I believe this quest for identity is a subversion of true acceptance of the nature of being. Which is to say although we must categorise to some degree our daily lives in an effort for survival, aproximate groupings are a fiction as zizek so eloquently put. The more radical and truthful motion is to abondon identity and to accept that you are a being and a law unto yourself. The practice of identity formation serves not only to create further division in society but also within the mind of an individual. How this works is that, say you choose an identity but suddenly you have an impulse whuch defies this identity, now you are at war with yourself. I believe that true liberation of the mind is that age old lesson of i am. The short koan about the man who wants to study at the temple and the master asks who are you to study here and so on. It is rather like saying dont try to square the circle you will be forever counting. Although we can estimate the area of a circle the nature of the infinitive pi means that it is not measurable. Human beings are like this we try to measure our existence but ultimately this is impossible.
I hope people understand that what Slavoj Zizek is talking about here is nothing like what most people discussing transgenderism hear. He is already operating under the principle that transgender people are humans who have the absolute rights to their own identities, bodies, and thoughts. There is no debate here about whether transgenderism is real, whether trans people deserve respect, pseudoscience about their brains, or what activities they should be prohibited from engaging in. This is purely good faith philosophy that doesn't stoop to a low level.
Ok as individual you have rights but how LGTBQ people think can decide about a reoriented the development of another individual and use a woman as an object? This is paradox. Do you have the recently studies about this in all world? I'm from Peru, and I'm starting to think that sciences studies have a strong geopolitical bias.
Agreeing with your point mostly, but keep in mind that by saying "transgenderism" you are reusing right wing rhetoric. There is no transgenderism since it is and never has been an ideology. Trans people are just fighting for the right to exist. That may be inherently political and also connected to left wing ideologies, but is not inself an ideology. It implicitly says that a transperson can just decide to "not be for transgenderism" and is then suddenly cis. Thats just not how it works.
These people are not fighting for the right to exist. They exist no matter how society chooses to describe them. They want recognition. The fight is whether or not what they want to be recognised as, is actually real/true, and a resistance to being told by one group how to address them or to believe/agree with that group’s experience and definition or previously “understood” terms.
@@elduderino3120 The implicit here is 'a right to exist (as what they believe their authentic true sense is)' And hence if wider society deems their internal identity of gender as the one by which they shall be socially classified in as well. So for example, being able to apply for a job in their internal identity of gender, or get a driving license in it, etc. The problem though is, that till now wider human society (at least western one) has classified gender socially based on biological sex classification. If this is 'radically' changed to being based on an internal gender identity classification, a lot of things that were based on biological sex would become incompatible with the new system of classification. eg. Maternity leave, or countries where tampons/sanitary napkins are given for free/subsidised for current classification of women, military drafts, sports etc. This is the obvious good faith political blocker. There also nevertheless exists a pretty bad faith (sometimes religious) reactionary blocker as well which often doesn't want to tolerate any kind of discussion or reiteration in social classification of gender.
Zizek of course is not a Finn, but for Finnish perspective this is very easy accent: words are pronounced as they are written. It is the main principle of Rally English.
@@mikahamari5994 I think that for most native english speakers it's not really a big deal at all and in fact the accent is pretty understandable. But it can be quite a pain to listeners whose first language is not English, because the thing is that most of us don't really understand speech sort of like in a 100% phonetically way. It depends heavily on context to fill in the gaps of the words we don't really catch at first. And when you have a non usual accent at play, this task is even harder to do. Because not only you are still very context dependent, but you also need to put much more effort into actually trying to understand every bit of phoneme to understand most of the words that wouldn't really be a big deal to understand in the first place if they were spoken by a native speaker.
@@mistersystem9385 Finnish almost 100 % phonemic writing system makes children pronounce foreign names as they are written. Then they learn, that WTF, many writing systems are more or less arbitrary. Then some of them learn that it is because of historical sound changes which are not reflected in writing. So, Finnish way to pronounce Italian name Giuseppe is like this (I am not sure about wovel qualities in English, but I will try to find an example): /giuseppe/ /g/ as g in "go" /i/ as i in "kill" /u/ as u in "shoot" (but short) /s/ as s in "sex" /e/ as e in "bet" /p/ as second p in "paper" /p/ as second p in "paper" /e/ as e in "bet" English examples are wrong, if wovels in them are reduced, but you get the basic principle: one particular grapheme, one particular phoneme. (But instead of /g/ we have a tendency to pronounce /k/, because /g/ has not traditionally been included in Finnish phoneme inventory.)
It’s true that a lot of LGBTQI activism sometimes falls on essentialist rhetoric, but there is also a good amount of queer theorists that don’t agree in the “born this way” argument, for example Paul Preciado , TH-camr Contrapoints also talks about it. I believe that essencialist rhetoric worked better because is more digestible/sellable and sexuality is not something as visual as race or gender.
There is a long historical correlation between queer theorists and child sex, queer theory honestly should be thrown out as entirely garbage junk science all together to be frank. Never have I seen an academic theory so thoroughly infested by child molestors and child rapists.
and then there's this neuroscientist who has evidence for a kind of neurological/psychological/internal sense of how the body is ought to be th-cam.com/video/8QScpDGqwsQ/w-d-xo.html
I had to watch the video twice before, I think, understanding Zizek's perspective. He is, indeed, saying that gender identity is socially constructed and contingent, but believes it in retrospect to feel essential and inevitable, i.e. once a person has developed a gender identity it is experienced to be essential and inevitable. His analogy is useful: who you fall in love with is a matter of historical contingencies, but once you have fallen in love the particular person you happened to fall in love with is essential as the object of your love experience. If this view is to be meaningful, it seems to imply an individual's gender identity to be largely a consequence of his/her actual history and experiences (including, of course, of the social environment). This seems to ignore the fact of biological sex being a strong predictor of gender identity. At the very least Zizek has a lot more explaining to do in order to make this view plausible...
Poor zizek... he has been put into the position of trying to reconcile a basic reality that is in front of every one of us while trying to not be canceled by the mob... Of course the behavioral differences between men and women are bi-modal... Here is one of many papers: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2879914/ Just look at the behavioral influences of oxytocin and the disproportionate oxytocin production between the genders. Just one of many many hormones which men and women produce in different quantities. If men and women produce different quantities of behavioral influencing hormones, they will naturally behave differently. That is not something that has been socialized into us, and it's not something that can be socialized out of us. So, be it. Men and women are different. Big shocker! Also, of course there are socialization aspects as well. Behaviour is obviously some combination of nature and nurture. It's frankly jaw dropping that people can even begin to fathom personality is 100% socially constructed. Or that the gender roles in society have no biological bearing at all.
Strife40k You’re right about the behavioral differences between men and women, however these differences just as you mention are actually almost purely dictated by social conditioning & hormone production. Once a subject let’s say is nurtured in an environment in which they are free to express themselves as the gender in which they choose to identify and perform, that alters them greatly. It is a huge challenge for that person to be treated in society as a gender of their choosing, separate from their biological sex which is why the research is never conclusive. Hormones, especially if taken in a very young age (before or around puberty) make all the difference in gender related behavior regardless of the amounts produced. To say that differences in behavior and hormone production dictates gender is to be absolutely oblivious of the differences within female and male bodies. Not all females behave the same but could be subject to a certain behavior based on their hormones just as males do. However you come to also understand that even that idea is complex within the binary sex spectrum. Some males behave in more feminine matter, develop less than most, produce more/less testosterone, sound lower/higher which make them subject to danger and scrutiny because of this flawed false narrative that males and females have fixed characteristics that differentiate them from each other almost exclusively.
@@Strife40k lmao I love how you copy paste the same comment to multiple people, some of which aren't even in agreeance with you. Seems like you've put about as much work into your internet posting as you have into your ideological viewpoints. "Gender is biological hurrdurr" K let us know when you get to the 21st centruy mate really
@@Strife40k I don't believe that anyone claims that biology has no bearing on personality. Rather we claim that much of our gender roles are socially constructed (for example the range your voice can talk in is largely biological, but how you use that voice - like the fact that as a man you do not speak at the high end of that range - is socially learned). However, even if it were the case that gender was 100% biological, I don't know why that would mean that trans people are any less right to consider themselves their preferred gender - after all, a trans woman would derive her womanhood from biology.
As someone who's studied this extensively and have lived experience as well I don't wholly disagree with what he's saying here. I agree members of my community do use very sloppy language to describe their personal experiences but we have to bear in mind that not everyone has the philosophical language to explain the phenomenon of gender precisely and it shouldn't be their responsibility to do so. I agree it's technically incorrect to say things like "Oh I have a female/male/other soul" because that does fly in the face of the anti-essentialist principles on which contemporary gender theory is founded, but again you have to realize that the average trans person who has no interest in philosophy can only recognize their internal experience as going from a state of mind in which every facet of their external selves causes grave distress and there is a distinct sense of incongruance that is relieved upon transitioning (98.7% of trans people report a generally positive outcome from transitioning socially and physically, according to a meta-analysis of 55 studies, one of which placed this number at 99.6% [1]) to one in which they finally feel as though they're using their entire brains, as if life clicked into focus from a deep blur. Of course, the reality is that the desire to look, feel, and be seen in a certain light is the "thing" trans people are referring to when they discuss "being" trans. So, forgive me, in essence, this desire to act is the thing itself. There obviously is no soul seperate from the body and obviously no way to have necessarily been destined from birth to be trans, existence preceeds essence and all that, however there is clearly ample empirical evidence that there is a strong biological component, even evidence to suggest that trans people on average have brain structures that more closely resemble the average for the gender they identify with, not their assigned sex[2]. That said, I do have to mention, recent research in neuroscience is starting to indicate that even sexed differences in brain structure might be less pronounced than we originally thought if you take very large sample sizes, not to mention that the jury is still very much out on how much of the differences in brain structure are down to initial biological conditions vs. development over the course of socialization. Regardless, there are many other biological factors with stronger empirical evidence[3]. I tend to look at gender identity from a practical standpoint through the lens of Wittgenstein's philosophy. Regardless of anything else, we can observe that in our contemporary culture, there is a group of people who pursue the societal role of the opposite sex. They present in that way, they act in that way, and many undergo physical changes that can make them indistinguishable from cis members of their gender. There is no way to peer inside of someone and observe some concrete thing which "is" their gender, as no such "thing" exists, there is ample scientific evidence to suggest that biological sex, gender, and sexuality all arise from wildly complex biopsychosocial processes with dozens of theorized causes[3], so in terms of explaining the world as it appears to us, all we can do is look at what people communicate with their words, with their actions, and with their physical appearance. It's a minor undergraduate essay focusing more on Wittgenstein's philosophy of language using gender as an example, so nothing Earth shattering, but for anyone curious for more information as to how I relate the issue of gender identity with Wittgenstein's philosophy, I wrote a very brief essay on the topic many moons ago: docs.google.com/document/d/1SPHO9Sf96hcoVFca7pJYGzofp9lMZJPwaCMXfaVcCZI/edit?usp=drivesdk All in all, if you strip away all emotions and all your gut impulses to say this (contemporarily) foreign concept must be inherently wrong, then I think all of this is very clearly enough to recognize trans people as the gender they identify as, and I would argue this is a moral imperative, given the empirical evidence that doing so leads to improved wellbeing by every conceivable metric, most significantly lowering suicidality to only slightly higher than that of a cis person[1] 1. whatweknow.inequality.cornell.edu/topics/lgbt-equality/what-does-the-scholarly-research-say-about-the-well-being-of-transgender-people/ 2. health.clevelandclinic.org/research-on-the-transgender-brain-what-you-should-know/ 3. www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-new-science-of-sex-and-gender/
Trans "feelings" go hand in hand with the development of neoliberalism, the countries with the most economic "freeeom" are the ones with the most amount of capitalist decadence.
@@TonySopeano46 Ab-so-lute nonsense. Shows a complete ignorance of history. Please move slightly past this limited, Eurocentric historical materialist understanding of history (which is where I presume you're arguing from as a presumed Marxist) and crack open an anthropology textbook written in the last couple hundred years. Over the course of human history and across cultures, this rigid biological essentialist understanding of gender and gender roles is the exception not the rule. As a counterpoint, broken down by region, look into: Asia/Oceania: the Hijra of India the Palao'ana of Micronesia the Fa'afafine of Somoa the mahu vahine of Tahiti the fakaleiti of Tahiti the Maori whakawahine the akava'ine of the Cook islands the Mahu of Hawaii the Waria of Indonesia the Burgis culture of Sulawesi, which actually has a place for five genders, each with a unique societal role Africa: the Chibados of the Ndongo the Ashtime of Maale culture the Mashoga of Mobasa the Mangaik of the Mbo people The Middle East and North Africa: the hierodules of ancient Mesopotamia the sekhet of ancient Egypt the Xanith of Oman the phenomenon of transgender recognition in contemporary Iran First Peoples of the Americas: As a rule, the indigenous cultures of the Americas do not adhere to anything remotely close to Western gender and sexuality norms, however across the board in dozens of tribes we find recognition of people who can be broadly be described with the neologism "two-spirited", which in essence is a sort of third gender. Additionally: the Muxe of the Zapotec people the Biza'ah the travestis of modern Brazil Regardless of how "primitive" you believe some of these cultures to be, it's undeniable that this presents an overwhelming amount of evidence to suggest that the basic biological impulse has always been with humanity.
@@jali4000 I agree with what you say about recognizing trans people in the gender they think they are, I believe it's the best way to help them, but I'm still pretty confused about the limits of this acceptance. As a non trans person, I cannot understand the feeling of not being born in the right body. I can't understand why and how would someone feel like that. I can just accept it "blindly", even if the physical characteristics that have always guided me to know people's genders say otherwise. So, what if someone says that he or she isn't black but white, even if the skin color says otherwise? What if someone says he is tall if he feels tall, even if he isn't? I know that gender is socially constructed and sex isn't, but we use the same words for the 2. Male/female. So we could start saying that the skin color is socially constructed and there is a biological skin color and a constructed one, which you can identify to even if it's not the one that has been attributed to you. How do we deal with that kind of logic? When does it have to stop, and for what reasons?
@@tdb517 That phrasing "born in the wrong body" is another thing that I don't think it's necessarily accurate to say, but people do because it's an easy way to describe the experience, albeit imprecisely. It's more that one has a desire to look and act a certain way, many times driven by a distinct psychological condition known as gender dysphoria, which is a persistent dissatisfaction with the gender role one has been socialized into which causes measurable distress, not caused by any mental illness or delusional disorder like schizophrenia, or something like internalized homophobia leading someone to believe that since they're attracted to men, they /must/ be a woman because they aren't a "real" man. There are many factors at play, which is why in order to transition, one must undergo months of therapy before they're given the go ahead. This weeds out people for whom transitioning would not be the right choice, which is why regrets following transition are exceptionally rare. As for the how and why, you can see from the sources I cited in my original post that it's a complicated issue but one that at the very least we can determine has a real biological basis. It's down to a complicated interplay between genetics, neural structure, androgen exposure in the womb, and about a dozen other identified factors. This lecture is orientated specifically towards teaching transgender care to medical students, however at the timestamp I've linked he goes over the theorized causes in a pretty succinct way: th-cam.com/video/fefu33e8O-0/w-d-xo.html All of this is based off of empirical evidence, evidence which suggests that it's distinct from any sort of delusional disorder, since gender is simply ones desire to act a certain way, there is no denial of reality. This makes it entirely different from someone who is "trans-racial" (a phenomenon which outside of a few headcases here and there is nothing more than a right-wing boogeyman), there is just no such thing, because there is no evidence to suggest a biological basis. For more: debunkingdenialism.com/2013/12/06/being-transgender-is-nothing-like-having-a-psychotic-napoleon-delusion/ As to why we use the same words, that gets quite murky as well. First, I think it's important to note that sex, while based on our observations of objective phenomenon we can see in the world as opposed to gender which is an internal experience, is not this neat "one or the other" situation some people envision it as. One's biological sex develops in the womb via several different mechanisms, and there is a lot of room for deviation. I linked to this in my original post, but I would strongly encourage you to take a look at this article, that breaks down these concepts very well: www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-new-science-of-sex-and-gender/ Sufficed to say, even sex is not a binary, rather it's a bimodal. People tend to come out of the womb as apparently identifiable as one or the other, male or female. However, as many as 1-2% of the population are intersex, meaning that they aren't neatly classifiable as either male or female, which is about as many people as have red hair. As an example, take for instance the case of total androgen insensitivity. This is a condition in which a fetus with XY chromosomes is completely unresponsive to the male sex hormones and so develops in a way almost indistinguishable from the female sex. It's only around puberty that differences start to become apparent, most notably a lack of menstruation, that leads a doctor to investigate and discover this person in fact does not have a uterus. The key thing though, is that it's only in recent memory that this observation would even have been able to be made. In almost any other time, this person would have been considered simply an infertile woman until the day she died. Sex and gender are clearly very strongly correlated, and research would suggest that there is crossover between their underlying mechanisms. We use the words interchangeably in some contexts because for most intents and purposes they /are/ interchangeable. Gender is a social role, it has to do with how one sees themselves in relation to others, we began to distinguish between sex and gender specifically to better describe the world as it is, because it was determined that generally speaking the role one pursues in society is who they are in that society. So basically, the way to "deal" with the sort of logic you're talking about is to realize that you're going off of a wild misconception and that gender is a completely different scenario to anything else you've mentioned. As for the signifiers you're saying have always guided you in determining someone's gender, presuming you mean things like genitalia, shoulder breadth, voice, laryngeal prominence, etc. the fact is that they simply aren't signals of gender, rather sex. Things like clothing, affect, and behavior are signifiers of gender. Not to mention these signals are loose ones at that, since as I said in my original post many trans people undergo extensive biological changes from gender affirming hormone therapy alone, let alone a vast array of cosmetic surgeries, to remove all of these sex indicators. Furthermore, since sex itself is not a binary, they may never have had these to begin with. I never had an Adam's apple, or broad shoulders, or a particularly deep voice, so I didn't have far to go in transitioning, and I even had certain intersex characteristics, namely pronounced gynecomastia, hypogonadism, and abdormally low testosterone for males, so even in terms of sex development I was certainly never as male as someone like Arnold Schwarzenegger. So what I'm saying here is that one should try to remain as impartial as possible when observing the world and recognize the vast complexities that get swept under the rug when we pretend that we can neatly classify things with words like "male" and "female", "man" and "woman". This will allow us to describe the world as it appears to us in as accurate and useful a way as possible.
