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Should morphology be the tie-breaker for sexual categorization?
A common tact one sees in trans skeptical circles is to put forward gametes as the tie-breaker for sexual categorization. In some ways, I like the simplicity of this solution, even as someone who is fairly pro trans. I'm not, in principle, opposed to a categorization scheme that would occasionally split transwomen and ciswomen, since I feel there's always a basic lumpers vs. splitters problem in all categorization problems, and I'm comfortable with either tiny base categories with supercategories above them, or larger categories and smaller subcategories. It's all the same, and the choice between various models of reality seems largely to be a matter of what is useful and what traits we find salient in a given context where we seek to categorize.
But I've always had a slight discomfort with the gamete-focused definition of sex. Even if we allow that sexual categorization is based on a cluster of traits, like chromosomes, genitalia, bone density, face and body shape, etc., where we're just using gametes as the tie breaker, I think we run into some problems. First, a gamete-focused definition is not naturally a binary. There are only two types of gametes, but there are technically four possible ways those two gametes could manifest:
Produces only sperm
Produces only eggs
Produces neither sperm nor eggs.
Produces sperm and eggs.
The last situation has never been observed in humans, though it is theoretically possible for a human chimera formed from a male and female zygote to fuse into a single embryo and result in a human with functional gonadal tissue of both types. We do observe ovotesticular syndome in humanity, but 50% of such cases ovulate, and only two such people have been found to produce sperm. Maybe the reason sperm and egg producing intersex conditions haven't happened is for some complex set of issues that result from such a chimera, and so it is effectively impossible.
But even ignoring that, it leaves us with three categories, not two. Now, there isn't actually an a priori reason to expect there to be exactly two sexes in humans, especially when we observe fungi like Coprinellus disseminatus, which has 143 different mating types that can each mate with any of the other mating types besides its own, but most people's intuition before they do any fancy book learning is that there are two sexes, so it seems unsatisfying to have a tie breaker that seems to naturally produce three categories.
Now, it's possible someone will object here that I have framed the problem wrong. Maybe the true proposal for sex categorization is not to use gametes as a tie breaker at all. Given that there seems to be an impulse in some trans skeptics to say that, for example, a trans women who has had her testes removed is still a man, one might conclude that, while gametes are (one of) the most important factor(s) in sex categorization, it is not actually the tie breaker. Maybe they will say that it is a much more fuzzy, amorphous categorization scheme based on a a wide variety of traits, and even lacking the ability to produce gametes altogether doesn't result in a sexless/third-sex categorization if a person has enough other traits common to either of the two (only two) sexes.
Or, they might put forward that it is actually some abstraction like "natural tendency to produce gametes" that is the true tie breaker, and not a person's current ability to produce gametes at all. A eunuch is not sexless, or some third sex - they are always a man, albeit a maimed man. This might still leave us with some problems in classifying people who are naturally infertile and don't produce gametes as mature adults (especially in the case of intersex conditions like ovotesticular syndrome where infertility is common and sex characteristics are mixed), but if that abstraction is truly a tie breaker and not the entirety of sex it would still rescue the idea of there being two sexes in humans.
I grant that either of these approaches could, in theory, rescue a truly two sex humanity.
But there is another misgiving that I have with such a framing, and it applies to all three of these models.
If gametes or some abstraction of them are an important component in sex categorization, then we get an entire class of epistemological problems surrounding sex categorization. I do not have the time or means to sequence the DNA, collect the gametes or see the genitals of every human being I interact with. And yet, my intuition is that I'm reasonably certain about the sex of most of the people I interact with in everyday situations. Here one might be able to make some arguments from evolutionary psychology, or the likelihood that there is some sort of sex categorizing module innate to humans that needed to be fairly accurate in order for humans to successfully mate with compatible mates. Maybe the bias towards thinking there are only two sexes goes fairly deep into human biology and psychology.
