Carleas wrote
You are not saying NY equals NY, you are saying Boston equals NY. If Siri has a male voice, should we call her female?
I mean, we’re also talking about calling some human a lion.
No. Do you think we should? How does this support your position?
Yet calling some human a lion wouldn’t be describing zebra like qualities. Transwomen have men’s voices, yet you say not to call them female.
Humans have human-like voices, not lion-like voices. It seems like to call a human a lion, you’re asking for a single metaphorically-plausible lion-like attribute, and to call a man a woman you need 100% of all attributes to be literally biologically female.
By extension we should call a butchy biological woman a man even if it offends her, is everyone comfortable with that?
I don’t think this follows exactly, but I take your point: if we expand the scope of “man” and “woman”, people who don’t want to be classified as men and women may be inadvertently mislabeled. Two problems would be that this could do whatever harm to those mislabeled individuals that we’re concerned is currently being done to transmen and transwomen, and, following Karpel Tunnel’s arguments, it could incentivize closer adherence to traditional gender norms.
I think this is not particularly problematic, for a few reasons:
First, I think we should give nearly dispositive weight to a person’s clearly expressed preference. Most people make efforts to communicate their intended social sex, they are generally successful, and we should assume that they are the local expert on the matter.
Second, there are already cases where social sex is just ambiguous, and people do OK with figuring it out. It’s also often possible to avoid any social sex-dependent behavior pending more information, or even indefinitely if the ambiguity persists.
And third, most people who are social sexually ambiguous are likely to be aware of it, and are not likely to be particularly offended if you get it wrong (further, those that do get offended by reasonable mistakes are likely to be easily offended anyway, so the difference from baseline in terms of harm due to offense is low).
This strikes me as an edge case to an edge case, but the absolute numbers of butch women vs transmen do make it possible that we would do more harm than good. But for the reasons I give, I find it unlikely.
Demonstrably false… we classify all sorts of life forms as male and female constantly.
There is next to nothing similar in either appearance or social treatment between us and trees and yet trees are meaningfully classified as male and female.
In fact, biology is arguably the most well defined and essential distinction we have between male and female…
Even you rely on it to generate meaning to your definitions of man and woman.
Why not apply the above rational to say Caitlyn Jenner is a male because he is LITERALLY a biological male?
You’d think that would be the logical conclusion as he doesn’t just have some superficial qualities that make him “similar” to a biological male… he LITERALLY is one.
We don’t interpret what people say so that they make sense, we try to infer their intended meaning from context.
Unless you indicate to us that you’re a crazy person, no one will think you are being literal when you call a ship or Siri “she or her”
But when you refer to people or even trees (or any biological life form) as she or her… we will think you mean literal biological female.
Because that’s the only context in which gender has a literal meaning.
And that’s EXACTLY why men who wish they were women would ask you to refer to them as such… so they can more easily forget the fact that they are not.
They want to live that fantasy… and I’m not saying we should necessarily deny them that… but we don’t need to do the sort of mental acrobatics that you’re performing here in order to do so.
If in fact we decide that’s the moral thing to do.
I disagree with your use of the word “literal”. Social sex is not the same as biological sex, so to say that someone is literally socially a man does not make a claim about that person’s biology. This is easier to see in places and times where social sexual roles were more rigid and distinct: Casmimir Pulaski was literally socially a man, and there isn’t anything that subsequent analysis of his skeleton can tell us that will change that he lived his life as a man and was recognized as a man and was granted access and honors and distinctions which simply weren’t available to women at that time – he was literally socially a man.
To deny that that is a legitimate, literal use of “man” is just question begging.
Right. And the intended meaning of a transman who communicates that he’s a man is pretty clearly not “I am a man in the same sense in which botanists consider certain trees male”. There are other senses of “man” that correspond to the social signaling of sex, that communicate mutual expectations about behavior and treatment, and that just aren’t about genitals or chromosomes or trees. We use those senses frequently and without confusion in similar contexts, where we ignore biology and defer to social signals, and there’s nothing but obstinate refusal to infer someones intended meaning that prevents us from doing the same here.
