The critique of exclusive ontologies
Deepities flying.
Ah the normativity of it. It’s so normative (and white and cis and Republican) to say that ospreys are not mammals or that whales are not plankton. Don’t be like Norman Normative; reach for the stars; call your dick a girl-dick and live on Cloud Freedom forever.
Bad definition to say that male people are male. Male people are not male if they utter the magic word “trans”! That’s not normative at all. Also: you’re stupid.
Therefore, all meanings are arbitrary (and normative); therefore, all words mean what we say they mean – but not what you say they mean of course. Just us, the cool kids.
Time for he/him to give up the title of biologist. No, the physical universe does not ‘decide’ what the definitions of words are. We decide what words to name things in the physical universe, so we can communicate with each other. When words become fungible, they become meaningless, and we can no longer communicate.
Hi, a literal scientist here with more than just something of a claim to the title biologist (i.e. I have the papers to prove it…certified by the AKC and everything!). A transwoman is male. If a transwoman was not male, we would call him a woman. There would be no trans.
A spongy moth is still the same creature as a gypsy moth and the scientific name hasn’t changed period. You can call a man a woman if you like but it still remains the same damn thing it was when it was called a man.
Fucking word games man… it’s like Christian “love”.
Good grief. Yes, the Universe doesn’t ‘decide’ anything. It’s in fact quite cold and uncaring about all of mankind’s cultural works and desires. And for precisely that reason you can’t waffle garb or word definitions to get out from under the Universe. The organism whose biology is structured around producing the small gametes is still the the organism whose biology is centred around producing small gametes. It really doesn’t matter whether you call it a sheila, a rose, a rock, or a man. It is what it is and it’s a different category than the organism whose biology is centred around producing the large gamete. You’d think someone claiming to be a biologist would be aware of that and not try to argue that their chosen word definition is more valid than someone else’s chosen word definition, despite an overwhelming majority giving them side eye (at best).
My goodness, that’s fun writing!
Well Mister Tattoo is very inspirational!
Postmodernism has been waiting for a time when it can reach enough idiots to resurrect itself.
The misused solipsism of postmodernism never really left us. My teenage son identified this garbage about us making up the world with our words as one of the sources of the trans cult. We can’t observe facts about the universe, we can only agree on them. Sex observed at birth becomes sex assigned at birth. It’s all too smart by half. It’s regurgitated platonism, really, shadows in the cave become the inescapable thicket of arbitrary words, making folks lose sight of the reality behind them, or doubt that it even exists.
I remember my brother brought that crap up with me one day in my kitchen. He was quite enthralled by it. I said to him, here is my cast iron skillet. Let’s you and me agree that it’s really a sponge. Then I will whack you in the head with it and it won’t hurt at all, being a sponge. I didn’t end up whacking him, but every time he would veer near to that solipsism I would reach up and ring it with my knuckle. Calling it anything different won’t change how hard it is. And calling a man something different doesn’t change what he is either. Maybe I should have put lipstick on the skillet and called it a trans skillet. But that was years ago, before the current stupid fad.
Funny you should mention it – I just this second read a fine summary of the postmodernism-transgenderism hookup suitable for framing and for sharing here.
Sometimes it seems that these people learned about Saussure’s arbitrariness of the sign and ended their linguistic education there. Yes, the particular sounds we use to represent the concept “woman” are in one sense arbitrary, in that we could use the sounds represented by the graphemes “mujer” or “kadın” or “table”, but of course the word itself has a history.
It’s also true that we don’t have direct access to objective reality–our access is filtered through our senses and is strongly influenced by both psychological and cultural factors. (I could go into a long digression about color perception, but all one really has to do is look at what we perceive as a monochrome wall and notice how much light and shadow and reflection changes its color, without affecting our ability to perceive it as “the same”.) But our perception of the outside world has to have some basis in actual objective reality, or we wouldn’t survive long. Our intuitive notion of physics isn’t Eisteinian or even Newtonian, but it works well enough in the real world to tell us that we’d better dodge the ball that’s coming straight at us*.
As for sex categories, they reflect a basic truth about a sexually dimorphic species like ours, even if they come with a lot of cultural and psychological baggage attached. But the fact is that humans (and, for that matter, other animals) are pretty good at figuring out which of the two basic categories individuals of the species fall into, even if we occasionally make mistakes.
*A roommate of mine who had studied physics in college once told me he hated the word “hot” because everything on earth is cold compared to, say, the sun. Until I pointed out to him that you wouldn’t tell a child “Don’t touch that stove! It’s relatively less cold than is safe for humans!”, that is.
I’m surprised no one has brought up this quote:
“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet”
Thought about it Jim, that’s why there’s still a rose reference in my comment.
Jim Baerg @10
I did! In my response to these two numpties (Stabby and nlbray).
Point went right over their heads, of course.