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I guess I don't really have a problem with the article's conclusion, or that it holds biological sex to be paramount in deciding that conclusion. But
That is not the basis for the distinction. It starts with the observation that a mass of social cues and expectations about how someone of a given sex should look and act has as much consequence on people's lives as does their biological sex. Explicit and implicit cues, not always consciously perceived, such that people pass them on just by existing. Then, the observation that these expectations are not static across time and space. This is nothing new, it's social science, and the literature is grounded in historical fact. The distinction is not an artifact of language, though language might exemplify it. But you prefer a psychopathological explanation, do I have it right? Trans rights activists are so stupid and naive they missed that men and women have different parts, or so megalomaniacal they want to undo biology,The terms sex and gender are sometimes mistakenly and unfortunately regarded as separate concepts. This oppressive semantic distinction is apparently based on the flawed observation that men and women have different physical characteristics, capacities, and potentials.
having come up with an elaborate system of leverage for tearing the rest of us down in order to make themselves feel better about their feelings. They're spoiled children. Claim hyperbole, decry academia, but if you want to criticize gender theory, criticize gender theory. This is lazy. Where have I heard this before:In addition, those individuals who decide that their gender/sex is sufficiently fluid that they cannot be limited, restricted, or denied access to the identity and opportunity of their own choosing must be given every option for self-expression.
Finally, if I accept the two initial observations, the question arises of how much of what I myself take for granted about my identity as a man is really universal or inevitable, not subject to historical contingency. I have to question my mandate from god/nature/the universe to do certain things I believe I am entitled to as a man. I have to put limits on my own identity. This corollary is unsettling, maybe more so if one can't articulate it openly. In my view, *this* is what really gets under people's skin. Not the ways implementations of gender theory will impinge upon people's freedom, not the people who want to brainwash children with 61 genders including "banana" and "teapot", but what the theory asks one to do. So I agree that the issue is one of entitlement.People who know nothing about a topic, especially a very technical one that requires specific training, knowledge, and experience, are not due an opinion about that topic and are better served by being quiet when it is asked about or discussed.
When is meaning ever created outside of a tradition, or without the interaction of people and objects? Even in science.Originally Posted by Scaldrew
How you read Shakespeare and whether splitting atoms is important are both humanistic questions, questions of value. And wouldn't you agree that how you read Shakespeare has something to do with what you'll end up doing with those atoms?
TMPHBITEU
I don't care about their psychopathology. My point is that they don't care about the effects on women, the primary brunt of their attempts to restructure sports according to their paradigm. I don't personally care if trans-women compete against congenital women, since it does not affect me personally now, and would not have when I was competing. But women should, and the women I coach don't deserve to be subjected to this particular psychological charade.
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The problem leftists (not liberals, leftists) have with this stems from a trans person's desire to be considered fully male or fully female. Making them another gender segregates them, in their minds. I completely agree with you, though. I think there's a way to acknowledge the "new gender" of a person and simultaneously create an even playing field, so to speak. I don't know what that looks like, but I believe people can figure it out without this kind of lunacy.
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This question is above my paygrade to answer. Maybe I'll think of something in about 30 years. But for now, I think you're confusing meaning in humanities with truth in science. "Meaning in science" is a meaningless combination of lexical items; you solve problems in science and you get meaningful adaptations from those solutions in applying the newfounds knowledge practically. A steam engine is a meaningful application because of how it changes how man interacts with his environment, his fellow man etc etc etc. That's about what science gets you. Good luck finding out what literature gets you.
I know my distinction implies that what we do in literary studies is inherently "non-truthful" and I expect to get some jeers out of that. But if I wanted to know how caffeine is represented chemically or whether shitting in the squat rack is a right I can waiver, I'd try for medical and law school, respectively, but I'd have to come to the conclusion that Feigenbaum and Butland exist and then I'd feel demotivated in my pursuits. Joking aside, and very succinctly, to study literature is to study human beings in their everything: their expression, their thoughts and beliefs, their interaction with the world, their lack of interaction with the world, and so on. That's what I care about or I wouldn't be doing it (among other reasons). In that way, we don't work with truth, but with truths, a word that while gaining nuance, loses a large portion of its original meaning; two opposing statements cannot both be truthful, by definition, yet it does work in reading texts because there are no definitive answers. Literature is this amorphous concept, if you'll pardon the paradox, that is hard enough to produce and even harder to pin down. The only general statements that apply to it as a whole are so entirely vague as to almost be completely meaningless or redundant. I guess in that way you could see it as a series of flukes by flukeful human beings in flukeful pockets in spacetime that we stupidly believe could hold any form of consistency or share common ground. And you want to derive yes or no-answers, causal relationships, and definitive answers from that? In comparison, natural science has natural laws of nature. It's stupid if it's not brave.
