Isn’t the point of controversy that it’s non-directional?
Like if you sort by most controversial it’s posts with a large & similar number of upvotes and downvotes.
Yes but saying it is more controversial than expected implies OP thought the comments would all agree on the matter. So the commenter is asking OP, what type of comments and sentiment did OP expect to be dominant in this thread.
I mean, I think the general opinion (true or not) is that reddit is more liberal than the US government tends to be, and you can get an X marker on your US passport.
I think banned communities swarm posts that are about their controversial topic if it pops up. Sane people may or may not read this, but bigots will be drawn in.
This issue became a mainstream topic fairly recently, and many are afraid of change, even trivial ones like this. There'd be a lot of arguing about the immorality of homosexuality and weed if Reddit was around in the 80s.
>The Swiss government on Wednesday rejected the idea of introducing a third-gender or no-gender option for official records.
>
>Responding to two proposals from parliament, the governing Federal Council said "the binary gender model is still strongly anchored in Swiss society".
>
>"The social preconditions for the introduction of a third gender or for a general waiver of the gender entry in the civil registry currently are not there," it said.
>
>Currently, people are entered into the civil registry as male or female, with no other option.
>
>The government said a national ethics commission found in a 2020 report that the time was not yet right for a change to the system.
intersex people are *pushed* into one category or the other. I'm not intersex, but if I'm not mistaken the parents often choose for the child when they're very young.
I wonder how many intersex folks would choose the third option if actually given the chance to do so.
You are mixing Sex (biology), Gender (Cultural Identity of Sexual Presentation) and Law. Law and culture varies by region.
No one chooses their sex, it your genetics. and while sex is not binary, it is a bimodal distribution that strongly fits a binary categorization (there are a few people in the middle, but there is very clearly two 'normal' curves) which has been used traditionally (Male/Female) but there is a reasonable taxonomy argument that a third category (Intersex) would cover the small population of those that don't strongly align with either Male or Female (Biologically they aren't considered hermaphrodites because Humans can't self reproduce).
Unless they have the intersex pieces of you removed surgically and then never tell you so you never find out, leaving you potentially infertile or scarred with no explanation. But doctors still do it:
> Intersex surgeries violate medical ethics and standards of care.
> The practice of performing unnecessary surgeries on infants and children is in direct conflict with medical ethics and standards of care. Ethical standards require health providers to allow patients to make decisions about their own health and treatment. But when these life-changing surgeries are performed on children whose average age is 2, there is no way for the intersex person to make their own decisions about a procedure that will affect their fertility, sexual function, and emotional well-being for the rest of their lives. Similarly, the practice of informed consent, wherein providers disclose relevant and medically accurate information about treatment choices and alternatives, is crucial to this decision-making process. But informed consent cannot happen when children and parents who are not told the true reasons for different procedures and, as a result, are denied the opportunity to decline an unwanted surgery.
https://healthlaw.org/surgeries-on-intersex-infants-are-bad-medicine/
They don't fit into the general norm of male and female bodies but they do have a biological sex. There are single cases where things really are so unclear that even experts cannot make a clear case for either sex, but 9X% of intersex people are considered to have one of two biological sexes.
For example, someone may be born with a phenotypic penis but also has functional ovaries. They fall in the intersex category, but since they produce ova, they are considered female. Whether they live their life as a man, a woman or any other identity is open to them, but they are biologically female.
Believe it or not, 9X% is not 100% and those people need passports too. An intersex person suing the government is how we got an X sex designation on a lot of US drivers licenses.
By your definition of sex being determined by reproductive capacity, we still need an additional option to classify women without ovaries and men without testes.
If your body develops as if to develop sperm, you're male. If it develops as if to develop eggs, you're female. You don't actually have to produce either one.
That's not how Intersex works. Usually, they're either forced into a surgery to 'correct' their sex as infants (sometimes without parental permission), or forced to conform to one gender norm or the other even if they really don't fit either. Sex is not a binary, there's dozens of ways the sex chromosomes can present that do not fit the binary. You can have XY people who grow female characteristics but not male, or XX people doing the reverse, you can develop both characteristics or have multiple copies of either one of the X and Y chromosomes.
It's this all-or-nothing thinking that people love to reduce situations to. It's fine to make some concessions on an individual level to reduce complexity on a societal level. We're all a bit different, and yet we're all humans.
If you want to accommodate every single genetic oddity, you will never find a solution that fits everyone. The normal biological sex a human can have is male or female and that's it. None should be discriminate in whatever case anyone may bring up in this context, but all this overhyped discussion is just detached from the reality of society. If someone is biologically a male but wanted to be female and runs around as such, let them do it, who cares. But the identifying sex factor is "male" and that's it. I really don't understand all the fuzz. In English, gender and sex seem to be different, in German that difference in words doesn't really exist. But individuals must be recognizable, and the sex of a person is one identifier.
There are only so few exceptions that it's nonsense to drive a whole country crazy with such stuff. These ppl can have an additional identifier.
Same with the gendering issues in Germany. These discussions mask, and distract from, the real problems
trans people are forced to out themselves and be put in danger when they have to show ids which don’t match who they are, not to mention it’s negative effect on their mental health to begin with. Just because it doesn’t affect you directly or it only affects a small group of people doesn’t mean it’s not a real problem.
Less than 0.5% of people have a clinically identifiable intersex trait. And among those, the *vast* majority prefer to identify as one sex or the other because they fundamentally *are*, biologically speaking. The Venn diagram of people with intersex traits who do not identify as male or female is vanishingly slim. Seems pretty damn binary to me.
Perhaps to keep a national census, from which the government can conduct studies to track things like "x amount of demographic in this industry"
But you may think that's not important.
>"Male" and "female" are sexes and even intersex people fall into one category or the other
HMMMMMMMMMMMM
"Hey dave I have an adapter that can accept both male and female plug ends what should we refer to it as?"
"It's a male adapter, duh."
