Is gender a social construct?

[luc]

Here are some thoughts about the 'lines of force' of philosophical concepts and how this intellectual mess came about. This is a gross over-simplification and doesn't do the various philosophical traditions justice, but I thought it might be fruitful to put my thoughts into words here to get a better grip on all this:

One of the major philosophical questions is of course "what is more real - the objective world of things or our internal, subjective world"? Behind it lurk such question as "can we know objective reality, and how? What is reality anyway?"

There are basically two camps:

The empiricists maintain that objective reality is what's 'out there'. There is no a priori knowledge, i.e. there is no truth per se in our thoughts; in order to know the truth, we must look at the outside world and study it accordingly. Taken to the extreme, this view leads to the kind of naive materialistic world view we find today in many scientific disciplines and in atheists: an object is an object, an atom is an atom, screw you and your strange philosophies. Consciousness is nothing but a by-product of the material world, if anything, it only screws our study of the material world and needs to be eliminated from the equation. Of course, faith, 'objective morality' and religion have no place in such a world view. Ultimately, it leads to nihilism: it can't bridge the gap between 'what is' and 'what ought to be'.

The early empiricists still had God in their equation, if only as a distant 'watchmaker' who created the mechanical universe. I guess this left some room for moral reasoning, as in the social contract theories or the utilitarian ethics à la John Stuart Mill: maybe maximizing wealth and well-being while not killing each other might be a good idea. Although these ideas become contradictory once you eliminate God from the equation, as happened later, because you can't answer the question why not killing each other or maximizing wealth is something worthwhile or even what it means, these concepts are still reflected in today's atheistic, 'liberal democracy' world view. The problem remains though that without consciousness/faith/religion it's impossible to bridge the gap between 'what is' and 'what out to be'. No wonder that ultimately, this die-hard empiricist philosophy gravitates towards nihilism: it just doesn't give us any reason to act morally, and there can't be any 'right' behavior, any worthwhile goals, any meaning.

Now the subjectivists (let's call them that), on the other hand, think that we can never fully access the objective 'outside' world; our perceptions are forever filtered by our a priori restrictions/knowledge. That is what Kant thought, and it might have been partly an attempt to save the 'primacy of consciousness' and as such, religion: there are things we can't know about the world out of principle; this leaves room for the mystical. The problem with this is that it can lead to relativism, as in 'your truth is as good as my truth'.

Now the postmodernists took this 'subjectivist' view and warped it into their pathological, schizoidal view of the world. They eliminated God/the mystical from the equation. Everything is subjective, and everything is just a power play - everyone fighting for dominance. This leads to extreme nihilism - there is no good or bad, there is no point in even discussing what's good or bad, everything goes, there is no truth etc. Needless to say, this 'philosophy' is a direct attack on empiricist science, which, despite its philosophical shortcomings, has a lot of merit. Worse yet, concepts such as social contracts or even basic common sense (that the empiricists still somewhat adhere to) not only become obsolete, but a tool for oppression that must be fought. This is what's happening right now. It's the postmodernist mind virus we are facing, and it is all the more dangerous since it preys on the revolutionary drive that exists in many people, especially young people. It also preys on legitimate criticism of empiricist science and uses this as an 'opening' for the infection with pathological content.

The problem though is this: both the empiricist/materialist world view and the postmodernist view ultimately lead to nihilism (though postmodernism leads to a more extreme and dangerous form of nihilism). How to solve this?

I think the solution is to acknowledge that yes, as Kant said, there are things we can't know (the thing-as-such/the essence of things, for example), and there is a priori knowledge and a priori restraints. This leaves room for a 'higher' reality that we can't access directly, for the primacy of consciousness, and for the fruitfulness of contemplating our 'a priori' knowledge. But here's the trick: we can actually study this a priori knowledge and these a priori restraints of our perception by looking at the world! For example, as Jordan Peterson said somewhere, our a priori knowledge is, at least in part, shaped by evolution. It is also shaped by various psychological and psychopathological phenomena. It is shaped by the interplay of our consciousness with 'the real world', individually and as a species throughout time. It may also be shaped by mass consciousness and the influence of 'morphic fields' and other phenomena not yet understood.

In other words, by studying our minds/our a priori restraints and a priori knowledge while simultaneously looking at the 'objective world', we may be able to overcome our internal restraints to an extent, to better tune our perception, and expand/transcend our a priori knowledge. This would be a form of esoteric growth to become better 'consciousness reading units'. It also bridges the gap between the 'objective world'/empiricism and the 'subjective world'/the world of thoughts and concepts. It's the marriage between science and religion, which also leaves room for a deeper discussion of ethics and uses consciousness as a tool to get a better understanding of 'what is', but also 'what out to be', what objective morality would look like.

