Cont: Trans Women are not Women 3

[LondonJohn]

You don't seem to realise that, for example, a trans woman is not a man.

 

[LondonJohn]

Oh and ETA: are you also unaware that homosexual men used to be regarded as "normal" (i.e. heterosexual) men who had a disorder which made them sexually attracted exclusively to other men, and that with treatment (and, often, with "God's help") they could be "cured" of their homosexual tendencies and become "normal" men again?

You may find this information germane to your argument......

 

[Roboramma]

Oh and ETA: are you also unaware that homosexual men used to be regarded as "normal" (i.e. heterosexual) men who had a disorder which made them sexually attracted exclusively to other men, and that with treatment (and, often, with "God's help") they could be "cured" of their homosexual tendencies and become "normal" men again?

You may find this information germane to your argument......

And the problem with that was that it was wrong.

You are right that I think trans women are not women. If I'm wrong about that, then the problem is the fact that I'm wrong, not some analogy to homosexuality.

You also haven't addressed the point that homosexuality has nothing to do with what one wishes to be attracted to. You tried to make an analogy between trans women wishing to be women and homosexual men wishing to be attracted to the opposite sex, only while it is true of the former, it's not necessarily true of the latter and certainly not a defining feature of homosexuality. That's the error that I, and others, have been pointing out.

Whether or not I'm wrong about other things (for instance the topic of discussion in this thread), doesn't impact on whether or not your analogy made sense.

 

[MisAndreG]

Tras: play pretend males are females.

Everyone else: No.

Tras. Reactionaries.

Tras: Accept these incoherent and circular definitions of X.

Everyone else: No.

Tras: Reactionaries.

For Darwin’s sake!

 

[Earthborn]

What strawman? I was literally responding to someone who doesn't think women's sports matter enough to be considered.

You got me there. I do indeed not care enough for professional women's sports to allow for such a blatant display of segregationism.

Come back to explain how I am such a meanie wanting to destroy women's sports and for not recognising how equally important everybody thinks women's sports is...

... when they're paid equally as well.

Who's talking about "tearing down the categories" in sport?

I am.

The original proposal to which you were responding actually suggested forming additional categories in women's sport,

No, that wasn't my proposal at all. I explicitely said that I think desegregating sports is doable. (I do not claim I have worked out all the kinks.)

 

[Earthborn]

Still waiting on a definition of "woman" that is not tautological. I'd really like to see that some day.

I suggest not waiting too long. There are a lot of still unsolvable philosophical questions of the form "what exactly defines the thing we call X"

Still waiting on a definition of Life, Justice, Science, Religion, Politics... that is not tautological or just someone's personal philosophy that excludes a lot things that are generally considered part of those concepts.

Call me a Post-Modernist if you want but perhaps language is inherently imprecise and words often don't have exact definitions.

 

[Earthborn]

According to the dictionary

Women - an adult female human being
Female - belonging or relating to women,

d4m10n: "Oh noes! Recursion! Out of Stack Space!"

 

[Roboramma]

I suggest not waiting too long. There are a lot of still unsolvable philosophical questions of the form "what exactly defines the thing we call X"

Still waiting on a definition of Life, Justice, Science, Religion, Politics... that is not tautological or just someone's personal philosophy that excludes a lot things that are generally considered part of those concepts.

Call me a Post-Modernist if you want but perhaps language is inherently imprecise and words often don't have exact definitions.

I don't think that the problem is that the definitions on offer are imperfect. The problem is when they are meaningless.

If X is said to mean: "someone who thinks they are X", can you tell me anything about X? I suppose I know it's a characteristic of a person, but nothing else.

Some people say that a women is a human with two X chromosomes. That's an imperfect definition. It leaves out some people who should be included in the class and (maybe? I'm not sure) includes some people who shouldn't be. For most cases it's good enough, but there are edge cases where that definition clearly fails. If this were the sort of problem being brought up, I'd find your response reasonable. We might then try to refine the definition or at least acknowledge how and why it fails for those edge cases. Rolfe has offered a better definition that seems to deal well with those edge cases.

I'm not saying that you should accept Rolfe's definition of the word "woman". I'm saying that it means something and if I didn't know the word woman before and she explained what it meant, I'd know something about it afterward.

If someone says "women are people who identify as women", I have learned literally nothing about what "woman" means. It's not an imperfect definition, it's a meaningless one, carrying zero information content.

 

[caveman1917]

*sigh*

Can't you just go and look this stuff up? There are plenty of good (and reliable) sources. DSM-5, for example.

(And it sounds like you're also accusing DSM-5 of a circular argument - in which case you'd be advised to contact the group of the world's leading mental health professionals who used all their skills, knowledge and expertise to derive the definitions and diagnoses, and tell them they don't know what they're talking about....)

You were asked to provide a non-tautological definition of "woman" and refused to do so. ETA: and lol at your appeal to the authority of mental health professionals on what is or isn't tautological, they probably don't even know what a tautology is in the first place. Do you? Can you provide the definition of "tautology" in logic without looking it up?

 

[caveman1917]

Call me a Post-Modernist if you want but perhaps language is inherently imprecise and words often don't have exact definitions.

Except of course that the precise and exact mainstream definitions of "woman" and "female" have been provided multiple times already, you just simply don't like them so you reject them out of hand in favour of vague wishy-washy. So yes, that makes you a postmodernist.

