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Wake up babe, the definition of woman just dropped.
The year was 2020, trans issues have already made their way through our social consciousness, and some women were getting frustrated at the inability to congregate without trans women showing up, and - in the minds of the TERF inclined - spoil the party.
Enter Sall Grover, a bold enterprising spirit, that recognized two facts:
She quickly joined the dots, and thus the Giggle app was born. In order to register you had to upload a selfie, which would be run through a sex-recognition AI, and non-females would be automatically rejected. The AI was deliberately calibrated to minimize false negatives, wanting to spare cis-women the humiliation of appealing the process, Grover figured it's better to let a few false-positives through and deal with them manually. For a while, the whole system worked wonderfully, and the women congregated, giggling happily.
But, as we all know, there is no Giggle without a Tickle... In February 2021, Roxy Tickle uploaded a selfie to the Giggle app and the AI was so amused at the word pun, it forgot it was supposed to be an image recognition algorithm. Roxy got through! Her joy lasted for several months, until she was caught by manual review as she was applying for premium features of the app. After a short and unsuccessful appeal attempt, she decided that the only way to resolve this dispute is in court.
Roxy Tickle argued that this was an outrageous injustice, that she was being discriminated against for being trans, and that this constitutes a violation of the Sex Discrimination Act of 1984. Sall Grover argued that this is nonsense, that Giggle does not discriminate against trans people, it merely excludes people on the basis of sex. The law hasn't outlawed sex-segregated spaces over the 30 years it was in effect, Roxy Tickle was treated no different than any other male-sexed individual, and therefore no illegal discrimination has taken place. The judge had to rule if Giggle excluded a man, and was well within it's rights, or if it excluded a woman and indirectly committed discrimination against a trans person. He was therefore forced to settle that ancient question - what is a woman? Last week we finally received the verdict, and the way I understood it is "a woman is anyone who the state identifies as a woman". It turns out that sex is mutable, and that Ms. Tickle is a woman because she has a state issued document saying so. Australia's legal system seems a bit complex to my eyes, but at first glance that seems to also boil down to "a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman".
The consequences of the verdict might be more interesting than the verdict itself. After all, if an app for women cannot keep an AMAB out, how can all the other controversial spaces like sports, prisons, waxing salons, etc.? We've covered enough of these cases over the years that I think it should be clear this isn't a hypothetical, and as connoisseurs of TERF content will know, hacking "gender violence" laws has become a pretty regular occurance in countries that lean on the self-ID side of the debate. More importantly, and/or ammusingly, normie men are deciding all that male privilege just ain't worth it, or perhaps the Spaniards are just more cheeky than average. In any case, if any such self-ID laws / rulings are to be maintained, I think they'll require some major qualifications.
1:
Quillette published an article about the verdict, too:
https://quillette.com/2024/08/27/tickle-vs-giggle/
2:
The verdict didn't surprise me because I'm already working from the sad assumption that in the woke West, biological sex is no longer recognized as real by anyone in a position of power. What was once a woman is now a “uterus-haver”, a “pregnant person” or a “chest feeder”, but such people have no collective rights. Those collective rights now belong to those who merely identify as women, even if they have penises and testicles, which means that there is no longer any legal basis for having female-only spaces, online or offline.
What confuses and angers me is that the judge will not even explain that state of affairs in clear terms, instead insisting that this was a case of discrimination based on gender identity. But that's literally impossible! Giggle is an app for women, and Tickle identifies as a woman, so whatever discrimination Tickle faced cannot have been based on gender identity (and it wasn't: it was based on biological sex).
That's also clear from the paragraph here:
Again, the decision was based on the fact that Tickle did not look biologically female, not that they looked insufficiently woman-identifying. In fact, Tickle looks exactly like a male who identifies as a woman. So the Giggle moderators, correctly, clocked her as a male and banned her for that reason. That is sex-based discrimination, which may or may not be illegal, but definitely not gender-identity discrimination.
So de facto the situation in Australia is as follows:
I don't agree that this should be the law, but this is what it is in practice. Then why can't the judge explicitly say so? Is he that stupid? Or is banning discrimination based on biological sex while claiming you are banning discrimination based on self-identification some elite power play that I'm too unsophisticated to understand?
3:
As for normie men increasingly identifying as female for the benefits:
I suspect that a lot of these benefits in practice are only afforded to biological females and to males who make enough effort to signal that they are serious about their gender identity.
The normie dad who changes his legal sex in hopes of getting custody of his children will be sussed out as faking it and will not get the benefits associated with women and real transwomen.
This all reminds me of an old but good article by The Last Psychiatrist, The Nature of the Grift, where (in section IV) he explains that to get asylum because you are persecuted as a homosexual, it's not sufficient to declare yourself homosexual, you have to play the part too. Officially there is no rule on how gay you must act to be considered homosexual, and in practice many people fake such a claim, but it's still a requirement that you fake it convincingly.
