Absolutely brilliant Alta! You see, you connect the dots, and you bravely enlighten. All of the items you mention here are corroborated in spades by my own teaching experience at a major university. The word propoganda is too good for what has happened. Brain-washing is more apt.
Yes the academy’s pied-piper hold on the ambitious young minds of the future ‘opinion-forming’ elite – including crucially the teaching profession - has proceeded unchecked, such that its seductive virtue-signalling mentality has now taken hold in most graduate-entry professional walks of life. And an Academia-Media Complex - a feedback loop between an overwhelmingly left-wing academy and a largely left-wing MSM – has softened up enough of what used to be called ‘the workers’ to keep the Progressive show on the road. The sheep dip is an especially powerful brew in the humanities and social sciences from which background the future professional and managerial elite is primarily drawn. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers
Agreed. Alta accurately articulates how woke ideology supplanted biological reality yet won’t subject itself to similar Deconstruction now that they have institutional Power. It’s cuz my discipline - rhetoric/composition - is 4 decades deep in postmodernism and now antiracism.
Loved this piece! Thank you for opening a reverie of my own graduate school days in the 1980s with too, too many lovers of Derrida and Foucault. Thankfully, I missed Judith at the time. I think growing up in the military, meeting different people, and gravitating towards interesting people with life in their eyes, then some (merciful) grounding in Mathematics and Linguistics — all this made me less likely to fall prey to the privileges being offered. I became a radfem and have been telling people to go to hell ever since.
What a desperately needed breath of fresh air in this stifling, fetid intellectual climate in which I and other reasonable people find ourselves gasping for common sense.
Quite superb, Dr Ifland (and my apologies for addressing you as 'Ms' hitherto; I somehow missed that you had a doctorate). So much of this resonates, and made me laugh too. Your friend who wished he was gay reminded me of Melvyn Shamburger in my novel, whose wife Frida urges him to 'go gay'. When he shows his reluctance, she chides him for not even making an effort. But this is a brilliant analysis of what's going on--I'd better not say a 'scarily brilliant' one! You're quite right about all these elitists and their luxury beliefs. We can only hope that soon the hypocrisy of these people will be unmasked for all to see.
Don't hold your breath (regarding my friend)! As for JB, she never debates. She only talks with sycophants who uphold her ideas. Just do a search online and you'll see that there is not a single debate in which she discusses with anyone of a different opinion. Never. And in all the videos I've seen, she repeats over and over that everybody who rejects "gender" is a fascist.
Well, this argument certainly checks out--brava Alta! Some lingering mist here--whether common usage of the term "university" is romantic/aspirational or downright fraudulent, it's impossible to know whether we're expecting too little or too much from the academy.
I don't see how Butler's supposedly universal "forms of gendered existence" could possibly be "constructed" in non-Western languages, where grammatical gender is very much the exception rather than the rule. Take Swahili, one of the most widely spoken African languages, which has no separate pronouns for "he", "she", "it", just a single 3rd-person singular pronoun applicable to any referent, be it animal, mineral, or vegetable, concrete or abstract, male or female (the same as in non-Indo-European European languages like Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Basque, in which likewise it would be linguistically impossible to state your pronouns or "misgender" someone). On the other hand, Swahili has no fewer than eighteen noun classes, but here the main "binaries" are animate/inanimate, animal/plant. There's even a noun class for things that have an extended outline, but no class for male or female or anything approaching them. There's probably a good argument for "gender theory" being a form of Anglophone linguistic colonialism/imperialism/hegemony, given that it takes the 3rd-person-pronoun situation of English to be universally the case and imposes it as some kind of self-evident truth on languages and cultures where it cannot make any sense.
