Allegedly Infallible Knowledge of "Gender Identity" Is Really A Special Case of the Left's Relativistic View That Thinking x Is So Makes x So

I'm not going to defend that claim, I'm just throwing it out there for now. As usual, the left has no very clear view of what it's trying to say. You can see their talk about "gender identity" on the model of realism + privileged access: there's a real feature of your internal terrain--your "gender identity"--and you have privileged access to it. That is: you have infallible knowledge of it. Note: the left accepts and rejects the idea of privileged access as convenient--you have infallible knowledge of "gender identity," but you can be wrong about whether you are a racist... 

   But you can also see this nonsense on the model of relativism: your thoughts and assertions about your "gender identity" create its properties. The left has long been relativistic--which is one reason they so adore the phrase ...is socially constructed. It's equivocal in exactly the way they want it to be. When they want to mean it realistically, they can say that's what they're doing; and when they want to mean it relativistically they can say that's what they're doing. Like most relativists, they tend to let the relativistic interpretation hang ostentatiously in the background--but then deny that when pressed on it. They tend to speak, for example, as if we actually created race by dreaming up the idea of race. They then move back and forth between these two interpretations:

(i) Race is real; and we created it by creating the idea.

(ii) Race is not real; it's just an idea; an idea that does not correspond to any reality.

The latter is false, but not all that weird. The former is nuts. They tend to add more confusion by sometimes interpreting 'real' in (i) as: "socially real." Another extremely confused and misleading phrase. By "socially real," they tend to mean: has social consequences. So race isn't real...er...except it is! It's Socially real! That is, basically: people believe it's real and act accordingly. 

   Which, of course, means that all of the following are also real: Bigfoot, witches, the Loch Ness Monster, phlogiston, innumerable gods, goddesses, demigods and demons, humors, ghosts...and on and on. Also: the Earth used to be flat (and still is for some), the solar system used to be geocentric (and still is for some)...etc.

   But all of these are also ways of advancing and defending the view that always hangs in the background: saying so makes things so.

   At any rate, this commitment to relativism and the say-so principle also explains the left's love of phrases like "your truth." And CRT's commitment to the authority of "story-telling" over science. And the primacy of "identification" / identifying as--to identify as F is to believe or say that you are F. And that semi-makes you F...pending an ad hoc decision about the case by the left. (Jenner et al.: yes; Dolezal: no).

   Anyway.