ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 7 ก.ย. 2024
- Something of a rambled exposition of my thoughts on this fine line "gender" seems to be walking between creating helpful new social identities for people and a descent over the precipice into meaninglessness.
This video was prompted by a comment response to this video:
Gender, Social Constructs, Boxes: A Response to Kizzume
• Gender, Social Constru...
My Patreon account for anyone motivated to support my videos here on TH-cam:
/ noelplum99
Or Paypal (inc recurring payments)
www.paypal.com...
My twitter account, in case any of you wish to follow or engage with me there:
/ noelplum
![[TH] 2024 PMSL SEA Finals D2 | Fall | ต้องรักษาฟอร์ม อย่ายอมให้ใครแซง](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/x38QsGn7A3M/mqdefault.jpg)
I came to a similar conclusion years ago: if a trait is solely based on an individual's personal identification as that trait, the trait tells you nothing and is useless.
The Bill story reminded me of that Karl Pilkington bit, when he wants his parents to call him Bret, but keeps forgetting about it and doesn't respond when they talk to him.
I got that when I started using my middle name.
I couldn't agree more. The way they rob gendered terms of all meaning has always been my biggest gripe with the more progressive uses of words that have been getting promoted in recent years. I just don't see any benefit in having everyone adopt a new way of using language that makes communication less effective than it was before.
The benefit is for the activists who want to use the confusion to their benefit. "Sometimes, sex and gender are different, and sometimes they're the same, whichever benefits us most at the time." We never should have agreed to split the definitions in the first place. Let sex and gender stay synonymous (as most of society still considers them), and use "masculine" and "feminine" to cover everything else. You'd find very little objection to someone identifying as a "masculine woman" or vice versa.
I think you've hit on the key point though. Nothing happens by accident. If it makes communication less effective, that was the goal, not a side effect. It's like those various people who can't seem to define what a woman is, like it's some vacuous term. If it doesn't mean anything, then you wouldn't want to identify as it. Could just as well say you're a blurge, or a smem, for all the sense it makes.
I've always asserted that the number of hyphens a person uses is in direct proportion to the amount of shit they're full of.
The only reason that “man” wouldn’t convey information for you is if you accept the activists dogma that man/woman is divorced from sex. You can simply reject their attempts to strong arm social change by forcible redefinition. Yes, words change. But only as and when the need arises. That’s not the case here.
Unfortunately, the conveyance of information doesn't just depend on how i define words but on how everyone else does. I can have very strict definitions for things but unless they are either universally shared or there is sufficient overlap between different definitions that we have some significant commonalities then how I choose to define a word is somewhat moot.
@@noelplum99 true. But I think a majority of people still define these words as they have been for millennia. The activists don’t. And they want you to believe that the tide has turned and it “just the way things are” now. But I don’t think that’s the case.
@@thegoondockswarcouncil9543 I would definitely agree in many cases that is true. How i feel about these words in the context of the exchanges I have on my fire station versus on twitter would be like chalk and cheese.
Truth may be perceived differently subjectively, but the methods used to find it should follow universal criteria. Because where one “considers the person of the thinker and not his thoughts,” as Karl Popper says, “truth becomes a question of affect - and thus itself relative.” Positions that can be assigned to a 'false' identity or this even supposedly reproduce, quickly disqualify themselves here. Men are expressly encouraged to appropriate women's identities and their spaces (also against feminist criticism), while the appropriation of ethnic identities is considered a scandal, as the case of Rachel Dolezal shows. This is not only questionable because superficial features such as skin color are jazzed up as a natural barrier between people, while natural differences between the sexes are denied.
Jim's pronouns are Bill/Noel. Or something. Splendid!
If you walked up to me and started the conversation with: " Hello, I am a typical biological male " my instant reaction would be this: That is the weirdest name I have ever heard... properly followed up by, why is this person being weird...
To be honest when I run into an oddball like that I just drop everything I'm doing set aside as much time as they need and listen. I never add in my two cents or mock them, I just nod along and make sure I look very interested in what they're saying.
I've almost never regretted spending that time, I've come out with a few interesting stories.
Thank you for this video. It has helped me make more sense to the thoughts in my head regarding this topic and will help me articulate my arguments better when I have these conversations in the future.
If there are binary, people and non binary people... doesn't that just create a .......well, a binary?
Reminds me of the joke, there are two kinds of people in the world; those that think there are two kinds of people and those that don't.
@@markpostgate2551 There's a war between the ones who say there's a war and the ones who say there isn't.
Noel Plum is back from the dead too! Just like Mykaru.. Waiting for GirlWritesWhat too
unlike your other videos i found myself frequently confused about what you were trying to say as well as disagreeing with occasional things. unfortunately i don't feel i could explain myself in writing as this is one of those topics that gets so complicated, i feel like i'd need to be face to face with someone to articulate myself and vice versa. in any case, i do appreciate your point at the end about the heating being turned down, there's something about this topic that does have that effect (and i'm sorry to say that it includes me too) and i'm not quite sure why. not sure how to end this comment, so maybe i'll just listen to this video a few more times or see if you make any further ones elaborating. love your channel and am happy you've made this comeback
I does get complicated quickly. If after subsequent viewings there is anything you think could be clarified by a comment exchange i would be willing to try.
I think part of what aggravates people when discussing this stuff is that there is an element of coercion to it. The people changing the language aren't asking for compliance, they are demanding it. I know I don't react kindly to people making demands of me. I'm not sure if the people doing it quite realize that's what they're doing though.
I feel like I understood this video very well, that it made sense to me. I'm always interested in any discussion where things get clarified, so I'm curious to see if you can put your finger on what wasn't making sense for you. Where people have trouble communicating clearly, that's where some really interesting boundaries are, but they can be difficult to find exactly.
ok i listened to some of it again and will make a go at summing up my feelings. i'm not sure actually if i do have disagreements, rather they may have been things that i didn't quite understand. but to sum up some of my thoughts
firstly, i'm not convinced that gender and sex are different things in the way people claim, i think that gender is more of a subset of sex and if you want to separate gender from sex completely, then i no longer know what gender means. it's like taking a county (say for example, Lincolnshire) and separating it from england, but when someone asks if Lincolnshire is now a country, claiming that it's still a county, it now doesn't become coherent to me. when someone describes what this new term for "gender" means, it runs into problems because it seems to just mean personality or something useless such as what you think of yourself and it sounds like people want to define their own reputation. other times, it seems to contradict the idea of gender equality, because some of the things that gender identity seems to advocate for appears to be what some would call sexist.
secondly, this doesn't seem to be the same thing as being trans. my understanding is that trans people are people that have psychical and biological things happening to them, but other people act as if being trans means just saying that you are. there's a lot of complications with things like gender dysphoria, intersex and sex changes ect and i'm constantly trying to learn new things about the science of it. i'm not convinced that scientists actually know all the answers as there are components like mental health and autism that come into the equation and i think that there's a trans religion that makes claims of absolute truth on these things that i'm not convinced we know the answers about. but also, this gender identity thing seems to be something entirely separate from being trans and so i'm confused about that. to quote jordan peterson "if it's just a social construct, then what are the hormones for?"
