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Transwomen are not Women - Part 15

Emily's Cat said:
Yep. This is part of why so many of us view the entire approach as deeply misogynistic and regressive. It inherently reinforces limiting and prescriptive stereotypes, in a way that will do far more harm to female humans than it will to male humans. It's going to drop us right back to the 1930s.
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From what I have seen, the average transman Is much hairier and musclier than me, so it's not just males..females are doing the stereotype thing too.
 
Ziggurat said:
If we take his argument seriously, the sex is definable and quantifiable, you could graph it, and doing so would produce a bimodal distribution.
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That's his stated conclusion, not his argument; they don't connect up.
Ziggurat said:
Indeed, you can't actually do that if your purpose is to breach the barriers of sex segregation.
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I don't recall anyone stating that purpose over at SBM; you appear to be broad-brushing everyone on that side as TRAs with the same end goals.
Ziggurat said:
They want to make it as muddy as possible.
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Again, you are attributing ill motives to someone with a very solid reputation as a scientific skeptic, rather than applying the priciple of charity.

I'd say that he believes himself to be educating his readership on the complexity of sex, explaining that there are plenty of variations on the most common karyotypes, body types, etc. In the process, he does mention that there is a gametic binary, which is more of concession that I've ever seen from dedicated activists who prefer to gloss over that inconvenient fact.
 
Emily's Cat said:
This is fallacious. I get what you're trying to do, and I appreciate it. But it doesn't actually work that way. And right here, even if you don't realize it, you have accepted a TRA premise that is flawed.

You're retroactively changing the definition of the word "woman" so that it means the wishy-washy, humpty-dumpty, inane idea that a woman is nothing more than a feeling and a concept, completely divorced from physical reality. You're accepting the trans talking point that the word "woman" ONLY refers to gender identity.

This is false - throughout all of our childhoods, the word "woman" was commonly used to mean "female human being". All of the labeling on bathrooms and sports and prisons is based on THAT commonly understood usage, the *literal* meaning of the word woman. They are not, and have NEVER been, based on the figurative meaning of "woman" that is essentially synonymous with "feminine" or "behaving as society expects females to behave".

Don't fall for their rhetoric, or you've already surrendered 75% of the battlefield.
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As a kid growing up I hated social conformity as I've said many times in this thread. As a kid I hated the idea of 'woman does this, man does that' and paid attention to the people that did not conform to those roles. Some of those people were insistent that they should be treated as a 'woman' or as a 'man' etc. None of them argued about what sex they were, no one even thought about it.
I was born in 1969, I'm not retroactively changing anything, these are the facts for me growing up.

I think the tra's and the people arguing against the tra's have been sucked into a realm where facts don't matter and they are both being irrational.

edit: Change the labels to male female instead of man woman and introduce a bit of science and logic back into whatever this is.
 
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d4m10n said:
Again, you are attributing ill motives to someone with a very solid reputation as a scientific skeptic, rather than applying the priciple of charity.
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You are correct, I'm not applying the principle of charity. Because again, my purpose isn't to address the argument itself, but to address the dynamics of how these arguments actually play out in terms of public policy. As for this person's reputation, I'll take your word for it, but that reinforces my point, it doesn't undermine it. If he's experienced in making scientific skeptical arguments, he should know how to do it better, and the fact that he isn't suggests intention, not accident.
d4m10n said:
I'd say that he believes himself to be educating his readership on the complexity of sex
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He isn't. He's using a standard TRA argument that sex is a spectrum with a bimodal distribution. But the people who make this claim NEVER actually map out what the variables involved are or demonstrate that you actually get a bimodal distribution on whatever axis (or even axes) supposedly constitute sex under their conception. You would think that if the purpose is to educate people about sex, then illustrating, or hell, even defining the axes of this supposed bimodal distribution would be pretty useful. But NO ONE does that. Because the point is never to educate, it's always to obfuscate. The pattern is obvious, and I'm not going to make excuses for it. Even if you think any particular person is being honest and trying to educate, even if you think this individual is an exception, the pattern is the important part. Because again, what I was discussing WAS NOT whether or not sex is a binary or a bimodal distribution. It was whether or not switching labels from "women" to "female" would somehow alleviate the conflict about trans identifying male access to female spaces. It wouldn't. And that guy's argument illustrates why.
 
d4m10n said:
One of the bizarre features of this particular debate is what happens when you try to tell someone that you're okay with them using "woman" to mean anyone who feels constrained by the norms of femininity (whether they like it or not) if they are okay with you using the same word to mean adult human female. After all, words typically have multiple meanings and there's no need for us to be prescriptivist about how other people use words.
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Yes, words have multiple meanings, but those meanings are contextually bound.

In a context about social norms of femininity, about behavior, dress, and temperament, then sure... go ahead and use "woman" in the figurative sense. It's entirely reasonable to do so. It's even appropriate and reasonable to refer to a male who is soft-spoken, subservient, collaborative, and focused on feelings as being "womanly".

