US won't tally LGBT people in '20 Census

All we need's a head count - even the Constitution says so:
"Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States ... according to their respective Numbers ... . The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years."

But no, inexorable government sprawl means America needs more government bureaucrats to tag people with more new and inventive labels so they can compare count of those labels with future counts of labels. How bout those spanish browns? Sounds like a fuckin menu item.
Censuses of fat tall short asshole liberal and conservative labels could all be useful to hire more government bureaucrats to compare old data with data to be collected in future.

The pay allowed for the 1790 "enumerators" was very small, and did not exceed $1 for 50 people properly recorded on the rolls.
The pay allowed for the 2020 "enumerators" will be very very very high, and will cost taxpayers millions and millions for thousands and thousands of government census assholes, um, bureaucrats.

What's amazing is how little value we get for taxpayer dollar these days from the mission creep going on with all those creeps in DC.

Year
Population
Total Cost
Cost per population

1790
3,929,214
$44,377
1.13 cents

and
2010
308,745,538
$13 Billion
$42.11

Honestly I think the whole "gender fluid" stuff comes from not fitting into gender stereotypes. Other than that it just comes off as a "I'm special!"

Ah, but see, if they don't have anything resembling hard data, they won't be able to institutionalize any more "positive" discrimination based on the idea of "representation." Not that a lack of hard data has ever stopped them up until now.

Goddamned furry fuckers ruining shit for everyone.

Now we're in the area of differing terminology. The way I use gender, it contains both gender identity and gender eros. I have always been sure I am male and have had relationships with various genders; I have sometimes been attracted to either gender, sometimes almost exclusively to women. I experience that as fluid -- and like many but apparently not all people in gender studies, I call that fact gender fluidity. However, things go deeper than that: While I have never doubted I am male, my idea of what that in turn means has shifted in various ways over my 38 years, in many ways that are quite removed from eros.

Interesting. I've always interpreted "gender fluid" to mean "I'm sometimes male, sometimes female", which sounds hella confusing. Gender forms the context for, well, nearly everything. Not having a strong tie to either (whether it be the one that matches the body you're born with or not) sounds very stressful.

How are we going to round these people up one day if we don't know who they are?

The 1850 census disagrees with your notion that only head counts matter. Before that census, only basic numerical statistics were requested. I know I joke to people about joining us in the 21st century, but if you could at least manage the 20th century, I'd be impressed.

was this the guy that did that incredibly stupid song "what the fox said?" BTW once when I was bow-hunting right before dark a fox snuck up behind me and made a cartoonish whooping sound, like Nature Boy Rick Flair. At least I think it was a fox the idea of Rick Flair running around in the woods is pretty damn disturbing.

The ironic thing about this to me is that it isn't at all clear what 'I'm male' or 'I'm female' means. I get the impression that you have comparatively few fixed notions about what women or men feel or do, and that makes it easier to hold on to one label. There was a time when a man who desired a man would be considered feminine on that basis alone, for instance. Whereas I'd say that while gender does indeed form a context to almost all social exchanges, that context is not binary at all, and contexts do shift. Which is why having a fixed gender identity or expecting oneself to have one seems much more stressful to me than the opposite.

I've seen Rick Flair three times IRL. Once as a kid, I saw him in the South Park Mall in Charlotte. In High School, my friends and I used to hang out in the Charlotte Douglas airport to people watch. The last time we did it right before I went to college, we saw Rick. The next time I was in Charlotte Douglas, it was 23 years later, and there he was again. :o

"Huge" in absolute terms? Quite a few.

But huge as a percentage of all persons, or even all self-identified trans persons? There's not any evidence i'm aware of to support that.

ALL trans people of any stripe are estimated to be ~1% of the population (at the highest current estimate) and"genderfluid" people seem to be a very small proportion even of that number.

Of course, 1% of Americans works out to around 3.2 million, and if 10% of those are gender fluid that's over 300k which is not nothing or negligible, but I speak of proportions, not absolute numbers.

Also, IIRC, I was speaking to the usage of certain words and in the context that "transsexual" was a more accurate description of trans folks who DID experience a fixed gender identity (opposite to their outward appearance at birth)

And...why do you mention attraction? Attraction has nothing to do with your internal sense of your gender

there's an (originalist) argument for that but it would involve removing many things that are currently part of the census, but the original intent of the constitution here serves as a floor, not a ceiling. You'd have to get to a 4th Amendment question before you found a ceiling.

Besides, if the fuckers you vote for can allow internet providers to sell our history to the highest bidder, they don't have a real leg to stand on when it comes to privacy.

That's cute and all but bet your ass it's not inflation adjusted.

Calculators vary, I've seen a figure this high for 1913->2017, but according to this one

http://www.in2013dollars.com/1790-dollars-in-2017?amount=1

$1 in 1790 is worth $25.79 now, and the overhead involved in counting 4 million people is considerably different than that involved in 310 million. Which, as a highly skilled business man I'm sure you know full well.

I've never heard an American use the term in that sense. Over here "gender fluid" refers exclusively to gender identity, not orientation.

I guess that's true. I never really think of gender in superficial terms. I guess mine just feels so intrinsic (I think that's the word I'm looking for) to me that it's hard to even imagine what it would feel like any other way. In a world where everything's negotiable and uncertain, this is one thing that makes sense internally.

Yeah, that makes zero sense to me.

As always, thanks for the thoughtful reply.

