No no no, not “The Gender Binary.” We all know The Gender Binary is “how closely you match shitty 1950s stereotypes as conceived of by early-2000s liberals”.
I'm stoked that you found my email interesting, but disappointed that you didn't credit me for recognizing that what radicals really mean is "gender is personality." You know I read your blog, tho, so I know you weren't trying to be sneaky.
I can't tell whether you're being ironic when you say it's okay to go along with this. As you know, I think we /shouldn't/ let people define gender as personality. It's an abuse of language. If we regularly allow language to shift as much as people have tried to shift it these past 10 years, people 200 years from now will have to go to graduate school to learn how to read 20th-century English. Not to mention that language change disables the search engines we now rely on for information retrieval, and will mislead large language models, with potentially disastrous consequences. This kind of language change isn't inventing new words for new meanings; it's always deliberately trying to fool people into accepting something they don't like by obscuring what is being said.
In this case, what's being said is that we should have no gender--that there should be at most sex, and that should have nothing to do with our personalities. Gender is the correlation between sex and personality, the crossroad between genes and social construction. To change it to mean "personality" is to assert there /is/ no correlation and no crossroads--to purify us of biology, and make our ontology of our selves as sterile and cleanly separable as Plato or a medieval scholastic would need it to be to impose their mad logic on us.
It's an especially pernicious abuse of language because, while people are used to thinking of a personality as a completely individual thing, they're used to thinking of genders as having finite number, or as being at most points along a spectrum (a mere one dimension). Getting people to accept "gender" as meaning "personality" thus still removes an infinite number of degrees of freedom from a person's personality, even if it leaves us with a smaller infinity (the cardinality of the reals). It's thus part of the larger program of all communitarians, which is to diminish individualism.
This may be the main point of identity politics--to make people confuse some highly-restricted categorization of themselves with their identity. It has short-term political uses, but why have so many different identity groups, often with conflicting political goals, come together under the banner of "identity politics"? I think it's because they're all children of Plato and Rousseau, all committed to philosophies which preach that there is just one Good for everyone; and thus they see no need for democratic conflict-resolution, as two good people can never have a conflict of interest. They all require the existence of a "Common Will", and therefore all need above all to crush individualism, diverse thought, and personality.
(Once they have, they will, as always, splinter back into mutually-hostile sects and fight to the death for supreme power, as Platonists always do after the Revolution.)
It's been a thing I've been bandying about internally and with friends for a while, but I appreciate your contribution as well! If I had to credit everyone I hashed out ideas with I'd have a whole acknowledgements appendix for every post. :)
I'm being serious about this. The "that's not what that word means" ship has sailed. The inertia behind this has been fed by thousands of highly-motivated people for years. People who have a lot of sway in media and journalism and academia -- the places where words keep their tap-roots. This isn't changing. What we can do is let everyone else know so they aren't kept as epistemic hostages.
And also, this is good actually, cuz we already have a word that means sex, and it's sex. Gender is freed up to do more productive labor elsewhere!
English changes famously quickly. No one can read Shakespeare without a translation guide because it was written in a foreign language, and that was just 400 years ago. If now it's 200 years instead of 400, so what?
>it's always deliberately trying to fool people into accepting something they don't like by obscuring what is being said.
Yes, and the change already happened. You can help people by letting them know what the change is so they aren't fooled. You can't turn back the clock.
> To change it to mean "personality" is to assert there /is/ no correlation and no crossroads
Eh, I disagree. You can claim that sex and personality don't correlate at the population level, but then everyone will know you're making stupid claims and will think less of you.
> This may be the main point of identity politics--to make people confuse some highly-restricted categorization of themselves with their identity.
