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Cont: [ED] Discussion: Trans Women are not Women (Part 5)

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Collin237 said:
You might inadvertently have a point. If it could be established, by taking motion-capture readings and putting them through pattern-matching software, that a distinction can be made between "moving like a male" and "moving like a female", then the debate between sex and gender could be dropped, and everyone could just defer to the software.
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But ... every female moves like a female. She's female.
 
LondonJohn said:
Good grief. No she does not. It's patently ridiculous (and curiously authoritarian) to make the demand that she "has a civic duty to explain and define her claims on demand".
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Okay, fine. She doesn't have any obligation to support her claims. On the other hand, however, if she refuses to support her claims, nobody else should have any obligation to support her policies either. Otherwise it boils down to "I want you to change the law, regardless of who it hurts, because I say so".
 
Rolfe said:
This is tangentially relevant to the current discussion. Break out the popcorn.

The National Executive Council of the SNP, which hasn't been as thoroughly recovered from the woke element as had been hoped, appears to have decreed that the top spots on the d'Hondt AMS lists for each region in the May elections should be reserved for BAME and disabled candidates. There are eight regions. They have chosen four to have BAME candidates topping the list and four to have disabled candidates topping the list.

Now I can almost hear the chorus of but, but, but here, and there are a lot of buts. But the best bit of all and the reason for the popcorn is that being both BAME and disabled will be a matter of self-identification which cannot be challenged. The woke activists who have pushed for this out of self-interest have already got their self-ID diagnoses lined up. Apparently being diabetic counts, as does having Tourette's syndrome (this, apparently, to explain the string of abusive tweets vilifying women that that candidate is responsible for) and who knows what else. I'm dying to know who will be the first peely-wally Scot to self-ID as BAME.
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Self-ID, seriously? :eye-poppi Well, hopefully the actual BAME and disabled folks will come out of the woodworks and help elucidate the sheer idiocy of this "self-id" craze.
 
Meadmaker said:
Surely you aren't referring to this link, which you posted earlier:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/envi...isthedifferencebetweensexandgender/2019-02-21

It doesn't actually contain any definition of "man" or "woman".

It contains definitions of "sex" and "gender", and notes that people might see themselves as man, woman, or somewhere on a spectrum between them, but it doesn't define the terms.

ETA: I think, reading the link, one could infer that they probably mean to use the definition, "A man is a person who expresses the male gender role". Similarly for woman. The problem with that definition, first put forward in these threads by Earthborn, is that either it is circular, and therefore meaningless, or it is offensive, because it asserts that men with feminine attributes aren't really men, and likewise for women. The only alternative reading of the article in the link is that it is not based on how you behave, but as how you identify, so we end up back to a woman is a person who identifies as a woman.

So, in summary, there is no actual statement of a definition of "man" or "woman" in the link. To the extent we could infer an intended definition, the definitions suffer from the same flaws as every other non-biological definition, i.e. circularity or inaccuracy.
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This is one of several dead ends that this debate inevitably arrives at.

Obviously we would like some kind of rational, consistent definition of sex and gender, upon which to base the desired public policy changes.

Unfortunately, none of the definitions so far provided seem to fit that criteria. (Part of the problem is that sex-derived gender roles evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, without any attempt at a definition. So we're not actually starting from a 'state of grace', so to speak. The TRAs have trouble defining "woman" partly because everybody has trouble defining "woman".)

So, after several rounds of "woman means ____", "but that's circular/incoherent/subjective/contrafactual", the TRAs are just gonna give up trying to produce a definition.

Which is where we are now. Boudicca says transwomen are biologically female. There's a lot to unpack in that claim, which not even other TRAs agree with. Which is something to unpack as well. If an actual legit transwoman says she's a biological female, who is LondonJohn to contradict her? Who is Collin to say that Jessica Yaniv is a provocateur and not simply a transsexual trying to have a valid lived experience?

But unpacking this baggage is unpleasant, and generally seems to reveal a surprising shortage of clothes for the Empress (Imperatrix?) to wear on her journey towards valid lived experience.