@@jali4000 Thanks for your answer. The notion of gender being different than sex and being a social construction is relatively recent. A lot of researches are done in the academic world today about what it is being black, or asian, or white today, from the way it is socially constructed and perceived. I don't see how, in a few years or decades, we couldn't do the same with racial identity. There is a biological reality behind being black (which is the equivalent of sex) and there's a social reality, which is constructed, behind being black too (which is the equivalent of gender). The way you're being perceived by society, the bias, the way people expect you to act, ... I know how race (or skin color) differs from gender, and there's no racial dysphoria etc, but those are technical issues. In the logic itself it's not different. And, as interesting as it was, I really doubt you'll be able to explain those subtleties to the average person in order to understand why you can identify to a different gender but not to a different race. We say there are 2 sexes because we're making a generalization. Of course some people are born with the 2, or absence of the 2, but they're a small minority. It's like saying humans have 2 hands and 10 fingers, a lot of people are born with 9 or 11 fingers, but they're the exception. We're not denying their existence by saying humans have 10 fingers. I don't think we should stop using generalities to explain concepts because it wouldn't represent accurately reality, I mean it's the very idea of making a generalization. I agree with your conclusion, but at the same time it is contradictory with a lot of what trans activists are saying.
The lgbt community disagrees normally with gender essentialist genders. I've seen plenty of transgender forums where trans people explain the issues with "man in a woman's body" and that kind of talk. The reasons why some trans people use essentialist language is the same why cis people use it too, they are learnt and promoted concepts. The fact that trans people use essentialist language is not proof of gender essentialist being true or partially true at all, it is the result of gender essentialist language being imposed to everybody since birth.
I think I agree with this but at the same time I am not really sure if Zizek is actually againts it. I mean, he simply says (it seems to be that's what he's saying) that there is a rift inside the LGBT community regarding their definitions of certain concepts. You could say that the LGB is in some conceptual war with the T over the idea of gender and sex, their possible difference, their scientifically oriented nature or whether it's a social construct rather than essential. I also think that the LGBT community is playing different games with regards to its seemingly "unified" goal. That is of course, due to the variance in opinion among humans and nothing especial in that community.
@@daedricdragon5976 I'm agreeing with Zizek really, he doesm't say transgenders always fall to essentialist gender talk but I'm just adding to the discussion that definitely it's a topic talked and discussed in lgbt communities and saying "I'm a men in a woman's body" by a trans men will be frowned upon and confronted in any serious conversation about feminism and transgenderism in their communities.
@@Strife40k having more oxytocin doesn't make one dress a certain way. Having bi-modal groups statistically doesn't justify a binarism in identities, it's like 2 gaussians with different peaks but that gives plenty of room for a crazy amount of behavioural diversity that doesn't justify the binarism and the discrimination and stigma towards non traditional gender roles we see everyday. Gender goes much more beyond levels of oxytocin, hormones or biological stuff, the differences in behaviour we see in men and women everyday cannot be traced back to that. With this line of thinking one can fall to things like Jordan Peterson said such as "women wear lipstick at work to subtly sexually attract men" or along the lines. I'm not saying biology doesn't play any factor, it does and it should be reasearched and studied, but if one tries to understand gender binarism through biological lenses one will always fall extremely short. Try to have neurobiologists explain why women wear more skirts than men, it's just an absurd thing to ask them. There's definitely a much more social and cultural explanation to present and historical gender expression and behaviour differences than a bimodalism in hormones or whatever.
@@Strife40k why are you spamming this horseshit everywhere? Could you not at least write a unique comment for each comment thread you want to infect with your worthless dialogue? What a joke.
So many people in the comments misunderstood Zizek here. Zizek DOES agree completely with Judith Butler that gender is socially constructed, and that it is performative. What Zizek questions I'd the paradox of historicism: has gender always been performative, or is this a phenomenon new to the modern subject? He also questions the liberal language which has dominated mainstream queer discourse which is often essentialist and biodeterminist.
Poor zizek... he has been put into the position of trying to reconcile a basic reality that is in front of every one of us while trying to not be canceled by the mob... Of course the behavioral differences between men and women are bi-modal... Here is one of many papers: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2879914/ Just look at the behavioral influences of oxytocin and the disproportionate oxytocin production between the genders. Just one of many many hormones which men and women produce in different quantities. If men and women produce different quantities of behavioral influencing hormones, they will naturally behave differently. That is not something that has been socialized into us, and it's not something that can be socialized out of us. So, be it. Men and women are different. Big shocker! Also, of course there are socialization aspects as well. Behaviour is obviously some combination of nature and nurture. It's frankly jaw dropping that people can even begin to fathom personality is 100% socially constructed. Or that the gender roles in society have no biological bearing at all.
There are modern biology studies that shows that some behaviors are genetically driven in mice. For one to claim that gender is a social construct, and only lives in the bounds of socially constructed ideas, you'd have to fully understand the roles of genes and influence of the environment, a thing we are millennia from finding the true answers. Therefore he is right in considering that social constructivists are idealists in nature, because no such thing can be proven with the scientific method, making it purely metaphysical. What bothers me is not the fact that there are people who believe in it, but people that not only don't fully understand what social constructivists are saying, either because they are stupid or because it tells them the answers they were looking for, the second one being the biggest poison for the mind one can get.
@@Strife40k What if there's a woman who produces more oxytocin than a randomly selected man/gender average for man? Is she no longer the female gender compared to that? Your rule is not consistent and therefore not absolute truth
The exception is not the rule. We don't base society and language off of the one exception. Sex is determined by chromosomes simply put, if you're intersex then you're just fucked.
@@ThorMNsuh, yes, these are absolute truths (unless you can objectivly prove them wrong). yes, it is true that hormones exist. Yes it is true that they influence behavior. Yes it is true that men and women produce them in different quantities. So yes, it is true that if men and women naturally produce different quantities of behavioral influencing hormones, they will naturally behave differently. Of course there are outliers, of course every person is unique in their particularities, both biological and conditional (which influence each other by the way!). But, when talking about society as a whole we are talking about the average behavior across all individuals. Those behavioral averages have biological influences which was NOT socialized into us, and CAN NOT be socialized out of us.
I think this ideological turn is largely rhetorical. It’s an apologetics for extremely entrenched views of what gender is-that is, an eternal category and absolute quality which is branded into one’s essential being. It’s a line of argument picked up in elsewhere in scientific (read: absolute) articles which posit observable neurobiological difference between cis and trans people.
I posit that you have written this post. Of course, I could be wrong. And right as well. As observed within a Presocratic split between the Being of Non-Being and the Non-Being of Being. It is a metaphysical unity of an epistemological disunity with the Being/Non-Being transcendence.
At 3:20, "The way we act is as if we have an priori identity and that's this paradox of how our practice presupposes or posits retroactively an identity whose essence doesn't exist in itself." I had to chuckle over this. Particularly, it requires a steep learning curve and quite a few beatings to turn a human into a masculine thing.
Germaine Greer hit upon this idea I think. Essentially her argument was that trans women are built upon an external and socially constructed idea of what it is to be a women. Whereas her view of womanness was not the constructed one but was an internal and experiential one. Is that kind of what zizek is speaking about here?
1:52 Butlerian... Jihad... Sniffles... The spice must flow. The spice is required for space travel. The spice also granted me the prescience required to say that discussing politics via posts can lead to accidental heated misunderstanding.
Zizek always follows good postmodernist practices: every now and then interjects "so what I'm saying is simply that" after which his elucidations become even more sophisticated and impermeable to reason. So here's what he's saying. That's basically Jordan Peterson's argument but let's leave that as it is. Either gender is a construct (it doesn't exist, we create it) or it is a reality. Arguing for sex change by saying that it makes one's appearance congruent to their *true identity* presupposes that such "true identity" exists. But then gender is not a mere construct. Or if gender is to be a construct, sex change is a "whim" (albeit a serious one).
@@marionow6227 I agree-it may indeed be a social construct but that doesn’t make it less real or powerful. The trick is to hold your mind in two places to be able to comprehend both sides. Trans people are real even if people don’t actually exist as we think we do.
He must speak in code so dummies wouldn't be triggerred. Simply saying 'no' would have had him booed off the stage by these pseudo intellectuals. Notice how he starts with 'i met a trans once', the equivilent of 'i had a black friend'. They say that beliving two opposing ideas at the same time makes you either a sophist, or a schizo. He chooses none and plays the stupid card: "Don't know, ask Darida. I'm still an atheist like you, though. Please pay me".
@@cozmiucc He only speaks in code so his fellow leftists don't understand how he's criticising them. But yea, you're right. "Read Derrida" is always a good catchphrase because nobody will and even if they did, it's just random nonsense so nothing can be exactly 'learned' from this reading.
comparing realizing that you're in love and realizing you're trans is beautiful and spot on. i didn't one day wake up and say "i am transgender", i just had to face the music of "how do i like to look" and "what do i like to do" and "how do i like to talk" etc. etc. until i just realized i was trans. and just like being in love, you doubt yourself over and over and over again until you just have to accept that it's true
Zizek is using Lacan here, not Hegal. In Lacanian terms desire leads retroactively to the person's conception that they existed in an individuated state before the experience of desire. The self emerges from a fiction which explains desire. This retroactively in-filled identity, both a fiction and an inescapable subjective reality, likewise informs essentialist views of gender identity according to Zizek.
Josef Frühauf I’d rather hear Dr. Kermit dissect the rich underlying truths of human nature as they relate to our literature and political practice much more than Sylvester the cat spew Marxist philosophies and agenda to young people who crave an intellectual relationship to justify pessimism and contribution to their philosophically hopeless futures
I think, he simply says (it seems to me that's what he's saying) that there is a rift inside the LGBT community regarding their definitions of certain concepts. You could say that the LGB is in some conceptual war with the T over the idea of gender and sex, their possible difference, their scientifically oriented nature or whether it's a social construct rather than essential. I also think that the LGBT community is playing different games with regards to its seemingly "unified" goal. That is of course, due to the variance in opinion among humans and nothing especial in that community. The problem, however, is that if the said community persumably has a shared goal, then their strategies (specifically in the Trans section of things) seem to be often times not only rather ineffective but worse, contradictory.
I don't think he's taking into account the LGBT community or whoever else might argue for essentialism. I think the essentialist or gender constructivist narratives are supportive, but kind of ad hoc justifications for the trans phenomenon that is not completely understood. Just like in the example of falling in love, we come to the realization that we are in love and then justify it in whatever way suits us.
So, in other words, what he's saying is that the idea of choice or modeling one's life, identity, love, etc. (existentialism) is somewhat an illusion, and therefore, in essence, essentialist?
I still don't know what his answer to the question is. He always leaves me wondering what he really meant. Of course he is not a native English speaker, for which we have to allow, but his style is such as leaves me often scratching my head.
There are no right or wrong answers. There are only way of thinking them. That is what he is discussing, the way he looks at the ideas and not necessarily dismissing o agreeing with them.
@Tim Romanski yup I said there are no right or wrong answers but what I didn't say was that there are no truths and false. Incase you still didn't understand my original point, what I meant was that a conclusive answer is irrelevant. What's important is that they make a discussion where you question the question itself. There is both a yes and a no to the question and both yes and no are equally relevant but zizek as an academic poses the response as a study of the question instead of a straight up answer. So what I meant was that, you can chose not to if you want ofcourse but I would recommend that you look at it as a study of the phenomenon instead of just a conclusion and hence there are no right or wrong answers. But in case you don't want to, I guess whatever works for you.
Of course he would say yes, Correct me if I'm wrong, but Zizek here is not quite right about the essentialist aspect of identification, because those who go through sexual transition change their sexuality not to match it with a gender they are easier to perform, but to actually feel right in their bodies.
feel right in their bodies to what extent? sexuality is a game of role-playing. '"right in their bodies" with respect to sexual relationships belies, what?, feeling normal with one's fundamental self identification. This 'normal' is a myth, for even those who feel they are born in the right body with their professed gender find this gender itself to be a source of continual strife, anxiety and doubt. Hence, the abysmally high number of post-op transgender suicides.
@@ParanoidAndroid29 Really, this. Being born as a man or woman and "accepting" society's identity for you can still lead to a lot of strife. And I do think that trying to convince children and boys struggling with society's expectation that they are not the sex we tell them they are is a little... I'll say it, ridiculous.
@@ParanoidAndroid29 Sexuality is a game of role-playing? That's not true. If that was the case, people should have been able to choose to suddenly change their orientation with ease, e.g. become gay, lesbian, etc.
I'm talking about symbolic roles, not peepee in clam, clam to clam peepee in backdoor. I suggest you read a briefer in Lacan on sexuality if you're interested in this. And acquaint yourself with Freud's notion that sexuality is formed in trauma. Then there are the social roles we live up to regarding gender. These roles exist no matter one's orientation.
@@ParanoidAndroid29 I know about that, but you used the word 'sexuality' (which is partly biological) instead of gender (which is performative and symbolic). That's why I have replied to you. Like I said, with all the respect I have for Zizek, I don't find his argument plausible enough, mainly because he's confusing sexuality and gender.
You ever meet a kid that tries to give themself a nick name? Like some weird kid who one day started saying "Everybody calls me Snake." And you were like "no one calls you that Clarence." That's how I view Transgenderism. 😂
Not sure... but Ill summarize it. He's talking about the paradox of claiming that gender is a social construction. One my claim that society forces gender upon you, but at the same time, those who wish to change their gender claim they always knew what gender they were...in other words, it wasn't a social construction. Its a logical fallacy.
@@zaphirael5303 Fine... but are you saying that transgender people don't "feel" internally what gender they are? Why change then? The very logical outcome of internally knowing (feeling) what you are means that society didn't/couldn't have forced it upon you. Sorry, I was simply interpreting Zizek, ...go speak with him if that bothers you...
@@zaphirael5303 Just edited my original comment, change sex to gender. You can easily interchange them within the equation, it doesnt matter, the logical fallacy still exists with either. Cheers
@@anthonybrett they don't feel comfortable with the gender they were assigned, but that doesn't necessarily mean they know why, or what would make them feel better, or know the gender they belong to instead
The last statement is peak philosophy. Eternal things always have to appear at a certain point in history, before retroactively being percieved as eternal 'always has been'.
I think what he believes the paradox is in gender theory is transitioning is purely based on a state of unease with the performance of ones assigned gender at birth. Physical dysphoria is often mixed up with gender performance. Gender performance is a construct as Judith Butler argues and so does the majority of gender theorists as well. However, the discomfort associated with presenting and performing gender could be present together in a person, therefor, for them to feel safe performing a gender “normally” aligned with having a masculine or feminine body offers a sense of safety, mental ease and belonging to the gender in which one feels they identify. Contrary to general belief, transgender people do not think of themselves as the sex they transitioned to. They understand that sex and gender are separate subjects. They understand that they went about life experiences the gender in which they were assigned at birth. Performing it, and living in those bodies in which they were born in hence the seperation between (cis-man/woman, trans-man/woman). So there is absolutely no paradox in the narrative in which they live by. Another important thing to mention is a lot of transgender individuals experience mere physical discomfort/dysphoria without actually feeling like they identify with the gender characteristics of the opposite sex. They transition physically but don’t necessarily perform in feminine or masculine manners. So this idea is not simple and fixed. It manifests itself in different ways depending on the person.
I agree completely. As with most things Zizek says I wonder if he actually understands this but is oversimplifying to make a point, or does he actually misunderstand something so simple as the nuance involved.
You seem to generalize A LOT. There were huge debates around the topic 'transgender women are women' with the goal to NOT separate between trans and cis women. I also heard of several transgender persons that did have dysphoria that went much further than to just reassign/adjust anatomical parts. The whole issue of 'passing' is exactly about that. Contrapoints talks about this conflict in one of her videos: trying to present super feminine to be perceived as a woman while at the same time not believing in traditional gender roles.
Tadeseus Actually, in the context of “Trans women are women.” The argument is about the validity of trans women as real women (gender-wise). “Trans women are women” does not argue that Trans women are biological women, and please correct me if I am wrong but I have never heard a trans woman claim to be a biological woman. The reason why that statement is often mentioned is because Trans women are excluded from feminist spaces (radical) and are not welcome in some “women” only spaces. That statement address the validity of trans women as women but it does not indicate that trans women are claiming to be cis. The transgender community acknowledges the difference between being trans and being cis (which is purely anatomical) but see absolutely no sense in gatekeeping gender.
Trans activists actively lobby for erasure of sex category, legally and politically. They claim that sex is a social construct and gender is essential.
I wrote about this very contradiction recently in university. I’ve searched high and low for trans activists to answer this problem and no one has even come close. Everyone who ive described it to was utterly stumped.
Its a glaring contradiction and yet LGBTQ activists insists on serious policy changes from govt and even changes in social outlook. I was having a discussion with a person from the community and all while she was speaking i could sense something wrong but could not really put finger on where the contradiction lied . Later I realized she was picking and choosing the different definitions of Gender expression whenever it suited her.
@@Valkyri3Z I think a lot of this has to do with how long term investment in culture war politics has led to an intellectual decline in the left. Yes, focusing on activism and culture war wins does make the culture more sympathetic to leftists causes, but it doesn't mean they understand them or that they even deem them coherent. In polls all over America, I believe last I checked 75% of Americans support non-discrimination laws to protect LGBT people. However, the activists and advocates who would help draft this legislation are so accustomed to engaging in incoherent arguments about their ideas, that they can't actually sit down and help create legislation that is coherent enough that it could be applied legally. This is why I often laugh in the U.S. when liberal media sources say 80% of the country approves a certain policy goal of the left, and then they view it as a testament to how much influence they have over the culture. But support doesn't equal understanding or persuasion. A lot of times people see how passionate and how needy you are for something and they support you out of pity, but just because you get empathy and sympathy doesn't mean you've persuaded people or that they understand you...and the problem with the American Left is that they have increasingly become incoherent and intellectually lazy, and often times it's not till they have to explain their new ideas to laymen and laywomen that they get exposed to how poorly thought out their thinking is... See Dave Chappelle.
@@jeviosoorishas181 and you will ALWAYS find the corporates and powerful elites co-opting these movements quite happily. From tech giants to all sorts of greasy people.
