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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.
Sure, but what does ‘female’ and ‘male’ mean?
Ultimately, it comes down to biological sex. The actual definition of a trans woman is ‘a biological male by sex who performs a social role or set of roles associated with women’. The question thereof comes down to ‘why should we care’. Like the social roles associated with women that aren’t on some level arbitrary are the ones a male-sexed person can’t perform anyways.
They're clusters that were originally based around sex, yes, but plenty of cultures use the categories without referring back to sex these days. It's like how "2024 AD" means "two thousand and twenty four years after Jesus died"; you're making a fairly simple error if you think our calendar system relies on the existence of an actual biological Jesus.
I mean, every word has multiple definitions, especially a controversial phrase like that. But also: that wasn't the question that was being asked.
This seems like a fundamentally flawed analogy. The choice of the year 1 as the starting point of the Gregorian calendar was arbitrary, meaningless and didn't refer to any actual historical event (even most historians no longer believe Jesus Christ was born in that specific year), but changing calendars is an enormous hassle, so we're stuck with this one even if it's based on something which is ultimately arbitrary and irrelevant. With you so far.
But the "clusters" that are based around the words "male" and "female" are not meaningless and arbitrary. In fact, the concepts associated with these words have more predictive power than almost anything in the biological (never mind social) sciences. For instance: 100% of human babies born via natural birth or C-section were gestated in the womb of a person whose body produced large gametes i.e. a female person. Conversely, 100% of the human people who impregnated another human person were people whose bodies produced small gametes i.e. male people.
Of course there's loads of ancillary, arbitrary and irrelevant nonsense associated with these two categories of human being (there's no reason that people whose bodies produce small gametes shouldn't wear pink clothes or dresses). But pointing out that there's loads of ancillary irrelevant nonsense associated with a given category of entity doesn't mean that the category itself is meaningless, or that the category doesn't "cleave reality at the joints" in a manner demonstrative of underlying physical laws. Boats still float on the water even if they are given a male name and no one gets around to smashing a bottle of champagne against the hull. "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
If you're measuring by gametes, then post-menopausal women are a third gender, and the same gender as a eunuch. Does that really seem like it cleaves reality at the joints?
That seems to be an attempt to make others adopt your frame that it is possible to change genders. If it is not assumed that it is possible to change genders, then it explains quite handily why a pre-pubescent or post- menopausal female is still considered a woman, and a post- castration male a man.
In biology there is always a "when functioning properly" attached to descriptions. A heart pumps blood "when functioning properly." A kidney filters waste "when functioning properly." A female organism produces large gametes at the species-appropriate point in the life cycle "when organs are functioning properly." Reproduction is generally only applicable at certain times in an organism's life cycle, but a bitch that isn't in heat is still a bitch.
I mean, you can change heart conditions and kidney conditions, why not everything else? We treat "people who have heart problems" as a discrete category regardless of whether it's congenital or not. No one sane is going around saying "well, your heart USED to function properly, so it's ridiculous to suggest you can transition into not functioning properly"
Also, really, "bitch"? C'mon, try to have some manners :)
The equivalent to changing heart conditions would be to go from a infertile to fertile, which happens all the time without changing sex. I'm not convinced you understand me and I don't know any way to be clearer.
We do have categories for female too young to be fertile - girl. But going from girl to woman is not a change in sex/gender, just a change in age. And going from infertile to fertile is not a change in sex/gender, just a change in health.
Do you not know what a bitch is or are you being cute? I would never call a woman a bitch, we are different species.
Edit: it's like you are claiming that someone with heart disease isn't in the phylum Chordata. A disease does not change a classification.
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