But such a "sex categorizing module" doesn't really solve the epistemological issue. Evolution is "lazy" and frequently does a hack job with its solutions. I find women attractive, I love boobs and cute feminine faces and the like. But I still find f1nnst5r, a male crossdresser, attractive in many of his photos. It turns out, it's much harder to code a computationally light sex categorizer when your only lever is whether the genes for your sex categorizer get passed on to the next generation. As long as guys who are attracted to femboys tend to also have sex with fertile women, the mesaoptimzer within you doesn't need to be perfect - just good enough.
All this to say, we can do better than the sex categorizing module in our brain. But if we try this route, we are forced to conclude that we don't know the sexes of most of the people we interact with. Sure, we can go the Bayesian route, and say based on base rates of the sex categorization module in our brain, checked against population-wide data, we can be 98% sure of a person's sex, regardless of definition being used. It might even be an isolated demand for rigor to expect more than 98% certainty. After all, humans also have a "face recognition module" that sometimes sees faces in tree bark and clouds, and yet we trust it to see human faces all of the time.
But I think if we do go the Bayesian route of trying to justify using the "sex categorization module" in the brain, we have actually conceded that the most important thing is actually how a person looks, their sexual morphology. Now obviously, a person could want biological children, and so, for reasons separate from their sex categorization module, care about about whether a particular person they are with is able to carry children, or produce sperm, but that would be something that only matters for potential romantic partners. For ordinary shop keepers and people you pass on the street, the only thing that really matters is the "sex categorization module."
Now, I'll concede that if this is accepted, non-passing trans people would have to be classed as their assigned sex at birth. That's almost exactly what it means to be non-passing in the first place - most people's sex categorization modules see you as the sex you were assigned at birth. But in the case of passing trans people, it would tend to mean that we can lean in to our wonky evolution-addled brains, and accept what we see at first glance. Of course, when we're going to interact with people frequently in our social circle, we could accept nicknames and nickpronouns, and allow these to override our brain's sex categorization modules, but that is a separate discussion.
The problem is that sexual categorization, like all categorization, is primarily functional. We define categories to serve some purpose. The boundaries we should draw are ones that should serve the function we want the category to serve. Sex categories serve different functions in different contexts and so it should be no surprise that people draw the boundaries in different places. Similarly this is why there is no One Ultimate Definition of sex categories that everyone finds sufficient for the purposes they want to put the category too. Notice all the people downthread who insist it is obvious what a woman is, that everyone knows, but apparently cannot articulate whatever it is everybody (themselves included presumably) knows.
To take your own comment, the criteria for what makes one "female" (in a biological sense of producing certain gametes) and what makes one "female" (in a sense of what linguistic term it is appropriate to use to refer to them) can be different! There's no reason these things have to be united, unless we want them to be for some reason.
To take a less politically charged example consider the humble Tomato. Botanically Tomatos are fruits (the seed bearing structure of a flowering plant) but culinarily (and sometimes legally) they are a vegetable. So, is a Tomato "really" a fruit? Or "really" a vegetable? You can pick one definition and call it the "real" definition but there's a reason people developed the alternate characterization and just arbitrarily declaring one the "real" one doesn't resolve the functional purpose achieved by the alternative categorization.
Frankly, this is one more reason I'm generally in favor of trans inclusive language. It replaces language with lossy or ambiguous referents with ones that are much closer to the relevant facts in the world in the appropriate contexts.
I understand not wanting to read all the comments but if you aren't going to please refrain from commenting on their contents.
Can you link me the comment you think I haven't read? I re-checked your comment but it doesn't seem to give any definition for what a woman is.
A woman is one of the two natural categories that humans develop into if they don't have a very rare disorder or spend significant effort to specifically and intentionally to emulate men. Women are the thing that trans women are attempting to emulate. For trans woman to be a meaningful concept at all you must acknowledge that 'women' is not a null pointer and that the subset of people who you define as 'trans women' are some delta away from the core concept of "women", follow the vector of that delta back and you intersect "man".
