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Now that we have a new thread, in order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a complete and thorough read before posting! NOTE: When providing a source, please provide a very brief summary on what it's about and what purpose it adds to the discussion. The supporting statement should clearly explain why the subject is relevant and needs to be discussed. Please follow this rule especially for tweets.
Your supporting statement should always come BEFORE you provide the source.If you have any questions, comments, concern, or feedback regarding the USPMT, then please use this thread: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/website-feedback/510156-us-politics-thread |
For some people the first thing to do when encountering a contradiction or an exception to their perceived norm is to call it "untrue" because it is "abnormal". Whether or not it actually is a contradiction/exception doesn't matter. What matters is that the perception of a norm means that the presence of a contradiction to the norm must mean that the norm has been violated, and not that either the perception of the norm is false or that the contradiction is a norm in its very own right.
When you think about transgender people as abnormal, you're automatically setting off on a path filled with biases. It helps if you shed your understanding of "normal" to understand why transgender people exist. They exist because the only thing that's "abnormal" about them is our perception of them. They're not a contradiction to the external world, they're a contradiction to our perception (that is our inner, subjective world). They're as fundamental to existence as any other person would be. They're as "true" as you and I. The only difference is that they experience themselves differently.
When you understand that "gender" is a construct, and that gender dysphoria is not a response to input from the external world but instead it is an internal incongruency, then you can also understand transgender people. They're not picking and choosing a gender, their psychological condition is tied to their biological appearance and functionality. They have no other choice than to pick the gender that conforms with their psychology (edit: mistakenly wrote biology) if they want to live a life free from gender dysphoria. This is not because the available constructed genders are the perfect fit for them - it's because there's no better alternative (or maybe there is? But that's an entirely different, more complex chapter)
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On July 09 2023 06:13 SEB2610 wrote:Show nested quote +On July 09 2023 03:13 Sermokala wrote:On July 09 2023 00:09 SEB2610 wrote:On July 08 2023 22:44 KwarK wrote:On July 08 2023 22:36 SEB2610 wrote:On July 08 2023 11:54 Mohdoo wrote:
Just out of curiosity for anyone who has anything against trans people in whatever context:
If it were medically possible for transitioning to be a 100% biologically accurate process, where there are no physical differences between a trans/cis woman to the point that no amount of medical testing would indicate someone was trans, would you still have any biases you have? This is mostly a question for folks with views similar to Taelshin, who have been open about their belief that trans women are not women.
I was thinking about our conversations in this thread recently and started to wonder if people's views would be different if trans women truly were biologically identical. 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. 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. 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. 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. This may come as a surprise to you but it is in fact possible to consider a request unreasonable without being motivated by cruelty or hatred.
No one cares if you find something reasonable or unreasonable. I don't find it reasonable to be a fan of the green bay packers but it doesn't change me calling them a green bay Packers fan if they would rather not be called a cheese head or a packer backer.
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On July 09 2023 06:54 StasisField wrote:Show nested quote +On July 09 2023 06:49 BlackJack wrote:1.7% or 0.018% depending on whose number you go withAnne 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% That's still over 1.4 million people. Address the point I made instead of trying to dodge like always.
"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."
Based on the definition offered here, I don't know either. "A woman is someone that says they are a woman" doesn't mean anything at face value. You still have to describe what it means to be a woman to give any meaning to it. So if it doesn't mean anything how am I wrong to say that definition cheapens it?
As much as everyone wants to criticize my definition for not accounting for extremely rare genetic exceptions, does anyone else want to offer what they think makes a woman a woman?
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On July 09 2023 06:57 Salazarz wrote:
even though FtM transitions are just as common as MtF transitions are. MTF is at least 2x more popular, actually.
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Northern Ireland23759 Posts
On July 09 2023 01:40 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +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? 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?
It’s an intriguing question, I think it’s unarguable a lot of genderisation is very much a long term cultural construction. On the other hand, there are reasonably pronounced biological differences between the sexes, so perhaps a truly non-gendered society is an impossibility. A considerably less gendered society seems like it could be done however, but it’s whether it could functionally be totally removed is something I would have zero idea on.
