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Historically, the distinction was "gender"= social norms for manhood and womanhood, while "sex"= biological X/Y/ gamete status. A child raised in a distant lab by sexless robot aliens, with absolutely no conception of human society, might not have a "gender"; but they would still have a "sex."
That version of gender did have real uses as a rhetorical countermove against the sex-determinist appeal-to-nature fallacy, which runs: sexual dimorphism is natural, therefore (a) all sex-specific social expectations and privileges are also "natural" and can never be changed because duh, biology doesn't change; and (b) a society's sex-specific stereotypes are "natural" and nature is good, so women should try to perform their society's conventional stereotypes of womanhood (and men: manhood), and those who less closely match those stereotypes are unnatural and bad.
Basically, trying to circumvent the fallacies in "But you have to dress your XX baby in pink because pink is naturally for girls!"/ "Sorry Jill, I can't offer you the same salary as Bob because he supports a family, that's just the nature of things."
Unfortunately, I think this usage ran afoul of the trans folks' desire to deliberately re-conflate the natural and the social in order to argue that their social performance of gender stereotypes was, indeed, "natural," therefore biological, unchangeable and good. So whether there's a definition distinct from "sex" on that side of the aisle, I couldn't say.
If blank slateism is true, yes.
That's kind of the problem. The ideological fortress is of use to larger groups than just the trans activist segment that captured it so now people don't have a way to disentangle themselves from ridiculousness like Tickle without losing their motte entirely. And they haven't found it because
If they were only attacking the fallacious version of that argument then trans activists would have a thinner wedge to work with. You can accept that it's ludicrous to assume static or totalizing gender roles without accepting that gender has nothing to do with sex (which is where we are) or the sort of doctrinaire blank slateist/anti-sex-based role position that came to dominate.
Simply having the sex-vs-gender distinction implies nothing about the relationship between the two, just that they're different things worth analyzing separately, like genotype vs phenotype or wealth vs. income.
I also think doctrinaire blank-slateism as you describe it is a bit of a strawman. Most of the instances I'm aware of sound more like (entirely reasonable) calls for for agnosticism or at least extreme skepticism about the precise extent to which biology determines culture (since everyone opining has serious skin in the game and we're certainly not at the point of making controlled experiments that could falsify our guesses). Similarly, there's an extremely good case for a presumption of blank-slatism as the best working approach to prevent grave injustice on an individual level.
Moreover, liberal modernity certainly works much better with fully interchangeable workers/citizens; and runaway gender-performance competition (like the kind the US saw in the 50s, or arguably is seeing today) is a costly Moloch-style trap that is hard to escape without externally-enforced change. So at a societal level I can fully understand advocating for periodic centrally-enforced sex-stereotype detoxes or elimination diets, just to reset to minimal levels.
Strawman or the bailey?
If that view is a strawman then what is 'all sex-specific social expectations and privileges are also "natural" and can never be changed because duh, biology doesn't change'. How many American conservatives explicitly state this belief?
If it was mere agnosticism or even skepticism people like James Damore wouldn't be anathematized for trying to provide empirical evidence that challenged the blank slateist ideology.
Yes, everyone knows the caveats to the statement "men and women are the same". But it's hardly my fault that we continually allow some people to turn the ratchet in one direction until we're now arguing about men in women's sports. If there was any example even blank slateists should laugh off...it used to be this. But, seemingly, what one generation knows but considers too obvious or impolite to say somehow stops being common knowledge and you have to fight about it.
"Everyone knows" is true until it's not. The slope is slippery. I don't consider it a weakness of my argument so much as the point itself.
As @ArjinFerman asks: in what sense? It certainly has certain Darwinian implications. The liberal societies that have adopted this viewpoint are facing the basic problem of being unable to reproduce themselves - which probably won't be helped by telling men and women they can swap sex and dope themselves to make it stick. The flight may feel smoother but the plane hasn't landed yet.
My other retort is that this view is simply just false, and it only appears not-false insofar as people employ a bunch of hotfixes and participate in the very sort of doctrinaire "see no evil" blank slateism you're writing off as strawmen.
