This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
But what is "birth"? A birth can be stillborn, yes? So what is the difference between expelling a dead clump of fetal cells, and expelling an unfertilized egg during menstruation? And if giving birth is just expelling some group of cells from your body, well, any human can do that...
But what is "sperm"? We already agreed to do away with the non-empirical categories of "man" and "woman" and just focus on what really matters, the genitalia, the organs, etc. So let's simply do away with the non-empirical concept of "cell" and focus on what really matters now, the DNA, the RNA, the ribosome and the other organelles, etc. You see where this is going.
But what is a "Y chromosome"? Suppose I have one mutation on my Y chromosome. And then another, and then another, until it is no longer recognizable as a Y chromosome. Or do we define it in terms of total number of base pairs? Suppose we add one base pair, and then another, and then another, until it's the same length as the X chromosome. At what single point does it stop being the Y chromosome?
This is what frustrates me about Scott's "The categories were made for man" post. It doesn't follow its own premises to their logical conclusion. It spends a lot of time discussing whether a whale is a fish, without acknowledging that the category of "whale" is vulnerable to the same attack that the category of "fish" is. It says that boundaries between categories should be drawn to help "people" fulfill their "goals", but what is a "person", and what is a "goal"? It concludes by making a distinction between "questions about category boundaries" and "questions of fact", but fails to notice that any "statement of fact" will necessarily make reference to categories which are themselves subject to boundary disputes. (Perhaps we might finally hit a rock bottom "natural" categorization when we get to fundamental particles? Even here it's not clear. If a particle is "nothing more" than a fluctuation in a field that pervades spacetime, then one could reasonably argue that they have no independent existence at all, the same way that we don't think of holes or ripples in a piece of fabric as independent objects apart from the fabric itself.)
There is no sharp dividing line between the mushy, subjective, philosophical questions and the hard-nosed, empirical, Just-The-Facts-Please questions. Once you accept the skeptical argument in the case of man vs woman, it runs through everything. Quickly you are lead to the view that there is only the primordial Oneness of reality, about which nothing further can be said; any attempt to speak of anything at all is an equally arbitrary attempt to impose categorical boundaries on the raw unstructured data. This isn't an implausible view, mind you. People should just be aware that this is where the skeptical arguments lead, instead of assuming that there is a natural empirical domain of cells and chromosomes where one can take refuge from philosophical analysis.
Scott's idea of categorization is a pragmatic one, so I'm not sure he would agree that it's all that vulnerable to the attack of "what is a whale?" or "what is birth?"
It might be philosophically unsatisfying, but humans do just tend to categorize things in their environment, and pragmatism is fairly happy to take large swaths of categorization for granted. Something like the category "dog" just naturally emerges from a human interacting with a lot of dogs. Likely for reasons of computational and memory efficiency, we're not the kind of animal that looks at one furry quadruped and treats it as a new and completely unique entity, and then encounters a similar furry quadruped and forgets everything we've learned as we try to learn all the new and unique rules that apply to this separate entity. We find patterns, and one of those patterns is something like what we label "dog."
The boundaries of these spontaneous categories are always fuzzy and ill-defined to start. Then, when humans engage in goal-directed behavior, we take all of these spontaneous categories and find the boundaries that are most important to have a consensus on with respect to that goal-directed behavior.
Why do we have words with well-defined boundaries like "cow", "heifer", "bull", "steer", "cattle", "calf", "milk", "beef", etc.? Because for the art of cattle ranching (which groups a number of goal-directed behaviors together), all of those distinctions are important. A steer can't have offspring, but might be suitable for pulling large equipment. A heifer doesn't produce milk, a cow does. And so on, and so forth.
Just by interacting in the world, humans are going to have a fuzzy version of the "woman" and "man" categories in their heads. Depending on our needs, we can change those fuzzy borders into well-defined ones by looking at what we're using the word for. We're perfectly happy to say that Shakespeare's Othello is a "man", even though he's just a fictional representation of a man. As a fictional character, Othello can't do any of the things usually characteristic of a man - he can't actually breathe, can't eat, can't sleep, and he certainly doesn't produce sperm that could impregnate a real flesh-and-blood woman. We're happy to omit the very important context that "Othello isn't real, and any sentence said about him is about the fictional story he belongs to", because most humans can understand the concept of fiction and don't really need reminding.
I think the distinction between a trans woman and a cis woman is going to emerge at some level of the discussion, because there are goal-directed reasons to make the distinction. If a cis man wants to have his own biological children, then he'll want to impregnate a cis woman and won't have much luck with a trans woman. But... the distinction exists. Even just "trans woman" and "cis woman" captures the distinction pretty well. I think the fight over the specific word "woman" is a distraction. We have "toy bears", which we're happy to call "bears" despite them just being paint and plastic. In a trivia game asking for "famous bears" most of the "bears" will actually be fictional representations of bears, and not flesh-and-blood bears. So, why can't a "trans woman" be a "famous woman" in a trivia game?
I think this starts to raise questions when there's...
I'm not sure how to put this. I think it has something to do with the noncentral fallacy, but thinking about it for a moment I think it's a bit more broad.
I think the audience would feel somewhat cheated if you:
Had a list of the "Greatest Admirals Ever", and put Kirk and Ackbar over Nelson and Yi Sun-Sin; or
Said you were researching "Oldest bears in the world and how they age" and in actuality you were researching wear-and-tear of bear statues that have lasted for well over a century; or
Asserted that the war between the GE vs FPA had "the highest body count ever", and it turns out that it's a fictional war between the fictional Galactic Empire vs the fictional Free Planets Alliance from the fictional Legends of the Galactic Heroes.
Something similar is in play when you celebrate "female achievement" when a trans woman is the first person to break into a field or hold some record, or if you find more trans women than cis women working in some certain company after affirmative action in favour of "women" as a category (I've heard someome mention something about this in tech, but it seems too ridiculous to be true from experiences of tech people I know in the Bay Area. Nevertheless, even as a theroetical example it stands)
It seems to me that these sorts of equivocations only work in very specific circumstances and contexts.
I think it's largely a function of what is common in a particular social and material environment, and what expectations are common in a particular question-asking environment.
In a culture that's crazy about pigs, the trivia category "Famous Pigs" will probably be about non-fictional pigs. In our culture, where most people hardly interact with real pigs, the names are going to be "Babe", "Piglet", "Wilbur", etc. In both worlds, additional context can disambiguate (e.g. "Famous Literary Pigs" vs. "Famous Real-world Pigs")
I don’t think this works out as well as you suggest. Most people don’t know any pigs, but these same people know hundreds of women at least. The social and material context is simply too different for “most famous pigs” including fictional pigs vs “most famous women” including transwomen.
Like, I don’t have a deep-seated aversion to and am quite open to treating genuine trans people with their “adopted sex”, like I did before the whole trans craze blew up in the last decade, simply as a matter of convenience and kindness. I also think there’s likely a small number of people who are genuinely “trans” in the sense that something has gone wrong in their neurobiology. But I don’t think the reasoning you put out is a strong justification for why we should treat trans women as women.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link