On the other hand, when we're talking about facilities like bathrooms and showers and prisons, it's absurd to try to retcon in a behavioral meaning to something that was clearly and incontrovertibly intended to refer to sex. It's not acceptable to substitute a figurative meaning into a literal use. Nor do I think it's reasonable to relinquish the literal meaning entirely and make the term only allowable as a figurative term.
 
p0lka said:
It's a gender stereotype that shouldn't exist, same as the man stereotype, people should just be themselves.
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Sure, I could go for that. But I think you should recognize that sex is a 'what' not a 'who'. Woman is what I am, not who I am.

Here are some other whats about me:
  • short
  • brunette going gray
  • pale green eyed
  • right handed
  • middle aged
  • have no toenails on my pinky toes
For comparisons, here are some whos about me:
  • Actuary with 20+ years experience specializing in the individual health insurance market and ACA
  • easily bored with routine
  • enjoys crochet because it's math made physical
  • raised in a racially mixed household and exposed to a significant amount of racial and cultural diversity as a child
  • strong appreciation for military and law enforcement
  • atheist who values and respects the role of religion in society even if I lack faith
  • super resistant to be told to calm down, or that it's not a big deal, or that I'm overreacting, or any other approach that dismisses my views when the topic is something I am either directly impacted by or something I know a lot about
 
Ziggurat said:
The sort of people who think of sex as a spectrum don't want to accurately describe it at all. They want to make it as muddy as possible.
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I want to expand upon this a little bit, and this is going to involve a tangent into something unrelated, so anyone can feel free to skip this if they don't enjoy me geeking out over my own pet interests.

I'm going to talk a bit about temperature. Temperature is a concept that kids get introduced to very early on: it's a measure of how hot or cold something is. Not very technical and certainly not complete, but good enough for kids, because they directly experience sensations of heat and cold, and the idea of measuring that makes sense. Get a bit further along in your education, and you might be taught that temperature is a measure of average kinetic energy of atoms in a material. Now we're getting technical. Now we have what looks like a scientific definition. And around this time, you might learn about things like absolute temperature, and that even though the Fahrenheit and Celsius scales go negative, absolute temperature can only go to zero.

Except it's wrong. That's NOT the actual scientific definition of temperature. It's a workable definition in most cases (and you can even find scientific sources using such a definition), but there are exceptions to it. And those exceptions can lead to things like negative absolute temperatures, which make no sense under that simplified definition. I'm not going to do a full-blown definition here of what temperature actually is, but the actual, rigorous definition of temperature involves the derivative of entropy with respect to energy. And entropy itself isn't an easy concept to wrap one's head around, and most people never really learn about. So temperature is actually more complex than it looks when you first introduce kids to it. But even though it's complex, even though we generally dumb it down, the full rigorous treatment is not only possible, it's routinely done. I've done it. I have literally taught college level thermodynamics, where you define exactly what you mean by temperature in a mathematical sense, and in a way that covers all those weird edge cases like negative absolute temperatures.

OK, so what does this have to do with sex? Well, on the surface it might look like the concept of sex is like the concept of temperature. We learn a simplified version (male vs female), and for most of our lives those simple definitions work fine. But then find out that there are all sorts of complexities (how sex develops, how different species handle sexual reproduction, what happens if the developmental pathways go off the rails, etc.) that are harder to fit in a simple "boys have a penis, girls have a vagina" concept of sex. And the "sex is a spectrum" folks play up this complexity as if it were a situation like temperature, where we're taught this wrong version (sex is binary) for simplicity but the truth is that sex isn't binary at all.

Except... they never get to the full story. They only get to the "sex is more complex than that" stage. They never actually define what sex is, they never demonstrate that this definition produces a spectrum, they never show that the spectrum produces a bimodal distribution. They always stop at the stage of "that simplified definition is wrong". Why can't they get past that step? Because they don't actually have a definition of sex which produces a spectrum, that says that transwomen aren't males. They want to make people think that the simple "sex is binary" definition fails, just like the simple definition of temperature can't handle negative absolute temperatures. But their own "sex is a spectrum" claim fails, because (unlike temperature) they can never actually define what it even is.
 
theprestige said:
What you're describing is a mimicking of secondary sexual characterisics, to better pass as a member of that sex. Not stereotyping a gender role.
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I was replying to this
Emily's Cat said:
Yep. This is part of why so many of us view the entire approach as deeply misogynistic and regressive. It inherently reinforces limiting and prescriptive stereotypes, in a way that will do far more harm to female humans than it will to male humans. It's going to drop us right back to the 1930s.
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I was just pointing out that females do it too.

Addressing your point. No I disagree, it's mimickry of gender stereotypes. I have no hairs on my chest and am not muscely at all, but I'm male. No one's trying to emulate me.
 
