What Led to the Idea that Gender is About Chosen Identity?
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- čas přidán 11. 03. 2024
- Our website: www.justandsinner.org
This is a discussion of the ideas that have led to the currently popular ideas about gender as identity which is not coterminous with biology or essence. I discuss Judith Butler's idea of gender performativity.
"And that is why you, Dr Cooper, are: uncanceled."--Matt Walsh
Gentlemen at work
I was thinking of that with the use of the Walsh clip.
I watched "What Is A Woman?" a while back. I heard an Anglican priest say that this issue is Christological at heart. Sobering. Lord Jesus Christ, please have mercy and save our culture!
Most things are!
@@DrJordanBCooper And now reading the comments, I want to go back and watch this full episode. If you've mentioned Derrida, post-modernism, post-structuralism, etc., culture, Philosophy and Christology -- Gotta watch in full! I got my undergrad degree in Philosophy, but you're probably the first person who seems to know how to keep Philosophy in its proper place, and not fall into what I call the "Colossians 2:8 heresy." Philosophy almost killed me lol
Thank you for posting Dr. Cooper! I did a cognitive science/ linguistics minor in college because I found the questions the professors asked to be fascinating- and ended up unwittingly jumping into a cesspool of structuralist / postmodern / conceptualist philosophies, all presented under the guise of scientific studies.
I had been warned about relativism and feminism somewhat in high school, but was completely unprepared for the amount of confusion that being exposed to such philosophies would produce, and I had no idea where the ideas were coming from. Even though I was living out my Christian faith through college and trying to discern lies from my professors, it produced a huge amount of cognitive dissonance and doubt. Without exaggeration, I had to spend a good three years reading Chesterton and Aquinas after graduating just to think like a normal person again 😂
I’m leaving this comment because it’s easy to ridicule these people (fair enough- the claims ARE ridiculous), but in order to protect students from lies like this, we need to take them seriously enough to understand their world view and truly prepare students and converse with these academics. In my experience, the professors no longer give a history of the development of their thought, and simply assume naturalism and subsequently poiesis. This video would have been so helpful for me if I had it in college. I hope it reaches more students now!
It is CRIMINAL that this video only has 5k views. Top notch stuff as always Mr. Cooper
To add- one of the things I started to believe while in these classes was that “I am only a Christian because I go to a church, fellowship group, and Bible studies, my social circle is a Christian group, so therefore I identify as a Christian” and experienced extreme despair over whether I could know what I believe (a rather 21st century version of doubting your salvation, haha). I am just now making the connection as to how social performative theory played into this!
Yes and it's so much simpler than people make it out to be, including within Christendom. Being a "Christian" equals one thing and one thing only: one who intentionally puts into practice the words of the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth (which demonstrates your faith in him and his words) and believes he was sent from God (ie. believes upon the one whom God sent).
As it says elsewhere in the scriptures about these people: these are they with the faith of Jesus who keep the commands of God.
Great we need more conversations about that.
Greetings from England. Nice summary. Very helpful. A succinct example of "ideas have consequences".
You made a very good point about considering the wider context of these ideologies, because nothing is ever as simple as the immediate reasoning and logic behind them. Something should be examined deeper, and the foundations of these ideologies should be explored. I'm an idealist, so I definitely believe in those things in themselves, as a universal approach, and the conjoining between objective universality and the individual; within this wholeness and so on.
Appreciate the video!
14:36 but wait, if language is self-referential, then translation is miraculous, and performative speech is practically god-like.
I don't think average people define, appear, or act as one particular gender based on its opposite (isn't that also language derived?). We usually just dress the part rather lazily. Although, it's hard to tell because we all swim in our culture.
Conversely, transgender people seem to gravitate toward a hyper-stylized (even hyper-sexualized) version of the "opposite" gender, which is entirely a physical protest, or, try their darndest to blend in, and fit squarely within the social norms for that gender - which is physical assent to a binary gender system.
I dunno. My brain hurts.
What I am certain of is that histrionics and name-calling isn't helpful, and far from Christ-like.
Thank you for doing your own darndest to look at this issue (among others) fairly and thoughtfully. Yes, more of the same.
Blessings. 🙏🏻
It's worse, a single common question destroys it all.
"What is that?"
@@lloydgush 😂
Great point. The binary still seems to be relevant when those who say they no longer ascribe to it present themselves as someone from within the binary; male or female.
