Transgender man gives birth

sir drinks-a-lot said:
What a strange notion, that problems that don't affect oneself personally don't actually exist.
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You have evidence that people are being made to use these terms? Please provide it.

Also, you yourself spend a lot of time on this very forum discussing problems that don't affect you personally.
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Discussing problems and lamenting manufactured ones are two different things.
 
tyr_13 said:
I already did, you just missed it because it was directed to someone who is making a full argument.
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Well could you tell the person with a full argument, who is obviously not you, to translate it for me? Where are your criteria? And could you make a single post without doing nothing but personalise the discussion?

You're using criteria from a different context for 'woman' to justify being rude to people (and in fact, denying that it's rude).
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Oh, yes. I'm constantly looking for excuses to be unpleasant to strangers. Totally me. :rolleyes:

No, you're not arguing in good faith because you continually refuse to clarify
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I've clarified every single point I've made. Is Ponderingturtle your mentor or something?

You're the one insisting you know the truth of other people's gender.
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And again you're lying. It's not like I made up the damned sexes, is it? You're the ones trying to rewrite the dictionary.

Again, do you not see the mirror held up?
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You really have no argument of your own, do you?

Except that doesn't even resemble what I did. I took the form of your argument and used it advancing a different argument from yours.
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You did a piss poor job of it. Clearly you don't understand my argument or yours.
 
johnny karate said:
You have evidence that people are being made to use these terms?
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Since I know your style, I can already see where your broken line of reasoning is heading. Unless I provide a video of someone being held at gunpoint being forced to say "xim", you'll say they're not being made to do it.

So much for my attempt at using plain English.
 
Cavemonster said:
First, let me say thank you for responding!
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Of course. Why wouldn't I?

What makes you say that? What discipline or objective set of observable facts leads you that claim?
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The dictionary, with which we define the terms we use in language. Gender is not defined as how you feel about your gender, as that would be circular.

That sounds a lot more like a commonly held definition of sex. What scientific or academic discipline do you draw from when you say it's a definition of gender? I'm not familiar with a field that defines it that way.
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While I'm at it, could you tell me which scientific discipline defines the word "table"?

Yes, in the majority of humans, sex matches gender matches physical appearance and presentation.
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The overwhelming majority of humans, to the exception of a tiny minority.

But the thing is, you seem to be saying that looking at someone and insisting that what you see is correct should be acceptable behavior.
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I think determining things by observation is acceptable behaviour, yes. But the problem here is that, as usual with this topic, you're trying to mix morality with objective definitions. And also adding "insisting" to the sentence, which seems there to put a spin on the discussion.

Even if you consider sex and gender equivalent, that can lead to a bad outcome.
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That's true of everything, though. What you need to establish is that the risk is much higher than normal.

It may "almost always" work, but the consequences for getting it wrong are at the very least pretty hurtful, and the consequences for letting the person you're talking to make that determination are... what?
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The issue is that all of this is based on how hurt people will be if we don't cater to their request. Considering how hurt people are at just about anything (including justifiable reasons) I don't think it's a very good argument in and of itself. Plenty of things hurt my feelings, for instance, and I don't request that people adjust to cater to me.

Male and Female are sex terms. A person who is Male(sex) may assert that they are a woman(gender).
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Operative word: assert.
 
I love the way people want to narrow and restrict the discussion. Let's get one guy to say that he won't call someone by their chosen gender if it doesn't match their actual, biological, reality. Then, we can say that the whole debate is about being rude to people at work.


No, that isn't it. You can probably keep Argumemnon going on that for a while, but that's not the reality of the transgender debate in America today. It's about whether a person who identifies as a woman is really a woman, and it matters because if you accept that argument, then someone will tell your teenage daughter that if she wants to use the locker room, she has to take her clothes off in front of that man, because, you know, even though she sees what is obviously a penis and a set of balls, she doesn't know what a woman really is, and is mistaken in her identification.

And yes. That happens. Really. I'm not making this up.
 
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Meadmaker said:
It does not exclude transmen.
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The second sense does, and that's all that's necessary. That is, in the context of gender (which is the dominant context in our day-to-day social lives) transmen are men. It's not reasonable to expect a definition to determine context for you.

The principle reason not to call a transman a woman in the first sense isn't lexical. It's that they don't want you to. Seems pretty easy to avoid--just use male and female wherever you want to indicate sex. I'm pretty great at meeting people a billionth of the way.
 
mumblethrax said:
The second sense does, and that's all that's necessary. That is, in the context of gender (which is the dominant context in our day-to-day social lives) transmen are men. It's not reasonable to expect a definition to determine context for you.

