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There are no insights to be drawn from the comparison, because you never stop to define what a "mom" is. If "mom" is defined as "the person from whose womb a child sprung," then step-moms are not moms, and nor are women who use surrogate mothers. If it means, as you hint is can, "the person who nutured you in the manner that our society associates with motherhood," then a step-mother can be a mother. As can arguably a man. And different definitions can be used in different contexts; for the purpose of determining who has the right to due process before being deprived of parental rights, a stepmother who has not adopted her stepchild might not be deemed to be the child's mother. But for purposes of determining who gets to go to mother-daughter day at the ballpark, she probably is.
Similarly, whether a transwoman is a "real woman" depends entirely on the definition one uses. And, that, of course, is the root of the dispute. People on the right think that self-identification is completely meaningless, while those on the left think that it is the whole thing, at least for the issues that they care about. And, of course, self-identification is often all that defines group membership in many contexts. But obviously not all.
Yes, because "mom" is defined as all these things. The modal mother gave birth to you, is the source of half your genotype, including the chromosome that doesn't determine your sex, is your legal guardian and is the wife of your father at the same time. And then you can play Jenga with this definition until you end up with your adoptive mother who wasn't even known by your adoptive father when you were adopted, because she is a "mother figure" in your life, which is somewhat of a circular definition.
A modal woman has XX sex chromosomes, is born with female genitalia, grows boobs and a butt during puberty, can give birth, has lower than average testosterone, doesn't grow coarse facial hair, has lower than average upper body strength, is sexually attracted to men, prefers people to things, seeks validation instead of advice, wears skirts and so on. There's a certain scale of "womanness" each trait conveys: most people in the first world will agree that someone who has all these traits, but doesn't wear skirts ever is still a woman, still a woman if she prefers things to people and advice to validation, still a woman if she's sexually attracted to women, still a woman if she can do more pull-ups than the modal mottizen. But the remaining traits are still challengeable: you can remove any one of them and the result is still a woman if the end goal is getting an answer to "do I treat this person as a woman or as a man".
Including wears skirts on this list is silly. Clothing is different across cultures and generations. Removing it from the list would strengthen your argument. I'd also change the first to female reproductive organs, actually, because of certain intersex conditions.
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Two problems with that:
If man/woman is defined through self-identification, then the definition becomes recursive, and therefore useless. I have no idea whether or not I am a woman, because I don't know whether I identify as one, because I don't know what a woman is.
The left does not think it is the whole thing. Relatively recently there was a shooting, where the shooter identified as non-binary. No one on the left believed him.
There are two large dense clusters in gender-identity space. Membership in these clusters is strongly, but not perfectly, correlated with genital configuration at birth. Therefore, the clusters can be defined by natal anatomy of their modal members, and individuals' gender can be defined by membership in one cluster or the other.
I'm not sure how well gender identity can be described as a space. It makes more sense to say that there are two large dense clusters in human-space (or something of that sort), corresponding to the two sexes/genders (since they're the same for most people). I suppose you could make identity one axis (well, it's not really continuous, I think, but whatever), but that doesn't really give a reason to privilege that axis above others.
In any case, I don't think it works to try to suggest we should use a "we take into account all the factors and see which they approximate the most overall" to argue that "this one factor is what matters" is the right way to do things.
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Not necessarily. There are many instances in which group membership is defined through self-identification, especially for practical purposes. A relatively trivial example: Political party membership in the United States is generally based purely on self-identification; if I declare myself to be a Republican, I can vote in my state's Republican primary. Another example, though one of group self-identification, is the concept of the nation, which is often defined solely in terms of self-identification.(Of course, others push back and dispute that, but that is the point). Another example: "Rape victim." For the purposes of access to rape counseling services, "rape victim" is often defined as anyone who thinks she has been raped, even if, objectively, she has not been. The key there is "for the purposes of access to rape counseling services"; apparently, those who make such decisions deem it sound public policy to define membership in the group, "rape victim" to be based purely on self-identification. For other purposes, eg, criminal conviction of an alleged rapist, public policy might demand a different definition. The same is true of the definition of "woman." For some purposes, sound policy might demand defining "woman" as anyone who identifies as a woman. (Eg: if a high school class is reviewing for a test by having a boys versus girls Jeopardy game, letting anyone who identifies as a girl compete on the girl's team might be sound policy). For other purposes, sound policy might demand defining "woman" using objective criteria (eg, for the purpose of who gets to play "women's" sports).