And I suppose in such a hypothetical society trans people wouldn’t really exist as there’d be no gender to be dysphoric about
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On July 09 2023 06:56 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On July 09 2023 06:20 ChristianS wrote:On July 09 2023 05:35 BlackJack wrote:On July 09 2023 00:13 ChristianS wrote:On July 08 2023 17:27 BlackJack wrote:On July 08 2023 16:59 ChristianS wrote:On July 08 2023 16:53 BlackJack wrote:On July 08 2023 15:52 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On July 08 2023 14:54 BlackJack wrote:
I have no problem saying I’m NOT on team “trans women are women” even if that makes me a transphobic bigoted asshole or whatever. If transitioning were a 100% biologically indistinguishable process then I would be on team “trans women are women.” 1. Would you mind elaborating on precisely what criteria would need to match for trans women to be "100% biologically indistinguishable" from cis women? Would they need a vagina? Breasts? XX chromosomes? Wider hips? Shorter? Physically slower or weaker? Certain hormones within certain ranges? Other things? I'm wondering what makes a woman a woman, in your view. 2. What if they had all those things but still didn't look like / pass as a woman visually (where your brain assumed he/him)? Would that person still be a woman to you? 3. What if they didn't have all those things, yet still looked like / passed as a woman visually (where your brain assumed she/her). Would that person still not be a woman to you? Yeah, XX chromosomes, vagina, uterus, fallopian tubes, ovaries, breasts, etc. sounds like a good start. What makes a woman a woman in your view? I’m pretty sure a person could be missing nearly every one of those criteria and you’d still consider them a woman. This is the problem with these definition questions, people tend to jump to things that are typical rather than things that are actually required elements. 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. 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: XX chromosomes, vagina, uterus, fallopian tubes, ovaries, breasts 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. 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. 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. I feel like this post doesn't really address my point. I'm happy to acknowledge that no definition perfectly accounts for every single genetic anomaly. My objection is that I don't see how it logically follows that the rare genetic anomaly gives you the leeway to essentially say "See, your definition doesn't work so we might as well just open it up for everybody regardless of their biology."
I don’t think I ever said “just open it up for everybody regardless of biology.” But there’s a tendency to throw out the word “biology” to vaguely gesture at some scientific reality that they’re sure supports their point of view, but when pressed they can’t actually enumerate it, and I’m pretty confident it doesn’t exist. Which means the guy repeatedly shouting “trans women aren’t women” isn’t some Defender of Objective Truth, he’s just a guy choosing an arbitrary definition like anybody else, and then being a dick about it.
If you have a purpose in mind for the distinction, you can better choose a definition that fits the purpose. If you’re trying to determine who might be a carrier for color-blindness, then certainly you might not wind up treating trans people (or maybe some cis people!) as belonging to their “chosen” group. But in most social contexts, meanwhile, none of the biological distinctions are particularly relevant. In which case “how does this person prefer to be gendered” probably is the most relevant question for whether they should be considered a woman for social purposes.
