Hollowed out?
And just one more thing about this Evans fella, because I hadn’t seen it, and because he’s being a ridiculous dogmatic twerp in that he’s blocking anyone who disputes his claims even though they are actual scholars in the field and he is not.
His polite, informed, in no way misogynist or anti-feminist sharing of his exciting article:
Ouch:
We agree that gender is a sociolinguistic concept, and therefore isn’t necessary in the first place, given the harm it wreaks on women. GCs don’t think gender identity must necessarily align with biological sex – we (mostly) don’t think it is a real or useful thing. We think the word « woman » describes biology, not a sociolinguistic concept. This is not tricky and I have no idea why you’ve failed to engage with what you are trying to tear down.
I have a tentative idea why. I think it might be because he’s not very sharp.
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.
Indeed. It’s insulting.
[…] a comment by What a Maroon on Hollowed […]
I get the impression that if he were to be invited to a debate, he would set the following conditions:
No women.
Nobody but him is allowed to speak.
No questions afterwards, just rapturous applause.
If anything was ever a risk of “hollowing out” feminism, it would be the choosie-choice, “sex work is work” version which sees submitting to exploitation as “empowering”. It’s this lot that has betrayed feminism by “expanding” the definition of “woman” so that it encompasses, in its own view, “all women”, including those who are men. Transmaidens have succeeded in turning formerly feminist organizations founded by women, for women, into “inclusive” platforms to spread gender bullshit, and attacking feminists who actually dare to point out who is, and who is not a woman. The Emperor is in womanface, and nobody is supposed to notice or comment, just shut up, bow, and let him into the women’s toilets. And prisons, and rape shelters, and sports teams, and locker rooms, and jobs, and awards, and short-lists….
Without an understanding what is to be a woman, a girl, a female, there is no feminism. If some other “feminism” can’t articulate the boundaries of that set, then that “feminism” is not feminism. If “GC” feminism is the only feminism that remembers what a woman is, then no, it hasn’t hollowed out the feminist movement. It is rather the last remnant of actual, pure feminism, free from male infiltration, from overzealous empathy, and from crypto-Marxist appropriation. Feminism is for females. It’s in the word, which used to be obvious before someone had the bright idea that “feminine” ought to refer to something other than sex. Males don’t get to lay claim to any part of feminism, and females can’t give any part away, and nobody gets to undefine women and girls out of the movement that is theirs.
I feel like I’m reiterating a comment I made nearly four years ago responding to some asshole’s attempt to support Genderism by appropriating Free to be You and Me. Because oh hell no, that’s our thing. You don’t get to take our thing, which is fundamentally antithetical to your entire ideological project, and pretend that is, in fact, yours. Go find your own ball. This one’s ours.
Ha! I was going to mention “sets” too, but wasn’t confident enough in my math to do so intelligently or cogently, so I deleted that bit, replacing it with the “who is, and who is not a woman” bit.
I hear you.
I feel like a broken record on gender bullshit. It gets tiresome pointing out the bloody obvious again and again. It’s even more tiresome to face the same crap again and again.
It feels like our culture is succumbing to some sort of collective, mental degenerative disease, disguised as a social justice movement. More homes, businesses and institutions display the Pride Progress flag. Our main library had a display that helpfully explained all of the licorice allsorts gender identity flags. For a moment I thought I was at a British Rail station. As part of Pride Month, our neighbourhood branch library had a children’s craft station set up with paper and crayons so that they could create their own Pride flag. Get them while they’re young! (As far as I can tell, our public library system features few GC books, but plenty of trans tripe, including fucking Grey Slavery’s Please Miss. I know I could suggest titles for purchase, but I don’t think I want to sink my energy tilting at that particular windmill.) A colleague at work (who is younger than me by a couple of weeks) said that his daughter (in her thirties, I think) offered to “educate” him about pronouns and such. All left-leaning political parties in Canada have blithely accepted the cuckoos’ egg of gender ideology into their platforms, with disatrous results for women across the country (I’m waiting in dread for day that notorious serial killer and rapist Paul Bernardo “identifies” his way into a women’s prison. He’s been denied early release repeatedly, but I could see him being inflicted on female prisoners by lunatic prison policies that have already saddled wome with TiM offenders. I’m surprised Bernardo hasn’t done this already).
And so on.
Thirty-odd years ago, I wrote lyrics for my band around issues like environmental destruction and the cost of “progress” (among other themes). If I were to write now, I feel like I’d just end up rehashing the same things from the late eighties and early nineties, just shuffling the words around a little.