It is a good thing, because everyone has an identity. Lots of them, really. Some deeply personal, some forced on them by society, some aspirational, some grounded in who I am and what I believe. Rufo's whole propaganda war is based on a simple assertion, that institutions are (somehow) forcing views and opinions on individuals. Recommendations and suggestions are requirements and orders. Its snake oil and nothing more. Mounk is working the same field, with a Brooksian veneer. Look at his claim that CRT claims categories like race, gender, and sexual orientation are "the primary prism through which to understand everything about our society". All the propaganda is full of this mind-reading list of absolutes that don't line up with real-world practice. It's all hysteria, over something that's not that big a deal. But the hysteria is a crucial component, deflecting argument or even engagement through hyperventilation. You don't have a rational argument with someone in hysterics, and that's the goal.
Telling people that race and gender are social constructions is just never going to work. I have trouble with it and I'm as liberal/progressive as it gets (or, close enough — I'm sure I could be outflanked; anyone could).
Would it help if I told you that they aren't *exclusively* social constructions? That the biology of sex is real and makes the very large majority of sex cases (as opposed to gender, which is a lot more difficult because the language lags so far behind the reality) easy to decide? And a good number of racial phenotypes are biologically real as well, in some kind of preponderance of cases. What's socially provided is the forcing of categories on individuals, the absence of complex categories (as in the "one-drop" rule of racial identity in the old South) and the conflict when it doesn't work, and the assumption and forcing of sociocultural characteristics as inherent (girls play with dolls and boys play with trucks).
Right, exactly — that all makes perfect sense. (That's the "missing chunk of the equation" that I referred to below.)
But — as with "defund the police" except multiplied a thousandfold -- the version non-liberals encounter, without that nuance, sounds totally crazy. The number of times I've seen a Conservative shut down a liberal by demanding "Is there a difference between men and women"/"boys and girls" and getting a convoluted response that makes the audience jeer is depressing. Or, I submit my Conservative Friend™ who demands "Can a woman have a penis?" (similarly trying to make me sound crazy).
Well, it's a problem, especially with the issue of transgender identities which are still pretty novel for most of us, and beyond that to the ideas of non-binary identities that aren't very well worked out (and may end up different, scientifically or socially, from how it looks now).
I have a clear idea of where I want to start from thinking about it, which is no doubt a pretty "liberal" place: with the suffering of body image dysphoria, which is very real and has all kinds of horrible consequences. I can alleviate that suffering by recognizing a person with a penis as a woman if that's what she needs from me, and it doesn't take anything from me to do so.
Why would I tell her she has to be a man, just because of certain "socially constructed" stereotype beliefs we hold about people with penises which we *know* don't in fact apply to everybody with a penis? Her personal inability to live by those stereotypes is just as real as the penis is, though more difficult to measure, and a lot harder to get rid of, if that's what she decides she wants to do. I'm sorry about the jeering audience, but they're not suffering, they're just being dumb, especially your friend, who is smart enough to do better.
The political problem is extremely difficult, which is why scoundrels like Chris Rufo make so much of it. It's also extremely minor, involving a relatively tiny number of individuals. I don't know what to do about it, of course.
Have you been hearing the recent discussion about biologically intersex people whose parents were forced to choose a gender for them when they were still babies, often making choices that were wrong for the kids when they were old enough to think about it? This could be a good place to build an argument from.
If you know any obstetricians or pediatric nurses, they've got stories. Lots of stories. My mom was a pediatric nurse. In the old days they didn't ask anyone, a decision was made in the room by the doctor.
Well of course, a false dichotomy is a go-to move in conservative debate. Do you know about the whole "sex is real" thing with TERFs? Conflating biology and performative sexuality is what passes for clever in that world. The reason conservatives are hammering on Trans: threat or menace? is that it pushes a primal button in the already insecure base. The face that they are adding on the GROOMER/What About The Children nonsense just highlights the whole bad faith stew.
I'm saying that, as with Critical Race Theory, which to my quasi (or, pseudo) philosophical eyes, instantly made perfect sense as the best possible place for American sociology and semiotics to go right now, is just such a stretch for so many Americans who aren't rejecting the premises so much as they're just revealing themselves to have absolutely no idea what goes on in real academic circles and what possible social utility it can ever have.
