KT wrote
Fair to a tiny minority, unfair to the vast majority. The fact that the majority is not the focus is ridiculous. This ambiguity about what has no definitive ambiguity. The changing of standard definitions, approximating ideas to mean something very different. Word games based on fantasy rather than observable reality. Degenerative doom will follow such a progressive society who applauds the unhealthy.
Sure, but then I’m not arguing that saying “I’m a woman” is a sufficient condition for treating someone as a woman. If someone says they’re Christian and does nothing else, I take them at their word. Hell, if someone says “I’m a Christian but I think it’s totally OK to separate the families of some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world as punishment for fleeing violence and seeking a better life”, I still take them at their word.
Yes, words have meaning, and it is meaningful that we consider Siri and Alexa as female virtual assistants. That’s meaningful. The meaning isn’t anything about genitals or chromosomes, it’s about social roles and expectations. That’s part of the existing meaning of the words we use to identify them as female; social sex as distinct from biology is a part of the concept of sex.
Sure, but just because we can distinguish “young woman” and “old woman”, and because that distinction might sometimes be relevant, doesn’t mean we should have to make it in contexts where it isn’t relevant.
Without conceding your characterization of what a diverse set of people want and why, this does not seem relevant.
My claim is that when a single person communicates to you that they sincerely prefer to be treated as a woman, and takes every reasonable step to make that treatment appropriate in context, and you already treat things with no biology to speak of as women, it is inconsistent to pedantically refuse on the basis of biology.
That claim doesn’t depend on why the person communicates it to you, or on what their goal is in communicating it to you, or how they would behave on an island.
My intuition in those situations is that I would say something like, “that’s not very Christian of you”, rather than, “you aren’t really a Christian”. That seems significant to me, in that it grants them their expressed identity even where their actions are at odds with it. Is that just me?
I agree with this. I’m arguing that it’s inconsistent to refuse to e.g. call Caitlyn Jenner a woman. I’m not arguing for any law. I think there is a case to be made that it’s immoral in some circumstances, but I don’t think I’ve made that case here.
Yes, this is an interesting observation. But is that really so strange? If someones name is Jon and I insist on calling them Tim, it wouldn’t be unreasonable for that person to be offended. It’s no difference to me what that person’s name is, but it can mean a lot to them that I address them by the name that they identify with. That would seem absolutely expected. So too could a transperson put a lot of personal stake on being called the right sex, in contexts where it is irrelevant to any reasonable person.
Bad faith is hard to deal with, but I think it is a very, very small problem. As far as I can tell, these kinds of concerns have done much more to make butch biowomen unwelcome than to exclude people masquerading as transwomen.
One reason is that for the people affected, this is a very big deal. But probably the more important reason is, sex sells.
The problem with this is that for some it automatically implies prejudice on the part of anyone thinking like this
The restriction upon specific language is a characteristic of the left and is by no means confined to this one issue
Controlling language is but one step removed from controlling thought and as a matter of principle it has to be resisted wherever it occurs
Company rules are however an exception to this because there will be a legal requirement not to adversely affect the companys reputation
Age and race could also then be self-identified.
It is already by a small minority (Rachel Dolezal for one, a transracial person)ready to usher in their preferences for the majority, ready to change the acceptable definitions to suit their desires.
Is Rachel black? The mind of a black woman is trapped in a white woman’s body.
https://medium.com/verve-up/transracial-is-not-the-new-transgender-why-race-and-gender-are-not-synonymous-b2c688ef0faeYeah, we’re supposed to believe that such delusions stop with transgendered, obviously they don’t. Peter Pan Syndrome for the age deal, but soon it will be debatable since children are legally prosecuted as adults…why not treat adults as children? They desire childhood forever. The wrong mind is trapped in an adult body.
But we don’t consider Siri or Alexa female… nor do we consider ships female.
This is not something we agree on…
I would be disturbed to learn that anyone was under the impression that Siri is a female,
because of how inaccurate that would be and the cascade failure it would produce in erecting a coherent model of the world…
You are using our poetic licence, representational short hands and metaphorical tendencies to justify a position that gender isn’t a well defined concept or is merely a social treatment…
We use and are safe to use these literally incorrect phrases or terms because we have common understanding about what it is they communicate…
Anyone who cannot discern that, like say a child, or someone with cognitive impairments (or ostensibly someone trying to make an ideological point) would need to be spoken to with far more literal precision.
