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Which is why I elaborate on the various possible answers, the contexts in which each would be relevant, and possible terminology that would allow one to specify each unambiguously.
Yes, sometimes a question rests on a point of fact which cannot be empirically determined, and we face a choice between a non-zero rate of dishonest people getting away with it, and innocent people suffering burdens which are in our ability to ameliorate.
I was attempting to give an extensional definition, akin to Charles Sanders Peirce's proposed definition of lithium:
If you take all the people in the world, put everyone with convex genitals in a blue room and everyone with concave genitals in a pink room, there will be one gender identity that is more common among those in the blue room and another more common in the pink room. The one more common in the blue room is the 'man' identity; the one more common in the pink room is the 'woman' identity. A woman is someone with the 'woman' identity.
If you take everyone who feels that they have the wrong genitals and move them to the other room, the correlation will be even stronger.
Putting people with XY chromosomes in the blue room and people with XX chromosomes in the pink room, or people who produce small gametes in the blue room and people who produce large gametes in the pink room, would have the same gender identities more prevalent in the same rooms, and thus would not change the identity-based definition.
The operative word there is 'rudely'. If I am giving testimony before a governmental organ, or a scheduled interview on television, I will expound on the answer given above. If I am coming home from the shops, and am accosted by a less-respectable individual looking for a sound bite, I am likely to give a crankier answer carrying the message that I do not take him/her/them seriously.
These terms are not widely used by people who hold misogynist attitudes.
The former two are an attempt at rigorous disambiguation. 'People who menstruate' or 'menstruators' is pointing to a category that, in addition to including some trans-men, also excludes many cis-women, who do not menstruate due to age, removal of relevant parts, malnutrition.... 'Birthing parent' is probably an attempt to unambiguously indicate that, if trans-woman Alice and trans-man Bob have a baby, we are at this time referring to Bob rather than Alice; I would consider 'biological mother' or 'reproductive mother' to be acceptable in that instance. Re terminology for genitals, that area of the body has accumulated a vast array of less-than-formal nomenclature (cf. an annotated edition of Shakespeare).
I have previously questioned the use of the term 'chestfeeding'.
I was more gesturing at 'cis-men, trans-men on artificial hormones, and trans-women not on artificial hormones' versus 'cis-women, trans-women on artificial hormones, and trans-men not on artificial hormones', or 'on a graph with testosterone levels on one axis and estrogen levels on the other, someone in the part of the graph with natal-anatomical men/women'.
People who can't afford it. People who can't find a chirurgeon who does it. People who can't afford the time off work for recovery.
I don't know what the distribution of these or other reasons is, as the source previously cited did not divide the 'trans without bottom chirurgery' group by why have not gotten it; it didn't even separate out 'has bottom chirurgery scheduled' or 'in early phase of transition'.
Among the Kamilaroi of what is today New South Wales, Australia, women are divided into four groups: an Ippata is the daughter of a Buta, a Buta is the daughter of an Ippata, a Mata is the daughter of a Kapota, and a Kapota is the daughter of a Mata. (Men are similarly divided: a Kumbo, a Kubbi, a Murri, and an Ippai are, respectively, the sons of an Ippata, a Mata, a Kapota, and a Buta. Marriage is only permitted between a Kumbo and a Mata, a Kubbi and an Ippata, a Murri and a Buta, or an Ippai and a Kapota.) (S. Alexander, review of Arguments About Aborigines, July 2025)
No Kamilaroi could offer you a non-circular definition of Ippata; is their kinship system non-sensical?
Please refer back to the third section of my previous post.
Which still leads us to the same two questions.
١, Islam is not a monolithic hive-mind; the factual and normative assertions made by Saudi-funded Wahhabists are not the same as those made by Sufi mystics.
٢, outside the realm of formal logic, 'correctness' isn't black and white; things can be more or less correct.
The assertion "the collection of factual and normative assertions Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab made about women are more correct than the collection of factual and normative assertions the in-this-house-we-believe crowd make about women." is not the same as the assertion "the collection of factual and normative assertions Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd made about women are more correct than the collection of factual and normative assertions the ante-Islamic Hijazi society made about women.".
Only because I can't think of more than one obvious answer: "Compared to referring to people with the pronouns of their ASAB regardless of how many times they have asked you to stop."
And prexactly what has that got to do with the price of tea in China?
Supposing you meet a male person who is independently wealthy, doesn't need to work for a living, and lives in an area with numerous cosmetic surgeons experienced in vaginoplasties. The person claims to identify as a woman, but makes it perfectly clear that he has a penis which he has no desire to remove.
In your opinion, is such a person "really" trans?
This is not an armchair hypothetical. Consider the National Transgender Discrimination Survey from 2011, which polled over 6,000 people who describe themselves as transgender or gender non-conforming, of which 3,870 were male. Of these, only a quarter claimed to have undergone a penectomy, while 23% claimed to have undergone a vaginoplasty. 14% said they had no interest in undergoing either procedure (this finding is on the page numbered 79, or page 85 of the PDF). In your opinion, are these 14% "really" women? (The finding is even more striking among trans-identified females, 72% of which report no desire to undergo a phalloplasty.)
For a more recent source, consider the US Trans Survey from 2022, which surveyed over 30,000 trans-identified males. Only 11% had undergone an orchiectomy, and only 9% a vaginoplasty. 21% affirmatively said that they did not want either procedure, while 27% said they were "unsure" if they wanted the former and 25% the latter (pg 48).
One-in-five trans-identified males have not undergone a vaginoplasty and explicitly do not want to, while a further one-in-four have not undergone one and are unsure whether they want to. Someone who's on the fence about whether they want something can hardly be said to "viscerally feel they ought to have it". By the terms you specified, nearly half of all trans-identified males in the US are not women. I'll ask again: if you meet a trans-identified male who has not undergone a vaginoplasty and doesn't want one, do you consider that person a woman?
Well, I think quite a number of trans-identified males hold misogynistic attitudes. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the median autogynephiliac male is more misogynistic than the median cis man.
As I've argued repeatedly before, it sure is interesting that trans activists are so keen on "rigorously disambiguating" different categories of people and using maximally clear terminology
... right up to the point where someone points out that, regardless of how they identify, a male person remains male, with all that implies, at which point these trans activists throw a tantrum and call you a Nazi.
Yeah, sounds like it.
Nothing, just that I find it annoying, along with many of your verbal tics (including "prexactly"). Even in the comment I'm replying to you used the term "chirurgeon" for no earthly reason I can discern.
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