#if any poor-pisser wants to act like I think fields taking pre-existing terms and recontextualizing them into jargon is bad--

[ramenheim]

I mean yeah but tbf both the word and the concept of FISH predate modern taxonomic attempts to define them, & that's just a problem of taking a word out of its original environment (the shared concept we agree on-- ~[animal creature in water]) & trying to artifishially constrain it with "new boundaries (-> jargon definitions)" as those boundaries are deemed relevant by people seeking to draw them for the purposes of communicating among others *in a specific academic field that requires the least amount of semantic wiggle room to usefully communicate* (and then rigidly demand that only this *new, less expansive jargon term* counts as the ""real"" definition, superceding common understanding** even where it would be wildly inappropriate/blantantly incorrect to do so.)

So yeah it's exactly the same thing happening in gender and sexuality 'discourse' which is why trying to taxonomically delineate "who counts" as xyz genders/sexualities/queer kinship sucks absolute dogshit & fails to actually grasp what those concepts are by trying to pare away as many aspects as possible to falsely pursue a "pure, undiluted core of Meaning" that not only *doesn't* tangibly exist, but actively flies in the face of real, lived human experience and understanding of /what those words mean to the ppl who have used them/, which is actually how those things are 'defined'. It's a dialogue between an individual's sense of understanding of self, and of the self within the context of the society and culture it exists within; facilitated with shared words that only sort of generally agree on complicated clouds of nuance (where no two ppl's clouds are precisely the same; even if those two ppl are both you just seperated by time).

Like, a tuatara *IS* a lizard by virtue of it Being Like That, not bc it is from any kind of rigorously demarcated lineage that has been stamped Gold Star Lizard, a standard that all other lizards are marked /against/ based on deviations from that arbitrarily decided norm* (that itself will also shift as new developments like dna sequencing/etc. get added to the 'data to sort' pile).

Your individual self *can* be labelled, but those labels can never truly express, with excruciating precision, what you are to other ppl (nor can other ppl ever precisely express what you are to them). There's never been a combo like you and there never will be again; and no amount of taxonimocal efforts are ever going to be comprehensively true (both individually+collectively)-- only ever usefully true, in context.

[Tweet from @/fozmeadows: "human gender and sexuality are very much like animal taxonomy, in that both look structured and simple on the surface, but once you start investigating, it turns out there's actually no such thing as a fish despite the fact that we all know what a fish is, and that's okay"]