Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
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User ID: 863
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
As I noted in another comment I don't think consent needs to be specifically verbal. The social context it's occurring in is important.
God, what a bizarre standard of behaviour. You realise that literally everyone you've met in your life has violated this ridiculous rule you've set up at some point in your life (including you, most probably)?
Yea, so? Just because I have harmed people a particular way, or that other people have commonly harmed myself or other people a particular way, doesn't mean it isn't harmful! People, myself included, aren't morally perfect and the only way we can pretend we are is blinding ourselves to the way our actions harm others.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
No I do not think that, which is why I think the harm or badness in this case is small. I agree that thinking about how the person subject to the nonconsensual touching would feel about that touching is important in evaluating its morality.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I think nonconsensually touching people is bad simpliciter. Sometimes there are good reasons to do it that outweigh the harm of doing so (carrying someone unconscious to safety from a fire or something) but generally I think it is bad.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Correct, although I think it is bad in a pretty minor way.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I mentioned the sexual or romantic aspect because the question is whether the commenter kissing their dad was sexual harassment. Nonconsensually touching someone can be bad even it if isn't sexual harassment.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Sure, you can read my comment with an implied "in our present cultural context" if that helps.
I think forced touching is generally bad so I think forcibly kissing someone would be bad in probably any cultural context. It would be less bad if it had a different social meaning than it currently does, but it would still be bad.
Also, what does this mean? In one sense, you can apply a moral rule in an uncomplicated sense. But surely the validity of that rule is, itself, complicated?
It means I do not think either the rule itself ("kissing people without their consent is bad") or its application to this case (there's literally video of him doing it) are complicated. If you want to argue in favor of forcibly kissing people or that he didn't actually forcibly kiss her I'm open to hearing the arguments.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I don't think consent can only ever be verbal. I have given my fair share of back slaps and shoulder grabs and hugs and so on that I didn't ask permission for in advance but that were nevertheless consensual. Part of it is the shared context the action is occurring in. Like, if you're on a date and your partner leans in for a kiss, they probably want to be kissed and it is ok to kiss them. If you have to grab their head with both hands and hold them in place to forcibly kiss them? Less obviously consensual.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I do not accept this is a reasonable precaution.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I didn't say it was good. I think the ecological fallacy is bad all the time. But it is a thing people commonly do.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I think it is possible for people's model of both unusually sexually successful men and unusually sexually unsuccessful men to be dense with men who are lacking moral virtue without contradiction.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
What about hugging?
Yes, nonconsensual hugging is generally bad.
What about hand shakes?
I am not sure how you do a nonconsensual handshake? But yea, bad.
Back pats?
Nonconsensual ones are bad, yes.
Was my old aunt sexually abusing me when I was 10 and she'd plant a big lipsticky kiss on my cheek?
Maybe!
Did I sexually harrass my dad when he was lying in a hospital bed in a coma and I kissed his forehead?
Probably not.
Or am I being outrageous?
Yes.
Is it bad, but the same way answering your phone in the library is bad rather than sexual abuse?
It is (much) worse than answering your phone in a library but probably not as bad as the median example of conduct described by the term "sexual abuse."
But is answering your phone in the library bad enough to lose your career over?
Probably not, but forcibly kissing a woman might be.
Could there be a middle ground perhaps, where it's not something people should do moving forward but we don't crucify this guy for not being American?
People learn what to do and not to do because of the consequences for the things they do. I am pretty sure he is criticized for forcibly kissing a woman, not for "not being American."
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I think kissing people without their consent is bad and I don't think any of ("I was very emotional", "It has happened a lot in the past", "Some iconic moments are similar", "The victim didn't react the right way in the moment") are very good excuses or justifications. This is not complicated.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
There are indeed such traits, and any exceptions are so rare you can safely ignore them.
Surely you can recognize the contradiction in this sentence. "Yes there are traits that perfectly sort humans into binaries, with exceptions."
All categories related to things existing on the physical world will work this way, only Mathematics offers perfect definitions.
I don't think this is true? I'm pretty sure our categorization of the elements requires that they have only a specific number of protons, for example. If an atom has eight protons it is Oxygen and if it has nine it's Fluorine. There's no such thing as "Oxygen with nine protons" or "Fluorine with eight protons."
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Human beings, like all mammals, reproduce sexually. The process requires contributions from two distinct categories of humans. The process output is a human who will develop to resemble and be one of these two distinct catagories unless interfered with by a disease or intention effort. This is all fundamental to human reproduction, it is a fact about humans. We call one of these groups, the ones who develop overaries, female or women. Without this process humans would cease to exist and this process requires there to be a meaningful distinction.
