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My understanding is that in "queer theory" gender is 100% socially constructed. This essentially means "women" are socially constructed. It is hard to have fe

My understanding is that in "queer theory" gender is 100% socially constructed. This essentially means "women" are socially constructed. It is hard to have feminism if you don't have "women". This seems to be at the core of the "terf" conflict. Ironically in critical race theory race is also socially constructed but racism forces race on people and therefore you must defeat racism before you can get to socially constructed race. This all quite complex so apologies if I didn't get that quite right.

RNCTX 5y ago
It's not quite that simple, in that it's not a nonsensical statement that there's no difference between the biological sexes as the zealots on the opposing side perceive it to be. It's more that the cultural perceptions and behaviors are socially constructed. The foundations of all of this are in Judith Butler (not coincidentally at Stanford) and Michel Foucault (not coincidentally French). In terms of race these two intersect (pun intended) with Kimberle Crenshaw. You're on to the crux of the issue with the word "forces" though, because the abstract consideration of all of these things is a question of power and coercion. So people who find themselves at odds with the proposed new norms would be wise to read these foundational texts to understand where their adversaries are coming from. In terms of race, this crosses paths with gender theory in the ideas of a professor named Kimberle Crenshaw, whose ideas were used to make the "preferential treatment" case back in a round of General Motors layoffs specifically, in which it was argued that by virtue of belonging to multiple disadvantaged groups, black women who were to be laid off from factory jobs were being unfairly persecuted (because the layoffs were done by seniority due to the union contract, and due to segregation and gender discrimination it was impossible for women or black people to have seniority at the time). Which of course is true, on the surface. It was impossible for women, and black women in particular, to have seniority as GM factory workers. But it is all a very overt exercise in intentionally disregarding the root cause of the factory layoffs, and in any case was predictably rejected by the US courts who refused to oppress one group instead of another in court rather than in commerce. Similar court cases have failed for similar reasons in the EU. The fact that she was challenging a union contract in court is why she works at any Ivy League school which is funded by corporations who very much do not like union contracts. Similarly, tech companies sending out transgender employees to do their most publicly distasteful deeds (like Microsoft recently did with the .NET foundation) is not coincidental to Judith Butler being at Stanford. If Judith Butler's ideas were not amenable to the goals of west coast corporations Judith Butler wouldn't be at Stanford. The root cause of the factory layoffs in the intersectionality case is the US empire post-WW2 had devalued its own currency to finance misguided and short-sighted wars like Korea and Vietnam. And the ruling class of the US was not going to pay for its own failed policies, it wanted its employees to pay and that's precisely what Jimmy Carter gave said ruling class, in the form of Paul Volcker. All of this is worth looking at in considering how these cultural theories have managed to position themselves so favorably in the eyes of corporations and 3 letter government security/surveillance agencies. Culture wars are a grand misdirection, employed by corporations and governments to turn people to any sort of conflict that minimizes the class conflict which they truly fear.
- greenail 5y ago
  > So people who find themselves at odds with the proposed new norms would be wise to read these foundational texts to understand where their adversaries are coming from. I strongly agree but none of it is easy reading and I doubt the average person has the time to understand the nuances.
  - RNCTX 5y ago
    Agreed, that's the catch. It is difficult reading. I would argue that without a grasp of Hegel's basic theories you can't even start, and without a grasp of Marx's basic theories you can't get from Hegel to the modern age. For anyone reading the comments, one of the best sources I've found, that remind me very much of my own days in formal humanities education so much that I find myself listening to the lectures more than once, is a youtube channel from a professor in the Pacific Northwest named Wes Cecil. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9ff15w4ufviWfv9UfIuByA https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9ff15w4ufviWfv9UfIuByA He has a whole series of one-hour public lectures (as in... targeted to the general public who may or may not have a humanities background themselves, not humanities university students who do) which cover the basic concepts of the most prominent figures in modern PHIL. ps: he didn't get to Hegel until 2019 so it's not in the PHIL playlist on his channel [1] 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNhCCXlaR2s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNhCCXlaR2s
tiredofcomp 5y ago
