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Let's have some more CW over trans issues, because we can never have enough of those, right?
Now, I've been gently chided by other commenters on here about my attitude regarding transgender activism. It's only a few edge cases and nothing to do with the reality of trans people's lives, I get told.
So here's a story I stumbled across that is happening in my own country. I'm hoping really hard that this is just a legal stratagem and not a guy who is now a gal claiming "I am too the biological mother of this child" for realsies:
I'm trying to be sympathetic here, but my well of the milk of human kindness seems to have run dry. If this person applies as the father of the child, the child can be granted Irish citizenship and this will recognise the parent as "legally and genetically a parent of the child". Otherwise, they are asking our High Court for a ruling that (a) the child has two mothers and no father (b) being trans means you are biologically a woman (c) even if she didn't bear and give birth to the child she is still a mother not a father (d) in future such cases, the mother of the child is "whoever wants to call themselves the mother" and not "biological mother".
Remind me again about how, silly normies, gender is not the same as sex and we're not making any claims that biological sex is the same thing as preferred gender, so just shut up and give in on our totally reasonable requests? I don't care if this person calls themself daddy, mommy, or XibablaMakiNooNoo as parent of the child, what I do care about is precedent that "trans gender you identify as is now the same as your biological sex, now if you're a trans woman you're a mother even if you're the father because calling you the father would be offensive, even though you are a father not a mother" for future cases. If the precedent is set, it won't be limited to "parent of child wishing to be identified as legal mother not legal father".
EDIT: I think my main objection here is the twisted logic on show: "You can't call me a 'father', I'm a woman! women are not fathers!" Yeah, but people with functioning male reproductive systems that are capable of getting cis women pregnant can be women. Uh-huh.
This confirms to me, more and more, that trans activism is about rules lawyering. Trans activists put the jews who made the kosher switch to shame. Their arguments for why a man should be considered a woman seemingly always boil down to things like "technically, a woman wears skirts, and I'm wearing a skirt, so I'm a woman!" much like how the jews argue that "technically, this wire forms a wall, so I'm technically not breaking the law that says I can't carry on Shabbat." Unlike the jews, though, this practice of rules lawyering affects anyone who wants to use the words "man" and "woman".
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Can I just throw in my opinion that this is a totally uninteresting and pointless case?
Everyone involved agrees on what should happen. The intent of the law is for the biological children of Irish citizens to become Irish citizens - both the parents and the state want this to happen. The only objection is that the trans woman (and biological father of the child) doesn't want to check the box that says 'father' on a government form because she doesn't like how it sounds. This is patently ridiculous grandstanding. The reason it says 'father' is because the genetic material for the child comes from a male and female gamete, and the father is the one who provided the male gamete, so for the purposes of the law (whose intent, again, everyone agrees with) it can't say anything else.
What a waste of time for everyone involved.
Seconded. This seems pointlessly stupid on both sides. The law, in this case, seems to treat parents the same whether they are mothers or fathers. A court should just decide that the parent is indeed a parent and thus their kid gets the citizenship.
If some crazy wants to use the terminology of budding to refer to their relationship to their offspring, that does not change the fact that they are a parent.
In any case where the gender of the parent actually matters, the answer is of course haha no. You get maternity leave iff you are carrying your unborn child in your uterus, however you got that organ. Likewise, if your body is capable of producing sperm, you can be ordered to provide DNA for a paternity test.
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Disagree.
The "trans" father has engaged in maximum levels of grandstanding and rebellion from the world he exists in.
If he wants his children to benefit from the world, he merely must accept normal rules.
All he has to do is be normal and his kid gets normal rules.
Prioritizing your weird rules over normal rules means you are crazy and people should not want your kids as citizens.
Thus, consequences.
Historically, the whole family is lucky to not be exiled.
"Just be normal" is possibly the worst objection to anything I could think of.
"I am the MOTHER in all contexts except for this particular one where the law requires me to declare I'm a father to act in the best interest of my child" is interesting, but a total nothing burger when you consider literally every other conceivable circumstance of a parent acting in the best interest of their child.
Gleefully posting laughing emojis on the twitter repost is fun and all, but i think the appropriate response to a handwave "lol stop being wierd and you won't have any problems, freak 😜" is "well that's just not how the world works."
Historically as in pre-enlightenment? We've spent a couple hundred years trying pretty hard to steer away from this type of ridiculousness for good reason.
Why? Being normal is how societies form and continue to function. If people just acted on any whim they had we'd live in chaos. Some places now do live in chaos because people do that as a norm. They litter, burn trash, shoot each other.
And before you say, "well those affect other people" so does transing yourself. You become a visual blight, you become a blight on language (demanding people use obviously incorrect pronouns), you demand special dispensations. Its all abnormal and taxing on society.
Pretending to be a mother is directly in contradiction with acting in the best interests of the child. How would we possibly accept any of this person's other actions as being so?
Because too many wrong people have won battles such as this. This is a good battle to fight to make the world better.
It is more recent that exile was used, but exile was a good punishment, if we had more unoccupied land I think it would be good to re-instate it. Its a happy middle ground between the death penalty & long prison sentences and the leniency that plagues modern society with rampant low level criminality and antisocial activities. If these people were in a town in Texas in the 1840s they'd be told they should leave. If they did, they'd go to Mexico or California (and one of those places would probably execute them unless they reformed) but, if they didn't they'd be shot.
Being abnormal does not equate to "acting on any whim". And being abnormal is definitely not a clear cut negative for society. What is it, like 75% of silicon valley unicorn founders are autistic? People with a propensity to not conform, socially or otherwise, seem to be disproportionately progressing society right now.
The law does, generally, accept people who are not optimal parents as the parents of their own children. And in this case, where these two people are undoubtedly the parents of this child, it should definitely accept it also.
Are you arguing that the Irish government should not accept that the actual, biological parent, is a parent, in this case?
An argument that basically goes "Trans people are weird, they should choose not to be, in an ideal world we would exile them or kill them, because I've had enough of losing these arguments" is just not working for me. Maybe you have all this background info that, if included, forms this into some rationale that I could follow. But as presented, this is the same level of "boo outgroup" ranting that the Reddit lefties are doing about everybody who voted for Trump. We can all just pick the political opponents we don't like, call them freaks and wish death on them because we're tired of each other.
I just come from a position where I think that type of rhetoric makes the world a worse place. I think it's a dogshit take, not because I am actually pro trans or anything. I'm pretty moderately to aggressively against the movement. But if you have some total insensitivity towards the specific issues in question, and can't differentiate from a bad expectation and a reasonable expectation (you seem to explicitly state you don't care what the issue is) you're definitely in a position to make the world worse. Which is what you're doing.
Some people can be a little abnormal an not be anti-social. Unfortunately, transgenderism has consistently failed that standard. They are antisocially abnormal as a general rule.
The children should likely be taken out of the home, yes.
I am not wishing death on trans people. I have noticed the results of attempts to accept trans people and have determined them to be very bad. I believe exile would be the most appropriate remedy to this issue.
Discussing what is the best solution to the existence of a decently sized group of antisocial people who pose a particularly large risk to children is making the world a worse place how? What do you think is the appropriate remedy for the trans movement, which, of course, intentionally targets children for recruitment and dangerous pseudo-scientific "medical" procedures?
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It should be an uninteresting and pointless case. The first time it crossed anyone's desk for permission to challenge the ruling, the decision should have been "Look, you can call yourself Queen of Romania for all we care, but you are the biological father of this child, not its mother".
Instead, we're going to have a court case which might get drawn out forever and a day, and I'm not at all sanguine that idiot judges won't make some bleeding-heart decision that yes indeedy, we cannot hurt the tender feelings of this fragile feminine blossom by requiring her to apply as the father.
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For long I have maintained that in lawsuits involving extreme edge cases, society would be better served if the government, rather than devising new legal logic or establishing precedents, simply assassinated the parties involved. This latest instance does little to dissuade me from that view.
I don't agree with you but I laughed.
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I already expressed my thoughts on why this case in particular is not actually about transgenderism downthread, and the decision doesn't contradict her being a woman.
I don't see anything twisted in this logic at all.
I'll start with my steelman for transgender ideology, so you know where I'm coming from. I am aware that the stance in practice varies between activists, and they often contradict one another, but I suspect the framing I give below would still make most anti-trans people unhappy, so it is not about "twisted logic", but rather a values difference.
Without any kind of gender theory:
Let's call this the "old" system ("cis(hetero)normativity", I suppose)
Now let's make binary transgender ideology (just 2 genders for now):
To address the typical complaints/questions about gender ideology:
With this framework, let's address your complaint.
Correct, she is not a father. She is a woman, and fathers are men. Calling her a father is in direct violation of transgender ideology ("transphobic", if we wish to pathologise it)
Individuals with "functioning male reproductive systems that are capable of getting cis women pregnant" are males, and are typically men. But they do not have to be men, and in this case, the individual is not a man, she is a woman.
Now of course, this framing I gave above doesn't get respected by TRAs in real life. Indeed, the woman in this very case makes a mistake:
She is supposed to say same-gender marriage! (Or gay/lesbian, which sounds less awkward than "same-gender")
You are right to call this out. My most charitable explanation is that she just misspoke when she said "same-sex" (other than that, she didn't say anything contradictory) - though it does seem that as of late, TRAs has started conflating the 2 concepts (more egregiously are the terms MtF and FtM, which refer to sex!)
I think the issue is just what you've said: this isn't actually how TRAs, or almost any transgender people actually view the situation, and anti-trans positions certainly don't like it. So what you've crafted is a steelman that means little, because no one's going to accept it. I agree it makes a sort of logical sense, in that you're not advocating for empirical facts of the world. But you are advocating for avoiding discussion of empirical categories that do exist, which in truth-seeking is simply a lie by omission: "Sex is real, but it just shouldn't talked about for moral reasons."
Actually, that part of your steelman is significantly more radical than at least some of the actual transgender people I've met! A lot of the less activist-minded trans people are often entirely comfortable with the reality of their sex, and agree that it's relevant for medical and documentary purposes. What they often want is simply people to use their pronouns out of politeness and treat them with general respect. They're often quite honest about the limitations of their transition and self-effacing, even. The fact that you're describing common self-identifications like MtF and FtM as "egregious" isn't a weakness in the trans movement -- it's a weakness in your steelman of it.
