Fascinating thread on false taxonomy and the current trans moral panic

Objectively 99.9% of humans fall into what we define as male and female. While the differentiation is a construct, it is a pretty obvious one based upon science. Historically gender has been synonymous with sex, but now weve decided that anybody can be whatever gender they want, and it seems like gender is now synonymous with stereotypes.

But ultimately we were trying to move away from artificial distinctions. Race. Sex. Sexual preference. Gender. Whatever. The initial goal of civil rights seemed to be that those didn’t matter in terms of rights, the workplace, stereotypes, etc. Now we have gone 180 degrees into identify politics and these things define who we are.

Perhaps I didn’t completely follow this guys winding rant, but it seemed to me he was pointing out that all classifications are arbitrary and reality is everything is a spectrum and differences are incremental. There is some truth to that, but how does that align with identity politics, where classification defines us and is the most important thing? We aren’t doing away with classifications, we are doubling down on them and just redefining them

 

I blame Hollywood. When every new show has the alphabet checklist, even with a small cast, it becomes a bit obvious.

oh, and Tik Tok whatever that is,

Going out to water the lawn now, so I can tell folks………

 

The majority of the people making essentialist arguments on things like gender or race are the ones that oppose trans rights, are hostile to homosexuality and are generally racist/xenophobic in their outlook on things like crime or even how good you are at being civilized. There are a few people like JK Rowling who arent frothing conservatives but nevertheless make essentialist, and flowery arguments on what womanhood entails, or who is or isnt a woman.

Once again I ask anyone to read any theory on the stuff informing these ideas, it argues the opposite of what you are saying! Its anti-essentialist. It seeks to make categories less restrictive and rigid while acknowledging that they do mean things to people. Perhaps it comes across differently in popular discourse (particularly when its people just coopting academic jargon), but the ideas are not grounded in that at all! The people majoring in gender studies or whatever are the opposite of the people that would say "gender defines who we are."

 

Panic over transgenders? What panic? There's only five stories on the Fox News homepage about transgenders at the moment. Just the lede story and four more.

 

OMG, any classifications are arbitrary when things exist along a continuum is an old, lazy, dumb pseudo intellectual argument. I guess odd, even, prime, real & transcendental numbers are just arbitrary classifications.

ar·bi·trar·y
adjective

1. based on random choice or personal whim, rather than any reason or system.
   "his mealtimes were entirely arbitrary"

&, what the hell is wrong with simplifying things? Are my kitchen counters hard or soft? I say hard. But "hardness" is probably a continuum. But, then in virtually every case, you could never accurately state hardness. It would be like trying to tell someone the value of pi. You either "arbitrarily" cut it off or spend eternity spewing numbers. remember, Cantor died in a mental hospital.

 

What is the counter made of, EXACTLY?

There is a list.

 

I'm not buying that men, women, boys, and girls are cultural constructs.

Also, the concept that we know who the oppressor is and who the oppressed is based on our arbitrary categories is a cultural construct. As you can see sometimes our cultural constructs are wrong about who the oppressor is and who the oppressed is.

 

Lol, so you make a post about the false taxonomy of male, female, boy, girl, man, woman, and you can't see the obvious parallel that placing people into buckets of oppressor and oppressed is a false taxonomy?

And you are SURE that is correct. OK, fine.

 

What is majorly ironic about that twitter thread is the twitter dude who posted it is trying to abolish the certainty of the male-female binary because he believes it serves the purpose of oppressing people.

How can one ignore the historical fact that the oppressor-oppressed binary dwarfs the male-female binary in the amount of global human suffering that it has caused. Anyone who has had any kind of education on the history of the 20th century knows this. The video in post #10 is exhibit A of the oppressor-oppressed binary and the kind of violence it can lead to.

 

Is this any more informative to the issue than someone posting a video of 6 ft 3 230 transgender female (biological male), with a mustache, shouting loudly at a young store clerk for misgendering “her”?

Or perhaps the thread of a transgender female from prison getting out a raping a little girl?

How do these extreme cases facilitate intelligent discussion on a complicated issue?

 

This is what I was saying. Placing groups into buckets and determining groups A, B, and C are the oppressors, and groups D, E, and F are the oppressed is the highway to embracing a really prejudicial view of people. People oppress people, and they can come from all kinds of groups.

 

the pt wasn’t what it was made of, the pt is is what it is made of hard or soft

 

I'm rolling with Mr. Rogers here.

 

Who would have guessed this would be offensive and oppressive 30 years later.

 

Which goes back to my point that oppression is the social construct.