It's maddening because while the actual concept is simple there is this shell game you can play. Where you pretend to not know about the thing you have to know about in order for transgenderism to even be a meaningful concept and then poo poo any simple definition with the weirdest edge cases imaginable because your strategy is just to discredit the concept of categories entirely. Oh yeah, "who are we to guess at how many limbs a human has?" or "we can't even decide if left handedness is variation or abnormality". As if the fact that no one has to time to write a definition that can cover 8 Billion cases at every possible intersection means we should give up on the entire idea of categories and just use whatever is politically expedient. Oh yeah, and by the way those things you called "women's sports" instead of "unaltered natal female sports" - that linguistic difference that no one ever considered before? We're going to go the direction opposite of what was the original intended purpose.
So what do you do when a trans woman manages to emulate womanhood better than many real women? Man and woman is not a binary; you have feminine men, masculine men, feminine women, masculine women. There are absolutely males who are so feminine they better encompass the "woman" concept than a good chunk of cis women.
Like this meme: https://old.reddit.com/r/traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns/comments/lnf0lw/conservatives_dont_really_understand_biology_smh/
I wouldn't want the person on the left to be in a woman's washroom tbh. And to a lesser degree, I wouldn't want the person on the right to be in a men's washroom.
This is nearly meaningless. There is more to womanhood than being attractive to men. There are other people in this thread arguing about whether trans women can "pass", I don't find that question all that interesting.
There is more to womanhood than being attractive to men, and some trans women embody that better than some cis women.
You've clearly not read the rest of this thread you're replying to. It is impossible for a trans woman to have a body that if not interfered with will develop into being able to bear children better than a cis woman.
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What do you do if a male sexual predator wants to use the same restroom, bathroom as your daughter.
If you don't believe weird and dangerous men are taking advantage of gender self-ID, check out Grahem Linehan's (father Ted) Glinner Update where he details a steady stream of them (under the banner "This Never Happens", which points to the naive assumptions of a lot of progressives).
I think it does happen. I don't think there are easy solutions.
Tbh I think it might be best to make the new gender system "Woman" and "Other". Being a woman comes with privileges like access to protected spaces such as women's washrooms, and only biological females have access to it. Everyone else uses the "Other" category when it comes to stuff like sports and washrooms, whether they're trans women, cis men, or trans men. If individual groups want to say trans women are welcome to participate in their Women's category, they're free to, but you can't sue an organization for excluding trans women from their women's category.
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Can you tell me more about these natural categories? What features characterize them? Frankly, I am an eliminativist about natural kinds. I don't think there is any such thing. There are facts in the world but any categorization or groupings of facts are things we do as humans.
Sure, the question is what is "women" pointing at. Can you tell me?
Obviously I disagree.
I don't really see how the pro-trans crowds goal is to discredit the concept of categories entirely. Indeed, it seems a central feature of their (our) arguments that there is a meaningful category called "women" and that it includes trans women. The anti-trans crowd clearly does not like this fact but it seems obvious to me the pro-trans crowd is not anti-categorization in some general way. We just want more complete and accurate categorizations for the purposes we think they should be put towards.
I understand this sentence to be sarcastic but it's not clear to me why. Different people... do have different numbers of limbs! A universal statement about the number of limbs humans have is false. Less absolute statements ("Most humans have four limbs", "The typical human has four limbs") may be true but the universal ("All humans have four limbs") is clearly not. Similarly we regard left handedness as ordinary variation today but that has not always the perspective society had! So much so that we tried to beat left handedness out of children.
I am not sure what the "original intended purpose" is or why it is relevant, nor am I clear on why the fact that no one has considered this linguistic difference before means it is not meaningful or interesting. Have all the distinctions it will ever be necessary to make already been made?
If nothing is excluded from being a woman then it renders the concept of transitioning null because any proposed exclusion will apply to transwomen, as it must because if they were already women they'd have no need nor potential to transition. If there are qualities that exclude a person from being a woman then they must and always will apply to transwomen.
