Friday, January 11, 2019

The Nonsense Of "Complementary" Egalitarianism

I have noticed a very conceptually bizarre kind of egalitarianism, which I call bizarre because it is far from having consistent veracity.  This type of egalitarianism holds that there are innate/non-conditioned differences between (most) men and women that go beyond the appearances and functions of their bodies.  For the sake of convenience, I will call this "complementary" egalitarianism, since it still retains elements of a complementarian mindset.  It is a selective merging of baseline complementarianism and egalitarianism, in that it posits complementary gender traits while still holding that men and women who are the exceptions should not be barred from living out their individual characteristics in their occupations and family lives.

All consistent egalitarians realize that there is no nonphysical trait (nothing besides anatomy and physiology) that one possesses simply by virtue of being a man or a woman.  There are nonphysical trait differences between individuals and other individuals, and there are are traits considered "masculine" or "feminine" by a given culture at large, but that is all.  No personality trait is masculine or feminine; some traits are merely encouraged or expected to show themselves in men or women by ignorant members of various societies.  That men and women have somewhat different bodies does not prove or even suggest that there are differences in the personalities of men and women.

It does not follow from one man or woman having a personality characteristic, skill, or desire that all men and women have it; it does not follow from one being a man or a woman that one has any particular personality characteristic or talent at all.  Logic, by exposing that anyone who says otherwise must use the fallacy of composition and the non sequitur fallacy, refutes the idea that there are nonphysical gender-specific traits a priori.  This means that even if a person who believes in gender stereotypes is surrounded by people who behave in accordance with those stereotypes, he or she is still without excuse for making the enormous and false assumptions behind the belief.

Because logic uproots anything that contradicts strict individualism, the notion of gender differences outside of anatomy and physiology is disproven irrespective of psychological studies and everyday experiences.  But even if complementary egalitarianism was true, how could a person distinguish between conditioned differences and natural ones?  There would be no way to tell one from the other!  Thus, even complementary egalitarians are forced to adopt wholly arbitrary, illogical beliefs that lack any ability to be verified.  Since refuting even a single gender stereotype refutes all of them at once (the refutations are identical for different stereotypes), complementary egalitarianism can only be nonsense, albeit not to the same degree as actual complementarianism.

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