Thursday, June 30, 2016

Pick a Gender, Any Gender

Much of what Rebecca Reilly-Cooper has to say about gender identity is cogent and intelligent. At times, unfortunately, her argument goes off the rails and descends into the kind of paranoid and crypto-Marxist thinking that has bedeviled feminism from the onset.

Yet, she is far more enlightened than noted dimwit Judith Butler.

RRC sees that it all begins at birth, when you are assigned a gender. She sees that you are, effectively, the gender you are assigned at birth. Assigned because of the manifest appearance of your external genitalia. Despite all of the nonsense about gender, no one who has ever had a baby has heard the obstetrician or the midwife declare: it’s undecided.

Only someone suffering from a serious mental defect would say that gender is assigned arbitrarily.

Second, members of each gender are taxed with different duties. Being male or female confers obligations on each and every one of us. Since RRC considers herself a feminist, she does not note that, among these rules is a manly duty to protect women. Nowadays women have decided that being protected is demeaning, and that they are strong enough to protect themselves.

Well, not exactly. They can protect themselves with a myriad of new laws, with the suspension of due process for anyone they accuse, and with the awesome power of the state.

Note well:  since gender identity is based on an objectively observable reality, each person’s moral obligations are defined and assigned. Thus, other people will know for a fact whether an individual has fulfilled them.

If your gender identity is known only to you-- an absurd proposition that has become politically correct dogma-- then no one will know whether you have fulfilled your duties or not. And no one will ever really know who you are. If it’s all in your mind, you have no face. And having no face makes you a self-declared pariah. Why this should be desirable is beyond me.

Since human community-- like human DNA-- is structured in binary terms, blinding yourself to identifying gender markers spells the disintegration of community. It makes social anomie a policy goal. 

Third, today’s culture warriors have concluded that you should decide your own gender. You, as a splendid individual, have been granted the power to decide who you are and what you are. And you can do so without any reference to the way that others see you or your biological reality. RRC emphasizes a point that others rarely mention: it’s one thing to convince yourself that you are an elf; it’s quite another to force others to treat you accordingly. By definition, forcing people to act contrary to their observation of reality is oppressive.

The culture warriors believe that whatever your biological reality, you can change it reality by changing your mind. Thinking will make it so. The notion borders on delusional, and it becomes even more delusional when you decide that everyone else must see you as you have chosen to define yourself. 

Note also that the argument for gender fluidity ignores the best interest of society. It sets the individual off against the social good and social harmony, thus dooming the structure that sustains these deliria.

We to take the notion of gender fluidity seriously, RRC says, we would find ourselves with a reduction ad absurdum. There would be as many possible genders as there are people. And thus gender would be something like personality. She ought to have noted that no one really thinks that there are billions of different personalities or that you can make up any personality  you wish.

RRC summarizes the gender fluidity argument:

Once we assert that the problem with gender is that we currently recognise only two of them, the obvious question to ask is: how many genders would we have to recognise in order not to be oppressive? Just how many possible gender identities are there?

The only consistent answer to this is: 7 billion, give or take. There are as many possible gender identities as there are humans on the planet. According to Nonbinary.org, one of the main internet reference sites for information about non-binary genders, your gender can be frost or the Sun or music or the sea or Jupiter or pure darkness. Your gender can be pizza.

But if this is so, it’s not clear how it makes sense or adds anything to our understanding to call any of this stuff ‘gender’, as opposed to just ‘human personality’ or ‘stuff I like’. The word gender is not just a fancy word for your personality or your tastes or preferences. It is not just a label to adopt so that you now have a unique way to describe just how large and multitudinous and interesting you are. Gender is the value system that ties desirable (and sometimes undesirable?) behaviours and characteristics to reproductive function. Once we’ve decoupled those behaviours and characteristics from reproductive function – which we should – and once we’ve rejected the idea that there are just two types of personality and that one is superior to the other – which we should – what can it possibly mean to continue to call this stuff ‘gender’? What meaning does the word ‘gender’ have here, that the word ‘personality’ cannot capture?

RRC offers some good points, but she goes off the rails when she embraces the feminist view that we should decouple gender identity from reproductive function. Thus, she falls into the paranoid thinking, the kind that has bedeviled feminism from its onset. In it, gender roles were imposed on women by a vast patriarchal conspiracy.

Nevertheless she describes it well:

On this view, which for simplicity we can call the radical feminist view, gender refers to the externally imposed set of norms that prescribe and proscribe desirable behaviour to individuals in accordance with morally arbitrary characteristics.

The problem lies with the word “arbitrary.” If feminists believes that gender roles are assigned arbitrarily they must also believe, as RRC does, that these roles have nothing to do with anatomy, with reproduction, with biology or with reality.

If gender identities define men as being stronger than women, this is an arbitrary imposition. If you believe that you will believe anything.

