While I'm still focusing on finishing my book and my essay series on understanding TERFs, I wrote a quick, bite-sized post on one of the most common gender-conservative temper-tantrums expressed as a pithy three-word shibboleth. We take a harsh look at the motivations and assumptions underlying this mindset, and what people really mean when they assert "sex is real" as an antagonistic principle to transsexual existence.
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My impression from following the chatter about the HBO series for His Dark Materials is that it did a good job of correcting the misconception which most American YA readers seem to take away from the books—that Philip Pullman was representing religion as “bad” and science as “good;” that all he was doing was flipping the good-evil dichotomy promoted by religious zealots on its head. Part of that is probably because the series is intended for adult audiences, who have difficulty overlooking the fact that Asriel sacrifices a child in the name of Science, and perhaps are better equipped to read the subtext—that Science merely replaces God as a means of justifying heinous acts. But the third season also did a lot to drive home that Asriel’s refusal to accept that cultural mythology must be taken seriously because it is nevertheless acted upon; that there is something called social fact which is just as “real” as scientific fact, and in his stubborn refusal to accept the complexity of reality, he becomes for most of the season a scientific zealot, just as narrow-minded as the religious zealots who he aimed to defeat.
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I guess terfs forgot to really study and understand the social construction of gender when going for their radical feminism certification. The naturalization of the patriarchy is the necessary outcome of biological essentialism. Belief in such a fantasy demands that the gender hierarchy be seen as natural, immutable and unable to be unrooted.
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Aha, haha! Language is the original meme!
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I kind of actually think the postmodern affinity for constructionism will be the downfall of society as we've known it and not in a good way.
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where did all these classist anti butch/femme radfems come from what happened to when radfems were all over this platform defending butch/femme as Lesbian Only??
...it's the political lesbians isn't it
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This sentence would have had more impact if luna wasn't the Spanish word for moon. I guess they don't have Spanish in the alternate world of this VN.
I mean, I get the point, and is not a real nitpick, but it is a stark reminder that this is a game written from an anglo perspective, and that's something interesting to think aboout in relationship to the themes of the game. By way of culture and gravity humans decide what's real and HWBM uses these allegorical metaphysics to talk about the othering of queer people and those who don't fit societal ideals.
However, cultural imperialism is very much a thing, anglo world powers (and othe world powers, but the English-speaking ones are particular) are often unaware of how much their cultures get to decide what's real, even among marginalized experiences. Their gravity is inmense and given the metaphysics of this game, the idea that English has erased other languages from existing it's not an unlikely outcome (Spanish would be far from the first to go, tho).
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"For Wilson...the idea of the mind as separable from the body is a ‘masculinist’ one; one that presumes a certain kind of embodiment, which ‘fits with certain masculinist presumptions about psychological functioning" (Fiaccadori, 2006)
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The quick explanation for how the phrase “just a social construct” is a demonstration of failing to comprehend the concept being invoked, is that “war crime” is a social construct.
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i would actually like to hear more of your thoughts on whipping girl, whenever you feel ready enough to talk about it. i've only ever heard positive recommendations for it. i was thinking of reading it. i've read one or two introductory 101 texts on transmisogyny as well as some medium/substack posts, and always looking to read more as a tme person. ty!
thanks for asking! I'm gonna try to be concise because I'm stuck on my phone for the month, but here are my thoughts on whipping girl:
serano is at her strongest in the book in three areas: manifestations of transmisogyny in media (e.g. how trans caricatures pervade movies), the history of medical institutions developing a pathology of transsexuality (like the diagnostics of blanchard et al. or how trans people seeking healthcare were and continue to be forced into acting out prescribed expressions and manufacturing memories), and the construction of her own transition narrative (telling the reader what it was like for her to grow up desiring femininity in a way that confused her, the experience of crossdressing, the effects of hrt for her)
whenever she's just sticking to this, I think she effectively communicates a lot that the unaware reader could benefit from—even many trans women/transfems/tma people who are otherwise in tune with the history of medicalized transsexualism and our popular depictions could probably benefit from her own personal narrative, by nature of how variegated our experiences can be.
