Guest post: If Og and Mog hadn’t known which was which
Originally a comment by What a Maroon on Hollowed out?
This hits close to home, for reasons I mentioned in the other thread. I hope that people don’t take this as a reason to dismiss the branch of (non-Chomskyan) linguistics that Vyv espouses, which goes under the (unfortunate) name of “cognitive linguistics”.
But anyway, yes, “gender” is a sociolinguistic construct. And I think he would agree with me when I say that the concepts expressed by language are not a direct reflection of an objective reality, but rather a result of our embodied interaction with the world, as filtered through our senses and our brain and also influenced by the culture we’re raised in.
But that doesn’t mean that those concepts are arbitrary, with no basis in reality. We wouldn’t survive long if our mental representation of the world (however incomplete and distorted it may be) had no relation to the real world. You have to be able to distinguish between an apple and a rattlesnake, and know that one is good for eating and the other is something to avoid, even if your language doesn’t distinguish between apples and pears, or red and orange. And knowing that there are two sexes that are immutable, and being able to distinguish between them, is pretty key to the propagation of our species–we wouldn’t be around to argue about gender if Og and Mog hadn’t known which was which. But that is not gender essentialism (it may be sex essentialism, I suppose, but then some things do have essential characteristics). Gender essentialism is saying that if you like to play with dolls and dress up in frilly clothes, you must be a girl regardless of your anatomy. Or that you have an inner sense of your gender that overrides your anatomy.
I know y’all know all this, but it irks me to see someone whose linguistics I largely agree with making such a weak, dishonest argument.
Hear, hear!
I get the sense that some linguists, like some philosphers, get tangled in their own webs and lose sight of the big picture.
One not only has to ask why there’s need for a meaningful distinction between an apple and a rattlesnake, one must also ask why some people want to erase or modify the distinction between an apple and a rattlesnake, or an apple and an orange, or — obviously, because this is what we’re really talking about — between a man and a woman.
Are we trying to correct a logical error here? Is something broken? Is the current means by which we categorize men and women not working? I daresay it’s not broken, because when we investigate the motives behind those who claim to have been miscategorized, we see that they themselves still rely on the current definitions of men and women for everyone else, they just don’t like how the categorization system maps onto themselves. Indeed, they must rely on the current definitions of man and woman in order to know how to fashion the opposite-sex disguises they wear. Men who claim to be women and women who claim to be men (or who claim to be neither men nor women) are in fact more aware of both gender and sex stereotypes than others, and the argument for gender identity paradoxically relies further on sex distinctions than the categories it seeks to overthrow.
In the current definitions, men and women are simply males and females, and while there are stereotypical differences between the two, deviations from norms don’t invalidate the categories. Stereotypically feminine-dressed males are still men, and stereotypically masculine-dressed females are still women, because there is a vast array of different properties between males and females beyond their superficial presentation. Gender identity seeks to reinforce the categories man and woman so strictly that deviations from stereotypical presentation necessitate recategorization.
It’s as if to replace the distinction between apples and oranges — different fruits which have a vast array of different properties — with the claim that all apples are red and all oranges are orange, and then to claim that if you buy a can of orange paint and dip an apple in it, then toss the apple into a basket of oranges, that everyone is obligated to act as if they can’t tell it’s an impostor.
Upon seeing an orange-painted apple in a basket of oranges, the reasonable reaction should be to ask, “why has someone gone to such trouble to pass that apple off as an orange,” not “I’m so much cleverer than everyone else, only I can tell that this orange-painted apple represents how complex the sociolinguistic concepts of apple and orange are.”
For all Evans’s talk of how apples and oranges — or men and women — are mere sociolinguistic concepts, the real world puts the lie to it. Many transgender advocates don’t even argue that gender identity is a concept separate from the material reality of their sex — rather, they argue that their sex was incorrectly “assigned” at birth. It’s not that some females can be men, it’s that I was never a female; there was a terrible mixup back at the hospital when I was born, and I’ve been male all along!. Which is to say, even if you do grant that “man” and “woman” are mere sociolinguistic concepts uncoupled from material facts, the activists are so acutely aware of how untrue that is, they almost inevitably up the ante and take aim at material reality itself.
