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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023

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The parallels with gender abound. How much does the biology matter? The relationships? The performance of the role’s expected behaviors? How much should we honor someone’s self-identification? Are there any useful insights to draw from the comparison?

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.

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.

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.