Firstly, they are not entirely artificial but possess a biological basis, so some of our gender roles are imposed on us by nature and reality. Thus gender roles are not entirely subscriptive or artificial, and it's difficult to know where nature ends and artificial begins.
I did not argue that gender did not stem from nature, but that nature is no basis on which to impose societal restraints. People should assume whichever roles and identities they find most fulfilling, and no have constructed roles and identities imposed upon them by society. Gender is, after all, a social concept, not a biological one.
Secondly, even if you could prove that they were entirely artificial, you have not demonstrated that you have any better alternatives, which is quite a serious requirement before you go breaking down things that already work and replacing them with experiments that might not work.
You misunderstand; I do not offer alternatives, because I do not seek to impose gender. I present gender as subscriptive; in essence, I think people should do whatever the hell they like. You assume tyranny where I offer anarchy!
As an Objectivist, I understand that the needs of a few individualists are rarely the same as those of the majority. You are talking about a small minority of people who possess the intelligence and self-awareness to engage in a self-creating project. Also, the minority of individuals who feel oppressed by their gender roles do tend to be more distressed than those who are secure in their role. So health/happiness and security of role seem to go together for the overwhelming majority of people.
I don't understand; why does the dissolution of a limited binary suggest that
Your train of logic that gender = artificial, artificial = subscriptive, subscriptive = harmful, has not been demonstrated as true. In the majority of cases, "subscriptive" gender roles are positive and helpful.
What? No it doesn't. Subscriptive is good,
prescriptive is bad. I argue that gender is artificial whether or not it is prescriptive or subscriptive, but that the recognition of artificiality demands the dissolution of a prescriptive model and the introduction of a subscriptive model of gender.
Subversion is more complex than this. The subtle infiltration and subversion of the instruments of social ideology in the Marxist sense is what I had in mind.
You're suggesting that third-wave feminism is a Marxist ideology?
You may need to elaborate on this one.
I think I have substantiated it. ~98% of people are happy with their gender role - that is all the substantiation I need to be very, very wary of what I would call "totalitarianism along Jacobin lines" - the idea that a blueprint can be made for society, and then the existing society simply destroyed and rebuilt along the lines of the blueprint.
People don't get to choose their own gender behaviour. Men can't have babies. Women don't have the upper body strength of men. In the real World, these things do lead to specialisation of role. But evolution provides the emotional and biological accompaniments to such roles - meaning that people generally are happy to fulfill their biological destiny. There would be something sick with a species that, after a billion years of evolution, was fundamentally unhappy with fulfilling its biological roles.
There are a minority of exceptions, of course. Yet what is interesting is that you point to a few thousand transexuals as evidence that gender roles don't work, while ignoring the billions of other humans on the Planet who prove that gender roles do work.
Firstly, transexuals are not the issue. Transexuality does not conflict with the a binary model of sexual determinism, it merely adjusts the nature of determination. My reference was to transgendered individuals, who demonstrate that sex and gender are not necessarily related, and to agendered, intergendered and third gendered individuals, who demonstrate the fact that a species' possession of a binary sexual biology does not necessarily suggest a binary gender society.
Secondly, you are missing the point entirely. I am not suggesting that biology does not inform behaviour or identity, but that society has no place in asserting the manner in which people assume these roles and identities. Imposed constructs constrain people, removing their ability to function autonomously, while voluntary, fluid constructs- which I advocate- do not. You can be every bit the archetypal Victorian man's man if you want, all I argue is that neither society nor any other individual has the right to impose this or any other identity upon you.
You seem to know more about feminism than I do, so perhaps you can make it easier by simply distancing yourself very clearly from such ideas.
It would help if you were able to communicate which ideas you were talking about. Asserting a support for a post-structuralist model of gender, which is all I am doing, should not be taken as support, explicit or implicit, for misandry, not least because misandry is as incompatible with the model as misogyny.