Let me switch from the general to the specific.
If having a penis is irrelevant then we're all women. If being cute and girly is irrelevant then we're all women. If uttering the words "I am a woman" is sufficient then four words is all it takes to be a woman, which is effectively no barrier and could happen by accident while reading this post out loud. If having one, or the other, or neither of the possible gamete production capabilities is irrelevant then we're all women. If having someone call you a woman is sufficient then a trivial variation on four words is all it takes: "you are a woman". If putting on a dress is sufficient then all women cease to be women the moment they take their dress off.
Trans rhetoric is glaringly motivated by their central requirement to construct and alter a set of categories that serve only to justify their ends of becoming what they categorically and self-admittedly are not. That's why it's so inconsistent and contradictory. You can't be something and not be something and become something that you already are that you'll never be. It's desparate backpedalling and feigned ignorance all the way down. Their claims on sex and gender strictly start where they are and end wherever they can reach. That is by necessity the full extent of their epistemology, because any extension beyond that entails defeating the conscious objective of their claims.
[Hitting post now, I have an addendum brewing that is both more conciliatory and more condemning]
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Human beings, like all mammals, reproduce sexually. The process requires contributions from two distinct categories of humans. The process output is a human who will develop to resemble and be one of these two distinct catagories unless interfered with by a disease or intention effort. This is all fundamental to human reproduction, it is a fact about humans. We call one of these groups, the ones who develop overaries, female or women. Without this process humans would cease to exist and this process requires there to be a meaningful distinction.
I suppose it would be more clear for me to say you want to discredit the concept of natural categories. That categories can be facts about the world. You favor treating catagories as totally arbitrary so that you can draw the boundaries wherever you please. But it's wrong, natural categories exist. It's not just arbitrary whim that causes us to differentiate oxygen from carbon dioxide and there are whole processes, that are very important to humans, that rely on these differences. If you give humans carbon dioxide instead of oxygen they will die. If you don't give plants carbon dioxide they will die.
You can of course propose other methods of categorization but you won't be cleaving reality nearly as neatly at the joints. In fact, as I said before your definition of "woman" necesarily contains my definition to avoid being totally circular, you've just tacked on a "also anyone who we would call a man but identifies as a woman" at the end.
But what you can't do is, after making this new arbitrary categorization, name it the same thing as the category we've been using with my definition this whole time and retroactively apply all the systems and assumptions we've built up under the original definition without having to get wide societal buy in. Women's sports were conceived and are predicated on my definition of woman, not your new one. If you want trans women in women's sports you need to make that case, not just play around with words. People do not like being manipulated and this tactic is so transparent.
But humans naturally have 4 limbs. Instances of people with some other number are exceptions where things have gone wrong. If nothing had gone wrong it would be in their nature to have 4 limbs. For the same reason a centipede with 4 limbs has had its nature subverted. This does not make the centipede more human like, it makes it an exception to centipedes. A man who mimics a woman is an except of the man case, not the woman case because it is in his nature to develop as a man. We can call this man a trans women if you'd like and if people are so inclined they can decide to use she/her pronouns - I myself would and have - but she is not a woman and cannot become one.
This is where it gets maddening. Are you seriously expecting me to believe you cannot fathom why we created woman's sports leagues?
Can you be more specific? What is it these humans develop to resemble? I'm also a little unclear on what is meant by "disease" in your description. I read "disease" as a stand in for "anything that causes humans to be different than my model of normal", which seems like it makes your definition tautological. "Humans develop into one of these normal categories unless something happens that makes them develop otherwise."
I think I have been clear since the beginning I don't believe in natural categories, but not believing in natural categories doesn't make categories arbitrary. Categories are useful at serving various functions and we should draw the boundaries of the categories so they serve the function we want them to. The boundaries of the category are not arbitrary, but decided by the function we want to put the category to. Categories like "oxygen" and "carbon dioxide" are very useful, because the particular atoms and molecules so described share many properties that let us make useful inferences about them and manipulate them in various ways to our ends.