Note that gender theory almost completely originates in the US, so my terminology on this, especially in English, comes exclusively from America. Just goes to show you that none of us should generalise from our individual experiences to other contexts and subcultures, even when we think they're our own.

So iyo, no mission creep?

I have a serious question, I'm not trolling. I respect whatever you want to call yourself. (Global you, not singular)

I have a vagina, what do I call myself based only on that biological fact? Shouldn't there be a term just for having a vagina? Even if it's just a scientific term. I want a nonambiguous term that isn't a lot of words for heterosexual, vagina bearing from birth, huminoid.

Taken as a serious question, isn't "vagina" a sufficient term to describe the vagina? Why do you need to say more about a person who has one than saying just that, namely, they have one?

I used to be a person who has an appendix, and for more than three decades now, I'm not. I wouldn't say 'I was an ...x..., but now I'm not." in order to describe the fact of my appendectomy, except of course for x='person with an appendix', which is an awkward but ultimately accurate way of saying that. But 'I had an appendix' is much less awkward than 'I was a person who has an appendix'.

By comparison, I always had and still have a penis, and I consider myself male, but if by some unfortunate accident I should lose my penis, I won't stop considering myself male. If, heavens forbid, something would damage your vagina, I don't think it would fundamentally change some category of person that you are or are not. For instance, I wouldn't say you're no longer a woman if that should happen.

Also, blacks, though property, were counted as 3/5 of one person. This was to tally up who was eligible for statehood. Later, it would make it difficult to continue, in the status of "things" if you already acknowledge they have something called personhood, though limited. The slave territories pushed this because, their slave population often outnumbered the free and they wanted statehood to push their agenda. Actually, slavehood, in the border states was evolving into serfdom. The plantations wanting to become war lords. They didn't want workers as much as the wanted muscle. That's when the North began passing laws forbidding black to bear arms and literacy. it made no sense to own people for work. It cost 50 dollars per anum to maintain each slave. But, each slave cost about 800 dollars. You could get 160 acres for 200 dollars. You could buy a plantation for the cost of one slave. they had a different agenda. What are slaves? Property-munitions. Worst case? sex toys. It was never about working the farm.

Gender and sex are not the same thing.

Female.

Okay, this is so hard to get out right. If I go to a Biology book it says a woman/female has XX chromosomes, and at birth had a uterus, vagina and so forth.

Today's society says a woman/female is whoever identifies as one. From the scientific view point what can we call the XX vagina human so that it isn't confused with those who identify.

From an unbiased scientific view point I think we need to be able to say this is such and such.

I don't care what you identify as. Transition to whatever you want.

But what scientific term should we be using? What should be in MD books? And no, I know the binary isn't a hard fast rule there are exceptions hermaphridite and so on but the vast majority come out XX with vagina and so on.

Because as it stands female/woman can be chromosomal or it can be a choice.

And I don't know maybe only woman has different ways of getting there either birth or transition and female IS the scientific term that only has one way of happening, by birth.

And the only reason I'm tagging you is you generally think things through and try to see what is being said, not a knee jerk reaction.

From a societable stand point I don't think it matters. People need to be who they are most comfortable as.

But what term goes in the Biology books, because more and more I'm seeing both woman and female being used to identify as.

I think biological terms should be as factual and precise as possible. As you have already pointed out, having XX chromosomes and having a vagina are two different states that do occur independently from one another, and the XX/XY binary doesn't hold for everyone. So the idea that we have a simple term to identify one whole human being with reference to their chromosomes and at the same time their genitalia and at the same time their hormonal state and so on is not biologically accurate in the first place. Thinking it was so was a mere artefact of a cultural bias.

It took disturbing that cultural bias with different cultural schemata to remind ourselves of that conceptual provenance, and now that that has happened, biology and medicine are less confusing than they were before. Let's not make them more confusing again by insisting that there should be a biological term for a concept that doesn't have a factual biological basis and was instead a result not only of a cultural prejudice, but a cultural prejudice we no longer share.

On that, I must agree. Whatever your orientation, you get one count per heart. If they are trying to figure out demographics in order gerrymander more effectively, then they shouldn't allowed to know much about anyone. Last I checked, no one gets PAID to belong to this group or that, so advertising brings little or no advantage.

How many people are born XY with a vagina? (And so on)

I'm asking as I'm wondering if it's a big enough population to be more than a side note in a biology book about the abnormalities of the genetic condition agreeing with the end product i.e. Born female with XY chromosomes.

Iirc, 46xy with functional female genitalia is pretty rare. I think there is one condition where they have a vagina but no ovaries and are infertile. Pretty sure Turner syndrome (45x/45xo) is more common, but I could be wrong. It's been a while since I took genetics.

About 1 promille of humans are born with no clear binary phenotypical sex. Chromosomal deviance is higher than that, but I forget how high. I'm curious at what number you'd draw the line. But it's just curiosity; it doesn't alter the point. 1 case of a being different from b suffices to point out the scientific fact that a!=b. "It's very rare" might be a good or bad reason for dismissing some cases from some cultural arguments, but it's never a reason to dismiss them from a scientific enquiry. We know that planets can support life because 1 planet does. We know that life can support written language because 1 species does. So as long as it's biology we're discussing, facts just are facts. They neither favour your nor my cultural biases, and that's fine.

So that's my answer to your question what you should call yourself from a biological point of view on the basis of having a vagina: A person with a vagina and nothing beyond that, because biology allows no more than that. With the same seriousness: Why would you intend to gain some farther reaching label for yourself on the basis of biology? What purpose would it serve if it were possible?