(June 12, 2021 at 7:20 pm)Neo-Scholastic Wrote:(June 12, 2021 at 2:33 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote: This makes sense to me in theory: Once we've detached our biological sex from our gender identity, every combination of those variables should be possible.
In my world growing up and through my 20’s, the gender references were about either sex or non-English grammar. Then in the late 1990’s, the term “sexual preference” got dropped (presumably because preference implies choice) and gradually replaced by “gender identity.” In the oughts, I adopted what seemed like the consensus opinion: that gender identity and biological sex referred to different things – the former relating to self-perception, the later relating to animal physical features. Then with social media, the number of proposed gender identities seemed to explode. Then in the late 2010’s, I saw my first ginger-bread-person infographic. As a concept, gender identity now seems to include pretty much anything anyone can invent.
So you can see, just within my life, the preferred terms for talking about sex and gender has changed significantly at least 3 times. And each time, for the sake of trying to be agreeable with people who considered themselves enlightened about such things, adopted and tried to respect the careful distinctions being made. At this point, I have given up on trying to keep up. I refuse to play all these “progressive” word games about sex and gender. They were never really about understanding; but either 1) misplaced enthusiasm for sexual self-realization or 2) making the language around human sexuality incoherent and filled with shibboleths.
My first new position is simple: fuck gender identity. It’s a meaningless category and I really don't care about how other people want to see themselves.
My second new position is equally simple: “biological sex” is redundant. Your sex is your sex precisely because it is not contingent on what you feel or believe about it.
The changes have been very interesting to watch. As with gay liberation, the changes were a long time in coming but when things got started it happened fast. I'm old enough to have seen big changes. And I think this is history -- it's not going to change back.
And I think that it's more complicated than the louder voices on both sides want to acknowledge. There is a hard-wired, born-this-way component, but there is also a strong social component. And since human beings are complicated mixtures of nature and nurture, a lot of complex stuff is going on.
One narrative wants us to think that all the various permutations of gender have always existed everywhere, and the only change is that such things can be more open now. This downplays the contingencies involved, I think. People develop according to the choices that their societies give them, and conceptualize themselves according to the concepts available to them. It's a bit (allegorically) like gene expression -- the genes exist and have their possibilities, but the effects they cause in the organism may arise from environmental factors.
This is not to say that culturally-determined identities are fake. Because things that arise from culture can be as real as anything else. The fact that we currently think in terms of "identities," and the current range of identities widely spoken of, is certainly influencing how people think of themselves. The identities are real, but they're also in part made possible by culture.
And since everybody's different, there's pretty much no way any of us can pass judgment on someone we read about on the Internet -- much less the whole diverse group of people.
@John 6IX Breezy will know more about this than I do, since it's definitely a topic for serious psychological investigation.
The sad thing to me is that some people will, by fiat, announce that an entire category of people is a priori irrational. That's just prejudice.
