Guest post: Gender as the inviolable Me-ness of Me
Originally a comment by Sastra on An innate sense of bulllshit.
It comes from the deepest knowledge and understanding of someone’s own identity, their heart, their soul, their brain, their being. Themself
And yet both gender — and sex — are supposed to be social constructs.
It’s quite a contradiction, this denial of objective categories consisting of the objectively true coupled with an intense belief in the innate and immutable truth of one’s own Identity. According to Yascha Mounk ( in his book The Identity Trap) this circle was squared by what’s called “strategic essentialism.”
While it is important to bear in mind the theoretical fact that identity groups are socially constructed, for practical purposes the strategic imperative to encourage the formation of identity groups that can become a locus for resistance against domination must take precedence. Over time, practice won out over theory, and the emphasis shifted from the idea that these concepts are socially constructed to the prescription that they should, to all intents and purposes, be treated as an objectively given fact.
Thus, the ability to believe two opposing things at once. We’re using metaphysical layers.
It would be a good idea I think for the Genderists to consider the distinct possibility that our deepest knowledge of our heart, soul, and being is also socially constructed, given how our nature was and is influenced and shaped from birth by our environment. All the talk of neural wiring causing transgender identities ignores the plasticity of the brain under different conditions. I am willing to entertain the idea that, given different circumstances in my upbringing and socialization, I might now be identifying as transgender. I might even be gay. If nothing is written in stone, fewer things were written in the prenatal brain than we can ourselves discern. Being extremely close doesn’t necessarily give us perspective.
At any rate, the contradiction between gender as social construct and gender as the inviolable Me-ness of Me gets to sit on the Science of Gender shelf next to the contradiction between wanting to eliminate strict binaries between the sexes while screaming that being referred to as one sex when you’re really the other strips away your humanity. Gender GP’s description of “the true nature of gender incongruence “ is nicely incongruent itself.
If one has a multitude of personal characteristics, how do they identify which gender identity they are associated with except through learning how the social structure assigns them? Say i like pink and the preponderance of my personal characteristics lean towards the desire to be domestic, subservient, to spend my time choosing the appurtenances of my physical presentation to signal my availability to the male sex, to want to have roles that are caretaker in nature, etc, how do I know that this is what marks my gender identity as feminine except as a reflection of how these characteristics are designated by the society in which I live? Colors, as much as personal names, pop back and forth between gender. Pink was once a masculine color, Ashley and Kelly were once predominantly male names. But gender identity is fixed and immutable and sometimes deposited in the wrong body? That’s the extraordinary claim.
A pink-wearing male Ashley of 1875 would not be experiencing gender in-congruence, but now in 2023 we must consider cross-sex hormones to help him survive.
I’ve never seen or heard a definition of “gender identity” that was distinguishable from boring, plain-old “personality.” Sure sounds like an example of entities being multiplied beyond necessity that Occam warned against doing.
…and where that places them in relation to gendered societal attitudes. But it’s still an internal immutable thing.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Despite his being captured on this one topic, I still read Mano Singham. A recent post brought his contradictions to light. So on the one hand he and his commentariat are derisively skeptical towards the claims of soul-ness at the point of conception. “What is this “soul”, they ask”. Yet when it comes to magic gender, they are all in. Science, they claim. Just like 19th century scientists were fond of the ether and measuring skulls to prove racial hierarchies.