Thank you for this informed comment! This is exactly the kind of discussion I was hoping my piece to generate. Unfortunately, I don't know any African languages, but I have read enough to have had an idea of the things you mention. And I knew that Butler's comment about "a vocabulary for forms of gendered existence" was based on some extremely vague notion of non Western cultures having a different way of dealing with "gender." As you clearly explain, if one knows something about these languages, one understands that the very concept of binary (male/female) versus non binary is based on a Western cultural presupposition, and the idea of a "neutral," non binary pronoun (they) is Anglophone. It is possible, though, that Butler may have had a vague idea of the existence of the Swahiili 3rd person singular pronoun applicable to any referent. But the way she is trying to enroll others (namely the "Global South") into a demonstration of her theory is very dishonest and unintelligent. If these other "forms of gendered existence" really were about what she is trying to prove (a third, non-binary type of human being), I am convinced that the very people whose languages included these supposed "non-binary" "forms of gendered existence" would have discovered themselves the existence of this type of human being. They would not have waited for Dr Butler to come and enlighten them. You touch on the crux of the matter: that we are dealing with an Anglophone colonialist/imperialist mindset, which belongs to the very people who can't stop lecturing us all on 'anti-colonialism."
Yes, the whole theory is based on a Western cultural presupposition, which is then taken to be universal and foisted on non-Western cultures, in a blatant example of the colonialist attitude of intellectual superiority that the theorists otherwise decry. If a language doesn't have separate gendered 3rd-person pronouns, it doesn't mean that the single pronoun applicable to any referent is "non-binary" in the English sense of the "neutral" "they", since the language in question does not possess a masculine/feminine binary in the first place, and you cannot negate something that does not exist; logically, a thing cannot be neutral in the absence of at least two other opposing things to which it might stand in relation. In other words, if Butler et al. are trying to enroll languages from the Global South into a demonstration of the theory, it would be deeply flawed linguistically and logically. I admit not to having read any works on "gender", but it seems to me that the theory could only have arisen within English, given the linguistic anomaly of the language having lost grammatical gender, i.e., classes of inflection, but preserved gendered 3rd-person-singular pronouns, with the result that "he" and "she" are now assigned solely to human beings (for the sake of argument, we can ignore other uses, such as for pets) and have created a fixation or obsession that makes no sense in other languages. After all, in a language where masculine and feminine pronouns are also assigned to tables, chairs, onions, puddles, spoons, slugs etc., it would be difficult to argue that "gender" is somehow socially constructed or innate, in other words that it derives from some extra-linguistic quality of the referent in itself.
I think you gave here the most cogent explanation of why the concept of a "gender identity" is so flawed: because it is entirely dependent on being an English-speaker. You demonstrated, by using logic and knowledge of linguistics/other languages, that we are dealing here with a type of flagrant cultural imperialism. Chapeau! I am going to quote you from now on. This is a brilliant explanation.
As I said, I've read little if anything about gender identity, but it strikes me that the whole thing relies on the fallacy that the gendered pronouns of English denote an extra-linguistic truth by virtue of their being third-person and therefore somehow objective. The theory collapses as a philosophical project as soon as you try to superimpose it on a language in which the masculine/feminine binary doesn't exist grammatically and which cannot provide the "objectivity" of separate and distinct third-person pronouns. In which case, identity is left only with first-person, subjective statements and the copula, predication, i.e., statements such as "the present king of France is bald" or "the world is round" or "I am Napoleon" or "grass is green" or "fire is wet", which may or may not correspond with an extra-linguistic reality but cannot logically be identified with any objective truth.
Again, well stated. And this is the reason why, even though Trans people exist in other societies, it is only in English-speaking societies that these people and the activists are so invested in "the pronouns," which they expect to be treated with some kind of religious piousness. The "pronouns" have become the Absolute signifier of the objective existence of this "identity." It is both hilarious and symptomatic that they are always listing TWO pronouns (like they/them) or she/her etc.. No one has ever explained why two, why not one or three?? The TWO pronouns are like a Freudian manifestation of their belief in the inherent connection between grammar and human binarism. They unconsciously believe that English grammar must be the language of God (or Nature)--even though they don't believe in God or Nature.