Go back though your LGBTQ+ history books. At least in American queer history, there has always been a break in the community between rights activists (who usually use essentialist language) and queer liberationists who deny essentialism but still insist on political freedom of expression and engagement. From a political perspective it is at times better to employ essentialist language since people respond more sympathetically to "who I am" versus "What I do". Ideology is great, but when the fight is life and death sometime it is best to speak the language of your oppressors instead of telling them their entire system is archaic garbage.....even if it means you might have to contradict yourself.
in these zizek discussions about performativity versus essentialism in gender it always strikes me as if he is missing the point. How i interpret this ''paradox'' is that butler is right, but that modern people who use essentialist language simply don't care to put themselves in some kind of historical perspective. Because not everyone wants to be some kind of holistic intellectual. In other words, when a modern person who transitioned from a man into woman says that ''i have always felt essentially female'' - they aren't claiming with this statement that there is an eternal female soul that they are pursuing. They are simply pursuing the role of female as it appears in their generation and they have just always identified with this much more than the male role. And then they stick with that identity because in this society you also need a gender identity for the sake of it. It's not a complicated paradox at all. They just use essentialist language but they don't mean it philsophically, they just use it because they only live in this generation. I'm a cis man but and i strongly believe in my gender identity but i don't have to deny that it's socially constructed in order to continue believing it. That's the difference between this kind of belief and e.g. a belief in god. A belief in god consists of a claim about natural forces but a belief in gender consists of a claim about the available social roles that fit you most. And those roles don't change just because you want them to. And i'm sure this is why zizek calls himself man and not nonbinary even though he says he loves the socially constructed arguments. If you assume that they do mean it philosophically then you have to apply weird mental gynmnastics to have it make sense which is what zizek is doing.
Well, I think your response is pretty weak. saying "people are ignorant" is not a valid point to justify a position. They may not think about it philosophically but the implications of absorbing a concept or an alien essence as a part of themselves are the same whether they see it or not. I think zizek's perspective in this is wonderful and I don't agree with him in almost everything he says. I believe that the only true form of liberation is identifiying oneself as an ego, not switching ideas. As long as you keep chasing for essences outside yourself you will always be subjected to them.
@@brandoagusti7288 I should have said that most people are not analytical rather than use the world intellectual. But yeah i agree it's not a super valid argument to justify a position. It's just my impression from being connected to people in trans communities. Though i feel as though you're answering a different question - i was trying to answer zizek's question of how it can be the case that people are trying to dismantle socially constructed essences by claiming new and other essences. It appears as though you are rather providing a normative view on how they should be doing that better. Do you have any good psychoanalysis reading tips? I tried reading Jung's anima and animus but it felt as though i was reading some kind of 1930s jordan peterson - some kind of mystic occult text haha. So it doesn't make any sense to me.
@@timolff9239 No, I don't know much about psychoanalists, but if you are interested in this sort of topic of rejecting external essences and imposing the ego over constructs there is no better book than Stirner's "The ego and its own." However I have to warn you that if you are religious you are going to be made fun of, and if you are an atheist and think that morality is possible without religion (like I used to beleive before reading this particular book) you may be shocked at his analysis of what not being superstitious leads to.
But Zizek.....this assumes that the reaction/experience of “finally being in the body I was meant to be” is accurate at face and literal value - not that, perhaps between societal pressures on being “right” and creating this feeling in oneself to convey feeling happy, the experience is created.
www.com.au lol? I’m 1million % pro-trans. This isn’t about that. i interpreted him as saying that experience/reaction somehow contradicts social construct - and I don’t believe it does.
What did anything he say have to do with whether gender is a social construct or not? It sounded like he was just pretending that when trans people say things like "I was born in the wrong body" that they literally mean something like "my soul was mistakenly placed in the wrong body" instead of just simply "I wish I had the body of the opposite sex", just like a short guy might wish that he was born in a tall body or an ugly girl might wish that she was born in a beautiful body etc.
I think his point is that if gender is a social construct, then people shouldn't feel compelled to essentialise their gender in the concrete form of biological sex. If gender is socially constructed, then why do people want to get into the 'right' body, when transgender ideology rightly points out that there is no 'right' body for any given gender identity to exist within. To change your biological sex to female because you feel like a woman is to tacitly accept the cultural paradigm that women ought to be female. I'm not agreeing with him, by the way, I'm just saying that seems to be his point. You have to admit, on the surface it is a bit of a paradox.
Not really a short guy may wish to have been born into a taller body but does not claim that should have been his destiny and that he cannot live a fulfilled life unless he is physically transformed into a taller person though like most people who feel deficient in some respect he may at times try to disguise the fact. It is quite different in scale to claim an essential need and a right to a transformation and that everybody should accept that is the the real him and treat him accordingly.
@@monkeymox2544 what is "transgender ideology"? I don't understand his logic there, why would people undergoing medical treatments to better pass as the gender they identify with mean that gender therefore isn't a social construct? For example people spend all kinds of money and effort to physically meet certain socially constructed beauty standards as well but that obviously doesn't mean that those beauty standards aren't socially constructed. I don't see why you couldn't simultaneously say that there is no "right" body that a man is supposed to have and also have strong preferences for what kind of a body you want to have. I don't think that a medically transitioned MtF trans person necessarily has to think that "women ought to be female", they might simply just be transitioning because that's the body they want to have and they know that if they want to be a woman in society then passing as much as possible is going to just practically speaking make everything way easier for them. I just don't think any of this has anything to do with whether gender is a social construct, which it is by definition. Yeah I think you explained what he probably meant much better than I originally understood.
@@elkabongg2716 sure, trans people often feel way stronger about wanting to have a different body than a short guy who just wants to be taller, so maybe a better comparison would be someone who was born with a bad deformity who really wants to get it surgically fixed or someone with a condition like muscle dysmoprhia. I just don't think that trans people actually mean it in an essentialist sense when they say things like that, people say hyperbolic things that could be twisted into an essentialist sentiment all the time. The reason why people with gender dysphoria should have "the right to a transformation" is that it's the best known way to combat severe gender dysphoria, and "claiming a right to everyone accepting the real them" sounds like a pretty strongly worded way of referring to trans people just asking to for example not be misgendered.
I take this to mean [thing] was not true until a point, but when that point came - [thing] is and has always been true. That's crazy I love it. To repeat that with more words: I take it to mean he is considering that it was not true this person was born in the wrong body when they were born - But, now that they are who they are and know what they know - yes it is true and has always been true that they we're born in to the wrong body. And to be terribly geeky it's like the chaos gods in warhammer 40k lol.
I dont understand why Zizek doesn't accept self-positioning or retroactive essentialism as simple essentialism. It seems so illogical to not to call it what it is, why all the gymnastics, why the dancing around it?
He’s saying that there is a paradox in the current transgender ideology. They say that our genders are socially constructed so we shouldn’t be so narrow minded when somebody wishes to transition. But the paradox is that in their attempt to move freely in the realm of gender they at the same time attach themselves to a specific gender or identity.
@@nuckinfuts7502 I mean, is it really a paradox? Acknowledging gender as a social construct but at the same time recognizing how we are living in that culture, that it is a part of us and and searching our favorite place in it can go by hands. You could still argue for gender abolitionism with this logic, saying that it isn't a thing to be done one time, but progressively not perpetuating gender roles while raising next generations.
Sebastian Csori right but all he’s doing is pointing out a paradox in the mode of thinking. He’s not advocating any action going forward. So yes there’s paradoxes in the thinking.
If we are going to turn what use to be scientific classifications into social constructs based on what we feel like at that moment - then you may as well do the same for every classification in science, and if you do that - then nothing is knowable and soon we find ourselves back in a dark age where language is impossible. If my gender determines that I feel like the number 1 is the number 0 today and that I feel like a brain is actually a heart - would you want me doing surgery on you? Or making computer codes for military weapons? Well why not are you a bigot?
There may not be essences but we have to live as if there are, otherwise we would go insane. The ground beneath us is deceptively solid. We must walk on it as if it is, otherwise we would not walk. The trick is to know there are no essences as we live as if there were. Religious people do this all the time.
there actually is an essence. Religious people are only trying to do it but there is actually there if you give it a good shot, it can be found. The essence.
Like we learn in Vipassana... we engage at the level of the apparently solid and unchanging reality, whilst knowing that everything is in constant flux
Yes. And this is a good thing. We should not be forcing people into rigid boxes and trying to categorize everyone into rigid structures. It's okay to be uncomfortable with new concepts and work towards a better understanding of them. We should be using the blurred lines as an opportunity to learn and grow. Let's not shut ourselves off from the world for a fear of losing the past.
Thank you, as someone who’s suffered from anorexia for over a decade, I often cannot convince myself that transgender identity is not just an extension of body dysmorphia because in the end, can’t we not argue that “skinny” and “fat” are culturally relative social constructs too? Of course I believe trans people deserve equal rights such as employment and protection from any form of discrimination but as someone who’s suffered from an illness which makes me feel alienated from my body, I have difficulty not empathizing with transgenders as a group who are also alienated from their body too. And it’s critical to note that anorexia, at least my experience of it , had little to do with aesthetics. It’s not that I found being “skinny” more attractive than being fat because if that was the case, I would’ve felt accomplished when I was under 90 pounds on a feeding tube. Anorexia involves attaching an identity to being skinny- very different than just thinking “ I look pretty this way” and as transgenders have it, they too attach an identity to their mind/body split too don’t they ? Thanks for bringing this up because it’s an analogy which directly suggests that transgenderism is an illness and more importantly, despite trans people continuous attacking the idea, what they don’t seem to realize is how insulting it is to make it seem like having a mental condition is inherently wrong or renders one totally devoid of agency .
@@Maziedivision I'm very sorry that was something you've had to overcome, I understand it's extremely difficult to battle. Your opinion was so well articulated, I couldn't agree more & you've really given us a new perspective on this experience. Thanks
@@Maziedivisionoh, and transition actually makes trans people happier, while no matter how thin you are, anorexia still makes you suffer, sometimes even, sadly, leading to death.
Understanding the difference between sex and gender is fundamental to understanding what constitutes our identities. When one does not understand that, it's impossible to have a meaningful conversation about our sexual selves.
@@joyusachoobarb Clearly. I didn't say he didn't.I was referring to those watching the video who don't know the difference, seeing as Slavoj mentioned it but didn't elaborate.
@@johnnonamegibbon3580 If you don't believe there is strictly one type of essential behaviour/being for men and another for women, then surely you can agree gender exists as a somewhat fluid expression of masculinity/femininity? For that reason it is helpful in understanding that our expectations of how a person should or shouldn't be(have) is up for discussion. What do you think?
We need the Constructivists here. We as humans can freely answer only those questions, that technically cannot be answered, like "how did the whole universe come?" There ain't nothing but hypotheses, and we are free to choose any, and this will tell about us, but nothing about the universe.
Yes there is cognitive dissonance between binary transgender people and gender abolitionist ideology. Transgender people choose binary identities for the same reason cis people choose binary identities. Binary trans people can't be expected to fight the battle of gender abolitionism and it's silly to try to understand gender through the prism of binary trans people. If binary trans people didn't identify as binary (such as the way they identify as third genders in places like India or Thailand) they'd still have plastic surgery, they'd still go on hormones, they'd look the same. The only difference would be semantic.
Not necessarily. An "essentialized" conception of gender is a (maybe the) primary catalyst for the using of technology to control and conform such conceptions in an "embodied" reality. It is a "making in our own image", as it were. The alternatives are infinite: manifesting gender fluidity in linguistic, social, artistic, theological etc. modes are examples of how gender fluidity have been historically incarnate. The transforming of the human body doesn't then constitute an "end" or even a "progression" in our understanding and lived experience of gender. It seems rather a product of, at least, the combination of a particular kind of bio-technology (that may even seem backwards in a future epoch) and the "essentializing" of gender dynamics that Zizek alluded to here.
I think Kaila nailed it. Everyone should watch Non-Compete's video on gender essentialism; Zizek would probably understand the topic better if he watched it.
Slavoj Zizek, town philosopher, talking about human biology, and the shit that even biologists can't answer at that. So reliable, you have to be deeply gullible to listen to these and be like, "no yeah, I believe him"
It’s absolutely ok to believe things on limited or no evidence, as long as that belief is in proportion to the reasons available. Weak reason, weak belief. Most importantly, a scientific mind should always be willing to reconsider a point of belief when faced with new information.
He always thinks that there is that "ONE LGBT MOVEMENT / IDEOLOGY" where everyone believes in instead of lots of different groups of different people into completey different situations with different claims, needs and self / society definitions.
@@andreacurti5927 not like that it makes n0 sense for me cuz it distorts the complexicity and that its not just one fight, strategy, claim. ppl have lots of different interests, many are anarchists, others bourgeois and so on
@@ullathurmann1184 Yes, but they don't have mainstream relevance. You could say that about any political ideology or any intellectual school of thought. He is also not addressing people who have technical expertise on the various aspects of LGBT political movements of the left...
If you are willing to deform your body to complete an idea others impose on you, how does that make you free? So you can either say gender is natural or a construct. But you cannot be liberated by performing along the norm. If you are willing to deform your body to suit the norms imposed, you might as well abide the norm that it's not accepted. So, what is really happening? Self-rejection. So, I'm not in favor of facilitation of surgery, but facilitating self-love. If someone is beyond that, they might have to go down the road to find out, that you cannot change who you are. But there might even be people who can successfully deceive them selves and ignore that reality.
I think that you’re generalizing a very false presumption of what you think transgender people do when they hope to pass as the opposite sex. A very small population alters their bodies through surgery. A lot of transgender individuals refuse to surgically alter their bodies. Hormones which is the most common tool used to medically transition is in no way a deformation. Neither is let’s say, removing breast tissue for female bodies individuals & adding breast tissue in male bodied individuals. In fact, the vast majority of individuals seeking to get breast implants and removing their breats for whatever reason are binary, cis gender, straight females. So this argument is absolute garbage
Isn’t sex biological and gender social like two sides of a single coin, gender being entirely socially constructed by definition. This is why this is an uninteresting topic to me, gender by definition is 100% social. Even if you’re describing the male/female continuum in its entirety, doesn’t it clearly have components of both biological/essentialist and gender/existentialism. There’s still the question of what the proportions might be, but would that not be a question best suited for science.
It is actually a really dumb argument to have outside of academia, I mean it's an interesting thing to study but as far as most people are concerned, irrational gut feelings and political predispositions are the only things that keep some people from just saying "Huh. Okay. I mean I don't really get it but whatever." just like they would to any other difficult concept in advanced biology/psychology. I think its just that it's such an obvious, jarring, and transgressive thing and when you encounter a trans person, especially a trans womam, for the first time you basically HAVE to either try and integrate it into your worldview or reject it outright, which is why it tends be such a polarizing issue. People who believe a woman's role is in the home and a man will suffer for all eternity for having sex with another man aren't quite so likely to look at a trans woman and say "yep that's a woman", although you might be surprised how many still do.
@@jali4000 Exactly. It is a shame that this topic is too politicized. People in the academia are discussing such counter-intuitive things that the whole trans issue would seem mild in comparision, but laypeople are stuck with this.
@@MrPtrlix It's almost a cliche at this point, but it's really easy for academics to lose sight of what normal people know and care about. It sucks, because people who are just as smart and curious as anyone else but just not initiated into the tribe want to understand something like gender identity and we start by trying to go over Kantian metaphysics and deconstruction and make sure they're ready to take the GRE before we even start gender. It's this kind of implicit elitism where people rightfully get turned off by this nonsense and think "it's all Greek to me" but we'll insist that it's all necessary for a proper understanding rather than admit the fact that a lot of us just completely suck at actually explaining things clearly. I think we really need to start taking a more pragmatic approach to trans issues. We focus far too much on the etiology of gender identity and far too little on the actual practical implications for society and what we need to do to keep trans people happy, healthy, and alive. Sometimes at the end of the day with some people the best you can say to them is "trans people exist, they have always existed, they will always exist, there is a biological basis and they are valid, figure out a way to cope with this and just move the fuck on already".
@@hre2044 Do you think public discourse and national policy should take these racial discrepancies into account? (science agrees that genetic differences between the races - as they are most commonly categorised- are very superficial). Also, nobody even mentioned race.
@@reubennb2859 Yeah, society should investigate race and IQ and talk about racial differences leading to disproportionate amounts of blacks in basketball and other sports. Race is not the largest taxon, I mean if we compared a homo sapien to a homo neandethalis there would be far greater difference, however the difference between a Caucasoid and a Congoloid is there. We don't live in the world Orcish race, Elven, human, goblin etc like Skyrim but we do have races.
@@hre2044 Racial IQ differences are environmental, according to all the science on the subject. You're actively refuting scientific consensus because...'black people look kinda different, so they must have different brains too. Must be skull shape or something...' You're unironically parroting nazi talking points.
Zizek is absolutelly right, though in a different layer of analysis. One should approach it not in terms of epistemological analysis, but in terms of discourse and power, an upper layer closer to political analysis. LGBTQIA+ people often try to belong by means of adhering to themselves the same essencialist discourses of heterossexual romantic fables. LGBTQIA+ are not aiming on redemption from masculinistic ideologies, but instead, trying to occupy the spaces previously reserved for heterossexuals.
I still can not see how proponents of gender fluidity solve their contradiction in their perception of gender being performative and also something innate.
gender is a description of some characteristic of a person that they are likely unable to change, hence it is "innate" in that sense but the performative aspect comes from the way that society systematically integrates gender, forcing individuals to act a certain way to be percieved as the gender they feel they are (with this sense of identity being the most accurate description of their gender)
@@hecknose5506 Gender cant be only performative or only innate at the same time. A person feels forced to behave certain way precisely because gender is innate. Hence someone cant just feel male in the morning or female in the evening depending on how the person performs the same social gender norms he or she ridicules. Its either or. Someone can not claim that cis males or cis females are so because of social conditioning because anyone who is cis is because he or she innately feels so. One cant be forced all his or her life like that. Its just hyperbole. Its also beazenly questioning the identity of another person and even appropriating it. The biggest failure of social conditioning theory is the existence of Trans people itself.. the fact no matter hard everyone tried they did not fall in 'line'.. they expressed their identity as they are.
@@Valkyri3Zah wait don't get me wrong I'm not trying to claim that gender itself is a result of social conditioning I am trying to claim that gender itself is an innate characteristic of a person while the way that gender is expressed is the performative aspect, as it has qualitatively changed across different time periods and cultures
@@hecknose5506 Here is the issue i have with this theory. There is no clearly defined spectrum of what behaviour can be called 'performative' and what is 'innate'. Gender theorists have never said that. They pick random traits and fits them into their idea. Now problem is, if our biology did not allow us we would not perform the way we do. The performative aspect also determined by thousands of years of evolution. It cant separated from our body. This is why if a cis person at birth given opposite sex (due to sex deformity) STILL refuse to perform the gender expression decided by the society. ALSO trans people decide their identity WITHIN the framework of same gender expression or performance. They have not invented a completely new performance. They are debating who is male or who is female based on those same traits of cis people.
