Michael Mitchell: Archive

What gender you are is a fact, but it's not a concrete that can't be honestly questioned. It's not self-evident, like the fact you're currently reading these words. Some facts are simple, such as: "My dog ate my homework." And some are very complex, such as: "Capitalism exploits the masses." It depends on the concepts involved.

A fact, for instance, is any true thought or statement. That means if you've determined some thought or statement about gender to be factual, you had to judge and verify its truth based on your own experience and reasoning. You can't just say a fact is a fact. It has to be proven true, to everyone who accepts it.

In other words, if a female human being with ovaries (just to be clear) thinks she's a man, she thinks it's a fact that she's a man just as she thinks it's a fact that she has ovaries, so every time I refer to her as "she", she thinks I'm ignoring the facts, going by my feelings instead, disrespecting her perspective on reality, "her truth". It's not merely her opinion that she's a man, so I really am fundamentally challenging her consciousness.

Actually, whether they're being honest or not, this is exactly what people with gender identity issues don't understand: perception of reality is not reality. They think gender is a fact which can change depending on their psychological state, maybe by feeling more masculine or feminine today than they did yesterday, and if that's their idea of gender, then within the context of their knowledge, they're right. Today, they might be a janitor and tomorrow they might be a plumber. Every fact isn't a universal principle. Most facts can and do change. Why should one's gender be any different than one's occupation? Our job certainly contributes to our personal identity, and if we chose it correctly it also matches our natural abilities and interests.

The real issue, then, is: what is gender? It's not a psychological issue, one that concerns a specific individual mind. It's a philosophical one. It concerns all individual minds. If I think you're a man and you think you're a woman, one of us is wrong. Gender's not an evaluation of a fact, like "girly" or "manly" or "bitch". Gender is a fact.

If you're a man, it's a fact you're a man, and if you're a woman, it's a fact you're a woman. No one disputes that. We are what we are. What's confusing is the concept "gender" itself doesn't refer to biological reality, it refers to a concept that does: sex. One's conception of gender isn't directly based on one's sex. It's based on one's conception of it, sex.

(Yeah. SMH.)

Logically, what sex you are, whether you're male or female, comes first, and your concept of gender should be based on that, otherwise all hell breaks loose in your mind with every other concept dependent on your sex, like "mother" or "father", but you don't have to be logical, of course, you can and most do put other minds above their own and reality, and while the idea of a pregnant man may be fucking hilarious to me, it's serious shit to conservatives and liberals because redefining gender redefines gender roles which redefines society, and, even though trans people are a very tiny minority, that's why this issue is very popular and controversial because to anyone who subscribes to traditional family values it looks like an attack on humanity itself by nihilistic sociologists and their army of SJWs, but regardless of any stated political goals or ulterior motives, that's not what "gender non-conformists" and their supporters are actually doing, since sociology is really just as mystical as religion, mostly nonsense based upon a false collectivist view of humanity, as if we're all just members of animal packs, which we're certainly not, it's philosophy, the ability to reason independently, that's truly the target, which proves progressive liberals don't give a fuck about individual minds any more than religious conservatives do, that it's all merely simply just another insipid battle in the "family" versus "community" war for control of the culture where whatever group you identify with is the basic unit of "social value" because all sides are collectivist, and this particular battle's only important because this particular "community" challenges "conservative reality" itself, and therefore it's beyond important for all of us to remember it's all serious shit because personal identity is beyond beyond important to each and every one of us because if your tribe is woker than my tribe, then who even am I? Aaah!

"Gender" is not an ostensive concept. It's not an abstraction we derive directly from physical reality, like "penis" or "vagina", like something you'd point at or describe, rather than define, if someone asked you what it was. It's an abstraction we derive from another abstraction, like how "genitalia" is derived from "penis" and "vagina", like how "furniture" is derived from "chair" and "bed" and "table" and so on.

You can actually suck dick or eat pussy, but you can't cucumber bang or whack off your genitalia to porn while relaxing on furniture, strictly speaking, because "genitalia" and "furniture" refer only to abstractions in your mind. They don't exist physically in external reality, only penises, vaginas, chairs, beds and tables do.

That's all the "gender dysphoric" and the "pronoun police" think they're really doing, just fucking with abstractions, the categorization of reality, not reality itself. What's wrong with that? It's just subtle differences in the meanings of the relevant concepts, as if a table identified as an "appliance". Really, what's the big deal? Why can't a bed be in the same category as a refrigerator? Why can't a human with a penis be a woman? No one's saying a bed is a refrigerator or a dick is a pussy. That would be absurd, an obvious contradiction.

In philosophy, it's widely believed there are two kinds of truths. Philosophers call it the analytic-synthetic distinction or dichotomy. It's hardcore epistemological bullshit, but you don't have to be a philosopher to understand it, if you understand basic grammar, thinking in terms of complete sentences, what we call "formal propositions" in a scientific context, when accuracy is crucial as fuck.

