It’s A or B or both or neither
More fun with JKR versus a bowl of oatmeal Sally Hines.
‘Gender identity refers to each person’s internal sense of being male, female, a combination of the two, or neither; it is a core part of who people know themselves to be.’
However, this core of what we know ourselves to be may change, possibly several times in a single afternoon:
‘Genderfluid people experience their gender identity as changing over time or between different situations.’
And some people have a partially missing core, or a core part so feeble we can’t know whether it’s male or female:
‘Agender people identify as having no gender, or feel that their gender is absent or neutral.’
Imagine writing those words and not once defining how it feels to have an internal sense of being male/female, not having a gender at all, or having a neutral gender.
Other groundbreaking things I learned from your book:
‘Not all bodies are biologically male or female – they are both, or neither.’
‘French adjectives are grammatically gendered.’
‘Post-colonial is sometimes used to describe the period of time after colonial rule.’
‘Aristotle was a philosopher and scientist living in ancient Greece.’
‘Historically, women have often been associated with nurturing behaviour.’
‘Traditional male labour is typical in heavy industries, such as Skinningrove blast furnace plant, which closed in 1971.’
Ouch.
You list bits of jargon like ‘genderflux’ (experiences their gender more or less intensely at different times) without ever explaining what is the thing the person is experiencing. Why isn’t there an entry-level explanation of how we can tell whether our gender is male, female, both, neither, absent, flux or fluid? How does this important ‘core thing’ manifest internally? Do we compare the picture of Skinningrove blast furnace and the one of the Miss America pageant and choose where we’d rather be? I imagine not, as we’re told endlessly that gender doesn’t rest on sex stereotypes. Your book, written for a lay audience, explains terms like ‘post-colonial’ but not the concept featured in its actual title.
Incidentally, it’s the nouns that are gendered in French. The adjectives merely agree with them. I’m qualified to tell you that; I have a French degree.
Sally Hines is not equipped for these exchanges.
The old saw applies; JKR is engaged in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent. Or, perhaps it is kinder to see it as JKR gently and politely giving SH the opportunity to see the glaring hole in the centre of her entire thesis.
Or both, or neither, or fluid…
These people really don’t know what a definition is, do they?
Well when it’s Sally Hines…
I don’t have a “core” anything that’s remotely like what they assert “gender” means, in any of their flim-flam equivocations about the supposed meaning of that word.
Same.
I’m not so sure. There’s a difference between not knowing what a definition is, and not having one, or not daring to offer one for fear of getting it wrong. It’s a “Don’t ask, don’t tell” kind of ecumenicalism, wherein everybody under the infinitely elastic “trans umbrella” refuses to examine anyone else’s credentials for being a member. As soon as any kind of binding, coherent definition is offered up, somebody will be “excluded” or excommunicated, because so many of the posited attributes of the myriad gender possibilities are completely contradictory. By this measure, the lack of any such definition of “gender” is a feature, not a bug.
If “gender identity” was an actual phenomonon, Rowling’s questions would be the basis of potentially fruitful lines of research. Correction: her questions would have been the pathway to such research, because these issues would have been investigated long ago; Hines would have already had answers to them. They would have been debated and thrashed out within the field itself. But no. The field is empty and fruitless. Nobody has been working in it because it is barren; “There is no there there.” Like astrology and palmistry, there has been no real attempt to delineate the exact nature, limits, and mechanism behind the phenomenon they claim to know so well. It’s all just claimed and assumed. They’re making it up as they go along with no thought or concern for coherence and consistency. Queer theory is above this petty need for evidence and explanation. In the light of rational inquiry (or simple questions), queer theory withers and dies, and genderism with it. Rowling’s comments are just making this plain.
