I think it is useful to open doors in conversations, even if we don’t know everything yet in the conversation. I was not presenting final words or self-evident coversation stoppers, but trying to probe the idea of self-determination of identity despite body. I think coming up with parallels and partial parallels presents us with a more diverse set of tools and cases to see if what we think makes sense.
- in this case you decided that there would be certain criteria that child would have to meet 2) that’s a rare situation where someone so young gets to do that. In this kind of rare situation we do not instruct people not to age categorize children as a whole. We have not created a culture where one must accept first their own determination. 3) I’d also be interested to see a holistic determination of whether it is good for the whole child, not just the academic child, to be in high school with peers who are different in a variety of ways. Is High School just an academic thing?
There is also emancipated minor as a concept. One can get the courts to determine that one is ready to be an adult or an adult in some ways. But this, again, is not done by the person alone. It is a rare exception. Most kids cannot walk into bars and get alcohol because they know they are 21 inside. Driver’s licences and so on. And this would have to do with grades, moving between them. I probably could have handled high school academics not at 7 but by 11 for sure. It would have been terrible for me to go there. And that’s the academic, college focused high school I went to. Other high schools I could have cleared even younger. I would guess you could have also. Hopefully the guy you linked to, his family made a lot of adjustments are took care to make sure the potential problems he might face he could handle. IOW a team made this work, a team with ongoing presence in his life, and a team that determined he was capable despite his chronological age. And probably they have some kind of caer around that kid NOT being taken as a 16 year old by his peers and teachers, except academically.
And all the other kids in his home city and state, were not being told to not assign age to any other child, that they must accept the age determination a person gives of themselves, that they are bad if they don’t, that they themselves must not think of themselves as a certain age and so on.
Why not use all such examples to triangulate. What is ‘being a woman in an office setting’?
And that ‘care’ includes teaching them not to care and then also that they must care. Right now. That is the message, care and don’t care, and don’t mess that up or you are a bad person.
I don’t think this is the case. I meet people regularly who combine traditional feminist ideas about gender being cultural and transwomen are women, they felt that and this must be honored and if you don’t you are bad. I encounter this systematically, not just in individuals. IOW through organizational policy, political party policy and even law. I’m not in the US but while the laws are not the same I am pretty sure organizational polices reflect the contradiction also.
It’s a good point to nuance the debate. I am sure you are correct that there are individuals that fit your breakdown above. But I don’t think your breakdown fits most. I think this is a big cognitive dissonence being not noticed. Further those individuals who are not aligned with the coalition’s internal contradictions are not making enough noise. And this in a context where people on boht sides are daming each other. The Right’s coalition must have similar nuances and they are also not making enough noise, the ones who are not aligned with whatever contradictions their coalition has.
We have teams, and ‘patiotism’ to that team is overriding nuance.
Great. It is not trickling down yet.
I think that is the vast majority. Likewise on the Right. I used to be able to get thrive in the Left. Not always smoothly, but in general. Not anymore. Please see my posts as, shit, I lost my home, now they are as volatile as the Right. I would guess there are people on the Right who feel this way also.
Sure, but right now they are in power. Whatever internal battles are not affecting life on the ground. I could pick out a consistent lefty position on sex and gender and relate to that, but that’s an academic issue, and actually it would be one I could be damaged by if it was public. Or I can react to the whole thing. It is not like the whole thing is not being pushed. So the correct A belief is being pushed in the way it is being pushed in the context of B and C being pushed. That is the reality I face. To just push A without complexifying and reacting to the rest of the Left is problematic. If A was being pushed with such nuance, my reaction would be different. Trying to breathe here.
Sounds like a useful line. I don’t know exactly what you mean by ‘requiring that intersubjective facts be mutually consistent’, but my sense is that freedom needs to cut two ways or all ways. That each person need not be consistent, ok. But then why not let others not be fully consistent with your beliefs also. Keep them from being violent and not renting apartments to you, but let them have their subjective sense of your gender, also. Why must one utopia come today, and then for whom?
I keep wanting to come back to this, since my gut reaction is there is something fundamentally confused here, but I haven’t yet been able to tie this down. I certainly don’t think C3PO is male. I don’t think he exists. And beyond that I don’t think I, in the immersed in movie sense, though of him as male, but as made in male-ish form. Even if we go to a better example, I think, Ex Machina, where the robot looks like a beautiful woman and probably feels like it, when her metal parts are not exposed, even in those sequences where we are presented by her as seemingly human - with emotions and a subjectivity - in the back of my mind, I kept thinking - we have no idea what this things internal states are like. What is simulated, if there is an experiencer, let alone is it female. IOW I never decided it was human. Many do. We have many films these days that present machines as oh, so human, really inside. I don’t like this.
I feel like your argument is a kind of argument ad populum. Now it can’t be dismissed merely for this. If people believe wrong thing X, but this wrong thing X contradicts other beliefs they have, pointing this out to them can be an effective argument. However it doesn’t mean that believing X is right. Or that believing the Y, that really they should also believe, given their belief in X, is right.
We suspend disbelief, to varying degrees, when we enter fantasy worlds. I am not sure how that carries over into everyday life.
If the argument is, we suspend disbelief with C3PO, so we should suspect disbelief with transpeople, I don’t think that holds. I doubt it would be enough for the transperson either, since it entails a temporary being entertained by a fantasy relation to them, then walking away no longer suspending disbelief. I think, as an analogy, it ends up with some pretty poor analogies. Plastic surgeons and endocrinologists become special effects people, the latter being people whose job it is to make you think something is happening that is not happening, for example. Mona Lisa, sure we might refer to her as a woman, in the special as if thinking we do with art. We wouldn’t let the painting adopt a child.
I don’t think I’ve quite got this yet, but this is a first probe.