Gender is not always purely objective, so we communicate things that aren't always objectively black and white.
Your definition of gender isn't objective at all. Operationally, it's completely subjective.
Ok, no idea how you got there. How did you determine that 'traditionally' a transwoman was sincere, but now it's just a crude 'aping'? Why were they sincere before but just apes now?
He didn't say anything about sincerity. He said something about effort. There may be a correlation between sincerity and effort, but they are not synonymous.
And what changed, rather obviously, is the advent of self ID. No real effort is required anymore.
I can't tell if your use of the word "apes" is supposed to be a noun or the third person present tense of the verb "ape", which doesn't actually have anything to do with the noun in context.
I don't know where you get this either. I treat women very differently than I do men.
Why do you treat them differently? Is that difference related to their sex? Or is it decoupled completely from their sex? That was theprestige's point: not that they have to be treated the same, but that the difference is grounded in sex, and not gender decoupled from sex.
I see no reason to treat men and women any differently that's not related to their sex. You have described some of the differences in how you treat them, but you have not said why those differences are decoupled from sex.
That's not a 'for example'. As I've said many times, that's the rare exception.
Um... what? No. There is absolutely nothing about flirting that is rare or exceptional at all. It's quite common.
If you are planning to ◊◊◊◊ them or perform certain medical procedures on them, their sex matters. In the vast overwhelming times we interact, their genitalia is irrelevant.
Then why would gender be relevant if sex is not?
Again, the core problem. 'Human' doesn't matter either, because we are not overly concerned with Koala bears in restrooms. Your flat assertion here is Woman = Biological Female. Ok. That subtly negates the whole concept of transpeople
Depends what you mean. It negates certain
concepts of trans people, but certain
concepts of trans people are just factually wrong. We need not accomodate every
concept out there. Does it negate the concept that certain people feel a certain way? No, it doesn't.
It turns a transwoman, as Ziggurat has insisted, into men pretending. That's a bridge too far for me.
Why?
I've said this several times: you can be definitionally linked without being synonymous. Related, or correlated, as it were. Meaningless, or almost so, if the coupling is severed, but I see no reason to sever all connection, as you assert, to have a functional understanding of gender as unique but strongly related to sex.
How is it related? You've said that it's their "internal sense", but what does that actually mean? Furthermore, you've made several claims based on this definition that don't withstand scrutiny, such as the impossibility of non-binary identity or gender fluidity. I don't know how you can claim that someone's sense can't change over time. I don't know how you can claim that if someone's sense can be something different from their actual body, that it can ONLY be one other thing and not multiple other things. You have never provided any basis for these claims. So I don't think you actually have a robust definition of gender at all. My sense is that your definition of gender is only constructed to the extent that it allows for trans identifying males to claim to be women, and that's where it ends.
Fairly useless in this context. If you insist on calling a transwoman 'he' at the workplace, is that person protected by policy? You seem to be leaning strongly towards removing their protections and allowing you to essentially humiliate, mock, and harass them multiple times a day at work, pointing to your definition of woman.
Is being called "he", on its own, really harassment? Is it mockery? Is it humiliation?
Why?
Denying their existence is not falling neatly under the 'honoring' halo from my POV.
What do you mean, denying their existence? How is noting that trans-identifying males are males denying their existence?
You like to lean on policy as a talking point.
No. theprestige (and myself, and many others) like to lean on policy because that's what has actual consequences, and we care about actual consequences.
Ok, clean pool. But the problem with policy is that it dumbs down the complexities of the human experience into drawing one-size-fits-all lines. The perfect everyday example is transforming into legal adult on your 18th birthday. Nothing changes, but policy intentionally dumbs it down to uselessness for the kind of nuanced discussion we are having here.
Nothing changes? Of course something changes. Age changes.
Now, in the case of age, you can argue that age shouldn't be what we really care about. We really care about things like responsibility, competence, etc., and that age is an imperfect proxy for these other much more complex factors. Which is true: these things correlate to age, but not perfectly, so that some people could be ready at a younger age and some at an older age. But age is, practically speaking, the best proxy for these things that we have which doesn't produce more problems than it solves. Thus, we use age anyways, imperfect though it may be. Do you have a better suggestion?
It sounds like you're claiming that we're trying to use sex as a proxy for other factors, just like age is used as a proxy, but that sex doesn't capture these other factors very well. That's a logical enough claim which I think has some merit, but let's examine that argument in more detail. Yes, sex is a proxy for a LOT of stuff that you might care about. But what, to your mind, are these other factors? And do you think gender is a better proxy than sex for these other factors? Why? From a policy perspective (because again, policy has consequences), we CANNOT write policy based on in-depth complex factors that are hard to access and evaluate. We often MUST use proxies like age for purely practical reasons. And should gender (which, under your definition, cannot be assessed in any objective way even if you think it exists objectively) actually be substituted for sex as a better proxy? Is there any better proxy than sex? Because I don't think there is a better proxy. I think sex is the best practical distinguisher for doing things like segregating sports or bathrooms or changing rooms. I think gender is a far inferior distinguisher for these purposes.
