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I've said it before and I'll say it again. Christianity is at least as unbacked by evidence and reason as transgender ideology. Believing that a certain man 2000 years ago was the son of god and rose from the dead is at least as unbacked by evidence and reason as believing that a man can become a woman by calling himself a woman and doing surgeries. But many people here on The Motte give Christianity a pass because it's really old and really popular and so it seems "normal", because they like its cultural/political connotations, and probably in some cases because they were raised Christian.
But I don't give Christianity a pass. When people tell me that they are Christian, I have pretty much the same reaction as I have when people try to convince me that a trans woman is a real woman. In both cases, I think that their beliefs are ludicrous and deeply irrational.
I don't think this is a fair comparison.
One is an empirical claim about the actual literal nature of reality, the other is a normative semantic claim about how we should draw category boundaries on a word (and cultural/legal/etc category boundaries as a society).
Even if they were both equally silly, one is a mistake about the actual physical nature of reality, the other is just a request to do language and culture differently.
The latter can be dumb but it can't be wrong in the same way.
Trans people make an impossible empirical claim as well. The claim that undergirds their requests are that they are actually able to tell that they are the opposite sex. That is to say they are claiming to be able to distinguish between the experience of "being a male who correctly thinks they have the internal experience of a female" and "being a male who mistakenly thinks they have the internal experience of being female". This is epistemically impossible as we each only have one experience and cannot triangulate reality.
Why do you think that there's such a thing as a unitary 'internal experience of a female', or that trans women think they have it?
Obviously every human has a different experience, I'm not really sure what your claim would mean.
Anyway, it sounds to me like you are adding circumlocutions to the whole thing. The claim is just 'trans women are women, trans men are men.' I'm not familiar with the specific extended claim you're making here being a common one, aside from in the again semantic sense of 'my experiences are a woman's experiences because I'm a woman'.
There being such as thing as being a woman separate from biology is foundational to trans people being a coherent concept. If there is no such "woman" qualia how can you actually explain dysphoria? A miss match implies a correct match which implies some category.
'Money' is a thing separate from the pieces of green paper and yet it's not a unique qualia.
This is what a 'social construct' is. Social constructs are very real and important, they basically make up the majority of our thoughts about and interactions with society, culture, language, and each other.
There's a social construct of 'woman', it is applied to some people and not others, trans women would like it applied to them. They experience dysphoria when their own self-image or self-understanding is not reflected either in their own form and appearance or in how society treats and interacts with them.
Unique qualia are not needed for any of this. The experience can be and is built from a complex structure of normal qualia, just like most experiences.
We didn't socially construct the female sex. Females do not have higher estrogen, wombs, larger breasts ect because society decided they should. The gender "woman" is built up around the reality of a sexually dimorphic species which must deal with the reality that half of the population has meaningfully different abilities and reproductive role. The qualia of womanness is the internal female experience.
There is a claim that tran women have this qualia and not the compliment male internal experience. The mismatch in these qualia is what causes dysphoria.
Maybe you have some other justification for the existence of trans people but it is tiresome to have the same behavior explained by dozens of different just so stories that all seem to fall apart immediately upon examination.
Yup, and many many people who do not meet some or many of those criteria would be called women by you.
And by me.
I think maybe you are just using the words 'qualia' and 'experience' interchangeably, which they very much are not.
But if you just mean 'experience', sure, the vast and imprecise and fuzzy-bordered and non-exclusionary category of 'woman' includes some things about thoughts and experiences. No two women will have the exact same woman-related thoughts and experiences, and woman who don't have central ones aren't excluded from being women, and etc etc. But whatever, sure, lets stipulate something like that vaguely exists.
You seem to be saying that we can't know what experiences other people have (and therefore can't meaningfully claim to have similar experiences to another person) because we're not psychic.
But we are psychic.
I'm taking thoughts in my head, and using an external signal to put those thoughts into your head. Right now.
Our modern forms of telepathy do not have infinite bandwidth or fidelity, sure. But we use them to share information about what we are thinking and feeling and experiencing all the goddamn time, that's like a huge part of what art and culture and just talking to people is. And in other categories we do not question or reject claims like 'yeah I've felt that way before' or 'I agree with you' or 'oh yeah I recognize that feeling' or etc.
These are normal kinds of conclusions to draw about similarities in experience between people based on them just describing their experiences, and rejecting that method only here is an isolated demand for rigor.
Do you think you know what it is like to be a bat?
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