Yes, though I don’t want to lose sight of the contexts where biology is relevant (e.g. boxing). It’s important to refer back to, since it’s a point on which we all agree, and when I talk about the contexts where it isn’t relevant, I mean to contrast those with the context where we agree that it’s relevant.
This trichotomy actually seems to track the objective/subjective/intersubjective division I mentioned in my previous post (i.e. biological, subjective, and social, respectively), so I’ll try to use that structure in replying to your hypothetical.
I actually don’t think this is an easy question, or one with a uniform yes/no answer.
Objectively, i.e., biologically/genetically (setting aside any of Gloominary’s ‘male brain’ claims), I think we agree that they are their new body’s sex. And I think this is what your physician is concerned with.
Subjectively, I think we agree that they are still their old sex (and this hypothetical is a much easier case on that question than that of trans people, where someone ‘feels like they’re the other sex’, even though any individual only has the experience of feeling like themselves, and can only mentally simulate being something that they aren’t imperfectly, cf. Nagel). I think the bathroom example might fall here, rather than in the social part below (or at least in both). Do I use the men’s room because society wants me too, or because I don’t want to shit in front of the opposite sex? Anecdotal reports of people’s experience in unisex restrooms suggests that the latter is actually a significant factor.
Intrasubjectively, i.e. socially, I don’t think it’s an easy question. You note that people who know you personally would care, but you seem to dismiss that as irrelevant. The people who know you best would treat you as your mental sex, rather than your physical sex. I think that caveat does more work than you acknowledge. It seems to indicate that in contexts where your mind is what matters, you are still a man. I would argue that this extends beyond just close interpersonal relationships, to e.g. internet web forums, where your declared sex is the whole of your existence. It also plausibly extend to places where bodies are expected to be functionally erased, e.g. formal environments like a corporate office. To your boss, co-workers, classmates, you’re better thought of as a mind than a body.
You say that “[t]hey should merely treat you with the same courtesy that they do everyone else”, but I think that downplays the degree to which people do in fact treat people differently based on sex. There are still norms around e.g. what you can and can’t discuss in mixed company, and ‘boys/girls weekend’ is still a thing, and gatherings often devolve into sex-segregated groups. For the purpose of such conversations, you-mentally-swapped-into-a-woman’s-body would still be a man, I would think. Or rather, you’d expect and want to be, and anyone who knew you well would expect you to be, and you would be noticeably awkward and stilted if you were mis-assigned. It’s not about courtesy, it’s about a distinct difference in social behavior and treatment. I admit, though, that most of these differences in treatment are unconscious, and overriding your gut reaction of noticing that a transwoman is a biological man may not entail treating them fully as a woman. Still, conscious shifts in perspective can feed back to influence automatic behaviors.
And part of what sex signals is about expectation: to signal that you are or wish to be treated as a woman is also to signal that you should expect me to “act like a woman”. Again, this gets to something that both you and Karpel Tunnel have noted, namely that there’s a tension between tearing down the whole idea of “acting like an X”, but that doesn’t change that men and women do act differently and are expected to act differently (in that last clause, let me be clear that “expected” there is meant in the sense that violating the expectation would lead people to feel that the behavior was unexpected, slightly surprising and incongruous, rather than the more schoolmarmish sense in which it is often used in similar statements, e.g. “I expect you to be home by 9pm, young man!”). So in that sense, too, you would be intersubjectively a man: people should expect you to act and to want to be treated like a man.
A last point on this body-swapping hypothetical: suppose the swap were into an ant instead of another human; is it a human or an ant? On the one hand, I’m tempted to say an ant, but I have the strong intuition that if someone knew that the ant had the mind of a human, and squished it anyway, that would be murder and not just bug-squishing. Do you agree?
I raised to Karpel Tunnel the hypothetical case where science advances to the point where we could more fully transition people. It seems to follow from what you’re saying here that such transition could ever change the fact that it’s a lie. Even if some kind of gene doping could fully replace every Y chromosome with an X chromosome, it would just be a yet-more-elaborate lie. Is that your position?
I assume it isn’t, given what you’ve said so far, so let me go a bit deeper here, because I think this hypothetical can help clarify our conflicting intuitions. Suppose some future technology that enables sex reassignment such that a person can be fully transitioned in every observable respect: their organs, genes, limb ratios, facial structure, etc. etc. are altered so that they are fully biologically their new sex, with no evidence of their previous sex remaining except in memories and paper trail. Is that person the new sex?