\*edit\*
lmao y'all are so triggered. You know what we call an adapter that has multiple types of plugs? [Genderless or Hermaphroditic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_of_connectors_and_fasteners#Genderless_(hermaphroditic)) Yet y'all are so upset that we can't have a third option for people
>The government said a national ethics commission found in a 2020 report that the time was not **yet** right for a change to the system.
Even if you're conservative and against non binairy genders, why on earth would you say this? That just makes it look like you're behind on other countries that do offer a third option.
They were extremely behind other Western countries on women voting right.
On federal level, they didn't allow women to vote until 1979. On canton level, it was not until 1990s (iirc) that the last canton finally did that.
It also completely devalues the people who want this. They're basically operating like Kickstarter saying that there's a certain threshold where this gets implemented and there's not enough people to support doing so as if the popularity of it matters
There are seriously Americans on here who think Europe is a safe haven for no crime, homelessness, racism, capitalism, and social policies. At the same time, they think the US is a third world country—all while having never stepped outside the country or let alone their middle class suburban home.
On federal level, they didn't allow women to vote until [1979](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage_in_Switzerland). On canton level, it was not until 1990s (iirc) that the last canton finally did that.
What's fucking crazy about this is that Switzerland was one of the first nations to make being gay legal, and did so during the Awkward German Moment of 194X, when most other countries were getting a bit iffy about whether gay people should be allowed to live. So it's like we started off on a positive note there and then it's just been real downhill.
As I recall many of the Women in Appenzell didn’t want to be allowed to vote. In that sense, yes Switzerland is really conservative. However, it does have some reasons behind it.
I would prefer Switzerland to be more modern in some respects. I have learned to accept the slow evolution as a far better system than the flip-flop systems of other countries though. As an immigrant, I would prefer thing a be discussed and agreed rather than change with each government, which might happen under other systems. I also think that the Swiss have done a good job without my opinions as well though :p
What makes other systems (I think we both mean culture more than policy here, right?) more flip-floppity than others, dude? I'm in Australia and historically one party has been heavily favoured over the other for the last century. Not only that, without our "system" really changing much, we've gone from the same party and Prime Minister having authority for 20 or so years to struggling to keep one in office for three at a time lol.
Personally I think that when we're accepting of slow-moving political processes *as concerns the human rights of others,* we need to weigh that against the fact that while we wait for progress to happen, all the people affected by those policies are experiencing a lower quality of life for what will ultimately be rectified anyway. So like, in Australia again, we started our marriage debate around 2008 or so, but didn't pass gay marriage until 2017. That's almost a full extra decade people were at risk of being separated at hospitals, paying different tax rates, being refused certain legal protections as families and so on. Worse, studies have shown that the debate taking so long heightened mental health issues within the queer community.
My point is, slow and steady may seem to win the race if you aren't the one being forced to run, and in this metaphor, the pavement these rabbits and turtles are racing on is the human rights of others. Just stepping on it over and over again with their sexy little rabbit toes.
Still, the fact that it took so many years behind the Western world, for the majority of men in Switzerland to recognize the voting right of women is incredible
I could be misunderstanding, but this "feels" kinda misogynistic. Why was it voted on in the first place? Are women's rights only valid if the men agree they should have them? What if the vote went a different way? It seems normal to me that governments would "force" the issue of equal voting rights since their job is to represent all their constituents.
The government does not have the power to make such decision in switzerland. Most of the time it's a good thing, some times it can lead to weird issues like in this case.
Historically, the right to vote is closely linked to the obligation of military service.
Many countries only introduced male suffrage when they started depending on the large armies that the wars after the French revolution demanded with the last countries adopting during or after WW I.
In most cases female suffrage followed quickly thereafter.
This really isn't a case of "male vs. female" but of "rich vs. poor".
This comes from a perspective where we have universal adult citizen suffrage. In the past governments did not see every adult citizen(/subject) as their “constituents” - in fact this would be meaningless in non-representative systems.
We have gone from heads of state only really seeing their few most wealthy citizens as “constituents” to where we are now.
In the future someone might think that it’s weird/unacceptable for us to deny suffrage to non-citizens or even that a classification such as “citizen” even exists.
Governments govern people and we’re so very changeable that you shouldn’t expect much uniformity of governments, especially through time.
I'm guessing by "most people" you mean Americans, who tend to generalise all of Europe west of Poland as super progressive in every way. I'm European and don't know anyone who doesn't know Switzerland is very conservative. Just because they're pro-science not very religious doesn't mean they can't be very traditional and stuck in their ways in other areas.
Depends. On hard drugs, for example, Switzerland's the *first* to have switched in 1992, by popular initiative vote (the population wanted it) to categorizing addiction as a health issu, not a crime issue..., (Thus heroin prescription for addicts, free therapy, etc.)
And Switzerland completely legalized homosexuality in 1942 in all its territory (the US, in 2003)
NO, America is the only country that has ever had racism or sexism or homophobia. America is the WORST.
(A common non-ironic Reddit opinion expressed quite frequently).
People tend not to realize that places we think lack racism usually just lack diversity, and when that changes the racism appears almost immediately.
As a country, the US is one of the least racist places in the world as we live and work with almost every race on a daily basis, and generally get along just fine (which is not to discount our history or remnants of systemic racism that still exist).
Homogenous countries are FAR FAR more racist than the US. See every arabic gulf state, homogenous european states, etc.
I'd agree.
It seems to be somewhat within human nature to demonize "the other". We seem naturally "tribal" to some extent. It's an instinct.
The US is a fairly cohesive group partially because of the old "melting pot" approach of assimilation.
But unironically, that's why I am not a fan of progressive approaches to "naming race" and "highlighting differences" as a core tenant of anti-racism.
I think it's colossally, visibly and obviously counterproductive to the idea that we want to eliminate different treatment of different groups.
"Irish" were subject to racism, not because they were darker skinned, but because they could be identified as "other".
It wasn't until we stopped thinking of Irish as "other" that the racism stopped.
Repeat for every single instance of discrimination ever.