If I were being precise I would never say Siri is female… I would say Siri is made to sound similar to a typical human female.
In much the same way… I would say a transwoman is a human male attempting to pass for a human female.
Agreed…
But if we are addressing a person’s age then their age is relevant… and even if we do bring it up in a context where it’s not relevant, that’s no reason to misrepresent it.
This is why I say your comparison of machines or objects to people is a red herring…
Virtually no behavior of mine would be similar when comparing Siri to a human being… If Siri was made to say “I would prefer male pronouns” I would tell IT to shut the fuck up or turn IT off
That in no way translates to how I would behave with a human being.
I have said over and over again that, as things are right now, I don’t know of a better way to help transgender people live comfortable and pleasant lives than to straight up LARP with them about their gender.
It seems the only way to help them cope with their, honestly, terrifying sounding condition…
BUT you and I don’t have to lose sight of what it is we are doing here or why we are doing it, even if the transgender person desperately wants us to…
And so long as we don’t lose sight of it, we know where to draw the line on the LARPing thing; or as you would say, in a context where it matters, we stop playing pretend.
If comparing it to LARPing is too much then we could say it’s like that social nicety where we pretend to be shocked to learn an older woman isn’t her daughters sister…
But then I’d expect that if we were asked her age in all seriousness, and we knew it… we’d give you her actual age, not what age she wishes she were…
I would not expect playing words games where we pretend we don’t know what age means or try to make a distinction between age and “social age” or some other BS to avoid “offending” this woman.
EDIT:
So just to clarify… my willingness to acquiesce to a transgender person’s desire to be addressed as male or female is NOT AT ALL dependent on their ability to “pass” for that gender.
It hinges entirely on their need for it and the consequences of my refusal to their quality of life…
By much the same metric, I would refuse those bratty kids who want to be called “them or they” or some nonsense motivated by petty snowflake status or some other trivial power play.
That kid would not be best helped by my playing along… that kid would stand to gain more from learning some humility and developing a less self-centered outlook.
Mad Man P wrote
Playing along helps change reality.
The way I see it, the distinction between man and woman is far more significant than the distinction between man and trans woman or woman and trans man.
Trans people need to adapt to our norms, just like gypsies, lefthanders, midgets, Muslims and everyone else does.
They can be themselves, but either they have to work with and around our norms instead of trying to bulldoze them, or they can find their own planet.
Academia, the politicians, megacorps, media and entertainment industry need to adapt to our norms too, they’re the ones pushing trans on us.
If they want their own Olympics, they should fund it themselves, not with our tax.
Trans people need to compete with other members of their biological sex, or they shouldn’t compete.
Transwomen who compete against women are cowards.
Good point.
This is not an isolated issue, it’s just one part of a systemic push in large part by the elite towards a more artificial world.
If it’s not the denaturing of sex and gender, it’s the denaturing of food and drugs.
If it’s not Ai and cybernetics, it’s genetic and geoengineering.
I’m not anti-tech but nor am I anti-nature, and 9 times out of 10 nature is fine as is.
I think we need to be a lot more apprehensive about the kinds of tech we embrace, in part because a lot of the time it’s being weaponized against us under different guises.
The thing is, for me, that my worldview even includes the possibility of transcracialism. But I don’t think anyone should be put in the position of having to accept that other person’s view. IOW we are talking about something that is magical, if real. Something well beyond most paradigms. Doesn’t mean it is false, but it means that when dealing with most people, t hey simply cannot expect other people to go along. For example the 12 years who feels like an adult, cannot expect people to allow him to get a driver’s licence or buy a gun. The adult who thinks he is a child cannot expect to not get charged as an adult in court or to attend the third grade.
fine, if you think that, confess to your close friends, allow the idea to make you feel right in relaiton to yourself in the way syou can. But since we have no way to confirm this you cannot expect society to conform to the idea and your beef is with God or whatever forces led to this problematic situation. As I have said earlier I do think there is an extremely small group who actually are transpersons. I know you disagree with this, Wendy, but we share concerns that this phenomenon is so blown out of proportion and includes self-contradictory indoctrination, that is badly affecting lots of children who are not trans.
Whether they are right with themselves? It’s not their issue, it’s our issue because they cannot be right with themselves alone. We have to support the delusion, whatever it may be, so they can pretend to be right. It’s pretend if we have to support it to make it true.
