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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34500 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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People on the both sides, while intelligent, hold stupid beliefs about this subject. This false belief is that gender is not distinct from sex. The fact is that gender is indeed totally distinct from sex. Sex is either "male" or "female" (and I'm excluding intersex for simplicity of argument) and is immutable from birth. Gender on the other hand refers to a socially created psychological programming that every tribe and society imbues its members on upon.

People have sexes, languages have genders. Anything more complicating than that is unprovable hibby jibby. This idea of gender as "socially created psychological programming" is the result of a modern propaganda campaign.

I think even if we taboo the word "gender" we still have the following distinct things from sex:

  • Sex roles: The roles a particular culture assigns to the sexes, including cultural fictions like hijra or kathoey, or artificially created categories like eunuch, trans, etc.

  • Sexual proprioception / Internal sense of sex or sex role: The bodily and psycho-social feeling of having a sexed body or belonging to a particular sex role in society.

I don't think any of these require "unprovable hibby jibby." Sex roles are obviously separate from sex itself, since there's nothing inherently "female" about dresses, or "male" about suit jackets.

And the existence of people with a sexual proprioception of different genitals or secondary sexual characteristics would hardly be mystical. If Scott's recent posts are anything to go on, there are people around the world in different cultures who are convinced the witches are stealing their penises, so it's not insane to believe that "sometimes brains do funny things, and people feel like they have different body parts than they physically have." They might be a minority of modern day trans people, but I don't think it's a crazy implausible claim to make that such people might exist. That would also of course be separate from how we deal with them on a societal level.

Similarly, the idea of having an internal sense of sex or sex role isn't crazy to me, even if it isn't a fundamental part of human psychology. I'm sure that the King of England feels like the King of England, even though there's no way he evolved a mental faculty to specifically feel like the King of England. Is it so crazy that there might be a female-bodied human that has an internal sense that they should occupy the male sex role? Insofar as the male sex role is separate from being male, why should we deny entry into that category?

I disagree - I think that there is actually something there when they point at their concept of gender. There absolutely are cultural expectations and social constructions with regard to gender, and there are definitely areas where those concepts change. There are real, observable and definite differences between what it means to be a good man in feudal Japan and what it means to be a good man in 1950s America.

I think that the left is wrong when they think you can actually divorce these concepts and ideas from sex in any real way, but their error isn't in identifying that part of what we view as gender is socially constructed (i.e. wearing skirts is feminine today, but a kilt is the height of masculinity on a highland warrior).

There absolutely are cultural expectations and social constructions with regard to gender, and there are definitely areas where those concepts change

Sure, but so what? What does this matter in any way with regards to calling a girl a girl or a boy a boy?

With regards to calling a girl a girl? Nothing, I explicitly said that the left is wrong they think that these concepts can be divorced from sex. They're right when they point out that a lot of our expectations regarding gender are created and reinforced culturally, and if you try to attack them on those grounds you are going to lose because they are right - that's not where the error is occurring. The problem arises when they expand the category of gender to include things that are really in the domain of sex, but that doesn't mean there isn't any use in being able to say that something is masculine due to an inherent property of human masculinity that transcends culture(sex) as opposed to something more local(gender).

I just don't think anyone really ever has used gender to mean, "what girls generally act like around here" or any definition similar to that. There are the people who used it as a synonym for sex, people who used it in reference to language, and now people who use it in an arguments as soldiers context.

People have been using it like that for decades in academia, and there is actually a use for the term. I am not suggesting that the term should be used uncritically at all - and I think that you can ultimately make a stronger "transphobic" argument by adopting and using those concepts.

People have been using it like that for decades in academia

Yes and? I am fairly certain it was invented in that context for the purpose of arguments as soldiers. And I dont really see the argument for a stronger argument. The argument is certain people have a delusion. Tomboy is perfectly good word as is Nancy. Other more powerful and specific ones include autogynephilia fetishist, delusional dysphoric, etc.

Yes and? I am fairly certain it was invented in that context for the purpose of arguments as soldiers.

And it worked. If your opponent has a strategy that is working and can convince reasonable bystanders, even if that strategy is just playing shellgames with definitions, then countering or side-stepping it is a good idea. By clearly laying out the distinction beforehand, you prevent them from using it as an escape-hatch later on in the discussion. Just calling a trans person a delusional fetishist might win you votes with the hard right, but it isn't a strategy that's terribly effective if you're trying to convince regular people who aren't extremely online/invested in the culture war.

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Everything is socially constructed, but society is biologically constructed.

The way we understand medicine is socially constructed but nobody uses 'actually cancer is a social construct' as a gotcha, or in order to get some kind of cancer-benefits in absence of medical evidence of cancer.

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