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On July 09 2023 08:01 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On July 09 2023 06:56 BlackJack wrote:On July 09 2023 06:20 ChristianS wrote:On July 09 2023 05:35 BlackJack wrote:On July 09 2023 00:13 ChristianS wrote:On July 08 2023 17:27 BlackJack wrote:On July 08 2023 16:59 ChristianS wrote:On July 08 2023 16:53 BlackJack wrote:On July 08 2023 15:52 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On July 08 2023 14:54 BlackJack wrote:
I have no problem saying I’m NOT on team “trans women are women” even if that makes me a transphobic bigoted asshole or whatever. If transitioning were a 100% biologically indistinguishable process then I would be on team “trans women are women.” 1. Would you mind elaborating on precisely what criteria would need to match for trans women to be "100% biologically indistinguishable" from cis women? Would they need a vagina? Breasts? XX chromosomes? Wider hips? Shorter? Physically slower or weaker? Certain hormones within certain ranges? Other things? I'm wondering what makes a woman a woman, in your view. 2. What if they had all those things but still didn't look like / pass as a woman visually (where your brain assumed he/him)? Would that person still be a woman to you? 3. What if they didn't have all those things, yet still looked like / passed as a woman visually (where your brain assumed she/her). Would that person still not be a woman to you? Yeah, XX chromosomes, vagina, uterus, fallopian tubes, ovaries, breasts, etc. sounds like a good start. What makes a woman a woman in your view? I’m pretty sure a person could be missing nearly every one of those criteria and you’d still consider them a woman. This is the problem with these definition questions, people tend to jump to things that are typical rather than things that are actually required elements. 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. 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: XX chromosomes, vagina, uterus, fallopian tubes, ovaries, breasts 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. 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. 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. I feel like this post doesn't really address my point. I'm happy to acknowledge that no definition perfectly accounts for every single genetic anomaly. My objection is that I don't see how it logically follows that the rare genetic anomaly gives you the leeway to essentially say "See, your definition doesn't work so we might as well just open it up for everybody regardless of their biology." I don’t think I ever said “just open it up for everybody regardless of biology.” But there’s a tendency to throw out the word “biology” to vaguely gesture at some scientific reality that they’re sure supports their point of view, but when pressed they can’t actually enumerate it, and I’m pretty confident it doesn’t exist. Which means the guy repeatedly shouting “trans women aren’t women” isn’t some Defender of Objective Truth, he’s just a guy choosing an arbitrary definition like anybody else, and then being a dick about it. If you have a purpose in mind for the distinction, you can better choose a definition that fits the purpose. If you’re trying to determine who might be a carrier for color-blindness, then certainly you might not wind up treating trans people (or maybe some cis people!) as belonging to their “chosen” group. But in most social contexts, meanwhile, none of the biological distinctions are particularly relevant. In which case “how does this person prefer to be gendered” probably is the most relevant question for whether they should be considered a woman for social purposes.
Simply put, I think you're getting way too much mileage out of the word "arbitrary" when characterizing how we distinguish between men and women
Edit: btw I’ve replied to one of your posts many months ago and said it’s very reasonable to say that although trans men are not literal man out of respect I will refer to them as men and use masculine pronouns. Is that not a perfectly reasonable take without having to go the extra mile to declare our distinction between man and woman is arbitrary because it may only account for 99.9% of cases and not 100%?
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On July 09 2023 05:12 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On July 08 2023 20:43 Acrofales wrote:On July 08 2023 20:25 BlackJack wrote:On July 08 2023 19:54 Acrofales wrote:On July 08 2023 19:42 ZeroByte13 wrote:On July 08 2023 19:27 Acrofales wrote:
Do you agree that someone who says they're a protestant is a protestant? And someone who says they're a muslim is a muslim? It's very probable but not necessarily true. I might say I'm a protestant if this makes something more convenient for next 2 hours, for example. Does this make me one though? I can say all sort of things, doesn't mean any of them are true. Sure, and lying is still bad. What's your point here? In my example you invented a XXX chromosome woman with a total hysterectomy and a double mastectomy just to try to show how my definition wouldn't fit. For yours I don't need to invent anyone and I can just disprove it by using myself and saying "I am a woman." By your definition you have to believe me to be a woman and yet everyone in this thread would know that's not the case. When my definition needs an extreme genetic anomaly to disprove and yours can be undone by anyone with a voice I'd say I'm closer to the truth. 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. Nope. The crucial difference here is that a liar may be able to bamboozle me into believing they are a woman when they are not. To you, the liar still is a literal woman just because they’ve said so.
How is there a difference there? You are not privy to any objective truth about that person's womanhood, insofar as such an objetive truth exists for a sociopsychologial construct. All you know is that that person said they are a woman. You were lied to, that person doesn't actually think of themselves as a woman. We both erroneously believe they are, because they said they were. We were both bamboozled and it had the exact same consequence in both cases (whatever it was).
You seem to think that womanhood can be measured in some way. It cannot. There is no magic femalometer for you to measure how womany someone is. As was pointed out, someone can have all the biological characteristics of a female, yet not feel like one on the inside. And someone can be missing most or even all of the biological characteristics of a female, yet feel like one on the inside.
On July 09 2023 05:56 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On July 09 2023 01:40 GreenHorizons wrote: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? 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? 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.
So following this reasoning, it should be possible to change genders, it should just be expensive? Why?
