WandererintheWilderness
No bio...
User ID: 3496
WandererintheWilderness
4mo ago
Yeah there's the definition of X, and then there are other attributes that aren't definitional to X but may or may not be true in a given case. What's the problem?
I don't think there is a problem. It's just that, for the same reason, I don't think it's fair to claim that you only "have to hear about all these other features even though the lack of them, even all of them, doesn't actually change anything" because of "empty sophistry".
I say: "my technical definition of woman is [someone who calls herself a woman]", you say "but clearly Alice is a woman in everyday usage has to mean something more than that", and I say back "yeah, sure, but the other attributes don't constitute the definition". Therefore the "come on, trans women who says they are woman clearly mean something more than to tautologically say that they-identify-as-women" counterargument fails. The symmetrical counterargument could easily be levied against someone defending the "a woman is someone with XX chromosomes" definition ("clearly when you say Mrs Wiggins is a woman, you're not talking about molecular biology, therefore we see that gender-as-social-construct is a better definition") and the gender-critical could refute it exactly as I have.
With this mind, I don't see why the circularity is a problem. Why would it be? I don't think it "sounds bad", and I'm not trying to obscure it. I started out by giving just that as the definition - we only got into the weeds of the correlated attributes because of people bringing up the "but people mean more than that when they say woman" thing, it's not some deceitful rhetorical strategy I'm using to mask the circularity of the technical definition.
I wouldn't tell either of them they're full of crap, no. Again, I think self-identification can be the ultimate hard boundary while not being the only salient point. Being a woman is strongly correlated with certain features, even though the presence or absence of any one of these features isn't make-or-break. Even if there's another trait that is the ultimate yes-or-no criterion, then when I tell you "this person is a woman" I am, colloquially, communicating useful information not limited to "this person identifies as a woman".
Frankly, I don't see why this is supposed to be some great defeater to my view when people who want to focus on biological sex have the exact same (non-)problem. In a few cases, the person with a vagina and XX chromosomes will be a muscular, bearded transman. But if a gender-critical colloquially tells me, "oh, by the way, the person you're going to meet for that business lunch is a woman", they obviously mean to communicate more than "stripped naked and put under a microscope, you can tell she's a biological female". Chromosomes and/or genital phenotype are their ultimate boundary which will make them come down on one side in edge-cases, but it's not the only thing that actually matters to them when they say someone's a woman in their everyday life.
(Other comparison: even if I say "an American is, ultimately, someone who has American citizenship", I will mean something more if I tell you "Bob is American". This remains true even if, faced with two identical Hispanic guys, neither of whom are assimilated into the culture or speak great English, I say "the one who has citizenship is technically An American, the other one isn't".)
WandererintheWilderness
4mo ago
He went back and edited it in ways which are generally agreed to weaken the piece (not that they change its core point or anything).
WandererintheWilderness
4mo ago
I think The_Nybbler interpreted the capital letters on "Good, Actually" as sarcastic.
WandererintheWilderness
4mo ago
If an agency pulls a minor stunt to not let them into the building, the President can and will have his team show up with a very minor show of force, and
and now the anti-Trump movement has lurid footage of the Fascist Authoritarian threatening random bureaucrats and charity workers at gunpoint. Some would count that as a win. (Though of course, "refuse to give in to the resultant shaming, keep doing this until such incidents lose all novelty value and the media cease to bother" is a viable counter-strategy.)
WandererintheWilderness
4mo ago
That implies that whoever doesn't say they are a woman isn't a woman. Or at least that we are incapable of knowing who is a woman until they declare whether they are or not.
It implies that we cannot state for sure that they are a woman. We can assume it based on all sorts of cues and circumstantial evidence.
WandererintheWilderness
4mo ago
Subcultures are the location of constant infighting over who qualifies and who doesn't
Yes, but such internal squabbles are generally regarded as silly intra-clique bickering. A non-goth, if he has any sense, will accept no other criterion, if asked if some random person is goth, than "well, do they call themself that?".
WandererintheWilderness
4mo ago
What you seem to want to say is, 'there is no important difference between biological men and biological women outside a very small number of very specific contexts so it doesn't matter who wants to be what gender'
Yes. Not only do I want to say it, I say it openly and have done so in the past. I got pretty deep in the weeds of trans prisoners in another culture war thread.