@@Valkyri3Z I would argue the reverse; gender is an arbitrary categorization of certain deterministic traits. what you have identified in the situation of a cis person with a sex deformity is actually the perfect demonstration of this. the deterministic traits were incorrectly determined by society hence there is a massive cognitive dissonance this is exactly WHY it is performative, because that person with the sex deformity was not the opposite gender despite definitions of gender (and how it should be performed) at the time saying otherwise
Love the first half of this talk. The issue, in plain terms, is that most people who identify as trans have not read Judith Butler, therefore their language contradicts the very discourse which justifies their identity and behavior.
@@fierce-green-fire8887 very true. But worth reading to understand where it all comes from. Because again, most trans people have not read the foundational literature on gender ideology. If you do, it’s not hard to understand, and it positions you so that you can counter bad/contradictory ideas from that community.
Slavoj ignores the fact that the phenomena he is talking about exist on a spectrum. Just as some people are trans and some are cis, some people experience gender as a pure expression of their biology whereas some experience it as a matter of self actualisation. Both cis and trans people can fall into either group. Some experience gender as something that continually evolves and some experience it as a fixed aspect of themselves, again, these can fall into any combination of the two categories i described previously. Some people self actualise their gender by performing gender norms, some by rejecting them, again people from any combination of the above 3 groups can have either relationship with gender. Queer ideology is not a prescription for how we should think about gender, as much as its a recognition that there are no limits. We aren't machines, and the easiest way to summarise slavoj's point here is the idea that "it was meant to be" isn't to be taken literally. The kind of philosophy 5 year olds grapple with. The existence of either agency or lack of agency (for example, premeditation vs determinism) in the universe are completely compatible, and purely expressions of perspective.
@Texan White Panther Sorry, you don't even know what you are talking about. Just by thinking this you are included as a communist. As most, of the Gramscian style. As Gramsci said, "everyone will be a communist and not even know it". "Telling the truth to whites take balls"? That must be why everyone says that to whites all the time and nothing happens to them, while if whites try to do so they will be canceled and likely arrested. Go on following the orders of corporate mainstream media, bankers and politicians, while imagining yourself a "rebel".
@Texan White Panther All of that can easily be explained by the hallucinations you suffer thanks to your condition of Gramscian communist. Whites suffer more racism than all the other "races" combined. And the number of nazis in your country doesn't reach 2,000. While there are around 70 million Gramscian or Fabian communists, and 10 million Bolshevik communists. And communists manage the impressive feat of being _even worse_ than nazis or fascists (100 to 200 million humans executed compared to about 18 million). I guess you even believe your president called white supremacists "fine people" (Fine People Hoax), that he said to people drink bleach (Disinfectant Hoax) and other hallucinations printed in the minds of hysterical people by the mainstream media.
Acknowledging the influence of biological sex on behavior is crucial. However, it's essential to recognize that societal constructs often mold non-existent categories out of these biological facts-like attributing certain behaviors to XX or XY chromosomes. This oversimplification overlooks the vibrant spectrum of nature and the myriad ways individuals exist and identify. Unlike animals, humans grapple with identity and consciousness, and gender encompasses this aspect of self-recognition. For transgender individuals, the sense of belonging to a different gender often coexists with dissatisfaction regarding their physical form. This discontent doesn't always necessitate physical alterations; it can simply involve rejecting societal perceptions. Gender deconstruction, therefore, becomes essential. It allows us to embrace the reality that being a woman or a man can encompass various identities beyond traditional norms-it's not a novel concept but a reflection of reality. While sex bears natural outcomes that society terms as "gender," rigid categorization becomes problematic. The equation of XX sex with the woman gender identity is not universally accurate-it might hold true for the majority, but exceptions exist. Gender's origins might stem from biological factors, yet it has been simplified, constrained, and confined by categorization. Sex is an undeniable reality-a natural phenomenon. In contrast, gender is a cultural construct-a byproduct of sex. Throughout history, gender has served to pigeonhole individuals into predefined roles, setting the stage for societal issues. Transgender individuals grapple with the misalignment between their assigned sex and gender. Some seek physical alterations, while others do not. The root problem lies in society's fixation on delineating only two genders with specific attributes. This societal narrative forces those with diverse identities to carve out a space for themselves by introducing new identities. Perhaps, if society focused on sex solely for health reasons, we'd witness a shift away from rigid categorization. Instead, we'd cultivate an environment of acceptance, where individuals are embraced without the need to adhere to predefined gender norms, or where their unique gender identities are celebrated.
He just has discovered there are conservative transexual (despite he can't differenciate between transexuality and transgender), and he's got microphone and a public... qué pesado es..
No it's not, that's why completely separated groups of humans or tribes across the world developed similar roles to one another, because its genetic not a construct. There may be socially constructed ideas on top of it but at the core its completely natural and unavoidable
That doesn't really counter the argument at all. Gender can still be seen as a socially developed construct, even when it developed the same way in most cultures. That doesn't make it "natural" but a natural result of history.
@@TheMagicDragonHD I'm making the point that regardless of what culture you come from men and women have biological traits that are expressed differently depending on the environment. Why is that such a bad thing?
@@shogunhashishin I get what you're saying. And I would agree that the way the historical and social roles of men and women have developed is, at its core, down to biology. But in the sense that basic biology (strength / motherhood) has determined these roles, not that the "ideal" role of the strong man and the caring woman is something biological itself. However, if your thesis would be right, I wouldn't regard it as a bad thing.
@@shogunhashishin > There may be socially constructed ideas on top of it but at the core its completely natural and unavoidable People typically say 'sex' is the genetic part (XX / XY chromosomes), and 'gender' is the socially constructed idea on top of sex (men look & act a certain way, women look & act a certain way) When you continually ask 'is that person a male, if so why', it's very difficult to come up with rules which apply universally and match a certain look to a certain set of chromosomes, hence the idea that gender is (at least primarily) a social construct For example: Is that person a male? Well yes, he has short hair (but women may have short hair also) Is that person a male? Well yes, he doesn't have breasts (but women may also have no / tiny breasts) Is that person a male? Well yes, he wears men's clothing (but women may also wear men's clothing) Is that person a male? Well yes, he has a penis (but EVEN THIS has examples where someone with XX chromosomes posesses a penis, see XX male syndrome) Yes, there are *general* differences between the genders - e.g. women *usually* have breasts, long hair, women's clothing, are physically weaker, have more mothering tendencies, etc. Therefore, in the past we've developed (constructed) the categories of man / woman to distinguish between them. In the modern day though, these categories don't really serve a practical purpose, and instead end up excluding the edge cases. This generally causes harm to those who feel unjustly excluded (e.g. gender dysphoria). Since gender is a social construct, and the purpose of a social construct is to serve humans, why not just... widen the definition such that anyone who feels like a woman can identify as a woman, & can go about their life doing whatever they want rather than constantly feeling like they have / do certain things which don't fit their category?
@@tomcheng3903 your answer is exactly the problem Tom, looks. We are more than looks and male and female are not just visual stimuli. How many born blind people have gender identity issues? The fact is completely unconnected tribal groups across the planet ended up dividing labour between eachother based off of the genetic strengths and weaknesses of the genders and they ended up with very very similar roles for eachother. They didnt get together and work out how to oppress people in the 21st century with self identity issues.
It's pretty interesting to see people being so confused about the concept of gender and often it is being confused with biological sex. When it comes to gender neurology, psychological identity, upbringing/nurture and the social understanding of it within a society all play a part. It's a way to big and complicated topic to be discussed in a short video, since it is a fundamental part of every human being. In short tho we can generally say that trans people are who say they are, and it can be proven neurologically. And when it comes to the topic of "is gender a social construct" answer is partially yes partially no, but that wouldn't cause such a huge debate so people seem to ignore it. as a whole tho very intriguing comment by Zizek his perspectives are thought provoking.
I totally understand why people are so confused about it, and why they mix gender and sex. We use the same words to talk about gender and sex, it's male female. Why not use different words when referring to gender and sex? Because trans people believe that what they think they are is reality, and if they identify as girls, that means they're girls. If we started use different words, it would be considered "transphobic" because gender identity would be named differently (and perceived as inferior) than sexual identity. This is nonsense.
@@tdb517 ughm no? We use words to describe the gender expression of a person, a person can be feminine or masculine for example. Neigther of the description necessarily states that we are talking about a biological male or a biological women tho.
@@katfed8861 The possible answers to "what is your sex" and "what is your gender" are the same, male or female (or even more for genders). Masculine or feminine is a characteristic of gender expression, it is not a gender.
@@tdb517 when somebody asks what is your sex they are asking about biolgical sex, when we talk about gender we talk about the social part generally. If a trans person feels like they are male even tho their biolgical sex is female they are still a man. Same goes for Transwomen. When you see a male in the streets you recognize them generally because of the way they act out their gender identity, the way they Express this is what we call a man, you do not check for each persons gentalia to see if they are acting according to their biological sex
@@katfed8861 All I'm saying is that there's a great confusion between gender and sex, partly because of the vocabulary. We should use different words for the masculine gender and the masculine sex, it would clarify a lot of things and help us move forward in understanding how complex gender and sex are. Right now my feeling is that, instead of fighting it, the confusion is maintained by trans activists for some reasons. For example, there are reasons why the is sex written on ID cards, because if you have an accident, doctors will not give you the same medicine if you're male or female. The gender you identify to is completely irrelevant. Yet trans activists want that gender is put on ID cards instead of sex. This has a completely different meaning and purpose.
The answer is yes, but actually no. There are lots of things in culture that are socially constructed, like how in western culture it's blue for boys and pink for girls. But the social constructions are built on biological differences. Put aside the obvious differentiation in society due to the fact the males and females have different roles when it comes to procreation, there is the other obvious problem that humans are sexually dimorphous, which means the larger and more powerful males won't be the same as the females. And on top of that we have verified differences in instinctual behavior and attitudes between the two sexes. And since sex and gender correlate pretty much 99 percent of the time, people who claim that gender is a social construct are the same level of intellect and willful ignorance as people who think the earth is five thousand years old, or that evolution is is lie. The question is, why are supposedly educated and intelligent people showing themselves to exactly the same as other people considered pig ignorant? And the answer is identical, belief. people who think the planet is five thousand years old or that evolution did not happen need to believe this stupid thing because if they don't then their belief that the Bible is the word of god cannot be true. Likewise people who think all differences must be due to systemic power structures cannot believe that there are innate differences between gender because then their beliefs can't be true. But in both cases the believers are wrong and are determined to ignore reality, leaving the rest of us to put up with their moronic and ignorant bullshit.
If we return to what Karl Mannheim once called the modern epistemology, where there is an object, which is not identical to the subjects opinion, it’s obvious that sex is defined in every cell in a persons body. A man has XY chromosomes, and a woman XX, which defines their bodies. Hegel preferred to speak about a dialectic between objective and subject, which means the subject defines the object but that the object also change the subjects definition. Which means that ”gender roles” can change in different cultures, but also that objective physical facts actually makes how people define themselves. In all cultures in the world men are seen as strong and powerful, and women are seen as less strong, smaller and therefore protected by men. These gender roles are of course social constructs but are depending on the fact that most women actually are smaller and less strong than men. That’s a part of the dialectic between objective and subjective traits.
Those who use the “x is a social construct” method of deconstructing an established or traditionally held belief, set themselves for a hard gotcha... Because invalidating something based on its socially constructed origins, would imply that only that which occurs in nature is valid. Man, being a sophisticated creature naturally creates and invents. The culmination of those things that man’s brain naturally created can be summed up as culture. Culture thus occurs naturally, and the global majority of two gender archetypes would therefore be a natural thing for man to express as part of his programming. This phenomenon of the global majority (I can’t stress majority-not-all enough here) of the human population having a two gender norm despite so many cultures having no contact would be an astonishing coincidence. An astonishing coincidence where the most far removed cultures of the world still managed to come to a generally (not exact) same conclusion on the question of the genders.
You are right that it's not a coincidence, but the meaning of this coincidence doesn't have to do with a natural/primordial/fundamental/irreducible state of things. Rather, it has to do with the necessary and functional self-divisions that groups of humans make as they encounter problems that threaten their survival and well-being. Sociologists speak of this in terms of "divisions of labor" in society. Our strength as a species lies in our ability to work together, but to do so we need to get organized. The visual/phenotypical differences between "male" and "female" bodies offer one of the most readily available cues for such divisions (we are very visual animals afterall). Therefore, the argument that the "two gender norm" is an "astonishing coincidence where the most far removed cultures of the world still managed to come to a generally (not exact) same conclusion on the question of the genders," as you put, is in a way based of the same cognitive premise behind the conspiracy theories that say that all the different pyramids from different cultures around the world were built by aliens because it cannot be a coincidence that they are so similar. Well, the real, simpler, more scientifically coherent meaning of this "coincidence" is that piling rocks atop each other in a pyramidal shape is easier than in any other shape. Similarly, if different groups divided themselves by gender, then this division is not natural in some anachronistic sense but functional in a situational sense. To further support this, take the fact that in one of the sides of the traditional two-gender division there is the types of bodies capable of effectively reproducing our species/birthing children. This is the ultimate form of labor (hence the phrase "going in labor") and our ancestors definitely perceived its importance. The prominence of physical strength in another, but not entirely different, set of bodies, reduced the question of group organization to whom could enforce their perceptions upon whom. Note, then, as many historical and anthropological studies have shown, that the male reliance on violence wasn't significant enough in some cultures, which simply allowed for other types of divisions, based on other references, to arise. What contemporary gender theory tries to propose is that today we can move on from more primitive forms of organization to new ones since the game of survival for us today looks a lot different than thousands of years ago. Our future is no longer determined just by whether we'll all be able to eat and reproduce (for many, and hopefully soon for all, this isn't even a concern) but by whether we'll life a fulfilling life. The social pressures to adequate to ancient forms of organization can be destructive to many people's mental health and thus should be normatively respected.
Also, recognizing that something is a social/historical construct doesn't necesarly means it is "invalid". This statement would only indicate the way in wich it came into being and the way in wich it could go out of it, the cultural nature of it, and this is necesary overall beacuse it easy for humans to believe that the things we are used to do are eternal, which tends to selfperpetuate our problems and condemn us to our own stupidity.
![[Full Episode] Hell's Kitchen Thailand EP.12 | 28 เม.ย. 67](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/xCjbu5t25Pw/mqdefault.jpg)
If you want to get Zizek's 'I WOULD PREFER NOT TO' t-shirt you can do so here:
i-would-prefer-not-to.com
"If you want to know more read my last book, whatever" *waves hands in a dismissive fashion*
Zizek PR masterclass.
and so on and so on
This guy is a gem xD
I believe this quest for identity is a subversion of true acceptance of the nature of being. Which is to say although we must categorise to some degree our daily lives in an effort for survival, aproximate groupings are a fiction as zizek so eloquently put. The more radical and truthful motion is to abondon identity and to accept that you are a being and a law unto yourself. The practice of identity formation serves not only to create further division in society but also within the mind of an individual. How this works is that, say you choose an identity but suddenly you have an impulse whuch defies this identity, now you are at war with yourself. I believe that true liberation of the mind is that age old lesson of i am. The short koan about the man who wants to study at the temple and the master asks who are you to study here and so on. It is rather like saying dont try to square the circle you will be forever counting. Although we can estimate the area of a circle the nature of the infinitive pi means that it is not measurable. Human beings are like this we try to measure our existence but ultimately this is impossible.
So "buy my book so I get richer".
dar val I like it but you can’t convince the left of this because they like to play identity politics more than anyone else.
I hope people understand that what Slavoj Zizek is talking about here is nothing like what most people discussing transgenderism hear. He is already operating under the principle that transgender people are humans who have the absolute rights to their own identities, bodies, and thoughts. There is no debate here about whether transgenderism is real, whether trans people deserve respect, pseudoscience about their brains, or what activities they should be prohibited from engaging in. This is purely good faith philosophy that doesn't stoop to a low level.
Ok as individual you have rights but how LGTBQ people think can decide about a reoriented the development of another individual and use a woman as an object? This is paradox. Do you have the recently studies about this in all world? I'm from Peru, and I'm starting to think that sciences studies have a strong geopolitical bias.
@@Angelo-sc9ofI would question all research coming from the humanities and social science.
Agreeing with your point mostly, but keep in mind that by saying "transgenderism" you are reusing right wing rhetoric. There is no transgenderism since it is and never has been an ideology. Trans people are just fighting for the right to exist. That may be inherently political and also connected to left wing ideologies, but is not inself an ideology. It implicitly says that a transperson can just decide to "not be for transgenderism" and is then suddenly cis. Thats just not how it works.
These people are not fighting for the right to exist.
They exist no matter how society chooses to describe them.
They want recognition.
The fight is whether or not what they want to be recognised as, is actually real/true, and a resistance to being told by one group how to address them or to believe/agree with that group’s experience and definition or previously “understood” terms.
@@elduderino3120 The implicit here is 'a right to exist (as what they believe their authentic true sense is)'
And hence if wider society deems their internal identity of gender as the one by which they shall be socially classified in as well.
So for example, being able to apply for a job in their internal identity of gender, or get a driving license in it, etc.
The problem though is, that till now wider human society (at least western one) has classified gender socially based on biological sex classification.
If this is 'radically' changed to being based on an internal gender identity classification, a lot of things that were based on biological sex would become incompatible with the new system of classification.
eg. Maternity leave, or countries where tampons/sanitary napkins are given for free/subsidised for current classification of women, military drafts, sports etc.
This is the obvious good faith political blocker. There also nevertheless exists a pretty bad faith (sometimes religious) reactionary blocker as well which often doesn't want to tolerate any kind of discussion or reiteration in social classification of gender.
I wish they would use subtitles.
Zizek of course is not a Finn, but for Finnish perspective this is very easy accent: words are pronounced as they are written. It is the main principle of Rally English.
@@mikahamari5994 I think that for most native english speakers it's not really a big deal at all and in fact the accent is pretty understandable. But it can be quite a pain to listeners whose first language is not English, because the thing is that most of us don't really understand speech sort of like in a 100% phonetically way. It depends heavily on context to fill in the gaps of the words we don't really catch at first.
And when you have a non usual accent at play, this task is even harder to do. Because not only you are still very context dependent, but you also need to put much more effort into actually trying to understand every bit of phoneme to understand most of the words that wouldn't really be a big deal to understand in the first place if they were spoken by a native speaker.