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On July 09 2023 08:19 Acrofales wrote:Show nested quote +On July 09 2023 05:12 BlackJack wrote:On July 08 2023 20:43 Acrofales wrote:On July 08 2023 20:25 BlackJack wrote:On July 08 2023 19:54 Acrofales wrote:On July 08 2023 19:42 ZeroByte13 wrote:On July 08 2023 19:27 Acrofales wrote:
Do you agree that someone who says they're a protestant is a protestant? And someone who says they're a muslim is a muslim? It's very probable but not necessarily true. I might say I'm a protestant if this makes something more convenient for next 2 hours, for example. Does this make me one though? I can say all sort of things, doesn't mean any of them are true. Sure, and lying is still bad. What's your point here? In my example you invented a XXX chromosome woman with a total hysterectomy and a double mastectomy just to try to show how my definition wouldn't fit. For yours I don't need to invent anyone and I can just disprove it by using myself and saying "I am a woman." By your definition you have to believe me to be a woman and yet everyone in this thread would know that's not the case. When my definition needs an extreme genetic anomaly to disprove and yours can be undone by anyone with a voice I'd say I'm closer to the truth. 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. Nope. The crucial difference here is that a liar may be able to bamboozle me into believing they are a woman when they are not. To you, the liar still is a literal woman just because they’ve said so. How is there a difference there? You are not privy to any objective truth about that person's womanhood, insofar as such an objetive truth exists for a sociopsychologial construct. All you know is that that person said they are a woman. You were lied to, that person doesn't actually think of themselves as a woman. We both erroneously believe they are, because they said they were. We were both bamboozled and it had the exact same consequence in both cases (whatever it was). You seem to think that womanhood can be measured in some way. It cannot. There is no magic femalometer for you to measure how womany someone is. As was pointed out, someone can have all the biological characteristics of a female, yet not feel like one on the inside. And someone can be missing most or even all of the biological characteristics of a female, yet feel like one on the inside. Show nested quote +On July 09 2023 05:56 BlackJack wrote:On July 09 2023 01:40 GreenHorizons wrote: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? 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? 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. So following this reasoning, it should be possible to change genders, it should just be expensive? Why?
The difference is there is an objective truth, regardless if I’m privy to it. For you there is no objective truth and womanhood is entirely subjective I.e the only thing that makes someone a woman is saying they are a woman.
Is your definition actually “a woman is anyone that says they are a woman as long as they really mean it.”? Do you get to decide who really means it or not? Seems to me you’d have to accept the liars just as much as anyone else or the whole exercise falls apart.
Also no, I’m not saying it should be expensive to become a woman. I’m saying you just can’t become a woman. You can become a transgender woman though and I think that should be just as easy as declaring yourself one.
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United States41956 Posts
On July 09 2023 09:07 BlackJack wrote:
You can become a transgender woman though and I think that should be just as easy as declaring yourself one.
Wait what?
Nobody was saying you could become a cis woman by declaring yourself to be one. That'd be absurd.
It was always people saying you could become a trans woman, not a cis woman.
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On July 09 2023 07:43 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On July 09 2023 06:54 StasisField wrote:On July 09 2023 06:49 BlackJack wrote:1.7% or 0.018% depending on whose number you go withAnne 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% That's still over 1.4 million people. Address the point I made instead of trying to dodge like always. "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." Based on the definition offered here, I don't know either. "A woman is someone that says they are a woman" doesn't mean anything at face value. You still have to describe what it means to be a woman to give any meaning to it. So if it doesn't mean anything how am I wrong to say that definition cheapens it? As much as everyone wants to criticize my definition for not accounting for extremely rare genetic exceptions, does anyone else want to offer what they think makes a woman a woman?
So there is no "cheapening" what a woman is because if there was you would have actually answered my question. But you dodged because you have no real answer. Glad to know the fake-outrage is alive and well with Blackjack!
There is no set "meaning" for being a woman. If there was, what a "woman" is in the eyes of society would be constant throughout history and society and we wouldn't have societies that found it necessary to use more than 2 genders to describe all the different people in said societies. That's why people aren't offering you what a woman is beyond "someone who thinks they're a woman."