“Social sex” just means “The social treatment of a given sex” which becomes meaningless if that social treatment is no longer conditional on the person ACTUAL sex… then it’s just a social treatment.
But YOU do not get to dictate your social sex any more than you get to dictate your social intellect or social hair color.
Society decides how they treat people of a given sex or hair color or whatever other REAL characteristic we decide warrants a distinct “social” treatment.
We’re going in circles dude… we’ve been here, I’ve made my counter arguments to this line of thinking already.
Yeah… that’s why you felt the need to say “transman” and not just “a man”
That’s why we have a word for that already… you know, a biological WOMAN who would like to be a man…
The discussion ought to be about WHAT treatment being trans warrants… Not whether or not they are REAL men or REAL women, because they are not and that’s the fucking problem to begin with.
You want to literally call a biological man a woman? No one is calling a human a lion, only lionlike. Transwomen don’t want to be classified as womanlike but as actual, literal women.
Carleas
Okay, let’s try to forget about biology for now (if that’s even possible), even tho it has profound implications for mind, body and behavior (or it is them), and focus solely on what features are most salient, as you put it, about a person at a given moment, so we can explore some of the ramifications of defining sex as you’d have us define it.
Firstly, if a person’s femininity is more salient one moment, and their masculinity the next, does that mean we should alternate what (pro)nouns we’re using to define them from moment to moment?
The trouble is masculinity and femininity aren’t arbitrary, they refer to a large cluster of features someone is suppose to have.
By calling a masculine transwoman a woman, you’re lying to them, yourself and everyone around you about what abilities and characteristics they have (both in the biological, and salient senses, altho in reality there’s more-less tremendous overlap between the two, biology in large part determines salience).
People should be treated according to their abilities/characteristics, not according to what they wish they had.
And sooner or later people will be treated according to their abilities/characteristics, which will disappoint the transwoman’s now unrealistic expectations.
It’s not like exaggerating how good someone’s cooking is a little, sex is one of the most profound ways in which we define and distinguish each other.
It’s not just clothing, makeup and a few superficial things you can whimsically put on and take off i.e. gender fluidity.
The trans movement tries to cheapen sex by reducing it to some cosmetics and mannerisms anyone can duplicate.
In one breath they say it’s nothing more than a social construct, but in another they’ll threaten to bash your skull in if you use the improper, according to them, (pro)nouns.
If it’s a really social construct than calling someone a boy or girl should be about as potentially offensive as calling someone a potato or ammonium sulfate.
But let’s assume you’re right, that we should give about equal consideration to what people are, and what people wish they were, what do we do then in the case of masculine transwomen, or masculine women for that matter, do we decide what (pro)nouns we’re going to use on a whim, or do we use agender (pro)nouns?
And if we do come across someone who’s about equally saliently masculine and feminine, does that mean we should use agender (pro)nouns to define them, regardless of how they wish to be defined, if we’re to remain objective?
Right, so we’ll be offending butch women more often, but offending transwomen less, so it about evens out, in terms of offence.
What can most easily be changed about someone’s gender (i.e. clothes, makeup, mannerisms, etcetera, as opposed to chromosomes), is what defines it least.
Definition by definition is something definite.
For the progressive, the most shallow and superficial things define you, the most cosmetic, ephemeral and mutable.
Is plastic food, real food, as long as it can pass for real food, or we’re not eating it?
No it’s pretend food, just as transwomen and transmen are pretend women and men respectively, which’s not to say they can’t authentically possess some attributes of the opposite sex, just as a plastic apple can be red and round like a real apple, but which’s to say they’re fundamentally or predominantly not the sex they’re claiming to be.
Are character actors the characters they’re attempting to portray?