@@mistersystem9385 Finnish almost 100 % phonemic writing system makes children pronounce foreign names as they are written. Then they learn, that WTF, many writing systems are more or less arbitrary. Then some of them learn that it is because of historical sound changes which are not reflected in writing.
So, Finnish way to pronounce Italian name Giuseppe is like this (I am not sure about wovel qualities in English, but I will try to find an example):
/giuseppe/
/g/ as g in "go"
/i/ as i in "kill"
/u/ as u in "shoot" (but short)
/s/ as s in "sex"
/e/ as e in "bet"
/p/ as second p in "paper"
/p/ as second p in "paper"
/e/ as e in "bet"
English examples are wrong, if wovels in them are reduced, but you get the basic principle: one particular grapheme, one particular phoneme. (But instead of /g/ we have a tendency to pronounce /k/, because /g/ has not traditionally been included in Finnish phoneme inventory.)
@@mistersystem9385 My first language is spanish and I can understand everything he says, I guess it can be annoying for some.
@@fgc_kaiser172 Yeah, same goes for me. But I'm thinking about other people not entirely myself.
žižek:says something serious,
the audience: haha isn’t he funny
"who you fall in love into" is such a great phrase
But who you fall in love with can still harm you. Like, for instance, what if you fall in love with a sociopath?
@@roseparade_ I guess he meant something like that pathologic relationship suck
“Retroactively they become eternal”
Love it
It’s true that a lot of LGBTQI activism sometimes falls on essentialist rhetoric, but there is also a good amount of queer theorists that don’t agree in the “born this way” argument, for example Paul Preciado , TH-camr Contrapoints also talks about it. I believe that essencialist rhetoric worked better because is more digestible/sellable and sexuality is not something as visual as race or gender.
Precisely this. You can't bring and existentialist argument to an essentialist gun fight....especially for a matter as prescient as LGBTQIA+ rights.
There is a long historical correlation between queer theorists and child sex, queer theory honestly should be thrown out as entirely garbage junk science all together to be frank. Never have I seen an academic theory so thoroughly infested by child molestors and child rapists.
based and true. there now that i said it your comment is officially correct
and then there's this neuroscientist who has evidence for a kind of neurological/psychological/internal sense of how the body is ought to be th-cam.com/video/8QScpDGqwsQ/w-d-xo.html
Social construct is a social construct (recursive property of social construct).
I suddenly got it in my head that Zizek's voice is very similar to Triumph the Insult Dog... and this kinda makes me love him more.
I want to hear him end one of his talks with ... "For me to Poop on!"
Wow. Now I hear it too.
@@RealProfessionalHumanBeing
and now you can't unhear it.
You're welcome
I believe he has the exact same voice of Silverste the cat
Why is this recommended to me, what have i done?
Ki co shut up gay boy
@@Nobddy wtf
Sniff?
be careful you might get breadpilled
Deleuze and Guitars if I was hungry I’d eat a bread pill
I had to watch the video twice before, I think, understanding Zizek's perspective. He is, indeed, saying that gender identity is socially constructed and contingent, but believes it in retrospect to feel essential and inevitable, i.e. once a person has developed a gender identity it is experienced to be essential and inevitable. His analogy is useful: who you fall in love with is a matter of historical contingencies, but once you have fallen in love the particular person you happened to fall in love with is essential as the object of your love experience.
If this view is to be meaningful, it seems to imply an individual's gender identity to be largely a consequence of his/her actual history and experiences (including, of course, of the social environment). This seems to ignore the fact of biological sex being a strong predictor of gender identity. At the very least Zizek has a lot more explaining to do in order to make this view plausible...
Poor zizek... he has been put into the position of trying to reconcile a basic reality that is in front of every one of us while trying to not be canceled by the mob...
Of course the behavioral differences between men and women are bi-modal...
Here is one of many papers: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2879914/
Just look at the behavioral influences of oxytocin and the disproportionate oxytocin production between the genders. Just one of many many hormones which men and women produce in different quantities. If men and women produce different quantities of behavioral influencing hormones, they will naturally behave differently.
That is not something that has been socialized into us, and it's not something that can be socialized out of us.
So, be it. Men and women are different. Big shocker!
Also, of course there are socialization aspects as well. Behaviour is obviously some combination of nature and nurture. It's frankly jaw dropping that people can even begin to fathom personality is 100% socially constructed. Or that the gender roles in society have no biological bearing at all.
Strife40k You’re right about the behavioral differences between men and women, however these differences just as you mention are actually almost purely dictated by social conditioning & hormone production. Once a subject let’s say is nurtured in an environment in which they are free to express themselves as the gender in which they choose to identify and perform, that alters them greatly. It is a huge challenge for that person to be treated in society as a gender of their choosing, separate from their biological sex which is why the research is never conclusive. Hormones, especially if taken in a very young age (before or around puberty) make all the difference in gender related behavior regardless of the amounts produced.
To say that differences in behavior and hormone production dictates gender is to be absolutely oblivious of the differences within female and male bodies. Not all females behave the same but could be subject to a certain behavior based on their hormones just as males do. However you come to also understand that even that idea is complex within the binary sex spectrum. Some males behave in more feminine matter, develop less than most, produce more/less testosterone, sound lower/higher which make them subject to danger and scrutiny because of this flawed false narrative that males and females have fixed characteristics that differentiate them from each other almost exclusively.
@@Strife40k lmao I love how you copy paste the same comment to multiple people, some of which aren't even in agreeance with you. Seems like you've put about as much work into your internet posting as you have into your ideological viewpoints. "Gender is biological hurrdurr" K let us know when you get to the 21st centruy mate really
@@JaydedWun thanks, it has really sparked some great discussions. Any part of it in particular you disagree with?
@@Strife40k I don't believe that anyone claims that biology has no bearing on personality. Rather we claim that much of our gender roles are socially constructed (for example the range your voice can talk in is largely biological, but how you use that voice - like the fact that as a man you do not speak at the high end of that range - is socially learned). However, even if it were the case that gender was 100% biological, I don't know why that would mean that trans people are any less right to consider themselves their preferred gender - after all, a trans woman would derive her womanhood from biology.
As someone who's studied this extensively and have lived experience as well I don't wholly disagree with what he's saying here. I agree members of my community do use very sloppy language to describe their personal experiences but we have to bear in mind that not everyone has the philosophical language to explain the phenomenon of gender precisely and it shouldn't be their responsibility to do so.
I agree it's technically incorrect to say things like "Oh I have a female/male/other soul" because that does fly in the face of the anti-essentialist principles on which contemporary gender theory is founded, but again you have to realize that the average trans person who has no interest in philosophy can only recognize their internal experience as going from a state of mind in which every facet of their external selves causes grave distress and there is a distinct sense of incongruance that is relieved upon transitioning (98.7% of trans people report a generally positive outcome from transitioning socially and physically, according to a meta-analysis of 55 studies, one of which placed this number at 99.6% [1]) to one in which they finally feel as though they're using their entire brains, as if life clicked into focus from a deep blur.
Of course, the reality is that the desire to look, feel, and be seen in a certain light is the "thing" trans people are referring to when they discuss "being" trans. So, forgive me, in essence, this desire to act is the thing itself.
There obviously is no soul seperate from the body and obviously no way to have necessarily been destined from birth to be trans, existence preceeds essence and all that, however there is clearly ample empirical evidence that there is a strong biological component, even evidence to suggest that trans people on average have brain structures that more closely resemble the average for the gender they identify with, not their assigned sex[2]. That said, I do have to mention, recent research in neuroscience is starting to indicate that even sexed differences in brain structure might be less pronounced than we originally thought if you take very large sample sizes, not to mention that the jury is still very much out on how much of the differences in brain structure are down to initial biological conditions vs. development over the course of socialization. Regardless, there are many other biological factors with stronger empirical evidence[3].
I tend to look at gender identity from a practical standpoint through the lens of Wittgenstein's philosophy. Regardless of anything else, we can observe that in our contemporary culture, there is a group of people who pursue the societal role of the opposite sex. They present in that way, they act in that way, and many undergo physical changes that can make them indistinguishable from cis members of their gender.
There is no way to peer inside of someone and observe some concrete thing which "is" their gender, as no such "thing" exists, there is ample scientific evidence to suggest that biological sex, gender, and sexuality all arise from wildly complex biopsychosocial processes with dozens of theorized causes[3], so in terms of explaining the world as it appears to us, all we can do is look at what people communicate with their words, with their actions, and with their physical appearance.
It's a minor undergraduate essay focusing more on Wittgenstein's philosophy of language using gender as an example, so nothing Earth shattering, but for anyone curious for more information as to how I relate the issue of gender identity with Wittgenstein's philosophy, I wrote a very brief essay on the topic many moons ago: docs.google.com/document/d/1SPHO9Sf96hcoVFca7pJYGzofp9lMZJPwaCMXfaVcCZI/edit?usp=drivesdk
All in all, if you strip away all emotions and all your gut impulses to say this (contemporarily) foreign concept must be inherently wrong, then I think all of this is very clearly enough to recognize trans people as the gender they identify as, and I would argue this is a moral imperative, given the empirical evidence that doing so leads to improved wellbeing by every conceivable metric, most significantly lowering suicidality to only slightly higher than that of a cis person[1]
1. whatweknow.inequality.cornell.edu/topics/lgbt-equality/what-does-the-scholarly-research-say-about-the-well-being-of-transgender-people/
2. health.clevelandclinic.org/research-on-the-transgender-brain-what-you-should-know/
3. www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-new-science-of-sex-and-gender/
Trans "feelings" go hand in hand with the development of neoliberalism, the countries with the most economic "freeeom" are the ones with the most amount of capitalist decadence.
@@TonySopeano46 Ab-so-lute nonsense. Shows a complete ignorance of history. Please move slightly past this limited, Eurocentric historical materialist understanding of history (which is where I presume you're arguing from as a presumed Marxist) and crack open an anthropology textbook written in the last couple hundred years. Over the course of human history and across cultures, this rigid biological essentialist understanding of gender and gender roles is the exception not the rule.
As a counterpoint, broken down by region, look into:
Asia/Oceania:
the Hijra of India
the Palao'ana of Micronesia
the Fa'afafine of Somoa
the mahu vahine of Tahiti
the fakaleiti of Tahiti
the Maori whakawahine
the akava'ine of the Cook islands
the Mahu of Hawaii
the Waria of Indonesia
the Burgis culture of Sulawesi, which actually has a place for five genders, each with a unique societal role
Africa:
the Chibados of the Ndongo
the Ashtime of Maale culture
the Mashoga of Mobasa
the Mangaik of the Mbo people
The Middle East and North Africa:
the hierodules of ancient Mesopotamia
the sekhet of ancient Egypt
the Xanith of Oman
the phenomenon of transgender recognition in contemporary Iran
First Peoples of the Americas:
As a rule, the indigenous cultures of the Americas do not adhere to anything remotely close to Western gender and sexuality norms, however across the board in dozens of tribes we find recognition of people who can be broadly be described with the neologism "two-spirited", which in essence is a sort of third gender. Additionally:
the Muxe of the Zapotec people
the Biza'ah
the travestis of modern Brazil
Regardless of how "primitive" you believe some of these cultures to be, it's undeniable that this presents an overwhelming amount of evidence to suggest that the basic biological impulse has always been with humanity.
@@jali4000 I agree with what you say about recognizing trans people in the gender they think they are, I believe it's the best way to help them, but I'm still pretty confused about the limits of this acceptance. As a non trans person, I cannot understand the feeling of not being born in the right body. I can't understand why and how would someone feel like that. I can just accept it "blindly", even if the physical characteristics that have always guided me to know people's genders say otherwise. So, what if someone says that he or she isn't black but white, even if the skin color says otherwise? What if someone says he is tall if he feels tall, even if he isn't?
I know that gender is socially constructed and sex isn't, but we use the same words for the 2. Male/female. So we could start saying that the skin color is socially constructed and there is a biological skin color and a constructed one, which you can identify to even if it's not the one that has been attributed to you.
How do we deal with that kind of logic? When does it have to stop, and for what reasons?
@@tdb517 That phrasing "born in the wrong body" is another thing that I don't think it's necessarily accurate to say, but people do because it's an easy way to describe the experience, albeit imprecisely. It's more that one has a desire to look and act a certain way, many times driven by a distinct psychological condition known as gender dysphoria, which is a persistent dissatisfaction with the gender role one has been socialized into which causes measurable distress, not caused by any mental illness or delusional disorder like schizophrenia, or something like internalized homophobia leading someone to believe that since they're attracted to men, they /must/ be a woman because they aren't a "real" man. There are many factors at play, which is why in order to transition, one must undergo months of therapy before they're given the go ahead. This weeds out people for whom transitioning would not be the right choice, which is why regrets following transition are exceptionally rare.
As for the how and why, you can see from the sources I cited in my original post that it's a complicated issue but one that at the very least we can determine has a real biological basis. It's down to a complicated interplay between genetics, neural structure, androgen exposure in the womb, and about a dozen other identified factors. This lecture is orientated specifically towards teaching transgender care to medical students, however at the timestamp I've linked he goes over the theorized causes in a pretty succinct way: th-cam.com/video/fefu33e8O-0/w-d-xo.html
All of this is based off of empirical evidence, evidence which suggests that it's distinct from any sort of delusional disorder, since gender is simply ones desire to act a certain way, there is no denial of reality. This makes it entirely different from someone who is "trans-racial" (a phenomenon which outside of a few headcases here and there is nothing more than a right-wing boogeyman), there is just no such thing, because there is no evidence to suggest a biological basis. For more: debunkingdenialism.com/2013/12/06/being-transgender-is-nothing-like-having-a-psychotic-napoleon-delusion/
As to why we use the same words, that gets quite murky as well. First, I think it's important to note that sex, while based on our observations of objective phenomenon we can see in the world as opposed to gender which is an internal experience, is not this neat "one or the other" situation some people envision it as. One's biological sex develops in the womb via several different mechanisms, and there is a lot of room for deviation. I linked to this in my original post, but I would strongly encourage you to take a look at this article, that breaks down these concepts very well: www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-new-science-of-sex-and-gender/
Sufficed to say, even sex is not a binary, rather it's a bimodal. People tend to come out of the womb as apparently identifiable as one or the other, male or female. However, as many as 1-2% of the population are intersex, meaning that they aren't neatly classifiable as either male or female, which is about as many people as have red hair. As an example, take for instance the case of total androgen insensitivity. This is a condition in which a fetus with XY chromosomes is completely unresponsive to the male sex hormones and so develops in a way almost indistinguishable from the female sex. It's only around puberty that differences start to become apparent, most notably a lack of menstruation, that leads a doctor to investigate and discover this person in fact does not have a uterus. The key thing though, is that it's only in recent memory that this observation would even have been able to be made. In almost any other time, this person would have been considered simply an infertile woman until the day she died.
Sex and gender are clearly very strongly correlated, and research would suggest that there is crossover between their underlying mechanisms. We use the words interchangeably in some contexts because for most intents and purposes they /are/ interchangeable. Gender is a social role, it has to do with how one sees themselves in relation to others, we began to distinguish between sex and gender specifically to better describe the world as it is, because it was determined that generally speaking the role one pursues in society is who they are in that society.
So basically, the way to "deal" with the sort of logic you're talking about is to realize that you're going off of a wild misconception and that gender is a completely different scenario to anything else you've mentioned. As for the signifiers you're saying have always guided you in determining someone's gender, presuming you mean things like genitalia, shoulder breadth, voice, laryngeal prominence, etc. the fact is that they simply aren't signals of gender, rather sex. Things like clothing, affect, and behavior are signifiers of gender.
Not to mention these signals are loose ones at that, since as I said in my original post many trans people undergo extensive biological changes from gender affirming hormone therapy alone, let alone a vast array of cosmetic surgeries, to remove all of these sex indicators. Furthermore, since sex itself is not a binary, they may never have had these to begin with. I never had an Adam's apple, or broad shoulders, or a particularly deep voice, so I didn't have far to go in transitioning, and I even had certain intersex characteristics, namely pronounced gynecomastia, hypogonadism, and abdormally low testosterone for males, so even in terms of sex development I was certainly never as male as someone like Arnold Schwarzenegger.
So what I'm saying here is that one should try to remain as impartial as possible when observing the world and recognize the vast complexities that get swept under the rug when we pretend that we can neatly classify things with words like "male" and "female", "man" and "woman". This will allow us to describe the world as it appears to us in as accurate and useful a way as possible.
@@jali4000 Thanks for your answer.
The notion of gender being different than sex and being a social construction is relatively recent. A lot of researches are done in the academic world today about what it is being black, or asian, or white today, from the way it is socially constructed and perceived. I don't see how, in a few years or decades, we couldn't do the same with racial identity. There is a biological reality behind being black (which is the equivalent of sex) and there's a social reality, which is constructed, behind being black too (which is the equivalent of gender). The way you're being perceived by society, the bias, the way people expect you to act, ... I know how race (or skin color) differs from gender, and there's no racial dysphoria etc, but those are technical issues. In the logic itself it's not different. And, as interesting as it was, I really doubt you'll be able to explain those subtleties to the average person in order to understand why you can identify to a different gender but not to a different race.
We say there are 2 sexes because we're making a generalization. Of course some people are born with the 2, or absence of the 2, but they're a small minority. It's like saying humans have 2 hands and 10 fingers, a lot of people are born with 9 or 11 fingers, but they're the exception. We're not denying their existence by saying humans have 10 fingers. I don't think we should stop using generalities to explain concepts because it wouldn't represent accurately reality, I mean it's the very idea of making a generalization.
I agree with your conclusion, but at the same time it is contradictory with a lot of what trans activists are saying.
There should be a whole cartoon series of Zizek's talks represented as Donald Duck. Much more people would listen to it.
needs an original name. Sylva Duckworth? idk
Ive long thought that Americans would like philosophy presented as humor.
Trueee
his talk with Peterson except its Donald Duck vs Kermit the Frog
@@maxonmendel5757 I haven't watched the whole talk, but I'd watch it in that form.
The lgbt community disagrees normally with gender essentialist genders. I've seen plenty of transgender forums where trans people explain the issues with "man in a woman's body" and that kind of talk. The reasons why some trans people use essentialist language is the same why cis people use it too, they are learnt and promoted concepts. The fact that trans people use essentialist language is not proof of gender essentialist being true or partially true at all, it is the result of gender essentialist language being imposed to everybody since birth.
I think I agree with this but at the same time I am not really sure if Zizek is actually againts it. I mean, he simply says (it seems to be that's what he's saying) that there is a rift inside the LGBT community regarding their definitions of certain concepts. You could say that the LGB is in some conceptual war with the T over the idea of gender and sex, their possible difference, their scientifically oriented nature or whether it's a social construct rather than essential.
