Zero Punctuation: Papers, Please and Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons

Dangit2019

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Turbo_ski said:
Jokes against transsexuals were completely unnecessary and completely offensive.
thaluikhain said:
Got a laugh out of "Ironically", but then that was followed up almost immediately by a bad transgender joke.

Transgenders don't get fucking shielded from jokes any more than Call of Duty fans. Suck it the fuck up.
 

Lonewolfm16

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snowfi6916 said:
Lonewolfm16 said:
snowfi6916 said:
I usually enjoy Yahtzee's videos, but his joke about transgender people really fucking bothered me.

Why? Because my girlfriend is trans.

I've told her how much I love her on many occasions. I had to have an honest heart-to-heart with myself, because I want to have sex with her and make her happy, but it will be a while before she can have her surgery (she wants everything, the HRT therapy and the SRS surgery).

So yeah, I decided that right now, her penis is part of who she is, and I want to make her happy. So yes, I would be willing to do that for her.

Obviously, I would prefer vaginal sex (I mean hell, she told me she not only wants a vagina for herself, but because she wants to "ride me so fucking badly", which made me blush). But it's funny... I don't like dudes. I like women. And even though my girlfriend wasn't born one, I see her as one, because she acts like one and sees herself as one.

So, I look at it like I'm sucking my girlfriend's penis. =)

Now, none of this has happened yet, because we are also long distance, so we have only talked over the Internet. But holy hell, every time I talk to her I get that warm tingly love feeling. Not just sexually aroused... it's more than that.

So yeah, I know this is the Escapist, and I know people will come out and call me gay for wanting to make my girlfriend happy because I love her. Don't care. I just wanted to say why Yahtzee's joke upset me.
Its not really a insult. More a observation. Sexual orientation is determined by attraction to certain genders. Heterosexual/straight=attraction to the opposite gender, homosexual/gay=attraction to the same gender, bisexual=attracted to both genders, pansexual means pretty much the same thing, but is more inclusive. If you are sexually attracted to a penis and male then you are gay/bi. Not a insult, not a judgement, simply how it is. I do question something though, would you be willing to date someone physically male, who also identified as male? If not, do you consider gender to be something more than physical, and are only attracted to people with a "female" personality or mannerism? Isn't that a little arbitrary?
Gender isn't physical. Sex is. When you refer to someones sex, you are referring to their physical parts. When you are referring to gender, you are referring to the non-physical.

Cisgendered means you see yourself as the gender you were born as. Transgender means you see yourself as the opposite gender.

Like I said, I'm not attracted to cis-males. I know this because one of my friends who I met at Bronycon is really handsome, but I wasn't attracted to him because he is strongly cis. And no, I don't think it's arbitrary.

Let me ask you, once my girlfriend gets her vagina, would that make me less gay in your eyes?

Who you are attracted to is based on gender, not sex. Therefore, I am attracted to the female gender, regardless of what physical parts they have. It's just that most of the time the person's gender matches their sex. In my case it doesn't.

Look, I honestly love her more than anything in the world. I know that she will never be able to have a uterus or ovaries even after her surgery, and we won't be able to have children together unless we adopt. But that's okay. As long as I'm with her.

Like I said, think what you want. =)
So, are you not attracted to people until you hear what they identify as? If you see someone naked, you have so sexual stimulation until you have heard whether the person likes being called he or she? If I was to show you a picture of a naked woman (or someone physically female, to be clear) and then asked you if you found the picture sexually arousing, then revealed that the person in the picture actually considered themselves male, would you stop being attractive? If it was later revealed that I lied about that, and she was actually cis, would you start finding her attractive again? What if someone identified as female, despite being physically male, and then later decided they were actually wrong about it and were actually male? It has happened before. If your girlfriend announced tomorrow that she was wrong about her gender, and was actually male, would you stop being attracted to her? This all seems really really arbitrary to me. If someone asks you if you are interested in sex with them, and your answer is "that depends, do you think of yourself as being male or female?" then your sexuality is really really bizarre to me. This is why I think orientation should be determined by biological sex, not gender. Gender is intangible, sex is very real and determinable, and I think this fits better with how sexuality works. Sexual arousal is largely physical, more concerned with certain signs of attractiveness that trigger arousal.

