FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
4hr ago
I was very confused at first since I thought chuffed meant angry, but it means the opposite, so I've been misinterpreting a bunch of speakers of British English for an unknown amount of time.
I have a helpful mnemonic video for you.
FtttG
4hr ago
I was referring to the fact that the categories of "male/female" are so basic and obvious, they are hard to define. And that people just think of them as primitive concepts in practice - you gave a definition (and it is a good one!), but I doubt you ever thought of man/woman needing a definition prior to gender ideology.
Incorrect. The differences between men and women are taught to children at a very young age, in the form of "mummy has a baby in her tummy". I think the average five-year-old child could reliably explain the key difference between the sexes: women can have babies, and men can't. And I'm sure the average five-year-old child could reliably do this long before Judith Butler was born.
I explained my definition of gender identity immediately after asserting it's existence and the corresponding language changes.
Did you? If so, I missed it. I'm reading your comment again, and the best I can find is this: "I define a new sort of identity marker (next to stuff like race, sex, age, etc) called "gender identity" (or "gender" for short). This is a redefinition of the old concept of gender." That... isn't a definition. At best it's an IOU for a gender. "Gender identity is a redefinition of the old concept of gender." "Psawdo identity is a redefinition of the old concept of psawdo". Do you see how this doesn't provide me with any insight into what "psawdo identity" is? Even when I was in primary school, I was told that, when defining a word, you can't use that word in the definition. It amazes me that so many proponents of gender ideology have yet to grasp this basic fact: when defining a word, if you use that word in the definition, it renders the definition circular and hence useless.
Ok, this is a good point. I will then amend my definition (I have edited my original comment) of [gender] to mean "wanting to be like [sex] in most regards".
So we can still have a trans woman with a penis, as long as she wants to be a female in most other ways, like wearing dresses, being perceived as a female, etc
How many "regards" must this trans woman be "like" before she qualifies as a woman? Are these "regards" weighted in any way, or are they each assigned a value of 1 ("well, Jo is a vicious rapist and a domestic abuser – but he likes astrology and wears skirts sometimes, so I'm calling it a wash"). Who is entitled to make that judgement? If you're interacting with a male person on the internet who has a penis, but asserts that their name is Sheila and pronouns are she/her, does it therefore follow that you shouldn't play along until after you have verified that Sheila "wants" to be a woman in most regards? ("Send pics or I won't respect your preferred pronouns.")
As an aside, I have it on good authority that trans women don't owe me femininity, so when a bearded man with a penis wearing jeans and a T-shirt calls himself a woman, I'm meant to just go along with that or I'm a hateful Nazi fascist TERF bigot who deserves to be decapitated.
You seem to conflate changing definitions with changing the underlying meaning of statements and lying.
Yes, I do, because it is. To quote myself:
Bill Clinton may have been technically telling the truth when he said "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky" according to the stipulative definition of "sexual relations" which only refers to PiV intercourse. But I have zero qualms about saying he was lying when he said that: in common usage, sucking someone's dick or inserting a cigar into someone's pussy absolutely falls under "sexual relations", and Clinton knew this, and he knew (indeed, hoped) that people would interpret his statement as a denial of any kind of sexual interaction with Lewinsky at all even if he'd only technically denied having PiV sex with her. So when a significant proportion of the population is unfamiliar with gender ideology and assumes that anyone referred to with the pronoun "she" is female, if you refer to a person as "she" and neglect to specify that the person is male, you are obfuscating important facts about that person whether you like it or not. And if you retort "it's not my fault those people aren't woke enough to know that not every woman is female", I'll respond with about as much sympathy and understanding as if Clinton had said "it's not my fault people are so uneducated that they don't know the legal definition of the term 'sexual relations'." Truly honest communication necessitates taking your audience's level of education and ideological leaning into account.
