Good thread here, though of course it won't matter for the bigots, since they actually don't care what a woman is; they just want an excuse to be bigots. Still, worth reading for the rest of us:
This might become a thread, but I keep thinking about how off the question of “what is a woman?” really is because you’re asking the definition of a word to precede the reality it describes.
— Magdalene Visaggio 🏳️⚧️ (@MagsVisaggs) November 15, 2022
I say this a lot, but words are fake, and definitions are *at best* approximations.
4 comments:
The Green brothers talk a lot about these kinds of concerns... like what is a sandwich, that sort of thing. And how language is imperfect. Taxonomies aren't real. It's funny when it's trying to sort out if a pizza or hotdog is a sandwich, but less so when people's beings are involved. But, as John Green often points out, all of these ontological arguments are silly and limited by the limits of our language. And yet, so important when people are defining themselves.
One of my mentors in graduate school said definitions were useful but reductive -- they're a box we put things in, but we have to remember the box isn't real. Kind of like the map not being the territory, now that I think about it.
Something I have to remind my students: translation is an art, not a science. Translations are the result of negotiations between two languages.
Translation was one of my areas in graduate school, and that is true! It's also true that you can't get a perfect translation, something that frustrated me endlessly.
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