I don't think this is analogous at all. By your argument, rape counselling services are defining "rape victim" more or less as follows: "a rape victim is a person who believes that they were orally, vaginally or anally penetrated without their consent". The term is defined by reference to a specific factual belief the individual in question does or does not hold (without passing judgement on whether that belief is true).
By contrast, "a woman is a person who identifies as a woman" tells you exactly nothing about what the term "woman" means. It is, as /u/arjin_ferman points out, recursive: "a woman is a person who identifies as a person who identifies as a person who identifies as a..."
No, I am not saying that at all. I am saying that as I understand it they do not provide an objective definition at all. Whether that is good policy or not, I don't know (but note that they seem to think it is, presumably because they want to err on the side of caution by providing services as broadly as possible).
Again, it depends on the purpose of the definition. Suppose I had a rule that says that men must open doors for women. Why? Because women get great satisfaction when that is done; they are aggrieved if that is not done (even if that is irrational); men don't care one way or the other; and we want to maximize total utility. In those circumstances, someone with a penis who identifies as a woman will be aggrieved if doors are not opened for them, and pleased if they are. Hence, if I wish to maximize utility, when someone asks, "how do you define 'woman' for purposes of your door-opening policy, I would respond: "Whoever identifies as a woman is a woman. If you you ask someone, 'what gender are you?' and they respond 'I am a woman,' then open the door. It is not recursive because it doesn't matter how they personally define "woman," nor does it matter whether they conform to an objective definition of "woman."
Let's suppose I provided counseling services for unhappy people. And I define an "unhappy person" as anyone who feels he is unhappy. Would you claim that that is endlessly discursive? I doubt it, because all that matters is how they feel, not what the "really" are objectively "unhappy persons," and not whether Joe, if he felt exactly as Fred does, would define himself as an unhappy person, while Fred does not.
In your example, a woman isn't defined by identifying as a woman, but rather by wanting others to hold the door open to them, so there is no recursion.
But wait! We already have a definition of “woman” which refers to the approximately 50% of humans that are of the sex that is able to give birth to children. That has practically nothing to do with holding doors open, so it's confusing to use the same word for both. We should use a different word for people who want the door to be held open for them, let's say “dorble”. Now people can identify as dorbles to signify they want to have the door held open for them, without confusing what a woman is.
A person with a penis and no uterus can be a dorble but not a woman. Would that satisfy you? The reason people don't like genderism is that it conflates desire to be treated as a woman with quality of actually being a woman. I can understand some people want to be a woman (I've thought about it many times myself) but I also understand that simply wishing you were a (cis)woman doesn't make you a (cis)woman. If transwomen only desired to be known as dorbles rather than women they'd get a lot less pushback.
If the only definition of “unhappy person” is “person who identifies as unhappy” then yes, it would be a circular definition. But you already said “feels” and not “identifies”, which implies they must actually feel a certain way. Happiness is hard to define objectively, but it involves a certain feeling of contentment. It's clear that if you are clinically depressed you cannot cure yourself by simply identifying as a happy person. So there does seem to be some intrinsic quality to happiness beyond mere self-identification. And of course, a person who feels happy cannot be unhappy, but actually feeling happy is different from claiming that you feel happy.
From the other side, there are lots of teenagers on Tiktok who whine about how they suffer from anxiety and depression and Tourettes and ADHD and autism and narcolepsy and... and... and.... are you saying all these kids are actually suffering from depression and anxiety disorder etc. in the clinical sense just because they identify as such? Or do you agree that for a lot of these people what they claim to experience is different from what they actually experience? I think transgenderism is similar: a lot of the people who claim they feel like the opposite sex don't actually feel that way.