We had feminist ministers in the labour government passing a host of legislation along these lines. I assumed you were British but if you have been abroad, just google Harriet Harman - even the left-leaning New Statesman thinks the Labour government was a little too feminist
http://www.newstatesman.com/199908300006
I suspected this is the sort of think that you were getting at, but I still don't see why it is relevant to me. This is second-wave stuff, with very little relevance to the dissolution of the binary gender model (indeed, much of it seems quite heavily invested in that model).
You simply won't be able to do it. Can I ask you why it means so much to you to do this? For a minority of people I can understand that they need this liberation. But the majority simply don't. They have never asked for it and vocalise against it.
One could say much the same thing of serfdom in the eleventh century. The complacency of the past is no defence of the complacency of the present. Society has always evolved, and it must and will continue to evolve. The reactionary has always been on the wrong side of history, in this as in all things.
LGBT has not established that the traditional concept of gender/sexuality is false - they have only established that they are exceptions.
The model needs to be expanded, not destroyed. There is no logical reason to conclude that the next step is to acknowledge that sex-gender is false.
Why is it that 2% of people is sufficient to convince you it's false, but 98% doesn't convince you of anything?
The model works well, very well, and it just needs refining.
Because the model asserts 100% applicability, and so even 0.001% would render it invalid. If the traditional models of sex-gender-sexuality are not entirely correct, then they are not correct at all, any more than a car which works 98% of the time can be said to be a working car.
Furthermore, I would contest that the "comfortable 98%" is a nonsense; the vast majority lack sufficient conflict with their prescribed identity to pursue an alternative, but that does not mean that the identity is not imposed. Even if they would subscribe to exactly the same identity without imposition, that does not imply for a second that anyone or anything has the right to impose it upon. Freedom is not found in establishing a comfortable niche within a system of repression, but about casting repression aside in favour of individual autonomy in all things.
Homosexuals and bisexuals have demonstrated, inarguably so, that sex does not determine sexual orientation. Trangendereds are in the process of demonstrating that sex does not determine gender. When sex, gender and sexuality are all isolated on a social scale, as they will be, then why do we choose to perpetuate a model that asserts interconnectedness, and imposes identities to that effect?
I would like to conclude by saying that society does need to put down gender roles and even sexuality roles for people. In the vast majority of cases [as noted, around ~98% arguably] society gets it right.
Children, when growing up, don't need to experiment with their gender roles. They are incapable of making any decisions about these things on an intellectual level and simply need to be given encouragement and reinforcement through as simple a model as possible. The majority of adults don't need to experiment with it either. We are lucky enough that we have a society where almost everyone is happy and secure in their gender and sexuality. Shouldn't you be celebrating this fact?
That is the very state of affairs which I seek to bring about, and the freedom that we are not deprive of. Perhaps your view of the world is rose-tinted, but mine is not. How can one pursue autonomy when one is so willing to paint repression as freedom, simply because the form that the repression takes does not intrude upon you (or you do not consciously perceive to intrude upon you)?
How easy it is for the complacent cisgendered heterosexual male to look at the world and see no oppression, blind to a society which constrains his fellow men and women, and even, despite his ignorance, his own self.
The perfect World of gender roles and sexuality that you are aiming at.... almost alreadty exists. The majority of people are already there
This is probably because we have a long evolutionary history, both biologically and socially, and we have the benefits of that evolution in the gender roles we have today, which are the most efficient, rational and productive balance that can exist.
Maybe the fourth wave will consolidate and support this beneficial situation, to the gain of all
To do so would be to sacrifice every achievement that feminism, masculism and the LGBT right's movement have ever attained. Perhaps that is Palin and her Visigothic hordes wish to achieve, but is something that no reasonable person- let alone one who subscribes to a form of philosophical anarchy, as you purport to do- should ever accept.
I am a cisgendered, heterosexual male, and I am able to identify as a supporter of feminism and LGBT rights. I recognise these, in their healthy and properly developed forms, as movements which pursue autonomy, and reject repression, to over-turn the soft tyranny of imposed identities and roles. To reject the imposed collectives of the binary gender model, and to establish, in it's place, a free and fluid model of voluntary identity. Why is it so difficult for you, a self-declared lover of liberty (and a vehement anti-collectivist), to do the same?
