Male and Female Robots

So I have, my apologies.

Though if you agree that they aren’t lying, it’s a bit strange to think that it would be lying when you respond with the same words.

And this is a nifty way to dismiss the real disutilities to the people you’re asking to use them.

And lest you think this is to excuse the lie, in the way that we may think it’s OK to lie to the Nazi at the door (because I think you’ve made it clear that, even though you think it’s a lie, you think it’s an excusable lie because it’s the less harmful option), I would again point to the communicated meaning of the words. Transsexuality is a relatively new development, at least in the US, and still fairly rare (~.6% of the population). I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that, on average, describing a transwoman as a “woman” will give your audience a more accurate picture of the world than if you described them as a “transwoman”.

One related point about coining new words that I think is in your favor: I think it would be considered rude or offensive to describe a transwoman as a transwoman. That’s hard to fit with my argument here, because my argument rests on the inability to do so, and so shouldn’t proscribe using that word where one can. And in many contexts where they feel comfortable, trans people to openly describe themselves as trans and aren’t offended by being called trans.

But in many contexts, I think it would be taken as offensive. One response would be that letting a transwoman know that she’s not ‘passing’ is tantamount to letting her know that’s she’s in danger, or just not fitting into social standards for how one ought to appear. Or it may be making genitalia and biology salient in a way that isn’t appropriate (similar to how it can be offensive to discuss sex or genitals or defecation or even disease in many social contexts), since the distinction between a woman and a transwoman is one of genitalia and biology.

Still, I think it’s weird to say both that we should call transwomen “women” because it’s more true, but also we shouldn’t call them transwomen, even though that’s even more true. And I expect that you agree that there’s a tension.

You “observed”, from Latin observare “watch over,” though presumably you didn’t ‘see’ the language get impoverished with your eyes, but inferred it with your reason. “Impoverished”, of course, as I alluded to before, means “to make poor”, but language has no money, it isn’t taking a pay cut when we let the meaning of words change. Perhaps this is another argument on which I’ve “lost the plot”, but this is an argument, not a work of fiction! or did you mean “plot” as in a plot of land? I can assure my title is sound. Perhaps I’m just not seeing this language stuff “clearly”, probably because I’m arguing with pixels on a computer monitor instead of letters shaped from transparent glass. “By the by”, I come at this from a different direction, which says that the expansion of meaning, even if it increases ambiguity in some cases, also greatly enriches our language. You say you disagree, but your words betray you – have them shot at dawn.

I’m not sure how useful this is, but let’s explore it a bit. We agree, I think, that a post-op transman entering the room would be incongruous with the expectation. But I think it would not be so incongruous to see a post-op transwoman, that would be pretty close to my expectation (though admittedly not the paradigm case). So too would a female-presenting android be much closer to my expectation than a post-op trans man; is that not true for you?

New York is on the map… but it’s not really new york. How are we not confused by that? Could it be context?
So what happens if we confuse the context?

Well you just demonstrated that quite nicely… congrats, you made my point.

Gender only has a literal meaning in the context of describing biological creatures… which is why we can use gender freely to describe androids, ships, toys, etc, without confusing anyone. Context is the clue.
So how do I know whether or not you mean biological sex when you describe a person as a man or woman?
How do you clue me in on your meaning?
Well you can’t… and that’s the point. That way you can call anyone who likes “man” or “woman” and it’ll never be a lie.

Spelling this out is going to sound painfully condescending, because it’s yet again a matter of common sense…

If I tell you a woman is about to walk on stage, you’re going to expect a typical human female… if the woman who is about to walk up on stage is radically different from the norm, you might be in for a surprise.
Let’s say this woman has been surgically altered to look like a lizard, I should probably give you a heads up about that.
Unfortunately we don’t have a single word that conveys “human female made to look like lizard” which means I have to use more than one word to describe this person.
We might invent a shorthand for this sort of thing if it’s common enough to warrant it. “female translizard” maybe?
I would not be giving you more accurate expectations, however, by saying “a female lizard is about to walk on stage”…

