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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   28424 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 2, 2025

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What is a woman?

I had an epiphany a while back and it's so obvious in retrospect that I'm mad about it. And I don't have anyone else to talk about it with, so you people can suffer this.

They actually don't know what a woman is.

Not everyone. I'm not saying there aren't any AGPs, or bad actors, or just people with extreme dysphoria. But a significant subset, including among the supporters? They actually just don't know.

Like, literally. They are not dissembling. They are not fucking with you. It's not Kolmgorov Complicity. They actually do not have a mental construct for "woman" that is a distinct referent class from a mental construct labeled "man".

I think this is the intersection of a couple of different things.

First, if a core conservative flaw is Othering, perhaps the core progressive flaw is the Typical Mind Fallacy. Think of the guy who can't even pretend to believe that fetuses have souls. Or the dude who looks at a religious extremist screaming "I love killing women and children in the name of my God!", and thinks "This person would adopt all of my beliefs about queer theory if they were just a bit less poor and uneducated and oppressed." Why on earth would that provincial fool do any better at understanding the alien category of "women"?

Especially with the elephant in the room, feminism, insisting that there are no meaningful between men and women that could justify any discrepancy in representation in any professional field. Women are just like men and want the exact same things, right? So, what exactly are the differences you're allowed to talk about?

(Writing prompt: explain gender variances in readership between romantasy and milscifi... to HR.)

And the cruel irony is that a lot of progressive men can traverse that minefield. Just blame the other men for gatekeeping and emotional immaturity. It's not a fair answer. It's not a true answer. But it threads the needle. There are plenty of people who can accomplish that task, because they have the mental agility and verbal IQ to mouth the platitudes while internally running logic straight out of a Hoe Math video.

It creates this doublethink world where everyone is supposed to know what a woman is and how to treat them differently, but never acknowledge the source of that knowledge, or openly admit to any real world implications. In fact, they have to actually deny that knowledge in a mass gaslighting. Remember Darwin? He was doing that all the time. A critical precursor to this epiphany was that time he pulled the mask down a little bit, and expressed his annoyed bewilderment that the rest of us spectrum-y nerds were taking progressive politics literally, instead of understanding it as a cynical exercise in tricking other men into acting like dumbasses.

Now what about the guys who aren't that mercenary cynical socially adroit? What happens when we combine the preceding socially-required doublethink with the common autistic struggle to model other minds? Remember that autistic-to-trans pipeline? Yeah.

So what the hell even is a woman, if you struggle to understand other people in general, and you don't think you're allowed to notice any impactful differences between men and women and all of the smart and successful people in your (blue) tribe sneer at the idea of any meaningful differences? The resulting rationalization is like a pastiche of the Jack Nicholson line: "I think of a man, and then add some cuteness and whimsey".

Which is, I observe, is exactly what it looks like when a pro-T prog guy tries to write women characters. They write women as men with some shallow "loli Dylan Mulanney" cuteness, because they don't actually have a mental model of "women" as having any differences in mentality, life experiences, preferences, traits, qualities or viewpoints compared to men. "A woman is a dude who spends 12 hours writing spreadsheets about Warhammer 40k battleships and then adds a heart emoji and a tee hee at the end. Don't deadname her, bigot."

And terfy ladies, you didn't just sow the seeds here. You plowed the fields, fertilized them, then set up aggressive arrangements of killbot scarecrows to fend off any threats to the seeds. I'm not sure how you can recover from that without rewriting a significant portion of third wave feminism, but maybe that's a me problem.

How would you explain to an autistic teenage boy the differences between boy people and girl people? In a way that provides useful guidance and doesn't make T seem like a normal thing for any boy who isn't obsessed with sports? In a way that let's them successfully navigate the differences?

How do you teach them to actually understand the difference?

... I don't think this is a good model. Even if you absolutely must frame it to sneer...

So, there's a joke that goes around in immigration contexts, where the CATO set think nationality is magic dirt, and national culture is food. And that's not a steelman, but it's not exactly an unfair criticism, either; there's a ton of long-built stuff just from one part of the US to another. If Alex Nowrasteh ended up in a SAW movie trap, you'd maybe get him to admit that cultural norms vary from one country to another rather than gnaw his own foot off, but I wouldn't bet on it. The idea that cultures tied to location of origin isn't just taboo, it's either unimaginable or a taboo behind a taboo. Nationality becomes what someone wants to do, in its most visible and immediate form.

What's that look like for gender, if a characteristic is only what the person wants to do? Well, what you were born with is a lot less actively chosen than what you carry in your pants, which is still a lot less actively chosen than what your call yourself. And that's clearly meaningless.

... but if you poke at it, that's not that incoherent. Yes, there are some obvious political compromise at the absolute edges (why is this butch a cis woman and this bitch trans male? why is that a femboy and that a transwoman?). But there's actually a lot of characteristics and terms we use like that: I use my current job title to describe my area of expertise, not the one I went to college over, and you'd probably be kinda weirded out if I used the field I started out with or what my family has historically done.

It's just not something you care about, and you see this as replacing a much more important term and concept. And it’s pretty reasonable to care more about what someone’s got in their pants than whether it’s wrapped in boxers or panties, and whether they want sir or ma’am even less. But that frame or most of the downstream characteristics are no more inaccessible to them than it is to you; the existence of "cis woman" as a term is a recognition of it.

Now, switching out 'trans woman' for 'lifestyle crossdresser' and 'trans man' for 'tomboy' isn't something the trans side is willing to offer for historical reasons even if soccons would accept it (and soccons wouldn't accept it, if they did). Perhaps even more critically, it won't solve the problems you or most soccons actually have, here. There are serious and difficult questions about how much we're willing to tradeoff opportunity costs for one group against another group's ability to reinvent themselves (am I talking about 'ban the box' or anti-college-diploma efforts?), of how welfare and entitlements need prioritize things that are actively undesirable to the wild majority of voters, of freedom of self-expression against social and regulatory norms, so on and so forth.

Everything before those questions is just disputing definitions.

and soccons wouldn't accept it, if they did

I mean, alienating people who also don't like social conservatives, don't care how you dress, and don't care who you fuck, seems like a good way to make those questions more difficult.

They actually don't know what a woman is.

Who are them which you mean? Are they in the room with us right now?

If you mean the LGBT* movement, I think you will find that they have plenty of cis-female members and allies. Surely these would know what it means to be a woman?

If you mean m2f trans people, you might be right that their idea of what a woman is might be different from the median idea of womanhood expressed by ciswomen in systematic ways. For example, it might be that for your warhammer nerd, rather than being driven to pursue some high platonic ideal of womanhood centered around social connections and care work has autogynophilia -- the thought of having boobs turns her on. Not that I find anything wrong with that. By contrast, I would expect there to be an anti-correlation between being trans and being unconditionally asexual, because if you are a man driven to do care work, that is a totally valid occupation for men today, and if you are a woman wanting to fix car engines, that is likewise fine. (Giant caveat here is that as a cis-by-default, I might not get people for whom gender is a big deal. Presumably, there are trans people for whom their transness is completely divorced from anything sexual, who knew that people were using the wrong pronouns for them based on the role models of men and women they observed at age eight, long before they even learned what the naughty bits were and how they worked.) Still, the autogynophile conception of woman has some significant intersection with the cis conception, I think. People being attracted to you and engaging in costly signaling to persuade you to have sex with them is not a universal experience of womanhood, but still a rather defining one, I imagine.