That an “unschooled amateur” like Rowling can come up with such devastatingly simple, basic, fundamental criticisms of this alleged field of alleged study is (or should be) a source of shamed embarassment, rather than smug condescension. You don’t need titles or degrees to see that the Emperor is naked, though in the case of genderism, it’s more like there is no Emperor at all. Hines’ response is, ironically, just an iteration of PZ’s “Courtier’s Reply”. You’re supposed to steep yourself thoroughly in the minutia and nuance of their refined, cerebral bullshit before you dare comment on it.
not Bruce, it’s sort of like defining God or Christianity. The moment someone tries, someone else will deny that’s the definition, and will often state that no one believes that way. Definitions are probably colonialist imperialist white supremacist cis-heteronormative Karen things.
Another thought.
Forget the implications of Rowling’s critique within academic circles. Hines is a laughable sideshow. Much more importantly, Rowlings questions have profound implications for the entire field of “gender affirming care.” Every one of these questions should have had firm, evidence-based answers before anyone ever reached for puberty blockers, wrong-sex hormones, or scalpels. Calling such “treatments” for children “experimental” gives them far more credit and credibility than they deserve. They’re not even that. They’ve got more in common with torture and butchery. In any other context, such “procedures”, prescribed and performed without any basis in reality, would be criminal. But I suppose haste and horror go hand in hand when the “medecine” you practice is based on little more than shallow, nonsensical pop psychology, and faddish, contrarian literary criticism.
I believe it was Eliza Mondegreen who managed to track many of these labels (“genderfae”, “demi-gender” etc.) that are now touted as more valid and real than leptons back to teenager self-labeling on Tumblr.
Given the vagueness of it all, I can’t tell whether I have a “gender identity” or not. Maybe there is such a thing within my mind, but I’m not able to recognize it as such or even to perceive it. It’s like Russel’s teapot: I can’t conclusively disprove it, but I don’t see any good basis to believe in it. Worse, not only does a gender identity not answer questions about my psyche, it raises many. Namely, why would I have one? What brings us to this conclusion? Why are gender identities both connected so blatantly to sexist stereotypes and completely separate from them? If gender identity has nothing to do with sex, why does it sometimes require surgery? What do gender identities have to do with athletic performance or bathroom separation or sexual orientation? If it’s such a deep and meaningful part of existence, if people really known with uttermost certainty what their gender identities are and what they say about themselves, why is it that nobody really seems to have formulated this particular concept prior to the 20th century? (The various examples that are brought up are always ambiguous: they never clearly match the modern notion.) If you can only assert your own gender identity, how can you meaningfully affirm someone else’s? What is the purpose of expressing your gender identity to others, and indeed what is the social relevance of it all? Why is it that expression of one’s gender identity appears to depend entirely on one’s culture and ultimately be arbitrary, while it’s also something intrinsic and independent of culture? In the same vein, how does the grammar of certain languages constitute evidence for gender identity? So many questions!
I like a good massacre. (I’m feeling particularly evil to day – I blame the heat.)
She might also have added that gender is a property of the word, not the thing. Tables aren’t male in Germany and female in Spain; a person doesn’t change from female when referred to as “una persona” to male when referred to as “un ser humano”, and a German girl doesn’t transition from a sexless “Mädchen” to a female “Frau”. There is some evidence that speakers of languages with grammatical sex-based gender tend to assign stereotypical masculine or feminine traits to objects depending on the gender of the noun, but that tells us about how the brain works, not the outside world; bridges aren’t necessarily stronger in Spain or more elegant in Germany even if speakers of those languages assign them those traits.
An Irish girl is likewise not a male “cailín”. (This is the origin of the name “Colleen”, by the way.)
When I first encountered people advocating for gender identity the underlying assumption was that its existence was self-evident. Just ask yourself “am I a man or a woman?” — and your answer was your gender identity. That’s all it was. Simple, right? And we’re born with it. There and done.
An awful lot of otherwise rational, skeptical people found that satisfying enough to accept it and get down to the real work of fighting for the rights of marginalized nonconformists who are opposed by the religious right. It’s only when you stop to dig at the meaning and concepts behind how we determine our beliefs about what sex we are that the simple becomes complex. It’s more complicated than that.
