Quote:
Originally Posted by Chazz
You're so smart and concise, Heart ! 
Of course it's about gender equality and NOT gender neutrality.
Can anyone really feature resolving racism by never mentioning race; having all dolls be green instead of Black, Brown, Asian, Indigenous or White; banning terms like African-American, Latino, Pacific Islander, etc.? That would be color blindness taken to the nth degree. Color blindness is not a desirable outcome under any circumstances.
I would be seriously irate if my gender variant child got stuffed into someone else's politically correct, gender neutral closet. |
Actually, you bring up a point I was going to make the other day and then decided to wait on it. What you describe re: race is almost *precisely* what both the Left and the Right have decided is the best way to deal with this. I see something similar happening with gender. The problem with this is that it puts the emphasis on the wrong part of the problem.
I'll describe it with race and then bring it back to gender. Both the Left (race doesn't matter) and the Right (content of our character...) appear to have decided, incorrectly in my estimation, that if we just *ignore* race then racism will go away. So one hears things like "I don't see color" or "I'm colorblind". The subtext is this: "I know I'm not supposed to be a racist so I won't see color. So as long as I can *pretend* that race doesn't exist I won't have racist thoughts or make racist statements. The moment I have to acknowledge the existence of race, I will have racist thoughts."
I think this is wrong. The problem is not that race doesn't exist (obviously there are genetic differences that lead to differences of phenotype) the problem is that we mistakenly ascribe *meaning* to these genetic differences. It is one thing to say "85% of all black Americans will develop hypertension by the time they are 50", a statement that could not be made if there were no such thing as black people. It is quite another thing to say "black Americans are more prone to be criminal than whites". One is simply a statement of fact about a particular disease and its frequency within a defined population. Another is a imposition of a meaning onto blacks.
Now we seem to have decided that the *best* way to deal with gender is not to extract mistakenly placed meaning but to do away with the category what-so-ever. So male and female must be done away with instead of the idea that, for instance, female = emotion-oriented or male = action-oriented Nor is the object to do away with the idea that the former is intrinsically bad and the latter is intrinsically good. No, the only way to liberation *must* be that the categories do not exist.
I think this is gravely mistaken. Equality is not, nor can it be, predicated on their being no categories or on the idea that all our categories are mere social constructions. Our commitment to equality and our arguments in favor of it are better based upon the idea that people are individual, semi-autonomous, self-interested agents and that it is morally unacceptable and ethically indefensible, to judge an individual on the perceived average characteristics of some group that person might be a member of.
Cheers
Aj