We’ve been here before

The interview The Great Reorganization of Sexuality and Gender by Hugh Ryan (This is Hell!) is quite an interesting discussion, which ranged over some absolutely terrible characterizations of what the concerns of so-called right-wingers are, as well as seemingly obstinately refusing to acknowledge the modern-day use of the word snowflake, instead clinging to a 19th-century definition, as well as completely misdefining the Dunning-Kruger Effect, and misusing “strawman argument” for good measure. Then he uses the phrase “fractaling forward”, which I don’t understand what that even means.

Still, he makes an interesting point about the categories we currently use to delineate genders and sexual preference being arbitrary. That is, just because we’ve had certain categories for 100 years doesn’t lend them any scientific verisimilitude. The conditions that led to the current list of categories were diverse, and kind of arbitrary. Intervening research has been largely ignored, largely for wholly unscientific and arbitrary reasons.

At about 35:00. Hugh says,

“Suddenly we have to break apart the queer idea of the 19th century, which was generally called ‘the invert’, which was kind of like the idea of what we think of trans and intersex mixed together. Well, now we know that there are people who desire other people of the same sex who are not trans or intersex. So, sexologists freak out, and they start to define all of these different categories. We end up picking out lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex as the ones we’ll move forward with, but these people are also defining things like ‘the identity of the woman who likes to be sexually aroused with hatpins.’ That was considered a standalone identity. Pickpockets in the nineteen-teens were considered a biological class the way we might think about homosexuals. Right?”

Now, your instinct might be to say, ‘yeah, but that was stupid. We know better now.“

Do we, though? Are we sure we’ve got it all right now? That we’ve accounted for all of the nuance of human experience with our handful of categories?

I’m not saying we put litterboxes into classrooms—because nobody shits in the classrom, you goddamned idiots, whether you identify as a cat or a human. No shitting in the classroom. A relatively easy rule to impose, I would say.

So, Hugh’s point is that this has all happened before, and that it was all bullshit based on prejudices and arbitrary choices before—and that’s all it is this time. Humans love to make arbitrary choices for no known rhyme or reason—or for spectacularly stupid, petty, or racist/discriminatory reasons—and then completely forget that they’ve done so. Stir, wait a few decades, and everyone is utterly convinced that it wouldn’t be the way that it is without good reason.

Which takes us to pronouns and identifies and sexual/gender identification. Look, science is screaming from its desk that there are only two genders as far as gametes are concerned. There are people who are both genders. There are people who don’t feel like either gender. There are people who have the biological equipment for one gender, but are genetically the other gender. It’s not like it happens all the time, but it can happen. There are people who are one biological gender, but absolutely feel like the other one.

Leave them all be.

Honestly, there are so many ways to be an awful human being and huge detriment to society—and absolutely none of those things listed above are any of those ways. If the worst thing you can find about a person is that they are acting like other than their biological gender, then you’ve found an incredibly good person. For Christ’s sake.

If a person looks very much like a man to you and they ask to be addressed as “she” and “her”, then you be polite and do your best to accommodate them. Their job is to not jump down your throat if you don’t get it right the first few times. It’s just as if someone named Robert asks to be called “Rob” or “Bob”—if you keep calling them Robert, you’re just being an asshole. Or you don’t care what they think. That’s a perfectly good reason to not call people by the monikers they prefer—but be aware that you’re burning bridges.

So, we have to clean up some terminology and we have to make sure the people do stay focused on solving actual societal problems—instead of focusing all of their energy on helping trans or intersex people and then calling it a day, which is also not cool because we really do have a list of things to do, in priority order, and it would be absolutely awesome if helping a handful of people and children feel more at home in their own skins were at the top of the list, but it’s just not. It’s just not even close.

Just in the same price range, there are children who are hungry every damned day and we’re not doing enough yet to make sure they’re fed, to say nothing of whether they feel OK in their own heads. They can’t think straight because they’re hungry. Let’s solve that one and then see how they feel.

They’ll probably feel that they’d like fresh air and fresh water and less climate change and a fuckload fewer billionaires sucking all of the value out of humanity like an engorged tick. So, yeah, priorities.

But I’m getting off course again here. Even with cleaning up terminology: this is not the first time we’re dealing with pronouns, FFS. Most of the people complaining about pronouns barely even know what one is—and they’re not even close to mentally equipped to examine the linguistic environment that we already inhabit and notice that there already is a framework of pronouns and titles, some of which is based on biological gender, and some of which is just cultural baggage.

There are languages that don’t recognize gender as much as English—e.g., Turkish—and there are others that have a neutral form—e.g., German and Russian—and those are languages that are relatively close to the European family of languages. I have no idea what’s going on in Hindi, Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, or any of the thousands of other languages used on this planet.

What I’m saying is that there is no God-given way of addressing someone. There is only the way that that person prefers to be addressed. In programming circles that don’t suck, people are incredibly concerned with making forms that stop asking for “first name” and “last name” because it’s incredibly culturally myopic. It barely even works in Europe anymore, to say nothing of the rest of the world. Instead, you should just ask for a person’s “official name”—where they fill out as many names as they want—and their “preferred name”—where they, again, fill out as many names as they want.

In fact, we still have so many forms that ask for gender—MALE or FEMALE PLEASE—or that ask for title, chosen from a dropdown list—Mr., Ms., Mrs., etc.—because everyone has one of those, right? What about Dr.? What about someone who doesn’t want to reveal their marital status with their name? Oh, then use “Ms.”. What if you’re a guy? Oh, then just … use “Mr.” What about if you’re a woman who identifies as a guy? Oh, FUCK IT, just stop asking for that information.

'Mrs.' is my preferred way of being addressed

Hell, we still have standardized tests that ask for “race”. Yikes. When I took the SAT, I told them I was a “Pacific Islander” because I knew, even then, that it absolutely does not matter.

Honestly, we’re past it and it never mattered in the first place. It only mattered as long as we had laws that discriminated against certain genders, skin colors, races, countries of origin, marital statuses, etc.. Now that we’ve cleared out a bunch of that juristic detritus, we’re faced with the possibility of just building a set of rules that make sense[1], rather than whatever bullshit we’ve cargo-culted from our more overtly colonial age.[2]