Epiphanies 2022: Does it matter why you’re queer ?
Doublethink
Admin, 8th Day Host
This is a spin off of the discussion in Hell here.
It seem to me that in the fight for civil rights, we’ve made a bit of an idol of the causes of queerness - whether that be sexual orientation or gender identity. As if it could only be OK if a) its biological b) it’s multicausal c) it’s learned but not volitional d) it’s fixed and unchanging.
I don’t think we actually know, and I don’t think that matters ?
I think the civil rights case is, we don’t live in a theocracy so therefore have no reason to deny rights to the queer. Why we are queer shouldn’t matter.
It seem to me that in the fight for civil rights, we’ve made a bit of an idol of the causes of queerness - whether that be sexual orientation or gender identity. As if it could only be OK if a) its biological b) it’s multicausal c) it’s learned but not volitional d) it’s fixed and unchanging.
I don’t think we actually know, and I don’t think that matters ?
I think the civil rights case is, we don’t live in a theocracy so therefore have no reason to deny rights to the queer. Why we are queer shouldn’t matter.
Comments
In fact, searching for causes was itself pathologizing. Freud asked the pertinent question, why are people straight. It doesn't matter.
Of course, the anti-trans attacks have become very ugly, but looking for causes of transgender is itself often ugly and punitive.
Game theory is my personal window into evolutionary biology, so apologies for the oversimplification. The translation is: no, the particular neurobiology mechanism isn’t important, IMO, but it’s important to have variety.
There's obvious evolutionary pressure in favour of straightness (or at least a willingness to engage in straight sex). There were a bunch of papers a while back suggesting an evolutionary advantage for having a modest share of the population being gay, along the lines of having extra adults attached to an extended family was an advantage for the rearing of nieces and nephews of gay adults, but I don't know that that went anywhere beyond speculation.
It doesn't make the slightest bit of difference to how modern society should treat gay people, or trans people, or whatever other group of people you're trying to "explain".
I think it's sort of interesting from a theological point of view, though - from my perspective, if being gay is innate, then it makes the "being gay is sinful" interpretation of scripture less reasonable. Whereas if being gay was a choice, akin to taking excessive pride in one's personal appearance, perhaps, then it might be more reasonable to admit the possibility of treating someone choosing to be gay along the same lines as someone choosing to be vain.
So from my POV, the fact that gayness is (at least in many cases) innate means I cannot interpret those clobber verses in scripture as a blanket denunciation of gay sex.
I am a woman who has never been ‘girlie’, and who prefers to wear trousers. If some men prefer to wear skirts, that’s fine. They wore frills a few hundred years ago, and curled their hair. Some men are gentle, some women like to fight.
If human beings hadn’t created the stereotypes, there may be less of an issue for those who feel the need to identify with one gender or the other.
Who we’re attracted to sexually is surely fine as long as we don’t force ourselves upon anyone, and we avoid the physical and emotional dangers of promiscuity .
The past obsession with procreation no longer applies in an overcrowded world.
If a gay man is married to a woman, do you think it would be inappropriate to say that he isn't straight? Because Bindel is *openly* a political lesbian - it's not a case of accusing her based on conjecture, but based on how she herself identifies. That is, she has chosen to reject men as romantic partners but is not actually attracted to women. Someone who isn't attracted to women cannot be a lesbian, because it is fundamental to being a lesbian.
I think this is a bit different to the discussion in Hell. Political lesbians aren't queer if they're not actually attracted to women at all. That some cishet women have chosen to identify as lesbians despite not being attracted to women is important when they are treated as authorities on what lesbians think about particular issues.
As far as civil rights go, a lot of anti-gay folks constructed the straw man that such protections should only cover "innate" characteristics. The most obvious problem with this is that those advancing this argument also claim to be very committed to civil rights protections covering religious belief, something that is not "innate" in any meaningful sense of the term.
For several decades now I've belonged within queer and non-binary and genderfluid communities. Most of the conscious belonging and advocacy has meant coming out, outing myself, over and over again, as bisexual, as a lesbian, as queer, as somebody wanting to be an effective ally for trans friends. The range of my intersectional concerns has extended to issues around ageing as a queer person, disability in the built urban environment, post-menopausal health, ecological concerns that will impinge on the world I know.
