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I would put it a different way. Because the history of feminism has been to erode men's only spaces (see female sports reporters fighting to be let into men's locker rooms, the erosion of old boys clubs, etc.), there are basically no men's spaces left to fight over with any cultural cache or legitimacy.
Virtually no man feels physically unsafe if a trans man is using the same restroom as him, and there otherwise aren't any widespread "men's safe spaces" in society for trans men to invade.
The reason people are fighting over "what is a woman?" is two-fold: 1) women's safe spaces and women's spaces in general actually exist in society, and 2) the reason they exist is because there are physical size and strength differences between men and women that matter in a number of circumstances. Figuring out how to deal with biological males who want to enter women's safe spaces, or other women's spaces is a genuine conflict between two opposing sets of rights (or claims to harm or risk) that must be resolved to somebody's dissatisfaction.
I don't think being trans is any one thing. I'm one of the more vocally pro-trans people on the Motte, but even I'll admit that the breakdown of trans and non-binary people today probably includes a small minority of non-culture bound trans people who would be trans no matter what society they lived in, and a large number of people who are only "trans" or "non-binary" because of the social environment they grew up in.
My main point of departure is being socially liberal enough that I think adults should be able to make risky medical decisions about their own bodies, and that in the face of ambiguous or bad evidence for childhood transition it's still probably better to let a combination of parents, kid and doctor decide how they want to deal with a child who wants to live as the opposite sex. Trans maximalists might call even my fairly liberal position "transphobic", but I view it as a fairly middle of the road position to say, "I think people should generally have enough freedom to make even bad decisions that might make their lives worse."
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This always struck me as a kind of map/territory confusion. The culture war hinges upon whether trans women should be referred to with feminine pronouns and be allowed in women exclusive spaces. Does anyone in this debate really care about anything else? It's like when people argue about the dictionary definition of "racism". Getting to a "true" definition is impossible and pointless because in this case words are just a proxy for the real issues.
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I think there's a category error underlying a lot of the discussion on this. I don't think it's right to think of sex and gender as being two distinct (though correlated) categories, where everyone has a sex, and everyone also has a gender, and we can place you into a little 2x2 box of what you are (non-binary, or whatever, aside). Rather, sex is some primitive physical category, and gender is the social result of your sex.
Put another way:
Sex is the physical category.
Gender is the set of assumptions, expectations, rules, and roles that society places on you as a result of your sex. It is socially constructed not in the tautological sense that "gender" (like "sex") is a categorization that people made up, but in the meaningful sense of "gender" being a set of material things that society does to you.
Notice, and let me emphasize:
Gender is not a category, it's a bunch of things that happen to you because of your category. Language often elides gender as the category, but everyone is really talking about sex.
Gender is a real thing in the material world. We in 2023 America expect that males (sex) will do man (gender) things like wear pants, get called "he", and pee in the restroom that other males do. It's not some metaphysical voodoo.
Gender being socially constructed doesn't imply that it can be changed from the individual's perspective. This is again a category error. It's not a category, it's a bunch of ways that society treats you.
A lot of components of gender probably make sense given sex differences, e.g., males are bigger and more aggressive, and gender roles need to clamp down on that; females are the sex class that gives birth and nurses children, and gender roles need to make that possible. On the other hand, there are likely many components of gender that make less sense given sex differences, either because they never did, or times have changed.
From this perspective it seems like the way forward is the so-called gender critical view, where we ask whether various components of gender are really appropriate social reactions to your sex category. Like, "girls can be good at math too!" and "boys can wear dresses!"
On the trans activist side, it the sex-gender is different argument is kind of a red herring. You don't get to choose your gender, not because gender and sex are the same thing, but because gender is what society does to you because of your sex. We can slowly change how society treats members differently by sex class, but you, an individual, don't get to control that. Also, by the way, it seems sort of obvious that the overall trajectory of their rhetorical move here is (1) say "fine, you can't change your sex but at least you can change your gender," and soon enough (2) "actually you can change your sex too." This leaves me thinking that they don't really believe sex-gender distinction that they emphasize.
Likewise people on the cultural right seem to think that separating sex and gender is merely a sneaky way to legitimize how trans identified males self-identify. I sort of think that's true, but at least analytically I think the distinction outlined above is useful. A lot of the more basic right wing discussion of this seems to blend together two issues: "can men become women" (no) and "do the gendered expectations we put on people because of their sex make sense?" (maybe, maybe not). Separating them is useful.