Can you be more specific? What is it these humans develop to resemble? I'm also a little unclear on what is meant by "disease" in your description. I read "disease" as a stand in for "anything that causes humans to be different than my model of normal", which seems like it makes your definition tautological. "Humans develop into one of these normal categories unless something happens that makes them develop otherwise."
I suppose it would be more clear for me to say you want to discredit the concept of natural categories. That categories can be facts about the world. You favor treating catagories as totally arbitrary so that you can draw the boundaries wherever you please. But it's wrong, natural categories exist. It's not just arbitrary whim that causes us to differentiate oxygen from carbon dioxide and there are whole processes, that are very important to humans, that rely on these differences. If you give humans carbon dioxide instead of oxygen they will die. If you don't give plants carbon dioxide they will die.
I think I have been clear since the beginning I don't believe in natural categories, but not believing in natural categories doesn't make categories arbitrary. Categories are useful at serving various functions and we should draw the boundaries of the categories so they serve the function we want them to. The boundaries of the category are not arbitrary, but decided by the function we want to put the category to. Categories like "oxygen" and "carbon dioxide" are very useful, because the particular atoms and molecules so described share many properties that let us make useful inferences about them and manipulate them in various ways to our ends.
You can of course propose other methods of categorization but you won't be cleaving reality nearly as neatly at the joints. In fact, as I said before your definition of "woman" necesarily contains my definition to avoid being totally circular, you've just tacked on a "also anyone who we would call a man but identifies as a woman" at the end.
I disagree.
But what you can't do is, after making this new arbitrary categorization, name it the same thing as the category we've been using with my definition this whole time and retroactively apply all the systems and assumptions we've built up under the original definition without having to get wide societal buy in. Women's sports were conceived and are predicated on my definition of woman, not your new one. If you want trans women in women's sports you need to make that case, not just play around with words. People do not like being manipulated and this tactic is so transparent.
What is stopping me from doing this? More generally, part of the argument by the pro-trans side is that gender based categorizations on the basis of the presence of secondary sex characteristics, or appearance, or similar measures more closely track how the term "woman" has been used than a definition based on chromosomes or reproductive capacity. After all, sterile women are still women and we had a concept of "woman" long before we knew anything about chromosomes or gametes.
But humans naturally have 4 limbs. Instances of people with some other number are exceptions where things have gone wrong. If nothing had gone wrong it would be in their nature to have 4 limbs. For the same reason a centipede with 4 limbs has had its nature subverted. This does not make the centipede more human like, it makes it an exception to centipedes. A man who mimics a woman is an except of the man case, not the woman case because it is in his nature to develop as a man. We can call this man a trans women if you'd like and if people are so inclined they can decide to use she/her pronouns - I myself would and have - but she is not a woman and cannot become one.
Frankly, this is entirely too essentialist about humans for me. If someone had, say, a genetic abnormality that caused them to develop a different number of limbs it seems to me it would be in that individuals nature to have that different number of limbs. There might be commonalities of human experience and existence but whatever our "nature" is, it is in us not some metaphysical model from which we deviate.
This is where it gets maddening. Are you seriously expecting me to believe you cannot fathom why we created woman's sports leagues?
Who is "we"? I am skeptical that every women's sport league that ever was created was for the same reason.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Well, so, what if those people exist?
Generally the purpose of pointing out these individuals is to counter the notion that there is some Particular Trait that neatly and unambiguously divides humans into a sexual binary. If your understanding of sex or gender is more of a cluster structure that people can in-principle move between by altering sufficient traits I think that already makes you much closer to the pro-trans position than most anti-trans people.
And besides, if I really end up needing to properly place a given intersex person (either in "men", "women", or some third category), maybe because I personally know them, this doesn't (and shouldn't) affect my original definitions of "men" and "women" - it was an edge case, so I dealt with it like an edge case, not by tossing everything out and starting completely from scratch.
In general I am a fan of "I will use my judgement to decide how to act with respect to X" but there are some situations (legal ones especially) where people being able to understand in advance how they will be treated is important.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Can you tell me what facts about a person determine that person's biological sex? Specifically,what facts or set of facts determine someone is in the "woman" biological category such that all cis women are so places and no trans women are?
But what is it that gives trans woman to think they are part of this category. Well common narratives suggest it's because they 'feel like a woman' - but what is the woman property they are feeling like.
My present understanding is that it's some kind of body dysphoria related to secondary sex characteristics in combination with a desire to occupy certain kinds of social roles and relations that often go along with possession of those characteristics. Some of these things are related to biology and some aren't.
Sex is a different kind is category - there is a reality to it beyond assigning an arbitrary set of properties.
I don't agree. All categories are fundamentally social. The set of traits that determine whether someone is a "woman" or "man", is "male" or "female" are things we decide socially like all other categorizations. There are no groupings or categorizations of traits that are any more real than any other.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Substitute "sterile" for "tall" in my comment then. Or substitute "testicle-less" if you think having testicles is an essential component of being a man.
