this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2025
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This knocks loose a memory for me. The instructor for the anthropology class that I took in college introduced the idea of natural categories versus cultural categories, and the example that he used was the category of things called "chair." It's a cultural category, which is defined as things that humans assign to the category somewhat arbitrarily.
A chair might be something for a human to sit on, like a wooden platform on four legs, with a vertical back for lumbar support. It may have armrests ("arms") or not. If it doesn't have a back, it's a stool. But stools can also have backs, like some barstools, if they have longer legs. But a director's chair has long legs, and a back, and is not a stool?! And then what of a papasan chair, with no legs, with the seat and backrest combined into one, curved platform?
If you sit on a stump around a campfire, that's kind of an improvised chair, defined more by the use than the shape. Then, put a collection of stumps around a table in a cabincore dining room, and now they are formally chairs.
In the other direction, the student union at my university is well-known for its colorful terrace chairs with a sunburst pattern on the back. It has a couple of 10-foot-tall versions for people to climb on (at their own risk!) for social media photo ops. Those are chairs, because of the shape, although they're not for a human to sit on.
And then let's not even get into lounge chairs, upon which you can be fully recumbent instead of sitting... Point is "biological female" is a natural category (sexually-reproducing organism bearing the larger of its species' gametes). It includes lizards and ferns, but not all of what we call women, because women is a cultural category. It's kind of arbitrary.
And yeah, intelligent people know this, and the "adult biological female" people are just trying to hide their bigotry. I just like to think out loud about it.
TIL the creator of Father Ted is a bigot. Fuckin bummer. Why can’t these assholes keep their shitty opinions to themselves?
He wrote an otherwise funny episode of the IT crowd, but the B plot involved violence against a trans woman. When he was criticized for it, the universe presented him with a choice:
this ties into a claim ContraPoints makes about the reasons people become conspiracy theorists, around 2 hours 26 minutes into her CONSPIRACY video she talks about "revenged humiliation" as a psychological reason - basically there are a lot of instances of people who became conspiracy theorists after an instance of intense public humiliation (she cites the guy who came up with the "space reptilians run the government", Naomi Wolf the ex-feminist turned Steve Bannon co-host and anti-vaxxer, and Candace Owens the ex-anti-racist activist turned famed conservative and alt-right activist.
Just interesting to see another clear example out in the wild.
I suspect it's possible JK Rowling's descent into her anti-trans obsession arguably was fueled by humiliation (the first time she got flak was in 2018 when she liked a transphobic tweet which she claims the like was a mistake, a slip of the finger when she was trying to screenshot the tweet for later; she wrote and published her essay defending her transphobia a few days after Daniel Radcliffe publicly decried JK's transphobia and affirmed trans identity in June 2020).
I prefer the enemies out themselves.
I prefer they not exist, but I guess we can't have everything we want.
these are connected ideas, harder to non-exist a Nazi when they're not open about being a Nazi