A biological man can certainly self identify as a woman but without actual female reproductive organs is the description an accurate one
I do not think it is which is why the necessary distinction between transwomen and biological women should exist so as to avoid confusion
As calling a transwoman a woman is confusing as you automatically think of woman as biologically female simply because that is the norm
The definitions of both gender and sex used to be fixed but now are subject to revision because of the trans issue and this is not yet a problem with a solution
So it is therefore the language itself that is in a state of transition as well as the men and women undergoing actual transition and all this takes time to resolve
There are four distinctive categories here and they are :
Biological female who identifies as biological female
Biological male who identifies as biological male
Biological female who identifies as trans male
Biological male who identifies as trans female
Reducing these four categories to two blurs the distinction between biological and trans
It may be done for the best of reasons but the distinction is too important to be denied
The competing of trans in professional sports is one unintended consequence of this
Until some uniformity on issues such as this is reached then the problem will remain
It is more complicated than simply accepting someone for who they are as acceptance does not exist within a vacuum
Let us look at the specific problem of transwomen competing with biological women in professional sports
The transwomen will have an unfair advantage over the biological women due to higher testosterone levels
Here are all possible solutions to this particular problem :
Let them carry on competing with biological females but not allowed to win which is unfair to them
Let them carry on competing with biological females which is unfair to the biological females
Let them only compete with biological males which would be fair but would not be allowed
Let biological females take testosterone which would be fair but would also not be allowed
Let them only compete with each other which is the ideal solution but there are currently not enough of them
Maybe in the future when there are the latter will be allowed as there will be Translympics just like the Paralympics now
However there is no ideal solution to this problem as of right now and till there are more trans athletes nor will there be
I once watched a film on industrial food creation. Like they were trying to come up with a food to sell at seven 11s and other, something you can eat while driving. I can’t remember any details, except these scientists and food managers were brainstorming texture, ingredients flavor etc. and I turned tot he person next to me and asked if this was a spoof. It was so surreal. And now we have gm foods and plastic surgery as the norm, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that now everything else will be up for grabs as the utter deadness of physicalism takes over the world.
You could only say she was man like as that would be objectively true so whether it was also offensive would be entirely academic
Language though can be offensive but when that is used as a reason to deny truth statements it becomes very questionable indeed
The freedom to deny someone self expression is the most offensive thing of all because it should not be decided by anyone else what it is you can say
Obviously there are consequences and rightly so but it is still better to say what you think and accept said consequences than be afraid to say it at all
Oops, thought you were responding to me, but then realized no, after I’d written the following…
No, obviously. In fact I wish we were pretty loose about what a woman or a man can do and still be considered a healthy/moral version of their sex. In the old way of doing things we had ideas about the differences, and there was certainly some truth in it, but then we would literally beat the qualities out of the child/teenager, if necessary, to make those children fit the models. I am glad that shifted and feminism did help with that. That doesn’t mean there were or are no problems with feminism or even the parallel stretching of what it is to be a man by men and male centered approaches. The way the word fag gets using in school is a kind of crossection of how we were long battered into what our natures supposedly were.
I do want that longer term context involved in all this. It’s not like the left just came and and fucked with gender/sex. We’ve been fucking with that for thousands of years, hallucinating away on children and making them fit ideas that obviously, I mean obviously did not fit their natures, or we would not have to work so damn hard to make them fit the archetypes.
Does this mean there are not differences? No.
Does this mean men and women are the same? No.
You seem much more complicated that ‘the right’ so this is aimed elsewhere, but often in these discussions and with some of the posters here at ILP, the answer is to go back. Well, I don’t wanna get in that box either. In fact this is part of my problem with the transmovement, since it implicitly says, hey, kid if you are feeling sad and afraid more than other boys, or are interested in clothes and aesthetics and relations or are not so interested in competition, there’s a good chance you’re really a girl. What?
Now in general people are not so sloppy as to say this out loud in such crude terms, but it is the message indirecly being implied with systematic regularity. And the kids most likely to be confused and influenced by this are those who already have problems in other ways.