This kind of culture shock has been exploited by the Right over and over again, like when they used Mapplethorpe or "Piss Christ" to try to defund the NEA. It just takes too many steps of remove to get from rigorous discourse to the vulgate, and the bridge can be nearly impossible to build — look at Carl Sagan vs. astrology or Richard Dawkins vs. Creationism, and those are more successful examples.
Sometimes something interesting happens in pop culture like "Barbie" (which I finally saw) so that terms like Patriarchy are accurately put forward in an attractive enough vessel that everyone can understand what's happening and participate — I actually think the "debate" over the movie (with Ben Shapiro types lamenting the absence of "faith and family" in sacrifice to a "liberal agenda" and people on our side saying, Yeah, that's exactly what it is, man) was very good; it was healthier and more helpful than the stuff usually is.
Anyway, maybe I'm a philistine but gender is not a "social construction." It's the foundation for tons and tons of social constructions, varying by society and era, but the underlying reality of the distinction can't be denied.
I mean, can it? Or am I missing the point entirely? I nod along when the stuff gets said like a good liberal, but I think there's a middle chunk of the equation missing, as I wrote above.
Maybe I'm not making myself clear (or, more likely, my thinking is just totally muddled). I'm saying that going around announcing that male/female is "a social construction" imposed by a power structure — when everyone with a brain can see that it's the most basic attribute of nearly all life on earth, the mechanism of evolution — makes me sometimes think that we're TRYING to sound like we're out of our minds.
OK, look, I wouldn't advise you to "go around announcing" anything. The language you put the announcement in isn't an accurate version of what I think or of anything I've said here, and I don't think it's an accurate version of what anybody else thinks. It sounds to me like a parody of what I think, composed by somebody like Rufo, meant specifically to mislead.
I guess I'll have to write something longer about it, though it's not a job I really feel like doing or feel qualified for. My own understanding of social construction is much more informed (from 30-odd years back, when I was first learning cultural anthropology) by issues of race and ethnicity than sex and gender, I don't really know much of the literature on the latter. I do have some experience of trans people, as I suppose your C.F.™ doesn't, and maybe I'll talk about that, but I don't think it will make any difference. He won't be persuaded by anything I say, anyhow. I can't help you persuade him of anything, I don't think. I'm not confident I can persuade you.
It just seems to me that — like all civilizational enlightenment — what's happening now is a new and good form of egalitarian abstraction that improves everyone's lives and the human condition in general by INTRODUCING social constructions, not getting rid of them.
I mean despite what Jefferson and Franklin settled on in terms of verbiage, we all over here in your club understand that the "rights" being introduced are an INVENTION that supersedes the far more natural and instinctive tendency of people to form oppressive hierarchies; fight race wars; invade and enslave etc. Just like "International Law," "Human Rights" and "Crimes Against Humanity" are INVENTIONS of civilization that result from centuries of suffering leading to the very cerebral and abstract construction of moral philosophy and the principles of society and governance that they directly inspire and fortify.
The trouble comes from a rhetorical need to make things seem important by calling them "intrinsic" or "inalienable" when in reality they're they opposite; they're social constructions.
(Conservatives understand this perfectly — they just take the other side, arguing for what's "natural" in order to uphold inequalities that we regard as barbaric or arbitrary but which nonetheless are NATURAL; they occur in every civilization until they're outgrown — hence progressives think in terms of progress while conservatives want to stand athwart history and shout "stop" etc.)
So if a man with a penis decides he's really a woman, that seems to me to fall into this category: the "natural" (and therefore conservative) position is that the penis means this is a man; full stop, are you crazy etc. while the progressive position, which is more abstracted just like all civilizational advances as I'm discussing, is that we can socially construct a framework where he becomes she and is better off.
Right? I mean this is exactly like any inclusive policy that overthrows centuries of oppression, isn't it? We CREATE social norms that make genders and races equal despite the natural human tendency to oppress (natural because it's there from the beginning and goes away as society advances).
Obviously I'm inviting those rebuttals where people try to claim that patriarchy is arbitrary and look at this primitive society ruled by women and look at this other remote island where the races intermingle so it's all just this "construction" we have to reject, but I mean, come on. To me it's self-evident that "equality" or "rights" of any kind are an invention that took centuries to create, and we, with our advanced brains, can take full credit.