I also think that the LGBT community is playing different games with regards to its seemingly "unified" goal.
That is of course, due to the variance in opinion among humans and nothing especial in that community.
This is just a way to be right being wrong
@@daedricdragon5976 I'm agreeing with Zizek really, he doesm't say transgenders always fall to essentialist gender talk but I'm just adding to the discussion that definitely it's a topic talked and discussed in lgbt communities and saying "I'm a men in a woman's body" by a trans men will be frowned upon and confronted in any serious conversation about feminism and transgenderism in their communities.
@@Strife40k having more oxytocin doesn't make one dress a certain way. Having bi-modal groups statistically doesn't justify a binarism in identities, it's like 2 gaussians with different peaks but that gives plenty of room for a crazy amount of behavioural diversity that doesn't justify the binarism and the discrimination and stigma towards non traditional gender roles we see everyday. Gender goes much more beyond levels of oxytocin, hormones or biological stuff, the differences in behaviour we see in men and women everyday cannot be traced back to that. With this line of thinking one can fall to things like Jordan Peterson said such as "women wear lipstick at work to subtly sexually attract men" or along the lines. I'm not saying biology doesn't play any factor, it does and it should be reasearched and studied, but if one tries to understand gender binarism through biological lenses one will always fall extremely short. Try to have neurobiologists explain why women wear more skirts than men, it's just an absurd thing to ask them. There's definitely a much more social and cultural explanation to present and historical gender expression and behaviour differences than a bimodalism in hormones or whatever.
@@Strife40k why are you spamming this horseshit everywhere? Could you not at least write a unique comment for each comment thread you want to infect with your worthless dialogue? What a joke.
So many people in the comments misunderstood Zizek here. Zizek DOES agree completely with Judith Butler that gender is socially constructed, and that it is performative. What Zizek questions I'd the paradox of historicism: has gender always been performative, or is this a phenomenon new to the modern subject? He also questions the liberal language which has dominated mainstream queer discourse which is often essentialist and biodeterminist.
Poor zizek... he has been put into the position of trying to reconcile a basic reality that is in front of every one of us while trying to not be canceled by the mob...
Of course the behavioral differences between men and women are bi-modal...
Here is one of many papers: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2879914/
Just look at the behavioral influences of oxytocin and the disproportionate oxytocin production between the genders. Just one of many many hormones which men and women produce in different quantities. If men and women produce different quantities of behavioral influencing hormones, they will naturally behave differently.
That is not something that has been socialized into us, and it's not something that can be socialized out of us.
So, be it. Men and women are different. Big shocker!
Also, of course there are socialization aspects as well. Behaviour is obviously some combination of nature and nurture. It's frankly jaw dropping that people can even begin to fathom personality is 100% socially constructed. Or that the gender roles in society have no biological bearing at all.
There are modern biology studies that shows that some behaviors are genetically driven in mice. For one to claim that gender is a social construct, and only lives in the bounds of socially constructed ideas, you'd have to fully understand the roles of genes and influence of the environment, a thing we are millennia from finding the true answers.
Therefore he is right in considering that social constructivists are idealists in nature, because no such thing can be proven with the scientific method, making it purely metaphysical. What bothers me is not the fact that there are people who believe in it, but people that not only don't fully understand what social constructivists are saying, either because they are stupid or because it tells them the answers they were looking for, the second one being the biggest poison for the mind one can get.
@@Strife40k What if there's a woman who produces more oxytocin than a randomly selected man/gender average for man? Is she no longer the female gender compared to that? Your rule is not consistent and therefore not absolute truth
The exception is not the rule. We don't base society and language off of the one exception. Sex is determined by chromosomes simply put, if you're intersex then you're just fucked.
@@ThorMNsuh, yes, these are absolute truths (unless you can objectivly prove them wrong).
yes, it is true that hormones exist.
Yes it is true that they influence behavior.
Yes it is true that men and women produce them in different quantities.
So yes, it is true that if men and women naturally produce different quantities of behavioral influencing hormones, they will naturally behave differently.
Of course there are outliers, of course every person is unique in their particularities, both biological and conditional (which influence each other by the way!). But, when talking about society as a whole we are talking about the average behavior across all individuals.
Those behavioral averages have biological influences which was NOT socialized into us, and CAN NOT be socialized out of us.
Thanks for this.
"who was the beak, other, who intervene" is my favourite.
The Big Other*
Give full video link
What is the title of thr last boom thag he is talking about?
the way how this man handle the English is so beautiful- clasting ICON.....
It’s serbo croatian in it’s essence.
I think this ideological turn is largely rhetorical. It’s an apologetics for extremely entrenched views of what gender is-that is, an eternal category and absolute quality which is branded into one’s essential being. It’s a line of argument picked up in elsewhere in scientific (read: absolute) articles which posit observable neurobiological difference between cis and trans people.
I posit that you have written this post. Of course, I could be wrong. And right as well. As observed within a Presocratic split between the Being of Non-Being and the Non-Being of Being. It is a metaphysical unity of an epistemological disunity with the Being/Non-Being transcendence.
At 3:20, "The way we act is as if we have an priori identity and that's this paradox of how our practice presupposes or posits retroactively an identity whose essence doesn't exist in itself." I had to chuckle over this. Particularly, it requires a steep learning curve and quite a few beatings to turn a human into a masculine thing.
Germaine Greer hit upon this idea I think. Essentially her argument was that trans women are built upon an external and socially constructed idea of what it is to be a women. Whereas her view of womanness was not the constructed one but was an internal and experiential one. Is that kind of what zizek is speaking about here?
1:52 Butlerian... Jihad... Sniffles...
The spice must flow. The spice is required for space travel. The spice also granted me the prescience required to say that discussing politics via posts can lead to accidental heated misunderstanding.
House Harkonen is a social construct
*Insert image of Paul with glowing red laser eyes smiling like a madman*
🤣 the edit won me over. We shall spread throughout the universe. For he who can destroy a thing, controls a thing. As the great Maud Dib said.
Zizek always follows good postmodernist practices: every now and then interjects "so what I'm saying is simply that" after which his elucidations become even more sophisticated and impermeable to reason.
So here's what he's saying. That's basically Jordan Peterson's argument but let's leave that as it is. Either gender is a construct (it doesn't exist, we create it) or it is a reality. Arguing for sex change by saying that it makes one's appearance congruent to their *true identity* presupposes that such "true identity" exists. But then gender is not a mere construct. Or if gender is to be a construct, sex change is a "whim" (albeit a serious one).
I believe the experience of (ones own) gender is often a mix of reality AND social construct. Its not either or.
We're all just terrified or eager for the consequences it has on society as we are social animals.
@@marionow6227 I agree-it may indeed be a social construct but that doesn’t make it less real or powerful. The trick is to hold your mind in two places to be able to comprehend both sides. Trans people are real even if people don’t actually exist as we think we do.
He must speak in code so dummies wouldn't be triggerred. Simply saying 'no' would have had him booed off the stage by these pseudo intellectuals. Notice how he starts with 'i met a trans once', the equivilent of 'i had a black friend'. They say that beliving two opposing ideas at the same time makes you either a sophist, or a schizo. He chooses none and plays the stupid card: "Don't know, ask Darida. I'm still an atheist like you, though. Please pay me".
@@cozmiucc He only speaks in code so his fellow leftists don't understand how he's criticising them. But yea, you're right.
"Read Derrida" is always a good catchphrase because nobody will and even if they did, it's just random nonsense so nothing can be exactly 'learned' from this reading.
comparing realizing that you're in love and realizing you're trans is beautiful and spot on. i didn't one day wake up and say "i am transgender", i just had to face the music of "how do i like to look" and "what do i like to do" and "how do i like to talk" etc. etc. until i just realized i was trans. and just like being in love, you doubt yourself over and over and over again until you just have to accept that it's true
This is a great comment
SUPERNATURAL MAN only as much as everyone else
@SUPERNATURAL MAN and you're here like the perfect guy that doesn't have any mental issues
@SUPERNATURAL MAN fuck off
@@ronanoloingsigh5251 you really cant imagine someone in denial about falling in love?
Please enable the subtitles!
Zizek is using Lacan here, not Hegal. In Lacanian terms desire leads retroactively to the person's conception that they existed in an individuated state before the experience of desire. The self emerges from a fiction which explains desire. This retroactively in-filled identity, both a fiction and an inescapable subjective reality, likewise informs essentialist views of gender identity according to Zizek.
Why is this dude all over my suggestions now
Don't fight it, go with the algorithm.
still better than Jordan Peterson being all over your suggestions
because someone has finally been clever enough to use clickbaity shit for zizek/leftist takes. very based tbh
Josef Frühauf I’d rather hear Dr. Kermit dissect the rich underlying truths of human nature as they relate to our literature and political practice much more than Sylvester the cat spew Marxist philosophies and agenda to young people who crave an intellectual relationship to justify pessimism and contribution to their philosophically hopeless futures
@@zachariahsmith8757 ok gamer
why nobody mentions that the automatic subtitles are in dutch 💀💀💀
Need subtitles
3:47 what??
Quick jazz.
I think, he simply says (it seems to me that's what he's saying) that there is a rift inside the LGBT community regarding their definitions of certain concepts. You could say that the LGB is in some conceptual war with the T over the idea of gender and sex, their possible difference, their scientifically oriented nature or whether it's a social construct rather than essential.
I also think that the LGBT community is playing different games with regards to its seemingly "unified" goal.
That is of course, due to the variance in opinion among humans and nothing especial in that community.
The problem, however, is that if the said community persumably has a shared goal, then their strategies (specifically in the Trans section of things) seem to be often times not only rather ineffective but worse, contradictory.
I don't think he's taking into account the LGBT community or whoever else might argue for essentialism. I think the essentialist or gender constructivist narratives are supportive, but kind of ad hoc justifications for the trans phenomenon that is not completely understood. Just like in the example of falling in love, we come to the realization that we are in love and then justify it in whatever way suits us.
So, in other words, what he's saying is that the idea of choice or modeling one's life, identity, love, etc. (existentialism) is somewhat an illusion, and therefore, in essence, essentialist?
I think people mix it with personality. Their gender identity is basically their personality.
Basically all best things in life are essentially essential and in a way out of our control.
Sniff
I still don't know what his answer to the question is. He always leaves me wondering what he really meant. Of course he is not a native English speaker, for which we have to allow, but his style is such as leaves me often scratching my head.
Because he has a tendency to talk in circles
There are no right or wrong answers. There are only way of thinking them. That is what he is discussing, the way he looks at the ideas and not necessarily dismissing o agreeing with them.
@@aka-47pro59 I reject your relativism. To me there is truth and falsehood or error. To think otherwise is to lapse into nihilism.
@@arthurchinaski3736 there is a difference between dichotomy of truth and false and right and wrong. How exactly are you rejecting my hypothesis?
@Tim Romanski yup I said there are no right or wrong answers but what I didn't say was that there are no truths and false. Incase you still didn't understand my original point, what I meant was that a conclusive answer is irrelevant. What's important is that they make a discussion where you question the question itself. There is both a yes and a no to the question and both yes and no are equally relevant but zizek as an academic poses the response as a study of the question instead of a straight up answer. So what I meant was that, you can chose not to if you want ofcourse but I would recommend that you look at it as a study of the phenomenon instead of just a conclusion and hence there are no right or wrong answers. But in case you don't want to, I guess whatever works for you.
Of course he would say yes,
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Zizek here is not quite right about the essentialist aspect of identification, because those who go through sexual transition change their sexuality not to match it with a gender they are easier to perform, but to actually feel right in their bodies.
feel right in their bodies to what extent? sexuality is a game of role-playing. '"right in their bodies" with respect to sexual relationships belies, what?, feeling normal with one's fundamental self identification. This 'normal' is a myth, for even those who feel they are born in the right body with their professed gender find this gender itself to be a source of continual strife, anxiety and doubt. Hence, the abysmally high number of post-op transgender suicides.
@@ParanoidAndroid29 Really, this. Being born as a man or woman and "accepting" society's identity for you can still lead to a lot of strife. And I do think that trying to convince children and boys struggling with society's expectation that they are not the sex we tell them they are is a little... I'll say it, ridiculous.
@@ParanoidAndroid29 Sexuality is a game of role-playing? That's not true.
If that was the case, people should have been able to choose to suddenly change their orientation with ease, e.g. become gay, lesbian, etc.
I'm talking about symbolic roles, not peepee in clam, clam to clam peepee in backdoor. I suggest you read a briefer in Lacan on sexuality if you're interested in this. And acquaint yourself with Freud's notion that sexuality is formed in trauma. Then there are the social roles we live up to regarding gender. These roles exist no matter one's orientation.
@@ParanoidAndroid29 I know about that, but you used the word 'sexuality' (which is partly biological) instead of gender (which is performative and symbolic). That's why I have replied to you. Like I said, with all the respect I have for Zizek, I don't find his argument plausible enough, mainly because he's confusing sexuality and gender.
You ever meet a kid that tries to give themself a nick name? Like some weird kid who one day started saying "Everybody calls me Snake." And you were like "no one calls you that Clarence." That's how I view Transgenderism. 😂
Robert Something... Raphael Samuel tho
Please load captions in your videos
This guy could read the ingredient label on a pack of Hot Pockets and it would still sound so engrossing 😮
If everything is social construction, then nothing is.
He's chewing words
Is there a transcript for this
Not sure... but Ill summarize it. He's talking about the paradox of claiming that gender is a social construction. One my claim that society forces gender upon you, but at the same time, those who wish to change their gender claim they always knew what gender they were...in other words, it wasn't a social construction. Its a logical fallacy.
@@anthonybrett I've never heard any transgender say they always knew what sex they were, and sex isn't the same as gender
@@zaphirael5303 Fine... but are you saying that transgender people don't "feel" internally what gender they are? Why change then? The very logical outcome of internally knowing (feeling) what you are means that society didn't/couldn't have forced it upon you. Sorry, I was simply interpreting Zizek, ...go speak with him if that bothers you...
@@zaphirael5303 Just edited my original comment, change sex to gender. You can easily interchange them within the equation, it doesnt matter, the logical fallacy still exists with either.
Cheers
@@anthonybrett they don't feel comfortable with the gender they were assigned, but that doesn't necessarily mean they know why, or what would make them feel better, or know the gender they belong to instead
The last statement is peak philosophy. Eternal things always have to appear at a certain point in history, before retroactively being percieved as eternal 'always has been'.
where did he disappear?
If I really want a straightforward issue muddled beyond recognition, I come to Zizek
I think what he believes the paradox is in gender theory is transitioning is purely based on a state of unease with the performance of ones assigned gender at birth. Physical dysphoria is often mixed up with gender performance.
Gender performance is a construct as Judith Butler argues and so does the majority of gender theorists as well. However, the discomfort associated with presenting and performing gender could be present together in a person, therefor, for them to feel safe performing a gender “normally” aligned with having a masculine or feminine body offers a sense of safety, mental ease and belonging to the gender in which one feels they identify.
Contrary to general belief, transgender people do not think of themselves as the sex they transitioned to. They understand that sex and gender are separate subjects. They understand that they went about life experiences the gender in which they were assigned at birth. Performing it, and living in those bodies in which they were born in hence the seperation between (cis-man/woman, trans-man/woman). So there is absolutely no paradox in the narrative in which they live by.
Another important thing to mention is a lot of transgender individuals experience mere physical discomfort/dysphoria without actually feeling like they identify with the gender characteristics of the opposite sex. They transition physically but don’t necessarily perform in feminine or masculine manners. So this idea is not simple and fixed. It manifests itself in different ways depending on the person.
interesting
I agree completely. As with most things Zizek says I wonder if he actually understands this but is oversimplifying to make a point, or does he actually misunderstand something so simple as the nuance involved.
You seem to generalize A LOT. There were huge debates around the topic 'transgender women are women' with the goal to NOT separate between trans and cis women. I also heard of several transgender persons that did have dysphoria that went much further than to just reassign/adjust anatomical parts. The whole issue of 'passing' is exactly about that.
Contrapoints talks about this conflict in one of her videos: trying to present super feminine to be perceived as a woman while at the same time not believing in traditional gender roles.
Tadeseus Actually, in the context of “Trans women are women.” The argument is about the validity of trans women as real women (gender-wise). “Trans women are women” does not argue that Trans women are biological women, and please correct me if I am wrong but I have never heard a trans woman claim to be a biological woman. The reason why that statement is often mentioned is because Trans women are excluded from feminist spaces (radical) and are not welcome in some “women” only spaces. That statement address the validity of trans women as women but it does not indicate that trans women are claiming to be cis. The transgender community acknowledges the difference between being trans and being cis (which is purely anatomical) but see absolutely no sense in gatekeeping gender.
Trans activists actively lobby for erasure of sex category, legally and politically. They claim that sex is a social construct and gender is essential.
I wrote about this very contradiction recently in university. I’ve searched high and low for trans activists to answer this problem and no one has even come close. Everyone who ive described it to was utterly stumped.
Its a glaring contradiction and yet LGBTQ activists insists on serious policy changes from govt and even changes in social outlook. I was having a discussion with a person from the community and all while she was speaking i could sense something wrong but could not really put finger on where the contradiction lied . Later I realized she was picking and choosing the different definitions of Gender expression whenever it suited her.
@@Valkyri3Z I think a lot of this has to do with how long term investment in culture war politics has led to an intellectual decline in the left. Yes, focusing on activism and culture war wins does make the culture more sympathetic to leftists causes, but it doesn't mean they understand them or that they even deem them coherent.
In polls all over America, I believe last I checked 75% of Americans support non-discrimination laws to protect LGBT people. However, the activists and advocates who would help draft this legislation are so accustomed to engaging in incoherent arguments about their ideas, that they can't actually sit down and help create legislation that is coherent enough that it could be applied legally.
This is why I often laugh in the U.S. when liberal media sources say 80% of the country approves a certain policy goal of the left, and then they view it as a testament to how much influence they have over the culture. But support doesn't equal understanding or persuasion. A lot of times people see how passionate and how needy you are for something and they support you out of pity, but just because you get empathy and sympathy doesn't mean you've persuaded people or that they understand you...and the problem with the American Left is that they have increasingly become incoherent and intellectually lazy, and often times it's not till they have to explain their new ideas to laymen and laywomen that they get exposed to how poorly thought out their thinking is...
See Dave Chappelle.
@@jeviosoorishas181 and you will ALWAYS find the corporates and powerful elites co-opting these movements quite happily. From tech giants to all sorts of greasy people.