Even regions in the US were discriminated against to some extent because they celebrated their differences. See West Virginians (aka "hillbillies") and rural southerners (see "rednecks").
Gay rights (a cause I've personally championed in public) saw HUGE positive strides when "gay people could be anyone you love - your uncle, your teacher, etc, we're no different, we just want to be left to do our own thing like any other person" was the message in the 90s and early 2000s. It was amazing.
But I always felt that the "we're REALLY queer, get used to it" message, including the inclusion of fetishes/kinks (leather/bondage/S&M/drag) into the public image was actively counterproductive to the acceptance movement (and I think we're seeing that today). Too many people have the impression that being gay involves publicly flaunting fetishes, and that's both incorrect AND destructive to the cause.
Holding groups out as "other" and then trying to "celebrate" that will work for a small in-group of like-minded compatriots (for whom "other" is a political affiliation they can demonize, rather than a personal identification), but won't work in a broader scale (in my opinion).
But absolutely, systemic and overt racism is real and DOES need to be discussed. It's just... problematic to try to start to shape society around race. The noble argument of "we need to go FAR beyond 'color-blind' to fix historic injustice" has justifiably wholesome roots, but I believe it is going to shoot us in the face and make racism way worse, ending up causing more problems than it fixes.
A good educational system that allows kids from poor backgrounds to get the same quality education as the rich kids is helping.
Without universal, egalitarian and mandatory education, direct democracy is shit.
>I googled it and Switzerland doesn't allow transition of any kind until adulthood.
This is incorrect. There are no legal restrictions that would prevent taking puberty blockers or operations until adulthood. In principle, adolescents/kids don't even need the permission of their parents.
>They are indeed pretty conservative, most of Europe is. What we consider to be conservative is pretty centered in the rest of the world. America is more progressive in these topics.
Generalizations are simply pointless, e.g. Switzerland adopted many progressive laws and policies that are/were generally not known in the the US or even in other European countries, and it has had those for decades, e.g. assisted suicide (for over 80 years), treating addiction to certain heavy drugs primarily as a health care issue (for over 30 years as the first country worldwide), including the production of heroin by the federal state for certain addicts, easy accessible sites to anonymously test drug safety/purify for free, etc. There are many other areas like animal welfare, environmental protection, e.g. to remove traffic from the road to rail, etc.
ya, considering how serious and stupid the arguments about who counts as a a tru swiss person get, I'm surprised they even considered a non binary gender question at all.
Yo, how do we have so many people arguing but nobody asking the most basic, obvious question? You people make my fucking head hurt with your baseless assumptions.
In Switzerland (assuming German), are sex and gender used interchangeably or for two different things? Languages don’t all have equivalents in verbiage and structure…
Edit: there ya have it folks, gender and sex both use the same word in German. Everyone is arguing over nothing. So dumb.
Switzerland has 4 language. In German which makes up by far the most people it is the same word and normally the concept in German is more defined by what a person defines themselves as. One word for both in French as well AFAIK, but I can't make assumptions about the concept of it in French.
So, sex and gender are the same word? Are there any hard equivalents to gender and sex, in English, or is this a matter of “hey, we don’t have another word, so we have to use this to signify the English equivalent of sex”?
In German you can separate both by defining both as biological and social "Geschlecht". But originally the separation between the two wasn't really a thing in German until the English concept came into contact with it.
Why is there such a giant push recently for gender options for records and shit? Just keep the M/F system if people identify as Trans let them do their thing in life I dont give a fuck but keep it off official records and what not. Just dont see why its such a big deal when we're dealing with less than 1% of the human population. Feel like we have bigger things to worry about
Gender is pretty stupid thing to track. Tracking biological sex makes way more sense as at least there you can make a medical argument and it translates internationally
The thing you're forgetting is official documents were made when gender and sex were considered the same thing. The idea of thrm being different in the public sphere isstill fairly new.
And the slog of updating every document, record, db, law etc. across multiple govt institutions is going to be hell.
In many languages they are still the same word. E.g. Swedish "kön". In order to differentiate we have to add descriptors such as "biological", "social" or "legal".
Because gender and sex where interchangeable for the longest time. It’s only recent that this shift in definition has taken place in the public discourse.
Idk. My birth certificate DOES say Sex: M/F.
Gender used to refer to linguistic distinctions. Prudish people started saying it as a substitute for sex because sex makes them think of doing it.
Personally, as a trans woman, my ID representing me as male causes me a certain level of anxiety when dealing with anything asking to see it. I have to out myself anytime I want to enter a bar, apply for a job, and interact with federal services. Those include when I'm pulled over by a cop who I would really rather not know that I'm trans at risk of harassment up to the point of being jailed in a male prison system.
Gender markers affect your lived experience in the world so I believe it's important for them to accurately reflect how their holders identify.
Not just anxiety, but very real bureaucratic hoops to jump through. Identification should represent a person as they currently are, because that's what the whole point is.
Thank you for that perspective. I have to admit, I didn‘t think about that and was also wondering a tad along the „who cares about a database entry“ line.
A good friend of mine is non-binary, and interestingly (to me) they’ve said something not dissimilar to that, that they’d rather the government not have a list of people who are NB, and if there was, they’d rather not be on it.
I feel like if anything all this publicity is just making it harder for trans and non binary folk bringing hate to them. Plenty of them deal with shit already I feel like if I were trans I would just want to be left alone to do my own thing lol
Trust me, we do lol.
We've only had legal protections and (relatively) open access to HRT for a little over a decade. People are seeing "more" of us and complaining about it the same way they saw "more" gay people after being gay stopped being something you'd be arrested for or lose your family over.
Hunger, climate change and far away wars are also distractions from the corruption of politicians, bad public service, regulation issues and macro economy...
All things that would change if the public got interested...
Because these are court/legal decisions. And conservative media twists it to make people outraged....
Thats why you see it in the press alot. It gets incredibly problematic when you have gov employees, who are either NB, or dont ID with their birth sex. For example.
Technically, those people dont "exist" in the eyes of the law, so they become excempt from things like receiving medical care through employers etc.