If we propose that any definition of womanhood should at least encompass all the adult female humans who have not explicitly rejected that label, then that definition of womanhood will by necessity be very broad. Sure, it will encompass the kind stay-at-home mum as a central example, but it will also include Margret Thatcher, car mechanics, butch lesbians, your odd XX warhammer nerd, nymphomaniacs, dominas, ruthless businesswomen, and so on. It would be really bad style to tell that car mechanic that she is not feminine enough to deserve the label woman. And once that is accepted, I think it would also be bad style to police the conduct of trans-women more restrictively. "Yes, Tina is a woman despite being a warhammer nerd, but you see, she was born with a uterus. You were not, so you will need to try to find a more suitable hobby before calling yourself a woman."

who have not explicitly rejected that label

This seems irrelevant?

And once that is accepted, I think it would also be bad style to police the conduct of trans-women more restrictively.

Men are, of course, welcome to have whatever (legal) hobbies their hearts desire.

How would you explain to an autistic teenage boy the differences between boy people and girl people? In a way that provides useful guidance and doesn't make T seem like a normal thing for any boy who isn't obsessed with sports? In a way that let's them successfully navigate the differences?

Well, #1 I'd make him do some sports. That's the easiest way for any teen to get on the path of appreciating the differences between men and woman. That girl who was good at tag? Guess what, when you both at 15 shes no good anymore. Even the slow boys are beating her. And physical activities involving even a modicum of contact like basketball? Forget it. Its not just that she can barely jump by comparison, its that any man that does even a little physical activity can just move her. And, its actually scary in many ways, because you will be afraid that you are going to break her. Which you could easily do on accident.

Well, #1 I'd make him do some sports. That's the easiest way for any teen to get on the path of appreciating the differences between men and woman. That girl who was good at tag? Guess what, when you both at 15 shes no good anymore

Eh, actually 15 is still in the danger zone. Girls will have started puberty 1-2 years ahead (12-13) and so at 15 will still be ahead or apace. The boys will overtake them, of course, but sometimes not quite at 15. It's just at the inflection point.

Eh, actually 15 is still in the danger zone. Girls will have started puberty 1-2 years ahead (12-13) and so at 15 will still be ahead or apace

The adult women world champion football team is losing to the under-16 boys' teams (not even the champions) regularly.

Obviously the average man is much stronger than the average woman, and elite female athletes cannot compete at all against elite male athletes, but I think you and a few posters here are exaggerating the disparity because there’s no way the “slow boys” can compete with actual athletic women.

When I was forced to play basketball in high school PE class, there were some girls who played with the boys, and I can tell you from first hand experience, a clumsy autistic nerd who’s just getting into shape absolutely cannot just move a 5’10 elite female athlete with broader shoulders than him.

Like, I was in OK-ish shape and could do a 5k in 21min, and there were girls who did it in 17mim. Sure, there were boys who could do it in 15min, and most girls did it in 25min or more, but I didn’t stop to think about the statistical distributions, I just saw that there were both boys and girls way ahead of me.

Just look at female athlete records in any sport, compared to the mean or even advanced male performance.

When I was forced to play basketball in high school PE class, there were some girls who played with the boys, and I can tell you from first hand experience, a clumsy autistic nerd who’s just getting into shape absolutely cannot just move a 5’10 elite female athlete with broader shoulders than him.

The existence of such a person is a failure of the public schools.

I agree with you with regards to comparing elite female athletes with average guys. But the fact is almost no high school has even one such elite female athlete. Under a proper physical fitness regimen, if the school held a 1v1 tug of war competition girls would win against guys like 5% of the time. That there are so many weak and feeble men is a choice propagated by the system that not only doesn't prioritize physical fitness, it actively discourages it for all but the top percentages. That is why you have guys thinking girls can beat them at things. Because those 20% are working out everyday while he eats potato chips and does nothing. If he merely did 20 minutes of running and 20 minutes of lifting every other day he'd instantly be in the top 5% of females.

I am by no means an elite athlete. That said, I once faced a girl who would go on to be an Olympian in a 1v1 match. I won. It was not close. I wasn't even fully into puberty at the time. I was embarrassed by the existence of the match.

The fact is, if you are losing to girls as a guy in basically every sport but super long distance swimming they are substantially outworking you. If you told George Washington that his country would be dominated by places of child education wherein the average kid just sits all day and cant run a 2 mile sprint to notify the neighbor you need some butter for a pie, he'd be appalled. Movement is the solution. It is, of course, pain as well. But pain is weakness leaving the body.

I don’t disagree that it’s appalling that physical fitness being neglected for the majority (although calling men “weak” and “feeble” as opposed to just unhealthy is an odd choice of language). It doesn’t really matter for the main point that there’s elite female athletes, but it’s still important to know that the delta is not that big at the extremes. The top female athletes are about ~10% worse than the top male ones, and if you look at something like a 5k run, the top females today are better than the top males from the 1930s. That’s way closer than most posters here would suggest, and to compete with female Olympians in most sports you’d still have to be in like the top 0.1% fittest men. The average Joe, even with a decent amount of training, doesn’t stand a chance.

But that’s getting aside from the main point. How exactly is knowing that he can easily surpass most women at sports with relatively little training supposed to dissuade the hypothetical autistic teenage boy from transitioning? If anything it might backfire and make him stop exercising altogether to match more female levels of performance/muscularity (and on estrogen, male performance is drastically reduced anyway).

I fed your comment into Gemini 2.5 Pro, and it came up with an incredibly insightful answer meant to be shared with these supposedly struggling men. Unfortunately, the majority opinion here frowns on reproducing AI output, so I'll be uncharacteristically catty and keep it to myself. Anyone curious can copy and paste for the same result, I'd presume.

Well it would be a similar result, but not the same result. To synthesise what it told me into a sentence it was basically "stereotypes are real but just a guide, people are a composite of their genes and their upbringing."

I don't think there's a rule against clearly attributed AI output. And I'm also curious.

...this is even worse than just posting the damn slop.

I'm glad I posted this because the responses revealed a serious flaw in my explanation.

I very specifically do not mean "they don't know what a female is". They get that, for the most part. I'm talking about the internal experience of womanhood, the preference for faces over mechanics, the keen interest in social networks and how much a man makes and the low-key rape fetish. Instead, when they think about the differences between men and women, they think the women are just smaller men. It parses the same way you would consider the differences between The Rock and Kevin Hart. They treat their female friends and girlfriends like a guy, and then don't understand why it backfires. To them, a woman is just a guy with a vagina in a skirt. So if a person with a penis puts on a skirt and claims to be a woman, what's the difference?

And the solution is to have other men explicitly teach them about the differences in perspective. The full Boomer Wisdom.

Or they can just watch Hoe Math videos.

Instead, when they think about the differences between men and women, they think the women are just smaller men. To them, a woman is just a guy with a vagina in a skirt.

And from that, witness the fundamental anxiety: there are women who qualify as this (tomboys are not trans men, though they function like the platonic ideal of one, including attitude and general outlook on life- there are women who just act like this more generally without specific tomboy markers, and they're harder to spot, but they'll always show you who they are eventually), and there are women who do not.