Yet I can imagine you telling me how this woman made to look like a lizard, really is best described as a lizard using the exact arguments you’ve put forward here in this thread…

“we call robots lizards when they look like them”
“there are aliens on tv shows we call lizards when they look like them”
“being described as a lizard isn’t about biology, it’s a social treatment”
“language is enriched by us expanding the definition of lizard”
“people are the best judges of their own identities, if they say they are lizards, we should respect that”
etc…

1. You’re avoiding my point about the richness of language. All those ambiguous words and phrases you use clearly add richness to the language. And they may not seem ambiguous in context now, but consider the first use where they were applied outside the then-accepted meaning.

2. The use of woman I’m defending is context-dependent.

Philosophy often requires explaining very basic things; I took no offense, and I hope you’ll bear with me as I return the favor

Let me point out that this isn’t the case we’re talking about, it is a different case dealing with different concepts and it may have a different answer.

To see how these differences might matter, look at the case of a brunette who has been surgically altered to look like a blonde (a non-invasive surgery, as it turns out).

Unfortunately we don’t have a single word that conveys “human brunette made to look like blonde” which means I have to use more than one word to describe this person.
We might invent a shorthand for this sort of thing if it’s common enough to warrant it. “brunette transblonde” maybe?
I would be giving you more accurate expectations, however, by saying “a blonde is about to walk on stage”…

And you can imagine me telling you how this brunette-made-to-look-like-a-blonde really is best described as a “blonde” using the exact arguments I’ve put forward here in this thread…

/condescension

So is being a woman more like being a lizard or more like being a blonde? Simply giving one example as dispositive is just question-begging: if you think “woman” is mostly about biology, then the lizard case is more on point; if it’s more about superficial appearance and social role, then the blonde case is more on point. We can come up with examples that cut either way, and they don’t relieve us of the necessity to analyze this case.

It’s not about what any individual “thinks” but what the words mean in a given language.
Again I refer you to the dictionary…

It seems “blond” and “brunte” have as a subject the color of a person’s hair… an appearance
While the subject of “woman” is the age and biological sex of a human… no appearance was specified, no social role was specified.

You can of course petition people to change the definition of “woman”.
It’s on you to propose an alternate definition and convince the rest of us that this change is for the better… maybe answer some questions that arise

Are you recommending eliminating the old meaning or simply adding a new context-dependent alternate meaning referring only to appearance and/or social role? can you specify the appearance and/or social role?
If it’s the latter, what are the context clues that lets us know which meaning is being used? confusion isn’t very enriching, after all.
Also would that mean retiring words like transman/woman? They already serve this function while maintaining clarity on biological sex…
If you do recommend eliminate the old meaning… then what words would you recommend we use to indicate biological sex?
Or is it your position that we don’t need to indicate biological sex? That appearances/social roles are all that concern us?

Sell me on this… convince me that this petition to change language isn’t simply to ease your own guilt for lying to people suffering from gender dysphoria.
That instead it’s an honest attempt at optimising communication and that you’ve really thought this shit through and can conclusively say your way is superior.

The dictionary doesn’t dictate definitions, it describes them, and it’s a trailing indicator of language and, even at its most up-to-date, an imperfect mirror. All of the words I mocked in my earlier post would at one point have been used in contravention of their dictionary definition (if dictionaries had existed at the time, which they probably didn’t, but amazingly words still meant things!)

I think that marks the end of this conversation

If your best argument is quoting me a single dictionary definition, and probably not even the full definition from whatever dictionary you’re using, then perhaps we should leave it there. If you looked at more than one dictionary, or likely more than one definition within the dictionary you chose, you’d find a much broader meaning than the narrow one you’re advocating.

And this meaning of female is significant because these dictionaries use “female” to define “woman”:

Do these change your mind? I should bloody well hope not. So why are we even talking about dictionaries if they aren’t your actual authority on what the language means?

