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Monk06

(7,675 posts)
14. So I am male and heterosexual. My gender is male my orientation is heterosexual. Sorry if I sound
Thu May 14, 2015, 06:03 AM
May 2015

thick by dwelling on what you said but no harm there. In that case the distinction between orientation and identity is easy to understand.

So if I expand it to the other categories we still have two genders but several more identities and orientations, you say intersect or overlap. Sorry again just getting it straight in my own mind.

The difficulty I was trying to elucidate was how do you alter, change or expand everyday language practice in such a way as to avoid stepping on someone's concerns or feeling based on their orientation and how they identify?

It's not obvious to me this can be accomplished by natural language in a way that would fit easily in day to day conversation such as how you greet people or start a simple conversation without having to resort to a more specialized language of identity that is not widely understood and perhaps may never be.

For example based on my unrelated experience in philosophy, I can understand and talk about philosophy at a fairly technical level. But I couldn't strike up a conversation in Starbucks about it unless the other person has studied Philosophy. That's why I haven't had many chances in the last thirty years to get into those sorts of discussion. I can't blame others for not having the same language background as mine.

In short expanding the lexicon of sexual identity may increase your conceptual understanding of the topic but there is no guarantee that the lexicon will be universally adopted. To paraphrase Wittgenstein, everyday conversation is a form of negotiation between two linguistically competent speakers wherein they come to mutual agreement about what words mean. This may vary from on conversation to another or even one sentence to another but again there is no guarantee.

Latest Discussions»General Discussion»Heterosexism: the Heteros...»Reply #14