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[–]Alan_Crowe 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

She starts off with soft bromides

The category of woman can and does change, and we need it to be that way.

and we nod along, because we know what she means. After menopause women turn invisible. We want to "change" the category of women to "incude" them. And when we oppose violence against women, we sometimes need to remind men that opposing violence against women includes protecting girls from their step-fathers; which stretches "women" to include "girls".

Then Butler hits us with

So we should not be surprised or opposed when the category of women expands to include cricket bats.

Whoops! I've misquoted her; but with a purpose. Sometimes we play games with language. We might say "the category of women includes cricket bats." and we are making a Dadaist joke. Probably with a didactic purpose. We want to jolt people awake. We want to make them realize that you cannot add just anything to the category of woman.

What Butler actually wrote was

So we should not be surprised or opposed when the category of women expands to include trans women.

She wants to add men to the category of women. Now I conceded earlier that one might want to make adjustments at the edge of the category woman, but the problem with the category of women is not that it excludes men; excluding men is the point! What next? Is seven to be the new even number?

Notice the pattern. She talks abstractly about the category women, without common sense examples, then hits us with an absurd expansion of the category. In psychiatry, that pattern, is called overinclusion and is an aspect of Formal Thought Disorder.

See http://frontierpsychiatrist.co.uk/formal-thought-disorder/

Overinclusion refers to a widening of the boundaries of concepts such that things are grouped together that are not often closely connected.