You’ve used a dozen words in your last post whose meaning clearly derives from an expansion of an earlier meaning. Do you disagree? If not, how do you square that with an appeal to an ostensibly static meaning of words, and moreover the claim that the expansion of meaning of words makes language less useful?

The meaning of a word isn’t what’s in a dictionary, it’s what’s conveyed by it between speakers, it depends on the who the speaker and listener are, the context in which it’s used, and it changes over time. Dictionary authors do their best to catalog the language as they find it, but it’s a moving target, and the meanings are so large and nuanced, layered with connotations and associations that shade the meaning.

Case in point: about half of Americans think transwomen and transmen should use the women’s and men’s restrooms, respectively, and the other half think so antirespectively. Those people disagree about what it means for a bathroom to be a “women’s room” and a “men’s room”. These are presumptively native speakers who aren’t confused about the language they’re using or the specific facts applicable to the case, and they disagree about the meaning of words. Is your whole takeaway from half a speaker population using a word in a certain way that they just need to read the dictionary to clear everything up?

In not too long, I expect that dictionaries are going to get woke under social pressure, and start putting the woke meaning of woman and man, to explicitly include transwomen and transmen explicitly, into dictionaries. You agree with that, right? Are you going to give up the fight then? I don’t think you should! Fuck the dictionary, “literally” does not mean “figuratively” and I will die on that hill.

You’ve argued that most uses of “woman” and “man” are about biology – they aren’t.
You’ve argued that broadening the sense of words impoverishes the language – it doesn’t.
Now you’re arguing that the dictionary says so – 1) it doesn’t, and 2) that is a very weak philosophical position.

That’s not my argument… nor the reason we’re stuck.

We’re caught in a loop… allow me to show you the loop.

Loop it from here…

Where do bull dykes get to go to the bathroom? Transvestites?

Mad Man, your last step in that loop is nonresponsive, that’s why we’re looping. “Is being a woman more like being a lizard or more like being a blonde” is not answered by the reply that “It’s on [me] to propose an alternate definition”.

You offer the lizard hypothetical, because you’ve argued all along that woman is an inherently biological term. That’s question-begging because it effectively says, “look how we would treat this obviously different case that’s more biological; therefore, we should treat this case the same way.” I point out that we can come up with more biological and more social cases, and we need to decide which one is relevant here. Returning to your claim that woman is biological is non-responsive.

What’s more, I then responded on your terms: the biological definition isn’t the only definition in the dictionary, the source of authority to which you appealed. I don’t need to invent my own definition, I pointed you to three sources that attest to the fact that woman has a social meaning that isn’t reducible to biology. And now you seem to be saying, “well I don’t accept the authority of the source of authority to which I’ve repeatedly appealed, so I guess we’re back at square one. It’s a loop!”

We’re looping because you’re cornered, by your own use of the words and concepts we’re discussing, and by the source of authority on which you’ve based your argument. Let me spell this out:
You claimed that “woman” is a word purely based in biology. But you acknowledge that it would be inappropriate to call a transman a “woman”, even though the change is superficial, non-biological. You may prefer a new word, you may prefer to multiply the genders, but your own acknowledge use of the language is one that doesn’t not depend solely on biology. When biology and social role don’t match, you admit that the word no longer applies.
You claimed that the authoritative definition of woman is biological, and I pointed to the same authority where it provides the non-biological meaning that you’re claiming doesn’t exist.

But let me offer another argument for the proposition that social sex is different from biological sex and doesn’t depend on it:
Young children frequently learn about social sex before the learn about biological sex. Their concept of social sex differences (hair length, style of dress, activities, household responsibilities, etc.) is often significantly more developed than their concept of biological sex differences, because they see a lot of the social differences and few of the biological ones. They may breastfeed at first, but they generally forget about breastfeeding at a fairly young age (anecdotally, my daughter stopped breastfeeding at around 1, and had forgotten about it by the time her sister was born around 2.5). They see few genitals other than their own. But they see social sexual roles in every interaction, in much language about the people around them, in every book and show and story they are exposed to.

