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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.
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!)
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 penis.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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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