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People have sexes, languages have genders. Anything more complicating than that is unprovable hibby jibby. This idea of gender as "socially created psychological programming" is the result of a modern propaganda campaign.
I think even if we taboo the word "gender" we still have the following distinct things from sex:
Sex roles: The roles a particular culture assigns to the sexes, including cultural fictions like hijra or kathoey, or artificially created categories like eunuch, trans, etc.
Sexual proprioception / Internal sense of sex or sex role: The bodily and psycho-social feeling of having a sexed body or belonging to a particular sex role in society.
I don't think any of these require "unprovable hibby jibby." Sex roles are obviously separate from sex itself, since there's nothing inherently "female" about dresses, or "male" about suit jackets.
And the existence of people with a sexual proprioception of different genitals or secondary sexual characteristics would hardly be mystical. If Scott's recent posts are anything to go on, there are people around the world in different cultures who are convinced the witches are stealing their penises, so it's not insane to believe that "sometimes brains do funny things, and people feel like they have different body parts than they physically have." They might be a minority of modern day trans people, but I don't think it's a crazy implausible claim to make that such people might exist. That would also of course be separate from how we deal with them on a societal level.
Similarly, the idea of having an internal sense of sex or sex role isn't crazy to me, even if it isn't a fundamental part of human psychology. I'm sure that the King of England feels like the King of England, even though there's no way he evolved a mental faculty to specifically feel like the King of England. Is it so crazy that there might be a female-bodied human that has an internal sense that they should occupy the male sex role? Insofar as the male sex role is separate from being male, why should we deny entry into that category?
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I disagree - I think that there is actually something there when they point at their concept of gender. There absolutely are cultural expectations and social constructions with regard to gender, and there are definitely areas where those concepts change. There are real, observable and definite differences between what it means to be a good man in feudal Japan and what it means to be a good man in 1950s America.
I think that the left is wrong when they think you can actually divorce these concepts and ideas from sex in any real way, but their error isn't in identifying that part of what we view as gender is socially constructed (i.e. wearing skirts is feminine today, but a kilt is the height of masculinity on a highland warrior).
Sure, but so what? What does this matter in any way with regards to calling a girl a girl or a boy a boy?
With regards to calling a girl a girl? Nothing, I explicitly said that the left is wrong they think that these concepts can be divorced from sex. They're right when they point out that a lot of our expectations regarding gender are created and reinforced culturally, and if you try to attack them on those grounds you are going to lose because they are right - that's not where the error is occurring. The problem arises when they expand the category of gender to include things that are really in the domain of sex, but that doesn't mean there isn't any use in being able to say that something is masculine due to an inherent property of human masculinity that transcends culture(sex) as opposed to something more local(gender).
I just don't think anyone really ever has used gender to mean, "what girls generally act like around here" or any definition similar to that. There are the people who used it as a synonym for sex, people who used it in reference to language, and now people who use it in an arguments as soldiers context.
People have been using it like that for decades in academia, and there is actually a use for the term. I am not suggesting that the term should be used uncritically at all - and I think that you can ultimately make a stronger "transphobic" argument by adopting and using those concepts.
Yes and? I am fairly certain it was invented in that context for the purpose of arguments as soldiers. And I dont really see the argument for a stronger argument. The argument is certain people have a delusion. Tomboy is perfectly good word as is Nancy. Other more powerful and specific ones include autogynephilia fetishist, delusional dysphoric, etc.
And it worked. If your opponent has a strategy that is working and can convince reasonable bystanders, even if that strategy is just playing shellgames with definitions, then countering or side-stepping it is a good idea. By clearly laying out the distinction beforehand, you prevent them from using it as an escape-hatch later on in the discussion. Just calling a trans person a delusional fetishist might win you votes with the hard right, but it isn't a strategy that's terribly effective if you're trying to convince regular people who aren't extremely online/invested in the culture war.
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Everything is socially constructed, but society is biologically constructed.
The way we understand medicine is socially constructed but nobody uses 'actually cancer is a social construct' as a gotcha, or in order to get some kind of cancer-benefits in absence of medical evidence of cancer.
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If you can assert it one way, I can assert it the other. "No it isn't, sex and gender are synonyms".
This is not a coherent thing even if one were to agree with your previous framing. If it's tribe-specific, then there is no such thing as "the female gender"; your gender would have to be "American female", "Burkina Fasoan female", "East Timorese female". Very little unifies those cultures (perhaps it was literally zero pre-globalisation), so by this account, we'd need +7,000 genders, to account for all roles in all cultures? At which point, your concept is so far away from the dictionary that you should probably start using a new word instead of trying to repurpose the "gender" one.
