Celestial-body-NOS's profile

Celestial-body-NOS 🦉This process must continue at an increasing rate. 1d ago

What do you think the attitudes are that lead to these horrors?

The notion that the bloodline-denominated collective is an end in itself and the individual is a means to that end.

The notion that whether or how much a Life Matters is dependant on bloodlines. (When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?)

The notion that the property rights of rich people are more important than the personal rights of the smallfolk.

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Celestial-body-NOS 🦉This process must continue at an increasing rate. 1d ago

On some level you obviously know it's nonsensical, given that by your own admission you would refuse to define the word "woman" if you knew you were being filmed.

I think you knew that I knew this and are just taking an opportunity to jeer at me like an adolescent.

It makes me think you lack confidence in your own arguments to persuade people

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Celestial-body-NOS 🦉This process must continue at an increasing rate. 1d ago

To most people, such an answer would make you appear suspicious and dishonest

Which is why I elaborate on the various possible answers, the contexts in which each would be relevant, and possible terminology that would allow one to specify each unambiguously.

Which is to say, your definition of the word "woman" rests on unfalsifiable claims people make about their own inner experiences.

Yes, sometimes a question rests on a point of fact which cannot be empirically determined, and we face a choice between a non-zero rate of dishonest people getting away with it, and innocent people suffering burdens which are in our ability to ameliorate.

And despite many of these people claiming that they viscerally feel that they ought to have female genitalia, the overwhelming majority of them choose not to undergo a surgical procedure which would give them an approximation (however crude) of said genitalia, even though many of them could presumably afford to do so.

It's also a strange definition in that you're using the exact same word for people who are X and people who wish that they were X, which is not how we define any other word in the English language.

I was attempting to give an extensional definition, akin to Charles Sanders Peirce's proposed definition of lithium:

If you look into a textbook of chemistry for a definition of lithium, you may be told that it is that element whose atomic weight is 7 very nearly. But if the author has a more logical mind he will tell you that if you search among minerals that are vitreous, translucent, grey or white, very hard, brittle, and insoluble, for one which imparts a crimson tinge to an unluminous flame, this mineral being triturated with lime or witherite rats-bane, and then fused, can be partly dissolved in muriatic acid; and if this solution be evaporated, and the residue be extracted with sulphuric acid, and duly purified, it can be converted by ordinary methods into a chloride, which being obtained in the solid state, fused, and electrolyzed with half a dozen powerful cells, will yield a globule of a pinkish silvery metal that will float on gasolene; and the material of that is a specimen of lithium.

If you take all the people in the world, put everyone with convex genitals in a blue room and everyone with concave genitals in a pink room, there will be one gender identity that is more common among those in the blue room and another more common in the pink room. The one more common in the blue room is the 'man' identity; the one more common in the pink room is the 'woman' identity. A woman is someone with the 'woman' identity.

If you take everyone who feels that they have the wrong genitals and move them to the other room, the correlation will be even stronger.

Putting people with XY chromosomes in the blue room and people with XX chromosomes in the pink room, or people who produce small gametes in the blue room and people who produce large gametes in the pink room, would have the same gender identities more prevalent in the same rooms, and thus would not change the identity-based definition.

Why would your answer change depending on whether a camera is being rudely shoved in your face? Does a word have a different meaning depending on whether the person defining it is being observed or not?

you would refuse to define the word "woman" if you knew you were being filmed.

The operative word there is 'rudely'. If I am giving testimony before a governmental organ, or a scheduled interview on television, I will expound on the answer given above. If I am coming home from the shops, and am accosted by a less-respectable individual looking for a sound bite, I am likely to give a crankier answer carrying the message that I do not take him/her/them seriously.

But not referring to female people as "menstruators", referring to mothers as "birthing parents", or referring to their genitals as their "front" or "bonus" hole. Curious.

These terms are not widely used by people who hold misogynist attitudes.

The former two are an attempt at rigorous disambiguation. 'People who menstruate' or 'menstruators' is pointing to a category that, in addition to including some trans-men, also excludes many cis-women, who do not menstruate due to age, removal of relevant parts, malnutrition.... 'Birthing parent' is probably an attempt to unambiguously indicate that, if trans-woman Alice and trans-man Bob have a baby, we are at this time referring to Bob rather than Alice; I would consider 'biological mother' or 'reproductive mother' to be acceptable in that instance. Re terminology for genitals, that area of the body has accumulated a vast array of less-than-formal nomenclature (cf. an annotated edition of Shakespeare).