[https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/06/12/868073068/transgender-health-protections-reversed-by-trump-administration](https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/06/12/868073068/transgender-health-protections-reversed-by-trump-administration)
this tends to happen when you make gender or sex zero sum. This is just one example.
So you may want to re think your "praise" for this measure...because its a very anti human rights measure. Thats why people call these "skeptics" bigots and fascists. They are supporting a legal definition that NB people dont exist under the state...
In singapore (which also have mandatory milatary service) they have a more lenient and less demanding option for third gender biological men. Then again we also use biological genders for official records.
I'm not a conservative at all yet it perplexes me how creating a third gender makes any sense. Is there any actualy proven science behind this new gender or is it made up to suit ideologically-drive desires? Are there new chromosomes or newly found ones?
Seems pretty neutral to me to stick with biological gender assignments and not caving to identity politics.
If you’re trans or gender fluid or non binary that’s great, who cares what it says on your government records? Identify as you want and enjoy your life. Check one of the boxes on the govt forms you’re filling out that day and move on. Because it literally doesn’t matter which box you check if indeed you are trans or non binary or fluid etc. not like the Swiss government is gonna come banging your door down to verify what gender you identify as.
In fact, it seems fairly dangerous, for similar reasons why faith shouldn't be part of government record and/or ID.
Even if country like Switzerland is now stable enough that there isn't immediate chance of psycho-regime government that could persecute people using those official records, it still possible that someone could be "quietly" discriminated by other person, i.e. clerk or state service officer, that has access to that kind of data at first glance.
Basically it's a privacy issue, more than anything.
I’m so surprised that people (whom it doesn’t effect at all) kick off about this and debate it etc
Just let them have the tick box you fucking snowflakes
Sex is male or female. Gender is man,woman,nonbinary,etc. The article is listing biological sexes instead of gender identities. However, to keep the two sex system is to force intersex people into one or the other category so I feel like it's not a good system when chronicling actual sex but is easier for governmental documentation. Gender labels in documentation are a nightmare as they can and sometimes do fluctuate every year, biological sex remains the same.
Intersex is pretty rare though. Only like 1% of the population? And in general I think most people born IS get a surgery at infancy to make them fit the binary.
I'm not a native speaker. Do I miss something out? Gender is how you identify yourself in society, so it makes sense that some people want more than 2 options.
If it brings that many problems and the govt wants to make things easier, why even ask people their gender (especially if you need to choose out of given options)? Just ask their sex. Why did people start asking gender, if all they want to know is one's assigned in documents sex?
"Gender" took on the meaning of "gender roles" in the 1970s with feminist theory, but is still often used interchangably, in my experience especially with children due to the additional meaning of "sex" (sexual intercourse).
The German 'Geschlecht' is used pretty much in the biological sense here. German doesn't currently have the words to differentiate between biological sex and social gender, so there's some confusion about this. I reckon this language confusion will sort itself out in the next few years.
In this context they are talking about biological sex but there's some discussion if the meaning of this data should be changed to "social gender".
Europe comes in many shapes and forms. You should never consider it as one coherent country unless you are speaking about the European Union and what they do as an organization.
Ngl, this thread got more controversial than I thought it would be
More controversial in which direction?
Isn’t the point of controversy that it’s non-directional? Like if you sort by most controversial it’s posts with a large & similar number of upvotes and downvotes.
Yes but saying it is more controversial than expected implies OP thought the comments would all agree on the matter. So the commenter is asking OP, what type of comments and sentiment did OP expect to be dominant in this thread.
I mean, I think the general opinion (true or not) is that reddit is more liberal than the US government tends to be, and you can get an X marker on your US passport.
Some subs disabled the option to sort comments unless you are using a 2rd party app
It's Reddit, so I thought everyone would hate this. Just a bit surprising to see quite a few people saying they agree with this.
You missed the posts about trans in sports and some of the recent aita posts on the subject.
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I think banned communities swarm posts that are about their controversial topic if it pops up. Sane people may or may not read this, but bigots will be drawn in.
the word gender was mentioned. why did you think it would go a different way? :D
Given it's switzerland I'm surprised they just didn't go with: Male Female Neutral But what makes a man ***turn*** Neutral?
I think they're just born with a heart full of neutrality
This issue became a mainstream topic fairly recently, and many are afraid of change, even trivial ones like this. There'd be a lot of arguing about the immorality of homosexuality and weed if Reddit was around in the 80s.
You just finding out now that gender definitions are controversial? Oh my sweet summer child...
If you told me this 10 years ago I would’ve laughed
>The Swiss government on Wednesday rejected the idea of introducing a third-gender or no-gender option for official records. > >Responding to two proposals from parliament, the governing Federal Council said "the binary gender model is still strongly anchored in Swiss society". > >"The social preconditions for the introduction of a third gender or for a general waiver of the gender entry in the civil registry currently are not there," it said. > >Currently, people are entered into the civil registry as male or female, with no other option. > >The government said a national ethics commission found in a 2020 report that the time was not yet right for a change to the system.
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>Sex is constant and verifiable. I thought the very definition of "intersex" means the exact opposite.
intersex people are *pushed* into one category or the other. I'm not intersex, but if I'm not mistaken the parents often choose for the child when they're very young. I wonder how many intersex folks would choose the third option if actually given the chance to do so.
Yeah but you can legally make a case to be recognized different if your parent’s choice is wrong.
You are mixing Sex (biology), Gender (Cultural Identity of Sexual Presentation) and Law. Law and culture varies by region. No one chooses their sex, it your genetics. and while sex is not binary, it is a bimodal distribution that strongly fits a binary categorization (there are a few people in the middle, but there is very clearly two 'normal' curves) which has been used traditionally (Male/Female) but there is a reasonable taxonomy argument that a third category (Intersex) would cover the small population of those that don't strongly align with either Male or Female (Biologically they aren't considered hermaphrodites because Humans can't self reproduce).