This was rich. Thank you. I’m prepping for comps now, and you are a good model of how to put together a genealogy of ideas.
When you break it down like this, you quickly realize what a load of hot nonsense it all is. Nobody actually thinks like this in their real lives, outside of someone doing a galaxy brain take in a philosophical text. If they did, they would probably be diagnosed with some form of psychosis. That's a breakdown in a person's ability to distinguish reality from fantasy, but how can you do that if reality is actually just a linguistic construct? The philosophical foundations of this entire movement is literal insanity.
This is why I think that the best thing we can do is actually explain what the beliefs of these movements are. They are self-defeating, ultimately.
What is insane about investigating gender as a more nuanced identity that exceeds mere chromosomal makeup?
And to your point regarding philosophy and people not thinking this way, that actually holds true for philosophy as a tradition as a whole.
Philosophy engages with features of our reality and lived experience that goes beyond what is merely immediate or obvious and sheds light on how a lot of what we think we know is hard to justify at all and then proceeds to search for a justification.
In a way, philosophy sheds light on our ignorance that we live in many ways and often times in darkness. It casts shadows over our certainties and sheds light on our ignorance, however you would like to put it.
Philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, philosophy of language, ethics, epistemology, philosophy of gender, etc all engage at a level that surpasses “every day think”. Occasionally you’ll have a philosopher take a more anti-philosophy stance such as Moore had done or certain epistemic Contextualists, etc. but even these insights are based in a philosophical way of thinking that is not immediate nor apparent and requires often extensive study and reflection, all of which takes place beyond the way “people actually think in the every day”.
That’s not to say philosophy is for everyone. Certainly it is not. And it is often difficult, requiring intellectual discipline, and can be quite traumatizing. But those features and the fact that it is not how normal people think in no way detracts from its importance and legitimacy as a discipline.
Dr. Tomas Bogardus wrote a great paper on this. (Not on what led up to it but the issues with it itself)
I don’t think Derrida intended it in this way but it seems to me that if language is purely self referential that’s a great argument for the existence of God, since it wouldn’t be possible for a purely self referential system to develop.
This is very helpful. Thank you.
“The Tao, which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgments. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgment of value in the history of the world. What purport to be new systems or…ideologies…all consist of fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they posses.”-C.S. Lewis
Excellent video
Great breakdown
Good stuff, thanks. It's very enlightening.
Please make more videos on this subject!
What's concerning to me is exactly your final point, Jordan. I'd venture to say over 99% of people who are a part of this movement do not have this philosophical underpinning justifying it. They just haven't thought it though in any meaningful way, yet they just went along with it and it's become such a powerful force in society. I'm trying to figure out why. What caused the widespread adoption of these beliefs if their underpinnings are so esoteric and bizarre?
@thealienrobotanthropologis8276 My light bulb moment came in college when I was studying polling data in political science. I found there is a strong correlation between people's opinions on abortion and nuclear energy. Two absolutely unrelated issues... but one of our tribes is supposed to be pro-life and pro-nuke, and the other tribe is supposed to be pro-choice and anti-nuke. Most people just assimilate to their tribe's views.
@@donatist59 Or it could be the individualistic underpinnings? One side is more for an individualistic perspective that leads to free markets and the value of individual life and the other side is more willing to sacrifice one life for the a collective purpose and to restrict the economy for similar reasons.
@danielboone8256 The vaguer the definitions get, the more exceptions seep through. A pro-choice person would argue that only pro-choice people are concerned with individual rights, by defining the unborn as non-individuals with no rights, whose survival impinges on the rights of "real" individuals.
Very insightful. Thank you!
Are you writing any book about this issue or do you know some books which dig into this issue?
Duke Divinity M.Div. Student here who’s aligning with the Global Methodist Church. Studied religion, philosophy, and history for undergrad. I encounter daily the more liberal views, quite interesting some claims that are made. Thanks for this Dr. Cooper.
I like your breakdown of the movements on this topic. I’d be interested in reading your article on Judith Butler. Will you make this article available to read?
Yes, I will.
I'm not sure Foucault is claiming power is about one person exerting power over another, but rather power is systemic.
Slightly off topic, do you have any thoughts about Michael Polanyi's epistemology? I bring him up because on the one hand he's committed to the proposition that our words and thoughts are about real, mind-independent things but on the other hand he doesn't believe things as such can ever be exhaustively rationally specified.
