There’s a difference between an essentialist gender outlook, where gender is an essential aspect of people with a certain biological configuration, and an objective gender outlook, where gender is an objectively observable configuration of human minds.
Specifically, the difference is that after the Great Feminist Cultural Revolution, gender won’t objectively exist. It will have been erased from institutions, individuals, and cultures (by “after”, we mean “hundreds of years after”).
Gender is like any other socially instilled bias, except that it tends to run much deeper (gender socialization starts at birth; religious socialization starts later, and isn’t connected to one’s anatomy at all). As such, it does objectively exist, and you can’t handwave it away.
As far as I can tell, this is a definitional dispute. There are many traits that females express in modern society. I take essentialist theory to be saying that all of these traits are based in sex, not in gender.
As you say, this is wrong—lots of these traits are gender and would disappear if feminist social engineering succeeded. Only those traits actually based on sex would remain
I was criticizing the position you expressed that men have literally nothing to say about the dividing line between female gender and female sex. For example, a man can say “Getting pregnant is an expression of sex, not gender” or “Wearing dresses is an expression of gender, not sex.”
Men have literally nothing to say about the experiences of women under patriarchy, which is the basis of feminism.
Let’s ignore for the moment whether all feminists do or should believe this.
Is you position that men have nothing useful to say about how to end patriarchy? Because that looks a lot like the stereotypical patriarchal assertion that women have nothing useful to say about how society should work. It seems to me that the counter-argument to that position should work just as well to justify male participation in the intellectual process that hopefully leads to the reshaping of society to make it more gender equal.
There’s a difference between an essentialist gender outlook, where gender is an essential aspect of people with a certain biological configuration, and an objective gender outlook, where gender is an objectively observable configuration of human minds.
Specifically, the difference is that after the Great Feminist Cultural Revolution, gender won’t objectively exist. It will have been erased from institutions, individuals, and cultures (by “after”, we mean “hundreds of years after”).
Gender is like any other socially instilled bias, except that it tends to run much deeper (gender socialization starts at birth; religious socialization starts later, and isn’t connected to one’s anatomy at all). As such, it does objectively exist, and you can’t handwave it away.
As far as I can tell, this is a definitional dispute. There are many traits that females express in modern society. I take essentialist theory to be saying that all of these traits are based in sex, not in gender.
As you say, this is wrong—lots of these traits are gender and would disappear if feminist social engineering succeeded. Only those traits actually based on sex would remain
I was criticizing the position you expressed that men have literally nothing to say about the dividing line between female gender and female sex. For example, a man can say “Getting pregnant is an expression of sex, not gender” or “Wearing dresses is an expression of gender, not sex.”
You seem to have targeted a problem that I don’t care about, so we’ve miscommunicated at some point.
Men have literally nothing to say about the experiences of women under patriarchy, which is the basis of feminism.
Let’s ignore for the moment whether all feminists do or should believe this.
Is you position that men have nothing useful to say about how to end patriarchy? Because that looks a lot like the stereotypical patriarchal assertion that women have nothing useful to say about how society should work. It seems to me that the counter-argument to that position should work just as well to justify male participation in the intellectual process that hopefully leads to the reshaping of society to make it more gender equal.