Is that so strange? It's like objecting that we can't refer to a single "leadership category" that holds true for all cultures. Like, yes there's a lot of similarities between a President, a King, an Emperor, a Pope, etc. But they are all different categories, and if we're being extra scrupulous you'll probably end up deciding that "American President" is a different category from "North Korean President" in spite of their similar names in English.
Certainly, I think it would be sensible enough to say that race is similar. Different cultures across space and time have had radically different conceptions of race, whether it was the Greeks and their concepts of Hellenes vs. Barbarians, or the highly detailed admixture charts of the colonial Spanish, or the census categories in modern America, it would be silly to criticize the concept of race because "American black" is a different category from "British black."
Why is it so crazy to say that the social category of "American female" is quite different from the social category of "Ancient Roman aristocratic female" which is different from "Ancient Roman female slave"? That just seems obviously true, and not at all weird. Certainly it's not evidence that we went wrong somewhere in our definitions or categorizations. Humans just have made up that many different kinds of social categories, even if they might share broad similarities that we could group together to create fewer categories that are easier to reason about and make broad conclusions about.
It's not crazy, but it's not relevant to the real world. We don't exclude people from bathrooms or decide what prison to send them to based on the difference between an American female and an Ancient Roman aristocratic female. Your categorization is useless for the things that people care about.
I feel like that example is only useless because Ancient Rome doesn't exist anymore. It's very relevant to American women who might travel to the Middle East how females are treated in those societies. The bigger problem is that, since most people never get the opportunity to travel, they never get the chance to see how people are categorically treated in different cultures. It's information they can only gather second hand.
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I think there is a misunderstanding here.
Sex and Gender are not two completely seperate entities, they are highly correlated. 97% of the time you can think of gender as "the way someone performs their biological sex". That is of course dependent on where and when they were socialized, their self-conception, their peergroup, their class and many other things. A woman in Iran today will perform the role "woman" differently than a woman in russia in the 19th century would have. If you try to think of this variance as discrete genders then yes you would need some ridiculous amount, which is why it is more practical to think of it as a spectrum or, even better, through the lens of clustering. Likewise a man might have different ideas about what it means to "be a man" or to "be manly" throughout his life and adjust his behaviour accordingly. I wouldn't think of that as him switching genders. He's moving around in genderspace if you will, but it's not like a switch gets flipped at a discrete point.
I'm honestly not sure what exactly is going on with transgender people but I suspect in the cases of "genuine" gender dysphoria there is some underlying physiological cause (hormone levels in the womb is one candidate) that causes someone to be born with a brain that behaves like a brain in a different-sex body would. Thus those people default to the opposite end of the gender spectrum and then start deviating from there.
The big difference between sex and gender is that while sex isn't a perfect binary (nothing in biology is) it forms a tight cluster. A very large percentage of people with XY Chromosomes have a penis, produce sperm, grow a beard and so on. Likewise a very large percentage of people that produce viable sperm have a penis etc. etc. Yes there are outliers but it is disingenuous to say that biological sex can't be thought of as binary(with a small asterisk). The same isn't true for gender. The probability that a person with a penis that was raised in the US enjoys one or more of {Beer, Sportsball, Guns, Jeans, (Arm-)Wrestling, Programming, Protecting others, Soldering,...} is high and is much higher than for someone with a vagina. However the correlation there is not nearly as strong as the XY Chromosomes/Penis or Penis/Beard correlations. Gender is much more fluid, more easily changed and obviously more dependent on external factors. There are still two relatively distinct clusters that capture most people but the variance is much higher.
Of course you can use sex and gender as synonyms but that leaves you with a weaker model that is unable to explain much of the variance that you see in how people act vs how they differ biologically.
An analogy I made previously is that this is like Byzantine theologians trying to make a distinction between the "nature" and "essence" of Christ to let him be simultaneously human and divine. To buy into their framing that there's a real distinction here (rather than just something pseudointellectual they made up to keep themselves in a job) is to already concede the debate.
I would contend that the correct answer when a Monophysite tries to draw you into a debate on homoousios is to tell him "That's a bullshit concept, you're making words up for distinctions that don't exist due to ideological motivation, Jesus was just Some Wierd Guy acting wierd, not a male performing the gender role of God". Likewise, I would contend that the correct answer when a trans theorist tries to draw you into a debate on gender is to tell him "That's a bullshit concept, you're making words up for distinctions that don't exist due to ideological motivation, Emerald Treespirit is just Some Wierd Guy acting wierd, not a male performing the gender role of a woman".