I blame the whole concept of gender. We didn't always have gender, it's a recent invention. We used to have sex and civilization ran pretty well with that alone.
I'm waiting for a non-self-referential definition of gender that doesn't just mean 'sex'.
So far, nobody has answered me.
(Hello! I'm new here and this is my first post, so apologies if I'm messing up any social norms here. Please feel free to call me out! :))
That seems like a pretty easy challenge. Here's my definitions:
External Gender: When people greet me, they say "ma'am" instead of "sir". There's a wealth of subtler behaviors, but the basic idea here is that people perceived as "female" get treated differently than people perceived as "male".
Internal Gender: I prefer being called "ma'am", and am happier when my external gender is "female". In a lot of magical stories, a character has their sex transformed by some magic. "Internal Gender" is when a character wants to transform back, which is fairly common. "Internal Gender" is the idea that if you body-swapped with your mom, you'd still want to be called "him" despite the uterus.
Sex: the biological reality. A messy mix of chromosomes, hormones, and anatomy.
Welcome to themotte!
People who think gender is defined circularly have a certain intuition about words - namely, that words don't really mean anything. These are usually highly systematizing people who would feel at home in a math textbook. In math, there is no particular reason why the particular words are used. Math could be done with random words as long as the relationship between the words is the same relationship as in our real math. This kind of person is over-represented in this forum many times more than in real life because of this forum's genetic history. Go back 15 years and some of the people on this website were reading a systematizer systematizing things
The reason why they would say these definitions are circular is because these definitions revolve around the use of the literal word "ma'am." If we played the randomize-the-word-keep-the-relationship, it starts to look kind of empty to say something like
So what is the meaning of the word "ma'am?"
In any case, I'm not sure "circular definitions" are the true objection to following trans-activist policy and culture proposals. You have a reasonable desire, which is for people to treat you a certain way. I think "transphobia" really is the best word for the reason why people don't treat a trans person like they desire.
Likewise, widespread shortphobia among straight women is the reason why society doesn't treat short kings like people.
A circular definition is just not useful. It breaks down and is only tethered to reality by the lingering remembrance of a rooted definition. A tether that will only fray and disintegrate over time like a plant pulled from it's soil.
There are ways to define trans that aren't circular, they just would cleave off one or another group of the trans coalition or make some asks carry less weight. My current model of trans(I'm going to give the MTF case but assume a symmetrical FTM case) is that it is a feature of some male brains that they are able to be in a state where they genuinely believe that would be happiest if they had as close as possible the experience of being female. This belief can be true or untrue, suppressible or unsuppressible those are their own questions. This belief is genuine and following the principles of freedom of form these people should be allowed to pursue body modifications and ask those around them to treat them as if they were female in whatever ways are reasonable to accommodate. Polite people should humor them and there should be a general understanding that this is an acceptable way to live. However we should not blind ourselves to the reality that this is fundamentally a truth about male brains, that there exist no gendered souls and that a brain cannot be in the wrong body.
I think this is basically the truth of the matter combined with the most reasonable course of action to take in response to it. A circular definition doesn't let us solve anything, it says nothing about the state of the world and is evidence of poor reasoning.
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I've noticed people do not at all share my intuitions about these terms, so I'm curious to explore this a bit more:
Gender is which pronouns I prefer, the same way my name is an identifier I prefer. Does this mean "names" are also an "empty" concept?
So, names used to be based on profession, right? Smith, Cook, so on. Does this mean that a name "just means" profession, even though that's a historical feature, not a modern one? Are you okay with the modern tradition of divorcing names from that former meaning?
Currency used to be based on the gold standard, but now it's just a bunch of numbers on computers. Is currency still "just about" gold? Is currency now also a circular word with no real meaning? Are you okay with the modern tradition of divorcing currency from the gold standard?
For the present, English pronouns do "just mean" sex, but it doesn't have to always be that way. In the far-future, pronouns could easily be just a normal thing people choose, eventually divorced from its accidental history of indicating sex. I think most realistically, we would rid language of gendered pronouns altogether to reduce social friction. Why memorize two identifiers for everyone in your life? That someone wants to overhaul language but chooses to keep gendered pronouns around indicates to me they have an agenda.
I have no problem, personally, with language moving that direction. Personally I try to use any trans person's preferred pronouns (for fear of social censure). I have no problem, personally, with decoupling all connotations and emotions from "she" and "woman." Because most of my social circle is progressive, I already do that in my head.
In 2100, Rule 30 of the internet will apply to real-life and also be amended -- that all women are trans women unless she proves it. I nominate the rule text "women are trans women."
You say that like it's a weird, nefarious thing, but it seems like everyone who wants to change anything is obviously going to have an agenda?
I'm certainly not adverse to "abolish gender entirely" but it seems a lot easier to slot trans women into the existing system -vs- getting rid of the whole thing.
