Cont: Trans Women are not Women 3

[d4m10n]

"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."

I like it. The definition for "man" would thus be:

A man is a person whose brain possesses certain intrinsic biological elements which make that person more comfortable in a human body that developed under the influences of an SRY gene.

The only problem I can see here is that no one knows what it is like to be in a body with a functional SRY gene and healthy androgen receptors other than those who are born therewith and subsequently undergo the process of male puberty. My wife can imagine what it must be like to be a dude, but she doesn't really have a sense of what it is subjectively like to be awash with free testosterone or to be subject to the (occasionally toxic) social expectations of masculinity.

 

[theprestige]

One huge problem with this thread is that it lacks any transsexuals who can explain what "man" and "woman" mean to them.

 

[caveman1917]

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.

It also leaves open the question as to which "intrinsic biological elements" the brain supposedly possesses that would cause this.

 

[Olmstead]

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.

I think it's a claim that could potentially be tested. If those elements are ever identified, and it is undeniably proven that people with those elements always decide to transition, it might be acceptable (though still ethically problematic) to transition babies. Of course, we would also need to be able to accurately reproduce/revert the influences of the SRY gene. All one would need to do after that is to observe the psychological results.

There might be easier ways to test it as well, but my point is that it is potentially testable.

 

[Rolfe]

All this semantic back-flipping to avoid talking about autogynaephilia.

It's such a shame that autogynaephilia, and indeed fetishism in general, is socially regarded as shameful. No man can help being an autogynaephile. No man has chosen it, and no man can simply decide not to be one. What is important is how he behaves. No man should be criticised or made to feel ashamed of being autogynaephilic, what he should be criticised for, and indeed should be ashamed of, is behaving badly towards other people as a result of this. If indeed he does behave badly, this is not a given.

But such is the societal disapproval of autogynaephilia that men who have the condition will dream up any fantasy, adopt any surreal explanation for their condition, deny realty itself, rather than acknowledge it. This has the unfortunate effect of also introducing excuses and justification for behaving badly towards other people. Maybe that's a feature rather than a bug from the point of view of the people doing it.

 

[Tanja]

I de-lurked a couple of pages ago for a slightly longer explanation of what I find confusing and puzzling in this debate, and I’m de-lurking again to ask another question of posters like LondonJohn and Boudicca and anyone else who is behind the simple unqualified “trans women are women” position. For example LondonJohn stating earlier “You don't seem to realise that, for example, a trans woman is not a man.”
I just can’t get over the idea that not only do a significant proportion of trans women retain their biologically male genitalia, a significant proportion of them continue using their male genitalia to have penetrative sex with partners (including about 30% with female partners if i’m understanding Wikipedia correctly not counting those who are bisexual). How is a person born a man, with functioning male sex organs, and continuing to use their male sexual organs like a man, not a man? Does this fact not make you at all concede that in some significant way at least, those individuals are still male/men? To me, it’s about the least woman-like characteristics I can think of, frankly.

 

[theprestige]

I think it's a claim that could potentially be tested. If those elements are ever identified, and it is undeniably proven that people with those elements always decide to transition, it might be acceptable (though still ethically problematic) to transition babies. Of course, we would also need to be able to accurately reproduce/revert the influences of the SRY gene. All one would need to do after that is to observe the psychological results.

There might be easier ways to test it as well, but my point is that it is potentially testable.

My understanding of the definition is that the only way to test it would be to transplant the consciousness into a body that had never had the SRY gene.

And even that would have problems. How much of the consciousness was influenced by the SRY body before transfer? How much of the SRY body's development is affected by the lack of a guiding consciousness prior to the transfer? I think testing this hypothesis falls entirely in the realm of trans-humanist science fiction.

"I believe I'm Napoleon. I would be happier if you treated me as if I am Napoleon."

"You'd probably be even happier if you no longer believed you were Napoleon."

"I'd probably be even happier than that if I actually occupied Napoleon's body."

The only thing that makes the Napoleon proposition more absurd than the transsexual proposition is that the Napoleon proposition requires time travel (or necromancy) in addition to consciousness transfer.

 

[TomB]

All this semantic back-flipping to avoid talking about autogynaephilia.