I think it's useful to think about such things because otherwise we can easily get caught up in the conundrum of 'postmodernists' vs. 'enlightenment', which makes it look like it's a battle between 'science' and 'anti-science', 'liberals vs communism' etc., when the issues go much deeper than that. What's missing in both camps is the mystical, faith, consciousness. I think part of Jordan Peterson's popularity lies in the fact that he critizises postmodernism not only from an empiricist perspective but brings back religious and mystical concepts into the discussion. In his critique of materialism, he criticizes die-hard empiricism and postmodernism alike.

Just my current thoughts on the matter.

 

[Laura]

That's an excellent analysis of the situation, Luc. I particularly liked: "an object is an object, an atom is an atom, screw you and your strange philosophies." Always nice to get a good chuckle when dealing with these issues.

Something interesting along this line is a book I just finished reading by someone obviously heavily influenced by postmodernism. "Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia" by Jean Bottero. It's a pretty good account though he's organized it thematically instead of chronologically which makes more work for me in organizing it. But anyway, he isn't au fait on the history of Judao-Christian historiograpy or he wouldn't have made such absurd mistakes as to attribute things to the Jews that they got later from elsewhere. Nevertheless, he writes:

This must have been one of Mosses' great revolutions in Israel: to replace the purely material maintenance of the gods with the single and sole "liturgical" obligation in life to obey a moral lay, thereby truly rendering to God the only homage worthy of him. p. 169

So he pretty much assumes that the Bible "history" is historical, which it isn't. Anyway, this then leads him to pronounce that the Jews had had taken many of the Mesopotamian ideas and they had been "reworked and radically transformed from within by stronger religious concepts and imaginations that were ultimately more fruitful and more durable than its own."

Now, this is shortly after him pointing out that Mesopotamian religion had developed to a certain point and remained more or less "pure" for something like 3 thousand years. And now, based on his error of dating, he is pronouncing Judeo-Christian reworkings of those ideas as being "more fruitful and durable". Considering that the Jewish part of things was actually ripped off mostly from Mesopotamia and ancient Persia AND Greece (which was also influenced by Mesopotamia via the Hittites and Persians), and was a VERY LATE production, and considering also the conditions of our world as a consequence of this religious underpinning, I would hardly say that the Judeo-Christian religious developments were "more fruitful and durable."

What the Mesopotamians developed could be called Deductive Divination. The majority of cuneiform texts for THOUSANDS of years, with little to no change in the form whatsoever, are lists of events and their interpretation. These LISTS are constructed in the form or protasis and apodosis. That is, an "If.... Then...." statement. This form of divination was not "communicated by a god," but was rather derived from READING THE ENVIRONMENT over and over and over again for THOUSANDS of years. Bottero writes:

The process was intellectually all the more striking... in that it supported an ancient conviction unique to the local culture: the link between the true identity of things and their expression. ... It was thus imagined that the gods, creators of everything (understood as forces/characteristics), each day WROTE 'in relief" through their making of things. Creating things was the writing of the gods, for they made objects the bearers of a definite meaning, of a message they wanted to communicate to humans. ... The gods were imagined to "write" things and, like all those who write, to deliberately have a message passed through those things, a message that preferably involved an activity of great interest to humans... It sufficed to "read" the objects thus created, to examine them, to reflect upon them in order to "decipher" them... Through deductive divination the future was not pronounced by the gods themselves speaking to a human medium, it was inscribed in things that they created. Humans had only to read the future in them, to decipher it, to deduce it, like any written message. ...To do that, as in writing itself, a "code" was indispensable: it was necessary to know all the possible meanings of all the "signs."

Beginning in the third millennium, these Mesopotamian scholars began to patiently collect all sorts of "presages" and the "oracles" of the future that could be perceived through those presages. This began as empirical investigations of good or bad "twists of fate", both individual and collective, that followed various "signs". Treatises were born out of that research and the content was eventually expanded to all classes of reality.

Now, I was reading about all this in the bedroom one day, and happened to visit the lady's room where a copy of Castaneda reposed. I picked it up and read:

Doubtlessly, one of the most worthwhile findings of the ancient seers, especially for them, was the discovery that organic life is not the only form of life present on this earth... Organic beings are not the only creatures that have life...

I countered with a long argument about the definition of life and being alive. I talked about reproduction, metabolism, and growth, the processes that distinguish live organisms from inanimate things. ...

