Billy Dee Williams and the Concept of "Gender-Fluidity"

a reply to: Gryphon66

In biological terms, there is just male and female and hermaphrodites. Yes, there are the technical "XX", "XY", "XXY", etc versions of 'biological identity', but this is far less relevant to how we humans use appearanceto regulate how it is we understand ourselves (as gendered) vis-à-vis others genders. We cannot use appearances in the identity politics world of ours. Appearances - or biological structure - is more or less denigrated.

dp

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a reply to: Hecate666

I find it a bit presumptious to say being gentle and loving are just female traits and being rough, is male. I am 100% female but whilst I can be loving and gentle, I can be very angry and nasty and rough if the situation demands.

As a psychologically rounded female and human I find it very patronising that I should be gentle and lovely otherwise I might be partially male. I mean WTF?

I can understand what you're saying here. But where do these self-states derive from? You call them "traits", but 'self-states' captures what's happening in our heads vis-à-vis our interactions with others. "Traits" is just a useful noun for a verb.

In a sense, I agree with what you're saying; but then again, was there ever a time where humans weren't female or male? Or didn't have brains that categorize the world in terms of similarities and differences (in cognitive science lingo: analogies or disanalogies)? It seems therefore justified to recognise that femininity has much to do with the trauma of birth, the inspiration of love, and the sensitivity that evolves between these two states. Conversely, men have historically been a bit more removed; not as isolated and polarized as men are today, but men will probably never have the sensitive capacities of females, since, from a biological perspective, females produce much more oxytocin than males do; just as males produce much more testosterone than females do.

The developmental neurosciences have discovered something interesting: male humans are fickle, emotionally sensitive creatures who actually need more love than females do. Females thus in a sense more easily possess the hardware for empathy; whereas males have to be consistently and regularly attended to in order to develop their empathic abilities.

I'm an intensely sensitive person. It came more through suffering than being reared by an emotionally consistent parent. I also wouldn't have survived without becoming what I am today. We're all a function of our experiences, and hence, our 'developmental landscape'; but our experiences are still under the control of archetypal patterns like maleness and femaleness.

This makes the present trend interesting, then, as I wouldn't predict it being a stable or durable way of categorizing the world. We're too visual to ignore gender. We have to be told and reminded and enculturated into what under most other circumstances inevitably evolves into a "male" and "female" dichotomy. Maybe Capitalisms general tendency towards not responding to realities constraints is the basis of todays belief that gender is neither real nor relevant.

I have no problem with someone feeling that way; but to fail to see its emergent nature from our mutual embeddedment in the socioeconomic reality of capitalism is just plain unimaginative.

a reply to: burdman30ott6

That's the thing though: reality is what the person first sees and experiences; and then the revisionist idealization enters consciousness a moment later to 'correct' the first perception of what the ideal is.

How can something this absurd survive? From a socioemotional and therapeutic perspective, I am committed to understanding these people and relating to them with compassion. I can't look at a person like this and see a caricature - a joker wearing makeup. I see a psychologically hurt human being who thinks this will make them happier.

My hope is, if we can tolerate such dramatically unjustified ontological claims about biological gender, maybe it'll actually set in place a culture where people don't interfere with one anothers experiences in negative ways. After all, what do you think the source of transgenderism is, other than interpersonal trauma? Paradoxically, accepting craziness will actually root out the even deeper craziness - trauma - that causes people to feel this way in the first place.

a reply to: UpIsNowDown

Mentally ill is an unproductive and antagonizing way of putting it.

Billy Dee Williams is a naïve bandwagoner. He's jumping on in order to feel a part of the group.

It's either that, or Billy Dee Williams is seeing things coherently.

Since coherency isn't a word in the postmodernist and post-structuralist dictionary, this seems to be little more than a highschool popularity contest. If enough people "say its normal", its normal, apparently. Such people think human minds have 'transcended structural' ways of thinking, which is pretty amazing, really.

You see structure, as do I. But post-structuralism says: "Its not meaningful though! Its arbitrary!".

Language somehow convinces itself that its representations are more real than what its eyes are showing them.

a reply to: Astrocyte

Billy Dee Williams: ‘What the hell is gender fluid?’

theundefeated.com...

Billy Dee Williams: ‘What the hell is gender fluid?’
An interview with the 82-year-old actor blew up the internet, but he says his remarks were misinterpreted

“Well, first of all, I asked last night. I said, ‘What the hell is gender fluid?’

No, no, no, I’m not gay — by any stretch of the imagination.

Williams says he identifies as a man.

Well there you go... as usual the MSM took someones words out of context. Billy Dee Williams wasn't talking about about sex or being gay.