Frankly, I think the "use pronouns out of politeness, sex remains necessary for medical purposes" is where the moderate left position is going and has been for a while. That seems to be a much better bridge to the right, and therefore a useful steelman, than what you're outlining. Your logician's take on the phenomenon is logically consistent, but cold, stripping out any source of moral urgency from the gender self-id case and therefore losing out to more impassioned versions (on both sides) of the trans phenomenon. "There's no objectively correct answer, it may make a small portion of the population less sad, and some people like it because it's aesthetic," is not a good argument for a political position!
Where I think the trans movement went wrong is when gender dysphoria (as an experience, not a diagnosis) was stripped out of the essential core of interpreting gender transition. Gender dysphoria is a serious form of suffering. I've known people who dealt with it. I've heard some stories. And the idea that someone might have such a tremendous mental incongruity with their sex that they can't recognize themselves in the mirror and feel about their genitals the way people who get limbs blown off sometimes feel about their missing limbs -- that's horrifying. And it activates a lot of compassion, especially in people who aren't primed by activists to find the overall concept disturbing. It's the sort of thing where knowing a transgender person is much more real and compelling than any amount of activism, or any logical argument.
The strongest, by far of the arguments that trans activists marshal for their view is that the only known way to treat this experience of suffering is gender transition. I'm not 100% convinced this is true, or that there are no other options available, but it's at least a plausible claim -- and an empirical one. I have no problem with the option being offered to adults, maybe even teenagers with parental consent -- go on, give it a shot, I don't support that we build a huge legal regime to stop you. But that view has some caveats. At the very least, I think therapy to help gender dysphoriacs be more comfortable with their sex must be legally available. I also know people who struggled with gender dysphoria, and general gender identity crises, but overcame them with social support. If the goal is to actually make people "less sad," as you put it, then we have to ask the empirical question: What will do that?
That also prompts the question of what the second-order effects are of the absolute self-id gender identity theory framing are, including on people who experience struggles with their gender identity: if we make this a prominent part of our culture or offer people the option loudly, do we actually generate more gender confusion and dysphoria among the vulnerable than might actually exist in a vacuum?
In the real world, I see conservatives grappling with that question far more than trans activists, who admit no downsides to gender transition (though there are many), and don't even admit the existence of a tradeoff between making peace with your sex or transitioning. That's another one of the big areas where both your theory and the activists' framing is wildly off-base from the on-the-ground experience of transgender people, who from personal experience I know grapple with and make judgments on that tradeoff all the time. I remember one of our posters here talked about struggling with gender identity, and feeling like people they interacted with online were, to paraphrase from memory, "part of a cult that just wanted to increase the number of trans people at all costs." I also know we have transgender posters here who take a more generally transmedicalist viewpoint; I've found them pleasant and easy to relate to, despite the disagreements we might have.
So I guess what I'm saying is this: you're bringing a QED to a knife fight. There's blood involved. Surgeries. Severe mental distress. Suicide. You can craft the most logical argument for whatever steelman you want, but it's not going to build a bridge here -- certainly not by telling people they can't acknowledge a fact of the world, even philosophically, for moral reasons. The only thing that builds a bridge is raw and real human experience. Or in other words, empirical things.
I suspect you were thinking of this - the actual line being "It felt like I was talking to an AI designed to maximize the number of trans people". Written by a Motte member, and quoted here three times that I know of, but not actually written on theMotte.
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Taken at face value, this seems bad on its merits, because why? There aren't any substantial actual claims in there, just a demand for changing language, so what benefit does this redefinition offer? This isn't even a steelman, because it involves no object level position. It's just a proposal for changing words without a justification.
Redefining terms is bad, because it leads to confusion. So where is the justification for paying that price, over creating new terms?
Aside from allowing for rhetorical shell games, of course?
The document isn't using the new definition under which this is true. If you honestly just want to change definitions, you can argue "the term 'father' should be replaced with 'male parent' (or similar) to reflect that 'father' now means something different". You can't argue the meaning/content of the document should change alongside a definition change of kne word it was using.
Your "steelman" framework doesn't give an argument here. It only appears to give one because it equivocates between the two meanings of "father".
Precisely - I'm trying to give a formulation that doesn't require lies or logical inconsistency.
It makes people with gender dysphoria less sad. And also some might just prefer a language / culture like this for aesthetic reasons.
I'm not saying this is an obviously worthwhile price to pay, in fact there isn't an objectively correct answer for this sort of subjective moral question. There are just people's differing preferences
At the cost of not having any substance beyond semantics. Your difficulties offering a steelman that is both consistent and meaningful might be indicative of the validity of the philosophy.
But does it really? If your redefinition succeeds - as the transparent redefinition it's advertised at - all that happens is that "father" now means "parent who wishes to be a man", and the birth certificate will change its terminology in response to the redefinition, using a new term with quite possibly the same implications, which won't satisfy the person from the OP. Because it's not about the word, it's about the meaning behind it.
Meanwhile, forcibly changing the language will make other people unhappy.
It's not really possible to make a definition based on biology, since one of the core tenets of modern transgenderism is inclusivity of anyone with dysphoria. Trying to base it on things like eostrogen levels, "female brains", etc will end up excluding people who still have dysphoria.
The only factor that can be considered is desire.
It depends what you mean by "valid"? I think this philosophy clearly captures a desire, and way to manifest this desire into reality (whilst still constrained by reality)
At the very least, this will make it impossible to refer to someone's sex (which is helpful if someone dislikes their sex) - and in cases of low information, people might just be forced to assume a man is actually a male - it is true that most people whose gender identity is "man" are actually XY-having males.
And also some people might just have trouble adjusting to the new defintiions, and start confusing map for territory and thinking of "men" as males. Or at least retain associations of the word "man" to the old concept of "man".
Yes, it's a tradeoff.
That's my point: If it's not possible to build a meaningful steelman that satisfies the tenets of transgenderism, transgenderism is indefensible.
That's not a philosophy, that's a tactic. A meaningful philosophy would contain some object level claims with a truth value, not just a manipulation of rhetoric to achieve a goal.
So it's about stopping people from talking about inconvenient reality
advancing falsehoods by hiding relevant information
and deliberately confusing people through rhetorical tricks. I suspected from the beginning it was a rhetorical shell game, but it's starting to look more like an Orwellian propaganda framework.
The concept of sex would have to be a cognitohazard threating to wipe out humanity for me to even consider this. And even then it couldn't be meaningfully said to be "true". Some people will be less sad" (but others more sad) is not a sufficient justification.
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I don't agree with this myself, but I suppose another steelman position would say that prior to transgenderism, terms like "women" and "men", "fathers" and "mothers" etc were not highly resolved, just like most natural language terms. We had not had cause to decide whether they refer to outward signs of feminity/masculinity, internal states such as genetics and gamete size, or psychological ones such as the sense one is a man. All these things were usually clustered together. Once edge cases appear, though, it's in our gift to further specify how we'll use the words in future.
Under this reading, sure, it is a language change or precisification to stipulate that we have always really been talking about e.g. psychological identity, but it would equally be one to say we have always been talking about gamete type. Examination of the previous usage of terms may not give a 100% clear answer.
(I guess this is basically Kripke/Putnam/Wittgenstein applied to gender, so no doubt there is a philosopher somewhere who has publicly adopted this position.)
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Clearly we need a sex-based classification system for parenthood, in addition to the gender-based "father" and "mother". I'm sure having her fill out a declaration that she sired the child would go over well with everybody /s.
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Pardon me if my instinctive reaction to that is "my arse". Lady Real Lady here definitely damn well means same-sex because she is Real Woman and a biological woman at that, hence why she should be permitted to apply as the mother not the father.
I have seen people arguing that because now they are taking HRT they are in fact biologically women and thus indeed the sex, not just the gender, they identify as. Anyone who pushes this far for a court case is not about "I want to apply for citizenship for my kid", they are pushing an agenda towards "I want a legally enforceable piece of paper that says I am too a real woman and if you deny that then I can sue the arse off you for hurting my fee-fees".
To be clear, I don't believe this, and any similar claims about biological reality.
I mean... yeah? That's not even being denied here, she is just arguing this is a good thing (and I was explaining the logically consistent framework behind this demand)
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Personally, my objection to gender ideology is not the social aspect. I ultimately don't care if a man wants to wear a skirt. But I see the discrepancy between the arguments they make and the actions they take. For as much as they say they are simply separating gender from sex, their actions are consistent with wanting to eliminate the concept of sex in humans.
"Biological" man/woman? This is offensive terminology.
Saying bathrooms/changing room usage is determined by sex? Bigot.
Sports separated by sex? "Leave it to the committee" when the committee allows trans women to compete, but get mad if they change it. Simultaneously attempt to argue that letting trans individuals compete with women is no big deal.
Attracted to the opposite sex? Genital preference.
Surgically altering your body to imitate the sexed characteristics of the opposite sex? Gender Affirmation Surgery.
Choosing your sex in video games? Body Type A or B.
In the progressive lexicon, there is no single word for the male and female sex in humans. There are acronyms like AFAB, or references to bodily functions (menstruators, chestfeeding, etc.).
Any decision based on sex must be made on gender. Any references to sex that cannot be replaced with gender must be hinted at rather than stated. Sure there's the "charitable" reading of the TRAs confusing their own terminology, but it seems to happen a lot. The most straightforward conclusion I can draw is that the rhetorical separation between sex and gender only exists because they worked backwards from the conclusion that they wanted to be treated like the desired sex in every way possible, and invented an argument that they convinced themselves of in order to square the circle.
With regards to this specific case, I could at least buy the argument if Irish law treated adoptive and birth mother the same. But if this line is true:
then it seems unambiguous that Ireland is not using "mother" as "feminine caregiver," it is using it as "person who carried the baby." The "sex is not gender" argument doesn't fly here because the real source of the conflict is that the state is specifying sex and the plaintiff wants gender to be the standard. The point TRAs don't mention is that when Gender got divorced from Sex, Sex was the breadwinner who named all the words for man/woman, but Gender got literally everything in the divorce. If TRAs had invented new terms for masculine/feminine gender roles, then there'd be no issue because it was clear Irish Law was specifying sex. The actual motivation for the lawsuit is over whether the law is allowed to use mother/father to refer to sex or whether Gender has stolen the word "mother" for all purposes.
Gender theory itself isn't an argument, but just a way to view the world. And it definitely arose from wanting to be the opposite sex, as you described. But "I want to be a man/woman" is a totally coherent concept.
