Everybody's talking about gun control as an issue again, without talking about the core problem. (In the US and Canada.)
Access to firearms is seen as a guarantee of a right to enforce patriarchal white supremacy through violence. (This is not an enumerated right but it's absolutely trivial to make an historical case for it.)
You can sidetrack into the "you don't treat me the way I think I should be treated so you're all going to suffer" (personal, local implementations of the core social drive for fascism; this is also the thing that ties it into the strong correlation between domestic abusers and those who commit gun violence) wibbling, because the traditional "economic marginalization" solution to unwelcome attitudes doesn't work when everybody has been economically marginalized, but while that's definitely A problem it's not THIS problem. (If unspoken core cultural precept was "live by the precepts of the Benedictine order", we'd definitely have problems but they wouldn't be shooting-up-schools-and-concerts problems.)
So all those folks coming up with desired gun control laws; that bit about "qualified instructor"? That's only going to work if all the instructors are black women, who have an at-will, no-justification-required power to flunk people for attitude.
At a time when the cousins have a department of their federal government engaged in active ethnic cleansing going on and the changing climate's effects on food security are gaining scope.
While I may agree with you on the point of gender's relevance to non-private situations, I do not think that can be changed any time soon.
ReplyDeleteWe are social animals, and heavily dependent on theory of mind for our interactions with others. Simplistic gender is helpful (and for some, necessary) in modeling the interlocutor. It is impossible to NOT give out social cues to others, because those cues exist in the mind of those others, as they try to predict our behaviour. Just like choice of dress, you will be judged (and you can make a statement) based on where you have positioned yourself on the conformity scale.
Your solution of treating everyone completely identically seems to me as impractical and unadvised as treating everyone completely differently. A compromise between the two extremes is the current default. Of course, it needs periodical reassessments and redesigns (like any other system), and it will never be perfect, but so what? We are not perfect either.