Ecmandu wrote:You're born male, female or hermaphodite.
A computer is neither.
We all know that the bulk of jobs is in the service industry. Now that females work, sex appeal is more profitable, thus vast amounts of men are out of the most common job. The sex appeal is derived from sexual stratification which commodifies sex.
My point? It's more profitable to have a non sex computer program be female because of the stratification of number of partners (which creates a desperation), just like women having almost all the service industry jobs, leaving men to live with their mothers, or work in coal mines ...
Edit: in short, women make the company more money. Gays as well
Mad Man P wrote:I don't see why any language should be impoverished...
Carleas wrote:So, as I understand the concept of lying, it requires intentional deception, right? If so, then someone can't be both delusional and lying, because by virtue of their delusion, they believe what they're saying and are trying to accurately convey their (false) belief.
So, you have at least that problem in your position.
someone attempting to create accurate expectations in the minds of their audience is not "lying".
Mad Man P wrote:I don't see why any language should be impoverished...
Is this just an aesthetic judgement?
Dictionary wrote:of or denoting the sex that can bear offspring or produce eggs, distinguished biologically by the production of gametes (ova) which can be fertilized by male gametes.
Mad Man P wrote:You've lost the plot on this one.
I'm lying to aid in establishing another's delusion... there are at least two parties involved here.
Mad Man P wrote:As for your "forced" choice excuse... that's a nifty way to dismiss the perfect utility of such words.
Mad Man P wrote:Nope, factual observation.
Mad Man P wrote:What exactly am I to expect if you tell me a woman is about to enter the room?
Carleas wrote: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.
Mad Man P wrote:What exactly am I to expect if you tell me a woman is about to enter the room?
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?
Mad Man P wrote: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.
Mad Man P wrote:Spelling this out is going to sound painfully condescending, because it's yet again a matter of common sense...
Mad Man P wrote:Let's say this woman has been surgically altered to look like a lizard, I should probably give you a heads up about that.
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 of us the necessity to analyze this case.
dictionary wrote:Blonde: a person with fair or pale yellow hair
Brunette: a person having brown hair.
Woman: an adult human female
Female: of or denoting the sex that can bear offspring or produce eggs, distinguished biologically by the production of gametes (ova) which can be fertilized by male gametes.
Carleas wrote: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!)
[url=Dictionary.com]https://www.dictionary.com/browse/female?s=t[/url] wrote:Female:
...of, relating to, or characteristic of a female person; feminine:
Mirriam Webster wrote:Female:
... characteristic of girls, women, or the female sex : exhibiting femaleness
...
having some quality (such as small size or delicacy of sound) associated with the female sex
Wiktionary wrote:Female:
...Characteristic of this sex/gender.
Dictionary.com wrote:an adult female person.
Merriam Webster wrote:an adult female person
Wiktionary wrote:An adult female human.
Carleas wrote:If your best argument is quoting me a single dictionary definition
MMP wrote:I get that we're in the middle of culture war and that in this particular case our language is caught in the crossfire... that generates ambiguity and confusion and makes communicating across the gap difficult.
If I say transwomen are men, you can't then say I'm wrong and that they are women and expect that to track if you know what I meant was "biological sex"...
you can INSIST that I use language the way you propose but I see no great need to comply... Like I pointed out, I'd want to retain unambiguous words for the biological sexes.
Carleas wrote:My argument in this thread is that it's another accepted meaning of the words.
MMP wrote:Accepted by some... rejected by others
Carleas wrote:I hazard to guess that if a friend set you up with "a nice woman" on a blind date, you'd be pretty surprised if you showed up to find a post-op transman. "I said 'woman'", they might protest, and, unambiguous as that statement is, you really should have seen it coming.
MMP wrote: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.
Carleas wrote: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 of us the necessity to analyze this case.
MMP wrote: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.
Carleas wrote:My argument in this thread is that it's another accepted meaning of the words.
MMP wrote:Accepted by some... rejected by others
Karpel Tunnel wrote:Where do bull dykes get to go to the bathroom? Transvestites?
Carleas wrote: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 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.Carleas wrote:Karpel Tunnel wrote:Where do bull dykes get to go to the bathroom? Transvestites?
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.
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.Carleas wrote: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?
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.lso, 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.
Carleas wrote: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 don't see the pronouns as as strongly tied to biology
Mad Man P wrote:Well I do [see pronouns as as strongly tied to biology as "woman" and "man"]
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.Carleas wrote: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;
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.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.
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 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.
Karpel Tunnel wrote:There are people happy to be androgenous.
Karpel Tunnel wrote: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.
Carleas wrote:I don't think it's useful to point to different cases where we aren't willing to grant people their choice of identity
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