FtttG
User ID: 1175
I need to come back to this again. If I'm reading you correctly, if I think a person is a woman, or if a person looks like a woman, then they are a woman. There is no objective state of fact: "woman" is defined solely by looking like, by resembling, by observation. It has absolutely nothing to do with objective factual questions like "what kind of organs does this person have?" or "can this person bear children?"
Your definition implies that a person who has never been observed by someone else cannot be a woman!
"Schrödinger, are there any women inside that room?"
"There are female people inside, but we won't know if they're women until we open the door and collapse the wave function."
Literally: if a female person falls over in the woods and there's nobody around to observe them, is that person a woman?
Maybe I sound a bit facetious, but trans activists have been scoffing at me for years for attempting to define "man" and "woman" based on biology because umm that's like gender essentialism?? and the idea of two sexes is a Western construct?? and also intersex people exist and you're like totally erasing them??
But the ostensibly common-sense definition(s) you're proposing seem far more insane and incoherent than "does this person ever have the organs associated with the production of large gametes?", a simple binary question that delineates the categories with significantly greater than 99% accuracy.
that's almost certainly the definition that you operate on
No, it isn't. A woman is an adult female human i.e. a person born with the organs associated with the production of large gametes, even if faulty. Owing to sexual dimorphism, it's usually possible to tell this at a glance, although errors can and do occur. A person being mistaken for a woman does not make them a woman, any more than people mistaking me for a German makes me German.
This is a map-territory confusion. If I mistakenly assume that a male person is female, that reflects a failure in my model of the universe (I have failed to take into account that some male people have androgynous appearances, unusually narrow shoulders, unusually wide hips, whatever). It does not reflect anything about the universe itself.
A person demanding that I "treat them as" a woman (whatever that means) does not make them a woman, any more than Rachel Dolezal demanding that people treat her as a black person makes her a black person.
we aren't asking to see their genitals or for chromosomal testing results and instead make a snap judgment based on their appearance.
You literally moved the goalposts from one end of your comment to the other! A moment ago you asserted that the practical definition of "woman" that I and everyone else is operating on is "someone... who made it clear that they wished to be treated as such, whether explicitly or by adopting conventional gender norms". Now you're saying that a woman is anyone who looks as we'd expect a female person to look.
Which one is it? Is a woman a person who looks female, or a person who demands that I treat them as such, regardless of their appearance?
In either case, both definitions are incoherent, which is obvious when applied to literally anything else. A person does not become African-American just because they've expressed a desire to be treated as such. "A turtle is an entity who has made it clear that it wishes to be treated as a turtle" is a circular definition that tells you literally nothing about what a "turtle" is. The circle on the left does not "become" smaller than the circle on the right just because it looks like it's smaller than the circle on the right: both circles are the same size.
FtttG
4hr ago
True. I don't think it's even remotely appropriate to refer to it as a "fallacy" anymore.
FtttG
4hr ago
she should have confidently asserted that a woman was someone, anyone, who made it clear that they wished to be treated as such, whether explicitly or by adopting conventional gender norms
Out of curiosity, is that the definition of "woman" that you operate on?
Funnily enough, I remember hearing that Jennifer Lopez fired one of her backup dancers upon learning her star sign. If that happened in Europe, I imagine the dancer could have sued Lopez for wrongful dismissal and won a tidy settlement. I wonder if we'll see more of these cases until astrology inevitably recedes in popularity again.
Needless to say, I don't want star signs to be a protected class, but I would be happy if birthdates were.
This all seems contingent on the idea that "father" must refer to sex, not gender.
Because for the purposes of a birth certificate, for purposes of tracing genealogy, for purposes of tracking inheritable disease, for purposes, the word "father" refers to the male person who sired a child, not to one (or both) of a child's parents who "identifies as" a man, whatever the fuck it means to "identify as" anything.
But the OP of this thread, and your post, both seem to imply that there is something additionally bad about this situation.