Calling masculine biowomen men so we can call feminine transwomen women, would be one of the consequences of defining sex according to what attributes are salient, as Carleas suggests we do, while giving little-no consideration to their feelings or what they take offence to, as I suggest we do, for the sake of consistency and objectivity.
It’s a rather subjective way of defining things, as what’s salient for one person or in one situation, might not be what’s salient for another person or in another situation.
So basically it boils down to how situationally masculine/feminine people are, rather than biology.
We’ll be offending one group more to offend another less.
Likewise feminine biowomen (the majority of women) will be called women and masculine transwomen men (arguably the majority of transwomen).
I think the shift from more rigid roles for men and women to more relaxed roles occurred less for ideological reasons and more because improvements in abortive and contraceptive techniques meant women were having less kids, partly freeing them from their traditional role as homemaker.
Technologies like the dishwasher, vacuum cleaner and washing machine made homework a lot easier, further freeing them.
Of course the megacorps took note of this, they didn’t want women to have all this free time on their hands, consequently they rigged the economy to make it even worse for the lower classes than it already was, so women had to slave away in factories and offices for the upper classes to support increasingly smaller families too.
Gradually jobs became less physically demanding and women could take them more.
While men and women tend to have different strengths, weakness and proclivities, as humans we also tend to have similar ones.
There’re plenty of exceptions to these rules, and our strengths and weaknesses are less relevant in a more technologically advanced world where we’re not having as many kids. So while I don’t think roles for men and women should be abolished altogether and our natural differences denied, I do think the relaxing of these roles was necessary, in no small part because the megacorps made it that way.
Right, and it’s much harder to fit a somewhat feminine man in the woman box, because biology, surgery, steroids and all that, than it is to fit him in the man box, so if anything we should be encouraging him to either fit himself more in the man box, or just leave him as is, as a man but possibly with more feminine traits than most men have.
Mad Man, I think we are actually not that far apart on this, placing different emphasis on very similar views.
And I will say that if there was good reason to believe that acquiescing to someone’s expressed social sexual identity was harmful for them, whether in general or in the case of a specific individual, I would endorse a different course of action. I don’t think we have good reason to think any alternative treatment is better.
I think social nicety is a fair standard, but to complicate things: people get fired for being rude to customers and coworkers, should they be subject to firing for refusing to refer to a transman as a man?
Now, I don’t think the actual social discussion around transexuality is anything like “social nicety”. People who refuse to recognize a person’s preferred social sex aren’t called rude, they’re called bigoted, and people want that called a hate crime on par with cross burning. But I wonder if you would support treating it as rude, together with all the social consequences that rudeness can entail.
I think my argument here goes much farther, but I am beginning to think that all that’s really necessary is a social norm that misgendering is rude in the same way that publicly acknowledging that someone is ugly is rude (though it’s a bit complicated by the fact that, unlike for beauty, sex distinctions are built into the language).
I basically agree with this, though I do wish there were a gender neutral pronoun in English, and to that end I fully endorse the singular use of “them” or “they” in general.
I also think there’s a weaker ‘nicety’ standard that would say that, where accommodating sincere requests like these is easy, we should do it. There are actually people who are intersex or asexual, and if a little effort in speech will avoid significant discomfort, we should opt to share the burden of their condition. Because it’s unusual and requires effort, we should weigh accusation of rudeness against other explanations that don’t appeal to malice.
To return to my stronger position, I think there is a significant difference between the concept of “female” as it is applied to ships and the concept as it is applied to Siri, and certainly “male” as applied to Data. I don’t think the “poetic” vs. “literal” distinction is a binary; ships are “she” in the most poetic sense, Siri is “she” is a less poetic sense, Data is “he” in a fairly literal sense. One way to show this is universality: ships aren’t universally female, that is specific to English; Siri might sometimes be called ‘it’, but never ‘he’ (unless we change to the “male” voice), and Data is rarely if ever called ‘it’. That seems intuitive, and meaningful.
Agreed…
I don’t know what it’s like to feel trapped in the wrong body… that sounds terrifying to me
If the only medicine we have right now for that condition is a heavy dose of delusion… then maybe that’s what we should do while we search for a better option.
I would liken this to giving someone morphine to dull the pain… and similarly I would be very weary of just casually handing it out to anyone who cares to ask for it.