One might argue that this meaning is indirectly biological, because their parents’ use is biological. But 1) this too will be question begging, and 2) we don’t disagree that the distinction between men and women is historically rooted in animal biology, only that the current meaning is not. And to the extent people’s present understanding of the difference currently starts with a social understanding, and only later includes the biological differences, the supports the idea that it’s primarily a social concept as used by modern speakers.

One might also object that though kids don’t see genitals, they do see differences of body type, hairiness, strength, etc. that are due to differences in biology. 1) They are also socialized to see e.g. Winnie the Pooh as a boy; the modern concept of social sex actually derives in greater and greater part from fictional representations of sex, and in particular from cartoons, in which biological is not depicted. 2) Most of those are social, in the sense that testosterone supplements will increase muscle mass and hair growth and strength, and if biowoman+testoerone=“woman”, I will consider that a vindication of my point.

The best countpoint I can come up with is that while the initial meaning does not depend on biology, once the biological understanding is added, it tends to dominate in importance, and supplant the earlier meaning. I think this is plausible, but not right.

I don’t know. I don’t think this is a simple question, and I don’t think easy answers are required. Indeed, I think one that ostensibly provides easy answers to complex question is more likely to be wrong.

With advanced modeling, the differences based on the need for choices will narrow, and ultimately disappear, as dynamic human control mechanisms will fade out of institutions.

The differences between biologal and learned differences will simplify as repressed instinctual motives can be extracted .
This mode has been known from the fallacious view of simpler things entail more complex levels of cognitive circuitry. Modeling inhabits both, and the only way that such models can become more prone to acceptance, is to reduce the fallaciousness between the real and the more true to real version.
The Hollywood cliche is developing as well, lets not forget the outworn model of the dumb blonde.

There will be a time when models will accrue an authenticism where models can be sold as real.

The meaning of a word is whatever we collectively decide it is…

It seems to me you are either unwilling or incapable of providing any reason to adopt your definition of “man” or “woman”… apart from pointing out that there are others who have adopted it.
I refer you to the dictionary to show it’s not yet the default understanding of those words and if you want it to become the default you have to convince people, like me, to use language the way you propose…

And if we’re supposed to come to some sort of agreement about how to use language, utility seems the only objective measure…

I thought I made my argument quite clear… we need a way to convey a person’s gender.
Even if it’s not those words, other means of conveying a person’s gender will be invented.
People suffering from gender dysphoria will wish to have the WRONG gender conveyed to or about them… that’s the nature of the condition.

This problem will persist, until either we cure the condition, ignore their plight, agree to LIE or eradicate all means of communicating gender.

Your attempts to “catch me out” already using language your way, despite myself, have failed and now you’re reduced to inventing a success.
And I’ve already addressed your points with respect to reverting to a more ignorant understanding of the phenomenon we call gender, sans biology.

And so we are stuck between groups, if you are correct, who are wrong. The ones who think that the boxes are simple and clear and biological and there are two of them - read: conservatives in the main; and the ones who think that if you feel female/female, you are female, and if you feel male/masculine you are male and others should think of you that way also or they are being bad.

On the internet I can happily explore, play devil’s advocate, trigger intentionally either or both of the main sides. But IRL: that’s dangerous. Easy to get labeled incredibly harshly, and actually right now, in my world, easy to get professionally damaged and seriously by the Left. Both sides are harsh and binary on the issue. But sides can make extreme judgments and I am sure in their areas of control, subcultures where they can make policy, each can punish those they disagree with. But in my world, not being Left PC and simple on this issue, can actually cause me professional damage, like loss of job and removal as a potential candidate in a number of fields.

And not for, say, attacking an individual or discriminating, but even for questioning certain polices - like, say, transwomen participating in sports against not transwomen - or talking about the issue at an abstract level. This can be taken as a kind of generalized hate speech and cause all sorts of problems. I don’t see a lot of true freedom of speech in practice in organizations and on the ground. One could see this as all fair and good, since it was the other way for a long time.

