Originally a comment by Artymorty on They are pretending they have the right to be certain.
Iâd like to offer at least a partial concession to Silent Bobâs argument about gender being âassigned at birth.â
If we take gender to broadly mean the sets of customs and behaviours that are expected of us based on how weâre perceived sexually, then in most other cultures, people really are assigned a gender at birth â theyâre assigned a very specific cultural role in their community. Elsewhere in the world, your observed sex at birth will determine which gender role you are assigned, and this will determine which clothing and jewellery you can and cannot wear, which hairstyles you can and cannot adopt, what kinds of work you can and cannot do, which sexual partners you can and cannot have, and what rights you do and do not have.
The thing is, the more a culture loosens the rules about what men and women can and canât do, the less the idea of âgender rolesâ makes sense. If itâs no longer illegal or taboo for a man to wear a dress and grow his hair long and have sex with men, thereâs no need for such men to deny that theyâre men.
In Samoa, for example, which maintains extremely strict and segregated masculine and feminine gender roles, itâs a manâs job to cut open a coconut. I saw a video of a butch lesbian in Samoa, defiantly cutting open coconuts, to show that she has a mascuine gender. She recognizes that sheâs female, but because sheâs butch (and gay) in a culture where these attributes break the rules that apply to women, she perceives herself as inhabiting a masculine gender â faâafatana, in the way of a man, akin to a âtrans manâ, or perhaps more closely to a ânonbinaryâ female. Sheâs well aware that sheâs female, but she doesnât see herself as a woman, because to her, woman is a gender role.
But in the US and Canada we donât prohibit women from cutting open coconuts. Sheâd have no need to identify as anything but a woman here. Because gender roles are gone, at least in law, and the only thing left that the words âmanâ and âwomanâ refer to is our sex.
So why has the idea that everybody needs a âgender roleâ come roaring back with a vengeance since social media came along? Itâs probably partly to do with increased pressure to conform to stereotypes. It may be legal for a woman to open a coconut here, but if her social media feed has nothing but images of Kardashian clones she may develop a sense that sheâs alienated from âwomanâ as a category of person and seek to find a label that doesnât make her feel bad.
But thereâs a far, far bigger factor at play. Man and woman may not denote âgender rolesâ in our culture anymore, but they still denote sex categories. Sexuality, not âgender rolesâ, is the primary reason men claim to be women in the Euro-American world today. To put it bluntly: when gay men pretend to be women, itâs because they want to look sexually attractive to straight men, and when straight men pretend to be women, itâs because they want to look sexually attractive to themselves. And when women pretend to be men, itâs often because theyâre trying to get away from male sexual attention.
You can see this in the different ways men and women endorse gender identity ideology: many women mistakenly think itâs about liberating people from sex-based oppression: they think females who identify as male or nonbinary are freeing themselves from the threat of male sexual assault, and they think the same of men who identify as trans. But men like Silent Bob donât see it as freedom from danger but an expansion of choice. To men, crossdressing guys in womenâs bathrooms equals more freedom because more choice. To the women who believe in gender ideology, crossdressing guys in womenâs bathrooms equals more freedom because less danger.
Itâs the total conquest of straight menâs rights over feminism and gay rights, masquerading as liberation.
I hope Silent Bob reads this and has a think.