> My understanding is that in "queer theory" gender is 100% socially constructed. This essentially means "women" are socially constructed. It is hard to have feminism if you don't have "women". This seems to be at the core of the "terf" conflict. TERFs don't actually disagree with this. They call themselves "gender critical" because they believe all gender roles are socially constructed and that the gender role we call "woman" was constructed so that females would be weaker than males and subservient to them. So when they see someone choosing to join that gender role they become very irked by it and can only explain it in terms of mental sickness or perversion. Likewise they see Female to Male trans people as somewhat more commendable since they are trying to escape the oppression of womanhood, but also bad because they are joining the enemy. Since Janice Raymond in the 70's their idea has been that they can completely eliminate transsexualism by abolishing all gender role distinctions. Now in practice, TERFs/Gender Crits behave exactly like any other religious conservatives regarding gender. You don't exactly see them encouraging boys to dress like princesses but still identify as boys do you? Instead you see them championing people like Ken Zucker who advocates for feminine boys to be forced to behave in a masculine way, going so far as to deny them access to their mothers in some cases lest she encourage their girlish behavior. Instead they just advocate that gender isn't real therefore sex determines everything forever without making any attempt to open up sex roles to more modes of acceptable behavior. Mainstream transgender organizations view gender as socially constructed but also related to one's own preferences and personality. Because of that gender may not always align with sex. They do not conflate sex and gender and do acknowledge that sex is a biological reality. They also don't imply that to have feminine preferences is to be lesser than someone having masculine preferences. The notion that transgender people think sex isn't real is a straw man argument. You can find people who say things like this but they don't represent mainstream thought. What you're more likely to find really is that some trans people and organizations point to disorders of sexual development like androgen insensitivity syndrome, kleinfelter's, etc.... as a way of selling the idea that sex isn't so simple that people should have their entire sense of being and self expression stifled by the size of their gametes. To some people this line of thinking is persuasive, to others it seems like a sellout in that it has an element of nature over nurture to it, and to others still like conservatives and TERFs it's frustrating because it sort of messes with their "biological reality of sex" high ground they've tried to claim thus their most common refrain is to say that such disorders are so rare that they don't matter. (DSDs are about as common as red hair in the US population so make of that what you will). Nevertheless, even this type of argument is a far cry from saying that "sex isn't real" which is what trans people are often accused of.
yanderekko 5y ago
>This essentially means "women" are socially constructed. It is hard to have feminism if you don't have "women". This seems to be at the core of the "terf" conflict. Yeah, one thing I've noticed lately is that TRAs seem to struggle to provide a definition of what a "woman" is nowadays. It's apparently "a person who identifies as a woman", and that's literally it. Maybe there are some caveats for people who "obviously" adopt the title in some sort of bad faith (eg. to get lower insurance rates), but I imagine that even this makes activists uneasy. This is why we're seeing a spate of non-gendered neologisms being pushed - "birthing person", etc.
- tiredofcomp 5y ago
  > This is why we're seeing a spate of non-gendered neologisms being pushed - "birthing person", etc. Almost all of these neologisms are in place to create conceptual space for trans men in AFAB medical contexts and yet almost all of the criticisms are directed at trans women. The fixation on trans women at all times speaks to something more going on beneath the surface in these debates. I think that something is just digust and anger looking for post-facto reasons to lash out. Like I said in other comments, I think self-id without any qualifications is "off". But the arguments being levied against it come attached to a lot of other arguments that are clearly motivated by hate and disgust at trans women rather than concern over this particular topic. Like the people against self-id would also like to make it so that a trans woman who transitioned when she was 12 and adopted a child couldn't access a women's shelter for her and her child if she were to be abused by her husband someday just because she has a Y chromosome. This is obviously just as "off" as saying that any guy who says they are a woman can play college women's volleyball the next day. Like seriously, "gender critical" people are so dead set on sex sex sex that they forget that most trans people aren't TRAs but rather just want to live normal lives and are rather invisible in society. The changes gender crits want to make will make their lives much more difficult which I think is the point right? Janice Raymond said that she wanted to see transsexualism extinguished by making it as costly and difficult as possible to be trans more or less in her book The Transsexual Empire.... It's cruelty for the sake of marginalizing a group out of existence. Very ugly stuff. If it weren't for that, I think the debate around self-id would be a lot less fraught. It's depressing to me as a person who transitioned pre-2010. Life was more comfortable before all of this rage was unleashed on us. I went from never having to think about being trans to suddenly 15 years in having to think of it nearly every day due to the constant attacks and vitriol in the news. Like even my husband's parents suddenly became open transphobes which was a shock. I've known them for years. Something very mean is going on that goes far beyond poor miss Stock's academic freedom.
krapp 5y ago
>My understanding is that in "queer theory" gender is 100% socially constructed. Yes. Gender is a social construct. Sex is a biological construct. Sex is not gender, and gender is not sex. They are typically correlated, but are not the same. >This essentially means "women" are socially constructed. To a degree, yes. Obviously humans are primates that display sexual dimorphism by which the females of the species ideally possess a vagina, womb and two x chromosomes, along with other attributes differentiating them biologically from males. But "woman" is an overloaded term which has never exclusively referred to biological sex, but also to the roles, duties and behavior by which societies recognize and classify gender. And the relationship between gender and sex is a cultural, not biological, imperative which can differ from culture to culture, and can change within a culture over time.

