US Politics Mega-thread - Page 4001

On July 08 2023 22:34 KwarK wrote:
I would be very surprised if we saw trans women competing in the Olympics, for example, because it’s probably difficult to fully undo all biological advantages.

On July 08 2023 22:36 SEB2610 wrote:

How could we ever know with absolute certainty? Just because no test would be able to tell any difference does not mean there would be no difference.

Anyone is free to think of themselves as anything they please as far as I am concerned but I do not consider myself morally obligated to pretend to believe in anyone else’s beliefs. Want me to wish for you to live a good life with joy, health etc? You got it. Do I think we should be mean or cruel to people we disagree with? No. Do I vehemently oppose any attempt to coerce anyone to impose any kind of ideology? Yes.

On July 08 2023 22:37 ZeroByte13 wrote:
There was a trans woman in NZ team at the last Olympics, in weight lifting.
She didn't advance far though. But it seems that trans women are allowed to the highest level.

Regarding testosterone levels - I'm not a medic or scientist so I don't know enough about this to have my own opinion, but I heard that even when current testosterone level was lowered it doesn't revert all advantages (e.g. bone density and lung capacity) of growing up with high testosterone level.
But then I guess we are at uncharted territory with no clear way forward. Any solution will make someone unhappy (I'm talking only about athletes now, not politicians)

On July 08 2023 22:44 KwarK wrote:

Who is coercing anyone though? It’s almost all social pressure levied against individuals who are acting like assholes. An employee who gets fired for continually and maliciously deadnaming a trans colleague is fired for creating a hostile work environment, they’d get fired just as quickly if they did the same thing to a cis employee who had changed their name.

If you’re treating people with dignity and respect, and it sounds like you are, then you’re doing great.

On July 08 2023 17:27 BlackJack wrote:


That’s kind of how definitions work though, they define what is typical, not every single genetic mutation imaginable. If we say dogs have 4 legs you wouldn’t argue that definition doesn’t work because you know a dog with 3 legs.

XX chromosomes, vagina, uterus, fallopian tubes, ovaries, breasts

On July 08 2023 18:51 BlackJack wrote:
Right so your definitions are

A man is anyone that says they are a man
A woman is anyone that says they are a woman

It doesn't really tell us what they are saying they are though, does it?

On July 09 2023 00:09 SEB2610 wrote:

You think there’s nowhere in present day Western countries where there might be legal consequences for speech that contradicts the ideology that states that biological men can be women and vice versa? Such coercion is already happening under the guise of ‘combating hate speech’.

Note: I am not using ideology in a derogatory manner — I would also consider belief in biological men not being women an ideology.

As for work environments, I am all for freedom of association for companies not entangled with government. If whoever is in charge deems someone a malicious trouble-maker, be all means, let them fire them.

For companies entangled with government, however, the matter is not as straightforward in my eyes.

In any case, my idea of a good work environment is accommodation of each other within reason.

On July 08 2023 20:43 Acrofales wrote:

Except that at the end of the day, the only external difference between an XX chromosome person with a uterus and 2 breasts and an XXX chromosome person with s histerectomy and a double mastectomy (and plastic surgery), is what they might say if you ask them. So unless you're asking women to submit their medical records, you're just going to have to take their word for it in almost all cases.

As for lying, you're right. I might be bamboozled into accepting someone as being a woman who actually is a man and lying. My response to that is (1) so what, and (2) so can you.

On July 09 2023 00:13 ChristianS wrote:

I mean, traditionally “definitional” would mean in a “but-for” sense, as in “But for having four sides, a shape is not a square.” Words might have multiple definitional characteristics (4 sides, equal lengths, straight, closed shape), and without any one of them met, the thing isn’t a square. A dictionary can also present “typical” attributes if they want (e.g. “squares are usually drawn colored in with a single solid color, often black or red, with one of the sides parallel to the bottom of the page”) but none of those characteristics are definitional. All of them or some of them or none of them could be true in any particular case, and it would have no bearing on whether that case meets the definition.

But I actually agree with you that definitions don’t work that way in biological cases, I just don’t think you’re acknowledging the full implications of it. In short: biology is complex and there’s hardly anything you can say with absolute universality about a given population. There’s always mutations and crossing over events and epigenetics creating all kinds of permutations of possibilities (and that’s just at the genetic level). So sometimes you define one species and call it the “three-spotted finch,” and define another and call it the “four-spotted finch,” but then you go find actual specimens and find one with four spots that still has the other characteristics of 3-spotted finches, can only produce fertile offspring with them, etc. So you’re forced to say stuff like “That’s actually not a four-spotted finch, it’s a three-spotted finch that happens to have four spots” (which sounds very dumb but might actually be correct).

With regards to sex and gender, I once heard it summarized as “biological sex isn’t binary, it’s bimodal,” and I think that’s a decent way to think of it. If you’re observing a population of dots on a 2D graph, and you see that there’s a high density of them around (1,1), and a high density of them around (-1,-1), and low density everywhere else, it’s natural to draw a circle around each population and give them each a name. But how wide the circle is, and how you characterize the few dots you find around (-1,1) or w/e is pretty arbitrary. The names you’ve given are just tools of convenience, not some universal law of nature.