One could probably construct a typology of languages in which there were three classes: (1) languages in which everything is gendered; (2) languages in which nothing is gendered; and (3) languages in which only human beings are gendered. Obviously, one would have to have a familiarity with every language that has ever been spoken to be able to state such a case categorically, but it may well be that class (3) has only one member, namely English. Anyway, the fact that class (3) is such an anomaly makes it all the more perplexing that the proponents of "the pronouns" are so invested in them as some kind of pre-linguistic, essential truth, whereas in fact they are purely relative to English. They are incapable of thinking outside of English, and even if they do engage in linguistic comparison, they take English to be the base or standard against which all other languages are measured. In other words, they both fall prey to the conceptual blindness of monolingualism and perpetuate the global linguistic hegemony of English.
Apropos of how gender theory is English-language-dependent, an exacerbation of how English-speakers' thinking in general is shaped by the fact that the pronouns "he" and "she" are assigned solely to humans, I remember an English mistranslation of the following lines from a Romanian poem: "mă tem că ai să te ascunzi într-un ochi străin, / şi el o să se-nchidă cu o frunză de pelin." The translator took "el" to refer not to "un ochi străin" but to a person, with the result that instead of the eye closing with an eyelid-like wormwood leaf, a man improbably wrapped in the said leaf pops up in the translation. In other words, the translator reflexively took the 3rd-person singular masculine pronoun to refer to a human, even where it made no sense whatever. The problem with "gender" seems to be that it takes this specifically English linguistic bias as the basis for a universal, extra-linguistic theory.
Again, excellent points! I am so grateful that we are having this discussion! In fact, I have intuited all the points you are making here, but wasn't quite able to phrase them in the coherent way you put them. This sentence "Gender theory is English-language-dependent, an exacerbation of how English-speakers' thinking in general is shaped by the fact that the pronouns "he" and "she" are assigned solely to humans" together with "in a language where masculine and feminine pronouns are also assigned to [objects] it would be difficult to argue that "gender" is somehow socially constructed or innate, in other words that it derives from some extra-linguistic quality of the referent in itself" are the best demonstration I've ever read that "gender" is an American (Anglophone) concept. To insist (like my friend in this essay or JB) that if you refuse this concept there is something wrong with you is to behave like a neo-colonialist.
I have come to the belief that when someone preaches and passionately defends a philosophy as if it were a part of that person, that is because the philosophy actually is part of them. It consists of the story of that individual's struggles in life, the perspectives forged in fear, pain and unresolved personal conflicts, as well as in class privilege and other external circumstances, as you explain in your article. Judith Butler is a very masculine looking woman who apparently has not yet reached a clear understanding or acceptance of who she is relative to conventional expectations of feminine appearance. She wants to overgeneralize her own struggle to the entire world, redefining the global population rather than making sense of who she is as an individual who doesn't conform to concrete, reductionistic ideas about what a woman can be.
You are right. In fact, we all have a tendency to generalize based on our own experience. And people who go througjh personal struggles more than others.
Great essay. And I love seeing Thoreau and Clarissa Pinkola Estes side by side in your analysis of your former friend's discourse. The language is very neo-Sentimental, as if these writers were trying to revive something from the American 1850s: stylistic bombast and emotional force, rhetoric toppling over logic in an overflow of carefully constructed "fellow feeling" among "allies."
Yes, the Thoreau reference was pretty humorous. I love Walden. But reading it as a mature adult, some of it is just completely over the top self-indulgence bordering on narcissism. Along the lines of "I'm completely above the realm of common society. I don't need to follow the rules everyone else does (those are for the unenlightened). And I can basically create my own truth and values essentially out of thin air. The self is inviolate." That's not everything, but that is one theme. And there are echoes of that way of thinking in woke gender ideology. Makes sense because of the through lines from Emerson/Thoreau and then on down to Nietzche who the postmodernists eventually picked up and ran with (I'm skipping over some people, but that's the general lineage).
Interesting... Thanks for sharing your thoughts on revisiting Walden. It's been a while since I read Walden and I'm definitely due for a reread! Have you also stumbled upon Substack articles about Thoreau and the art of making pencils? I've come across more than one! I'm just sorry I didn't save the links to share.
I really appreciate your well-written essay on class being the dominant factor in the woke take-over of academic and political discourse.