RNCTX 5y ago

It's not quite that simple, in that it's not a nonsensical statement that there's no difference between the biological sexes as the zealots on the opposing side perceive it to be. It's more that the cultural perceptions and behaviors are socially constructed. The foundations of all of this are in Judith Butler (not coincidentally at Stanford) and Michel Foucault (not coincidentally French). In terms of race these two intersect (pun intended) with Kimberle Crenshaw. You're on to the crux of the issue with the word "forces" though, because the abstract consideration of all of these things is a question of power and coercion. So people who find themselves at odds with the proposed new norms would be wise to read these foundational texts to understand where their adversaries are coming from. In terms of race, this crosses paths with gender theory in the ideas of a professor named Kimberle Crenshaw, whose ideas were used to make the "preferential treatment" case back in a round of General Motors layoffs specifically, in which it was argued that by virtue of belonging to multiple disadvantaged groups, black women who were to be laid off from factory jobs were being unfairly persecuted (because the layoffs were done by seniority due to the union contract, and due to segregation and gender discrimination it was impossible for women or black people to have seniority at the time). Which of course is true, on the surface. It was impossible for women, and black women in particular, to have seniority as GM factory workers. But it is all a very overt exercise in intentionally disregarding the root cause of the factory layoffs, and in any case was predictably rejected by the US courts who refused to oppress one group instead of another in court rather than in commerce. Similar court cases have failed for similar reasons in the EU. The fact that she was challenging a union contract in court is why she works at any Ivy League school which is funded by corporations who very much do not like union contracts. Similarly, tech companies sending out transgender employees to do their most publicly distasteful deeds (like Microsoft recently did with the .NET foundation) is not coincidental to Judith Butler being at Stanford. If Judith Butler's ideas were not amenable to the goals of west coast corporations Judith Butler wouldn't be at Stanford. The root cause of the factory layoffs in the intersectionality case is the US empire post-WW2 had devalued its own currency to finance misguided and short-sighted wars like Korea and Vietnam. And the ruling class of the US was not going to pay for its own failed policies, it wanted its employees to pay and that's precisely what Jimmy Carter gave said ruling class, in the form of Paul Volcker. All of this is worth looking at in considering how these cultural theories have managed to position themselves so favorably in the eyes of corporations and 3 letter government security/surveillance agencies. Culture wars are a grand misdirection, employed by corporations and governments to turn people to any sort of conflict that minimizes the class conflict which they truly fear.

greenail 5y ago
> So people who find themselves at odds with the proposed new norms would be wise to read these foundational texts to understand where their adversaries are coming from. I strongly agree but none of it is easy reading and I doubt the average person has the time to understand the nuances.
- RNCTX 5y ago
  Agreed, that's the catch. It is difficult reading. I would argue that without a grasp of Hegel's basic theories you can't even start, and without a grasp of Marx's basic theories you can't get from Hegel to the modern age. For anyone reading the comments, one of the best sources I've found, that remind me very much of my own days in formal humanities education so much that I find myself listening to the lectures more than once, is a youtube channel from a professor in the Pacific Northwest named Wes Cecil. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9ff15w4ufviWfv9UfIuByA https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9ff15w4ufviWfv9UfIuByA He has a whole series of one-hour public lectures (as in... targeted to the general public who may or may not have a humanities background themselves, not humanities university students who do) which cover the basic concepts of the most prominent figures in modern PHIL. ps: he didn't get to Hegel until 2019 so it's not in the PHIL playlist on his channel [1] 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNhCCXlaR2s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNhCCXlaR2s

