That’s easy for you to say
Excellent: we’re having the conversation about difficulty/complexity versus truth. It’s an important conversation.
I wouldn’t mind, but the people telling me I don’t appreciate the complexity of the issue are the same ones saying ‘a man is a woman if he says he’s one. This isn’t difficult. How can you not grasp it?’
It’s complex when they want it to be complex and easy when they want it to be easy.
But more to the point, it doesn’t matter that it “isn’t difficult.” Of course it isn’t difficult; making stupid flat nonsensical assertions is laughably easy; so what? The point is, it isn’t true.
Eyes on the prize, people.
If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance (biological reality), baffle them with bullshit (gender ideology). Some are better at it than others, but Butlerian pseudo-complexity is about as good as it gets (and by good I mean bad).
It’s amazing how many people think Butler is some kind of deep philosophical genius, rather than seeing her as someone who writes in such turgid jargon intentionally because she knows perfectly well that expressed in plain language her work would have been dismissed out of hand as lacking merit, sense or meaning.
Bullshit comes in at least 57 varieties, give or take one or two… hundred.
An absurd exchange in the replies to that comment:
“Because I know.” The rest of the verbiage amounts to nothing, all he has is a naked faith claim. Bear in mind that this person styles himself as ‘Dr.’ and appears to be a retired psychologist – a person with training in the vagaries of human experience – and yet believes feeling sure = truth.
P.S. I have never had much trust in psychology as a science.
Holms:
I think that it is not so much psychology that is the problem. Rather, in my experience, it is those who take it up and study it as a profession. In my experience, they have below average insight into themselves.
Holms: see, TOLD you it was a religion
Holms, yes, that Amaya Deakins fool is a real piece of work. He’s the one I had a bit of hilarity with a week or two ago after he asked JKR if she would change her mind about trans people if one trans person rescued her from an attack by another trans person. He is proFOUNDLY dense.
Sure, proselytizing about trans ideology on twitter is a whole ‘nother thing — it’s not really ‘activism.’
and…
Is that your professional diagnosis, Doctor?
You know the sun will rise and set because, like probably every light-sensitive land animal (and many aquatic animals) with something like a central nervous system, you’ve experienced it every day of your life. Moreover, as a human with the capacity to use and understand language, you can benefit from millennia of human experience.
The color blue is not a simple thing. Our ability to perceive and name colors is dependent on a complex interplay of physics, biology, psychology, culture, and language, and it’s not always obvious whether something is blue or violet (or green, or black). And if you’re a lifelong Russian speaker, you probably consider light blue and dark blue different colors.
As for “everything will be ok”, that’s a nice sentiment, but experience doesn’t always bear that out.
And none of that has much to do with what sex you are.
This is exactly the crux of it. We’re only ever given our one, single, lonely perspective on what it is to be human. The only skin we inhabit is our own, the brain/mind we use to sense, filter, and reconstruct the world is the one inside our own head. We can’t shop around to try different existences on for size, to take test drives in other peoples’ minds or bodies. Autobiography and fiction offer imaginative sketches of others’ subjectivities, but not the experience. We don’t get blisters on our feet or suffer from dehydration from reading someone’s account of their desperate trek across the Sahara. A map is not the territory. To put it trivially, does it make any sense to express a preference for a flavour of ice cream you can never taste? How could one claim to like it “better” than the one and only flavour you will ever have? All you can see is the apparent satisfaction of those eating it (each of whom is, like you, limited to a single flavour of their own). You can’t swap your tastebuds for their’s to declare a “winner”, to say that their’s is indeed, a better flavour than your own.