The principle reason not to call a transman a woman in the first sense isn't lexical. It's that they don't want you to. Seems pretty easy to avoid--just use male and female wherever you want to indicate sex. I'm pretty great at meeting people a billionth of the way.
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If a definition is "this or that", and the object in question satisfies one of those senses, then the definition doesn't exclude the object in question.

If your definition of woman begins with "A biological female or...." and a person is a biological female, then the person is, by that definition, a woman. Transmen are biological females.

Reminder of the challenge for anyone who missed it:

Provide a definition of "woman" that
1. Includes transwomen
2. Excludes transmen
3. Is not circular.
 
Posters keep talking about "objective reality" but it seems to me that there is more than one reality in this situation. There is the reality that someone has a biological sex as defined by certain characteristics. There is also the reality that someone has a sense of their self which may not match whatever those biological characteristics are.

Maybe we don't know enough about it yet, but isn't it possible that the set of biological characteristics isn't always 100% binary? That is, a single individual may have biologically male genitals but biologically female brain composition, for example? In that case, are we not defining "gender" based solely on part of the relevant characteristics and claiming that is the objective "reality".
 
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sylvan8798 said:
Posters keep talking about "objective reality" but it seems to me that there is more than one reality in this situation. There is the reality that someone has a biological sex as defined by certain characteristics. There is also the reality that someone has a sense of their self which may not match whatever those biological characteristics are.

Maybe we don't know enough about it yet, but isn't it possible that the set of biological characteristics isn't always 100% binary? That is, a single individual may have biologically male genitals but biologically female brain composition, for example? In that case, are we not defining "gender" based solely on part of the relevant characteristics and claiming that is the objective "reality".
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Certainly biological sex is non binary. There are intersexed people in the world. That's not a myth. While there is an objective reality about people being male or female, it is not true that every human being fits neatly into one category or the other, even if only physical attributes are considered.

To the best of medical knowledge as it exists today, there is no such thing as "female brain composition", but that doesn't exclude the possibility that such a thing will be discovered in the future. We don't know enough to say such a thing does or does not exist.
 
sylvan8798 said:
Posters keep talking about "objective reality" but it seems to me that there is more than one reality in this situation.
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Yes, the objective one and the subjective one.

Let's forget about what's rude or polite or hurtful or bad for a moment and focus on what is. I think that what people are should be based on objective measures observable by others, not just themselves. Do you agree?

Maybe we don't know enough about it yet, but isn't it possible that the set of biological characteristics isn't always 100% binary?
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Not only is it possible, but it clearly happens, though rarely. I suspect that sex is expressed through a great number of genes, which are usually all to one "setting" or the other. A smaller number of people have a few switches on the "wrong" setting (that is, not the same as the other switches). In a small number of people, that results in gender dysphoria.

However, that still doesn't mean that the person's perceptions trump objective measures.
 
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Meadmaker said:
It's about whether a person who identifies as a woman is really a woman, and it matters because if you accept that argument, then someone will tell your teenage daughter that if she wants to use the locker room, she has to take her clothes off in front of that man, because, you know, even though she sees what is obviously a penis and a set of balls, she doesn't know what a woman really is, and is mistaken in her identification.
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I have it on good authority that telling people that they are mistaken in their identification is dehumanising. ;)
 
Argumemnon said:
Hey, shame on me for taking the bait, right?
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I often "take the bait" from posters because I give the benefit of the doubt that they might be arguing honestly and coherently.

Once a given poster proves otherwise, though, I try to stop biting on that line.
 
Argumemnon said:
Yes, the objective one and the subjective one.

Let's forget about what's rude or polite or hurtful or bad for a moment and focus on what is. I think that what people are should be based on objective measures observable by others, not just themselves. Do you agree?
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If you mean observable as in visually, tactically, or chemically, then no, I don't agree. Just because I can't observe someone's mental process doesn't in and of itself make it less valid as a measurement. In that case I may need more to go by. How someone FEELS is not "wrong" per se. If I say I feel hot, you can't say that I don't feel hot, just because it's 10 degrees in my house.

Not only is it possible, but it clearly happens, though rarely. I suspect that sex is expressed through a great number of genes, which are usually all to one "setting" or the other. A smaller number of people have a few switches on the "wrong" setting (that is, not the same as the other switches). In a small number of people, that results in gender dysphoria.

However, that still doesn't mean that the person's perceptions trump objective measures.
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I'm not sure I see that as a mental disorder in the sense that we usually think of them (i.e. as a disease). Yes, it's not what is seen in most individuals, but then genius is also not what is seen in most individuals, and we don't consider that a mental disorder in and of itself.
 
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