unfortunately I think the book fails at its primary—stated—goal, which is to theorize about transmisogyny. in the big picture this is a bifurcated failure:
on one branch of her argument, she remains committed to there being something biologically essential/innate about gender. this manifests thru multiple claims: that we have "innate inclinations" toward masculinity/femininity and "subconscious sex" rather than what I believe, which is that the latter are constructed categories imposed on different matrices of behaviour/expression/desire in different cultural contexts; that there is "definitely a biological component to gender" (close paraphrase) after a discussion of how she believes E and T tend to affect people (thus equivocating gender with dominant hormones!); that we have such a thing as "physical sex" which is the composition of our culturally decided "sex characteristics" (don't ask me how the dividing line is drawn) even as she says we should stop using "biological sex" as a term; that there is "no harm" in agreeing that "sex" is largely bimodal with some exceptions; that social constructionism is necessarily erasure of transsexual experiences in early childhood... altogether she is unwilling to relinquish arguments about the partial "innateness" of femininity/masculinity and gender. this is at tension with her admission on several occasions that these are neither culturally/geographically nor temporally stable concepts! but that doesn't seem to be a line she can follow thru on.
on another, intertwining branch, she engages in what I think is a deep and widespread mistake in the theorizing of transmisogyny: reducing it (mechanistically) to what she calls effemimania* or essentially anti-femininity. it is her stated thesis at the start that masculinity is universally preferred to femininity. she doesn't offer a definition of either term until one of the final chapters, where she defines them as the behaviours and expressions associated with a particular gender. but I think this reduction just misunderstands transmisogyny. it is even in tension with an observation she makes early on, that trans women are often punished for their perceived masculinity! but again, this is a thought she seems unable or unwilling to follow thru with.
my problem with the thesis is that masculinity and femininity do not float free of gender—it is not possible to speak of their valuation in the abstract. anyone who grew up as a masculine cis girl and never "grew out" of that "phase" can attest to the violence wrought upon expressions of masculinity from women. and this applies doubly so to the subjects of transmisogyny! not only are we punished for any perceived bleed-through of masculinity from our supposed "underlying male selves", those of us who are willingly masculine and thriving as mascs are punished for our failure to conform to the rules of the normative womanhood that is imposed on us (just as we are punished for any willing femininity as "false" and predatory upon cis womanhood—observe that transmisogyny is reactive degendering in every case!).
on both branches serano makes only perfunctory remarks about the intersections with race, class, and colonialism. "sex" as such was made to only be accessible to the "civilized", most of all the white european! for a racialized person and particularly a Black person navigating gender the waters are just not the same; the signifiers of sex neither available in the same way, nor granted the same medical legitimacy. what is the "physical sex" of someone who is de-sexed altogether? how can gender have a "biologically innate" component when its expressions between the bourgeoisie and the working class are at total odds with one another? this all goes for the masculine/feminine distinctions as well. what sense is there in the claim that we have innately masculine/feminine inclinations when globally (and transmisogyny has been made global!) what is feminine and masculine can be very nearly mirrored? nor is "masculinity is always considered superior to femininity" innocent of obviating race. transmisogynoir adds yet further degendering thru the coercive masculinization of someone as a Black woman—masculinization as punishment, again!
and as a final point, the account fails to be materialist. there is no attempt to place transmisogyny in its role as an instrument of political economy or, as jules gill-peterson might say, as a tool of statecraft. it is just a psychological response to the way the world is, as far as serano has anything to say about it. but how did the world become that way, and why?? serano's solution, the abolition of what she calls gender entitlement, is naive to the fact that gender entitlement is necessary to the maintenance of the capitalist state, which is structured thru patriarchy and built on colonialism. it is not possible to reskin this into something innocuous!
this is why I cannot recommend whipping girl as a work about transmisogyny except at the most shallow level. it could be a helpful critical read, but imo, it is just wrong about transmisogyny.
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Gender as a social construction became the cornerstone of much feminist discourse. The notion was particularly attractive because it was interpreted to mean that gender differences were not ordained by nature; they were mutable and therefore changeable. This in turn led to the opposition between social constructionism and biological determinism, as if they were mutually exclusive. Such a dichotomous presentation is unwarranted, however, because the ubiquity of biologically rooted explanations for difference in Western social thought and practices is a reflection of the extent to which biological explanations are found compelling. In other words, so long as the issue is difference (whether the issue is why women breast-feed babies or why they could not vote), old biologies will be found or new biologies will be constructed to explain women's disadvantage. The Western preoccupation with biology continues to generate constructions of "new biologies" even as some of the old biological assumptions are being dislodged. In fact, in the Western experience, social construction and biological determinism have been two sides of the same coin, since both ideas continue to reinforce each other. When social categories like gender are constructed, new biologies of difference can be invented. When biological interpretations are found to be compelling, social categories do derive their legitimacy and power from biology. In short, the social and the biological feed on each other.
