France is a lie schemed up by the British monarchy in the 1400s to reinforce traditional power structures via a common enemy.
I want to understand tho. Like, yeah I don’t need to, to not be an asshole; but I still want to understand everything I don’t. I’m curious like that.
Also, because gender is a social construct, it requires that enough people understand it to a sufficient degree.
As opposed to French, which famously exists as a natural truth of the universe. Even if we had never discovered French it would still be there… waiting.
Gender’s an overloaded term. Are you talking about the internal feeling, the way someone’s treated by others, the shared sense of a variable that differentiates people, social institutions, ideas, or something else?
Those of course are all related very strongly, but they’re not the same thing. Different models of gender will define of differently, but that’s usually just to best fit the area they’re applicable to. If a philosopher tells you gender is a social construct, that’s because they’re analyzing things through the lens of social construction. Very useful, but merely one perspective.
I mean, I guess there’s a point to that, but isn’t there inevitably a social aspect to it? Especially in this post, where the person is saying others don’t have to understand it, meaning it’s clearly outwardly visible and part of who they are.
I’m not saying you should seek approval from anyone (for your gender nor anything else), because that’ll never happen. But denying the importance of some social acceptance for things in the social sphere is kind of weird, and feels like a “haha, unless…?” thing; you want others to understand and accept it, but the moment you don’t their acceptance becomes irrelevant and you never sought any acceptance at all. It feels like an unhealthy way to cope with rejection.
France isn’t real!
Somebody has a gender you don’t understand. Tough
Also
Somebody doesn’t understand your gender. Tough.
While I agree with your sentiment, there is a difference between not understanding and actively disparaging. The former is fine - there’s plenty of stuff I don’t understand, and I just don’t comment on it because I have no business doing so. Where I take objection is when the lack of understanding transforms into bigotry and disparaging remarks.
By all means be ignorant (and I don’t mean that in a derogatory manner - we are all ignorant about various things), but don’t let your ignorance manifest into negativity.
And in French everything has a gender: a table? Definitely a she. A coat hanger? Looks like a he to me. A car? Look at those curves, she it is. That truck though, totally masculine. But the trailer behind it, still a she.
The funny thing with gendered languages is that synonyms can have different genders. So “el pollo” and “la gallina” both mean “chicken”, but their grammatical gender differs.
yeah really interesting in this case both come from Latin, and both made their way in the modern languages, one in its masculine form the other in its feminine form.
- Pullus (adj.) very small (animal), a young rooster, “pulla” for the female chicken. French : la poule
- Gallus (name) rooster, “gallina” for the female chicken. French : le gallinacé (a chicken specimen, member of the species Gallus domestica)
i want to wedgie the people who decided to call it “gender” in grammar, people don’t associate tables with femininity or whatever, it’s just an arbitrary grouping that has no inherent meaning, the only reason we force associations with social gender is because inevitably the words “man” and “woman” belong to one of the groupings.
Like in swedish you can say “timma” or “timme” (hour), but no one’s going to think you’re somehow implying that the unit of time itself is somehow gendered.