thirdly and finally, i fear i may have some cognitive dissonance on the matter. i get wound up very easily on this topic and I'm trying to work out why. i think Malevolent explained some of that. they're trying to force a change in language and that's what some of this boils down to, i don't want to change the way i speak because it hurts someone's feelings and sometimes i'm confused as to whether we're debating about language usage or scientific facts about the human body, sometimes i feel like these people flip flop on the 2 things. i do believe there's a trans religious cult out there (separate from actual trans people) and they really get to me because i feel like they have a lot of power. however, i also don't want to be wrong and i want to make sure i'm not mistaken about the facts and when i question that i feel myself getting very stressed and i'm not sure why. i do wonder though if perhaps the differences between men and women may in fact be a profoundly important thing in our psychology and that maybe our brain activity is different depending on which we're thinking about. kind of in the same way we do with people's ages, i think our brains see children, old people, adults, teens, adolescence ect in very different categories and so maybe being asked to knock that line of difference may go too much against human nature and that's why it winds me up, but that is pure speculation on my part.
i'm not sure if this actually addressed anything in your video lol. but that's probably because this is a topic that can't be talked about in depth via the internet, it's just one of those things i guess
@@jhibbitt2896
*sometimes i'm confused as to whether we're debating about language usage or scientific facts about the human body*
I have jumped into a few arguments with people I follow on twitter the last couple of years for precisely this. Two people arguing and it isn't clear to me or, more importantly, to either of them, whether they are debating how we define words or scientific facts. A clear cut example of this is when someone says "science has proven that trans women are women" What they MEAN is that science has demonstrated that gender is distinct from bio sex and that gender dysphoria exists. Phrasing it to suggest that science "proves" an objective meaning for a word is obviously absurd: science cannot "prove" what ANY word means.
It's not about identifying yourself or others, it's about control.
It's time these people, shut up.
I'm not a bigot, I have no criminal record and these people are trying/succeeding in stopping me from speaking freely. Congrats, this now makes any of you, the lot that are pro this sort of thing, my enemy. That's not a threat, it's a warning that you've now angered those who wanted to keep you as happy as possible, good job. This conversation is now over in my eyes, all 10 or more years of it. 😑
The conversation can be avoided. The damage still occurring within societies cannot.
The importance of things like 'man' or 'woman' is they are descriptions: They're defining traits to help separate you from someone else.
The issue comes then from handling a disaster: A coach with 17 people hits a car with 2 and a minibus with 5. The response teams are looking for 24 people. They find 19 bodes, and 5 survivors: Do they continue searching?
No: Why would they: Other than a quick check, is there any point to continue? There's cost, there's risk to the searchers, there's other incidents they need to respond to so resource allocation.
Had the response team been told the coach held 17 women, the car was 1 woman and 1 man, and the minibus was 5 men, they could check: Have they found 18 women and 6 men? No? Then the numbers don't balance and they do need to continue searching. Now say the 5 in the minibus were Black. All those on the coach were white. The two in the car were Asian. That makes the check so much easier. Now say the coach had 16 teenagers and one adult, approx 35. The car were a 24 and 26 yr old. The Minibus was a a mix: 19, 22, 23, 30, 50: Grandfather, father, three sons. Now checking all the people are accounted for is even easier. And if you have their ID's (supplied by the coach company and insurance for example) and can match those to the people found? That's darn near perfect.
Treat people with respect, but not at the cost of lives, and being a volunteer responder: I want to know I've accounted for everyone, even the baby in the back seat people forgot to mention. Making that bit harder just goes to put peoples lives at risk, like the 17 year old girl off the coach who was thrown clear, rolled down the bank, was unresponsive and hidden from view. The other body found was a pedestrian who got hit - but it was a body that counted to the tally and hey: We've got everyone.
Thankfully that was a training exercise, but it highlighted how important accurate information is...
This reminds me of the debate you hear in musical circles some times over, say, what is punk, or what is metal, etc. Some people want really flexible definitions, but the problem then becomes one of the terms becoming less helpful. If someone says "I like such-and-such punk band," but what that band makes is music like Barry Manilow, then the use of the word "punk" becomes really unhelpful to me, because I have no real idea what they are getting at.
The terms might have some meaning beyond mere labels, but i suspect all of that could better be delivered with other terms
As I already sort of implied in the same comment thread you are referring to: to me it's rather nonsensical to talk about being a man as some sort of self identification or inner feeling. Your gender is a _social_ identity, and thus has as much to do with how you relate to other as to yourself, and how others relate to you. Of course the basis for our genders is the fact that we are a sexual dimorphic species, and we have certain rules of courtship that go along with that. The social structure that has been build up around how men and women should behave towards each other, and, by extension, among themselves is what created the concept of gender as something distinct from sex. Thus it's an identity that we all decide on together, not just something we assign to ourselves.
The problem with added gendered terms is that they claim to add specificity to and essentially showcase that one can exist at any point on the spectrum of gender but each new term is just more obscure than the next. Some of them are essentially un-categories where there are no things specific to that category and it could mean basically anything yet it is extremely vital information about the person at the same time.
If gender is a performance, this just takes it to next level where everyone NEEDS to act in a certain way but nobody really knows why they are acting that way. We just perform to validate people's internal feelings without knowing what those feelings are.
"To silence people with the labels that they use and the claims that they make." You nailed it. The label war comes with market niches, affirmative actions, courting the electorate, budget and services, moral superiority, and rights to use certain words, or being invited to certain events, or being allowed to wear whatever you want, or to talk freely. My label, my rights. For exemple, since 2019 in Montreal, antifeminism is officially a heinous crime and synonymous with misogyny. Silenced.
With this gender identity stuff, I keep coming back to the fact that all we seem to be doing is encouraging people to increasingly care what other people think of us, which is not a good thing IMO. A simple thought experiment for you, if there was no one else to see them, who would care what their gender identity was?
Theres not a single comment or string of comments that could communicate where I find your video and thought process troubling. I would have to discuss this with you over video and in a discussion, theres too much to do it any other way
Aren't there multiple meanings involved depending on the context in which a statement is made?
The claim to be some kind of gender category, depends on there being a general interpretation of what the category is (i.e. what it's defined as, or how it's known that someone belongs to that category) and what that means (as in what constellation of behaviours are associated with that category). If a multitude of categories are added, each of which requires some kind of associated descriptions, then who, other than the person who is making a category claim, is defining what the category means?
We are, for all intents and purposes unique beings. So although we may personally consider ourselves belonging to some categorisation, what we are in reality is a specific presentation of ourselves (as far as I'm concerned).
Where this comes particularly pertinent, is with respect to how cultures function. I would suggest that what happens within a coherent culture is that some assumptions about a categorisation can occur simply by the use of some label, some set of behaviours and some set of presentations (clothes, jewellery, etc). That is, for instance, if someone is a man, they behave in a particular way and they dress a particular way. Similarly, there are ways they would not act and would not dress. In such a culture, i don't need to investigate someone's identity as long as they conform to the cultural archetype to a sufficient degree.
When we add more categories of identity we are creating cultural dissonance, where no such assumptions can be made as they don't hold true.
Where this becomes a systemic issue is that we depend on cultural cues to navigate social interaction and as they no longer provide consistent results, the nature of the societal binding behaviour dissolves. This means that it will also amplify the difference between the public explicit expression of ideas and the implicit action and choices we make.
As we all highly depend on the systemic reliability and resilience of our societies to actually live in this world, such disruptions to the notion of cultural coherence can be a precursor to massive destabilisation and the disruption of civil conduct.
From what I can tell, the enforcement of ideas by the groups that think new categories are useful, seems to be equivalent to a mob mentality where disagreement is met with intense , and derogatory attacks on those who don't agree with some assertion or claim. Similarly, those who hold to a original cultural outlook can be equally damming of those who claim it can be different (or is different).
I am concerned those who are experimenting are not taking into account how cultures work, nor are they responding to those who've been brought up in a culture in a respectful way.
With the increase in the rate of change within western societies this will be a ever increasing problem to deal with. As the rate of change of culture understandings become increasingly less reliable and sub-cultural factions vie for influence over society as a whole. I do wonder if it's possible to live in a society without a culture, and what that would look like. Could that ever be systemically stable enough to provide a basis for social living?