The Invention of Women ~ Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí
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tbh I hate how tumblr discourse treats the topic of queer erasure as an either/or thing like its either
All historians are homophobic & transphobic and are all actively and intentionally erasing queer history.
or
No historians are homophobic and/or transphobic and anyone who is talking about the issue of queer erasure is actually just an anti-intellectual who doesn't understand social constructionism and the medicalisation of homosexuality (bonus the person saying this has such a simplistic understanding of social constructionism and the medicalisation of homosexuality that they inadvertently participate in the erasure of queer history due to ignorance).
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By; Andrew Doyle
Published: Feb 28, 2024
Many years ago I gave a talk at the London Metropolitan Archives in which I outlined my reasons for rejecting the then fashionable theory of social constructionism in relation to human sexuality. In the coffee break that followed, I was approached by a lesbian activist, who claimed to have chosen her orientation as a means to oppose the patriarchy. She demanded to know why I would not accept that sexuality had no biological basis, even though I had spent the best part of an hour answering this very question. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but I’ve already explained why I don’t agree with you’. ‘But why won’t you agree?’ she shouted in response. ‘Why?’
Primary school teachers are familiar with such frustrated pleas. The anger of children is so often connected with incomprehension, a sense of injustice, or both. When it persists into adulthood it represents a failure of socialisation. We frequently hear talk of our degraded political discourse – and there is some truth to that – but really we are dealing with mass infantilism. Its impact is evident wherever one cares to look: online, in the media, even in Parliament. Argumentation is so often reduced to a matter of tribal loyalty; whether one is right or wrong becomes secondary to the satisfaction of one’s ego through the submission of an opponent. This is not, as some imagine, simply a consequence of the ubiquity of social media, but rather a general failure over a number of years to instil critical thinking at every level of our educational institutions.
To be a freethinker has little to do with mastery of rhetoric and everything to do with introspection. It is all very well engaging in a debate in order to refine our persuasive skills, but it is a futile exercise unless we can entertain the possibility that we might be wrong. In Richard Dawkins’s book, The God Delusion (2006), he relates an anecdote about his time as an undergraduate at Oxford. A visiting academic from America gave a talk on the Golgi apparatus, a microscopic organelle found in plant and animal cells, and in doing so provided incontrovertible evidence of its existence. An elderly member of the Zoology Department, who had asserted for many years that the Golgi apparatus was a myth, was present at the lecture. Dawkins relates how, as the speaker drew to a close, ‘The old man strode to the front of the hall, shook the American by the hand and said – with passion – “My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years.” We clapped our hands red’.
This is the ideal that so few embody, particularly when it comes to the unexamined tenets of political ideology. We often see examples of media commentators or politicians being discredited in interviews or discussions, but how often do we see them concede their errors, even when they are exposed beyond doubt? There is a very good reason why the sociologist and philosopher Herbert Spencer opened his First Principles (1862) by asserting that there exists ‘a soul of truth in things erroneous’; but such concessions can only be made by those who are able to prioritise being right over being seen to be right. Too many are seemingly determined to turn difficult arguments into zero-sum games in which to give any ground whatsoever is to automatically surrender it to an opponent.
The discipline of critical thinking invites us to consider the origins of our knowledge and convictions. A man may speak with the certainty of an Old Testament prophet, but has he reached his conclusions for himself? Or is he a mere resurrectionist, plundering his bookshelves for the leather-bound corpses of other people’s ideas? Hazlitt expounded at length on how sophistry might be mistaken for critical faculties, noting that the man who sees only one half of a subject may still be able to express it fluently. ‘You might as well ask the paralytic to leap from his chair and throw away his crutch,’ he wrote, ‘as expect the learned reader to throw down his book and think for himself. He clings to it for his intellectual support; and his dread of being left to himself is like the horror of a vacuum’.
The natural human instinct for confirmation bias presents a further problem, one especially prominent among ideologues. Anything can be taken to bolster one’s position so long as it is perceived through the lens of prejudgment. We can see this most notably in the proponents of Critical Social Justice, who start from the premise that unequal outcomes – disparities in average earnings between men and women, for instance – are evidence of structural inequalities in society. They are beginning with the conclusion and working backwards, mistaking their own arguments for proof.
Worse still, such an approach often correlates with a distinctly moralistic standpoint. Many of the most abusive individuals on social media cannot recognise their behaviour for what it is because they have cast themselves in the role of the virtuous. If we are morally good, the logic goes, it must be assumed that our detractors are motivated by evil and we are therefore relieved of the obligation to treat them as human beings. What they lack in empathy they make up in their capacity for invective.