Which is ironic, really. The idea that “only two sexes” is the hasty, simplistic answer which satisfies the lazy general public and the nuanced, perceptive understanding of gender identities is a scientific advancement seems to have seduced many of those otherwise reasonable people.
Well, you get in the habit of denying whatever the opposition says solely because it’s what the opposition says, and you’re eventually going to get to the point that you reject even the things you know to be true, just to own the [libtards|rethuglicans|religiots]. If a [liberal|conservative] says the sky is blue, a [conservative|liberal] will respond that actually what we see as blue is just a result of the atmosphere’s interference with light. Present a news story from an opposed source, and watch it get immediately rejected, even when you apologize profusely for daring to read something so heretical. Preferring insane claims to be some kind of non-man non-woman over “man and woman he created them” just continues the same pattern.
Also this. Basic reasoning is compromised by politics.
The concept of gender identity seems to operate very much like the concept of the soul. You can’t put it under a microscope, you can’t hold it, you can’t locate it on a map, but you know you have one, and you extrapolate that so does everyone, including the people who deny having one. Atheists and agenderists, deniers of spiritual realities.
This was all dependent upon the very recent discovery that other states of material being were actually accessible through the purchase and application of a packet of blue hair dye.
“When I first encountered people advocating for gender identity the underlying assumption was that its existence was self-evident. Just ask yourself “am I a man or a woman?” — and your answer was your gender identity. That’s all it was. Simple, right? And we’re born with it. There and done.”
Like Sastra, I’ve often found that believers in gender identity theory will often say that since I know that I’m a woman – for example, when filling out a medical form I have no difficulty in checking the F box rather than the M box – then that’s my gender identity. They would go on to say that transwomen have the same knowledge of themselves as women.
But I disagree. What I mean when I say “I know that I’m a woman” is entirely different from what a transwomen means when she says that. My knowledge is based on empirical evidence. I can observe my primary and secondary sex characteristics by looking down, looking in the mirror, or in photos. For many years, I observed periodic bleeding from my vagina and felt cramping in my lower abdomen. The doctors who did my pap smears did not report any difficulty in locating my cervix. I have a PDF, with my correct name and birthdate, of a pathology report describing my uterus after my hysterectomy. All of these things are the objective evidence underlying my knowledge that I’m female.
A transwoman might also say “I know that I’m a woman”, but when she does so, she is not referring to an evidence-based knowledge of her reproductive anatomy and physiology; in fact her knowledge is contrary to this evidence. The only evidence that she can present is rooted in culture-bound stereotypes (e.g., “I played with dolls as a kid, and now I like to wear makeup and dresses”). Or she might not present any evidence at all, saying that it’s some indescribable inner feeling and that she just knows.
So, I reject the idea that a transwoman and I have the same gender identity. We might use some of the same words about ourselves, but we mean completely different things by these words.
[…] a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on It’s A or B or both or […]
Sally Hines openly admits “gender is an expression of the social norms, a combination of the behaviours, roles, and expectations through which a society defines women and men.” So, social stereotypes but with kinder language.
Well when you put it that way…
If I have learnt anything since escaping from being a member of the gender cult myself, thelibrarian, it’s that the men who call themselves ‘transwomen’ are still men, not any kind of woman, and therefore should be referred to with male pronouns and as ‘men claiming to be women’, and never given any access whatsoever to anything previously reserved for women.
The cult got in early with the deceptive language, making it increasingly difficult to explain even to ourselves, let alone to the public at large, that these men aren’t a new kind of woman. Using their Orwellian language changes makes us complicit in the invasion of women’s toilets, shelters, career opportunities etc. and we really have to stop.
It isn’t kindness to use their idiosyncratic definition; it’s capitulation to the latest iteration of patriarchal overreach, and extremely unkind to the women and girls who are the victims of this pernicious ideology.