I am not denying this. Trans activism is trying to make wider society adopt the gender theory lens of viewing things, make it the "standard" as you say.
I'm just pointing out that this is not something that can be objectively proven false, and is just a moral preference.
It's coherent in that there is a desire there, for whatever reason. Part of my frustration admittedly is switching arguments between "this is totally normal, gender roles are all made up" and "go along with it or kids will commit suicide." The "kids will commit suicide" aspect suggests something is very wrong (when this argument is not used as emotional manipulation) but "go along with it" does not follow. To me "going along with it" is like if society decided that the treatment for hearing voices in your head is to say the voices are real, for society to grant personhood to the voices, and to redefine sound from vibrations in the air to anything someone perceives as auditory sensation. It makes the sufferer feel better about having it, but nothing has actually changed about them having it and it all collapses when someone naturally points out the elephant in the room. The only way for this treatment to improve is to increasingly demand conformity to avoiding the topic.
Whenever someone like Jesse Singal questions whether this treatment program is actually saving kids lives he's accused of wanting to kill kids. If you suggest that some kids might be autistic or struggling with adolescence, you get mobbed. Imagine if someone decided to research a drug to deal with dysphoria by suppressing the dysphoria and making them more comfortable in their own skin. And for that matter, if there have always been trans people, don't you find it a little odd that suicide is such a massive concern now as opposed to 100 years ago? If you think a trans kid was bullied 10 years ago, imagine 100. You'd think they'd have been killing themselves left and right and people would have noticed.
In reality they are doing this. From their own claims they are doing nothing, they are just living their lives and mean people are going out of their way to torment them. They act as if they have always been the standard.
Gender was always implicitly recognized throughout history because no one went around looking under women's skirts. Spend 5 seconds imagining what would probably happen if someone with a penis was identified dressing as a woman in the past (not counting theater).
Cherry picking niche societies with categories like "two spirit." Many of them were societies with strict gender roles that they wouldn't want to live in, and these gender roles were often a form of emasculation.
Salami slicing small changes in the name of acceptance, then framing the opposition as overreacting to nothing. Related anecdote: video games have quietly almost entirely changed character creators to say "Body Type A or B", "styles," or unnamed silhouettes, despite choosing the character's sex. They claim that this is no big deal. The right wing owner of the company behind Lords of the Fallen forced the devs to change it to Male/Female. Cue lefties saying they will no longer buy anything from the company. If asked about this discrepancy, Male/Female is appeasing right-wing chuds, Type A/B is "being a decent person" even when localizers changed it from the original Japanese.
Claims that non-experts should defer to experts, then denounce any experts/evidence as operating in bad faith and try to personally and professionally disqualify them. Experts that find evidence in their favor are of course neutral and professional.
Moral preference cannot be proven false, this is true. But try comparing believing in gender identity to religious belief and watch the left howl.
Also, I can point out how their arguments in favor of their moral preference they conveniently discard when it leads to outcomes that don't support their moral preference. The "gender and sex are two different things" argument is presented as "I'm not trying to replace sex, I'm trying to add nuance." Then they repeatedly oppose any decision making based on sex, even matters where biology is a main factor. My favorite was another conversation where I also pointed out the discrepancy of it being called gender affirmation surgery despite gender being all in the mind, and was calmly told that breasts are also a gendered characteristic. And their definition of gender is nonsensical. Ask them to define a woman and it means anyone who identifies as a woman. Ask what woman-as-a-concept is, and all you will get is an endless runaround of what it is not.
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Yes, good point. It seems these gender idealogues are trying to hijack the language. Why can't I have a convenient way to refer to, and distinguish, men and women as those terms have been traditionally used?
Here's another example: Suppose a Trans Identifying Man asserts that he is a woman while I assert that he is not a woman but is in fact a man. Theoretically, there is no contradiction there: We are just using words in different ways. So why is it that I must respect his definitions but he is not required to respect mine?
Because when wider society thinks this way, it makes the lives of those with genders incongruent to their sex more difficult.
There is no contradiction - that is why there is this cultural conflict. Who tells whom how the words are used? Neither way of thinking is inconsistent or based on an incorrect map of objective reality - there is just a question of whose feelings and desires are priotised over the other.
Exactly how? (And by the way, I am very skeptical that any such person actually exists. How could such a thing even be verified?)
Agreed. In my view, there must be a very compelling case made to justify this kind of societal change in language. And trans activists have come nowhere near making such a case.
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They aren't, though. A male person is a person who was born with the organs associated with the production of small gametes, even if faulty. A female person is a person who was born with the organs associated with the production of large gametes, even if faulty.
Okay, but I'll ask this question for the millionth time – what is gender identity? Race, sex and age are all traits which can be directly observed or verified via a medical test. What does it even mean to "identify as" a woman? Every single attempt to define this concept inevitably runs into circularity. What does it mean to "feel like" a woman, or to have an "internally felt sense of womanhood" or whatever? You say "I define... this is a redefinition of...", but you didn't even define it, you just asserted that it exists. If I ask you for a definition of the word "ladder", I will not be satisfied if you just repeat "Ladder!" in a confident tone of voice. What actually is "gender identity"?
What, then, to do with the male people who purport to "identify as" women and yet make no effort to make themselves more like women than they could be e.g. the ~95% of trans-identified males who don't undergo bottom surgery?
What gives you the impression that the complainant in this case had a "sincere desire" to be female? I can think of few things less typically female than impregnating someone
with your fully intact and functional peniswith your semen.Is your claim then that this child, wholly unique in the annals of human history, has no male biological parent? Because that's what the word "father" means in a legal context. You are committing yourself to a stance that this is the first child in the history of human race with two female biological parents and no male? And you wonder why people assert that gender ideology is anti-scientific claptrap?
I was referring to the fact that the categories of "male/female" are so basic and obvious, they are hard to define. And that people just think of them as primitive concepts in practice - you gave a definition (and it is a good one!), but I doubt you ever thought of man/woman needing a definition prior to gender ideology.
In case you are pattern matching me to those who try and deny sex exists, I want to make clear I am not saying the "old system" is in any way inconsistent or incoherent. I agree male/female are real, meaningful concepts.
I explained my definition of gender identity immediately after asserting it's existence and the corresponding language changes.
Ok, this is a good point. I will then amend my definition (I have edited my original comment) of [gender] to mean "wanting to be like [sex] in most regards".
So we can still have a trans woman with a penis, as long as she wants to be a female in most other ways, like wearing dresses, being perceived as a female, etc
See my above ammendment. Obviously the perception of sincerity depends on your own personal judgement, but I was more referring to cases where the person is likely trying to be a woman just to get a temporary benefit (like the situation where a male is sentenced to prison and then afterwards claims to want to be a woman)
No, that would be insane. This is just a mundane change of definitions - under gender theory, "father" refers to gender identity instead of sex. The child has a male and female parent, like every other human child - but the male parent has a woman gender identity.
Part of the goals of the theory is to change all of these definitions to refer to gender instead of sex, including in the law.
As I conceded at the very start:
I am providing a formulation of gender ideology that would allow for most of the stuff that happens in practice, without having to need to resort to lies or logical inconsistency.
You seem to conflate changing definitions with changing the underlying meaning of statements and lying. Addressing an analogy you made elsewhere that isn't gender specific:
Again that is not a lie! It is just a redefinition. The earth is 4.5 billion years old, and under this change it would still be that old, but we just wouldn't be able to talk about the old unit of a year, and instead have to talk about the new invented unit.
I agree this, and gender theory, is an inconvenience and makes reasoning about things more difficult. But that is not lying.
Incorrect. The differences between men and women are taught to children at a very young age, in the form of "mummy has a baby in her tummy". I think the average five-year-old child could reliably explain the key difference between the sexes: women can have babies, and men can't. And I'm sure the average five-year-old child could reliably do this long before Judith Butler was born. As they get older the definition these children use will get a bit more precise and granular to account for edge cases (not all women can have babies, some women had babies but no longer can etc.) but the basic concept of sexual dimorphism is understood from a very young age.
Did you? If so, I missed it. I'm reading your comment again, and the best I can find is this:
That... isn't a definition. At best it's an IOU for a definition. "Gender identity is a redefinition of the old concept of gender." "Psawdo identity is a redefinition of the old concept of psawdo". Do you see how this doesn't provide me with any insight into what "psawdo identity" is? Even when I was in primary school, I was told that, when defining a word, you can't use that word in the definition. It amazes me that so many proponents of gender ideology have yet to grasp this basic fact: when defining a word, if you use that word in the definition, it renders the definition circular and hence useless.
How many "regards" must this trans woman be "like" before she qualifies as a woman? Are these "regards" weighted in any way, or are they each assigned a value of 1? ("Well, Jo is a vicious rapist and a domestic abuser – but he likes astrology and wears skirts sometimes, so I'm calling it a wash.") Who is entitled to make that judgement? If you're interacting with a male person on the internet who has a penis, but they assert that their name is Sheila and their pronouns are she/her, does it therefore follow that you shouldn't play along until after you have verified that Sheila "wants" to be a woman in most regards? ("Send pics or I won't respect your preferred pronouns.")
As an aside, I have it on good authority that trans women don't owe me femininity, so when a bearded man with a penis wearing jeans and a T-shirt calls himself a woman, I'm meant to just go along with that or I'm a hateful Nazi fascist TERF bigot who deserves to be decapitated.
Yes, I do, because it is. To quote myself:
This is one of my biggest problems with gender ideology. Its proponents claim that they just want to redefine words to be more inclusive of trans people. But they don't. They want to muddy the waters such that the old words (like "woman", "mother" and "girl") no longer denote female people only, but still retain the positive connotations people have for those words. Because if you're a bad actor, passing yourself off as a good person is a vital strategy. Bad actors who are trans are not hoping to redefine the word "woman" such that everyone who hears it thinks "a person of unspecified sex but a female gender identity". No: they are hoping that when people refer to them as "women", people make the same statistical assumptions of them as they would make of a given female person (e.g. physical strength, aggression, propensity for violence, propensity to commit rape and sexual assault). The strategy is glaringly obvious when you recognise that trans activists make it perfectly clear they want both definitions in circulation at the same time, allowing them to strategically equivocate between the two as needed. Gender ideology's drive to "redefine" words (by which they really mean "add secondary definitions to words already in use") is just a big motte-and-bailey:
To return to my earlier analogy: if a public official exclusively used the word "year" to refer to a single rotation around the sun, that's fine. If he uses it exclusively to refer to 756,667 rotations around the sun, that's also fine. But if he uses both definitions, jumping back and forth depending on the needs of the moment, the rhetorical point he's making and the audience to whom he is speaking: then I can no longer trust any sentence that comes out of his mouth that contains the word "year", any more than I can trust Bill Clinton's claims not to have had "sexual relations" with Ms. Lewinsky.