Moreover, I have to stress the following: these insights are "well, duh" to us younglings. Yes, of course people are operating within their own biases. Haven't you ever heard of the very common practice of disclaiming your biases at the start of a paper? We'd flog you if you'd forget. But it wasn't that obvious to people a century ago, bearing in mind that the study of texts or even phenomena in general has been going on for literally thousands of years. The simplest of things we know today took brilliant human beings lifetimes to figure out: light operates on a spectrum, water boils at 100° Celsius, heavy deadlifts only move once they're over the middle of the foot, and polar bears are dicks. We can all scoff at others thinking what morons they must be that they feel the need to explicitly state all of the above, but people tend to forget anything that isn't contentious (not incidentally why stories revolve around conflict). In a completely arbitrary way, sometimes people need to be told what's best in life. (Crushing of enemies may or may not be on that list.)
I think you're completely overblowing how relevant literature is in making those kinds of decisions. It was Oppenheimer, after all, who famously quoted the Hindu holy text when he said "now I am become death, destroyer of worlds". His passionate reading and understanding of that text and his own conceptualisation of right and wrong didn't stop the bomb, his creation, from being deployed. I can talk about things I nor anyone else truly understands or can possibly know, the workings of the mind of the person who has to make that call and the process of doubts and conversations and sleepless nights leading up to that event, but I'd rather just spout some more shit about literature.
Literature is a human product and thus tells us primarily what the human mind is like. This doesn't mean that Shakespeare's texts are direct representations of his most fundamental beliefs or most basic thoughts, but he had to create those texts so a part of him will be included. Even if it's only the mention of god in a positive way to avoid breaking blasphemy laws, that decision had to be made by the author, who is of course based in a time and place in the world and history. Reading Shakespeare tells us more about ourselves and others than it does about: Shakespeare, himself, maybe; splitting atoms and whether or not we should; the world; the subject matter in Shakespeare. That's the current paradigm, anyway, that meaning in texts is derived from an interaction between the reader and the text (where before it could have been argued that the author, the world, and the text, itself, were more important, though all of these of course interact with one another on some level). It isn't too much of a stretch to think of it in terms of psychological projection, but that's oversimplifying the whole process.
Oppenheimer can be seen on video talking about when the bomb exploded. It is there he quoted the Bhagavad Gita, but his comments surrounding the quote actually make for a great case study in how literature impacts others or can be used as a lense, a book of catch-all terms that signify the unsignifiable. "Some people laughed, some people cried, most were silent" and he was reminded of the passage he then quotes. Afterwards, he says "I suppose we all thought that, one way or another" and I honestly still get chills hearing him say that every time. That aside, here Oppenheimer takes a page out of the philologist's book by first reading a passage and then applying that to his fellow man. I could go on and on about this, but suffice it to say that the solitary act of reading is paradoxically a way to achieve a level of connectivity with others that would otherwise not be possible. Think "we have so much in common, we like the same music" but on a level that completely blows that out of the water, on the level of the human condition rather than personal preference.
Feeling interconnected with your fellow man on any basis is pretty great. Dawkins would say something like "shit, boy, we're all made of atoms and we're related to spinach and shit" and be awe-struck in that way. Humanists would generally ascribe their feeling of being connected to everyone else to the idea that "we're all humans" and no more is really necessary. As a man of stories, I have to say that telling stories is what makes up human more than anything else, and I'm not 100% right in saying that (because I'm sure there's more distinctions to be made between homo sapiens sapiens and spiders, for example), but I'm also not 1% wrong. All that aside, imagine knowing all of this; imagine knowing that human beings are made of carbon, of star dust, of 2/3 water, have brains and reasonable symmetry (except for Rip who has perfect symmetry), have the ability to adapt to the environment which allows for strength, skill, and brain gains, feel a sense of loss which drives them to creative, artistic expression (or just any old expression, really), and still drop the bomb on innocent people in 2 major cities in Japan. All the knowledge in the world and you still, quite frankly, murder men, women, and children who had no hand in killing "mah fellow 'Mericans" with an object so contentious and so volatile that it's only ever been put to use in this practical setting at one time since and it was just a few days after the first time, only to never be used that way ever again in any of the succeeding conflicts. But you have to make that decision and I'm not going to call it good or bad without even considering this fact.
