I’m surprised that you are making a connection between Nate’s new position and modern attitudes towards gender. To me, it’s just the opposite.
For me, “dolphins are fish because they swim and look fishy” is associated with a “common sense clusters” classification strategy, which also gives a traditional common-sense idea of who is a man and who is a woman.
Conversely, “dolphins are mammals because of their genetic lineage and specific mammalian traits” is associated with a kind of “cleverly selected clusters by some intellectuals” classification strategy, e.g. “people have a separate innate gender identity which determines their gender.”
That is kind of interesting as the mapping happens differently for my mind.
To me the gender issues would map to the animal issue by there being some grandpas being essentialists and upon noticing that dolphins breathe would try to strand them while spouting something to the effect of “get out of the water, you are truly a mammal and you belong to land”. This would be silly, bad for dolphin health and the sense of “there is an error in the world” that the grandpa might try to alleviate with their actions is misplaced. It would be proper to say to them “Grandpa stop trying to take fish out of the ocean”.
I’m surprised that you are making a connection between Nate’s new position and modern attitudes towards gender. To me, it’s just the opposite.
For me, “dolphins are fish because they swim and look fishy” is associated with a “common sense clusters” classification strategy, which also gives a traditional common-sense idea of who is a man and who is a woman.
Conversely, “dolphins are mammals because of their genetic lineage and specific mammalian traits” is associated with a kind of “cleverly selected clusters by some intellectuals” classification strategy, e.g. “people have a separate innate gender identity which determines their gender.”
That is kind of interesting as the mapping happens differently for my mind.
To me the gender issues would map to the animal issue by there being some grandpas being essentialists and upon noticing that dolphins breathe would try to strand them while spouting something to the effect of “get out of the water, you are truly a mammal and you belong to land”. This would be silly, bad for dolphin health and the sense of “there is an error in the world” that the grandpa might try to alleviate with their actions is misplaced. It would be proper to say to them “Grandpa stop trying to take fish out of the ocean”.