A puzzle concerning identity - the incoherence of Gender
Gender identity in transgender folk is described as a conflict between one's internal sense of being male or female, and one's physical characteristics.
A woman trapped in a man's body.
Can one know what it is like to be a man? Or what it is like to be a woman? How, if one can have no more than one's own experiences?
Is it rather the case that one can have a preference for taking on the roll of a man, or the roll of a woman, despite one's physique?
A woman trapped in a man's body.
Can one know what it is like to be a man? Or what it is like to be a woman? How, if one can have no more than one's own experiences?
Is it rather the case that one can have a preference for taking on the roll of a man, or the roll of a woman, despite one's physique?
Comments (464)
It's a bad description. In those instances, the conflict is between one's existing body and a sense of body one belonging to.
The specific connection to identity is defined in how those bodies relate to sex and gender catergories we use. It's not a question of measuring from the presence of one body or not.
In this sense, there is no "what is it like to be a man" or "what is it like to be a woman". Belonging to such an identity is not determined by an external criteria like what body one has, how someone behaves or what they wear, etc.
Instead defined by a truth of belonging to an identity itself.
I think it may have more to do with the inadequation of your experience with the expected experience that social pressure imposed on you.
This is somewhat on point with my social life. One of my friend is transitioning into a women, and lately started giving advice to me and my group of friends on how to act around women, as if she had natural authority on the subject.
It made for an akward conversation.
Consider...
Quoting Banno
...which had me re-thinking Rebecca Reilly-Cooper's interesting analysis.
I tend to avoid those sorts of propositional relations in this context because they try to set out identity as a language rule (e.g. "Trump is the president") of a proposition.
They don't give an adequate account because they are about whether someone's claim meets a rule, rather than the definition of identity.
Even "Trump is president" has the first kind of "is." Before we get to a point of suggesting the truth or falisity of a proposition, we need to index the relevant elements.
I cannot make the conclusion "Trump is president" is a true proposition without first understanding the identity Trump is president. The former is understood only in the context of the latter.
Without gasping that identity, I couldn't answer the question. If I just knew Trump is Trump, and the president is the president, I wouldn't have an answer to whether Trump was president. I would lack the indexing of what I knew to the relevant person.
As a male I know what it is like to be a lesbian woman. Does that count?
That suggests some self beyond any particular role. That's a well worn idea.
Is that a negative vote for the idea if it has been worn well or is it just an observation that the idea is reasonably irrefutable over a long time?
Your reply just has zero substance in it's structure to know what you mean or where you stand with the idea, so merely for the sake of clarity.....
This is also related to Heidegger's notion of Dasein and authenticity, but we wouldn't call that thing beyond the role a "self".
It feels entirely normal to me to feel like me. But other people think I'm weird.
Living with Mrs Un has obliged me to become aware of being white, and aware that the normality of whiteness, the unawareness of the identity is a privilege of whiteness in the culture. A non-white person simply cannot walk down the street unaware of their non-whiteness; it impinges itself by way of 'the look', which roughly translates as "who do you think you are?" It is a question that it is a privilege not to be forced to confront. Not to confront it is to feel at home.
Can one know what it is like to feel at home, or not to feel at home? To be questionable or un questionable? Only by 'encountering the other'.
Let me declare that one's identity is not one's role, in any straightforward sense. There is a huge gulf between a transvestite, who prefers (sometimes) the role of the opposite sex, and trans gender identification as the opposite sex.
I feel at home in my body, but not everyone does. Where this bites folks on the bum is that in encountering that other, who does not feel at home in their body, one's own identity is called into question - the unquestioned becomes questionable; the comfortable becomes uncomfortable; one becomes aware, paradoxically, that one's identity is a role, but one that one has played unconsciously one's whole life, like one's posture, that one can change by a conscious effort - for about 30 seconds.
Men are hairy, and women are not; everyone knows that. But are you an hairy man, or a smooth man?
There is a personal remedy. The not identifying oneself as role or even as body (including mind/brain).
It is employing, for oneself, a psychological trick to counter the culture tricks and the trickiness of mindlessness.
After all, those "who do you think you are?" looks are just demonstrations of mindlessness that is not worth fighting against. Battles of the kind you allude to are ultimately interior, and therefore, as a consequence, the most fulfilling to win.
The mindless will l probably never even reach the juncture of opportunity for such fulfillment.
Similar with Wife and Disability.
I, at present, am a hairy man. I have, at times. been a smooth man. In those periods of my life when I have been smooth, I have indeed felt a deep absence, as something were missing from my life.
And my chin was cold.
So, as Satre, being proceeds essence, and we are obliged to choose; easy, then, to choose from the ubiquitous roles really set before us; to bypass some experiences.
Choice is part of change.
Is choice part of identity?
I don't think that that's necessarily the case [I]instead of[/I] having an internal sense of being male or female, in conflict with one's physical characteristics. It could be either or both. But it is just a sense, and a sense can be right or wrong, and I do not believe that there is any reality to the idea of being a woman trapped inside a man's body, beyond the sense.
Quoting Banno
To some extent, but not fully. I don't exclude what we gain from our experience of the opposite gender - through observation, interaction, our ability to relate and to imagine, and suchlike - from our knowledge of what it is like to be that gender.
It is. But not always.
I'm not sure exactly the aspect of identity you're interested in. Is your focus on sex and gender, or is it on interiority -- feeling like such and such -- and exteriority?
Then my answer is yes -- one can know what it is like to be such and such. How do I claim this? Well, people make these sorts of claims frequently. They are believable to me because I have such feelings too. The claims are about their own experiences, but also highlight similarities in experience. And even though such descriptions change between time, place, and person they also have similarities that allow people who feel like such and such to bond over such identifiers, and even theorize about their identities.
Now, that doesn't exactly answer how it is possible to be able to do such. It only justifies that one can do so. I'd also point out that even though it can be done that this isn't exhaustive of identity. In some ways the theories, the descriptors, the names are products of what is more basic -- individual experience. So you can disagree over the meaning of a name, the descriptor, the theory to explain what it is you're feeling based upon individual experience, even if it doesn't quite match the general trend.
I find that ridiculous, as, I can say with confidence, would many others, whether gay, straight, or other. Clearly there is meaning enough to come up with at least a working definition.
"Then my answer is yes -- one can know what it is like to be such and such. "
You should let Thomas Nagel know.
What's the problem?
Consider why we can't know what it's like to be a bat. Among the reasons: our perceptions are based on our world-view, and our world-view is a product of hard-wiring, and layers of experience. Each layer of experience is a product of the lower (earlier) layers.
Males and females are hardwired differently. Among other differences are the hormonal - these influence our perceptions. A boy may empathize with girls rather than boys (and vice versa), and conceptualize an opposite gender-role, but it will not be identical to being that opposite sex. (Don't construe this to imply I'm opposed to trans-rights. I'm socially liberal on this, but that doesn't mean I can set aside reasonable analysis.)
I know what it is like to be poor because I have been poor. I am not currently poor, and I know that because I know the exact pressures and feelings of poorness, having been so myself at one point.
I'd basically just leave talk of hard-wiring out of it.
:lol:
Quoting tim wood
The "if anything" is funny, suggesting that it's possible that it's nothing at all. How absurd.
Listen, Woody, do you really need me or anyone else to tell you what "gay" is? No, I don't believe so. It's hilarious that you felt it necessary to ask your former colleagues, and then took their stupid answer as gospel, just because they're gay.
To be gay is to be homosexual, which is to be sexually attracted to people of one's own sex, or exclusively so. It seems to be used more in relation to men than women. You could've gotten that from a dictionary. And yes, that definition could be pedantically picked apart like practically any other definition, with the words "game" and "chair" being good examples. But that doesn't mean that the meaning is a mystery or that there is no meaning at all. Get a grip, lad.
You're also not a girl (I assume). There certainly are more differences between bats and humans than there are between boys and girls, but they're still different. The differences are physical as well as social. There certainly is a "girl role" that is "imposed" on girls, but that role is part of their identity. A boy who'd like to live in that role will not have had the same experiences as the girl.
Of course, we could chose to define the "girl role" in a way that people of either genetic sex could fit - but there will be arbitrariness to it. I'm actually OK with doing that, but this doesn't make it something more than it is (arbitrary).
Same here. I wonder if we experienced it the same way, though. Everyone experiences things based on who and what they are, and on their environment.
Eh, I'm pretty much limiting myself to the more general question rather than digging into the specifics of gender theory, here. How this might work at with regards to specifics would be up to those people who identify as such and such, according to my theory. Not being transgender I'm fairly hesitant to begin generalizing in that area.
Well, it's not rocket science, is it? What did you expect? You're basically asking me to teach you how to suck eggs.
Quoting tim wood
If you genuinely didn't know what "gay" is, then it wouldn't be so outlandish if you also didn't know what "or" is. What other common English words are you unfamiliar with? You seem to understand the words that I'm using in conversation with you well enough, and you don't seem all that surprised when I reveal the meaning to you. Could it be that you've had this knowledge all along, and are in fact just putting on a show, for some reason unbeknownst to me?
