Or, one could hypothetically agree on a compromise and say that you are a man, but less of a man, or less fully or properly a man, than a typical straight man.
I wouldn't agree to such a one-sided "compromise". Neither would Metaphor. Would you?
It wasn't a serious suggestion, and was used only to try to make a related point.
Yeah, I know. To all appearances, the related point you were trying to make with that suggestion, and with several other similar comments in your exchange, was that you perceive Metaphor's line of argument to be a lot like some of the lines of argument commonly used by conservatives against gays: lines of argument we more enlightened people all know to reject. Is that about the size of it? They propose that a gay man is less fully or properly a man than a typical straight man. Metaphor and I know better. And so do you. You were offering that non-serious suggestion
precisely because you know it's wrong, yes? My point was, since you know it's wrong,
I was inviting you to back up your analogy -- to exhibit the corresponding flaws Metaphor's arguments supposedly contain.
The thing is, conservative arguments against homosexuality, like all bad arguments, aren't bad because they're made by conservatives. They aren't bad because we disapprove of their conclusions. They aren't bad because they express values better people than conservatives don't share. They aren't bad because their targets rank higher than conservatives on the progressive stack. They're bad because of specific identifiable objectively false premises and/or specific identifiable fallacious reasoning steps. So if you want to refute Metaphor, it isn't enough to have your brain's pattern-matcher light up when you juxtapose his argument with a bad conservative anti-gay argument. You'd also need to actually identify an error in the bad conservative anti-gay argument, and then check Metaphor's argument to see if it contains the same error.
For instance, one popular conservative anti-gay argument is that gays are misusing their parts because a penis is primarily for impregnating women via sexual intercourse. That's why you brought up penises, isn't it? Well, that bad conservative anti-gay argument contains a false premise and an invalid inference. Can you show where Metaphor's argument contains an error corresponding to one or the other of those?
One thing I am suggesting is that we allow as much validity to 'the feeling in a person's head' that they are a certain gender (including allowing use of words like 'he/she' and 'man/woman' for example) as we do for 'the feeling in a person's head' that they are a certain orientation.
So where exactly did Metaphor propose to disallow validity to a feeling in a person's head? I don't recall him asking for trans people to not be allowed to call themselves whatever they please, or for others not to be allowed to call M2Fs "she" or F2Ms "he", or for barring trans people from engaging in whatever activities are stereotypically associated with their desired sex, as long as they aren't hurting anyone.
As to beliefs, I would argue that in the end, even preferences are essentially beliefs, psychologically and philosophically-speaking
If so, that's a failing on the part of those attempting to practice psychology and philosophy. Those fields aren't supposed to be disciplines of reality avoidance, though they're often used that way.
(both are arguably propositional attitudes)
And cats and dogs are both mammals; therefore cats are dogs. If we interpret a preference as a propositional attitude, the attitude would have to be an attitude of wanting to make a proposition become true; a belief would be an attitude of thinking the proposition is already true.
In any event, interpreting either beliefs or preferences as propositional attitudes appears to be the sort of pre-Copernican thinking that psychologists and philosophers are all-too-often guilty of. Humans aren't the center of the universe; human beliefs and preferences are not the private invention of mankind; they're an inheritance from monkeys, from lemurs, from our Cretaceous tree-shrew ancestors. It seems improbable that a tree shrew who believed her eyes about a dinosaur and preferred to get away had any attitude at all toward any proposition. Propositions hadn't been invented yet.
As to my preference for sometimes using the word 'arguably', I do that when I'm not entirely certain whether an argument, or a counter-argument, is better, although when I do it, I am leaning towards the former, yes, as in the previous sentence above.
Are you seriously leaning toward thinking calling someone a golfer because he owns golf clubs even though he never uses them for actually playing golf really is a bit like calling Metaphor a man even though he never uses his junk to impregnate women? Are you similarly leaning toward thinking the argument that I'm not quite a man and my wife isn't quite a woman because we use contraceptives is likewise a good argument?
