non-binary as our latest Shibboleth

Because both lacrosse and chess are games, would it be reasonable to rule that internet “news” sports-pages cover chess, contract bridge and Go ?
Lacrosse is a physical sport in respects in which chess is not. In a chess match, White injuring Black would halt the match if not the tournament and not for teams being only of one-player each! There is no “injured list” in chess tournaments. Or shall we invoke “tag-team” chess on the model of “professional” wrestling as a “sport” ??

Species have no clear boundaries as they are based on populations and not individuals. On the other hand, whether a team has a fixed list of individuals depends upon rather arbitrary rules.

Whether chess and lacrosse were both originally played outdoors does not make the case for both being sports today. Is chess a sport of kings? Saying so, would not make it so.

The fact that gender is not always clear at birth or through the course of post-natal development does not make the case that hominids do not breed as male and female nor would widespread techno-fertilization and gestation change that simple fact about the species of which we are members at this point in hominid evolution on this planet.

It is not a point of rhetoric that hominids are not, in general, parthenogenic as might be some few reptiles. It is not a matter of capitalist or socialist ideology of whatever flavour, however distasteful that may be.

The notion of generality does not require the revolting existentialist shibboleth of “essence” anymore that religion requires eventual monotheism, the Hegel dear to wealthy J-P Sartre in his Harris tweed jackets and gold cuff links, notwithstanding. Religion does not entail monotheism in its essence anymore than existentialist proclamations required obscurantist Sartre to change his sartorial preferences. The most important notions of religion rely upon no such essences.
Saying that religion is essentially ‘X’ does not imbue religion with an essence. Some religions at some point in time are essentially ancestor worship. But that is a manner of speaking and not a well-defended matter of ontology.

But is male and female gender the result of “essentialist” binary doctrine?

That some or many Koreans are non-religious in any sense of Western European religions does not mean that a few atheists make the USA, in general, a culture that is non-religious. These are uncomfortable facts of what we have learned through the efforts of anthropologists and sociologists regardless of the final status of their putative sciences. If sociology proves closer to Library Science than mathematical physics, the generality of certain reasonable conclusions drawn from appraising known facts will not be over-turned.

Then there is jurisprudence. Perhaps Library Science is closer to mere logic than jurisprudence, but it is also the more arbitrary for that. A view that Political Science is not separable from history, sociology and economics might cause a revision in Library Science(s) regardless of precedent.

When dominant, the role of precedent in jurisprudence is only superficially similar to that role in Library Science. When precedent-oriented jurisprudence comes to subjects of International Law — not as matters of historical record, but as matters of arbitration (if not also justice) — the role of precedent and the creation of new precedent may be decisive in a way not readily seen even in pre–genetic botany. When botany became global, as when zoology became global, those systems of classification changed, but changed in a way completely unlike the introduction of clades in the botany and the zoology of post-genome assays.

If jurisprudence across cultures is required to address matters of gender and marriage, some uncomfortable issues may be raised if reasonableness and rationality are able to sustain the assaults of ideology and internet shibboleths.

The prime question is whether marriage is best understood as a heterosexual contract for the purposes of procreation, firstly, and property and wealth inheritance, secondarily.

Consider the widespread view that individuals have rights to own property if they continue to satisfy certain basic social duties. It is not at all clear that a right to dispose of property can be defended unconditionally as a matter of international law. It is not obvious that if Gibraltar is not British territory, then it is perforce Spanish territory. That case should be even more obvious for the islands in dispute between Russia and Japan at this time. In Canada and Australia, there has been a view emerging concerning culture and the adoption of the children of members of a previously indigenous population or group of populations. As hominids, the roles of old “aunties” and a very few “old boys” (who are no longer competing with an alpha male) cannot be disputed where the care of offspring is concerned.

But the hominid facts concerning male care for a partner and her offspring cannot be used to justify male parental neglect within civil societies. That hominid males appear in general to have short–term alliances with females and their offspring is not a fact relevant to matters of precedent in jurisprudence. And this is, in large part,because the concept of person and the concept of duty are not matters of population–based zoology.

It is not likely reasonable to assert by fiat that “person” and “duty” are inventions of capitalist ideology anymore than to assert that they have BECOME such through the course of some historical dialectic. The adequacy of the notion of “duty” is not decided on the basis of its apparent success within some population, except in the most trivial sense of vapid analogies.

Nothing with regard to international law is decided by the historical fact that the SCOTUS has interpreted the Constitution of the USA and its amendments with regard to gender and marriage. All gentleman owning chattel property (which included slaves) were once claimed to be equals before the law in the new (and few) United States. Regardless, slavery became unconstitutional and women (among others) gained the right to vote whether they owned property or no.

The case of the USA has not established that a defensible civil national administration requires an establishment constitution or even an ad hoc constitution. Some nations get by with only a Bill of Rights.