At the beginning of this journey, much of lesbian/gay existence in southern Africa was criminalised and pathologised, stigmatised by the AIDS crisis. Cis-heterosexuality was considered 'natural' and the norm. The climate of state-sanctioned homophobia meant negotiating discourses that were religious, ethical, medical, institutional. Church was not a sanctuary, it was another place where invisibility was no safer than standing out as deviant or unwelcome. And then I had to deal with sexism and misogyny, with racial prejudice, body-shaming, with so many constraints and barriers all around that some days it felt as if the inchoate me I was might give up or succumb to the psychic breakdown that seemed to hover close at hand.
The naming itself was so hard. I was reading Adrienne Rich on compulsory heterosexual and wondering how many women would choose the given norm if they had choices? Young men friends were undergoing the notorious aversion therapies and gay conversion workshops run by right-wing churches and an apartheid defence force. The sinister talk of a Cure was everywhere: lesbians could be cured of their perversion by rape, men could
be cured of wanting to love other men. Some lesbian friends described themselves as androgynous, some as butch or femme, some spoke of longing to transition. I knew men who were becoming women, women who were gender-fluid, and we accompanied one another on a journey that was unpredictable and uncertain. The opposition would always be there, from family, church, in the workplace, in a capitalist women-hating society.
For me to be queer is to live with conflict, that some of us find out who we are by resisting the imposition of identities that don't fit and scripts that limit or deform us. What has shaped my life has been the fight, that is what made me who I am today as much as desire or extended choice or companionship.
I felt generally hostile to attempts to ‘explain’ my sexuality. Most of the time when this was done it was by people hostile to us. It was to do with people talking about us, in clinical, medicalising or religious terms. There’s something extraordinarily odd about having lived my entire life with my sexuality being talked about by others who do not experience it.
Obviously homosexuality is not a choice, but even if it was, so what? That’s still no reason to treat people in the way Queers are treated.
Nowadays, with more innate & genetic explanations being so fashionable & all, I have come to regard them with a less dismissive attitude.
But my identity is not validated by a string of numbers in DNA code. Not in my lived experience.
As I am not, in a pernickety or technical way, a Christian (thank God!) I can just disregard the ‘clobber verses’ as something I disagree with.
So, in answer to the opening question of the thread, no I don’t think explanation matters. It doesn’t matter to me.
I don't know anyone who would argue for a genetic explanation being found as a good thing, simply because a genetic explanation would inevitably lead to a eugenicist programme of eradicating those genes or combinations of genes. In my experience of LGBT+ people in their 20s and 30s, it's viewed as innate but I don't see any desire to argue *how* the innateness has occurred. Whether it's genetic or something else isn't seen as important. It being innate is seen as important so as not to validate conversion narratives, but that doesn't mean people wouldn't also choose to be LGBT+ if it was a choice.
I think the issue here is that the content of civil rights aren't determined in a vacuum and practically speaking they are influenced by societal attitudes. In Canada, the Charter came into existence in the early 1980s but it took at least a decade for a consensus to emerge that its equality provisions actually applied to sexual orientation. The equal protection clause in the Fourteenth Amendment obviously has been around for a lot longer. There's been a sea change in societal attitudes about LGBT issues in the last 50 years and while attitudes toward etiology aren't the whole story I think it's fair to say that they're part of the story.
I find it somewhat hard to draw a clear distinction between phenomenology and etiology. I think when we talk about innateness, for instance, we have already moved into making some big-picture claims about etiology. I think we've also gotten to point where responsible research into gender and sexuality is focused how it comes into being for everyone and not just for LGBT people.
I think that's highly likely (I'll try to keep this brief as I am cishetpalemale&stale, so I don't have personal experience here). There's been a number of burials reported recently from pagan Anglo-Saxon cemeteries where bodies with female grave goods are skeletally male - I don't recall any skeletally female bodies with male goods, but that may be a failure of memory. There's also been at least one body that DNA has shown to be intersex but was buried with female grave goods so presumably the person it once belonged to identified as female.
AS grave goods are fairly distinctive - men buried with knives and larger weapons, women with purses and chatelaines or keyhangers, so these burials stick out.
Do you have a link about the Anglo Saxon burials you mention? It reminds me of a Viking burial I read about some years ago where a female skeleton (they checked the chromosomes to make sure) was found with the implements of a warrior commonly found in male burials.
