Found this at my IT job on a desk.

  • Lumelore (She/her)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    11 days ago

    itspronouncedmetrosexual (aka Sam Killerman) is a cishet white man who’s made a career out of speaking over marginalized voices.

    He did not create the genderbread person but he chose to slap his name on it anyways.

    He also tried to popularize the term trans* despite not being trans himself nor having the approval of actual trans people. (Trans* is a useless term since trans already includes all trans people. Trans* causes people to falsely think that trans is an uninclusive term)

    Here’s a tumblr post for the plagiarism claim You can also find stuff by just searching for “sam killerman controversy” or similar. The other stuff you can find on his own website.

    Edit: It seems like my Lemmy client is confusing Tumblr links for Lemmy instance links so I’ll just post it again below just in case.

    https://whatdoesenbymean.tumblr.com/post/62247473507/itspronouncedmetrosexual-com-plagarised-the

    • Catoblepas@piefed.blahaj.zone
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      11 days ago

      I have no idea who this guy is, but based on my own memories I’m pretty sure trans* did come from within the community. I know trans* as a term dates back at least to the early 00s because I remember seeing it around then, and from what I recall it wasn’t a new term, but one that came from 90s trans user groups (with the * being a programming reference to wildcards, because some things about trans spaces never change). Trans* was used to be inclusive of transgender and transsexual, which were common self identification terms at the time that obviously gave way to transgender.

      But what we lost in the (pardon the pun) transition is that transgender as a term used to include many people who would consider themselves cisgender today. If you look through flyers and media from the time you’ll sometimes see illustrations of the ‘transgender umbrella,’ and it includes butch women, feminine men, drag performers, basically anyone who could conceivably fall into the ‘gender criminal’ category. What trans* did is give people a way to make it clear they were talking about both groups. And I think the inclusion of people we would now consider cis under the transgender umbrella was an important way to help a lot of people who now consider trans rights to not have much to do with them (because they don’t want to transition and identify with their birth sex) that it actually has a ton to do with them, because anyone who diverges from gender norms is a target of the same patriarchal system.

      Again, no clue who this dude is, this is just one of my old trans recites memories at clouds routines. Caveat: I can only speak for my own memories of the time, someone else may be able to speak more accurately than me.

      • Lumelore (She/her)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        11 days ago

        I wasn’t alive in the 90s and I wasn’t aware of trans stuff until I started exploring my gender in 2019 so as a result I am kinda ignorant of the way things were in the 00s and earlier. I really don’t see things like trans* and trans+ being used today, similarly to how you don’t really see people using antiquated terms for transgender either.

        Today what I see instead is trans and GNC (gender nonconforming) which serves the same purpose of being a broad umbrella term but is more accurate.

        As a computer nerd myself, the wildcard aspect makes me feel like trans* includes things like transportation and transghwujdjrudndndjjd which I don’t like.

        Anyways, its not up to cishet person to decide what term should be used to refer to transgender and gnc people. I have a unfinished project, which is a website compiling a bunch of info and resources for trans and gnc people. I came across the genderbread at some point but I decided to research the creator before adding it to the site and that is how I discovered the above info about him.

        • Norah (pup/it/she)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          10 days ago

          I’d strongly suggest looking through places like the Queer Zine Archive Project and the Digital Transgender Archive if you’re working on a project like that. FWIW I don’t think he coined the term Trans* at all, and it’s just fallen out of favour now. When I first figured things out at 12 in the early 2000s, it was a term used online a lot. Especially as Transsexual and Transgender were (genuinely) considered slightly divergent things. These days only Truscum seem to believe that though and Transsexual has definitively fallen out of favour too.

          • Lumelore (She/her)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            10 days ago

            Thanks for the suggestion! I know he didn’t coin the term but he did write an article on his website trying to get people to use it. He definitely did grab it from the past but either didn’t realize or didn’t care that it has fallen out of usage.

    • Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOP
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      10 days ago

      Dang, I guess the counselor who printed this had no idea. I’m no longer at that jobsite, but I’ll let the next person know if I see this again.

  • yyprum@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    11 days ago

    From my very basic cis position and trying to learn as much as possible of the right ways to name each, this graphic is actually quite nice, but it confuses me that things like hobbies, roles, jobs, personality traits are treated as part of gender identity… Is it just me and my autistic ass that considers those as completely independent from the gender identity? My gender identity is really clear to me, but I don’t let that define what hobbies I may have or like what movies I should watch or something like that.

    • SincerityIsCool@lemmy.ca
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      11 days ago

      That’s definitely one of the problems with this graphic. Those are a part of “gender roles”, stereotypical expectations of masculinity/femininity. Your impulse to consider them independent is correct, but you may encounter bigots with old fashioned ideas about what’s appropriate for someone to get up to based on their gender.

    • Catoblepas@piefed.blahaj.zone
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      11 days ago

      If I’m understanding you correctly, I think the key distinction is that gender expression is completely arbitrary and based on the society you’re in, but gender identity is something that is tied to your inner sense of self/brain and seems to develop fairly early in children (3-4).

      For example, wearing a piece of clothing that has a single opening for both legs and stops at the knees would be called a skirt and be considered solely a feminine gender expression in most areas, but a kilt and something considered a masculine gender expression if it has the right pattern and is in Scotland. There’s no functional difference between them, it’s completely social.

      That said, we do live in a society and all that, and people tend to want their gender expression to match (or at least complement) their gender identity. What you wear and do doesn’t change who you are, but who you are likely changes how you feel about what you wear and do.

    • WalrusDragonOnABike [they/them]@reddthat.com
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      11 days ago

      Overall, I agree. That said, because of the socially constructed associations with gender, people sometimes find euphoria from doing those things as a result and experiencing that euphoria (not because you enjoy the thing, but because its a “feminine”/“masculine” thing) could be a sign that perhaps you should consider that maybe your gender isn’t the one assigned at birth.

    • Stovetop@lemmy.world
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      11 days ago

      it confuses me that things like hobbies, roles, jobs, personality traits are treated as part of gender identity

      It depends a lot on social context, but for some professions and hobbies, there are still strong lingering gender associations that are hard for people to shake. Examples below are my own observations of the state of things in the US and other countries I’ve been.

      If I grab someone off the street and ask them to picture a nurse in their mind, 9 times out of 10, that nurse will be a woman. That statistic is reflected in the actual gender representation of nurses where I live. As a society, we consciously acknowledge that nursing is no longer an inherently gendered profession, and yet it is still seen as unusual for men to want to be nurses.

      Similar is true in education. The vast majority of early childhood educators in the US are women because it was long held that women are natural caretakers of young children, while men are often stigmatized or seen as creepy for choosing to work with kids. Meanwhile, you get into higher education and find that a lot of universities are still patriarchal systems because men are scholars. Though when I was in China, there were a lot more early childhood educators who were men than there appear to be in the US, so this is not necessarily a universal standard either.

      It’s normal for men and women alike to enjoy cooking, but for some reason it is still faintly stigmatized for men to like cooking for themselves or women to want to get paid for it. Most professional chefs are still men, while cooking at home is seen as a woman’s work.

      For hobbies, there are a lot of gender overlaps, but depending on the specific hobby, you may still find mostly men or mostly women engaging with it. Video games used to be seen as something only boys cared about, but now I think it’s fairly gender neutral. Yet if you’re interested in book clubs, prepare for it to be mostly women. Or if you like fishing, it’s mostly men, and of course serves as traditional father/son bonding time. I’ve also never met a woman who enjoys playing Warhammer, though I have to imagine they’re out there somewhere.

      These are all things that I believe should not be, but nevertheless are. I have no idea why this continues to be the case today, but I think is slowly but surely self-correcting as more people consider the absurdity of applying gender binaries to activities that are not inherently gendered.