Go back though your LGBTQ+ history books. At least in American queer history, there has always been a break in the community between rights activists (who usually use essentialist language) and queer liberationists who deny essentialism but still insist on political freedom of expression and engagement. From a political perspective it is at times better to employ essentialist language since people respond more sympathetically to "who I am" versus "What I do". Ideology is great, but when the fight is life and death sometime it is best to speak the language of your oppressors instead of telling them their entire system is archaic garbage.....even if it means you might have to contradict yourself.
@@richardfoxpivencloward971 well said
I love to hear zizek speaks while I'm reading the comments because it sounds like if he was reading it to me hahaha
And so on and so on and so on whateveRR RReAlize
in these zizek discussions about performativity versus essentialism in gender it always strikes me as if he is missing the point. How i interpret this ''paradox'' is that butler is right, but that modern people who use essentialist language simply don't care to put themselves in some kind of historical perspective. Because not everyone wants to be some kind of holistic intellectual. In other words, when a modern person who transitioned from a man into woman says that ''i have always felt essentially female'' - they aren't claiming with this statement that there is an eternal female soul that they are pursuing. They are simply pursuing the role of female as it appears in their generation and they have just always identified with this much more than the male role. And then they stick with that identity because in this society you also need a gender identity for the sake of it. It's not a complicated paradox at all. They just use essentialist language but they don't mean it philsophically, they just use it because they only live in this generation. I'm a cis man but and i strongly believe in my gender identity but i don't have to deny that it's socially constructed in order to continue believing it. That's the difference between this kind of belief and e.g. a belief in god. A belief in god consists of a claim about natural forces but a belief in gender consists of a claim about the available social roles that fit you most. And those roles don't change just because you want them to. And i'm sure this is why zizek calls himself man and not nonbinary even though he says he loves the socially constructed arguments.
If you assume that they do mean it philosophically then you have to apply weird mental gynmnastics to have it make sense which is what zizek is doing.
Well, I think your response is pretty weak. saying "people are ignorant" is not a valid point to justify a position. They may not think about it philosophically but the implications of absorbing a concept or an alien essence as a part of themselves are the same whether they see it or not. I think zizek's perspective in this is wonderful and I don't agree with him in almost everything he says.
I believe that the only true form of liberation is identifiying oneself as an ego, not switching ideas. As long as you keep chasing for essences outside yourself you will always be subjected to them.
@@brandoagusti7288 I should have said that most people are not analytical rather than use the world intellectual. But yeah i agree it's not a super valid argument to justify a position. It's just my impression from being connected to people in trans communities.
Though i feel as though you're answering a different question - i was trying to answer zizek's question of how it can be the case that people are trying to dismantle socially constructed essences by claiming new and other essences. It appears as though you are rather providing a normative view on how they should be doing that better. Do you have any good psychoanalysis reading tips? I tried reading Jung's anima and animus but it felt as though i was reading some kind of 1930s jordan peterson - some kind of mystic occult text haha. So it doesn't make any sense to me.
@@timolff9239 No, I don't know much about psychoanalists, but if you are interested in this sort of topic of rejecting external essences and imposing the ego over constructs there is no better book than Stirner's "The ego and its own." However I have to warn you that if you are religious you are going to be made fun of, and if you are an atheist and think that morality is possible without religion (like I used to beleive before reading this particular book) you may be shocked at his analysis of what not being superstitious leads to.
@@brandoagusti7288 Thanks!
Absolute nonsense. Gender is not a social construct, its an expression of the innate differences between men and women.
But Zizek.....this assumes that the reaction/experience of “finally being in the body I was meant to be” is accurate at face and literal value - not that, perhaps between societal pressures on being “right” and creating this feeling in oneself to convey feeling happy, the experience is created.
The science on the matter disagrees with you at length. Trans people are real
www.com.au lol? I’m 1million % pro-trans. This isn’t about that. i interpreted him as saying that experience/reaction somehow contradicts social construct - and I don’t believe it does.
The Experience of Non-Experience. The unhappiness of happiness.
It's so obvious that it just is.
And this is just one of the huge contradictions of their theories.... Lets move on.
Non ti curar di loro ma guarda e qpassa. Dante, Divina commedia.1
What did anything he say have to do with whether gender is a social construct or not? It sounded like he was just pretending that when trans people say things like "I was born in the wrong body" that they literally mean something like "my soul was mistakenly placed in the wrong body" instead of just simply "I wish I had the body of the opposite sex", just like a short guy might wish that he was born in a tall body or an ugly girl might wish that she was born in a beautiful body etc.
Lasaret perfect point
I think his point is that if gender is a social construct, then people shouldn't feel compelled to essentialise their gender in the concrete form of biological sex. If gender is socially constructed, then why do people want to get into the 'right' body, when transgender ideology rightly points out that there is no 'right' body for any given gender identity to exist within. To change your biological sex to female because you feel like a woman is to tacitly accept the cultural paradigm that women ought to be female.
I'm not agreeing with him, by the way, I'm just saying that seems to be his point. You have to admit, on the surface it is a bit of a paradox.
Not really a short guy may wish to have been born into a taller body but does not claim that should have been his destiny and that he cannot live a fulfilled life unless he is physically transformed into a taller person though like most people who feel deficient in some respect he may at times try to disguise the fact. It is quite different in scale to claim an essential need and a right to a transformation and that everybody should accept that is the the real him and treat him accordingly.
@@monkeymox2544 what is "transgender ideology"? I don't understand his logic there, why would people undergoing medical treatments to better pass as the gender they identify with mean that gender therefore isn't a social construct? For example people spend all kinds of money and effort to physically meet certain socially constructed beauty standards as well but that obviously doesn't mean that those beauty standards aren't socially constructed. I don't see why you couldn't simultaneously say that there is no "right" body that a man is supposed to have and also have strong preferences for what kind of a body you want to have. I don't think that a medically transitioned MtF trans person necessarily has to think that "women ought to be female", they might simply just be transitioning because that's the body they want to have and they know that if they want to be a woman in society then passing as much as possible is going to just practically speaking make everything way easier for them. I just don't think any of this has anything to do with whether gender is a social construct, which it is by definition.
Yeah I think you explained what he probably meant much better than I originally understood.
@@elkabongg2716 sure, trans people often feel way stronger about wanting to have a different body than a short guy who just wants to be taller, so maybe a better comparison would be someone who was born with a bad deformity who really wants to get it surgically fixed or someone with a condition like muscle dysmoprhia. I just don't think that trans people actually mean it in an essentialist sense when they say things like that, people say hyperbolic things that could be twisted into an essentialist sentiment all the time. The reason why people with gender dysphoria should have "the right to a transformation" is that it's the best known way to combat severe gender dysphoria, and "claiming a right to everyone accepting the real them" sounds like a pretty strongly worded way of referring to trans people just asking to for example not be misgendered.
I take this to mean [thing] was not true until a point, but when that point came - [thing] is and has always been true. That's crazy I love it.
To repeat that with more words: I take it to mean he is considering that it was not true this person was born in the wrong body when they were born - But, now that they are who they are and know what they know - yes it is true and has always been true that they we're born in to the wrong body.
And to be terribly geeky it's like the chaos gods in warhammer 40k lol.
I dont understand why Zizek doesn't accept self-positioning or retroactive essentialism as simple essentialism. It seems so illogical to not to call it what it is, why all the gymnastics, why the dancing around it?
I didn't get it.. does he agree that gender is a social construct? Pleaee someone clarify for me
From what i understood, hes saying gender may be socially/ historically constructed, but the individual experiences it as something essential.
He’s saying that there is a paradox in the current transgender ideology. They say that our genders are socially constructed so we shouldn’t be so narrow minded when somebody wishes to transition. But the paradox is that in their attempt to move freely in the realm of gender they at the same time attach themselves to a specific gender or identity.
@@nuckinfuts7502 I mean, is it really a paradox? Acknowledging gender as a social construct but at the same time recognizing how we are living in that culture, that it is a part of us and and searching our favorite place in it can go by hands. You could still argue for gender abolitionism with this logic, saying that it isn't a thing to be done one time, but progressively not perpetuating gender roles while raising next generations.
Sebastian Csori right but all he’s doing is pointing out a paradox in the mode of thinking. He’s not advocating any action going forward. So yes there’s paradoxes in the thinking.
@@nuckinfuts7502 oh. I guess I can see where he is going from then.
Slavoj "I don't have the time to go into it" Zizek
If we are going to turn what use to be scientific classifications into social constructs based on what we feel like at that moment - then you may as well do the same for every classification in science, and if you do that - then nothing is knowable and soon we find ourselves back in a dark age where language is impossible. If my gender determines that I feel like the number 1 is the number 0 today and that I feel like a brain is actually a heart - would you want me doing surgery on you? Or making computer codes for military weapons? Well why not are you a bigot?
did someone in this video cites Simon de Beauvoir ? no ? pfff....
There may not be essences but we have to live as if there are, otherwise we would go insane. The ground beneath us is deceptively solid. We must walk on it as if it is, otherwise we would not walk. The trick is to know there are no essences as we live as if there were. Religious people do this all the time.
So then what you would be describing is a belief system and can be as easily dismissed as such.
there actually is an essence. Religious people are only trying to do it but there is actually there if you give it a good shot, it can be found. The essence.
Like we learn in Vipassana... we engage at the level of the apparently solid and unchanging reality, whilst knowing that everything is in constant flux
Lines are so blurred in these times
Yes. And this is a good thing.
We should not be forcing people into rigid boxes and trying to categorize everyone into rigid structures. It's okay to be uncomfortable with new concepts and work towards a better understanding of them. We should be using the blurred lines as an opportunity to learn and grow. Let's not shut ourselves off from the world for a fear of losing the past.
@@lvl6laserlotus it’s also ok to reject new concepts.
eternity itself is historical
is Neil Degrasse Tyson watching this?
If a person with anorexia is looking into a mirror saying, "look how fat I am", are we obliged to say, yes you're right.
Thank you, as someone who’s suffered from anorexia for over a decade, I often cannot convince myself that transgender identity is not just an extension of body dysmorphia because in the end, can’t we not argue that “skinny” and “fat” are culturally relative social constructs too? Of course I believe trans people deserve equal rights such as employment and protection from any form of discrimination but as someone who’s suffered from an illness which makes me feel alienated from my body, I have difficulty not empathizing with transgenders as a group who are also alienated from their body too. And it’s critical to note that anorexia, at least my experience of it , had little to do with aesthetics. It’s not that I found being “skinny” more attractive than being fat because if that was the case, I would’ve felt accomplished when I was under 90 pounds on a feeding tube. Anorexia involves attaching an identity to being skinny- very different than just thinking “ I look pretty this way” and as transgenders have it, they too attach an identity to their mind/body split too don’t they ? Thanks for bringing this up because it’s an analogy which directly suggests that transgenderism is an illness and more importantly, despite trans people continuous attacking the idea, what they don’t seem to realize is how insulting it is to make it seem like having a mental condition is inherently wrong or renders one totally devoid of agency .
@@Maziedivision I'm very sorry that was something you've had to overcome, I understand it's extremely difficult to battle. Your opinion was so well articulated, I couldn't agree more & you've really given us a new perspective on this experience. Thanks
@@Maziedivisionoh, and transition actually makes trans people happier, while no matter how thin you are, anorexia still makes you suffer, sometimes even, sadly, leading to death.
This is what i say all the time.
Understanding the difference between sex and gender is fundamental to understanding what constitutes our identities. When one does not understand that, it's impossible to have a meaningful conversation about our sexual selves.
I think he does, don't you?
@@joyusachoobarb Clearly. I didn't say he didn't.I was referring to those watching the video who don't know the difference, seeing as Slavoj mentioned it but didn't elaborate.
I'm taking a shit right now
There is no difference. Gender is a made up concept from the 60's that isn't necessary or helpful.
@@johnnonamegibbon3580 If you don't believe there is strictly one type of essential behaviour/being for men and another for women, then surely you can agree gender exists as a somewhat fluid expression of masculinity/femininity? For that reason it is helpful in understanding that our expectations of how a person should or shouldn't be(have) is up for discussion. What do you think?
We need the Constructivists here.
We as humans can freely answer only those questions, that technically cannot be answered, like "how did the whole universe come?"
There ain't nothing but hypotheses, and we are free to choose any, and this will tell about us, but nothing about the universe.
"how or why did my soul come into this particular body?"
but also this is more like a question to a wise Buddhist...
3:47 : "Who was the big other who intervened now?"
Kook ! Silvester cat !
Yes there is cognitive dissonance between binary transgender people and gender abolitionist ideology. Transgender people choose binary identities for the same reason cis people choose binary identities. Binary trans people can't be expected to fight the battle of gender abolitionism and it's silly to try to understand gender through the prism of binary trans people.
If binary trans people didn't identify as binary (such as the way they identify as third genders in places like India or Thailand) they'd still have plastic surgery, they'd still go on hormones, they'd look the same. The only difference would be semantic.
Thanks, I find a big strawman in his point
Not necessarily. An "essentialized" conception of gender is a (maybe the) primary catalyst for the using of technology to control and conform such conceptions in an "embodied" reality. It is a "making in our own image", as it were. The alternatives are infinite: manifesting gender fluidity in linguistic, social, artistic, theological etc. modes are examples of how gender fluidity have been historically incarnate.
The transforming of the human body doesn't then constitute an "end" or even a "progression" in our understanding and lived experience of gender. It seems rather a product of, at least, the combination of a particular kind of bio-technology (that may even seem backwards in a future epoch) and the "essentializing" of gender dynamics that Zizek alluded to here.
trans apologist i bet u dont even lift
I think Kaila nailed it. Everyone should watch Non-Compete's video on gender essentialism; Zizek would probably understand the topic better if he watched it.
Marcus Cato Spoken like a true idiot.
Slavoj Zizek, town philosopher, talking about human biology, and the shit that even biologists can't answer at that.
So reliable, you have to be deeply gullible to listen to these and be like, "no yeah, I believe him"
It’s absolutely ok to believe things on limited or no evidence, as long as that belief is in proportion to the reasons available. Weak reason, weak belief.
Most importantly, a scientific mind should always be willing to reconsider a point of belief when faced with new information.
@@somefuckstolemynick what's lame is to have an audience of millions
@@0786RICARDO what?
Part of the "just asking" crowd. Hey grandpa, what's on your computer?
He always thinks that there is that "ONE LGBT MOVEMENT / IDEOLOGY" where everyone believes in instead of lots of
different groups of different people into completey different situations with different claims, needs and self / society
definitions.
Like any other movement that has any existed, unfortunatly you need to generalize a bit if you want to talk about millions of people
@@andreacurti5927 not like that it makes n0 sense for me cuz it distorts the complexicity and that its not just one fight, strategy, claim. ppl have lots of different interests, many are anarchists, others bourgeois and so on
@@ullathurmann1184 Yes, but they don't have mainstream relevance. You could say that about any political ideology or any intellectual school of thought. He is also not addressing people who have technical expertise on the various aspects of LGBT political movements of the left...
If you are willing to deform your body to complete an idea others impose on you, how does that make you free? So you can either say gender is natural or a construct. But you cannot be liberated by performing along the norm. If you are willing to deform your body to suit the norms imposed, you might as well abide the norm that it's not accepted. So, what is really happening? Self-rejection. So, I'm not in favor of facilitation of surgery, but facilitating self-love. If someone is beyond that, they might have to go down the road to find out, that you cannot change who you are. But there might even be people who can successfully deceive them selves and ignore that reality.
Great thought!
I think that you’re generalizing a very false presumption of what you think transgender people do when they hope to pass as the opposite sex. A very small population alters their bodies through surgery. A lot of transgender individuals refuse to surgically alter their bodies. Hormones which is the most common tool used to medically transition is in no way a deformation. Neither is let’s say, removing breast tissue for female bodies individuals & adding breast tissue in male bodied individuals. In fact, the vast majority of individuals seeking to get breast implants and removing their breats for whatever reason are binary, cis gender, straight females. So this argument is absolute garbage
Isn’t sex biological and gender social like two sides of a single coin, gender being entirely socially constructed by definition. This is why this is an uninteresting topic to me, gender by definition is 100% social. Even if you’re describing the male/female continuum in its entirety, doesn’t it clearly have components of both biological/essentialist and gender/existentialism. There’s still the question of what the proportions might be, but would that not be a question best suited for science.
It is actually a really dumb argument to have outside of academia, I mean it's an interesting thing to study but as far as most people are concerned, irrational gut feelings and political predispositions are the only things that keep some people from just saying "Huh. Okay. I mean I don't really get it but whatever." just like they would to any other difficult concept in advanced biology/psychology.
I think its just that it's such an obvious, jarring, and transgressive thing and when you encounter a trans person, especially a trans womam, for the first time you basically HAVE to either try and integrate it into your worldview or reject it outright, which is why it tends be such a polarizing issue. People who believe a woman's role is in the home and a man will suffer for all eternity for having sex with another man aren't quite so likely to look at a trans woman and say "yep that's a woman", although you might be surprised how many still do.
@@jali4000 Exactly. It is a shame that this topic is too politicized. People in the academia are discussing such counter-intuitive things that the whole trans issue would seem mild in comparision, but laypeople are stuck with this.
@@MrPtrlix It's almost a cliche at this point, but it's really easy for academics to lose sight of what normal people know and care about. It sucks, because people who are just as smart and curious as anyone else but just not initiated into the tribe want to understand something like gender identity and we start by trying to go over Kantian metaphysics and deconstruction and make sure they're ready to take the GRE before we even start gender. It's this kind of implicit elitism where people rightfully get turned off by this nonsense and think "it's all Greek to me" but we'll insist that it's all necessary for a proper understanding rather than admit the fact that a lot of us just completely suck at actually explaining things clearly.
I think we really need to start taking a more pragmatic approach to trans issues. We focus far too much on the etiology of gender identity and far too little on the actual practical implications for society and what we need to do to keep trans people happy, healthy, and alive.
Sometimes at the end of the day with some people the best you can say to them is "trans people exist, they have always existed, they will always exist, there is a biological basis and they are valid, figure out a way to cope with this and just move the fuck on already".
4:03 bookmark
Wtf. How can one man be so based
Gender is for language/nouns. Sex is for biology. One is arbitrary/subjective. The other is objectively real.
Race is a valid category and is objective as sex. Gender ideology is Marxist nonsense and not indicative of good mental health.
@Quest Tzecai Anything besides accepting reality is cringe.
@@hre2044 Do you think public discourse and national policy should take these racial discrepancies into account? (science agrees that genetic differences between the races - as they are most commonly categorised- are very superficial). Also, nobody even mentioned race.