As for your second paragraph, you may want to read what I wrote out here.
I understand your complaint. I think the issue, and what I was trying to get at with the "goth" comparison, is a kind of motte-and-bailey about what we mean by "definition" - broad characterization vs boundary-setting. Being goth is clearly a cluster of characteristics beyond the self-identification tag. However, no one characteristic in that cluster is a clincher - no single feature is individually make-or-break. If I tried to define "goth" as "someone who wears black clothing and vaguely Satanic jewelry" you could find me someone who wears dark purple, red mascara and Egyptian jewelry that would still be recognizable as a goth; and so on for any set of traits. When I tell you "Keith is goth" I am usefully telling you that he probably has some combination of those traits, but there is no specific set of traits other than self-identification by which you could falsify my claim.
The progressive view of womanhood is that it's works this way. "Woman" is a trait-cluster that might include anything from "bald chin" to "likes romance novel" to "likes to be sexually penetrated" to "likely to wear white if gets married" to "has a uterus". Trans women typically try to take on a sufficient number of traits to place themselves firmly within that cluster, even though some of the most common traits (like "has a vagina") are beyond their reach. But you can't turn that trait-cluster into a technical 'definition' in the boundary-setting sense. Any definition that tries to pull some of the traits is, by necessity, too reductive: obviously one needn't have any one of such-and-such typical female physical characteristics or any one of such-and-such stereotypes of feminine personality and behavior to be a woman. Being a woman is just a predictor of probably having some combination of these traits. So the only hard boundary, the only trait that everyone in the class has in common, is going to be long-term self-identification.
Progressives asked to answer "What is a woman?" correctly recognize that they are being asked for a boundary-setting, technical definition; something on the basis of which a claim of the form "X is a woman" can be verified or falsified. So they avoid getting into the weeds of "What are some of the traits you might expect a woman to have?", although that answer obviously exists and is obviously important to trans women; because it's not what's being asked, and answering the boundary question with a set of traits from the cluster will rightfully draw ridicule. ("You say you're progressive and you define womanhood as conforming to Western female social norms like wearing dresses and crying at movies? Har! Har!")
WandererintheWilderness
4mo ago
No. The present tense "calls" in "someone who calls himself" was, I thought, sufficient to imply "habitually calls himself"; to imply a measure of stability. If you really think this is ambiguous, we can add an adverb, whatever.
WandererintheWilderness
4mo ago
The conservatives shrug and say, ‘fine, but we care about whether you’re a biological male so that’s how we’ll treat you’
And I can tell them "stop being sexist". (Outside of the couple of specific contexts where the biological difference really does directly matter.)
and the progressives get furious
Which progressives? I'm a progressive. My friends are progressives.
If you tell me you're a blorb and when I ask you what that means, you tell me it's anyone who says they're a blorb, you haven't conveyed any information.
No, but if there are millions of self-identified blorbs, you can begin to form a gestalt impression of the sort of aesthetics blorbs are usually into, how they tend to dress, the sorts of interest they tend to have. A person who tells you they're a blorb won't necessarily be saying that they have all the features of the archetypal or median blorb, but they're asking you to look at their behavior relative to the common image of a blorb.
This works very well if you replace "blorb" with something like "punk" or "scene" or "goth". You could get a long way thinking of genders as very large (and as a result very hazily-defined) subcultures. The analogy also helps to explain what a butch transfem means by identifying as female even if she personally keeps dressing quite a lot like a man: picture someone who dresses normally but considers themself "a goth", because they're into goth media; like to hang out with more conventional goths by whom they don't want to be seen as an outsider but just 'one of the gang who dresses a bit weird'; think of goths as "their kind of people"; etc.
tldr: "Keith is goth" clearly means something, even though it doesn't actually tell you any specific thing about what Keith is like besides identifying as goth. (You might think it likely that he wears a lot of black clothing; but he might not! Similarly, if I say "Alice is a woman", it's reasonable to suspect that she has tits, but then again, maybe not.)
WandererintheWilderness
4mo ago
‘What is a William’ is not a nonsense question
I obviously meant, in the wider context of my [checks notes] two-sentence-long post, that it's a nonsensical follow-up question to ask once someone has already told you that "a William is someone who calls himself William". Obviously it can be true or false in that narrow sense, but then so can "does this person identify as a woman or not".