Absolutely not given that it would be confusing and subjective and also entirely unnecessary
Everyone regardless of gender possesses both feminine and masculine character traits so identifying them as such would be rather superfluous
In English pronouns are usually only applied to living things not to types of behaviour so introducing this would only make it more complicated
Do we really want to adopt the French model of extending pronoun usage to anything other than living things when there is no reason to do so
This would be guaranteed to almost certainly fail because would men freely allow having any aspect of their behaviour referred to as feminine
Already it is considered a slur to refer to something as gay when its referenced in relation to a man so it would not go down well with feminine
Liberal men would find it politically incorrect and conservative men would find it offensive and so it would never catch on
There is probably enough political incorrectness and offensiveness without creating an entirely new category of it anyway
But my point is that we have cases where the social treatment is no longer conditional on actual sex, e.g. digital assistants. And it turns out that it doesn’t become meaningless, it remains intact. Yes, it’s bootstrapped from a biological distinction, but the social distinction remains when you take away the biology.
This is question begging. You and me, we are society, and if enough people like us decide to treat someone a certain way, then society decides to treat someone that way. I’m arguing that people like you and me, people like the people who compose society, should decide to treat people in a certain way.
Interesting that you read into my use of “transman” and not into your use of “biological woman”. Both add precision where, in context, simply saying “man” or “woman” would be ambiguous.
This is a discussion of what treatment being trans warrants. I’m arguing that the appropriate treatment is to recognize peoples clearly communicated social sex in contexts where only social sex is relevant.
We are, but I like to think the center of our orbit is precessing and spiraling in towards truth.
See my response to Mad Man re: “literal”
Interesting. I think not, though maybe we could come up with a hypothetical in which I’d question that conclusion. Again I see the major consideration as being that people don’t intend for their social sexual role to oscillate. But I also think that it doesn’t make sense in terms of the function of social sexual roles. Social sexual roles don’t change on short time scales, and because they act in part to inform our expectations about behavior, they wouldn’t work if they weren’t sufficiently fixed to form the basis of our expectations about future behavior (again, over some longish time scale).
(This seems to be a point of agreement: I take it you think the answer should be no, as do I, as do Karpel Tunnel and Surreptitious. Perhaps we can make something of it?)
But if we look at practice, we don’t do this. If a biological woman looks “manish” (to use Austin Powers’ term), we don’t think it’s a lie to just not point out how manish they look. I agree that masculinity and femininity can refer to a large cluster of features, but in most social contexts, almost none of those features is relevant. Where they become relevant, it makes sense to become more precise, to start differentiating trans vs. cis.
We should continue doing what we do now until a better norm presents itself. Which is to say, this is legitimately an edge case that all norms will have a problem coping with.
I don’t think this is as strong a point in your favor as you think it is, and that’s interesting. If there’s a bowl of plastic fruit, and I ask you to pass me the apple, you know what I’m talking about. If I hold up the banana and ask you what it is, you wouldn’t be wrong to say “a banana”. In a lot of relevant ways, it is a banana, and the concept of banana encompasses those ways too.
I feel like you (and Mad Man) are appealing to some kind of Platonic form of sex, and treating the word as though it points to that and only that. But that isn’t how language works. There are not such clear lines in sex, particularly when we include its social expression. We aren’t pointing to a sharply delineated form behind the world, we’re pointing to a messy and fuzzily defined set of features that don’t apply to all things we call male or female and that apply to lots of things we don’t call male and female.
It seems like trans advocates largely see their ask as evolving language and concepts, where people that oppose those asks see it as applying the existing (or ostensibly existing) language and concepts to something different. Really, it’s best thought of as some combination of the two: there’s an intersubjective fact of the matter about what counts as a man or woman, and because it’s intersubjective, it can change if we all learn to parse the world differently.
My argument here is that the concepts trans activists are pushing already exist as applied to fictional beings and non-biological, quasi-social things like virtual assistants.
I agree, and in contexts where the distinction matters, let’s use it. But where it doesn’t, e.g. in an office setting where biology just isn’t relevant, we don’t need to make fine distinctions.