 

[Olmstead]

You got me there. I do indeed not care enough for professional women's sports to allow for such a blatant display of segregationism.

Come back to explain how I am such a meanie wanting to destroy women's sports and for not recognising how equally important everybody thinks women's sports is...

... when they're paid equally as well.

And you would make it harder for women to be paid equally? Because that's what would happen if you removed the segregation. You can talk about absolute fairness if you want, but sometimes it's worth looking at results. I want women to have the best possible chance at achieving success in sports, and segregation is the best way to do that, even if it could be considered artificial depending on your point of view. Maybe it's not "fair" in some philosophical sense, but it gives both sexes a much more equal choice at how they would like to live their lives regardless of their sex.

 

[Rolfe]

Still waiting on a definition of "woman" that is not tautological. I'd really like to see that some day.

Adult member of the species homo sapiens who (in the overwhelming majority of cases) does not possess a functional SRY gene, or (rarely) does not possess functioning androgen receptors.

ETA: Obviously most of these cases can be more simply defined simply by saying "an adult human being with the karyotype 46XX". (Not "who has two X chromosomes" because people with 47XXY chromosomes are undoubtedly male.) However, as Roboramma says, this falls down in the rare edge cases of some DSD conditions, but these can be covered by switching to the presence or absence of functioning SRY gene and/or androgen receptors. You need both an SRY gene and androgen receptors for the foetus to develop along the male pathway. The overwhelming majority of women are 46XX and the overwhelming majority of men are 46XY, but occasionally something goes pear-shaped and you can trust the trans activists to start their tedious whatabootery and their unwecome weaponisation of DSD conditions if you don't allow for the rarities.

 

[Rolfe]

You don't seem to realise that, for example, a trans woman is not a man.

That's because transwomen are indeed men. Being a man is a fundamental prerequisite for being a transwoman. Transwomen are a subset of men.

 

[Ziggurat]

Come back to explain how I am such a meanie wanting to destroy women's sports and for not recognising how equally important everybody thinks women's sports is...

... when they're paid equally as well.

This is a non sequitor. Women’s sports don’t have to matter as much as men’s sports in order to still matter.

 

[lionking]

You got me there. I do indeed not care enough for professional women's sports to allow for such a blatant display of segregationism.

Good for you. Do you understand how genetic women who have made a living from and/or gained great satisfaction from their sport feel when they are blown away by people who simply declare they are women? Is this not a legitimate issue?

 

[Earthborn]

I'm not saying that you should accept Rolfe's definition of the word "woman".

It is a fine definition of what in transgender circles is called a "biological woman".

I'm saying that it means something and if I didn't know the word woman before and she explained what it meant, I'd know something about it afterward.

You would not however know a whole lot about how the word is used in everyday speech. People are generally not subjecting medical tests on other people to determine whether they consider another person a "woman'.

If someone says "women are people who identify as women", I have learned literally nothing about what "woman" means.

You learned quite a lot. You learned that "woman" is category of people, and that society categorises people in different groups. You have also learned that people may or may not feel they belong in the category to which they have been assigned.

 

[d4m10n]

You don't seem to realise that, for example, a trans woman is not a man.

Which (non-circular) definition of "man" are you invoking here?

 

[Olmstead]

I can provide a non-circular definition. It's a little tortuous, and I don't think it really addresses the deeper problems, but I think this is what it basically comes down to for transwomen:

"A woman is a person whose brain possesses certain intrinsic biological elements which make that person more comfortable in a human body that developed without the influences of an SRY gene than a body that was influenced by the SRY gene."

Please don't accuse me of a strawman. That is literally my understanding of what being a woman means for transwomen, and anyone is welcome to alter that definition if they see fit.

 

[theprestige]

I can provide a non-circular definition. It's a little tortuous, and I don't think it really addresses the deeper problems, but I think this is what it basically comes down to for transwomen:

"A woman is a person whose brain possesses certain intrinsic biological elements which make that person more comfortable in a human body that developed without the influences of an SRY gene than a body that was influenced by the SRY gene."

Please don't accuse me of a strawman. That is literally my understanding of what being a woman means for transwomen, and anyone is welcome to alter that definition if they see fit.

As a guess about what transwomen believe, it seems like a good guess.

As a definition, it has a glaring problem. The assumption that they'd be more comfortable in a body without the SRY gene is completely untested, and completely untestable. The entire premise of transsexuality is that the transsexual imagines they would be more comfortable in the other kind of body.

 

[Ziggurat]

I can provide a non-circular definition. It's a little tortuous, and I don't think it really addresses the deeper problems, but I think this is what it basically comes down to for transwomen:

"A woman is a person whose brain possesses certain intrinsic biological elements which make that person more comfortable in a human body that developed without the influences of an SRY gene than a body that was influenced by the SRY gene."

Please don't accuse me of a strawman. That is literally my understanding of what being a woman means for transwomen, and anyone is welcome to alter that definition if they see fit.

Nope, doesn't cut it. In addition to the logical difficulties that theprestige mentioned, it doesn't cover the transwomen who want a male body and only want to socially transition. They'll call you truscum.

Plus it retains all the problems of any purely self-identified definition, making it ripe for abuse.