Epistemology of infinity
Another point about that evasive non-response from Essex –
“a person can experience unknown genders”
What can that possibly mean? The whole point about these oh so important “genders” is that the people who claim to have them and experience them say they know they have them, and what they are, and what we have to do in relation to the fact – the cold hard fact – that they have and experience and know them. They don’t say it’s just some vague state of mind or mood, much less that they don’t know they have it, they insist, with menaces, that it’s real and they experience it and that experience is knowledge that it’s real. The reality is what they beat us over the head with. We are not to say it’s just something they think, we are to say it’s really real, just as real as sex or even realer, and it’s the sure and certain knowledge of eternal GenderSoul.
And in any case I don’t see how anyone can experience something while not knowing it. Experiencing it entails being aware of it. You can’t describe your experience of being under anesthesia because your brain was rendered incapable of experiencing it. If you don’t know about it, it ain’t your experience.
Hm, I read the last part there as “given that a person can experience genders knowable only to themselves and not to anyone else, including us academics in Essex, we couldn’t possibly provide a full list. Nor could anyone.”
It’s like trying to make sense of something out of Lewis Carroll.
But minus the fun.
Invariably and at the same time with 57 varieties of bovine manure. It reminds me of that old saying about the Scotch haggis: “It looks like shit, it smells like shit, and after the first mouthful you wish it was shit.”
What strikes me sometimes about this “unknowability” of a person’s gender is the relatively new accompanying claim that others must DO SOMETHING about it, and therefore, the transfer of power and agency that comes with that.
Women have never been allowed a great deal of power and agency, but what we did have up until recently, was the power to recognise a man, say so, and state that he did not belong here in this women’s locker room/bathroom/hospital ward/prison cell/sports team etc, and now we don’t have that agency, and if we exercise it, we may expect to be punished for it.
And that this power transfer is not just to “trans women”, but to ALL men, because it’s not just the “trans women” we cannot question or challenge, but anyone who MIGHT be, and that’s literally ALL MEN.
Exactly. We are explicitly forbidden to challenge and NO IT DOESN’T MATTER WHAT HE I MEAN SHE LOOKS LIKE.
And all this in a world already riddled with “what did he do?” ‘Nothing at all I can put my finger on but by Jesus he gives me the creeps and I cannot shake this horrible feeling I have and I do not want to be alone with him but it’s getting harder and harder to make socially acceptable excuses that don’t look suspicious”.
So we can “experience unknown genders” now, eh? What does it mean to experience a gender? How do we know those genders are unknown? How do we know that a gender is A and not B? These questions require answers, for something else supervenes on them: the capacity to make the fundamental trans or enby claim of self-knowledge.
Of course, any answer that would provide the power to distinguish A from B would be too clear and would reveal that “gender” is just being used as a roundabout way to talk about personality and interests through a sexist lens.
Omar#3 – just a day or two after Burns Night! How dare you!
With apologies to Lewis Carroll:
‘Don’t stand chattering to yourself like that,’ Humpty Dumpty said, looking at her for the first time, ‘but tell me your gender and your business.’
‘My pronouns are legion, but —’
‘It’s a stupid pronoun enough!’ Humpty Dumpty interrupted impatiently. ‘What does it refer to?’
‘Must a pronoun refer to something?’ Alice asked doubtfully.
‘Of course it must,’ Humpty Dumpty said with a short laugh: ‘my pronoun, which is ‘ego’, because it’s a capacious ego I possess, refers to the gender I possess— and a good capacious gender it is, too, capable of holding any and all other genders in it. With a gender like yours, you might be anything, almost.’
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘why can’t you make gender be anything and everything you want, even if that gender doesn’t exist?’
‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘why use “legion” when you can get way with one as I do?’
<3
Maybe my dumb question for the morning, but can we, or they, actually define a ‘gender’? What exactly is it, and how does it manifest itself? And if it doesn’t manifest itself, how can anyone besides the ‘gender haver’ know it? And what does it have to do with which bathroom you use/what sports team you play on/etc? I recently read someone pointing out that there’s really nothing wrong with ‘what gender am I’ being a teenage fad, like which Pikachu monster you are or which Hogwarts house you belong to–but people who announce that they’re pangender, as Arcadia alludes to, seem to believe that this entails some kind of real-world consequence.
Is the infinite number of genders countably or uncountably infinite?
Guest #11 – I think the answer to your question is “you’re a transphobe!”
You’re welcome.
Much obliged ;)
A ‘multiplicity of genders’ but somehow they will all clamour to be able to use the same toilets. And it won’t be the men’s.
There could be light at the end of this tunnel..!
Label the womens’ washroom, dunny, changeroom or whatever ‘WOMEN ONLY, BUT TERFS WELCOME AND MAY USE THIS FACILITY..’