It is a good thing, because everyone has an identity. Lots of them, really. Some deeply personal, some forced on them by society, some aspirational, some grounded in who I am and what I believe. Rufo's whole propaganda war is based on a simple assertion, that institutions are (somehow) forcing views and opinions on individuals. Recommendations and suggestions are requirements and orders. Its snake oil and nothing more. Mounk is working the same field, with a Brooksian veneer. Look at his claim that CRT claims categories like race, gender, and sexual orientation are "the primary prism through which to understand everything about our society". All the propaganda is full of this mind-reading list of absolutes that don't line up with real-world practice. It's all hysteria, over something that's not that big a deal. But the hysteria is a crucial component, deflecting argument or even engagement through hyperventilation. You don't have a rational argument with someone in hysterics, and that's the goal.
Telling people that race and gender are social constructions is just never going to work. I have trouble with it and I'm as liberal/progressive as it gets (or, close enough — I'm sure I could be outflanked; anyone could).
Would it help if I told you that they aren't *exclusively* social constructions? That the biology of sex is real and makes the very large majority of sex cases (as opposed to gender, which is a lot more difficult because the language lags so far behind the reality) easy to decide? And a good number of racial phenotypes are biologically real as well, in some kind of preponderance of cases. What's socially provided is the forcing of categories on individuals, the absence of complex categories (as in the "one-drop" rule of racial identity in the old South) and the conflict when it doesn't work, and the assumption and forcing of sociocultural characteristics as inherent (girls play with dolls and boys play with trucks).
Right, exactly — that all makes perfect sense. (That's the "missing chunk of the equation" that I referred to below.)
But — as with "defund the police" except multiplied a thousandfold -- the version non-liberals encounter, without that nuance, sounds totally crazy. The number of times I've seen a Conservative shut down a liberal by demanding "Is there a difference between men and women"/"boys and girls" and getting a convoluted response that makes the audience jeer is depressing. Or, I submit my Conservative Friend™ who demands "Can a woman have a penis?" (similarly trying to make me sound crazy).
Well, it's a problem, especially with the issue of transgender identities which are still pretty novel for most of us, and beyond that to the ideas of non-binary identities that aren't very well worked out (and may end up different, scientifically or socially, from how it looks now).
I have a clear idea of where I want to start from thinking about it, which is no doubt a pretty "liberal" place: with the suffering of body image dysphoria, which is very real and has all kinds of horrible consequences. I can alleviate that suffering by recognizing a person with a penis as a woman if that's what she needs from me, and it doesn't take anything from me to do so.
Why would I tell her she has to be a man, just because of certain "socially constructed" stereotype beliefs we hold about people with penises which we *know* don't in fact apply to everybody with a penis? Her personal inability to live by those stereotypes is just as real as the penis is, though more difficult to measure, and a lot harder to get rid of, if that's what she decides she wants to do. I'm sorry about the jeering audience, but they're not suffering, they're just being dumb, especially your friend, who is smart enough to do better.
The political problem is extremely difficult, which is why scoundrels like Chris Rufo make so much of it. It's also extremely minor, involving a relatively tiny number of individuals. I don't know what to do about it, of course.
Have you been hearing the recent discussion about biologically intersex people whose parents were forced to choose a gender for them when they were still babies, often making choices that were wrong for the kids when they were old enough to think about it? This could be a good place to build an argument from.
If you know any obstetricians or pediatric nurses, they've got stories. Lots of stories. My mom was a pediatric nurse. In the old days they didn't ask anyone, a decision was made in the room by the doctor.
Well of course, a false dichotomy is a go-to move in conservative debate. Do you know about the whole "sex is real" thing with TERFs? Conflating biology and performative sexuality is what passes for clever in that world. The reason conservatives are hammering on Trans: threat or menace? is that it pushes a primal button in the already insecure base. The face that they are adding on the GROOMER/What About The Children nonsense just highlights the whole bad faith stew.
I meant to write more; excuse me.
I'm saying that, as with Critical Race Theory, which to my quasi (or, pseudo) philosophical eyes, instantly made perfect sense as the best possible place for American sociology and semiotics to go right now, is just such a stretch for so many Americans who aren't rejecting the premises so much as they're just revealing themselves to have absolutely no idea what goes on in real academic circles and what possible social utility it can ever have.
