The left eats JK Rowling over transgender comments

[Angra Mainyu]

Assuming for the moment that we interpret biological sex to refer to one's chromosomal makeup, a biological male with androgen insensitivity syndrome who was classified as female at birth will not have to transition if they want to live their life as a woman.

I've seen that assumption a lot. Why? How the heck is androgen insensitivity syndrome an iota less biological than the number of X chromosomes? What makes such a person any more "a biological male with androgen insensitivity syndrome" than "a biological female with a deactivated Y chromosome."? For the presumably hundred-thousand-odd years that words for male and female have existed, people with that disorder have generally been included in the female category. Since when do microscopes trump usage as a determiner for the meaning of words?

(There's a "House" episode in which the protagonist doctor ultimately diagnoses a girl's symptoms to have been caused by testicular cancer, and informs her father about his so-called "son's" condition. But being a scriptwriter for a medical TV show isn't a qualification in biology. Or linguistics.)

Indeed.

But for a related reason, I do not believe that the meaning of the words "man" and "woman" has changed. Briefly, I think it would be akin to changing the meaning of "ill" and "healthy" or at least "red" and "green". Slightly less briefly:

As you mention, words for male and female presumably existed for hundred-thousand-odd years. In fact, I would say that for tens of millions of years at least, our ancestors could tell females from males (at least, of their own species), under some intuitive concept of "female" and "male" (not as complex as a human context, but still).

Now, there are some differences between those categories of course: For example, ill/health seem to have the same concepts across human societies, whereas color concepts vary to some extent. That's understandable because (among other reasons) people care about health and illness much more than they do about color, but still, color concepts vary but the classification is always based on human color vision. For example, the (slightly fuzzy) line between colors might vary, but I don't think one can find a human society that classifies say (99% of green stuff + 1% of red stuff) as one color and some other color for almost all red + a little green.

Where does sex stand?

I would expect it's less important to nearly all people than health/illness, but overall more than colors (even people not interested in having sex, given the relevance of sex differences in human societies, not all of which are the result of cultural variation). But even assuming it's overall not more important to humans than color, the 99% green + 1% red would still not happen.

Suppose that someone said that for some reason, they want to redefine words as follows:

R1:

cis green:= green
cis red: = red.

green (new def): something with (99% of green stuff + 1% of red stuff)

red (new def): something similar in reverse.

(and something similar for trans green, etc.)

Moreover, they want to keep saying "green" and "red" in nearly all conversations, and only use "cis green", "cis red", etc. in a very small percentage of cases.

I think even if 99% of the population were to try, the vast majority would fail, and would keep using the words (at least in nearly all cases). A few very smart and rational people would pull it off and change how they regularly use the words, but for the most part, the meaning would stay. And a major obstacle would be that if they were to redefine the words as above, then they would not want to mean "green" and "red" (new defs) anymore, but "cis green" and "cis red", because those are concepts that align reasonably well with human color vision, rather than the new ones.

What if they did not explicitly state that intent to change the meaning, but they tried anyway, trying to learn the new concepts by pointing at stuff?
I think that that would fail too: either the meaning would not change (probably), or people would usually say "cis green", "cis red", etc., precisely because of how the concepts allign with human color vision. In other words, even if this particularly difficult change in the meaning of the words is achievable (much easier would be to come up with new words that do not closely resemble the previous ones), that would not change the classifications human monkeys actually care about, and would want to talk about, in the vast majority of cases.

Now, maybe I'm wrong about the above and female and male are not even like red or green. But I do not believe I am, because one can just look at the behavior of almost any thing (including all monkeys as far as I can tell) to see that the classification between females and males is relevant in all of their societies - bonobos too, of course. One would expect that anything smart enough would have words that track their intuitive classification, and that those words would be used regularly.

I might be missing some piece of evidence here (and if so, I would actually appreciate the input ), but I'm inclined to think this change very probably has not happened.

There is another difficulty, even assuming the color or illness analogy fails:

I actually do not think that, for the most part, people do not seem to understand themselves as talking about something different now when they say "woman" or "man" than they were talking about 30 years go for example (assuming older people). Many might believe (mistakenly, I think) that some of the people they thought were women were actually men, and vice versa.

But - at least in most of the cases I have encountered, and of course with exceptions - they do not behave themselves as if they believed that they meant something else 30 years ago.

 

[repoman]

In addition to the large corporation Human Resource industrial complex pushing these concepts there is the effect of the extremely squeaky wheels of social media getting the grease of concessions from the rest of us.

The Last of US 2 is under fire for deadnaming a character even though it was shown that this action is done by despicable people.

https://www.inverse.com/gaming/last-of-us-2-deadname-lev-controversy-explained

Last of Us Part II deadnaming prompts outcry from LGBTQ+ community and allies

There are no brakes on this train.

