March 24, 2015

"Dividing the world into males and female is such a big part of the culture that it can seem impossible, and perhaps even aggravating, to try to think outside those categories."

"This is not only a problem for squares stuck in a binary way of thinking — many of the terms associated with genderqueerness end up referring back to masculinity or femininity in some way, which is a bit tricky if the ideal is to move beyond the gender binary entirely."

If the ideal is... I find that sentence so amusing because it violates its own standards. Isn't there something square about having an ideal? Squares — we're told — are people who are stuck. But the writer of that sentence — Vanessa Vitiello Urquhart at Slate — is stuck on a way of thinking, which is that the squares are those icky people and we'd better not be squares! We'd better not be stuck! We need to move beyond the place where they are stuck, because we are the un-stuck, the non-squares, and we have an ideal, which is not being stuck where those others people are stuck.

It's tricky, you say. Yes, it is. It's tricky to get so wound up in something that most people don't bother with, especially with your fixated idea that those other people are stuck on "a binary way of thinking" — which is, ironically, a binary way of thinking. Who are those other people you're railing against? I think an awful lot of people, perhaps most people, are not in the 2 categories Vitiello Urquhart posits in her binary construct. They follow the obvious and benevolent practice of regarding individuals as individuals. That can work for the square and the hip and for the grand set of persons of mixed square/hipness.

Maybe, regarding individuals as individuals is just too simple, and Vitiello Urquhart wants something tricky to do. Whoever attempts that trick can be judged as an individual... an individual who is interested in doing that particular trick. Is it entertaining, is it enlightening, is it loving, is it beautiful, is it helpful, is it generous, is it done for the purpose of tweaking others and distancing yourself from those whom you regard as icky... ?

58 comments:

Krumhorn said...

Ann, the first sentence of your last paragraph is too tricky for me. I'm a simple square.

- Krumhorn

YoungHegelian said...

Postmodernism doesn't worry its pretty little head with avoiding its own internal contradictions, and, to quote that high-priestess of postmodernism, Martha Stewart, ...and that's a good thing. If they did, there wouldn't be much left of it at all.

Boltforge said...

OK. Genetically I'm a human. If I believe I'm a tree ... I have a mental issue.

Genetically I'm a male human. If I think I'm a female ... I'd still say I have a mental issue. If you think that I didn't have a mental issue, then scientifically what role do X,Y chromosomes play in gender/sex?

James Pawlak said...

"You can't fool Mother Nature"!!

traditionalguy said...

War on chromosomes. Some double helixes are better than others.,

This eternal question is finally ready for the Double Predestination impasse

Some truth is Offensive and we want popular support more.



Eric the Fruit Bat said...

There are two kinds of people in this world: Those who tend to divide the whole of the population into two distinct groups and those who do not.

Anonymous said...

Beyond the need for unisex rest rooms, some method of dealing with testosterone fueled players on female sports teams and a whole new cause of action in work place law, does most of this matter?

The gender outliers don't seem to breed much and as such, they take themselves out of the gene pool leaving it a bit more binary (XX, XY)

bleh said...

Am I expected to hold the door open for male-to-female trans? What about a female-to-male trans?

rhhardin said...

Coleridge points out Milton's "[T]wo great sexes animate the world" is a bad start for the root of a biological taxonomy.

Bob Boyd said...

I identify as gendersquare.

Boltforge said...

The Drill SGT said...
"... does most of this matter?"

I personally lean towards a form of Rectification of Names. A society that can no longer distinguish reality from their mental ideas is a good indicator that it is about to die (as a society).

Example: How can a people stand if they can no longer tell the difference between Iran and Israel? A people that call Israel 'evil' and Iran 'good' can no longer distinguish reality versus a mental idea. Just consider Obama shrugging off his negotiation partner chanting "Yes indeed, death to America" as meaning nothing to America.

Rocketeer said...

Look, I have compassion for the mentally ill and am happy to do my part to provide for their care, treatment, and succor. But I tire of assertions that I'm obliged to indulge the mentally ill in their folly that their mental illnesses are not mental illnesses, but instead previously unrecognized categories of normalcy. This avoidance of reality is immediately unhelpful to the afflicted, and ultimately damages the larger society.