I reside in the Netherlands and, as of yet, things in continental Europe are not as bad (yet) as they have become in the Anglo-speaking world. A couple of years ago people started talking about children ‘being born in the wrong body’ which triggered my interest in gender ideology and social justice activism. Since then I read about this subject on a daily basis and it seems to me like the world has gone cuckoo. The most intriguing part is how swiftly and profoundly this reality-defying and cult-like ideology has captured the Western world.
The underlying questions are ofcourse: who benefits most and where do the profits go to.
Your essay sheds a very interesting light on this and at the same time tells a personal tale about the culture wars in the United States. I share your fear about the very real erosion of sex-based rights and the framing of same-sex attraction as ‘genital fixation’. It seems like women, children and LGB’s are thrown under the bus to accommodate an activist men’s rights movement.
As for your friend D., I have read her essay on Butler’s latest book. To me it seems like an subservient expression of total allegiance to the high priestess of the mighty gender god. She seems to be a genuine believer. However, let’s not forget, she is also virtue signalling for moral bonus points. That doesn’t necessarily make her a bad person (or a fascist ;) but we all know that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Her lack of critical faculty on Butler’s book is reprehensible though. She should know better by now. The genderwoo arguments are beginning to wear thin, especially since the recent publication of the Cass report in the UK on the irreversible damage inflicted on children. The cracks in the ceiling are beginning to show and the walls will start caving in. It’s a matter of time before the whole temple comes crushing down. In all likelihood, the upper classes that have laid it’s ground work, will not perish. They will simply look for a new psychological defense mechanism elsewhere. In her new novel ‘Mania’ Lionel Shriver imagines the ‘Mental Parity Movement’ as the next great social contagion, which insists that everyone is equally intelligent. Different story, similar mechanisms at play. Let’s stay vigilant.
Thank you very much for this thoughtful comment. All very good points. I keep saying that very nice people can create evil ideologies. At the same time, these nice people aren't innocent because they are making or enhancing their careers by supporting these ideologies, all the while destroying other people's careers.
I love Lionel Shriver and heard of her book, which I am sure it's great. Reality has become weirder than fiction.
There was a cartoon early in the aughts of rich white homogenous people pulling up the ladder of opportunity behind them. I think that's the point of all this. I was a teen in the 90s and while I read a lot, I didn't quite understand what Catch 22 was about. Now I understand the satire of the loyalty oaths. Where people who weren't born rich are buying into this, though, is when their kids turn trans. It breaks my heart to see my friend's kids start that irreversible process and about half of my upper middle class friends then simply fall in line. For me seeing it happen to kids in my community made me see it for what it is and appreciate the quote you posted on evil. But I get, have been there, and understand the hurt of losing long time friends to this new religion that demands the denial of logic and the sacrifice of children and has recreated original sin.
I really enjoyed this piece. The point about the sex binary being colonialism or white supremacy or whatever was especially funny - even from my single college anthropology class, it was obvious that most (all?) cultures are well aware of the sex binary. Even the cultures that have additional categories have a male/female binary as well. Ironically, trans activists would be furious if you tried to treat trans people as a third gender in our culture, since that wouldn't be validating enough.
To whom you are attracted sexually is purely subjective and therefore cannot reasonably be contested by an outside observer.
Where you decide to live your life on a spectrum of superficial, stereotypical male to female attributes (and we all do) is also purely subjective and similarly cannot be questioned.
However, your biological sex reflects an objective reality which cannot be changed by your subjective personal view and futile attempts to do so can result in serious health impacts to you as well as actual harms to members of the sex you are impersonating (especially women).
Finally, others who are grounded in objective reality should never be forced to accept your subjective version of your actual biological sex.
It’s a real shame you’re too afraid of the complexity of life to see how little you know! I’m sure that thinking you’ve got “those people” all figured out is very helpful for salving the anxiety you feel at not understanding people who are different from you, but it’s pretty rich to posit such stale, shallow ideas as enlightening.
Absolutely brilliant Alta! You see, you connect the dots, and you bravely enlighten. All of the items you mention here are corroborated in spades by my own teaching experience at a major university. The word propoganda is too good for what has happened. Brain-washing is more apt.