So I ask you this: are you really advocating redefining the word "woman" such that it only refers to "a person of either sex with a female gender identity"? Or are you advocating that it mean that in addition to its traditional meaning of "an adult female human, regardless of gender identity"?
Actually, I don't even need to ask you – that's what your comment history is for!
Now that I think about it, even this comment, the one to which I'm replying, is internally contradictory. If you define "woman" as "a person with a female gender identity", and a "female gender identity" is the state of "wanting to be a woman in most regards" – again, it's just circular, isn't it? It never bottoms out at anything.
Suffice to say that your attempted "steelman" of gender ideology has left me no less confused than I was before reading it, and no less convinced that it's just a fundamentally incoherent belief system from top to bottom. Honestly, I get the impression that even you don't fully understand this belief system or what it entails (just like Freddie deBoer).
I gave the following definition: "Being a man/woman means sincerely wanting to be (EDIT: mostly) male/female" (this is a definition of gender identity, because man/woman refers to gender identity under gender theory)
I am aware of that problem, which is why I made sure my definition references sex ("male/female"), which is already defined.
But they are trying to make the definitions more inclusive of trans people. You are literally just described the mechanism by which they make things more inclusive - by trying to blur people's mental categories. In practice, this often does include lies / inconsistencies, but the blurring can be done without having to lie (e.g. via my construction of gender identity)
Sure, and in practice many activists do switch the meanings. But I'm saying that we can still have gender theory (and the various policy implications) without having to be inconsistent.
From the start, I made it clear that I was just providing a consistent framework for gender that could be used in theory. An easy way to use preferred pronouns without lying.
But since you've asked my personal stance, and have brought up specific things I've said, it has made me second-guess whether I'm personally consistent and not the young-earth guy with this stuff, and whether I actually know what I mean when I say things all the time (regarding gender)
My personal policy is to be okay with both systems. And to use the gender system myself (but when speaking to an unsympathetic audience, make it clear what I mean, e.g. by stressing "cis") - but be willing to listen to and understand others when they are clearly using the old system (and I can use the old system when defining gender theory)
So, actually, I have failed to follow my (until now unwritten) policy, and I don't think it is workable in practice (I will eventually forgot to do the substitutions, in a few months when this conversation fades from memory) - I'll go back to the old system (on the Motte) as default, and mark clearly where I am using the gender system (i.e. what most people do)
But moving away from my own personal failing/refusal to adhere to the theory, the theory is still consistent!
It is the state of wanting to be a female in most regards (which in gender theory is still the normal thing - an XX-haver), you misquoted me.
Just using normal language - surely it makes sense for a man to say "I want to be a woman", right? And the definitions of gender theory flow from trying to accomodate this desire ("dysphoria") - we change the meaning of woman to mean "wanting to be a woman", where the second "woman" is the old kind of woman (and leave the synonym, now semantically distinct, "female" as the original concept)
It bottoms out at sex, after just one step: "[gender] = wanting to be (mostly) [sex]"
I don't see what is confusing about inventing a concept to refer to the state of "wanting to be (mostly) [opposite sex]", in order to help make people with that desire feel happier.
It causes concept blurring and just generally makes it harder to reason about things you care about (this is by design, because most people care about the difference between male/female) - in fact, as your callout on my old comments show, it very difficult to talk this way over a long time without slipping up.
But it is possible to adhere to this ideology without being inconsistent or lying. It doesn't require you to think false things, just to avoid thinking/saying certain true things. If you want to use a boo-word, I think "censorship" is more appropriate.
It's not a single belief system, because there is no central authority. Lots of people can make theories (like the one I gave), that roughly overlap in spirit and conclusions (e.g. "trans X are X" must somehow arise from the theory), but will contradict eachother (and in some cases, contradict themselves) - it's like how Catholics and Protestants are both Christian, but contract eachother on some stuff.
I tried to provide a consistent theory, to prove most of the demands of the movement can be made in a logically consistent way. To challenge the general anti-woke liberal attack on the grounds of pure logic without making value judgements about lifestyles being "wrong".
This was quite rambly. So I will repeat my main points:
Yeah, this is the big part of why some of us are confused by your view. It's not that I think you're inconsistent, it's that you seem to have had a major change of heart on this issue, but you're solely describing it in terms of logical consistency as a frame of the world. The gap isn't in logic, it's in personal experience.
Especially when you say this:
That's a pretty big change, to go from "non-binaries are actually just women or gay men" to "gender self-id is logically consistent with the facts of the world and I choose it as a policy"! I feel like there's a whole part of the story that's missing, where you met a transgender person, or you read some stories, or you yourself dealt with gender identity issues... I feel like what we're getting is the rider's logical post-change ideas, not the elephant's emotional journey.
I actually went through a similar change of heart -- though obviously not as extreme -- and my earlier reply to you was in part a way for me to express that.
One of my key values, in terms of communication and persuasion, is that the most persuasive argument for any position is the reason why you, personally, believe it. If you try to craft a persuasive argument independent from your own reasons, you're simply going to construct a worse argument for your position... if it were a better argument than your own reasoning, it would become the reason you believe it! That's why a lot of my posts are emotive, and personal (perhaps more than they ought to be): I don't know how to argue for something where my head and my heart aren't both in it.
I think very few people, even in rationalist-lite spaces, are really all that interested in logical consistency. They're interested in living in a compelling narrative, or having some reason for their values that gets their whole self aflame. Obviously, as you see, this particular issue gets people immensely emotionally invested.
You obviously have some reasons for your change of heart, from dismissive comments about elements of the gender self-id movement, to a logical case for gender theory as a frame on the world, which you've used several comments to justify. What I'd like to hear, if you want to argue for it, or resolve your feelings of personal inconsistency, is what changed in you or your life that made you look at things a different way.
Okay, so rewinding all the way to the start when I made the original post. OP said:
And I pattern matched this to a general theme where people attack [progressive cause] by saying it is inherently "confusing" or "logically inconsistent": not just in practice, but that the entire idea of colourblindness, DEI, gay/trans rights, etc somehow doesn't make "logical" sense.
I don't have a coherent view on the moral side of gender ideology, and I didn't want to try and sort through my feelings on the issue (then or now) and commit to a stance on that question under my pseudonym.
So I deliberately avoided taking any such stance, and just stated this theoretical framework that explains the various demands of the movement as part of a unifying theory, without saying if it is good or bad.
Very roughly, my "story" is that:
Also I realise I was ambiguous when I said I adopted the theory. I meant I adopted the language definition parts of the theory on the Motte, I don't advocate (again, it's a gray area) for trying to make society adopt the theory.
This is a low stakes personal stylistic choice, on the level of capitalising Black/White (and with no neutral answer) - hence my willingness to just change it when someone gave examples where it makes my writing less clear to others and myself.
I fully agree with this when the position in question is about objective reality. But when it comes to stuff about subjective morality, like, say, whether or not the government should change the definition of "mother" to include a transgender person of the male sex - then it's all a matter of taste and personal experiences.
And for moral questions - yes that probably is the best way to persuade. But this mode of discourse feels sort of "pointless": both sides just take turns sharing really emotive stories, and nothing is really learned except about the person sharing their stories.
You can share with us how you came to your own change of heart - and it might unironically be really emotional to read (e.g. someone killed themselves over a lack of affirmation), but then I'm sure an anti-trans person can share a similarly emotional story (e.g. I remember there was a post on the Wellness thread once about a guy struggling to convince his friend not to transition their son)
And where does this go? Nowhere it seems - there's just a bunch of different perspectives. What is the best ice cream flavour? Favourite color? Best way to cook a steak?
I think I can read my comment on a formulation of gender theory in many years time and still stand by it, because I just put forward a possible set of rules, without saying that they are good/bad for [reasons].
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To be as fair as I can be, this person froze their sperm before transitioning and that frozen sperm was then used to impregnate their wife, so penises may not have been involved at all (we can hope and pray).
Ah, that's marginally different I suppose.
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When Marsha Blackburn asked Ketanji Brown Jackson for her definition of a woman during her confirmation hearing, Jackson gave a weasely answer that satisfied nobody and caused a minor kerfuffel over her need to defer to a medical professional a determination that the average person can make in five seconds. If Jackson wanted to turn the tables she should have confidently asserted that a woman was someone, anyone, who made it clear that they wished to be treated as such, whether explicitly or by adopting conventional gender norms. If Blackburn were smart she would leave it right there and change the subject, but she's a senator, and it's unlikely that she'd be able to resist pressing the issue further. Hell, in the real case she could have left it at that but had to press the issue further.
Since we all know that no definition that doesn't involve genetics or genitals is unacceptable to conservatives, there's a strong likelihood that the senator would have prodded in that direction, at which point Jackson could have told Ms. Blackburn that she assumed that she (Marsha Blackburn) was a woman despite never having seen her (Marsha Blackburn's) genitals nor though much about what they might look like. At this point Ms. Blackburn has no choice but to back off and change the subject, leaving Jackson with the last word, as the subject is, for all intents and purposes, now her (Marsha Blackburn's) genitals, unless of course Ms. Blackburn really wants her genitals to be the subject of senate confirmation hearings.
To be treated as what?
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Out of curiosity, is that the definition of "woman" that you operate on?
Yes, and that's almost certainly the definition that you operate on, and that Marsha Blackburn operates on, and that Ketanji Brown Jackson operates on, despite her insistence that she doesn't operate on any definition besides perhaps a legal one. We can talk definitions until the end of time, but in the real world, when we have to make a decision whether to call someone sir or ma'am, we aren't asking to see their genitals or for chromosomal testing results and instead make a snap judgment based on their appearance.
There are 100% people who, obviously, are not women and wish to be treated as such. They're called non-passing transgenders.
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No, I wouldn't say that's the definition I operate from. I'm not sure exactly how I would phrase my definition of "woman" (as definitions are notoriously hard to nail down), but it more or less comes down to "an adult who was born with female reproductive organs". The adoption of gender norms you speak of is a proxy that I use to determine if someone is a woman (since one can't, after all, go checking everyone's pants to see what bits they have), but it is a proxy measurement only and not the actual definition I use.
