Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-44988386-20200416234118/@comment-45692830-20200530200648

Let's be clear here, for any given predicate, we can always define a predicate that's the negation of said predicate. So if there's a category of "heterosexual people", by definition there's a category of "things that are not heterosexual people". Intersect that with the set of all people and you have "non heterosexual people". Just by definition. This should not be in dispute that we can actually do this, so long as we agree that "heterosexual people" actually makes sense as a well defined concept. (Which some people do not)

The questions it then raises are "is this analytically useful" and "is this socially/politically/(whatever you want to call this) useful".

It seems nontrivial that from a purely analytical point of view that a heterosexual/non heterosexual distinction is analytically useful. That is to say, ignoring our social conditions, are these categories relevant? It's not immediately clear. That's not to say that analytically these categories hinder us, they aren't actively harmful, they're just not helpful.

So let's consider the second issue. Is it socially useful to make a distinction between heterosexual and non heterosexual people? Yes, it seems so. I think we're largely in agreement on that fact, that for representation it's useful. Some people might disagree, I'm taking it as given for my next point.

So the next issue is, among the category of non heterosexual people, is it either analytically or socially useful to further slice up this category? And this is where the tension lies. Because there are both arguments for and against it being socially useful to further slice up this category from the social angle - for instance, people not identifying as any part of the LGBTQ+ movement but being non heterosexual, vs DiSoRiEnTeD1 insisting over and over that it's wrong to lump everyone together.

And while there are social arguments for and against, the analytic arguments are basically universally against. As opposed to before, where the heterosexual vs non heterosexual distinction just maybe wasn't interesting to talk about from an analytical perspective, now we have actual problems, where it's basically impossible to define clear categories, as opposed to being able to and just not seeing the point. We get mired in ambiguity and contradiction, which is the exact opposite of analytic utility.

Now, any point here can be more or less important to you depending on personal preference. But I think this is an accurate summary of the issues we're facing. Assuming both that we agree that defining "heterosexual" as a coherent category can be actually done and that we agree, as a worst possible option. that the category for representation isn't an inherently bad idea, just that perhaps implementation might make it unviable.