On the other hand, that shouldn’t be the range of choices.

This bathroom thing is another red-herring… though I think KT did a good job bringing it back on point.

One might try to ask why do we have gender specific bathrooms?
Presumably it had something to do with people’s comfort as well as practicality.
Ideally we each have our own private bathrooms, but because we can’t have that as a compromise maybe we can make people more comfortable by at least separating the boys and girls.

Now maybe times have changed… maybe we’re more comfortable with unisex bathrooms… maybe we’re less comfortable.
Maybe it has less to do with gender now and more to do with sexuality… maybe in today’s world it makes more sense that only the people not attracted to each other share bathrooms.
Maybe in today’s world, it’s as it always was, impossible to make everyone happy, so we should simply do the thing that makes the least amount of people unhappy.

And maybe that changes based on location, culture and/or subculture… so maybe not all bathroom policies need to be identical.

But language is where we can’t so easily dispense with conformity… communication requires we agree that a spade is called a spade so we all know what the hell you mean when you say something is a spade.
The words we use to describe a person are either meaningful or meaningless noises we make… the question should be what are we describing and is it accurate?

If “man” or “woman” is a description of appearances, what are those appearances? The appearance of a “man” or “woman” is not defined… it’s just an amalgam of our experiences with members of that gender.
The notion that being a woman has something to do with long hair or wearing a dress is just an accident of culture. It might mean having short hair and wearing a plate in your lip, in another culture…
So are those cultures then devoid of “women” since no one has long hair or is wearing a dress? Or is our culture devoid of women because we don’t have people with plates in their lips?

Maybe it’s not appearances, maybe it’s something to do with how you feel… It then becomes an indication of an individual’s preference to say someone is a woman. But what is it that they prefer?
A specific social treatment, perhaps? But which treatment?
Could a person who wishes to be called a “man” not also prefer the same social treatment as women, without the label? What if they prefer a mixture of the treatments, or something novel?
Well there’s a whole slew of non-binary “gender” terms to cover this exact conundrum…
But we treat people uniquely once we get to know their preferences, anyway, and their names are how we distinguish them.
So why do we need to memorize a giant list of pre-packaged preferences instead of just getting to know individuals?
Or is it just the label that matters? a title or label that doesn’t mean anything amounts to us making redundant noises, because others like those noises.

This is all a muddied soup of nonsense…
We’ve gone at this for so long now and gotten no closer to a conclusion than when we started… I’m ready to throw in the towel at this point.
Please say something that moves us in a forward direction Carleas.

Let me ask what I think is the same question in another way:

J is a transman. Is he a transman or is she a transman?
K is a transwoman. Is she a transwoman or is he a transwoman?

I think it’s the same question as the “is X a ‘woman’?” question, and as the “which bathroom should X use?” question, except simpler. I don’t see the pronouns as as strongly tied to biology; biology is about humans-as-objects, where pronouns are about humans-as-subjects. And the bathroom debate raises complicated skeeviness and safety questions that I think are beside the point.

Unsurprisingly, I’d say “he is a transman” and “she is a transwoman”. I wonder where others fall, or if you even see this as a useful distinction from what we’ve been discussing.

Also, to something Karpel Tunnel brings up: as I’ve tried to say elsewhere in the thread, there are distinct questions about the ontology of gender and the morality of how we deal with it. I’m mostly concerned with ontology here, although the ontology of intersubjective facts is necessarily normative.

My first reaction is none of the above, or, better thought out, it depends and its not enough information, and I don’t even want to bother boiling it down to a pronoun. These are very unique rare cases. Like hermaphrodites, though not as part of the same category of rare case.

Now that’s easy to say, and I can work out a defense, but doesn’t give them or us an easy way to relate. But why can’t, off the top of my head, they just be trans. I get that this leads to all sorts of practical problems, but there’s something odd about having to maek an answer that everyone else must accept, especially since the context is that…

he
and
she should not be considered the way they used to be…
we should get used to freedom, more freedom with those terms.