But if you grasp the fuzziness of biological definitions, such that they can’t have the traditional “but-for” definitional elements and always involve a fair bit of arbitrary line-drawing for convenience, why would you try to stake out a rhetorical position like “trans women aren’t women?” “Trans women” is already gonna be pretty undefined as a biological phenomenon, and even “women” is gonna be a vague, somewhat arbitrary circle around a population that has a huge amount of variance on any variable you care to measure. A person could meet every definitional element you provided:

and still be considered a “trans woman.” Meanwhile someone else could fail to meet most (maybe even all?) of those elements and still be considered a “cis woman.” It’s just not a useful game to play.

On July 09 2023 01:40 GreenHorizons wrote:

I think this inadvertently touches on something Drone raised which is: Do we need a gendered society?

What does the pro-con list look like for a gendered vs non-gendered society?

On July 09 2023 03:13 Sermokala wrote:

I'm being coerced to not sexually harass my coworkers, to not be racist to my coworkers, to not harass other people based on their religion, and any number of things in my day to day life. Does that make society a lesser place? People are not asking you to be perfect they're asking you to treat your fellow person with respect and dignity. No police are going to arrest you for not knowing what everyones name is at all times.

Just put in what some of us call "good faith effort" and you will be fine. The idea that learning peoples names and pronouns being something that is unreasonable is just so dumb and disingenuous. Its a level of basic respect that is expected for a thousand other things people are fine with. Again, if you are capable of learning how to pronounce someones name, you are capable of learning what pronoun they prefer to use. You shouldn't be aiming for cruelty as the default choice in life as the gop keeps telling you to.

On July 09 2023 05:35 BlackJack wrote:


You know of trans women (MTF) that have fallopian tubes, ovaries, uterus, vagina and XX chromosomes? I would think this to be extraordinarily rare, correct? I fundamentally disagree with your opinion that because there are these 0.1% outliers then the entire thing is all "fuzzy" and "arbitrary" that we should just abandon the whole binary concept altogether.

I think the best argument is to just say "man" and "woman" are gendered terms, not biological, and since everyone can pick their gender anyone can be a "man" or a "woman." Trying to go down this rabbit hole of rare genetic anomalies to argue that the biology of sex is ambiguous and arbitrary so as to cast doubt on the entire thing seems to be more driven by compassion than what is true.

On July 09 2023 06:19 StasisField wrote:
What stereotypes makes someone a "woman" is ever-evolving blackjack. From culture to culture, from decade to decade, the traits associated with being a man or a woman is always changing. Societies with 3+ genders have also been around for a very long time so it's not like this is some new thing being made up by the new generation or the crazy radical left. You say being able to declare yourself a woman "cheapens" what it means to be a woman but I really don't even know what is being cheapened. I honestly think you're just uncomfortable with trans people.

Edit: We also have the existence of intersex people who make up around 1.7% of the population which comes out to about 134,096,000 intersex people. We also have many variations beyond the XX and XY sex Chromosomes with these making up 1 in 400 males and 1 in 650 females which means there about 9,925,000 males with sex chromosome variations and 5,923,076 females with sex variations. These aren't insignificant numbers and don't fit neatly into a system where sex = gender.

Anne Fausto-Sterling and her co-authors suggest that the prevalence of "nondimorphic sexual development" might be as high as 1.7%. A study published by Leonard Sax reports that this figure includes conditions such as Klinefelter syndrome (XXY) which most clinicians do not recognize as intersex, and that if the term is understood to mean only "conditions in which chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex, or in which the phenotype is not classifiable as either male or female", the prevalence of intersex is about 0.018%

On July 09 2023 06:20 ChristianS wrote:

There’s a bunch of “atypical” biological phenomena that would deviate from various definitions we might try to provide of male or female. It doesn’t mean “male” or “female” are meaningless, but it does mean that any given definition you choose is going to be a somewhat arbitrary line. For instance: the part of the Y chromosome that causes you to develop a penis, testicles, etc. can get swapped to the X chromosome in a crossing over event, leading to either an apparent “female” with XY chromosomes, or an apparent “male” with XX chromosomes. They might never know it unless they had a karyotype done! If you were drawing, say, Punnett squares tracking color-blindness, you might want to know about it, otherwise for most purposes they would just be a cis male or cis female.

Hormone levels, genitalia, fertility all have a “typical” presentation but can have also have an atypical presentation that we would still consider “cis.” In some cases it’s rare, in other cases we don’t really have any idea how rare it is because people would normally just live their whole lives without realizing their biology was atypical in some way. And once you start getting into things like chimerism it really becomes clear that we’re not going to be able to divide the species into “male” and “female” boxes without making some extremely arbitrary calls. Introduce a third “other” box and you’re still going to have some pretty arbitrary calls about what counts as sufficiently atypical to go in the “other” box.

Words are abstractions that help us make sense of a complex world, but they often do so by eliding a lot of minute details that don’t fit the broad categories. Once we’re discussing those minute details, we shouldn’t convince ourselves those categories are actually universal laws of the universe and the details must be wrong.

On July 09 2023 05:56 BlackJack wrote:


Sure seems that way. I mean consider the modern woke definition of woman that I think Acrofales correctly states. A woman is anyone that says they are a woman. That means it takes literally 3 seconds to become a woman. Doesn't this cheapen the whole idea of gender identity in the first place? If anyone can do it in no time flat it really seems to take away a lot of what it means to be a woman. It seems most of the money and effort to becoming a woman is not the part where you become a woman, it takes nothing to declare yourself a woman, but to go out and buy the dresses and makeup and lipstick and heels to conform to the stereotypes of a typical woman.