An "analytic truth" is one where the "truth" is included in the main concept: "A tree is a big plant." A "synthetic truth" is one where the "truth" is not included in the main concept: "The tree fell down." You see, we "know" that a tree is a big plant because that's what we think a tree is, but we can't be sure it fell down because that requires relying on our perception, on what we "think" we perceived. That's the dumbass "distinction".

"Analytic truths" include "synthetic truths". "Synthetic truths" include "analytic truths". If we can't rely on our experience, what the fuck do words even mean? Ayn Rand's the only philosopher who isn't a bawbling idiot. Prove me wrong.

The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy

I get it. This shit happens to me all the time. I see something move out of the corner of my eye and then I turn and look and holy fuck! it was nothing. We're not infallible. We have to use logic and reason to be sure of things, but we can use logic and reason to be sure of things because sense-perception doesn't lie. Thank God. It gives us exactly what it gives us -- automatically, involuntarily -- and then we use that information to consciously identify what things really are -- if we feel like it, of course.

I sit in a basement on a computer all day and night and there are these tiny little baby spiders that web down on me all the damn time, sometimes two or three times a day. In two years, I know I've killed at least a hundred of them, even though I haven't kept count. One might be crawling on me right now, even though I can't feel it. I'm wearing glasses, too, which means I can't see as clearly peripherally as I can through the lenses. Any moving spot I see really could be a spider, not just a speck of dust floating in the light or whatever, so I'm understandably more aware of any moving spot I see.

This is our problem with gender, not the spider thing, the perception thing. It's not obvious. We can't just look at a person and identify his or her gender as easy as we can look at a person and identify they're a person. It should be obvious to the person, of course, but that requires honesty and integrity and good epistemology, a ruthlessly strict conceptual fidelity to reality, and we simply haven't learned or been taught how important any of that is. Ask any college professor. It's not a secret. We've actually been taught the opposite, that consciousness creates reality.

(Dumb motherfuckers.)

With sex, either you're male or female, and to say otherwise would be a contradiction, but to say you're a man or a woman, that you should or should not act a certain way consistent with that perspective, requires an analysis and synthesis of biological and psychological information about what a male or female is and how he or she should properly act according to his or her sex. That's gender. It requires us to understand humans, ourselves, on a level more fundamental than whether you should grow your hair long, put on some lipstick and wear a dress or not, and therein lies the wiggle room (subjectivist wormhole) for people to disconnect their minds from reality. "Who says I have to wear a fucking dress?!" leads to "Who says I have to be a fucking woman?!" leads to "Who says I have to conform to fucking reality?!"

We know what it means physically to be male or female -- males, for instance, can't get pregnant -- but we don't know what it means psychologically. Masculinity and femininity are very difficult concepts to define, because we have free will, because we're fallible, because, unlike spiders, we can act against our nature, because no matter what qualities we ascribe to either gender, we can all possess and display qualities we've ascribed to both, purposefully, if only to fuck with each other's heads.

The problem is we think that matters when it doesn't. We want some set list of characteristics and traits exclusive to gender to use to determine how to act morally and socially -- Be a man! Don't be a pussy! Cowboy up! -- like the ones that compel us to act right physically -- Eat your vegetables! Brush your teeth! Wear a condom! -- and in the absence of such "sexual commandments" we think "anything goes".

Reality is the primary, though. It doesn't matter if it's socially acceptable to wear a dress if you have male reproductive organs, you have male reproductive organs. If the word "man" or "woman", your concept of gender, isn't based on your sexual identity, then the concept itself literally just floats away and disintegrates. A moral commandment is an obvious contradiction in terms, but "anything goes" isn't all it's cracked up to be, either. For proof, just ask any hermaphrodite.

This is the root of all of our collectivist political issues, not just gender. Only individual minds actually exist. There's no such thing as a collective concept.

For instance, you have an idea of what a tree is and I have an idea of what a tree is and a botanist has an idea of what a tree is. Essentially, it's the same idea, a concept. The botanist could write books about trees, you could successfully plant them in your backyard, and I may never look deeper than the branches and leaves and pretty colors, but we all have the same concept in our minds of what a tree is, otherwise we couldn't communicate with each other about trees.

(Now apply that to pronouns, morons.)

The concept "tree", which even toddlers can comprehend, isn't based on some general consensus of what we all think trees are or should be. (Get your shit together, dictionary writers!) It's based on the trees themselves, on their natures as entities (independent existents) in reality, objects we've all determined to be so similar that we've conceptualized and given them the same name to distinguish them in our minds from all other objects in the universe. Individually, not collectively, we've all performed the same conceptual/linguistic feat. (What's the probability of that, bitch ass statisticians?!)

