terflies:

featherinmycapandcheese:

terflies:

Well, sure, if you redefine those words a certain way, but everyone could be anything if you do that arbitrarily. Except (not that much argument is given) it still doesn’t seem to follow—since some people are still “women”, so how have you redefined “non-binary”?

“gender was invented to keep down a certain gender!”

I mean, there are cases to be made for problems that sound similar to this, but usually they’re not said in the one way that makes them sound like a paradox

I’ve seen people redefine ‘gender’ to refer to a system of oppression before (e.g. as synonymous to “systemic misogyny” or “patriarchy”) which is fine in principle (we can define words how we like) but

1. Now we need a word for what we used to call gender (what is described in the social ideas of ‘male’, ‘female’, ‘man’, ‘woman’ etc., distinct from sex),
2. We can’t substitute this new word ‘gender’ where people used the old/other meaning of it.

It’s sort of a semantic sleight of hand, defining one meaning, the conflating it with another.