It doesn't leave you with a weaker model, it leaves you with a better model, because "man acting wierd" correctly predicts what happens when you put them in female prison, whereas "performing the social role of a woman" does not. The POOR predictivity of your model recently cost the Scottish premier her job.
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Biology defines males and females as having small (sperm) and large (egg) sex cells.
True hermaphroditism is extremely rare and non functional:
The chromosomes XY, XX etc generally kick off development to phenotypically adult human sexes but there are rare disorders which most people are familiar with now.
The chromosomal pairs for sexes are different in different species, eg in birds males are the sex with 2 identical sex chroms.
But birds and mammals both fit the large/small sex cell binary
Yeah I deleted that maybe a minute after posting, because I didn't want to explain thee edge cases
RNA != DNA
Still happens (and can cause cancer or mutations in future generations) but in DNA the rates are something like a handful per few billion.
Then they have to make it through repair and error detecting mechanisms.
Not as good as computers (you can move gigabyte files across the internet no problem) but far more accurate than almost anything graspable by humans
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Debated this before here. The people who really grew up in the blue tribe have accepted gender is not sex.
I have no idea what they are talking about but in their social environment it’s extremely past being seperate meanings.
Honestly don’t think this ever gets settled unless transgenders disappears. Which seems like the most likely path. Transsexuals seem like a fad to me. Someday we will look back at this debate like beanie babies when the young people get a new current thing. A lot of us will always look at you stupid if you claim gender and sex are different.
Oh no, that was just the first stage in the gender war. Progressives have moved on from "biological sex and gender identity are separate" (which at least allowed a definition of transgender as "someone whose gender identity differs from their biological sex") to "gender identity is biological sex".
As an example, take this Slate article from almost 7 years ago: What Is a “Male Body”?, which contains statements like:
Which obviously raises the question: what does it mean to be a transgender woman if the transgender woman is also biologically a woman? How does she differ from non-trans biological women and is there a word to describe that difference, if it's not "biological sex"?
Then she continues with this:
This is true, but all of those people are still medically classifiable as male or female. Women with high testosterone are still women: they have a female reproductive system (ovaries, uterus, vagina), and not a male reproductive system (prostate, penis, testes). People born with XXY-chromosomes are said to suffer from Klinefelter's syndrome, which is understood to affect exclusively males.
Conspicuously the author never claimed that they are affected by any of these genetic or chromosomal aberrations. Yet they go on to conclude:
Which again raises the question: in what way was their body not female? If they have XX-chromosomes, ovaries, uterus and a vagina, no SRY gene, no penis, no testes, no prostate, what divides them from the biological women who have the same physical characteristics?
So in short, no: progressives have not accepted that gender is not sex. Many now insist that gender is sex, but that sex has nothing to do with genetics or body parts. It's all in the mind. This is obviously ridiculous to any rational person, but here we are.
One way they may explain it is that saying "transgender woman" is a similar to let's say saying "tall woman". Of course it does not remove the problem of definition of the word woman. Which as far as I understand is then defined metaphysically, woman is somebody who "feels like a woman born in wrong body". So womanhood is metaphysical term, it is something like a soul.
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I can speak to my experience of this. I remember back in the mid 2000s I was starting college at what is one of the most obnoxiously progressive institutions on the planet. It was end of freshman year. I remember talking with someone who said that gender and sex were different and gender was a social construct. She just like dropped it into a conversation so casually, so matter of factly, such that I, who tries to be a blank slate, just accepted it, assumed she knows something I don't or whatever.
And there were hundreds more conversations just like that that happened throughout my college career. I basically started believing it and buying into it myself to some degree. All these people, all the reasonable and smart people i knew, couldn't be wrong about something they're so sure about, right? It wasn't until 4 years after college, that I saw "gender and sex are different" had started to be weaponized into justifications I disagreed regarding the how society needs treat trans people. I then realized, "Wait, why did I buy into this in the first place? What value or evidence is there that gender and sex are different? Is there any logical consistency to this?" such that I ended up rejecting the notion of gender and sex being different altogether.
This is the moment of enlightenment with the gender/sex distinction, I think: when you realise that there was never a good evidence basis for this distinction, and it was developed for political rather than explanatory purposes.
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Ya agree.
My dog always wants to sit in a human seat when we eat. And he will be quiet and pretend he’s part of the conversation and mimics our behavior like he’s a human. He’s still a dog.
