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2nd August 2017, 04:16 PM | #281 |
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2nd August 2017, 04:20 PM | #282 |
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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?
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2nd August 2017, 04:26 PM | #283 |
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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. |
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2nd August 2017, 04:27 PM | #284 |
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2nd August 2017, 04:27 PM | #285 |
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"Transgender female masturbates and semen comes out!"
shocker.. |
2nd August 2017, 04:28 PM | #286 |
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Of course. Why wouldn't I?
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2nd August 2017, 04:30 PM | #287 |
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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. |
2nd August 2017, 04:35 PM | #288 |
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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. |
2nd August 2017, 04:47 PM | #289 |
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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. |
2nd August 2017, 05:14 PM | #290 |
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2nd August 2017, 05:22 PM | #291 |
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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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2nd August 2017, 05:41 PM | #292 |
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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. |
2nd August 2017, 05:47 PM | #293 |
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2nd August 2017, 05:50 PM | #294 |
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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?
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However, that still doesn't mean that the person's perceptions trump objective measures. |
2nd August 2017, 05:53 PM | #295 |
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2nd August 2017, 05:57 PM | #296 |
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2nd August 2017, 05:57 PM | #297 |
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2nd August 2017, 05:58 PM | #298 |
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2nd August 2017, 06:04 PM | #299 |
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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.
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2nd August 2017, 06:05 PM | #300 |
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The Australian Family Association's John Morrissey was aghast when he learned Jessica Watson was bidding to become the youngest person to sail round the world alone, unaided and without stopping. |
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2nd August 2017, 06:17 PM | #301 |
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2nd August 2017, 06:19 PM | #302 |
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Well since it can't be measured, doesn't it make it an invalid measurement by definition? For instance, we never ask people how tall they feel they are, or how much they feel they weigh.
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2nd August 2017, 06:21 PM | #303 |
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2nd August 2017, 06:37 PM | #304 |
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My "broken line of reasoning" is simply asking you to substantiate your claim that you - or any one else - are somehow being forced to learn a list gender variant terms, or whatever they are.
Clearly that substantiation will not be forthcoming, in plain English or any other language. And coming from someone who delights in mocking those who exaggerate the problem of racially motivated hate crimes, the irony of your hand-wringing over this ridiculous and nonexistent problem is rather enjoyable. |
2nd August 2017, 06:40 PM | #305 |
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2nd August 2017, 06:52 PM | #306 |
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I would be perfectly willing to consider those individuals as intersexed, and I think it is a sep in the right direction that the phenomenon of intersexed individuals is being recognized and accepted. If that were good enough for the advocates, I doubt there would be any problem.
Unfortunately, that's not good enough. The advocates insist on binary gender identification, and that the gender identification must be based on psychology, not anatomy. |
2nd August 2017, 06:53 PM | #307 |
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It doesn't need to. You determine the relevant sense from context, not the other way around.
The relevant sense is usually "gender" in our day-to-day lives, because that the sense that implicates social differences.
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Which is why I think your claim that denying this is part of the trans orthodoxy is silly. It is, at best, a radical view which undermines the case for trans rights.
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It seems rather pointless, since that's just not how language works.
Originally Posted by Meadmaker
The only thing that prevents us from calling it as a special case of intersexuality today is that it's not clear which direction the causal arrow points. |
2nd August 2017, 06:53 PM | #308 |
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2nd August 2017, 06:57 PM | #309 |
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2nd August 2017, 07:18 PM | #310 |
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No, a female is a member of the sex that produces egg cells.
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2nd August 2017, 07:26 PM | #311 |
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People who are transgender don't believe that they have "man parts" or "woman parts" contrary to the physical manifestation. They believe that their parts do not correspond to how they perceive themselves in the societal context of male vs female. Still not convinced that constitutes a mental disorder.
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2nd August 2017, 09:02 PM | #312 |
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2nd August 2017, 09:51 PM | #313 |
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2nd August 2017, 10:00 PM | #314 |
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You are assuming an objective reality based on a narrow set of criteria. Suppose the only measure you have to determine someone's gender is their voice. I have been mistaken for a man on the phone MANY times. Does the fact that my perception contradicts what you are using as a metric mean that I am wrong and you are right, or that I am delusional, mentally ill?
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2nd August 2017, 10:02 PM | #315 |
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Okay, we could discuss dictionaries in general, their descriptive rather than prescriptive nature, their limitations, but we can skip that for the moment. Here's the Merriam Webster definition of gender.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gender
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Clearly, we're not talking about definition #1a, b or c. You seem to like definition #2a, but it seems clear to me that when trans people refer to their gender they are referring to something closer to 2b. Now since you said the dictionary was that "with which we define the terms we use in language. " surely you must accept that 2b is a valid use of the word and that it does not in that usage refer to chromosomes or genitals.
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Philosophers and sociologists and psychologists all study gender. If you insist that you're dictating a particular truth about gender, surely academic standards of terminology might come in handy.
