well, firstly, i hate all biological determinism. i thinks mostly bs. theres somethings obviously that are genetic, but generally im a very big nurture over nature kind of person.
but more than that, i just hate it out of priciple. because why does it matter? if we arent born with a gendered soul, or the brain of the other sex or whatever else, then why does it matter? does that make the pain of dysphoria less real? does that make the treatment any different? i dont think so.
its like how i hate gays talking about homosexuality in nature. like cool, but it doesnt mean anything. if humans were the only species on the planet to practice homosexual relations, itd still be okay for gay people to exist.
we dont live natural lives, we are so much more complex than that. if someone isnt hurting another person, then thats all that should matter. the ones who hate us, who hate gay people, they dont care about appeals to nature. its just fighting them on their own terf and conceding to their arguments because they’ll never believe anything but their own reactionary world views anyway.
what i meant by that is that we arent bound by the rules of nature. not truly. not like the rest of the living species on this planet. our lives are so much more complex. theres parts of us dictated by nature, yes, that comes for free with being a biological lifeform, but we are not bound completely by nature anymore, and we havent for a long time
how so? i truly don’t think there’s any way to separate humans from other animals that isn’t just drawing arbitrary human-biased lines in the sand. there’s no way to delineate exactly when humans stopped being “natural” because there is no natural. everything is nature.
idk, vaccines, gene editing, glasses, etc. all dont seem very natural. we live in places where its too cold or too hot for us too because of the advent of AC. improvements to water purification, mass industrialized agriculture allowing for population sizes far exceeding what would normally be possible, etc.
that’s still all arbitrary. it’s just environmental manipulation and adaptation, something all animals do—just not on the same scale. you still can’t call this transcending nature.
this just feels pedantic but i mean, sure ig? if youre going to define what is natural that broadly then sure, everything is natural. but then the word loses literally all meaning. we arent describing anything then
if you were just going to define nature as “not man-made” i would still have quibbles but i could accept it as a usable definition. but you said that humans were once bound by nature and now aren’t. so what is the delineation of natural and unnatural? why are bronze tools natural but hypodermic needles unnatural? like i get that this is kind of a pedantic “when does a hill become a mountain” thing but that’s what i’m getting at. that there is no meaningful way to define nature.
but again, then theres no meaningful way to define literally anything. all words and definitions are arbitrary. words dont have 100% factual, unarguable definitions. it just doesnt work that way. we made the words up, we get to define what they represent.
if something is natural just because it exists in the real world, then the word natural means nothing. the antonym of natural isnt virtual, its artificial. glasses do not occur in nature, they cannot exist without human intervention. bronze literally isnt natural either, its made by combining two different naturally occuring metals. there are no bronze deposits, and even if there were, they wouldnt form as hammers, weapons, hoes, etc.
theres gradients to all this. humans might not live completely unnatural lives, we still interact with the environment and world around us, but compared to every other species on the planet, our lives are definitely the most artificial.
agreed, but i’m not talking about language and semantics broadly—i’m specifically saying that nature cannot be defined. unless i missed it, i don’t think you’ve given your definition of natural, other than providing some examples, and i’ve yet to see nature defined in a way that doesn’t arbitrarily center humans.
that we know of; there’s nothing uniquely human required to synthesize them. theoretically, some alien species could come down and start making bronze or glass or whatever. or some other species on earth could evolve to do so.
and even if i were to concede that humans are somehow innately unnatural, where did humans come from? were the primates we evolved from also unnatural? humans are so deeply interconnected with everything else in nature that you can’t just remove them from the picture. we’re only biased towards humans because we are humans.
what? if aliens made bronze or glasses itd still be unnatural? isnt that obvious??? why is it so hard to understand that?