This is one of my biggest problems with gender ideology. Its proponents claim that they just want to redefine words to be more inclusive of trans people. But they don't. They want to muddy the waters such that the old words (like "woman", "mother" and "girl") no longer denote female people only, but still retain the positive connotations people have for those words. Because if you're a bad actor, passing yourself off as a good person is a vital strategy. Bad actors who are trans are not hoping to redefine the word "woman" such that everyone who hears it thinks "a person of unspecified sex but a female gender identity". No: they are hoping that when people refer to them as "women", people make the same statistical assumptions of them as they would make of a given female person (e.g. physical strength, aggression, propensity for violence, propensity to commit rape and sexual assault). The strategy is glaringly obvious when you recognise that trans activists make it perfectly clear they want both definitions in circulation at the same time, allowing them to strategically equivocate between the two as needed. Gender ideology's drive to "redefine" words (by which they really mean "add secondary definitions to words already in use") is just a big motte-and-bailey:
Frankly, I think the two definitions of "woman" you're using (one commonsense and straightforward, the other postmodern and controversial) amount to a motte-and-bailey fallacy, and I don't like motte-and-bailey fallacies on general principle.
If you said "a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman", I would think that definition was incoherent and circular - but at least I'd know exactly what you meant when you used the term "woman" in conversation. If you said "a woman is a person with female reproductive organs", I would likewise know exactly what you meant whenever you used that term.
But if the single word means both of those things, then that gives you a blank cheque to jump back and forth between the definitions on a whim according to the needs of the moment, depending on who you're trying to persuade and what rhetorical point you're trying to make.
To return to my earlier analogy: if a public official exclusively used the word "year" to refer to a single rotation around the sun, that's fine. If he uses it exclusively to refer to 756,667 rotations around the sun, that's also fine. But if he uses both definitions, jumping back and forth depending on the needs of the moment, the rhetorical point he's making and the audience to whom he is speaking: then I can no longer trust any sentence that comes out of his mouth that contains the word "year", any more than I can trust Bill Clinton's claims not to have had "sexual relations" with Ms. Lewinsky.
So I ask you this: are you really advocating redefining the word "woman" such that it only refers to "a person of either sex with a female gender identity"? Or are you advocating that it mean that in addition to its traditional meaning of "an adult female human, regardless of gender identity"?
Actually, I don't even need to ask you – that's what your comment history is for!
- "Every "non-binary" I know of is either a woman or a male homosexual" – is it fair to say that when you used the word "woman" here you were referring to female adults? If the word "woman" means "a person with a female gender identity", then by definition no "woman" can be non-binary.
- "...what if a normal woman literally decided, against common sense, to walk around in a bad part of town at night in a miniskirt alone?" – what did you mean by "normal woman", in this context?
- "Eleanor is a (White) woman. Her flaws are being lecherous, loud, rude, and gluttonous. Generally she just acts as the oppposite of a woman... Janet is a (White) woman..." – in the former case you assert that a woman who acts as the opposite of a woman is still a woman, but in this comment, the one I'm replying to, you're claiming that a person who acts a member of the opposite sex "in most regards" therefore becomes the opposite gender. Which one is it?
- "Also the person who said it was a woman (in the normal sense of the word: an AFAB, uterus-haver, etc)" – well, that just gives the whole game away doesn't it? You're perfectly willing to use the word "woman" in the "normal sense of the word" when it's rhetorically convenient. You aren't actually committed to "redefining" the word "woman": you just want to tack on a secondary definition on to the "normal" meaning so that you don't subjectively feel like a liar when making an assertion like "Karen White is a woman".
- "... I would view it the same to a heterosexual male gynaecologist treating an attractive young woman." – Gynaecologists do not treat people of either sex who happen to have female "gender identities": they treat female people. By definition, heterosexual males are attracted to female people, not to male people who purport to have female gender identities (much to trans incels' chagrin). Thus, the only context in which "a heterosexual male gynecologist treating an attractive young woman" might raise an eyebrow would be if the word "woman" refers to "female person" and not to "person of either sex with a female gender identity". Yet another example of your being perfectly willing to use the word "woman" in the "normal sense of the word" when it's convenient.
Now that I think about it, even this comment, the one to which I'm replying, is internally contradictory. If you define "woman" as "a person with a female gender identity", and a "female gender identity" is the state of "wanting to be a woman in most regards" – again, it's just circular, isn't it? It never bottoms out at anything.
Suffice to say that your attempted "steelman" of gender ideology has left me no less confused than I was before reading it, and no less convinced that it's just a fundamentally incoherent belief system from top to bottom. Honestly, I get the impression that even you don't fully understand this belief system or what it entails (just like Freddie deBoer).
