Hi, thanks for the response. Sorry it's taken me a week to read it, I've found a lot of these replies to be someone who's read the first paragraph and rushed back to tell me I'm a moron, which may be true, but still. Anyway, thanks yours is actually helpful and maybe I threw that abortion bit in without enough context.

You're perhaps right abortion isn't the best example, but the point is to reflect that it is a debate between an absurd dichotomy of a person deciding arbitrarily if a life is a life, and a person insisting a life is objectively a life at a point of conception because of a religious 'fact', and that this mirrors say, the gender squabble between the "I feel like a woman on the inside therefore I am a woman and it's morally wrong to say otherwise" and "woman is a female nothing else matters". Unfortunately, these debates really are that absurd. All the points you've raised illustrate that its a broad ethical issue with both outcomes and "values" that might not be agreed on, but it's literally framed in the public sphere as black/white subjective/objective.

So my point in saying the problem is that we don't read enough poetry is perhaps the other way around, we don't read poetry because we can't deal with metaphorical language without a facile insistence on reducing it to objective claims. 'Gender', however you look at it, is a metaphor. A literal man cannot literally be a woman, but masculinity and femininity are metaphors and abstractions, and if you accept that both have kinds of truth, but not the same kinds of truth, you can actually have a discussion. The point is that it's akin to Dawkins arguing about evolution with a seven day creationist. They're trying to argue the same things but putting together two language systems that aren't accessing truth in the same way, genesis one might be 'true', but it isn't an objective scientific theory.

If that makes any sense.