Women who qualify tend to get lots of high-quality male attention, for reasons that are blatantly obvious (the self-awareness alone makes a much better partner, to say nothing of the other stuff; hostile unproductive attitude, which is something TERFs don't solve, is corrosive). Pick-me-s. This makes Mean Girls jealous.

So, how best to attack such a woman? By doing the same thing to these men-women that they did to men more generally- take away their spaces, destroy what was good about them through gender politics. That is the sole purpose of having men in women's sports: destroying the spaces where participating in a male-type pursuit is productive, and making them as miserable as every other worthless bitch (and now a disadvantage in the instinctual quest for the highest sexual price that defines womanhood). Mission accomplished.

The spear counterpart to this behavior is, of course, as you described:

that time he pulled the mask down a little bit, and expressed his annoyed bewilderment that the rest of us spectrum-y nerds were taking progressive politics literally, instead of understanding it as a cynical exercise in tricking other men into acting like dumbasses.

I'm talking about the internal experience of womanhood, the preference for faces over mechanics, the keen interest in social networks and how much a man makes and the low-key rape fetish

"Lived experience" of a thing is not required to know how expressions of it can be destructive.

I’m not entirely convinced that anyone can know the internal experience of any group that you are not a member of. You can approximate, sure, but my question to anyone claiming to be having the internal experience of being the opposite sex is “what does being that gender feel like exactly?” Like, im a woman and im not sure I could explain the feeling of femaleness to another person. And I’m certain I could never understand the internal experience of maleness. I could approximate, but my thought of what maleness feels like (interest in competition, visual based sexuality, practicality, and disinterest in arts) would likely offend males much like any other stereotype even if true in other areas.

I’m not entirely convinced that anyone can know the internal experience of any group that you are not a member of.

Don't worry about "knowing". Settle for "being able to usefully predict the results of". For example, I have read books from an author with a feminine name that I knew literally nothing about as a person. And halfway through my brain just says "Sorry, but there is no chance a woman wrote something this spectacularly autistic", and then I go look and of course the author is trans. There are tells, in what gets highlighted and how things are approached.

Perhaps, but the offense comes more because discussing them quickly pattern-matches into angry venting (in the "I don't see the use of you, let us clear you away" Chesterton's Fence sense).

That, and "knowing"[1] someone in public is just fucking obnoxious. "I read in a book that You People do X, so I'm going to do X then get frustrated that it's not working" kind of comes off like stealing in the... sense that you've taken information that wasn't being emitted then drawn conclusions based on that to gain a personal advantage. Compare the "I read that black people like fried chicken, so we'll serve it for Black History Month" thing for a more neutral? example.

But then, how to balance "making the attempt to understand" against "there's a right way and a wrong way to do this", combined with the fact that the people who aren't all that experienced (or competent, in some cases) at the former are less likely to understand the required secondary knowledge of the latter? And then you have people who want to do it for the wrong reasons anyway.

[1] I find the Biblical meaning of "knowing" to be instructive here (and as a consequence, take being trusted with certain other kinds of information more seriously than I do the knowledge gained by 'merely' sleeping with someone; there are plenty of things that can be way more destructive than that).

And I’m certain I could never understand the internal experience of maleness

Sure, but when people say that, a "so you don't have the right to call them out for destructive behaviors that I'm trying to normalize for myself" is being smuggled in. You don't need to internally experience being an X to have the right [when it is within my political power] to impose costs designed to constrain nastiness that the statistically-average member of X exhibits.

I’m not entirely convinced that anyone can know the internal experience of any group that you are not a member of.

Forget groups, I’m not entirely convinced that anyone can know the internal experience of anyone else.

We just had a whole discussion about how one man thought no men would be willingly be kicked in the balls to have a child. And was immediately corrected several times over by multiple other men. So clearly even for men, for a fairly universal experience of being kicked in the balls our individual internal experiences vary massively.

Well that's just explicitly denied by ideology. Everything that you described is what Butler would call a performance of gender, and argued to not be innate.

That's where this whole thing starts, that's what gender as a concept is: social constructivism.

I agree that it's probably not true and renders the endeavour impossible, but let's be fair, they understand what a woman is, they just want to change that or destroy that, because they think the world will be better for it.

What is a whale? Or a crab, a tree, a planet, a psychdelic drug, cannibalism, a champagne wine, jazz music, a poem...?

What is "knowing what a woman is?" If Person A shares your conception, but cannot articulate it, while Person B has a different conception and can pass an ideological turing test for many different conceptions of womanhood, who would you recognize as "knowing what a woman is" and why?

Keep seeing same link. Keep making same response

If "is a fish" really were just semantic, then by the same mechanism "has tiny hairs" would be just semantic. So there would be no facts based on which you can classify things... The only thing that makes this theory remotely workable is that you already know which things you want to apply it too. Its pure Humpty-Dumpty-ism in practice.

Good words refer to clusters in thingspace.

In Scott's article, this is a shared understanding between "you" and King Solomon, because both are assumed to have read the sequences. Both can happily agree on a definition of "hair" at least as long as no disputed example (such as the hair on a coconut) becomes relevant.

The thing with thingspace is that it has a really high dimensionality, and often people do not care about all of the axis. Solomon is basically saying "for the projection of thingspace I am interested in, it makes sense to classify a whale as dag.

In mathematics, you can really build your definitions bottom-up, so that new definitions only contain stuff already defined (as well as pre-agreed syntax, such as quantors). In all other human endeavors, not so much. Every definition is its own can of worms, and it is highly practical to be able to open up a minimal number of them, for example to debate what should be included as a mammal without pre-emptively also debating what "hair", "water", "leg", "swim", and "definition" mean, exactly.

Yes, this is another example of asserting that there are two kinds of words, and that the "pragmatic" ones should be optimised according to reasons provided using the "primary" ones, without explaining how to distinguish the two. Yuds version is better in that it at least gives you a concept of a plan he might propose - like "primary properties are continuous" - but it doesnt give us a system that could be evaluated for corresponding to our epistemic situation, or even being coherent. I also dont think his version of "optimise" has considerations like "Norton really wants to be an emperor so lets include him in the category":

Suppose we mapped all the birds in the world into thingspace, using a distance metric that corresponds as well as possible to perceived similarity in humans

This helps, because you have to describe your "optimisation target" in terms of primary words to avoid circularity - I doubt the Yud primary words could actually be used for the Scott objective. For the Scott version, you need to make it so "aggregate human preferences" is a real word, but "woman" is not. For an illustrative example of this problem, see here:

Similarly, if I’m thinking about whether shrimp are conscious, I’m thinking about how shrimp are similar to and different from creatures we normally think of as ‘conscious’, and what these differences indicate about whether there’s something it’s like to be a shrimp.

where you might notice that "whether there’s something it’s like to be an X" is well established in philosophical discourse as being pretty much exactly as difficult as "consciousness", and has in many ways even started the trend of considering consciousness difficult in analytic philosophy. Thats what happens when your redefinition attempts accidentally hit on one of the terms in the optimisation objective, which happened because youre not systematic about it, because youve convinced yourself its unnecessary by intellectual descent from the exact thing in Scotts post Im objecting to.

