If gender really is a social construct, the very word "gender" codifies those constructs in a particularly nasty way, just as "race" once did.
Calling a man a "transwoman" is like calling a white person a "wigga." It is seizing on the performative aspects of one's identity-- which seem to have replaced personality for Gen. TikTok-- and labeling the outcome one's "true self."
So, my daughter wrote her dissertation for her degree (Newcastle Uni) in 2021 on gendered experiences of men and women in a contemporary mixed gendered gym. So I've just asked her for a definition of gender. She responded (she shouldn't have responded because she's supposed to be at work right now) with a section of her dissertation; essentially that it's a social construct, created by performances and societal expectations rather than biology (Butler, 1990; Massey, 1994). So, I asked her your final question, that "if gender is dependent on social constructs, then by the simple expedient of crossing a border to a different society with different constructs, one can change one's gender" and she replied, "yes". In her defence, she is not alone in trotting out this stuff; I know loads of her generation who will spout the same (except my son who couldn't give a toss about such matters). I am no clearer on the matter.
Perhaps a more pertinent question than "what is a woman?" might be : "what is gender?"
What's really strange is that the notion of gender seems to depend quite heavily on stereotypes.
If you read some of the 'trans' stories you'll see rather a lot of statements from parents along the lines of "we knew Johnny was really a girl because he played with dolls".
I can't say I'm a big fan of modern feminism (4th, 5th wave?) but wholly on board with many of the goals of earlier incarnations of feminism. One of the great things feminism achieved was a recognition that 'gender' stereotypes can be harmful and limiting - and should not be enforced.
We seem to have gone back several decades where sexual stereotypes are now being used to determine gender. It's really perverse - and it's going to lead to a whole lot of trouble down the road as a generation of kids discover they're completely messed up in all sorts of ways.
I don't see how she can use Judith Buter and arrive at that conclusion, really. If I remember right, using Butler's reasoning, you would change the perception of the performative aspects of how said gendered performance influences how strongly the perception of your sex correlates to your tertiary sexual characteristics (clothing, speech, manners, etc).
I may have mixed Butler up with some others though.
I have not a clue and currently I care even less! She did pretty well though from memory although her bibliography seemed to be longer than the actual dissertation. To be honest, I was delighted it was finally submitted because having to read and check it a hundred times over was doing my head in. I couldn’t get my head round the whole gender v sex thing then and I still can’t. It hurts my brain.
Good thing that it is something one can do without to 100% and still have (or thanks do doing without it have) a full life, innit? (Edit: oh dear, I just read what I wrote and gawd it looks condscending and snobbish! I'll leave it in anyway but the intent is jocular and friendly, nothing else! Apologies for any offence.)
I've read all her - my wife's - books on the topic and many others too as I took sociology at uni. Human behaviour, the hows and whys and so on on: both makro and mikro scales was always an interest of mine. So despite being a reactionary (to me, conservatives are just closeted liberals) I'm reasonably well-read on the subject, despite it being 99% unscientific nonsense.
To be honest, I didn't quite understand your meaning and didn't take offence in any case. My daughter actually studied Geography with Planning (or 'colouring in' as her cousin puts it) which was really quite interesting (I know this because I read all her essays). It was her dissertation topic which was a little 'left of field' in my opinion and stemmed from her and those of her friends (both male and female) experiences in the gym (and upon reading some of the interviews, I was quite shocked. More that the things that were pretty par for the course in my day, were still happening today). I studied History. At least that was based on some facts!
Having two concepts instead of one (sex and gender) is like in those computer/mobile games (temple run, subway surfer) where you quickly have to change lanes all the time. Somebody is throwing a definition of "woman" at you on the sex lane? Quickly change to the gender lane. Somebody is asking on the gender lane how the patriarchy can be a thing if biology doesn't matter? Back to sex lane. The faster you can switch lanes, the more confused your opponent is going to be, and the more coins you are going to collect before the train hits you.
Oh, there are even more lanes. The Veronica Ivy person jumped to human rights lane at one point...
Btw, lanes: during Covid, our local pool changed the swimming lane rules to circling (one lane up, the other down). This has turned out quite convenient, and will stay. Finally, a positive effect of the pandemic...
There's an attempt. But sex is like 500 million years old. It take some arrogance to attempt to change that.
Me, I think it's just an attempt to impose a new religion and these guys are there to disrupt and cause havoc while those plans are attempted to be imposed.
You do know how long it took the Greeks & Romans to impose Abrahamic religions on us right? It wasn't 2 years.
