This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link