Judith Butler: "The Backlash Against 'Gender Ideology' Must Stop"
Presumably not her title.
What Butler gets right isn't hers, and what's hers isn't right. The same old errors are on display in that piece. For one thing, sex isn't "assigned," it's discovered / discerned. There are a very few intersexed cases in which it may be a coin-toss, and a decision has to be made if the infant is going to be medically shoved in one direction or the other--but, in general, determining the sex of an infant is just a straightforward matter of simple observation at its birth. It's no more a decision than determining its weight and length. Such cases no more make sex a matter of arbitrary choice than the existence of gray makes the difference between white and black an arbitrary choice. Second: 'man' and 'woman' are sex/age/specie terms, not "gender" terms. You're a man if and only if you're an adult male human. It's astounding how much mischief has been caused by failing to recognize this simple point.
As for the indoctrination part: it's true that gender theory isn't inherently tied to indoctrination. But it's contingently associated with the dogmatic PC left. So, as we actually have to deal with it, it is largely a matter of indoctrination--see: what's going on in schools. One decent response is: gender (i.e.: the stuff having to do with masculinity and femininity) is already bound up with indoctrination (on a large social scale). That is: we already indoctrinate kids with gender stuff (though much of it's natural). So a case can be made for counter-indoctrination. That seems wrong to me. We should counter indoctrination with reason--which is what my regular old working-class parents did. Like most parents all over the country at the time, they taught their boys not to be assholes, and made it clear to them that they weren't expected to, e.g., play football. So I don't buy the counter-indoctrination case. Also, the left just loves indoctrination, so we ought to fight that at every step.
Anyway. Judith Butler is as overrated as all this gender crap is overblown.
What Butler gets right isn't hers, and what's hers isn't right. The same old errors are on display in that piece. For one thing, sex isn't "assigned," it's discovered / discerned. There are a very few intersexed cases in which it may be a coin-toss, and a decision has to be made if the infant is going to be medically shoved in one direction or the other--but, in general, determining the sex of an infant is just a straightforward matter of simple observation at its birth. It's no more a decision than determining its weight and length. Such cases no more make sex a matter of arbitrary choice than the existence of gray makes the difference between white and black an arbitrary choice. Second: 'man' and 'woman' are sex/age/specie terms, not "gender" terms. You're a man if and only if you're an adult male human. It's astounding how much mischief has been caused by failing to recognize this simple point.
As for the indoctrination part: it's true that gender theory isn't inherently tied to indoctrination. But it's contingently associated with the dogmatic PC left. So, as we actually have to deal with it, it is largely a matter of indoctrination--see: what's going on in schools. One decent response is: gender (i.e.: the stuff having to do with masculinity and femininity) is already bound up with indoctrination (on a large social scale). That is: we already indoctrinate kids with gender stuff (though much of it's natural). So a case can be made for counter-indoctrination. That seems wrong to me. We should counter indoctrination with reason--which is what my regular old working-class parents did. Like most parents all over the country at the time, they taught their boys not to be assholes, and made it clear to them that they weren't expected to, e.g., play football. So I don't buy the counter-indoctrination case. Also, the left just loves indoctrination, so we ought to fight that at every step.
Anyway. Judith Butler is as overrated as all this gender crap is overblown.
posted by Winston Smith at
11:32 AM
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