@@reubennb2859 Yeah, society should investigate race and IQ and talk about racial differences leading to disproportionate amounts of blacks in basketball and other sports.
Race is not the largest taxon, I mean if we compared a homo sapien to a homo neandethalis there would be far greater difference, however the difference between a Caucasoid and a Congoloid is there. We don't live in the world Orcish race, Elven, human, goblin etc like Skyrim but we do have races.
@@hre2044 Racial IQ differences are environmental, according to all the science on the subject. You're actively refuting scientific consensus because...'black people look kinda different, so they must have different brains too. Must be skull shape or something...'
You're unironically parroting nazi talking points.
Zizek is absolutelly right, though in a different layer of analysis. One should approach it not in terms of epistemological analysis, but in terms of discourse and power, an upper layer closer to political analysis. LGBTQIA+ people often try to belong by means of adhering to themselves the same essencialist discourses of heterossexual romantic fables. LGBTQIA+ are not aiming on redemption from masculinistic ideologies, but instead, trying to occupy the spaces previously reserved for heterossexuals.
No. Next question.
I still can not see how proponents of gender fluidity solve their contradiction in their perception of gender being performative and also something innate.
gender is a description of some characteristic of a person that they are likely unable to change, hence it is "innate" in that sense
but the performative aspect comes from the way that society systematically integrates gender, forcing individuals to act a certain way to be percieved as the gender they feel they are (with this sense of identity being the most accurate description of their gender)
@@hecknose5506 Gender cant be only performative or only innate at the same time. A person feels forced to behave certain way precisely because gender is innate. Hence someone cant just feel male in the morning or female in the evening depending on how the person performs the same social gender norms he or she ridicules. Its either or. Someone can not claim that cis males or cis females are so because of social conditioning because anyone who is cis is because he or she innately feels so. One cant be forced all his or her life like that. Its just hyperbole. Its also beazenly questioning the identity of another person and even appropriating it. The biggest failure of social conditioning theory is the existence of Trans people itself.. the fact no matter hard everyone tried they did not fall in 'line'.. they expressed their identity as they are.
@@Valkyri3Zah wait don't get me wrong I'm not trying to claim that gender itself is a result of social conditioning
I am trying to claim that gender itself is an innate characteristic of a person while the way that gender is expressed is the performative aspect, as it has qualitatively changed across different time periods and cultures
@@hecknose5506 Here is the issue i have with this theory. There is no clearly defined spectrum of what behaviour can be called 'performative' and what is 'innate'. Gender theorists have never said that. They pick random traits and fits them into their idea. Now problem is, if our biology did not allow us we would not perform the way we do. The performative aspect also determined by thousands of years of evolution. It cant separated from our body. This is why if a cis person at birth given opposite sex (due to sex deformity) STILL refuse to perform the gender expression decided by the society. ALSO trans people decide their identity WITHIN the framework of same gender expression or performance. They have not invented a completely new performance. They are debating who is male or who is female based on those same traits of cis people.
@@Valkyri3Z I would argue the reverse; gender is an arbitrary categorization of certain deterministic traits.
what you have identified in the situation of a cis person with a sex deformity is actually the perfect demonstration of this. the deterministic traits were incorrectly determined by society hence there is a massive cognitive dissonance
this is exactly WHY it is performative, because that person with the sex deformity was not the opposite gender despite definitions of gender (and how it should be performed) at the time saying otherwise
Love the first half of this talk. The issue, in plain terms, is that most people who identify as trans have not read Judith Butler, therefore their language contradicts the very discourse which justifies their identity and behavior.
He is so difficult to listen to because he just yaps and yaps and literally could have distilled it into what you just said.
Can you recommend me some of Judith Butler's book? Is she good or is she impartial
She’s definitely not impartial, she’s an architect of gender ideology.
@@fierce-green-fire8887 very true. But worth reading to understand where it all comes from. Because again, most trans people have not read the foundational literature on gender ideology. If you do, it’s not hard to understand, and it positions you so that you can counter bad/contradictory ideas from that community.
@@JLuck88 The yapping is the best part tho
Slavoj ignores the fact that the phenomena he is talking about exist on a spectrum. Just as some people are trans and some are cis, some people experience gender as a pure expression of their biology whereas some experience it as a matter of self actualisation. Both cis and trans people can fall into either group. Some experience gender as something that continually evolves and some experience it as a fixed aspect of themselves, again, these can fall into any combination of the two categories i described previously. Some people self actualise their gender by performing gender norms, some by rejecting them, again people from any combination of the above 3 groups can have either relationship with gender. Queer ideology is not a prescription for how we should think about gender, as much as its a recognition that there are no limits. We aren't machines, and the easiest way to summarise slavoj's point here is the idea that "it was meant to be" isn't to be taken literally. The kind of philosophy 5 year olds grapple with. The existence of either agency or lack of agency (for example, premeditation vs determinism) in the universe are completely compatible, and purely expressions of perspective.
You only have to see that ships are routinely given gender to understand that gender must be a social construct.
Zizek has some balls: as a communist, telling a truth to communists! Few get out alive...
@Texan White Panther Sorry, you don't even know what you are talking about. Just by thinking this you are included as a communist. As most, of the Gramscian style. As Gramsci said, "everyone will be a communist and not even know it".
"Telling the truth to whites take balls"? That must be why everyone says that to whites all the time and nothing happens to them, while if whites try to do so they will be canceled and likely arrested.
Go on following the orders of corporate mainstream media, bankers and politicians, while imagining yourself a "rebel".
@Texan White Panther All of that can easily be explained by the hallucinations you suffer thanks to your condition of Gramscian communist. Whites suffer more racism than all the other "races" combined. And the number of nazis in your country doesn't reach 2,000. While there are around 70 million Gramscian or Fabian communists, and 10 million Bolshevik communists. And communists manage the impressive feat of being _even worse_ than nazis or fascists (100 to 200 million humans executed compared to about 18 million).
I guess you even believe your president called white supremacists "fine people" (Fine People Hoax), that he said to people drink bleach (Disinfectant Hoax) and other hallucinations printed in the minds of hysterical people by the mainstream media.
@Texan White Panther @Vlad Mordekeiser come on guys. Make love not war
@Texan White Panther As I said right above citing Gramsci: all we be communists without even knowing it.
@@vladmordekeiser1054 There are actually 7 billion communists in the world they just don't know it.
Can someone put up a transcript of all zizek's vidoes. His voice is painful to the ears.
No problem for me - my ears are functioning normally
Do you want all the "err"s and "and so on and so on"s left in or cut out?
Acknowledging the influence of biological sex on behavior is crucial. However, it's essential to recognize that societal constructs often mold non-existent categories out of these biological facts-like attributing certain behaviors to XX or XY chromosomes. This oversimplification overlooks the vibrant spectrum of nature and the myriad ways individuals exist and identify. Unlike animals, humans grapple with identity and consciousness, and gender encompasses this aspect of self-recognition.
For transgender individuals, the sense of belonging to a different gender often coexists with dissatisfaction regarding their physical form. This discontent doesn't always necessitate physical alterations; it can simply involve rejecting societal perceptions. Gender deconstruction, therefore, becomes essential. It allows us to embrace the reality that being a woman or a man can encompass various identities beyond traditional norms-it's not a novel concept but a reflection of reality.
While sex bears natural outcomes that society terms as "gender," rigid categorization becomes problematic. The equation of XX sex with the woman gender identity is not universally accurate-it might hold true for the majority, but exceptions exist. Gender's origins might stem from biological factors, yet it has been simplified, constrained, and confined by categorization.
Sex is an undeniable reality-a natural phenomenon. In contrast, gender is a cultural construct-a byproduct of sex. Throughout history, gender has served to pigeonhole individuals into predefined roles, setting the stage for societal issues. Transgender individuals grapple with the misalignment between their assigned sex and gender. Some seek physical alterations, while others do not.
The root problem lies in society's fixation on delineating only two genders with specific attributes. This societal narrative forces those with diverse identities to carve out a space for themselves by introducing new identities. Perhaps, if society focused on sex solely for health reasons, we'd witness a shift away from rigid categorization. Instead, we'd cultivate an environment of acceptance, where individuals are embraced without the need to adhere to predefined gender norms, or where their unique gender identities are celebrated.
Slavoj “and so on and so on” Zizek
He just has discovered there are conservative transexual (despite he can't differenciate between transexuality and transgender), and he's got microphone and a public... qué pesado es..
lol are you serious. Zizek probably understands this better than everyone who watched this video combined.
@@HeelPower200 probably? Just because it's zizek, the wise man? Better than transfeminist? You seem not to have a clue neather...
No it's not, that's why completely separated groups of humans or tribes across the world developed similar roles to one another, because its genetic not a construct. There may be socially constructed ideas on top of it but at the core its completely natural and unavoidable
That doesn't really counter the argument at all. Gender can still be seen as a socially developed construct, even when it developed the same way in most cultures. That doesn't make it "natural" but a natural result of history.
@@TheMagicDragonHD I'm making the point that regardless of what culture you come from men and women have biological traits that are expressed differently depending on the environment. Why is that such a bad thing?
@@shogunhashishin I get what you're saying. And I would agree that the way the historical and social roles of men and women have developed is, at its core, down to biology. But in the sense that basic biology (strength / motherhood) has determined these roles, not that the "ideal" role of the strong man and the caring woman is something biological itself. However, if your thesis would be right, I wouldn't regard it as a bad thing.
@@shogunhashishin > There may be socially constructed ideas on top of it but at the core its completely natural and unavoidable
People typically say 'sex' is the genetic part (XX / XY chromosomes), and 'gender' is the socially constructed idea on top of sex (men look & act a certain way, women look & act a certain way)
When you continually ask 'is that person a male, if so why', it's very difficult to come up with rules which apply universally and match a certain look to a certain set of chromosomes, hence the idea that gender is (at least primarily) a social construct
For example: Is that person a male? Well yes, he has short hair (but women may have short hair also)
Is that person a male? Well yes, he doesn't have breasts (but women may also have no / tiny breasts)
Is that person a male? Well yes, he wears men's clothing (but women may also wear men's clothing)
Is that person a male? Well yes, he has a penis (but EVEN THIS has examples where someone with XX chromosomes posesses a penis, see XX male syndrome)
Yes, there are *general* differences between the genders - e.g. women *usually* have breasts, long hair, women's clothing, are physically weaker, have more mothering tendencies, etc. Therefore, in the past we've developed (constructed) the categories of man / woman to distinguish between them.
In the modern day though, these categories don't really serve a practical purpose, and instead end up excluding the edge cases. This generally causes harm to those who feel unjustly excluded (e.g. gender dysphoria).
Since gender is a social construct, and the purpose of a social construct is to serve humans, why not just... widen the definition such that anyone who feels like a woman can identify as a woman, & can go about their life doing whatever they want rather than constantly feeling like they have / do certain things which don't fit their category?
@@tomcheng3903 your answer is exactly the problem Tom, looks. We are more than looks and male and female are not just visual stimuli. How many born blind people have gender identity issues?
The fact is completely unconnected tribal groups across the planet ended up dividing labour between eachother based off of the genetic strengths and weaknesses of the genders and they ended up with very very similar roles for eachother. They didnt get together and work out how to oppress people in the 21st century with self identity issues.
ab: 4:34
"Self-important TH-cam videos are a social construct."
It's pretty interesting to see people being so confused about the concept of gender and often it is being confused with biological sex.
When it comes to gender neurology, psychological identity, upbringing/nurture and the social understanding of it within a society all play a part.
It's a way to big and complicated topic to be discussed in a short video, since it is a fundamental part of every human being.
In short tho we can generally say that trans people are who say they are, and it can be proven neurologically.
And when it comes to the topic of "is gender a social construct" answer is partially yes partially no, but that wouldn't cause such a huge debate so people seem to ignore it.
as a whole tho very intriguing comment by Zizek his perspectives are thought provoking.
I totally understand why people are so confused about it, and why they mix gender and sex. We use the same words to talk about gender and sex, it's male female. Why not use different words when referring to gender and sex? Because trans people believe that what they think they are is reality, and if they identify as girls, that means they're girls. If we started use different words, it would be considered "transphobic" because gender identity would be named differently (and perceived as inferior) than sexual identity. This is nonsense.
@@tdb517 ughm no?
We use words to describe the gender expression of a person, a person can be feminine or masculine for example.
Neigther of the description necessarily states that we are talking about a biological male or a biological women tho.
@@katfed8861 The possible answers to "what is your sex" and "what is your gender" are the same, male or female (or even more for genders). Masculine or feminine is a characteristic of gender expression, it is not a gender.
@@tdb517 when somebody asks what is your sex they are asking about biolgical sex, when we talk about gender we talk about the social part generally.
If a trans person feels like they are male even tho their biolgical sex is female they are still a man. Same goes for Transwomen.
When you see a male in the streets you recognize them generally because of the way they act out their gender identity, the way they Express this is what we call a man, you do not check for each persons gentalia to see if they are acting according to their biological sex
@@katfed8861 All I'm saying is that there's a great confusion between gender and sex, partly because of the vocabulary. We should use different words for the masculine gender and the masculine sex, it would clarify a lot of things and help us move forward in understanding how complex gender and sex are. Right now my feeling is that, instead of fighting it, the confusion is maintained by trans activists for some reasons.
For example, there are reasons why the is sex written on ID cards, because if you have an accident, doctors will not give you the same medicine if you're male or female. The gender you identify to is completely irrelevant. Yet trans activists want that gender is put on ID cards instead of sex. This has a completely different meaning and purpose.
The answer is yes, but actually no. There are lots of things in culture that are socially constructed, like how in western culture it's blue for boys and pink for girls. But the social constructions are built on biological differences. Put aside the obvious differentiation in society due to the fact the males and females have different roles when it comes to procreation, there is the other obvious problem that humans are sexually dimorphous, which means the larger and more powerful males won't be the same as the females. And on top of that we have verified differences in instinctual behavior and attitudes between the two sexes. And since sex and gender correlate pretty much 99 percent of the time, people who claim that gender is a social construct are the same level of intellect and willful ignorance as people who think the earth is five thousand years old, or that evolution is is lie.
The question is, why are supposedly educated and intelligent people showing themselves to exactly the same as other people considered pig ignorant? And the answer is identical, belief. people who think the planet is five thousand years old or that evolution did not happen need to believe this stupid thing because if they don't then their belief that the Bible is the word of god cannot be true. Likewise people who think all differences must be due to systemic power structures cannot believe that there are innate differences between gender because then their beliefs can't be true. But in both cases the believers are wrong and are determined to ignore reality, leaving the rest of us to put up with their moronic and ignorant bullshit.
Is it me or he is mixing gender and Queer ideologies? Not all transgender or transsexual people agreed with non fixed identities.
No i noticed that too
If we return to what Karl Mannheim once called the modern epistemology, where there is an object, which is not identical to the subjects opinion, it’s obvious that sex is defined in every cell in a persons body. A man has XY chromosomes, and a woman XX, which defines their bodies. Hegel preferred to speak about a dialectic between objective and subject, which means the subject defines the object but that the object also change the subjects definition. Which means that ”gender roles” can change in different cultures, but also that objective physical facts actually makes how people define themselves. In all cultures in the world men are seen as strong and powerful, and women are seen as less strong, smaller and therefore protected by men. These gender roles are of course social constructs but are depending on the fact that most women actually are smaller and less strong than men. That’s a part of the dialectic between objective and subjective traits.
Those who use the “x is a social construct” method of deconstructing an established or traditionally held belief, set themselves for a hard gotcha...
Because invalidating something based on its socially constructed origins, would imply that only that which occurs in nature is valid.
Man, being a sophisticated creature naturally creates and invents. The culmination of those things that man’s brain naturally created can be summed up as culture.
Culture thus occurs naturally, and the global majority of two gender archetypes would therefore be a natural thing for man to express as part of his programming.
This phenomenon of the global majority (I can’t stress majority-not-all enough here) of the human population having a two gender norm despite so many cultures having no contact would be an astonishing coincidence. An astonishing coincidence where the most far removed cultures of the world still managed to come to a generally (not exact) same conclusion on the question of the genders.
You are right that it's not a coincidence, but the meaning of this coincidence doesn't have to do with a natural/primordial/fundamental/irreducible state of things. Rather, it has to do with the necessary and functional self-divisions that groups of humans make as they encounter problems that threaten their survival and well-being. Sociologists speak of this in terms of "divisions of labor" in society. Our strength as a species lies in our ability to work together, but to do so we need to get organized.
The visual/phenotypical differences between "male" and "female" bodies offer one of the most readily available cues for such divisions (we are very visual animals afterall). Therefore, the argument that the "two gender norm" is an "astonishing coincidence where the most far removed cultures of the world still managed to come to a generally (not exact) same conclusion on the question of the genders," as you put, is in a way based of the same cognitive premise behind the conspiracy theories that say that all the different pyramids from different cultures around the world were built by aliens because it cannot be a coincidence that they are so similar. Well, the real, simpler, more scientifically coherent meaning of this "coincidence" is that piling rocks atop each other in a pyramidal shape is easier than in any other shape. Similarly, if different groups divided themselves by gender, then this division is not natural in some anachronistic sense but functional in a situational sense.
To further support this, take the fact that in one of the sides of the traditional two-gender division there is the types of bodies capable of effectively reproducing our species/birthing children. This is the ultimate form of labor (hence the phrase "going in labor") and our ancestors definitely perceived its importance. The prominence of physical strength in another, but not entirely different, set of bodies, reduced the question of group organization to whom could enforce their perceptions upon whom. Note, then, as many historical and anthropological studies have shown, that the male reliance on violence wasn't significant enough in some cultures, which simply allowed for other types of divisions, based on other references, to arise.
What contemporary gender theory tries to propose is that today we can move on from more primitive forms of organization to new ones since the game of survival for us today looks a lot different than thousands of years ago. Our future is no longer determined just by whether we'll all be able to eat and reproduce (for many, and hopefully soon for all, this isn't even a concern) but by whether we'll life a fulfilling life. The social pressures to adequate to ancient forms of organization can be destructive to many people's mental health and thus should be normatively respected.
@@JoaoPedro-jr8pf Well said.
Also, recognizing that something is a social/historical construct doesn't necesarly means it is "invalid". This statement would only indicate the way in wich it came into being and the way in wich it could go out of it, the cultural nature of it, and this is necesary overall beacuse it easy for humans to believe that the things we are used to do are eternal, which tends to selfperpetuate our problems and condemn us to our own stupidity.