Male and Female Robots

I think it is an untenable assumption to suppose that people who want to have a social sex different from their biological sex don’t understand what they’re doing. They aren’t ‘genuinely delusional’, in that they are aware of the biological facts.

But the larger point here is about how we understand the social dimension of sex. We know what it means, socially, to treat virtual assistants as women, despite their lack of any sexual biology – and indeed, it’s the social dimension of sex that leads companies to choose female-presenting voices for their virtual assistants. This tells us that there’s a part of the concept of sex that has nothing to do with biology, and everything to do with social roles.

In a sense, all social identities are a kind of fiction. We present ourselves in a certain way to establish how we want to be treated, based on prevailing social norms and presumptions. People tune how they dress, how they speak, and what they do, to convey who they are and wish to be in society. Politicians famously flub their addresses to subcultures by attempting to affect aspects of social identity based on the crowds they’re addressing, assuming ‘folksy’ expressions and mannerisms and dressing more or less formally, all to convey the social fiction, ‘I’m one of you, I’m on your team’.

There’s little difference between these things and biological men who choose to present as women to adopt the female social role. They tune their dress, their speech, and their actions to convey that they should be treated socially as women.

If your only objection is that one can do so delusionally, do you then accept when people do this with full awareness of what they’re doing? If not, what’s your objection to a non-delusional adoption of a social sexual role different from ones biological sex?

Can robots feel like they were born in the wrong body?
At least it’ll be easier to transition if they do, just unscrew one part and screw on another.

Will Pinocchio ever be a real boy?

Firstly, I’ve never met a nuts and bolts android or gynoid, so I’m not sure what I’d call it.
Last I checked, this’s still 2019, and the (cultural) Marxist transhumanist utopia we’ve been dreaming of since the 19th century hasn’t materialized just yet.
Secondly, in reference to a gynoid, I’d probably use the pronouns she and it interchangeably, and I don’t think I’d call it a woman, I’d probably be more comfortable calling it a gynoid.
Did they ever call data a man on Star Trek?
Thirdly, if I were to talk about this gynoid with the other humans, I would make sure they knew I’m not talking about a flesh and blood woman before I started calling her by her name, presuming it had one, or using the pronoun she.

Transactivists want us to believe transmen and transwomen are men and women in all the ways that matter, at least psychosocially, if not biologically.
I don’t think an android or gynoid could be a man or woman in all the ways that matter psychosocially, but even if they could, we’re still lightyears away from that reality.
And I don’t think a transman or transwoman could be a man or woman in all the ways that matter psychosocially either, altho some may be more passable than others.

The problem I have with this, is what are these people saying about women who do not dress and act that way. Are butch lesbians not women? Are men who dress that way but identify as men, actually wrong? It seems to me there is an uncomfortable area in the current left PC about gender and it is mostly ignored by them. I don’t think the answer to all that is simple, but it is presented as simple. If someone feels like they are X (qualities related in how they feel like acting and presenting themselves) then they are a man or woman. But this to me is making hard and fast claims about men and women, that on the other hand the PC left does not want us to be making. Why can’t some of the men who have decided they are women, actually be men with those qualities? There are certainly other men who display those qualities but consider themselves men. y t

And then toss in what things like drag are saying about women. It seems taboo to look at but drag strikes me as like blackface - not in degree but in kind. Presenting a distorted outdated idea of womanhood that is often not that complimentary however dazzling the clothes and hairdos.

I feel like there are tensions inside the PC that are not being looked at, and I wonder about what younger people are making of this as they try to navigate their own complexity. A woman will be told that she can have any qualities and be a woman and should be respected even if she is a tomboy/butch/competitive person for example (and this I heartily agree with). But they also say that another teenager, say, who feels these things is absolutely correct in deciding that she is a man. How could any teenager possibly work that out. And hormone treatments and puberty blockers are available with parental consent well under the age of consent and everything at 18. Once you start in on the endocrins system, this will definitely create a kind of radical confirmation bias from that point forward.