As to your question, yes, that would make you less gay in my eyes (though it seems to me that your sexuality is best described as pansexual, gay would be exclusively attracted to the same gender). I believe I have fairly solid logic behind that. Plenty of people are able to be aroused by paintings of attractive, naked women. And hentai/draw porn exists, and is fairly popular. Why is that? Doesn't our ability to be aroused by inanimate things disprove gender being a part of sexual attraction? No, of course not. If I look at a drawing of a attractive woman, and am aroused, its because I am straight. I see something that looks like a attractive woman and the parts of my brain responsible for arousal respond. I am not aroused by porn on a computer because I am attracted to pixels. As such, if you find someone attractive when they look just like a woman (cis woman that is) that is because you are straight. Or bi/pansexual.

Finally, I would like to make a point about gender. I understand that gender dysphoria is a very real mental disorder. There is some research to suggest those who have it possess brains more like the gender they identify as than the gender they physically are. But I find the idea of gender being separate from sex as odd. Sex is physical, determined by chromosomes and expressed as actual physical differences between the respective sex. But what is gender? Seems to me to be entirely a social construct, more useful for determining things like what pronoun is used, or how one is expected to dress than a unbiased observation of physical reality. I am genuinely curious, what is gender, if it is unrelated to physical sex?

Finally, I would like to apologize if I have offended you, as it was never my intention. I wish you, and your girlfriend, the best.
 

Lonewolfm16

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Zombie Badger said:
Lonewolfm16 said:
[Sexual attraction is a matter of physical reality, not gender identity. If I asked a lesbian to have sex with me, and she declined because she was not attracted to men, and I responded that I identified as a woman, what difference would it make? My physical characteristics (which are male) are what she is not attracted to, which pronoun I use or how I dress, is irrelevant. As such, it would be logical to judge sexual orientation on physical sex, not gender (though I somewhat dislike that these are no longer synonyms for the purpose of these discussions, but oh well, doesn't harm me in any way). If you find male characteristics attractive (the penis is included, and a major part of this) then you are gay or bisexual. If you are willing to date people who are physically male, but identify as female, and females who identify as female, but not males who identify as men, then it would logically follow that you are bi/pansexual and just oddly discriminatory.
The thing with classifying gay and straight attraction based on physical characteristics is that things get interesting when you involve pre or non-op transgender people in that they possess characteristics of both genders. And yet men who are interested in MtF transgender people identify as straight and would never find themselves attracted to men. Even if you just judge by physical characteristics, pre/non-op transgender people have more physical characteristics of the gender they are transitioning to. Due to this, I (as a gay man), would not consider having sex with a woman (regardless of her genitals) but would consider sleeping with a man (regardless of his).
I point you to my below post (below yours, above this one) that I wrote before reading this, as I think it covers what my thoughts on the matter are fairly clearly. And I am somewhat interested to see how you respond to some of the questions I asked. Switched to compensate for the fact that the person I was talking to was straight and you are gay.
 

sir neillios

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canadamus_prime said:
No you must be thinking of someone else because while it's true I've commented a few times about the prevalence of "generic 'medal of call of duty' shooters," I don't write off any new indie IP as boring because it's not based around war, or shooting, or fighting. I don't even like war games. I'm writing off Papers Please because it sounds boring PERIOD. However I am open to the possibility that it isn't boring.
Well I can only recommend that you download the free demo, not sure if it's on steam, but you can get it from his website. Quite a small file, shouldn't take you more than forty minutes to complete, would be enough to figure out if you like it or not.

And oh good gracious a zero punctuation video has gone to a gender thread, there is no getting away from these things.
 

Reeve

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A pre-op transexual: In other words someone who hasn't had a sex change.

Are people really saying in this thread that it wouldn't be homosexual behaviour for a guy to suck off another guy - just because he's going to have a sex change at some point in the future?
 

Zombie Badger

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MeisterKleister said:
I think you are making too many assumptions here. The only things said in the video are:
-A politician claims he is not gay.
-He fellates a "pre-op transsexual".
The implication being that he is attracted to this and gay, at least to some degree.
I also think you might be committing a fallacy here by trying to categorize people as simply as either "gay" or "straight" and "male" or "female", when the lines aren't that clear and can also vary according to definitions.