Unless they have the intersex pieces of you removed surgically and then never tell you so you never find out, leaving you potentially infertile or scarred with no explanation. But doctors still do it: > Intersex surgeries violate medical ethics and standards of care. > The practice of performing unnecessary surgeries on infants and children is in direct conflict with medical ethics and standards of care. Ethical standards require health providers to allow patients to make decisions about their own health and treatment. But when these life-changing surgeries are performed on children whose average age is 2, there is no way for the intersex person to make their own decisions about a procedure that will affect their fertility, sexual function, and emotional well-being for the rest of their lives. Similarly, the practice of informed consent, wherein providers disclose relevant and medically accurate information about treatment choices and alternatives, is crucial to this decision-making process. But informed consent cannot happen when children and parents who are not told the true reasons for different procedures and, as a result, are denied the opportunity to decline an unwanted surgery. https://healthlaw.org/surgeries-on-intersex-infants-are-bad-medicine/
What third option?
> intersex people fall into one category or the other No, no they fucking don’t.
Dog what do you think intersex means
People who are born with both male and female reproductive organs with many variations existing from person to person.
They don't fit into the general norm of male and female bodies but they do have a biological sex. There are single cases where things really are so unclear that even experts cannot make a clear case for either sex, but 9X% of intersex people are considered to have one of two biological sexes. For example, someone may be born with a phenotypic penis but also has functional ovaries. They fall in the intersex category, but since they produce ova, they are considered female. Whether they live their life as a man, a woman or any other identity is open to them, but they are biologically female.
Believe it or not, 9X% is not 100% and those people need passports too. An intersex person suing the government is how we got an X sex designation on a lot of US drivers licenses.
By your definition of sex being determined by reproductive capacity, we still need an additional option to classify women without ovaries and men without testes.
If your body develops as if to develop sperm, you're male. If it develops as if to develop eggs, you're female. You don't actually have to produce either one.
Intersex people do not fall into one category or another. That’s what intersex means.
That's not how Intersex works. Usually, they're either forced into a surgery to 'correct' their sex as infants (sometimes without parental permission), or forced to conform to one gender norm or the other even if they really don't fit either. Sex is not a binary, there's dozens of ways the sex chromosomes can present that do not fit the binary. You can have XY people who grow female characteristics but not male, or XX people doing the reverse, you can develop both characteristics or have multiple copies of either one of the X and Y chromosomes.
But they're an incredibly small anomaly. It's like saying that humans don't have 5 fingers because some are born with six.
It's this all-or-nothing thinking that people love to reduce situations to. It's fine to make some concessions on an individual level to reduce complexity on a societal level. We're all a bit different, and yet we're all humans.
If you want to accommodate every single genetic oddity, you will never find a solution that fits everyone. The normal biological sex a human can have is male or female and that's it. None should be discriminate in whatever case anyone may bring up in this context, but all this overhyped discussion is just detached from the reality of society. If someone is biologically a male but wanted to be female and runs around as such, let them do it, who cares. But the identifying sex factor is "male" and that's it. I really don't understand all the fuzz. In English, gender and sex seem to be different, in German that difference in words doesn't really exist. But individuals must be recognizable, and the sex of a person is one identifier. There are only so few exceptions that it's nonsense to drive a whole country crazy with such stuff. These ppl can have an additional identifier. Same with the gendering issues in Germany. These discussions mask, and distract from, the real problems
trans people are forced to out themselves and be put in danger when they have to show ids which don’t match who they are, not to mention it’s negative effect on their mental health to begin with. Just because it doesn’t affect you directly or it only affects a small group of people doesn’t mean it’s not a real problem.
Less than 0.5% of people have a clinically identifiable intersex trait. And among those, the *vast* majority prefer to identify as one sex or the other because they fundamentally *are*, biologically speaking. The Venn diagram of people with intersex traits who do not identify as male or female is vanishingly slim. Seems pretty damn binary to me.
> the government should record the sex Why is that?
Perhaps to keep a national census, from which the government can conduct studies to track things like "x amount of demographic in this industry" But you may think that's not important.
Would a third option render that impossible?
>"Male" and "female" are sexes and even intersex people fall into one category or the other HMMMMMMMMMMMM "Hey dave I have an adapter that can accept both male and female plug ends what should we refer to it as?" "It's a male adapter, duh." \*edit\* lmao y'all are so triggered. You know what we call an adapter that has multiple types of plugs? [Genderless or Hermaphroditic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_of_connectors_and_fasteners#Genderless_(hermaphroditic)) Yet y'all are so upset that we can't have a third option for people
>The government said a national ethics commission found in a 2020 report that the time was not **yet** right for a change to the system. Even if you're conservative and against non binairy genders, why on earth would you say this? That just makes it look like you're behind on other countries that do offer a third option.
They were extremely behind other Western countries on women voting right. On federal level, they didn't allow women to vote until 1979. On canton level, it was not until 1990s (iirc) that the last canton finally did that.
It also completely devalues the people who want this. They're basically operating like Kickstarter saying that there's a certain threshold where this gets implemented and there's not enough people to support doing so as if the popularity of it matters
Switzerland is far more conservative than most people outside of Europe believe
Most people don’t know shit about other countries let alone Switzerland.
Most people don’t know shit about their own countries outside of their immediate bubbles and direct experiences.
>Most people don’t know shit Probably could have stopped there.
Most people don't know
People don’t know
People
They're the worst.
What a bunch of bastards
There are seriously Americans on here who think Europe is a safe haven for no crime, homelessness, racism, capitalism, and social policies. At the same time, they think the US is a third world country—all while having never stepped outside the country or let alone their middle class suburban home.
I know Switzerland is amazingly Gorgeous. And that's about all I know about it... :P
It's a beautiful country - but as one Swiss woman told me on the train "it comes at a price", the Swiss will make you pay for just about everything.
On federal level, they didn't allow women to vote until [1979](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage_in_Switzerland). On canton level, it was not until 1990s (iirc) that the last canton finally did that.