I am old enough to have seen that earlier ideas about the limitations of both sexs - how emotional, how physically skilled, how lacking in certain emotions and interests, how intellectually skilled or not, etc. - were utterly loopy. I am glad that people regardless of their gender can more easily still consider themselves fine.

But I see something pernicious happening now where a giant mixed message is being sent at the children and from one, supposedly unified political position. You can be like anything regardless of your sex. If you seem like X you may not be a member of your biological gender. And then making widely available the tools to start hacking your gender biologically. Teenagers are not ready to make that decision and parents are not ready to give consent based on teenagers (and even younger kids nowadays) self-evaluations.

Now I have no idea what treated socially as women means. I get it, that this probably means, label them as they wish to be labeled. But note the language it is couched in. Treated socially like women. After all this time there is now still a way I should be treating women socially that I do not treat men like? Open doors for them? Condescend? Avoid politics and sports as topics? I know, of course that’s not what you or they mean. But really it should mean nothing, except labelling. And why must one label`? if we can be anything as either sex.

Am I a partial trans because I have certain (supposedly ) female attributes more than other men. And I do. Since everyone pares down their attributes as far as I can tell to become the cutout figures most adults have decided is best.

“I think it is an untenable assumption to suppose that people who want to have a social sex different from their biological sex don’t understand what they’re doing. They aren’t ‘genuinely delusional’, in that they are aware of the biological facts.”

The derangement that I refer to is not of the conscious choice, but of the inspiration. If a man believed himself to be a robot, insisted that society treat him as such with all of the benefits of warranties, guarantees, and replacement parts then proceeded to insist that the government fund the upgrading of his biological body with mechanical parts, would you be making the same argument? Should he be treated as less than you? Are you a bigot? Don’t you believe in healthcare for all?

What if he believed himself to be a dog or a tree. What is the difference in those beliefs and believing that he is a female? And why should other people pay to have him pursue his deranged belief?

“But the larger point here is about how we understand the social dimension of sex. We know what it means, socially, to treat virtual assistants as women, despite their lack of any sexual biology – and indeed, it’s the social dimension of sex that leads companies to choose female-presenting voices for their virtual assistants. This tells us that there’s a part of the concept of sex that has nothing to do with biology, and everything to do with social roles.”

I have a different education on that issue than you. I don’t think that I can accept your premise that sex is the only reason that females are chosen for those occupations. And so I cant accept your conclusion that it is all about social role playing. You seem to be accepting and presuming a fallacious sexist perspective to make an argument against sexism.

If women or female models are chosen for those occupations for a different reason than you propose ,and I believe that they are, then your argument is void.

“In a sense, all social identities are a kind of fiction. We present ourselves in a certain way to establish how we want to be treated, based on prevailing social norms and presumptions.”

Yes, that is your, I believe, false premise defeating your apparent socialist globalism support effort.

"People tune how they dress, how they speak, and what they do, to convey who they are and wish to be in society. Politicians famously flub their addresses to subcultures by attempting to affect aspects of social identity based on the crowds they’re addressing, assuming ‘folksy’ expressions and mannerisms and dressing more or less formally, all to convey the social fiction, ‘I’m one of you, I’m on your team’.

There’s little difference between these things and biological men who choose to present as women to adopt the female social role. They tune their dress, their speech, and their actions to convey that they should be treated socially as women."

I think that part is all true but irrelevant in that it is merely the aftermath of a possible delusion and intentional deceptive manipulation.

The issue that you seem to be avoiding entirely is, “why are they even wanting people to treat them as something that they clearly are not?” And that is related but a different issue than why people want their robots to seem gender related.

It seems to me that billions of years of evolution created behaviors of creatures by killing off what didn’t work for their survival and propagation. To now claim that it has all been merely a social role playing game that can be easily rewritten seems excessively naive and petulant.

“what’s your objection to a non-delusional adoption of a social sexual role different from ones biological sex?”

Who said that I objected?

When someone is ill, I don’t object to them coughing, being lazy, and perhaps irritable, and perhaps for the rest of their life. But that doesn’t mean that I am accepting that they are not sick. But I don’t see how that has anything at all to do with why androids are built gender specific.