Yes the academy’s pied-piper hold on the ambitious young minds of the future ‘opinion-forming’ elite – including crucially the teaching profession - has proceeded unchecked, such that its seductive virtue-signalling mentality has now taken hold in most graduate-entry professional walks of life. And an Academia-Media Complex - a feedback loop between an overwhelmingly left-wing academy and a largely left-wing MSM – has softened up enough of what used to be called ‘the workers’ to keep the Progressive show on the road. The sheep dip is an especially powerful brew in the humanities and social sciences from which background the future professional and managerial elite is primarily drawn. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers
Agreed. Alta accurately articulates how woke ideology supplanted biological reality yet won’t subject itself to similar Deconstruction now that they have institutional Power. It’s cuz my discipline - rhetoric/composition - is 4 decades deep in postmodernism and now antiracism.
Loved this piece! Thank you for opening a reverie of my own graduate school days in the 1980s with too, too many lovers of Derrida and Foucault. Thankfully, I missed Judith at the time. I think growing up in the military, meeting different people, and gravitating towards interesting people with life in their eyes, then some (merciful) grounding in Mathematics and Linguistics — all this made me less likely to fall prey to the privileges being offered. I became a radfem and have been telling people to go to hell ever since.
What a desperately needed breath of fresh air in this stifling, fetid intellectual climate in which I and other reasonable people find ourselves gasping for common sense.
Quite superb, Dr Ifland (and my apologies for addressing you as 'Ms' hitherto; I somehow missed that you had a doctorate). So much of this resonates, and made me laugh too. Your friend who wished he was gay reminded me of Melvyn Shamburger in my novel, whose wife Frida urges him to 'go gay'. When he shows his reluctance, she chides him for not even making an effort. But this is a brilliant analysis of what's going on--I'd better not say a 'scarily brilliant' one! You're quite right about all these elitists and their luxury beliefs. We can only hope that soon the hypocrisy of these people will be unmasked for all to see.
Don't apologize! No one calls me Dr. Ifland. I stopped teaching years ago and it sounds funny.
I prefer to be too formal, rather than not formal enough. My students often called me Dr Powell, though I told them not to, as I only had an MFA.
Fascinating essay. I hope the debate happens - you, your friend and Judith Butler. What an interesting conversation.
Don't hold your breath (regarding my friend)! As for JB, she never debates. She only talks with sycophants who uphold her ideas. Just do a search online and you'll see that there is not a single debate in which she discusses with anyone of a different opinion. Never. And in all the videos I've seen, she repeats over and over that everybody who rejects "gender" is a fascist.
Well, this argument certainly checks out--brava Alta! Some lingering mist here--whether common usage of the term "university" is romantic/aspirational or downright fraudulent, it's impossible to know whether we're expecting too little or too much from the academy.
Too little. They used to be far better. I remember.
I don't see how Butler's supposedly universal "forms of gendered existence" could possibly be "constructed" in non-Western languages, where grammatical gender is very much the exception rather than the rule. Take Swahili, one of the most widely spoken African languages, which has no separate pronouns for "he", "she", "it", just a single 3rd-person singular pronoun applicable to any referent, be it animal, mineral, or vegetable, concrete or abstract, male or female (the same as in non-Indo-European European languages like Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Basque, in which likewise it would be linguistically impossible to state your pronouns or "misgender" someone). On the other hand, Swahili has no fewer than eighteen noun classes, but here the main "binaries" are animate/inanimate, animal/plant. There's even a noun class for things that have an extended outline, but no class for male or female or anything approaching them. There's probably a good argument for "gender theory" being a form of Anglophone linguistic colonialism/imperialism/hegemony, given that it takes the 3rd-person-pronoun situation of English to be universally the case and imposes it as some kind of self-evident truth on languages and cultures where it cannot make any sense.
