“Sex is a result of colonialism”

[SmugglersHaunt]

Just saw an old friend I’ve not seen in a long time. We were talking about this and that then got on to trans issues. She said that binary sex is a concept that comes from colonial times and racial oppression etc. I actually couldn’t argue as it was so nuts. Apparently I’m akin to a QAnon person for believing in biological sex. She basically said I’ve been radicalised.

Apparently men won’t ‘dress up as women’ to enter women’s spaces, as ‘they can more easily ‘dress up as a policeman’ to abuse women. Everything I said was shouted down. Cases like Karen White etc are apparently not true.

I’m (probably stupidly) shocked. I have read a lot of this shite over the years, but to hear it from someone who I‘ve known for a long time was bewildering. I honestly can’t understand how anyone goes along with this. Not sure why I’m posting this but just want to vent I guess.

We are hearing some nutty nonsense but this really does beat it all. Must’ve come from some American University. I do think it’s most unwise to send you kids to university these days as they get their heads filled with nonsense

Of course heteronormative power structures existed before the 18th century!

Who were the priests and the clerics in the Catholic Church? Not women, that is for sure. Does not the apostle Paul emphasise men’s authority over women? And Christianity was pervasive. While it was before the rise of domesticity in the late nineteenth century, women still were those who ran the household, birthed and cared for the children, were legally dependent on their husbands, oh and let’s not forget witch burnings. So yes, there were heteronormative power structures.

What did happen in the 18th century was that - according to Laquer - there was a shift in medical understanding of reproduction from women being seen as a subset of men (a one-sex model) to women being seen as incommensurably different ( a two sex model). This mapped onto to societally constructed sex roles which saw women as hysterical and irrational due to menstruation and their reproductive role. This grew out of heteronormative power structures and reinforced them. Who was deciding how anatomy should be understood and practicing medicine at the time? Not women for sure.

Thank you, everyone who has taken up the challenge of explaining reality to believers in genderism. This latest bit of woowoo dogma, sex being a colonialist construct, takes the batshittery to levels that make anti-vaxxers sound smart.

Surely if there were more than 2 sexes then we would still need ‘single’ sex spaces - just 3, 4 or whatever ridiculous number they suggest. Better than squeezing those who don’t belong in the wrong ones.

@Ameadowwalk ,

I was being sarcastic, which I now regret.

Aristotle demonstrably had a clear idea of the different reproductive roles of males and females, in a way which mirrors my own understanding of these roles even if he had an odd understanding of the mechanics and biology of it all. But I can't see how this adds up to a "one sex" view unless you are using the word "sex" to mean more than just reproductive role, and to refer to the whole natures of men and women. So not just referring to gametes and plumbing and the physiological differences which go along with this, but instead becoming a word which describes our whole beings. I think this is making the word do too much work - so much work that it stops referring to anything specific and becomes useless. The word becomes useless becasue it can refer to anything and everything to do with being human, and we can never know in any instance precisely what is meant.

I'm aware of Laqueur's book, but I haven't read it.

The one sex model - and I might have this wrong as a good while since I read Laqueur - was the idea that female reproductive organs were inverted, less perfect male reproductive organs, not different. It makes more sense if you see early modern drawings of what they thought they looked like. Male organs on the outside of men and female ones were inverted versions on the inside of women. Then anatomists discovered female organs were not actually male inverted but different and this meshed with social ideas that men and women could not be compared in terms of their natures either. The idea of women being ‘the weaker sex’, for example.
I agree that the word sex was doing a lot more than simply describing biological sex by the nineteenth century but not that this was meaningless - there were were distinct and different expectations of how men and women should be simply because they were male or female, those expectations (and laws) structured people’s lives. This is where I sort of see the argument that imperialism brought these ideas of sexual difference (and the laws and organisations built around them) to the colonial context - not meaning that male and female had not existed before or that people did not understand sexual difference and reproduction but that imperial ruling classes took the particular sex-based roles and attributes which were associated with Victorian masculinity and femininity (which contemporaries associated with distinct male and female sexes) into the colonial context, just as they did racial hierarchies.

(Continuing my previous post) All of which is different than saying sex is a result of colonialism, which is so simplistic as to be meaningless.
however, thinking on it a bit more, I wonder if what is meant is that -taking the hierarchical thinking about race of the nineteenth century, this is about the ways in which white educated elites sought to make themselves distinct from other groups - by having stark sexual differences in social roles. I cannot remember which nineteenth century writer wrote something along the lines of ‘the more civilised the race, the more distinct men and women are’.
It fits with the development of social Darwinism.

But it doesn’t mean sex as in the biological differences between men and women - it means the socially constructed roles of what men and women do, how they behave and so on. Nobody was arguing that men and women were physically the same in other places, but that races were not civilised if women and men did not have distinct social roles as befitting to their sex (in their view not mine, so women caring and nurturing and not entering the professions, for example - ‘woman, know thy place’ dressed up in pseudo-scientific language). It was racist and sexist rolled into one.

The nonsense seems to mostly be learned earlier, from the Internet.
There may be some uni subjects worth them steering clear of but not the whole of higher education.

KatMcBundleface, thank you for that delightful link