Researchers considered whether this was a burial of a transgender or androgynous individual but in the end decided that
Still,
Not to hand, though I'll see if I can find one. They are mentioned in Mike Pitts'* book "Digging for Britain", as is the skeleton with intersex DNA, so the reference must be out there.
*Great name for an archaeologist.
Christine Fell mentions another example in Women in Anglo-Saxon England - a ninth century Viking burial in Gerdrup in Denmark where a woman was buried with a spear, knife and needlecase.
I also had crushingly low self esteem, so I felt that even if not all men in relationships with women were bad to women, I wasn't a particularly good person so I probably would be one of "those guys" that women were always complaining about.
I probably am naturally more attracted to men than to women. The attraction that I feel to women is qualitatively different than what I feel for men, but it is still there and it is still valid. When I was a teenager, the feelings I had for women terrified me. Once I learned enough about homosexuality, it oddly enough felt so much safer for me (that is, it made me feel safe from the fear of hurting others). Given all that I have learned since (including from personal experience) about how abusive men can be to other men, it was stupid for me to think this, but I honestly felt at the time that women were enlightened beings and men were animalistic brutes, so I would have very little chance of hurting anyone if I just dated men (and once I was in my 20's and felt enough courage to start dating, I even limited myself to older men and waited for them to express interest in me before doing anything, hoping that that would mean I was not mistreating anyone - I would of course learn that even in that situation plenty of men took advantage of other men!).
So, no, I did not "choose" to feel attractions to both women and men. But I did make choices about how to act on those attractions, and they have had a big effect on my life (I am very happy with my husband now, luckily).
As for my friend, now in his 70's - he had a strict religious upbringing (unlike me) decades before me. He is attracted to both women and men and rather than calling him bisexual I would just call him "sexual." But after being married to a woman (who left him for another man) he came to feel that relationships with men were just easier for him so those are the only relationships he has had since. He even likes to call himself "Gay by Choice" but of course he didn't choose to be attracted to men (or to be attracted to women either). But he did choose what gender he wanted to be in a relationship with.
Another important point is that many partners not only put effort into maintaining their partner's attraction to them, but also put effort into strengthening their own attraction to their partner. We can't force ourselves to be attracted to someone that we are not, but we can cultivate potential attraction and see where it leads. Attraction isn't always like being hit over the head, especially once we age past adolescence. It is often subtle and takes effort within one's own mind to allow it to take root.
is not actually happening. If anything, LGBT+ rights and acceptance is *declining* in many countries. Certainly that's been the case in the UK since 2016, and applies to LGB people as much as T. The neoliberal assumption that progress is inevitable is unfortunately just not true.
Fear of justifying conversion therapy is also not the same as fear of justifying discrimination. Conversion therapy seeks to erase LGBT+ people from the population - it's not merely discriminatory, it's genocidal.
I was being overly vague and Eurocentric in saying "modern societies" and should have limited my sweeping assertions to North America, Western Europe, and Australia and New Zealand, but similar trends exist in much of Latin America and East Asia and in parts of Southeast Asia as well - and I should also have clarified that I was talking about the attitudes of younger generations and not the trend of current legislation. Are you denying that for many if not most people in their 20s and younger in the West, LGBT rights are not seen as indistinguishable from other human rights? I haven't seen any survey that indicates otherwise, but maybe there is a recent reversal of the trend that I am not aware of.
And conversion therapy is indeed psychologically abusive (less so if it affirms the unchangeability of one's attractions and is aimed towards enabling celibacy or platonic relationships with people of any gender if that is what an adult client with no coercion wishes, but given the conflicts of interest that most such therapists have, even this kind of therapy usually is not in the best interest of the client and is still often abusive). But does this mean that people who genuinely feel that, even if they cannot choose their attractions and identity, there is an element of choice in how they act upon them must lie in order to not give fodder to the those who would try to "fix" all of us?
Right now, most LGBT people don't talk about choice, and given many people's trauma, I understand why. But in a more sexual- and gender-fluid future, I think individual agency will be a greater part of how people come to terms with their identities, and defenders of LGBT rights will have to come up with stronger, more assertive, and more affirming ideological defenses against those who want to wish us out of existence than "despite all our efforts to the contrary, we can't help but act this way."