And that’s the danger of this game, of trying to shift “man” and “woman” into malleable concepts instead of material facts: the people strugging with confusion about sex and gender identity — the apples who paint themselves orange — don’t usually settle nicely into the orange basket. They struggle to fit in, and they often suffer, sometimes terribly, sometimes to the point of suicide. Eventually it becomes crystal clear that orange paint does not an orange make, because their shape is a little off, their skin texture is all wrong, they have a different firmness, they don’t smell the same… and most importantly, they don’t work the same in the kitchen. You simply cannot make orange juice with an apple.
Look at the motives behind the painted apples and it becomes clear that all linguists’ babbling about sociolinguistic concepts mean nothing in the real world, and it was doing vastly more harm than good, including to the very people it was intending to help.
It’s better to say upfront that apples can’t really be oranges than to lie about it.
Ah, hell, thanks, Ophelia.
Artymorty, no way I can respond right now to your very thoughtful (as always) comment, but as for this:
Yes, definitely. Lakoff, for example, who has done a lot of good work, tends to fall for the One Big Idea fallacy (I don’t know if it’s a real fallacy, but it should be). And don’t get me started on Chomsky, or even worse Pinker. My favorite linguist is Ron Langacker, who you’ve probably never heard of if you’ve never studied linguistics, which as far as I’m concerned is a compliment. He’s concentrated on coming up with a theory of language without leaving his lane, and from my perspective he did a very careful and thorough job of explaining how language works, and how it’s connected to other cognitive processes.
All this with the caveat that my professional work since I finished my degree has nothing to do with pure linguistics, so I’m not really up on where the field has gone in the last 15 or so years.
Very well put. They’d be lost without the hated “gender binary.” Without it, they can’t lay claim to being the other sex.
Update! I’ve revised and expanded my comment into a Substack article:
https://artymorty.substack.com/p/the-apples-who-paint-themselves-orange
What a Maroon, I’ve quoted your excellent piece extensively. I hope you don’t mind.
Maroon, thank you. I was really inspired by your words; they’ve energized me to break a two-month dry spell in my article postings. Cheers.
I’m not a cunning linguist, so I have only the understanding of language that a decent primary and secondary education in various languages gives a person, plus a lifelong amateur interest in etymology.
My take on this is that the apparent confusion of the instigators of the language obfuscation is entirely deliberate, and intended, totalitarian-style, to make it difficult or even impossible for ordinary people to discuss, or eventually even think to themselves, unapproved ideas.
English in particular is a language with a very wide vocabulary. Humans, like many other animals, use sounds to communicate with one another; i.e. to convey an idea in one person’s head as faithfully as possible for another to visualise the same idea. In English, these sounds are called words, and may comprise many syllables.
Aside:
Where I live, I always know when there is a cat in the garden, because the blackbird yells “Keck-eck-eck-eck-eck-eck-eck-eck-eck…” as it flies down to harry it; all the other birds understand that sound just as if it were a word – predator – but my cats, sitting safely on the windowsill indoors, make a close approximation of that sound when they see the blackbird, or a bird of similar size. Only adult male blackbirds are black; females and juveniles are brown, but all make the same alarm call, unlike thrushes. However, my cats can’t distinguish between them. Same word, different meaning.
In English, we have words (not an exhaustive list) for our own species, – humans, people; for the sex of people – male, female; for the age of people – baby, infant, toddler, child, adolescent, teenager, adult; and for the sex of people in two broad categories – man for an adult male, boy for an immature male, woman for an adult female, and girl for an immature female.
Those words all map onto material reality, even if the boundaries between some of the categories are fuzzy, and are applied differently in different societies over distance and time, and in different circumstances within those societies.