Well, let’s have freedom then. we could be less binary. It’s weird to be told in the same context, stop being so rigid and traditional when the same people are demanding to be included by the language use of others in the old rigid categories. A transwoman wants to be called a woman and that it mean they are in the traditional box. But they ain’t. If they manage to simply get called that, then the practical issue is gone for them. But the ontological message of the Left is demanding flexibility and rigidity in the same breath.

Be flexible in precisely the way I want you to be (remember his is in law also) while I demand the rigid binary determination of sex is used to describe me. I am in that rigid box. Or, she is in that box. Period.

EDIT: let me take one more shot at this because I think it is important. Transpeople, some of them, are demanding, and advocates for them are demanding, that we apply rigid binary categories to them. The transwoman wants the she and her pronouns to be applied to her (me doing this here) and that this means, that, really, she is a woman. She has, often, though not always, changed her biology, as much as she can, to make herself be in that box. She wants us to think there are men and women, and that she is in that latter category. And that men and women are different and they are different physically and the physical differences are important. She is saying that her internal feelings lead her to know she is a she. That is what she is. She is supporting binary sexes and that certain feelings and personality traits mean that one is either male or female. She got the wrong body for that personality.

Then if people react to her differences and do not want to use those pronouns, they are not being flexible and respectful. She is radically free, they are not. They need to consider her the category she wants to be in. They need to think or at least act like she is in that category. People who go against this desire on her part can be and are being punished by organizations and even the law.

This is happening inside a Left wing politically correctness that also says that women and men need not be different. There are no traits, thinking mainly of personality, skills and emotions, that men have that women do not and vice versa. Men can be anything, women can be anything. Be flexible. Don’t put people in boxes. Allow them freedom, allow them diversity.

Be flexible and don’t have boxes. Have boxes and honor my sense of the box I am in or that she or he places herself in. Accept the butch woman and don’t put women in a box. Accept the transwoman and put her in the woman box. She is a woman, she is like a woman inside and now, as much as technology/endocrinology allows, outside also.

I think a better direction is staying with the freedom. Allow for freedom and diversity. Men can be all sorts of thigns, women can be all sorts of things. If some people want bodies that are like X. Let them move their bodies in that direction. Allow people to think of them as they will. Allow diversity of response and conceptualizing of other people as they think of gender and sex.

You can’t demand diversity of thought and conception of gender/sex with one hand, when also promoting a rigidity of sex/gender. Allow the diversity which inlcludes other people not seeing a woman when there is a transwoman standing there. Let the whole system move towards freedom. Freedom to categorize self and other.

Inhibit behavior, in some case. Inhibit discrimination or violence against transpersons. But leave go of thinking other people must conceive gender/sex as you do. Since this is what is being demanded the other way.

This does not solve all the problems. I don’t think transatheletes should compete in women’s sports. I don’t think that actually makes sense. I feel like the fastest woman in the world inside is what that will end up amounting to.

Note: I by no means, think I have solved the issue. But I realized that is my gut reaction. I am being told to be loose and very tight in the same breathe. To forget the old, and apply the old, at pain of fines or worse in some jurisdictions and companies. My reaction is…nah, I don’t have to say he or she. Maybe we could have some new terms.

A

Well, for me with my beliefs, ontology of sex/gender is more complicated than physicalism allows, at present. But that doesn’t mean I think transwomen are all women, lol. Some are, some are not.

I also think the ontology is not binary. The door is open. Once you open that door, you can’t demand everyone else uses the binary boxes the way you want them to. (you, in that sentence is not Carleas)

J is pregnant: is HE pregnant or is SHE pregnant? is HE the mother or father? is SHE the mother or father?
K impregnated J, as pertains to K: is HE the father or the mother? is SHE the mother or the father?

Well I do… so how do we resolve this?
How can you and I reach a consensus?
To what do we appeal in order to sway each other?