I suspect that the larger society is swinging to my way of thinking on this, which accounts for the increasing desperation and incoherence of the advocates of the charade.

rhhardin said...

comment on modern gender copied from Maggie's Farm

There was a nice passage in Catch 22,

"(Nurse Duckett's) own body was such a familiar and unremarkable thing to her that she was puzzled by the convulsive ecstasy men could take from it, by the intense and amusing need they had merely to touch it, to reach out urgently and press it, squeeze it, pinch it, rub it. She did not understand Yossarian's lust; but she was willing to take his word for it."

You're wired for that attraction, it being easier to evolve the wiring than something abstractly attractive; and wiring can be wrong sometimes for various usual reasons, and those would be various minorities.

I don't know that it's a mental illness so much as a mistake, but you evolve a form of life with it that fits in somehow.

The modern mistake is removing the necessity to fit in, and weird and counterproductive stable forms of life result.

The psychological help then would be try to fit in and ignore the crap.

Henry said...

As Althouse points out, it's very hard to figure out the active agent of Ms. Urquhart's "coercively imposed social regime that stifles individual expression in order to maintain oppressive, entrenched power structures."

What strikes me is how oddly Ms. Urquhart slides between "terminology" and "culture" without any real discussion of language.

Can you imagine if Ms. Urquhart had to write this in German? To face, not only the division of people into males and females, but armchairs and mustaches as well?

I use German as my example to call upon Mark Twain as an expert witness.

Here he is, expounding on "The Awful German Language":

In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl. See how it looks in print -- I translate this from a conversation in one of the best of the German Sunday-school books:

"Gretchen. Wilhelm, where is the turnip?
Wilhelm. She has gone to the kitchen.
Gretchen. Where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden?
Wilhelm. It has gone to the opera."

To continue with the German genders: a tree is male, its buds are female, its leaves are neuter; horses are sexless, dogs are male, cats are female -- tomcats included, of course; a person's mouth, neck, bosom, elbows, fingers, nails, feet, and body are of the male sex, and his head is male or neuter according to the word selected to signify it, and not according to the sex of the individual who wears it -- for in Germany all the women either male heads or sexless ones; a person's nose, lips, shoulders, breast, hands, and toes are of the female sex; and his hair, ears, eyes, chin, legs, knees, heart, and conscience haven't any sex at all. The inventor of the language probably got what he knew about a conscience from hearsay.

Now, by the above dissection, the reader will see that in Germany a man may think he is a man, but when he comes to look into the matter closely, he is bound to have his doubts...


Aha! Perhaps what we need is not less binary but more! Divide and divide and divide until entropy unites us.

MartyH said...

Biologically, we are all either male or female. Our sex is determined by our chromosones.

Socially, some most people's genders align with their sex. Some, for whatever reason, do not.

Because people use the terms "gender" and "sex" interchangebaly, this whole field is a mishmash of confused and contradictory thoughts.

Just my 2 cents.

Anonymous said...

ah, the Das Madchen paradox

sparrow said...

Das Madchen marks a linguistic moral boundary : you should not think of young girls as feminine yet. Seems obvious enough - although unusual it's enshrined the language itself.

Bob R said...

If the problem were just XX people who genuinely thought they were men and XY people who genuinely thought they were women and people with chromosomal abnormalities, then she might have a point. We don't know how to change these conditions and they aren't life threatening. We could figure a way of accommodating them as we do blindness and immobility.

But that's not really the goal. The goal is to exert power over others. What better way than to undermine institutions that have been the cornerstone of civil society. So a real but tiny problem gets expanded to include people having fun playing dress-up. They insist we accommodate their games.

Gahrie said...

Everyday, it looks more and more like the Weimer Republic has returned....

MadisonMan said...

I divide the human race into people born with a penis, and people born with a vagina. Such a Venn Diagram has very little overlap. True hermaphrodites in Homo sapiens are exceptionally rare -- although with 7+ billion people on Earth, not unheard of.