OK, so take away one more tool of confussion by letting everyone know what "gender" means now. Also, I don't think you need a cabal to push people into categorizing themselves, that's one of the things humans love doing most. I'm a Donatello! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtsmluPK7Ug
Oct 21, 2023·edited Oct 21, 2023Liked by Eneasz Brodski
Well, then, great minds think alike! :)
The loss of "gender" isn't a terrible loss, since the word was barely used before 1970. But I do think, supposing we have obligations at all, that we have an obligation to the future to try to keep the language as steady as it has been these past few centuries. Allowing it to change quickly makes the past inaccessible. People might as well be illiterate. It would be like the Middle Ages again, when people without Latin knew basically nothing that had happened before the oldest person they knew was born.
The development of media (print, radio, movies, TV) and transportation progressively stabilized language, until now, when it's switched in the other direction. Air travel isolates city from country, and the control of the media by linguistic radicals today is what Orwell warned us of, being used pretty much as he foretold.
The rate at which English has been changing had been slowing down exponentially for the past 1,000 years. The author of "Of Arthour and Merlin" (circa 1270) would have been unable to read Beowulf (c 700-1000). Chaucer (1340-1400) would have had a hell of a time reading "Of Arthour and Merlin". Shakespeare would have had a difficult time reading Chaucer. But writing from Shakespeare's time is perfectly comprehensible to us today, except for that of Shakespeare himself, who did not write in the proper English of his time, but in his own phony-archaic and grammatically atrocious style, with word order sometimes inverted to fit the meter or the rhyme, and sometimes just to confuse people. He searched old manuscripts for words that had fallen out of use centuries before, preferring them to words that his audience might know; and used many words of his own invention.
(If you study the meter of Shakespeare's play at the points where one character stops speaking and another character begins, you'll see that the second speaker very often finishes the metric line that the first speaker began, even in places where any speaker of any language would have paused before speaking. This shows that Shakespeare had his actors ram their lines together without pauses between characters. I think this in itself is sufficient proof that he was trying to confuse and bewilder the audience.)
> Eh, I disagree. You can claim that sex and personality don't correlate at the population level, but then everyone will know you're making stupid claims and will think less of you.
I wish it were possible to make a claim stupid enough that everyone could tell it was stupid. We're now in a land where stupidity is taken as proof of profundity. You can thank Hegel.
"Goth Rationalist Poly Househusbands", Did you self identify as a HUSBAND!!!??? ( Gasp!) 😝
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I'm stoked that you found my email interesting, but disappointed that you didn't credit me for recognizing that what radicals really mean is "gender is personality." You know I read your blog, tho, so I know you weren't trying to be sneaky.
I can't tell whether you're being ironic when you say it's okay to go along with this. As you know, I think we /shouldn't/ let people define gender as personality. It's an abuse of language. If we regularly allow language to shift as much as people have tried to shift it these past 10 years, people 200 years from now will have to go to graduate school to learn how to read 20th-century English. Not to mention that language change disables the search engines we now rely on for information retrieval, and will mislead large language models, with potentially disastrous consequences. This kind of language change isn't inventing new words for new meanings; it's always deliberately trying to fool people into accepting something they don't like by obscuring what is being said.
In this case, what's being said is that we should have no gender--that there should be at most sex, and that should have nothing to do with our personalities. Gender is the correlation between sex and personality, the crossroad between genes and social construction. To change it to mean "personality" is to assert there /is/ no correlation and no crossroads--to purify us of biology, and make our ontology of our selves as sterile and cleanly separable as Plato or a medieval scholastic would need it to be to impose their mad logic on us.
It's an especially pernicious abuse of language because, while people are used to thinking of a personality as a completely individual thing, they're used to thinking of genders as having finite number, or as being at most points along a spectrum (a mere one dimension). Getting people to accept "gender" as meaning "personality" thus still removes an infinite number of degrees of freedom from a person's personality, even if it leaves us with a smaller infinity (the cardinality of the reals). It's thus part of the larger program of all communitarians, which is to diminish individualism.
