I'm gradually unlearning white & male as default-person ("white" is a totally garbage concept anyway, but say "european-looking") but straight & cis seem to me to be obvious defaults in any decent ontology however! not-default doesn't mean queer or trans are bad/wrong/unnatural
Defaults, markedness, and what counts as the unmarked human
14 tweets · August 2023 · 48 likes · 0 retweets · read on Twitter
to be clear here I'm not making a claim based on majority/minority right-handedness is more common, so it's a kind of default, but it doesn't seem to me that it's ontologically more primary (although squinting at hemispheres, I can make a case for it).
part of my inspiration for these thoughts (which I've been having for some months, not just today) I think was Deborah Tannen's stuff, which I traced to a 1993 essay There is No Unmarked Women which I just went and read! short, juicy, very relevant. academics.otc.edu/media/uploads/…
she points out that in a biological sense, female is probably a better candidate for unmarked/default sex: - all X chromosomes make a woman; all Y chromosomes make nothing (men are XY) - men have nipples - in some species, "only female"; in ants, non-reproducing workers female
she talks about how in most contexts there's no way to dress or style one's hair as a woman that fades into the background I can now restate this tweet: as a long-haired man, I am not part of the unmarked class.
anyway, Tannen's piece was helpful. I think what she's saying with "marked"/"unmarked" is different from what I mean by defaults I mean more like "if told there's a person, and no additional facts, does anything else get assumed?" ...tho that's not quite it either
you need to have a notion of gender-identity-matching-body-as-default in order to even refer to trans-gender sexual orientation is a bit less clear but hetero sex is both temporally and ongoingly necessary for/prior to the possibility of homo sex
I want to be clear: I'm not attempting to say that these defaults are "normal" in the sense in which the word "normal" is associated with normativity, rightness, shouldness, rules, conformity, etc many ontologies (including DSM) foolishly fuse these two
interestingly the categories {neurotypical, neurodivergent} are named in a way that suggests neurotypicality is a natural default, but it seems likely to me that NT correlates with ability and/or desire to conform *in general* not just fitness for a NT-run society
I have a whole nother theory about that but I don't want to try to fit it into this thread. point is, I don't think there is a default human neurotype in any reasonable ontology, and that the notion that there is one is an artifact of bad ontologies.
the reason I'm publishing my thoughts-in-progress about this is part of my quest to name the obvious about culture-war topics, doing my best to avoid culture-war ontologies acknowledge all the things!
so even if I later realize I was missing some key detail here (likely! even more likely if I publish!) sharing my perspective is a resource to others who can notice someone saying what they were also thinking but weren't saying!
or, alternatively, if someone has an ontology that is denying some obvious things I'm saying because the only other people saying those obvious things are obviously being dicks about it, then hearing someone say it curiously might help them look at those things afresh
also to be clear here, I'm not claiming to be 100% curious and 0% defensive and if overall I don't read to you as curious, I respect that!