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You're right we're looking at both moral and factual questions. I'll do my best to untangle them. The question of whether it is right or appropriate to say something is always a moral/ethical question, regardless of whether or not what you say is factual. The factual nature of a statement can impact it's moral standing, it does not determine it. So, to get back to the issue, let's start with the factual claim. A trans man claims to have a masculine gender even though his sex is female. The behavior we're investigating is firmly maintaining the practice of referring to this person as "she" and "her" despite this person's express communication of a preference to be thought of as a man and referred to by the pronouns "he" and "him". Now correct me if I'm wrong, but your position seems to be that this person is incorrect in maintaining a masculine gender and the use of those pronouns, and because of that fact you feel morally/ethically justified in using "she" and "her" and referring to this person as a woman. This person is clearly not referring to their DNA or genitalia when they define their gender, so one would not use definition of gender 1a to determine the truth or falsity of this person's statements. The truth or falsity would rest somewhere within behavior, culture or psychology. Now an academic definition would give us more specificity, but since we're not using those, and the dictionary has defined our term, the truth rests on there simply being some element within those three domains that is masculine. Your previous standard of determining the truth value of their statement seems flawed from this perspective. Not being a psychologist or privy to a detailed psychological definition of gender, it seems from an epistemological point of view that one ought to rely on this person's self report of their psychological state. They have far more access to both the information and the standard than you and no particular reason for dishonesty. While delusion is possible, I suppose, we'd need to more specifically define what psychological state was misperceived. Now back to the moral/ethical part of it. Engaging in a behavior with no practical workplace value, targeted toward a particular coworker, repeatedly over their objections is hard to justify. Peeking in someone's cubical and mooing at them, even after they repeatedly made clear it was very unpleasant would be at a minimum, a jerk move. Now if your action directly irritated a reasonable sensitivity, for instance, if you poked your head in an overweight coworker's cubical and yelled "you're fat" on a daily basis, after they made it clear that it hurt them, that would be harassment. Even though the statement "you're fat" is true, it's still a major jerk move. The behavior we're discussing more broadly is such a jerk move, but to add to that, it isn't even true. The coworker described earlier is not objectively of a feminine gender. So you would be both ethically and factually wrong to insist on referring to him as such. |
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3rd August 2017, 12:38 AM | #316 |
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Cavemonster, thank you for your non-polemical contribution to this thread. Seriously, thank you!
You seem like the person I should ask a question that has been nagging me for a while: How do I make sense of the claim that gender is fluid, with respect to those who use pronouns like 'xim' and 'xer'? I understand the distinction between sex and gender, I "get" biological males/females having an internal understanding of their gender as woman/man, respectively. What I don't understand is this idea that gender is "fluid", and that there exist third/fourth/fifth, etc. genders. I don't understand what is meant by a trans person saying they are "gender non-conforming". This is where I get lost. Any help? |
Last edited by The Nimble Pianist; 3rd August 2017 at 02:13 AM. Reason: Subject-verb agreement. (Grammar) |
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3rd August 2017, 01:04 AM | #317 |
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I don't disagree with those reasons at all. But the question is at what point does liberalism evolve to the point where it does disagree? If you had asked the average liberal 40 years ago, what they thought of gay marriage, they probably would have laughed. Transgender in the military? It was a running joke on MASH that was a dodge to get out of the military.
Okay, so maybe the liberals don't go for the real predators, the guys raping babies. But they find someone like Mary Kay Letourneau. She got off extraordinarily light as it was; for her first conviction of having sex with a sixth-grader (one whom she was teaching) she got 6 months, 3 suspended. Second time around (with the same kid) she got 7-1/2 years, but served less than 6. And then after she got released, they were married (apparently separated since, but their marriage lasted 13 years, not bad by today's standards). Those kinds of female teacher/male student caught having sex stories come up periodically. Around here the reaction mostly seems to be, lucky guy! So you start with the women. But then comes the fairness argument. Mary Kay had sex with her student who was 12, why is this guy in prison for 20 years having sex with a female student who was 13? And I assume there will be some gay cause celebre about a man who was after all only showing a youngster how to become comfortable with his own sexuality. The idea that liberals will cease trying to preen themselves for being more tolerant than their elders is patently absurd. Indeed, that is exactly what the person I was originally responding to was doing. His grandfather was racist. Mom was more tolerant but still homophobic. Him perfectly tolerant in every regard. I'm guessing his descendants will find his blind spot, whether it's pedophobia or something else that we all take for granted. |
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3rd August 2017, 01:57 AM | #318 |
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3rd August 2017, 01:59 AM | #319 |
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3rd August 2017, 02:09 AM | #320 |
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I like both 2a and 2b. I just don't view it as meaning that a biological woman can have a male gender. Gender is the social expression of biological sex.
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The disconnect, of course, is that your definition of gender is simply "what a person feels their gender is like", which I obviously disagree with.
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