I disagree.
What is stopping me from doing this? More generally, part of the argument by the pro-trans side is that gender based categorizations on the basis of the presence of secondary sex characteristics, or appearance, or similar measures more closely track how the term "woman" has been used than a definition based on chromosomes or reproductive capacity. After all, sterile women are still women and we had a concept of "woman" long before we knew anything about chromosomes or gametes.
Frankly, this is entirely too essentialist about humans for me. If someone had, say, a genetic abnormality that caused them to develop a different number of limbs it seems to me it would be in that individuals nature to have that different number of limbs. There might be commonalities of human experience and existence but whatever our "nature" is, it is in us not some metaphysical model from which we deviate.
Who is "we"? I am skeptical that every women's sport league that ever was created was for the same reason.
A common assumption in this kind of discourse, taking after Plato I presume, is that there is an abstract, immaterial essence of humanness or manness or womanness which actual humans and men and women in the material world may reflect more or less perfectly, but which nevertheless exists independently of any physical instance. I think you reject this assumption, and if so I agree; it's one thing to speak of a typical human that has four limbs as a useful generalization, but humans with three or five limbs exist no less than humans with four, they are just fewer in number. If a rule has exceptions, it's because the rule fails to describe reality in full, not because reality fails to conform to the rule.
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Sure. The two natural categories of human develop different features to facilitate their different contributions to reproduction. Most primarily and obviously the woman side develops ovaries and eggs and the equipment around which to facilitate the man category's ability to get sperms in contact with these eggs as well as structural differences to allow for the incubation of the offspring, wider hips and a pelvis capable of pass a baby. In addition to these primary traits women also develop secondary traits that also aid in the production of offspring, one of which the category of mammal gets it's name from, mammaries or breasts to feed young infants. Men naturally develop a different set of features in order to perform their role in reproduction primarily the prostate and semen as well as the equipment meant to aid in getting the semen in contact with the woman's eggs.
All these natural differences cause the two groups to have distinct appearances.
Disease is the deviation from natural development that impedes healthy function and development. Heart disease is the category of things that prevent, or reduces the ability for, the heart from perform it's vital task of pumping blood throughout the body. Likewise anything that interferes with humans to develop in such a way that their reproductive ability is prevented or retarded is a disease.
It's not just different, it's different in a way contrary to the function that the organs developed, or would have developed if not prevented from developing, to support. If lack of key nutrients caused an infant's heart to not pump blood resulting in the infant dying we do not conclude that hearts aren't necesarily meant to pump blood because in some situations they fail to. Nor do we say that the infant didn't have a heart. They did, just not a functioning one. We say that hearts are meant to pump blood but can fail, if the heart did not fail then it would have become a healthy heart that pumps blood. Likewise if there is some intersex condition we identify what went wrong in development to cause it, because something must have gone wrong.
This just strikes me as confused. Do you agree that there are facts about the world? Because these facts necesarily imply categorization. If we agree that atom exist and that atoms can have different stable configurations and that these different stable configuration constitute different materials and those materials have different properties then a categorization system simply follows. Carbon is different than oxygen. This is a natural category.
Carbon and oxygen do not need you to acknowledge their natural category to have one. Carbon and oxygen have been behaving as distinct things far before there were any humans to name them and will continue to do so if we are no longer here. The same is true of mammalian sex. There is no kangaroo word for woman and yet the joeys find the self in their mother's pouch anyways. In communication we are forced to use words which are only maps of reality, but the purpose of the words is to faithfully describe reality. Reality contains categories. You are using language for a reason other than to describe reality for some means you find just. I get it, people appear to be suffering from a condition and desperately wish reality was different - I see the temptation to just lie about the mapping between words and reality. But it's a lie, a kind of linguistic defection.