Karpel Tunnel, what if we apply what you’re saying to the case of a cisman, who I decide to call “she” and “her” and “woman”. I see where you’re coming from, and agree there’s a tension between deconstructing traditional sex roles and putting people in traditional boxes. But I think it’s significant that we aren’t there yet. We actually do have sex roles, we actually put people in boxes, and while we do it’s not really a live option to let people call people whatever sex they want. It’s important to cis people that they be recognized as the sex they identify with; you can see this by calling your average male bar patron a woman and observing the (likely violent) reaction. So long as we recognize and expect that, and so long as our language has two gendered pronouns and we expect everyone to fit one, it’s not really an answer to say that we should change those things.

And while there’s a tension between two ideals, there’s not a tension in saying that one option is achievable now, and another option is something we should aim for in the long term.

MMP, mother/father is an interesting case. Like sex, it’s rooted in biology, but it has more clearly been divorced from its biological root. Adoptive parents are considered the mother or father, even though there’s no biological connection, it’s purely legal and social. So it seems an easy question for present purposes: if X is a woman, she is the mother, if X is a man, he is the father, regardless of that person’s biological connection to the child. Combining that with a system where a person can be a man regardless of biology does lead to weird cases where a biological mother is socially a child’s father, but that’s not really that different from a case where a biological father is not socially the child’s father (because of e.g. divorce or emancipation), and some biological third party is the child’s social father; or cases where a child has two social fathers or two social mothers (e.g. gay couples that adopt, or a spouse that remarries and the new partner gets some parental rights).

I think you are wrong about your own use of those words, and you are certainly wrong if you think that any significant part of the speaker population uses the language that way. Pronouns just aren’t biological in the ways that other linguistic indicia of sex are.

Unlike ‘female’ and ‘male’, ‘she’ and ‘he’ don’t have biological meanings, biology textbooks don’t call female trees ‘she’, they most likely don’t call female newts ‘she’. But female humans will ~always be called ‘she’ in those contexts.

Look, if I refer to a boat or a dog as “it”, most people don’t bat an eye. If I refer to a woman as “it”, it sounds incorrect at best and offensive at worst. And people are likely to have similar reactions for a family pet to the extent that the pet is part of the ‘pack’, i.e. to the extent the pet is granted agency, to the extent that it is a subject.

Now, maybe you mean that where you use ‘she’ or ‘he’, which one you use is always dictated by the underlying sex. I’m not challenging that claim. Rather, I’m challenging it on the other side: there are lots and lots and lots of biological examples where you don’t use ‘she’ or ‘he’, and instead use ‘it’. And the reason for that is that those pronouns are reserved for subjects: they are less strongly tied to biology in that biology is not a sufficient condition in the way it is for ‘male’ and ‘female’.

(It’s harder to show for ‘man’ and ‘woman’, since those are only used for humans, and humans are universally granted agency. But I think it’s still true: a dead male body is the body of a man, but it’s appropriate to call it ‘it’.

Note also the family pet case: ‘it’ becomes ‘she’ where a dog becomes a family member, but it does not become a ‘woman’. So it’s not just that ‘he’ and ‘she’ refer to male and female humans, they refer to male and female subjects)

and are. But also, not to all. There are people happy to be androgenous. There are those who know they are presenting ambiguously and don’t care.

The transperson knows, generally, that they don’t quite pass. There are exceptions, and then they get taken as the sex they want, at least in most interactions with strangers.

But that’s my point, we are being told not to keep things binary by the vast majority of the people who are telling us to, in the case of transpeople, keep things binary. The same lefty pc people want there to be a wide variety of sexualities including non-sexual or asexual. I think many butch lesbians are not concerned about being considered male and many gay or transvestite men who are not concerned about being called female. There are movements to eliminate gender pronouns - see Sweden and ‘hen’. There are arguments, from that group, to eliminate determining, the social act of determining. Except when someone who is a transperson wants it. I am sure there are transpeople who are not aligned with this. I know transpeople who think that men and women are different, period, and they are a man or woman who was born in the wrong body. But the movement as a whole is absolutely trying to complexify all things, but not this part.