I'm somewhat surprised that you've taken quite this long to come to this conclusion. I suspect that any words, that pertain to people's characteristics that have a objective definition are perceived as exclusionary and characterised as bad, therefore we can be convinced that it is somehow unkind to use them.
Don't think for a minute that for a significant amount of commentators the terms male and female are not mutable characteristics, I have started to see increasing amounts of people claiming that sex is not fixed and is a social construct (much in the same way gender was detached from biology).
I'm surprised that articulation of a conclusion is somehow an indication of the length of time required to reach such conclusion.
@@atticstattic to be fair also, much of what I have said here I have said before, just not in a video specifically devoted to it. In fact, at the end of my video discussing the Matt Walsh docu from 6 months back included some of these very points in the last few minutes.
@@noelplum99
Indeed, this seemed just a more detailed take on previously expressed thoughts.
The idea that sex is a spectrum & that some males are less male than other males is highly regressive
There is no "Very male", "slightly male", "kinda male"
Only male.
And males with disorders of sexual development are just as immutably male as any other male.
Same goes for females.
If the definition of "man" is "someone who identifies as a man," the definition is circular. Which, I think, is the ultimate point: the point is to destroy distinction and meaning. Part of a larger project of destroying all distinction and meaning and reducing humanity to a homogonized, flavorless slop.
How can I identify as something if there is no objective definition for that something?
Clearly expressed, in your usual straightforward manner, which should illustrate the problems for everyone... even though it won't.
12:00 reminds me of Christians saying you secretly believe in god because you say "bless you" when someone sneezes
Okay, but some post-theists do retain ideas that are theist without awareness that they are; e.g. the idea that if it is natural it is good and if it's not good it must be man-made originates in the concept of a benevolent creator, and possibly also the concept of original sin and the Eden myth that the world was good before we screwed it up, and yet many people who consider themselves atheist continue to believe that despite having abandoned its theistic root.
Speaking as a Bill, you're welcome to join the club if you want ;)
I think an important concept you could look into is called "family resemblance" as a theory of language, Zarathustra's Serpent has a video on it as well.
Essentially, any term in our language refers to a group of things, and this group of things is like a sliding window that includes similar things by their similarity but holds no meaning intrinsically. So the term "man" is essentially "of qualities that men have" and nothing more.
So we can descriptively find the meaning of men by studying what qualities men (as a proper noun) have, that means that contrary to your point "Billy" could have a meaning associated with the qualities that "Billies" have, and actually there is research that suggests people associate personalities and physical traits with proper nouns like that, and that by being given (or choosing) a certain proper noun you naturalise into it a bit and become more similar to how society expects that name to function.
Let's say for example you become a citizen of the US, you might not subscribe to the idea of "when in rome do as the romans do" but by living in US culture you eventually adopt some of their practices, as well as share a bit of your practices you brought from your culture with them. Similarly, being called "man" might make you act or think of yourself a little bit more in line with those expectations than if you had just naturally came into your personality and self image without those labels, and your potential deviations from that expectation push the boundaries and the center of the expectations a little bit.
It's basically a cultural game that we play, projecting expectations onto labels and things with those labels reflecting those expectations, and at the same time observing the properties of those labels and incorporating them into our expectations. Similar to political movements and their labels (e.g. from this video 'feminist' might have a definition, but its real meaning has shifted into something separate from that due to how people use the label)
You can say those expectations and associations are oppressive, or prejudiced, and without that they do indeed mean nothing but that's just not how human society operates, and at the same time you can say that they are pragmatic simplifications driven by our pattern matching brains that we used to survive, and that there is not always an objective underlying core to the patterns, but that some patterns just reinforce themselves by our use of those associations.
Now, I disagree with the idea that men and women are free floating identities, but I don't think that's necessary what's being said either, and it might be a mischaracterisation on your part. They clearly are tied to biological sex, but only technically by the historical use of the terms as being derived from them and then that association being reinforced by family resemblance. So it is right to think of them as socially constructed, the consequences of that thought is where the real debate is.
And here's a rant on my part related to this:
I think it's valid to want to preserve the meaning of these categories, even if that means imposing constraints on who can hold them, and that might cause dysphoria due to their strong connections to us. That doesn't mean I won't call trans people by their preferred pronouns, but I am saying it will be very dissonant to do that if they do not 'pass' as in fit my expectations for the use of those pronouns (e.g. resemble the family of 'she' or 'her' or 'woman' etc), and if I choose to not labour over my use of pronouns based on my implicit assumptions I think I should not be penalised.
Also it should be noted that all terms are also context sensitive, so if I'm thinking in a more sexually heated way then my associations with the term 'woman' become more specialised to sexual qualities of that term which are fundamentally closer related to biology, and I think people need to keep this distinction in mind. If I say "I want to date a woman" I mean a biological female in that context.
Something that is at issue though is that people find a need to 'belong' and in a tribal sense these categories can offer a 'tribe' to belong to, and simultaneously being called what you want to, or what you feel closer associated to, could make you feel 'noticed' or 'included' or 'understood'. The opposite also applies, you can feel disenfranchised, 'excluded', 'ignored', 'abused' by being put into categories you don't resonate with (or resonate against).
So of course there's a lot of emotional charge associated with the labels people give, and so it's easy to become insulted or offended when our understanding of these terms differ, and I just wish people would learn to detach themselves, instead of trying to hold strong to them. Yes there's research that says that bottling up emotional responses to this sort of thing is bad but that doesn't mean we have to blame the other person, and we don't have to create a movement to unnaturally normalise an understanding of the term by vitriolically asserting validity, we don't have to create rules that establish a specific understanding of these terms where deviating from that understanding puts you at odds with the system, we don't have to segregate society into safe spaces and thought bubbles.
I've always used the terms male & man interchangeably, as I suspect nearly everyone has. As I learn more and more about the transgender matter, I find myself in a quandary. On the one hand, I am sympathetic to the idea the trans-men feel more like men than women (and that there is evidence to suggest that this is scientifically valid), and therefore open to re-arranging the gender categories of men & women (as distinct from the biological categories of male & female) to be more inclusive of the those people who are genuinely transgender. On the other hand, I haven't yet come across a definition which accurately defines a category to be both inclusive and meaningful. That is, a definition which neither excludes transgender individuals but also excludes members of the opposite gender. Non-binary complicates matters even further. Then there's the notion of numerous (or perhaps even infinite) genders, which to me makes the language problem insoluble. I agree with you that there is a danger of these categories becoming so amorphous or so idiosyncratic as to be rendered useless as a means of communicating information about gender.
I have had the exact same reasoning that it becomes equivalent to a name is it's only based on self identification. In my mother tounge sex and gender is the same word and I suppose this would be the future of English, gender will mean nothing and people will just start saying "as a male" in stead of "as a man" for example.
I dont know what you are worried about. The traits and differences we have are many and varied. How truthful or accurate is dependent on those trying to describe them through language. Ultimately it is our morality and empathy that come through in creating accurate language and descriptors for some of the ways we exist. The expansion of pronoun use is an example of this. We are becoming more moral and empathatic to parts of our population who are not recognized properly in our language. It is ultimately up to us all to utilize our skills in langauge, morality and empathy to create what we need to express and address reality as best we can. Or our lack to not. I prefer we do our best to utilize language to our best abilities to be as moral and empathetic as we can. It will become normal in time.