Feminism needs this hypothesis because it sees social organization based on different gender roles as a massive right wing conspiracy to oppress women, to force them to have and to raise children, thus to deprive them of the full self-actualization they would achieve if they were captains of industry or tech oligarchs. Thus, thetranshistorical universal conspiracy has defined the female role as maternal, inner directed, weak, subordinate, passive, submissive, oppressed… what have you.

Oft times you get the impression that many of these women do not like being women. They have no conception of how women exercise power in relationships and in the world and have come to believe that the male way is the only way.

Anyway RRC explains:

Not only are these norms external to the individual and coercively imposed, but they also represent a binary caste system or hierarchy, a value system with two positions: maleness above femaleness, manhood above womanhood, masculinity above femininity. Individuals are born with the potential to perform one of two reproductive roles, determined at birth, or even before, by the external genitals that the infant possesses. From then on, they will be inculcated into one of two classes in the hierarchy: the superior class if their genitals are convex, the inferior one if their genitals are concave.

From birth, and the identification of sex-class membership that happens at that moment, most female people are raised to be passive, submissive, weak and nurturing, while most male people are raised to be active, dominant, strong and aggressive. This value system, and the process of socialising and inculcating individuals into it, is what a radical feminist means by the word ‘gender’. Understood like this, it’s not difficult to see what is objectionable and oppressive about gender, since it constrains the potential of both male and female people alike, and asserts the superiority of males over females. So, for the radical feminist, the aim is to abolish gender altogether: to stop putting people into pink and blue boxes, and to allow the development of individuals’ personalities and preferences without the coercive influence of this socially-enacted value system.

As I said, RRC simply goes off the rails. She ends up in a ditch where there is no gender, where biology does not matter, where facts don't matter, and where we will conclude that all of the social institutions that human beings have ever constructed were designed to suppress women. Thinking such thoughts must constitute a mania.

RRC concludes:

The way to avoid this conclusion is to realise that gender is not a spectrum. It’s not a spectrum, because it’s not an innate, internal essence or property. Gender is not a fact about persons that we must take as fixed and essential, and then build our social institutions around that fact. Gender is socially constructed all the way through, an externally imposed hierarchy, with two classes, occupying two value positions: male over female, man over woman, masculinity over femininity.

And also:

The solution is not to reify gender by insisting on ever more gender categories that define the complexity of human personality in rigid and essentialist ways. The solution is to abolish gender altogether. We do not need gender. We would be better off without it. Gender as a hierarchy with two positions operates to naturalise and perpetuate the subordination of female people to male people, and constrains the development of individuals of both sexes. 

Behold the moral blindness and ignorance. You would think that procreation is incidental to human life, that anyone can decide to mother or to father a child, that there are no maternal instincts and that human beings and their societies have no interest in being perpetuated. Without procreation there is no future, of our communities or of our genes. Without providing the best upbringing for children, the community will degenerate and ultimately disintegrate.

We might ignore the Bible and other religious texts. Have these people ever read Darwin? Do they understand nothing of evolution? Don't they see that you cannot base a human community on individual fantasies and delusions. 

If you do not like women and want to caricature them as weak and submissive and ineffective that is your constitutional right. But, be aware of the fact that you, by your storytelling are diminishing and demeaning all women who have considered it a valuable human enterprise to bring children into the world and to provide them with the best upbringing. Today’s women have far more opportunities than did women in the past, but they ought not to hold foremothers in contempt for not having said opportunities. The feminist attitude is grossly insulting, to mothers, to grandmothers and to all of the women who preceded them.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Modern men should choose 'castrati'.

Anonymous said...

http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/06/30/wristbands-stop-sex-attacks/

Wristbands.

Ares Olympus said...

While reading this topic I thought about a somewhat parallel one, the battle between left and right-handedness.

They say only ~10% of people are left-handed, but in my immediate family it was 40%, with my mom and my brother, and I find myself mostly right-handed - writing and throwing with my right hand, but wear my watch on my right wrist, and bat and golf left-handed, even if both ways seem equally okay for me there, so preference might be just habit.

The world prefers right-handed people, like school desks for instance have arm rests on the right, table manners, and various equipment like scissors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias_against_left-handed_people

So if those 10% would just conform with right-normative standards, everyone would be happier, and some parents and teachers may still try to encourage right-handedness in young children, in hopes of decreasing their problems in the world.

And coincidentally homosexuality might be around 10% of the population, so an inconvenient minority that threatens the sexual identity of a good fraction of the other 90%.

And outside of sexual expression is gender expression. If we were good observers we would surely observe a spectrum of behaviors in both X-Y genders, and those bell curves may overlap in certain areas, even if society would prefer a single standard for feminine behavior and a single standard for masculine behavior, and a large fraction of the population is happy to do their best to conform to whatever behavior standard matches their X-Y gender.

