the funniest thing to hear bigots say is “haven’t you ever read a biology textbook?”
bitch my biology textbook believed in linnaean taxonomy and haematothermia. do you really think it’s going to be up to date on sociology
There is something to be said for the way we’re educated being at fault for all this.
We’re taught that so many things are completely fixed and set and stone – and that certain things we learn are as set in reality. We’re taught that the fact that “a duck has feathers” is the same kind of fact as “a duck is a bird.” One is an observable truth; the other is a social construct (yes, a social construct) that we’ve created in order to categorize the world and speak more efficiently.
It is significantly faster to say “bird” than it is to say “a warm-blooded organism that lays eggs and has feathers”, in the old way of doing it, or “an animal that is the most recent common ancestor of Struthio and Passer, or a descendant of that ancestor”
But that term, “bird,” is made up, in order to summarize that information. If we had to define every single thing as we say it, then we would never actually be able to have a conversation, and we’d also be talking in circles (we’d have to define a feather, and an egg, and etc. etc. etc.)
So we learn that “bird” is the same kind of set-in-stone of thing as, say, the fact that a duck is covered in feathers. One is a shortcut, the other is an observation about the natural world.
So, people think that “male” and “female” are the same thing as “someone with a penis” and “someone with a vagina” because, in school, those things are treated as the same; when in reality, the first two are ways of grouping up characteristics (whether physical, if we’re talking about the anatomical sex of someone, or societal, if we’re talking about their gender – which have been separate things for years), and the latter two are observations about someone’s anatomy .
We’re allowed to – and have to – redefine our shortcut words as we receive new evidence. We used to think “Dinosaur” meant one thing, but now we know it means another, and so on. The same applies to “gender”, “man” and “woman”. And all of our shortcut words will always be imperfect compared to observation, because one is based on fact that we can see in front of us and is based on our senses (let’s not get into the philosophical debate on whether or not we can trust our senses), and the other is a word that carries meaning that we assign to things, and that meaning can and does change as we learn more about those things. We used to think man came along with certain anatomical characteristics & societal roles. We now know that it means someone who identifies with that concept in society, regardless of anatomy or how much one partakes in societal expectations of that concept.
So, the real way to get people to understand this better – and stop being ignorant transphobes – is to go back to high school (and earlier. Elementary school even, I’d argue) and explain the difference between observation as “fact’ and terms made up to categorize & sum up these observations as “fact”.
(Of course this doesn’t excuse transphobia of people who make statements like this, but it does explain where these misconceptions come from – and how we can work to tear them down at the source).
Furthermore, one of the biggest flaws of our education system is teaching kids that Math and English are fixed, constant, and rigid.
In both of these fields you have to reach college level courses (and upper college level courses, even) before you get to the theory and explanation that everything you’ve learned about Math and English being fixed is a huge, whopping lie.
Language exists to communicate meaning. As @a-dinosaur-a-day states, there’s a linguistic difference between observing the world and conveying observed information. This is the entire reason that jargon exists. What lawyers need to convey observed information and what, say, paleontologists need to convey observed information are entirely different subsets of language.
Sometimes, a word can have one meaning in English but a different meaning in an English jargon. Set is a great example. A set in English is a group of items. A set in Math is a specific group of numbers. Which specific group of numbers it is depends on what set you’re working with (the set of integers, the set of real numbers, the set of even integers (where n is divisible by two), etc.). Sets can be finite (the set of even integers from 0-10) or infinite (the set of integers, the set of numbers between 0 and 1). Which set you’re working with even dictates what functions (ways of combining the numbers, think: multiplication) you can work with and how those functions work. The basic math you learn (Parentheses, Exponent, Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction) works on the set of integers.* When you start getting into different sets–things get more complicated.
Math, like English, is more fluid than we’re taught to believe. In teaching students the rules for the set of integers as though it’s how All of Math Works Forever and in teaching students the rules for Academic English as though it’s how All of English Works Forever does a huge disservice to everyone. English (and Language) change when we need it to! When we learn more about how sex and gender are different or about a specific type of contract killer whose target is most often dignitaries or other people in the public eye and the act of performing that contract (what up shakespeare reference) we develop new words to talk about them! When we develop a new way of looking for information using all of human history and a certain website–we develop a new verb!
when we move to a more text based place of communicating we come up with changes to grammar like punctuation and capitalization to help us convey tone that is not easily represented in text because we crave that mineral, you know?
And all of these things have their own rules that we develop together, and they are consistent in a way that makes them eligible for being their own jargons and dialects–just like the ways of speaking English have been adapted and changed to meet the needs of Lawyers or southerners or Paleontologists or people from New Orleans/Louisiana or New Yorkers. How someone speaks English may vary wildly from what we’re taught in Academic English, but that doesn’t automatically make it wrong! How you use grammar on tumblr or reddit or when talking about puppers is a sign of the subset of language you’re using to convey meaning–not a sign of intelligence or lack thereof.
This is some cool shit! Of course our language and science and terminology should change as we learn more about ourselves and the world and as we find new ways to communicate. Of course we should be regularly updating our terms to reflect the current research and understanding.
But we have got to do a better job of bringing people into the fluidity of these things earlier. We have got to stop acting like what’s taught in class is the One True Way instead of the most agreed upon conventions. The people who invented the internet didn’t have a set of words they were going to use planned in advance–they found the words when they needed them. The same is true for the first people who did calculus or found fossils. Language will grow with us–and so will everything else. We have to let it.
*and a fair number of other sets, but that is for another time.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 