What is “exclusionary”?
There’s this idea that the truth is “exclusionary.”
Of course, that’s true, in a sense. Right answers exclude wrong ones; truth excludes falsehood. But it’s not true in the political sense of “exclusionary,” but many people think it is true. (Thus they exclude the claim that it’s false. Bigots!)
There’s a new comet in the sky of Facebook, called This Angry Inclusionist Enby Lesbian. Lets call him Taiel for short. Taiel explains:
You cannot exclude non-binary folks from identifying with whatever labels we choose.
That strikes me as a very odd way of putting it, but it fits with the overall interpretation of “exclusion” that has become fashionable.
Here’s the thing: it’s not “exclusion” the way saying “you can’t join our club” is exclusion. It’s “exclusion” only in the sense of declining to accept self-evidently false claims as true.
Taiel is right that people – all people, not just non-binary people – can identify with whatever labels they choose, but he’s not right if he thinks that means we all have to accept and endorse those labels ourselves. You can identify as a Saturn rocket; you can’t make me agree that you’re a Saturn rocket.
Truth, reality, facts are all “exclusionary” in that way because that just is how it is.
And they, of course, are practicing exclusion and refusing to allow people to “identify” as they please, if those people are women who don’t go around attaching strange made-up labels to themselves. They insist that we are “cis”, and if we protest that we do not identify that way, too bad. They get to exclude us from their club of special people with pronoun issues.
And lesbians? Yes, by all means let’s exclude them, too, because, well, they are women, too, actually.
So if a Nazi identifies as a not-Nazi? Does that mean he is really not a Nazi? What if a member of the KKK identifies as a not-racist? Does that mean we must accept this self-ID and consider him a not-racist? What if a serial rapist identifies as a not-rapist? Does this mean we have to give Brock Turner a spot on the swim team because he self-identifies as a not-rapist?
Oh, wait, it only applies to people who identify as women, but are not actually women? Okay, got it.
I for one, have had many of my most fantastical notions thwarted by the tyranny of facts. Not even quantum reality has been much help since. apparently, my imagination prefers extremely low probability scenarios.
Taiel, think this through. You can only be in the special, unusual gender category of “nonbinary” if most people, are, in fact, “binary” — not in the open middle, but defining the ends.They are either completely masculine, or completely feminine. You, on the other hand, are different. You’re both; or neither; or neither and both. Whatever you want. The vast majority of the world, however, falls into one of two boxes.
Which you have shoved them in, against their will.
Really, now. If one side of the binary is Pure Manhood ( whatever the hell *that* means) and the other side of the binary is Pure Womanhood ( whatever the hell *that* means) wouldn’t virtually everyone be somewhere in between? Nobody completely fits a stereotype. Shouldn’t we all be non-binary?
No. We are excluded from being non-binary because Taiel won’t let us.
Mean.
Mean and oh so exclusionary. Bigot!
That sentence doesn’t even make grammatical sense. Unless he thinks “exclude” is a synonym for “prevent,” which it isn’t.
I think the mixed-up wording is a deliberate tactic to conceal the fact that he’s making an unreasonable demand. Of course you can’t prevent people from identifying with whatever labels they want. And of course you can’t prevent others from disbelieving people’s self-labels. When you put it that way it’s obvious. He doesn’t like this fact, so he’s resorting to word games to conceal the truth. How very culty.
I’m still trying to wrap my head around “non-binary lesbian.”
Oh, I wouldn’t bother trying. It’s best just to Exclude it.
About Taiel’s use of “exclude” instead of “prevent” – I think he did that because of the connection with TERFs. We’re Evil because we’re Exclusionary. What do we exclude? Well, men from women-only events, for one thing, but also men from the category “women.” This means that the word is very loaded, and invokes the hatred of TERFs whenever it is used. Somehow we “exclude” “non-binary folks” from the category “people who can make words mean whatever they say they mean.” Bigots!
But if, as we are constantly being ordered to believe, neither sex nor gender is binary then everybody is non-binary. Have the TRAs defined themselves out of specialness?
Funny you should mention it, he does exactly that on another post. See the latest.
#5 AoS #8 OB
It’s a word game to a specific end. By framing the issue as one of excluding/including, they imply right from the start of the conversation that this is somehow related to bigoted discrimination. As you say, the linguistically sensible word would actually be ‘prevent’, but then the word game is much harder for them to win.
They can identify however the fuck they want and we can ignore that however the fuck we want.
One of the more irritating memes these days says “I’d rather be excluded for who I include than included for who I exclude”. I think it’s supposed to be profound, but it makes no sense beyond “inclusion good, exclusion bad”. Word games indeed.