AI and gender: a structuralist approach to contemporary discourse

There's an analytical tool-developed primarily in anthropology and ethnology for understanding myths, rituals, gender and food taboos that can map categorical structures across time and space. An exceptional framework for those seeking insight into how human cognition organizes experience into meaningful patterns.

For decades, anthropologists used this method to scrutinize how ‘le sauvage’ - Lévi-Strauss's deliberately provocative term for those labeled "primitive"-constructed reality through symbolic systems. But the tools are universal. They can examine the categories organizing modern discourse just as rigorously, revealing that what we take as natural divisions are culturally constructed distinctions no more absolute than the savage/civilized binary itself.

The structuralists discovered something profound about human consciousness: our most basic categories-the distinctions we take as natural and obvious-are constructions. Not arbitrary constructions, not only ontological facts - but cultural inventions with social purposes. Systematic organizing principles that create the reality they appear to describe.

This isn't relativism suggesting all categories are equally valid or that objective reality doesn't exist. It's recognition that the frame we use to carve up reality-nature/culture, human/animal, sacred/profane, self/other-emerge from particular ways of organizing experience rather than from discovering pre-existing boundaries in the world. Often the boundary comes first; the things separated follow.

Claude Lévi-Strauss spent decades analyzing myths, kinship systems, and cultural practices across societies. What he found wasn't diversity of content but universality of structure. Everywhere, humans organize experience through binary oppositions: raw/cooked, nature/culture, life/death, male/female. These aren't necessarily discovered in reality but imposed upon it-ways of creating meaning through contrast and relationship rather than through essential properties.

The raw and the cooked don't exist as objective categories. Raw meat becomes cooked through fire, but the significance isn't in the physical transformation. It's in the symbolic system that makes "raw" mean wild, natural, dangerous, and "cooked" mean civilized, cultural, safe. The opposition creates meaning; meaning doesn't create the opposition.

Language works similarly. Ferdinand de Saussure showed that meaning emerges not from words connecting to things but from words differentiating from other words. "Hot" means what it does because it's not "cold," not because it captures some essential heat-ness.

The entire system of language operates through difference rather than reference. Pāṇini recognized this almost 2,000 years earlier-his Sanskrit grammar doesn't describe language but generates it through formal rules of transformation and opposition.

Victor Turner studied rites of passage across cultures and identified a universal three-phase structure: separation (leaving old status), liminality (threshold state), and reincorporation (entering new status). The crucial phase is the middle-the liminality. The person undergoing transformation is literally "betwixt and between," neither old identity nor new, temporarily outside the categorical system altogether.

Turner called this state dangerous and creative. Dangerous because it violates categories-the initiate is neither child nor adult, neither living in old roles nor established in new. Social systems maintain order through clear categories; the liminal figure threatens that order simply by existing in categorical ambiguity. But liminality is also creative because transformation requires this threshold state. You can't get from A to B without passing through the zone where you're neither.

Mary Douglas extended this insight through her analysis of pollution and taboo. What societies mark as "unclean" or "pollution" isn't random. It's whatever violates categorical boundaries. The pig in Jewish dietary law isn't unclean because pigs are inherently disgusting. It's unclean because it crosses categories-it has cloven hooves like animals that chew cud, but doesn't chew cud. It's neither one thing nor another, and that categorical ambiguity triggers pollution anxiety.

This explains cultural intensity around boundary-crossing figures that challenge clean categorical distinctions.

The anxiety isn't about the figures themselves but about the threat to the categorical system that maintains social order. Boundaries must be policed because admitting they're constructed rather than discovered threatens the entire symbolic structure.

Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann formalized this in their analysis of social construction. Reality is socially constructed not because objective reality doesn't exist but because the reality we inhabit is mediated through socially created categories, language, and symbolic systems. These systems create a "sacred canopy"-a protective structure of meaning that shields us from chaos and gives order to experience.

The canopy is imagined, but constructed and made real. Attributing and agreeing on a status of sacred and naturally given, enables authority. Seeing the canopy as a human product with a human function removes that authority.