Metaphor, you are 100% going to lose this culture war skirmish unfortunately.

Speaking of getting angry about portrayals and events one doesn't like. Once I massively tweaked my lat that lasted for months doing something dumb at the gym. At the time of recovering I saw The Rock do something similar in a movie (except he grabbed a bar after falling like 10 meters) and almost turned it off from feeling a psychic twinge, lol.

Yes, that is sort of the twinge that a trans may have for these scenes, but for the large amount of non trans who play the game, do these scenes help make deadnaming become less common?

 

[Metaphor]

In addition to the large corporation Human Resource industrial complex pushing these concepts there is the effect of the extremely squeaky wheels of social media getting the grease of concessions from the rest of us.

The Last of US 2 is under fire for deadnaming a character even though it was shown that this action is done by despicable people.

https://www.inverse.com/gaming/last-of-us-2-deadname-lev-controversy-explained

Last of Us Part II deadnaming prompts outcry from LGBTQ+ community and allies

There are no brakes on this train.

Metaphor, you are 100% going to lose this culture war skirmish unfortunately.

I've pretty much regarded the battle as lost for a while now. I didn't know about the Last of Us 2, but I do know Rowling got into similar trouble because she wrote one character making a threat to a trans character in one of her novels.

The proscription on deadnaming--even in fiction--is Orwellian. I don't mean that lightly. Have you read Caitlyn Jenner's wikipedia article? It goes to such lengths to refrain from pronoun use in the athletic history section it is near-unreadable.

I've asked multiple people multiple times in this thread 'what is a woman?'

None have answered.

 

[Arctish]

I've given it several times in this thread. A woman is an adult human female.

How do you determine if someone is female?

See - no. I gave you a definition and I'm not getting into an endless recursion exercise until I hear yours.

If it looks like this discussion will be endlessly recursive, that's probably because it's based on circular reasoning: a woman is a mature human female and a human female is, or will become, a woman upon achieving maturity.

There's more to being a woman that external genitalia, internal reproductive organs, chromosomes, and hormones. There's also the psychological and sociological factors that influence how one self-identifies and is perceived by others. It's a complicated concept.

I think your definition is useful in a general, broad brush kind of way. But it falls short when discussing all the possible permutations of sex and gender among human beings. There's a lot more possibilities than 'males produce sperm' and 'female can gestate babies'.


Here's a very interesting article about that very thing:

My daughter was not of woman born. That is a concept that has fascinated people through the ages.

My daughter's gestation was perfectly “natural,” I should point out--but I carried her, and I was never of the female sex; I am diagnosed as "true gonadal intersex.” I was assigned female at birth, and was living as such when I gave birth to her, but I never identified as a woman, and am now legally male.

A lot of myths circulate around the topic of intersex fertility, many of them perpetuated by doctors. They all relate to the current Western insistence on the ideology of sex dyadism. That ideology holds that there are two and only two sexes, and that this is required by “nature” in order to perpetuate the human species. In fact, sex is a spectrum (see here and here for more information). About one in 150 people has some intersex characteristic. However, in contemporary Western society we are hidden away, medically “corrected,” erased. And often this erasure is bound up in rhetoric about fertility....

... Sometimes intersex people assigned to the female sex inseminate a partner, or male-assigned intersex people become pregnant. In the first half of the 20th century, when intersex children were rarely if ever surgically sex assigned, and doctors wrote about “cases of hermaphroditism” they encountered as adults, this was a popular topic in medical journal articles, but such is not the case today. Since there is no reason why intersex people should be born with less capacity for fertility that in the past, there are two possible explanations. Either medical interventions are rendering more intersex individuals infertile, or doctors have no incentive to publish about what they would deem “sex assignment failure.” A person a doctor has assigned female is not “supposed” to impregnate anyone, thereby supposedly providing embarrassing proof they should have been assigned male. The idea that someone might actually be happy with a female sex assignment and also pleased to be able to contribute to the conception of a child by providing sperm in the way their body permits does not enter the picture at all. The dyadic gender ideology doctors impose awkwardly onto intersex people is again revealed.

The author, Dr. Cary Gabriel Costello, was certainly was capable of fulfilling the female reproductive role, which makes him female as you defined it. But he isn't female. He's a male who has some female characteristics in addition to his male characteristics. The idea that he had to 'transition' to become a male is illogical. He already was male, even when he was pregnant. But our society has difficulty recognizing that.

I think it's time to update the categories we use when sorting people by sex and gender to better reflect reality. There's more than just males and females among our fellow humans.

ETA: and the less sexist our society becomes, the less our 'assigned sex' it will matter in our everyday lives.

 

[Metaphor]

If it looks like this discussion will be endlessly recursive, that's probably because it's based on circular reasoning: a woman is a mature human female and a human female is, or will become, a woman upon achieving maturity.

