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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   30131 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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Western progressive society cannot even agree on the meaning of gender any more

I'd say that gender itself is an unnecessary concept. We used to have sex alone and that was good enough.

The concept of gender, in the modern sense, is a recent invention in human history.[21] The ancient world had no basis of understanding gender as it has been understood in the humanities and social sciences for the past few decades.[21] The term gender had been associated with grammar for most of history and only started to move towards it being a malleable cultural construct in the 1950s and 1960s.[22]

In Chinese Daoism they have this big emphasis on avoiding distinctions, of not trying to define the universal dao. Once you differentiate between good and bad, you create good and bad and split everything up when it should be united. Normally, I think this is ridiculous. But in this case, it seems reasonable. The concept of gender creates confusion and unnecessary problems. Without the idea of gender, people could still be more or less masculine or feminine. There were tomboys, which originally had eugenic connotations of strong, capable, athletic women advancing the race. Yet there wasn't an awareness of them being gender non-conforming. Enid Blyton's George for instance was a girl who acted like a boy, yet Blyton was an arch-conservative, reviled by progressives. She didn't have a concept of George being trans, there was no notion of gender in the work, only behaviour.

Vis versa, you could have men who behaved effeminately, yet were still men. The idea of gender creates and strengthens a link between sex and behaviour that has all kinds of complicated, troubling implications. Public officials aren't even in a position to define what a woman is after this epistemological apocalypse. The root cause of the problem was inventing gender and the best solution IMO is abolishing gender.

Yes, as usual both sides are to blame. Many on the right are not helping matters by having an attitude of "you are not a real man unless you... (some stereotypical tough manly shit)". It is basically the same sort of thinking that transgenderism advocates engage in, but they do not realize it.

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