So one nopes out. Another nopes out. A third falls falls back on i aLrEaDy pRoViDeD My sOuRcEs aNd yOu'rE BeInG MeAn. A fourth deploys argumentum ad tantrum before reining back in.

Defining "woman" is a dead end. The skeptics won't proceed without a good definition. The TRAs can't come up with one.
 
LondonJohn said:
Not analogous in absolute terms. Analogous insomuch as applies to the facets which pertain to the comparison: that 1) both transidentity and homosexuality are valid lived conditions (as opposed to mental health defects etc);
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Homosexuality is directly observable by others. Sexual attraction is actually measurable.

Transidentity is neither observable nor measurable. It is a matter of belief alone.
 
theprestige said:
Defining "woman" is a dead end. The skeptics won't proceed without a good definition. The TRAs can't come up with one.
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I still don't see what's wrong with "Women are the set of people who are generally expected to perform femininity, either on account of sex or self-presentation."
 
qayak said:
Not understanding your point. "'Trans women are men' mostly comes from feminists." Why should that surprise anyone. "BLM" mostly came from Blacks, "All dogs deserve a good home" mostly comes from dog advocates.

What is odd is that there is push back on the first two but not the third. No cat advocate takes offence at someone trying to improve the lives of dogs but a certain subset of the population gets upset when anyone advocates for women or people of colour.

If women don't want non-women infringing in their hard won rights and privileges, those non-women can **** off and set up their own sports leagues and change areas.
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Well said.
 
d4m10n said:
I still don't see what's wrong with "Women are the set of people who are generally expected to perform femininity, either on account of sex or self-presentation."
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It's completely circular.

"Feminine" is fuzzy edged at best.

The "Either sex or self-presentation" part just cuts the legs out of the entire point.
 
Collin237 said:
You might inadvertently have a point. If it could be established, by taking motion-capture readings and putting them through pattern-matching software, that a distinction can be made between "moving like a male" and "moving like a female", then the debate between sex and gender could be dropped, and everyone could just defer to the software.
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Except now you are in a position where effeminate males would be called women. I don't think anyone wants that.
 
TomB said:
Yes. I think that what she actually meant by that is that she considers her gender to be biologically determined as opposed to a "desire" or the result of some environmental factor.

The issue with that statement is not the position stated above, assuming I interpret her correctly, but that the statement violated what had been previously (mostly) agreed to terminology for the discussion: male/female referred to sex, man/woman referred to gender. She wished to claim both terms to refer to gender. Or perhaps its more accurate to say she did not want her sex referred to.

Further, and I may be mis-remembering this, I think she also considered her sex to be female. But I think that for her, gender overruled sex to the point that sex did not matter to her. Anyway, for whatever reason, she found being referred to as male to be offensive even when the reference was to her physical sex, not her gender.

This conversation is largely about sex and gender as separate (but linked) concepts. That separation of terminology is necessary. Unfortunately, when discussing the condition and experiences of a person participating in the conversation, it may be triggering because those same types of statements in other contexts have been weaponized.
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I really didn't understand Boudicca's position. At one point she said something akin to "I'm transgender so I'm a woman, and because I'm a woman I'm female, and because I'm female, then my penis is a female penis". Although I believe that sentiment was spread across a few posts, and less clear.
 
Emily's Cat said:
Homosexuality is directly observable by others. Sexual attraction is actually measurable.

Transidentity is neither observable nor measurable. It is a matter of belief alone.
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Forget that. There is a clear difference between the statements "I like ... " and "I am ... "
 
TomB said:
Yes. I think that what she actually meant by that is that she considers her gender to be biologically determined as opposed to a "desire" or the result of some environmental factor.

The issue with that statement is not the position stated above, assuming I interpret her correctly, but that the statement violated what had been previously (mostly) agreed to terminology for the discussion: male/female referred to sex, man/woman referred to gender. She wished to claim both terms to refer to gender. Or perhaps its more accurate to say she did not want her sex referred to.
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The agreed to terminology was:

male/female: sex
masculine/feminine: gender
man/woman: adult human male/female (ie sex)

Which are also the dictionary & Wikipedia definitions of the terms. It was just LondonJohn who's been claiming that man/woman has a different definition while refusing to provide such definition.
 
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