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I think it’s a consequence, in part because of the utilitarian approach most self described rationalists have. Utilitarian philosophy doesn’t have any inherent moral principles other than “minimize harm.” The problem comes when you have a group that’s defined “telling the truth” as “causing harm.” Theres no leverage to push back with. You can’t say “I refuse to tell lies” because that’s not really a base level moral principle of utilitarian moral thinking. The argument would take the form of “I don’t want to tell lies”, but unless you can show that you telling a lie leads to worse consequences than “trans woman committing suicide because you hurt their feelings,” it’s not something you can support under that moral code. It end up being “suicide vs my desire to tell the truth.” Truth loses.
Thing is, the problem with this view is that "trans women are not women" is not a universally-accepted truth--if anything, it is a matter of fundamental values conflict. To you, it is truth, but to trans women, it is the opposite. The only thing that points to objective reality is a trans person's birth identity--but the entire point of being transgender is to leave said identity behind as thoroughly and quickly as possible. You're not going to be able to do more than keep referring to The Artist Formerly Known As Prince as just "Prince."
It may not be a universally-accepted truth, but it is a scientific truth. We're a sexually dimorphic species. There are plenty of tests which easily tell the two groups apart with 99.99% accuracy, and if you're MtF you'd sure as hell better inform your doctor of that fact rather than acting like you're just a normal woman.
Joe Blow down the street thinks he's Napoleon. So, it's not a "universally-accepted truth" that he's not Napoleon. And maybe he gets violent if you don't affirm his Napoleonness in person, so there are cases where feeding his delusion is the path of least resistance. There's a "fundamental values conflict" there. But it remains an objective truth that he's not Napoleon.
I think this is a category error. It would be a bit like saying, "Scientifically speaking, an in-law is not your relative." Like, sure, I have no biological relationship to my mother-in-law, but we have a societal convention that marriage creates kin relationships, to not just my wife, but her whole family.
Similarly, it would be obtuse to say something like, "Scientifically speaking, 'adopted children' do not exist." Again, we normally consider the parent-child relationship to be biological, but adopted children and adoptive parents are granted an honorary parent-child relationship as a societal convention.
I think transness is best explained as an honorary social status. It has a family resemblance to institutions like the sworn virgins of Albania, or Queen Hatshepsut's honorary maleness. It's just an emerging social role within some Anglo-European societies, where a person of one sex declares that they would like to live as the other sex, usually adopting as much of the appearance of the opposite sex as possible and requesting treatment appropriate to that adopted sex role. It's not "scientific" to say, "transwomen are women", but neither is saying, "Augustus was Julius Ceasar's son." But we shouldn't expect all "true" statements to be true in a scientific way, rather than in an intersubjective cultural way.
Er, but "man" and "woman" really do have an objective scientific meaning, unlike "relative", which is a social convention. (Note that it would be equally incorrect to say "an in-law is your blood relative".) So I don't agree with your analogies; saying "trans women are women" is just an incorrect statement of fact, rather than describing social conventions.
That said, I do think your framing of transness as a social status is reasonable. If we were simply allowed to say someone was "living as the other sex", rather than the Orwellian thought control that the ideologues insist on, I think it wouldn't be nearly as controversial.
I'm not sure that I've heard the objective, scientific meaning of "man" and "woman" that doesn't fall prey to the Diogenes-style "behold Plato's man" objection.
I think a gamete-based definition is a strong option (and Trump seems to agree, based on his EO) or a cluster-of-traits definition. But even those have their flaws.
And even aside from core definitions, I think this ignores the way words often operate at many levels. A "bear" is centrally an animal, but if I call a bear-shaped toy or a fictional bear character a "bear", I'm stretching and skewing the word in a way that is immediately intuitively understandable to an English speaker, even though in a real, literal sense I'm not actually talking about any kind of bear at all.
A "woman" could centrally be an "adult human of the sex that produces large gametes", and we could still allow for stretched usages like calling a particular type of game piece in a board game a "woman", or granting trans women the status of honorary "women."
Isn't that the very crux of the issue? The big problem for trans activists is that using woman to describe a trans woman isn't immediately intuitively understood. That's why they need to oppress people into it.
Calling an adoptive child "my son", or my wife's mother "mother-in-law" isn't intuitive either. It is a social convention concerning common ways we stretch and skew language.
Calling an adoptive child "my son" is cromulent in the majority of the contexts where it comes up, because a majority of the mind-independent facts about reality conveyed by the term (chiefly, the processes involved in parenting a child) are still highly correlated with the term's usage - and the cases where the distinction matters (medicine, childbirth, cultural/legal distinctions) come up infrequently enough that these contexts typically warrant a clarifying distinction (adopted son), if they're ever mentioned at all.
Calling my wife's mother "mother-in-law" could only be described as unintuitive in the sense that nothing is left to the intuition, because the obvious distinction between objective and intersubjective information is directly encoded in the term.
I'll grant that there are languages and cultures where the same term can be used for "mother" and "mother-in-law", or where it is inappropriate to refer to a ward as "my son", and these use cases feel unintuitive to someone brought up without these linguistic or cultural practices. But I suggest that those languages and cultures arrived at their way of expressing these relationships because some of the mind-independent facts about reality conveyed by the terms in those languages or cultures are also more or less relevant to communication in those languages or cultures. And what's relevant to communication in those languages or cultures has historically been a consequence of many evolutionary adaptations generated by divergent selective pressures, such as geography, resource availability, proximity to other cultures and languages, etc.
I think the extent to which the language is being stretched and skewed in your examples is greatly overstated. Compare with: calling an adoptive child or my wife's mother "my flesh and blood" isn't intuitive, because it's not correlated with the (much more specific) mind-independent facts about reality that this language usually implies. A tenuous argument can be made for the wife's mother, in the sense that a flesh and blood bond is formed through a biological child, but it's indirect enough to be unintuitive. For an adopted child, I can't imagine any usage other than simile or metaphor, which is again indirect enough to be unintuitive. Calling an adoptive child and my wife's mother (with the implied familial relations) "my flesh and blood" is quite a stretch for the language, and we must retreat to subjective experiences (how I feel about the emotional bonds I share with my family) or abstract metaphors (religious covenant) to make sense of it - or maybe it doesn't make sense, and it's a lie.
It is precisely the degree to which the language is stretched and skewed by a non-central usage, relative to the information conveyed by a central usage, that determines how likely we are to permit it into everyday parlance.
With all of that in mind, consider: I've been reading a bunch of your comments to get a better understanding of your model of honorary social statuses, and I think the choice of the word "honorary" adds an implied meritorious connotation that isn't actually present. In my model of communication, languages are locally-optimizing compression schemes for transmitting information, relying on a common set of shared mind-independent facts about reality and presumed-to-be-shared subjective experiences, preferences, and tastes; intersubjective contexts such as culture and law are transforms applied to the language to modify the correlation between terms and the set of objective and subjective information they compress. The primary driver of the evolution of language is communicative fitness, which tends to map more closely to things like efficiency or clarity, than to something like merit. This isn't to say that deliberate linguistic engineering is impossible, or even necessarily unusual; nevertheless, I think a lot of your default examples of "honorary status" are not some top-down special award conferred by society upon the edge cases which then filtered down into everyday parlance, but are instead "close enough" practical communicative terminology that eventually required special intersubjective considerations as the edge cases naturally bubbled up from everyday parlance and encountered gaps, contradictions, and disputes in existing cultural, legal, and societal frameworks. In other words, I think calling this phenomenon "honorary status" inverts cause and effect by implication of merit.
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