For your information, I used the word "or" to indicate that there is more than one interpretation.
Quoting tim wood
Yes, philosophy can have that effect. Nothing remarkable there. Sometimes it's almost as though the more you think about something, the more stupid your conclusion will be. It's a phenomenon known as overthinking. I trust you have first-hand experience of it, so I shouldn't really need to explain it to you. Sometimes, and especially in philosophy, we fail to see what's right in front of us, and go searching for answers elsewhere. It's like a blind spot.
Quoting tim wood
That's a good one! :lol:
Quoting tim wood
No, you're wrong there. One can be all of that and more, yet still come out with a stupid answer to a simple question.
You can't possibly believe this?
It's philosophy. Nothing surprises me anymore.
I think that a homosexual is someone who is exclusively sexually attracted to members of their own sex.
Do you?
Is there a thing that it is like to be Molie?
How would you tell? Since you can't know what it is like to be a bat, how can you differentiate what it is like to be Molie?
That is, the whole what it is like to be... is logically fraught.
The principle appealed to here, that one can't know what it's like to be oneself without being something else, I see no reason to believe.
So you are happy that there is no difference between "How are you feeling?" and "What is it like to be you?"
As if how you feel is not subject to change...
Your feeling of what it is like to be you changes without your noticing. Then it cannot be part of what it is to be you; and not what makes you who you are...
Because how you feel might change continually.
And that includes Gender. The fact of one's physique historically provided the expectation that one fulfil either of two gender roles.
Recognising that there is not a something-that-it-is-like-to-feel-male, not a something-that-it-is-like-to-feel-female, deflates this expectation, exposing it as a now-defunct social norm.
Including being a man or a woman.
The former seems to imply a stage-level or momentary inquiry, the latter an individual-level or habitual inquiry.
Hence the error here:
Quoting Banno
Quoting Banno
Nonetheless, there are patterns characteristic of the way one feels over time.
Why not?
And how could you know that you understood them correctly?
Moreover, how could you be sure that you feel something that all other women also feel?
Do all women feel the same way about themselves? Men? Do they all share the same beliefs?
Looks like the entire enterprise is based upon gross overgeneralization.
If more than one answer is acceptable, then...
Have you ever felt like you were not yourself? Or perhaps you felt you were not true to yourself. Surely if you know yourself, then you do know what it is like to be yourself.
I'm not sure there is a thing that it is like to be myself. But there is a what it is like to by myself. The "it" is a little more generic, and needn't be an actual thing. It's not like there is a chair which it is like to be myself.
It seems to me that you can tell what something is like by two means -- being it, or feeling it.
I'm not so sure here. But it's not necessarily the greatest thing ever, either. It's just a common frame of reference, a decent enough way of talking about interiority.
Quoting Banno
Not to me, but worth noting for myself at least. I don't think I'm arguing for essence in the above. That's a side issue. That we change doesn't bother me -- of course we do. We aren't static beings, after all.
Sure. Listening now.
Seems at odds with anything I'm saying, but I'm listening.
Seems like a straw person to me. There is perhaps a solid stick hidden in the straw, which one might assent to, which is that "I" am independent (potentially) from both my biology and my socialisation; I am free to make up my own games, and do not have to play your games. And at that point, the long and tedious argument that my games are made up loses it's force, because societies' games are also made up.
The protection offered by separate changing rooms for shorties is sacrosanct and slouching tallies must not be allowed to undermine it, even if they have had surgery to shorten their legs. Or to put it more plainly, why do we care so much? My answer is that it is a matter of identity, and identity is always defined in terms of difference. What it is like to be a man, is the way in which it is different from being a woman. So ambiguous, androgynous, mixed-up people are a threat to my identity - in effect a threat to my life. Hence the persecution of deviance of all kinds.
So, for instance, if one is Muslim -- meaning they have a deeply held feeling of being Muslim, and they outwardly express such sentiments -- then we can tell well enough what a Muslim is for legal purposes. And if violence or workplace discrimination takes place based on said identity then we have a reason why to offer legal protections for said identity.
I change to Muslim here because she likens transgender identity to religious identity.
To me it seems less that she is interested in interiority as much as she is interested in the legal protections afforded to personal claims on identity. It's a question of political philosophy more than it is a question of mind or metaphysics or epistemology. yes?
That's what I'm not so sure about. We do, after all, offer legal protections to religious identities.
Quoting Sapientia
The professional social workers were, most likely, "over-thinking" the question, but what is the cause, motivation, or source of "over-thinking"? One source is over-exposure to social theory (soctheo) which, for various reasons, seeks to undermine systems of oppression which, some theorists think, depends on rigid definitions. So, race and gender (two faves of the soctheo types) come in for major dithering operations which fuzz up everything until they can't see anything clearly.
So, male, masculine, men, boys; female, feminine, women, girls; blacks, whites, germans, french, welsh, scot, etc. are all found to be insubstantial in all ways, as are gay and straight. The only thing clear to soctheos is that most people are oppressed by white males, and that point they can analyze with self-declared clarity and certainty (which they do over and over again).
So, how does one "identify" as a homosexual / gay person? Is it possible? Sure, it's possible. For the individual, there is first self-identity: "I know I am gay". They know what they feel (affective axis) and what they think (cognitive axis). They know what gives them an instant hard on, and what doesn't (physical axis). Gay men know they are gay because they fantasize about male bodies and having sex with other men. Gay men have, and like to have sex with other men (performative axis). Gay men may preferentially socialize with other gay men (social axis).
Straight men differ from gay men in how they self-identify, what they feel, what they think bout, what turns them on, how they perform sex, and who and how they socialize. They will be oriented towards heterosexuality.
Do some straight, heterosexual men resemble gay men? Sure -- and visa versa. Some men are bisexual -- they respond sexually to both men and women (usually not equally). That some men are bisexual doesn't invalidate the straight-gay dichotomy that most people experience, since most people are not, in the long run, bisexual. (A gay man having sex with a woman a few times doesn't make him bisexual or straight, anymore than a straight man having sex with another man a few times makes him bisexual or gay.)
What about stereotypical gay behavior, like "swishy" "faggoty" talking and walking? Like dressing up in women's clothes and (usually caricaturing some) women's behavior? Are these stereotypes an essential part of gay identity? No. Well done swish and drag are learned behaviors that require practice. Some men can do backward somersaults in high heels and plant without so much as a wobble. Most people (male or female) can not. Gays have subtle methods of signaling (like eye contact and other secret methods) but sometimes subtleness is just too limited. A faggoty walk is a much more efficient broadcast. They weren't born knowing how to do that.
What about the more feminine gender roles (apart from sex) that some gay men assume; is that an essential part of gayness? No. Sometimes boys are partial to feminine activities because the are excluded from typical male activities by other boys or men. Sometimes feminine activities (like cooking is in traditional families) were more interesting than masculine activities (like auto repair, mowing the lawn, etc.). Many gay men perform jobs which are either typically male gender-identified or are more gender-neutral--like white collar work. Some gay men are interior decorators, hair dressers, or social workers but one is far more likely to come across gay computer programmers, businessmen, technicians, and the like in groups of gay men.
What this statement implies is that a woman is a mental state-of-affairs and a man is a physical state-of-affairs and that one can placed inside another.
Someone claiming that they are a man in a woman's body would contradict the previous statement. It would be implying that a man is a mental state of affairs and a woman is a physical state of affairs.
To remove the contradiction we could say that being a man or woman is a combination of a mental and physical state of affairs. When someone says that they are a man in a woman's body or a woman in a man's body what they are really saying is that they are a man or a woman, respectively, with a mental illness, or raised in a way to diverge their mental and physical synchronization (parents raising their son to dress like a girl and play with girl toys).
I would only say it has negative psychological implications if this state of mind is expressed, by the person, as "trapped".
'Trapped" expresses a problem.
Otherwise, if it causes no harm then "illness" is unnecessary.
I have long thought the "what it is to be like" is kind of wrongheaded. Nagel says there is something it is like to be a bat. I would say there is nothing (else) it is like to be a bat, but that it is something to be a bat, just as it is something to be you, or me, or gay, or a policeman, to play golf, or drink beer, or anything at all that has an experiential dimension.
But maybe this is just being pedantic. It's normal parlance to ask questions such as "What's it like to play golf" or "what's it like to visit China" or "what's it like to be heterosexual". It's just that if we take that kind of question literally it seems kind of nonsensical. If I ask "what's it like to be you", you could rightly answer "it's not like anything else at all", because what it is to be you cannot be compared with what it is to be anything else. On the other hand being you is presumably more like being me than it is like being a stone. Just the usual imprecisions of language.
What it is to play golf as an experience is not something you share with others, but an experience you have in kind with other golfers. You cannot know what it is (in the sense of what it is like) to play golf (except perhaps "by analogy", by imagining other experiences you have had which might be similar in some ways) unless you have actually played golf.
Quoting Moliere
The possible political consequences to her are negative. She says early on that that is the reason she's arguing against this particular notion of gender identity, and she argues for the problematic consequences at the end...