That's simply how concepts work. Without them you wouldn't even be able to comprehend what I'm saying right now, nor would the language I'm using to say it even exist. If you divorce concepts from reality, if you think any concept is a "social construct", you're doomed. Doomed. Doomed. Doomed. It doesn't matter if the concept refers to a tree or your own identity as a human being, if what you think doesn't match reality, reality will fucking fuck you up every fucking time.

If you're a male and you wear a dress, you're still a male. If you have sex with other males, you're still a male. If you chop your fucking dick off, you're still a male. The whole world may look at you and not know if you're a male or not. They may ridicule and ostracize you. They may bully you or beat your ass or kill you. You may wish you were female and hate your biological fate beyond anyone else's comprehension. But you're still a male.

Now here's the "rub". Just as sexual concepts shouldn't be divorced from biological reality, gender concepts shouldn't be divorced from sexual concepts. Just as if you took away the concept "life", the concept "sex" wouldn't exist, so if you took away the concept "sex", the concept "gender" wouldn't exist. They're all contextually and hierarchically dependent on each other, just as they're ultimately dependent on reality itself -- or, as Ayn Rand was the first to formulate it, "consciousness possesses identity".

Consciousness And Identity

Just as a tree is a tree, a concept is a concept. Metaphysically, the status of a mental entity is no different than the status of a physical one. If you're a male and you think you're a woman, you're thinking wrong. You're confusing symbols and meanings, concepts and referents, perception and reality, subject and object, consciousness and existence. In this case, the reality you're confusing with imagination also exists only in your mind, because concepts can refer to other concepts.

Nothing is more important to you as a rational, self-conscious being than your mind's relationship to reality. Your concept of gender isn't derived from what you or society wants it to be, but on what you actually are. You can be wrong. You can actually believe you're a woman when you're a male or a man when you're a female, but you can't make reality fit your delusions. That's how you know you're wrong. That's what it means to be wrong, when your ideas don't match reality. If you flip that, regardless of the issue, God help you, because you're at war with your nature as a human being. There's a huge difference between being a man and desperately wanting to be a woman and being a man and actually believing you're a woman. You're dicking around with your concept of identity itself.

("Who says I have to be fallible?!")

You could change the word "woman" to mean what the word "man" means, and vice versa, just as you could use a different word for a tree, but the concepts didn't change, only the symbols you use to refer to them. If you're a man and want to look and act like how society thinks a woman should look and act, then be that, go all the fucking way, prove that's something a man can do, that we need a better understanding of the concept, that it's deeper than reproductive attributes, all of which can be physically altered. Imagine if no tree in the history of the world ever fell down, and then one did. It would still be a tree, right? If you just switch the words, however, you're validating the perspective you allegedly reject, which means you're putting how others see you above what you really are, because you can't actually change your sexual identity. It's not a choice, like your favorite high heels or who you orgasm with or getting cosmetic surgery. You really were born that way.

There may be no dire or apocalyptic consequence for divorcing gender concepts from sexual or biological concepts, just as there are rarely "big" consequences for "little white lies", but the fact that you think that's an acceptable way to think will eventually lead to the corruption of all your higher-level concepts, like moral and political concepts, which you do rely on to survive.

(God is watching, you fucking commies!)

Imagine if bleeding heart poor people supporters started an anti-food movement on the grounds the impoverished are oppressed by hunger. They have to change with the times. Welfare didn't work and it's really not greedy capitalists' fault they're hungry. The human condition is simply unfair. It's the progressive way to look at the issue. Stop blaming people and start blaming reality. They didn't ask to be born that way. Food, therefore, must be banned and replaced with something better. If everyone can't have it, then no one should. Hunger equality! But they know they can't convince everyone that a big juicy steak doesn't taste good as fuck because big juicy steaks taste goood as fuck, so they just stop identifying nourishment as food, change "hunger" to mean "horny" by means of an agonizingly slow and steady lateral linguistic move made over the course of a few generations, and now come the revolution the government will provide everyone with free orgasms -- at least until we all starve to death.

Crazy? The "Defund The Police" protests or movement or whatever is actually the perfect example of a conceptual war with reality. The whole point of government is to protect us from each other. Policing is its primary function. Sure, it's a human institution, man-made. It didn't grow on trees. We can change it at will. And we've never truly conceived of it properly. But it was devised by us for a reason, to solve a societal problem without any other solution: self-defense. If you lessen or take away it's reason for existence, then even if it still exists in some perverse or corrupt form, it's not what it is anymore. The result of "defunding the police" wouldn't be government reform, it wouldn't be government at all. It would be tyranny, the exact opposite of what "Defund The Police" proponents allegedly claim they want.

Concepts matter to everyone.

And that's the true motivation behind all this "progressive" nonsense, from wealth equality to racial justice to gender identity to socialism -- steal concepts, own minds, enslave society, rule the world...