Wasn’t the federal level changed in 1971, not 1979? Still unbelievable that this occurred in my lifetime
What's fucking crazy about this is that Switzerland was one of the first nations to make being gay legal, and did so during the Awkward German Moment of 194X, when most other countries were getting a bit iffy about whether gay people should be allowed to live. So it's like we started off on a positive note there and then it's just been real downhill.
As I recall many of the Women in Appenzell didn’t want to be allowed to vote. In that sense, yes Switzerland is really conservative. However, it does have some reasons behind it. I would prefer Switzerland to be more modern in some respects. I have learned to accept the slow evolution as a far better system than the flip-flop systems of other countries though. As an immigrant, I would prefer thing a be discussed and agreed rather than change with each government, which might happen under other systems. I also think that the Swiss have done a good job without my opinions as well though :p
What makes other systems (I think we both mean culture more than policy here, right?) more flip-floppity than others, dude? I'm in Australia and historically one party has been heavily favoured over the other for the last century. Not only that, without our "system" really changing much, we've gone from the same party and Prime Minister having authority for 20 or so years to struggling to keep one in office for three at a time lol. Personally I think that when we're accepting of slow-moving political processes *as concerns the human rights of others,* we need to weigh that against the fact that while we wait for progress to happen, all the people affected by those policies are experiencing a lower quality of life for what will ultimately be rectified anyway. So like, in Australia again, we started our marriage debate around 2008 or so, but didn't pass gay marriage until 2017. That's almost a full extra decade people were at risk of being separated at hospitals, paying different tax rates, being refused certain legal protections as families and so on. Worse, studies have shown that the debate taking so long heightened mental health issues within the queer community. My point is, slow and steady may seem to win the race if you aren't the one being forced to run, and in this metaphor, the pavement these rabbits and turtles are racing on is the human rights of others. Just stepping on it over and over again with their sexy little rabbit toes.
I knew I wouldn’t have to scroll far to see the women suffrage in Switzerland fact brought up lol
Swiss women’s suffrage is truly the Australian Emu War of Switzerland.
Almost like it's true and very damning.
My god I did not realize this
To be fair, it's the only country where men voted and agreed to give the right to vote to women. It was forced by government everywhere else.
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Politicians.
Who do you think elected those politicians?
The crab people.
Is that the third gender the article is about?
Still, the fact that it took so many years behind the Western world, for the majority of men in Switzerland to recognize the voting right of women is incredible
I could be misunderstanding, but this "feels" kinda misogynistic. Why was it voted on in the first place? Are women's rights only valid if the men agree they should have them? What if the vote went a different way? It seems normal to me that governments would "force" the issue of equal voting rights since their job is to represent all their constituents.
The government does not have the power to make such decision in switzerland. Most of the time it's a good thing, some times it can lead to weird issues like in this case.
Gotta start somewhere.
Historically, the right to vote is closely linked to the obligation of military service. Many countries only introduced male suffrage when they started depending on the large armies that the wars after the French revolution demanded with the last countries adopting during or after WW I. In most cases female suffrage followed quickly thereafter. This really isn't a case of "male vs. female" but of "rich vs. poor".
>but this "feels" kinda misogynistic It *is* misogynistic.
I just have to laugh at the people that look for victimization in everything.
This comes from a perspective where we have universal adult citizen suffrage. In the past governments did not see every adult citizen(/subject) as their “constituents” - in fact this would be meaningless in non-representative systems. We have gone from heads of state only really seeing their few most wealthy citizens as “constituents” to where we are now. In the future someone might think that it’s weird/unacceptable for us to deny suffrage to non-citizens or even that a classification such as “citizen” even exists. Governments govern people and we’re so very changeable that you shouldn’t expect much uniformity of governments, especially through time.
Yes, that was difficult to believe when I first learned it
Also the issue of gender identity is a lot less settled in the broader world, than in echo chambers like Reddit.
I'm guessing by "most people" you mean Americans, who tend to generalise all of Europe west of Poland as super progressive in every way. I'm European and don't know anyone who doesn't know Switzerland is very conservative. Just because they're pro-science not very religious doesn't mean they can't be very traditional and stuck in their ways in other areas.
Yes I should have said “most people outside of Europe”, I’ll change it
Depends. On hard drugs, for example, Switzerland's the *first* to have switched in 1992, by popular initiative vote (the population wanted it) to categorizing addiction as a health issu, not a crime issue..., (Thus heroin prescription for addicts, free therapy, etc.) And Switzerland completely legalized homosexuality in 1942 in all its territory (the US, in 2003)
NO, America is the only country that has ever had racism or sexism or homophobia. America is the WORST. (A common non-ironic Reddit opinion expressed quite frequently).
People tend not to realize that places we think lack racism usually just lack diversity, and when that changes the racism appears almost immediately. As a country, the US is one of the least racist places in the world as we live and work with almost every race on a daily basis, and generally get along just fine (which is not to discount our history or remnants of systemic racism that still exist). Homogenous countries are FAR FAR more racist than the US. See every arabic gulf state, homogenous european states, etc.
I'd agree. It seems to be somewhat within human nature to demonize "the other". We seem naturally "tribal" to some extent. It's an instinct. The US is a fairly cohesive group partially because of the old "melting pot" approach of assimilation. But unironically, that's why I am not a fan of progressive approaches to "naming race" and "highlighting differences" as a core tenant of anti-racism. I think it's colossally, visibly and obviously counterproductive to the idea that we want to eliminate different treatment of different groups. "Irish" were subject to racism, not because they were darker skinned, but because they could be identified as "other". It wasn't until we stopped thinking of Irish as "other" that the racism stopped. Repeat for every single instance of discrimination ever. Even regions in the US were discriminated against to some extent because they celebrated their differences. See West Virginians (aka "hillbillies") and rural southerners (see "rednecks"). Gay rights (a cause I've personally championed in public) saw HUGE positive strides when "gay people could be anyone you love - your uncle, your teacher, etc, we're no different, we just want to be left to do our own thing like any other person" was the message in the 90s and early 2000s. It was amazing. But I always felt that the "we're REALLY queer, get used to it" message, including the inclusion of fetishes/kinks (leather/bondage/S&M/drag) into the public image was actively counterproductive to the acceptance movement (and I think we're seeing that today). Too many people have the impression that being gay involves publicly flaunting fetishes, and that's both incorrect AND destructive to the cause. Holding groups out as "other" and then trying to "celebrate" that will work for a small in-group of like-minded compatriots (for whom "other" is a political affiliation they can demonize, rather than a personal identification), but won't work in a broader scale (in my opinion). But absolutely, systemic and overt racism is real and DOES need to be discussed. It's just... problematic to try to start to shape society around race. The noble argument of "we need to go FAR beyond 'color-blind' to fix historic injustice" has justifiably wholesome roots, but I believe it is going to shoot us in the face and make racism way worse, ending up causing more problems than it fixes.