Self-identification would not alone be sufficient as a test. Anyone can say they are gay or straight. Backing it up with behavior is much more compelling.
Quoting tim wood
I did not intend to give you the impression that there was no "test". If you rate sexual behaviors on the various axes I listed (affective, cognitive, physical, performative, social) most individuals will report or display feelings, ideas, physical responses (erections, intense interest...) sexual activity, and social activity that will place them as exclusively or primarily heterosexual, bisexual, or homosexual.
The objectively observable axes (physical and observable emotional responses, sexual performance, and social behavior) are, I think, reasonably reliable indicators of what and how much sexual interest one has in someone else. If a guy does not get an erection while kissing and fondling an attractive, willing, and available woman, what would that indicate? It strongly suggests he is not interested in women--not heterosexual. You would buy that much of a test, wouldn't you?
If a man who is kissing and fondling an attractive man gets an erection, and further professes and demonstrates strong interest in having sex, wouldn't that indicate he was homosexual? Especially if the social setting where the encounter is taking place is exclusive to homosexuals (like a park or a gay bar). If in conversation the man offered additional information on the affective and cognitive axes that backed up the observable behavior, wouldn't that further strengthen the test results?
From my experience, if someone in a gay environment acts like they are interested in gay sex, and says the sort of thing that gay men say in conversations about being gay, then they are gay -- until proven otherwise. And they aren't proven otherwise very often. Yes, I have met a few people who seemed to be gay for all practical purposes, but who couldn't or wouldn't perform sexually in an appropriate setting. In 40 years of looking for and having sex with hundred of men, and talking with hundreds more men about being gay (some in encounter groups) very few -- less than... 10? failed to deliver.
So I ask you: do you really think the gay social workers are unable to define what a homosexual is? How, for instance, do they find sexual partners? How do they assess whether someone they have had sex with all night is a one night stand or a potential for a longer relationship? I submit they go by the sorts of tests I provided.
A heterosexual is what a heterosexual does. Heterosexual men court and have sex with women--again and again. Is there some mystery still lurking here?
If you are not going to get on the page by listening to the podcast, your posts will remain unhelpful.
But being a golfer does. Playing golf is something people can have a shared experience of – not being a man or a woman.
Is this a plausible thing to think?
That’s what makes it different.
Can one be wrong about ones gender identity?
Further, I'd say Rebecca does not necessarily have a gender identity. Why go so far as to call it a universal phenomena? For her the only reason to do so is for political purposes -- that without the three main characteristics she is arguing against then there is no reason to give gender identity legal or political weight, that doing so undermines what trans activists are asking for.
That's why it seems to me that her aim is mainly political.
Universality: It needs to be a phenomena that all persons have.
Stability: It needs to be a relatively fixed or essential property.
Independence: It must be independent of both sex-body, and upbringing.
And she argues how these cannot all hold. So the original claim is something that cannot be true, on pain of incoherence.
She does offer some mid-way concessions. She even seems to believe that we all have individual access to ourselves -- I cannot know what it is like to be someone else, but I can know what it is like to be me. On that basis I cannot know what it is like to be a man, because I do not share experiences with other men. She also seems fine with the notion of preference for artifacts associated with words. She's mostly concerned with the claim she introduces.
But why would interiority need any of these things to make sense? There is the fact that people do bond over identities -- so men bond over man-like experiences, and women do the same. Rebecca can very well be a woman and not feel like there is some bond there. There is nothing contradictory in this. Experience is very particular. But we can know what someone is talking about, and know what they mean, and know they have experienced such-and-such when they give an outward expression of such. This is especially so over time. So one claim all by itself is just one claim. But sharing an experience comes down to a relationship -- it comes down to what a person is like over time.
We can come to know another through a relationship, through sharing. We do so by listening, which can only happen if we trust them.
Then you have rejected the notion of gender identity as Rebecca sets it out, and we are pretty much in agreement. That's fine.
Quoting Moliere
Hmm. At one stage Rebecca points out that it would be far simpler to refer to one's genitals than a brain scan to determine one's gender. I have to agree with her that gender is not completely performative. It's not just a social construct, because there are observable physical differences between men and women. But the social superstructure built on the basis of these differences is absurd. One's genitals ought play no part in one's income, for example - yet the evidence shows that it does.
I suppose I take it that she draws a lot more from said rejection than I do, though. The details of the rejection seem important to me, which is why I felt like I needed to say more than just that.
Though for you this is just an illustrative example, I think.
Quoting Banno
Even more simple would be to ask, and determine if the person is trustworthy or not. Gender, so I'd put it, is a possible aspect of identity. Identity has both a personal and social side -- so the radical feminist distinction between sex and gender points out that the physical facts determine sex, whereas the social performance, expectations, rules, and roles create gender. So the physical facts and differences between men and women don't have a bearing on gender. I think I could go along with that. The part I'd say is more complicated is on the side of identity. Where I certainly agree is that sex, and gender, should not result in income disparity or generally speaking in discrimination or violence -- which evidence shows sex and gender to result in both.
The part I disagree on is with respect to personal identification.
Now I could say, "I am irascible" -- I am talking about a part of my identity in so doing. The sentence "I am irascible" is truth-apt. You can determine whether I am or not irascible not really from my stating so, checking a part of my body, doing a brain scan, or anything like that -- far better to simply take is as true and see where it goes. If you find that my disposition in action doesn't match up, you might start to question the statement. But if I find me becoming angry at many slights you'd say that I know something about myself.
There is that internal part, where I have a deep feeling about my personality, and there are outward expressions of what I feel deeply about myself. And however that plays out, within our relationship with one another, will allow you to determine whether such is true or false.
So we might have a person who says "I am femme" -- expressing her gender identity. She responds to feminine pronouns, associates parts of her identity with feminity, and even bonds with other femme persons over said identity. There are feelings associated with the identity that are shared, as well as other aspects. But how they know such is the case is simply by being such. How we might know such is the case is if we have a relationship with them, they are trustworthy, and their outward expressions confirm what they say about themself through time. It is an assymetric relationship -- we might have reason to call such into question, but our reasons for justification are based upon what someone else tells us, feels, and is. They have priority in marking that boundary.
Can one be wrong about one's pain? I think it is an unhelpful suggestion to make to one who is suffering phantom limb pain.
Can one be wrong about one's body-identity? Well you might want to argue that people like this are 'wrong', you might want to argue that anorexics are likewise 'wrong', but it's beside the point, unless you can put them right in a way that makes them feel right and not wrong. It's the 'wrong' question.
you will be disappointed because no such absolute tests exists, and is unlikely to exist any time in the near future.
The reason for the absence of an absolute test is not that all the king's horses, all the king's social workers, Tim Wood, and Humpty Dumpty himself could not figure out whether Humpty Dumpty was gay (before his unfortunate fall). The reason is that there is a severe insufficiency of information about how genetics, prenatal development, brain structure, and experience combine to constitute intellect, personality, and behavior. We do not know why some people are musical prodigies and other people are tone deaf; why some people build commercial empires and others panhandle; why some people become champion bicyclists and other people prefer to do gastrointestinal surgery. We do not know the why and wherefore of a multitude of human characteristics.
The difficult identity question is not WHETHER someone is homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual; the difficult question is HOW the identity of gay, bi, straight, or trans came to be.
I [I]knew[/I] he was a sensible fellow.
It's not defunct, it's just less taken for granted now than in previous eras. The characteristics, associations, understandings, of what it is like to feel male or female haven't just vanished into thin air.
Exactly. Like I said in my reply to the opening post on page one: through observation, interaction, our ability to relate and to imagine, and suchlike.
Quoting tim wood
No. Self ID-ing; consistent report on phantasy; visible arousal; performance, and social -- that's enough. Your social workers probably can't tell whether somebody is an auto mechanic either, even though they can take a Chevy engine apart, fix it, and put it back together--and enjoy every minute of it.
The same thoughts as what?
Fuck the prefix "cis". Cis boom bah humbug!
Would there not be some common outward manifestations of the "inner' experience of identifying oneself with some particular notion of gender identity?
George Weinberg coined the term, and "homophobia" made its print debut in the May 23, 1969 edition of the distinguished straight porn newspaper, Screw. Screw may not have been as scholarly as the Journal of Psychoanalysis, but was certainly read as avidly. Google Ngram shows that the word "homophobia" was, as neologisms go, a hit.
Weinberg defined homophobia as "the fear that other people would think one was gay", and was based on a strong aversion to homosexuality. This is a more straightforward (so to speak) meaning than the more rococo, pseudo-Freudian type of misinterpretation that "homophobia is a fear that a man might himself be homosexual--apparently without knowing it", and the cause of outward directed hostility".
I believe that people are entitled to hate whatever it is they can't stand, be that strong perfume that smells like insecticide, homosexuals, or fascists. Their right to hate homosexuals, however, doesn't entitle them to close the 2 inch gap between their fist and my nose.