Again, we must be alert to the danger of cheapening argumentation and analysis to the mere satisfaction of ego. One of the reasons why disagreements on social media tend towards the bellicose is that the forum is public. Where there is an audience, there is always the risk that critical thinking will be subordinated to the performative desire for victory or the humiliation of a rival. In these circumstances, complexities that require a nuanced approach are refashioned into misleading binaries, and opponents are mischaracterised out of all recognition so that people effectively end up arguing with spectres of their imagination. The Socratic method, by contrast, urges us to see disputation as essentially cooperative. This is the ideal that should be embedded into our national curricula. Children need to be taught that there are few instances in which serious discussions can be simplified to a matter of right or wrong, and fewer still in which one person’s rightness should be taken as proof of another’s wrongness. In the lexicon of Critical Thinking, this is called the fallacy of ‘affirming a disjunct’; that is to say, ‘either you are right or I am right, which means that if you are wrong I must be right’. One cannot think critically in such reductionist terms.
To attempt seriously to understand an alternative worldview involves, as Bertrand Russell put it, ‘some effort of thought, and most people would die sooner than think’. In the study of psychology this is termed the ‘cognitive miser’ model, which acknowledges that most human brains will favour the easiest solution to any given problem. These mental shortcuts – known as heuristics – are hardwired into us, which is why being told what to think is more pleasurable than thinking for ourselves. I remember an English lesson in which I had initiated a discussion with my students about the representation of Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost, a topic that routinely comes up in exams. I wanted to know what they thought, and why. One student was sufficiently bold to ask: ‘Can’t you just tell us what we need to write to get the highest marks?’
This was not the fault of the student; there has been a trend in recent years, most likely influenced by the pressures of league tables, for schools to engage in ‘spoon-feeding’. Schemes of work and assessment criteria are made readily available to the pupils so that they can systematically hit the necessary targets in order to elevate their grades. The notion of education for education’s sake no longer carries any weight. I have even seen talented pupils marked down by moderators for an excess of individuality in their answers. In such circumstances, even a subject like English Literature can be reduced to a kind of memory test in which essays are regurgitated by rote.
It is hardly surprising, then, that pupils who opt for Critical Thinking courses at GCSE or A-level often perceive it to be a light option, a means to enhance the curriculum vitae without too much exertion. Courses are generally divided into Problem Solving and Critical Thinking, the former concerned with processing and interpreting data, and the latter covering the fundamentals of analysis and argumentation. Pupils learn about common fallacies such as the ad hominem (personal attack), tu quoque (counter-attack) and post hoc, ergo propter hoc (mistaking correlation for causality), along with others derived from Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations. The Latin may be off-putting, but in truth these are simple ideas which are readily digestible. If one were to discount arguments in which these fallacies were committed, virtually all online disputes would disappear.
That said, the existence of Critical Thinking as an academic subject in its own right might not be the best way to achieve this. As the psychologist Daniel T. Willingham has argued, cognitive abilities are redundant without secure contextual knowledge. Critical thinking is already embedded into any pedagogical practice that focuses on how to think rather than what to think. The increased influence of the new puritans in education presents a problem in this regard, given that they are particularly hostile to divergent viewpoints. Any institution which becomes ideologically driven is unlikely to successfully foster critical thinking, and this is particularly the case when teachers are at times expected to proselytise in accordance with fashionable identity politics. The depoliticisation of schools is just the first step. Critical thinking requires humility; this involves not just the ability to admit that one might be wrong, but also to recognise that an uninformed opinion is worthless, however stridently expressed. Interpretative skills are key, but only when developed on a secure foundation of subject-specific knowledge. This is the basis for Camille Paglia’s view that art history should be built into the national curriculum from primary school level. In her book, Glittering Images (2012), Paglia explains that children require ‘a historical framework of objective knowledge about art’, rather than merely treating art as ‘therapeutic praxis’ to ‘unleash children’s hidden creativity’. Potato prints and zigzag scissors have their place, but we mustn’t forget about the textbooks.
When I was a part-time English teacher at a private secondary school for girls in London, one of my favourite exercises for the younger pupils was to ask them to study a photograph of a well-known work of art for five minutes without speaking, after which time they would share their observations with the rest of the class. So, for instance, I would give them each a copy of Paul Delaroche’s ‘Les Enfants d’Edouard’ (1831), which depicts the two nephews of Richard III in their chamber in the Tower of London just prior to their murder. My pupils knew nothing of the historical context, but after minutes of silent consideration were able to pick out details – the ominous shadows under the door, the dog alerted to the assassins’ footfall, how the older boy stares out at us with a sense of resignation – and offer some personal reflections on their cumulative impact. To create, one must first learn how to interpret.