Anyway, I think the video does not provide sufficient information to determine that the politician is definitely not gay. Or not "gay" according to Yahtzee's definition.
I admit that the boundries between gay and straight are often vague in the real world, but not within the confines of this joke. The joke treats the politician as unambiguously gay for sleeping with a pre-op transwoman, who to get this conclusion has to be considered unambiguously male. Personally, if someone is transgender, I consider them to be automatically a member of the sex they desire to be, as that's what they are mentally anyway. As to people who consider themselves to be permanently between genders, I really don't know anything about that.
I personally hate having gay and straight as absolutes, both because I know there is a lot of middle-ground and because people desperately try to force their lives to conform to an absolute that doesn't really exist, but when discussing material that treats them as absolutes any implication of it will also treat them as absolutes so I get stuck discussing absolutes when I really should try to discuss the vagueness of the reality. Thank you for reminding me of that.
As for the information provided by the video, I don't see enough to say that the politician is gay. If he were he would likely be sleeping with men, and even if you were to consider it experimentation on his part it's vague at best. But the joke doesn't count vagueness.
 

snowfi6916

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Lonewolfm16 said:
snowfi6916 said:
Lonewolfm16 said:
snowfi6916 said:
I usually enjoy Yahtzee's videos, but his joke about transgender people really fucking bothered me.

Why? Because my girlfriend is trans.

I've told her how much I love her on many occasions. I had to have an honest heart-to-heart with myself, because I want to have sex with her and make her happy, but it will be a while before she can have her surgery (she wants everything, the HRT therapy and the SRS surgery).

So yeah, I decided that right now, her penis is part of who she is, and I want to make her happy. So yes, I would be willing to do that for her.

Obviously, I would prefer vaginal sex (I mean hell, she told me she not only wants a vagina for herself, but because she wants to "ride me so fucking badly", which made me blush). But it's funny... I don't like dudes. I like women. And even though my girlfriend wasn't born one, I see her as one, because she acts like one and sees herself as one.

So, I look at it like I'm sucking my girlfriend's penis. =)

Now, none of this has happened yet, because we are also long distance, so we have only talked over the Internet. But holy hell, every time I talk to her I get that warm tingly love feeling. Not just sexually aroused... it's more than that.

So yeah, I know this is the Escapist, and I know people will come out and call me gay for wanting to make my girlfriend happy because I love her. Don't care. I just wanted to say why Yahtzee's joke upset me.
Its not really a insult. More a observation. Sexual orientation is determined by attraction to certain genders. Heterosexual/straight=attraction to the opposite gender, homosexual/gay=attraction to the same gender, bisexual=attracted to both genders, pansexual means pretty much the same thing, but is more inclusive. If you are sexually attracted to a penis and male then you are gay/bi. Not a insult, not a judgement, simply how it is. I do question something though, would you be willing to date someone physically male, who also identified as male? If not, do you consider gender to be something more than physical, and are only attracted to people with a "female" personality or mannerism? Isn't that a little arbitrary?
Gender isn't physical. Sex is. When you refer to someones sex, you are referring to their physical parts. When you are referring to gender, you are referring to the non-physical.

Cisgendered means you see yourself as the gender you were born as. Transgender means you see yourself as the opposite gender.

Like I said, I'm not attracted to cis-males. I know this because one of my friends who I met at Bronycon is really handsome, but I wasn't attracted to him because he is strongly cis. And no, I don't think it's arbitrary.

Let me ask you, once my girlfriend gets her vagina, would that make me less gay in your eyes?

Who you are attracted to is based on gender, not sex. Therefore, I am attracted to the female gender, regardless of what physical parts they have. It's just that most of the time the person's gender matches their sex. In my case it doesn't.

Look, I honestly love her more than anything in the world. I know that she will never be able to have a uterus or ovaries even after her surgery, and we won't be able to have children together unless we adopt. But that's okay. As long as I'm with her.

Like I said, think what you want. =)
So, are you not attracted to people until you hear what they identify as? If you see someone naked, you have so sexual stimulation until you have heard whether the person likes being called he or she? If I was to show you a picture of a naked woman (or someone physically female, to be clear) and then asked you if you found the picture sexually arousing, then revealed that the person in the picture actually considered themselves male, would you stop being attractive? If it was later revealed that I lied about that, and she was actually cis, would you start finding her attractive again? What if someone identified as female, despite being physically male, and then later decided they were actually wrong about it and were actually male? It has happened before. If your girlfriend announced tomorrow that she was wrong about her gender, and was actually male, would you stop being attracted to her? This all seems really really arbitrary to me. If someone asks you if you are interested in sex with them, and your answer is "that depends, do you think of yourself as being male or female?" then your sexuality is really really bizarre to me. This is why I think orientation should be determined by biological sex, not gender. Gender is intangible, sex is very real and determinable, and I think this fits better with how sexuality works. Sexual arousal is largely physical, more concerned with certain signs of attractiveness that trigger arousal.