I think the likelihood of homophobia (per Weinberg's meaning) has little likelihood of disappearing. Indeed, I rather expect a resurgence of both homophobia and a withdrawal of some legislation that was intended to protect gay people. A more conservative Supreme court might rule against gay marriage. It isn't just Trump. Look at Roe vs. Wade. When R vs W was handed down in 1973, I thought that would be the end of the matter. But no, the anti-abortion groups persisted in a very long campaign to seriously undermine, if not gut, the principles in the ruling. They have been successful in many states.
If various civil rights rulings and legislation have not been repealed, it is also the case that not much has changed for many minority communities. (It hasn't changed a lot for many poorer black gay men; for middle class gay men -- white or black -- conditions have changed a lot.) Urban gays have always been less oppressed than small-town and rural gays, because the social structures of large cities are just not as close as they are in small towns.
There is nothing guaranteed about social progress. It can always move retrograde, and has on many occasions. And sometimes, it should be noted, the causes of regression are located within the minority community.
Well, sure enough. That is so. It's part of the larger problem of stupid people.
I cease to be gay the moment it becomes inconvenient, then I immediately switch back to being gay afterwards. And by "gay", I mean "homosexual", by which I mean "dolphin". So I tend to be gay in the sea, but not on land. So right now, I'm not gay, but next week when I visit the seaside, I'll probably be gay for a while.
All of which are public,
Her target is a form of argument that sets as its basis a private claim of gender identity.
If you like.
What's wrong with that?
There's a long part of the discussion that looks for a coherent definition of gender; specifically on that does not include the term "gender" in the definition. Unsuccessfully.
There is no problem with someone who says that despite their sex, they would much rather be treated as if they had different genitals. They have a preference for the social role that is usually given to the opposite sex. Neither I nor Rebecca, I think, would have an issue here.
The issue is with folk who say their gender is determined by private introspection. As if we each had a gender in a box, and only we could see what was in the box... er, so to speak.
In the end I think the argument leads us to deny that genitals have a wider role in determining one's social position. Claiming that one has an inherent female or inherent male gender is in that sense anti-feminist. One's genitalia have made a difference to one's role in society. They ought not. Nor should a private sensation of gender preference.
Where is the problem?
Failing to understand X does not rule out X.
For some reason some people struggle with that suppression and they may express it by saying "I feel female."
Per historians, Native Americans allowed people to transfer to the opposite gender. The crossing was permanent and such people were considered holy.
So what they say "I feel female", they mean that they prefer to be treated as a woman. Fine. No issue.
But, as is pointed out in the source text, some folk take it to mean more than that.
If they mean that they have a feeling that they share with all other women, then there is a problem, because they cannot know what other women feel.
But further, it is questionable that there is a feeling that is shared by all women, a something it feels like to be a woman. Rebecca denies that she has such a sensation. I deny that I have a feeling of being male.
It seems unreasonable to me that a person would go through gender transition without being motivated by feelings as opposed to some abstract desire to be treated a certain way.
Well, as a man don't my experiences include that of being a man? It's something I am, it affects various things in my life in various ways that I am cognizant of or even ways I don't know of or at least don't bother acnowledging. Vague, but it doesn't seem especially difficult to warrant giving a bunch examples unless asked.
So if one is a male, but feels like a woman, I suppose that would include experiences one might include under being a woman (however this is to be; gender of roles, particular secondary sexual characteristics that are atypical for males, what have you).
Perhaps. Do you suggest that those with body integrity disorder ought be permitted to amputate whatever body part they fell is not their own? IS that feeling enough?
All that I am sugesting is that there is more involved here than it might at first seem. Hence the thread is a puzzle.
SO now, if you can see the issue, can we work towards some sort of coherence?
What do you mean?
But, for example, some men who suppose themselves to feel like women may be mistaken.
"Man, I feel like a woman!"
Well I would say that body integrity disorder is a 'what it is like' that we can see in the behaviour, in the expressed preferences. So I suggest that part of 'what it is like to be a man' in a non-pathological way, is to be fundamentally ok with having a penis and facial hair, just as part of being human is to be fundamentally ok with having 2 legs.
That is, preferences are part of identity, not something added on.
Unsuccessfully only on the terms of universality. In that part of the discussion she posits that it's possible that some people have such and such and some people do not. She goes on to say that this is denied.
I am inclined to say that gender identity is a part of one's interior experience of their own identity. So it's only natural that I wouldn't be able to sense someone else's. I would say someone is in error for claiming to know Rebecca's interior experience -- that she must have a gender identity. And it seems to me an error to demand universal, necessary, and sufficient conditions for making the claim on one's own identity too.
As for how we know if someone else has one, then listening, trust, and sharing within a relationship is all that it takes. And as you say that is all public. So there isn't even a conflict between this notion of what is public and someone knowing their self through what is private, or interior.
I am inclined to say that the interior is not wholly private, in the usual sense of public/private when talking about the beetle in the box. This is why I mentioned things like people bonding over identities, or knowing what someone else feels through words alone -- knowing that someone has experienced what you have. But it is private in the sense that there are not any conditions of evidence outside of taking someone's word on it if you do not have that experience.
Sometimes we just don't have the same experience of the world or our self. That's simple enough, I think.
Quoting Banno
I don't think that claiming one has this experience leads to the the implication that they ought to be in a certain role within society. I'd say that this highlights nicely the difference between gender, and identity -- whereas gender is this set of social expectations, and in a classical patriarchal society it goes from biology to mentality to role.
But accepting that others feel a certain way does not mean we need to be committed to the notion that one's sex, gender, or identity should predicate role. In fact, given the divergence between sex, gender, identity, and social ability it seems to me that accepting these things would lead to an easy inference that social role should not be determined by any of these things.
No, the latter is a result of the former. They prefer to be treated as a woman because they feel female. I don't see how you could have misunderstood that.
Quoting Banno
They cannot know what other women feel? Really, Banno? I'm sure they have some idea. Women are not extraterrestrials, for crying out loud.
Quoting Banno
It doesn't have to be shared by all women, because it's based on a generalisation, and it has never been otherwise. That's your misunderstanding.
There's a difference, of course, between "What it is like to be a man" and "What it feels like to be a man".
And I remain unconvinced that there is a something it feels like to be a man - or a woman, or a bat.
Well, at this stage, given that it has been explained to you, that is your problem. It might be puzzling to you, but it isn't so for others.
That is an odd turn of phrase. I don't sit back and observe myself being male. Yet the notion that I experience being male implies something like that.
I don't experience being a man.
Being a man is not something that happens to me, in the way I experience a film or a pain.
I know when I am feeling pain and when I am not; when I am attending a film and when I am not. But I can have no idea of what it would feel like to not be a man. similarly, I cannot have any idea of what it might feel like to be a woman.
That's a superficial argument, but it goes much deeper than that. Suppose a woman imagines herself with a penis, testicles, extra testosterone and whatever. She claims that she feels like a man... But how could we tell she was right? How could we tell that what she felt was really what it feels like to be a man?
It simply can't be done. There is nothing it feels like to be a man.
One does not experience one's gender. Perhaps one lives it.
How can you tell that "I feel female" were true?
You have to claim that here is a feeling that is had by all women, and that this is shared by your proponent.
Quoting Sapientia
Except that there are some women who feel male. And some that feel female sometimes, male at other times. So your proponent feels the way women do, except for those who do not feel that way.
Not convinced.
In the same way as if she were to claim that she feels like a pauper, a queen, or a barbarian. By combining our knowledge and imagination.
No I don't. Like I said, it's a claim based on a generalisation, based on common or stereotypical characteristics shared by females.
Quoting Banno
Yes.
Quoting Banno
Why not?
If a rich person feels like a pauper, their feelings are out of step with the reality of their wealth. They certainly are not wealthy.
If a commoner feels like a queen their feelings are out of step with the facts. They are a commoner, not a queen.
If a female feels like a man, are they out of step with reality?
Because it is a hollow claim.
Quoting Banno
That just kicks the can a little further down the road. Why do you think that it's a hollow claim?
Tell me more. What is the difference?
It's not just me that's kicking the can:
Quoting Banno
"What it is like to be a man" invites a list of publicly assessable criteria
"What it feels like to be a man" invites introspection.
And if you can't how are your feelings to be made party of the public discourse?
Here. I said yes. If a female feels like a man, then they are out of step with reality in the same sense as the other examples, given that it's a female, and a female is not a man.
Let me lay it out a bit. We know that people can feel that their own limb is alien to them. We know that the feeling is real and intense because they sometimes try and destroy the offending limb. We and they can understand that feeling in relation to the same public criteria. And we know that people can have a similar distaste for their own sexual characteristics, in relation to similarly public criteria.
So what's the problem? Such people say, perhaps, "I feel like a woman trapped in a man's body", and you say "you can't possibly know." But this is simply an uncharitable refusal to understand their condition.
Yes, I agree. And that - Banno's misunderstanding - is the only problem here, in my assessment.
I don't think that living it differs much from feeling it. I don't think learning about yourself is like sitting back, taking inventory, and reporting on what you find. But I do have certain feelings, all the same, and they aren't shared by everyone -- but they are shared by some.