You're drawing from the organic, he said. But that's only one instance. You shouldn't draw all you have to say from one category alone. For seers, to be alive means to be aware. For the average man, to be aware means to be an organism. ...Organic living beings have a cocoon that encloses the emanations. But there are other creatures whose receptacles don't look like a cocoon to a seer. Yet they have the emanations of awareness in them and characteristics of life other than reproduction and metabolism. ...Such as emotional dependency, sadness, joy, wrath, and so forth and so on. ... and love, a kind of love man can't even conceive.

Are you serious, don Juan?

If we take as our clue what seers see, life is indeed extraordinary.

If those beings are alive, why don't they make themselves known to man?

They do, all the time. And not only to seers but also to the average man. The problem is that all the energy available is consumed by the first attention. Man's inventory not only takes it all, but it also toughens the cocoon to the point of making it inflexible. Under those circumstances there is no possible interaction.

I realized that this was exactly the same thing that the Mesopotamian list makers were dealing with because, of course, out of all this activity of presages and outcomes came also "exorcism" or doing something that would change the outcome if possible. The Mesopotamians did not think that stuff was set in stone: people were warned and, most often, had a chance to change their trajectory.

And, of course, this is what the Sufi al-Arabi said also, and I cited him in The Wave, that everything in the world is the "writing of god," so to say. Everything is symbolic in some sense, a sign of a meaning, only that meaning has to be figured out by repeated, close and careful observation. Indeed, there may be some inspired communication, but as the Cs point out, one ought to gather knowledge from as many sources as possible and compare and contrast and evaluate. This is what the Mesopotamians appear to have been doing for thousands of years on tens or hundreds of thousands of cuneiform tablets.

Their moral code was purely pragmatic. Human beings were created to serve the gods, that is, to be successful enough themselves that they could contribute to the support of the house of the god (temple) and the support of the servants of the god (priests/scholars/those who study and teach). And, of course, the only way to be successful was to behave decently and honestly. It was pure pragmatism. The side effect was, of course, that the truly successful person was also generally happy.

Coming back now to the problem of the implosive subjectivism of Postmodernism, contrast that to what the Cs have said.

Life is religion. Life experiences reflect how one interacts with God. Those who are asleep are those of little faith in terms of their interaction with the creation. Some people think that the world exists for them to overcome or ignore or shut out. For those individuals, the worlds will cease. They will become exactly what they give to life. They will become merely a dream in the "past". People who pay strict attention to objective reality right and left, become the reality of the "Future".

Messing with the OBSERVED natural order of things, the LANGUAGE OF THE GODS, so to say, as in "gender fluidity", amounts to attempting to "overcome or ignore or shut out" the REAL world.

Their nihilism will bear fruit: their world will cease.

 

[mkrnhr]

Very often, shady philosophies and ideologies use pompous words like "construct" to hide their shallowness. Post-Modernism, and its manifestations, like gender studies, are a negation not only of truth, but also of reality. It goes further ahead than say materialism in the negation of what could be inferred from reality as value and meaning. Perception is partly subjective, Reality is partly observable, and Truth can be partly inferred from what is observed and perceived through some process that allows information to circulate between different levels of knowledge in a hopefully positive feedback loop.

That some individuals come up with such pathological (and anti-life) ideologies is bad enough, but what's most alarming is how easily it is for people to fall into their traps. Part of the tools of this trap is such superficial affirmations as "everything is relative" (if I've been paid everytime someone said that in my presence I'd be rich) and many others, which sound profound or something but mean nothing. Most of all it invites to mental laziness because if we have it all figured out with such formulae or "memes", then there is no incentive to use one's mind and dig deeper and go to more complex issues like where, when or how does such and such thing applies and why, etc. These pre-processed formulae are like the "because god said so" of the religious fanatics, and time will come when these postmodernists will become as deadly as religious fanatics. The weakening of the mind and all associated cognitive abilities is not a negligible danger when it affects entire generations. It is already producing such nonsensical claims like those of the gender fluidity thing or breastfeeding invented in the 1970 lunacy but claims and ideologies can become actions when hysteria takes possession of crowds already indoctrinated.

If it becomes "okey" to kill babies in the name of "progressivism" (towards what?) then nothing good can ever come from such a philosophy (Warning: a difficult read):

_http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/9113394/Killing-babies-no-different-from-abortion-experts-say.html

Parents should be allowed to have their newborn babies killed because they are “morally irrelevant” and ending their lives is no different to abortion, a group of medical ethicists linked to Oxford University has argued.

and then:

The journal’s editor, Prof Julian Savulescu, director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, said the article's authors had received death threats since publishing the article. He said those who made abusive and threatening posts about the study were “fanatics opposed to the very values of a liberal society”.

They call it "After-birth abortion".

 

[Laura]

Egads. Well, nihilism reigns supreme amongst those idiots, even those who are not aware that they have taken the bait and are being led down the path to the cliff.

