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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 27, 2026

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So, in practical terms, your definition of a woman boils down to "anyone who says they are". All of this talk about "visceral feeling that they should have had concave genitals" was just smoke and mirrors designed to distract me from noticing that your definition of the word "woman" is exactly as circular as that I ridiculed in the OP. I will reiterate that spending five or six comments pretending that of course your definition of the word "woman" isn't circular, only to then finally admit that in fact it is circular: this is hardly the most honest and forthright behaviour. Rather than rambling off on digressions which according to you are irrelevant for several hundred words, you could have just as easily said "for medical purposes, a woman is a person with concave genitals; for all other purposes, a woman is anyone who says they are". That's what your "definition" ultimately boils down to, right? Why not just come out and say that? I'm sure it couldn't possibly be because on some level you're aware of how vacuous and incoherent this worldview is, and want to dress it up as something more grounded.

I presume the "narrow set of purposes" to which you refer are those in which anatomy is especially salient e.g. for the purposes of a prostate exam, a trans-identified male is a man, not a woman. For every other purpose, you essentially treat trans-identified males as secular Oracles at Delphi, whose accounts of their inner lives can never be questioned by anyone under any circumstances, no matter how suspicious or laughable. Outside of gender ideology, there are many contexts in which we do not accept any individual's word at face value (e.g. a police officer who pulls someone over for speeding will demand to see their driver's license, even if they're a charity worker, a man of the cloth, or a former President), up to and including claims about one's inner experience (doctors must separate the patients who are legitimately in pain from the addicts seeking opiates). But as far as you're concerned, any male person who announces he's a woman instantly becomes one, no questions asked; no questions permitted to be asked; and anyone who so much as raises an eyebrow, points out the incongruity of this claim, or suggests that the male in question might have ulterior motives for so "identifying" has thereby outed themselves as a fascist Nazi bigot. As far as you're concerned, it is simply impossible for the declarative statements "I am a woman" or "I identify as a woman" to be untruthful or knowingly deceptive. These statements need not be vetted for accuracy: regardless of who speaks them, they are true by definition. I will note, again, that I cannot think of any other statements in the English language (or any language) to which this description applies, although I am open to suggestions. I am curious why gender ideology is so important that it requires us to completely overhaul our entire practice of epistemology, the philosophical assessment of what is true, what is false and how we tell one from another. "Because if we don't, some people will feel sad." Okay.

When this topic has come up in the past, I've asked you for what specific "purposes" treating a trans-identifed male as a woman provides better predictive power than treating them as a male person. I believe your answer was "none of your business". Which was, well, illustrative.

As an aside, you've been expounding on your personal interpretation of gender ideology (at great length) for several months now, and to my eyes it seems, if anything, even more incoherent than it seemed at first brush. I'm curious if anyone who's read any of the comments you've posted has had their mind changed on any sub-facet of this topic. If my experience is typical, it suggests that, regardless of whether you do "lack confidence in your own arguments to persuade people", you shouldn't have much confidence therein.