From the OP, my impression was that @HereAndGone2 was bemoaning the motte-and-bailey shell game that trans activists have been playing on Western society for years. For years we were assured that of course trans people aren't literally claiming to be members of the opposite sex: they're just demanding that we recognise the existence of something else called "gender identity" in addition to sex. Cases like these make it abundantly obvious that this was a barefaced lie: that the trans activist movement is fully intent on deconstructing and redefining 100% of sexed nouns in the English language, and that trans-identified males will not rest until they have been officially deemed members of 100% of categories previously considered the sole province of female people. This man's preposterous demand to have himself legally declared a mother is of a piece with any number of grotesque neologisms like "chestfeeding", "pregnant people", "birthing person", "menstruators" and the like.
It seems silly to me to think that the rule would ever be that she is both a "woman" and a "father".
Correct, it is silly. If this man can get his friends and family to play along with his self-image*, more power to him. I'd even make an effort to refer to him by his preferred name if I met him in person. But in the eyes of the law, he should be considered neither "woman" nor "mother". Because he is neither, he knows he is neither, the actual mother of his child knows he is neither, and no amount of legal documentation will ever persuade any of them or us otherwise.
*Or rather, what he claims his image of himself is: a self-image that needs to be "validated" and "affirmed" at every turn, up to and including within his child's legal documentation, sounds like it has more in common with vulnerable narcissism than a stable self-image.
FtttG
6hr ago
Remember a few years ago when the job title for a person who prepared cocktails was "mixologist"? That seems to have fallen out of vogue.
Wait - are they calling you boring, or themselves?
I read it as they were describing themselves boring. See this delightful article "The Mainstreaming of Loserdom": it's remarkable to think how recently people would be embarrassed to admit that their weekend plans consisted of rotting in bed alone watching their shows all day.
my date calls her boss a typical Aries - as long as it helps her to put people into the right boxes, why not?
It's interesting that calling her a typical [ethnicity], [sexuality], [gender identity] or [religion] would raise a few eyebrows, but we're meant to think of Birthday Racism as harmless and cute.
FtttG
7hr ago
These categories are hard to verbalise.
They aren't, though. A male person is a person who was born with the organs associated with the production of small gametes, even if faulty. A female person is a person who was born with the organs associated with the production of large gametes, even if faulty.
I define a new sort of identity marker (next to stuff like race, sex, age, etc) called "gender identity" (or "gender" for short)
Okay, but I'll ask this question for the millionth time – what is gender identity? Race, sex and age are all traits which can be directly observed or verified via a medical test. What does it even mean to "identify as" a woman? Every single attempt to define this concept inevitably runs into circularity. What does it mean to "feel like" a woman, or to have an "internally felt sense of womanhood" or whatever? You say "I define... this is a redefinition of...", but you didn't even define it, you just asserted that it exists. If I ask you for a definition of the word "ladder", I will not be satisfied if you just repeat "Ladder!" in a confident tone of voice. What actually is "gender identity"?
Being a man/woman means sincerely wanting to be male/female
What, then, to do with the male people who purport to "identify as" women and yet make no effort to make themselves more like women than they could be e.g. the ~95% of trans-identified males who don't undergo bottom surgery?
But I think most anti-trans people are unhappy even in cases where there is clearly a sincere desire (e.g. this one!)
What gives you the impression that the complainant in this case had a "sincere desire" to be female? I can think of few things less typically female than impregnating someone with your fully intact and functional penis.
Correct, she is not a father.
Is your claim then that this child, wholly unique in the annals of human history, has no male biological parent? Because that's what the word "father" means in a legal context. You are committing yourself to a stance that this is the first child in the history of human race with two female biological parents and no male? And you wonder why people assert that gender ideology is anti-scientific claptrap?
Of course I don't agree with self-ID. Did you think I was trying to pretend otherwise?
Even with adoption we acknowledge that we're using the words "mother" and "father" in a nonstandard way, but it's a social convention that these words can respectively refer to "female primary caregiver" and "male primary caregiver" respectively, in addition to their traditional meanings of "female biological parent" and "male biological parent".