I also feel like insinuating that bisexuality/pansexuality and nonbinary genders are inherently 'fluid' is not in actuality true, and simply reinforces existing prejudice that these are unstable and indecisive identities. They also have nothing to do with polyamorous relationships, and one also doesn't determine having the other (eg, there are plenty of nonbinary lesbians who are only attracted to women).
Likewise *all* trans people defy the gender binary, so to imply that trans people who don't identify as nonbinary specifically have some kind of privilege over those who do is untrue and posits that non-nb trans people are somehow just as 'binary' as the cis people creating and enforcing the gender binary in the first place. That doesn't make much sense.
*nb is nonbinary and afab is assigned female at birth
**And they figure that being nb for an afab person is "moving in the correct direction"
My point is supposed to be confusing because sexual and gender identity is complex. I have tried to differentiate people's attractions (which are not a choice) from how people respond to those attractions (which is a choice, and is not as simple as choosing to repress them or not). I am suggesting that attractions can be cultivated and explored and that especially in a relationship they take work.
I was referring to fluid gender and/or sexual identity, not to the genderfluid identity, which I am aware of. Fluid maybe is not the best word. I meant an identity that either in one timeframe defies easy categorization or that over time has qualities of multiple categories whether or not the individual in question believes that their identity is changing. I apologize to anyone here who identifies as genderfluid, nonbinary, bi, pan, or otherwise queer or LGBT+ who feels that I am being offensive with my nonspecific use of language. I do not mean to demean or diminish anyone else's experience of their identity or to suggest that they should "try to be different."
I did not mean to suggest that being bi or pan necessarily means that your attractions or your experience of them change over your lifetime. I am well aware of the biphobic association of non-monosexuality with promiscuity, and by lifelong sexual "experimentation" I was not referring specifically to non-monogamy. Rather, I very deliberately meant to include monogamy and celibacy as well. I was talking about how some (not all people) in an increasingly non-heteronormative, non-cisnormative environment might embrace a sense of agency in their sexual and gender identity.
As for gender identity, I am not saying that people can choose who they are. But they can choose how they express their identity. And in a more accepting culture, some (not all) people might feel more free to explore different ways of expressing whatever identity they have.
I replied to your earlier post before reading this one. I was not aware that the term monosexual was offensive to some people and I will stop using it. I learned the term from bi internet forums in the early 2000's when I was a teenager. Back then, I did not have the courage to actually post anything. I don't talk to people very much in real life even today so I in spite of my efforts I still have a good deal of ignorance about language and I apologize again for any offense I have caused. I am completely fine with not using the term. Is there a more acceptable alternative to the term, or is the categorization itself problematic?
I never meant to suggest that gay and non-non-binary trans people are more privileged than bi, pan, and nonbinary people.
I am not saying that people "should" believe that they have a choice in how they live out their sexual orientation and gender identity. (Again, I am not saying that people can choose who they are attracted to or what gender(s) they identify with.) I am only saying that maybe, in the future, it might be less dangerous for more people to have this belief about themselves (not to impose this belief on others) and to be public about it. However, both now and in the future, if someone feels that their expression of their attractions and gender identity is the only one that they could possibly healthily have and that they have no choice in the matter, great!
For me personally, the only possible argument against same-sex relationships would be the well-known Biblical "clobber verses". If we set scripture to one side, then there's no reason to care about people having same-sex relationships. As was mentioned upthread, we're not anywhere near the sort of situation where society needs everyone to do their bit for the population and gene pool and pop out a few kids.
So then the question becomes "how do I interpret those passages?" Do I interpret them as the conservatives do as a blanket condemnation of same-sex relationships, or do they mean something else? And for me, the fact that sexual orientation seems to be to a significant degree not a choice means that it's unreasonable to take the conservative line here, and so those passages cannot mean what the conservatives think they do.
And if those passages don't mean that, then there isn't any Biblical reason to oppose same-sex relationships, whether they are "by choice" or not.
That's how my logic runs, anyway.
I don't follow your argument.
If "a trans man is a man" and "a trans woman is a woman", then how does the existence of trans men and trans women defy binary gender? It's still invoking a binary gender division - just one that isn't entirely congruent with biological sex*.
*Yes, intersex people exist, so bio sex isn't 100% binary. Similarly, the existence of agender / third gender etc. people says that gender isn't 100% binary, but I don't get why you say that all trans people defy the gender binary.