Anyway, it occurs to me that something Luc said above is supremely important:

...as Jordan Peterson said somewhere, our a priori knowledge is, at least in part, shaped by evolution. It is also shaped by various psychological and psychopathological phenomena. It is shaped by the interplay of our consciousness with 'the real world', individually and as a species throughout time. It may also be shaped by mass consciousness and the influence of 'morphic fields' and other phenomena not yet understood.

If human beings reject the knowledge/awareness that is shaped by evolutionary processes, there is no outcome but extinction.

 

[Scottie]

Coming back now to the problem of the implosive subjectivism of Postmodernism, contrast that to what the Cs have said.

Life is religion. Life experiences reflect how one interacts with God. Those who are asleep are those of little faith in terms of their interaction with the creation. Some people think that the world exists for them to overcome or ignore or shut out. For those individuals, the worlds will cease. They will become exactly what they give to life. They will become merely a dream in the "past". People who pay strict attention to objective reality right and left, become the reality of the "Future".

Ya know, over the years, many people have taken issue with the concept of "objective reality". This is often misinterpreted as, "there is only one way that things are, period".

But I don't think that's what it means at all.

You could argue (perhaps even correctly) that everything exists - parallel universes where you're the opposite sex, where Hitler ended up ruling the world, etc. Therefore, you might say that either everything is true, or there is no truth.

But that kind of misses the point: We aren't Over There, we're HERE, and now. An event happens. Something very specific happened, certain people were involved, they did this or that. That's the objective reality.

Tomorrow, you wake up, and due to whatever, there is new information that another party was involved, things weren't exactly as we had thought, and so on. So tomorrow, there is a new objective reality - assuming that we really were observing objective reality the day before and not deluding ourselves. That also means that part of observing reality is observing when and how it suddenly shifts. Fun times!

Did it happen because there was something we didn't know about? Was it splitting realities? Was it little green men who used their Chronometric Particle Disruptor to modify the timeline? Who the heck knows. It doesn't really matter!

The same applies when we look at ourselves, our relationships, etc. "It's not me acting like a donkey, it's YOU!" and so on.

So the whole point of all these "dramas" is basically just to trap us into believing something that isn't true in this instant.

The point is not that there is One Big Truth, but rather that it's our job to look at what IS at this moment - and to continue to do so each second of each day, continually refining our understanding of what is.

Anything less invariably leads to personal struggles, disasters, and maybe even a zombie apocalypse.


But, I digress.

 

[Laura]

I think that, in the end, the answer to the question: "Is gender a social construct" has to be a qualified "no". Gender, per se, is the same as "sex", i.e. the equipment a person was born with. Hermaprhodites are extremely rare so can't be considered as another gender.

People who feel "inside" like the opposite sex from the one they were born are still what they are born according to their equipment. If they surgically change that equipment, then they can be considered the sex they have changed to.

Men who like being men and like other men, are still men. Women who like being women and like other women, are still women.

Persons who are "in process of change" are what they are born until surgical procedures change that. The bathroom issue is thorny. Lesbians could prey on other women/girls in a woman's bathroom just as gay men could prey on other men/boys in the men's room. So having strictly men's and women's bathrooms is kind of irrelevant. Bathrooms should probably be uni-sex and simply have private stalls. In schools, one might wish to separate them into girl's and boy's room. Yeah, there may be incipient gays and lesbians, but really, at that age, it should not be considered a done deal.

The nuance here is that, indeed, there are different expectations of gender roles and abilities that are pretty much cultural, but there are other aspects of gender/sex that are the same everywhere. Men impregnate women and are therefore fathers, women gestate and give birth to children and nurse them with milk that Nature provides, and are therefore mothers.

A two woman family, as described above, means there are two mothers. A two man couple as described above means that there are two fathers. However, one of either pair can play the more fatherly or motherly role, care-wise, or share equally. Yes, men can feed babies with bottles, but that is not optimal. Nature has designed mother's milk to be ideal for an infant. Some women cannot nurse their babies for various reasons, but that is a minority and denotes some pathology. Men might be able to nurse a baby, but again, that would be pathology. Pathology is pathology, there is no rational reason to normalize it just as there is no reason to declare that a born psychopath has all the characteristics of the majority of humans; it is a small percentage.

Women do not HAVE to be wives and mothers and men do not HAVE to be husbands and fathers. Men and women should be allowed to work at whatever job suits them irrespective of so-called "gender specific jobs". But note that this should not be taken over the cliff.

Bottom line: there are only two sexes/genders. Period.