The kind of humility fostered in the appreciation of great art could act as a corrective to the rise of narcissism and decline of empathy that psychologists have observed over the past thirty years. According to the National Institutes of Health, millennials are three times more likely to suffer from narcissistic personality disorder than those of the baby boomer generation. Writers such as Peter Whittle, Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett have traced the rise of hyper-individualism in Western culture. One particular study revealed that in 1950 only 12 per cent of respondents agreed with the statement ‘I am a very important person’. By 1990, this figure had risen to 80 per cent and the trajectory shows no signs of stopping. One of the ways in which this trend manifests itself is the now common tendency for arguments to deteriorate into accusations of dishonesty. After all, it takes an extreme form of egotism to assume that the only possible explanation for an alternative point of view is that one’s opponent must be lying. In order to think critically, we cannot be in the business of simply assessing conclusions on the basis of whether or not they accord with our own.
An education underpinned by critical thinking is the very bedrock of civilisation, the means by which chaos is tamed into order. Tribalism, mudslinging, the inability to critique one’s own position: these are the telltale markers of the boorish and the hidebound. A society is ill-served by a generation of adults who have not been educated beyond the solipsistic impulses of childhood. At a time when so many are lamenting the degradation of public discourse, a conversation about how best to incorporate critical thinking into our schools is long overdue. Our civilisation might just depend on it.
This is an excerpt from The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World. You can buy the book here. It’s also available as an audiobook.
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Picking flowers and reading on social constructionism in crime
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― [ N ] EUTRALISM IN PILTOVER .
Piltover does not believe in the social constructs of sexuality or gender norms. Before fully understanding this, one must first understand what this means.
Social Constructs, or Constructionism, is the concept of a culture placing meaning between symbols, objects, and other solid products and giving an immutable quality to them. Such concepts are the idea of the worth of money or the power of a noble house sigil. The opposite of this is Neutralism. Neutralism is the idea that qualities, attributes, or meanings are their true nature without any kind of rules or framework. This means that something is the way it is and there is no need to place value or importance upon it.
Piltover does not place any kind of social constructs upon sexuality or gender terms. They do not see it as anything of importance to place value or terms upon and the idea that there must be this kind of gender or that kind of sexuality. In Piltover, sexuality doesn't even exist. They believe that people will like who they want based on their nature and their own decisions. There is no need to place some kind of hard rule upon it.
This means, that if you decide you are a man, and you like men, that's your nature. They don't use the term gay nor do they box it in as saying this is all you can like. Sexuality and gender are fluid within Piltover and you decide what you are when you want. Another example is the idea that you are a woman but decide to be gender neutral (as in binary and use them). Again, this is a respected process. The concept of Pronouns does not negate femininism or masculinity. A person can express discomfort in being called she or her, however much of the time people in Piltover do not see any kind of gender exclusion to these pronouns. She/her, he/him, or they/them for example, are just a way to reference a person and NOT state you are a man or woman.
Another example is going to a brothel house. In Piltover, these brothel houses are called bathhouses, and when you go to them you do not speak of your gender wants or your sexuality. You meet with the people and decide who you want to be with. If you have no interest in being with someone with a penis, then you do not have with those people because you have no interest in that bodily part. Same thing if you don't want someone with breasts. It's not uncommon to have sexual interest in body parts, but these body parts do not negate your sexuality or your gender. There is no concept that someone doesn't like someone because they have this body part or that, just that they are not sexually attracted to it and do not have any interest to lay with that. It doesn't make anyone wrong, only that they have an interest.
Piltover does not need to place constructs upon sexuality or gender as they believe it is a neutral concept based on your nature. They do not label anyone as gay, lesbian, straight, trans, or any kind of gender-based constructed label nor do they believe in homosexuality, demisexual, asexual, or others. In Piltover, there are no labels and there is no construct. You are what you are by what you deem your nature to be.
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On the subject of headmate origin, validity, and "realness" of headmates...
The way we solved the question for us was like... Either each of us is "real" by virtue of being a distinct person. Or if we are not distinct, if we are all different faces of the same person, then we all share in the realness and humanity of that one person..
This is unrelated to origin or internal dynamics.. and certainly, the claim that only headmates caused by this or that origin can claim to be "real" is rather anxiety inducing and not very helpful..
It also begs the question of what is meant by real.. ? Does it mean 'not an act, not a performance of the self'? Boy have I got some news for some of y'all about social constructionism and related notions.. Singlets have been discussing if there's even ONE real self for ages.. decades... Centuries...
I guess what I mean to say is... Only you get to define your own experience and your own realness. If you think your plurality is rooted in psychotic mechanisms, this doesn't dictate that it is bad, fake, problematic, harmful, something to ignore or eradicate.
You get to define your own experience and your own self/selves, your own goals.
Don't let others write your narratives for you.
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