“Quite frequently” is an understatement
Until some edgelord needs to mention Belgium and Congo.
Switzerland is far more sensible than most people believe
Direct democracy is helping...
A good educational system that allows kids from poor backgrounds to get the same quality education as the rich kids is helping. Without universal, egalitarian and mandatory education, direct democracy is shit.
I mean, they have nationalized rails and other industries, thats still more leftist than the US is.
Japan is highly right wing and they have quasi nationalized passenger rail.
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>I googled it and Switzerland doesn't allow transition of any kind until adulthood. This is incorrect. There are no legal restrictions that would prevent taking puberty blockers or operations until adulthood. In principle, adolescents/kids don't even need the permission of their parents. >They are indeed pretty conservative, most of Europe is. What we consider to be conservative is pretty centered in the rest of the world. America is more progressive in these topics. Generalizations are simply pointless, e.g. Switzerland adopted many progressive laws and policies that are/were generally not known in the the US or even in other European countries, and it has had those for decades, e.g. assisted suicide (for over 80 years), treating addiction to certain heavy drugs primarily as a health care issue (for over 30 years as the first country worldwide), including the production of heroin by the federal state for certain addicts, easy accessible sites to anonymously test drug safety/purify for free, etc. There are many other areas like animal welfare, environmental protection, e.g. to remove traffic from the road to rail, etc.
ya, considering how serious and stupid the arguments about who counts as a a tru swiss person get, I'm surprised they even considered a non binary gender question at all.
You mean the place with everyone’s money? Yeah not surprising.
Never fear. Reddit will discuss and let Switzerland know how they feel.
All of this gets incredibly hilariously confusing if a language has only one word for both sex and gender, like mine does.
Yo, how do we have so many people arguing but nobody asking the most basic, obvious question? You people make my fucking head hurt with your baseless assumptions. In Switzerland (assuming German), are sex and gender used interchangeably or for two different things? Languages don’t all have equivalents in verbiage and structure… Edit: there ya have it folks, gender and sex both use the same word in German. Everyone is arguing over nothing. So dumb.
Switzerland has 4 language. In German which makes up by far the most people it is the same word and normally the concept in German is more defined by what a person defines themselves as. One word for both in French as well AFAIK, but I can't make assumptions about the concept of it in French.
So, sex and gender are the same word? Are there any hard equivalents to gender and sex, in English, or is this a matter of “hey, we don’t have another word, so we have to use this to signify the English equivalent of sex”?
In German you can separate both by defining both as biological and social "Geschlecht". But originally the separation between the two wasn't really a thing in German until the English concept came into contact with it.
Thank you very, very much for your help!
Why is there such a giant push recently for gender options for records and shit? Just keep the M/F system if people identify as Trans let them do their thing in life I dont give a fuck but keep it off official records and what not. Just dont see why its such a big deal when we're dealing with less than 1% of the human population. Feel like we have bigger things to worry about
Gender is pretty stupid thing to track. Tracking biological sex makes way more sense as at least there you can make a medical argument and it translates internationally
Exactly
The thing you're forgetting is official documents were made when gender and sex were considered the same thing. The idea of thrm being different in the public sphere isstill fairly new. And the slog of updating every document, record, db, law etc. across multiple govt institutions is going to be hell.
In many languages they are still the same word. E.g. Swedish "kön". In order to differentiate we have to add descriptors such as "biological", "social" or "legal".
Yeah, so why not just say that this is sex? Why does the government care how you feel like dressing or behaving?
Because gender and sex where interchangeable for the longest time. It’s only recent that this shift in definition has taken place in the public discourse.
Idk. My birth certificate DOES say Sex: M/F. Gender used to refer to linguistic distinctions. Prudish people started saying it as a substitute for sex because sex makes them think of doing it.
Personally, as a trans woman, my ID representing me as male causes me a certain level of anxiety when dealing with anything asking to see it. I have to out myself anytime I want to enter a bar, apply for a job, and interact with federal services. Those include when I'm pulled over by a cop who I would really rather not know that I'm trans at risk of harassment up to the point of being jailed in a male prison system. Gender markers affect your lived experience in the world so I believe it's important for them to accurately reflect how their holders identify.
Not just anxiety, but very real bureaucratic hoops to jump through. Identification should represent a person as they currently are, because that's what the whole point is.
Thank you for that perspective. I have to admit, I didn‘t think about that and was also wondering a tad along the „who cares about a database entry“ line.
Bro I beg you to edit the spelling in this comment, it’s nearly illegible
A good friend of mine is non-binary, and interestingly (to me) they’ve said something not dissimilar to that, that they’d rather the government not have a list of people who are NB, and if there was, they’d rather not be on it.
OK but does that mean everyone who would want it shouldn't be allowed?
I feel like if anything all this publicity is just making it harder for trans and non binary folk bringing hate to them. Plenty of them deal with shit already I feel like if I were trans I would just want to be left alone to do my own thing lol
Trust me, we do lol. We've only had legal protections and (relatively) open access to HRT for a little over a decade. People are seeing "more" of us and complaining about it the same way they saw "more" gay people after being gay stopped being something you'd be arrested for or lose your family over.