Also got my first don’t be evil reddit notification. Felt proud of it. I’ve definitely hardened in my belief from wtf are these people talking about to actively opposing Tran life.
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Gender is a polite word for sex, and was overwhelmingly used as such for the vast majority of the existence of the language. What gender-theorists use the word to refer to is, to put it mildly, less than concrete.
I have no idea what feeling like a woman means. I have no idea what feeling like a man means, either, despite being one! I simply have nothing to compare against. I understand bright in comparison to dark, happy in comparison to sad, but I have nothing to compare any gender feelings I may or may not have against, so I know no way to define them because they are all I know. And I simply don't see how anyone else does, either.
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I could compromise on that, were it not that the movement now seems to have moved on and changed its mind yet again about this, so now we have trans people talking about their gender and meaning the exact same thing as sex. Now they are female-gender, which is the same thing as being female-sex, and if you raise any queries you are a transphobe and TERF.
I'm tired of the entire conversation, and we haven't even reached a workable consensus yet. I do find my attitudes hardening: there are only two sexes, male and female. Intersex is a different, real thing and you don't get to invoke it to cover your notion of "well uh I'm obviously female but apart from cutting my hair and wearing baggy jumpers I make no difference, but I do identify as non-binary and get VERY UPSET if you refer to me as 'she/her'".
The way that DEI is now, seemingly, DEIB - "B" for "belonging", because "inclusion" was not inclusive enough, it seems. This is the kind of thing that pisses people off: just when you think that at last there is something that everyone finally agrees on, the most progressive of the fringe go off and change it all and the entire argument gets reset back to the beginning all over again.
Oh, I see you are not educated enough yet. The term belonging means one has to take vigorous action to support the DEI initiative. Inclusion means no microaggressions, you just make sure you do not alienate protected groups and their DEI shepherds from HR. Now belonging goes one step further, it is implemented once the organization is committed enough. Belonging requires action from your side to be actively welcoming and supporting DEI initiatives. So belonging means that you put on BLM t-shirt or participate in black month event or that you rat on your colleague who was not inclusive enough because he committed microaggression today. You see, all people who clapped after Stalin's speech were expressing their mutual belonging, therefore one who does not clap, or he who does not clap loud enough or long enough can be even viewed as not being inclusive. It's kind of genius, isn't it?
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Nah, it's probably just to stop people from being able to call them "DIE".
Now it's DIEB. German for Thief.
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I have qualms about the term of "belonging" to an organization: they don't own me, and never will. I realize it can also refer to more affirmative group membership, but it's such an obviously two-faced word choice that I have trouble taking it seriously.
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This is a mod note on all of your posts in this thread, not just this one:
You are presenting an interesting argument in an interesting way: that's good.
You're being condescending, antagonistic, and posting a lot of responses that pattern-match to "troll": that's bad.
A lot of people have reported you for trolling. I am not sure whether you're just having a go at "rationalists" to see how worked up you can get them about gender, or if you are making a serious attempt to challenge "gender theory," but if your intention is to prompt a debate about whether gender is real, please stop presenting your arguments in the tone of a fictional time traveler from the far future who's already figured out that everyone who disagrees with him is an ignoramus. In other words, strive for good faith engagement. Right now, what you are posting does not look very much like good faith.
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At the core, I really can't accept the attempt to both reject the 'gender binary' whilst still defining all gender expression in terms of 'masculine' and 'feminine' identities. Indeed, claiming that gender is a 'spectrum' still implies ONLY TWO ENDPOINTS.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/spectrum
Quoth:
To me, there has to be an acknowledgement of the underlying biological reality. We don't have to give it moral weight, we don't have to believe it can't be changed, we don't have to use it to judge people as groups (lol). I grasp that the naturalistic fallacy applies here.
BUT.
If you were born with a uterus, ovaries, and thus produced the chemical known as estrogen in abundance, the physical development of your body, including your brain, is going to follow a predictable path.
If you are capable of bearing children, capable of producing milk to feed infants, and have a natural tendency towards socializing with other humans...
This is going to lead to a VERY different social role for you in a state of nature. And removing you from the 'state of nature' won't revert the biological factors.
Likewise, if you you have greater upper body strength and bone density due to having testes that produce testosterone, and a generally more physically aggressive nature... that ALSO implies a different social role.
And turns out that the definitions of 'masculine,' 'male,' and 'man' were forged over centuries of these social roles being acknowledged, as with 'feminine,' 'female,' and 'woman.'
So I don't see ANY way you can completely divorce the concept of masculinity and femininity from the biological differences that come from being a sexually dimorphic species.