As to your question, yes, that would make you less gay in my eyes (though it seems to me that your sexuality is best described as pansexual, gay would be exclusively attracted to the same gender). I believe I have fairly solid logic behind that. Plenty of people are able to be aroused by paintings of attractive, naked women. And hentai/draw porn exists, and is fairly popular. Why is that? Doesn't our ability to be aroused by inanimate things disprove gender being a part of sexual attraction? No, of course not. If I look at a drawing of a attractive woman, and am aroused, its because I am straight. I see something that looks like a attractive woman and the parts of my brain responsible for arousal respond. I am not aroused by porn on a computer because I am attracted to pixels. As such, if you find someone attractive when they look just like a woman (cis woman that is) that is because you are straight. Or bi/pansexual.

Finally, I would like to make a point about gender. I understand that gender dysphoria is a very real mental disorder. There is some research to suggest those who have it possess brains more like the gender they identify as than the gender they physically are. But I find the idea of gender being separate from sex as odd. Sex is physical, determined by chromosomes and expressed as actual physical differences between the respective sex. But what is gender? Seems to me to be entirely a social construct, more useful for determining things like what pronoun is used, or how one is expected to dress than a unbiased observation of physical reality. I am genuinely curious, what is gender, if it is unrelated to physical sex?

Finally, I would like to apologize if I have offended you, as it was never my intention. I wish you, and your girlfriend, the best.
I guess I should give you a little history. When I first met my girlfriend, she wasn't trans. But she was really conflicted by feelings she's had since she was 10 years old. But she was afraid of what that meant, so she tried to convince herself she was cis.

We met each other on one of the FiM forums, and on those forums we have a LGBT thread, which she started reading. She saw that I was helping other people in the thread along with either coming to terms with who they are, or better understanding LGBT people.

She sent me a few PMs, asking about how religion views trans people, how she was Baptist and knew her church wouldn't like it. I told her I was Catholic so I understood, and told her my personal view on it. She sent me a PM confessing that she thought she was transphobic (which in retrospect was a result of her being afraid of who she was). I told her you can't force yourself to be attracted to people you're not attracted to.

What clinched it though was another trans girl on the forums who was posting pictures of herself going through HRT. She looked amazing, and I told her so. I also said that if she lived closer to me, I'd ask her out. So this was based on physical appearance mostly.

This got my girlfriend thinking. What she was afraid of was not finding someone who could love her even when she's trans. But I just proved that a cis guy could love a transwoman.

She told me in a PM how much I meant to her, and that she considered me her best friend. I told her she was my best friend too. I really meant that. Our chats felt like we knew each other for years, even though it was only a month.

She then posted in the LGBT thread about fantasizing about giving her friend oral sex. And how she never saw them face to face. Yeah, I was able to put two and two together. Her fantasy about me made her realize she was trans, and she came out after that. She confessed her love for me, and I told her how it felt to have her fantasize about me.

One thing that made me fall in love with her so much was because I have Crohn's, and I didn't think another woman could love me with that going on. But here was a girl doing just that. So I told her I loved her too. =)

So yeah, that's how it happened. She's a lot happier now, and not depressed as much (except when she's feeling dysphoric).

And no, you didn't offend me. But please understand, gender and physical sex are two different things. Basically, anything that is considered female but is not a vagina, breasts, etc. is part of the female gender. Same with being male.

If you got testicular cancer, or you lost your penis in an accident, and no longer had it... would you consider yourself any less of a guy because of that?

One of my female friends (not my girlfriend) is 21 and wants to have her tubes tied, because the thought of pregnancy scares her to death. Is she any less of a woman because she wants to be infertile and not reproduce?