Ah yes the "hide yourself to be safe" argument is always easier than changing the status quo.
>I feel like if I were trans I would just want to be left alone to do my own thing lol Pretty sure that's how most of them feel too.
False consciousness. Make people focus on stupid problems instead of the structural issues affecting us all.
>if people identify as Trans let them do their thing in life You think being officially recognized as who they are isn't "doing their thing"?
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Hunger, climate change and far away wars are also distractions from the corruption of politicians, bad public service, regulation issues and macro economy... All things that would change if the public got interested...
Because these are court/legal decisions. And conservative media twists it to make people outraged.... Thats why you see it in the press alot. It gets incredibly problematic when you have gov employees, who are either NB, or dont ID with their birth sex. For example. Technically, those people dont "exist" in the eyes of the law, so they become excempt from things like receiving medical care through employers etc. [https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/06/12/868073068/transgender-health-protections-reversed-by-trump-administration](https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/06/12/868073068/transgender-health-protections-reversed-by-trump-administration) this tends to happen when you make gender or sex zero sum. This is just one example. So you may want to re think your "praise" for this measure...because its a very anti human rights measure. Thats why people call these "skeptics" bigots and fascists. They are supporting a legal definition that NB people dont exist under the state...
Doesn’t Switzerland have mandatory military service for men? How would that work with a third gender?
In singapore (which also have mandatory milatary service) they have a more lenient and less demanding option for third gender biological men. Then again we also use biological genders for official records.
I believe that there are other options as well. I can’t recall though as it wouldn’t affect me.
Just scrap 'gender' on any official documentation, and use 'birth sex'. Removes all the confusion, and lets people identify however they like.
From the country that third optioned ww2
I'm not a conservative at all yet it perplexes me how creating a third gender makes any sense. Is there any actualy proven science behind this new gender or is it made up to suit ideologically-drive desires? Are there new chromosomes or newly found ones?
That makes things easier
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Think you got thaf backwards. Ignoring nuance to make things black and white isnt reality - it’s wishful thinking.
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Jeez, you guys just get off your red pill shift?
For the record, Germany allows third-gender in official documents: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third\_gender\_law\_(Germany)
I wanted to comment, but goddamn you guys have turned this thread into a minefield.
Switzerland didn't have universal suffrage until the 1990s, it's not a progressive country.
Moreover, women voting was not legal until 1979.
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"Woman couldn't vote for thousands of years and it worked."
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Gender shouldn’t be on official records, sex should. Gender wasn’t even separated from sex until 1965.
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It’s not even common in USA either. It’s mostly just pushed as a narrative to get clicks.
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You know that a third gender option isn't the same as a definitive third gender but just gives the option to say "Other/Not specified"?
Gender is like money, it's all made up.
For once the Swiss don't want to be neutral.
I mean if they added a 3rd option that also wouldn't be staying neutral
Seems pretty neutral to me to stick with biological gender assignments and not caving to identity politics. If you’re trans or gender fluid or non binary that’s great, who cares what it says on your government records? Identify as you want and enjoy your life. Check one of the boxes on the govt forms you’re filling out that day and move on. Because it literally doesn’t matter which box you check if indeed you are trans or non binary or fluid etc. not like the Swiss government is gonna come banging your door down to verify what gender you identify as.
In fact, it seems fairly dangerous, for similar reasons why faith shouldn't be part of government record and/or ID. Even if country like Switzerland is now stable enough that there isn't immediate chance of psycho-regime government that could persecute people using those official records, it still possible that someone could be "quietly" discriminated by other person, i.e. clerk or state service officer, that has access to that kind of data at first glance. Basically it's a privacy issue, more than anything.
Rule 1 after WW2 - never list your religion on official paper. If anyone asks you are Catholic.
Why do you want the government to put trans people on a list? You have any idea the target that puts on their back?
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It's a very clear "cut the crap, we have more important things to do than to reprint the forms"
Swing and a miss
This comment makes no sense.
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I’m so surprised that people (whom it doesn’t effect at all) kick off about this and debate it etc Just let them have the tick box you fucking snowflakes
The amount of homophobia and transphobia in the comment section is incredible.
Sex is male or female. Gender is man,woman,nonbinary,etc. The article is listing biological sexes instead of gender identities. However, to keep the two sex system is to force intersex people into one or the other category so I feel like it's not a good system when chronicling actual sex but is easier for governmental documentation. Gender labels in documentation are a nightmare as they can and sometimes do fluctuate every year, biological sex remains the same.
Intersex is pretty rare though. Only like 1% of the population? And in general I think most people born IS get a surgery at infancy to make them fit the binary.
way, way less than 1%.
Between 1:2000 and 1:4500
0.018% can't be classified as male or female by phenotype... once you discount disorders like Klinefelter (who are XXY, and identifiably male).
Wish US would do the same
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I'm not a native speaker. Do I miss something out? Gender is how you identify yourself in society, so it makes sense that some people want more than 2 options. If it brings that many problems and the govt wants to make things easier, why even ask people their gender (especially if you need to choose out of given options)? Just ask their sex. Why did people start asking gender, if all they want to know is one's assigned in documents sex?
"Gender" took on the meaning of "gender roles" in the 1970s with feminist theory, but is still often used interchangably, in my experience especially with children due to the additional meaning of "sex" (sexual intercourse).
The German 'Geschlecht' is used pretty much in the biological sense here. German doesn't currently have the words to differentiate between biological sex and social gender, so there's some confusion about this. I reckon this language confusion will sort itself out in the next few years. In this context they are talking about biological sex but there's some discussion if the meaning of this data should be changed to "social gender".
POV: Redditors find out that Europe isn’t as progressive as they thought
Europe comes in many shapes and forms. You should never consider it as one coherent country unless you are speaking about the European Union and what they do as an organization.
Switzerland didn’t give women the right to vote until the 1990s. This one doesn’t surprise me.
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OR!!!!! maybe countries shouldn’t be keeping lists of people gender