If so, the hypothetical converts the question of whether a transwoman is a woman into the Ship of Theseus: somewhere between a man who dresses and acts and subjectively identifies as a man, and a transwoman who is completely biologically converted into a woman, there exists a line where on one side we have to call that person a man and where we have to call that person a woman. Everything we’ve discussed so far is just pinning down that line. One step between being a born-man who identifies as a man and born-man super-post-op-woman who identifies as a woman is a born-man who identifies as a woman. Another step is a born-man who acts, dresses, introduces herself as a woman. Another step is a born-man who has undergone plastic surgery, hormone therapy, genital inversion, etc. etc. Do you agree that this constitutes a Ship-of-Theseus-like spectrum?
Karpel Tunnel, I’d be interested in your take on this hypothetical, since you’ve said your ontology has a concept of the male-ness or femaleness attached to the soul and not just to the body.
I’d point out again that this is something that happens to lots of words and concepts, it’s not unique to sex. Also note that its a largely a-rational process, tracking how people parse the world into fuzzy collections of connected ideas, and which ideas they tie to which words.
Certainly the social will drift from where it began, but I don’t think that entails it vanishing. There are many dichotomies divorced from their initial justifying distinction, but which continue through sheer intersubjective inertia, e.g. the US political parties, which were founded as 1) a pro-business, rural, small government, anti-immigrant, pro-party, and 2) a social and economic modernization and reform party that opposed the expansion of slavery and whose first president was responsible for abolishing it. They’ve morphed into 1) a pro-immigrant, pro-reform party with the overwhelming support of the descendants of slaves, and 2) an arguably white-nationalist party in the pocket of big business. Respectively.
Which is just to say, the social won’t vanish, it will drift.
This seems extreme, but depends on what constitutes treating someone with appropriate courtesy. To return again to the religion example, we might call not mocking Christian beliefs in front of a Christian, or not accusing someone of not being a Christian or not being a good Christian, treating those people with the appropriate courtesy. Applying a similar standard to sex would mean not pointing out that someone is trans, or not accusing a transwoman of not being a real woman or not passing. In that case, in which case I can agree with the idea that going further than that is something of an imposition, though I’m not sure what “going further” would look like; what is giving a damn beyond caring enough to avoid acts that you know will hurt someone?
My understanding is that the distribution of testosterone levels between the sexes is such that effectively no biologically women who aren’t at least partly hermaphroditic have anywhere near male levels of testosterone without supplementation, i.e. that there is no overlap in the distributions between those who are unambiguously biologically women and those who are unambiguously biologically men.
This is an interesting point, and I expect you are right, but I don’t know quite what to make of such claims. Suppose some 18 year old gets the surgery. At 36, are they as legitimately a woman as an 18 year old biological woman? What if they get the surgery at 1 year old? It also seems that the position is dependent on a certain culture and time, such that the future culture in which this technology exists may not have whatever pathologies create the issue in our culture. I suspect at least some such feminists would agree.
In terms of formal logic, potentially contingent is contingent, no? Potentially contingent = contingently contingent = contingent.
I think I take your point, that we’re using a hypothetical technology that doesn’t exist, but unless we think it’s impossible even in theory, we can still use it to show that biological-man-ness isn’t actually what we care about.
I think there’s a case to be made that they shouldn’t, though I present it more for consideration than because I am fully convinced of it: permitting inconsistent rules can lead to better outcomes where 1) the inconsistent rule produces better outcomes than would no rule at all, and 2) no consistent rule could get sufficient approval. And this is likely to be the case where an inconsistent rule is consistent as applied in most specific cases, and only inconsistent in theory, across many cases, or in outlier cases.
This is a non-sequitur in context. My claim is that, for any coalition C, there exists some area of policy P such that C’s position on P is contradictory. If that’s true, then pointing out that the coalition “the left” is contradictory on policy “sex” is not a particular strike against that coalition, it’s just an instance of a general rule.
I’d argue it’s moreso that the unsophisticated people are just very noisy. That may seem a distinction without a difference, but I don’t think so. Two consequences seem to be 1) that we should look for the sophisticated positions to steelman the ideas we disagree with, and 2) when we respond primarily to the unsophisticated position, we add to the din that drowns out the more nuanced positions.
I’m not sure what to make of this claim. Claims about the meaning of words are paradigmatically intersubjective, right?
I also think that there’s a strong case that complex concepts are intersubjective, particularly where they have socially relevant connotations. But the mere fuzziness of such concepts, for which there’s no sufficient or necessary condition, means that it’s only by a general intersubjective agreement that we have truths about them. Perhaps this just hints at a deeper disagreement in our philosophies; I would say that concepts are statistical rather than atomic, and that there is always more than one way to parse the world into coherent concepts.