You disagree that your definition of woman necessarily contains mine?
I suppose nothing is stopping you from trying. Just like nothing is stopping you from attempting to enforce a category of "healthy food" inclusive of human excrement. But I'm not going to eat it uncoerced.
Sterile women, if not afflicted by a disease, would have developed into healthy non-sterile women. They are unfortunate exception that do not in any ways undermine the category.
Give me three different plausible justifications.
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There is some equivocation in a lot of the discussion I think we can bring clarity to. It's apparent there is biological sex and depending on who you talk to trans woman aren't claiming this category, they are a different kind of woman, but still a woman in this other sense, let's call it a social category. Social categories can obviously be determined by social consensus. But what is it that gives trans woman to think they are part of this category. Well common narratives suggest it's because they 'feel like a woman' - but what is the woman property they are feeling like. There needs to be some content provided by something else to give woman meaning in the first place, and that meaning content is biological sex. Identifying as a woman, is definitionally dependent on sex itself. It is actually parasitic on sex, because it tries to undermine the sex category at the same time as depending on it.
Put another way, imagine biological sex is meaningless. I declare my sex to be that of a Novan- what does that mean? Well of course I can socially agree that it means someone who likes pottery and playing bridge but then we are then truly just constructing and believing in the sense of how we treat money. Sex is a different kind is category - there is a reality to it beyond assigning an arbitrary set of properties.
Can you tell me what facts about a person determine that person's biological sex? Specifically,what facts or set of facts determine someone is in the "woman" biological category such that all cis women are so places and no trans women are?
My present understanding is that it's some kind of body dysphoria related to secondary sex characteristics in combination with a desire to occupy certain kinds of social roles and relations that often go along with possession of those characteristics. Some of these things are related to biology and some aren't.
I don't agree. All categories are fundamentally social. The set of traits that determine whether someone is a "woman" or "man", is "male" or "female" are things we decide socially like all other categorizations. There are no groupings or categorizations of traits that are any more real than any other.
I think we're honing in to the right space, which is good. To start with the finish, re categories, there's a sense of course where you're right, categories are partly socially decided through language, culture. But there's a sense in which it's deeply lacking -- are the set of square numbers a human category? if socially constructed how do we decide the truth of a category, if we have no external reference beyond ourselves? I guess you might say, by its 'social justice' value, but this just raises another set of questions. If its only human, how would we resolve differences about category definitions -- it could only be consensus or power. Now many social categories are indeed resolved through our language and culture in a process through consensus and power but we also have science, or rationality, to bring to bear. The categorisation of chemicals post Mendeleev was much better than prior, it is even better now. Is it chance that all human societies recognize the categories men and women?
What is man and woman, you asked. Well, I could point to all your descendants, the people that heterosexual and homosexuals are attracted to, the people we most fear on a dark night. The people that suffer mood swings during menopause, bear children, endure pregnancy, suffer childbirth, those with prostate problems and morning glories.
Now of course formally because of the many variations then assigning sex to some individuals does give rise to difficult to resolve edge cases, but a fuzzy boundary does not dissolve the category. We know there are men and women because we were born. The definition is based on this basis, it is the phenotype that gives rise to this successful reproduction, which rather than an arbitrary set of characteristics is a coherent and coordinated set, which we share, with some variation in specific genetics, with the members of our sex. I can articulate a family resemblance, or polythetic, category which would include people with most of the machinery but perhaps lacking a key gene, which keeps them in their sex category even if they can not reproduce. But this boundary doesn't extend to intersex because they do not set up enough of these characteristics to belong to a single sex and they often have (non-functional) elements of both. I appreciate this is messy, but think of a bucket with a hole in it, is it a bucket? What about when it lacks the handle and the entire bottom?