(This isnt really relevant to the gender conversation, but one consequence of these cluster words is that all logical arguments, which require language compositionality, come with an asterisk to them. This is highly relevant when you try to use such arguments to convince people of a rather unusual conclusion, where you will not have an opportunity to see if these particular words "empirically describe the cluster well enough for these purposes" until its too late.)

it is highly practical to be able to open up a minimal number of them, for example to debate what should be included as a mammal without pre-emptively also debating what "hair", "water", "leg", "swim", and "definition" mean, exactly

You, on the other hand, seem content with there not being a real distinction, and as far as I can tell youre saying here that my complaint that "this principle requires selective application" is true of Scotts theory and also in reality, without any way to be systematic about it.

When the FTX thing happened recently and people argued about consequentialist justifications for lying, I realised Scotts theory of categories literally cant tell the difference between the truth and the highest-utility-thing-to-say.

How is that supported by anything Scott has written? My interpretation is "categories are an example of 'all models are wrong, but some models are useful' and [I can't remember if this is in that specific essay, but it doesn't really matter] reaching a shared vocabulary for categories is a coordination problem." Scott knows what noble lies are and has written about them:

What if all this stuff about sexism driving away women is all a big hoax? And so after we make women feel safer, stamp out prejudice, enforce common decency, and encourage everyone to treat each other with compassion – darn it, we created a better world for nothing! If the goal is “eliminate malignant sexism” – and surely it should be – why be so upset about one argument for eliminating malignant sexism which might not be entirely accurate?

First, because I’m a heartless thing-oriented systematizer, and I despise bad arguments on principle, and I don’t care if you people-oriented empathizers think they serve a prosocial community-building function.

But second, because this gives fuzzy-empathizing-humanities types a giant hammer with which to beat all sciency-systematizing-utilitarian types forever.

(Don't be shocked that this does not become a call for consequentialists to use noble lies.)

'all models are wrong, but some models are useful'

Yes, what do you think "useful" means? Of course, your evaluation of whats high-utility will have to include all sorts of knock-on effects - but it cant include things like "this is useful to say because its true". This is of course incoherent, you cant actually decide whats high-utility without knowing whats true, and Scott the human knows what truth is when its about normal topics - but thats what the argument of the post implies when taken seriously (you will notice that the section thats actually talking about how language works is very short relative to the post). Theres no conceptual role left for truth, as distinct from "the outcome of usefully structuring language".

Yes, what do you think "useful" means?

Understanding the world, e.g., which hypothetical ancient Hebrewite government ministry would be better suited whale issues.

Those are two different things. Whats useful for dealing with whale hunting is not whats useful for understanding. As for the latter, Scott disagrees with that:

If I’m willing to accept an unexpected chunk of Turkey deep inside Syrian territory to honor some random dead guy – and I better, or else a platoon of Turkish special forces will want to have a word with me – then I ought to accept an unexpected man or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally be considered female if it’ll save someone’s life.

If the only thing you do with whales is hunt, then understanding hunting them is understanding them in general.

Do you think gay conversion therapy is bad? If so, can we make it not-gay-conversion-therapy by insisting that the opposite sex partner we're trying to hook the gay person up with is actually of the same sex?

I'm not sure precisely what scenario you're imagining, but how you describe the people involved doesn't seem like a factor in whether or not that scenario is bad.

How would you explain to an autistic teenage boy the differences between boy people and girl people? In a way that provides useful guidance and doesn't make T seem like a normal thing for any boy who isn't obsessed with sports? In a way that let's them successfully navigate the differences?

The way the Masai tribesmen in What is a Woman? do. Of course progressives can't do that. I never said they could. Just that it is a solved problem. Just like 'strong female characters who actually act like women' was a solved problem... in the BC days(that is, after all, what Hera/Juno is). But woke doesn't want that. Woke is basically progressivism as a totalizing identity.

I think totalizing identity is key here. Scott touches on it a few times, where he talks about what progressive attitudes are identities or not- the post where he said something like 'John and Jane are united by their shared environmentalism, OK, pretty normal, John and Jane are united by their shared support for gun control, pretty weird'. The DR touches on it where it goes on and on about 'hollowing out your religion and wearing it as a skinsuit'. Themotte talks about it with progressivism as a religion. But I think 'gay rites are civil rites' is the most head on treatment. I think back to my childhood- we learned about Elizabeth Ann Seton and Our Lady of Guadalupe, and about how Jesus treated women equally(unlike those saracens America is at war with). In more secular contexts we learned, risibly, that native American religions were proto-Christianity- they believed in 'the great spirit' and lots of them had Jesus analogues(TTBMK, both of those claims are ludicrously false). This very much fit the needs of the church state alliance of 2002. But there is a limit to how much Christianity can accommodate. Woke doesn't have that, or at least it doesn't have to. But obviously there's no woke pope, no woke council of Nicea. There's no woke bible. In analogues to different traditions there's equally no woke Sharia law, no woke imamate, no woke talmud, no woke temples or dalai lama, no woke oracle of delphi. The civil rites religion as a state religion fits the needs of a total state very well. And when you totalize it, some of the prescriptions- like gender equality even if it entails embracing some fictions that are gonna be a rough fit- get taken too far.

People yearn for a totalizing identity. It's comforting for normies to be told what to do, how to think, what each day is for, how to interact with whom. It soothes a certain personality type to have the progressive version of apostolic Christianity instead of mere progressivism; woke has saints and a special calendar and observances of near-liturgical set rules. It has moral theology, but not in the autistic legalism of other Abrahamic religions. It has a special priest class which is made, not born. It prides itself on better treatment of women. It claims to be the one truth, and formal adherence is the lion's share of being a good person(not too long ago, I listened to a homily by an SSPX priest who explained that formally practicing traditional Catholicism was just being a good person- almost identical in mentality to 'it's called just being a decent person'. If I find it on youtube I will copy the link over.).

I've wondered how the trans-women-are-women meme swept like wildfire among millenials and gen Z.

The main issue, as i see it, is that multiple generations have been taught to believe that anything branded a civil right or a human right is above reproach, so thought leaders and activists are able to elide critical discussion of certain issues entirely. This short-circuiting of the healthy process of deliberation is an inverse of facts-don't-care-about-your-feelings. Progressive-libs who know better see nothing to gain by acknowledging the emperor's lack of clothes if it gets them tarred as MAGA adjacent.

I don't think any of our very logical and factual counterarguments will do much in the long run. TWAW will replicate for as long as there's a social incentive for believing/spreading it.

The way the Masai tribesmen in What is a Woman? do.

Never saw the documentary, but found the scene on yt:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=6yAnHFj4IK0

Especially with the elephant in the room, feminism, insisting that there are no meaningful between men and women that could justify any discrepancy in representation in any professional field. Women are just like men and want the exact same things, right? So, what exactly are the differences you're allowed to talk about?

This did short-circuit my brain for quite a while. Arguably the whole trans thing is a massive conspiracy to genocide and/or cause misery to the autists - even if they don't get you to sterilize yourself, navigating sex differences without ever being able to acknowledge their existence will be quite a minefield.

And terfy ladies, you didn't just sow the seeds here. You plowed the fields, fertilized them, then set up aggressive arrangements of killbot scarecrows to fend off any threats to the seeds. I'm not sure how you can recover from that without rewriting a significant portion of third wave feminism, but maybe that's a me problem.

