I don't know if you are familiar with the short story called "Brokeback Mountain" by Annie Proulx.
Almost 20 years ago there was a big cultural kerfuffle about that short story and a film that was to be made about it. I generally don't read fiction, but decided to read it and it is extraordinarily good, up there with O'Connor, perhaps Flaubert.
I think about that short story alot, and its 2 cowboys who are so in love with each other. They themselves remark at a couple of points, that what ever this was, it was something overwhelming. Yet they had not name for it......they didn't say, "Are we gay, or musical, or friends of Dorothy?"
In other words they lived completely in signified and not at all in the world of signifiers and signs. They simple were: identity not needed.
I think of "Brokeback Mountain" alot these days because it's really astounding to me how much trans/gender movement is so signifier dependent. So many genders luxuriate as signifiers with the names, pronouns, flags, but peter out as signified.
At one moment you are being told that "sex" points to biology, whereas "gender" to social conventions. And then you find a few sentences down that the 2 terms are being conflated and confused. Really something.
I read it before it was adapted as a film. I have always liked Proulx ever since The Shipping News and I also enjoy works that explore or invert the tropes of fictional worlds by introducing them to reality. Cormac McCarthy does this with the Western. George RR Martin does this with the fantasy. But I had never thought about how Proulx avoided labels in Brokeback Mountain. Fascinating point. Trans literalists focus on labels rather than reality precisely because reality is not on their side, so they use language to get people to believe the lie. But when a trans woman tells you they know they are a woman and you ask how they know, they either reply with gender essentialism or circular logic. The only rational way out of this double bind is by acknowledging that one is a man who simply prefers to live as a woman, rather than attempting to argue that one actually is a woman in any meaningful sense. After that, they can shift gears to make the case for their dignity based on classical liberal values (let bygones be bygones) rather than using clinically psychotic manipulation.
In Always Coming Home, Ursula K Le Guin refers to one character as "a woman-living man." If that book had come out in 2025 instead of the 1980s, she'd be brigaded as the next J.K. Rowling.
The intro to this essay was correct. It's silly and beneath the adults in the room that this conversation even happens.
To borrow from an analogy in the middle, these people are the sort to label trees "cars" based on the notion that language is arbitrary, and then as soon as someone agrees, they assert that we've further agreed that trees contain spark plugs and transmissions.
And as always, I've never seen anything worthwhile from Richard Hanania. Not a single tidbit. It's mind-boggling to me that that midwit has a following.
I seriously doubt that the real world versions of Proux’s characters would have had 20th century angst about identity. Men did enjoy sex with each other back then and men had affection for each other, not always simultaneously. (Think Walt Whitman picking up sailors, while enjoying deep friendships with fellow writers.) To be fair, every historical novel is filled with contemporary characters in costume: Scarlett O’Hara is a 1920s career woman like her author
But I really came on here to remind all of us that at the height of pandemic madness, Twitter was full of activists arguing, unironically, that 2+2=5. All you needed was a branch of obscure math that changed the rules.
And I just today learned that Brokeback Mountain is set in contemporary America (1963+). What’s the emoji for cringe-inducing embarrassment? Admit I’m not a fan of Proulx and didn’t make it through the kindle sample of Shipping News when a friend recently recommended it. What can I say?
Your essays are always a treat, thank you. However, this topic I find especially intriguing.
The bit about Saussure's argument on the relationship between signifiers and signifieds, or words and the concepts they reference being arbitrary reminded me there was a study a while back on the peculiar commonalities of sound use across different languages.
Thank you, this led me to all sorts of Hubbard and Ramachandran. (My glimpse of synesthesia consisted of an old interview in which Lorde described being able to see the music she's composing in colours. It seemed to fit, so I'd never given it another thought.) Brilliant.
"Let’s consider the definition you gave at the top of your essay:
Let me first tell you what I think the terms man and woman refer to. There are a series of traits typically possessed by and associated with biological females. Not all women share all of these traits but having them is correlated with being female. These traits include:
Let me first tell you what I think the terms man and woman refer to. There are a series of traits typically possessed by and associated with biological females. Not all women share all of these traits but having them is correlated with being female. These traits include:"
This occurred to me: If a trans woman IS a woman because claiming otherwise is offensive, is a trans woman the “same” as a woman? Is this 2 the same as that 3? No.