It is not deranged at all but is simply the extension of anthropomorphism from animal to machine
This phenomenon already exists with ships for example being referred to by the female pronoun
It is nothing more than the natural desire to humanise certain non human objects that one likes

This misses the point. Rather, knowing that their bodies have no biological sex to speak of, we still happily use gendered pronouns to refer to them.

Yes. There’s an episode in the first season of Next Generation called “Measure of a Man”, the title referring to Data, and the plot revolving around a tribunal to decide whether Data has rights (the question isn’t whether he’s a man vs. a woman, but a man vs. a machine). This is also one of the episodes that establishes the shape of Data’s genitals in canon.

But Data is almost always referred to by male pronouns, and when he’s referred to as ‘it’, it’s deliberately to disparage him and reflects badly on the speaker in context.

Karpel Tunnel, I agree with your points, there’s absolutely a tension in PC culture between demanding the use of chosen gender pronouns and demanding equal treatment for all genders. But my response would be that, in practice, we don’t treat men and women equally, it is a true descriptive statement that there are social sexual roles. Whether or not that should continue, while it’s the case, we should be open to letting people choose their sexual role. There are arguments that this will tend to reinforce those roles, but I think it’s more likely that it will continue to erode the distinction and increase equality. And, in any case, if there’s less stigma attached to switching roles, there’s less problem with those roles existing anyway.

I also agree with your point about drag and blackface, and I’m under the impression that there are people that consider it as similar in both degree and kind (I would bet that there are TERF scholars who take this position). But I also think the Rachel Dolezal case (the white woman who lived as a black woman) was not as straightforward as it was made out to be. Like with sex, there are dimensions of racial difference that have eroded over the past half century in ways that make those cases more likely. Take for example Black English Vernacular, which is spoken by people of all races that grow up in cultures in which that dialect is spoken. Certain elements of race are actually derived from culture, and where race and culture were once more reliably aligned (at least in the US), the correlation is much weaker now, but the concepts surrounding them have lagged. If someone grows up in a culture that would have historically only been open to people of a certain race, there’s a live question as to whether they will identify primarily by their ‘biological race’ or their ‘cultural race’.

I think this is beside the point. First, to your latter question, one big difference is that there are a lot of people who identify as a sex different from their biological sex, and not so many (if any) who identify as a dog or a tree.

Second, how we should fund healthcare is a distinct a complicated question. What counts as a discretionary procedure extends far beyond sex reassignment: Vasectomy? Vision correction? Sleep apnea? Cleft lip? There’s a lot of grey here, and it’s not helpful to inject all that grey as an impediment to resolving the simpler question: There are plenty of pre-op trans people who only ask to be acknowledge in social contexts as the sex that they signal through their speech, dress, behavior, etc. We should grant that to them.

Well, I’m not talking about women or female models, I’m talking about a disembodied voice on a phone.

I should clarify that I don’t think this is usually deceptive. A person anecdote: I grew up in Boston with a bit of the local accent, and my parents have fairly strong accents. I went to school in California and over a couple years, my accent shifted. My friends tell me that when I would go home for holidays, my accent would come roaring back. That wasn’t a deliberate choice on my part, I can’t even perceive the difference myself.This is a common thing, people tend to unconsciously mirror the people their around, in speech, behavior, body posture, etc. It’s part of human social communication, and likely aids cooperation and community.

Another finding I read about recently is that people shift the pitch of their voice in ways that signal their place in a social hierarchy. This happens rapidly, and people’s private evaluation of group dynamics strongly track the changes. This seems more closely related the selection of a social sexual role: people signal how they should be treated by the group. It’s not duplicitous, if anything it’s quite honest.

I’m avoiding it because there’s not a single answer, and in a social setting you will never know why a specific person wants that. You have to make a choice in the absence of that knowledge. I’m arguing that in many other contexts, we make the choice to assign a social sexual role that is not tied to biology. We do that all the time, and so we should be willing to do it for people.

If I know that a specific person is doing it for a bad reason, e.g. to scam the government, or that some other response will be better for them, e.g. they think they’re the queen of England and I’m their shrink, then we can of course make exceptions. But the general rule should be the one we already use in assigning social sex distinct from biology, i.e. go ahead and accept the role they are signaling.

