Guest post: We know less about a person than before
Originally a comment by Pliny the in Between on The pedantic version.
In my day job I work with information management and AI systems. A key goal we’re always striving for is improved information content within structured data sets. We only add new elements or classifiers to the language or lexicon structures if they are required to improve differentiation amongst a set of entities that are characterized by some combination of these classifiers. We meticulously avoid adding ambiguous classifiers as these do nothing but reduce the information content of data sets and reduce the precision of the operations that can be performed by the systems.
It seems to me this is similar to the gender/pronoun language problem. All these new categorizations reduce the actual information content of language. We know less about a person than before. And not just one person who makes an issue about it. By insisting on using these new gender classifiers we introduce ambiguity in all descriptions until we get these tortured monikers like people who menstruate rather than saying women. And that’s not even accurate since not all women (or females) menstruate. Should we expect in the future to have to further refine this to, ‘people who could menstruate if they were mature, but not too mature, and not on any medications but not everyday so they may not currently be menstruating’ in order to preserve the information content? Or maybe we can come up with a single term that contains all the same information – maybe something like ‘women’.
I’ve read somewhere that part of the point of ‘people who menstruate’ etc is to divide the reality of the class of people ‘women’ into unrelated fragments, so that it’s linguistically (and eventually psychologically) impossible to recognise that the categories of ‘people who menstruate’ ‘people with cervixes’ ‘people who can get pregnant’ etc. actually have a significant and meaningful overlap. That makes it more challenging to explicitly recognise that there is a particular class of person who always seems to be oppressed, discriminated against or treated badly in specific and predictable ways.
Probably here, about eleventy thousand times. I absolutely think that’s [at least part of] why – I think the whole point is to delete women from the discourse altogether, and thus from politics, reform, debate, scholarship, inquiry, opinion – everything.
“LGBTQ+” is an example of a term that gives us less information than we had when the individual letters were broken out into separate attributes. And I suspect that’s a large part of LGBTQ+’s appeal.
LGBTQ+ basically just means “different in a sex and gender kind of way.” Which is deliberately more vague than “sexually attracted to persons of the same sex.”
Deliberately more vague is appealing to lazy journalists who don’t want to bother being specific.
Deliberately more vague is appealing to formerly-LGB-focused lobby groups who want to capture a broader demographic.
Deliberately more vague is appealing to straight people who aren’t actually sexually attracted to persons of the same sex, but who want to claim a place in the rainbow parade now that it’s got cachet.
Deliberately more vague is appealing to men for whom their specific “sex and gender” difference constitutes having sexual paraphilias that they’re too embarrassed to openly admit to; and it’s more appealing to the people who have to interact with these paraphilic men in their family or work life, who would rather not have to address head-on the kinky elephant in the room.
And deliberately more vague is most appealing to the many young people who are struggling to reconcile themselves with the bodies they inhabit, which each come equipped with a sex and a sexual orientation of their own, outside of their inhabitants’ control, and often ill-fitting with the identities these young people are trying to curate online so that they can fit in with their peers.
The primary problem with labelling people — especially young people — as “LGBTQ+” is that we’re taking information away: we’re saying, there’s a cohort of kids who are “different” and it doesn’t actually matter how they’re different. Because a lot of people believe that once someone has found his or her (or their) way to the LGBTQ+ club, they’ve found their oasis of acceptance, free from the malign influence of the far right and the Christian conservatives, and everything that comes afterwards must therefore play out organically without friction or bias, in a kind of utopian paradise where all the misfits find their perfect fit. And that void of critical thinking is irresistible to charlatans, profiteers, crooks and liars.
Arty
I hear you and agree.
Its deliberate vagueness is also an issue for straights who support the L & G, and acknowledge the harm gender woo is causing to girls and women of any sexual orientation and to gay men.
We thought the fight was over in the 70s, then the 80s and nineties. Here we are, sixty years later, STILL having to fight for the rights of girls, women, Lesbians, Gays, and anyone else who is “gender non conforming”. Not all short haired women are “dykes”, and not all softly-spoken men are gay.
The TRA/MRA/Incel Alliance are doing their damnedest to progress us right back to 1930 when women were mostly confined to the home and homosexuals were bashed, jailed, and murdered.
[…] a comment by Artymorty on We know less about a person than […]