And of course, Genesis Nemesis is always there standing by to fling a completely baseless insult at me.
Right wingers have much trouble understanding the complexity of the gender topic (or any particular topic).
At
you? I don't see any reference to you, and I assumed his comment was aimed at the student under discussion in the OP; But if the cap fits...
Much of right wing policy is founded on simpletonism - a determination to reduce all complex problems to a small set of simple rules that anyone can follow, coupled with attacks on anyone who suggests that the rules are so oversimplified as to be actively harmful to society as a whole.
This is also how religions operate, and that is no coincidence. There's a reason why Christians bang on about the ten commandments, and not about the six hundred and thirteen.
As Albert Einstein is
alleged to have remarked: "Everything should be kept as simple as possible,
but no simpler".
Simplicity is valuable, and up to a point is very useful; But simpletons are a huge threat to our ability to understand and manage anything, by their insistence on puic policies based on half-baked over-approximations, which they typically characterise as "facts" or "truth" - set in stone and immutable for all time.
Dichotomies are the hallmark of simpletonism. When someone starts demanding that every single one of the 8+ billion humans must fit into
exactly one of
exactly two categories, it is almost certainly simpletonism at work.
Good/Evil
Saved/Damned
Man/Woman
Us/Them
Black/White
Parasite/Worker
Enemy/Friend
These are all presented by the simpleton as hard dichotomies; But the reality is that they are all spectra, and some are multidimensional. Even when they have a two-peak distribution, there will always be some folk who fall somewhere in between, and often some who fall closer to one extreme than the vast majority of humanity.
Dichotomies and other simplifications can be a useful tool for getting a handle on how stuff is, but we must always remember Bilby's Law:
There are no statements about biology (or politics) that cannot be made more accurate by adding "...although in reality it is far more complicated than this".
Sheesh. Everyone with half a brain knows there are well over 50 (and climbing).
