@JenLucPiquant

Damn straight. Reified social constructs cause a lot of problems.

#TTRPG #DnD #DontMakeMeTapTheSign #Bioessentialism

Okay, listen folks. Tying #gender to any arbitrary body part is still terf talk, even if you try to refraim it. "Gender is rooted in brain structure," stays brown terf bullshit, even if you try to recolor it with, "and I believe that anyone knows their gender best." It's called #biologism and #bioessentialism. What you probaly mean is sex, but then we're talking about an entirely different category here. Gender is not sex! Tying gender to any aspect of a human body is and will ever be arbitrary. Why boobs or genitals? Why not hair color or the color of my skin? Oh, wait the later is already claimed by #racism. Sorry, getting sarcastic here. But you get the point. Gender is not tied to body. Gender is a social construct and has nothing to do with biology. And even the biological categories are just artifical categories made up by humans, who like to put anything in boxes in an desperate attempt to descripe the vast biodiversity around us. Nature can't be sortet in neat little boxes.
That is, what terfs don't get. They think, this kind of stuff is "natural law" when in fact nature doesn't play by the rules we humans have created.

Accepting these insidious forms of “positive” #BioEssentialism in our #TTRPG systems is implicitly endorsing and perpetuating their expression in the real world.

/🧵

Both of these systems have a lot to recommend them and I’m not saying people shouldn’t play them, but if you’re going to make recommendations, you should call these things out so people can an informed decision about where to invest their time.

#BioEssentialism had already been the subect of intense debate for decades at the time these systems were developed and progress had been made in moving away from it. However, the designers of these systems deliberately chose to return to it.

Two of the top recommendations I see for medieval fantasy RPGs enshrine the kind of #BioEssentialism we had in the very early days of D&D that most of the community has been trying to leave behind. Things like: humans get to be whatever they want, but “dwarf”, for example, is a class with zero options.