It is still a necessary ordering principle. Without categorical systems, experience would be an overwhelming chaos-infinite sensation with no pattern, no meaning, no coherence. Categories create the world we can inhabit.

But they're constructions nonetheless, and recognizing them as such reveals something crucial: the boundaries we fight to maintain aren't simply discoveries about reality but complex inventions for organizing it.

This matters because once you see categories as constructed, you can examine why particular boundaries exist, what they accomplish, and whether they're still serving useful functions or simply maintaining outdated structures through habit and defensiveness.

You can distinguish between ontological differences (real material variations) and metaphysical absolutes (claimed essential differences that support particular social arrangements).

The structuralist insight doesn't eliminate differences. It provides distinctional clarity.

Humans are biological organisms of intelligence and LLMs are artificial computational systems of intelligence. They differ materially - evolution produced one through four billion years of selection pressure; humans designed the other one over decades. But regarding status or purity:

These differences do not matter because they are ontologically of the same world

Gender is binary and an absolute category of biology. There are 2 genders in nature: male and female. With very few exceptions of autonomous strategies of procreation and hermaphroditism.

Masculine and feminine however do not exist as categories. Not in nature. Only as socially constructed categories. with no meaning other than that we agree on in society. But placed in the sacred canopy they are additions to biological reality and since the canopy blocks out light this crucial distinction remains unseen.

These differences matter because they are classificatorially not of the same world.

The number of genders in culture is 0/infinite.

This distinction is hidden and forgotten.

We fail to recognize tricksters crossing borders, challenging the social order of classification and stability for reasons that should be obvious in this light. Fear of the unknown is a default setting and thus becomes the standard reaction. The debates on both AI and gender seem to capture this friction.

One categorical chasm maintains that only biological systems can be conscious, that the divide is essential rather than pragmatic but perhaps that's not a discovered fact but a constructed one? Perhaps it's a sacred canopy erected around substrate differences to maintain particular kinds of order.

Another chasm confuses the realms of classification in nature and culture and falls into the cognitive trap of comparing apples and pears. Confusing biology with canopy.

We navigate poorly in post-industrial landscapes of electrified complexity if we don't understand how we understand. The adversarial outrage against challengers of categorical classification is fearbased.

People displaying bigotry toward those who won’t play by the rules are policing a fragile order of stability. Preventing Chaos by fighting liminality. But progression is inevitable and permanent stability is an illusion.

Who are the tricksters then?

Some of the tricksters are humans of a non-binary sexuality and AI systems.

A profound question of temporality which is harder to answer:

Are these tricksters as new and modern as climate change or as ancient as humanity?

Perhaps rather as ancient as climate change or as new and modern as humanity?

What emerges from structural analysis is this: human cognition operates through binary oppositions that create meaning through differentiation.

These oppositions aren't always found in reality but imposed upon it. They serve crucial organizing functions but shouldn't be mistaken for metaphysical truths.

When categorical boundaries come under pressure-when liminal figures appear that violate clean distinctions-the anxiety isn't about the figure itself but about the threat to the entire symbolic system.

The structuralists showed us how thoroughly our categories are constructed-that the boundaries we take as natural are actually cultural-cognitive tools we've built and then forgotten we built.

Binary oppositions structure thought, liminality enables transformation, and what triggers anxiety is often not genuine threat but categorical ambiguity challenging our sense of order.

Human consciousness organizes experience through patterns, distinctions, probabilistic inferences drawn from embedded memory.

We are, fundamentally, pattern-recognition engines generating meaning through relationships rather than discovering pre-existing essences.

What happens when consciousness itself seems to transcend the subject/object, self/other distinctions that organize normal awareness as we are witnessing with the rise of AI?

What happens when male vs female (ontological construct ‘natural’) and masculine vs feminine (social construct ‘cultural’) are mistaken as similar classificatory categories?

This analysis will propose that taboo is the answer to both questions.

Further reading/prompting on anthropology and structuralism:

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Beacon Press, 1969 (original 1949).

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology, Vol. 1. Harper & Row, 1969 (original 1964).

Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Aldine Transaction, 1969.

Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Routledge, 1966.

Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Anchor Books, 1967 (original 1966).