What people feel they should be called is a question of belief. You can't argue someone out of a belief they hold.

Michael K said...

The solution to all this gender confusion is on its way now.

However, the particular fundamentalist ideology of ‘Islamist’ groups that have dedicated themselves to terror – such as Al Qaeda, Boko Haram and now in its most vicious, barbaric and threatening form the Islamic Caliphate, Isis or the Islamic State (IS) – interprets the foundation and the beginning as dating from the birth of the Prophet Mohammed in the 6th Century.
This fundamentalism denies the value and even the existence of civilisations that preceded the revelations of the Koran.
It was an article of 6th and 7th Century Arab faith that everything before it was wrong, heretical. There was no room for the pre-Islamic past.


It's coming and Obama is opening the gates.

Bay Area Guy said...

The leftist putsch to abolish all distinctions between male and female -- is just plain weird.

Yes, there are differences, on the whole, between the sexes. That's often a good thing! For both sexes!

From a guy's perspective, there's nothing like seeing a pretty girl with a pretty smile on a sunny day. Nothing. It is the quintessence of beauty, not lust, not sexuality, but just beauty.

Can females succeed in traditional all male professions, like law, medicine, politics, academia? Yes, duh. Nobody cares.

But, trying to abolish male and female bathrooms, which is what these harpies are reduced to, is just plain weird!

Bruce Hayden said...

Sex and language have always somewhat intrigued me. In English, we have gendered pronouns, but not nouns. But, the Romance languages tend to have both. Why did humans feel this need? Making this a bit more pressing - with modern language trends, we have to desex our language, and not use a male pronoun for females, when in the past, the male was considered the general/generic choice.

My thoughts right now are that gendered language persists because there is some efficiency gained. In my normal life, there are two of us, one of each sex/gender. So, he/she, his/hers, him/her, etc. are somewhat efficient. This somewhat presupposes that normal is a marriage of a male and a female. Which, realistically is true, even today, with this being true for maybe > 95% of couples. Most of us are heteronormal (which is good, because that is what most efficiently propagates the species).

n.n said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
n.n said...

Genderfluid. It's merely a clump of cells.

As for traditional male and female roles, there are sperm depositors and womb banks, if we want a Posterity; or fertile aliens that have not ceded their natural function to regimes of progressive confusion, selective normalization, etc.

We live in interesting times.

Ignorance is Bliss said...

I thought Genderfluid was what Bill got on Monica's dress.

MadisonMan said...

But I do agree: treating people as individuals is the way to go. Do I care if a vagina'ed person want to be treated as I would treat a man? Not really. Isn't it simple politeness to treat people as they wish?

If they're all in my face to be called male, or whatever, I'll do it, and note one word to describe them: rude.

What do you call a brunette who dyes their hair blond(e), after all? A blond(e).

Gabriel said...

Dubious cases do not render "male" and "female" arbitrary or meaningless any more than "tall" and "short" are.

Peter said...

MarthH said, "Because people use the terms "gender" and "sex" interchangeably, this whole field is a mishmash of confused and contradictory thoughts."


It's not so much that people use "sex" and "gender" interchangeably, but that "gender" has supplanted and suppressed "sex," so that when the words "male" and "female" are used (which is seldom) they are used as though they were merely synonyms of "masculine" and "feminine."

And it does sometimes seem infantile, this insistence that one can be whatever one wishes to be, simply by ignoring (and/or mutilating) the underlying biological realities.

mikeski said...

"What do you call a brunette who dyes their hair blond(e), after all? A blond(e)."

And yet my follicles would continue to produce brown hair. Cursed nature!

If I wear bright red contact lenses, am I no longer brown-eyed?

If I discard them entirely and claim to see, am I fully-sighted rather than almost legally blind?

If I wear elevator shoes, am I six feet tall?

The text on my driver's license would disagree with all four.

jr565 said...

