I've been following this thread with interest for a while now but I just want to talk about this for a second. I'm not entirely sure what belgiansocialist in fact means by this, but:
This is the core of what being human is about. We speak, and we speak about ourselves. And after we've spoken, we take what's been said deadly seriously. You care about your gender. You care absurdly much about your gender. You care about your gender identity to the point where you're willing to go the extra mile to claim it. Looking at you Nathan.
You laugh at Lacan, but at the end of the day a pun can really make you sick to the core of your being. Here are four words which can make you ill: 'I am a man'.
My problem with this is a considerable amount of confusion about it. I can't claim something if I'm not sure what it is, particularly if it's a category (or any of a number of categories) that doesn't 'naturally' exist (the quotes are obviously hugely important here, since it's a bit of a crock concept and has a damaging influence on my psychology). I realize that because of this it's probably pretty easy to argue that I'm in bad faith and that's a lot of why I've been talking about this less, in general, in my life, lately, because I want to be able to discuss this cogently and I have a
lot of other things to 'discuss cogently' too right now. Which is admittedly itself a bit of an excuse to not answer hard questions relating to identity--something I actually do feel opposed to the idea that I or anybody
has to do.
And if I went over the aspects of the situation that do make me feel sick I'd be here for a while, and outstrip the bounds of what I want to share with the Atlas Forum.
Poll
