Thursday 12 July 2018

The validity of subjective experience


What we are seeing currently is a challenge to conventional gender divisions, based on claims to the 'validity of subjective experience'. LGBTQ plus non binary offer a whole range of alternatives to those who feel constricted by conventional gender assignments. This choice is being given to children as young as 10 years old within the UK education system, and the UK Labour Party has recently agreed to accept applicants for women's positions from those who 'self-identify as women'.
Questioning gender divisions also challenges our whole notion of what we think of as 'masculine' and 'feminine' qualities.  

There is beginning to be a recognition of the validity of a subjective experience, which is not tied to social norms. This freedom allows us to see that though there may be distinct biological differences, (and even these vary much more than is generally supposed) between masculine and feminine, this does not define qualitative differences between genders. Women are free to be as 'masculine' as they want and vice versa. This is acknowledged within enlightenment philosophies, by proposing that everybody has both masculine and feminine qualities within them, 'the yin yang paradigm'. Although this makes a nonsense of the distinction between masculine and feminine qualities, yet it seems difficult for people to abandon that mindset.


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