 

[luc]

Some further thoughts:

...as Jordan Peterson said somewhere, our a priori knowledge is, at least in part, shaped by evolution. It is also shaped by various psychological and psychopathological phenomena. It is shaped by the interplay of our consciousness with 'the real world', individually and as a species throughout time. It may also be shaped by mass consciousness and the influence of 'morphic fields' and other phenomena not yet understood.

If human beings reject the knowledge/awareness that is shaped by evolutionary processes, there is no outcome but extinction.

This becomes even more apparent if we think of evolution not only in terms of neo-darwinian theory, which proclaims that evolution happens only through chance mutations and natural selection, but in terms of a broader view of evolution: we now know that epigenetic changes ('activation of genes') can be brought about by behavioral patterns, i.e. conscious decisions, and as such can be inherited. If we accept Sheldrake's theory of morphic fields in which we 'tune into' based on certain gene expressions and which give evolution a certain direction that is in part influenced by our own consciousness, the consequences might be even more far-reaching: we can influence our own evolution and that of our species and maybe even that of the cosmos by our own conscious decisions.

All this means our 'evolutionary substratum' is at least partly based on consciousness, which is the fabric of reality, the All/the universe - God. So rejecting this heritage, doing away with our inborn awareness and failing to evolve is to spit in the face of God, so to speak.

That's one part of the equation - the other being the reading of 'outside' reality, the 'language of God', which speaks to us and can provide direct feedback on our state of being and the degree to which we are 'conscious', i.e. make use of the holy names of God that exist in us as a result of the evolution of human consciousness:

What the Mesopotamians developed could be called Deductive Divination. The majority of cuneiform texts for THOUSANDS of years, with little to no change in the form whatsoever, are lists of events and their interpretation. These LISTS are constructed in the form or protasis and apodosis. That is, an "If.... Then...." statement. This form of divination was not "communicated by a god," but was rather derived from READING THE ENVIRONMENT over and over and over again for THOUSANDS of years. Bottero writes:

The process was intellectually all the more striking... in that it supported an ancient conviction unique to the local culture: the link between the true identity of things and their expression. ... It was thus imagined that the gods, creators of everything (understood as forces/characteristics), each day WROTE 'in relief" through their making of things. Creating things was the writing of the gods, for they made objects the bearers of a definite meaning, of a message they wanted to communicate to humans. ... The gods were imagined to "write" things and, like all those who write, to deliberately have a message passed through those things, a message that preferably involved an activity of great interest to humans... It sufficed to "read" the objects thus created, to examine them, to reflect upon them in order to "decipher" them... Through deductive divination the future was not pronounced by the gods themselves speaking to a human medium, it was inscribed in things that they created. Humans had only to read the future in them, to decipher it, to deduce it, like any written message. ...To do that, as in writing itself, a "code" was indispensable: it was necessary to know all the possible meanings of all the "signs."

The interplay of both these elements - our evolutionary history/a priori knowledge and the observable world - allow us to evolve and expand our consciousness/awareness in a constant feedback loop. So, as Scottie said, objective reality is not set in stone; it is that which the universe puts in front of us in this very moment to 'experience itself' through our consciousness and to teach us in order to evolve. Postmodernism manages to deny both: our 'holy' evolutionary heritage and the 'holy' language of God as manifested in observable reality. Both are essentially the same, and denying them can only lead to a deep and hard fall.

With regard to the question at hand, I think our sexes/genders (is there another language except for english where there are two different words for that?) are part of our heritage; they serve a useful goal. Denying this is rejecting reality on many levels. However, denying that there are some abnormalities in this or constructing an ideology out of gender stereotypes is also denying reality. Maybe our (conscious) evolution will one day lead out of the gender duality, but this isn't something that can or should be enforced by an ideological dictator! And if this transcendence of genders happens, it sure will look very differently than how the gender-benders imagine it.

 

[Scottie]

Maybe our (conscious) evolution will one day lead out of the gender duality, but this isn't something that can or should be enforced by an ideological dictator! And if this transcendence of genders happens, it sure will look very differently than how the gender-benders imagine it.

I think that any such change out of gender duality will most certainly look nothing like what is happening now.

I really don't have a problem with the idea of more than two genders - were that to actually become the case - but that's not what's happening right now.

What's happening now is everyone pretending that there are more than 2 genders due to a giant psyop designed to pickle people's minds, pit people against each other, and basically generate chaos.

It's actually quite similar to the Flat Earth thing!

 

[Siberia]

With regard to the question at hand, I think our sexes/genders (is there another language except for english where there are two different words for that?) are part of our heritage; they serve a useful goal.

In Russian, there used to be two words: "pol" (to denote a biological sex) and "rod" (to denote a category of grammar). The latter is used to classify both animate and inanimate nouns, e.g. "sun" (neutral), "river" (feminine), "wind" (masculine).

