Bloody gerunds!

[TyroSaysMeow]

Working through my vast backlog of open tabs, I came across this quote in an article someone shared the other day:

This [cisnormativity], for those not up with the language and beliefs of the trans movement, means ‘the sociocultural conditions which allow the belief that being cisgender is the norm and normal’. It is a term which assumes that we all have an ‘inner gender identity’ as well as a biological sex.

And it set me off on an internal rant about gerunds.

Stick an -ed on the end of 'cisgender', turn it back into a verb, and it's exactly the same as what we're all saying here - that the act of being, as it were, forcibly cisgendered - by which I mean pressured to comply with the expectations society holds of women ie looking pretty and doing the washing up etc, is considered normal, and that this is wrong on many levels.

We just don't call it 'cisnormativity'; we call it sex-based oppression operating through the mechanism of gendered sex-role stereotypes and expectations.

The second quoted sentence reveals just where the masses - woke and fast asleep alike - keep going wrong.

One is not a subject in possession of a gender. One is both a subject who genders and an object upon which the process of gendering is performed. That's the entire fucking basis of the whole "gendering is bad" line.

Attempting to perform the process on yourself? We need a word for that, and the most logical one is banned here because we're all GC and so intuitively understand it to be pejorative when directed at us. Three letters, starts with a C.

Can we set up some sort of crowdfunding for remedial grammar lessons for the entire populace? This is hurting my head.

I am loving this thread.

No, no, Sign, that's perfect (forgive the unintentional pun). It was entirely the point!

Perfect passive participle is exactly what I'm thinking, I just didn't know the word for it.

Trouble is, I can say "I have been cisgendered" and people hear "I used to be cisgender". Whereas what I actually mean is that I was treated according to and expected to behave like the stereotypes attached to my sex.

See, that -ed at the end matters.

This is the content I am here for. Educational, reasonable, with a touch of justifiable ranting.

Well thanks for that.

Okay, now you lot are making me blush.

StillWeRise I do indeed love those gerunds. Takes me right back to childhood.

I hate that we're not really allowed to use the c-word, because stripped back to the same/opposite meaning they claim is true, it's actually a bloody useful concept. To treat someone in a manner considered socially appropriate for the sexes of everyone involved is to cisgender them; to transgender someone is then to expect them to conform to opposite-sex expectations, cf David Reimer.

Which means every time some entitled dick starts banging on about misgendering and expecting us to pander, said dick is cisgendering us - expecting us to display appropriately feminine coddling behaviour in response to the demands of a male.

And every time we refuse to defer and instead try to have a reasonable and constructive debate, we're not just refusing to cisgender ourselves. We're transgendering them - because we're not treating them in a manner considered appropriate for the sex that gets coddled ie as men, but rather in the manner we'd treat our female peers ie as human beings capable of rational debate and critical thinking.

So quite why they get so arsey about attempts at reasonable dialogue is beyond me.

I suspect that if you tried to tell them that women can be subjects you'd get a blank stare.

Absolutely.

Which is where the remedial philosophy lessons come in.

To be human is be both subject and object simultaneously.

Unfortunately a lot of well-meaning idiots on the left have got the memo that "objectification is bad" but haven't got a clue what it really means.

Oh my god, Stillwerise - that is exactly how I’ve always imagined a gerund. Where does the picture come from? Apart from the back of my brain ....

Ronald Searle, Molesworth, How to be Topp, is what the back of my brain throws up.

Loved that book when I was a kid.

I can never quite figure out what wokebeards think objectification means, other than "something I'm being accused of unfairly because women are failing to properly respect my penis needs".

I like Granny Weatherwax's simple and concise take on it, when talking to Mightily Oats in Carpe Jugulum:

"... sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That's what sin is."

I suspect they don't quite grasp that the concept of objectification isn't just about sex.

Funny you should mention Pratchett given that a couple of other current threads are heading in a rather Corporal Visit-like direction!

Seems unfair to lose Pratchett and have Trump still Trump-ing all over the place.

Cisgender is an adjective, in grammatical terms, isn’t it? How can an adjective be made into a verb?
It’s like saying ‘I am talled’ or ‘I am shorted’; or talking about talling or shorting.