I'm 100% sure, totally confident, that Truman read Shakespeare in class at some point in his life. I didn't even need to Google that to know for sure, but I did and I was right. I'm also very sure that Truman was told about man's inner vices and politics and all that shit Shakespeare wrote about (to which there is no end). And I'm equally sure he either had quotes going through his head when he was mulling over his options or he was looking them up in his old schoolbooks or whatever. 100% sure. Cos these decisions aren't made lightly. But none of it mattered if you believe that Shakespeare had to stop him from going that far. The difference between Truman who dropped the bomb having read Shakespeare and Truman who dropped the bomb not having read Shakespeare is it's a different person who dropped the bomb, but he still dropped it. Truman may have cried over believing he had to do it, knowing that his situation could fit perfectly in a play by good ol' William; he may have shouted at his wife about the pressure he was under; he may have tried to commit suicide over it at some point; all of this thanks to Shakespeare. But to say that the difference between reading and not reading author X is he who did read X would not do Y is a correlation that is simply not supported by any evidence whatsoever.
Guess that's about all I get to post for a few days.
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This is the logical remedy IF being trans is an actual thing, but the nonsense being spouted is that trans people ARE the gender they CLAIM to be, which they are clearly not, instead of being another thing entirely, which they obviously are.
But obvious doesn't get a vote when that is the very thing you are aiming to obscure.
These are legitimate questions about how we function as people, but the problem is that we have got to where we are making the rules based upon the exceptions. Just because there are bigots who want to pretend that there are no exceptions, doesn't make the current insanity any more sane.
There are such things as norms that span across cultures because of our shared biology. The social constructionist want to deny this based upon the perceived exceptions they can point to.
Even when you look at the differences between cultures you often find that they are still motivated by the same instincts and when you eliminate for militant brainwashing in the West and genuine oppression in places like the Middle East you find most people fitting in to broad gender roles/expectations, in spite of there always being a very small minority of exceptions.
In spite of this the social constructionists are clamoring that we should just assume that our entire concept of gender is wrong because Johnny feels like he fits into those very same general gender ideas, except for the gender that doesn't match his biology.
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Fascinating post. What do you think of Harold Bloom's idea that Shakespeare invented modern man? Life imitating art.
If so, LBJ's angst-ridden decision over the bomb would trace back to WS, and would not be in spite of WS.
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I think this is a good case study for the problem of the chicken vs the egg and which came first. Having not read Bloom's book on this, I can certainly see how Shakespeare could have influenced everyone who saw his plays in action and every writer who read him (which would've been everyone; Shakespeare was popular among his contemporaries). I can see how the confrontation with complex, (early) modern characters could have lead to a great increase in introspection and maybe even a change in behaviour. But when considering art in relation to life, it's always important to realise that while life may certainly imitate art, the reverse is also (and more often) true.
While it's likely Shakespeare caused the realisation of man's evolution into the modern man and in that way sped up the process in a way, it's even more likely that Shakespeare merely wrote characters based on individuals in his daily life or character traits in the abstract as they related to relevant events or even characters from older source material. Part of what makes a great author is insight into how human beings work and that takes a level of interest and knowledge of the human psyche. Shakespeare wouldn't have studied psychology or anything like that, but conversing with people or observing certain behaviours with this gift, this insight into the inner workings of the mind as a breeding ground onto which this experience can build, would certainly have helped flesh out seemingly realistic characters or "the modern man". Even if merely upstaging real life interactions in his mind could have been an interesting puzzle for him to aid his writing of round characters.
Additionally, Shakespeare is often credited for breathing new life into the English language. But Shakespeare probably didn't invent all of these new words and idioms, himself. Rather he was the first to record these new lexical items in his plays; lexical firsts as it is called in linguistics. This makes sense because language is based on conventions: you and I implicitly agree that the word "tree" refers to our conception of what constitutes a physical tree and that makes communication possible on a shallow level. But if I were to use words that only I agree refers to some amorphous idea in my mind, then you won't ever know what I'm talking about (which is one of the reasons why there's different languages that we cannot understand). Similarly, if Shakespeare used words like assassination or champion while no-one had any idea of what he was talking about, he wouldn't have been half as popular as he ended up becoming both then and now. That isn't to say that I believe every single word he used that was new was "stolen" or already existed; but rather, there was a linguistic basis for his creativity to take place. Shakespeare borrowed and translated words and was a big fan of converting word classes into other word classes (verbs into nouns etc). I think this makes it also very likely he had a basis in reality which he then exaggerated for the big screen (or, well, stage).
As far as anyone's decision in dropping the H bomb anywhere and it being traceable to Shakesman, you'd have to elaborate. I'm not really sure what you mean by that.
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This question has already been answered to my complete satisfaction.
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