Why your gender can't be a fighter helipcopter

There's a joke that your gender can be anything you want, so it can even be a fighter helicopter if you so desire. Many people use this as a way to point to the ridiculousness of contemporary gender studies. Feminists, for the most part, treat this as what it is, a joke, but let's examine this "joke" in more detail.

So, why can't one's gender be a fighter helicopter? The short answer is: you can't because you're being disingenuous. When gender studies scholar talk about non-conforming gender identities, they are referring to a very concrete phenomenon, where people feel uncomfortable assuming their gender as is defined by social conventions. This gives rise not only to different sexual orientation markers such as LGB, but also to sexual identities such as transgender and queer.

The concreteness of these occurrences is what makes the existence of non-conforming gender categories valid, much the same way the existence of disabled persons make the demands of ramps in buildings valid. Hence, if we want to attack a principle, it's not enough to just attack its nominal metaphysical inconsistencies and absurdities. We need to address the empirical phenomenon that make the principle valid in the first place.

Empirically, people do not feel troubled by not having their gender named a fighter helicopter. This request is an obvious break from normal life that is intentionally brought about by actors wishing to sabotage the contemporary gender movement. It is not the deductive logic (gender can be anything, hence gender can be an attack helicopter), but the obvious deviance from social norms that make this claim invalid.

This is not to say that, in an alternative universe, where endless wars has made a sizable portion of the world population fighter helicopter pilots, and that their whole existence is tied to operating helicopters, so much so that is becomes a part of their identity, fighter helicopters cannot be their identity.

Another way to think about this is to replace gender with personality. Nominally, you can really describe your personality any way you want, but the description will only be considered socially valid if it can refer to something people can imagine as a personality. For example, saying that you have a "dog personality" makes sense, but saying that you have an "orange personality" makes little sense. Protest against not being accepted as having an orange personality says more about one's inability to understand what a personality is than the absurdity of personalities.