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On July 09 2023 08:11 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On July 09 2023 08:01 ChristianS wrote:On July 09 2023 06:56 BlackJack wrote:On July 09 2023 06:20 ChristianS wrote:On July 09 2023 05:35 BlackJack wrote:On July 09 2023 00:13 ChristianS wrote:On July 08 2023 17:27 BlackJack wrote:On July 08 2023 16:59 ChristianS wrote:On July 08 2023 16:53 BlackJack wrote:On July 08 2023 15:52 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
[quote]
1. Would you mind elaborating on precisely what criteria would need to match for trans women to be "100% biologically indistinguishable" from cis women? Would they need a vagina? Breasts? XX chromosomes? Wider hips? Shorter? Physically slower or weaker? Certain hormones within certain ranges? Other things? I'm wondering what makes a woman a woman, in your view.
2. What if they had all those things but still didn't look like / pass as a woman visually (where your brain assumed he/him)? Would that person still be a woman to you?
3. What if they didn't have all those things, yet still looked like / passed as a woman visually (where your brain assumed she/her). Would that person still not be a woman to you? Yeah, XX chromosomes, vagina, uterus, fallopian tubes, ovaries, breasts, etc. sounds like a good start. What makes a woman a woman in your view? I’m pretty sure a person could be missing nearly every one of those criteria and you’d still consider them a woman. This is the problem with these definition questions, people tend to jump to things that are typical rather than things that are actually required elements. 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. 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: XX chromosomes, vagina, uterus, fallopian tubes, ovaries, breasts 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. 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. 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. I feel like this post doesn't really address my point. I'm happy to acknowledge that no definition perfectly accounts for every single genetic anomaly. My objection is that I don't see how it logically follows that the rare genetic anomaly gives you the leeway to essentially say "See, your definition doesn't work so we might as well just open it up for everybody regardless of their biology." I don’t think I ever said “just open it up for everybody regardless of biology.” But there’s a tendency to throw out the word “biology” to vaguely gesture at some scientific reality that they’re sure supports their point of view, but when pressed they can’t actually enumerate it, and I’m pretty confident it doesn’t exist. Which means the guy repeatedly shouting “trans women aren’t women” isn’t some Defender of Objective Truth, he’s just a guy choosing an arbitrary definition like anybody else, and then being a dick about it. If you have a purpose in mind for the distinction, you can better choose a definition that fits the purpose. If you’re trying to determine who might be a carrier for color-blindness, then certainly you might not wind up treating trans people (or maybe some cis people!) as belonging to their “chosen” group. But in most social contexts, meanwhile, none of the biological distinctions are particularly relevant. In which case “how does this person prefer to be gendered” probably is the most relevant question for whether they should be considered a woman for social purposes. Simply put, I think you're getting way too much mileage out of the word "arbitrary" when characterizing how we distinguish between men and women Edit: btw I’ve replied to one of your posts many months ago and said it’s very reasonable to say that although trans men are not literal man out of respect I will refer to them as men and use masculine pronouns. Is that not a perfectly reasonable take without having to go the extra mile to declare our distinction between man and woman is arbitrary because it may only account for 99.9% of cases and not 100%?
You don’t need me to tell you you’re reasonable, man. “Out of respect I will refer to them [how they want to be referred to]” is all I’d ask from people for most social purposes, maybe with a tracked on “and not be fucking weird about it” (you know better than me whether that’s an issue for you, but I have no reason to think so).
But you seem to be under the impression that when (out of respect) you refer to that trans man as a man, you’re betraying some deeper Biologically True sense of the word in order to be polite, and I just don’t think that’s the case. For scientific purposes, dividing all humanity into a “man” box and a “woman” box was always a simplified model that doesn’t deal well with exceptional cases. I think those exceptional cases are a lot more common than the 0.1% you’re assuming, but more to the point, that trans man you’re talking to *is one of the exceptional cases*.
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On July 08 2023 11:54 Mohdoo wrote:
Just out of curiosity for anyone who has anything against trans people in whatever context:
If it were medically possible for transitioning to be a 100% biologically accurate process, where there are no physical differences between a trans/cis woman to the point that no amount of medical testing would indicate someone was trans, would you still have any biases you have? This is mostly a question for folks with views similar to Taelshin, who have been open about their belief that trans women are not women.