At the very least, I think the people trying to turn those terms into floating signifiers whose meanings exist only in the minds of the individual have utterly failed to meet the burden of showing that these concepts are no longer useful or accurate and that a change is necessary.
They'd have a better case if they were trying to completely do away with the concepts and introduce whatever New Soviet (Wo)Man identity they want to apply to everyone which ignores individual differences altogether, methinks.
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Something I’ve noticed about gender trolls is that they feel like they can “gotcha” reality by redefining words.
Has anyone here ever heard of the “sovereign citizen” movement? A culture war adjacent recent happening was the trial of a mass murderer named “Darrel Brooks”. Darrell is, and also was, an adherent to this movement.
His belief was essentially that he could use some clever wording to get himself out of trouble for having obviously, on multiple videos, killed a bunch of people at a parade in Waukesha Wisconsin. Despite being obviously guilty of this crime, Darrel spent weeks wasting time arguing with the judge about him, the person in the courtroom, not being Darrel Brooks, but being a “third party intervenor”, as if this would catch the judge in a linguistic gotcha that would prove that the obvious objective reality that the court exists in wasnt actually so real after all.
You can see some of what I’m talking about here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=jm-E3FNUIvs
What’s interesting about that these sovcits is that they aren’t stupid, the arguments they make have some internal consistency; it’s just that they think that if they torture the words enough, that they can warp reality.
I think the gender trolls are suffering from a similar sort of delusion. No matter how much somebody might torture the meaning of words, and no matter how complex and seemingly sophisticated these linguistic arguments might become (they do seem to get ever more complex over time), they will never change the reality that women are in fact women, and men are in fact men, and that there is a very very tiny minority of people who suffer from a genetic defect which causes them to be neither. You cannot make a linguistic argument that alters reality because the language is only a tool which describes reality.
Saying “well actually sex and gender are different! So this whole time when you’ve been using the worded gender to describe something, you didn’t realize but you were actually an adherent to my ideology!” Is just…silly. No, my mother saying “gender” because she does like saying “sex” in front of people, does not change what she meant, which was a description of a reality where men and women both exist.
No, their arguments have no internal consistency, yes they are stupid.
'The government is illegitimate band of gangsters with no authority other than guns, taxes are extortion and armed robbery, but there is one clever trick how to avoid them! If you spell your name in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS, they have to leave you alone! Do not ask why, they just have to!"
It is not any kind of brave protest or noble resistance, it is nothing than plain delusion.
Rational Wiki is in their case 100% right.
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For that matter the idea that Gender is not a direct synonym for sex is contested at best. If you just look at the way people debate the gender issue, you can confirm that this is the case.
You might consider a superposition of two states:
In one, gender and sex mean the same thing. Therefore, trans people are both the sex and gender they were born as, can change neither. It follows that they should be legally/practically treated as that sex.
In the other, sex is biological, gender is a social/mental construct. Therefore, trans people are the sex they were born as, but can be whatever gender they want, even totally made up ones. It follows that gender is practically meaningless, there's little reason to ever bring it up or care about it, and all legal/practical behaviors should ignore gender and only use sex as an input.
In either case, the behavioral prognosis is the same: treat people according to their biological sex, at least for the small number of instances where there is legitimate cause to segregate based on sex, such as sports or prisons. It's only by conflating the two via Motte and Bailey shenanigans that trans activists can construct arguments to justify the changing of sex.
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Of course this was the genius of “What is a Woman.” The basic problem with transgenderism is that it equivocates. On one hand, it says woman is based purely on self identification. On the other hand, it requires a platonic ideal of what a woman is (how do you identify with X without being able to categorize what X is outside of self ID). Clearly that platonic form is based on sex. And that transsexual people don’t actually meet this platonic form and therefore are clearly something different.
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It doesn’t hinge on definitions, it hinges on the utility of language versus power dynamics.
When liberals think of definitions, they think about what a specialized academic body has defined. This is, in fact, not actually a definition. This is a “term of art” or jargon which can (at most) act as a lesser definition. A legal definition of argument is different than the real world definition of argument. The legal definers do not get to force their definition upon the normal, everyday majority usage. So it is with all terms of art.
Per a survey 20 years ago, the majority of people believe the word is rooted in male/female division. Only 10% bring up social roles or “socially defined”. A self-perception origin of the word only accounted for 19% of origin beliefs, but because only 42% of definitions supplied a statement on origin, this is more like 8%.
