A trouncing
So I just listened to this and sure enough – Sally Hines does not come out of it well.
The link is to the clip, not the whole hour, so no searching is needed.
Tip Jar
So I just listened to this and sure enough – Sally Hines does not come out of it well.
The link is to the clip, not the whole hour, so no searching is needed.
Ooooh – I don’t think I’d heard that before.
Note the sleight of hand from Hines about how other cultures have “recognised” that sex is not binary.
To say that they’ve recognised it is to say that it is the case, otherwise there could be no recognition. But these other cultures having divvied up the world in another way is what Hines presents as evidence that sex is not binary. And that’s question-begging. In effect, she’s saying that we’re entitled to say that sex is not binary because other cultures have recognised it as such; but they can only have recognised it as such if it is, in fact, not binary. This point stands whatever we happen to think about sex and sex-categorisation.
Another, related, point: what entitles these other cultures to say that sex is not binary? Presumably, it’d be some appeal to a fact of the matter. But if that’s the case, we have two competing sets of claims: one built around sex’s being binary, and another built on it’s not being binary. The competing merits of these claims could then be assessed.
I will not offer odds on which set of claims is the more likely to be truth-tracking. And their truth-trackingness has nothing to do with which culture is making it. Sometimes, people are just wrong.
(And sometimes, they’re misrepresented by dimwit sociologists. But I digress.)
Maybe Hines is being sloppy with language: maybe “recognised” is the wrong word to use. But in that case, it’s not at all clear what she’s on about.
But that much we’d all guessed anyway.
Indeed. “Recognize” is a very useful weasel-word when making emphatic truth claims that are in fact contested.
It’s quite similar to Frances Coppola’s insistence that “Whether someone is female or male is defined by the law.”
As for Sally Hines on ‘other cultures’, I have lived in Japan for many years, and in East Asia and Southeast Asia, there has been in certain areas a greater tolerance of what were regarded as horrible ‘vices’ in Christian countries, but it has had nothing to do with some sort of declaration or scientific understanding that clashes with the view that sex is ‘binary’. It is more a cultural tolerance, and deviation from sexual ‘norms’ was treated more as an eccentricity than anything else. Hines is propagating a convenient and sentimental myth. Despite this traditionally greater degree of tolerance, though, gay people and trans-people in these countries have not necessarily led easy lives, as one may see by reading Ihara Saikaku’s ‘The Great Mirror of Male Love’, ‘Male Colors: the Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan’ by Gary Leupp, or ‘Passions of the Cut Sleeve: The Male Homosexual Tradition in China’ by Bret Hinsch. Gay marriage is still not permitted in Japan, South Korea or China, and certainly in the latter country, under its present government, homosexuality is actively discouraged. What was lacking in these countries was the Christian intolerance which with the help of bad science in the 19th & 20th centuries resulted in the vilification of anybody who did not lead what was considered a ‘normal’ sexual life, and in legal measures being taken against them. Britain in the Middle Ages & in the English Renaissance, before muscular Christianity, bad science and the punitiveness of English culture all joined together, tended to be more tolerant.
I very much like the cogency of Kathleen Stock’s remarks, and deplore the sheer sloppiness, silliness and ignorance displayed in those of Sally Hines.
Throwing “western” in front of something is believed to make it automatically suspect, because if “other cultures” (poorly defined here, I notice) disagree, they are considered more honest, more authentic, and purer, and therefore correct.
And I think this idea that so many scientists see sex as something other than male/female is bogus, but I have nothing but anecdotal evidence for that. I live my life among scientists. This statement would be controversial (read, assumed incorrect) by all but one of those scientists, and the one who would agree has a son who believes he is a daughter, possibly because his therapist decided that was the case.
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Yeah: I wonder how much of the “other cultures” stuff is just plain old “noble savage” nonsense… which in its way, is incredibly narcissistic, inasmuch as that it relies on the idea that you have to have reached a certain level of sophistication to be as ghastly as Europeans, and brown people are just too simple and good for that.
I don’t even wonder, I think it reeks of plain old “noble savage” nonsense, along with new “whiteness” nonsense.
Of course the roots of both are a reaction against racism and colonialism, and those are good roots. But some of the flowers are dummm.