But now we have three words: "pol", "rod" and "gender". The latter is used to denote a "gender identity" of a person that we discuss here, and is borrowed from English.

 

[Atreides]

and time will come when these postmodernists will become as deadly as religious fanatics.

The great tragedy of the 20th century, in my opinion, is that they already were and are and more so, and people still don't see it. Hell is empty, and all the devil's are wearing white coats.

 

[Phill4]

With regard to the question at hand, I think our sexes/genders (is there another language except for english where there are two different words for that?) are part of our heritage; they serve a useful goal.

In Russian, there used to be two words: "pol" (to denote a biological sex) and "rod" (to denote a category of grammar). The latter is used to classify both animate and inanimate nouns, e.g. "sun" (neutral), "river" (feminine), "wind" (masculine).

But now we have three words: "pol", "rod" and "gender". The latter is used to denote a "gender identity" of a person that we discuss here, and is borrowed from English.

I see it in this manner also, biological gender is the body and what the body is made of, and the other the "social construct" is just the social attributes given to a gender. I think is more for lack of descriptive terms with our linguistic delimitation, I mean one thing is one thing and another thing is another thing.

One thing is to say Michal Jackson is white, which is accurate.
another thing is to say that Michael Jackson is Caucasian which is false. It is an example that may well apply
X person has all the visual aspects of what is consider to be a prototype of contemporary woman, accurate
X person is a woman, inaccurate.
Being a woman is more than looks and hormones or how we feel , taking into account the genetic body and that sort of thing.
In more esoteric terms, the experiences that a transgender "borrows" from the opposite type is more in line with this type of experience and reality and perception is another conceptual deffinition of gender experience.

G. talked about worlds, in one of the beginning chapters when he explains that the world for a scientist is defined in a certain way and follow certain system, and the world for a priest follows its own laws of its own system, but when looking at reality as a whole this is when these systems we use to describe the world clash, and we need to put all concepts in its due place for proper understanding. Otherwise a "social gender woman" and a "biological woman" and a cosmic "feminine force" would be the same thing, and as we know they belong to different "worlds"

I still think their gender is T for transgender, I mean although many transgenders argue that they deserve the right of acceptance, what about people who unwillingly and unknowingly walk into a relationship with a transgender man or woman only to find out later this item?
It seems that their goals is to change the notion of correctness about the perception that a transgender is wrong and all the associations that come with it, result of social indoctrination, yes, but this new indoctrination is also turning into an out of balance notion. That is what I see as the greatest danger. It fits to say that nowdays, there are sufficient means for transgender to lead fairly normal lives as the sex they chose to, so this fight to me seems rather induced and out of proportion.
So I still think that it should be required to name themselves as transgender man or woman rather than man or woman. while at the same time retain enough social tolerance to them.

Discussing the why and the neurological, psychological and biological basis of it is more the line of study to understand how this happens in the first place seem the key to understand how social influences affect a person , and why under our current postmodernist condition this is blooming in this manner.

 

[Nević Nenad]

With regard to the question at hand, I think our sexes/genders (is there another language except for english where there are two different words for that?) are part of our heritage; they serve a useful goal.

In Russian, there used to be two words: "pol" (to denote a biological sex) and "rod" (to denote a category of grammar). The latter is used to classify both animate and inanimate nouns, e.g. "sun" (neutral), "river" (feminine), "wind" (masculine).

But now we have three words: "pol", "rod" and "gender". The latter is used to denote a "gender identity" of a person that we discuss here, and is borrowed from English.

The same words in Serbian, but without borrowing any English phrase. American NGO's who actually runs the country tried to impose "rodna uloga", which would be something like "role of the sex-gender identity", but never catched up in people. You can hear it only on TV.

They also tried to change the words to show if someone who is done some work is male or female (such as in german) but in Serbian it is ridiculous, because its just a title, and cant show the sex of the person. For example "director" is just a title, male or female, no "directoress". It sounds funny and idiotic, so today news TVs in Serbia (all owned by USA) are speaking some strange language which not representing the real language and people's way of thinking.

 

[Laura]

I still think their gender is T for transgender, I mean although many transgenders argue that they deserve the right of acceptance, what about people who unwillingly and unknowingly walk into a relationship with a transgender man or woman only to find out later this item?
It seems that their goals is to change the notion of correctness about the perception that a transgender is wrong and all the associations that come with it, result of social indoctrination, yes, but this new indoctrination is also turning into an out of balance notion. That is what I see as the greatest danger. It fits to say that nowdays, there are sufficient means for transgender to lead fairly normal lives as the sex they chose to, so this fight to me seems rather induced and out of proportion.
So I still think that it should be required to name themselves as transgender man or woman rather than man or woman. while at the same time retain enough social tolerance to them.

