FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
5hr 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
5hr 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
9hr 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
10hr ago
About a third of the way through my fourth draft, and I've cut out about 4,500 words.
FtttG
11hr ago
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
11hr 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
18hr 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
20hr ago
True. I don't think it's even remotely appropriate to refer to it as a "fallacy" anymore.
FtttG
20hr 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
22hr 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
22hr 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
1d 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
1d 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.
Absolutely, do it bro. Impress some girl with your spice tolerance.
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