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 mean actual gender as it is actually used in the real world. As is obvious to everyone who has spent a lot of time in The Discourse, gender is personality.
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.)
"Goth Rationalist Poly Househusbands", Did you self identify as a HUSBAND!!!??? ( Gasp!) 😝
Share
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.)