On one hand, not wrong, on the other we've all been subjected to psyop upon psyop, and it's not like the male counterpart - "Tits and beer liberalism" - has nothing to answer for here. As long as they're willing to move on and work with men in a constructive capacity (and I've seen some indication of that happening, the Men's Sheds drama in the UK got quite a pushback from TERFs), I'm for cutting them some slack.

I think knowing what a woman is is pretty deeply rooted in our biology and no amount of gaslighting and enforced consensus can change that. 1984, famously about the Party's ability to make people say black is white and up is down and war is peace, spent a lot of time describing how much effort went into enforcing these edicts, and the implicit message there (though not the one Orwell was getting at) is that people actually knew the truth, even if they knew better than to say it. Even the most loyal enthusiasts might convince themselves they really believed war was peace and we had always been at war with Oceania, but people would slip because they couldn't actually turn off memory and reason entirely.

So it is even with the most devoted adherents of trans ideology. They tell themselves they really, truly believe trans women are women and "woman" is just an arbitrary socially constructed label. But they don't actually want to fuck a person who clocks as the wrong sex (it's more than just genitals, we all know this). On a deep, instinctual level they recognize the difference. To the degree that they are sincere, they may convince themselves TWAW but they have to work at it to keep their words and behavior in line with what they claim to believe or they will slip up. And I think actually a lot of them are insincere and will ditch TWAW as soon as it is no longer the thing all good progressives believe. You'll see then how attached they really were to this professed lack of difference.

That said, you are right about some things. A lot of unphysical guys who've never done sports or martial arts really don't understand just how significant the physical differences between men and women are. If their last time in physical competition was middle school, they probably knew some girls who were more athletic than a lot of boys and hadn't yet seen just how rapidly that changes once the T hits.

I have to admit to being a nerdy, awkward kid who hated sports in school, and I was one of those guys... until I took up martial arts as an adult. At first I was a little confused that a woman with a higher belt wasn't wiping the mat with me the way more experienced men did, and that in fact I had to be careful not to hurt her. This was, you might say, a little red-pill moment.

Which is, I observe, is exactly what it looks like when a pro-T prog guy tries to write women characters. They write women as men with some shallow "loli Dylan Mulanney" cuteness, because they don't actually have a mental model of "women" as having any differences in mentality, life experiences, preferences, traits, qualities or viewpoints compared to men. "A woman is a dude who spends 12 hours writing spreadsheets about Warhammer 40k battleships and then adds a heart emoji and a tee hee at the end. Don't deadname her, bigot."

You've read John Scalzi, I see.

And terfy ladies, you didn't just sow the seeds here. You plowed the fields, fertilized them, then set up aggressive arrangements of killbot scarecrows to fend off any threats to the seeds. I'm not sure how you can recover from that without rewriting a significant portion of third wave feminism, but maybe that's a me problem.

TERFs are mostly second wave feminists and very much want to rewrite third wave feminism. Second wavers largely believe that absent the patriarchy, men and women would behave the same, but physical differences are real. Third wavers are the ones who went post-modernist about gender categories.

You've read John Scalzi, I see.

I haven't actually. He never rose high enough on the TBR pile before his antics and personality turned me off. That's not a total dealbreaker for me, but there's a lot of other stuff to read.

But that character trope is a fairly common issue.

I thought Old Man's War wasn't half bad. It's far up from the disgustingly mediocre level of stuff that populates the Hugos these days.

But I don't think Scalzi is ever going to write anything that transcends being formulaic genre fiction. And him not being that great of a character writer probably is a big part of that, never mind the antics.

That said, I don't recommend holding his stuff in the same level of contempt as Martha Wells or something.

All his modern books have the same plot and the same relatively mediocre writing style but they're still fast, enjoyable reads. Grab on the next time you have a 3 hour flight-- they're peak airplane fiction.

Of course we do. The entire debate is meaningless semantics. Obviously there is such a thing as biological sex, obviously there are some differences in behavior of the two biological sexes on average. Obviously there is such a thing as a male brain and female brain. None of that is inconsistent with allowing people to transition. Transgenderism is a transhumanist technological development, not an ideology. The only people who are confused about what a woman is are feminists and christians who think there is some deep meaning to gender roles and gender identity.

Transhumanism is the chief ideology of TESCREAL fascists and extremely right-wing and problematic.

No wonder Moldbug always claims to be the most right wing person in the room.

I notice that for all your discussion of how obvious it is, you did not, yourself, say what a woman is.

Of course we do. The entire debate is meaningless semantics. Obviously there is such a thing as biological sex, obviously there are some differences in behavior of the two biological sexes on average. Obviously there is such a thing as a male brain and female brain.

Many trans activists and progressives now explicitly reject all of those premises.

None of that is inconsistent with allowing people to transition.

There are really only a handful of anti-trans people who literally believe people shouldn't be "allowed" to transition. You are an adult who wants to have surgery and hormones and live your life as the opposite sex? Okay. Probably most conservatives would even be willing to go along and use your preferred pronouns out of politeness. They might think you're mentally ill and should reconsider your life choices, but only assholes go out of their way to "misgender" someone just to make sure you know what they think of you.

It's when the "debate" went far beyond semantics and social kindness that trans people became seen as more than just troubled individuals who deserve sympathy. It's not meaningless semantics when we're talking about puberty blockers for children, or men competing in sports and being housed in women's prisons and taking over women's spaces, or people being shunned or professionally harmed for saying there are four lights.

'Only a handful' is not accurate. The median social conservative believes people with a position of social trust(eg teachers, cops, clergy) shouldn't be allowed to transition, that the fringes who transition should be required to use same-sex restrooms and not ones matching their gender identity(and that if it is a safety issue for FTM's to use the men's then they shouldn't have transitioned), and that using preferred pronouns is a lie. They would refuse to allow their son to wear dresses or use a female name(tolerance for gender bending the other way is typically higher just because gender roles are loosey-goosier).

More to the point, 'homosexuality among consenting adults should be explicitly illegal and a serious crime' still has just-below-20% support in the American public, and most of them believe it should be punishable by death. We can presume that the 15% or so of people who think homosexuals should be hanged also believe gender transition should be illegal. That is a minority, but not a handful.

…Where are you getting your numbers from? I simply cannot believe that support for criminalization of homosexuality approaches 1 in 5, let alone support for construction crane conversion therapy. By my observation, the anti-LGBT crowd generally don’t desire to go on the offensive, they just want to be left alone.

By my observation, the anti-LGBT crowd generally don’t desire to go on the offensive, they just want to be left alone.

Then you probably don't live in the right areas of the country. People still disown their gay kids. There are a lot of very socially conservative spaces in America, they are just not visible online mostly.

Being left alone is clearly not an option. I would speculate the number of people who want to criminalize homosexuality is increasing as a result of being exposed to it more often. I certainly have moved away from a libertarian position for those reasons.

Indeed. As AntiDem put it:

Is the existence of homosexual pride parades reason enough to re-outlaw same-sex sexual intercourse?

You ban it to preserve your society - your faith and traditions - against fatal poisoning by degeneracy.

Fifty years ago, the gay rights movement said that all they wanted was to be left alone to do as they pleased behind the privacy of closed doors. That was a lie. What they really wanted was to upend society in order to serve their own aims, to spread Cultural Marxism, and to bring low our faith and traditions. We know this, because that is what they have actually done. If it is a case of "they are always either at your feet or at your throat", then they shall be at our feet. And so it is: they have proven themselves to be the kind of monster you don't let out of the basement, so next time we won't.