It seems to me the nature of PC is to expect it now and expect people to conform, now, to have very little transition period, and to be considered bad or evil if one does not shift now.

And I really see no option for a physicalist but to sympathize with people who do not want to say person X is a woman, when they can see a male body. An adam’s apple and large hands and a bulge in the pants.

Why can’t we let them react as they react and let the transpeople Identify as they wish?

There is a serious difference from racism here. To call someone a nigger is to label them extremely negatively - if it’s going white to black, say.

To call someone a different sex than they identify with is not the same, unless one thinks men or women are bad. (you haven’t raised this parallel or as a parallel, but I noticed my own mind wondering here) I do get that it hurts.

If the physicalist can accept that being a man is a choice regardless of a body, then it seems like other physical categorizings are now on the table. Age. Being older gets one rights and one is treated differently. A 15 year old who feels older says I am 18. We know the age related rights are based on statistics, people at this age tend to be better able to handle alcohol, etc. Yet, would we open the door for self-determination of age.

7 year olds enrolling in High school. 35 years requesting social security benefits and free rides on buses (in those cities). People who feel they are black but are born white applying for scholarships or afro-american artists -certainly there are white who grew up in black areas adn are culturally immersed in afroamerican culture, may even have dreads and experience some of the oppression. Handicapped parking for people without disabilities doctors can verify, but feel handicapped, in need of closer parking.

Accepting long term work absence based of feelings of being sick that doctors cannot verify.

Disability claims.

Heavyweight fighters who feel lighter and destroy featherweight fighters.

Discrimination suits for actors who feel like they are women but look like men and didn’t even get to read for the part.

Demands for passports from other countries - that the UN supports - because while born in California, they feel like they are Brazilian. They want to be taken as brazilian.

People who believe they are animals.

As I said to Mad Man P, I don’t think it’s useful to point to different cases where we aren’t willing to grant people their choice of identity, at least not without going into more detail about how the cases are relevantly similar. I don’t find it hard to distinguish your cases in the same way I distinguish treating someone as a woman in an office setting and treating them as a woman in a boxing ring. For other things, like “7 year olds enrolling in High school”, I don’t see why a 7 year old who can keep up with the material should be prevented from attending high school classes (and indeed, that’s exactly what we do).

But similar to what I asked Mad Man, is being a woman in an office setting more like being a heavyweight in a cage match, or more like being a 7 year old in a high school class? We can produce cases that cut either way, and merely producing them is just question-begging.

Granted. I think we can safely ignore them, and focus on the people who care about what social sexual label they receive.

Consider a group of people, and a set of beliefs A, B, and C. A, B, and C have a relation such that one can consistently believe any two, but not all three. If a third of the group believes A and B, a third believes A and C, and a third believes B and C, then the group as a whole will on average believe A, B, and C (66% believing each), which we agree is inconsistent, and yet no individual has any inconsistent view. This is a problem for the group as a coalition, and may be painful to work out, but no one is being irrational in their beliefs in coming to this situation.

I think that might be partly what’s going on here. As we discussed earlier, there is a growing schism in the left between pro-trans and “gender-critical” (AKA “TERF”, Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist). They’re having exactly the argument you point out, with the pro-trans faction demanding recognition and complete inclusion, and the TERF faction rejecting that demand in favor of destroying gender roles.

Now, I do think there are a lot of people ‘on the left’ who have inconsistent beliefs because they just take what they perceive to be the accepted wisdom and go with it. But I think we should be cautious about how we use them as an example, since people that don’t critically examine their beliefs in the philosophical mode are likely to have inconsistent beliefs.

And it occurs to me that I don’t really know how to deal with their beliefs for the purpose of examining intersubjective facts. There doesn’t seem to be anything requiring that intersubjective facts be mutually consistent, does there? Especially if different facts are made salient at different times, so that the inconsistency generally doesn’t usually present itself in situations where you have to act on the facts. I need to think more about how to think about intersubjectivity, it seems a significant and underdiscussed part of these issues.