I believe you when you say you don't experience being a man. I also believe my coworkers who say they are such and such -- be it man or woman or something else. You and they are trustworthy people who I've had conversations with before, and I have no reason to think you are lying. This is how we can tell whether or not someone else is speaking the truth. This is the only method that I know of. In a sense you could look at the statements that people say of themselves as the data. To question them is like questioning "How do we know the ruler is really telling me this paper is 10 inches in length?" -- because the ruler says so.
In particular, for myself, while gender doesn't play a central role to my interior experience, depression does. And those are far from shared experiences at all. Not everyone has depression. But those who do "get it" -- and those who don't can only imagine, just like I can only imagine what it feels like to be transgender.
The ethics is much clearer here than the logic, isn't it. The issue is not what we (you and I) do about transgender folk, and we will continue to suport and defend how they choose to live.
The issue is logical; it is how best to think about the challenge of transgender to the previously polar opposite gender.
Of course these two are related, and hence the puzzle.
In a case of bodily dysphoria it is open to others to say that the feeling that the limb does not belong to the patient is pathological; that it is the feeling that needs to be treated, not the limb.
If our conception of transgender is also based solely on a feeling, then it also remains open to others to say that the feeling that the genitals do not belong to the patient is pathological; that it is the feeling that needs to be treated, not the body.
The idea that gender is determined by feeling leaves itself open to this criticism. What's the answer?
And this is where Rebecca Reilly-Cooper's discourse becomes a great strength: at it's heart, the concept of gender is no longer defensible.
So the answer to my question, "how best to think about the challenge of transgender?", is to admit that gender is a social construct that we are better off without.
I suspect that in defending the concept of gender you both missed the thrust of this discussion.
I haven't followed your discussion in detail. The notion of innate homosexuality plays a great roll in the legal thinking that leads to equity for homosexual behaviour. Transgender folk may be following this lead in advocating for gender as some innate feeling. For the reasons given in my reply to @unenlightened, above, I think this might be an error on their part.
Your thoughts would be more than welcome.
What we know about transsexuals is this: They state a desire to be and appear to be, the gender opposite of the one they have. Plastic surgery and hormone therapy can reshape the body so that it superficially appears to match the desired gender. This seems to relieve the discomfort of discordance between how they appear and how they wish to appear.
As far as I know, (and as far as I have observed in ordinary contexts) there are no biological markers for transsexuality. There are no physical features that identify transsexuals. As far as I know, the critical test for transsexuality is a fervently defended consistent narrative. However, most transsexuals seem to enjoy the changes brought about by hormone therapy (feminization or masculinization) as well as the changes that can be brought about surgically (breast/ovaries/penis/testicle removal or vagina and penis construction).
It is one thing if reasonably mature gay men decide that they really would rather be women, or a heterosexuals decide they would rather be the opposite sex. We can be doubtful and wonder if there isn't something slightly crazy about the whole thing, but at least they are adults.
I for one am not willing to accept that 4 or 5 year olds declaring that they want to be the opposite sex should be given the benefit of the doubt. To put it bluntly, I am suspicious of the parents, cooperating school authorities, and medical officials who aid or allow children to act out any sort of transsexual fantasy. It would not be the first time that incredibly naive (or stupid) theory was applied to young children. It also wouldn't be the first time that parents imposed inappropriate ideas on their children.
The thing about homosexuals, heterosexuals, and bisexuals is that they can demonstrate the validity of their preference by performing what it is that they prefer. Consistent arousal in a same sex or opposite sex situation provides physical proof (if anybody needed it). Further, there is the consistency of fantasy and arousal.
I suppose it can be said that transsexuals also demonstrate by performance the validity of their condition. What is more difficult is for a transsexual to demonstrate arousal. If they have been given hormone and surgical treatment, the body parts that show arousal may not be there any more, or may not work as they did before hormone therapy.
I am not in favor of categorizing adult transsexuals as people who only engage in very elaborate drag. The people who have embarked on transsexual transition have often had to endure too much brutal public ridicule (and a good deal worse sometimes) for it to be considered merely an affectation. This is especially true for transsexuals operating on a shoestring. Clearly they are committed.
On the other hand, people are prone to believing their own bullshit. A lot of empathetic types who want to be sensitive on the issue accept pretty much everything transsexual advocates say without too much critical questioning. More critical thinking is needed here, and not just for pro-advocacy.
Can't you as the author change the text in the title? How about asking the mods to do it.
But that is not an answer to anything. We would be better off without the constructs of race and nationality, but we don't have the option. And not having the option, one might want to say it is pathological to want to lighten your skin, but the pathology is society's not the individual's. Surely the point is that gender is not determined by feeling or by physicality but by conformity to stereotypes.
I remember the days when a bloke growing his hair over his ears was an act of rebellion that people found threatening to their own identity. The thinking was fairly transparent; 'If a bloke has long hair, I might fancy him, and that would make me a queer.' And that was a fate worse than death at the time. And it is the same kind of threat to their own identity that galvanises folks in their horror at the idea of a penis in the women's toilets. Rebecca is a conformist, and her suggestion that gender is indefensible is a performative contradiction.
I've drawn from more examples than gender to elucidate interiority. And I've noted a few times how people both bond over identities (so they are shared, though not by everyone) and can know what others feel based upon sharing experiences through words.
Gender is just another faucet of the interior which, treated in a consistent manner, is included.
I've also directly answered the question "How do we know?" to demonstrate the logic of interiority two times now. The answer to "How?" doesn't change whether we are talking about gender identity or some other aspect of identity.
I'd say we just happen to disagree. Which is different from missing the point, I think.
Your spell check needs a new washer.
One thing this has in common with gender is that the statements of the person of interest are taken at face value for what they are. That does not mean they are unintepretted, or that there couldn't be other facts or inferences that play a role in making a determination or that they are not truth-apt. Just like the ruler -- it reads 10", but if you measure any one thing several times over you'll see that it's actually very precise, but you don't get the same measurement every single time. It also doesn't mean that everything said by a patient is just treated as true all the time -- that saying so makes it so. Another commonality is the imprecision such a test has -- it may be accurate, but it is imprecise. Notice how even in the very same question behaviors or feelings which are even opposite one from another are used to determine depression.
Now I use this mostly because it is a diagnostic, in the sense that is demonstrates how one might determine how another feels -- it is simultaneously imprecise and ambiguous, but not meaningless and not futile. And the best judgements are had over time -- that is, they require some kind of a relationship with another person, they require some amount of trust (rather than control), and they require sharing and listening.
Now there is an aspect to this that really is a social construct. Depression didn't always exist, and the medical treatment of the soul is quite novel. The identity of depression is certainly novel and invented. There are particular activities associated with the word. One need not have any of these trappings. And one could even de-construct it, reinvent. One could believe that the world would be better off without such identifiers.
But the feelings would remain. The interior experience would still be something which is only partially shared, partially not shared, and only determinable by asking questions within a relationship and listening to the answers.
Edit the OP. Oops. You have already.
If a person says that they ARE NOT a woman, and this characterization of what they are remains within the binary conceptualization of gender, then they are a man.
It is not about feeling like a man as much as it is knowing that one is not what they have been defined by others to be.
Furthermore, what is a man? What is a woman? There, after analyzing, only exists some imaginary abstraction of what a true man or woman would be, so in a sense they recreate what they are, based in an understanding of what they are not. And this is true for everyone. You are what you are not, and you are not what you are (Sartre).
I find myself in the position of defending transgender folk and finding the existing explanations inadequate. What stands out is the "fervently defended consistent narrative". Such a narrative depends on the perceived competence of the narrator. The disabled and young are left in an ambiguous position. Hence, I agree with:
Quoting Bitter Crank
and leave myself open to the accusation of having been duped.
That is, I desire, but cannot find, a firmer platform on which to stand in defence of transgender folk.
I noticed also the thread at gender-ideology-and-its-contradictions and the compounded confusions of @Terran Imperium. I cannot agree with your conclusion that transsexuals are delusional. Rather I would say they epitomise, and instantiate, the incoherence of the notion of gender. Perhaps it is social expectation that is delusional.
Sure. But given that feelings change, how could you know when an issue involving feelings is resolved?
Hence we are again dependent on the fervently defended consistent narrative, and the power of the narrator.
How's that? I don't see your argument.
Fine.
:roll:
No, Banno, that is not what I was suggesting. I'm giving my serious input on where the problem lies, and suggesting that it might help to think about it differently, from another angle. The conclusions that you're drawing don't sit right, and I'm thinking about why that is.
Well, perhaps that was a bit hyperbolic, but...
I think it is reasonable to distinguish the physical, the social and the personal as aspects of the world.
So, Rebecca is a conformist to social stereotypes (dress, hair, make-up, demeanour) that align with her physicality (I presume), and (a) identifies the two, and (b) identifies with/as that unity 'woman', and (c) is comfortable with that.
So her performance is of a comfortable identity of sex and gender, while her rhetoric is that only sex matters, and gender and comfort or discomfort can be disregarded.
Her performance is strongly gendered, therefore "...her suggestion that gender is indefensible is a performative contradiction."
