There is no pure Within
The markers of masculinity and femininity are not ‘inside us’, as internal essences which we express, and then demand that the outside world recognise as our true selves. Rather, gender identities surround us, in the messages, images and expectations we are born and then socialised into, as social animals. We may be born male or female, but we become feminine or masculine.
That. It’s one reason it’s so annoying when people drone on about their inner sense of being the sex they’re not – this clueless, childish lack of awareness of socialization. How can anybody possibly know that her/his “feeling” about something external and factual is 100% internal as opposed to being a product of many years of being socially embedded? How can people possibly know their “gender” comes from within unless they’ve been raised without social media, tv, radio, movies, books, education…friends, siblings, parents, human contact of any kind? They can’t. There is no pure Within for people raised among other people. The self is always mediated by other selves. The cult of the self is a dead end.
The words we use to describe ourselves and others rest on a consensus as to their meaning. Male or female, like short or tall, or black or white, are words that reference an objective, shared reality. The moment we give in to those who insist they identify as such and such, we violate that linguistic consensus and sense of shared reality.
A different aspect of the same point. We can’t have a pure uncontaminated self unless we’re raised by ants, and we can’t have a personal language unless we want to communicate only to our precious uncontaminated selves.
Now, there’s an instance where I’d buy “they’ as preferred pronoun…
Or even a few years or a couple of months of being “embedded.”
A transwoman on another blog recently wrote:
So it’s apparently not even anything to do with feelings or beliefs. It’s a kind of being which is so internal it not only bypasses socialization and cultural messages, it skips right over self-reflection, too. That’s deep. You might have no idea you’re not the sex you were assigned — until something something parts and now it’s crystal clear. Don’t you feel sheepish?
Which rather handily deals with Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, along with any need to explain yourself.
@YNnB? #1: Surely the pronoun should be “Them”…
BUGGER! You’re RIGHT! How stupid of me to have missed that!
“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
Good man, that Jo Bartosch … ;-)
Think she was one of the first to rally around the flag that Posie Parker raised, to defend the line in the sand that Parker drew with her “adult human female” definition for “woman”. And that as a result she was one of the first to be “deplatformed” by Twitter for calling a spade an effen shovel. As far as I’m concerned, both should get “Woman of the Year” awards for that alone: “the shot heard round the world”, indeed.
But sure do stand with Bartosch in her “the words we use to describe ourselves and others rest on a consensus as to their meaning”; think they should acquire a lot more “currency” than they seem to have at the moment.
And that “currency” seems the crux of the matter: far too many are peddling counterfeits these days, particularly for “woman” and for “female”. Seems that far too many don’t have a clue that such counterfeits for the “coin of the realm”, our common currency – the language which undergirds our common wealth, helps no one but blackguards and thugs.
One is reminded that Sir Isaac Newton, in between inventing calculus and finding the law of gravitation, was “Master of the Royal Mint” and, apparently, oversaw the hanging of those guilty of counterfeiting. One might suggest similar penalties for those egregiously counterfeiting words.