It's the same thing here. My girlfriend views herself as female. I view her as female. So no matter what she has or doesn't have between her legs, that means she is female. I know it's weird to describe, but I can't think of sucking anyone else's dick but hers. Because it is still a part of her, and I love HER, not just her physical parts. I will enjoy sex with her more once she has her vagina like I said, but more than anything, I want to pleasure her and see her happy with me. So, if I have to swallow some of my masculinity, I will gladly do that for her.

So yeah, that's pretty much it. I probably didn't make it any clearer, but I tried. =)
 

JimB

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Reeve said:
Are people really saying in this thread that it wouldn't be homosexual behavior for a guy to suck off another guy just because he's going to have a sex change at some point in the future?
No, people are saying Mr. Croshaw, and you, and any outside observer, don't get to say someone who identifies as female is male. Gender dysphoria is a real thing, and being born with the wrong kind of crotch does happen. I don't think it's what Mr. Croshaw is describing in his joke, but as far as the whole "If she says she's a woman, then she's a woman" statement goes, I support it.
 

Zombie Badger

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Lonewolfm16 said:
I point you to my below post (below yours, above this one) that I wrote before reading this, as I think it covers what my thoughts on the matter are fairly clearly. And I am somewhat interested to see how you respond to some of the questions I asked. Switched to compensate for the fact that the person I was talking to was straight and you are gay.
As far as identifying myself I would describe myself as gay in that I am attracted to both physical sex and gender. If I were to see an attractive man who identified as a woman I would be able to appreciate her physically but I would not date or sleep with her because there the fact that from behind that there is a girl behind that boyish exterior would turn me off. I also would be unlikely to do either with someone physically female who identified as male, at least before they had taken steps on transitioning to the opposite sex, but it would not be impossible.

The problem with discussing sexuality is that it is a clusterfuck at the best of times. Labels like 'gay' and 'straight' are invented by cultures in an attempt to catagorise something that is insanely hard to catagorise. However they have become ingrained in society to the extent at which they shape many people's views and actions and due to this have ingrained themselves in the modern psyche to the point that they have become self-fulfilling prophecies (looking at various civilisations throughout the ages shows insanely wide varieties of attempts to create structures based on sexuality) and end up being considered by people to be universal constants.

As far as gender being a social construct goes, if my memory serves there was an experiment in the 70's which attempted to examine this, trying to raise children as the opposite gender to their physical sex. The result was that the intended gender's didn't take, and that gender is at least somewhat biological.
 

Canadamus Prime

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sir neillios said:
canadamus_prime said:
No you must be thinking of someone else because while it's true I've commented a few times about the prevalence of "generic 'medal of call of duty' shooters," I don't write off any new indie IP as boring because it's not based around war, or shooting, or fighting. I don't even like war games. I'm writing off Papers Please because it sounds boring PERIOD. However I am open to the possibility that it isn't boring.
Well I can only recommend that you download the free demo, not sure if it's on steam, but you can get it from his website. Quite a small file, shouldn't take you more than forty minutes to complete, would be enough to figure out if you like it or not.
I'll have to check that out then.
sir neillios said:
And oh good gracious a zero punctuation video has gone to a gender thread, there is no getting away from these things.
Yeah how the hell did that happen?
 

Grach

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I love how a absolutely throwaway joke made this thread burst into flames like powdered plutonium.

I played a bit of Papers, please and did find it very strangely attractive, like when you're attracted to someone you find ugly without even knowing them.
I did experience some of the transphobia of the game's government. I encountered a woman whose passport stated that she was a male. I asked her about it and said that the passport was correct. I thought about it for a while, eventually letting her into the country. I was kind of pissed when I got a warning saying that the sex in the passport must coincide with the sex I saw (I didn't had access to the X-Rays, so I couldn't check). It could go many ways though, it could've been easely a cis woman who noticed the discrepancy in her passport and simply wanted to pass as a trans man, hoping that it worked. It did with me, anyways.
 

Shamanic Rhythm

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Zombie Badger said:
MeisterKleister said:
I think you are making too many assumptions here. The only things said in the video are:
-A politician claims he is not gay.
-He fellates a "pre-op transsexual".
The implication being that he is attracted to this and gay, at least to some degree.
I also think you might be committing a fallacy here by trying to categorize people as simply as either "gay" or "straight" and "male" or "female", when the lines aren't that clear and can also vary according to definitions.