No: you want it to be circular, and you expect it to be circular based on the use of 'female'. You didn't question that women are adults and humans, even though I didn't define those either.

There's more to being a woman that external genitalia, internal reproductive organs, chromosomes, and hormones. There's also the psychological and sociological factors that influence how one self-identifies and is perceived by others. It's a complicated concept.

You haven't given a definition of woman yet. How can I know what you think is involved until you tell me what you think is involved?

The author, Dr. Cary Gabriel Costello, was certainly was capable of fulfilling the female reproductive role, which makes him female as you defined it. But he isn't female. He's a male who has some female characteristics in addition to his male characteristics. The idea that he had to 'transition' to become a male is illogical. He already was male, even when he was pregnant.

I didn't define female. I defined 'woman'.

The existence of intersex people does not mean sex isn't real or that sex in mammals is not functionally binary, because it is.

Also, this constant reference to intersex people is a furphy. Most trans people are not intersex.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I've given it several times in this thread. A woman is an adult human female.

How do you determine if someone is female?

See - no. I gave you a definition and I'm not getting into an endless recursion exercise until I hear yours.

You're the one engaging in recursion. You're basically saying a female is a female--not meaningful. What measurements do you make to determine that an entity is male, what measurements do you make to determine an entity is female?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Intersex is not a third sex. Rather, what it's saying is that sex is a range with the vast majority of data points being at one end or the other.

I hesitate about this. I don't think intersex is a third sex... but neither do I think that sex is a spectrum. I find it similar to noting that sometimes snakes end up having two heads, and then concluding that the number of heads in a snake is a spectrum.

Heads are discrete. You don't get a snake with an extra half head.

A friend of mine has Kalman syndrome, which is quite rare. Her pituitary gland didn't fully form during gestation. As a result, she has no nasal bulbs, and is congenitally anosmic. In addition, because of that malformation of her pituitary gland, she is unable to enter puberty on her own. Her adrenal function is fine, so she gains height, and grows leg hair and armpit hair... but her hips won't widen, her breasts won't develop, she won't experience menarche, and some of her body hair won't thicken on it's own. For all of that to happen, she needs to take estrogen supplements.

She's no less female for that. She's not intersex, she's not a third sex. Her instruction set just skipped a step.

You don't seem to understand intersex. You're describing a failure to develop, not an intersex condition. Intersex is someone displaying some characteristics of both sexes. For example, the guy mentioned upthread with a uterus. (Although that was probably an absorbed twin rather than true intersex development.)

 

[Arctish]

No: you want it to be circular, and you expect it to be circular based on the use of 'female'. You didn't question that women are adults and humans, even though I didn't define those either.

I don't see a need to be really, really wordy and explain everything in excruciating detail. Not yet anyway.

I'm focusing on how sex and gender are understood and assigned, not how hominids are sorted by genus or how maturity is determined to have been achieved.

You haven't given a definition of woman yet. How can I know what you think is involved until you tell me what you think is involved?

I don't have a definition already worked out. It's a complicated concept that involves a lot of factors. I use the default definition in Standard American English when speaking in general terms. When I'm speaking about someone in particular I use whatever designation they give themselves. I figure they know more about themselves than I do, so I defer to their judgement.

The author, Dr. Cary Gabriel Costello, was certainly was capable of fulfilling the female reproductive role, which makes him female as you defined it. But he isn't female. He's a male who has some female characteristics in addition to his male characteristics. The idea that he had to 'transition' to become a male is illogical. He already was male, even when he was pregnant.

I didn't define female. I defined 'woman'.

True, you didn't define 'female', which makes the definition you gave for woman ( "A woman is an adult human female.") meaningless.

The existence of intersex people does not mean sex isn't real or that sex in mammals is not functionally binary, because it is.

Also, this constant reference to intersex people is a furphy. Most trans people are not intersex.

The existence of intersex people challenges the fundamental assumptions behind the simple binary system of sorting people into just two sexes.

If your sorting system can't handle variations you already know exist, then your system needs improvement. And if sorting people into categories results in some of them saying they have been assigned to the wrong category, pay attention. You might be making assumptions about which group they belong to based on faulty or incomplete information. Or maybe you just made a mistake.

 

[Metaphor]

See - no. I gave you a definition and I'm not getting into an endless recursion exercise until I hear yours.

You're the one engaging in recursion. You're basically saying a female is a female--not meaningful. What measurements do you make to determine that an entity is male, what measurements do you make to determine an entity is female?

No. I did not say that. You can tell I didn't say that, because I did not define 'female'.

I asked for anybody else in this thread to answer the question 'what is a woman?' I've had no takers.

