I.......I wonder why in the world I read all eight pages of this thread. I must be some kind of masochistic fucker.
Well, I'm going to throw my opinion out there, and that is all it is, my opinion. It is idealistic and quite possibly naive, but I like it.
Slamlander, perpetuating a shitty situation does nothing to help correct it. Yes, perhaps debate is won by whoever presents the illusion of victory, but as soon as you allow that to be enough for yourself you become part of a much wider problem. Realize that it means victory to the common man, but please have enough respect for yourself to call bullshit on a fallacious argument when you see it. If you permit the person who submitted such an argument into a discussion to convince you that they have won I do not believe that you honestly have to right to believe that any of your subsequent opinions on a topic bear any relevance whatsoever. We're nothing more than savages if our response to conflict is to bash someone in the face until they shut the hell up, and verbal conflicts must be handled is the same manner to uphold any pretext of civility. Yes, the world may be fucked up and uncivil, but accepting that fact really isn't going to help anyone, and we've seen the world change because of just one person, or a handful or people, in our lifetime. Things aren't always as they appear.
Onion, what the fuck? I mean, I honestly just don't get you. Which, I suppose, is more than fine in my book. being an asshole, I get, because I can be a completely fucker. I am 19, and I work in foodservice. people piss me off each and every day that I go into work, and I fuck with their heads all the damn time. But it is something I only do to people who are asshats to me. I mean, I've never honestly gotten the "being a jerk just to be a jerk" attitude. Makes me think kind of the same thing that I said to Slamlander, you're just helping the problem. I mean, of course you feel alienated from society, you aren't doing much to be a part of it. And before anyone spouts some bullshit about not being a sheep, societies are full of great people, but we all start out not giving a fuck about each other. I mean, say fuck you to the ones who don;t matter, and chill with the people who are great. It is a simple concept, but it doesn;t really help if you tell everyone to fuck off from the start. And before anyone jumps in asking whether or not I'm hypocritical for being a dick to people then saying I don;t get why you are, there is a difference in being a dick to someone as a commentary on their actions and being a dick based on the arbitrary desire to just be a dick. It also helps if you are willing to stop being a dick when someone shows you that they are not who you thought they were.
And forrest, I don't really think you were in the wrong for most, if any, of this conversation. I am not going to say something stupid like "just ignore her" because 1) you are not a child, and 2) that is a fucking annoying thing to be told. Arguments, especially arguments started by random dickery, are just very easy to be drawn into. But please, next time take it to PM's. The only reason I'm not placing all of this into 3 different PM's is because I want the three of you to know that I'm not just taking offense to your individual comments, but to this discussion as a whole.
And yes, to everyone reading this post, I could have just skipped over all the arguments, and read about the dickgirls that everyone else seems to love. I chose not to because I feel that such matters do need to be resolved. If flames and arguments are not solved, then a forum falls all to shit. Members leave, meaningful discussion ceases, and the moderators find themselves without decent human beings to moderate. I've seen meaningful posts from all three of the people I took offense to in this thread, and it would be a shame to see even one of them leave these forums because of a stupid argument, so I felt that something should be said.
Ok, now that that is out of the way, about the intersexed discussion. There are a lot of different ways that someone can be intersexed, and, as a lot of people have already said, it depends on the person and exactly what they have. The biggest issue I have is how doctors handle it. Nine times out of ten, it is easier for the doctor to make the person a girl, which is pretty much what they do. Sometimes they don;t tell the child, and sometimes they don't tell the parents. I remember watching a documentary in which an intersexed child who was being raised as a boy was essentially castrated(they removed his one testicle, telling his parents that it was possibly cancerous. The parents sued for the right to see the log of the procedures and the first line in it described it as a "healthy Testicle"-quotation here is inexact) without his parents consent, after they had been raising him as a boy for nearly 6 years. They effectively made him a eunuch. Now, that kind of shit isn't right, but it happens all the time. Doctors make that decision for the child, and sometimes for the parents, just because it is easier.
While it may be easier to assign someone the female gender if their genitals are in a certain state, a lot of times that can fuck up their life, depending on the amount of hormones they recieve. Intersexed individuals sometimes, though not always, feel confusion as to why their genitals look different from those of "normal" people of their sex, or feel that they would be better off as a boy or girl depedning on what hormones they are recieving.
Although, in truth, a lot of the blame for this falls on society. People generally aren;t very accepting of other people's "deformities", and oftentimes it seems best to assign some role to a child so that other children do not make life difficult for them. But in doing so we're actually harming both the development of the intersexed child and the children that we are hiding the truth from. We're making sure that other children see this sort of thing as "weird", and that the child in questions feels abnormal. We're setting our society up for failure from day one by not addressing this issues and attempting to promote tolerance. If you think that it would not work to introduce children to this sort of thing, consider what happened when we started allowing homosexual couples to adopt children. Many people were afraid that the children adopted by such couples would lead a less happy childhood, that they would consider their parents different, and that it would alienate them, but recent studies have shown that children adopted by such couples grow up to be just as happy as children raising by traditional couples.
We need to have more respect for the capacity for tolerance and understanding that can be found among our fellow human beings, because it is often surprising just what they'll show us.
And......um, when I started this post I wanted to somehow metaphorically tie in my comments about Onion, Forrest, and Slamlander into the actions of either Riley or the bar patrons in the strip.....but fuck all this was a lot to write, and they are gone. Vanished.
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Labrat wrote: You are lucky I'm not trying to type with my genitals. Yet.
onion wrote: Yup, round here we call this 'fishing for whores'...
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