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Are you arguing that common definitions of gender (e.g. "a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman") aren't circular? Or are you being sarcastic and I'm too drunk to pick up on it?
I was explaining arguments without endorsing them because my personal opinion isn't that important.
"a woman is anyone who identifies as 'woman'" isn't circular exactly, but it is empty and silly. To engage in malicious compliance, you should just agree that a woman is someone who identifies as 'woman' but then play stupid whenever anyone ever says anything interesting about a woman. If playing semantic games with "woman" is beneath you, then I'm not sure why you'd care if [silly progressive definition] is circular or not -- it would be silly to you either way.
There is a coherent definition hidden inside the woke agenda: A woman is anyone who wants to be treated like a ciswoman adult human female. This is obviously the correct description for the category that progressives call "woman." Naturally, they are allergic to saying the quiet part out loud.
Edit: (Unsurprisingly, the natural definition reveals that ciswomen is a more fundamental category than woman. Ciswoman is like "red" or "purple" -- you just vaguely gesture at examples from the senses -- you know obviously what I'm talking about)
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We can obviously agree, empirically, that there are two major clusters in how people get treated, male and female. "Ma'am" refers to one of those two clusters. The "ma'am" cluster includes both people with penises, and people with vaginas. This all seems like a basic objective observation of reality to me.
Given that, I don't get how this is any more circular than any other subjective category, like "nerd" or "tall" or "centrist"?
If you mean to argue that the way people treat trans women is functionally indistinguishable from the way they treat cis women - well, no. Indeed, even trans activists don't believe this - essentially every complaint made by trans activists (including Tickle, which started this debate) seems to ultimately boil down to "I wish people treated me as a [sir/ma'am], but they don't. Even when I can see that they're trying to treat me as a [sir/ma'am], I can tell they don't really see me that way and are just playing pretend in an effort to mollify me." And that's not even getting into the people who complain that "people keep treating me as a sir, even though I would prefer to be treated as neither sir nor ma'am and this should be obvious to outside observers even though everything about my appearance and comportment is entirely consistent with my being a sir" even though our society never created a script for how to interact with people who are neither sir nor ma'am because those two categories covered 100% of people until some teenagers spent too much time having their narcissism reinforced and encouraged on Tumblr, and now here we are.
I get called "ma'am" and don't see any particular difference in how I'm treated. Plenty of trans people "pass"; it's not exactly an obscure topic. It shouldn't be surprising that trans people who fail at passing complain more - the ones who succeed are already getting treated how they want, so there's no really much to complain about personally.
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The supposed circularity of woman is just whenever people use quotes to say something like identifies as "woman." You sidestep that by changing the word to "ma'am" but what if someone says, "err, but you're not a ma'am"? Then you need to define ma'am and then you might run into some circularity.
If you don't want to define ma'am then it turns out woman is just a cluster unified by an arbitrary desire to be called a certain word. Realistically, it's also an arbitrary desire to be treated a certain way in general.
With tall and nerd you don't need to make reference to "quoted" "labels" and self-ID, so you are unlikely to run into any circularity.
I will re-iterate that the supposed circularity is not really the objection to trans activist policy and culture proposals. A significant part of the population thinks the trans desire is unreasonable. The circularity of the new woman definition is a strategy to give trans people what they desire (certain social privileges and connotations).
That would seem like a weird thing to say, since "ma'am" is how most people refer to me, and it'll confuse other people if you refer to me as "sir".
I mean, isn't that how names work? What's wrong with wanting to be called a certain word? I'm not forcing anyone to use it
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Yes we can.
No it does not. The ma'am cluster- otherwise known as women- includes people who have vaginas, xx chromosomes, uteruses, etc. Larping males don't belong there even if it makes them sad, any more than the various schizos who run for president on the platform that they have a chip in their brain belong in the oval office.
Having male genitals or xy chromosomes is disqualifying from being a woman. There are some people who don't fit into either category, for no fault of their own, and we call them intersex.
You can say that this way of drawing the line is arbitrary, but you would simply be wrong- my way, and the old way, is better because it gets at the information people actually care about. I don't find you wearing skirts to be some fundamental aspect of your identity because you can put on a pair of pants with, presumably, the same level of effort that I can. But you can't change your biological sex. It takes major surgery to change your anatomy- and artificial vaginas are not functional in the same way as natural ones in a variety of ways. It is impossible to change your genetic makeup. Transwomen having female-typical hormones requires constant intervention.
It is possible to be wrong about your own identity, even if you disguise yourself.
You're really claiming that not a single trans woman has ever been referred to as "ma'am"? 😂 That's a pretty amazing claim, so I'm assuming you have some pretty amazing evidence for it?
But, you know, people have called me personally "ma'am", totally unprompted! They do it all the time, in fact. If I try to explain that I'm a guy, they get confused. So... I mean, I know for a fact you're wrong. I'm pretty sure you can find other trans people with similar experiences.
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