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Then why don't you provide such a scheme? Why so few on the left have given precise definition of a woman that got traction. The left keeps extremely vague on the topic what is a woman, the only concrete thing that they say is that trans women are women.
Seconding this challenge. The left has collectively choked to death on the "what is a woman" meme and failed to even articulate any sort of attempt at an answer. Every single time I've ever deployed it anywhere I've gotten a bunch of circular logic and hand-waving in response, and nothing of substance.
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.
How do they know whether or not they "identify" as a "woman" if that particular word isn't associated with any actual characteristics? You've reduced it to a meaningless noise. 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.
I guess the definition that transgender people are actually using, the set of characteristics they compare themselves to in order to determine if this particular word describes their "identity" or not, is... what, a secret nobody needs to know?
Typical nonsense answer on your part, and clearly not a "definition" actually being used by anyone on any side. The one trans people actually employ to make decisions remains unspoken for another day. What a surprise.
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.)
If I ask someone for a definition of the word goth, I expect them to produce something containing at least some actual attributes that I can compare with actual people in order to determine whether it applies. What I don't expect is for them to contort themselves in order to give a "definition" that contains absolutely no actual terms whatsoever, as you've done here.
The transgender movement clearly has some definition of the word "woman" that means something. People are comparing themselves to some set of attributes in order to determine that their identity is expressed by the word "woman" and not "man" or "blorb" or "fish" or anything else.
But apparently the nature of that actual practiced definition is some kind of secret that its advocates refuse to divulge even when loudly challenged on the matter for years on end. Kind of crazy, isn't it? I mean people might disagree vehemently with... say... Marxists or anarcho-capitalists, but at least those people don't start doing a desperate semantic tap dance the moment someone asks them what words like labor or property mean.
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!")
Pardon me for responding to this a second time in order to ping your notifications, but out of everything said in this exchange this seems very salient:
I'm quite curious whether you're willing to tell either of them that they're full of crap. If you'll never contradict sincere self-identification under any circumstance then it really is the only thing that actually matters to you.
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".)
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