First, thank you for engaging critically with the actual issue. But I remain unconvinced, for the following reasons:
But that is not how I defined a woman. I said, "Suppose I had a rule that says that men must open doors for women." That rule requires men to open doors for all women, regardless of whether they want the door opened for them or not. Much like the rule saying that all parents must send their minor children to school most certainly does NOT define "minor children" as "those who want to go to school," as many parents know all too well. And, in fact, I specifically defined "woman" as "Whoever identifies as a woman is a woman," because, under the terms of the hypothetical, that would maximize utility.
In other words, although I did hypothesize that transwoman would get utility out of door opening, that was a policy reason for including them in the definition of "woman." It was not part of the definition itself. After all, if the definition was "all those who get value from door opening," then the rule would extend to people holding packages, felons fleeing the police, etc. But, it doesn't apply to them. It applies only to "women," defined as anyone who identifies as a woman.
It would be perfectly fine with me if we used "dorble", but that is not really germane to the underlying issue. because we already have a different term for people who feel that they are women, yet are not born as a member the sex able to bear children: It is "transwoman"! The broad issue is how transwomen should be treated, and the specific issue in this comment thread is whether the claim, "a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman" is circular. See further comment below.
I am extremely skeptical that that is the reason that a dedication to logical consistency is the reason that they don't like genderism. And you missttate the issue when you say, "I also understand that simply wishing you were a (cis)woman doesn't make you a (cis)woman." No transgernder person makes that claim, because it is impossible by definition; a cisgender person is "a person whose gender identity corresponds with the sex the person had or was identified as having at birth". The claim, "a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman" means that both cisgender woman and transgender woman are "women."
More importantly, consider the following:
I hire an alien to be the head of Women's Services at my university. It's job is to ensure that women, but only women, receive the offered services. But there is a problem; the alien is from a species that reproduces asexually, and hence has no concept of "man" and "woman." It asks me for a definition of "woman." I reply thusly:
Now, there are many reasons to object to some of that. Some might or might not be sound policy. It might be confusing. The policy goals of each might be better served by slightly different definitions. The last one might be based on an incorrect assessment of the existence or effect of "the patriarchy." But, is any of it circular, or logically incoherent? I don't think so, and so I don't think that it is correct to claim that it is inherently illogical to say, "a 'woman' is anyone who identifies as a woman." If you applied that rule to intramural sports, a lot of cisgender women might get hurt, but that makes it bad policy, not inherently illogical.
If being a dorble is defined only as identifying as such, and the only consequence of that identification is that non-dorbles must open doors for you, then yes, I think people would identify as dorbles only based on whether they want doors to be held open (or whether they don't want to open doors for others, of course). After all, what else could feeling like a dorble mean? If identifying as a dorble comes with no duties or privileges, it's meaningless.
What is your dorble identity anyway? How did you determine it if not by thinking about doors being held open?
So no matter how you squirm, you have defined dorble as "someone who prefers to have doors held open for them, rather than hold doors open for others", because someone of the opposite preference wouldn't identify as a dorble!
It's the same with genderism. Transwomen want to be seen as women because women are viewed and treated differently in society. What's the point of identifying as a woman if nobody treats you like one?
It's not "logical consistency", it's the erasure of biological sex as a real thing and the root cause of women's oppression.
Oh sweet summer child! I agree it's a logical contradiction, but the whole trans movement is illogical. Go read/watch some interviews with Caster Semenya and find me a single instance where she will admit to being male. It's all "everyone is different, I just happen to have high testosterone", which makes me want to scream: you have high testosterone because you are male, or rather: you don't have high testosterone levels, they are perfectly normal for a male. But again, go find me one interview where this biologically male transwoman admits to being male and/or trans. I'll wait.
Then when you can't find it, please retract your statement and admit that I was right that some transwomen refuse to admit they are not ciswomen. (It's not only Semenya, by the way, but it's a high-profile example.) This is the erasure of biological sex I was talking about.
