Monday, June 02, 2014

I dislike bullshit, in the Frankfurtian definition of language designed to impress rather than communicate. It is circularly meaningless, relying on it's own assumptions to give it weight.
Kevin D. Williamson, a writer for the National Review, scribbled an editorial for The Chicago Sun Times. I won't link to it. It's inflammatory bullshit designed to draw clicks, and I've already given them too many. The editorial is entitled "Laverne Cox Is Not a Woman." The title sums up the attitude, intent and failure.
In order to try and make his opinion a fact, Williamson describes gender as "a very primitive understanding of reality, namely the sympathetic magic described by James George Frazer in The Golden Bough." Sympathetic magic is the idea that one thing becomes more like another thing because it resembles that thing.
There is no quality of gender that is not completely an affectation, that can't be superimposed from one gender to another. Every facet or expression of Williamson's masculine gender identity, or his presumably heternormative partners' femininity, can be completely and thoroughly copied by members of either sex. All of gender is sympathetic magic.
Bullshit imitates information. Williamson closes by saying: “I have little or no desire to police how Cox or any other man or woman conducts his or her personal life.”
However, he still needs to express a largely irrelevant opinion. To deny having authority while at the same time trying to assert authority is indicative of nothing except the author's belief he has authority where none exist. Like a prophet of one of the "old testament mystery cults" he references.

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