Is that possible to exist "in between"? I've met a transgender who said: "Today mourning I felt as if I was a man, and later as if I was a woman..." So, is that possible to avoid the binary in self-identification?
Here is the problem: to become a transgender by many people ( and, by transgenders themselves) is understood as a manifestation of their freedom, as a free choice of a new identity. Yet, isn't this process is guided and taken up by mass-media and by so many institutions and organizations? So, it is rather taking part in a mass movement than a free choice of an individual identity.
In other words, this talk by 'them' about the abstraction of 'transgenderedism' is fundamentally inauthentic, as it does not relate to any specification of personality or existence, but of an objective generalization of what it might be for someone who fits under that category.
There must be, to remain within a sphere or paridigm of authenticity, a separation between what is real, like my trans friend Ryan and me the homosexual, and this talk of trans people and homosexuals.
But there is the point that transgender folk take gender very seriously. So denying the importance of gender in their defence is odd. If that were your point, I'd agree. It would be on a par with telling aboriginal people that their culture does not matter. That is, telling a man who says he feels like a woman that the distinction between man and woman is irrelevant is ignoring the problem, not sorting it. Gender is central for transgender people.
That would be a good discussion point.
The deeper performative contradiction is that no gender/gender is a meaningless is an identity category. Rebecca is getting up to say people have an identity of gender. This puts their position in the same place as anyone claiming to have a gender. Both are asserting a meaning about an individual is true.
In terms of understanding gender, Rebecca's issue is treating like it is a standard which defines something else or a rule someone has to meet. Why would anyone both with gender when any reason for thinking you have to belong to one of the other (i.e. you must be X because you dress/behave/have a body part Y)? Well, for the reason that gender is its own distinction and meaning, given not be the constrictive terms of some other quality meeting a standard to "be a gender", but rather in gender being its own feature of oneself.
Feminism points out that the role of acting like a woman is forced on females; that is, the gender role and its consequences are forced onto the individual because of their sex. Feminism seeks to point out discrepancies between the genders that have nothing to do with sex - women having lowed average incomes, women being subject to violence and so on - but instead relate to power. Feminism downplays the importance of gender.
Transsexuality, almost in opposition to this, seeks to emphasise gender over sex. So transexual politics holds for example that I am a female but I want to be treated as a man; my gender is more important to who I am than my sex.
Feminism wishes to downplay gender, transsexuality wishes to emphasis it.
@unenlightened
Rebecca's assertion of "no gender" no less involves a gender-related category than an assertion someone is "male" or "female."
We might ask here the same question she puts to gender: why have no gender? Since gender is meaningless in terms of defining which things are "male" or "female," no gender isn't required to rid us of a gender constriction. There is nothing (e.g. a body, behaviour, etc. ) which makes one a male, female or no gender.
Yes, I agree gender not meaningless, my point was that "no gender" is on the same level.
I meant "meaningless" in terms a constraint. Just as there is "no what is like to be a man/women," there is no "what is it like to be no gender." Gender or no gender, there is no constraint is placed.
A man may have any combination of body, dress behaviour, etc.
A woman may have any combination of body, dress behaviour, etc.
Someone with no gender may have any combination body, dress behaviour, etc.
The "meaningless" of gender doesn't give us a reason to reject it in favour of no gender. No gender is "meaningless" in exactly the same way. We have no reason to prefer it over a gender in terms of fighting social constraints.
You may have let that utilitarian rubbish have too great an influence on your thinking. If gender is a constraint, it is one that we are able to modify; something calling it a constraint only serves to hide.
Otherwise, your argument appears to be analogous to calling atheism a religion. It doesn't work.
Good my point is exact opposite then. Gender (or no gender) is not a constraint.
In terms of an identity, there is no body, behaviour, dress, etc. that it necessitates. When I say "meaningless," I mean gender offers nothing to the outcome of constraining who someone might be or their position in society. There is no "someone must be this" by gender or no gender.
My reference to "social constraint' was referring to the various constraining social practices which are supposedly done because of gender.
Trying to eliminate gender categories isn't a way to prevent such social practices. Categories of no gender can be used equally well in that respect.
A society can form a myth, for example, that person in society must wear dresses because they had no gender. The society might use it in exactly the same way as ours did "women must wear dresses."
It means Rebecca's attack on gender is a performative contradiction. To have "no gender" isn't a way of escaping a category which enables such myth based social constraint. "No gender" is an identity just as capable of being misrepresented in such myth.
Eliminating gender identity (or trying to) wouldn't give us a world protected from those myth based social constraints.
I'm just saying "no gender" is just as much a category as "gender." Rebecca is not escaping the use of categories which may be used by myth in social constraint. She's using the very thing she is trying to escape.
It's not the same. Calling atheist religious is an error because the former excludes the latter. To be equivalent, I would have to be saying claiming someone had no gender (atheist) was claiming someone had gender (religious).
I am not doing so. To suggest someone has no gender is never the claim someone has gender.
We can draw an analogy the atheist and the religious here. A society might have a myth: "An atheist must be X." or a myth: "A religious person must be X." Despite being entirely different, both atheist and religious are categories which a myth might form around.
Gender and no gender are both categories in this way.
How does a human not have gender? My computer does not have gender and a door knob lacks gender (even if it's LA poignée de porte). You know, it's a knob -- its range of behaviors is extremely limited, unless it is very inventive. But door knobs are morons.
The same way anything lack a particular feature: an absence of that feature.
A cars lack a wheel by the absence of a wheel. I lack the name "Bitter Crank" because it's absent from the name meanings which refer to me. For a human to have no gender, it's just a matter of the meaning "no gender" being true about them.
Much like how a doors without gender don't have a gender, actually.
Behaviours simply aren't relevant because being a gender (or not being a gender) isn't an account of behaviour. Nor does the presence of a certain behaviour define a gender (hence the absurdity and falsification of claims like "only men/women can do that" ).
The reason this is the case is because being a certain gender does not imply any capacity of capability with regard to doing something, and neither does it necessitate any conclusion about capacity or potentiality at all. This is non-sequitur: what necessitates a conclusion about capacity, potentiality or capability is that which would be directly causally related, as opposed to some sort metaphorically based relation. Being a woman has nothing to do with being able to give birth or ejaculate. This refers to anatomy, not gender. There are those who want to draw correlations, but these correlations are at base with regard to some sort of ulterior motive or other ideological framework the impetus of a will to the domination of woman.
1. Do not immediately take this statement at face value or, in other words, as an assertion that would be true analytically; by virtue of the meaning of the words. Instead, understand this sentence with regard to its context, as you would understand a singular word by both denotation and connotation. The reason this is the case is due to this: often those who say "I am born this way" do not mean that they are determined to be this way and because of this are authentic by virtue of it being 'natural' or something. They often mean something different and metaphorical. They often mean that they themselves ARE this and want to establish this truth meaningfully; they metaphorically posit (metaphor does contain a certain power) their existence, their birth, their whole life and authenticity of being as a pillar of truth atop which their homosexuality is supported.
2. If the statement, "I was born gay," is asserted as if to be analytically true... This is obviously impossible. It is impossible because a person is not born any sexuality. Sexuality regards (and I hope this isn't too metaphorical) the libido, a psychical energy. Freud says that the libido becomes manifest in different ways, and becomes an impetus of expression for the individual. This libido thus does not depend on genitalia and actually has nothing to do with it, for it is more-so an activity of the brain, not any other organ. According to experience, a person changes and their outlets of expression, identification and the manifestations of their desires become conditioned and mirror their experiences, according to what that particular person wants, which cannot ever be described adequately in theory but is at base irreducibly personal. One is not born any sexuality but becomes who they are and wills with their freedom their interactions, relations and intimacy.
3. I am gay. I am gay because I choose to be gay. I choose to be gay because that is what I feel. I feel what is closest and proximal to me. I realize the manifestations of my desires and my impulses and I direct my attention towards that. I have perhaps an inclination to be this way but I also have past experiences that have changed not my conception of what I desire in other people but what I desire for myself and what I want my existence to consist of. I was not born to be determined. I was born free. I have always been free. I choose everything that I am. It is bad faith to live a life of trying to conform with what you are, as if what you are is absolute and separate and you, the innocent bystander, are relative to these inescapable conditions. You are the totality of your experience, regardless of its origins--the origin of something is meaningless with regard to the apprehension of its meaning.
Nonsense. Only women can have be pregnant and have babies. That is a result of their physical features and how those physical features give rise to certain behaviors only allowed by those physical features. No matter how hard you try, you can't fly without wings. You can't use your nose as a hand unless you have a trunk. You can't manipulate nature unless you have opposable thumbs, etc. Your capacity for any behavior is governed by not just the size and shape of your body, but also the processes that go on inside it, like the level of certain hormones and chemicals flooding your brain at any given moment.
A man who transitions into a woman doesn't have a real vagina. They have an open wound that they have to keep open with stents to prevent the body from doing what it naturally does - heal itself. That is what women don't need to do. It is what men with a delusional disorder have to do after having a doctor cut off their penis and makes a hole and calls it a "vagina" - a miscategorization of the Nth degree.
