Colorless green ideas sleep furiously
Pink News tweeted this clip from last year today.
One thing the “non-binary lesbian” on the left said – or “argued” – is interesting.
At the end of the day they are terms, they are linguistic tools to describe an experience that already exists. So someone telling me that I can’t be a non-binary lesbian doesn’t mean anything [snigger] because I already am one.
What?
Yes, they are linguistic tools to describe an experience that already exists, but to do that they have to do that. They have to be accurate as opposed to inaccurate, or otherwise they’re not describing the experience, but failing to do so. If she’s trying to describe her experience of being a lesbian and swaps the word “rabbit” for the word “lesbian” she will fail at describing her experience of being a lesbian because her hearers will think she’s talking about her experience as a rabbit.
It’s the same with “non-binary lesbian.” Lesbians are women and girls attracted to women or girls. I don’t know what non-binary people are, but we are told very firmly what they are not, which is women or men. Our non-binary friend in the flowery shirt is not a woman, so she can’t be a lesbian, because lesbians are women (or girls but she’s an adult). Saying that words are terms are linguistic tools doesn’t change that.
I don’t know. As a tall, married bachelor who’s short, it all makes perfect sense to me.
Again for me it boils down to the “I’m just so incredibly special and unique that you couldn’t possibly understand me!” desire. They feign wanting acceptance, but if everyone were like, “cool, enbie lesbians, that totally makes sense and is perfectly normal”, I don’t think they’d be at all pleased.
“When I use a word, it means exactly what I want it to mean.”
It’s a standard technique: keep stretching the meaning of a word to the point of being insubstantial, then claim victory. It’s related to the one where you carefully avoid the fact that the set of confirming items might be null.
I once had a bunch of new-agey types try to convince me that I was actually “spiritual” by expanding its meaning until it was synonymous with “thinking”.
I love the “sooooooooooooooooooo……..” as a… well, let’s call it a ‘linguistic tool’ clearly designed to disentangle the consequence from the premise so that it seems as though the latter makes sense.
Graham:
Groan, yeah, I bet most of us here have been there. My very first internet death threat was from a rabbi who insisted that I was Christian because I took Christmas off work, regardless of the fact that my workplace was closed and locked over the Christmas period and that I got his threat while checking my work email on Christmas day.
“Can you be both non-binary and lesbian?”
Yes, because you are female (despite not admitting it) and you are attracted to the female body. Your identity does not factor into it.
Perhaps “non-binary” is a typo for “non-brainy”?
Robin Williams, as Mrs Doubtfire, described lesbians as “women in comfortable shoes”. These lesbians are clearly just women in comfortable clothes and the term “non-binary” simply means that they don’t conform to the feminine stereotyped, “girly” image. Same thing with what we called “gender-benders” in the 80s – men who wore makeup and feminine clothing.
I recall that at the start of all this the trans-lobby were insistent that gender was not the same as sex, which it isn’t, but I lost track of the point at which they started to argue that gender trumped sex. This is the crux of the trans-sports argument. They have successfully persuaded organisations to consider gender and totally lose sight of the fact that sports were segregated according to sex – i.e. physical not mental considerations.
It is a very frustrating sleight of hand.
Actually, it wasn’t Mrs Doubtfire. I think that line was in Good Morning Vietnam.
Colin, I think it was part of one of Williams’ stand-up routines. As close as I can recall, he described a protective dyke as a large woman in sensible shoes, yelling ‘stay away from the water’.
@latsot #5 l’esprit boggle
Quoth Colin:
Of course they switched. They can’t generate their starting position (“I’m a girl with a penis!”) without some sort of illicit logical move. It would be interesting to dig through the wayback machine and locate that inflection point. Go for it on three! One, two, …
[pedantry]Gender can be different from sex, but it doesn’t have to be. The use of gender as a grammatical term predates its use as a synonym for sex, which predates its use as a description of social norms, which predates its queered use as a nonsensical political bludgeon that parasitize prior social movements. The use as a synonym for sex is still the most common non-grammatical sense.[/pedantry]
The message I got from the video may not be the one they wanted to send. Sex counts. There are males and females. Females who are sexually attracted to other females are lesbians. There you go.
Then there’s some other irrelevant mess concerning something called “gender,” which doesn’t really count. It took over the words “man” and “woman.” You can be a man, a woman, neither, both, partially one or the other — it’s all up to you to decide what that means to you! Traditional gender stereotypes, nothing to do with gender stereotypes, neither, both, partially one or the other.
Sex is real. Gender used to be considered a social construct. Now it’s a personal construct.
Can an otter be a lemur?
iknklast, maybe, but in a heatwave a lemur can be a little ‘otter.
lol