What this man is demanding is rather more radical than that. He is not demanding to be recognised as the child's legal parent, even if he is not the child's biological parent. He is not even demanding to be recognised as the child's legal parent of a specific gender, while not being the child's biological parent. No – he is the child's male biological parent, and wants that fact struck from public record, because it makes him uncomfortable. He wants it said that this child does not have a biological father, only two biological mothers. Sorry, but no matter how you swing it, this is a lie. It is a lie to say that this child has no biological father. And it is an abuse of the court system that so much public time and resources have been wasted on painstakingly refuting the fantasy of this narcissist, who wants a simple biological fact expunged from public records because it makes him sad.
As an aside, if the prospect of being referred to as the father of your child* makes you so unhappy, maybe you should have considered that before impregnating your female partner. I'd even go so far as to say that a man ostensibly reduced to fits of crying when someone accurately refers to him as the father of his child may not be mentally stable enough to be a functional parent.
*And solely in legal documents: I'm sure everyone in your social circle would be more than happy to indulge your delusions.
FtttG
10hr ago
"Dad" is not a term of art in law, unlike "father". There is no meaningful legal sense in which this person is this child's mother: he did not gestate the child in his womb for nine months, nor is he a woman who adopted a child with different biological parents. I find it almost impossible to divine any sense in which the assertion "this child's male biological parent is not their father" is not simply a lie. You can say that you're not lying, you're just proposing to change the definitions of words to newer, more "inclusive" definitions. Well, I don't care if an official proclamation from a state body that "the earth is 6,000 thousand years old" is followed by a footnote clarifying that the word "year" is here defined as a unit of time equal to 756,667 rotations around the sun. That might make creationists feel more "included", but it's still a lie.
Legal documents do not exist to validate narcissists' claimed sense of self.
FtttG
11hr ago
Why? What does it matter to you if the state calls her a woman or man, mother or father?
State-endorsed science denialism is bad. The government should not assert that the male person who fertilised an egg is the child's mother, any more than they should assert that homeopathy works or that the earth is 6,000 years old.
FtttG
11hr ago
Your point about the game telling the player that Amelia has "extreme" opinions without saying what those opinions are reminds me of a post I wrote a few years ago. Supposing the journalist Alice wants to smear Bob because Bob said something Alice doesn't approve of. The thing is, while Alice doesn't approve of it, she knows that most people agree with Bob, so simply stating what Bob's opinion is (e.g. "I don't think trans-identified man belong in women's prisons") won't work as a smear tactic. Instead, Alice talks about Bob's opinion in a circuitous way: "Bob has faced criticism for his political opinions, which have been widely characterised as transphobic". This allows Alice to get away with implying Bob said something hateful and in so doing turn her readers against him. The longer this goes on, the more Google search results get clogged up with articles about how hateful Bob is but without quoting anything he's said, and the harder it gets to find out what Bob actually believes. I'd hazard a guess that an outright majority of people asserting that JK Rowling is transphobic would, if pressed, be wholly unable to cite a specific opinion she has expressed on this issue.
Likewise here. The people who made this game knew full well that the opinions expressed by people like Amelia (e.g. "it was outrageous that the police turned a blind eye to the grooming gangs in Rotherham, Rochdale etc. for so long") sound perfectly reasonable to most people. Actually having Amelia express such opinions in the game would have the opposite of the desired effect, in much the same way it would if Alice attempted to defame Bob by quoting him directly. The only way to get away with it would be for Amelia to jump off the slippery slope by having her express extreme opinions (and naughty words) wholly unrepresentative of the modal British conservative activist.
But past that, I feel this presents an implicit model of good citizenship, and that model is to be passive and obedient.
