Right, but you don't need god or genes to affirm someone's identity, you just need to believe them.
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I guess this is what I don't get - why is that sort of determinism any better just because the mechanism is obscured? "Your gender is fixed by your genitals" and "Your gender is fixed by something in your brain/mind/soul but we won't say what" are both still essentialism.
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Replying to @Moonlitpiglet @ReinH and
As I said to Christa earlier, there's this related idea that linking gender to a particular psychological trait is fine *as long as the trait isn't fixed itself.* But the linking of the traits is bad to begin with - it doesn't matter how stable the essentialized property is.
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Replying to @Moonlitpiglet @ReinH and
This is silly. I'm agender, actually agender and not the weird political thing TERFs sometimes do. Lots of people are genderfluid. TERFs are the ones who get pissy about this.
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I don't see how this avoids the problem, though - saying "I have no gender because I don't have some particular psychological experience" still essentializes gender to a particular psychological experience in the same way!
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Replying to @Moonlitpiglet @Eristae and
Right, but the problem with essentialism is that there are so many causal factors that interact in such complex ways that it's silly to claim that someone is some way because of god or genes or nurture or any other single factor.
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But I just keep asking - why is is gender essentialism any better just because it's essentialized to some particular quality we can't access or measure? If I said, "I think being Asian makes you good at math..."
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Replying to @Moonlitpiglet @ReinH and
This is a stupid-ass definition of "essentialism" It's like saying it's "essentialism" to define my religious identity by what I believe about God and the afterlife
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Moonlitpiglet and
I mean it's arguably *reductive*, like you could argue against that by saying "A lot of people do trace their religious identity to their ethnicity and cultural upbringing rather than their current theological beliefs, there are a lot of agnostic Jews and atheist Catholics"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Moonlitpiglet and
But it's not fucking essentialism It's especially perverse to then turn around and argue that some other position that obviously IS essentialism is less essentialist
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"Let's just agree that if your parents were both Christians, then by the biological definition of Christianity you are a Christian and inescapably so -- but that that has nothing to do at all with how you live your life or what you believe Isn't that liberating?"
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