I mentioned definitions only as an academic perspective.
Of course, the "gender" nonsense is part of the gaslighting and the obedience training for the masses.
Those, who are doing it wield undeserved power, but power is nearly always arrogant...
In Rome, Christianity became the state religion in 325 and paganism was forbidden in 385 or 386, I forget. Not sure what you mean by the Greeks and the two years.
I think in the process of imposing a new religion, the five books...., the Greeks lost their empire to the Romans (who were just Greeks who had moved to Italy) who eventually added Christianity. But the Greeks had also taken several hundred years of trying, which is a lot of effort just to lose your Empire.
Who’s pushing? The same arseholes pushing everything and anything else that makes no sense. What’s my solution? Ignore them all. Not easy - but worth it.
I found this quote helpful in my quest to understand. Basically making simple things complicated and applying social pressures to accept these convoluted schemes are ultimately tools for narrative control. See below
“In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is...in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.” - Dalrymple
So I'm going to cheat, okay? The wife, before giving off a big heartfelt "F*** Y** sideways with a red-hot poker dipped in caustic soda!" to academia, was in Gender Studies. (Caveat: this was when it was still called "women's studies" or similar, and "queertheory" was the new kid in the block".) So I just asked her and had a quick gander at the cubic metre of books out in the outhouse attic:
Sex = biology, and everything majorly or mainly biological and dependent on biology.
Gender = sociology, and evey aspect not dependent on biology.
That's the cheat sheet. So take such a thing as breastfeeding. It's 100% biology as men can't breastfeed. But any and ritual and taboos around it, say "No breastfeeding in public" is sociology as there are no naturally, spontaneously and biologically grounded reasons for no breastfeeding in public, only sociological ones.
Counter-example is fireman. Strength, stamina, stability of psyche under hard acute stress and so on are all hard naturally imposed limits to who can become a fireman, as the demands are based in actual measurable performance - they are as objective as they can be, and as many as 90% of men might not pass the tests, much fewer women will even with the same set of applicants as men and women are naturally, spontaneously and biologically different.
Last one to hammer it home: combat pilot, submarine crew, tank crew similar. Sex almost completely irrelevant re: the physical aspects of the job. Gender very important due to sociological reasons, most women not being interested even remotely.
Funnily enough, history is full of evidence. Thereäs no male fashion, trend, attribute and so on that hasn't been seen as the height of maleness in one culture and as eminently effeminate in another, at some point. Meaning, when starting from the biological sex angle, we use objective metrics, and when starting from the sociological gender angle, we use wholly subjective metrics. Neither is aproblem, as long as the researcher makes an honest and noteworthy effort in remembering which one is which.
So there you have it from my wife, a real expert (not in the modern media sense) in gender studies as she based everything she did, claimed or even speculated about on empirical evidence. I'm sure my little and maximally biased exposé makes it very clear why she wasn't allowed and didn't want to continue her career in that field.
I feel like I ought to read more stuff by people like Butler - but whenever I try I just see largely incoherent word salad. It's probably a defect in me - I'm used to working in a field where there are strict, rigorous, definitions and where definite conclusions can be drawn.
The whole 'gender' thing is so bloody vague. How can an objective, external, observer determine what 'gender' someone is without asking them? The notion of gender seems, to me, to be somewhat dependent on the notion of gender identity - and we're back to circular definition la-la land.
Word salad is what 99% of it is. Think of it as a litmus test: people who balk at actually reading it, are future subjects as they will have to rely on infirmed authority; people who do read and object are enemies to be emascuated, désavoured, and made examples of; and those who read and acquiesce are to be dominated as they represent the up and coming competition for leadership.
My academic background is, apart from pol sic, in ideas of history/history of ideas (don't really knwo what it's called in english properly, we simply call it "idéhistoria") so I have a leg up so to speak, as 99.9% of all ideas re: society, norms, ethics and so on are 1) cultural and racial 2) already known, talked about and empirically tested somewhere, somewhen.
So when the woke, the WEF and the Cut of Greta talks about their schtick I go: "Hmmm, I recognise this. Right, Greta is just a new version of Jiddhu Krishnamurti, and the WEF is simply old french synarchism and anglo/US cosmopolitanism from the 19th century, and the woke are just another turn of the screw for modernism, this time paired with de Sade's ideas about soceital norms filtered through Derrida, Foucault, Laclau and other such having put new labels on old ideas".
As for circular definitions: all definitions in a closed system are circular if the one formulating the definition is inside said system.
