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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.
No I am not claiming that. You are claiming that usage of a word in historical contexts where no distinction was made between sex and gender somehow provides information on whether the word best applies to sex or gender.
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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.
I find this response confusing.
If you believe this, you do not understand what people mean by gender identity. Gender and sex are two components of what was previously seen as a single concept. It's not a brand new layer built on top of sex, it's taking certain components and calling them "sex", and other components and calling them "gender". As you say:
It would be incoherent because they do not make that distinction.
Certainly. But you are litigating this distinction:
Or @HereAndGone2 above:
To state it plainly, here are two different statements:
#1 is a coherent view that I disagree with, but it seems you hold. #2 is something you are claiming that seems pretty obviously false to me. It's at best ambiguous, and in actual practice it gets used in line with gender in situations where sex and gender do not agree.
#2 is an incoherent statement unless you reject #1, even if only for the sake of argument. Do you believe that, within the frame where we believe that sex and gender are separate concepts worth distinguishing, it makes sense to refer to this woman as a mother? If not, why?
It would be more accurate to say that I believe sex is a real thing, and that "gender" (and "gender identity") is a meaningless and incoherent concept unworthy of discussion. It's not that I think gender is a meaningful idea, but that it's not the place of the courts to debate it: it's that I don't think the courts should be passing comment on a completely meaningless concept in the first place. As a society, we've been collectively talking about this "gender" concept for decades, but I've yet to come across a simple, cogent, concise and non-circular definition of what the word actually means, and what it means to have a "gender identity" of x.
It is a simple scientific fact that every mammal must have a male parent and a female parent. The identity of one's biological parents is of paramount importance in a range of medical and genealogical context.
By contrast, there is no similar requirement that every mammal must have one parent of each gender identity. In recognition of this basic biological fact (and for the sake of consistency with how the word is used when talking about every species other than humans) I think it's more appropriate if, in the context of genealogy, the words "father" and "mother" are used to refer to individuals of a specific sex only.
You might say that the litigant in this case only wants to be referred to as the child's "mother" and would have no objection to being referred to as the child's "male parent". And I think you're attempting to sanewash the trans activist movement. I think this man would object just as strenuously to being described as the child's "male parent" as he would to being described as the child's "father". 100% of the time when a "moderate" trans activist announces that they're not engaging in science denialism, they're just calling on everyone to acknowledge the distinction between sex and gender – within a matter of minutes, a trans person will invariably show up to assert that, no, I really am "female" and it's dehumanising to describe me as "male".
(This is why I find this case corrosive to scientific fact and sense-making. In the case of adoptive parents, an adult simply wishes to be recognised as a child's primary caregiver, while still acknowledging the adults who are the child's biological parents. This is different: the litigant is the child's male biological parent, but wants to be legally recognised as not being the child's male biological parent. His claim is that this child does not have a male biological parent. You can talk about "recognising the distinction between sex and gender" til the cows come home, but I think we both know what he would say if the question was put to him point blank.)
Even in your example of how the words "father" and "mother" are used to refer to adoptive rather than biological parents, I don't really think this has anything to do with your mystical concept of "gender". Rather, the word "father" traditionally had two meanings:
Typically these two entities would be the same person, but we acknowledged various instances in which they would not be, as in the case of adoption. But I think it's blatant historical revisionism to claim that, when we refer to an adoptive parent as a child's father, this is in reference to his performing the "gendered role" of a father or whatever. On the contrary, I would say that referring to an adoptive parent as a "father" would be historically understood to mean "despite the fact that the child is not his biological offspring, this individual serves as this child's primary caregiver, and this individual is of the male sex". "Gender" or "gender roles" or how the man "identifies" simply wouldn't enter into the discussion at all.
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