I was thinking about our conversations in this thread recently and started to wonder if people's views would be different if trans women truly were biologically identical.
I have seen this question before. And I think it actually touches on another sort of "trans" that being transhumanism. I think some people would insist that even the perfectly engineered new woman lacked the qualia of a true woman. Some spirit and knowledge that is built trough living an entire life as a infant girl, through childhood as a girl, into a teenager, and then becoming a woman.
At the same time this question becomes interesting technologically, we will also be asking, "what is a human?" Is a guy who has modified himself to be able to pick up cars, never age, and now has a 400 IQ still a human? Perhaps at that time the words man, woman, and human will lose their usefulness. Perhaps not, I can't see that far. But as for now, for most of my lifetime those words have had useful meanings for everyday life, and only recently has the usefulness of the former two of them been under assault.
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On July 09 2023 09:22 StasisField wrote:Show nested quote +On July 09 2023 07:43 BlackJack wrote:On July 09 2023 06:54 StasisField wrote:On July 09 2023 06:49 BlackJack wrote:1.7% or 0.018% depending on whose number you go withAnne 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% That's still over 1.4 million people. Address the point I made instead of trying to dodge like always. "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." Based on the definition offered here, I don't know either. "A woman is someone that says they are a woman" doesn't mean anything at face value. You still have to describe what it means to be a woman to give any meaning to it. So if it doesn't mean anything how am I wrong to say that definition cheapens it? As much as everyone wants to criticize my definition for not accounting for extremely rare genetic exceptions, does anyone else want to offer what they think makes a woman a woman? So there is no "cheapening" what a woman is because if there was you would have actually answered my question. But you dodged because you have no real answer. Glad to know the fake-outrage is alive and well with Blackjack! There is no set "meaning" for being a woman. If there was, what a "woman" is in the eyes of society would be constant throughout history and society and we wouldn't have societies that found it necessary to use more than 2 genders to describe all the different people in said societies. That's why people aren't offering you what a woman is beyond "someone who thinks they're a woman."
If there is no set meaning for being a woman, then everyone can attach different meaning to it. So person who identify self as a woman may have totally different idea what being a women mean, than any other person. Why cis woman should prioritize the meaning attached to it by trans women, rather than the one she attaches to it herself?
Somewhat on the matter:
I actually think that biggest issue in acceptance of trans people are actually LGBTQ+ activists. Some recently suggested vocabulary/definitions in the name of inclusivity:
Birthing person
Bonus hole (aka vagina)
Lesbian - non-man attracted to non-men
This looks like something from "Handmaid's Tale", if they wanted to turn people hostile on purpose, they would have a hard time beating that.
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On July 09 2023 11:08 Razyda wrote:
I actually think that biggest issue in acceptance of trans people are actually LGBTQ+ activists. Some recently suggested vocabulary/definitions in the name of inclusivity:
Birthing person
Bonus hole (aka vagina)
Lesbian - non-man attracted to non-men
This looks like something from "Handmaid's Tale", if they wanted to turn people hostile on purpose, they would have a hard time beating that.
Considering that hostility to trans people often manifests in the form of violence, I would say that the biggest problem is the violence.
If you suggested that the new word for “tree” should be “frumble,” and then I killed you, the biggest problem in that scenario is not that you made a crazy suggestion, it’s that I’m a murderous psycho.
Some people just hate trans people and wish they didn’t exist. If we are ranking the issues in acceptance of trans people, that one is the biggest.
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On July 09 2023 11:51 JimmiC wrote:
And the the other issue is some fear of being “tricked” into sex with a “man”. The latter I have heard a few times. Regarding this I heard conflicting opinions.
Some say trans folks absolutely should mention this when they meet new people on, say, Tinder.
And some say they shouldn't, and some even think it's actually dangerous to mention that.
I never used Tinder so can't say anything about this, but I'd think in general there's a higher chance of violence if this information is hidden intitially and then revealed later, compared to when it's said upfront. So people who are not interested don't waste their time.
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I absolutely agree with what JimmiC said.
Let people know and decide if they're interested.
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EPT
