Exhibition Road
A friend went to the Science Museum – you know, the prototype one, the original one, the one in South Kensington. The friend took pictures of an exhibit. I got permission to share them. They’re from a Wellcome Trust exhibition, Who Am I?
“Who am I?” is a somewhat odd question for a science museum. Science can tell us what we are but not really who. Who questions are conceptual rather than scientific.
“Gender identity” isn’t a scientific term. It’s political. It’s maybe literary, maybe philosophical; it’s conceptual…but it’s not scientific.
“Identity” too is not scientific. “Feeling” male or female is not scientific.
Not science.
I can remember when ‘gender’ was a linguistic term and had no application to biology and ‘sex’ referred to male or female and didn’t indicate copulation. The term ‘to have sex’ is really clumsy,
I fear that this sort of thing is going to become an enduring trend.
Yes I’m reading a book on language at the moment. The gender of a noun just means type of thing. This could refer to masculine and feminine words but languages have categories for all sorts of things.
I have trouble accepting a phrase like “feeling male or female” as meaningful. It comes across as mixing the experience with the explanation. A bit like some believers telling they feel god’s presence in their lives.
I don’t question that they experience something that somehow doesn’t feel right. But how do they know they are feeling male or female? They have only their own experience, so there is nothing to compare it with. Maybe what they feel is the unease of being in a society that pressures them in a role that differs from how they see themselves. But how would that differ significantly from living in a family with expectations you feel you can’t meet or only by somehow denying yourself (partly)?
It just raises too many questions, that don’t seem to have an answer right now.
Exactly. That’s why the whole idea of “feeling like an X” makes no sense.
It does make sense to talk about feeling a mismatch (including an acutely uncomfortable one) between one’s sense of self and what appear to be the social expectations of one’s [sex, race, nationality, religion etc etc etc]. But that takes more words.
[…] yes. I was taken aback by that exhibit too, as were a lot of my friends. We’ve all been a good deal taken aback by this whole claim […]