Thank you for this informed comment! This is exactly the kind of discussion I was hoping my piece to generate. Unfortunately, I don't know any African languages, but I have read enough to have had an idea of the things you mention. And I knew that Butler's comment about "a vocabulary for forms of gendered existence" was based on some extremely vague notion of non Western cultures having a different way of dealing with "gender." As you clearly explain, if one knows something about these languages, one understands that the very concept of binary (male/female) versus non binary is based on a Western cultural presupposition, and the idea of a "neutral," non binary pronoun (they) is Anglophone. It is possible, though, that Butler may have had a vague idea of the existence of the Swahiili 3rd person singular pronoun applicable to any referent. But the way she is trying to enroll others (namely the "Global South") into a demonstration of her theory is very dishonest and unintelligent. If these other "forms of gendered existence" really were about what she is trying to prove (a third, non-binary type of human being), I am convinced that the very people whose languages included these supposed "non-binary" "forms of gendered existence" would have discovered themselves the existence of this type of human being. They would not have waited for Dr Butler to come and enlighten them. You touch on the crux of the matter: that we are dealing with an Anglophone colonialist/imperialist mindset, which belongs to the very people who can't stop lecturing us all on 'anti-colonialism."
Yes, the whole theory is based on a Western cultural presupposition, which is then taken to be universal and foisted on non-Western cultures, in a blatant example of the colonialist attitude of intellectual superiority that the theorists otherwise decry. If a language doesn't have separate gendered 3rd-person pronouns, it doesn't mean that the single pronoun applicable to any referent is "non-binary" in the English sense of the "neutral" "they", since the language in question does not possess a masculine/feminine binary in the first place, and you cannot negate something that does not exist; logically, a thing cannot be neutral in the absence of at least two other opposing things to which it might stand in relation. In other words, if Butler et al. are trying to enroll languages from the Global South into a demonstration of the theory, it would be deeply flawed linguistically and logically. I admit not to having read any works on "gender", but it seems to me that the theory could only have arisen within English, given the linguistic anomaly of the language having lost grammatical gender, i.e., classes of inflection, but preserved gendered 3rd-person-singular pronouns, with the result that "he" and "she" are now assigned solely to human beings (for the sake of argument, we can ignore other uses, such as for pets) and have created a fixation or obsession that makes no sense in other languages. After all, in a language where masculine and feminine pronouns are also assigned to tables, chairs, onions, puddles, spoons, slugs etc., it would be difficult to argue that "gender" is somehow socially constructed or innate, in other words that it derives from some extra-linguistic quality of the referent in itself.
I think you gave here the most cogent explanation of why the concept of a "gender identity" is so flawed: because it is entirely dependent on being an English-speaker. You demonstrated, by using logic and knowledge of linguistics/other languages, that we are dealing here with a type of flagrant cultural imperialism. Chapeau! I am going to quote you from now on. This is a brilliant explanation.
As I said, I've read little if anything about gender identity, but it strikes me that the whole thing relies on the fallacy that the gendered pronouns of English denote an extra-linguistic truth by virtue of their being third-person and therefore somehow objective. The theory collapses as a philosophical project as soon as you try to superimpose it on a language in which the masculine/feminine binary doesn't exist grammatically and which cannot provide the "objectivity" of separate and distinct third-person pronouns. In which case, identity is left only with first-person, subjective statements and the copula, predication, i.e., statements such as "the present king of France is bald" or "the world is round" or "I am Napoleon" or "grass is green" or "fire is wet", which may or may not correspond with an extra-linguistic reality but cannot logically be identified with any objective truth.
Again, well stated. And this is the reason why, even though Trans people exist in other societies, it is only in English-speaking societies that these people and the activists are so invested in "the pronouns," which they expect to be treated with some kind of religious piousness. The "pronouns" have become the Absolute signifier of the objective existence of this "identity." It is both hilarious and symptomatic that they are always listing TWO pronouns (like they/them) or she/her etc.. No one has ever explained why two, why not one or three?? The TWO pronouns are like a Freudian manifestation of their belief in the inherent connection between grammar and human binarism. They unconsciously believe that English grammar must be the language of God (or Nature)--even though they don't believe in God or Nature.