Now this is biological sex, there is also a social category of sex, the way of living in that sex. Intersex live in one of these, whether by their choice, parental choice, or cultural convenience. That doesn't make them that biological sex. Could we then extend the social category to include trans. I think some accomodations were already made in that space, but now we can see a conflict between women's rights, based on sex, and rights of men, say, to self-ID as women. This is a different kind of accomodation- intersex have no choice but trans can be based on as little as the idea in someone's head. This needs to be resolved by negotiation- ironically self-ID has made it harder. Unlikely as it may seem, progressive politics has placed Muslim women at the bottom of the heirarchy of concern.
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Then what is the meaning behind the word "woman"? What conditions have to be met that when someone says "I am a woman" I can reply "no you're not" and have trans activists agree with me?
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This was a misspeak on @aqouta's part, they meant discrediting the concept of certain categories, i.e. the ones that would place "trans women" in the "women" category.
I do agree with them that there is a certain game that's always played (and is a bit tiresome) where people attack a definition by pointing out edge cases. It's like, you say that men are born with a penis and women are born with a vagina, and then they point out the existence of intersex people who may be born with an amalgamation of both or neither.
Well, so, what if those people exist? Does that mean that it's wrong to use the category of "men" and "women"? I personally find no problem with using those categories as-is and going about my daily life with much bigger concerns to deal with than where I should properly place intersex people in my mind.
And besides, if I really end up needing to properly place a given intersex person (either in "men", "women", or some third category), maybe because I personally know them, this doesn't (and shouldn't) affect my original definitions of "men" and "women" - it was an edge case, so I dealt with it like an edge case, not by tossing everything out and starting completely from scratch.
The reality is, you can't expect people to give a tight, locked-down definition of anything, much less what a man and woman are. All they can do is give a general overview by a common case, maybe describe a few exceptions here and there, but certainly nothing that would stand up to infinite philosophical scrutiny.
And really, it's pointless, because the trans skeptical are simply not going to categorize "trans women" as "women", even though trans women share more attributes of women than most men share attributes of women. The reason for this is simple: They still simply share too many attributes with men, and we are not at an advanced level of technology yet to completely patch them out.
A trans woman has a penis - well, okay, so then they get gender reassignment surgery. But now a trans woman has a hole in their groin that must be kept open by dilation. Sure, a trans woman wears a dress or a skirt, maybe did some voice training to talk more feminine, grew out their hair, is interested in girl things. But a trans woman still has a male bone structure, male bone density, male facial features, male puberty (no, you cannot just "choose your puberty", that's a whole other rabbit hole that's just wrong), etc.
A trans woman has a whole host of very male-like things that can't be faked or changed as easily as their social characteristics.
Generally the purpose of pointing out these individuals is to counter the notion that there is some Particular Trait that neatly and unambiguously divides humans into a sexual binary. If your understanding of sex or gender is more of a cluster structure that people can in-principle move between by altering sufficient traits I think that already makes you much closer to the pro-trans position than most anti-trans people.
In general I am a fan of "I will use my judgement to decide how to act with respect to X" but there are some situations (legal ones especially) where people being able to understand in advance how they will be treated is important.
I mean, sure, it does that. But that doesn't necessarily mean the definition is wrong and needs to be tossed out. Oftentimes I see these edge cases pointed out by trans activists to argue in favor of a definition by self-identification (which is arguably even more wrong than "penis = man, vagina = woman").
I think most anti-trans people are in-principle like this too. If we lived in a magical transhumanist future where a man could genuinely become a woman, 99.99% of the time an anti-trans person today would see her as a woman and the question wouldn't even cross their mind as to what sex she is because she's unambiguously a woman. There'd only be a few nutcases who'd care too much about her past history as a man and would be very principled about that, but the case for trans people would be exponentially stronger than it is today if actual transition actually existed. Most anti-trans people don't have all this figured out though and when they see a trans woman, it just looks like a man to them, therefore their argument is that the trans woman's sex-based traits are immutable (which, today, is completely correct).
I feel like a lot of trans debates is obscured by a refusal to acknowledge that transition today with current medical technology is actually, really shockingly primitive.