Isn't the body telling you that you are a man by trying to revert back to it's old form? Having the notion that you are really a woman and that your body is wrong, just begs the question: "How do you really know that the body is wrong and your mind is right? Could it not be possible that it is the other way around?"
First, humans have hardware, even if it is called wetware in this context. :smile: The part of the software that engages directly with the wetware is usually called firmware. If you consider that men and women have a few different appendages, you will realise that their firmware must be a little bit different. Different drivers for male and female genitalia, if you will. But not just that. Women live their lives more 'saturated' with active biochemicals than men, and this also requires differences in the firmware. And there are other differences too that must be accounted-for by the firmware. The end result is that we have wetware differences between men and women, and corresponding firmware differences too.
If a human with a penis has firmware that is usually found in someone with other fitments, there is a mismatch. I do not submit this as an explanation, but as an analogy or metaphor, as a help to understand how a human could be a man (say) in the body of a woman. I.e. female wetware + male firmware. In the context of my computer-based analogy, this explanation makes perfect sense. I can't guarantee the sense transfers to human men and women, but it feels like it could; maybe it does. :chin:
Yes, of course it could. But, in purely practical terms, we cannot (i.e. we don't know how) change the mind to suit the body, but we can change the body to approximately match the mind. But these are details. The issue at hand is the mismatch between mind and body, not which one of them is 'wrong'. :roll:
Not only that, but there are plenty of stories of regret in going through with reassignment surgery. So it clearly isn't a fix for everyone. AND isn't it ironic that before you are allowed to go through the surgery you have to pass a psychological exam and get approval from a psychiatrist? You don't need that to get a tumor removed.
What does that even mean to say there is a mismatch between mind and body? It seems no different from what I have said. And again it just begs the question: "How do you know that it is the mind that is right and the body wrong", especially when the body tries to revert back after surgery and you have to use stents to keep the wound open?
But in the case of a simple mismatch, as we have here, the source of the problem is unclear. It could be either. Schizophrenics and anorexics cannot be cured by addressing the body, otherwise I'm sure we'd give it a go. It isn't even clear that gender dysphoria can be directly compared with conditions like schizophrenia. Would you compare psoriasis with diabetes, and maybe try to treat them both in the same way? No, you would consider the suggestion to be nonsense, quite rightly. :up: Your problem is, well, your problem. Intolerance, bigotry and hate are your problems, and you should not be looking at trans folk to find their source.... :fear:
Great reply. I don't think that I've said anything too difficult to get your head around. Like I said before, gender can be made sense of if you think in terms of general characteristics associated with male and female. You've rejected this way of thinking about gender for some unknown reason, and have instead chosen to stand by a method of analysis which leads to incoherence.
So be it.
These are heroic claims. They are validating and contribute to your sense of being a proudly autonomous being. They might, however, be a bit of a delusion, or misapprehension. I resist your confidence not because I want to degrade you in any way, but because your claim may be wrong, and I want to encourage you to think it through again. Whether you think it through again or not, you'll still be gay, still be confident of who you are, still be an autonomous being (more or less), and still be happy with who you are.
We are given a certain embodied form at conception and during prenatal development. The way the neural tube of the fetus develops into the brain has a great deal to say about "who I am" without any choice on my part. I am gay, male, visually impaired, fairly bright, 5'10", once dark brown but now white hair, male pattern balding (rats!), descended from English and Irish forebears, etc. I didn't choose any of this. I am reasonably well educated -- that was a choice pursued over many years of formal and informal study. There are people who (so they say) never read another book after college. I presume they chose to stop learning.
We are a mix of embodied conditions which we could not have chosen and choices which we could and did make.
Some gay men choose to dress in drag from time to time. I might have made that choice, but I was too stupid to figure out how to pull that off. Some people make wise decisions throughout their lives which advance their careers. I may have chosen--or it may have been a given--to be an obstinate resistor to the general goals of American society, so I failed to have a glorious career. That had to do with choice, mostly. (or maybe not.)
The list of givens, choices, chance occurrences, and so forth that make us who we are is long. Yes, we do make choices, but we can not be sure that the way we choose isn't also the result of a given. Some people, for instance, are risk averse (or risk tolerant), and make decisions accordingly. Risk tolerance or aversion seems to be present from an early age.
This is an argument from bad faith. What of a woman happens to be physiologically sterile? Therefore she is not a woman? What if a woman has parts of her reproductive organs surgically removed because of a disease. That makes her not a woman? Quoting Harry Hindu
Surely you have some good examples!
...
Quoting Harry Hindu
You are omitting the opposite, which is a f to m procedure...
But the sex organs are not the focal point. You clearly know no transgender people. They resemble what they identify as, and they recreate these concepts according to their own authenticity and creation and freedom, which you are undermining or obdurately and intransigently rejecting according to an empirical realism that is far from being unequivocal or infallible!
Debra Bergoffen. The author is listed on SEP, at the very end of the web page, at least on mobile.
The Sartrian account of choice isn't a question of vapid consumerist trend or even an authority to be whatever your whim might want.
It's an analysis of our logical definition. Sartre is addressing the idea of what makes someone who they are. How is it we come by our identity? How do we have two arms? Or belong to a philosophy forum? Choose to forgive rather than take revenge? Choose to eat porridge rather toast?
Many will try to pass of the reason they do or are anything to someone else. They will say: "I did that because God made me" or "Nature necessitated I do that." Anything and everything to deny their existence was responsible for the event.
In saying we choose everything about ourselves, Sartre is pointing out we are the difference in every case. Our own existence defines who we are and who we are not.
We can "choose anything" because our future states are always to come. Who I am now cannot be used as a rule to devine who I will be in the future. Whether I have two arms, one, none or twenty, can only be given in my present. Our existence is the only way we are one thing not another. No constraints are doing the work of making us who we are.
I hope you don’t mean that discussing transgenderism with a heterosexual man is an idle talk. I asked you about authenticity just because it is important for me to find the criteria for differentiation between fake and authentic. As Adorno pointed out:” the sacred quality of the authentic talk belongs to the cult of authenticity rather than to the Christian cult, even where - for temporary lack of any other available authority - its language resembles the Christian. Prior to any consideration of particular content, this language molds thought. As a consequence, that thought accommodates itself to the goal of subordination even where it aspires to resist that goal.”
But I'm not really talking about an 'authentic talk:' this in itself seems to be idle.
I am referring to an adequate exchange of meaning.
Authenticity is the expression of oneself how they are, unadulterated by the conceptions that would label their authenticity as something objectively unequivocal, which is at base inauthentic.
Quoting Blue Lux
Any kind of human expression assumes the split between the expressed and expressing.
Actually, there is a real void between them. I think that the authentic thought is in-between.
I seem to think the seem thing about this in-between the expressed and the expressing...
Oh Lord, here it comes again.
What is doing the expressing??
I could say reasonably accurately that the expressed is an affect or an emotion.
Is there something doing the expressing?
Is there just an expressing?
An improvized analysis
I am expressing something.
"am expressing something" would be the predicate, something that gives information about the subject, something the subject can have or lack.
But this subject 'I' can not lack this expressed something. Let's say I am expressing existence. Expressing 'my' existence. This subject 'I' is more-so a 'my.' Therefore the expressed something is a fundamental quality of what does the expressing; the reference by which the expressing takes place.
This is the authenticity. The authenticity originates in the personality, in the being-in-the-middle, in 'the my.' The expressed never gets fully expressed. That is the state of affairs. Idle talk is based upon the objectivation of the expressed as actualized and apprehendable as a form.
there is a value and a meaning of Cogito, as of existence, which escapes the alternative of a determined madness or a determined reason...I philosophize only in terror, but in the confessed terror
of going mad". Yet, anyway, we must produce positivistic sentences and meaningful utterances!:blush:
And I feel like we are on the same page here :nerd:
What other aspect of identity comes under scrutiny like transgender identity does? It seems to me that we have no problem with people who identify as Christian, men (when their sex is in alignment with their gender identity), Democrat, liberal, stern, black, a foodie, an artist, and so forth. There is a certain ambiguity involved in all such identities, and can even be contradictory when we consider the multitude of people who identify as such.
There is something Cartesian in my approach to interiority. But there is a sort of truth that this approach captures that others do not. There is a very real sense in which, because I am not you I do not feel what you do. We can both see cats on mats, but we cannot both feel what the other feels in the same way. Feelings are contagious, but they aren't objects. They are internal. They are a part of what makes us unique. And I can feel what you feel only insofar that I feel it -- sometimes I won't, even if you happen to. With cats on mats, on the other hand, this is not the case -- someone may be blind, of course, but they can still pick up the cat. The cat is something like an object, just like our body is something like an object. There is just also an interior which is exterior to our own interior -- another's interiority appears as an exteriority, and not in the sense of an external world. Rather it is external to anything we experience -- it is outside of our field of vision. And it is only through relating to another that we come to encounter the fact of the exterior, while also never actually making it our own interior. Hence my emphasis on the act of listening.