I absolutely agree with you that any label with sole meaning "someone who identifies with this label" is pointless, due to it's lack of informative content, but I thought the Trans community and its allies defined "man", in the gender sense, to be something like "someone who identifies with the roles and traits associated with masculinity within their culture". That's basically how I've been interpreting it. If I'm wrong, I'm not sure in what way a Trans man and a CIS man are men; what are the defining characteristics of the category of "man" that fit both these people?
We have to be careful Paul because different trans people (and others) define these terms in different ways. The underlying issue is really that no traits seem ever to fit the bill, in this way of thinking, as to be uniquely masculine or feminine other than the words "man" and "woman" and other associated words. Words literally appear to be the only things that have any kind of exclusivity
Really interesting thoughts. It's so good to see you really delving into the language of this stuff. There's a lot to digest in this, I'll have to do a lot of thinking. One thing I want to address before I go away and think about this, the definition of a man being "someone who identifies as a man" is a bit of an oversimplification. The way a lot of people I know tend to define it is "someone who identifies with what is socialy associated with masculinity", and while that is still a fluid definition, I think it's an important distinction.
And thank you for really taking the heat out of the conversation, you're an absolute pleasure
"define it is "someone who identifies with what is socialy associated with masculinity""
All that does is equate "man" with "traditional masculinity" -- reinforcing all the old stereotypes which progressives have been trying to do away with for decades. You shouldn't have to be traditionally masculine to be a man.
I never identified as a woman. I‘m just one.
I'm still largely confused as to why these terms are expected to exist in anything but a utilitarian context.
Man, boy, girl, woman, etc. only offered some expectations, yet we've always had to take people as they come. There's just such a broad range of things that define a person which aren't those things to an extent that these are basically just a polite way to group a common set of physical features.
I fundamentally don't see how non-binary can exist in any real context, given that it can only exist in the context in which we force personality into gender and sever the distinction between "convenient label", "group", and "individual".
There's something I've been toying in my mind with for some time about that subject, and may not be directly related to what you said in this video, but is at least somewhat parallel I think.
When it comes to words like man/woman and pronouns especially, even if we decide to link their definitions to gender expression, I have the feeling that the way anyone uses them should be up to the person uttering them, according to how they perceive the person they are talking about in terms of said gender expression.
Much as anybody would subjectively use qualifiers such as attractive/ugly, smart/stupid, tall/small, etc... we all have learned heuristics in our minds that make us come up with assessments of people we encounter along spectrums, and using words to describe them, whether we express them or keep them inside our thoughts.
Whether or not the people in question are happy with those assessments should, I believe, ultimately not matter in any of those cases. In other words, is it an actionable offence to be qualified as small/stupid/ugly when one identifies themselves as tall/smart/attractive? If not, why should it be different when it comes to gender expression?
Another point : if somebody I cared asked me to use different pronouns that my learned heuristics genuinely come up with, I would out of respect.
If there was some applicable logic to it, my heuristics would adapt along time, but the problem is there is indeed no logic to find when gender expression is defined in such a way that short of reading the person's mind, you can't tell for sure.
Indeed, even when I wanted to go out of my way to respect the person's choice, I would only be arbitrarily circumventing the result my mind comes up with.
When it comes to accusations of bigotry, I then wonder : what, according to some people, should one do to not be a bigot any more? is circumventing one's own brain enough, or does it take rewiring their gender expression heuristics, or even dismantle them altogether? and is that even possible?
Firstly, it was one of your best channel decisions not to let Patreon make you feel tied down to only making perfectly argued and sourced videos. It's been great to hear your more free-flowing thoughts recently. You always have a way of taking the ideas floating around my head on any topic and expressing them with more clarity than I ever could.
At the beginning of this video, you mentioned a comment that made you reconsider the validity of non-binary identities, or at least raised some good points about it. I wish you had read the whole comment or shown it on screen, because I'm skeptical of the whole non-binary thing myself. I've always favored an expand-the-boxes approach over one that says if you're not a typical man or woman, it's reasonable to categorize yourself as neither.
I think you need dysphoria to be trans (a position called transmedicalism, which alone is enough to get you labeled transphobic in some parts of the internet). If you didn't have dysphoria, how would you even know you're trans? But that means the only way I can make sense of someone being non-binary is if they feel dysphoria about being perceived as *_both_* a man and a woman - that is, they'd only feel fully comfortable when people are unable to consistently peg them as one or the other! But surely that must describe so few people that we wouldn't need a concept or word for it. All the trans people I've talked to have felt better the more masculine or feminine they got - none would want to stay "in the middle".
So what else could it mean to be non-binary? Maybe it depends on your answer to the classic "What if you woke up tomorrow as the opposite sex?" thought experiment. Perhaps you're non-binary if you genuinely wouldn't mind that happening - if you have almost no attachment to your biological sex. But I get the feeling that could describe up to around 20% of the population. Are that many people non-binary?
It seems like the only ways I can think of defining it either dramatically undercount or overcount compared to the number of self-identified non-binary people, and I haven't come across any other rational ways of defining it.
Anyway, if you've made it this far Noel, I'd appreciate hearing your thoughts on this in a future video. It's good to have you back :)
Thanks for the comment.
I will copy and paste the comments from the person and my responses here:
H&F - *I'm NB myself, and it's more of an internal thing than what you describe it as. I don't really see myself as a man nor a woman. From the outside I know I look like the average man, but that's not at all how I feel inside. You're far too focused on gender expression, when gender identity is more of a psychological thing. Does that make sense?*
Noel Plum - *To a degree but then a question I have asked myself is why I see myself as a man?*
*The best answer I can come up with really us that I do so because I have always done so and I have always done so because I am male..*
*Where I therefore get a bit lost is that I don't really know what "feels like to be a man" is, even though I apply the term to myself, because all I really know is what it feels like to be me *and, by extension, I suppose I just assume "well that must be an example of it.*
*So my question to you would be how you know what feeling like a man would feel like to know you don't feel like one? I mean if that question makes any sense!!!*
*PS: I should also add I personally have never really had any beef with non-binarism itself but rather than subdivision of it into ever new and endless sub-identities. Those to me clearly appear to be a different cladistic level to "man" and "woman".*
H&F - *Does the societal image of man line up with your internal perception of yourself? Does that resonate with you in any way. When people call you a man, and use he him pronouns, does it feel like they see who you are and are talking about you? Do you feel flattered by words like handsome and gentleman? For me, none of that is the case. Some feminine compliments feel good, but only insofar as it contrasts with what I've heard all my life.*
*The way I see it, there are 3 broad catagories, Man, Non Binary, and Woman, and just like you said it's a wide spectrum with people largely fitting on one of two extremes. The subcategories that people are inventing are useful to communicate to people where along that spectrum they are, but they'll generally be happy to be referred to as one of the 3 major catagories, at least from my experience.*
Oh, and to address the actual content of the video - namely the problem of "man" and "woman" becoming meaningless empty boxes that essentially act like names: That problem only occurs if you use circular definitions of those words (which contain the word they're defining, e.g. "a woman is someone who identifies as a woman"). Those definitions should be rejected as nonsensical - the problem quickly becomes obvious if you try to substitute in the word being defined:
A woman is someone who identifies as [someone who identifies as [someone who identifies as...]]
It's possible to come up with a trans-inclusive definition that has informational content, e.g. "woman" could be defined as "a member of the gender category containing most human females". It's a bit clunkier than "adult human female" but it has the added benefit of categorizing intersex conditions in the common-sense way, like people with CAIS, who are technically male but never consider themselves to be anything other than (cis) women.
Gender-based definitions like the one above raise the question of exactly what gender is, and I think Merriam-Webster gives a pretty good definition (the relevant sense being 2b): "the behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits typically associated with one sex". I take behavioral/cultural traits to be referring to gender expression, and psychological traits to refer to gender identity.