Edit: thank you. As to the difference in fields of study, my brother is a hydrogeologist so I have lots of practice trying to translate the lingo and jargon - often spell-like - of the humanities and social sciences to naturalist or tech.
The lack of a working definition of gender is not bug but a feature. The point is to elevate subjectivity as a valid form of political struggle. First it starts in the culture then as it becomes "normalized", more formal political structures can use it.
The state can no longer hold using objectivity - it is objectively falling apart. What's left? Subjectivity. Power will continue to make crazy decisions simply because it has no choice.
A side effect (perhaps the goal) is that this splits historic oppositions to power - divide and conquer via sex and race. Kind of an obvious playbook but what else can they do?
The Marxian/Hegelian weaklings who need more, of what isn't theirs, trying to achieve it by cranking the ratchet another notch their direction are the ones pushing this and so many other myriad of absurdities from gender, to health, to economics, to society, to violence and ultimately reality.
This group, who always push ideology to the extreme, to achieve the ends no matter the cost of the means are the true "-phobes". They are realiphobes.
Who is pushing it?
Communists.
Why?
Watch the interview with Yuri Bezmenov on YouTube.
Who's this Veronica Ivy that you talk about?
His name is Rhys.
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/veronica-ivy-a-k-a-rhys-mckinnon/
Thanks for the link. I particularly liked "Men can be so rude sometimes".
He’s a cheater
If gender really is a social construct, the very word "gender" codifies those constructs in a particularly nasty way, just as "race" once did.
Calling a man a "transwoman" is like calling a white person a "wigga." It is seizing on the performative aspects of one's identity-- which seem to have replaced personality for Gen. TikTok-- and labeling the outcome one's "true self."
(Should I have said "the w- word?")
So, my daughter wrote her dissertation for her degree (Newcastle Uni) in 2021 on gendered experiences of men and women in a contemporary mixed gendered gym. So I've just asked her for a definition of gender. She responded (she shouldn't have responded because she's supposed to be at work right now) with a section of her dissertation; essentially that it's a social construct, created by performances and societal expectations rather than biology (Butler, 1990; Massey, 1994). So, I asked her your final question, that "if gender is dependent on social constructs, then by the simple expedient of crossing a border to a different society with different constructs, one can change one's gender" and she replied, "yes". In her defence, she is not alone in trotting out this stuff; I know loads of her generation who will spout the same (except my son who couldn't give a toss about such matters). I am no clearer on the matter.
Fascinating - thanks Anneliese
Perhaps a more pertinent question than "what is a woman?" might be : "what is gender?"
What's really strange is that the notion of gender seems to depend quite heavily on stereotypes.
If you read some of the 'trans' stories you'll see rather a lot of statements from parents along the lines of "we knew Johnny was really a girl because he played with dolls".
I can't say I'm a big fan of modern feminism (4th, 5th wave?) but wholly on board with many of the goals of earlier incarnations of feminism. One of the great things feminism achieved was a recognition that 'gender' stereotypes can be harmful and limiting - and should not be enforced.
We seem to have gone back several decades where sexual stereotypes are now being used to determine gender. It's really perverse - and it's going to lead to a whole lot of trouble down the road as a generation of kids discover they're completely messed up in all sorts of ways.
I don't see how she can use Judith Buter and arrive at that conclusion, really. If I remember right, using Butler's reasoning, you would change the perception of the performative aspects of how said gendered performance influences how strongly the perception of your sex correlates to your tertiary sexual characteristics (clothing, speech, manners, etc).
I may have mixed Butler up with some others though.
I have not a clue and currently I care even less! She did pretty well though from memory although her bibliography seemed to be longer than the actual dissertation. To be honest, I was delighted it was finally submitted because having to read and check it a hundred times over was doing my head in. I couldn’t get my head round the whole gender v sex thing then and I still can’t. It hurts my brain.
Good thing that it is something one can do without to 100% and still have (or thanks do doing without it have) a full life, innit? (Edit: oh dear, I just read what I wrote and gawd it looks condscending and snobbish! I'll leave it in anyway but the intent is jocular and friendly, nothing else! Apologies for any offence.)
I've read all her - my wife's - books on the topic and many others too as I took sociology at uni. Human behaviour, the hows and whys and so on on: both makro and mikro scales was always an interest of mine. So despite being a reactionary (to me, conservatives are just closeted liberals) I'm reasonably well-read on the subject, despite it being 99% unscientific nonsense.