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I need to come back to this again. If I'm reading you correctly, if I think a person is a woman, or if a person looks like a woman, then they are a woman. There is no objective state of fact: "woman" is defined solely by looking like, by resembling, by observation. It has absolutely nothing to do with objective factual questions like "what kind of organs does this person have?" or "can this person bear children?"
Your definition implies that a person who has never been observed by someone else cannot be a woman!
Literally: if a female person falls over in the woods and there's nobody around to observe them, is that person a woman?
Maybe I sound a bit facetious, but trans activists have been scoffing at me for years for attempting to define "man" and "woman" based on biology because umm that's like gender essentialism?? and the idea of two sexes is a Western construct?? and also intersex people exist and you're like totally erasing them??
But the ostensibly common-sense definition(s) you're proposing seem far more insane and incoherent than "does this person ever have the organs associated with the production of large gametes?", a simple binary question that delineates the categories with significantly greater than 99% accuracy.
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No, it isn't. A woman is an adult female human i.e. a person born with the organs associated with the production of large gametes, even if faulty. Owing to sexual dimorphism, it's usually possible to tell this at a glance, although errors can and do occur. A person being mistaken for a woman does not make them a woman, any more than people mistaking me for a German makes me German.
This is a map-territory confusion. If I mistakenly assume that a male person is female, that reflects a failure in my model of the universe (I have failed to take into account that some male people have androgynous appearances, unusually narrow shoulders, unusually wide hips, whatever). It does not reflect anything about the universe itself.
A person demanding that I "treat them as" a woman (whatever that means) does not make them a woman, any more than Rachel Dolezal demanding that people treat her as a black person makes her a black person.
You literally moved the goalposts from one end of your comment to the other! A moment ago you asserted that the practical definition of "woman" that I and everyone else is operating on is "someone... who made it clear that they wished to be treated as such, whether explicitly or by adopting conventional gender norms". Now you're saying that a woman is anyone who looks as we'd expect a female person to look.
Which one is it? Is a woman a person who looks female, or a person who demands that I treat them as such, regardless of their appearance?
In either case, both definitions are incoherent, which is obvious when applied to literally anything else. A person does not become African-American just because they've expressed a desire to be treated as such. "A turtle is an entity who has made it clear that it wishes to be treated as a turtle" is a circular definition that tells you literally nothing about what a "turtle" is. The circle on the left does not "become" smaller than the circle on the right just because it looks like it's smaller than the circle on the right: both circles are the same size.
The thing about expressing a desire to be treated as such was more to account for people with an unintentionally androgynous appearance who are women under anyone's definition but for whom you wouldn't necessarily know it unless you were told. I wasn't referring to trans people who make no effort to appear as women. But when someone has a stereotypically feminine appearance, one generally assumes they are female and treats them as a woman, no? I know you probably think you can spot trannies a mile away, but I've known enough women who have a mannish appearance that I'm hesitant to start making assumptions about the shape of their genitalia. I'm guessing that for north of 99% of the women you actually deal with you don't give the matter a second thought.
I want to be flippant and say "skill issue" here, but maybe it comes down to people not really paying attention. I know a tall, strong-jawed broad-shouldered woman with a deep voice and large hands. She still doesn't have a brow ridge or adam's apple or surface veins in her large hands.
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Yes, but this is a heuristic, not a definition.
Definition: A woman is an adult female human; that is, a person born with the organs associated with the production of large gametes (even if faulty).
Heuristic: You can usually identify a woman by sight on the basis of her height relative to men and various secondary sexual characteristics (narrow shoulders, wide hips, breasts, vocal pitch etc.).
A heuristic is a useful guide to identifying something, or to distinguishing X from Y, but every heuristic is prone to error to a greater or lesser extent (tall women and short men exist, as do women with deep voices or flat chests). A definition, by contrast, is supposed to be, well, definitive, clearly delineating the members of the set X from the members of the set Y with zero room for ambiguity. If you mistake a member of set X for a member of set Y, then this demonstrates a limitation of the heuristic: it does not necessarily imply any limitation of the definition.
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FtMs have a vastly easier time passing as male far more than MtFs can female. That being said, FtMs still have certain features that distinguish them from real men. In my experience, trans-identifying men stick out like a sore thumb, but people are polite enough to not bring it up, or at least not in front of them.
Correct. Which brings up a good point, that if one has to assert that they are a woman, they probably aren't. A real woman almost never has to clarify that she is a woman. She simply is.
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People don't have platonic definitions in their head that they use to make their speech perfectly logical. The generic term is "same-sex marriage" so that's the term they use. People use "male" and "female" to refer to both sex and gender, hence MtF and FtM.
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Transmothers are mothers. /s
Notice how, while advancing that womanhood and motherhood are socially constructed floating signifiers, nationhood and citizenship remain resolutely concrete assumptions in this argument. Hmm!
What is being invalidated is same-sex conception and the notion that a child can have two birth-mothers. Denying this individual the status of motherhood very much validates and upholds their legal status as a "woman" in a ""same-sex"" marriage, I assume other women in same-sex marriages are equally unable to be registered as a second birth-mother.
Semantics aside this person is an Irish parent, and if the purpose of the law in question is to offer Irish citizenship to the children of an Irish parent then the child should qualify for the same. That's reasonable! I don't think children should be denied Irish citizenship because one of their parents is Irish and trans identified, but I don't think radically redefining motherhood is a remotely sensible means to that end.
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With respect, I don't really think this is a great post. There isn't some strong pro-trans orthodoxy among the posters in this forum; if anything, I think that the forum leans pretty anti-trans. And I agree with you that the situation you are discussing is a farce, but it doesn't seem like it actually is all that interesting as a discussion topic. It's crazy, but I'm not seeing the substance apart from "can you believe what those crazies are doing now?".
The substance is, here is someone attempting to create a legal precedent. The substance is, here is something happening which I was assured would never happen. The substance is, here is someone who wants something but does not want to go the normal route about it.
The substance is not "can you believe what those crazies are doing now?" but rather "we are being told we must accept black is white, up is down, and fathers are mothers". The person may be a crazy, but it's gone past "those crazies" into mainstream society.
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... there's a fun kink sense for 'making a trans guy a dad' , but ime most of the ones that don't get incredibly squicked by the whole idea of pregnancy tend to be into getting sexually misgendered, so there's a whole bunch of off-color comedy here that doesn't actually work in practice, to the disappointment of a lot of bi men and Blanchard theorists.
On one hand, yeah, the transwoman needs to grow up and deal with a bit of paperwork that isn't custom-built for their specific extremely rare circumstance, especially if the child's citizenship is of any serious relevance (and if it's not, having this whole tempest in a teapot for something that's just paperwork is more than a little obnoxious). On the other hand, while Irish law prefers to recognize gestational mothers and genetic fathers, it recognizes citizenship by adoption, has since 1956, recognized gay adoption since 2017, and IVF since 2020; you could well have a 'mother' that isn't the actual egg donor and a 'father' who wasn't the sperm donor, and it seems like the IVF provisions specifically are dependent on where the turkey basting occurred(?). If the transwoman wasn't the sperm donor, that wouldn't necessarily stop citizenship so much as add extra steps. On the gripping hand, there are places where it's genuinely relevant to know things like genetic ties, and this does smell a little too much of the activists who go rabid at the idea that transwoman might have XY chromosomes or different bone structure, and damn any evidence otherwise.
I guess it just seems like the whole things filled with namespace collisions. Are fathers just sperm donors, and mothers just wombs? Well, no, for a wide variety of reasons ranging from the legal recognition of adoption to more serious ones about deadbeat dads (and from a quick google, the status of unmarried-but-present biological fathers gets weird)... but the law here isn't about that, either. Genetics? No, IVF screws that up, and even pre-IVF there was a presumption of paternity (since 1987?) that can probably get into weird spaces if uncontested even where the facts clearly aren't in compliance. Okay, well, are we really focused on a more spiritual or philosophical definition of parenthood? Eh, not that either, because a surrogate can figuratively flip the kid the bird and walk out and remains the 'mom' if she got IVF in the wrong country. And while I like that perspective on parenthood, my preferences aren't something that has to happen in every country on the planet, or even necessarily the best policy.
That makes this legal argument stupid, but it's hard to get too worked up about it while the Irish legal system's definitions seem kinda broken for situations well outside of this one. Which doesn't leave this specific legal argument in a better place, but makes it kinda hard to get too worked up over it.
This person wants to claim Irish citizenship for their child. The wife, biological mother of the child, is not an Irish citizen and so can't claim citizenship by parentage for the child. The biological father, who is now a Real Woman, can do so but doesn't want to do so, since biology not real dude and it's offensive and hurtful and the ninety-nine other bad things that normies inflict on the trans to get them to apply as father of the child instead of mother of the child.
So we are being asked to make it a legal decision that being the sperm donor of the child makes you the mother not the father. Because being able to produce sperm doesn't mean you are not a woman, but being asked to describe yourself as a father in line with physical reality is wrong since "women are not fathers, women are mothers".
There's a confusing and toxic confluence of both biological essentialism ("women are mothers not fathers") and denial of biology ("producing the sperm which inseminated the biological mother who conceived and gestated the pregnancy is compatible with being a real woman, even though real women do not produce sperm").
You're correct that it probably would be easier to try for citizenship for the child if it was adopted by "my granny was Irish that makes me Irish too" Real Woman here, but that's not the question. And I can't help feeling that there is more going on than simply "I want my kid to have Irish citizenship". If it was just about getting the kid an Irish passport, I feel they'd shut up and apply as biological father. I get the distinct impression this nutjob wants Official Legal Declaration That I Am A Mother, So Suck My Feminine Penis, Haters!
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Indeed. The pro-trans lobby here is vicious, I'm not surprised you were mauled for daring to bravely express your skepticism of trans activism.
Why? What does it matter to you if the state calls her a woman or man, mother or father? At least in the women's sports and prison rape questions I can see the negative externalities, here I don't see how it affects your life at all other than People Are Doing Things You Don't Like. You seem to agree that the child should legally have a right to Irish citizenship so presumably the outcome will be the same either way.
In a future where genuine SRS is possible and she could have first extracted sperm, then either grown a womb or implanted with an artificial one, would you call her a woman? What's your threshold?