Except that culture and biology evolve separately. We’re talking about a cultural change, and conversations like this one, and the behavior changes they engender, are how cultures evolve.

That relates to how we use social sex. It shows that we already conceive of social sex as distinct from biological sex.

I think this is a fair critique of my position, though not a defeater. The question is, if we remove biology from sex, should we remove it from species? If we treat Siri as human, do we then accept that humanness is not about biology? But my response is, yes. We treat Siri as a human because she’s designed to be interacted with in a human-like way. But we know that we don’t have to feed her or let her vote. Similarly, we treat her as a woman to the extent that it matters, e.g. caller her “her” (and, arguably, ordering her about).

In the same way, we can treat female-presenting biological men as women in social contexts to the extent that it’s relevant, without assuming that they have periods or get pregnant.

It’s representational… and the only thing that’s “incorrect” is treating it as anything different.

If we point to a specific spot on a map and say “that’s new york” that can be correct or incorrect depending on where on the map we point.
But it can also be “incorrect” regardless of where we point if you take any of that to mean it’s the real new york and not merely where it’s represented on the map.

Presumably this fact about maps and named locations does not hinge on the similarities of the social roles of maps vs actual locations or any such thing…
But rather on whether the real thing is being, in one form or another, recognizably represented

Gender certainly can be and often is separable from biological sex, but it then becomes representational… the same way geographic locations can be represented on pieces of paper, digitally, or in our minds.
Ships are traditionally referred to as female and given female names, for who knows what reason… perhaps because captains felt like they were wed to their ship and that they loved “it” like they would a woman.
Siri and Alexa were given feminine voices, that’s a much more pronounced and less abstract representation of human females than ships ever were…
And yet for all the years in which we spoke of ships as females… we managed to stave off any confusion about it merely being representational… through no real effort, I might add.

There is no mystery here, this is not complicated… and I can only speculate as to why you think it worth discussing, especially in the context of social roles.

But what’s interesting is the biological representations persist in other words Siri is modeled after the sound of female vocal cords and referred to as such. If we were to scrap traditional biological references to the sexes and their corresponding genders then Siri with a female voice would be referred to as a male which would be confusing, retarded, and inaccurate.

Lol, that was intended as a joke.

I grew up watching Star Trek TNG, I’ve seen every episode multiple times and I never once heard the characters call Data human or a man…not that we should be modeling our social norms off a work of fiction, an extremely progressive work of fiction at that.

What bothers me most about the trans movement, is how undemocratic it is.
Progressive ideologues and psychologists together with the MS(S)M and entertainment industry dubiously claim to represent the trans community (why’re trans people suddenly a community instead of individuals?) a demographic that comprises less than 1% of the population) want to rewrite some of our most basic, fundamental sexual norms for 100% of the population overnight.
Disagree, hell voice your concerns publicly and you’ll be vilified, ostracized and doxed by a very tiny, but very loud gang of progressive bullies.

We were never asked for our input, just shut up and accept everything they’re rolling out for us in succession: reconceiving and defining gender, the nouns man and woman, the pronouns he and she, gender-neutral bathrooms, transwomen athletes competing with women, taxpayers paying for trans people’s sex reassignment surgery, having your children stolen from you if you don’t agree to pay for their sex reassignment surgery as well, and on and on it goes.

I mean in the last several years we’ve just been blindsided and bombarded with this shit almost on the daily by the MSM from waaay faaar out in the left field.
And we’re all just supposed to go along with it like unthinking zombies.
Yes Mr. Zuckerberg, whatever you say, there are 50 genders…wait hold on 93 now?
Okay there are 93 genders, must’ve missed that memo this morning.
But why not 247?
Why not 6580?

Notice how choreographed it is too, every MSM outlet in complete agreement, not just in the US and Canada but all over the western world.
This is not a spontaneous, organic, grassroots phenomenon, this’s all being orchestrated top-down by the social engineers.