There are plenty of places where it's clear people are not interchangeable widgets and we solve it by various forms of redistribution that are intended to push them to look and act more alike (enforcing equal parental leave in European countries) and the deployment of a vast bureaucracy to root out sexual "bias" or "discrimination" across both employment and education and the burning of a witch every so often that points out this truth.
As a child of this period, it's hard to escape the view that this is much preferable to the alternative (certainly it's in my interests when we come to the racial version of it) but it's hard to argue it doesn't impose all sorts of costs.
Even if I accepted this as some worthy goal, I don't see how what's happening is some sort of stereotype of rationalist ChiCom planning with ten year plans to tap and reduce standard sex stereotyping (you'd think, if people were interchangeable widgets such totalitarianism would be unneeded).
Some of the tools used are products of the center but I don't see any retrenchment. Just various groups of people seizing Title IX or this or that handle of a ratchet and taking us further and further.
There's no, as far as I can see, cultural movement in the center that goes "maybe we don't need female Marines so leave standards as-is" or "maybe get male Secret Service agents, cause we're all fucked if the bullet skips past someone's 5'6 head into their principal's chest". Nope, some moral entrepreneur will find some new thing to be the first to diversify, and then we go from mere detox to imposing things like gender identity on schools.
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I don't know about that. Ever since we bet on interchangeability of men and women, we can't seem to reproduce ourselves and have to make up for the shortfall by importing people from more fertile parts of the world, hoping that interchangeability works out this time.
What's the upside it's supposed to have brought us?
If we saw it in the 50's and we're seeing it today, I have to ask if the term has any meaning.
Industrial processes work best with other industrial processes, so I guess it's a race to industrialize that biology as we have various other forms of organic production. I'm not saying I'm a fan, but it's weird for a community as virtualized, urban and seemingly techno-optimist as the Motte to come down so hard in favor of artisanal methods in this single area.
The interesting and under-discussed thing is that male roles got liquidated by modernity way before female roles did. Watch some living-history documentaries about preindustrial farm life, or read about crime in early cities and roads, and it becomes extremely obvious why it would be helpful to have someone around who's taller with a lot of upper-body strength and greater potential for physical aggression, and why a smaller-bodied person might willingly relinquish a certain amount of autonomy to retain that alliance. Once men deliberately technologize themselves out of the hard-labor-and-physical-defense game, to which their biology is naturally suited, it becomes much easier for women to look at their desk-jockey vidya-playing husbands and brothers and ask why they get to demand so much and give so little in return.
Speaking of hotfixes:
I used to take this for granted too but then you look at something like student loans where women hold more debt and take longer to pay it off and student loan forgiveness is argued for specifically as a salve for women and I wonder.
If all of these jobs better fit a woman's temperament why can't they just pay their loans?
Male roles may have been liquidated by modernity but not necessarily just because the inevitable march of technology making lifting things and whacking people less useful. The modern liberal state may have given us a little push.
Yeah, as I pointed out a few weeks ago, men's roles are not obsolete. What's obsolete is giving men credit for their fulfilling them. Instead they're either generally taken for granted (as with various blue collar roles than are still 90-99% men) or men are actually criticized for doing it (as with engineering and other lucrative male-dominated white collar professions).
I think people are pretty good at giving credit for real, visible contributions, where the reality is clear and concrete (as opposed to a statistical construct, a historical artifact, or an abstract case that somebody could maybe make if they wanted to).
In the subsistence-agriculture conditions that birthed The Patriarchy, and in a world where physical strength is a valuable resource overall, it seems extremely clear why an able-bodied adult man wrangling a yoke of oxen, carrying stones for a wall or fighting with hand weapons is both taking on extra personal risk and rendering irreplaceable value for his family, and why the usefulness of having him in that role might justify investing it with extra privilege versus the females and immature males of his household.
Fast-forward to modern industrial/financial democracy, and sure, construction workers and other male-dominated industrial roles are great and necessary, but:
(a) superior brute strength is no longer the money-maker, thus no longer the source of high status, that it once was;
(b) availability of mechanical aids and automated tools means there's at most a small disparity between male and female capacity to perform those roles (realistically, a country of Amazons could do all their plumbing and engineering just fine)
(c) ergonomics and safety tech improvements mean that these roles are much less dramatically taxing/ uncomfortable, and that men performing them no longer take on substantial daily risk of bodily injury and death, vs. in a preindustrial context
(d) society is much less casually violent, so the utility of physical strength is restricted to a very limited number of workplaces, not experienced daily in street life; and finally
(e) even women married to physical laborers experience concrete benefit from the labor only in the form of a paycheck, which could just as easily be derived from white-collar work; hence there's no particular reason to regard the man as rendering irreplaceable value to the family through his biological form.