""This is not only a problem for squares stuck in a binary way of thinking — many of the terms associated with genderqueerness end up referring back to masculinity or femininity in some way, which is a bit tricky if the ideal is to move beyond the gender binary entirely."

there's a reason that terms associated with gender queerness keep referring back to those terms because sex is largely binary. And the gender queer advocates are trying to do away with biology and instead include feelings and lollipops and unicorns.

n.n said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
traditionalguy said...

The solution this way cometh. A computer chip wired into everyones' brains and re-programmable by Government wifi.

You can be an iperson.

n.n said...

Ignorance is Bliss:

That's an old joke. Fine.

Knock, knock.
Who's there?
Gender.
Gender who?
Gender bender.

I think that's the popular term in the urban jungle.

For the record, sex includes oral... Sorry Bill. While Gender is likely derived from the root "gene" and is binary, there are different expressions that may be environmentally sensitive or a choice. When possible, I suggest principled tolerance, rather than selective exclusion.

Semantic warfare has taken its toll on verbal expression, which has become notably bent.

Charlie Currie said...

On the left there are no individuals, only groups...it takes a village, you know.

Gabriel said...

@n.n.Gender is likely derived from the root "gene"

"Gender" is from genus, kind or type, and "gene" is from generare, beget or create.

and is binary

German and other languages have three genders. Sometimes the genders are animate/inanimate.

khematite@aol.com said...

Robert Benchley's Law of Distinction:

“There are two kinds of people in the world: those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don’t.”

dbp said...

I think we should all defer to the wisdom of Huey Lewis on matters of being hip or being square.

dbp said...

@khematite@aol.com

There are 10 kinds of people in the world:

Those who understand binary and those who do not.

HoodlumDoodlum said...

Maybe, regarding individuals as individuals is just too simple, and Vitiello Urquhart wants something tricky to do.

Without reading the article I'm going to assume what Vitiello wants to do is have a reason to feel like Vitiello and Vitiello's friends are better than the squares.

You can't ever do enough for the true Progressive to consider you acceptable--if they define themselves primarily by how much better they are than the mainstream they'll always need to find some way to distinguish themselves when the mainstream shifts. Oh, you accept gay marriage, don't discriminate against same sex couples, and are ok with drug legalization? Well, you still use just two genders, SQUARE!

jr565 said...

Gays should excommunicate the transgender from their acronym salad.
It undermines sex and gender and sexual preference and even undermines the Lady Gaga song "born this way".

jr565 said...

Facebook has like 50 genders you can choose from to define yourself.at a certain point it becomes needlessly complex and silly even. However, don't all those gender definitions undermine the need for a sex change?
If you can be a man who's a woman, or tri gender why couldn't you be a transgender and not need a sex change. That gender definition of a man trapped in a woman's body would be the gender you're born with. So why then do they need to change SEX?

Balfegor said...

Re: Bruce Hayden:

My thoughts right now are that gendered language persists because there is some efficiency gained.

Gendered language persists because it's the language we speak. You might as well ask why we have subject verb agreement -- can't we just infer that from context?

Activists have tried to construct a back-formation of social meaning out of grammatical gender -- and if they are noisy enough, eventually there will be people who buy in -- but it's nothing more than folk etymology.

Linguists are always happy to criticise traditional prescriptive style (e.g. no split infinitives) on descriptivist grounds (i.e. that it's not how native speakers speak), but somehow they never muster up the gumption to criticise the perennial nonsense over sexism in grammatical gender as nothing but a perverse form of prescriptivism bent on distorting language to explicitly ideological ends.

Michael K said...

"Robert Benchley's Law of Distinction:

“There are two kinds of people in the world: those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don’t.”

Sir William Osler, "There are three sexes, men, women and female physicians."

That, of course, was in 1905.

n.n said...

Gabriel:


from PIE root *gene- (see genus)

The linguistic interpretations are designated for cultural, not biological classification, as is evidence by the limited popularity of transitional classifications in our own society.

MadisonMan said...

@dbp, I've seen that before (at least 1011 times), and it never fails to make me grin.

SGT Ted said...

It's not a "binary" way of thinking. Its a biological and scientific way of thinking.