WandererintheWilderness
4mo ago
What should the teacher do?
Allow it this once, but observe whether William actually lastingly goes by William in other social contexts, and/or if he switches back to Aaron when drinking order switches back again. Take appropriate disciplinary action if you get conclusive evidence he's doing it frivolously.
WandererintheWilderness
4mo ago
This mysteriously isn't a problem when we need to convey that people are called William. (Also, I realize that by definition I cannot prove it, but I have made this point before IRL.)
WandererintheWilderness
4mo ago
circular logic
I refer you to my reply here. "A woman is someone who says they're a woman" is only as circular as "a William is someone who says their name is William", and I don't see why that's a problem. If you object "but then saying 'So-and-so is a woman' doesn't tell you anything else about that person besides this one bit of trivia about how they self-identify" I will yeschad.jpg you.
WandererintheWilderness
4mo ago
"Drag queen" refers to a specific, sexualized behavior. A biological male who would like to be called "Alice" and "Miss" but dresses in understated, largely androgynous casual wear is not a "drag queen"; she is not even meaningfully a "crossdresser" or "transvestite". If you tell me "Alice is a drag queen" (or as the case may be "Mr Smith is a drag queen") I'll get completely the wrong idea. Calling him "feminine" wouldn't do either.
WandererintheWilderness
4mo ago
Would you agree that the simplest, most obvious solution to the [gender] wage gap?
Only in the sense that it would decouple the gender wage gap from the sex wage gap. The sex gap would still exist. "Feminism" is too broad a church to say that any one idea is or isn't coherent with it, but replace the term with "anti-sexism" and it's instantly clearer that it can coexist happily with transgenderism. (Transgenderism cannot coexist happily with biological-female supremacists, but since when do we like them? Trans activists certainly don't pretend that Radical Feminists are anything but their enemies. There's no incoherence there, just open rivalry.)
Also:
when people say that the progressive position is not simple
Actually, lizzardspawn, to whom my reply was directed, was very much accusing the progressive position of lacking a detailed definition at all; not complaining about it being insufficiently simple.
WandererintheWilderness
4mo ago
"A woman is someone who calls herself a woman" is as simple as "a William is someone who calls himself William". "Yes, but what is a William" is a nonsense-question and has no other answer than "someone called William".
What does your simple definition says about it?
It does indeed yield that she isn't one. (We might call her one anyway for practicality's sake, either purely for our benefit like calling a female dog a "girl", or on the presumption that if she understood the question, she would probably identify as such - being that being a biologically female human is a strong predictor for identifying as a woman. But we cannot categorically assert it.)
WandererintheWilderness
4mo ago
Our view is that whoever says they are a woman is a woman. You can argue all you like that this is overly permissive, socially corrosive, whatever, but you can't say it isn't simple.
WandererintheWilderness
4mo ago
I mean. Primaries, anyone?
WandererintheWilderness
5mo ago
I think by "bestiality" I think RandomRanger meant the aliens genuinely have some inscrutable moral code that makes them want to force us to have sex with ordinary Earth animals, not with the aliens.
WandererintheWilderness
5mo ago
We now know that the people running the occupation were systematically lying to the public about the occupation's prospects and achievements for most and perhaps all of those twenty years, because in fact the occupation was achieving nothing of identifiable value. (…) What goal would staying longer have achieved?
Not dr_analog, but an obvious answer - not necessarily mine, but obvious - would be "the same goal as keeping a dangerous terrorist in prison even if the rehab program he's supposedly signed up for has a snowball's chance in hell of reforming him". The people in charge lying about how well the turn-it-into-an-enlightened-democracy project was going looks like a grievous blow to the entire enterprise if you think westernizing Aghanistan was actually the point, but not if you think that "we're just staying as long as it takes to turn them into a peaceful democracy" was always just a fig leaf to make the bitter pill of "we're indefinitely occupying this colonized territory to keep the barbarians suppressed" go down.
Was she charging people? OP just said she was carrying her gear. I don't see why she should be forbidden from doing it for free, as a hobby, even if she gets paid for it at home. I feel like the line here ought to be "did they get paid", not "were they doing things that other people might get paid for in other circumstances", particularly when it comes to artists.
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