Can you unpack this? It seems like an oxymoron to me.
*Assigned male at birth.
I am somewhat skeptical of the phrase unless the person really isn't attracted to nonbinary people. It feels like it's erasing us, but that is considered an incorrect opinion, so I haven't shared it with others.
That’s why for my own sexual orientation I prefer the term queer (although I’m not a huge fan of the word itself since it implies abnormality) because all I want to let people know is that I’m not straight. I don’t to have to decide whether I’m gay, bi, pan, homoflexible, a Kinsey 4.5, etc., and I wouldn’t want to have to spend a long time explaining what I am to others even if was absolutely sure what I was.
As for gender identity, I am very drawn to some kind of non-binary identity but my gender expression is pretty indistinguishable from that of a very bland male so I feel a bit like if I identified as non-binary I would be appropriating the label.
From a scientific POV, the question of causes is interesting, and I think worth exploring (just because as a psychologist I'm always curious about why people do what they do). I rather suspect that we will never have an answer, because it's likely that there are many pathways to phenotypically similar ways of being. And as a constructivist, I lean toward the idea that gender is really a story we tell ourselves about the anatomical differences associated with sexual reproduction, and the social roles we've devised around it. And there are an infinite number of possible stories, as a cursory survey of the ethnographic literature shows.
You raise an interesting question here. I consider myself a straight man. A young person of my acquaintance was afab, identifies as agender, and uses they/them as pronouns. I consider them to be attractive, and if I was 20 years younger and not happily married, I'd consider pursuing a romantic interest in their direction.
I don't think that makes me less straight, and I don't think I'm erasing their non-binaryness by doing so.
I'm not even slightly attracted to male biology (a penis or facial hair would be real turn-offs). So I think that makes "straight" an accurate description of me, regardless of the fact that the set of people I might be attracted to includes some nonbinary people with female biology.
Someone I know says that 5/8 or so of her dates for the last so many years have all transitioned to men/nb people even though they were all afab and considered themselves women when she dated them. Since she didn't consciously select this or expect it and it's very statistically unlikely to happen by accident, I conclude she's probably somewhat attracted to genderqueer people. She now agrees that her attraction is not just toward women but also to various other non-masculine genders.
Similarly, I have told my husband that he was not simply straight since he is married to me. That said, I wouldn't presume to tell you what your personal attraction is, @Leorning Cniht
Still, way I see it, gender and sexuality are both axes. Some people find that potential partner's gender presentation is irrelevant. Others of us find potential partner's sex is irrelevant.
Right if we use straight for attracted to men/women of the opposite gender then being attracted to nonbinary people makes one not straight. (Or it means one denies that nonbinary people are anything but deluded.) Maybe the word will develop a more nuanced meaning over time.
*As in I'm not attracted to particularly femme women or manly guys
I think not enough attention is paid to the possible differences in the causes of our turn-offs vs. the causes of our turn-ons. I think it is just assumed that if a person is attracted to certain gender(s) (in terms of their bodies, their gender expression or both), that that person will experience an opposite feeling towards having sex or a romantic relationship with someone from any other gender(s). This opposite feeling is portrayed in our culture as some kind of disgust (and, judging from the number of trans people who are murdered when someone who perhaps was initially attracted to them discovers they are trans, for some people it indeed is disgust), but I think others would describe it as water being poured on a flame. I think that feeling is worth investigating.
I'm not sure that non-attraction is our default - ie, we feel that feeling of wet kindling unable to catch fire until all of a sudden someone walks in that we are attracted to. I think there are two possibilities. One is that attraction and non-attraction are two ends on a spectrum. Strong non-attraction is something we often don't want to talk about because it not only involves our very justified taboos such as those against incest, pedophilia, and bestiality but also involves our implicit biases against certain races or colors, the disabled, and people with appearances very distant from conventional standards of beauty. I think that this strong non-attraction, which at its strongest involves the moral taboos mentioned (although a vehement racist might also feel the same feeling regarding members of certain races) but in its slightly-less strong forms might include our other implicit biases, might have something to do with the disgust pathways in our brains (which I don't understand at a level beyond the Pixar movie Inside Out, so the input of anyone who knows more would be appreciated).
