As a philosopher i have to note that while the proper use of words like "chair" is a issue of language while that of "human", "turtle" "mammal," is a issue about reality, reality itself has no firm boundaries. Darwin realized this implication of his theory. On a superficial level species A evolves into species B and anomalous B's are still B's, but at a deeper level there will be thousands of indivuals that have enough accumulated anomalies (mutations) that are enough that they aren't really quite A's anymore, but not enough to really be B's. In fact, there were entire genuses that were in between reptile and mammal. That however does not mean the distinction between the two isn't useful or that a third, and hence a fourth, fifth.... millionth category, will get us any closer to the underlying changing reality. And of course males aren't evolving into females for vice versa even if sex as a biological category did evolve.
I mean… maybe it’s because my parents both have a background in biological sciences this seems blatantly obvious to me. Your point about the language confusion is spot on, and there’s more to that story.
Gender is originally a linguistic construct which assigned nouns as ‘masculine’, ‘feminine’ or ‘neutral’ most commonly in Romance languages (but not English with its hybrid Germanic/French structure). The assignment of gender to words doesn’t necessarily have significant meaning. (Eg, in Italian, a table (tavolo) is masculine and a chair (sedia) is feminine, unless you’re a French deconstructionist of the late 19th to early 20th century. These philosophers who were deconstructing a Romance language that was subject to a high level of bureaucratic management and regulation were well and truly out of fashion by the time the American academy picked them up via translation in the 1960s. Since they didn’t have anything like the French government ‘official French’ they had to deconstruct of culture, politics and social relations, including between the sexes. By the 1970s you’ve got a full blown post-modernist theory of ‘gender’ in the academy and it has leaked out into the real world where a variety of bastardised versions run riot under the veneer of ‘academic theory’.
So yes, the linguistic confusion is really what this is. When you combine this with the fact that ‘grammar’ hasn’t been taught systematically in the English speaking world (at least it hasn’t in Australia) since the 1970s and a steep decline in learning foreign languages in high school, you have multiple generations of people who don’t know how language actually works and are able to be taken in by a cynical pop po-mo version that is the philosophical and political air today.
This is fantastic. Perfect pitch, powerful message. The sophistry that's entangling us all over sex and gender is exhausting and seemingly driving us off a societal cliff. So now I'm annoyed: I just today published a piece, partly on the problem of sophistry within the gender debate, and if I'd read this even 12 hours ago I absolutely would have linked it within my essay. Your framing is brilliant and clear, too good to be missed. In fact, I might just sneak it in anyway...
As a philosopher i have to note that while the proper use of words like "chair" is a issue of language while that of "human", "turtle" "mammal," is a issue about reality, reality itself has no firm boundaries. Darwin realized this implication of his theory. On a superficial level species A evolves into species B and anomalous B's are still B's, but at a deeper level there will be thousands of indivuals that have enough accumulated anomalies (mutations) that are enough that they aren't really quite A's anymore, but not enough to really be B's. In fact, there were entire genuses that were in between reptile and mammal. That however does not mean the distinction between the two isn't useful or that a third, and hence a fourth, fifth.... millionth category, will get us any closer to the underlying changing reality. And of course males aren't evolving into females for vice versa even if sex as a biological category did evolve.
I mean… maybe it’s because my parents both have a background in biological sciences this seems blatantly obvious to me. Your point about the language confusion is spot on, and there’s more to that story.
Gender is originally a linguistic construct which assigned nouns as ‘masculine’, ‘feminine’ or ‘neutral’ most commonly in Romance languages (but not English with its hybrid Germanic/French structure). The assignment of gender to words doesn’t necessarily have significant meaning. (Eg, in Italian, a table (tavolo) is masculine and a chair (sedia) is feminine, unless you’re a French deconstructionist of the late 19th to early 20th century. These philosophers who were deconstructing a Romance language that was subject to a high level of bureaucratic management and regulation were well and truly out of fashion by the time the American academy picked them up via translation in the 1960s. Since they didn’t have anything like the French government ‘official French’ they had to deconstruct of culture, politics and social relations, including between the sexes. By the 1970s you’ve got a full blown post-modernist theory of ‘gender’ in the academy and it has leaked out into the real world where a variety of bastardised versions run riot under the veneer of ‘academic theory’.
So yes, the linguistic confusion is really what this is. When you combine this with the fact that ‘grammar’ hasn’t been taught systematically in the English speaking world (at least it hasn’t in Australia) since the 1970s and a steep decline in learning foreign languages in high school, you have multiple generations of people who don’t know how language actually works and are able to be taken in by a cynical pop po-mo version that is the philosophical and political air today.
This is fantastic. Perfect pitch, powerful message. The sophistry that's entangling us all over sex and gender is exhausting and seemingly driving us off a societal cliff. So now I'm annoyed: I just today published a piece, partly on the problem of sophistry within the gender debate, and if I'd read this even 12 hours ago I absolutely would have linked it within my essay. Your framing is brilliant and clear, too good to be missed. In fact, I might just sneak it in anyway...