Ultimately, I think humans reason about respect in extremely concrete, embodied ways, and with open self-interest. Making some abstract argument that engineers are broadly good to have around, and that like 80% of engineers are men therefore all men deserve some credit for the existence of engineers (?!), is simply not the viscerally compelling case for male privilege that "need this tree chopped down and carried over there? great, I'll get on it" seems to have been.
Contingent on the definition of "Amazons", I do not believe this is the case. If "Amazons" is just ordinary women who don't need no man, it seems very unlikely they could do these roles... because if they could they would in greater quantities than they are. If by "Amazons" you mean women 3 sigmas above the current mean in whatever manly traits are necessary for that, then perhaps, but nowhere has that. This is what I mean by refusing to give men credit.
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You may be mischaracterizing the Motte as a community, but even if you're right on average, you've run into the resident unironic Luddite.
I don't think you answered my question though, I still don't see any specific upside that, one can point to, to society as a whole treating everybody as though they are interchangeable. Definitely nothing that can counter the downsides of interchangeability that I mentioned.
I'm aware of the "industrialist" arguments for standardization, but the retort is simply that you're driving a square beg into a round hole, and breaking all sorts of things in the process.
Last I checked, men still tend to be the ones supporting the households, so that question seems to be misplaced. And you seem to be simply confirming what I said - interchangeability does not enhance liberalism, it drives it's extinction.
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Although the sex/gender distinction is still useful even in the real world where blank slatism is true. In a sane society (i.e. one which sets up a default where men are gently steered towards being Real Men TM and women are gently steered towards being Real Women TM) gender is a structure built on top of biological sex. Some of that structure (like war being for men and child-raising for women) is close to the root and necessary, and therefore conserved across cultures. But "blue is for boys and pink is for girls" is an accident of certain western cultures.
Yes. That would be the fallacious version.
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I don't think that's accurate. There were different social roles and expectations for men and women, but no one referred to them using words "man" and "woman", nor were the words "male" and "female" used in any sort of contrast to "man" and woman", nor was there any sort of confusion if taking on a different role would make you a different "gender" (an anthropologist asking one of the famed "third gender" tribesmen if they consider themselves something other than a man, and hearing "are you retarded?" in response, is a thing that actually happened in real life).
Ironically it turned out that it was far less fallacious than the genderist argument. For all the attempts at "gender neutral upbringing" girls still tend to zero-in on girlie princess stuff, and boys on trucks and whatnot. Despite "Sorry Jill, I can't offer you the same salary as Bob" being cancellable and outright illegal, women still earn less money than men, etc.
I mean, I'm aware of many of the checkmate-libtard! style memes on these topics, but a couple weirdos failing at their halfhearted attempts to raise ungendered children in a very gendered social world, or some women continuing to lose out in pay negotiations despite their bosses' professions of fair treatment, says virtually nothing one way or another about the optimum extent to which a well-run society should embrace, enforce or renounce differential treatment of individuals by sex. I don't really know what the "genderist argument" is, since that's not how anybody seems to label themselves in these conversation.
The "genderist argument" is that these differences are a result of socialization, and that the appeal to nature is a fallacy.
I agree, but that seems irrelevant to the discussion.
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You can't just drop something that funny without citing your source.
Here you go. Turns out I misremembered it, and they guy still hangs on to the sex/gender distinction, but also insists the way these obscure tribes understand it does not match how the activists are potraying it:
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The problem is that the source is a bit of a pain in the ass to cite. It was an interview with Paul L. Vasey, who originally documented the "third gender" phenomenon, and got frustrated with the way his research is brought up by trans activists. Somewhere in this or this podcast, he drops the anecdote. I can give them a relisten and ping you when I have the timestamp if you want, though I also recommend just listening to the whole thing, they're good interviews.
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