Yeah, but the point is, both groups are trying to be descriptive, just one of them is failing at that. And in that failure they are adopting harmful prescriptive attitudes.
It is generally not the case that those being prescriptive† (with regard to gender or language) could give an accurate descriptive account of reality.
Fuck, I walked away for a moment and when I came back the auto-update had eaten my reply.
Yeah, but the point is, both groups are trying to be descriptive, just one of them is failing at that. And in that failure they are adopting harmful prescriptive attitudes.
It is generally not the case that those being prescriptive† (with regard to gender or language) could give an accurate descriptive account of reality.
I mean yeah, that's basically what I said in the first followup: they have their ideas of what "is" that are informed by them being socialized in a chauvinist, patriarchal society. What I'm getting at is that cleaving to those ideas and declaring them to be facts is necessarily a prescriptivist stance, even if they earnestly believe them to be some natural and fundamental part of the human condition.
I suppose I should probably to amend the assertion that they believe “everyone fits into one of these two boxes, I will be the judge of which one they are in, and they must behave accordingly” to include the caveat that they may not formally believe that specifically, but rather that that is a description of how their worldview and actions intersect, and that what exactly that worldview is is going to be different for a truscum chud like Blaire White than for your run of the mill cishet gamer chud even if fundamentally how it relates to reality and how it seeks to impose archaic ideas unilaterally on others (knowingly or not) is the same.
To be completely honest, even though this is apparently an established explanation and argument I just had the realization that there was a parallel between the prescriptivist vs descriptivist thing and the two separate approaches to talking about gender while trying to think of a way to explain the gender discourse to OP, and decided to see if I could coherently elaborate on and build off that thought. After being made to defend it and thinking on it further, I do still believe that it's fundamentally accurate but as you've made clear it is incomplete and needs a bunch of caveats and further elaborations to be accurate and clear.
I don't mean to discard the 'prescriptivist vs descriptivist thing' altogether, it's a great way of thinking about it; and it was new to me in this context.
In general my view of models/analogies is that they are as illustrative and useful in how they differ from what they aim to describe as how precisely they can match up.
but I do tend to be anal about those caveats, to the extent that I self-replied to my own arguments above. *cringe* lol
(self-reply)
I guess there is a difference with regard to some fascist and eugenicist ideologies; where those are overtly prescriptive and aim towards some kind of utopia.
The Biblical account could also be read as utopian and aiming towards the return of the kingdom of God.
But I consider those positions somewhat fringe; religious dogmatism is common, but the mainstream in increasingly liberal and receptive to secular ethics.
My point is that the efficient cause of most bigotry tends to be ignorance or misinformation, not some utopian ideals.
Most religious dogmatists are bigoted, but not just because of their religion; if they lose that religion, they are often still bigoted.
It is usually just those who reject religion in part because of the bigotry that come out the other end without it.
Edit: that said, in many cases it not quite that either, but mere 'disgust', but the origins of that are complicated and for the most part culturally determined.
when you ask people to explain why they're disgusted, they'll respond with moral language. ask them to unpack the implications and they'll go right back to disgust. (this is easiest to show with something like beastiality where there generally aren't human costs to any particular course of action.) because of this, I'm not sure it makes sense to separate their positions from the prescriptivist ones, when they describe human actions as unnatural or disgusting.
moreover, the actual task of education in these cases is to inspire empathy, patiently encouraging the bigot to recognize the subjectivities of those they judge, rather than objects to be categorized. that is, no litany of facts can convince the transphobe that someone assigned male at birth may well and truly be female, as that consignment is an immutable fact of the other person, objectified.
note: this is not merely a description of the person. the knowledge that the person they view was assigned male (by whom? why? questions that are never asked) will change their perception, and frequently the categorization, of the person so considered. the mere introduction of this knowledge will change how they gender the person they view. when their expectations don't align with what they view, they slip into the moral language of disgust, and become prescriptive in their words/actions to put the world aright.
conversely, once shown an empathetic view of the targets of their bigotries, taking into consideration their subjectivity, bigots almost always cease to be bigots. consequently, I think this bigotry is fundamentally prescriptive. if it were merely descriptive, they would not choose to act to reassert the category. the subject/object designation is key to when description becomes prescription. your view of prescription almost eliminates it entirely and I don't think that's quite correct as the very moral language people use to describe their intent ceases to make sense.
no litany of facts can convince the transphobe that someone assigned male at birth may well and truly be female,
well, in terms of truscum, MRI studies seem to do that; but there might be some motivated reasoning going on there, as it's just as easy to find differences between cis- and trans- counterparts as it is to find similarities.
I've had some odd success changing online reactionaries minds by framing transsexualism as 'intersex of the brain' or even a 'birth defect'†; although it gets them past the moral objections, they start frothing at the mouth with eugenicist zeal.