Except that we also already have a word that means "adult human female" and it's "woman". So instead of relabeling "woman" to "ciswoman" why don't we keep "woman" (sex based) and "dorble" (identity based) and invent a new term for the superset, let's say "worbles"? That seems much less confusing: Caster Semenya is a dorble and a worble but not a woman.
Of course, the conflation of terms is very much intentional. By saying "transwomen are women" trans-activists intend to claim privileges are conferred to ciswomen on the basis of biological sex.
Or if you really want to use the term "woman" to include both males and females, how would you feel if, as a one-time concession, we replaced the words "woman" and "man" with "female" and "male" in all laws and rules written before 2010 we would replace man and woman with male and female? Men's bathrooms would be male bathrooms, women's sports would be female sports, women's prison wards would be female wards, your passport would contain your biological sex again (maybe next to your chosen gender identity), and so on. In this framework I would recognize that I'm male but I wouldn't identify as a man or a woman since the term is meaningless to me.
Then we can discuss whether female bathrooms should be changed to women's bathrooms, and so on. Do you think that would be acceptable to trans activists? Or do you agree it's likely they would fight tooth and nail to get male women recognized as "females" so they can claim all the female privileges by default?
To summarize, what you're arguing for here is to use different definitions of "woman" in different contexts. This is similar to my proposal of separating male/female from man/woman except you make the meaning of the word variable instead of using separate words.
I'm not philosophically opposed to this (many words have different meanings depending on context) but I would start from the assumption that "woman" means "female" and any case to include males would have to be made separately. So no males in women's sports or women's spa's just because those males self-identify as women.
This safe space of course already exists: it's every single college campus in America.
In this model, will there also be a safe space for females who want to contemplate their oppression at the hands of males, which is actually much more common than gender-based oppression? Or do they get banned, harassed and assaulted everywhere they go, as is the case for TERFs today?
Are females allowed to have female only spaces such as spas?
Are lesbian females allowed to have female-only dating apps?
Unless the answer is yes, you are just advocating for more oppression of the female sex.
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Pedantic reply:
Since you have no first-hand knowledge of their unhappiness, you are smuggling into your definition “anyone who communicates he feels he is unhappy”.
Even more pedantic response: As it happens, I have a device that can directly analyze each applicant's brain and can determine whether they indeed are experiencing unhappiness.
You are conflating my ability to accurately determine whether criteria of a definition are satisfied with the the content of the definition. If I have a rule that says "intentional killers must get life in prison," the fact that I cannot know first-hand whether a person actually intended to kill does not mean the category "intentional killers" is illegitimate.
What? What does that make Joe? Do you force treatment on him?
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So can you tell me how can I find out whether or not I am a woman?
Nope. The parties are specific organizations with specific structures, and a process of becoming a member, even if it's quite open. Saying "I'm a member of the Democratic party because I identify as a Democrat" is wrong if I haven't actually registered as a Democrat.
Nope. You can't suddenly declare yourself Japanese and be taken seriously.
Nope. At the very least being a rape victim requires that you had sex with someone.
This is sophistry. What this actually means is that you don't have to be a rape victim to get access to counseling services.
Using the same word for different purposes effectively changes it's definition, and what we are talking about is whether a self-ID based definition is useful, not whether different definitions are possible.
So let's say I'm supposed to be a player in this game, how am I supposed to pick a team if you won't tell me a non-selfID definition of "girl" or "boy"?
I believe this is what the "group" in "group self-identification" was referring to: you have to be accepted by other members of the group. The Japanese are stingy about Japaneseness, but other nations are more generous. You can move to the US and declare yourself an American and you will generally be accepted. (This is my understanding, at least. I am not American.) In general, considering yourself part of a nation (meaning an ethnic group, not a nation in the sense of a legally constituted country) and being accepted by others as part of that nation is what being part of a nation is. Nations (ethnic groups) are entirely socially constructed, formed by social consensus.
It's pragmatism. They are acknowledging that their goal is to provide rape counseling and not to explore complicated ethical or legal questions about sex and consent.
No one is actually confused in the way you are pretending to be here.