It's such a shame that autogynaephilia, and indeed fetishism in general, is socially regarded as shameful. No man can help being an autogynaephile. No man has chosen it, and no man can simply decide not to be one. What is important is how he behaves. No man should be criticised or made to feel ashamed of being autogynaephilic, what he should be criticised for, and indeed should be ashamed of, is behaving badly towards other people as a result of this. If indeed he does behave badly, this is not a given.

But such is the societal disapproval of autogynaephilia that men who have the condition will dream up any fantasy, adopt any surreal explanation for their condition, deny realty itself, rather than acknowledge it. This has the unfortunate effect of also introducing excuses and justification for behaving badly towards other people. Maybe that's a feature rather than a bug from the point of view of the people doing it.

The problem (or one problem) with autogynaephilia as an explanation for trans women is that it assumes a cause/effect relationship that would logically also work in reverse.

Suppose a male has gender dysphoria. If that person, being human, has a sex drive, they will have fantasies. Fantasies in which the picture themselves as male will, obviously trigger their dysphoria, causing anxiety and killing the fantasy. Thus the fantasies that work best for them will be those where they have female bodies.

So a strong correlation of transgender and autogynephilia does not necessarily mean the trans is caused by autogynephilia. The reverse could be true as well.

Also, I find it unlikely that someone would feel the need to lead there lives in a mode where they were constantly feeding their fetish.

 

[d4m10n]

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

Female^WP, though.

 

[Olmstead]

My understanding of the definition is that the only way to test it would be to transplant the consciousness into a body that had never had the SRY gene.

And even that would have problems. How much of the consciousness was influenced by the SRY body before transfer? How much of the SRY body's development is affected by the lack of a guiding consciousness prior to the transfer? I think testing this hypothesis falls entirely in the realm of trans-humanist science fiction.

"I believe I'm Napoleon. I would be happier if you treated me as if I am Napoleon."

"You'd probably be even happier if you no longer believed you were Napoleon."

"I'd probably be even happier than that if I actually occupied Napoleon's body."

The only thing that makes the Napoleon proposition more absurd than the transsexual proposition is that the Napoleon proposition requires time travel (or necromancy) in addition to consciousness transfer.

I'm not a scientist, so I could be wrong, but I think it's often impossible to recreate perfect conditions for experiments, so researchers instead shoot for "good enough to draw conclusions".

Not that it matters. Even my idea is pure sci-fi, and no one has even identified the elements my definition talks about. But I think deciding on a coherent common definition would at least make the discussion less nebulous.

 

[Paul2]

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.

The better biological definition of the sexes is that females produce a smaller number of larger gametes, and males produce a larger number of smaller gametes. There's very little wiggle room in between (there aren't, to my knowledge, sexually reproducing organisms in which there are a moderate number of moderate-sized gametes).

 

[Roboramma]

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.

It also leaves out the possibility that there are biological women who consider themselves women, and are women, but who would be more comfortable in a male body.

 

[Roboramma]

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'.

I think it does a good job of informing us about how the word is used in everyday speech. What people mean by the word "woman" is different from whether or not they are perfectly accurate in classifying people very time they use that word.

Similarly I don't need to take a bite out of every apple I see before I call it an apple. This means I may sometimes see a plastic apple and think it's a piece of fruit, and even call it by that name. That's just me making a mistake. My everyday use of the word apple still refers to the fruit, even if I don't have a perfectly accurate test that I use to identify that fruit every time I use the word.

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.

Okay, sure, I learned those things. That doesn't sound like "quite a lot" to me, but I agree that it's more than zero. I admit to exaggerating slightly.

 

[sphenisc]

It also leaves out the possibility that there are biological women who consider themselves women, and are women, but who would be more comfortable in a male body.

I think most women feel that way roughly once a month.

 

[theprestige]

The nice thing about the plastic apple analogy is that it works on three relevant levels:

You can call it an apple because you mistake it for a real apple.

You can call it an apple because it makes sense in context. If there's a bowl of plastic apples, you can say, "hand me one of those apples". You don't have to say, "hand me one of those plastic apples from that bowl of plastic apples."

And you don't have to run around calling all apples "real apples" to avoid confusion with plastic apples, just because plastic apples also exist. You can just call the real ones "apples".

