Because to not be exclusionary, in some instances, is to permit a situation in which nothing ‘creative’, in the strict sense of that word, can be accomplished.

Which, fine, sometimes rhetoric is exclusionary, where it should not be. But sometimes rhetoric is exclusionary because it ought to be — because, quite clearly, it has to be.

A person might have suggested, with Simone de Beauvoir, that gender was a social construct, and had little (if any) correlation to sex, but almost everyone could utter, as she did, the words ‘man’ and ‘woman’, or ‘male’ and ‘female’, without needing to stop and consider (as one must do now) whether one’s audience would know what one meant, or whether that audience would find one’s rhetoric ‘exclusionary’, and take offense at it.

Not very many years ago the category of biological sex, for example, was generally considered, if not a binary, then something resembling one; we tended not to equivocate about it.

Insofar as equivocating (in the context of those categories) has become something of a human norm.

Which speaks to the problem I was trying to get at a minute ago, with regard to categories, and the question of how humans relate to them.

I’m one of the worst equivocators you’ll meet, it’s horrible.

And then I’d continue in that vein, never making a statement that would require of me any commitment.

Meaning, I’d probably try to say that I’m both a talented and untalented writer, depending on how one looks at my so-called ‘work’.

Most likely I’d hem and haw about it, and try to ‘see it both ways’, while secretly believing the contention about me was wrong.

Though neither would I volunteer it, were it to come to that.

Which might be an indication that I’m not all that good a writer, who knows? I wouldn’t outright deny it, were someone to describe me as such.

Even if the preamble serves no purpose, but is only a kind of throat-clearing.

Which is as it should be, and which I mention only because I don’t know how to get into it — the ‘real’— without an annoying preamble.

Because to do so is to float down from the philosophic to the ‘real’, where one always encounters objections and arguments, many of which (though not all) are well thought-out and relevant, and against which one is then expected to defend oneself.

I suppose I should offer an example, and I can (and probably will), though I’m not looking forward to doing so.

One must decide, in other words, what something or someone is, in order to conceive of a way of responding to it, or to them. And then commit to that way of responding, to the extent that the object of the response sustains themself (or itself) in the identity that is evident, or has been manifest.

Which isn’t to say there aren’t instances, in nature, where the edges of certain categories are unclear, but that even where those edges are unclear one must, finally, demarcate them in one place, rather than another, if one intends to interact with the instance in question in more than a superficial, or cursory, or esoteric way.

By refusing to recognize that which a given category is communicating to us about itself. And instead imposing on it whatever we would like for it to mean, for our own purposes or desires.

But to return to what I was trying to to say earlier, about sin as a violence against categories…what I meant is that categories are not just a fact but a gift (perhaps the primary gift of God to every rational or sensate animal); and to ignore them is to dishonor them, as gift; which is what sin does, if not explicitly than implicitly.