To be honest, I didn't quite understand your meaning and didn't take offence in any case. My daughter actually studied Geography with Planning (or 'colouring in' as her cousin puts it) which was really quite interesting (I know this because I read all her essays). It was her dissertation topic which was a little 'left of field' in my opinion and stemmed from her and those of her friends (both male and female) experiences in the gym (and upon reading some of the interviews, I was quite shocked. More that the things that were pretty par for the course in my day, were still happening today). I studied History. At least that was based on some facts!
Having two concepts instead of one (sex and gender) is like in those computer/mobile games (temple run, subway surfer) where you quickly have to change lanes all the time. Somebody is throwing a definition of "woman" at you on the sex lane? Quickly change to the gender lane. Somebody is asking on the gender lane how the patriarchy can be a thing if biology doesn't matter? Back to sex lane. The faster you can switch lanes, the more confused your opponent is going to be, and the more coins you are going to collect before the train hits you.
Very well put! Excellent visuals too!
Oh god I'm confused.
Oh, there are even more lanes. The Veronica Ivy person jumped to human rights lane at one point...
Btw, lanes: during Covid, our local pool changed the swimming lane rules to circling (one lane up, the other down). This has turned out quite convenient, and will stay. Finally, a positive effect of the pandemic...
Definitions are system-dependent; you change the system, the definition changes.
The system is being changed. :)
There's an attempt. But sex is like 500 million years old. It take some arrogance to attempt to change that.
Me, I think it's just an attempt to impose a new religion and these guys are there to disrupt and cause havoc while those plans are attempted to be imposed.
You do know how long it took the Greeks & Romans to impose Abrahamic religions on us right? It wasn't 2 years.
I mentioned definitions only as an academic perspective.
Of course, the "gender" nonsense is part of the gaslighting and the obedience training for the masses.
Those, who are doing it wield undeserved power, but power is nearly always arrogant...
In Rome, Christianity became the state religion in 325 and paganism was forbidden in 385 or 386, I forget. Not sure what you mean by the Greeks and the two years.
I think in the process of imposing a new religion, the five books...., the Greeks lost their empire to the Romans (who were just Greeks who had moved to Italy) who eventually added Christianity. But the Greeks had also taken several hundred years of trying, which is a lot of effort just to lose your Empire.
Good old days... Things used to be slower then. These days, it's going to be a lot less than the average 250 years. :)
Whoever remains free will inherit the world in my view. And you're probably right, in a generation. It's not Klaus's world.
I concur. Still, it's going to be tough to remain independent.
Ever since you said it, I've been cherishing the idea of Klaus being thrown under the bus by the monsters as a result of the AI's advice! :)
You can put this in the category of 'alternative history' if you want.
And of course I'm just joking....
It's good not to inhale stuff too deeply. One might never have a chance to exhale. :)
Who’s pushing? The same arseholes pushing everything and anything else that makes no sense. What’s my solution? Ignore them all. Not easy - but worth it.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/billionaire-family-pushing-synthetic-sex-identities-ssi-pritzkers
http://web.archive.org/web/20201111204624/https://guidopreparata.com/ad-triarios-transphobic-bus-power-elite-feminism/
http://web.archive.org/web/20191102004341/http://guidopreparata.com/ad-triarios-transphobic-bus-lbgt-elagabalus/
https://antelopehillpublishing.com/product/the-transgender-industrial-complex-by-scott-howard/
https://elamerican.com/john-money-father-of-gender-identity-falsifier-and-advocate-of-pedophilia/
I found this quote helpful in my quest to understand. Basically making simple things complicated and applying social pressures to accept these convoluted schemes are ultimately tools for narrative control. See below
“In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is...in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.” - Dalrymple
Yes, that Dalrymple quote is excellent - thanks for reminding me of it
Worse, even when having realised that you've been conditioned from birth, it's still there. It's like an addiction.
Just when you kicked the habit, you light up another coffin nail.
So I'm going to cheat, okay? The wife, before giving off a big heartfelt "F*** Y** sideways with a red-hot poker dipped in caustic soda!" to academia, was in Gender Studies. (Caveat: this was when it was still called "women's studies" or similar, and "queertheory" was the new kid in the block".) So I just asked her and had a quick gander at the cubic metre of books out in the outhouse attic:
Sex = biology, and everything majorly or mainly biological and dependent on biology.
Gender = sociology, and evey aspect not dependent on biology.