I have previously questioned the use of the term 'chestfeeding'.

A nonsensical categorisation. A bodybuilder is not "more male" than a nerdy coder.

I was more gesturing at 'cis-men, trans-men on artificial hormones, and trans-women not on artificial hormones' versus 'cis-women, trans-women on artificial hormones, and trans-men not on artificial hormones', or 'on a graph with testosterone levels on one axis and estrogen levels on the other, someone in the part of the graph with natal-anatomical men/women'.

I will reiterate that the vast majority of trans-identified males have not undergone bottom surgery. I genuinely don't know what "would have given the opportunity" means here.

People who can't afford it. People who can't find a chirurgeon who does it. People who can't afford the time off work for recovery.

I don't know what the distribution of these or other reasons is, as the source previously cited did not divide the 'trans without bottom chirurgery' group by why have not gotten it; it didn't even separate out 'has bottom chirurgery scheduled' or 'in early phase of transition'.

unable to provide a definition of the word "woman" which is coherent and non-circular, thereby demonstrating how fundamentally nonsensical gender ideology is.

Among the Kamilaroi of what is today New South Wales, Australia, women are divided into four groups: an Ippata is the daughter of a Buta, a Buta is the daughter of an Ippata, a Mata is the daughter of a Kapota, and a Kapota is the daughter of a Mata. (Men are similarly divided: a Kumbo, a Kubbi, a Murri, and an Ippai are, respectively, the sons of an Ippata, a Mata, a Kapota, and a Buta. Marriage is only permitted between a Kumbo and a Mata, a Kubbi and an Ippata, a Murri and a Buta, or an Ippai and a Kapota.) (S. Alexander, review of Arguments About Aborigines, July 2025)

No Kamilaroi could offer you a non-circular definition of Ippata; is their kinship system non-sensical?

On some level you obviously know it's nonsensical

Please refer back to the third section of my previous post.

I take the assertion "Islam is right about women" to mean "the collection of factual and normative assertions the Islamic faith makes about women are correct".

Which still leads us to the same two questions.

١, Islam is not a monolithic hive-mind; the factual and normative assertions made by Saudi-funded Wahhabists are not the same as those made by Sufi mystics.

٢, outside the realm of formal logic, 'correctness' isn't black and white; things can be more or less correct.

The assertion "the collection of factual and normative assertions Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab made about women are more correct than the collection of factual and normative assertions the in-this-house-we-believe crowd make about women." is not the same as the assertion "the collection of factual and normative assertions Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd made about women are more correct than the collection of factual and normative assertions the ante-Islamic Hijazi society made about women.".

Likewise if I said "respecting people's preferred pronouns is the right thing to do", you would never ask "compared to what?"

Only because I can't think of more than one obvious answer: "Compared to referring to people with the pronouns of their ASAB regardless of how many times they have asked you to stop."

And the Greek characters are such a pretentious affectation.

And prexactly what has that got to do with the price of tea in China?

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Celestial-body-NOS 🦉This process must continue at an increasing rate. 1d ago

they did what they did in ages very different from our own

There are people alive today who met veterans of the Slavers' Revolt.

There are over two hundred thousand people alive today who lived through the Holocaust.

A decade ago, the United States Government was still paying pensions from the Civil War.

The attitudes that lead to the historical horrors are still very much with us.

The past is never dead. It is not even past. --William Faulkner

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Celestial-body-NOS 🦉This process must continue at an increasing rate. 1d ago

there is nothing worse for an adult man than to be a liability

Beating your daughter eleven times is worse.

Tying burning rags to cats' tails is worse.

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Celestial-body-NOS 🦉This process must continue at an increasing rate. 1d ago

[replied to wrong comment]

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Celestial-body-NOS 🦉This process must continue at an increasing rate. 4d ago

α

My answer¹ to "What is a woman?" is "It depends on the context."