Getting back to the two possibilities: One possibility is that at one end of the spectrum we experience disgust-like non-attraction and that somewhere in the middle is the average adult member of a gender we are not attracted to (which we might say that we feel "nothing" towards) and that at the far other end is someone we experience a visceral attraction to. The other possibility is that attraction and non-attraction are not on the same spectrum but are different in kind. This could mean we can have 0-100% attraction to someone and also 0-100% experience of being repelled by the thought of sex or a romantic relationship with someone. And this doesn't even begin to get into the causes of why some of us only see some people as potential romantic partners and others as bodies to be exploited, why some people are attracted to what they hate, and why some people commit sexual violence and abuse.
All of this is to say that if science maybe has a limited understanding of the immutability from an early age of what gender(s) we can be attracted to and what gender identity (within certain cultural parameters) we will develop, I'm not sure how much science has investigated how and why we come to experience more than a passive non-attraction to certain gender(s) and to other groups of people.
I've heard of a scientific hypothesis that the reason close blood relatives who do not meet each other into adulthood often experience a strong sexual attraction to each other (I am not arguing in favor of incest here) is that we have two innate tendencies: to be attracted to people similar in facial appearance to us (which might strengthen clan cohesion but also helps to partially explain racial prejudice) and to be disgusted by the thought of sex with the people closest to us in young childhood (to prevent incest). If two siblings first meet as adults, they might experience the attraction arising from their facial similarly but not the repulsion arising from growing up in the same household. I'm not sure how much evidence there is for this hypothesis, but it is one of the few examples I can think of that try to explain at least one kind of non-attraction.
It can apply to either but in my experience it is mostly afab people who are nonbinary butch lesbians (self-identifying as butch). Often it's understanding their gender as 'lesbian' while also experiencing alienation from womanhood - this has a long history within the lesbian community, with Leslie Feinberg being probably the most prominent example. They are lesbians first and foremost, but also 'not women'. I don't know how you expect butch lesbians who consider themselves butches rather than women as such to identify if you think nonbinary lesbian is inappropriate.
Also, a penis isn't 'male genitalia' because some women have them and some men don't. There is nothing inherently male about a penis.
Well that would be a trans lesbian if they identify solely as a woman as opposed to being nonbinary. Amab nb lesbians do exist but they're not women (or not *just* women, some may be somewhere on the genderfluid spectrum for instance). Generally for nb lesbians, their lesbianism is considered to be their primary gender identity rather than being a woman as such.
If you have two binary genders, and you have two binary biological sexes, and they are not coincident, then you can have trans people.
In such a picture, intersex and agender / nonbinary folks don't exist (so we know this picture doesn't match reality) but trans people can exist.
I don't agree (see below).
Basically every model, and every categorization is simpler than reality. If you have a distribution of some quantity which is strongly bimodal, starting with a binary model is a normal thing to do. And then when you add in the additional complexities of points that fall outside the bimodal distribution, or are far enough away from the centre of each mode that the binary description isn't quite right, it's still normal to use the binary model as a reference.
And that's fine. I'm not going to tell you what you should or shouldn't find important. But there's at least two ways of interpreting that statement. In a binary sex, binary gender model, we could describe cis men as MM (male bio sex, male gender), trans men as FM (female bio sex, male gender), trans women as MF (male bio sex, female gender) and cis women as FF. And in such a model, it's perfectly consistent to think it important that you are FM rather than MM.
Or you can think that "trans male" is a different region of gender space from "cis male", which is also fine (although prompts me to ask if you think that a trans man can have "cis male" gender, or a cis man can have "trans male" gender.)
'Male' can refer to both gender and to biological sex. It's inconvenient that we have the same word, but there you go. "Male biology" refers to the biology of people with male biological sex, and not to the biology of people with male gender.
Re binary gender, I would consider that the experience of being a trans man (for instance) is uniquely trans male and does occupy a different gender space to being a cis man - but not in a way that makes them less male or a separate kind of maleness. I would compare it to any other intersection of being male and being in another marginalised group. Likewise, men from X marginalised group and men who are not from X marginalised group are all still men, but those who are also in X marginalised group also have experiences not shared by those outside of that group.
But of course, not all trans people would understand it that way - there's not one trans view on this. It isn't something you can solve like a logic puzzle as you seem to be doing - I'm not accusing you of anything but responding in good faith, just pointing out that you're taking a very cerebral approach to something which is just....not possible to put in such cerebral categories for most people concerned.