Sure, we can carve out edge cases in the law for those people too. But the general definition should still remain.
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But it doesn't work. There are indeed such traits, and any exceptions are so rare you can safely ignore them. All categories related to things existing on the physical world will work this way, only Mathematics offers perfect definitions.
Further the intersex edge case is useless for trans people, unless you wish to claim only intersex people can be trans.
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But I lose information content if I adopt your trans-inclusive language, a man identifying as a woman is more informative, than just woman. It's also true and scientifically provable. Why is this lossy or ambiguous - the trans inclusive language is ambiguous because it conflates gender identity with biological sex.
I mean, dropping an adjective always conveys less information than including it. "Woman" contains less information than "trans woman" but "man" also conveys less information than "tall man." The question is in what context the information conveyed by the adjective is useful. The "trans" adjective conveys useful information in some contexts and not others. Same for the trans inclusive language.
"Tall man" is just additional information: A tall man is for all intents and purposes a man, his height isn't affecting his man-ness.
"Trans man" is a qualifier. It doesn't just add information, it also removes information that is normally contained in the description "man". It's not just less information, it's also ambiguous.
"You're a man, so you should regularly get checked for testicular cancer" makes sense, because "has testicles" is part of "man". This is information you expect to have from "man", so the qualifier is required in the case of "trans man" to warn you that some qualities of "man" might not apply.
If you drop it because it doesn't seem useful in context (leaving aside that that's controversial almost everywhere) then you're still implying information that isn't there, and once it does come up, there will be confusion.
You don't say "president" if you mean "vize president" or "year" if you mean "half-year" either.
Substitute "sterile" for "tall" in my comment then. Or substitute "testicle-less" if you think having testicles is an essential component of being a man.
Am I also doing this if I refer to a man who has had a double orchiectomy as a "man", without the "testicle-less" qualifier? Should I be required to add that qualifier the same way I should add "trans"?
Fair enough, bad example from me, but there's a both qualitative and quantitative difference here. "Testicle-less" or any other example is just one property out of too many to list. Here the only reasonable thing to do is deal with exceptions as they come up. A trans man, however, is missing a lot of the properties of men, and a lot of what's there is artificial. Usually, a man naturally has a number of properties that can be deducted from knowing he's a man, with the exceptions being rare and surprising, because everything in nature has exceptions. A trans man does not. What's more, a trans man has a lot of the properties of woman, which in humans is the opposite of man.
Most of the time where it's not reasonable to distinguish between men and trans men, it's not reasonable to distinguish between men and women either.
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Yes agreed, but the goal is not context-dependent usage, it's controlling choice of information conveyance in entire tranches of life, media, workplaces. It's implying this is the actual reality with no need to dig beneath. Why people would insist on the usage of third-person pronouns is perverse to me. People should be free to use whatever descriptors they consider useful.
I mean, the point is that they consider the adjective as not conveying any additionally relevant information. If every time I spoke about my coworker Bob I called them "Fat Bob" people might wonder why I was doing so, what relevance his weight had to the question. I think this is pretty analogous to how trans people feel.
I think the issue is that, almost always, when "trans woman" is said, it's a context analogous to one in which Bob being fat is highly relevant (dunno, maybe discussing jobs involving going into tight alleyways to fix things?), and the default presumption was automatically that Bob would be skinny. Personally, I'm having a hard time thinking of a context in everyday social life to me where the "trans" in "trans woman" wouldn't add critically important information.
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There's a lot of people who don't use the word "woman" to refer to gender, and who consider someone's sex to be relevant information. Insisting on using the "trans" qualifier is an attempt to meet you half way, but as with many things, doing so only seems to result in demands for courtesy being pushed even further.
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Yeah, I'd adjust my usage to just Bob as well in time, who wouldn't, but I don't want to be told off for telling a new person who doesn't know Bob that he's that fat guy with the long hair.
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