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Ziggurat said:
Because again, my purpose isn't to address the argument itself, but to address the dynamics of how these arguments actually play out in terms of public policy.
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Novella's argument doesn't connect to public policy at all, either explicitly in the article itself or implicitly in terms of what it implies. He mentions a few policy questions upfront but doesn't push any particular conclusions.
Ziggurat said:
As for this person's reputation, I'll take your word for it, but that reinforces my point, it doesn't undermine it. If he's experienced in making scientific skeptical arguments, he should know how to do it better, and the fact that he isn't suggests intention, not accident.
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He doesn't get any of the scientific background wrong (aside from the supposed functionality of human ovotestes, correct me if I missed something else) but fails to show how such things as karyotype, reproductive organs, external genitalia, gametes & secondary morphological sexual characteristics could be rolled up into a quantitative variable which could then be plotted as a histogram. Assigning weights to each of the subcomponents would necessarily be arbitrary, because people don't actually try to weigh these things against one another when determining sex in practice, and would likely generate more controversy than illumination.
Ziggurat said:
They only get to the "sex is more complex than that" stage. They never actually define what sex is, they never demonstrate that this definition produces a spectrum, they never show that the spectrum produces a bimodal distribution. They always stop at the stage of "that simplified definition is wrong". Why can't they get past that step?
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The point of the argument is to conclude that "humanity cannot be placed entirely into two categories" rather than to invent a synthetic variable and then demonstrate how weakly or strongly bimodal it is when applied to a large sample of patients. As with most skepticism, the point is to debunk a given claim (strict binary) rather than create and defend a new one. The article would have been much improved if it had avoided the bimodality trope altogether, because it is being invoked as a vague metaphor rather than a mathematical descriptor.
 
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d4m10n said:
Novella's argument doesn't connect to public policy at all, either explicitly in the article itself or implicitly in terms of what it implies.
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It does, explicitly in the article itself AND implicitly in terms of what it implies. Here's an explicit connection:
Novella said:
The debate over how best to approach people who identify as transgender or non-binary is many-layered and can be complex.
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d4m10n said:
He mentions a few policy questions upfront
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Oh, so you knew it connects to public policy, but claimed it didn't anyways.
d4m10n said:
but doesn't push any particular conclusions.
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He doesn't need to in order for his claims to have implications for public policy.
d4m10n said:
The point of the argument is to conclude that "humanity cannot be placed entirely into two categories"
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And why does that matter? Because a lot of public policy places people into two categories by segregating by sex, and if you want to breach sex segregation, then claiming that they can't be placed in two categories goes a long way towards doing that. The entire question of whether or not you can place people in two sex categories only matters in the first place because of public policy, which is precisely and explicitly why he wrote this in the first pace.

I've been treating your posts according to the principle of charity, but you're making it harder and harder to do that.
 
Emily's Cat said:
Sure, I could go for that. But I think you should recognize that sex is a 'what' not a 'who'. Woman is what I am, not who I am.
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Yeah sex is definitely a 'what' I agree, you can do a blood test to demonstrate it.

Emily's Cat said:
Here are some other whats about me:
  • short
  • brunette going gray
  • pale green eyed
  • right handed
  • middle aged
  • have no toenails on my pinky toes
For comparisons, here are some whos about me:
  • Actuary with 20+ years experience specializing in the individual health insurance market and ACA
  • easily bored with routine
  • enjoys crochet because it's math made physical
  • raised in a racially mixed household and exposed to a significant amount of racial and cultural diversity as a child
  • strong appreciation for military and law enforcement
  • atheist who values and respects the role of religion in society even if I lack faith
  • super resistant to be told to calm down, or that it's not a big deal, or that I'm overreacting, or any other approach that dismisses my views when the topic is something I am either directly impacted by or something I know a lot about
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The bit i made yellow sounds like you're actually comparing yourself to a gender stereotype without realising it? You are saying as a woman you have to deal with the yellow stuff? but everyone, regardless of gender has to deal with that stuff.
 
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Ziggurat said:
He doesn't need to in order for his claims to have implications for public policy.
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Which of his factual assertions or arguments implies any particular policy outcome? I'm not seeing it.
Ziggurat said:
Because a lot of public policy places people into two categories by segregating by sex, and if you want to breach sex segregation, then claiming that they can't be placed in two categories goes a long way towards doing that.
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You assume it's always about breaching sex segregation but that's the most extreme possible outcome, the result of taking TWAW literally. We've already discussed the enbies who want an "X" (rather than "M" or "F") on their state-issued i.d.'s upthread. Putting marks on identity documents might somehow impact segregation, but it need not do so. The same is true about other purely linguistic acts such as calling female students "they/them" at schools while they continue to use the ladies room or how the mainstream media style guides treat people like Sam Smith.
Ziggurat said:
And why does that matter?
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Because "humanity can be placed entirely into two categories" was the claim he was hoping to debunk by teaching people a little bit of biology.
 
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d4m10n said:
Which of his factual assertions or arguments implies any particular policy outcome? I'm not seeing it.
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I'm not playing this game with you, you have already spent my charity budget. Go look at the comments below his article, and then try to keep denying that this has nothing to do with public policy, and his audience isn't concerned about those policy questions.
 
d4m10n said:
Which of his factual assertions or arguments implies any particular policy outcome? I'm not seeing it.
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Ziggurat said:
I'm not playing this game with you, you have already spent my charity budget. Go look at the comments below his article, and then try to keep denying that this has nothing to do with public policy, and his audience isn't concerned about those policy questions.
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Like I keep saying, the only real debate is the debate about trans rights in public policy. Anyone investing their social capital in debating this topic is investing in that issue.
 
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