Having a separate "gender" for people in transition is guaranteed to put them in the "oddball category" which is not, I think, what they really want. They just want to be accepted. They need to understand that they are a very small minority and if they want to be accepted, just figure out what the reality is and figure out how to fit in, not try to force everyone else to change their concepts for that small minority.

If the surgeries do the job, if they feel to be the sex/gender they have changed to and felt that way before, then they are "real men and real women" and surgery only helped them achieve that just like surgery can help people achieve normalcy in a lot of other situations. Nature erred, so it gets fixed. No big deal. Sure, they would want to tell a potential partner - or maybe not. Up to the individual. If they want to be a man or a woman as opposed to the equipment they were born with, and they do the job, it is up to everyone else to accept them as what they have achieved. They don't have to advertise while in the process.

If the surgeries don't really do the job, then we have a problem: artificial men and artificial women? I don't think that declaring that they are inadequate or faulty in some way is exactly what they want to achieve. "Oh, I was born a man, but always felt like a woman and Nature made a mistake, so I had all these treatments and surgeries, and now I'm still not a real woman because there is no real way to make such a change; I'm just a 'reasonable facsimile.'" I guess, in that case, we WOULD need another classification. But is that what they want? To be set apart as truly oddball, freaks of Nature?

Man (Includes Gay Men.)
Woman (Includes Lesbians)
Facsimile Woman. (Man who feels like a woman inside, has surgeries/treatments, but can't really change things except in appearance.)
Facsimile Man. (Woman who feels like a man inside, has surgeries/treatments, but can't really change things except in appearance.)

Is this what we are talking about? People who are demanding to be accepted as Oddities forever? That's not very conducive to acceptance within the larger group.

We should remember what they are battling against:

Man’s instinctive substratum has a slightly different biological structure than that of animals. Energetically speaking, it has become less dynamic and become more plastic, thereby giving up its job as the main dictator of behavior. It has become more receptive to the controls of reasoning, without, however, losing much of the rich specific contents of the human kind. ...This substratum contains millions of years’ worth of bio-psychological development that was the product of species’ life conditions, so it neither is nor can be a perfect creation. Our well known weaknesses of human nature and errors in the natural perception and comprehension of reality have thus been conditioned on that phylogenetic level for millennia....

Man has lived in groups throughout his prehistory, so our species’ instinctual substratum was shaped in this tie, thus conditioning our emotions as regard the mining of existence. The need for an appropriate internal structure of commonality, and a striving to achieve a worthy role within that structure, are encoded at this very level. In the final analysis, our self-preservation instinct is rivaled by another feeling: the good of society demands that we make sacrifices, sometimes even the supreme sacrifice. At the same time, however, it is worth pointing out that if we love a man, we love his human instinct above all.

Our zeal to control anyone harmful to ourselves or our group is so primal in its near-reflex necessity as to leave no doubt that it is also encoded at the instinctual level. Our instinct, however, does not differentiate between behavior motivated by simple human failure and behavior performed by individuals with pathological aberrations. Quite the contrary: we instinctively tend to judge the latter more severely, harkening to nature’s striving to eliminate biologically or psychologically defective individuals. Our tendency to such evil generating error is thus conditioned at the instinctual level. ...

The above-mentioned statements about human nature apply to normal people, with a few exceptions.

That's what they are up against: millions of years of evolutionary development at a level of psycho-physiology that probably can't be changed.

And, here they are:

In a civilization deficient in psychological cognition, hyperactive individuals driven by the internal doubts caused by a feeling of being different usually find a ready echo in other people’s insufficiently developed consciousness. Such individuals are dreaming of imposing their power and their different experiential manner upon their environment and their society... In every society, a certain percentage of the people has developed a world view a good deal different from that used by the majority. The causes of the aberrations are by no means qualitatively monolithic...

...each society on earth contains a certain percentage of individuals, a relatively small but active minority, who cannot be considered normal. We emphasize that we are dealing with qualitative, not statistical, abnormality. Outstandingly intelligent persons are statistically abnormal, but they can be quite normal members of society from the qualitative point of view.

Thus there are people who reveal morbid phenomena, and such in whom mental deviations and anomalies of various qualities and intensities can be observed. Many such people are driven by internal anxieties: they search for unconventional paths of action and adjustment to the life with their characteristic hyperactivity. In part, such activity is pioneering and creative, which ensures societal tolerance for some of these individuals. Some psychiatrists, especially Germans, have praised such people as embodying the principal inspiration for the development of civilization; this is a damagingly unilateral view of reality. Laymen in the field of psychopathology frequently gain the impression that such persons represent some extraordinary talents. This very science, however, explains that these individuals’ hyperactivity and sense of being exceptional are derived from their drive to overcompensate for a feeling of some deficiency. ...