Someone asked for my definition of woman. I gave it. And now, instead of providing their definition, they are requesting clarification of the words in mine. Non. If you disagree with my definition of 'woman', provide your own.

 

[Metaphor]

I don't have a definition already worked out. It's a complicated concept that involves a lot of factors. I use the default definition in Standard American English when speaking in general terms. When I'm speaking about someone in particular I use whatever designation they give themselves. I figure they know more about themselves than I do, so I defer to their judgement.

That is not a definition.

True, you didn't define 'female', which makes the definition you gave for woman ( "A woman is an adult human female.") meaningless.

No. All words are defined by other words. If having words to define 'woman' makes the definition meaningless, all words and all dictionaries and all definitions are meaningless.

I'll point out that you did not decide that using the words 'adult', and 'human' made my definition meaningless.

The existence of intersex people challenges the fundamental assumptions behind the simple binary system of sorting people into just two sexes.

If your sorting system can't handle variations you already know exist, then your system needs improvement. And if sorting people into categories results in some of them saying they have been assigned to the wrong category, pay attention. You might be making assumptions about which group they belong to based on faulty information.

This is all a furphy. Even if sex is not functionally binary in mammals (it is), even if some people cannot be classified in the binary or are intersex or were wrongly sexed at birth, that does not mean that feelings in your head (gender) are somehow a better descriptor of your sex than your sex.

 

[Arctish]

That is not a definition.

Here, let me highlight it for you:

I don't have a definition already worked out.

No. All words are defined by other words. If having words to define 'woman' makes the definition meaningless, all words and all dictionaries and all definitions are meaningless.

The definition isn't meaningless because it uses words to define words. It's meaningless when the definition of the term hinges on the definition of another term that hasn't been defined.

You said "a woman is an adult human female" but wouldn't provide your definition of 'female'. That's like saying "A coelint is a dagg" and then not saying what a 'dagg' is.

I'll point out that you did not decide that using the words 'adult', and 'human' made my definition meaningless.

This discussion is focused on sex and gender, not species or age related characteristics of individuals. But if species or age related characteristics becomes relevant, I'll be sure to ask you what you mean by 'adult' and 'human'.

The existence of intersex people challenges the fundamental assumptions behind the simple binary system of sorting people into just two sexes.

If your sorting system can't handle variations you already know exist, then your system needs improvement. And if sorting people into categories results in some of them saying they have been assigned to the wrong category, pay attention. You might be making assumptions about which group they belong to based on faulty information.

This is all a furphy. Even if sex is not functionally binary in mammals (it is), even if some people cannot be classified in the binary or are intersex or were wrongly sexed at birth, that does not mean that feelings in your head (gender) are somehow a better descriptor of your sex than your sex.

How do you determine the sex of another person?

Are you relying on external genitalia, internal organs, their chromosomes, their hormones, or what?

Even if you can observe characteristics that are strongly associated with one particular sex, that doesn't mean an assigned sex based on them is going to be accurate. Biology is quirky. Women with testes exist along side of women with ovaries, and men who can get pregnant exist along side of men who can impregnate others.

As for transgender people, I think we need to sort out the mis-categorized ones before we talk about people 'transitioning' from one sex to another. Some or even most of them might simply be correcting an error others made when they were assigned a sex at birth.

I don't think we understand the range of possible sexes, although we understand more than people did just a few decades ago. The creation of the category 'intersex" is certainly a step in the right direction. Perhaps it will prove to be all that was needed to recognize and acknowledge the sex of people who don't fit in either the 'male' or 'female' category.

 

[Metaphor]

Here, let me highlight it for you:

I don't have a definition already worked out.

And yet you are willling to say 'trans women are women'?

The definition isn't meaningless because it uses words to define words. It's meaningless when the definition of the term hinges on the definition of another term that hasn't been defined.

All definitions hinge on other words that are not defined.

I point out again that you had no problem whatsoever with the 'adult' and 'human' part of my definition. Why didn't that make it meaningless? I didn't define those either.

You said "a woman is an adult human female" but wouldn't provide your definition of 'female'. That's like saying "A coelint is a dagg" and then not saying what a 'dagg' is.

All words are defined with other words. I am actually willing to define 'female', but I'm only going to do it as part of an honest discussion.

How do you determine the sex of another person?

It depends on what you mean. Usually, all I have to do is look at them. Not at their genitals (though that is also generally sufficient).

Are you relying on external genitalia, internal organs, their chromosomes, their hormones, or what?

I'm not relying on their genitalia, generally because I don't see the genitalia of most people I know, but I do know the sex of most people I know.

I don't rely on anything I can't see like internal organs or anything I don't have access to like their chromosomes or hormones.