I'm a fan of the streamer Destiny who often talks about these kinds of topics. One recent video I'd recommend is his discussion about gender with philosophy professor Dr Tomas Bogardus: th-cam.com/video/2PuIIo5VEy0/w-d-xo.html
@@noelplum99 Sorry, was typing out the second comment when you replied. Thanks for the copy/paste - I'll give it a read.
@@razzle_dazzle
*That problem only occurs if you use circular definitions of those words (which contain the word they're defining, e.g. "a woman is someone who identifies as a woman").*
I agree with this. I myself have a notepad document on my desktop to ask the definition of "man" I have in my own mind (Why I frame it in terms of "man" when all people appear to care about is what constitutes a "woman" and what additional rights so accrue, i have no idea, but there you go). I will copy/paste that definition that I tend to prefer:
"Personally, I would define man as someone whose brain developed along a pathway which led to an innate sense of being biologically male, including in some cases where that does not align with the developmental pathway and consequent biological sex of the rest of the body."
The point where I would disagree with you, or perhaps just refine what you said, is that I think often the "a woman is someone who identifies as a woman" is not explicitly made but the conditions are set such that this is what their definition amounts to.
It reminds me of an objection I had back in the day to some people, Kristi Winters amongst them, who would claim until they were blue in the face that they are not presupposing that all statistical gender differences are "nurture" rather than "nature" but would then demand nothing short of equality of outcome on the grounds that inequality of outcome presupposes bias. Clearly that demand follows ONLY if you DO presuppose that all differences in outcome are as a result of cultural factors and upbringing given how hard they would be to justify if males and females were making statistically different life (study subject, job, parenting etc) choices based on innate differences in predisposition.
I see the same thing here. There are those who say they are not making the self-referential "a woman is someone who identifies as a woman" definition, yet the only thing they ARE prepared to hang womanhood on is self-identification, with everything else seeming to corresponds to that (accidental properties for the individual rather than essential ones).
My other issue would be that your definition *"a member of the gender category containing most human females"* may be factually true, most women are human females, but it isn't really a definition. It is akin to defining amphibians as "a clade that comprises mostly of frogs". I still don't know what an amphibian is. I suppose in this case at least all frogs are amphibians, even if all amphibians are not frogs. In the case of "woman" using a gender related definition, not only are some of the "amphibians" not "frogs" but some of the "frogs" are not "amphibians", so i would ask how your definition enlightens matters at all?
@@noelplum99 "Personally, I would define man as someone whose brain developed along a pathway which led to an innate sense of being biologically male, including in some cases where that does not align with the developmental pathway and consequent biological sex of the rest of the body."
My question with these sort of "innate gender identity" definitions is that I don't think an "innate sense of being biologically male" is at all well evidenced. I've not seen compelling evidence that the majority of biological males or females have any such sense. What does it even mean to have such a sense. There's certainly nothing I experience that I would be able to relate to such a sense.
I do see the appeal of such definitions as there is at least some basis to the term, and it attempts to account for trans identifying people. However, previously whenever I try to ask about the details of such a sense further the explanations tend to become very pseudoscientific sounding very quickly.
I hear explanations about "features of the brain", but nothing clear about which features or how to measure or differentiate between them. I hear explanations that everyone has such a sense, it's just the most people don't know it because it's in "alignment".
I've become skeptical that there is substance behind these explanations. I would be interested if you were able to actually give a view of what an innate sense of being biologically male is and the evidence that the majority of male people have such a thing (assuming you do think the majority of male people are men).
There are three things to unpack here:
* gender is usually connected to biological sex, but there are exceptions
* gender is more than personal identity; it also has to be social experience
* diversity & inclusion can be taken to an extreme to the point of erasing all identity.
Yes, man is connected to biological male and woman to biological female. that's because the brain/mind is also based in biology and there are too many similarities between all cultures, regardless of how feminist they are. In nearly all cultures, men are the risk takers and they are found in the most dangerous jobs, while women like to work with people. Of course, there are exceptions, but they are not the rule. So what about the exceptions?
That brings us to personal identity vs. social experience. The reason that binary trans men/women bother to transition is to present themselves to society so that the rest of the world recognizes their gender expression and relates to them accordingly. It's politically incorrect to talk about "passing" but it's reality. In order to live as your gender, you need to be recognized as such. This brings up the problem with being nonbinary. There is very little social recognition of nonbinary gender. We do have an inkling of androgyny from the 70s and 80s pop culture with the likes of David Bowie and others. I think this realization is beginning to break into mainstream culture, and maybe there will be more acceptance of what some cultures have referred to as "lady boys" or "berdache". Spiritual leaders and healers have been havens for a third gender expression in some cultures.
Finally, there is the problem of diversity/inclusion that muddies the waters. 50+ genders and neo-pronouns don't work. It does nothing but confuse most people, and it trivializes gender altogether. People can identify all they want, but if they don't do the work of successfully presenting their gender identity to society and establish a social experience with it, their gender will amount to no more than navel gazing. Gender is a social experience as well as a personal identity. Society hasn't completely accepted a third gender category, let alone dozens of new genders - not going to happen. This is why too much diversity and inclusion, deconstructs everything, in this case the deconstruction being gender itself. It trivializes gender to the point that even men and women become seen as arbitrary. So yes, it is even possible to be too open minded as well as too rigid in your thinking.
How about using man to refer to the adult human males and woman to refer to adult human females. These are useful categories to have. They have worked for hundreds of years.
Of course terms do not have to remain the same just because of tradition, new definitions can be proposed, but nothing so far has been proposed that would be anywhere near as useful. As you say, the vacuous "anyone who identifies as" is devoid of any content, it's parasitic on the traditional understanding.
It relies on people conflating the traditional understanding with the identity based one. It requires, when someone identifies as a man / woman for you to imagine in your head a typical adult human male / female to have any hope of having substance. Without this it would be blindingly obvious that the "identifies as" understanding is truly meaningless.
I will continue to use man and woman to refer to adult human males and females unless some coherent argument can be put forward as to why a different understanding would be better or more useful.
Something that is a semi-big issue in Denmark is that we have generede social security numbers. Females have even numbers and males have odd numbers. But a bunch of people are trying to have theirs changed to match their genderi dentity. And my take on this is to wonder why it was ever gendered to begin with. I mean it may have mede sense to the people who designed the system back in the 60-70's but I don't know of a single public institution or part of the danish health system that use the gendered function as part of their work - with the possible exception for statistics but they will have to change that anyway since people are now having their numbers cchanged.My mother used to work doing mamograpic scans and they used to have the MO that since every woman over a certain age was recomended a scan they would use the CPR-numbers but I think they have had to change that. And I think that the easy solution would be to just change the CPR-numbers to just be non-gendered going forward and the bloody problem would solve itself as people got used to that, and then we could let politicians and healthcare professionals get back to doing their actual work instead of all that pointless bickering.
I do think that we as society does put entirely too much weight on "genders" and maybe we just have to start thinking in terms of "people". Why do we feel the need to apply labels on ourselves and others all the time and then proceed to fight each other over the application of those labels. People can wear what they fancy and feel attracted to who they like and hold whatever jobs they are suited for for all I care, so long as they treat each other with dignity and respect. I think it is pointless and destructive and that we already have spent entirely too much time and mental energy on it - but it may just be my borderline-asbergers clicking in.
Merry Christmas Bill
🤣🤣🤣
Et Joyeux Noel ! (see what I did there 🙄)
@@jgingras2615 A few people have said over the years that Noel Plum sounds wonderfully Christmassy!