Now, the power dynamic today may be that the academics do get to foist their “social construct” definition on the word gender. For a time, there will exist a purgatory of definitions where the previous majority definers are tricked into believing that this is the real definition. But what will happen is that most people will discount the importance of “gender” as a word. It would be as if someone created a new word, “spashiboo”, which refers to a social construction — the majority will simply not care about “spashiboo” and go back to caring about the male/female sex distinction.
But why is the male/female sex distinction so important and resilient to attempts at obfuscation? And here is where the significance lies: words are used for their utility. There is hardly a definition in social affairs more important than the male/female division, because it dictates our sexual aims (and thus our evolutionary and biological aims, and our social aims), and it efficiently categorized the psychological differences between men and women.
This is more important than anything that the ivory tower gender wizards can brew in their textbooks. Normal people care about having sex and procreating, and they also want to divide humans according to useful social categories. The first reason mandates the priority of a male/female definition. The second reason encourages a male/female definition, because men and women act differently, and I have seen no evidence than MTF are more womanly in their psychological orientation (in fact I have seen evidence to the opposite: excelling in video games, typical male autism, masculine faces, etc).
The link to your pdf document doesn't work for me.
It is “Definitions of gender and sex: The subtleties of meaning”
https://sci-hub.ru/https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1007123617636
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I wonder if this is a partial explanation for the use of "females" among some types of young men.
There's just no real better term to apply to female kind as a whole. Girls has a connotation of youth and immaturity, women has an inference of age that excludes the younger cohort.
But it's probably only caught on because it sounds better if you say it while sneering.
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"Males" is a common construct supported by the social justice movement, usually in the phrase "white males". It's unsurprising that some people would not recognize that the social justice movement is engaged in double standards where "males" is acceptable but "females" isn't.
Those men don't seem to be taking many ques from the social justice movement. If anything, it's the exact opposite, something like "I'm talking about people born with pussies, not whatever the fuck you wierdos are on about."
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To the community, we probably shouldn't feed the trolls. I suspect this person is a troll due to statements like this further down thread:
That and a general vague sense of belligerence, and argumentativeness.
I know I replied further down, and I probably shouldn't have. I suspected this person was a troll and fed the troll anyway. Live and learn.
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I used to work in a genetics lab that spent a good amount of time identifying sex markers in species and determineing if samples were male or female. The field in the database that got an M or an F was gender.
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You assert that which must be proven.
This is not a fact, this is an assertion.
And it's a pretty silly one at that. Gender is totally distinct? What does that even mean? Does it have any relation to sex? What is that relation? You can't define "gender" without reference to sex, and if you could it would stop meaning what the trans lobby wants it to mean.
If gender is a "feeling", as you claim, then that is the same thing as saying it does not exist.
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Can you cite evidence for why this particular framing should be the way we define these words? As I've said before on this forum, the thing that most people refer to these days as gender may more traditionally (as in prior to 2012, for most of society) be referred to as "gender roles", and I think that there would be a lot less controversy (and the statements would carry less weight) if people said that gender roles are socially constructed or distinct from sex, etc.
Also as I've said before, the debate about the definition of the word "gender" is kind of weird. Like Scott once said:
I'm keen on pointing out that it always seemed to me comparable to a situation in which one day half of society started using the word "tallness" differently. Some people may tell me that I have to treat them as if they're 6'4". And if I point out that they're actually 5'8", they say, "that's my height. It's completely distinct from my tallness, which everyone knows is just socially constructed roles and is determined entirely by how people self-identify".
It's just a definition. But the problem is that that definition carries implications based on the previous usage of the word. It seems as if gender advocates coopted the word "gender" and applied the definitions of "gender roles" to it, using the weight the term "gender" carries towards specific ends in the form of social activism.
I don’t think in anyway they are referring to gender roles. A stay at home dad is still 100% male even if he’s performing traditionally female roles. And that dude who stole suitcases runs i believe some health department for the Feds isn’t claiming to be a man because he has an executive role but is claiming to be a female because ???? Wants attention from the best I can tell.
Sorry, maybe I muddled the conversation, and shouldn't have mentioned gender roles here. I just brought it up because I often see people say "gender is a social construct. The proof is because what it means to be a women in China is different than here, women in China dress differently, etc". I just mean to say that I reject that sort of argument, because it's talking about gender roles, not gender. Gender roles are different in China. Not gender itself.
Is that even true? Do women in China not take more interest in children and babies? Are they more authoritative and aggressive than men? In what way are gender roles different in China beyond superficial elements like clothing? Is a woman in a red dress expressing a different gender role than a woman in a yellow dress?