† wouldn't use those terms in general, but you sometimes gotta meet them at their level for any conversation to be possible.
when their expectations don’t align with what they view, they slip into the moral language of disgust,
that is an interesting point. (instead of updating their views they become oppositional)
once shown an empathetic view of the targets of their bigotries, taking into consideration their subjectivity, bigots almost always cease to be bigots.
yeah, but I'm not sure that empathy is really doing the legwork here; because these subjective accounts often contain new information.
an empathic subjective account of bestiality is probably not going to shift that many opinions. I mean yeah, that dachshund was totally asking for it, but still, what the fuck.
if it were merely descriptive, they would not choose to act to reassert the category.
but in the case of say Peterson, his position is that non-binary gender identification either is symptomatic of (or inevitably results in) mental health issues.
from that descriptive position, a prescriptive move against non-binary identification could simply be a utilitarian or consequentialist one.
I am not at all dismissing that there is a prescriptive element to "only two genders", that is almost invariably the case, but I object to the notion that our side alone is being descriptive.
the subject/object designation is key
but I know how to empathize with fascists, seeing them as subjects, understanding how they got so messed up; but that doesn't at all stop me from hating, opposing, or objectifying them either.
If we look at for example KF (an online harassment, doxing, and primarily observation for the lulz form), I don't think it is entirely honest to say they must lack subjective insight, their position is sadistic not objectifying.
Even the worst of the TERFs are more intent on inflicting harm sadistically than on putting the world right. But at that point we're dealing with psychopathology, not ordinary bigots.
your view of prescription almost eliminates [subject/object] entirely
we are but atoms in the dance of nature. my want for an icy popsicle is merely a fact about my brain, my choice to open the freezer is merely an event in time out of reach. /s
but you're right that subject/object is not of primary importance in how I think about these things; I'm not convinced that it should be.
I mean, even like the KKK, there is no sense in which you can throw a brick through someone's window without having a subjective account of how it affects them; the whole point of terrorizing people is using that subject view towards objective ends.
So for me, the objective aspect will always have primacy. I don't believe there is a failure to empathize, but a failure to understand, which leads to inaccurate or badly contextualized subjective accounts.
Everybody knows that BLM are unhappy, afraid, desperate for change; a subjective view into what it is like to be Black in America can amount to "sucks for them", it doesn't imply self-pitying white voters are going to help.
The way capitalist healthcare massively harms people isn't enough to budge many conservative voters either; they seem perfectly content with Social Darwinism.
Beyond that, people can be indifferent to the subjective altogether; as in the slogan "fuck your feelings" which to me is not avoiding the subjective, but discounting it as irrelevant.
They way in which the alt-right revels in lib-left misery seems to me quite the opposite of objectification.
I'm sure that many, many, people have gone from ignorance via empathy to holding better political opinions; but if that were really enough I don't think there would be many conservatives left.
I suppose my view of human nature is darker than most.
Anyway, some of this has gotten rather abstract, and I might have misunderstood what you were getting at, and there is far too much to be said on all these topics, but I can feel events transpiring in my brain such that *post*
Yeah, but the point is, both groups are trying to be descriptive, just one of them is failing at that. And in that failure they are adopting harmful prescriptive attitudes.
It is generally not the case that those being prescriptive† (with regard to gender or language) could give an accurate descriptive account of reality.
Even with homophobia, many homophobes conceptualize gay sex and marriage as mere choices because they are themselves somewhat bisexual.
In the UK less than half of those under 24 describe themselves as exclusively homosexual.
(† defining "do whatever you want" as not prescriptive for sake of simplicity)
Fuck, I walked away for a moment and when I came back the auto-update had eaten my reply.
I mean yeah, that's basically what I said in the first followup: they have their ideas of what "is" that are informed by them being socialized in a chauvinist, patriarchal society. What I'm getting at is that cleaving to those ideas and declaring them to be facts is necessarily a prescriptivist stance, even if they earnestly believe them to be some natural and fundamental part of the human condition.
I suppose I should probably to amend the assertion that they believe “everyone fits into one of these two boxes, I will be the judge of which one they are in, and they must behave accordingly” to include the caveat that they may not formally believe that specifically, but rather that that is a description of how their worldview and actions intersect, and that what exactly that worldview is is going to be different for a truscum chud like Blaire White than for your run of the mill cishet gamer chud even if fundamentally how it relates to reality and how it seeks to impose archaic ideas unilaterally on others (knowingly or not) is the same.
To be completely honest, even though this is apparently an established explanation and argument I just had the realization that there was a parallel between the prescriptivist vs descriptivist thing and the two separate approaches to talking about gender while trying to think of a way to explain the gender discourse to OP, and decided to see if I could coherently elaborate on and build off that thought. After being made to defend it and thinking on it further, I do still believe that it's fundamentally accurate but as you've made clear it is incomplete and needs a bunch of caveats and further elaborations to be accurate and clear.
I don't mean to discard the 'prescriptivist vs descriptivist thing' altogether, it's a great way of thinking about it; and it was new to me in this context.
In general my view of models/analogies is that they are as illustrative and useful in how they differ from what they aim to describe as how precisely they can match up.
but I do tend to be anal about those caveats, to the extent that I self-replied to my own arguments above. *cringe* lol
(self-reply)
I guess there is a difference with regard to some fascist and eugenicist ideologies; where those are overtly prescriptive and aim towards some kind of utopia.