I have also been asked a few times if it is a play on words for "Nom de Plume" and I always wish I could honestly say that it is. Alas, whilst that would be a somewhat clever play on words for what is, after all, my nom de plume, it is just pure coincidence!
@@noelplum99 Like you said, it's just a proper name, like a Steve or a Rebecca: character is much more important and meaningful than a name or a box, as long as it's genuine and not just a cloak we wear for show... Welcome back
Man = adult human male
Woman = adult human female
That is simply what the nouns mean, a biological reality. How you choose to live your life is another thing.
I think the root of what you're saying makes sense, if we open the boundaries to what defines a man and women to a certain point then what are trans people really transitioning to? This can be a bit of a touchy topic in trans spaces as there are the people who believe your valid so long as you identify, while others believe you're valid if you only get the big ol' surgeries.
There's this term 'passing' which refers to how often a trans person successfully conveys their desired gender to another person. So one approach is labeling people as man if they pass as male 50% or more of the time. But what if a person is just starting out or someone just isn't hitting that 50% mark? Do we only allow the label of man/woman & the applicable pronouns to those who are successful and those otherwise just are screwed?
And I think that's why the trans spaces opened up to having identity be the criteria for gender. But then this lead to the current problem you describe in this video, where now we lose part of the meaning associated with the genders. I don't think putting in place that barrier is necessarily a bad thing, but I do think the moment we put that in place then insurance should start covering treatments to help trans individuals pass, otherwise transitioning would only be allowed for the wealthy. The current financial barrier to passing is probably why the idea of identity == gender, as it's the best option for people who can't afford to medically transition, which happens to be most trans people.
I get no "affirmation when being referred to by my gender's pronouns. That's _normal_. It's weird to get some sort of kick out of that. I daresay, it sounds like the person getting that euphoria is gaining it from either being obeyed or tricking others. "Duper's delight" and all that. I have a name people associate with women, as you can see in my handle, so sometimes get a "she," which amuses me, knowing that I am not. Going through puberty or when I was pre-pubescent, I would answer the phone and get a "ma'am," and it only slightly bothered me then because you want to be seen as an adult, but that means your voice isn't passing for your adult form yet.
Very well articulated, sir. For myself, I maintain that there are two genders (male/man/boy and female/woman/girl) consistent with our dimorphic nature as a species - and there are people in transition between them. Slice this any way that you like and you'll find it descriptive of most, if not all people on this planet. Sure, there are people who will kick back against the reality of this - as evident in those who 'identify' as things like unicorns, fairies and babies well into their adult life - and these people, I maintain, are in need of some serious psychological help.
hmm
@@RavenJay what's 'wrong' about the transition part? Its what's happening isn't it?
Am I about to be cancelled for refusing to acknowledge unicorn, fairy and baby as valid adult genders?
@@BrianJ1962 I've yet to hear the logical argument explaining how being trans-racial, trans-age, or trans-species (all of which are claimed as identities by significant numbers of people) can be casually dismissed as ridiculous or irrational, but you can't question trans-gender identities or you're a bigot. As far as I can tell the only difference is marketing.
@@Springheel01 , agreed.
@@Springheel01 so acceptance of those in transition from one gender to the other isn't enough?
... not to mention all the confusion one could get in the hospital.
I have male anatomy though I don't identify as male. I am identifiable as male. I don't use he/him pronouns. People use he/him pronouns as an identifier about me.
Isn't that how it is? How we identify ourselves is wholly irrelevant if other people largely identify us ubiquitously.
I fail to see a practical difference between adjectives and pronouns in terms of identification. I am tall, I am bearded, I am a man.
Edit: I would also be intrigued to know if you ask people which words they identify with in other languages without telling them what the words mean - if they could identify which ones "vibe" with them. Unless you want the word which adds you to a category. So I would be Otoko in Japanese not because I like the word but because I fit the category that the word means. I haven't used it my whole life but it is how I would be described by those around me.
Though if someone would change genders depending on how much they like the word it would absolutely make the terms wholly vacuous but at least be consistent.
A phrase I just repeat when it comes to these things is "Gender is useful", "Biological sex is objectively true and useful".
Gender abolitionism - which seems to be the broad argument you're butting up with here - postulates two assumptions in the main
1. that gendered behaviour is strictly untethered from biology
2. gender is a harmful social construct that can and therefore should be abolished
Both of the assumptions are incorrect. Gendered behaviour will all things being equal give a person the most success in life, especially in finding a partner and procreating. And also if it was abolished, people would invent it again the very next day. It cannot be abolished and it's incredibly meaningful.
I treat trans and pronoun stuff the same as any other religion, if it isn’t being stuffed down my throat then I’m content to respect a person’s delusions. Where I draw the line is when I am expected to play along in that.
Call me old fashion but I've come to the realization that my understanding of these nuances was based on a more utilitarianist view:
In biology, the male is the one that, during the sexual reproduction, brings on the sperm. The female being the one that brings the egg.
When, for some reason, the male can't produce sperm or the female can't produce egg is a defect, NOT proof that this duality is wrong.
An individual can feel more closer to the other sex or somewhere in between male/female, but during the reproduction, the production of either sperm or egg determine how I see them male of female. It doesnt mean that I won't call them by the pronoun they identify with.
Sorry for bad English, I'm not a native speaker.
i'm curious if you followed any of the drama that resulted from Destiny talking about transwomen in sports?
I haven't, no. I always find those Twitch streamer type dramas hard to follow without watching half a dozen hours worth of long rambling streams.
I have seen some Destiny though. He seems like a pretty level-headed bloke. I like what I have seen
Thanks for this Jim/Noel/Bill. I started writing a comment but it just got longer and longer, so I scrapped it and decided to boil it down to a question. Is the trans issue one of those small number whereby there is no compromise that can be made to work in a sensible, practical way, and thus, one side or the other has to win absolutely? My answer is YES , and the trans-activists know this which is why they are so vociferous and aggressive to anyone who puts forward even well-thought through & relatively mild criticism of their absolutist position. Thoughts?
@revilo178 I mean more the latter. I can't think of a compromise that would be acceptable (and therefore implementable in a way that lasts) to both the trans-activists and, for example, the gender critical feminists. Please let me have your compromises and let's see if they could be acceptable to both. Remember, the agenda is set & responses determined by the hard-line radicals on both sides, not the reasonable folk
@@radicalcentrist5288 One thing that seems clear to me is that positions have hardened and compromise seems farther away than it was. As someone who largely follows this through the lens of the sports debate, when I initially followed this (starting back in 2016, when I made my first video on this) the discussion was largely just involving people with a specific interest in sport and there was a lot of accommodation possible. That situation was probably still true back in 2020, albeit to a lesser degree. Unfortunately, the trans-inclusion side took such a hardline stance that they "pied piped" the hardcore feminist contingent into the issue and this includes a lot of individuals who are frankly misandrists and cannot abide anything tainted with the "original sin" of maleness/masculinity tainting their hallowed female spaces (not all feminists btw, but a sizeable group that got a "free pass" for decades because their bigotry was tolerated widely by the left up until it spilled over to trans women). As a result, what now exists is a gulf where both sides are equally vitriolic, intransigent and both well versed in playing the same dirty games with a sizeable number of actors in each camp who will truck nothing short of an outcome where they walk away with everything just as they wish it: no compromise.
It is a very unhealthy situation. Not least for those of us who end up having to side with people we really really don't like (and in some cases we know hold very deep-rooted prejudices against us)
@@noelplum99 As ever, you elucidate your position clearly and in detail. I agree entirely, including the parts about a section of feminists simply hating all things archetypally (traditionally) masculine & being forced, on this issue only, into their camp on the enemy of my enemy is my friend basis.