We gave them an inch, they took a mile; next time they get nothing.

Whether or not those conservatives should be required to pay taxes towards your seen-as-elective medical treatments is probably also a sticking point. That one comes up with abortion too, and has with birth control in the past --- I'm not sure if anyone beyond Hobby Lobby really cares quite as strongly there these days.

I know several people who belong to 'christian health sharing ministries' in lieu of insurance because they can't stomach paying for birth control with their premiums.

It's when the "debate" went far beyond semantics and social kindness that trans people became seen as more than just troubled individuals who deserve sympathy.

One additional factor: it's when transness began to be seen as contagious. I don't know if that makes the eventually-anti-trans position look better or worse but there it is.

The problem with this position taking is that the popular messaging and what most activists actually say is against you. So they're either cynically lying or you very transparently are on the outside.

I think it's fair to say that any movement will have people who sincerely believe in the motte and do not believe in the bailey.

What does believing the motte cash out to? If it's mere preference, a transhumanist freedom of form where we let people edit their own bodies as much as they want surely this doesn't imply much in terms of trans women in women's sports, endorsing childhood intervention or nearly any other culture war hot point. Consenting adults can do whatever they want is the old truce if people want to return to it then they shouldn't be on the trans rights advocates side of most disputes.

trans women in women's sports, endorsing childhood intervention or nearly any other culture war hot point

Yep that's the bailey. I'm not trying to speak for the other poster, and it's not my position, but it seems reasonable to me that people who believe the motte but not the bailey can still pick their side based on whether they think it's more important to avoid being caught out in the bailey, or whether defending the motte from people who are 100% anti-trans is still worth it.

What does believing the motte cash out to?

Believing a motte shouldn't "cash out to" partisan/tribal goals.

My point is that believing in the motte version excludes them from the group under discussion. They believe something entirely different. It'd be like a libertarian responding with of course we care about the deficit when discussing whether the people supporting the big beautiful bill care about the deficit. Great that you care but the actual party passing the actual bill isn't listening to you and thinks your concerns are stupid and wrong.

I think your implicit line of argument/theory about the relationship between articulating differences and policing boundaries fails generalisation to the usual counterexamples. Take a boundary that is still policed by most Americans, progressive and traditionalist alike - how do you explain to the autist the difference between black people and white people? You can't take something silly like the one-drop rule, because everyone knows Donald Trump would not enjoy a late bestowal of the n-word pass if it now turned out some great grandmother of his was a castaway African slave, any more than in the discerning conservative's eye anything about the femininity of the serial West Coast testicle shaver would change if it turned out that he did actually have XX chromosomes plus some weird novel genetic abnormality producing the phenotype.

In other words, there is something going on in your post that is similar to "proving too much".

Americans understand the one drop rule makes Meghan Markle black, but not the pope. But race-as-a-spectrum is actually literally arbitrary; there are cultures which see mulattos as not-black. There are cultures which see whiteness as a one drop rule. The same is not true for man and woman.

how do you explain to the autist the difference between black people and white people

I like Brazil's solution: a committee looks at you and then states your race. They don't accept one-drop "my grandmother was a quarter [something]" stories and don't need DNA tests. They look and state the obvious truth. If Elizabeth Warren stood before them, they'd yell "she's white" and be done with it. Because it is perfectly clear that she is white. "I share a common ancestor with some modern Guatemalans around 10 generations ago." Yes, yes. That's called being white.

Categories are fuzzy and sometimes you get a perfect wobbler: someone who is mixed race and self-identifies as some Brazilian racial category, but the committee disagrees. Categories being fuzzy doesn't mean they don't exist. This is an acceptable outcome.

You can't take something silly like the one-drop rule, because everyone knows Donald Trump would not enjoy a late bestowal of the n-word pass if it now turned out some great grandmother of his was a castaway African slave

I see you've missed the recent "the new pope is actually black" discourse elsewhere, you lucky person you! And yes, they're invoking the one drop rule: hey, if under slavery/Jim Crow laws he'd be considered black due to the discriminatory one drop rule, then yeah he counts as black now.

I don't know about Trump, but I think it would be hilarious. Especially in light of the John Oliver "Drumpf" stuff - he's not just descended from a recent immigrant, he is the Second (Just As) Black (As Obama or Kamala) president! 😁

Louisiana's one drop rule never applied that strictly because a large portion of the French speaking white population had a black ancestor somewhere in the family tree, even if you couldn't tell by looking. IIRC the pope identifies as partially creole, which is a catch all term for french-y and not Cajun, but usually is a code word for southern Louisiana black, so it's even more complicated.

But TL;DR is that in 1900 he'd have ridden in the whites section of the train.

Didn't Obama have some very distant claim to descent from ADOS through his white mother? His father was African-(not-American).

Not only a Slave, but the first legally enslaved person under criminal law: an African indentured servant ran away with friends and was caught, his European mates got 4 years extra, but he was sentenced to service his master for life.

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/us/obamas-mother-had-african-forebear-study-suggests.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

records suggested that Mr. Punch fathered children with a white woman, who passed her free status on to those children, giving rise to a family of a slightly different name, the Bunches, that ultimately spawned Mr. Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham.

Quite an interesting colonial story:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Punch_(slave)

Through continued intermarriage with white families in Virginia, the line of Obama's maternal Bunch ancestors probably were identified as white as early as 1720.[15] Members of this line eventually migrated into Tennessee and ultimately to Kansas, where descendants included Obama's maternal grandmother and his mother …. Y-DNA testing of direct male descendants of the Bunch family lines has revealed a common ancestry going back to a single male ancestor of African ethnicity.[15][9][38] Genealogists believe this male ancestor to be John Punch the African. He was probably born in present-day Cameroon in Central Africa, where his particular type of DNA is most common.

That was in the early 1600s and before cattle slavery as an institution though. But cool that Obamas roots are going way back into colonial times.

Edit:
The first black slave “just because” was an indentured servant named John Casor whose (ironically) black master refused to release him: “Although two white planters confirmed that Casor had completed his indentured contract with Johnson, the court still ruled in Johnson's favor.“

how do you explain to the autist the difference between black people and white people?

  1. if they look unambiguously black

  2. if they look ambiguously black and at least one parent is black (recursively)

If the autist is not able to tell if someone looks unambiguously black, there is nothing you can do.

This fails if someone is wearing a good disguise. But that's a general problem with determining anything by sight. This problem also applies in obvious ways to the trans issue.

Compare to a hypothetical progressive definition of women:

  1. if they look unambiguously female

  2. if they look ambiguously progressive, claim to be a woman and at least one woman agrees they are a woman (recursively)

Of course you might be tempted to argue that parentage is somehow more solid as an axis of identity conveyance than being part of the same society, but this would be too convenient since "genetics matter" is a known non-progressive moral precept.

I wouldn't endorse applying this logic to gender, but "I, an outsider, think a person's face-value claim to group affiliation is of ambiguous merit, but a confirmed member of that group endorses their claim, so I will recognize it" isn't per se unreasonable.

this would be too convenient since "genetics matter" is a known non-progressive moral precept.

That's all right, I'm not a progressive.