Again, I fail to see the effect on your life besides you getting angry about a news story and complaining on the internet.
How is this an abuse of the system? The kid is going to get citizenship either way if I'm understanding correctly, it's just a question of what gender/sex the state recognizes this individual as?
Not particularly; some not insignificant fraction of your political allies in this community are genuine misogynists who think women have the intellectual fortitude of children and should mind the house. You're attracted to this place because you like complaining about the trans people and the abortions, but you flame out when the leopards inevitably start eating your face.
The modern major general one was good though, can we do that again?
I think that's an exaggeration. I see... four?... major positions here that could be called sexist, although only two of them even somewhat merit the term "misogynist".
"Women tend to prefer and/or be good at languages, soft science and pink-collar fields including homemaking; men tend to prefer and/or be good at STEM. So if STEM jobs slew heavily male and the others heavily female, that's not evidence of heinous discrimination, just biology." (I wouldn't call this misogynist.)
"We need birth rate to replenish our species, and it is not very good for birth rate for women to normally not settle down until their late twenties or thirties, due to the unforgiving timetable of menopause." (I wouldn't call this misogynist; proposed solutions to the bad norm vary wildly in objectionability, though.)
"Women's intuitive preferences for how to resolve problems and conflict are different than men's, and it so happens that the male pattern works better as large-scale policy."
"Due to women being better at emotional manipulation than men - including but not limited to the 'woman's tasp' - formal equality and a state monopoly on force tend to produce actual inequality in women's favour."
None of these rely on "women hav[ing] the intellectual fortitude of children". Not saying I'm 100% sold on any of them, and particularly not saying I'm sold on the usually-proposed policy solutions, but AFAICT you're beating up a strawman.
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Why does it matter to him? If I were him, I would just check the box that says "I am the father" because it's the pragmatic thing to do, and I couldn't care less about what some piece of paper says. If he has an interest in challenging the law, then I have an interest in following the proceedings to see which laws get overruled, upheld, or changed, since laws affect everyone.
Is this hypothetical worth addressing? The amount of scientific advancements necessary to have a working womb transplant, organic or artificial, with no ill side effects, would result in several dozen Nobel prizes being awarded. It means we would be living in a world that is scarcely the same as the one we are currently living in, and I don't think we are going to approach it anytime in this century.
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It matters if I am now expected to say, as Just Being Courteous Nothing More, that a biological father is, in fact, a biological mother.
I may be a Catholic, but even I try to hang on to some shreds of accordance with actuality and physical reality. If I'm supposed to just shrug and go with the flow, then hell why not accept perpetual motion machines, phlogiston, healing crystal vibrations, and drinking bleach to cure autism?
So the whole legal discussion was just a sideshow for coming back to the main externality, which is that some people expect you to say a certain thing and you dislike that?
I'm sure you could manage to construct a beliefs system that encompassed the holy ghost, transgenderism and your hatred of Kamala Harris while excluding perpetual motion machines, phlogiston, healing crystals and drinking bleach without too much cognitive dissonance.
Am I understanding correctly that the child could be granted Irish citizenship if either parent were a citizen? From your post:
So in a hypothetical where an Irish man abroad who can't get it done the old-fashioned way uses an IVF clinic with his own sperm to impregnate his foreign wife, is their child eligible for citizenship? And/or if the subject of your post had filled out the paperwork as father (which, for the record, you would probably still have posted here as evidence of trans hypocrisy), her child would have been granted citizenship?
Call me crazy, but I do like to try and make sure that when I see a deer, it's a deer and not a horse. So easy to get confused about these things, I know!
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Accepting the metaphysical claims of transgenderism is one of the few hard lines the RCC actually maintains in practice, on par with its stance on abortion. Even Fr James Martin SJ is very very careful not to use their language in describing transgenders, despite his powerful protectors and abundant scapegoats. You cannot construct a belief system that contains Catholicism and transgenderism at the same time any more than you could construct a belief system that contains Catholicism and disbelief in the real presence at the same time.
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I appreciate your post for pushing back, but
Modus ponens, modus tollens. If it shouldn't matter to me, why should it matter at all?
A little less facetiously, it matters because if these terms become floating signifiers that are only realised when claimed by an individual then I don't know whether my father was in a same-sex lesbian relationship with the man that gave birth to me. Saying that it doesn't matter doesn't suffice. The words have lost 98% of their meaning and what's left is "I have parents", which is little more than a truism.
"My father is a Nazi". Was my father a man who served in the wehrmacht, or was my father a woman in trousers who used the okay gesture? Does it matter?
Was my father even my father? I can't even check the records because they might have been assigned fatherhood at transition. Who knows?! Eh, what does it matter.
I do not like or accept the claim of 'gender identity' but if you are not a bastard then I suppose you very well know your father's gender identity.
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It boils my piss when people throw out accusations at people in the Motte in the general sense. If you're going to smear a 'not insignificant' fraction of his fellow partisans in this community as misogynists, you better have everything cut and dry or I'm going to assume you're talking shit. Name names.
That sounds unpleasant.
Her fellow partisans.
Naming names is either ban-baiting me or trying to start drama, but if you like, here are incidents where her piss is being boiled -
Here's her and sloot. Number of other comments in that thread.
Took me a while to figure it out, but here's her getting into it with 'The Mountain' guy on her previous account (you can follow her comments on his weekly posts if you like).
Here's what I thought would be the next flameout.
I would call the viewpoint that women are lesser, less agentic, less intelligent, less capable (excluding less physically strong) misogynistic. I don't think these arguments are particularly rare around here. Would you disagree with either point?
As a side note, I would have to disagree with this. Of course it's all a matter of semantics, but defining misogyny in this way implies that it's somehow immoral or hateful to make a generalization which puts women as a group in a negative light -- even if that generalization is correct.
In my view, this gives the game away. Why is it not misogynistic to observe that men are physically stronger than women? Presumably the reason is that this observation is correct - men are indeed stronger than women. It seems to me that there are other correct generalizations for which women compare unfavorably to men. At a minimum, reasonable people could reach such a conclusion. Would doing so be immoral or hateful?
It's also worth noting the double-standard in play. If someone observes that men are more prone to committing violent crime than women, it's far more tolerated by society since it puts women in a positive light compared to men.
Consider the following 2 statements:
Both are arguably true, but only one will get you labeled a "misogynist" if you say it.
So that in practice "misogyny" means "anything which is unfavorable to women"
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State-endorsed science denialism is bad. The government should not assert that the male person who fertilised an egg is the child's mother, any more than they should assert that homeopathy works or that the earth is 6,000 years old.
It's especially bad in states that don't have US-style free speech protections.
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But who fertilized the egg is not what is being asserted, and outside of hospitals and genetics studies, 'who fertilized the egg' is not equivalent to 'father.' A baby wearing a shirt saying 'I love my two dads' isn't engaging in science denialism, it's just an expression of their relationship with two same-gender parents. Ditto for children of a remarried widower calling their father's new partner 'mom.' Gattsuru has other examples above.
At risk of drawing mod ire for being excessively glib, no, the baby isn't expressing anything because it can't read and didn't pick the shirt. It's being used as an ignorant/unwilling prop and/or billboard for its guardians' views. Just like if someone stuffs a chihuahua in a sweater that says "I love my mommy" they're not actually expressing any of the chihuahua's views - they're using the chihuahua as a prop.
I'm no narc, you can be as pedantic and annoying as you like.
Your babies are just dumb compared to mine.
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In fact it is. The application for citizenship is on the basis of the biological parent who holds Irish citizenship. The mother (woman) isn't an Irish citizen or holding Irish citizenship. The person who fertilised the egg is the one claiming Irish citizenship and requesting it on behalf of the child. Unless we are going to say "words have no meaning at all" which is kinda tricky when we're making legal decisions, the transwoman (gender) is the father (sex) of the child, not its mother.
On what basis have you determined that "father" must refer to sex and not gender?
Reflecting how the word is used in medical, biological and zoological contexts; how the word is used in common parlance; centuries of legal precedent.
Not sure what you mean by this? This certainly isn't how trans people and the people around them, i.e. the people who actually need to make this decision on a regular basis, use the word. Most fathers are cis men, and usage in that context provides no information on this question.
Precedent from times when there was no distinction made between sex and gender is totally meaningless for answering this question.
There are certainly contexts when "father" refers to sex characteristics (e.g. use of the verb father) and certainly contexts when it refers to gender roles (e.g. adoptive parents). You are free to believe that those things cannot and should not be separated. But it's silly to pretend that one of those contexts doesn't exist. Some people think the gender context is more important and can be separated out. That is a coherent view even if you disagree with it.
Is it your opinion that, for all of human history, when people used the word "father", they were only referring to the parent who had a masculine gender identity, irrespective of which reproductive organs that parent had? And that, coincidentally, we use the same word to refer to the male parent in animal husbandry, even though animals (so far as we can tell) have no conception of gender identity?
I mean, this is a pretty radical act of historical revisionism, you must admit.
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For most people in most of human history, the word "father" refers to individuals of a particular sex, not individuals of a particular gender identity. Therefore, it is the common definition, the definition used in common parlance. The people using it in the nonstandard way you recommend are a minuscule minority, and there are hundreds of millions of living people for whom the question "does the word 'father' refer to the male parent, or the parent with a masculine gender identity?" would simply be incoherent. If you think the standard definition is deficient, you're welcome to argue in favour of your own, but it's rather obnoxious of you to pretend that everyone's already using your definition and that I'm the weird one because I understand the word "father" to mean "the male parent" and not "a parent with a masculine gender identity".
On the contrary, I think it demonstrates just how recent and faddish this worldview is. Only a tiny minority of currently living humans currently believe this is a distinction worth litigating, and dozens if not hundreds of countries manage just fine without.
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"Dad" is not a term of art in law, unlike "father". There is no meaningful legal sense in which this person is this child's mother: he did not gestate the child in his womb for nine months, nor is he a woman who adopted a child with different biological parents. I find it almost impossible to divine any sense in which the assertion "this child's male biological parent is not their father" is not simply a lie. You can say that you're not lying, you're just proposing to change the definitions of words to newer, more "inclusive" definitions. Well, I don't care if an official proclamation from a state body that "the earth is 6,000 thousand years old" is followed by a footnote clarifying that the word "year" is here defined as a unit of time equal to 756,667 rotations around the sun. That might make creationists feel more "included", but it's still a lie.