My specific point is that I think the ultra-hardline trans-inclusionists deliberately, (i.e. with malice aforethought), took this line as they realised very early that, in the eyes of the vast majority, some of their demands were verging so much on the ludicrous that the only way to 'win' was to go in hard and get capitulation before that vast majority knew what had happened, or at least realised how it would adversely affect them. So on this specific issue, I am holding my nose and siding with the group that absolutely includes hardened misandrists.
On a counter point though, it IS amazing that the trans trouble comes almost entirely from trans-women (biogical men) not trans-men (biological women), a fact ironically, almost entirely proving that the underlying issue is of course, the differences between adult human male and adult human female bodies in a binary biological species.
But terms like man and woman are already meaningless. Since I cannot tell from the fact that someone is a man that they have a beard or not, that they can impregnate someone or not, that they attracted to a certain biological sex. Sure, there exist some correlation to the biological terms of male and female, but only in regard how those inform a social role, but in our modern age they old gender roles are simply no longer needed thus making these terms useless.
Ten years ago, if you knew someone is a man (since man = male) then you could safely make a number of assumptions with a high probability of success. Just like if you know something is a "human" you can make an assumption that they have 10 fingers and 10 toes, even though a tiny percentage of people don't. Divorcing the term "man" from "male" completely is what has started to make it useless.
In my 20s I earned a nickname, and at first I thought it derogatory, but it such and 20 years later my friend and family use it as often as my given name, and I "identify"with it more than my actual name because it is meaningful to the story of my life.
If this what it is like for trans people? I honestly don't know...
This is also a really good point in a psychological analysis of the situation as well.
Often times humans give eachother nicknames to indicate a kind of closeness, an in group that one is a part of and accepted by nigh unconditionally. It’s like the SNL skit where Hook gets angry with Wendy calling him “Hook” because that’s not his actual name but it’s a name that he and his friends use among themselves as in group identification. The same is true between a Korean Vs English name or a Chinese name vs English name or username vs real name. You often feel accepted via your different name which the in group accepts of you.
Friends call you that nickname and you started accepting it as a sign of friendship at some point, a sign of acceptance.
These fake non-binary kids are doing the exact same thing but with gender. They have this woke little friend group and give eachother different “genders” based on things they relate to or based on what would be the most fun and use that to indicate their individual role in the group. Like a unique nickname.
The problem is that these kids try to justify their appropriation of a serious psychological condition by watering that condition down to the point of being useless. Anyone can be trans at the snap of a finger according to these kids. This also aligns with kids adopting other conditions to better fit into their social in group of leftists like faking Tourette’s, DID, PTSD, BPD, Autism and more. These aren’t the serious issues that adults have been researching and trying to understand for Decades, but little social labels they can simply add to their bio to better fit their personality and social values.
That’s what gender has become. It’s now no different from being vegan or liking Indie rock. It’s just nickname that indicates their social values.
If only they could leave serious conditions alone and accept that these two phenomena are unrelated.
@@kimmiewise1044 Spot on. Unfortunately, we have activists and governments giving them the power to demand that everyone use their new nickname, or else.
I would prefer to identify as a Collie, but everyone just calls me a stupid Lassie!
I find it very interesting that you are just a short stone's throw away from getting it. You state yourself that your concern is that the term of man and woman will become similar to a name, something you grew up with because society, in this case, your parents, have given you. You're worried that it won't have any meaning to the word other than what society gives it.
And the redirect is simply...
Yes.
That's the point.
If you feel like a Barbara, you are a Barbara. If you feel like a Steve, you're a Steve. If you feel like society's definition of a gendered male, you're male. And if society's definition change, or if you no longer like your name, you change your gender/name. That's the definition of a societal construct.
In short, your concern is not a concern. It is the goal.
And the next question to ask yourself is, if this goal is met, does it matter anything?
I refer to people as their biological sex. I don't care if somebody doesn't like it, nor do I have any respect for someone's 'preferred' pronouns or identity. Start drawing the damn line in the sand.
I'd be interested to know why your chanel name is Noel Plum (99) and not your real name.
TH-cam channel names are the kind of thing you can spend less than five minutes deciding on and then a decade living with.
It was a made up name I used at university to play video games with my friends (particularly PGA Tour Golf on the Sega Megadrive) and when I wanted to set up a YT account it needed a name and i chose that. If you want to really get into the weeds, on the games console I called myself "Sir Noel Plum" and the name intended to reflect some very posh English gent, with the name formed in my mind from a mixture of Sir Noel Coward and Sir Pelham (Plum) Warner, both of whom fitted the bill in my mind
Back in the day names had to include a number and hence "noelplum99". Later, we were allowed to drop the number but I got attached to the name and the avatar I used at the time and so have stuck with them both throughout.
what if "you" becomes offensive?
I'm not sure that your worries and concerns aren't already the case. And that's, frankly, got a lot more to do with the subjectivity of language than anything sociopolitical.
Speaking referential, you never really know what someone's 'proper nouns' really are, unless they're addressed specifically. I think forcing more pronouns, expressions, and explanations, is essentially just people who buck the term "typical" seeking a remedy to that existent situation.
On handsome/beautiful. I've always thought they could be used with a man, or a woman, as either could present themselves as either. As a woman in a pantsuit might be 'handsome', and a man in a in a summer dress might be beautiful. Or a woman in a kilt might be handsome, and a man in leotard might be beautiful.
Now, I wouldn't say any of that is any sort of objective truth, but that's just how I've always thought of it, subjectively.
Little too meandering to me. Not sure I actually grasp your argument or position. I'll have to rewatch, but right now it seems like the basic points of your argument are: People grew up with sex being synonymous with gender terms, therefore their gender identity includes their biologic sex. Therefore anyone not of a biological sex congruent with their gender identity makes the gender term meaningless because its not a universally socially understood term anymore. And you have no real skin in the game because you don't care if anyone genders you in a way you don't identify. Is that an accurate understanding?
That isn't quite what I meant but it merits a clarification.
*People grew up with sex being synonymous with gender terms, therefore their gender identity includes their biologic sex.*
This is where you misunderstand me. You have shifted from a couple of terms which were used as synonymous with biological sex (typically, in this context) and moved seamlessly to "gender identity". I am talking specifically about identifying two words with two sexes and then making that link somewhat more ambiguous (not breaking it so much on a statistical basis - most males identify as men etc - but quite severely in terms of how they are sometimes now defined).
Gender identity exists however we define "man" and "woman". The comments I was making here had very little to do with gender identity (unless we take the absurdist position that gender identity is no more than whether you prefer the term "man" or "woman") and more to do with anachronistic interpretations of what people mean by the words they use. If someone grows up in a situation where man and male are used synonymously (for our species) it makes no sense decades later to try and interpret their identifying as a "man" without acknowledging that their attachment to that word is formulated under very different circumstances.
Growing up I wasn't even aware that there was an option of identifying as anything other than a man or a boy because I regarded them as intrinsically tied to biological maleness. Had someone asked me why i was a boy i would have simply referenced my biological sex. That would have been both the start and the end of my defence. Now, if you could erase all my past attachment to that word and ask me afresh, today, whether I identify as "man" then I would likely decline to adopt the label (linguistic convenience to one side) because i would no longer passively just take on the label in the way I did back then.
Of course we still don't really do that. My son is seven years old and he knows "boy", "man" and "son" as relating strictly to maleness. In some ways I am playing this anachronistic game with him even though society has moved on. I think 99% of parents are doing the same. One assumes by the time he is old enough to see these more esoteric and convoluted discussions of these words as referencing gender identity as apart from bio sex he will likely also have grown too attached to these words to jettison them (unless he suffers gender dysphoria and feels the need to associate that which society associates with femaleness ....or just wants to be different).