Even if you can observe characteristics that are strongly associated with one particular sex, that doesn't mean an assigned sex based on them is going to be accurate. Biology is quirky. Women with testes exist along side of women with ovaries, and men who can get pregnant exist along side of men who can impregnate others.

So what? Being wrong about somebody's sex does not mean a feeling in somebody's head is a better determinant of sex than sex is.

As for transgender people, I think we need to sort out the mis-categorized ones before we talk about people 'transitioning' from one sex to another. Some or even most of them might simply be correcting an error others made when they were assigned a sex at birth.

Except, that has nothing to do with what trans activists want. If a genetic male, with a penis and testes, with ordinary levels of circulating testosterone, who has 'M' on their birth certificate and who has no female organs on the outside or inside, who was 'male' on every single measure used in the biological definition of sex for mammals, wants to change the sex on their birth certificate to 'F', you would like to let them. It has nothing to do with allowing intersex people to correct the record. Intersex status is a furphy.

 

[Arctish]

And yet you are willling to say 'trans women are women'?

I think you have me confused with another poster.

I said "When I'm speaking about someone in particular I use whatever designation they give themselves. I figure they know more about themselves than I do, so I defer to their judgement."

All definitions hinge on other words that are not defined.

No.

All definitions hinge on other words. Those other words are defined. Either an explanation of the term is included in the definition in which it is being used, or it is available from the person using it.

For example: A coelint is a dagg*

* a dagg is a form of interpretive dance that uses found items such as leaves and garbage for artistic expression and visual impact.

Now, if you wonder what interpretive dance is, or what the term 'artistic' means, or whether the dried up kale in your fridge would be considered leaves or garbage, I can provide further definitions. Because the whole point is communication, and that doesn't happen when people won't explain what they mean by the words they're using.

I point out again that you had no problem whatsoever with the 'adult' and 'human' page. art of my definition. Why didn't that make it meaningless? I didn't define those either.

And I point out again that I have addressed this twice already.

You said "a woman is an adult human female" but wouldn't provide your definition of 'female'. That's like saying "A coelint is a dagg" and then not saying what a 'dagg' is.

All words are defined with other words. I am actually willing to define 'female', but I'm only going to do it as part of an honest discussion.

Then by all means, start having one.

How do you determine the sex of another person?

It depends on what you mean. Usually, all I have to do is look at them. Not at their genitals (though that is also generally sufficient).

Are you relying on external genitalia, internal organs, their chromosomes, their hormones, or what?

I'm not relying on their genitalia, generally because I don't see the genitalia of most people I know, but I do know the sex of most people I know.

I don't rely on anything I can't see like internal organs or anything I don't have access to like their chromosomes or hormones.

So you're just going by general impressions.

Even if you can observe characteristics that are strongly associated with one particular sex, that doesn't mean an assigned sex based on them is going to be accurate. Biology is quirky. Women with testes exist along side of women with ovaries, and men who can get pregnant exist along side of men who can impregnate others.

So what? Being wrong about somebody's sex does not mean a feeling in somebody's head is a better determinant of sex than sex is.

Are you suggesting you can tell a person's sex just by looking at them, but people can't tell their own sex by what they feel is their sex?

As for transgender people, I think we need to sort out the mis-categorized ones before we talk about people 'transitioning' from one sex to another. Some or even most of them might simply be correcting an error others made when they were assigned a sex at birth.

Except, that has nothing to do with what trans activists want. If a genetic male, with a penis and testes, with ordinary levels of circulating testosterone, who has 'M' on their birth certificate and who has no female organs on the outside or inside, who was 'male' on every single measure used in the biological definition of sex for mammals, wants to change the sex on their birth certificate to 'F', you would like to let them. It has nothing to do with allowing intersex people to correct the record. Intersex status is a furphy.

Assuming we're talking about someone who was correctly identified as male at birth and who now is female, either as a matter of self-identification alone or in combination with surgery and hormone treatments, what's the problem here? They want their identification papers to match their identity. If sex based discrimination is no longer a thing, what does it matter if the State recognized a person as being male or female?

All that really matters on a birth certificate is that the State recognizes you were born within its jurisdiction.

Whatever it says about your sex isn't all that important and might even be wrong.

 

[Metaphor]

No.

All definitions hinge on other words. Those other words are defined. Either an explanation of the term is included in the definition in which it is being used, or it is available from the person using it.

For example: A coelint is a dagg*

* a dagg is a form of interpretive dance that uses found items such as leaves and garbage for artistic expression and visual impact.

Now, if you wonder what interpretive dance is, or what the term 'artistic' means, or whether the dried up kale in your fridge would be considered leaves or garbage, I can provide further definitions. Because the whole point is communication, and that doesn't happen when people won't explain what they mean by the words they're using.

But I did not say I could not define 'female'. In fact, I have a definition. But I'm not willing to define it only for a further recursive challenge from somebody who demanded a definition in exchange for their own, but then won't provide their own.