I haven't read Polanyi since college. I'd have to revisit his writing to say anything particularly thoughtful.
I knownyour goal is to inform us, but i feel like i got dumber as you taught the reasoning behind their thought. Not because of you, but because of what they teach and their thought process
Yup. That sounds about right.
Spring break one year,,and I'm to blame,I was fishing,really..really.
Dr.Ruth I love you...we should have dated..
I'm not sure third wave feminism targets "gender essentialism," but biological essentialism. I would argue the current gender Self Id often invokes gender essentialism, and in this, they do not disagree with the trad/religious evaluation of gender differences. Their disagreement rests on the import/relevance of sex (i.e. male/female) to gender. The stereotypes (and hierarchical attribution of value to male over female) remain intact, such that man/woman or masculine/feminine are not interrogated by the TRAs or trad religious folk.
I have not seen "What is a woman" but I gather from discussion and clips that its point is that the people with authority to teach about gender and the people who take the authority to decide for themselves:
Dont know what they are talking about.
Dr. Cooper, does all this make you pessimistic about the future?
I may be on the theological and political left, but I confess that the gender fad is completely insane.
I always forget but what synod are you again? I know not WELS or LCMS
This sounds like nominalism of the self. It seems to break down at its foundational level by making language arbitrary, and nothing means anything.
In regards to social interactions, I thought of a funny idea. Instead of shaking someones hand when you greet them, scream in their face, and if they have a problem with that, you can simply say, "I'm just expressing who I truly am."
Wait, so according to this theory, gender only exists when I am in the company of other people? Human beings are genderless when they are alone? No wonder everybody is depressed! If everything that is important or unique about me only exists in the context of other people, of course I'm going to hate myself and become depressed whenever I have a moment to myself. This makes so much sense...
If there are only 2 genders and everyone falls under either one or the other, what is so unique about being one of them? It almost seems as if gender (if it is to be this thing that exists as a binary and subsumes all people under one of its sides) is one of the least unique things possible about a person.
@@AbstractMan1 You say that like it's a bad thing, but one of the downfalls of this modern gender Insanity is that every single person feels this constant pressure and urge to be hyper special and unique at all times in all senses. You're not unique for being a man or a woman, but that's just how you are. Not everything about you has to be special.
@@jaihummel5057 good, so we can throw to the way side the idea that someone’s biological sex as a synonym for gender is unique to a person, since there really are (in the main), 2 chromosomal combinations.
Now I think it would be beneficial to consider what the hell these attention seeking gender people mean when they speak of “gender”. Surely they don’t mean chromosomal makeup, since then the very phrase “transgender” would be meaningless. The very addition of the word “trans-“ in “transgender” implies an asymmetry of some kind, but even so, we are left with really only 2 options.
Either 1, when gender espouses speak of “transgender”, they mean an individual who has quite literally transformed their chromosomal combination into an entirely different set.
Or 2. They hold gender to be something related to chromosomes in some way, but not reducible to it so as to result in their usage of the term to convey a distinction between chromosomes and gender.
It seems that 2 is the more plausible theory, as I’ve rarely seen transgender people or gender theorists claim that a transgender is someone who has quite literally changed their chromosomes.
Of course, we could describe a transgender person as someone merely desiring to have different chromosomes. But I think a simple thought experiment can put that possibility as a feasible one to rest.
Imagine you were to ask a self identifying transgender woman, who in many ways appears to be the expected presentation of a biological woman (long hair,narrow shoulders, breasts, more often form fitting or tight clothes, etc), who is clearly making an effort to appear a a way that is expected of the general range of biological women to appear, the following question:
“If it were your choice and somehow feasible to select either to be born and exist as a person with the chromosomal makeup of a woman yet the appearence of masculine, male-like features (broad shoulders, small breasts, developed muscles, wider figure, etc) or to be born with the chromosomal makeup of a man as you have now, yet look (much as you do now) like a person with what are attributed to be the general range of female characteristics, i.e. narrow shoulders, smaller figure, soft facial features, long hair, proportionately sized breasts, feminine voice, etc. which would you select, if only one were an option?”
I think it would be quite clear which the transgender would select, or at least which the vast majority would.
Hopefully that returns us back to the original 2 alternative meanings that transgender and gender theorists are examining and hopefully we can assume it is the 2nd meaning, not the first.
