Changing Definitions is Useful

Saying that men are men and women are women is about as solid an argument as saying Pluto is a planet because Pluto was a planet; we changed the definition because the old one proved impractical. Like, I understand what people are trying to say when they say a man is a man and a woman is a woman but I believe they misunderstand a core principal of language when they make that argument and therefor completely miss that said argument is 100% circular. The principal they are missing is that words and their meanings are arbitrary, we made them up, that’s literally how language works. Definitions cannot be used as arguments because they are arbitrary.

FYI, Pluto changed classification because we found quite a few other celestial bodies around Pluto’s orbit that fit into our previous definition of a planet and we are also quite sure we will keep finding more. This meant we either had to add them all and any new ones discovered in the future to what we consider planets which would have very easily gotten out of hand as we continued to find more celestial bodies… or we could just change our definition of a planet. It’s not like we no longer recognize Pluto’s existence, or the other newly found celestial bodies, but rather that at least for scientist’s sake, it is easier to not classify them as planets. Changing Pluto’s classification is exactly the same as changing what we decide to call a man and a woman, because we made those words up just like we made up the word planet, only planets don’t give emotional weight to what we call them so there’s a lot more at stake with what we call people.

I once saw Ben Shapiro make an argument against people being transsexual that at first seems like it could be solid but under further inspection is nothing more than a half baked sleight. His argument for being able to call yourself a different gender than you were given at birth was this question he asked to a young person ” well, why aren’t you sixty?” to which the person seemed dumfounded. It is true that said person cannot choose to be what the word “sixty” represents which is going around the sun sixty times, just like someone born with a penis cannot choose to have been born without one… BUT… a person absolutely could say they want to change the definition of the word sixty to not be explicitly someone who’s circled the sun x amount of times. This is what is happening now with trans people and all of genders, we now realize our previous classifications of people are more hurtful than helpful so we are changing them. It is literally that simple. We can and should change words when they no longer benefit society.

I am not a trans person so I cannot speak to the emotion they feel when being called a gender they do not associate with, but I believe I understand the logical part of one way trans people might feel and that is that broad labels hurt people. I believe the strict adherence to a sexual dichotomy not only hurts trans people but truly it hurts all of us. So many people have aspects of their personality that don’t fit the gender that society has ascribed to them and so they will often oppress those aspects of themselves to better fit their assigned gender and I just find this sad and truly disgusting on anyone’s part who supports this mindset. There is literally no point in this. It hurts people. If I want to wear a sparkly rainbow dress but was also born with a penis, why…. the fuck…. would you care?

At the end of the day you might say, “it’s only really referring to genitalia so what is the problem.” The problem is that you and I both know that while technically speaking that is the only real requirement to be considered one or the other, there is so much more attached to those words like “strong, rugged, tall, hairy” for men or ” short, soft, kind, caring” for women to name a few of endless lists. As stated before, this causes a situation where people try to fit into those categories lest not be a considered a man or a woman, and as many people have found out, they’d just rather not be considered a man or a woman because 99.999999999% of people have traits from both completely arbitrary pools of characteristics, but since not being considered a man or a woman is pretty alienating in a society that fervently wants to classify everyone by one or the other, they’d rather change the definitions of man and woman… which we have… and are… because words are made up and when definitions prove impractical………… we change them.

P.S. Another great solution is to either abandon the idea of genders altogether or create endless genders which I am all for both and so are plenty of people. Wouldn’t it be great if we only saw genitalia as like who has a big nose or not… you know…. completely meaningless except for in and of itself? This is what I will be fighting for.