...in each society there are people whose basic intelligence, natural psychological world view, and moral reasoning have developed improperly. Some of these persons contain the cause within themselves, others succumbed to childhood influences on the part of psychologically abnormal people. Such individuals’ comprehension of social and moral questions is different, both from the natural and from the objective viewpoint; they constitute a destructive factor for the development of society’s psychological concepts, social structure, and internal bonds.

At the same time, such people easily line the social structure with a ramified network of mutual pathological conspiracies poorly connected to the main social structure. These people and their network participate in the genesis of that evil which spares no nation. This substructure gives birth to dreams of obtaining power and imposing one’s will upon society, a fear actually brought about in various countries, and during historical times as well.

It seems that, just like the old Soviet ideology....

The doctrinaire and propaganda-based Soviet system contains a characteristic built-in contradiction:. Man’s descent from the animals, bereft of any extraordinary occurrences, is accepted there as the obvious basis for the materialistic world view. At the same time, however, they suppress the fact that man has an instinctive endowment, i.e. something in common with the rest of the animal world.

The comments above, mine and Lobaczewski's, seem to largely describe this whole gender fluidity business.

 

[thorbiorn]

Wow!! just wow. This is all insane. What a world we are living in. I can’t believe it’s got so bad that I agree with tucker Carlson, of all people. Every day I see more and more how truly horrifying it is living with psychopaths and “their” world. Call me bitter but I pray for cosmic intervention everyday now.

This whole issue was nothing more than an oddity for me not really understanding what all the hoopla was about. It's sometimes hard to grasp just how different some other people think from how I think. It just shows how disconnected from reality one can become when one accepts wrong ideas as true. The whole crystallizing on a wrong foundation idea, I guess. But this has been a great thread for detailing all the intricacies of this issue which really shouldn't be an issue at all. What a mess! I have to admit I'm kind of with Nima on being ready for whatever "help" the C's are referring to. Even of the cosmic variety. Or, "beam me up Scottie!" Geezus

Although I hope for the Sun to come out again after a few days of overcast, I am still not hoping for Cosmic Intervention in terms of widespread destruction. Okay, if it comes, I hope I can accept the consequences, provided I survive, in an adequate manner in terms of responding, but it is harder for me to genuinely wish for such destruction to occur. For me it is a bit like wishing for suicide of the collective kind. I can't get myself to support that, perhaps because I have known a number of people who took their own lives? Sure, it was their choice, but hardly the only one they had! It seems to me that beyond all the turmoil we live through now there is much work to be done. This work may turn out be become more complicated if we are seriously traumatized or even dead due to a cosmic event that happened because so many wished for it.

 

[Seppo Ilmarinen]

With regard to the question at hand, I think our sexes/genders (is there another language except for english where there are two different words for that?) are part of our heritage; they serve a useful goal.

In Russian, there used to be two words: "pol" (to denote a biological sex) and "rod" (to denote a category of grammar). The latter is used to classify both animate and inanimate nouns, e.g. "sun" (neutral), "river" (feminine), "wind" (masculine).

But now we have three words: "pol", "rod" and "gender". The latter is used to denote a "gender identity" of a person that we discuss here, and is borrowed from English.

In Finnish language there's normally been only one word for sex and gender ("sukupuoli"). Only recently there's been some push to use word "social gender" ("sosiaalinen sukupuoli"). But that's not part of normal language people use. We also have only one word for he and she ("hän"), which is "gender-neutral" by design. From this perspective too it's been really hard to grasp this whole movement, for example the idea of adding new pronouns and people who zealously advocate this could be straight from Monty Python episode - their mindset is so extreme and bizarre that it's hard to distinguish from parody.

I just can't see how gender could be a social construct. There's biological realities like the whole endocrine system and evolutionary aspects of our mind/brain, which have direct and often unconscious effect in our behavior. Societal environment can effect how we view ourselves (sexuality, gender roles) and there's masculine and feminine energies that can vary largely from individual basis, but you can't tear social, psyhological and biological reality apart. Perhaps deep down these SJW's don't want to acknowledge that we have deep roots into primal world and that these instincts play huge part in our everyday life, even if our direct experience creates illusion that we have "everything under control". Without proper knowledge it can be existentially frightening to sense this.

So they have bias to view human being as plasticine, something to mold and shape into anything they wish - like creating your own reality. Maybe turning something fundamental as biological sex into social construct is ultimate proof of this fantasy for them.