The big one there is food and housing subsidies. The way way we have it set-up can create a situation where a raise can cost you benefits that are worth more than the raise. With disability benefits there can actually be limits on the amount of money you’re allowed to have in general, which means that disabled people can find themselves in places where not only do they need to avoid trying to find work that they might be able to do, since trying and failing can still make them need to restart the benefits application process or even pay back historical benefits, but they also need to reject gifts above a certain value and can’t prepare for any type of emergency, like a car breakdown.

It’s annoying because it creates a disincentive to do the things that would help people on assistance actually get off of it, when the people who push for those limits purport to want them for exactly that reason.
Tapering off benefits as income grows, but at a slower rate than the income growth creates a continuous incentive for a person on benefits to increase their earned income. (If you lose $500 in benefits for every $1000 in income, your $1000 raise still puts $500 extra in your pocket, instead of potentially costing you your entire $8000 food subsidy)

Can’t do that though, because it doesn’t punish people for the audacity of needing help.

I have never been invited to burn peanuts with a bunsen burner. Showing the relationship between chemical energy and thermal energy and the sometimes surprising differences between foods?

I think we had too much separation between diet classes and physical science. I think I recall doing something like a puzzle, with physical pieces, where you tried to make a days food using different foods. The point was that it’s easier and you get more if you pick the healthier foods. Instead everyone knew what the point was and then fucked around making the dumbest possible meal that fit the defined criteria.
I seem to recall the teacher not being amused with my solution that only has one food group per meal. (What’s for breakfast? 9 eggs. Lunch? 3 unseasoned grilled chicken breasts. Dinner? Six baked potatos, plain)

First it goes into free fall, then it slows its drop, but the ticket starts going backwards in time.

Ants use oleic acid to identify other ants as dead, which is also commonly found is plants, although usually not in any notable concentration until we press the plant for oil. Trix use canola oil which contains a lot of oleic acid (compared to other oils, it’s not objectively a lot). I wonder if something in the cooking process or combination with one of the other colors or flavors makes it enough to mess them up.
Skimming a research article it looks like oleic acid isn’t what they use to mark the burial pile, just what goes in the pile.

That’s simple. Growing facial hair isn’t cool, it’s facial hair itself that’s cool.
Someone with a big walrusy Wilford Brimly moustache is cooler than someone who’s working on growing a moustache.

I don’t think that reading of the who page tracks, and I kinda struggle to see how you got what you did from it.

Gender [categories] refers to the characteristics of women, men, girls and boys that are socially constructed.

Gender interacts with but is different from sex

Gender and sex are related to but different from gender identity.

Gender identity refers to a person’s deeply felt, internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond to the person’s physiology or designated sex at birth.

(As an aside, I feel like picking on an overview that explicitly acknowledges intersex individuals for not addressing the social construction of sex, while simultaneously being critical of it for addressing the social construction of gender is a bit nit-picky)

I really feel like there’s this persistent conflation of gender categories and gender identity in your interpretation of what others are expressing, and an insistence that talking about social constructs is an endorsement of social constructionism as a whole.

It seems like we agree that the roles and attitudes we ascribe to gender categories are not objective, but socially constructed.
“Gender” is regularly used to refer to both the category and the individuals identity as being to some degree a member of that category, and it’s expected that people know which is being referred to by context.

In your example involving race, I don’t think that’s a good comparison. In your example the person is saying words that generally minimize the importance of race while attempting to convey that they’re not prejudiced. Critically, everyone agrees to what the words are referring to.
In the “gender is a social construct” case, I don’t think there’s agreement about what the word “gender” is referring to. The speaker means gender category, and the listener keeps understanding it as gender identity.

It’s like if someone says “gender isn’t a social construct” and I keep hearing them imply “women are naturally more differential and domestic, and men more forceful and outdoorsy”, even once they explain they meant an individuals identity is more than social convention.