We need to have a public discussion about this first, last I checked this is still a democracy, not a progressive or psychiatric dictatorship.
Gender isn’t broken and doesn’t need to be fixed, it’s been working out for almost everyone for centuries if not millennia.
The vast majority of people are fine or happy with their biological sex, with being raised in accordance with their biological sex, only a tiny minority of people are unhappy.
And most people are fine with the traditional definition of man and woman.

Almost everybody I talk to thinks all of this is absolutely ludicrous and when it comes to children, dangerous, again it’s mostly a small group of radicals who think it’s a great idea.
We need to stop acquiescing and start resisting the tyrannical social engineers and take back our democracy.

And I would do this. If someone wanted to be called something other than what they seem to be to my eyes, I would do it. But this doesn’t mean I endorse the philosophy, per se. More important, yes, we do treat them differently but one part, the part I support, of the Left is saying let’s end that. The other part is saying it’s fine and good to continue that, to create and support stereotypes, to teach children those stereotypes - for example the whole drag queens reading children stories movement, or the whole, if you think you have the qualities of a girl but were born a boy then you are a transperson philosophy. That is problematic. It’s gone beyond ‘accept people for who they are’ to a philosophical underpinned based on fixed sex qualities.

I can’t see how. You will have adults telling girls and boys that girls, for example can be like X, should not be exluded from B because they are girls and also that girls needs not be Y. They you are also telling them that Janie is a girl despite being born in a body that is male, and this is based on not feeling like a male inside. And then Janie will, generally, though yes, not always, act more like a girl (in the traditional sense) than many of the girls. And they everyone will be told they are bad (though often not in those words) if they do not accept this. That’s a mess, and I cannot see how that mess in part reinforces the differences, and in fact is more pernicious because it is a kind of brainwashing, wehre one says opposing ‘truths’ to people. IOW this is a method used by brainwashers. I am not using the term to simply mean ‘sticking ideas without consent into people’s heads’ but the use of contradictory messages is a tool used in attempts to brainwash.

I am not sure that is the case. And since there is incredible rage and judgment aimed at those not accepting something that at the same time is being fought elsewhere, I don’t think the roles will be less fixed.

I wouldn’t call that blackface. It’s something else. I don’t think I judged that woman. I think it’s off for her to say she’s black, but I have sympathy for her sense of that. I can see no reason to tell others that however. I can certainly imagine saying, I feel black, to friends.

My beliefs actually include an ontology that actually allow for being born in the wrong body. I would be considered loopy by many here on these topics. However I think it is more rare than is now being put forward. My main concern is what is being aimed at teenagers and younger with their radically plastic brains trying to reconcile two unreconcilable messages, both coming from the PC of just one group. It’s bad enough when several groups are in on the ‘education’ each with different philosophies. but now we have one group aiming contradictory messages.

“one big difference is that there are a lot of people who identify as a sex different from their biological sex, and not so many (if any) who identify as a dog or a tree.”

All that says is that there are many more people who have cancer than influenza.

"Second, how we should fund healthcare is a distinct a complicated question. What counts as a discretionary procedure extends far beyond sex reassignment: Vasectomy? Vision correction? Sleep apnea? Cleft lip? "

Hey, there are a lot of serious things happening over the issue as to whether biological males are to be allowed abortion rights. People are being targeted, fired, and removed from influential positions due to the argument. So don’t think that any of this stuff has to make sense.

“the simpler question: There are plenty of pre-op trans people who only ask to be acknowledge in social contexts as the sex that they signal through their speech, dress, behavior, etc. We should grant that to them.”

They want, much as young children, to be treated in their own special way. But why should anyone be required by law to treat anyone as anything different than what they actually are?

You are now demanding that society be nothing at all but a fictitious pretense. This is what I was saying before. You are insisting that your premise of fictitious role playing be a requirement.

“I’m talking about a disembodied voice on a phone.”

Same difference. I believe that such things are chosen for reasons unrelated to social submission concepts and your demanded role playing scenario.