Anyway, I think the video does not provide sufficient information to determine that the politician is definitely not gay. Or not "gay" according to Yahtzee's definition.
I admit that the boundries between gay and straight are often vague in the real world, but not within the confines of this joke. The joke treats the politician as unambiguously gay for sleeping with a pre-op transwoman, who to get this conclusion has to be considered unambiguously male. Personally, if someone is transgender, I consider them to be automatically a member of the sex they desire to be, as that's what they are mentally anyway. As to people who consider themselves to be permanently between genders, I really don't know anything about that.
I personally hate having gay and straight as absolutes, both because I know there is a lot of middle-ground and because people desperately try to force their lives to conform to an absolute that doesn't really exist, but when discussing material that treats them as absolutes any implication of it will also treat them as absolutes so I get stuck discussing absolutes when I really should try to discuss the vagueness of the reality. Thank you for reminding me of that.
As for the information provided by the video, I don't see enough to say that the politician is gay. If he were he would likely be sleeping with men, and even if you were to consider it experimentation on his part it's vague at best. But the joke doesn't count vagueness.
I think the gist of the joke is more that it's making fun of the kind of conservative politicians or statesmen who constantly beat up on gay or transgender people to win support, but are shagging men in private. People like J. Edgar Hoover, for instance. That's why he said 'politician' and not just 'bloke'.
 

Zombie Badger

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Shamanic Rhythm said:
I think the gist of the joke is more that it's making fun of the kind of conservative politicians or statesmen who constantly beat up on gay or transgender people to win support, but are shagging men in private. People like J. Edgar Hoover, for instance. That's why he said 'politician' and not just 'bloke'.
Well,

Zombie Badger said:
The problem is not the politician. The problem is that it treats pre-op MtF transgender people as unambiguously male, implying that the only thing that defines that person's gender identity is their genitalia, which then implies that the person's feelings towards themself does not matter, which taken to its logical conclusion says that transgender people are not actually transgender as their personal image means nothing (whereas in reality the 'man trapped in a woman's body' thing is literal).
Essentially this is saying that it is impossible for a transgender person's gender to be anything other than the physical sex of the body they are born with before surgery, so it is perpetuating the worldview that pre-op or non-op transgender people should not be treated as their desired sex. Views like this play a significant part in the staggeringly high suicide rate for transgender people (31% in the UK)
The other problem with this joke is that it only works if you subscribe to this view. In reality the genitalia of the person you are having sex with do not make the encounter gay or straight, it is the gender of the person you are sleeping with that does this (All MtF transsexual porn is consumed by straight men, gay men (like myself) having no interest in it because it involves women). So the politician in the joke is not a hypocrite because he is exclusively having sex with women.
 

porous_shield

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Grach said:
I did experience some of the transphobia of the game's government. I encountered a woman whose passport stated that she was a male. I asked her about it and said that the passport was correct. I thought about it for a while, eventually letting her into the country. I was kind of pissed when I got a warning saying that the sex in the passport must coincide with the sex I saw (I didn't had access to the X-Rays, so I couldn't check). It could go many ways though, it could've been easely a cis woman who noticed the discrepancy in her passport and simply wanted to pass as a trans man, hoping that it worked. It did with me, anyways.
...but the country isn't necessarily transphobic though it could very well be since totalitarian regime aren't usually the most tolerant places to live. The rules just say that the passport has to match the person. It could be bureaucratic oversight and there is no mention how post-op transexuals fall into the debate because we have no idea how getting the paperwork works in that world. Presumably, it works that same as this one and that matter varies wildy from place to place where some places it is much easier to change your birth certificate and get the proper sex on your passport.

I can easily see why the rule is there because they don't want people coming into their country impersonating other most likely for ill will and that could be the official reason but we don't know if that is the offical offical reason.
 

Grach

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porous_shield said:
...but the country isn't necessarily transphobic though it could very well be since totalitarian regime aren't usually the most tolerant places to live. The rules just say that the passport has to match the person. It could be bureaucratic oversight and there is no mention how post-op transexuals fall into the debate because we have no idea how getting the paperwork works in that world. Presumably, it works that same as this one and that matter varies wildy from place to place where some places it is much easier to change your birth certificate and get the proper sex on your passport.