Why isn’t woman a non-relational concept though? My position is that all identities are relational, in the sense that what constitutes an identity of something is the totality of its relations with other things. The way it works then, is that in the world there is a fundamental relationship of biological reproduction, and for the purposes of reproduction, humans are divided into two categories: male and female. So someone is male if he’s male for the purposes of reproduction.
Perhaps, he argues that there’s also a sociological dimension, in which we divide humans into males and females in a more complex way than in the biological dimension. That might be sometimes true practically, but logically it’s a fallacy: our sociological concept of men and women is still grounded in the biological concept of male and female. The only way you can pull one from the other is by saying that sociological human and biological human are two different things because sociology and biology are different sciences. This contains the fallacy of the primacy of consciousness: the idea that our concepts and classifications define objective reality. It also misunderstands scientific hierarchy: in no way can sociology override biology, chemistry and physics. A human always retains his animal component, and his human mind and social role can not exist without the former.
Now as for parenting, it’a good example : there’s a biological reality of parenting, and there is also a social reality of parenting which is substantially more complex than the biological. A person might not be a biological parent, but can play the social role of parenting. It can sound like it can imply us something about sexual identity. However, it is not a good analogy because of a different structure of causality. Being a biological parent does not imply that a person will (or even can) act as a social parent to his/her child, and someone can play the role of a social parent without being biological parent. Strictly speaking, there is no logical causality between the two concepts, although usually biological parents act as social parents. The difference in the case of sex is that there is a hard fact of causality: in order to be able to give birth to a child and become what we call “mother’ to someone, you need to be biologically female. We ground our social concept of “woman” in this biological realty which is for like it or not, is not changeable and resists flexibility. So the comparison with parenting is not legitimate.
I don't know if you are familiar with the short story called "Brokeback Mountain" by Annie Proulx.
Almost 20 years ago there was a big cultural kerfuffle about that short story and a film that was to be made about it. I generally don't read fiction, but decided to read it and it is extraordinarily good, up there with O'Connor, perhaps Flaubert.
I think about that short story alot, and its 2 cowboys who are so in love with each other. They themselves remark at a couple of points, that what ever this was, it was something overwhelming. Yet they had not name for it......they didn't say, "Are we gay, or musical, or friends of Dorothy?"
In other words they lived completely in signified and not at all in the world of signifiers and signs. They simple were: identity not needed.
I think of "Brokeback Mountain" alot these days because it's really astounding to me how much trans/gender movement is so signifier dependent. So many genders luxuriate as signifiers with the names, pronouns, flags, but peter out as signified.
At one moment you are being told that "sex" points to biology, whereas "gender" to social conventions. And then you find a few sentences down that the 2 terms are being conflated and confused. Really something.
I read it before it was adapted as a film. I have always liked Proulx ever since The Shipping News and I also enjoy works that explore or invert the tropes of fictional worlds by introducing them to reality. Cormac McCarthy does this with the Western. George RR Martin does this with the fantasy. But I had never thought about how Proulx avoided labels in Brokeback Mountain. Fascinating point. Trans literalists focus on labels rather than reality precisely because reality is not on their side, so they use language to get people to believe the lie. But when a trans woman tells you they know they are a woman and you ask how they know, they either reply with gender essentialism or circular logic. The only rational way out of this double bind is by acknowledging that one is a man who simply prefers to live as a woman, rather than attempting to argue that one actually is a woman in any meaningful sense. After that, they can shift gears to make the case for their dignity based on classical liberal values (let bygones be bygones) rather than using clinically psychotic manipulation.
In Always Coming Home, Ursula K Le Guin refers to one character as "a woman-living man." If that book had come out in 2025 instead of the 1980s, she'd be brigaded as the next J.K. Rowling.
The intro to this essay was correct. It's silly and beneath the adults in the room that this conversation even happens.
To borrow from an analogy in the middle, these people are the sort to label trees "cars" based on the notion that language is arbitrary, and then as soon as someone agrees, they assert that we've further agreed that trees contain spark plugs and transmissions.
And as always, I've never seen anything worthwhile from Richard Hanania. Not a single tidbit. It's mind-boggling to me that that midwit has a following.
