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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29324 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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I just came across a word that I feel could be very useful in the trans debate: signalment. Specifically, I'm inspired by the way the term is used in verterinary medicine.

Signalment is a complete description of the patient including species, breed, age and date of birth, sex and reproductive status, whether the animal is neutered or intact.

I feel like this term captures an important point I've seen brought up in a few contexts - that a person's status as transgender might matter to their doctor, and their sexual partners, but it doesn't matter much to their social interactions in ~90% of cases. "Signalment" seems to capture the idea of "medically necessary information needed by a physician to narrow down their search space and provide quality care." Just as it might be important to know that dalmations are more prone to bladder stones than other breeds, it might be important to know that a patient is "Female, with a hysterectomy, and on testosterone for the last 3 years" because that might provide unique medical information that could be useful to the proper treatment of a patient.

I think it also bypasses some of the issues people take with terms like "biological sex" or "gametic sex."

Instead of saying, "Your biological sex is still male though", to a transwoman, you could instead say, "Your sex signalment is 'male, orchiectomy, testosterone blockers and estrogen for 5 years.'"

Then we could have the following distinction:

  • Signalment: All the medically relevant information about a patient.

  • Courtesy title (honorific), personal pronouns and gender identity: All of the social information that will make interacting with the patient easier.

So a patient might be Miss Tiffany Lewis [she/her, woman], with a sex signalment of "male, orchiectomy, testosterone blockers and estrogen for 5 years."

While I applaud the attempt, I don't think you can solve anything this way. At its core, the trans debate is a values debate, not a confusion of terminology. The left-ish side (as I understand it, not trying to strawman) is that you need to do whatever you can to respect people's feelings, and that this stuff is all socially constructed anyway. So if John says he's Jane now, then you owe it to Jane to try to be courteous by respecting her decision. The right-ish side is that while respecting people's feelings is important, recognizing objective reality is more important. And if John says he's Jane now, yeah no he can't become John just by fiat. He's a man who wears dresses and got his genitals removed, not actually a woman (which is something we simply do not have the medical technology to grant at this time).

There's nuance to this, and it's basically impossible to boil everything down to a simple "this vs that" idea. I have no doubt that there are many people on both sides of the trans debate whose positions I didn't capture. In fact, I know there's a religious argument I didn't touch on and really is kind of orthogonal to the "anti" perspective I gave. But the point is, even though many different values exist in this soup, the fundamental issue is one of values. If it were a terminology issue, then it would've been resolved ages ago. So as much as I think your post is well-intentioned, I think it's also fundamentally incapable of actually resolving anything.

I think of the quokka as something like the larval phase of a rationalist before they fully mature into a cynical old goat.

The problem is, of course, that while members of one's one species find the neotenic features of the quokka quite adorable, they mean nothing to the hungry jackals who would happily devour it.

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