We also already have words for the concept of the appearance and behaviours expected of members of each sex – masculine and feminine.
I take issue with any so-called linguist who tries to map the meaning of those words onto the words man and woman, because it is obvious that s/he is trying to make arguing against the illogical assertions of the gender cult at least very difficult, if not impossible.
Unfortunately, the cult’s acolytes are already in schools, teaching our society’s children a confused and greatly impoverished version of our language, with the purpose of making communication between the generations on this subject impossible. When two people who believe that they are communicating the same meaning by using the same word are actually understanding that word completely differently, they aren’t changing material reality – but someone is behind the scenes changing the political landscape, and it would seem that the aim of this change is totalitarian. The narcissistic sociopaths driving the change want to be in charge, be able to get whatever they want, and have everyone else turned into mindless drones to do their bidding. Every narcissist I’ve ever met has treated other people as mobile bits of scenery, to be manipulated into doing whatever the narcissist wants, and every single one of them has done their level best to ensure that the people they know never meet one another without their supervision, usually by bad-mouthing their ‘friends’ to one another, and falsely claiming that one party has insulted the other.
The cult seems to have realised that it can’t change the language of educated adults, so it has been targetting youth – and bad-mouthing those adults. How much better it is to persuade a vulnerable autistic and/or proto-lesbian child that her own parents are nasty bigots who hate her, whilst persuading her that she’s really a boy, born in the wrong body, than it is to try to get realist parents on board.
And it all starts with pretending that words don’t have accepted meanings, and that changing the meaning changes reality.
Not at all, though if I had known in advance that this would happen, I would’ve taken the time to think up a better comparison than apples and rattlesnakes.
Apples and rattlesnakes make a perfect cromulent comparison!
Yes. And “NO DEBATE!” is designed to prevent people from discovering that these changed meanings have been imposed, and to work out a common understanding which would reveal the trickery, because without that trickery, they have no case. Gender ideology is grounded on lies and deception, and we’re not allowed to point this out. Material reality is “bigotry” and “hatred,” and we are supposed to accept this and stop talking about it and leave the field to the genderists.
@Maroon, I think it underscores the importance of real differentiation appropriately: if you paint an apple green, it still won’t bite you; if you paint a rattlesnake red, it well might. Creepy dudes lurking around the women’s toilets are a bit like red-painted rattlesnakes.
@tigger, I think a bit more could be said here:
Is it that you object to “masculine” and “feminine” being asked to do work for which they are not suited, such as in the epithet “masculine gender?” Or that we are underusing those words?
I find the words surprisingly underused for their appropriate meaning. For example, many of these boys and girls falling prey to the gender cult are feminine boys and masculine girls. They may well grow up to be gay or lesbian, they may be more or less feminine or masculine when they grow up, but they will 100% be men and women, respectively. We don’t need to talk about them being “gender diverse” or “gender non-conforming” nearly as much as we do. Maybe if we just used the words we already had it would take some of the pressure out of it.
I have a rather masculine girl – she’s strong and beefy, and wears a mullet and cargo shorts every day. She loves math and being strong. That doesn’t make her a boy, and I’m happy she knows that. She’s not a person of the “feminine gender,” she’s just female, and she can be female any way that she wants, which right now isn’t a very feminine way. Yes, most of her nerdy girlfriends (who are all more feminine than she is) are using weird, unfeminine names their parents didn’t give them, but she isn’t; I like to think we have immunized her against that contagion.
Papito, I meant that those words are being avoided, probably deliberately, by the cult; and they are pretending that the words man and woman are actually and solely describing social roles, when everyone knows that they are describing a material reality. Hence the huge tantrums at the dictionary definition of woman, and the nonsensical assertion that it’s transphobic to state it.
I’m a masculine-looking woman, but (despite almost losing myself to the cult early in the last decade) I’m not, and never can be, a man.