Then by all means, start having one.

Not only have I been hones this entire thread, I took it that other people in the thread were participating in good faith.

And yet nobody, including you, wants to define what they mean by woman. I'm the only person who's done it.

So you're just going by general impressions.

Yes.

Are you suggesting you can tell a person's sex just by looking at them, but people can't tell their own sex by what they feel is their sex?

If somebody told me they 'feel' like they are a sex that they are obviously not, I would not trust their self-categorisation. That would be absurd and a hopeless abdication of using my brain and senses.

If my brother told me he felt like he was an Asian man, I would say "you are not an Asian man." His delusional feelings on the matter notwithstanding.

Assuming we're talking about someone who was correctly identified as male at birth and who now is female, either as a matter of self-identification alone or in combination with surgery and hormone treatments,

Human mammals cannot change sex. There are species (not mammals) that can change sex. Humans are not among them. No human being has ever changed their sex.

"Identifying" as a sex that you are not does not change your sex. Cutting off and refashioning parts of your body does not change your sex. Taking hormones for the rest of your life so that your internal chemistry more closely matches the opposite sex than it would without hormones does not change your sex. Dressing in clothes typical of the opposite sex does not change your sex.

In the very far future, with extraordinary feats of biological engineering, an adult male might be able to be so wholly rebuilt that he literally becomes a she--XX cells, a uterus, ova, a vagina, a vulva, lactating breasts, the whole deal. That is currently science fiction though.

what's the problem here? They want their identification papers to match their identity. If sex based discrimination is no longer a thing, what does it matter if the State recognized a person as being male or female?

The gender you identify as is a feeling in your head and cannot change your sex. If a feeling in your head could change biological facts, Rachel Dolezal would be black.

All that really matters on a birth certificate is that the State recognizes you were born within its jurisdiction.

Whatever it says about your sex isn't all that important and might even be wrong.

It is, no doubt, sometimes wrong. Some people who are intersex instead have been assigned an M or F when an 'X' would be better.

But that doesn't mean your gender can change your sex, even when they conflict.

And it also does not mean that we should upend all the social conventions we have established that are based on sex, and pretend instead, in front of God and everybody, that they had been based on gender all along.

EDIT: I feel very sorry for people with gender dysphoria as I do for anybody with a distressing mental condition. And politeness and kindness have their place, but I cannot wholesale induce myself to believe things that I do not believe and are not true.

You appear to question my ability to identify somebody's sex from visual inspection alone, but everyone does this all the time and humans have been doing it for 100,000 years. But I can't look at a trans woman's obviously male hands and pretend they are female. I can't look at the shoulders and hands of trans men, and the obvious widening of their hips, and the female gait that their physiology cannot unlearn, and believe they are men. I can't be sucking somebody's dick and believe he's a woman. I can't do these things because these things are absurd.

I'm sorry that it is that way but it simply is that way.

 

[ruby sparks]

Assuming for the moment that we interpret biological sex to refer to one's chromosomal makeup, a biological male with androgen insensitivity syndrome who was classified as female at birth will not have to transition if they want to live their life as a woman.

I've seen that assumption a lot. Why? How the heck is androgen insensitivity syndrome an iota less biological than the number of X chromosomes? What makes such a person any more "a biological male with androgen insensitivity syndrome" than "a biological female with a deactivated Y chromosome."? For the presumably hundred-thousand-odd years that words for male and female have existed, people with that disorder have generally been included in the female category. Since when do microscopes trump usage as a determiner for the meaning of words?

(There's a "House" episode in which the protagonist doctor ultimately diagnoses a girl's symptoms to have been caused by testicular cancer, and informs her father about his so-called "son's" condition. But being a scriptwriter for a medical TV show isn't a qualification in biology. Or linguistics.)

Indeed.

But for a related reason, I do not believe that the meaning of the words "man" and "woman" has changed. Briefly, I think it would be akin to changing the meaning of "ill" and "healthy" or at least "red" and "green". Slightly less briefly:

As you mention, words for male and female presumably existed for hundred-thousand-odd years. In fact, I would say that for tens of millions of years at least, our ancestors could tell females from males (at least, of their own species), under some intuitive concept of "female" and "male" (not as complex as a human context, but still).

Now, there are some differences between those categories of course: For example, ill/health seem to have the same concepts across human societies, whereas color concepts vary to some extent. That's understandable because (among other reasons) people care about health and illness much more than they do about color, but still, color concepts vary but the classification is always based on human color vision. For example, the (slightly fuzzy) line between colors might vary, but I don't think one can find a human society that classifies say (99% of green stuff + 1% of red stuff) as one color and some other color for almost all red + a little green.

Where does sex stand?