It's also interesting considering how students might square this with the messages they receive in their other classes. In both secondary and primary school, a lot of the material we covered preached the virtues of civil disobedience, using the canonical examples of MLK Jr., Rosa Parks, Gandhi and to a lesser extent the suffragettes. I can't imagine present-day British schoolchildren are receiving fewer lessons about MLK et al. than my generation did, and it isn't hard to imagine how this could induce a sensation of cognitive dissonance: history class at 10 a.m., in which you learn the importance of civil disobedience against clearly unjust laws; followed immediately by civics class at 11, in which you learn that a good British subject follows all laws to the letter, no matter how ridiculous they are on their face. (Being arrested for watching a political video?)
It's another reminder of how woke people reflexively arrogate to themselves a monopoly on virtue. Paul Graham once posed a rhetorical question to his students: "do you hold any opinions which you would feel uncomfortable expressing in front of any of your friends or family?" If you answer in the negative, you're most likely a conformist, and it stands to reason that if you'd lived in the antebellum south or Nazi Germany, you would have gone along with what everyone else was doing. It's easy to be an Oskar Schindler in hindsight.
Woke apparatchiks in the British civil service commend to the high heavens historical examples of civil disobedience against Jim Crow etc., but this does not inspire in them any methodic doubt in whether any modern laws are unjust. The attitude seems to be that disobeying unjust laws is heroic and noble – but, in a staggering coincidence, we just so happen to live in an unprecedented era wholly devoid of unjust laws, and in which the only speech the government censors is speech which deserves to be censored.
FtttG
14hr ago
I don't know why we're giving bachelor's degrees to people who can't distinguish between astrology and astronomy
Interestingly, this confusion is common enough to seriously pollute survey results. The proportion of people who respond affirmatively to the question "do you believe in horoscopes and star signs?" is dramatically lower than the proportion who responds in the affirmative to "do you believe in astrology?"
No, that was the point I was making alright. I think the whole thing might come down to a Russell conjugation, or Trivers' theory of self-deception: if a strategy is beneficial to us, we unconsciously come up with reasons why it's also the pro-social thing to do. See also "yasslighting": I don't believe that talented actors are consciously thinking "if I encourage a bunch of talentless hacks to pursue careers in acting, it'll make it easier for me to secure roles", any more than attractive women are consciously thinking "if I encourage my friend to get an unflattering haircut and tell her it really suits her, it'll make me look more attractive by comparison". Of course in their own heads they'll tell themselves a story which casts their behaviour in a more favourable light e.g. "it would devastate Bob to be told he's a terrible actor, so instead I'll just give him some pat platitude about never giving up on your dreams"; "I don't want to hurt Alice's feelings, so I'll tell her her new haircut really suits her". But subconsciously, the practical benefit of these decisions to those who make them is obvious. It surely cannot be an accident that actors so rarely encourage their more talented peers not to give up on their dreams.
FtttG
15hr ago
They know that people respond much better to "we've all been there, keep plugging," than to "dude, sorry, chances are you can't do what I can do".
Well, yes, they do. That doesn't mean that filling talentless hacks with false hope is a pro-social way to behave.
FtttG
16hr ago
The most infuriating thing about this court case is that there may be legal precedent for this in the EU:
McConnell gave birth to a son, publicly known just as SJ, in January 2018. When attempting to register the child's birth, the Registrar denied McConnell's petition to be listed as the child's father on the birth certificate, though allowing McConnell to use his current name. In September 2019, McConnell lost an application for judicial review to be described as father or parent on the child's birth certificate... The president declared that McConnell was legally the child's mother and thus possessed parental responsibility of the child accordingly. Because of this decision, McConnell could not be listed as the child's father on the birth certificate... McConnell announced his second pregnancy in August 2021,[12] with plans to give birth in Sweden in order to be listed as the child's father, rather than mother, on their birth certificate. His second child was born in the UK in January 2022 via emergency c-section.
If I'm reading this correctly, the second child was actually born in the UK rather than Sweden, meaning the same legal ruling would apply to the second child as the first. If the child had been born in Sweden, would the Swedish courts have ruled in McConnell's favour, and allowed her to be listed as the child's father? Apparently so.
Reflecting how the word is used in medical, biological and zoological contexts; how the word is used in common parlance; centuries of legal precedent.
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