“I should clarify that I don’t think this is usually deceptive. A person anecdote: I grew up in Boston with a bit of the local accent, and my parents have fairly strong accents. I went to school in California and over a couple years, my accent shifted. My friends tell me that when I would go home for holidays, my accent would come roaring back. That wasn’t a deliberate choice on my part, I can’t even perceive the difference myself.This is a common thing, people tend to unconsciously mirror the people their around, in speech, behavior, body posture, etc. It’s part of human social communication, and likely aids cooperation and community.”

We were talking about the choices people make concerning how they present themselves and want to be perceived, not the general influences that cause perceptions to vary.

“I’m avoiding it because there’s not a single answer, and in a social setting you will never know why a specific person wants that. You have to make a choice in the absence of that knowledge. I’m arguing that in many other contexts, we make the choice to assign a social sexual role that is not tied to biology. We do that all the time, and so we should be willing to do it for people.”

You were questioning the legitimacy of my word “deranged”. Understanding their motivation is required to determine whether they are deranged or merely manipulative. If you choose to focus on those who are not consciously attempting to manipulate society either through deception or merely social pressure, there is no other option but that their mind has refused the reality of what they are. And that is called “being deranged”.

So it appears that you demand that people submit to the mental derangement of others.

Isn’t that the same as the immigration issue as it relates to criminal illegal aliens who are not only free from prosecution but also are to be given free healthcare, free homestead, free schooling, and free college. All at tax payers expense.

In both cases you are supporting the abuse of the current population (demanding that they obey and fund the deranged and sometimes illegal whims of others) for sake of manipulating a global socialism into supreme authority. Whether you do this intentionally isn’t my call to make but if you are familiar with global politics, especially as it relates to the USA, you can certainly see the direct relationship and inevitable consequences.

I think that robots are given gender appearance for teasing sales and manipulating a population into dictatorial submission. It has nothing to do with submissive social roles, but rather simple sex appeal as a snare into inescapable mass submission of both genders. And I find it hard to believe that you wouldn’t know that. Perhaps you can convince me.

This is interesting, because it seems completely aligned with what I’m arguing. To treat someone socially as a certain sex is to point to the map and say “New York”. We aren’t saying that the picture on a map has an aquifer or a looming problem with coastal flooding, and we aren’t saying anything about Siri’s genitals. Neither are we suggesting anything about the biology of a female-presenting person who clearly signals that they wish to treated socially as a woman when we grant them that.

I was mistaken, Measure of a Man was from the second season:

My argument here is that these works of fiction reflect our existing social norms: we do in fact treat social sex and biological sex as distinct, as evidenced by our application of the concept to thing we acknowledge to be abiological.

A few thoughts to support my claim:

Most importantly, it just erodes the meaningful distinction between men and women. As you show, it becomes harder to make true general statements about women if the set of women includes people with penises etc.

But another way is that it shifts how people signal female-ness. One reason that drag queens go over-the-top in terms of femininity is that they are trying to overcome their biology: as drag queens are by definition not transsexual, they still have many male traits; a flamboyant femininity is one way to outweigh them, so be perceived as feminine despite their male physiology. Similarly, because biological sex affects gross morphology like the shape of the face and body, features which are hard to alter even with sex-reassignment, transwomen may wear more feminine clothes and more makeup to overcome those latent male signals. As a result, as trans people gain prominence, it may be that the most feminine-presenting people in society are trans, and that very strong adherence to traditional sexual roles becomes a weaker signal of biological sex. That means that biological women who want to signal not only their social sex but their biological sex will be incentivized to be less feminine. The example that comes to mind is of the ‘pixie cut’, i.e. very short hair typically only worn by very feminine-featured women. Short hair is a traditionally male signal, but it can be a strong female counter-signal that says in a sense, “I’m so feminine that I don’t need traditional social sexual signals for you to see that I’m a woman”.

I have gotten the impression that anyone who tries to have a rational and self-consistent position on these issues is considered loopy. And with the world being what it is, I have to admit that it’s a bit crazy to take the risk of even engaging in a conversation such as this. But it’s clearly a topic worth discussing, if only so we have a reasonably well thought out response when our kids inevitably ask.

While I think the disease comparison is question-begging, I will point out that we do treat different diseases differently on number of dimensions.

