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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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This false belief is that gender is not distinct from sex. The fact is that gender is indeed totally distinct from sex.

If you can assert it one way, I can assert it the other. "No it isn't, sex and gender are synonyms".

Gender on the other hand refers to a socially created psychological programming that every tribe and society imbues its members on upon.

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.

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.

The people who really grew up in the blue tribe have accepted gender is not sex.

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:

[When] a transgender woman uses a women’s restroom there are still zero men — biological or otherwise — in that restroom.

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:

Some people assigned female at birth have more testosterone than others; some people are born with XXY or XO chromosomes instead of XX or XY chromosomes.

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:

I was assigned female at birth, but I have never had a female body.

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.

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"?

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.