Brilliant defense of your position. Logical. Respectful. Methodical.
Thank you again for an outstanding piece.
I seriously doubt that the real world versions of Proux’s characters would have had 20th century angst about identity. Men did enjoy sex with each other back then and men had affection for each other, not always simultaneously. (Think Walt Whitman picking up sailors, while enjoying deep friendships with fellow writers.) To be fair, every historical novel is filled with contemporary characters in costume: Scarlett O’Hara is a 1920s career woman like her author
But I really came on here to remind all of us that at the height of pandemic madness, Twitter was full of activists arguing, unironically, that 2+2=5. All you needed was a branch of obscure math that changed the rules.
And I just today learned that Brokeback Mountain is set in contemporary America (1963+). What’s the emoji for cringe-inducing embarrassment? Admit I’m not a fan of Proulx and didn’t make it through the kindle sample of Shipping News when a friend recently recommended it. What can I say?
Your essays are always a treat, thank you. However, this topic I find especially intriguing.
The bit about Saussure's argument on the relationship between signifiers and signifieds, or words and the concepts they reference being arbitrary reminded me there was a study a while back on the peculiar commonalities of sound use across different languages.
So I had a rummage, and Morten Christiansen has been researching the relationships between the sound of words and their meaning for at least twenty years. An article about it: https://www.sciencenordic.com/denmark-language-society--culture/two-thirds-of-all-languages-use-similar-sounds-in-common-words/1438756
The 2016 study: https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1605782113
Take that Saussure! ^^
Thanks for the links, and the compliment. Adding to the list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect
Thank you, this led me to all sorts of Hubbard and Ramachandran. (My glimpse of synesthesia consisted of an old interview in which Lorde described being able to see the music she's composing in colours. It seemed to fit, so I'd never given it another thought.) Brilliant.
I love to hear it. Thanks for sharing, Louise.
Duplicate paragraph here:
"Let’s consider the definition you gave at the top of your essay:
Let me first tell you what I think the terms man and woman refer to. There are a series of traits typically possessed by and associated with biological females. Not all women share all of these traits but having them is correlated with being female. These traits include:
Let me first tell you what I think the terms man and woman refer to. There are a series of traits typically possessed by and associated with biological females. Not all women share all of these traits but having them is correlated with being female. These traits include:"
Thank you.
This occurred to me: If a trans woman IS a woman because claiming otherwise is offensive, is a trans woman the “same” as a woman? Is this 2 the same as that 3? No.
Armstrong and Getty have a slogan, “Hot dogs ARE dogs.”
Why isn’t woman a non-relational concept though? My position is that all identities are relational, in the sense that what constitutes an identity of something is the totality of its relations with other things. The way it works then, is that in the world there is a fundamental relationship of biological reproduction, and for the purposes of reproduction, humans are divided into two categories: male and female. So someone is male if he’s male for the purposes of reproduction.
Perhaps, he argues that there’s also a sociological dimension, in which we divide humans into males and females in a more complex way than in the biological dimension. That might be sometimes true practically, but logically it’s a fallacy: our sociological concept of men and women is still grounded in the biological concept of male and female. The only way you can pull one from the other is by saying that sociological human and biological human are two different things because sociology and biology are different sciences. This contains the fallacy of the primacy of consciousness: the idea that our concepts and classifications define objective reality. It also misunderstands scientific hierarchy: in no way can sociology override biology, chemistry and physics. A human always retains his animal component, and his human mind and social role can not exist without the former.
Now as for parenting, it’a good example : there’s a biological reality of parenting, and there is also a social reality of parenting which is substantially more complex than the biological. A person might not be a biological parent, but can play the social role of parenting. It can sound like it can imply us something about sexual identity. However, it is not a good analogy because of a different structure of causality. Being a biological parent does not imply that a person will (or even can) act as a social parent to his/her child, and someone can play the role of a social parent without being biological parent. Strictly speaking, there is no logical causality between the two concepts, although usually biological parents act as social parents. The difference in the case of sex is that there is a hard fact of causality: in order to be able to give birth to a child and become what we call “mother’ to someone, you need to be biologically female. We ground our social concept of “woman” in this biological realty which is for like it or not, is not changeable and resists flexibility. So the comparison with parenting is not legitimate.