The DWR Quote of the Day – Drawing the Line

Interesting how all of this has come about simply by a fiat made by a majority panel of non elected, non legal, non medical political appointees ruling that “gender identity” and “gender expression” should be added as grounds of discrimination in the Ontario Human Rights Code. Never have these terms been defined, other than as “sense” or a “feeling” related to fitting with sexual stereotypes (which is a bell curve and not a data point). All the rest has followed, capturing institution after institution with this nebulous hand waving autogynephilic claim.

And the same linguistic trick – inserting by fiat that ‘gender’ was something real and inherited except when it was fluid – was used to alter Title IX in the US – from protecting the class of people being discriminated against for an immutable characteristic of being born female – to equivalently ‘protect’ men claiming to be women from being denied access to the same legal protections even though they shared none of the inherited characteristics!

It’s fucking insane.

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Really good article here explaining the differences (and why it matters) between using a structural versus conceptual approach to trying to gain understanding and knowledge about reality:

“Sex is not assigned (an act of power), it is observed. Sex is not a conceptual game, it is a structural reality.

“Assigning sex” is typical critical constructivism—a popularisation of Critical Theories we often call “woke”. It’s playing conceptual games for alchemical—changing reality—purposes rather than accurate description.

It’s critical constructivism that gives us the following: people are not homeless, they’re unhoused, because someone unhoused them. Folk are not illegal immigrants, they are undocumented, because someone failed to provide them with documents. People are not of a marginal or minority group, they are marginalised or minoritized because someone marginalised or minoritized them. All have actions performed upon them, because—in this system—the true cause is an oppressive power structure which created structural inequalities to which these people are subjected.

“Assigning sex” is the same Foucauldian power nonsense, turning everything into socially constructed power-games whose deconstruction “unmasks” the oppressive power involved.

Critical constructivism attempts to systematically replace observing structure with the playing of conceptual games. This is not surprising when its roots go back to a pre-Darwinian metaphysician who pretended to be a social scientist (edit: referring to Marx).

Critical constructivism pretends (including to itself) to be about structure — e.g., the concern with “structural/systemic racism”. However, it’s really about rhetoric useful for generating moralised social leverage. It relies on burying analytically impoverished analyses of social dynamics under a fog of conceptual games. Inconvenient attention to reality is de-legitimised as collaboration with alleged structures of oppression.”

How great is that description? A shorter title than ‘critical constructivism and the metaphysics that promotes it’ is called Bullshit Theory (see Harry Frankfurt’s essay On Bullshit, what it is and why it grows).

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