I can easily see why the rule is there because they don't want people coming into their country impersonating other most likely for ill will and that could be the official reason but we don't know if that is the offical offical reason.
That's what I meant by saying it could go in many ways. This is probably what Yahtzee meant by saying that the game told more than it showed, or could simply be wild extrapolation on our part. That's why I find it kind of interesting, it really makes you question this authority as someone hateful or simply bureaucratic. The terrorist attacks do shift the perspective a bit.
 

Shamanic Rhythm

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Zombie Badger said:
Shamanic Rhythm said:
I think the gist of the joke is more that it's making fun of the kind of conservative politicians or statesmen who constantly beat up on gay or transgender people to win support, but are shagging men in private. People like J. Edgar Hoover, for instance. That's why he said 'politician' and not just 'bloke'.
Well,

Zombie Badger said:
The problem is not the politician. The problem is that it treats pre-op MtF transgender people as unambiguously male, implying that the only thing that defines that person's gender identity is their genitalia, which then implies that the person's feelings towards themself does not matter, which taken to its logical conclusion says that transgender people are not actually transgender as their personal image means nothing (whereas in reality the 'man trapped in a woman's body' thing is literal).
Essentially this is saying that it is impossible for a transgender person's gender to be anything other than the physical sex of the body they are born with before surgery, so it is perpetuating the worldview that pre-op or non-op transgender people should not be treated as their desired sex. Views like this play a significant part in the staggeringly high suicide rate for transgender people (31% in the UK)
The other problem with this joke is that it only works if you subscribe to this view. In reality the genitalia of the person you are having sex with do not make the encounter gay or straight, it is the gender of the person you are sleeping with that does this (All MtF transsexual porn is consumed by straight men, gay men (like myself) having no interest in it because it involves women). So the politician in the joke is not a hypocrite because he is exclusively having sex with women.
I don't think you quite get the point of the joke. This hypothetical politician only sleeps with pre-op transexuals. One can respect the rights of transexuals everywhere to self-identify whatever gender they feel they belong to, and still acknowledge that a man with a consistent sexual preference for men who identify as women is most definitely not straight.
 

EvilRoy

The face I make when I see unguarded pie.
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Jan 9, 2011
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Deshara said:
gjkbgt said:
LadyRhian said:
So "Papers, Please" is a story about the banality of evil- how easy it is to be a bad person when it affects you and your family's ability to live.
That opinion was so poorly thought out i it might just have given me cancer
Except that he was completely, 100% spot on. The game is about how the systems break down to the point that people are forced to choose between hurting complete strangers massively, once, or failing to support your family in smalls way on a daily basis.
Not even necessarily small ways. Haven't played the game myself, but unless your job title is "Office Scapegoat" if you screw up enough times you're gonna lose that job, and getting fired from a govt position can seriously damage your future job prospects.
 

Zombie Badger

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Shamanic Rhythm said:
I don't think you quite get the point of the joke. This hypothetical politician only sleeps with pre-op transexuals. One can respect the rights of transexuals everywhere to self-identify whatever gender they feel they belong to, and still acknowledge that a man with a consistent sexual preference for men who identify as women is most definitely not straight.
Well,

Zombie Badger said:
The thing is, Yahtzee is saying that anyone who would have sex with a pre-op transgender person would be gay, which implies that any pre-op or non-op people cannot be considered in any way to be their desired gender. Now, the thing with the definition of gay and straight is that they are not based on genitalia, instead being based on gender. As strange as it may sound, being attracted to penis does not make you gay. Being attracted to people of the same gender (regardless of their genitals) does. This can be seen in that MtF transsexual porn is exclusively consumed by straight men (Details on FtM porn is hard to find and its existence is often debated). Gay men (such as myself) are not attracted to women, regardless of their genitalia, and MtF transgender individuals are not considered attractive to gay men due to them being distinctly female.
 

BurningWyvern90

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Hot damn, what happened to this comment section?

You do realize that two of the three jokes/references you all are getting up in arms about are actually mechanics in the game, right? If you're going to get mad at anything, get mad at the game. Although even there it's used to illustrate how oppressive and stringent Arstotzka is. And the other one's just a joke. Calm down.

Anyway.

Strangely absorbing is definitely the best description for Papers, Please. I saw it mentioned somewhere and then ended up checking out the beginning of a Let's Play. I decided to buy it after that, and then 5 hours later I realized it was 3 in the morning and I should probably go to sleep. Best $10 I've spent in a while.