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.