Legal documents do not exist to validate narcissists' claimed sense of self.
Ireland allows self-ID. Do you think it would be reasonable for a trans woman who adopted a child to be referred to as the child's father, by the state that recognizes them as a woman? Of course not, "mother" is the most reasonable word in this context.
There's no lying here, you just don't agree with self-ID.
Mother is a word that carries a range of connotations, from "gave birth" to "will pour the tea". Like with man/woman, trans rights activists (at least this one) want to cleave off and deny the connotations that don't serve their ends (like gave birth!) while holding tight to those that do serve their ends (has some manner of parental relation to a child) regardless of any broader implications, for as long as they serve their ends, and no longer. It's that simple.
One very narrow implication that shows how the rationale rapidly ceases to serve their ends: The argument only works if fatherhood excludes transwomen, and that's trans erasure.
I think calling a trans woman a mother is basically the same as calling an adoptive woman a mother. I don't think anyone here is saying that adoptive mothers can't call themselves mothers because they didn't e.g. give birth. I don't really see how this situation is any different.
You are phrasing things in a maximally sinister way. But yes, you are being asked to use words in a specific way. You are free not to do so but it doesn't seem unreasonable to me and certainly doesn't feel like an evil plot.
I can't speak for anyone else but I have no issues with the idea that fatherhood excludes trans women in most contexts.
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If the trans woman adopted the child, which was no way related to her at all, go ahead and Call Her Daddy (or Mommy, in this instance).
This is not the case. This is the father of the child trying to get permission to apply as the mother of the child, when the mother of the child is her wife who is not an Irish citizen. Mommy Number Two (and God alone knows how they sort things out in their house as to who is Mom, Mum, or Mam) provided the sperm to knock up Mommy Number One. All the current system wants is that this person applies as, technically, the father (which is what they are: the provider of the male sperm to inseminate the female ovum that created this child in the first place).
Mommy Two doesn't want to do this because it insults her primal womanhood or something.
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Of course I don't agree with self-ID. Did you think I was trying to pretend otherwise?
Even with adoption we acknowledge that we're using the words "mother" and "father" in a nonstandard way, but it's a social convention that these words can respectively refer to "female primary caregiver" and "male primary caregiver" respectively, in addition to their traditional meanings of "female biological parent" and "male biological parent".
What this man is demanding is rather more radical than that. He is not demanding to be recognised as the child's legal parent, even if he is not the child's biological parent. He is not even demanding to be recognised as the child's legal parent of a specific gender, while not being the child's biological parent. No – he is the child's male biological parent, and wants that fact struck from public record, because it makes him uncomfortable. He wants it said that this child does not have a biological father, only two biological mothers. Sorry, but no matter how you swing it, this is a lie. It is a lie to say that this child has no biological father. And it is an abuse of the court system that so much public time and resources have been wasted on painstakingly refuting the fantasy of this narcissist, who wants a simple biological fact expunged from public records because it makes him sad.
As an aside, if the prospect of being referred to as the father of your child* makes you so unhappy, maybe you should have considered that before impregnating your female partner. I'd even go so far as to say that a man ostensibly reduced to fits of crying when someone accurately refers to him as the father of his child may not be mentally stable enough to be a functional parent.
*And solely in legal documents: I'm sure everyone in your social circle would be more than happy to indulge your delusions.
This all seems contingent on the idea that "father" must refer to sex, not gender. I don't really see where you are getting that from. Certainly in the nascent world of out trans people, that isn't how it is used.
If you're just arguing against self-ID in general, fine. I've rehashed that enough in the past and am not really interested. But the OP of this thread, and your post, both seem to imply that there is something additionally bad about this situation. And I don't really understand what that is. It seems silly to me to think that the rule would ever be that she is both a "woman" and a "father". Of course if the state is willing to recognize her as a woman it should also recognize her as a mother. That isn't a "lie", everyone involved understands perfectly well that she didn't give birth to the kid and nobody is attempting to claim otherwise.
Because for the purposes of a birth certificate, for purposes of tracing genealogy, for purposes of tracking inheritable disease, for legal purposes, the word "father" refers to the male person who sired a child, not to one (or both) of a child's parents who "identifies as" a man, whatever the fuck it means to "identify as" anything.
From the OP, my impression was that @HereAndGone2 was bemoaning the motte-and-bailey shell game that trans activists have been playing on Western society for years. We were assured that of course trans people aren't literally claiming to be members of the opposite sex: they're just demanding that we recognise the existence of something else called "gender identity" in addition to sex. Cases like these make it abundantly obvious that this was a barefaced lie: that the trans activist movement is fully intent on deconstructing and redefining 100% of sexed nouns in the English language, and that trans-identified males will not rest until they have been officially deemed members of 100% of categories previously considered the sole province of female people. This man's preposterous demand to have himself legally declared a mother is of a piece with any number of grotesque neologisms like "chestfeeding", "pregnant people", "birthing person", "menstruators" and the like.
Correct, it is silly. If this man can get his friends and family to play along with his self-image*, more power to him. I'd even make an effort to refer to him by his preferred name if I met him in person. But in the eyes of the law, he should be considered neither "woman" nor "mother". Because he is neither, he knows he is neither, the actual mother of his child knows he is neither, and no amount of legal documentation will ever persuade any of them or us otherwise.
*Or rather, what he claims his image of himself is: a self-image that needs to be "validated" and "affirmed" at every turn, up to and including within his child's legal documentation, sounds like it has more in common with vulnerable narcissism than a stable self-image.
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If we grant the premise that it can affect someone's life via sports/prison, then the question of the extent to which trans women should be recognised as women in any facet of life becomes relevant. If she is treated as a woman in something unrelated to sports/prison, then it makes it easiser to argue to treat her as a women in sports/prison too.
See above.
Having said that... I don't think this particular case is an example of anti-trans legislation. Quoting the article:
This law discriminates against this woman on the basis of her infertility, not her AMAB status. And since there is no widespread movement to try and declare infertile cis women as not-real-women, I don't think this, to quote the defendant, "invalidates her legal status as a woman"
It's not her infertility, as she was plenty fertile enough to store sperm viable enough to impregnate her wife. It's her inability to give birth because she lacks ovaries, a uterus, a cervix and vagina. Since there is no way, barring a miracle or huge advances in science, that she can conceive, gestate, and deliver a baby, she is the biological father and not the biological mother.
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"How does this affect you?" is the lowest form of discourse.
Really? One would think that "My Tribe is good vs the enemy who is bad, Zug-Zug!!" would be the lowest form of discourse as it is the one most commonly found in the animal kingdom. People who can't behave better than animals are generally locked up in prison, and definitely shouldn't be enfranchised.
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Careful, you're going to trigger the libertarians.
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It is important to me that the state has a grasp of basic facts of reality. If it does not, then all sorts of things become fraught; evidentiary standards being a big one.
Do you apply this principle to other topics as well? There are a lot things the state operates on that are not objective reality, do you write posts about those too? You know religion, psychology, conspiracy theories/misinfo, fiat currency, borders, markets, etc. None of these the things exist in basic reality, they are all fictions. You mentioned in the AI-thread about your big problems with science. The scientific method seems like a very basic fact of reality.
As a general rule, I probably don't want the state to have much to say about these things.
With the notable exception of fiat currency, I'd prefer the state to have minimal involvement in all of these.
Play semantic games, win semantic prizes; I think I quibble with your definition of "exists"
Include specific reference, I am not following.
Ha. It's more one - of many - epistemic methods. Again, the problems of empiricism alone are well documented.
I mean I agree that I want the state to have little say in any of those things too, but I also extend that to defining the gender of the Spawner on official bureaucrat forms. If you have similar small government sensibilities I'm not sure why you care if the pointless bureaucracy has dotted the right I and cross the right T in regards to which parent of a child is which gender. Giving the bureaucracy power means they will just use it against you when they get a similar chance.
Basic reality = Physical reality. Basic implies the most primitive, lowest, natural element. If you can't deploy any of your 5 senses on it does it "exist" in physical reality or is it a construct of human social belief?
This, though additional edits point to it being Science TM which it wasn't when I read it.
The scientific method is not the only epistemic method, nor the most complete one, but it is the least arbitrary and most self-correcting method available for grounding state action in basic reality. Or would you prefer a method far more biased and value driven? It would have the same problems, in far greater measures, that you are decrying above about grounding in basic reality.
Yes, absolutely.
I'm getting the sense that what you're advocating for a kind of State management system that relies heavily on empiricism for governing. I think this is incredibly foolish advocacy for technocracy and a kind of political Scientific Management.
On the hard problem side of things, this fails because of complexity. Society, a large economy, the legal system etc. simply interact too dynamically and in too complex of a network for any central authority to effectively model the current state of things. Let alone the idea of being able to create policy and accurately predict it's outcomes. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Social Security began as a well intentioned program to help out the poor elderly. It has metastasized to be an intergenerational grift. There are simply too many variables changing too often and interacting in non-obvious ways to able to come close to accurate modeling. When the State tries to do this, not only does it fail at its own stated goals, it often actively harms its own citizens, albeit in subtle ways.
This is why I want a state that is 100% value driven based on deontological principles. The original American Constitution is a great start, but was gradually altered by amendments and fundamentally corrupted by the 14th. It isn't a very long or complicated document and has little to nothing prescriptive to say.
I don't disagree with the logic of this statement, I just think it's impossible to implement. History is full of governments of various kinds saying, "no, this time it's different. We're going to be able to run the country based on hard facts and data." Number one, they can't in a very functional sense. Number 2, all decisions are at some level value based decisions. Humans can override their own hardwired instincts for self-preservation in extreme circumstances (family protection, self-sacrifice in combat, heroic deeds even beyond those two).
That could not be further than the truth. The world is complex and technocrats that think they can manage everything with a central authority fuck up on a grander scale than anyone. China is a planned economy and its technocrats are still paying for the fuckups from the last batch of mistakes from the technocrats several decades ago. Technocracy creates a system that ignores the human element of the world and in its tyranny it forces people to submit.
My preferred state only exists to solve collective coordination problems. It should do so rationality based on empiricism yes, but the empiricism of letting individuals decide their own actions. The empiricism of understanding how sociology, economics, and psychology work. Which is essentially a market. A deontological system could easily be one who's values are some shithole 3rd worldist state. I agree that science can never tell you how to act, or why, or what to value, it only tells you what is or is not. But I also don't think the government should be in the business of telling individuals why or what value and should just stick to protecting negative rights as the how.