I haven’t taken any position here with respect to law. My argument here is that people who don’t pedantically correct anyone who e.g. refers to Data as a man also shouldn’t pedantically refuse to e.g. call Caitlyn Jenner a woman.

What laws and social consequences follow from that argument are a separate issue. I will say that I don’t generally endorse speech restrictions. There are many things that I would consider irrational or even morally wrong that I don’t think should be illegal.

We recognize based on biology for it is literally what signifies gender. I don’t believe in social sexual distinctions as legitimate for they are based on unnatural lies.

Sorry, WendyDarling, I meant to respond to your early comment as well.

This doesn’t follow. Siri’s only social-sexual attribute is the sound of her voice (I think Apple actually been careful not to give her additional female social-sexual attributes, to the point that in WWDC talks and on their website, they actually don’t use gendered pronouns to refer to her).

Now, we consider some rules for social sex recognition: one rule is that we rely solely on biology, in which case it’s incorrect to refer to Siri as female. Another would be that we rely on biology for humans and the sum of social-sexual attributes elsewhere, which is what seems to be the predominant anti-trans position, and under which we treat Siri as female because the sum of her social-sexual attributes says ‘female’. My position is that we rely on the sum of social-sexual attributes in all cases, under which we treat Siri as female because the sum of her social-sexual attributes says ‘female’.

Come on, you don’t accuse everyone who refers to Alexa or Siri or Data or Thor by a gendered pronoun of being a liar. You don’t act the way you’re describing. You actually use gendered language for things that do not have a gendered biology, and you have no problem with other people who do that. The only basis on which you can do that is the social signaling of sex.

That’s a false analogy… on two fronts.
First of all you can point to the WRONG spot on the map, it’s not arbitrary where “New York” is represented there.
Second, referring to people as though they are of another gender is not like pointing to a map… people are not commonly viewed as “representations”.
It’d be akin to pointing to the ACTUAL city of Boston and saying “New York”… No one would assume what you meant was “it represents New York”
Even if they did I doubt they would agree… as it’s more akin to Boston than it is to New York…

Here’s a thought experiment to help underline this:
Imagine Data with Siri’s voice… I dare say most people would still refer to Data as male, because body type is more typical to gender than voice is, which makes the suggestion that Data represents a male, more compelling.
Now picture a member of an alien species that’s humanoid, mammalian, very stout, muscular and has plenty of facial hair and generally far more typically masculine than Data in appearance.
Yet this is the member of the species that birthes their live young and secrets milk etc… We’d all recognise this as the female of the species, and refer to it as such.
Because biological function is more typical to gender than superficial appearances…

There’s a pattern here Carleas… Our treatment of men and women socially is a reflection of what we perceive to be typical differences between them. Now our perception might be wrong, we might be misinformed, but we’re not looking for exceptions to inform our behavior… we’re looking for the norms, the most typical examples and patterns, that is what we want to inform our behavior. Because then our behavior will be suitable and comfortable to the majority.

Riker was having an emotional moment.
99.8% of the time the cast used the noun android in reference to the android Data, not man, and no one took offence to this, including Data himself.
From the very same episode:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4377HhZ_NSM[/youtube]

Riker: Commander what are you?
Data: An android…made to resemble a human being.

Dolls, manakins, puppets, sculptures and toys are made to resemble animals and human beings.
We may even call a figurine or statuette made to resemble a dog, a dog, but still no one would object to calling it a figurine, and everyone knows it’s essentially a figurine, not a dog, whereas many transwomen object to being called men, and want everyone to think of them as essentially women, even tho they know they were born with XY chromosomes and a penis, and women were, and still are defined by most people as having XX chromosomes, tits and vaginas.

Resemblance doesn’t precede existence, existence precedes resemblance.

Then why point to fiction?
Why not point to the social norms directly?

Mad Man P and I agree with the nature of what is biologically represented which you seem to have a disconnect with. Biological representations are constructed regarding Siri and Data that signify a biological sex which you want to dispute while at the same time supporting that faulty representations of biology in the case of trans persons should be accepted. No Siri with a female voice should not be interpreted as male which is what you desire people do in the case of trans when trans women sound like men but we should call them women. That is absurd.