This may be the main point of identity politics--to make people confuse some highly-restricted categorization of themselves with their identity. It has short-term political uses, but why have so many different identity groups, often with conflicting political goals, come together under the banner of "identity politics"? I think it's because they're all children of Plato and Rousseau, all committed to philosophies which preach that there is just one Good for everyone; and thus they see no need for democratic conflict-resolution, as two good people can never have a conflict of interest. They all require the existence of a "Common Will", and therefore all need above all to crush individualism, diverse thought, and personality.
(Once they have, they will, as always, splinter back into mutually-hostile sects and fight to the death for supreme power, as Platonists always do after the Revolution.)
It's been a thing I've been bandying about internally and with friends for a while, but I appreciate your contribution as well! If I had to credit everyone I hashed out ideas with I'd have a whole acknowledgements appendix for every post. :)
I'm being serious about this. The "that's not what that word means" ship has sailed. The inertia behind this has been fed by thousands of highly-motivated people for years. People who have a lot of sway in media and journalism and academia -- the places where words keep their tap-roots. This isn't changing. What we can do is let everyone else know so they aren't kept as epistemic hostages.
And also, this is good actually, cuz we already have a word that means sex, and it's sex. Gender is freed up to do more productive labor elsewhere!
English changes famously quickly. No one can read Shakespeare without a translation guide because it was written in a foreign language, and that was just 400 years ago. If now it's 200 years instead of 400, so what?
>it's always deliberately trying to fool people into accepting something they don't like by obscuring what is being said.
Yes, and the change already happened. You can help people by letting them know what the change is so they aren't fooled. You can't turn back the clock.
> To change it to mean "personality" is to assert there /is/ no correlation and no crossroads
Eh, I disagree. You can claim that sex and personality don't correlate at the population level, but then everyone will know you're making stupid claims and will think less of you.
> This may be the main point of identity politics--to make people confuse some highly-restricted categorization of themselves with their identity.
OK, so take away one more tool of confussion by letting everyone know what "gender" means now. Also, I don't think you need a cabal to push people into categorizing themselves, that's one of the things humans love doing most. I'm a Donatello! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtsmluPK7Ug
Well, then, great minds think alike! :)
The loss of "gender" isn't a terrible loss, since the word was barely used before 1970. But I do think, supposing we have obligations at all, that we have an obligation to the future to try to keep the language as steady as it has been these past few centuries. Allowing it to change quickly makes the past inaccessible. People might as well be illiterate. It would be like the Middle Ages again, when people without Latin knew basically nothing that had happened before the oldest person they knew was born.
The development of media (print, radio, movies, TV) and transportation progressively stabilized language, until now, when it's switched in the other direction. Air travel isolates city from country, and the control of the media by linguistic radicals today is what Orwell warned us of, being used pretty much as he foretold.
The rate at which English has been changing had been slowing down exponentially for the past 1,000 years. The author of "Of Arthour and Merlin" (circa 1270) would have been unable to read Beowulf (c 700-1000). Chaucer (1340-1400) would have had a hell of a time reading "Of Arthour and Merlin". Shakespeare would have had a difficult time reading Chaucer. But writing from Shakespeare's time is perfectly comprehensible to us today, except for that of Shakespeare himself, who did not write in the proper English of his time, but in his own phony-archaic and grammatically atrocious style, with word order sometimes inverted to fit the meter or the rhyme, and sometimes just to confuse people. He searched old manuscripts for words that had fallen out of use centuries before, preferring them to words that his audience might know; and used many words of his own invention.
(If you study the meter of Shakespeare's play at the points where one character stops speaking and another character begins, you'll see that the second speaker very often finishes the metric line that the first speaker began, even in places where any speaker of any language would have paused before speaking. This shows that Shakespeare had his actors ram their lines together without pauses between characters. I think this in itself is sufficient proof that he was trying to confuse and bewilder the audience.)
> Eh, I disagree. You can claim that sex and personality don't correlate at the population level, but then everyone will know you're making stupid claims and will think less of you.
I wish it were possible to make a claim stupid enough that everyone could tell it was stupid. We're now in a land where stupidity is taken as proof of profundity. You can thank Hegel.