Sorry, I'll get back to the rest of your post later, just wanted to get to this quickly:
Yeah, because no one is actually using the definition "a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman", anyone using the word has some referrer external to the definition in mind.
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The "signing up" requirement does not strike me as particularly significant. It seems indistinguishable from saying I am a woman for the purpose of playing women's sports if I 1) identify as a woman; and 2) sign up for the woman's team. The difference, of course, is not the signing up, but the underlying public policy behind allowing someone to be a Democrat by simply declaring his identity and filing a form, and the underlying policy behind not allowing someone to be a member of the women's team simply by declaring his (her) identity and filing a form. Please note that I am not arguing one way or the other re who should be able to be on a women's team, nor who should be treated as a Democrat for purposes of voting in a primary. My point is simply that, sometimes, self-identification is all that matters.
Note that I referred to it as an example of group identity, not individual identity. If a group defines itself as "Ryukyuan" rather than "Japanese," then the Ryukyuan nation has sprung into being, at least under some definitions of "nation."
That's the point: For the purposes of providing services, it is perfectly possible to define "rape victim" as someone who feels they have been raped, regardless of whether they had sex or not. Again, the definition depends on the purpose for which it is being employed.
Yes, exactly. You can get services regardless of whether you meet objective criteria. That is the point: It is sound policy, in the view of those who provide the services, to define "rape victim" as anyone who subjectively believes they are a rape victim.
That's the point:
Teacher: "Let's review by playing Jeopardy, boys versus girls. Boys, move to the left of the class; girls move to the right"
Student: "But, what is the definition of "boy" and "girl."
Teacher: "For the purposes of the game, if you identify as a girl, you are a girl."
It is when you're talking about definitions, because it provides a referrer external to the definition itself. If there's no political party that you can sign up for, "a Democract is anyone who identifies as a Democrat" becomes meaningless.
This is like the goth example I used in the other comment - In practice there will have to be something that sets the group apart from others, or the word will lose it's meaning.
Ok, but all you're doing in those cases is saying "a rape victim is someone who wants to use these specific services" and "a girl is anyone who wants to play on Team A rather than Team B", you're not actually defining either of these groups through self-ID.
I you want to claim that the definition of gender identity does not depend on the team I want to play, you actually have to answer my original question in a non-self-referential way: what is a woman? I cannot know if I identify as one, unless I know what a woman is.
But we are not talking about in practice. We are talking about whether the definition is irrational. . Besides, the whole claim of transgender advocates is that that which truly sets "women" apart from "men" is shared by both ciswoman and transwomen, and that the differences between them are unimportant. That is obviously debatable, but they actually agree with you in principal. And note that, in regard to national identity, debates about what similarities and differences are relevant (and hence whether claims to national self-determination should be recognized in practice) are commonplace.
No, I am not. For example, re the classroom teams, if Pat identifies as a girl, she is assigned to the girl's team, regardless of whether she wants to be on that team or not. Because the only criterion is her gender identity.
But we're living in the real world, and we're subject to it's constraints. A definition might make sense in a parallel universe where our constraints do not apply, but using it here makes no sense.
In any case after giving it more thought, like your other examples, this is just playing word games to hide the fact that definition is not self-ID. Yeah, people can get together, form a group, and put whatever label they want on it, but the group is defined by it's members, not by it's label, which is why you cannot suddenly identify yourself into being Japanese. Trying to sidestep it with "oh, I was talking about collective self-ID" doesn't work either, because from a collective perspective one nation cannot relabel itself to lay claim to being another nation. China is sort of trying to do that with Taiwan, but no matter how many declarations are issued that there is only one China, everybody knows that the entities are separate. The opposite wouldn't work either, if PRC relabeled itself to ROC to lay claim to Taiwan, it would be no different than PRC just declaring war and laying claim to Taiwan.
Except you explicitly specified the definition is only for the purposes of the game, and within the game there is no way to tell whether or not someone identifies as a boy or girl except for which team they chose to play on. So you are doing that.
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I think the biggest problem with the passage you quoted is that neither the left nor the right are a singular ideological block with regards to their views on identity.