Why do genderqueers hate science?

Todd Roberson said...

Boats appearing on the Western horizon!

We're at sort of a Louis XV moment in American culture. It'll last our time ... but after us, the deluge!

I'm 52 years old so I'm safe, but sooner or later (my guess is around 2040 or so) invaders will appear from the West coming from a civilization that has been slowing spreading from a core in the upper Yellow River valley for roughly 4000 years. Their physical appearance will simply be the culmination of a well earned, deserved and creeping business, financial and intellectual domination of American culture.

They won't mess with Hawaii, California or Colorado. Their objective will be the Mississippi Basin, and the lower Great Lakes; the world's greatest expanse of arable farmland spread around a network of dependably navigable rivers. Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Western Kentucky, most of Tennessee, Western Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Southern Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Eastern Kansas & Nebraska, and parts of Texas, Oklahoma Mississippi and Alabama. Wherever there is arable land and head ward navigation from a tributary of the Mississippi system.

At that moment in time the discussion outlined in the post will seem a little ... uh ... trivial.

Chris N said...

As has been said before. If such people want to control language, what else do they want to control?

chickelit said...

Vitello Irkhard sounds like he believes that white collared conservatives are pointing their plastic fingers at him and hoping his kind will soon drop and die. He needs to realize that he's the one who's square and that his language will look silly in the future.

Jason said...

Fuck these delusional narcissists. Do we treat anorexia with liposuction? No. Do we all play along with anorexia by saying, "yes, dear. You're way too fat and you will look so much better if you can get below 65 pounds."

No, we don't. Because it's obviously stupid to play into a delusion. Because it's obviously stupid to nod and encourage these people to pay tons of money to surgically and psychologically and socially mutilate themselves?

So let's not do it with gender identity disorders.

Known Unknown said...

I just divide the world into halfs and half-nots.

chickelit said...

I just divide the world into halfs and half-nots.

Or, halving it all vs. halve nots.

wildswan said...

Prediction.

It won't work. If they themselves can't even get what they mean said correctly then how will they ever get it to work.

But, like skepticism, something that can't actually work in society can still reside in social law as a principle of disruption. Like Planet Fitness bathrooms.

Unknown said...

The Drill SGT comment, "The gender outliers don't seem to breed much and as such, they take themselves out of the gene pool leaving it a bit more binary (XX, XY)."

If "evolution" is true, why are these cases still in the gene pool?

Kirk Parker said...

Bruce,

"My thoughts right now are that gendered language persists because there is some efficiency gained. "

Interesting thought, but my take on this (as a one-time professional linguist) is that it is a teleological argument with no basis in fact.

When I was working on learning a language with no gender, even in pronouns, I never felt the lack of gender--and interestingly that language had a construct where you were required to indicate, in a sentence like "he said he was going to the store", whether the two referents of "he" were the same person or different. Very, very useful, but not something I ever felt the lack of in English.

Similarly, having hosted half-a-dozen Asian high school students, and occasionally helping them with their written papers: trying to explain the subtleties of English articles, or even of number, is quite a task when the speaker or writer is coming from a language that has neither.

Gabriel,

"German and other languages have three genders"

Some languages have 4: male, female, neuter, divine. (Mesoamerican, if I recall correctly, but it's been decades...)

Unknown said...

Fascinating choice of a quote, Ann. You picked the bit where I was at my most critical of the genderqueers (pointing out that they themselves often seem to struggle to escape this binary they are supposedly so critical of), and misinterpreted it entirely. Perhaps it's because you yourself are stuck in a binary way of thinking, in this case, a binary of progressives and conservatives.

If it helps, I largely count myself among the squares. ;)

mikeski said...

"If "evolution" is true, why are these cases still in the gene pool?"

We still haven't mastered this "walking on our hind legs" thing (else back problems wouldn't be so prevalent). We still have appendixes and tailbones. We still have colorblindness.

Why would some other genetic oddity (that isn't guaranteed to kill you before breeding age if you even carry the gene) necessarily have selected itself out of the gene pool entirely at this point?