Yet I have the impression that you believe it to be a far more harmless exercise, more akin to handing out tic tacs…
We’re not there yet… this is supper muddy, in part due to people who would parrot some of the ideas you have forwarded here.
There is a subculture right now that believes gender is social and so it can and should be whatever you want it to be, whenever you want it to be…
I don’t think we should treat it as an expected norm, but as a kindness… it’s a special treatment.
Like holding a door open for someone… it’s a kindness to do it, but it’s not exactly rude NOT to do it.
It gets progressively worse NOT to do it, as the other person’s NEED for that assistance grows… so NOT holding a door for someone who is carrying a lot of stuff and has to juggle to get their hand free is worse.
NOT holding the door for Stephen Hawking might even approach “rude”.
But this is all contingent on you being aware of their need…
Yet in our world too many people are competing in the oppression olympics and fighting in the snowflake wars for us to be able to tell who’s faking it and who’s not…
In a world where it is “hip” to ride around in wheelchairs, you can’t easily tell who you ought to hold the door open for and who is just being a dick.
Yeah I get that… but that’s just how you would like to use language.
Arguing over semantics is pointless… but allow me to make an appeal to practicality here.
Why words like man, woman, female, male, associated pronouns and gender in general SHOULD only be applied to biological creatures LITERALLY.
If you’re being figurative or metaphorical, that’s a different story…
It’s no accident we have words for only two genders and not 4 or 5…
Words like “male” or “female” were invented and used to address the biological sexes that our species and most other species we saw around us required for procreation.
We knew very little about this phenomenon at first, but we have a much richer and more precise understanding of what these genders are, that they are rooted in biology and what that means…
And it’s growing richer and more precise every day.
I don’t much feel like going back to the ignorant stone age version where we have to guesstimate based off superficial appearances, peepees and/or vagaigais to determine what gender a creature is.
If that’s what you want to do, you’re welcome to it brother… but I’m happy where we are.
Now you can argue that Data is “literally” a male till you are blue in the face… but that’s just semantics, it means you define “male” such that Data fits the mold.
I am saying we wouldn’t need a word like “male” if there was only one biological sex… if all creatures known to us were hermaphrodites or asexual, say.
We would no more need to invent a gender to describe Data, than we currently need to invent a new gender to describe a hair dryer…
But if we came across klingons… we would need to address the fact that their procreation and biology depends on producing two distinct genders in their species…
We would need words for those genders and that’s when we’d need words like male and female to reference that fact.
Edit:
Now we can agree to redefine “male” such that Data qualifies and redefine gender to be a social treatment… it’s our language we can do what we want.
But then I’m left wanting unambiguous words for each biological sex… care to invent them?
And once invented and injected into the language… Do you think we could use those words to describe transexuals without it being upsetting?
Do you think perhaps we might make use of poetic or figurative license to use those words to describe dolls, objects or even androids made to look or sound like a typical members of one such sex?
Do you think perhaps one day, due to this license… you might want to change the definition of those words too, like you want to do now?
Necessitating yet another pair of words be invented, so that we may repeat this endless cycle that’s beginning to form…
I don’t think there is a norm against pointing out someone is ugly, or strange, or off, or not ‘professional’ or too emotional or any of a number of norm controlling behavior patterns. In many subcultures but not all directly saying someone is ugly si problematic, but in all you can say to everyone else htey are pretty and be silent with that one person. There are thousands of ways of implying it. And one can say it behind people’s backs, which might even be worse. Shouldn’t it be that one not gender at all.
But then the parallel is off, since ugly is a bad thing to be, but being a man or a woman should not be bad. The beef it seems to me is DNA or God or both. If you don’t seem to be a man, and someone calls you a woman, well, that isn’t necessarily their fault.
Men who wear drag are men. If you think someone has made an effort to look like a woman over what seems like a male base and you call them women, you will misgender men in drag. Or butch women men, the same type of problem.
Gender doesn’t matter, biological sex doesn’t matter, but it’s rude to misgender.
So, then we go to intentionally misgendering, which would mean you know how they want to be taken, but you continue anyway. Of course, you do not think you are misgendering, but that is different than the mistake, which God or DNA is responsible for.
I call people what they want. Though I don’t think I would call a white person black if they feel their soul is black. Because that act on my part involves other people, not just the person I am labelling. It says something, in a sense, to blacks. Get the blacks to agree and get back to me.
But why are these so different?
