my take is just that we should stop caring so much about the precise details of people’s identity and treat it like food preferences: if it becomes relevant we try to explain it in as much detail as is needed, and people we interact with a lot will probably have a good understanding of it.
The comparison to language is actually quite apt since language has the same problem of people insisting it be grouped into neat boxes, when in reality every person basically speaks a unique language that may well vary from time to time.
I’m with you on the first half of this; the second half isn’t bad - just never thought of it like that
Anyway, yes, your sexuality and gender ID in my eyes is similar to a food preference/allergy. If I need to know, please tell me! I might have some questions about it so I can adequately manage our interactions without feeding you peanuts, but other than that, you do you. Similarly, I very much hope you have a bit of patience; I don’t often deal with people that have allergies, so while I’m trying to be sensitive to them, I might fuck up.
Nah, forget about trying to reason with them. They’ll just respond with “I honestly don’t care, I just don’t like it being shoved down my throat all the time!”, even though it isn’t actually being ‘shoved down their throat’, but you can’t reason them out of a subjective delusion like that.
Somebody has a gender you don’t understand. Tough
Also
Somebody doesn’t understand your gender. Tough.
Nothing a discussion can’t clarify.
France is a lie schemed up by the British monarchy in the 1400s to reinforce traditional power structures via a common enemy.
This is a week analogy… french only works as a means of communication because it has internal rules that are objective (as in different people understand the same/very similar thing when hearing/seeing a symbol/word).
Singularity of experience is cool, but anything social requires communication/synchronization.
Even though gender is used as a box or definition people are forced to fit into (and this is bad), reducing human experience to a blackbox kind of singularity is a highly individualist take.
You can work on understanding each other without forcing anyone to fit into your definition…
Language isn’t objective though. It wasn’t handed down from some deity.
Language is a constantly evolving negotiation of new and remixed communications, performed through billions of interactions every single day. It’s collaborative and unpredictable and sometimes someone comes up with something cool and the next day everybody is copying them.
In short, language is socially constructed.
I think it’s a great analogy for gender in that respect.
Objective and socially constructed isn’t a ‘hard’ contradiction.
Yes of course language evolves and so on, but in a given time(period) it needs to be interpretable more or less independently from the specific actor (a dictionary ensures this, even though it needs to be updated regularly).
In other words yeah sometimes language comes up with new stuff. If it would do it all the time, it wouldn’t function
And in French everything has a gender: a table? Definitely a she. A coat hanger? Looks like a he to me. A car? Look at those curves, she it is. That truck though, totally masculine. But the trailer behind it, still a she.
i want to wedgie the people who decided to call it “gender” in grammar, people don’t associate tables with femininity or whatever, it’s just an arbitrary grouping that has no inherent meaning, the only reason we force associations with social gender is because inevitably the words “man” and “woman” belong to one of the groupings.
Like in swedish you can say “timma” or “timme” (hour), but no one’s going to think you’re somehow implying that the unit of time itself is somehow gendered.
I want to understand tho. Like, yeah I don’t need to, to not be an asshole; but I still want to understand everything I don’t. I’m curious like that.
Also, because gender is a social construct, it requires that enough people understand it to a sufficient degree.
As opposed to French, which famously exists as a natural truth of the universe. Even if we had never discovered French it would still be there… waiting.
I think the language analogy is actually very apt, because not every has to understand it, but the people you want to speak French with necessarily have to know it. Otherwise it just doesn’t fulfil any purpose.
Gender’s an overloaded term. Are you talking about the internal feeling, the way someone’s treated by others, the shared sense of a variable that differentiates people, social institutions, ideas, or something else?
Those of course are all related very strongly, but they’re not the same thing. Different models of gender will define of differently, but that’s usually just to best fit the area they’re applicable to. If a philosopher tells you gender is a social construct, that’s because they’re analyzing things through the lens of social construction. Very useful, but merely one perspective.
I mean, I guess there’s a point to that, but isn’t there inevitably a social aspect to it? Especially in this post, where the person is saying others don’t have to understand it, meaning it’s clearly outwardly visible and part of who they are.
I’m not saying you should seek approval from anyone (for your gender nor anything else), because that’ll never happen. But denying the importance of some social acceptance for things in the social sphere is kind of weird, and feels like a “haha, unless…?” thing; you want others to understand and accept it, but the moment you don’t their acceptance becomes irrelevant and you never sought any acceptance at all. It feels like an unhealthy way to cope with rejection.
You don’t have to understand it, but you do have to accept it. That’s not “haha, unless”.