One could probably construct a typology of languages in which there were three classes: (1) languages in which everything is gendered; (2) languages in which nothing is gendered; and (3) languages in which only human beings are gendered. Obviously, one would have to have a familiarity with every language that has ever been spoken to be able to state such a case categorically, but it may well be that class (3) has only one member, namely English. Anyway, the fact that class (3) is such an anomaly makes it all the more perplexing that the proponents of "the pronouns" are so invested in them as some kind of pre-linguistic, essential truth, whereas in fact they are purely relative to English. They are incapable of thinking outside of English, and even if they do engage in linguistic comparison, they take English to be the base or standard against which all other languages are measured. In other words, they both fall prey to the conceptual blindness of monolingualism and perpetuate the global linguistic hegemony of English.
Apropos of how gender theory is English-language-dependent, an exacerbation of how English-speakers' thinking in general is shaped by the fact that the pronouns "he" and "she" are assigned solely to humans, I remember an English mistranslation of the following lines from a Romanian poem: "mă tem că ai să te ascunzi într-un ochi străin, / şi el o să se-nchidă cu o frunză de pelin." The translator took "el" to refer not to "un ochi străin" but to a person, with the result that instead of the eye closing with an eyelid-like wormwood leaf, a man improbably wrapped in the said leaf pops up in the translation. In other words, the translator reflexively took the 3rd-person singular masculine pronoun to refer to a human, even where it made no sense whatever. The problem with "gender" seems to be that it takes this specifically English linguistic bias as the basis for a universal, extra-linguistic theory.
Again, excellent points! I am so grateful that we are having this discussion! In fact, I have intuited all the points you are making here, but wasn't quite able to phrase them in the coherent way you put them. This sentence "Gender theory is English-language-dependent, an exacerbation of how English-speakers' thinking in general is shaped by the fact that the pronouns "he" and "she" are assigned solely to humans" together with "in a language where masculine and feminine pronouns are also assigned to [objects] it would be difficult to argue that "gender" is somehow socially constructed or innate, in other words that it derives from some extra-linguistic quality of the referent in itself" are the best demonstration I've ever read that "gender" is an American (Anglophone) concept. To insist (like my friend in this essay or JB) that if you refuse this concept there is something wrong with you is to behave like a neo-colonialist.
I have come to the belief that when someone preaches and passionately defends a philosophy as if it were a part of that person, that is because the philosophy actually is part of them. It consists of the story of that individual's struggles in life, the perspectives forged in fear, pain and unresolved personal conflicts, as well as in class privilege and other external circumstances, as you explain in your article. Judith Butler is a very masculine looking woman who apparently has not yet reached a clear understanding or acceptance of who she is relative to conventional expectations of feminine appearance. She wants to overgeneralize her own struggle to the entire world, redefining the global population rather than making sense of who she is as an individual who doesn't conform to concrete, reductionistic ideas about what a woman can be.
You are right. In fact, we all have a tendency to generalize based on our own experience. And people who go througjh personal struggles more than others.
🤯 love this comment
Great essay. And I love seeing Thoreau and Clarissa Pinkola Estes side by side in your analysis of your former friend's discourse. The language is very neo-Sentimental, as if these writers were trying to revive something from the American 1850s: stylistic bombast and emotional force, rhetoric toppling over logic in an overflow of carefully constructed "fellow feeling" among "allies."
Yes, the Thoreau reference was pretty humorous. I love Walden. But reading it as a mature adult, some of it is just completely over the top self-indulgence bordering on narcissism. Along the lines of "I'm completely above the realm of common society. I don't need to follow the rules everyone else does (those are for the unenlightened). And I can basically create my own truth and values essentially out of thin air. The self is inviolate." That's not everything, but that is one theme. And there are echoes of that way of thinking in woke gender ideology. Makes sense because of the through lines from Emerson/Thoreau and then on down to Nietzche who the postmodernists eventually picked up and ran with (I'm skipping over some people, but that's the general lineage).
Interesting... Thanks for sharing your thoughts on revisiting Walden. It's been a while since I read Walden and I'm definitely due for a reread! Have you also stumbled upon Substack articles about Thoreau and the art of making pencils? I've come across more than one! I'm just sorry I didn't save the links to share.
Brilliant, as always. Scarily brilliant (to beat them on their turf) :-)
:)))
I really appreciate your well-written essay on class being the dominant factor in the woke take-over of academic and political discourse.
