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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.
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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