Deeeep
Another one.
No. This is such a beginner’s error. The words are “something we created” but the underlying reality is not. Calling the moon the moon is social, but that rocky roundish object is not. Naming is human and cultural, but not everything we name is a human artifact.
Only people who lived near it knew about what we now call the Grand Canyon until well into the 19th century, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t there.
Just think about all those untold billions upon billions of poor organisms unable to reproduce, until humans invented the concept of sex.
“Gender categories are something we created to make us intelligible to each other — because of that they feel real and innate, but pretending that ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ predate the human beings who invented these categories to make ourselves legible is a bit weird isn’t it (!!)”
Better.
So if we stop saying “virus” will the pande— Oh wait. can’t say that word either. So the secret of survival is to be unintelligible. Brilliant.
No, Sastra, you silly, gender categories are real, and have always existed.
Humans didn’t even exist until they invented the word “human”. Who was “they”? Oh look, squirrel!
None of these people ever took Biology 101, did they? ALL animals have sexes, not genders. We speak of male and female dogs, cats, fish, birds, whatever. And don’t even get me started on the misuse of clownfish biology as an analogy to transgenderism. Clownfish (and other hermaphroditic fishes) produces gametes as both males and females. No human is currently capable of that and probably never will be. Is that reducing people to their parts? Maybe. But it is a scientific fact.
More to the point all the sex-changing species spawn in water, externally as far as I know. Once internal fertilization evolved in vertebrates it stopped happening (which btw is especially the dumbest thing about Jurassic Park on top of the idea that it’s a “hormone” that determines the sex of the dinosaur)
Has anyone ever proposed an evolutionary explanation for a “gender identity” in the brain which may — or may not — match up with the reproductive system? I’m trying to think of a stage in the evolution of animal species ( or earlier) where those with a gender identity mutation would have left more offspring than those without. It would seem to require starting out with a mating instinct which wasn’t very robust. I don’t know.
Presumably the “gender identity is SCIENTIFIC” crowd has worked that out.
This is on the same level as the claim that “Native Americans couldn’t even see the first European ships, because they had no frame of reference for such things.”
So who is the biology denier, Bruce or Caitlyn? (this is a trick question) :P
And even being intersex is a matter of biology, not identification.
Half a century of epistemic relativism comes home to roost. From Heidegger to Norman Vincent Peale to Trump to this…
You forgot Stanley Fish.
INSTANT TELEPORTATION
You’re welcome. I just created a thing by naming it, and now all our lives will be so much easier. No more commuting, no more sitting on airplanes for hours, no more train delays!
Yay! Thanks Mister Wordjeans!
Heck where’s the magic food replicators and warp drive for zipping around the galaxy and universal translators and Vulcans and holodecks and no more poverty on Earth and and and and…
@13 I did too, it must be easy. :D
That’s what they do in Turkmenistan! And they claim that they have zero cases.
Wait … have people actually claimed that?!
Amy, #6:
I once watched a natural history programme, possibly one of Attenborough’s, about the mating strategies of various animals. In one of the grouper family of fish, an alpha male will have a ‘harem’ of females and will chase away or fight any males that get too close. However, some lesser males have learnt a trick to gain access to a breeding population: by impersonating the females they can often slip past the alpha male unnoticed and then hastily mate with a female or two before the subterfuge is noticed and they rapidly depart.
For some unknown reason those who love to use certain fish as an analogy to transgender never seem to refer to this species with its rather apt behaviour for their example.
Acolyte of Satan:
In an episode of Blue Planet (narrated by David Attenborough), they showed a smaller male cuttlefish mimicking female coloring to slip past a larger male and mate with a female. If I recall correctly, the smaller male did this after the larger male and the female had mated. The female also mated with the smaller male.
Then there was the segment (same or different episode??) about a type of fish, forget which, lives near reefs, the males have big protruding “chins”. Females, when they reach a certain size, metamorphose into males, with male bodies and physiology. In the case they showed, the newly minted male challenged the resident male and won.