The Biblical account could also be read as utopian and aiming towards the return of the kingdom of God.
But I consider those positions somewhat fringe; religious dogmatism is common, but the mainstream in increasingly liberal and receptive to secular ethics.
My point is that the efficient cause of most bigotry tends to be ignorance or misinformation, not some utopian ideals.
Most religious dogmatists are bigoted, but not just because of their religion; if they lose that religion, they are often still bigoted.
It is usually just those who reject religion in part because of the bigotry that come out the other end without it.
Edit: that said, in many cases it not quite that either, but mere 'disgust', but the origins of that are complicated and for the most part culturally determined.
when you ask people to explain why they're disgusted, they'll respond with moral language. ask them to unpack the implications and they'll go right back to disgust. (this is easiest to show with something like beastiality where there generally aren't human costs to any particular course of action.) because of this, I'm not sure it makes sense to separate their positions from the prescriptivist ones, when they describe human actions as unnatural or disgusting.
moreover, the actual task of education in these cases is to inspire empathy, patiently encouraging the bigot to recognize the subjectivities of those they judge, rather than objects to be categorized. that is, no litany of facts can convince the transphobe that someone assigned male at birth may well and truly be female, as that consignment is an immutable fact of the other person, objectified.
note: this is not merely a description of the person. the knowledge that the person they view was assigned male (by whom? why? questions that are never asked) will change their perception, and frequently the categorization, of the person so considered. the mere introduction of this knowledge will change how they gender the person they view. when their expectations don't align with what they view, they slip into the moral language of disgust, and become prescriptive in their words/actions to put the world aright.
conversely, once shown an empathetic view of the targets of their bigotries, taking into consideration their subjectivity, bigots almost always cease to be bigots. consequently, I think this bigotry is fundamentally prescriptive. if it were merely descriptive, they would not choose to act to reassert the category. the subject/object designation is key to when description becomes prescription. your view of prescription almost eliminates it entirely and I don't think that's quite correct as the very moral language people use to describe their intent ceases to make sense.
well, in terms of truscum, MRI studies seem to do that; but there might be some motivated reasoning going on there, as it's just as easy to find differences between cis- and trans- counterparts as it is to find similarities.
I've had some odd success changing online reactionaries minds by framing transsexualism as 'intersex of the brain' or even a 'birth defect'†; although it gets them past the moral objections, they start frothing at the mouth with eugenicist zeal.
† wouldn't use those terms in general, but you sometimes gotta meet them at their level for any conversation to be possible.
that is an interesting point. (instead of updating their views they become oppositional)
yeah, but I'm not sure that empathy is really doing the legwork here; because these subjective accounts often contain new information.
an empathic subjective account of bestiality is probably not going to shift that many opinions. I mean yeah, that dachshund was totally asking for it, but still, what the fuck.
but in the case of say Peterson, his position is that non-binary gender identification either is symptomatic of (or inevitably results in) mental health issues.
from that descriptive position, a prescriptive move against non-binary identification could simply be a utilitarian or consequentialist one.
I am not at all dismissing that there is a prescriptive element to "only two genders", that is almost invariably the case, but I object to the notion that our side alone is being descriptive.
but I know how to empathize with fascists, seeing them as subjects, understanding how they got so messed up; but that doesn't at all stop me from hating, opposing, or objectifying them either.
If we look at for example KF (an online harassment, doxing, and primarily observation for the lulz form), I don't think it is entirely honest to say they must lack subjective insight, their position is sadistic not objectifying.
Even the worst of the TERFs are more intent on inflicting harm sadistically than on putting the world right. But at that point we're dealing with psychopathology, not ordinary bigots.
we are but atoms in the dance of nature. my want for an icy popsicle is merely a fact about my brain, my choice to open the freezer is merely an event in time out of reach. /s
but you're right that subject/object is not of primary importance in how I think about these things; I'm not convinced that it should be.
I mean, even like the KKK, there is no sense in which you can throw a brick through someone's window without having a subjective account of how it affects them; the whole point of terrorizing people is using that subject view towards objective ends.
So for me, the objective aspect will always have primacy. I don't believe there is a failure to empathize, but a failure to understand, which leads to inaccurate or badly contextualized subjective accounts.
Everybody knows that BLM are unhappy, afraid, desperate for change; a subjective view into what it is like to be Black in America can amount to "sucks for them", it doesn't imply self-pitying white voters are going to help.
The way capitalist healthcare massively harms people isn't enough to budge many conservative voters either; they seem perfectly content with Social Darwinism.
Beyond that, people can be indifferent to the subjective altogether; as in the slogan "fuck your feelings" which to me is not avoiding the subjective, but discounting it as irrelevant.
They way in which the alt-right revels in lib-left misery seems to me quite the opposite of objectification.
I'm sure that many, many, people have gone from ignorance via empathy to holding better political opinions; but if that were really enough I don't think there would be many conservatives left.
I suppose my view of human nature is darker than most.
Anyway, some of this has gotten rather abstract, and I might have misunderstood what you were getting at, and there is far too much to be said on all these topics, but I can feel events transpiring in my brain such that *post*