I'm chuffed that my deadlift is about the same as yours, but if it's any consolation, my squat and my bench are dramatically lower (in freedom units, 198 and 160 lbs respectively).
FtttG
8hr ago
The weights I'm doing are just embarrassingly low.
What's your PR, out of interest?
FtttG
13hr ago
Is that something you can go to by yourself?
Absolutely, do it bro. Impress some girl with your spice tolerance.
FtttG
13hr ago
Is it your opinion that, for all of human history, when people used the word "father", they were only referring to the parent who had a masculine gender identity, irrespective of which reproductive organs that parent had? And that, coincidentally, we use the same word to refer to the male parent in animal husbandry, even though animals (so far as we can tell) have no conception of gender identity?
I mean, this is a pretty radical act of historical revisionism, you must admit.
FtttG
14hr ago
For most people in most of human history, the word "father" refers to individuals of a particular sex, not individuals of a particular gender identity. Therefore, it is the common definition, the definition used in common parlance. The people using it in the nonstandard way you recommend are a minuscule minority, and there are hundreds of millions of living people for whom the question "does the word 'father' refer to the male parent, or the parent with a masculine gender identity?" would simply be incoherent. If you think the standard definition is deficient, you're welcome to argue in favour of your own, but it's rather obnoxious of you to pretend that everyone's already using your definition and that I'm the weird one because I understand the word "father" to mean "the male parent" and not "a parent with a masculine gender identity".
Precedent from times when there was no distinction made between sex and gender is totally meaningless for answering this question.
On the contrary, I think it demonstrates just how recent and faddish this worldview is. Only a tiny minority of currently living humans currently believe this is a distinction worth litigating, and dozens if not hundreds of countries manage just fine without.
FtttG
17hr ago
New year's resolutions check-in (nice that I can actually start crossing off resolutions I've completed):
- Went to the gym three times last week, again yesterday evening, planning to go at lunchtime today. Can deadlift 1.78x my bodyweight for 4 reps, squat .93x for 10 reps and bench press .75x for 9 reps.
- Managed to go the entirety of January without consuming any alcohol, fast food or fizzy drinks, though I was back at it like a demon from midnight on February 1st.
- Have not consumed any pornography since waking up on January 1st.
- Have completed 7/11 modules in the SQL course.
- Practised guitar for roughly an hour every day in January.
How goes it, @thejdizzler and @oats_son?
FtttG
19hr ago
About a third of the way through my fourth draft, and I've cut out about 4,500 words.
FtMs have a vastly easier time passing as male far more than MtFs can female.
One thing I find interesting is that basically every trans-identified female I know moves in nerdy circles (D&D, board games etc.). In these circles, you're much less likely to clock a TiF, because plenty of the actual males are short with narrow shoulders and reedy, nasal voices.
FtttG
20hr ago
But when someone has a stereotypically feminine appearance, one generally assumes they are female and treats them as a woman, no?
Yes, but this is a heuristic, not a definition.
Definition: A woman is an adult female human; that is, a person born with the organs associated with the production of large gametes (even if faulty).
Heuristic: You can usually identify a woman by sight on the basis of her height relative to men and various secondary sexual characteristics (narrow shoulders, wide hips, breasts, vocal pitch etc.).
A heuristic is a useful guide to identifying something, or to distinguishing X from Y, but every heuristic is prone to error to a greater or lesser extent (tall women and short men exist, as do women with deep voices or flat chests). A definition, by contrast, is supposed to be, well, definitive, clearly delineating the members of the set X from the members of the set Y with zero room for ambiguity. If you mistake a member of set X for a member of set Y, then this demonstrates a limitation of the heuristic: it does not necessarily imply any limitation of the definition.
FtttG
1d ago
Reflecting how the word is used in medical, biological and zoological contexts; how the word is used in common parlance; centuries of legal precedent.
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
1d ago
True. I don't think it's even remotely appropriate to refer to it as a "fallacy" anymore.
FtttG
1d 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 legal 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. 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
1d 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.
Thanks, I'll keep an eye out when we're replenishing our supply.
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