This kind of culture shock has been exploited by the Right over and over again, like when they used Mapplethorpe or "Piss Christ" to try to defund the NEA. It just takes too many steps of remove to get from rigorous discourse to the vulgate, and the bridge can be nearly impossible to build — look at Carl Sagan vs. astrology or Richard Dawkins vs. Creationism, and those are more successful examples.
Sometimes something interesting happens in pop culture like "Barbie" (which I finally saw) so that terms like Patriarchy are accurately put forward in an attractive enough vessel that everyone can understand what's happening and participate — I actually think the "debate" over the movie (with Ben Shapiro types lamenting the absence of "faith and family" in sacrifice to a "liberal agenda" and people on our side saying, Yeah, that's exactly what it is, man) was very good; it was healthier and more helpful than the stuff usually is.
Anyway, maybe I'm a philistine but gender is not a "social construction." It's the foundation for tons and tons of social constructions, varying by society and era, but the underlying reality of the distinction can't be denied.
I mean, can it? Or am I missing the point entirely? I nod along when the stuff gets said like a good liberal, but I think there's a middle chunk of the equation missing, as I wrote above.
On distinguishing sex from gender, here are some simple rules https://www.coe.int/en/web/gender-matters/sex-and-gender
Maybe I'm not making myself clear (or, more likely, my thinking is just totally muddled). I'm saying that going around announcing that male/female is "a social construction" imposed by a power structure — when everyone with a brain can see that it's the most basic attribute of nearly all life on earth, the mechanism of evolution — makes me sometimes think that we're TRYING to sound like we're out of our minds.
OK, look, I wouldn't advise you to "go around announcing" anything. The language you put the announcement in isn't an accurate version of what I think or of anything I've said here, and I don't think it's an accurate version of what anybody else thinks. It sounds to me like a parody of what I think, composed by somebody like Rufo, meant specifically to mislead.
I guess I'll have to write something longer about it, though it's not a job I really feel like doing or feel qualified for. My own understanding of social construction is much more informed (from 30-odd years back, when I was first learning cultural anthropology) by issues of race and ethnicity than sex and gender, I don't really know much of the literature on the latter. I do have some experience of trans people, as I suppose your C.F.™ doesn't, and maybe I'll talk about that, but I don't think it will make any difference. He won't be persuaded by anything I say, anyhow. I can't help you persuade him of anything, I don't think. I'm not confident I can persuade you.
It just seems to me that — like all civilizational enlightenment — what's happening now is a new and good form of egalitarian abstraction that improves everyone's lives and the human condition in general by INTRODUCING social constructions, not getting rid of them.
I mean despite what Jefferson and Franklin settled on in terms of verbiage, we all over here in your club understand that the "rights" being introduced are an INVENTION that supersedes the far more natural and instinctive tendency of people to form oppressive hierarchies; fight race wars; invade and enslave etc. Just like "International Law," "Human Rights" and "Crimes Against Humanity" are INVENTIONS of civilization that result from centuries of suffering leading to the very cerebral and abstract construction of moral philosophy and the principles of society and governance that they directly inspire and fortify.
The trouble comes from a rhetorical need to make things seem important by calling them "intrinsic" or "inalienable" when in reality they're they opposite; they're social constructions.
(Conservatives understand this perfectly — they just take the other side, arguing for what's "natural" in order to uphold inequalities that we regard as barbaric or arbitrary but which nonetheless are NATURAL; they occur in every civilization until they're outgrown — hence progressives think in terms of progress while conservatives want to stand athwart history and shout "stop" etc.)
So if a man with a penis decides he's really a woman, that seems to me to fall into this category: the "natural" (and therefore conservative) position is that the penis means this is a man; full stop, are you crazy etc. while the progressive position, which is more abstracted just like all civilizational advances as I'm discussing, is that we can socially construct a framework where he becomes she and is better off.
Right? I mean this is exactly like any inclusive policy that overthrows centuries of oppression, isn't it? We CREATE social norms that make genders and races equal despite the natural human tendency to oppress (natural because it's there from the beginning and goes away as society advances).
Obviously I'm inviting those rebuttals where people try to claim that patriarchy is arbitrary and look at this primitive society ruled by women and look at this other remote island where the races intermingle so it's all just this "construction" we have to reject, but I mean, come on. To me it's self-evident that "equality" or "rights" of any kind are an invention that took centuries to create, and we, with our advanced brains, can take full credit.