I reside in the Netherlands and, as of yet, things in continental Europe are not as bad (yet) as they have become in the Anglo-speaking world. A couple of years ago people started talking about children ‘being born in the wrong body’ which triggered my interest in gender ideology and social justice activism. Since then I read about this subject on a daily basis and it seems to me like the world has gone cuckoo. The most intriguing part is how swiftly and profoundly this reality-defying and cult-like ideology has captured the Western world.
The underlying questions are ofcourse: who benefits most and where do the profits go to.
Your essay sheds a very interesting light on this and at the same time tells a personal tale about the culture wars in the United States. I share your fear about the very real erosion of sex-based rights and the framing of same-sex attraction as ‘genital fixation’. It seems like women, children and LGB’s are thrown under the bus to accommodate an activist men’s rights movement.
As for your friend D., I have read her essay on Butler’s latest book. To me it seems like an subservient expression of total allegiance to the high priestess of the mighty gender god. She seems to be a genuine believer. However, let’s not forget, she is also virtue signalling for moral bonus points. That doesn’t necessarily make her a bad person (or a fascist ;) but we all know that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Her lack of critical faculty on Butler’s book is reprehensible though. She should know better by now. The genderwoo arguments are beginning to wear thin, especially since the recent publication of the Cass report in the UK on the irreversible damage inflicted on children. The cracks in the ceiling are beginning to show and the walls will start caving in. It’s a matter of time before the whole temple comes crushing down. In all likelihood, the upper classes that have laid it’s ground work, will not perish. They will simply look for a new psychological defense mechanism elsewhere. In her new novel ‘Mania’ Lionel Shriver imagines the ‘Mental Parity Movement’ as the next great social contagion, which insists that everyone is equally intelligent. Different story, similar mechanisms at play. Let’s stay vigilant.
Thank you very much for this thoughtful comment. All very good points. I keep saying that very nice people can create evil ideologies. At the same time, these nice people aren't innocent because they are making or enhancing their careers by supporting these ideologies, all the while destroying other people's careers.
I love Lionel Shriver and heard of her book, which I am sure it's great. Reality has become weirder than fiction.
Love this series, Alta!
Wow, I must be psychic because I was just thinking about you, wondering if you still receive these posts.
There was a cartoon early in the aughts of rich white homogenous people pulling up the ladder of opportunity behind them. I think that's the point of all this. I was a teen in the 90s and while I read a lot, I didn't quite understand what Catch 22 was about. Now I understand the satire of the loyalty oaths. Where people who weren't born rich are buying into this, though, is when their kids turn trans. It breaks my heart to see my friend's kids start that irreversible process and about half of my upper middle class friends then simply fall in line. For me seeing it happen to kids in my community made me see it for what it is and appreciate the quote you posted on evil. But I get, have been there, and understand the hurt of losing long time friends to this new religion that demands the denial of logic and the sacrifice of children and has recreated original sin.
I really enjoyed this piece. The point about the sex binary being colonialism or white supremacy or whatever was especially funny - even from my single college anthropology class, it was obvious that most (all?) cultures are well aware of the sex binary. Even the cultures that have additional categories have a male/female binary as well. Ironically, trans activists would be furious if you tried to treat trans people as a third gender in our culture, since that wouldn't be validating enough.
Not to overstate the case, but your friend D is a retard.
To whom you are attracted sexually is purely subjective and therefore cannot reasonably be contested by an outside observer.
Where you decide to live your life on a spectrum of superficial, stereotypical male to female attributes (and we all do) is also purely subjective and similarly cannot be questioned.
However, your biological sex reflects an objective reality which cannot be changed by your subjective personal view and futile attempts to do so can result in serious health impacts to you as well as actual harms to members of the sex you are impersonating (especially women).
Finally, others who are grounded in objective reality should never be forced to accept your subjective version of your actual biological sex.
It’s a real shame you’re too afraid of the complexity of life to see how little you know! I’m sure that thinking you’ve got “those people” all figured out is very helpful for salving the anxiety you feel at not understanding people who are different from you, but it’s pretty rich to posit such stale, shallow ideas as enlightening.