*And you have no real skin in the game because you don't care if anyone genders you in a way you don't identify.*
that makes a throwaway remark I made sound a bit heartless. bear in mind this response was driven by someone asking me specifically what attachment I felt to certain words. Hence, I made the point that actually personally i don't feel particularly wedded to them. I also acknowledged that for some people (a mixed bag, potentially, of both those more heavily personally attached to traditional gender norms and those least personally attached, though for very different reasons) but i don't think it unreasonable to mention my own lower level of attachment to these things.
@@noelplum99 Have to say, I don't think you are correct. Your statements don't reflect the research that has gone into this topic. Gender identity begins forming very young, essentially as soon as children are able to start pattern recognition around two and a half years old. Children, you included, don't know what sex is, they simply know that mommy and daddy don't look or dress the same and they are told that they are a gender, and the gender their parents and society expect of them is essentially indoctrinated onto them. Eventually they learn their gender is tied to their parents gender and they start the process of gaining a gender identity. Yea by the time you can "remember" consciously identifying as a gender you may have learned that boys and girls have different sexes but that is long into a process that has already instilled a recognition that you are a specific gender.
Yes, gender is as diverse and undefined as a persons name, and yes its functional use is in some ways hindered by the current emphasis many people place on correct identification. But much like how Peterson is wrong on the topic, it isn't meaningless. It is an expression of human respect. Not acknowledging how someone identifies through use of correct pronouns is no different than misidentifying their name. You might not be bothered if someone called you "what's your face" or "sally", but if they continued to do so it would be assumed to be a sign of disrespect. You might not care if someone is disrespecting you, but I bet it would if you perceived a significant discrimination against you.
@@Uhlbelk With respect, I don't see how your first paragraph has a single iota of relevance. There is nothing within it that I dispute but also nothing within it that determines what we must, or must not, mean by the words "man" and "woman". The suggestion here is that, as is being proposed now (and applying it to the reference example you give here) "man" could as justifiably relate to "how mommy looked and dressed" as it does to "how daddy looked and dressed" as these words purely relate to how each and every one of us wishes them to relate. I could feel and express my gender in EXACTLY the same way as "mommy", apply the label "man" and that would be deemed as "valid". So I am 100% with you on the ways we, from an early age, have a sense of our gender identity but that seems to have little to no relation to the (zero) constraints on what "man" and "woman" can mean in this open-ended way of approaching these terms.
*But much like how Peterson is wrong on the topic, it isn't meaningless. It is an expression of human respect*
I am surprised you felt the need to throw this at me given how many exchanges we have had on this subject. I am not sure where I could possibly have given the idea to you that i think pronouns are meaningless nor that I feel that acceding to people's preferences in this regard is not a reasonably expected form of behaviour. Did I not, in this very example, talk about how I have first hand experience with the dysphoria I myself felt when people referred to me using a proper noun (to wit: Bill) to which I felt no resonance? That shows my position clearly: even if a term has no more objective kinship to us than that so ingratiated through familiarity and repetition it is still reasonably an accepted courtesy that others respect our preference; that they call us that which we prefer to be called (within reason).
I will add, I feel in some ways you are skirting within a whisker of telling me you know what I feel better than I do myself. I won't disabuse you of your right to do so but it seems a fairly rum irony given the context of the subject matter we are discussing here when so much usually hinges on the demand we take people on their word with regard to how they feel about their gender and the way they identify.
@@noelplum99 The title of your video included the word meaningless. I was saying that granting you the uncertainty of how anyone is defining it doesn't make it meaningless. My point is that regardless on how you feel about the ambiguity of the term it doesn't change the reality of that ambiguity. You learned what gender was from your environment (long before you knew what sex was) and that is different than my experience, but our shared societal understanding of the terms means that while you and I have different definitions they are still largely congruent. And unless you were talking to someone who was being simply dishonest I'm sure every trans person exposed to the same similar social environment would have very similar understanding of what those gender terms mean. Which is exactly why gender dysphoria is an issue, not because we have different understanding but because we have the same, and sex is a *part* of those definitions.
Saying that man could mean mom and woman dad, sounds a whole lot like "brain in a vat" kind of argument.
@@Uhlbelk
*Saying that man could mean mom and woman dad, sounds a whole lot like "brain in a vat" kind of argument.*
That wasn't what I said though, either in the video nor in my responses to you. In the video i specifically talked about how these linked words effectively act as proxies for "man" and "woman" but in themselves are just more of the same. In the video I referred to the words "handsome" and "beautiful" but "mommy" and "daddy" would do just the same.
What I DID specify in my response to you was "how daddy/mommy looked and dressed". As I said in the video, for some people I could make no changes to how I look, dress and behave, barring growing a beard and spending my evenings playing pool in sports bars and that would be as "valid" in terms of identifying as a woman as anything else.
Maybe this is the time for you to tell me those things we attributed to masculinity growing up that we could not attribute to a femininity under this more modern schema used to define "man" and "woman" and associated terms (such as daddy and mommy, respectively)? Maybe that is unfair. Maybe masculine and feminine have no single essential characteristics but are defined based upon a constellation of characteristics. Ok, so instead give me a constellation of characteristics under this modern schema, beyond simply preferred terms (man, dad, he etc) that could not be attributed to femininity; would not be allowed to fly under the banner "woman". My issue is, I don't think you can give me one because there isn't one, so detached have these terms become from the very sense of gender identity that you yourself are pointing out.
*not because we have different understanding but because we have the same, and sex is a part of those definitions*
And yet we are at a stage where a beard, cock and balls can be deemed feminine characteristics
PS: To clarify there, this is not to say "if you have a penis you cannot be a woman" but rather, in my view, a penis is still a masculine characteristic, you would be a woman DESPITE having a penis in the same way traditionally we saw "Tomboys" as women DESPITE displaying what we saw as masculine behaviour traits, we didn't redefine their behaviours as feminine just because it was woman who displayed them.
I still think you miss the bigger issue, the big problem with 'I want to identify as non-binary' isn't the 'non-binary' it's the 'i want to identify' Identity is how other people see me not how I identify myself. At least at a legal and financial level.
My passport and driving license is my identity but they exist for the benefit of society not for me.
You can call yourself whatever you want but what really matters if you don't want to end up in prison for fraud is what society calls you.
It's pure narcissism to think how you see yourself matters to anyone else. Should you have a right to be gay or homosexual yes, should you have a right to be seen by the rest of the world as gay or homosexual absolutely not
I don't think that is true. I think both how YOU choose to identify AND how society perceives you is relevant.
When it comes to a census we are asked what religion, if any, WE identify ourselves into, not what religion the people we know would identify us as. The same with ethnicity. If you are of mixed ancestry you can put whatever you feel like putting even if that is at odds with the box most people walking down the street would put you in.
That said, I DO think we must be able to reserve the right to slot people into boxes other than the boxes they self-identify into. If I want to survey the level of atheism in the UK then it would be imperative that i can place everyone who claims to not believe in a god into the "atheist" box and everyone who does into the "theist" box. Someone who asserts they have never believed in a god but prefers not to use the label "Atheist" for themselves is fine as an individual preference but it makes a mockery of my survey if I am working to a fixed definition of "atheist" rather than surveying for "self-identification" (as the census does).
Hello from long ago . . .
Hello back from right now!!!
Screw this! I was born with 2X chromosomes. Birthed 3 male offspring.
Mom has an anecdote when I came home from Kindergarten (unsure what the UK equivalent is) I announced "my name is LAURA. Not Lori"
Just screw off trying to label as male.
wut