Stuart: The culture warriors believe that whatever your biological reality, you can change it reality by changing your mind. Thinking will make it so. The notion borders on delusional, and it becomes even more delusional when you decide that everyone else must see you as you have chosen to define yourself.

Interestingly you could reverse that argument. We can say people are doing this ALL THE TIME. People are trying to take their inner preferences and warp them to fit cultural expectations, whether or not those expectations are biologically determinant, or culturally determinant.

Yesterday Stuart posted a conversation with Camille Paglia arguing that Gender studies need to include biology lessons, like the effects of testosterone to help ground their wild and confused theories, and I can agree. And I also see that part of the reason of avoiding consideration of hormones is that it would threaten their assumptions of being unbiased, since hormones affect how we see and experience the world.

And perhaps hormones are also a part of the solution for "gender fluidity", that is to say if we accept a spectrum of hormonal influences within each gender, then we have to acknowledge we're all biased by our own hormones, and those hormones are biased by our social status as well into a messy circle of confusion that probably can't be unwound.

Somewhere in the end, its possible we could accept everyone is different, and even if we have a DNA binary switch, that's not the whole story, and its just as delusional to claim it is the whole story as it is to ignore that switch.

Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

All I know is that America is safer this afternoon than it was this morning, now that we have ended the ban on transgenders serving in our nation's military.

I just hope Ash Carter made careful preparations, because our recruiting centers will certainly be overrun by eager recruits who have been excluded for so long. Getting the right uniform look and fit is going to be a little more tricky, but this is a paltry sacrifice. I'm just glad we'll have torrents of people joining the ranks. This terrible time of bigotry, ignorance and waste is behind us. Obama is again a hero, as we "honor our values."

I am filled with jubilation as we await the first transgender member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff... no doubt it is just around the corner, and the appointment will be based on merit, not politics.

After all, the military is for winning wars and protecting the country, not a playground for social experiments or other such notions. It's serious business.

Now subordinates will say "Yes, sir!" or "Yes, ma'am!" Depending on what the transgender superior identifies that day. My, my, we are on the cutting edge of... something.

And America shrugs.

AesopFan said...

Ares said:
"And outside of sexual expression is gender expression. If we were good observers we would surely observe a spectrum of behaviors in both X-Y genders, and those bell curves may overlap in certain areas, even if society would prefer a single standard for feminine behavior and a single standard for masculine behavior, and a large fraction of the population is happy to do their best to conform to whatever behavior standard matches their X-Y gender."

This is where, as Stuart puts it, the feminists run off the rails. Back in the dark ages when the RadFemLibs first seized control of the narrative, this is what I understood the argument to center on. Sex (Male, Female, and a microscopic percentage of genuinely androgynous people) is determined by your biological plumbing and your DNA.
Gender is (in fact) a social construct about what kind of personality and behaviour "ought to" go with your Sex. The one-on-one mapping to Sex has always been unfair to those whose personality and life-style choices didn't fit the standard.
Unfortunately, no one ever developed a good way of separating the two factors linguistically, and the words that were settled on for gender are like square pegs hammered into round holes: they just don't fit. Using the wrong words means we can't discuss the problem intelligently.
However, the decay of the idea of gender into the insane propositions now being bandied about by the Left is, in many ways, a deliberate move to make the situation as bad as possible in order to advance the Supreme Agenda of destroying Western Civilization and its Christian foundation and adherents.

Ares Olympus said...

AesopFan said.. However, the decay of the idea of gender into the insane propositions now being bandied about by the Left is, in many ways, a deliberate move to make the situation as bad as possible in order to advance the Supreme Agenda of destroying Western Civilization and its Christian foundation and adherents.

I suppose if many feminists are also atheists, that might be a true agenda, although apparently many atheists would prefer the feminists keep their distance.

In this whole brave new world of shameless self-expressiveness, gender or otherwise, I'm also reminded of Adam Curtis's 2002 film "The Century of Self" talking about how mass production and public relations took over our world to try to expand the wants and desires of people to meet the supply of new materialism, as well as how this new prosperity was dangerous, and how society could be controlled when anything goes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self "This series is about how those in power have used Freud's theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy."

Here's a copy of it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s The Century of the Self (Full Documentary)

It contains all the cringe-worthy aspects of Freud that Stuart hates, but also important to me because even this "science/religion" doesn't greatly help in therapy, its discoveries have enabled people in positions of power to have stronger tools to manipulate the masses, whether politically, or economically in their spending habits, reducing people to passive consumers who don't see any choices outside what is offered to them by mass media and their credit card limits.

At least now we know the enabling modern factor in "The century of self" is easy debt, and until we end that false solution, I'm with the conservatives, that we're going to need a cheaper path to pursue happiness than whatever stray thought enters our advertizing-addled brains. Gender-confusion is the least of our worries.

Anonymous said...

A stalinist whom Stalin would have hated.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dNbWGaaxWM