That's the cheat sheet. So take such a thing as breastfeeding. It's 100% biology as men can't breastfeed. But any and ritual and taboos around it, say "No breastfeeding in public" is sociology as there are no naturally, spontaneously and biologically grounded reasons for no breastfeeding in public, only sociological ones.
Counter-example is fireman. Strength, stamina, stability of psyche under hard acute stress and so on are all hard naturally imposed limits to who can become a fireman, as the demands are based in actual measurable performance - they are as objective as they can be, and as many as 90% of men might not pass the tests, much fewer women will even with the same set of applicants as men and women are naturally, spontaneously and biologically different.
Last one to hammer it home: combat pilot, submarine crew, tank crew similar. Sex almost completely irrelevant re: the physical aspects of the job. Gender very important due to sociological reasons, most women not being interested even remotely.
Funnily enough, history is full of evidence. Thereäs no male fashion, trend, attribute and so on that hasn't been seen as the height of maleness in one culture and as eminently effeminate in another, at some point. Meaning, when starting from the biological sex angle, we use objective metrics, and when starting from the sociological gender angle, we use wholly subjective metrics. Neither is aproblem, as long as the researcher makes an honest and noteworthy effort in remembering which one is which.
So there you have it from my wife, a real expert (not in the modern media sense) in gender studies as she based everything she did, claimed or even speculated about on empirical evidence. I'm sure my little and maximally biased exposé makes it very clear why she wasn't allowed and didn't want to continue her career in that field.
an excellent summary Rikard
I feel like I ought to read more stuff by people like Butler - but whenever I try I just see largely incoherent word salad. It's probably a defect in me - I'm used to working in a field where there are strict, rigorous, definitions and where definite conclusions can be drawn.
The whole 'gender' thing is so bloody vague. How can an objective, external, observer determine what 'gender' someone is without asking them? The notion of gender seems, to me, to be somewhat dependent on the notion of gender identity - and we're back to circular definition la-la land.
Word salad is what 99% of it is. Think of it as a litmus test: people who balk at actually reading it, are future subjects as they will have to rely on infirmed authority; people who do read and object are enemies to be emascuated, désavoured, and made examples of; and those who read and acquiesce are to be dominated as they represent the up and coming competition for leadership.
My academic background is, apart from pol sic, in ideas of history/history of ideas (don't really knwo what it's called in english properly, we simply call it "idéhistoria") so I have a leg up so to speak, as 99.9% of all ideas re: society, norms, ethics and so on are 1) cultural and racial 2) already known, talked about and empirically tested somewhere, somewhen.
So when the woke, the WEF and the Cut of Greta talks about their schtick I go: "Hmmm, I recognise this. Right, Greta is just a new version of Jiddhu Krishnamurti, and the WEF is simply old french synarchism and anglo/US cosmopolitanism from the 19th century, and the woke are just another turn of the screw for modernism, this time paired with de Sade's ideas about soceital norms filtered through Derrida, Foucault, Laclau and other such having put new labels on old ideas".
As for circular definitions: all definitions in a closed system are circular if the one formulating the definition is inside said system.
Edit: thank you. As to the difference in fields of study, my brother is a hydrogeologist so I have lots of practice trying to translate the lingo and jargon - often spell-like - of the humanities and social sciences to naturalist or tech.
There is nothing more insufferable than a male lecturing women that males are ackshully women. May they all date trans”women” exclusively
The lack of a working definition of gender is not bug but a feature. The point is to elevate subjectivity as a valid form of political struggle. First it starts in the culture then as it becomes "normalized", more formal political structures can use it.
The state can no longer hold using objectivity - it is objectively falling apart. What's left? Subjectivity. Power will continue to make crazy decisions simply because it has no choice.
A side effect (perhaps the goal) is that this splits historic oppositions to power - divide and conquer via sex and race. Kind of an obvious playbook but what else can they do?
The Marxian/Hegelian weaklings who need more, of what isn't theirs, trying to achieve it by cranking the ratchet another notch their direction are the ones pushing this and so many other myriad of absurdities from gender, to health, to economics, to society, to violence and ultimately reality.
This group, who always push ideology to the extreme, to achieve the ends no matter the cost of the means are the true "-phobes". They are realiphobes.
When I was five years old, I exactly told adults whatever is attributed to Einstein. I guess, he was a year off with his estimate. :)
"I would very much like to know is who is pushing this crap, and why?"
Polite people are not allowed to name the group pushing this.
That would be "hateful" and "anti-******c", Mr. Rigger!
Stop, stop wanting to look behind the curtain.