tiredofcomp 5y ago

> My understanding is that in "queer theory" gender is 100% socially constructed. This essentially means "women" are socially constructed. It is hard to have feminism if you don't have "women". This seems to be at the core of the "terf" conflict. TERFs don't actually disagree with this. They call themselves "gender critical" because they believe all gender roles are socially constructed and that the gender role we call "woman" was constructed so that females would be weaker than males and subservient to them. So when they see someone choosing to join that gender role they become very irked by it and can only explain it in terms of mental sickness or perversion. Likewise they see Female to Male trans people as somewhat more commendable since they are trying to escape the oppression of womanhood, but also bad because they are joining the enemy. Since Janice Raymond in the 70's their idea has been that they can completely eliminate transsexualism by abolishing all gender role distinctions. Now in practice, TERFs/Gender Crits behave exactly like any other religious conservatives regarding gender. You don't exactly see them encouraging boys to dress like princesses but still identify as boys do you? Instead you see them championing people like Ken Zucker who advocates for feminine boys to be forced to behave in a masculine way, going so far as to deny them access to their mothers in some cases lest she encourage their girlish behavior. Instead they just advocate that gender isn't real therefore sex determines everything forever without making any attempt to open up sex roles to more modes of acceptable behavior. Mainstream transgender organizations view gender as socially constructed but also related to one's own preferences and personality. Because of that gender may not always align with sex. They do not conflate sex and gender and do acknowledge that sex is a biological reality. They also don't imply that to have feminine preferences is to be lesser than someone having masculine preferences. The notion that transgender people think sex isn't real is a straw man argument. You can find people who say things like this but they don't represent mainstream thought. What you're more likely to find really is that some trans people and organizations point to disorders of sexual development like androgen insensitivity syndrome, kleinfelter's, etc.... as a way of selling the idea that sex isn't so simple that people should have their entire sense of being and self expression stifled by the size of their gametes. To some people this line of thinking is persuasive, to others it seems like a sellout in that it has an element of nature over nurture to it, and to others still like conservatives and TERFs it's frustrating because it sort of messes with their "biological reality of sex" high ground they've tried to claim thus their most common refrain is to say that such disorders are so rare that they don't matter. (DSDs are about as common as red hair in the US population so make of that what you will). Nevertheless, even this type of argument is a far cry from saying that "sex isn't real" which is what trans people are often accused of.

yanderekko 5y ago

>This essentially means "women" are socially constructed. It is hard to have feminism if you don't have "women". This seems to be at the core of the "terf" conflict. Yeah, one thing I've noticed lately is that TRAs seem to struggle to provide a definition of what a "woman" is nowadays. It's apparently "a person who identifies as a woman", and that's literally it. Maybe there are some caveats for people who "obviously" adopt the title in some sort of bad faith (eg. to get lower insurance rates), but I imagine that even this makes activists uneasy. This is why we're seeing a spate of non-gendered neologisms being pushed - "birthing person", etc.

tiredofcomp 5y ago
> This is why we're seeing a spate of non-gendered neologisms being pushed - "birthing person", etc. Almost all of these neologisms are in place to create conceptual space for trans men in AFAB medical contexts and yet almost all of the criticisms are directed at trans women. The fixation on trans women at all times speaks to something more going on beneath the surface in these debates. I think that something is just digust and anger looking for post-facto reasons to lash out. Like I said in other comments, I think self-id without any qualifications is "off". But the arguments being levied against it come attached to a lot of other arguments that are clearly motivated by hate and disgust at trans women rather than concern over this particular topic. Like the people against self-id would also like to make it so that a trans woman who transitioned when she was 12 and adopted a child couldn't access a women's shelter for her and her child if she were to be abused by her husband someday just because she has a Y chromosome. This is obviously just as "off" as saying that any guy who says they are a woman can play college women's volleyball the next day. Like seriously, "gender critical" people are so dead set on sex sex sex that they forget that most trans people aren't TRAs but rather just want to live normal lives and are rather invisible in society. The changes gender crits want to make will make their lives much more difficult which I think is the point right? Janice Raymond said that she wanted to see transsexualism extinguished by making it as costly and difficult as possible to be trans more or less in her book The Transsexual Empire.... It's cruelty for the sake of marginalizing a group out of existence. Very ugly stuff. If it weren't for that, I think the debate around self-id would be a lot less fraught. It's depressing to me as a person who transitioned pre-2010. Life was more comfortable before all of this rage was unleashed on us. I went from never having to think about being trans to suddenly 15 years in having to think of it nearly every day due to the constant attacks and vitriol in the news. Like even my husband's parents suddenly became open transphobes which was a shock. I've known them for years. Something very mean is going on that goes far beyond poor miss Stock's academic freedom.

krapp 5y ago

>My understanding is that in "queer theory" gender is 100% socially constructed. Yes. Gender is a social construct. Sex is a biological construct. Sex is not gender, and gender is not sex. They are typically correlated, but are not the same. >This essentially means "women" are socially constructed. To a degree, yes. Obviously humans are primates that display sexual dimorphism by which the females of the species ideally possess a vagina, womb and two x chromosomes, along with other attributes differentiating them biologically from males. But "woman" is an overloaded term which has never exclusively referred to biological sex, but also to the roles, duties and behavior by which societies recognize and classify gender. And the relationship between gender and sex is a cultural, not biological, imperative which can differ from culture to culture, and can change within a culture over time.