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There's something sociolinguistically peculiar about treating government form submissions as in the same class as conversations among peers or speeches in the public square. Reserving judgement, I would venture to say that most people worldwide treat government bureaucracies in a purely utilitarian way, as an alien beast that must be appeased by certain sigils or spells that are otherwise meaningless.
(Presumably there's a statement on this Irish citizenship form like "I swear under penalty of perjury that the above is true and correct", but is the transwoman in this story really worried about the Gardai busting down their door on charges that they lied about their gender identity? I strongly doubt it.)
It seems like this attitude towards paperwork is a relic from an earlier time, when the State really was "just the things we do together" and not something imposed from above. Which is not the case anywhere anymore, but it's nice to be nostalgic about.
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Seems like most of this has a simple cause and a simple fix. Ireland can stop discriminating against fathers, under the implication they are some sort of second class parent, in determining parental citizenship. We have the tests for it now, it's not abusable (only one father can be listed per child anyway after all) and it's the right thing to do regardless.
It doesn’t. Ireland would allow this trans to pass on citizenship paternally- but requires that it list itself as the father, which it doesn’t wish to do.
Do you feel that referring to a person as "it" is a good way to have productive conversations?
Small anecdote, there is a somewhat well-known public incident where a guy got into trouble due to being recorded while referring to a person as "it", but then later it turns out that this particular person literally identified as "it". When I told this to an acquaintance who is involved in mental health counselling at university, she told me that this has happened to her as well, it just didn't go public - she had a counselling session with a person who wanted to be referred to as "it", and then afterwards had a private discussion with a colleague about it. The colleague was incensed and slandered her behind her back afterwards, unwilling to believe that anyone would like to be referred to as such. Fortunately, her general reputation was good enough that it didn't get her into trouble, and after a while she managed to mostly explain it.
It's true that there are also some people who use "it" in a derogatory sense, but it does at least exist as self-identification as well.
Sure, but this post is clearly using it in the derogatory sense. In which case, fine, you do you, but I didn't think the goal of this forum was to signal how much you dislike trans people.
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I will register the unpopular opinion that I personally have no objection to being called "it".
Haha I think that is certainly unpopular but fair enough!
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'It' is the gender neutral singular third person pronoun in English. If xe was anything other than in fringe use I would use xe, but that is not the case- and 'it' is acceptable to use as reference towards small children, who are animate and agreed on as being people. The choice to take it as intentionally offensive rather than the default when sex-correct pronouns are renounced is a choice; one made by the trans community, but a choice nonetheless.
This is just as ridiculous as trans activists insisting that using "they" for a specific singular person of known gender has substantial historical precedent. (OTOH, the default gender-neutral pronoun for people in English was most of the time "he", and I bet the activists won't agree to that either.) You can use "it" for people if you like, but it is a novel and annoying use of pronouns. I suppose turnabout is fair play.
ETA: On the broader issue, as a trans person, FFS just fill out the paperwork as the father of the child and stop being an attention whore/mentally ill (strike whichever does not apply).
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At least it's clear how many people he's talking about.
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That's not the issue here. The child can get citizenship through the biological mother or father, but the trans person doesn't want to register as the baby's father, and Ireland will only recognize the person who gave birth to the child as the mother.
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I don't think that's what's happening here. The kid is entitled to citizenship whether it is their mother or father who is a citizen, but for some reason (poorly written law? bureaucratic nonsense? malice?) this isn't being applied in this case.
Because in this case, the biological mother is not an Irish citizen, and the biological father who can claim and hand on Irish citizenship is demanding to apply as the mother of the child. Given that we poor backwards Paddies wrote the law to refer to the mother as "the person who gave birth to the child", as would have been the universal experience of all humanity up to, well, still right this minute, this is highly offensive. Just because the mother donated the sperm to fertilise the mother, that is no reason to deny the mother is the mother as well as the other mother being the mother!
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Case where the US Supreme Court did something like this: 1 2
If a child is born outside the US and out of wedlock to a citizen parent and an alien parent, then the child becomes a citizen only if the alien parent lived in the US for N years before the child's birth. By default, N is 10 under the law applicable when petitioner was born (5 under the law applicable today). But a separate law establishes an exception setting N to just 1 if the alien parent is the mother, implicitly making N = 10 applicable only if the alien parent is the father.
Petitioner is born outside the US and out of wedlock to a citizen mother and an alien father. The alien father was present in the US for literally 9.95 years. Petitioner doesn't get citizenship, and sues.
The Supreme Court unanimously agrees that the second law establishing a gender-based exception is unconstitutional discrimination. However, it is empowered only to strike down the second law, and cannot rewrite the first law to extend the 1-year exception to fathers. So the petitioner still doesn't get citizenship.
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I don't really see how you're reading this as objectionable over and above the usual self-ID.
The facts seem to be that:
I don't really see how you can accept #2 while also believing that she should have to self-report as the father of the child?
Are you intending these two statements to read as contradictory? They seem to be saying exactly the same thing to me?
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I'm a little confused. Does Ireland not give birthright citizenship though the father's line? Or is it that he had the option to pass on citizenship rights as the father but refused, and claimed to be the mother which wasn't accepted?
The "mother" has Irish citizenship via the granny rule. If you read further down the article, "she" could apply as biological father of the child and pass on citizenship that way. but "she" does not want to do it that way, because that would be offensive to "her" as a "woman". And a "lesbian". And trans.
Instead, "she" wants the High Court to let "her" apply as the child's "mother" (second mother, presumably) for citizenship. The biological mother, "her" wife, does not have Irish citizenship and so can't apply as the relevant parent.
I mean the obvious answer is that the granny rule is nice, but if you can't do the paperwork(it seems very explicitly opt-in, or at least it is for the other Euro countries which have it) then you just have to go without nice things. There's lots and lots of people who miss out on nice things by not wanting to do paperwork; someone believing fan-fiction about gender doesn't make it a special case.
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It does, yes. The person is entirely able to obtain citizenship for the child by identifying as the 'father' of the child. It is, of course, a true biological fact that this person is the 'father' of the child, if by 'father' we mean 'the source of the sperm that contributed 50% of the child's genetic make-up'.
This is a purely semantic dispute. The person is the biological parent of the child, but wants to be referred to legally as 'mother' of the child rather than 'father'. No actual facts are in contention here.
I see, thanks for clarifying.
My gut reaction is that this issue should have been resolved earlier because it is analogous to the situation of a child adopted by a same-sex married couple (which while not exactly common, is something that happens often enough to be legible to bureaucracies), or to a child born by IVF (with donor sperm) where the mother's lesbian partner is a legal parent (which is routine).
I wonder if lesbians are happy to just fill in the online form as "father" but transwomen are not.
It isn't quite analogous since adopted children don't automatically get citizenship. With most same-sex couples this isn't an issue because a typical scenario in e.g. the US would be that both the biological parent and the adoptive parent are US citizens and the child is born in the US. If a man who is a US citizen living in Europe marries an Italian widow and adopts her son, and an amended birth certificate is issued recognizing him as the father, the child will not be considered a native-born US citizen as he would if the man were the actual father. The child could get US citizenship through naturalization, but that would require the family to be living in the US. By the same token, the kid in the case in question could probably get Irish citizenship if they were actually living in Ireland, but they aren't and there's no indication that they ever plan to.
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It looks like the adoption form is very specifically about Parent #1/Parent #2. I'm not able to find much information about lesbian IVF specifically, but some sites are claiming that there's a version specific to that case which recognizes them as 'parents' rather than mother/father.
At least from other jurisdictions, every pretty butch lesbians tend to complain a lot about having to id as 'fathers', even on far-less-formal paperwork, although it doesn't seem as philosophically aggravating at it is for transwomen.
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The most infuriating thing about this court case is that there may be legal precedent for this in the EU:
If I'm reading this correctly, the second child was actually born in the UK rather than Sweden, meaning the same legal ruling would apply to the second child as the first. If the child had been born in Sweden, would the Swedish courts have ruled in McConnell's favour, and allowed her to be listed as the child's father? Apparently so.
But remember, it's just a few crazy college kids, it's only edge cases, and none of this will have effects on your life, straight cis people! It's just asking to be allowed to use the bathroom aligned with their gender identity, nothing more!
Years back when I was asking "but what about if someone abuses this?" and was being assured (in a rather patronising manner) that nope, that would never happen ever. Slope, slippery, what that? We can dismiss that happily as just a fallacy, nothing that will ever occur in the real world.
Is anyone surprised I'm a cynic?
Oh come on, I think it’s ridiculous as you do, but it’s laughable to say that this somehow affects your life.
Gosh, yeah, why didn't I realise that reality being altered around me will have no effect whatsoever on my life?
Would you care to engage in meaningful discussion instead of dismissive sarcasm? We’re not on Twitter, here you can score points with intellectual essayposting instead. Go on, I’ve called you out on your Bailey of “leftist freaks wanting to file paperwork in strange ways is ruining my life”, please hit me with your Motte.
My motte is that if we start to bend physical facts in strange ways, this does affect everyone. My motte is that I was sold a bill of goods before about other things that would "never affect my life" and then it came about that "well in fact it does affect your life since now we've enshrined it in law that unless you say 'yes sir no sir three bags full sir' to this, you are at risk of fines and jail". My motte is that I don't care about this person's politics or who they're married to or what they call themselves, but the undeniable fact remains: they are father and not mother of the child.
What is your problem, here?
My problem is that your rhetoric is incendiary rather than illuminating. This site is devolving into mindless “boo outgroup” drivel.
The fact that you can be fined and arrested for acknowledging the ridiculousness of the situation is a valid example of how this affects your life and I wish you would have led with that. I’m sorry your country does not protect free speech.
Personally, I don’t mind people lying to themselves in the comfort of their own home, or, when it makes for meaningless paperwork issues. I do care about people lying to themselves when it affects others and I think many others are the same, and that’s why trans in bathrooms and sports are such contentious points in otherwise totally woke-d out societies. If the article you posted were in America, I, as an American, would think it’s stupid but inconsequential to my life. You, as an Irish person posting about Ireland are allowed to feel upset. I still think it’s mostly inconsequential to your life.
Ah yes, like the meaningless paperwork issues around ICE asking people for identification as citizens? I think a lot of people would not class that as meaningless paperwork, but indeed seem to see it as evidence of living in a totalitarian state.
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