It was your tone, not that the opinion was dissenting, that made it seem aggressive or like an attack. My suggestion was how you could have worded it differently to make your argument so it comes across as reasonable and not just dismissive and rude. (That's just my perception, not trying to litigate that or insist my perspective is the only way to interpret your message, but it is the perspective I'm coming from when reading and responding to you.)
It seems that you prefer for it to be a bias, only for it to be in your favour. Which sounds only natural given we are all humans, but i fail to see how it’ll solve anything. Putting incompetent people in power is just wrong.
The way you articulate the opposing perspective is with strawmen ... I can't tell if you really think we are "pro-bias" and in favor of putting incompetent people in power when expressing concerns with gender inequality, or if you are being intellectually lazy and are in a habit of arguing in bad faith against strawmen so you feel confident in your position and don't have to consider other ideas?
As a conversational partner, it sends signals that you aren't worth engaging or taking seriously - you just might consider that ...
Either way, characterizing advocating for gender equality in the workplace with policies that are not just gender-blind as being equivalent to putting incompetent people in power and institutionalizing bias comes across as either deeply unaware, or overtly sexist ... I will assume it's the prior, that you're just unaware. (See how I do that, I give you the benefit of the doubt, even when you assume the worst about my perspectives? That's because I'm trying to be nice and I want to have a conversation with you, and because I would prefer to have a real discussion here rather than a pointless shouting match. I hope my investment is worthwhile, and not a mistake 😅)
So why do I believe this? Well, when you only focus only on merit and take entirely gender-blind approaches (which I can understand the immediate appeal of - that sounds great, right?), what happens is that you entrench the gender inequalities that already existed ... that's because the inequality does not just happen at that one moment, e.g. when deciding which candidate to hire or who gets the scholarship.
Women are disadvantaged from birth, and the results of those inequalities throughout their lives are compounding - the way teachers, police, doctors, parents, and everyone else in society treats them is different and worse, and this results in worse outcomes. We have study after study showing that minorities (including women) experience more stress and this translates to worse performance (e.g. take this study that found even just the ways that unconscious, unintentional bias impacts women in STEM, here's a PDF link; another study found that even when you control for job satisfaction, work environment, and self-evaluation, the biased ways people treat women were a predictor in those women were a statistically significant predictor of turnover). That is to say, the perceived incompetence and poor outcomes of minorities is due to the ways they are mistreated, and we should probably do something to even those odds. Those interventions are partially what help mitigate gender inequality, and what we're talking about here.
An example to make this more concrete: as a marginalized group, women are victims of sexual and physical violence at much higher rates than men - a young sexual assault victim (whether male of female) is much less likely to succeed (let alone excel) in their studies than someone who hasn't been victimized, and guess what - the differences in who is a victim is gendered.
By eliminating gender as a consideration when creating policies, you eliminate the possibility for increasing the odds of success and recovery for marginalized genders. This isn't just theoretical, it's empirical, and it's not really controversial either.
Here's a helpful source you could dig into if you feel like it:
https://gender.study/issues-of-gender-and-development/gender-blind-approach-inequality-failure/
While ignoring gender sounds good on the surface, I think by ignoring we default to the uncritical and unthinking status quo, which unfortunately is still gendered in nature, i.e. there is something called "implicit bias" where people have internalized biases and preferences that they are not even aware they are thinking or having.
Gender blindness can still be a useful tool, for example, instead of attacking OP for asking how to reduce gender bias, you could have suggested a HR policy that removes any gendered aspects of candidates CVs or applications so that decisions on who gets interviewed can't be subject to those biases.
ha, thanks for your comment - unfortunately, this is a women-only space. Hope you understand 💛
lol, I borderline worry I shouldn't talk to you because I think we have some similar afflictions and perspectives, and usually I steer things right into "yeah, why even be alive" territory ... that's not gone so well with some other folks so I try to be more ethical and aware about that potential now.
so yeaah, didn't expect happy - but I might have been trying to steer myself away from the dark places I typically would have gone, and it seems you got what I meant - the things that keep you alive. 😅
Music can be great, I taught myself the electric bass a couple years ago - that can be fun 😁
hey, thanks for your comment, but this community is intended for women only to comment and post. Hope you understand 💜
I had to look up dysthymia, but it sounds awful, I'm so sorry 🫂
I don't have PDD, but I do have a variety of mental health symptoms that overlap with the symptoms of PDD, and while I'm doing a lot better these days, I have previously suffered decades of depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation that I wouldn't want anyone else to go through. 😅
If not celebration, what are ways that you cope or find joy?
