us, even on an individial level. Men are indeed seen as more violent as a whole, just as women are seen as sex objects as a whole, and working to change those societal pressures to conform to them is the point of pointing to “toxic masculinity.” There are good aspects to masculinity to admire, that we can try to positively adopt those, the same way that women try to adopt positive aspects of feminimity!

I actually see this the worst among conservative men and women. Conservative men and women tell you to “man up”, that “men don’t cry”, that you need to “take it with your own hands”, the idea of “alpha and beta males”. Very aggressive, and that’s a toxic mindset. The hard part about those cultural aspects is that they DO affect us all! Part of feminism is undersranding these biases within yourself and actively working to change them.

The first thing I do when I meet a woman I don’t know in a social setting is to somehow work in that I have a girlfriend in a way that feels organic, and a good amount of times I can see their body language shift

This actually goes both ways, too. Women very often have to tell men they aren’t interested, trying to tell them gently that they are taken. (There is the joke of “I have a boyfriend.” out of the blue to the most innocuous things.) This is a consequence of a society that pushes men to be the active pursuer of relationships. It is, frankly, stressful to have every interaction possibly be taken as a signal that you want a relationship. It is easy for me to understand their perspective because it feels like how my PTSD manifested. Trauma is hard to deal with, and being understanding and accomodating can also be hard, too.

There are a lot of single women I know that are very much architects of their own misery. They have super shallow dating standards, unrealistic expectations, and this mentality that if a man is attractive enough red flags are just misunderstanding.

Very much applies to anyone of any gender, so I’m not sure of the issue. I have seen this in cis-men, cis-women, trans-men, trans-women, enbies, gay men, lesbian women, and so on. This is not exclusive to women, and never will be.

• There are multi hundred member Facebook groups of women in every city that gossip about the men they date. This is obviously toxic, but the organizers frame it as a #metoo thing so it’s widely considered acceptable.

Okay? Don’t date them? I don’t see the issue, but discussing your partners isn’t particularly weird, and men do this too, and if it bothers you, well, don’t date anyone who does it.

• Basically everything I mentioned would be considered absolutely unacceptable if genders were reversed, but if you bring this up then you’ll get a pseudo academic lecture about historical oppression and the patriarchy that basically boils down to “it’s different when I do it”.

There’s some truth to that. Women are, ostensibly, an oppressed group, having less rights than men do, as well as being the one responsible when they get pregnant. They maintain a level of risk that most men do not have to face (though you could consider it a different type of risk, since men also face their own adversities that women typically do not.)

However, that’s irrelevant because none of the things you listed were women-exclusive behaviors, but I figured I would explain why it might be important just in case.

• This isn’t a big deal at all, but it’s sort of ridiculous that most women I meet both consider themselves feminist but will get peeved if men don’t pay for the date.

Don’t date them, then? I mean, I get it. I like when my dates offer to split, and I do judge them if they don’t. But it’s definitely silly to bring up as though they aren’t a feminist for engaging in that behavior. Progress is made incrementally, and sometimes we aren’t aware lf our own biases.

I support queer identities, but have become more conservative in my idea of monogamy and commitment.

Hey man, monogamy is a dating choice, just like ENM. No one makes you have to be one or the other. It is okay to be monogamous, but no one has ever oppressed monogamous people.

I even briefly considered staying home this election when it looked like the main line of attack democrats were gonna do was just to call republicans weirdos over and over again until November, because I’m personally just done associating myself with middle school mean girl politics.

It is really weird to me that you thought calling people weird for legitimately fascist behavior as a way of denormalizing that behavior was somehow a step too far, but the behavior that provoked it wasn’t, as if they hadn’t attempted to call the behavior out beforehand and were ignored.

If that was gonna dissuade you, then I think you might have bigger problems.

What behaviors do you mean and how does that correlate to being conservative?

I’m not sure I understand how that applies here or changes what I posted.

I used to as well until I looked into it, which is why I now know way, way more than anyone really needs to (there is… a lot.) Anyway, figured I’d explain just in case. You didn’t seem like you had bad intentions, so thanks for being understanding.

A furry is someone that identifies with anthropomorphic animal characters (or sometimes just animal characteristics). No dressing up required. Now, a lot of the people that go to cons tend to have more money, so you will see more fursuits and such, but most furries do not dress up.

You are right, but a lot of the roots of furry criticism do tend to be queerphobic in origin. It’s just something to recognize.

I’m using kink in a pretty generic way because a lot of the criticisms of furries relate to sex (e.g. beastiality or pedophilia), and thus any depiction of kink (like bondage gear) is used to demonize them that it’s a fetish (and one that is coming for your children.)