That's exactly what I'm complaining about, ilove - people using the concept as an adjective. As an adjective it means "behaving and believing in a manner considered appropriate to one's sex."

Which rather presupposes that there are behaviours etc that are inappropriate to one's sex.

Which is sexist as hell.

What I'm saying is that people have forgotten the implications of gender being a verb. And as a verb, adding the prefix is a useful way to denote whether one is being treated as a member of one's own sex class or a member of the other one.

I believe there's a terribly smug Simon Heffer anecdote out there, where he describes as a 22-year-old graduate interviewing for a job as a proofreader, being set a tet to find 24 mistakes in a piece of prose. Heffer finds 26, "because the setter forgot gerunds".

As 99% of us were never introduced to the idea of gerunds, let alone be able to spot them in a piece of text, why don't you put the issue in words of one syllable for the rest of us? I say this as a graduate (albeit sciences) of a Russell Group University.

My rants about gerunds and their lack of familiarity to 99.995% of us aside, can we consider this sentence:

‘the sociocultural conditions which allow the belief that being cisgender is the norm and normal’

The "sociocultural conditions"which allow "the belief that being cisgender is the norm and normal" are the fact that 99.995% of us are 'cisgender' and therefore, 99.995% of the population being a certain thing and only 0.005% of us are not is pretty much the definition of normal. It means in a town of 100,000 people, only 5 do not conform to 'the norm'. This is not an enforced "sociocultural condition", it is pretty much standard behaviour throughout human history, that the 5 people in the town who have condition X are defined as such and the 99,995 who do not have it are considered 'normal', whatever condition it may be.

This is not an enforced "sociocultural condition"

I'd dispute that.

As I think I've made clear upthread, I'm using 'cisgendered' to mean 'raised in accordance with stereotypes associated with one's sex,' which is the norm throughout the world - female and male specific socialisation, in other words.

I'm not convinced it makes any sense to describe a person as "cisgender" rather than "cisgendered". And they were damned insistent that we describe the sacred caste as "transgender" rather than "transgendered" - which immediately suggests an area worthy of exploration.

The sociocultural conditions in question I can sum up for you in one easy word: patriarchy.

Patriarchy may be the norm, but that doesn't mean it ought to be.

If they were teaching kids that there's something fucked up and in need of dismantlement in the idea that it's normal to expect people to meet the gendered stereotypes associated with their sex, then that's fine.

But teaching kids that they need to stop making assumptions about other people's "gender identity" is teaching them that gender identities are real.

Which I disagree with strongly. Gendered identities, fine. Gender identities, not fine.

@TyroSaysMeow
you mention remedial philosophy
I think I've said it on here before, but I used to be quite involved with
philosophy for children
which, briefly is a method for helping children (or adults for that matter) think critically. It can be very effective, and I have taught KS2 children who would easily run rings round all this bollocks. I really think that if it was used more widely we would nt be in this position.

I agree, Still.

Influenced by the tradition of Socratic dialogue, I see - that's the line I tend to take with DD too. The powers that be don't want the masses educated in critical thinking though. Too dangerous. It makes me ever so cross.

notmrpootles
I didn't get introduced to gerunds until I took a tefl course. The course took a very practical approach to gerund explanation and identification which went something like this:

Gerunds end in -ing, but are not verbs. To tell if what -ing thing you have in your sentence, try replacing the word with "it". If the sentence still makes sense, you have a gerund. If not; a verb.

eg.
I hear singing --> I hear it = gerund
I hear people singing --> I hear people it = verb

I am terribly happy that this thread has popped up because I never had the opportunity to introduce this handy gerund-finding technique to any of my EFL students...

Tyro
For helping youngish people to learn to think and argue I would also highly recommended An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments. It's got all the logical fallacies in there, presented with examples and explanations of why you ought not to argue in that way. It might help in identifying the problems in all sorts of arguments, which is a useful skill in almost any situation...

Will look it up, RadicalFern - DD only seven so perhaps young for it, but it sounds like a book I could happily sneak into my 11&14 year old nieces' bookshelves.