The greatest insult the LGBTQ movement has done to feminism is to convince us that being a woman is a fashion statement that can be as easily worn and discarded as drag.

— Megha (@lefthemisphere9) September 27, 2019

I don’t quite agree with this, or really anything this person writes, but it does parallel something I’ve been thinking about myself.

A lot of times when some social practice is brought up or instance of human behavior mentioned, standard liberals and academics will say, “That’s just socially constructed!” Implying, of course, that it’s easily changeable due to its method of instantiation in the world.

This could not be further from the truth and evinces an extremely poor understanding of what a powerful tool and what a heavy weight culture in fact is. It’s not a dial that you turn, or a button you press to change a setting. It’s more like a huge boulder you laboriously shift inch by inch over many many years. This is true equally of the culture that lives in one’s heart and mind and the culture that ramifies out and into the entirety of the human world.

This is generally contrasted with something genetic (which most laypeople and academics also have a poor understanding of), which is considered simply impossible to change. This, also, is usually not true, or at least is not the whole truth, and neither is dichotomous or perhaps even separable in a way that we understand.

The world might be a lot better if it were true, this liberal idea that changing culture could be done with a button press. But that’s just not the way it works.