The other difference between this and defining "woman" is that people who disguise themselves as other races are not really an issue, and the equivalent for women is. If a lot of white people claimed to be black and tried to look black, the definition would no longer work.

that people who disguise themselves as other races are not really an issue

It is maybe less of an issue, but it does come up from time to time. There have been several prominent fake Native Americans within the last few decades. There are fewer examples, but not zero, for other races.

I dont think thats a good analogy. While people do try to police race boundaries sometimes, there is not in fact a consensus sorting everyone into white and black. I would tell our autist about definitely white and definitely black people, and the ones in between will depend on whos making the judgement and whats convenient for them at the time. I dont think progressives are happy with this a model for how transgender should work.

There isn't a consensus sorting of everyone into male and female either, though of course there the disputed set is much smaller (consider the case of that Algerian boxer, Imane Khelif. I do not believe in transitioning or self-id and do not consider any transwoman I am aware of an instance of the class "woman", but I would genuinely struggle to assign them to one of the categories based on what I have heard).

Either way, this should not be relevant - transwomen are in general not saying something that amounts to "there is a fuzzy boundary between men and women, I understand I am somewhere near it, but I contend that on the balance of evidence I should fall on the 'woman' side", but rather "whatever the boundary between men and women is, I am a reasonably central example of the category 'woman'". OP essentially has to contend that the latter is something that is transparently false to his camp and ambiguous to progressives, i.e. whatever notion of women they have is so weak a separator that it can't even refute what to conservatives is a claim that a central example of a man is actually a central example of a woman. OP proposes that the test that evidences this is that they cannot provide a verbal definition of "woman". However, I would argue that the reason people fail to do this is the real or imagined fuzzy boundary of the category - progressives would also have no trouble identifying what they call a definitional core of "unambiguous women", but this would look like "phenotypical women not asserting they are not + progressives in good standing asserting to be women". The same situation holds for the category "black" for either side, where both agree on central examples, the boundaries are fuzzy so few would be comfortable defining an exhaustive predicate and committing to it, and yet neither side is okay with transracialism (central-example whites asserting that they are central-example blacks).

There isn't a consensus sorting of everyone into male and female either

I agree thats the status quo; but success for the trans movement would be creating one. Thats what I said.

they call a definitional core of "unambiguous women", but this would look like "phenotypical women not asserting they are not + progressives in good standing asserting to be women".

I think this goes back to whether the definition by self-identification is circular or not. I think we all, including OP, know that progressives can answer "a woman is whoever says theyre a woman" in response to the question. He must not consider that a real answer.

neither side is okay with transracialism (central-example whites asserting that they are central-example blacks).

Actually, I dont think theyre necessarily fine with non-central people asserting to be either, either.

where both agree on central examples, the boundaries are fuzzy so few would be comfortable defining an exhaustive predicate and committing to it

The difference is that with gender, progressives are accused, IMO accurately, of their criteria ultimately depending on sex stereotypes, and they deny it. The right on race, once its out that they care about it at all, doesnt really mind their categorisation judgements being understood. I dont think progressives even have a theory there, true or not, that they would want to deny.

How do you teach them to actually understand the difference?

The same way it was managed before the revolution: you tell people the truth that men and women differ , and then you impose social costs on the males who can't behave appropriately . No focus on sympathetically explaining this, no "uplifting as Simone Biles demands even as she calls for transmen to be exiled to their own league. That implies ambivalence and people can sniff it out.

Start with unbelieving denial - of course you're not a woman, don't be ridiculous. Then mockery, contempt, maybe informal punishment from their fellow men when they step out of line by doing things like demanding to enter female washrooms (when administrations turn a blind eye men can rectify even the most stubborn)

I'm not convinced that most people are legitimately as clueless as they claim, I think many are just entitled and coddled (hand-wringing about how to get them to see this is,imo, part of the same coddling instinct). Jessica Yaniv knows what he's doing, he's outright malicious imo. Artemis at the very least knows that he makes women feel uncomfortable. He just knows he can get away with it.

But the lawyers are in charge of things now and you live in an age of "zero tolerance" for bullying. These sorts of men are harder to convince because they know they have the option of filing a lawsuit or complaining to some administrator or finding some advocacy group. That's most of it. It's not a matter of rational debate or education if one side can win by tattling to the teacher. It's just about power.

They actually don't know what a woman is.

No, they do.

We know that they do because they're able to distinguish between ciswomen and transwomen with 100% accuracy (or at least, they can achieve the same level of accuracy that everyone else does). They have to be able to do this, otherwise the trans movement would fall apart because no one would be able to consistently identify the trans people in the first place. This requires an implicit model of what a (real) woman is, because they need to be able to distinguish the real women (ciswomen) from the men who simply desire to be women (transwomen).

You seem to be gesturing at this concept here:

It creates this doublethink world where everyone is supposed to know what a woman is and how to treat them differently, but never acknowledge the source of that knowledge, or openly admit to any real world implications.

although I'm not entirely sure what your exact position is here. Do you think there are "thought leaders" at the top of the progressive movement who actually do have an accurate model of reality, followed by a legion of "footsoldiers" who uncritically imbibe the propaganda? I don't think I find this to be very convincing, because even among the "footsoldiers", we can tell from their discourse that they're able to consistently and accurately distinguish between transwomen and ciswomen, and thus they have an at least implicit model of what a woman is, although they may use doublethink to not consciously acknowledge it.

How would you explain to an autistic teenage boy the differences between boy people and girl people?

Well, how would you?

(I don't actually know how I would do it without sounding a bit mean, while also being honest and avoiding overly romanticized depictions. I suppose the most brutally honest and concise way of putting it is that "woman was fashioned by nature for one thing, man for several".)

Trans women are trans women.

Your (correct) point highlights the biggest flaw in their arguments. "Trans women are women", well no they aren't because you already gave them a category called "trans women" which you can obviously identify, is obviously useful to you, and obviously has a meaning. That meaning is: men who are dressing like women, or in other words again: men.

That does not follow. We have tons of sub-categories that are labelled {adjective}-{super category}. As an example "green-apples". They're still apples, but the category of green apples is useful for certain reasons.

This, of course, doesn't mean you're wrong (or right either), but you argument isn't good and it isn't helpful.

The ultimate argument is that the categories of human gender gets weird near the edges, are the parts near the edges part of the super category, part of the other super category, or something else entirely.

You're just continuing down the linguistic treadmill. Are trans-women a distinct category that is different than "cis" women?

Yes, that is why you can identify them as "trans women". Regardless of the semantics: trans woman(2030 parlance) = man(<2030 parlance).

It doesn't matter. The language is simply describing the reality, which is that "trans women" are men.

To use your analogy: if we genetically engineer an apple to be the color orange, it is still an apple, just an orange one. We could call it an "orange apple", but tit's still just an apple which is orange.

A man in a dress is still a man, just a man with a dress on.

I mean, if you want to make the overarching category “women,” but allow for the subcategories to be defined as “cis” and “trans,” I think that’s acceptable, as long as people can use this as an actual distinguishing factor (cis-women only bathrooms, attracted to cis-women, cis-women only sports, etc.)