Without any possibility of a standard of comparison, there is no way that anyone can declare a stronger preference for, or affinity to a different form of being, an existence other than the one they have always had and will always have. Within limits we can change our circumstances and our attitudes towards them, but we cannot step outside our own particular subjectivity and into anyone else’s. I can only ever know what it’s like to be me. I happen to be male, but I have know way of knowing how much of my “meness” is due to my maleness. Nor can I winnow out the effects of my heredity, or the effects of my upbringing in the time and place into which I was born. Would I still be “me” if I’d been born 700 years ago on an island in the Pacific? Probably not, but I can never know. I can never say that this “other, Pacific island, female me” is more the real me than current Canadian, male me. The arbitrary inclusion of different time, place, and sex are for effect only. I’m equally as incapable of choosing a “preference” for the subjective existence of the person sitting next to me on the bus, whoever they are. We are each limited to who we are; you can learn, grow, and change, but you can’t step outside of yourself. You can only imagine doing so, but to live in a fantasy is not healthy, and ultimately, not really possible. You are inevitably bound to engage with reality at some times, at some level, even if it’s no more than what is required to meet the material needs of life and metabolism.
Every day on my way to work I see any number of people who seem to be bound to reality by little more than the needs of their physical bodies. Whether they are afflicted by mental illness, or the effects of drugs, they seem to be in a world only they can see or hear. I cannot imagine what it must be like, but from my own singular perspective, I can, in this instance say I have a preference to stay where and who I am. But this is based solely on my perception of the external appearance of their behaviour and circumstances. As unlikely as it may seem to me, they may be experiencing ecstatic euphoria that makes them, for all intents and purposes, happier than I presently am. But A have no way of knowing this, not for certain. Their own circumstances are as unique to the forging of their experience of and response to the world as my own. This is not an attempt to romanticize or glamourize mental illness or drug addiction, it’s simply a matter of offering an additional perspective on the impossibility of expressing an innate preference for other states of being from which one is forever barred.
That’s not to say there’s nothing going on inside the head of someone who feels they are trapped in “the wrong body” , it’s just something other than what they are claiming, which is simply impossible. The person suffering from anorexia is suffering from something, but it has nothing to do with obesity. There’s something else going on. The distress is real, but the cause cited by the sufferer is incorrect. There is already some kind of disconnect between the body and the person’s body image; attempts to change the body to bring it into conformity with this distorted self-perception are doomed to failure. Trying to bend reality to match a mistaken impression of it is a losing proposition. Better to correct the mistake. Easier said than done, of course, but it’s easier than trying to correct reality (and forcing everyone else around you to go along for the ride).
One phenomena that I believe is better captured better by the answer “Because I’ve known my whole life”? Sexual orientation.
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I’m willing to bet that group showers are a source of rather unbearable anxiety and shame for members of either sex, especially once puberty begins.
No kidding @12, I dreaded PE for that very reason. The girls weren’t required to strip naked and shower, but the boys all had to. I thought it was akin to being in prison or the military or something. No modesty allowed for boys, and you would get thrown in fully clothed if you refused (ask me how I know). It was creepy.
That’s some agreeable theory of mind, YNnB. I’ve had some of the same thoughts at times, often with animals when I was younger; horses, dogs, birds, fish, etc. Needless to say I enjoyed reading Nagel. I’ve kind of given up on trying to understand people on some level due to disillusionment. :/
Jeez! Why on earth?
Because boys are stinky and don’t have feelings? OBviously.
Right? What took me so long is the problem. :(
Oh that NiV? I thought Ophelia was sarcasming my disillusionment.
And yes this was in California in the 60’s too, we weren’t all having love-ins, some of us were being institutionalized (and so,etimes terrorized) by the education system.
Stinky didn’t begin to describe the boy’s locker room either, it smelled more like a goat pen in a rainstorm, so creepy and gross at the same time. I would have rather put on a hazmat suit than disrobe.
Late 80s in high school, we didn’t have mandatory showers normally, but to get to the pool during the semesters you had swimming as the course, you had to do the following:
1: Strip down completely in the main locker room
2: Run up the stairs to the changing room where you got your school-provided (and laundered) swimsuit
3: Run through a U-shaped Shower-Hall sort of space that hosed you down before entering the actual pool.
Leaving was the reverse of this–you ran through shower to rinse off the chlorine, stripped off the suit so that it could be laundered, then ran down to the locker room to get dressed.
I’m reasonably certain the girls had to do the same thing, but there was never any actual confirmation of that.