I am so glad people are generally not dragged around behind pickups for not seeming right for their gender. Or for their race. At least, must less.
We wanna get people to think and talk right, while democracy is going down the tubes? for example.
I agree, but this is a consequence of what Carleas proposes.
If we define sex according to salient mannishness/womanliness (as you would have us do), In the arena, bathroom, bedroom, doctor’s office, at physical jobs and in romantic relationships, where biology supposedly becomes more salient, it would make sense to refer to people by their biological sex, whereas at nonphysical jobs and in platonic relationships, where sociology, if you will, supposedly becomes more salient, it would make sense to refer to people by their social sex.
When wearing a dress and makeup a transwoman may appear womanish, so we would call her a woman, but when not wearing a dress and makeup they may appear manly, so we would call him a man.
If their social sex is partly or fully an act, on days they’re behaving ladylike, it would make sense to call her one, but on days they’re behaving manlike, it would make sense to call him one.
They may have mannish/womanly mood swings, so during their womanly moods, we’d call her a woman, and during their mannish, a man.
However, all that being said, the truth of the matter is, biology is always more-less salient, even at nonphysical jobs and in platonic relationships, no matter how much you try to cover it up with clothes, makeup, steroids and surgery, all thing which should define sex least, because they’re not innate to the person.
Biological sex in large part determines social sex, how we look underneath all the cosmetics and how we interact with other people and the world.
Altho the science is in its early stages, it’s demonstrating at best transwomen have androgynous brains and at worst mannish brains, so at best they’ll interact with other people, themselves for that matter and the world androgynously and at worst mannishly.
And underneath the cosmetics, at their very, very best, they have androgynous phenotypes and bodies, and at worst, mannish phenotypes and bodies.
Women look and behave differently than men, in platonic relationships and even at nonphysical jobs, and we treat them differently.
They bring a different approach, aura and energy to the workplace than do men.
Just as women can’t compete with men in sports because there’s a fundamental biological difference, men can’t compete with women at being womanly because there’s a fundamental biological difference.
Beneath all the externalities, the vast majority of women look and behave more womanly than both men, and transwomen, and while there may be a few exceptions, those biological women who look mannish, if they put as much effort into looking and behaving womanly as transwomen do, they could probably surpass them too.
But if there’s a bowl of organic fruit beside the bowl of plastic fruit, I’d ask you which apple, the fake one or the real one?
I’m not sure about Mad Man, I haven’t been closely following him, but if that were the case, I wouldn’t even acknowledge men can be authentically, genuinely, even naturally feminine in many ways, and women masculine.
It’s not that men are wholly masculine and women feminine, it’s that they’re fundamentally or predominantly masculine and feminine respectively, trans or no trans.
Progressives grossly exaggerate how much you can trans.
I’m a nominalist, not a Platonist.
An ape may be able to ape men, but he’s still an ape.
I appreciate that you’ve taken a nuanced position between two extremes.
I think I have too, but I’m more center-right on this, whereas you’re more center-left…or a dualist, because you think the social can be totally separated from the biological in most circumstances, whereas I don’t.
Part of being a woman means shared experiences.
Transwomen are never going to know what it’s like to have real tits and a vag.
They’re never going to know what it’s like to have a period or go through menopause, or life with the possibility of becoming pregnant.
They’ll never know what it’s like to be both vulnerable, and attractive to men by default, not by choice.
Never know what it’s like to be subject to the exact same hormonal influences women are subject to, try as they may to replicate them, live in the exact same bodies, feel and think the exact same way.
These experiences, or lack thereof, shape their social role.
Their life experiences are not the life experiences of women, they’re the life experiences of (androgynous) men.
Consequently they’ll never be able to relate to women, or men the way real women do.
You can’t separate the social world from the biological, in the cut and dry way progressives think you can.
Mannish women who still identify as women and transwomen aren’t the same thing either, they’re very, very different.
A side point, I hate the term cis gender, cis sounds like sissy.
I’m going to start using the term biogender I coined, and instead of cis men and women, biomen and women.
To summarize, If you call a transwoman a man, you’ll be 100% right in the biological sense (chromosomes, sex organs at birth), mostly right in the physical sense (secondary sex characteristics), and arguably mostly right in the social sense, for the biological in large part determines the social, and furthermore the biological is more important than the social, for it’s immutable, and what defines you most is what’s most definite about you.