Even under that mindset, I’m not sure I agree with you saying that trans women are a type of woman; in a lot of ways, they are much closer to men (larger, stronger, have traditionally male interests). The only reason we’re calling them a subset of women at all is that is the term that the activists coined. Do you consider sea horses to be a type of horse? Or panda bears to be a type of bear? We could easily have said the term is “trans men” (for MTF, as they are a man who is transitioning).

The problem is that the cis/trans distinction matters a lot for most people - it isn’t like green vs red apples, more like peanut vs cow butter.

Panda bears are a type of bear, yes.

We know that they do because they're able to distinguish between ciswomen and transwomen with 100% accuracy (or at least, they can achieve the same level of accuracy that everyone else does). They have to be able to do this, otherwise the trans movement would fall apart because no one would be able to consistently identify the trans people in the first place. This requires an implicit model of what a (real) woman is, because they need to be able to distinguish the real women (ciswomen) from the men who simply desire to be women (transwomen).

I don't follow this line of argument. Imagine a world in which progressives could not distinguish between ciswomen and transwomen at all, ever. In this world, what progressives would see is essentially that there is a subset of women that a large part of their outgroup inexplicably asserts are not real women, and wants to treat badly. Assuming that progressives have no issue adopting the term "trans" for this subset that the outgroup inexplicably discriminates against, how would this not be fertile ground for a "trans movement"?

If transwomen and women were identical you'd imagine that progressives would at least be accidentally on the side of women a few times.

On their side against whom? Transwomen? Do you think "I was trying to help B against C, but accidentally helped A against B instead" (with A=cis women, B=trans women, C=conservatives) is an easy mistake to make, even if your distinction between A and B is solely based on who is the target of C's enmity? Consensus men (men as defined by progressives \cap men as defined by conservatives)? I'm pretty sure they do side with cis women against consensus men much more than a few accidental times; let me know if you actually need examples.

(Are you in fact trying to make a serious argument there, or are you just attached to the snappy sound of this line of polemic for your side?)

I was trying to help B against C, but accidentally helped A against B instead" (with A=cis women, B=trans women, C=conservatives) is an easy mistake to make, even if your distinction between A and B is solely based on who is the target of C's enmity?

But they don't just help against "conservatives". The movement against maximal trans rights in Britain didn't run through conservatives but apostates who were themselves lesbians and former feminists in good standing.

I'm not OP, I do think in this situation things likely just dissolve. But if transwomen were making some sort of demand that made them distinct from women (the male version would be being forced to tolerate Sam Smith's ridiculous name shenanigans), without a clear indication of who wins on the stack, you'd at least think sometimes the bulk of the movement would sometimes just side with the women who don't want to deal with it. Especially since they couldn't appeal to the alleged suicide epidemic.

(Are you in fact trying to make a serious argument there, or are you just attached to the snappy sound of this line of polemic for your side?)

Yes.

But they don't just help against "conservatives". The movement against maximal trans rights in Britain didn't run through conservatives but apostates who were themselves lesbians and former feminists in good standing.

Fine, replace "conservatives" with "everyone who is not declaring allegiance to Team Trans". It really doesn't seem important to the hypothetical what the exact boundaries of C are - I'm just positing, as a counterexample to what seems to be @Primaprimaprima's argument, a contrived scenario in which the conjunction of things he needs to be impossible is actually true, namely that trans women exist in just the same way as they do in reality, progressives are a sort of perceptual mutant set that really can't distinguish trans women from cis women at all, and yet there is a trans movement similar to the one we are in fact seeing.

There are in fact real examples of what seems to be discrimination over nothing at all, and opposition to that discrimination by people who do not have any understanding of the discriminated-against set except by way of "they are the ones that are inexplicably targeted for discrimination"; and I don't think the Cagot truther would have an argument in saying that the people fighting against anti-Cagot discrimination must actually have a model of a real non-Cagot good Frenchman, because they need to be able to distinguish the real humans (non-Cagots) from animals that simply desire to be humans (Cagots), or that "if non-Cagots and Cagots were identical you'd imagine they would at least be accidentally on the side of non-Cagots a few times". Note that I am on some level agnostic about whether Cagot discriminators have a point; for all I know, the Wikipedia article could be progressive propaganda and they might actually be a lineage of evil sociopaths that would put all of European racists' usual boogeymen to shame. I still default to being for equal rights for Cagots, and I have no more of an understanding of what sets them apart than the wiki!

Of course, you could say that yes, the hypothetical progressives and real Cagot rights campaigners actually do have a clear sense (in extension) of who are the Cagots/transwomen, even if in intension their sense is different - the anti-trans team thinks transwomen are definitionally men who claim to be women, and the pro-trans team thinks that transwomen are definitionally women that the anti-trans team claims are not women. The resulting consensus definition winds up being exactly the same, even though I don't think this is what @Primaprimaprima would consider an "accurate model of reality".

But a big part of why the whole Cagot discrimination thing fell apart is that there really was no way to physically distinguish a Cagot from any other person either at a glance, or by thorough examination. Once families stopped living in the same medieval town of 800 people for generation after generation it became untenable. Even back then it relied on an elaborate system of written records and forced signaling.

How do you teach them to actually understand the difference?

Easy. Inter-sex physical combat.

And forget "teaching them to understand", this is one of those truths you have to feel in your bones. Every school could do it for gym. Perhaps Freshman year?

Feminists to the front.

We did it the opposite way. You just didn't fight women. It was made clear that you were a bitch for even attempting it (let alone attempting it and losing). Do it enough and some men would step in. The implicit message was clear.

Then again, we hadn't ceded our entire teaching apparatus (if it even counted as one) to feminists and bureaucrats. There may be advantages to backwardness

How do you teach them to actually understand the difference?

You don't? But I'm not sure why you'd want to. Watching the last wave realize that the next wave is really a wall of autistic guys who took "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" as an honest description of reality has been fairly funny.

I don't want my nephews to chop their dicks off. I can see how it was humorous maybe for prior generations, but as always millenials took the joke too far and ruined it.

I am laughing as we speak. (And JK Rowling is posting as we speak. The windmills, the windmills are calling...)

(I admit "entirely voluntary eugenics program" was not on my Bingo card.)

What else was "humorous maybe" in the past, but ruined by millenials taking it too far?

Deconstructionist art, funny quips in serious dramas, political satire, etc.

Pretty much everything "humorous maybe" was ruined by millenials. We took gross out comedies too far (Freddy got fingered) we took teen comedies too far (Van Wilder sequels) we took sports comedies too far (Baseketball), we took internet absurdism too far (somethingawful), stoner comedy too far (Pineapple Express) meme comedy too far (shit my dad says), political comedy too far (Trump vs Clinton) - I love elements of everything I just mentioned, but each of those killed their genres.

How do you know there aren't equally excessive gen-x examples of those things, and that the humor typed weren't ruined some other way?

I made my response multiple choice. Pick as you please:

A) Magic. The gathering, I mean. The cards speak to me in tongues man has forgotten - but our genes remember. And my neighbour Gene is happy to translate for me.

B) Because human perception of time is linear so things aren't ruined until they are?

C) Are you hoping that disproving my jovial rebuttal of the 'gaslighting kids is funny' argument will convince me transing kids is a good idea? Because it won't.

D) All of the above.

Heck if anything I've always considered Freddy Got Fingered to be a Gen X comedy. The movie came out in 2001 when the oldest millennials would have only been 20 and Tom Green himself is Gen X.

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