If you drop it because it doesn't seem useful in context (leaving aside that that's controversial almost everywhere) then you're still implying information that isn't there, and once it does come up, there will be confusion.
Am I also doing this if I refer to a man who has had a double orchiectomy as a "man", without the "testicle-less" qualifier? Should I be required to add that qualifier the same way I should add "trans"?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I am not sure I count the Lion King, given its CGI, but you're correct that the outcomes are much more mixed than I thought they were.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I propose a simpler explanation for the underperformance of The Little Mermaid: It's a live action remake of a beloved animated show. Consider Dragonball Evolution, or The Last Airbender, or the Cowboy Bebop TV series, or Aladdin. I could do this all day! Has taking a beloved animated property and turning it into a live action remake ever worked? At some point you would think studios would learn this is Shit Nobody Wants, and yet...
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
A woman is one of the two natural categories that humans develop into if they don't have a very rare disorder or spend significant effort to specifically and intentionally to emulate men.
Can you tell me more about these natural categories? What features characterize them? Frankly, I am an eliminativist about natural kinds. I don't think there is any such thing. There are facts in the world but any categorization or groupings of facts are things we do as humans.
Women are the thing that trans women are attempting to emulate. For trans woman to be a meaningful concept at all you must acknowledge that 'women' is not a null pointer and that the subset of people who you define as 'trans women' are some delta away from the core concept of "women",
Sure, the question is what is "women" pointing at. Can you tell me?
follow the vector of that delta back and you intersect "man".
Obviously I disagree.
It's maddening because while the actual concept is simple there is this shell game you can play. Where you pretend to not know about the thing you have to know about in order for transgenderism to even be a meaningful concept and then poo poo any simple definition with the weirdest edge cases imaginable because your strategy is just to discredit the concept of categories entirely.
I don't really see how the pro-trans crowds goal is to discredit the concept of categories entirely. Indeed, it seems a central feature of their (our) arguments that there is a meaningful category called "women" and that it includes trans women. The anti-trans crowd clearly does not like this fact but it seems obvious to me the pro-trans crowd is not anti-categorization in some general way. We just want more complete and accurate categorizations for the purposes we think they should be put towards.
Oh yeah, "who are we to guess at how many limbs a human has?" or "we can't even decide if left handedness is variation or abnormality".
I understand this sentence to be sarcastic but it's not clear to me why. Different people... do have different numbers of limbs! A universal statement about the number of limbs humans have is false. Less absolute statements ("Most humans have four limbs", "The typical human has four limbs") may be true but the universal ("All humans have four limbs") is clearly not. Similarly we regard left handedness as ordinary variation today but that has not always the perspective society had! So much so that we tried to beat left handedness out of children.
Oh yeah, and by the way those things you called "women's sports" instead of "unaltered natal female sports" - that linguistic difference that no one ever considered before? We're going to go the direction opposite of what was the original intended purpose.
I am not sure what the "original intended purpose" is or why it is relevant, nor am I clear on why the fact that no one has considered this linguistic difference before means it is not meaningful or interesting. Have all the distinctions it will ever be necessary to make already been made?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I mean, the point is that they consider the adjective as not conveying any additionally relevant information. If every time I spoke about my coworker Bob I called them "Fat Bob" people might wonder why I was doing so, what relevance his weight had to the question. I think this is pretty analogous to how trans people feel.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I would broadly agree with this, yes. But the current trans inclusive position is that Transwomen Are Women in all circumstances and for all purposes. When we are trying to determine who changes clothes with each other, which kids attend sleepovers together, who runs footraces against each other, who gets in boxing rings together, who is ruled in or out as a sex partner, who counsels rape victims, and who is imprisoned together - for all of these purposes, TWAW.
I generally agree that the trans inclusive position considers trans women to be women for the purposes you've listed but I don't think it's for all purposes. For example, I think the trans inclusive position includes trans women being prostate exams when cis women don't. Or cis women needing pap smears when trans women don't.
How recently did social norms change such that forcibly kissing a woman is taboo? Luis was born in 1977. I'm confident forcibly kissing women has been taboo since the 90's, when he would have been a teenager.
As I said in my original comment I do not think "commonality of 'doing crazy things right after you win a big event in sports'" provides any justification or defense. Either as a general principle or here specifically. Probably it has some explanatory power for why he did it, but I don't think it goes at all to justification or mitigation.
I am not sure about "using his power in a workplace" but it was definitely "forc[ing] a woman to do things she doesn't want to do." Rephrase your example slightly. Coworker A forcibly kisses Coworker B at a public work-related function. A has no (formal) power over B. Is that just "a mistake", something requiring only an apology, or something Coworker A should face some discipline (perhaps not termination) for?
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