Label the mens’ ‘MEN, TRANS MEN AND ALSO TRANS WOMEN..’
I reckon,that should clear things up, and leave no loopholes. iI’d say win, win, win all the way off into the sunset.
Those evasive liars. Maybe they can’t be expected to list the ones nobody knows about, but a fair answer to the question requires them to list the ones they do know about. Nothing about unknown or infinite genders relieves them of the duty to list the ones they know of.
That’s a silly question*, infinity is infinity, of course you can’t count it! /s
Even if you can’t count to infinity, you can count to fucking 2 or 7 or however many “genders” you know about FFS (as others have pointed out I know).
* I know it’s not a silly question, in case the /s isn’t clear :)
Ooh, I know this one! Gender is a way of classifying nouns that triggers agreement in other parts of speech (e.g., adjectives, articles, pronouns). Some distinguish between “gender” and “noun class”, using the former only for classifications based on sex (though of course there’s never a one-to-one correspondence), while others use it more broadly. I was educated in the latter approach, so for me and my ilk gender refers to any such classification of nouns. In some cases it’s sex-based, in some cases animate vs. inanimate, in some cases human vs. non-human, and in some cases there are so many (up to 20 in some African languages) that you can’t easily characterize the system (Lakoff, or probably some employee of his publisher, alluded to this in the title of his book Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things). In principle, there’s no upper limit to the number of genders a language can have, though in practice the more genders the harder it would be to learn them. An infinite number of genders would complicate a language infinitely.
Um, we are talking about grammatical gender, right?
Mike Kuebler:
Well, in fairness it is a silly question but not for that reason ;)
The beauty and convenience of living in a self reflective dream world is that the limits of objective reality never have to be adhered to or interfered by. This is a common human condition that quite often is only nullified when consequences become unavoidable. That’s why statements that are so removed from anything meaningfully representative of reality can be said with a straight face. But are we sure this isn’t satire?
In Semitic languages, also verbs!
Incidentally, in a lot of late medieval and early modern Hebrew (especially in the 18th-19th century), written by native speakers of other languages, there is a lot of gender confusion regarding inanimates; that is, there is a lot of deviation from the classical genders of nouns, and there seems to be little rhyme or reason behind this — it’s not that a certain noun that was classically feminine is now masculine, but rather that the various forms are used indiscriminately. However, this never happens with animate nouns, certainly not with people.
Honestly, I think that that may be the best solution.
I’m totally OK with accept the TRA terminology “AFAB” and “AMAB”, and using them in place of “women” and “men” in all contexts, and writing them into all laws. Then people can be whatever genders they want or whatever genders they feel, but what will matter for law will be the two sexes, AFAB and AMAB.
But why sholdn’t transmen be welcome in the AFAB facility?
GW,
Interesting about Hebrew, but it’s not surprising. There really isn’t any semantic cue to tell you that a table is feminine (in Spanish, at least; in German it’s masculine*), so if you haven’t grown up hearing “der Tisch” all your life and there aren’t any reliable phonetic cues (as there are in Spanish, but with exceptions), there’s going to be confusion.
*There is some experimental evidence that the gender of a noun in languages like Spanish and German has some influence on how speakers perceive the object: they tend to use stereotypically masculine adjectives (strong, hard) to describe masculine nouns and stereotypically feminine adjectives (beautiful, elegant) to describe feminine nouns. Interestingly, this holds true even for bilingual speakers: their perceptions seem to change depending on which language they’re using.
In Hebrew written by medieval and early modern Italians, the Hebrew words maveth (“death”) and bayith (“house”), both masculine in classical Hebrew, are pretty consistently feminine, due to influence from la morte and la casa
(This is distinct from the other phenomenon that I described, which is mostly [but not exclusively] later, where the gender of everything inaminate becomes haphazard and inconsistent.)
What a Maroon #23
The experimental evidence you speak of strikes me as unsurprising, for words simply are not abstract counters that the intellect doles out, but embedded in our world, and our understanding of it and feeling for it.
Umberto Eco, in one of his books on translation, speaks of a children’s rhyme (I seem to remember it was by the author of Struwelpeter, though I don’t think it appears in that book) in which the moon invites the sun to supper, and there is a picture showing the moon as male and the sun as female, following the gender of the two nouns in German. Translate the German rhyme into French, though, and the genders switch and people feel a serious contradiction between the rhyme & the picture.
Tim Harris,
Not surprising, perhaps, but it doesn’t fit well with some theories of language (most notably Chomsky’s notions of Universal Grammar and Pinker’s extreme modularity).
latslot #11
surely the question is: is the number of genders transfinite?
If it isn’t, then colour me unimpressed
bascule
I must learn to type slower:)