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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29505 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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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."

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).

That version of gender did have real uses as a rhetorical countermove against the sex-determinist appeal-to-nature fallacy

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.

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.

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 agree, but that seems irrelevant to the discussion.

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

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:

- Can you just share your opinion on like this attempt to blur the boundary between male and female that you see happening specifically in in the western context?

- I think there's an enormous amount of confusion about sex, what is sex, what is gender, and the two get mixed up and mashed up and the conversations very very very quickly become completely unproductive. You know in my class (...) we start off by talking about what is objectivity what, is subjectivity, what is inner subjectivity, what is sex what is gender... um so i i start the class off by really clearly defining these terms, and so i think i think an enormous amount of the confusion is just because what do people mean by sex, what do people mean by gender, and when they mean different things, or when you have two people in a dialogue, and they're using these terms differently, it just goes nowhere almost immediately.

And i as far as using Fa’fafine for example to blur the distinction between male and female sex categories i would say that that is a western project because the Fa’fafine have no doubt whatsoever what their sex is. The muxe [the Zapotec tribe's "third gender"] have no doubt whatsoever what their sex is. They know they're not... they know what their gender is... they know they're not men, and they know they're not women, but if you ask them are you... in terms of your body, are you male or female, they're like yeah... they might not say the word "male", but they're like, yeah... i'm i'm a man, i'm male... So I remember interviewing one... I mean this is how nonsensical things become, when you start translating some of this stuff into a field setting, in a non-western culture... so I remember being in southern Mexico and asking a muxe "you know, are you male or female... you know, do you have a penis or a vulva?" and she looked at me like and she actually said "are you stupid?"

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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