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
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