No Reality, Just Power

In my continuing effort to understand the transgender mania, I am now reading The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory by Abigail Favale. It's a work of genius.

Abigail was a radical feminist who taught gender theory for about a decade at a university whose name escapes me right now. During that time, she converted to Catholicism, as unlikely as that sounds. In doing so, her eyes were opened to the Catholic world view and she came to realize that gender theory was utter twaddle. Part of her book is spent describing the underlying ideas behind gender theory. Here are a few relevant quotes.

First, words define reality and each of us gets to choose our words and what they mean.

There is no creator, and so we are free to create ourselves. The body is an object with no intrinsic meaning. We give it whatever meaning we want, using technology to undo what is perceived to be natural.

We do not receive meaning from God or our bodies or the world, we impose it. What we take to be real is merely a linguistic construct. Ergo, we should consciously wield language to conjure the reality we want. To be free is to transgress limits continually to unfetter the will.

Woman and man are language-based identities that can be inhabited by anyone, because truth is just a story we tell ourselves and all self told stories are true.

Under this construct, communication becomes impossible because we are each making up the definitions of the words we're using and those definitions aren't accessible to the person to whom we are speaking. This is why Matt Walsh's What Is A Woman? is so frustrating to watch. 

In that movie, we see all these academics and professionals tell Matt that woman means many things, different things to different people. Not being insane, Matt pushes back, saying their definitions are circular nonsense. It doesn't make them pause because that's the point of gender theory. It is meant to be nonsense at an objective level. Everything is subjective to these people.

Wanna know why this is happening? The French philosopher and total idiot, Foucault, channeled by Judith Butler is the answer.

Power dissimulates as ontology. Ontology refers to the philosophy of being, of what exists. What Butler is saying here is that what we perceive to be “real” is actually a fiction that is created and enforced by institutional power. In the postmodern perspective, truth is suspended in air quotes as ultimately unknowable (or nonexistent). All that remains is power. Knowledge, then, is not a matter of discerning or recognizing what is true, because “truth” itself is a construction of power...

From birth, human beings are categorized by gender and given separate social scripts, so to speak. The continuous enacting of those scripts upholds the illusion that those categories are real, rather than social constructs.

In other words, there is no shared reality, there is only the reality each of us creates for ourselves. Or goal is to achieve freedom, freedom from the power structures, read: straight, white men, who are trying to force an image of reality on us for their own, evil purposes.

This is how SciAm publishes absolute rubbish these days. It has swallowed the pill and entered the looking glass of subjectivity.

Again, none of this makes sense. Physics is objective and universal. In order for Butler and Foucault to be right, there would have to be an interface between physics and subjective truth. On one side, dropping a bowling ball on your foot would smash it, but on the other side, you would get to define what "bowling ball," "smash" and "foot" meant.

The question of the transgender movement, then, is not whether or not my daughter is a man, it's these: Who determines what is real? Is there such a thing as objective reality?

You might want to get those questions squared away before you drop one of these on your foot.

Special Bonus Insanity

This clip from What Is A Woman? now makes sense to me. Or at least I know what the professor is trying to say. It's complete bullocks, of course, but there's a point he wants to make with his non-responses.