Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on “Gender itself is a colonial introduction”.

That does not, of course, translate to “men are women if they say they are.” I suspect we’ll find that Butler relies on equivocating between the two – gender as The Rules and gender as “sexual dimorphism.”

I wouldn’t be at all surprised, as the entire genderist enterprise seems to be entirely dependent upon a combination of exactly that conflation, bait and switch (where a genderist will switch gears and meanings from one to the other mid-argument), and what Bjarte Foshaug has characterized as “bad puns,” such as TWAW. All heavily fortified with a generous heaping of “because SHUT UP!”

So much of this stems from questions about just how much of a window (if any) our limited, fallible senses offer on what we might call “the real world” external to our selves, and by extension, if there is any such “real world” at all. Maybe we’re just making stuff up as we go along, with various competing narratives vying for dominance, with an arbitrary, jury-rigged, threadbare, patchwork “reality” imposed by fiat on the rest of the universe by the most recent victor in the constant power-struggle for momentary, provisional, epistemic hegemony, and that any thoughts of a real world somehow underpinning anything are naive, mawkish, wishful thinking.

We are indeed fortunate that we live at a stage in our cultural and intellectual development that we can entertain such debates at all; for the vast majority of our lineage’s time on this Earth, an individual indulging in such esoteric cogitation for any length of time would have been soon eaten by a hungry lion unburdened by any such immobilizing doubts or second thoughts.