IDK, it's probably true to some degree, though I'm no expert. Some places have tribes where they track lineage through the women. Many places have variances on how demure women are and how subservient they are to men, and variances on the specific notions of what is a woman/man's obligation to society.
My experience in a country not unlike China (I assume) is that the women here are much more feminine, in all the ways you can suggest other than that they are not particularly demure (or chaste!) The men are not particularly masculine though (not trying to put them down), but I hear they do pretty well.
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I would contest that gender roles are socially constructed. Sure, society has an influence but so does biology. There are feedback loops at work.
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I agree with everything you're saying and only get confused when you get to:
which is culturally and personally subjective value laden language-
and
which sounds accurate, cool and based. Yes I just agree with this, and disagree with the values that seem to be getting laid onto it.
I do think the conversation has lost itself. The ultimate progression of the philosophy of morphological freedom, does not stop at trans people. It shouldn't even really start with gender. But the saturation of gender into society, the fact that it is one of the things we have made matter, has turned it into the central issue. Furthermore, the push to normalize the artistic (read, self expressive) flesh-crafting of the body has become combative. Too combative. Both in the sense that its created push-back and in the sense that it's been pushing an ideological conformity.
Still, I always feel a bit exasperated by these conversations. People are arguing whether people should be allowed to grow tits, and I'm still here in the year 3000 rolling my eyes and waiting for the public to take universal morphological freedom seriously as an ideal so I can become a velociraptor.
To be fair, the conversation is more "should parents get to veto their kids growing tits the same way they get to veto a tattoo?" and "should people be forced to consider a guy who grew tits to be the same thing as a woman". The temperature for this culture war issue would drop significantly, if it was limited to simple body modification, rather than imposing one's values on others.
There are a lot of trans sub-issues I think have gone too far, at least for the philosophical conversation about body modification I'm trying to sort out in my head. But what we have here is really the heart of my conundrum.
As soon as you say "People shouldn't just be legally allowed to change their bodies, they should be socially allowed to change their bodies." you are restricting people's ability to socially enforce their values.
I predict, if people were getting Stalking Cat-esque modifications by the hundred-thousands, there would be a hell of a culture war about that too.
Sure, but this problem is bigger than trans issues, or body modification. It's a question of how to balance individual vs. collective rights. You can apply to anything from body modification to your diet.
I don't think that's true. Look at furries, people have strong opinions on them, but there isn't really a culture war around them. In my opinion it's precisely because they aren't trying to impose their values on others.
It's actually teetering on the verge of being a serious frontier on the culture war. After one or two furries made some noise about joining a trans counterprotest to Scotland radfems, culture war sites started going after uninvolved but gross furries in the vicinity. Graham Linehan is in on the fun, as are other commentators in a similar milieu. Fox News has taken note of a Boston College professor who teaches a furry-focused course.
Will it erupt into something more? Eh, I'm not counting on it, but we'll see. It definitely shows signs of real potential as a culture war front, though.
I've never really grokked the level of commitment to furryness that exists. Is it like MLP fandom, a strange group of probably disproportionately autistic people who find community in something that isn't taken all that serious by most members, where if the culture war really got hot around it people would probably just drop the practice and pick a different thing to build a community around? or is it more like gay/trans/religion/emacs(intentionally large range) where it will be fought to the bitter end?
I suspect it's more like the latter. I've never particularly liked the community, and I'm far from alone in that among people who are fond of anthro animals, but etiology-wise I suspect it's much more like being gay/trans than most of any of those groups want to credit. Culture wars heating up only encourages identity--nothing like a bit of Persecution to build a determined culture (for better or worse).
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Depends who'd be doing the attacking. If it was the blue tribe, it would probably dwindle in size like you said. If it was the red tribe, you'd probably actually start seeing litter boxes in public schools (oh wait, that's otherkin, not furries, but hopefully you get what I mean).
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Furries don't go to work in fur-suits. They don't openly express themselves as furries 24 hours per day.
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The trans movement not about morphological freedom, it is about self-assigned identity trumping morphology. It is not dangerous because it is asking for men to be able to lop their dicks off, or even because it is insisting that men who lop their dicks off thereby become women. It is dangerous because it insists that some men are already women even if they don't lop their dicks off.
The trans movement has been about lots of things.
I see that your main concern wrt it is:
I imagine you refer to the many pragmatic concerns regarding how we handle the segregation of men and women as the concepts break down.
The short of it is that I just agree that those are complicated and difficult and have to be hashed out on a practical level.
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