Nothing in the nature of European nations requires that nations persist as a unit of civil administrative and legal reality. Nations might easily become merely an historical fact as were colonial empires.

Because of the current state of linguistics, one can argue that all extant languages be preserved where reasonably possible. Should a universal grammar or some such come to revolutionize linguistics or should some advance in AI utterly revise fundamental presuppositions in linguistics, it may cease to be reasonable to attempt to preserve all extant languages of few speakers in face of, say, catastrophic results of climate change.

This need not be the case for heterosexual marriage as a defensible institution for child-rearing after procreation. While it is true, that states such as Canada once took the position that the state was entitled to remove children from parents for reasons of social homogeneity based on bias, prejudice and bad science coupled with inadequate juridical tests, it may never again be possible to make such a case as a matter of international law anymore than petrolean engineers could endlessly deny the theory of plate tectonics ( they did and their base was in Tulsa, Oklahoma.)

Whether is will be the case that abortion for the convenience of the child-bearer will always be legally permissible may depend upon the state of moral argument AND technological change. If the reasonable safe transfer of a fetus to another gestational module (machine or person or hybrid) were to become a reality, the notions of ‘person’ and ‘duty’ might require the out-lawing of arbitrary abortion regardless of feminist slogans of our day. If religion withers away, who is to say that “person” and “duty” will not trump “choice” and “rights” as a matter of international law such that an American person in Europe might not be able to insist upon an abortion even if sever storms prevented travel to an American jurisdiction.

While the advocates of progress are sure today that “non-binary” shall one day prevail and “gender” be abhorred as much as “racism” or “rape” or “anti-Semitism” “kidnapping with murder” might always remain abhorrent, is an aspect of “progress” that is not obvious at all.

It may be the case, the TOE will not remove electron and photon as classifications of types of relatively fundamental units of physical reality. The vast empty space of the universe is not longer “empty” but “The Ether” has not returned. Black Holes may prove to be somewhat “grey” but very dense neutron stars may remain a fact of astronomy and the account of certain explosive events common in old binary star formations.

Even if a pernicious virus were to make the gestation to term of male fetus a practical impossibility leaving a world of non-male persons, the fact that this species was, arguably, of binary gender, would not be controverted any more that the same effect in some species of previous dioecious trees.

That some trees in some populations are generally dioecious but not always so does not remove those trees from a reasonable classification as dioecious species, a fact that might be relevant for matters of policy concerning pollinators such as bees.

Enter the concept of individual rights. In the popular mind, the case for non-heterosexual marriage is a matter of individual rights in the USA and some other jurisdictions. This need not be the ideology that triumphs as a matter of international law should the role of nation states begin to be less prominent in human affairs.

Consider the matter of abortion in China in recent decades. Gender-based abortion is a social evil in a gender-based society. One may take that as indefeasible given what we know of such societies. No argument that pubescent or adolescent or young or aging hominids are fundamentally of some non-binary non-gender will change that as a matter of history, sociology and jurisprudence even though its shibboleths triumph as expressions of political ideology or literary fashion.

So what is the reasonable case of heterosexual marriage as the prototypical marriage contract ( a view that i do not share personally as one who has doubts about marriage as a reasonable contract ab initio — but i am only one individual musing, and not the bearer or vendor of considered arguments resulting from some international commission and the published or promulgated result of its public or private deliberations.

It is the case that in sociolinguistics, we find that some dead metaphors and hackneyed expressions are offensive. We have a duty to avoid them so as not to offend persons or pointlessly engender strife among persons or social groups. It is not likely that advanced sociolinguistics will be able to make predictions such as to produce even very short lists of such expressions before their currency is contested. Sociolinguists may be able to predict that some massive shifts in leisure activities will engender lexical shifts just as population changes with climate may lead to revised predictions in phonology. But will the distinction between definite and indefinite articles disappear in English, French and German even if the notion of “article” is replaced by some other “particle” concept in linguistics? Generally speaking, French and Russian remain unalike in so far as the latter lacks such explicit particles in the spoken language.

Suppose that Russian, English, French and German (i do not choose these at random) some to replace the third-person pronouns with variants of “they” as a non-binary pronoun akin to “person” were that to be pronominal in function in some assertions. There might be convincing arguments conveyed by major social media figures that we have a duty to eschew offensive pronouns reflecting ingrained prejudices. Or it might become a pervasive fashion, rather as was the male necktie or the male hat (1950’s mandatory or 1970’s old–fashioned.)

At one time, academic writers used “we” and not “I” just as today i often choose the less Cartesian and immodest Self pronoun of “I” in first–person singular text. But text is notoriously NOT language, not even on internet of generally reliable, predictive and self–correcting voice–recognition.

[ to be continued ]