I would expect it's less important to nearly all people than health/illness, but overall more than colors (even people not interested in having sex, given the relevance of sex differences in human societies, not all of which are the result of cultural variation). But even assuming it's overall not more important to humans than color, the 99% green + 1% red would still not happen.

Suppose that someone said that for some reason, they want to redefine words as follows:

R1:

cis green:= green
cis red: = red.

green (new def): something with (99% of green stuff + 1% of red stuff)

red (new def): something similar in reverse.

(and something similar for trans green, etc.)

Moreover, they want to keep saying "green" and "red" in nearly all conversations, and only use "cis green", "cis red", etc. in a very small percentage of cases.

I think even if 99% of the population were to try, the vast majority would fail, and would keep using the words (at least in nearly all cases). A few very smart and rational people would pull it off and change how they regularly use the words, but for the most part, the meaning would stay. And a major obstacle would be that if they were to redefine the words as above, then they would not want to mean "green" and "red" (new defs) anymore, but "cis green" and "cis red", because those are concepts that align reasonably well with human color vision, rather than the new ones.

What if they did not explicitly state that intent to change the meaning, but they tried anyway, trying to learn the new concepts by pointing at stuff?
I think that that would fail too: either the meaning would not change (probably), or people would usually say "cis green", "cis red", etc., precisely because of how the concepts allign with human color vision. In other words, even if this particularly difficult change in the meaning of the words is achievable (much easier would be to come up with new words that do not closely resemble the previous ones), that would not change the classifications human monkeys actually care about, and would want to talk about, in the vast majority of cases.

Now, maybe I'm wrong about the above and female and male are not even like red or green. But I do not believe I am, because one can just look at the behavior of almost any thing (including all monkeys as far as I can tell) to see that the classification between females and males is relevant in all of their societies - bonobos too, of course. One would expect that anything smart enough would have words that track their intuitive classification, and that those words would be used regularly.

I might be missing some piece of evidence here (and if so, I would actually appreciate the input ), but I'm inclined to think this change very probably has not happened.

There is another difficulty, even assuming the color or illness analogy fails:

I actually do not think that, for the most part, people do not seem to understand themselves as talking about something different now when they say "woman" or "man" than they were talking about 30 years go for example (assuming older people). Many might believe (mistakenly, I think) that some of the people they thought were women were actually men, and vice versa.

But - at least in most of the cases I have encountered, and of course with exceptions - they do not behave themselves as if they believed that they meant something else 30 years ago.

I think your analogy is quite good, and certainly interesting, and as usual very thorough.

Now, does it deal with third party (external) descriptions only? What about objects (or entities) that appear green on the outside but feel (or psychologically are) red on the inside? We may or may not be best to temporarily set aside why this might be the case, because (a) there could be a variety of complicated reasons/factors, involving different levels of analysis (from the macro to the micro, from nature to nurture), that (b) might be at least slightly different in each individual case, and (c) some of them might involve the interactions of and overlap between what we might call psychology on the one hand and biology/physiology on the other, and we might even assume the former reduces to the latter anyway, which would pave the way for saying that permanently feeling red is as (physically) real in colour terms as permanently appearing green on the outside, even if in a different way.

I consider myself lucky. Like most people, my internal (subjective) and external (objective) colour happens to be at least pretty much the same one (allowing for at least some psychological fluidity, ambiguity or variance, which I imagine is very common).

 

[Angra Mainyu]

What about objects (or entities) that appear green 'on the outside' but feel (or psychologically are) red on the inside?

You would need a very strange (and clearly false) metaphysics of color to have something like that, but that aside, the answer would be that it depends on the meaning of the words "red" and "green".

Whether feelings matter to whether they are red or green depends on what the words "red" or "green" mean. In my reply, I was talking about whether the meaning of the words has changed - I argue that probably it has not -, not about whether the bundle of properties picked by "woman" and "man" has something to do with minds.

By the way, in my experience, many people deny that human minds can be classified in female and male with a reasonable degree of accuracy - a denial that is pretty much lethal for their own support of trans claims. Indeed, if there is no such thing as a female and a male human mind (or whatever one calls it if not "female" and "male"), then surely the classifications "man" and "woman" cannot be based on precisely that which does not exist! (assuming no error theory, but they are implying no error theory by supporting such claims).

Obviously, I would not object to the claim that there are female and male human minds. But granting that there are female and male human minds, at least two more things would be needed for trans claims to succeed:

1. That people who make trans claims have the sort of mind that corresponds to the claim they make.

2. That the meaning of the words "man" and "woman" are such that whether a person is a man or a woman depends on the sort of mind they have (i.e., some properties of the mind are relevant and make them female or mail), trumping sexual organs or other characteristics in the sense that female sexual organs + male mind -> man, and male sexual organs + female mind -> woman.