I remember through those times rewarding / tasty food became a bit like a lifeline. I do not know your depression, but my depression was very anhedonic, so as a baseline everything was less enjoyable.
So I had a lot of "craving" behavior, seeking easy and quick rewards because I couldn't motivate myself to do much else and nothing was enjoyable anyway.
Cooking for others became a major coping strategy, as cooking for others triggered my sense of responsibility, which helped with the depressive / motivation issues.
Basically I could leverage stress to animate my unwilling flesh (even though it was, you know, stressful and awful), and getting good enough at cooking then setup a reliable pattern of rewards.
Eventually I noticed if I ate at restaurants too much or outsourced my cooking to something like prepared or frozen meals to save time, I became much more miserable and sank more into my depression - honestly cooking kept me alive in multiple senses.
Anyway, I wonder if you have something like that, not necessarily celebratory - but like a spring bubbling up from the ground that sustains you.
chocolate is very important, lol
in fact, my main account may have been unconsciously named that way
thanks for your supportive comment! Unfortunately this is a women-only community, however. Hope you understand! 💛
yea, admittedly I don't see transfems wanting to hang around mens-only spaces the same way some trans men have trouble moving on from a butch lesbian identity, for example.
The closest I could think of is the way some transfems end up stuck in femboy or sissy cultures and they have trouble moving on from that even when they're dysphoric and suffering for it, but I still think that's a different experience.
That said, I don't know if you've seen Will & Harper (incidentally I hated this film and thought it did a terrible job at both trans representation and modeling cis allyship), but the film is about Harper, a woman who transitioned in her 60s, and she goes on a roadtrip with her friend Will Ferrell.
Part of the film is about Harper attempting to recreate the experiences she had as a man traveling freely through small towns and going to sketchy bars, and that felt a bit like the analogous experience to the trans man who feels connection to women community. Harper longed for a kind of belonging to a particular space that was largely male-coded ... not unlike the way Sylvia Plath, a cis woman, yearned for that nomadic adventurous freedom, "to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night", which was not accessible to her as a woman.
no worries that's very common, and thanks for being so understanding 💕
hi there, thanks for your humorous comment, but this community is for women only. Hope you understand 🧡
thanks for your comment, but this is a womens-only community, hope you understand 💛
thanks for your comment, but only women are permitted to comment or post in this community, hope you understand 💛
thanks for your response, but in this community only women are permitted to comment or post. Hope you understand 🧡
thanks for your contribution, but this community is for women only to comment and post in. Hope you understand 💛
Yes, and being a man is very alienating and lonely ... that aspect of transitioning to be a man can be a bit of a shock I've heard.
I think the rule should allow those people to decide to what extent they belong in a womens-only community, and that gives them the space to make that decision ... there is also the fact that in my mind a big reason for a womens space is to provide a space where people who have been oppressed as women can talk away from the oppressors, and trans men typically have a history of living as a woman and thus having had the experiences of that social oppression (despite being men).
Either way, allowing people to self-identify and choose themselves whether they belong in a women-only community (rather than gatekeeping others identities) seems like the right approach to me.
It should be clarified: this is a womens-only community that allows trans & intersex folks (including non-women and trans men) to decide for themselves whether they feel they belong in a womens-only community. We technically allow cis men to disclose whether they're women or not, too - when we don't know, we just ask! It's not that different for a trans man, we just might have extra language of "you decide whether you feel you belong here".
But that's not why you belong here, you belong because you're a woman, silly 😝
I mean, I don't know - I still debate this with myself tbh, it makes me feel a bit ill to include trans men in womens spaces because it's just so transphobic on the face of it, it reminds me of womens spaces like the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival which famously excluded trans women from attending or performing, but allowed fully transitioned trans men not only to attend but to perform ...
There is some implicit notion that when a woman becomes more masculine it is good, and trans men somehow embody the ultimate apotheosis of a woman (i.e. a woman who achieves manhood), it all just reeks of misogyny and transphobia to me. This thinking seems to hate femininity and it negates the male gender identity of trans men.
But being trans is so difficult even for the trans individual to come to terms with or understand that it's not uncommon for trans folks to have complicated relationships to gender. A lot of us fall are not strictly binary, and we fall somewhere between men or women.
Some of us are binary enough but have been so pressured by society to fit in one box even after we realize we don't fix that box we don't feel we can move to the other box.
So I guess the "even trans men" is a way to just leave wiggle room for people to decide for themselves, and to prioritize self-identity, even though that is admittedly messy. And yes, it is to avoid someone feeling wronged by being excluded from a space where they feel they belong.
Thanks for your comment, but unfortunately this community is for women only. Hope you understand 🧡