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I highly doubt you're arguing in good faith here.
Not sure who you're talking to, but that isn't the modal "anti-trans" view, and I doubt anyone has that strawman view on this forum. Sure, many trans people are delusional (the ones who merely declare they want to be treated as the other sex aren't, but the modern line that they are and always have been another sex is just obviously false). But adults are free to pursue happiness in their own way, including transitioning, and it's no big deal for me to be polite and play along with their preferences most of the time.
I suspect you know that most people's main objection is to forcing the rest of society to play along. That includes:
This is a hilariously absurd take. You're just shit-stirring.
Wikipedia is a private organization and is allowed to set their policies as they please.
Employers should have a right to free association and should be able to fire someone for any reason they please.
I am not aware of this ever happening in the US. There may be some other nations that have done so, but those nations also tend to be highly censorious in other areas too (like how the UK has effectively outlawed a lot of Palestine support) so it seems to be a general free speech issue with them.
Same thing with this. Employer right to free association is based, government compelling something is not.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/
The only instance I know of people actually trying to feign transness to enter sports was for the Daily Wire's movie LadyBallers in which they failed to get a man actually willing to undergo the transition requirements in joining the women's competitions.
Makes sense, nobody cares about women's sports to begin with so people aren't giving themselves hormones and surgeries for multiple years just to win in them. Every trans participant in women's sports I've heard of (the vanishingly few already) seem to have been transitioning for real and persisted even after they stopped participating.
http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/
The problem with this response has always been is that categories vary wildly between groups.
Even something as simple as "what is a sound?" gets a fierce debate when you ask if a tree falling in a forest with no one around makes one. No one contests the base level reality, that the air around the tree vibrates. They disagree over whether or not the vibrations itself counts as sound, or if it's the perception of said vibrations that do.
We see this everywhere. Is water wet? Is a hot dog a sandwich? Is a palm tree a tree?
And the words themselves can shift depending on the context they're used in. The tomato as a fruit vs a vegetable is a common example of this. And Scott's own example of whales and dolphins as dag for the department of dag.
And words change over time too. And it's not just trans activists who commit this either. When someone refers to Caster Semenya, Imane Khelif or other intersex individuals with female presenting genital as a man, they have changed the definition of man and woman. They are applying a new modern definition over words far far older than chromosomes were known to exist for. Historically intersex people like Semenya and Khelif would have been women, it is the changed definition that says otherwise.
The trans debate is often like this. A debate over categories, a debate if sound is the vibrations or the perception. A debate if a tree is the morphological structure of a tall perinnial plant with a trunk and crown and thus the palm tree is included, or if a tree is that but also as a woody plant with secondary growth. Or if we wanted to define it even more exclusively, we could do a woody dicot with secondary growth and exclude stuff like conifers as well since they're of a different lineage. We can do all sorts of things like that! And we do. And we argue about them all the time. Categories are made for man, not man for the categories.
The problem is that Scott's essay was silly, socially motivated, and shot a hole through the chest of Rationalism as being anything more than postmodern word games with a nerd's coat of hobby paint.
HA! You know, I just realized that in context the phrasing highlights quite explicitly the TERF complaint that most trans discourse is inherently misogynistic. Indeed, the categories were made for man.
Can't believe it took me this long. I wish I could think Scott was being subtly Straussian but no chance of him being less than a true believer.
In other words, you just don't like it. Meta discussions about words and meaning have been here since the beginning of rationalism https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SGB7Y5WERh4skwtnb
Speaking of, that's an example! "Man" in Scott's case is referring to humans, homo sapiens.
If you want to be reductive, sure. I don't like murder either, or green bell peppers.
Does it make sense to put all those in one category?
That is what I call damning with faint praise.
I can give actual substanted reasons for why I don't like murder, like "having people live in fear of violence makes them less economically efficient" or "allowing murder dismantles a functional society" or even just the basic "I think murder is morally wrong".
What you provide here is just fluff. Pure ad hominem.
It's disguised in a wordy way to appear sophisticated, but there is nothing substantial said here.
But even with the fluff, it's still wrong. These "word games" have been a part of rationalism since at least the sequences, thus Scott playing word games couldn't have blown a hole open, if there is a hole it was already there. So even the fluff is wrong.
How dare you, my prose is meant to be playfully purple, not sophisticated!
Fine, this particular instantiation of word games was the final straw to a portion of the rationalist-adjacent crowd that had never bothered with Yud's masturbatory sequences, and proved that the considerations of the Bay Arean Social Influence were more important than anything a normal person would call rationalism or utilitarianism for the greatest good of the greatest number of people, and virtually stamped approval of utility monsters- so long as they are utility monsters approved by the Bay Arean Society.
Let's try again: redefining the categories of "man" and "woman" to be useless circular referents makes people less economically efficient and dismantles a functional society that broadly continues to find significant moral, ethical, and economic value in having some legal separation of the sexes.
Better?
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