 

[ruby sparks]

Ill get back to you later Angra.

As usual, I have edited (elaborated on) my post after initially posting it, and possibly while you were replying. Sorry. Bad habit of mine.

 

[ruby sparks]

Obviously, I would not object to the claim that there are female and male human minds. But granting that there are female and male human minds, at least two more things would be needed for trans claims to succeed:

1. That people who make trans claims have the sort of mind that corresponds to the claim they make.

2. That the meaning of the words "man" and "woman" are such that whether a person is a man or a woman depends on the sort of mind they have (i.e., some properties of the mind are relevant and make them female or mail), trumping sexual organs or other characteristics in the sense that female sexual organs + male mind -> man, and male sexual organs + female mind -> woman.

What trans claims do you mean? If you mean, as I think you might, the claim by a trans woman that she is a woman, then my suggestion is to agree that she is a trans woman, perhaps keeping the term woman for cis (non trans) women. Isn't this how it pretty much is at the moment?

A slight improvement might be for both to have a prefix (trans or cis as appropriate), so that a clear and fair distinction is made. The unprefixed version could still be used in everyday casual conversation perhaps, subject to being clarified if necessary, or left unprefixed if used as an umbrella term (which trans already is).

No need for one to trump the other, and several of the issues around pinpointing the definition of ‘woman’ or ‘real woman’ (and who gets to use the term) avoided.

I personally have no problems with being routinely or usually called a cis man rather than just a man. It would seem to involve a very, very small change, one that I would not even see as a concession or an inconvenience, because it would just be more accurate and I generally like language that conveys accurate information.

As to ‘different brain’ criteria, I do not think we either need or can get confirmation. In other words, I don't think we need to identify brain differences, just as I don't think we do (or reliably can, as far as I know) for homosexuality, or even depression. It might be useful if we could, but since I don't think that's possible at present, I prefer to work on the basis that unless someone is either lying or confused, that they are what they feel they are (trans, gay, depressed, etc) and that there must be physical differences (otherwise it would not be the case) even if we can't detect or classify them (could be brain chemicals rather than brain structure for example).

If on the other hand you mean the claim to have the right, as a trans woman, to use the women's showers at the gym, or race against cis women, then that is obviously more complicated. All I would say in principle is that I do not think the answer should automatically or necessarily be yes, and I might even lean slightly towards no. But my guess is that there could be ways and means to come to some reasonable criteria and accommodations.

If for example a trans woman met the criteria, and raced in a women’s race, then obviously the word women in that case would then become an umbrella term of some sort. Ditto for the equivalent situation regarding women’s showers.

I’m not saying it wouldn’t be complicated, but where there’s a will there’s a way.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You don't seem to understand intersex. You're describing a failure to develop, not an intersex condition. Intersex is someone displaying some characteristics of both sexes. For example, the guy mentioned upthread with a uterus. (Although that was probably an absorbed twin rather than true intersex development.)

P.S. on this: The truly intersexed do not have extra anatomy. Rather, they have a piece of anatomy that is partially or fully developed as the opposite gender of what is expected. You get testicles or ovaries, never both, as they develop from the same tissue. There are other such relationships but I do not recall them off the top of my head. Anyone with both is a chimera.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Suppose that someone said that for some reason, they want to redefine words as follows:

R1:

cis green:= green
cis red: = red.

green (new def): something with (99% of green stuff + 1% of red stuff)

red (new def): something similar in reverse.

(and something similar for trans green, etc.)

Moreover, they want to keep saying "green" and "red" in nearly all conversations, and only use "cis green", "cis red", etc. in a very small percentage of cases.

I think even if 99% of the population were to try, the vast majority would fail, and would keep using the words (at least in nearly all cases). A few very smart and rational people would pull it off and change how they regularly use the words, but for the most part, the meaning would stay. And a major obstacle would be that if they were to redefine the words as above, then they would not want to mean "green" and "red" (new defs) anymore, but "cis green" and "cis red", because those are concepts that align reasonably well with human color vision, rather than the new ones.

Lets try a variation on this idea.

The vast majority of objects are either 255,0,0 or 0,255,0. We call the former red and the latter green.

However there are other possibilities. We have x,0,0 and 0,x,0 objects for x >= 0 and x < 255. These are treated as flawed versions of red and green. (An example being the woman mentioned above who will not go through puberty without hormone replacement.)

But there are also those who are x,255-x,0. They are rare but they do exist. Most are close to red or green and are generally classified as the primary color, but some are closer to the middle and are harder to define. These are the intersexed.

The real problem is that in addition to the obvious anatomy there's a mental wiring for red or green and it is far more common for this mental wiring to deviate from the 255,0,0 vs 0,255,0 dichotomy. These are the transgendered.