Stumbling Over Gender, and an Apology
My awareness and understanding of gender issues is … well, let’s just say there’s an ongoing and deliberate evolution.
As a kid, I got the basic Kindergarten Cop lesson: Boys have a penis and girls have a vagina.
By the time I got to college, I was starting to recognize more layers. I distinguished between sex (a biological binary) and gender, the ( Read more... )
Because you're talking about humor that exists at the boundary of reality and societal stereotypes. So a group that only contains people who present as male might well contain people who do not have penises, it's fairly likely that the unconscious selection criteria applied to produce a group of people who present as male would also assume that all members of this group have penises.
So... would an appropriate alternate joke be:
"What, do they think people type with their putative penises?" In that it acknowledges that the people on the list may or may not have penises, but that societal stereotypes that filter for people to present as male are likely assume penis possession as well?
(Mind you, the assumption that male presentation is assumed to equal possession of a penis is not absolute, for all that it is distressingly common in current circumstances. And FtM transfolk are generally invisible whereas MtF transfolk are often presented as deceptive and dangerous.)
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