I'd like to talk to some LGBT LWers.

Solvent

When _ozymandias posted zir introduction post a few days ago, I went off and binged on blogs from the trans/men's rights/feminist spectrum. I found them absolutely fascinating. I've always had lots of sympathy for transgendered people in particular, and care a lot about all those issues. I don't know what I think of making up new pronouns, and I get a bit offput by trying to remember the non-offensive terms for everything. For example, I'm sure that LGBT as a term offends people, and I agree that lumping the T with the LGB is a bit dubious, but I don't know any other equivalent term that everyone will understand. I'm going to keep using it.

However, I don't currently know any LGBT people who I can talk to about these things. In particular, the whole LGBT and feminist and so on community seems to be prone to taking unnecessary offense, and believing in subjectivism and silly things like that.

So I'd really like to talk with some LWers who have experience with these things. I've got questions that I think would be better answered by an IM conversation than by just reading blogs.

If anyone wants to have an IM conversation about this, please message me. I'd be very grateful.

EDIT: Wow, that's an amazing response. Thank you all for your kind offers. I'll talk to as many of you as I can get around to.

So I'd really like to talk with some LWers who have experience with these things. I've got questions that I think would be better answered by an IM conversation than by just reading blogs.

If anyone wants to have an IM conversation about this, please message me. I'd be very grateful.

EDIT: Wow, that's an amazing response. Thank you all for your kind offers. I'll talk to as many of you as I can get around to.

There is significant tension between the 'anti-sexist' view and the 'sex-blind' view, and I prefer the latter.

Is the "anti-sexist' view something along the lines of "You should be more sexist in favour of females (so long as they are behaving like good feminists)"? If not, what is the difference between anti-sexist and sex blind?

It is along those lines (the 'good feminists' part is becoming less and less meaningful as time progresses).* Unnamed is right to point out the prominence of bias in anti-sexist thinking: 'fight fire with fire' comes to mind, though I'm not sure I've ever seen an anti-sexist put it that way.

Anti-sexists are sometimes prone to thinking sexism cannot negatively affect men, but thankfully that's less and less common these days. (It helps that men who are being discriminated against on sexist grounds generally tend to want to be feminine, which is not very thr... (read more)

11Unnamed15y

I'd characterize the anti-sexist view as: "There are many ways in which people and society are sexist against females, often without realizing it, so in order to be non-sexist you have to work to identify those biases and counteract them."