In most contexts, a woman is a person whose gender identity is that found more commonly in people who have, or feel viscerally that they ought to have, concave genitalia. This is both trans-inclusive and non-circular, although one could, I suppose, model it as an expanding spiral.... (Note that 'born with concave genitalia', 'born with organs to produce large gametes', and 'has XX karyotype' are strongly correlated; thus, substituting any of them would still point to the same identity.)

In medical contexts, a trans person might be a man for some purposes and a woman for other purposes; the same can apply to some cis patients.

¹Unless the question is being asked by someone rudely shoving a camera in my face while I'm busy, in which case my answer will be "A large happy pile of public information". (If you know, you know.)

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Part of the reason 'adult human female' rubs me the wrong way is that using 'female' as a noun in reference to humans is associated with misogyny. 'Adult female human' would avoid this, but 'female' as an adjective picks up much of the same flexibility in meaning as 'woman'. For the biological categories to which I believe you are attempting to gesture:

'genetically male/female' = which chromosomes they have
'gonadally male/female' = what gamete-producing organs they have
'gametically male/female' = what gametes they produce
'natal-anatomically male/female' = what was between their legs when they were born
'current-anatomically male/female' = what they have between their legs now
'hormonally male/female' = how much testosterone versus estrogen they have

Less biologically:

'aspirational-anatomically male/female' = what they intend to have between their legs, or would have given the opportunity
'male/female identified' = whether they identify as a man or a woman
'male/female presenting' = whether they look like a man or a woman

If and when we figure out how to grow new gonads in vitro, 'gonadally' and 'gametically' can be modified in the same manner as 'anatomically'.

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I have noticed a certain form of argument over the years, of the approximate form "My opponent knows that I am right and he is wrong, and is continuing to contradict me out of less-than-honest motives." It is annoying when it is Evangelical preachers assuming that non-Christians 'know' that Jesus Is Lord and reject Him in order to continue sinning, it is annoying when it is the Blue Tribe telling the Red Tribe "You know what an assault weapon is, and you know you don’t need one.", and it is annoying when it is the gender-critical assuming that everyone 'knows' that the True Definition Of Woman does not include trans-women.

Atheists actually believe that God doesn't exist, 2nd-Amendment advocates actually believe that they have legitimate reason to own firearms that the Blue Tribe thinks look scary, and progressives actually believe that trans-women are women.

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With regard to whether Islam is right about women, there are two clarifiying questions that need to be asked:

What variety of Islam? If Fred Rogers and Fred Phelps can both be Christians, even both be Protestant Christians, and have such a wide gulf between them, I don't see why a similar gulf cannot exist between Zohran Mamdani and Abdul-Rahman Ballout.
What are we comparing it to? Attitudes that seem retrograde compared to XXI. century progressivism look a lot more enlightened when compared to ante-Islamic Arabian paganism.

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Celestial-body-NOS 🦉This process must continue at an increasing rate. 4d ago

Or a conservative who thinks embryos/fetuses are people...

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Celestial-body-NOS 🦉This process must continue at an increasing rate. 4d ago

One, there was a separation of several weeks between the diary entries and the Congressional testimony; new information could easily have fit in that temporal gap.

Two, 'as bad as influenza' covers some rather alarming territory (e. g. 1918).

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Celestial-body-NOS 🦉This process must continue at an increasing rate. 4d ago

There's a weird shift in progress amongst certain sects, that are starting to insist that "they" be used for everyone, regardless of gender. It remains to be seen if it'll win out.

Wouldn't be surprised; singular 'they' isn't that much more of a stretch than singular 'you'.

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Celestial-body-NOS 🦉This process must continue at an increasing rate. 5d ago

...which leads into the argument for the three-foundation morality: the liberal foundations are universalisable, while the others are dependant on particular notions of 'which things are impure', 'to whom is loyalty owed', and 'which authorities are legitimate'. (The European Wars of Religion in the XVII. century were entirely driven by the latter: the authority of the Church versus the authority of the Scriptures.)

Thus, in order to bring an end to millennia of bloody tribal conflict, liberals proposed a norm of "Use whichever foundations you wish in deciding your own lifestyle, but if you're trying to impose rules on others, they'd better be backed up by something that's consistent across tribal boundaries, such as the Golden Rule."

This norm was, to snowclone Chesterton, not tried and found wanting, but found difficult and left untried.