I don't buy this one though. You can totally have purely personally chosen definitions, because- well, because in a sense you are right. There's no such thing as a purely recursive identity. People choose identities because those identities mean something to them, those meanings are imbibed from the world. They don't go around pulling identities out of the aether. So the more meaningless an identity word becomes in the world, the fewer people choose it, and the fewer people choose it, the more meaningful it becomes. This creates a self-correcting balance on the amount of collapse in meaning an identity word can undergo, even if you let anyone choose to use any identity word.
You end up with a recursive algorithm for the definition similar to PageRank. Where the perceived definition of an Identity word is coordinated around the people who choose to use it, who choose to use it because it's meaning resonates with them, where the meaning resonates with them because people like them choose it.
This is related to your other point actually. I think it's motivated reasoning, but what those leftists are saying is that the shooter doesn't actually self-identify with the words they are saying. You can lie about your feelings and personal meanings, and self-identity is about feelings and personal meanings, not spoken words. It was a sort of conspiracy hypothesis that the shooter was just saying that they're enby as a personal psyop because they hate enbies.
I'd buy that if there were several observable factions on the left, fighting each other over the gender ID of the shooter, but as far as I can tell the reaction was basically uniformly "nah, he's full of shit". There might be some exceptions, but they're overwhelmed by the consensus.
There's a problem with that too. You can go with a definition like that for identifying as Goth or something, but the moment a cluster emerges, so will a set of defining features. If I can be Goth without taking on the Goth appearance, listening to the music, or doing anything else that Goths do, the word is meaningless again.
In the case of "woman" you have another problem on top of that, because any non-biological definition will necessarily rely on appearance and behavior, but the feminist movement has spent decades pushing back against labeling certain type of behaviors and appearance as feminine. So you can't use that definition without dismissing feminism... which is the source of the conflict with TERFs, I guess.
The word is meaningless with respect to you. But as long as "that guy is goth" is a statement that is able to update my audience's priors towards- you know. The people you and I think of as goth, the word still has meaning.
I do think you need some level of ability to say "yeah that guy calls himself goth but... he only wears bright colors. So... uh... you know."
But in practice you rarely need to use this, because the guy wearing bright colors doesn't call himself goth very often, and the fact that brightcolor guys 'usually' don't gall them selves goth, means that there is still a lot of specificity in the word goth, even if you religiously humor every bright shirted 'goth's identity.
Similarly the traditional meaning of the word 'woman' doesn't totally break down until 50% of women are men who look and act like men. And this is never going to happen. Don't get me wrong, the worst case scenario for 'woman' as an identity is still pretty bad if you favor the traditional one. But it's only going to be the most fem and fem-aspirational men and a handful of extreme outliers. Perhaps it might eventually mutate further in some still stranger direction, but it's never going to cease to be interpretable as a statistical statement about someone's likely attributes.
Sometimes I am frustrated by this whole concept because.... in terms of wanting the interpretability to hold- that breaks down no matter how you change gender norms. If you call a fully transitioned trans man a 'woman', I still have to deal with the word 'woman' meaning almost nothing relevant to my conception of what that's supposed to entail in this context. Dude this guy has a six inch beard and is made of muscle and speaks in a gruff voice and says he's a man what are you talking about? I do not need to be told he has XX chromosomes and was born with a vagina. I need actionable information please.
But similarly, I do think it's reasonable to treat this like the goth case. "That person is a woman, but, they don't like... have a womb. So... uh... you know."
Though I think its a real dick move to treat them poorly over it.
As for Terfs... I actually model Terfs as the opposite. Most Terfs are pro gender norms. The idea is that- being a woman is a pretty chill deal if you play by the conservative rules, in that you get an exclusion from competing with men on being one. There is some of the "You guys are reifying gender norms" stuff, but I see more of that from the leftist professors posting yet another hot gender take than the Terfs. Terfs tend to be perfectly happy wielding gender norms as a weapon against other women, trans or otherwise, in my experience. I see them more as a spiritual successor of the lesbian exclusionaries of second wave feminism. Though I do think there are more 'real' fears involved with accepting trans women than lesbian women.