If we can agree that the 2nd meaning is the accurate one conveyed and of interest to the transgender and gender theorists, then regardless of desires to be unique or special, there appears to be something very real and something very important of interest here.
A sense of identity that perhaps circulates in a given culture, cementing its expectations on individuals born with certain features and physical characteristics, that gives rise to the various and changing associations, desires, preferences, etc that are surely in at least some ways influenced by a variety of patterns of development, ideas, and physically and socially contingent conditions.
@@AbstractMan1
It seems reasonable to me to at least postulate a potential distinction between gender and sex, with one being the social and cultural aspect related to one’s biology and the other being one’s biological nature itself, but I don’t see how that makes the idea of transgenderism any more reasonable. Is it unreasonable to think that each gender should comport with their biological reality, especially since they’re so intertwined (e.g. nurturing and childrearing motherly role, the protective and provider role for the father, and the various desires men and women tend to have as related to their biology)?
@@danielboone8256 the issue is that all these things you last mentioned are, as you acknowledged, socially determined. Meaning the act of nurturing in that way is socially *contingent*, meaning it could be otherwise, so it’s entirely reasonable for someone to not align with the identity that follows from their conditioning and social expectations. Surely we’d agree that just because black people were at one point socially expected and conditioned to be held at a subservient role, that therefore they must have identified as subservient beings. And surely we would not say that just because they were conditioned and expected to be subservient, that then they must have somehow biologically actually been subservient.
It may be the case that without any specific social conditioning, the general trend and dispositions that the average biological woman may have would somewhat deviate from the average biological man, but this would very likely be negligible and the distinction in identity, experience, treatment, behavior, etc would be far less different between the sexes on average in such an equal society as compared to the society we currently live in.
So if there is no self, and we are only defined by our social interactions, there is no possibility for the individual to possess any rights as those are defined to be only held at the individual level. If the feminist 5.0 or whatever people have no rights, society should not bother with them and treat them as though they have no rights. The rest of us can hold on to our essence, our self including gender, and the rights that we innately possess, and run society for people who have rights.
The idea of individuality only being meaningful in the context of social relations is to point out how who we are as individuals is almost entirely determined by the social setting we are situated in / were raised in.
It’s important to consider what a finite person is like in the context of no other people there to influence or engage with them.
Clearly this individual all alone and isolated possesses *some* qualities even still, but these are so far less in quantity and quality that their “individuality” is almost entirely based on the fact that they simply exist as a person and no one denies humans exist as individual humans.
A person alone must still abide by the laws of nature. Their requirements for survival, their needs.
A person all alone would be left to fend for themselves. In fact, any notion of “progressing their individuality” or “affirming” it would be almost entirely cashed out into merely surviving such as growing food, hunting, maintaining shelter, etc. and then whatever time they had left for trivial activities and non-essentials would be so far less developed and intricate than anything that even a society of 25 people would be able to have.
This is still an individual person which is true a priori, but the values we hold as beings are overwhelmingly social in nature. So the social settings which we are in so vastly influences our values, our dispositions, and our views of even ourselves as individuals.
And this is all before even concepts of “gender” get injected into our reflections. It’s difficult to even conceive of a man stranded alone on an island even conceiving himself as “a man”, considering he’d have no point of comparison aside from perhaps some animals, so he might eventually infer there is something he can mate with that is different than him.
Gnosticism and postmodernism.
Dr. Jordan the obvious follow up should be from a Biblical objective analysis that God made them male and female.
However the antithesis was “did God really say”…to confuse or subjectively challenge God’s objective word(s) as the existential reality !
1 Corinthians 1:20 (NIV)
[20] Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?
Ephesians 5:11 (NIV)
[11] Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them.
Did you really mean to assert that 3rd wave feminism suggests that there is no soul? @10:40
What these gender ideologue ignore that if we believe in natural selection then we already believe in hierarchy of sexual selection and if being is becoming we have hierarchy for manhood and womanhood which is related to sex, reproduction, motherhood and fatherhood. These standards we have to chase. These postmodernist ignores human experience i think Jordan Peterson, John vraverky and Jonathan pageau can help here how our perception, attention and identity works.
Derrida is insane, same issue as rousseau, any experience with kids beyond watch beauvoir molest them?
Actually, does he understand body language?