Biological sex is often assigned to things that are not biological but most often the things represent biological attributes in manner of voice, shape of face, body type. Such assignments make sense since they are modeled on reality. What you espouse does not make sense for it is not modeled on reality.

Sure, and if you think a satchel is a purse you can be wrong about the intended signal about social sex.

That’s a bit flip, but the point is that we can misinterpret social sexual signals, and we can misidentify them in ways that are wrong in the same way that pointing to Boston on a map and calling it “New York” is wrong. That gets complicated, as your thought experiments illustrate: What if Data had Siri’s voice and lipstick? A beard and boobs? Exactly the same but wore a dress? The same as the series but played by a woman in a Brent Spiner mask? But I don’t think the existence of ambiguous cases is a defeater for clear cases.

I mean, both New York and Boston have ‘Chinatown’, what is that supposed to represent?

But more seriously, though I agree that “people are not commonly viewed as ‘representations’”, I think there’s a good reason to think that they actually are representations, or rather that their social identities are representations. As I mention above, social identity is a kind of fiction, we portray ourselves not how we are, but how we want other people to see us. That’s true when a biological man suppresses his emotions, and it’s true when she wears makeup and a dress and introduces herself as Brittany.

But if a person is telling you that their behavior will conform to the social norms of female behavior, and we have every reason to believe that they are accurately describing themselves, our behavior will be better informed to listen to them. And that’s exactly what we do with non-biological characters to which we ascribe a social sexual role.

It’s hard to search the script of the entire series for times when the word “man” is used to describe Data, so I can’t verify. But it’s not hard to find that in basically every episode, Data is referred to with male pronouns, he’s called “Mr. Data”, his subordinates refer to him as “sir” (though that term is used inconsistently in the Star Trek universe, and doesn’t reliably signal gender), and in an early episode a crotchety old man calls him “boy” a whole bunch (though perhaps not after learning he’s an android). He and Lore refer to each other as “brothers”.

In any case, he’s socially accepted as being male gendered, whether or not he is “a man”. That’s kind of the point I’m making here.

I dispute that they signify biological sex, yes. They signal social sex. No one takes Siri’s voice to say anything about her biology, and nothing about her social sex is in tension with that.

Again, I think you’re making a social/biological distinction, and just avoiding the word. No one is claiming anything about Siri’s biology why they refer to her as ‘her’. That use of ‘her’ is purely social: it’s social sex that’s being assinged.

Also, transmen who supplement testosterone get a deeper more masculine voice and a more male body type.

Exactly right… when we know a creature to have a biological sex, whether human, fish or alien we don’t need to do a lot of guesswork or interpretation based on approximations or similarity of appearance, voice, social behavior etc. Never mind the more abstract relationships like with “mother earth” or ships…

See this is why your approach to this topic is a red herring… I have to disagree with the above.
This is decidedly not what we do with characters like Data or Siri… What we do with them is not predicated on their preference, but rather our own judgements about what they represent, if anything.
A forklift does not get a gender… because we don’t feel it reminds us of any gender in particular and we’ve no sufficiently poetic relationship with them from which to draw a some abstract simile, either.

If you had left machines and fictional characters out of this, we could have had a separate discussion all together…

Some people wish they were a different gender than what they are…
We might well decide to treat some men like women and vice versa if that’s what they prefer and they can signal this to us by way of their dress, say.
On the other hand, there’s a case to be made that indulging such wishful thinking to the point of delusion might ultimately not be what’s best for people in that situation.
That perhaps the most compassionate thing we could do is look into ways that would allow them to find comfort in their own bodies…

And this is why I think you want to make the case you’re making. If we can undermine the “reality” of gender in the first place, there’s no “delusion” we could be complicit in creating.
Not that I’m questioning your motives… but noting the the utility of trying to separate biological sex from gender.

We can always separate the thing from our own behavior in response to the thing. Your “social identity” is merely how we respond to you socially.
You might do the same with regards to intellect and our social response to intellect. We could start treating morons as the greatest minds who ever lived… because that would make them happy.