Well yeah, you can only have "people you and I think of as goth" only if there's some way to say "this guy calls himself goth, but he's not".
Well, for one the rarity of the cases is small comfort given their egregiousness, we've already had a bunch of sentencing day transitions by absolute psychos who wanted to go to women's prisons.
Another thing is that this is only true because a lot of people are devoted to maintaining the material/biological definition of the word. If self-ID becomes undisputed, I'll be identifying as a one any time I'm accused of sexism, and by then I will hopefully be able to also identify as black whenever racism comes up.
I don't follow. The traditional meaning of the word "woman" does not break down no matter how people act. It's a biological category.
I don't see how calling that person a man is actionable information. I try not to treat people differently based on their sex, and adapt to their individual personality.
I'll grant you that feminists generally play dirty by alternating appeals to equality and appeals to chivalry, but political lesbianism is hardly what I'd call "conservative rules".
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Individual people on the left believe that it is the whole thing when it suits them. Or at the very least, they believe that it is the whole thing often enough that making self-ID the legal standard is defensible.
Which shooting?
Believing something when it suits you is another way of saying you don't believe it, as far as I'm concerned. "Often enough" might be more defensible, if there are some criteria provided for when the definition applies, and when not. Provided the criteria don't boil down to "when it suits me".
Colorado Springs from November last year.
That's the problem with self-ID. Leftists may tacitly acknowledge that Karen White isn't really trans, but the framework of self-ID admits no such distinction - declaring it makes it so. As far as I can see the whole thing boils down to a no true Scotsman argument - if they're a good guy then they're really trans, if they're a bad guy then they're a faker. It's the exact same kind of sophistry as "that guy who murdered two people wasn't a true Christian (despite going to church every day and being able to recite the Bible from memory), because as soon as he murdered two people he was no longer following the teachings of Christ - therefore, the set of 'true Christians' logically can only include good guys."
'"The best course of action is to take the suspect’s assertion “in stride” and use they/them pronouns for Aldrich, while at the same time keeping in mind the suspect’s alleged crimes, past and the impact that this kind of troll could have on the LGBTQ community, according to Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate.'
So at least one person on the left (cautiously) believes him enough to honour his request to be addressed by the relevant pronouns.
I don't think you can conclude that they believe he is sincere. It seems more likely that they are willing to humor an obvious troll to cement the rule that everyone's preferred pronouns must be respected. If they make an exception in his case, it becomes clear that the rule is not absolute, which raises the question: who gets to decide who is truly trans and therefore deserving of their personal pronouns? It's better for them to insist that the rule is set in stone and accept the occasional troll as the cost of doing business.
It also reminds me of how Black Lives Matters supported Jussie Smollett even after all the evidence came out that proved his story was a hoax: “In our commitment to abolition, we can never believe police, especially the Chicago Police Department (CPD) over Jussie Smollett, a Black man who has been courageously present, visible, and vocal in the struggle for Black freedom.”
Does the black professor writing this actually believe Smollet is the more credible party here? I doubt it. But throwing their support behind an obvious liar just because he's black reinforces their rule that all black people must be believed over the police all the time.
I don't care what either of these people "really believe". I care about the policies they are endorsing. "I believe the Colorado Springs shooter is actually non-binary" and "I don't believe the Colorado Springs shooter is actually non-binary, but I'm pretending to because I support an ironclad inflexible social prohibition on expressing even the mildest scepticism about anyone's claimed gender identity, no matter how obvious a bad actor they are" amount to the same thing at the end of the day.
I'm not here to tell you what to care about, but you were arguing with @arjin_ferman, who made a claim about what leftists actually believe; you cannot refute that by talking about their stated beliefs. That way you're just talking past each other.
Apart from that, I would still recommend that you try to distinguish between expressed beliefs and true beliefs. It's quite common for these to differ, and the difference is important. What's the point of quibbling about the letter of the law, when the judgment is not based on the letter of the law?
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