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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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