I get that it can be frustrating to know a deeper and more nuanced definition of a thing and come up against people using a simpler, different or “hijacked” definition: I work in computer security and enjoy playing with machine learning. Most people get a very different impression if I say I do a lot of stuff with crypto and AI from what I mean. They hear finance bro and wasteful chatbots, and I mean user authentication, privacy and statistics.

A big point of friction I see is that it seems you’re reading the words people say, interpreting them as though they’re coming from the same background as you, and then responding in their terms.

If one more person tells me that “all gender is performance”

There is frustration that is generated by the “gender is just a social construct”.

hour long lecture from an academic on how gender is actually just a social construct

The “performance” and “just” a social construct interpretations are what you’re bringing, not the person typing.

Being told gender, that you had to struggle to find a way to make right, is reducible to how you were socialized or choose to act flies in the face of the existence of trans people and the difficulties they invariably have and is justifiably infuriating.
That the message is being given by people who very clearly, in both intent and action, believe the exact opposite should make it clear that there’s a dictionary mismatch somewhere.
I feel like it stems from the belief that “social construct” implies “social constructionism”.
Social constructionism is a specific theory involving social constructs , and acknowledging the existence of a social construct doesn’t imply acceptance of that theory.

I don’t think any reasonable person would argue that law is anything other than real by fiat of convention or collective agreement, but someone could easily disagree with the notion that scientific discovery is more about social convention than empirical reality.

Most people mean it in the sense that the WHO means it: https://www.who.int/health-topics/gender#tab=tab_1

You’re putting far too much thought into what other people mean by the phrase, particularly in the context of a joke.
Most people are not referring to several different anthropological, sociological, and feminist theories/philosophies.

When you disagree with “gender is a social construct” in a casual setting, intentionally or not, you’re conveying the statement “gender is innately tied to biological sex, there are precisely two, and trans people are invalid”.

It’s better to take the phrase as meaning “having a vagina doesn’t mean you’re a hot pink wearing pretty princess, nor does a penis imply you aren’t. Gender is more complicated than a binary, and we’re better off raising children as little people who tell us who they are than spending too much time being concerned that they only play with plastic figurines compatible with their genitals and playacting the right chores”.

It’s a joke about tricking people into attending an event usually focused on baby genitals, and then instead giving them cake that isn’t coded to the babies genitals with a lecture about how they don’t tell you as much about who this little person will be as people think.

Results: Evidence that there is a biologic basis for gender identity primarily involves (1) data on gender identity in patients with disorders of sex development (DSDs, also known as differences of sex development) along with (2) neuroanatomical differences associated with gender identity.

Conclusions: Although the mechanisms remain to be determined, there is strong support in the literature for a biologic basis of gender identity.

That’s not saying what you seem to be implying, and it’s not contrary to what people mean when they say gender is a social construct.
Saying gender expression is not only performance is not really related to gender being a social construct.

What we define the genders to be is what is a social construct. The masculine gender encompasses a wide array of behaviours and expressions, as does the feminine. The behaviours and attitudes we assign to each gender is what’s socially constructed. People tend to have a gender identity that matches their biological sex, and through acculturation we teach them the behaviors associated with each gender in our culture. Some people later realize that they’re most comfortable conforming to a different gender than what matches their sex.

The fun bit is that the word gender was pulled from linguistics into sociology exactly to try to make a less ambiguous situation.

It literally went "what if we talked about people having gender like the French talk about objects?” Much like people, a table is feminine in French regardless of if it has a penis or not.

Later, people decided to use gender as a synonym for sex and complain about using the word gender in a way that’s ambiguous with sex.

I’ve never understood the people who seem to not get that some people actually don’t mind scanning their stuff and putting it in bags, and insist that that’s the line between what the customer does and the employee. They also used to carry your groceries to the car for you, and you can also get them to pick everything up, bag it and bring it to your car or house. It’s not like the checkout process is the special part that can’t change.

Yeah, they want to save money by having fewer people get more customers checked out faster. I don’t really care since the part I like, getting finished at the store, happens faster.