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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   33222 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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What massively bothers me is that this gender as social and sex as physical is completely thrown out of the window when talking about transgender people's need to physically mimic the opposite sex. Both of these narratives can't be true at the same time. And that isn't the only issue that is solvable but I never see people grapple with. If we're going to start taking seriously that womanhood has certain gender characteristics and throw out the "women can be and do anything" framework that implies some female people who think they are women are wrong. Otherwise the category is meaningless.

There are some frameworks of gender ideology that actually make sense, and as I care very little about gender itself I'd be willing to adopt but what mainstream gender advocates are offering is not one of those frameworks. It's all of them at once carefully switching from one to another in order to dodge the uncomfortable implications.

The problem is that - many 'trans people' do, even though the cause is some weird simulacra desire alienation thing, really strongly want to be seen like women. And, for a progressive, this plus the whole 'being oppressed by gender roles' thing means we really need to protect, amplify, and ensure they can express themselves. And that entirely beats out anything about 'gender is a social role'.

and as I care very little about gender itself I'd be willing to adopt

you'd be willing to "adopt" something that's wrong, just from caring little about it?

The problem is that - many 'trans people' do, even though the cause is some weird simulacra desire alienation thing, really strongly want to be seen like women.

I know this is a meme but it's important. What you do mean by "women"? do you mean female? Because if you say women then the category is self referential in really strange way. There is some tension in it and activists are resistant to efforts to switch to using "female" in many categories where it's thought that might better capture the original intent(most flamingly hot example being sexuality, the 'Super Straight' phenomenon). What the actual ask seems to be is that we need to hold two categories in or heads at once when talking about women so that trans people can identify as a category that would otherwise inherently excludes them and lie about doing so.

you'd be willing to "adopt" something that's wrong, just from caring little about it?

I'd be able to adopt some coherent way to think/talk about gender as a real phenomenon so long as it's consistent. If I can talk about it in a consistent way I could find the truth in that framework and dispel the obviously silly elements. If the framework is not internally consistent then I can't use it to describe/compare to reality. If asked what my gender is should I say man because that's the role I actually play out in real life or should I say nonbinary because of the aforementioned indifference to gender as a general concept? what relation, if any, does my answer have to do with my sex/sexuality? There's half a dozen contradictory ways within the gender sphere to interpret my answer and come to opposite results. I don't want the delta between my understanding of the world and my interlocutors understanding of the world to be obscured by incomprehensible language games.

Is there a term that combines motte-and-bailey with the sort of three-card-monte shuffle you're talking about?

If there is I don't know what it's called beyond the rather loose 'incoherent' or 'cognitive dissonance'. When both the frameworks are invoked at once I think it's rightfully called cognitive dissonance, like famous struggle over the phrase "what is a woman" where the nonbinary friendly framework butts up against the transgender friendly framework.

Monte-bailey?

That sounds like a castle with 3 baileys one that contains goats, and another that contains cars, and a third with no gate.

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