 

[Emily's Cat]

Please then tell me: in what way did any part of the post which I excluded make any different the part which I did include and to which I responded?
...

So how exactly was I being disingenous?

All of the rest of the context, particularly the bolded section...

It was redefined from gender identity disorder to gender dysphoria when DSM5 came out in 2013, in order to remove stigma attached to the term and to describe the condition more accurately. Some trans activists did not want any diagnosis related to transgender identity retained, but the consensus was to rename rather than remove it. If it was regarded as a 'medical condition' rather than a mental disorder (where does this claim come from?) it would have been removed.

...

It is probably not appropriate to describe gender dysphoria as a mental illness or the product of a mental illness. Many other diagnosis in DSM are not appropriately described as mental illness either (e.g. autism). Evidence of a neurological basis for a disorder does not automatically affect it's inclusion in DSM.

 

[Rolfe]

The better biological definition of the sexes is that females produce a smaller number of larger gametes, and males produce a larger number of smaller gametes. There's very little wiggle room in between (there aren't, to my knowledge, sexually reproducing organisms in which there are a moderate number of moderate-sized gametes).

While not disagreeing with you in principle, the problem with this again is that it doesn't account for the edge-cases that will be invoked (usually much against their will) by the trans-activists.

It's quite disturbing to see the trans-activists' responses when actual people with DSD conditions enter ths discussion, usually objecting to their very real and sometimes very distressing medical conditions being invoked in support of a delusional mental condition. It's as if they'd never imagined people with CAIS or Turner's syndrome, or Swyer's syndrome, or Klinefelter's syndrome as being actual people called Clare or Mary or Peter. People with opinions of their own and identities of their own, actually there on Twitter ir wherever.

Once woman with CAIS has "not a clownfish" in her twitter biography. Of course she never has and never will produce gametes, either small or large. It's extremely upsetting for her when her condition, which has caused her a lot of distress over the years, is held up in the abstract to prove that men can become women. And although she has XY chromosomes, nobody meeting her could ever seriously claim she's not a woman.

 

[Emily's Cat]

I may have missed it, but where did Boudicca90 insult you for saying that her sex is male?

(Because the issue at hand is not about sex identity, but gender identity)

Boudicca has repeatedly labeled me a TERF and a bigot... when I've done nothing that merits those insults. She has also quite clearly said:

And yes, I do take offense to being called male or a man, which is why your insistence that you aren't misgendering me in the same posts where you misgender me multiple times is laughable.

Boudicca has made it clear that she feels that referencing her actual biological sex is misgendering her, and hence a grave insult.

 

[Emily's Cat]

It's been provided several times within this very thread.

But, once more with gusto:

"Woman" is a lived identity; it is typically the lived identity of females, but with the proviso that a) some females have a lived identity of "man" (and we call these people trans men, and b) some males have a lived identity of "woman" (and we call these people trans women).

So "woman" is the lived identity of (most) females, plus those males who are trans women.

That's... not an answer. "woman is a lived identity" has zero meaning. Or, more specifically, it has infinite meaning. It means whatever anyone wants it to, in any circumstance. It is completely devoid of meaning.

What is the "lived identity" of which you speak? Can you describe it? What "lived identity" do transwomen and natal women have in common that is not present in natal men and transmen?

 

[Emily's Cat]

4) With reference to all of the above, there has been nobody on the "side" of transgender issues - over the past several pages of the thread - who has been suggesting that it is somehow valid that (eg) a man can just decide to self-identify as a woman, and that this should necessarily/automatically confer upon him the identity of a woman. If others from further back in the thread have been making those claims, then a) I'm obv not aware of that, and b) in any case, in my view they're wrong.

Boudicca has stated that she does not think any medical diagnosis of any sort, nor any action to present as the identified gender, should be required. The "proof of dedication" she has referenced is the person applying to change their sex on their drivers license (or similar legal document)... with no other requirements at all.

That is exactly self-id alone.

And yes, Boudicca has expressed that this claim of being a woman, in the absence of any diagnosis or therapy or anything at all, should confer upon that male person the entirety of the identity of "woman", and give them unfettered access to all female things, including private spaces, and access to female scholarships, and obligate everyone else to refer to them with female pronouns. But she does require a very low level of testosterone to participate in female sports.