I don't think that there is an unbridgeable gulf a priori -- sometimes it can come to seem like it is so through discussion, but I think that you have to try in order to determine if there is just too much divergence between persons. Then our interior experiences become something like a beetle in a box -- except to the extent that there are still some individuals who can relate, even if not everyone can.
Any aspect of identity that contradicts reality - like claiming that you are actually an alien, Jesus, President Obama's secret mistress, feeling like you are morbidly fat and need to starve yourself to loose weight, or that you are the opposite sex. When someone's feelings are not a true representation of reality - that is when we have a responsibility to question the claims of people.
Shouldn't the question be: "What is it about SEX that keeps us from scrutinizing those that feel as if they are the opposite sex, when we scrutinize all other feelings that are not consistent with reality?"
People can come to the wrong conclusions about the meaning of their feelings. We have no problem telling religious people that their dead loved ones don't exist and that there is no afterlife and we often get the same reaction that we get from the trans-people. We are told that there is a "War on Christmas", that you are "hater", "you don't know what love really is", etc. This is evidence that we are talking about a delusion (in both cases) - when ad hominem attacks are their only defense to what you are saying and they are fearful of questioning their own conclusions.
No one has been able to define "gender" in a meaningful way that implies any of what you have said. Gender is not some feeling of being the opposite sex. It is the behaviors unique to a certain sex that cannot be duplicated by another - like getting pregnant and giving birth.
Dressing a certain way, or wearing make-up, or shaving your legs are things both sexes can do and therefore aren't related to gender or sex. If it were then you are telling every woman that has ever existed, and that presently exists in other cultures, that they aren't actually women if they don't wear long hair, make-up and shave their legs.
Fear is what keeps people from asking the right questions - fear of being labeled a bigot and being disowned by your friends or social group. Fear and feelings should be the furthest thing from one's mind when trying to determine the truth.
And yet, when someone questions your claims, you complain (unreasonably) of ad hominem attacks.
Oh, and how do you know what reality is, that you are able to determine that the feelings of others contradict it? How do you know it's not your feelings that "are not a true representation of reality"? Please share your evidence...
I have to point out here that this is something you have no problem with, but if we includes me then part of we does.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Identity is a part of reality, and feelings are not claims.
It's not sex that's being claimed. Sex is distinguished from gender is distinguished from gender-identity. Sex is biological. Gender is social. Gender-identity is psychological. Biology has to do with what you're talking about in getting pregnant and giving birth, but it's more complicated than that even. If a man cannot impregnate someone, because he is impotent, does his sex change? If he has erectile dysfunction, does his sex change?
Not at all. So the sex category a single person belongs to isn't exactly based on what a single person can do. It is based on their physiological characteristics or genome or what-have-you -- and there are people who don't fall neatly into the two categories there too, it's worth noting.
In the case of gender-identity there isn't much of a standard outside of the statements a person makes of themself and the actions they take.
When someone claims to be Jesus then there are facts to the matter which are ascertainable outside of the psychological profile of someone. I would believe the person feels like Jesus if they claimed they are Jesus. But there's more to the matter than the statements the person makes and the actions they take -- that he is the son of God, that he was resurrected after being crucified, that he has a second coming to judge the living and the dead. There is something else to look at.
In the case of gender-identity there is not. And the feelings someone has are as much a part of reality as the chair I'm sitting upon. And since the feelings aren't making claims about physiology (sex) there is no contradiction.
I'm just going to note here I don't believe that gender has a fixed essence -- so any behavior can potentially be associated with the gender "man" or "woman", be it shaving, wearing makeup, making decisions, dieting, exercise, or what-have-you. In actuality there are certain behaviors temporarily affixed to genders, but they change over time and with place.
I suggest we just agree to stick to the topic. This is pretty out there, given that right here, at least, we are asking questions.
So, you have never told someone that they were wrong, or contradicted their belief, or otherwise engaged in some debate where someone's deeply held belief was questioned? And "deeply held beliefs" are the ones in which feelings are attached to and cannot be uprooted without compromising those feelings. What about the feeling associated with being correct and the subsequent bad feeling of being wrong when your beliefs contradict reality? I can probably point to many instances on this forum where members are rude, condescending and indifferent to people's feelings, of which you could be included?
Quoting Moliere
If a man has sexual reassignment then they are changing their sex, not their gender. So it is about sex and not gender as gender is arbitrary.
If a man is impotent or has erectile dysfunction, he is still a man because any surgery to try and change his sex ends up with the body trying to revert itself back to it's original form. This is why men have to use stents to keep their wound open (its not a vagina, it is an open wound). Just as there are men with physical disorders, there are men with mental disorders - something you seem unwilling to admit or be consistent about. The disorder doesn't make them less of a man, or more of a woman. That is determined by biology alone.
Quoting MoliereThe something else to look at would be the person's sex.
Quoting Moliere
I still don't see a distinction. For someone who believes they are Jesus - their feelings are real too. As I pointed out, their claims ARE about sex, as they try to change their sex. Their claims are about being the opposite sex.
You end up having to make it about "gender" to avoid attributing some psychological disorder to transgenderism, yet you can't even come up with a meaningful definition of "gender".
Quoting Moliere
Then "gender" has no meaning if there is no fixed essence. Any behavior could be "gender"-related, and trans-people can adopt any behavior they want and still be the sex that they are born with, but many don't want to stop there.
They claim that they are a woman or a man, which are claims about sex. If there are no clear distinctions between how they wear their hair, make-up, what clothes they wear (meaning there is no physical barrier to doing these things) then why are they making claims about being a man or a woman when these behaviors are not restricted to just a man or a woman? When men can have long hair and wear make-up, then why is their claim that they are a woman just so that they can have long hair and wear make-up, when men have no restriction to doing any of these things? IT IS about sex, no matter how much mental gymnastics you try to perform, you cannot escape this fact.
That there is the primary point of disagreement.
If someone is male, but wishes to be treated as a woman, I don't see an issue. If someone is female, but wishes to be treated as a man, no problem.
But if they are male and claim to be female, or if they are female and claim to be male - then there is something worthy of further discussion.
So we make sense of gender in terms of sexual characteristics?
Then how is it that the gender of an individual is set by what they feel, and not their sexual characteristics?
But even the radical feminists, at least, acknowledge a distinction between sex and gender. Gender-identity is the term of disagreement there.
There's a book I read a few years ago (Kate Millett's Sexual Politics) that gives a structure to patriarchy -- in a patriarchal system biology is believed to imply mentality is believed to imply social role. And by 'biology', of course, all that is meant is sex. The mentality could be read as a social expectation, though. Women are expected to be nurturing, and so they are given the role of mothers, teachers, nurses, cooks, and so forth. The trick of seeing this as patriarchy was to inverse the relationship, and see the role as being prescribed, and having the rest follow as post hoc rationalization of said role.
Of course the mental lives of people are not expectations of said mental lives -- hence why women would object to such nonsense. And truth be told, isn't the determination of someone else's mental life the real question here?
If that be the case then distinguishing the three on the basis of biology, sociology, and psychology seems to make sense of the difference between the three. So we have at least a theoretical basis for the distinction. Also, I prefer to say the abolition of patriarchy to the abolition of gender, though the two look the same in a patriarchal culture since gender is built/grown with patriarchal values in mind.
And the only reason I can't agree with you is because you haven't even defined "gender" in any coherent way.
Quoting Banno
I don't see a difference between wanting to be treated as a male/female vs man/woman. Look it up in the dictionary. A woman is an adult female human being, while a man is an adult male human being.
Sex is gender and then there are arbitrary expectations (norms established) of men/males and women/females behaviors that contradict each other. There are also varying degrees of punishments for not abiding by those expectations. In some countries it is punishable by death, while others have no laws limiting what both sexes can do.
IF someone is saying that they want to be treated as a woman for example, and imply that it is only their culture's treatment and expectations of women, and not others, then they must not really mean that they ARE a woman because that would be inconsistent. But then, what does that question even mean in a country where both sexes are treated equally? In a society where the sexes are treated equally doesn't "gender" become meaningless?
I haven't defined sex, either, but you don't have a problem there. I've been using a more ostensive approach -- by denoting the various things I mean to indicate with the words I am using.
Now I will just say here that I don't expect to persuade you. But identifying where disagreement springs from is still a win, plus it helps us to better see our own beliefs.
That said, you can possess less precise knowledge learnt from sociology and other humanities, and you can possess insight and intuition - fuzzy "knowledge" gained from the interactions in your life. Social behavior contains subtle clues from which we can develop a lot of implicit, imprecise "knowledge." Call it street smarts if you will.
It's not definsible? What kind of defense do you require for the free pursuit of well-being and existential fulfillment? Personally, I only expect ethical defense for that, and I can't find ethical problems with transgenderism.
And, @Moliere, I understand the notion of gender as a patriarchal construct.
SO let me put the problem in terms of the critique of that patriarchal construct. Let's dismantle the distinction between man and woman (gender, not sex). Yet Transgender people insist on that distinction.
Where do they fit?
Good idea. How you gonna do it?
It seems to me that social constructs cannot just be abolished by pointing out that they are 'made-up.' Let's dismantle race too, and just be left with skin-colour. But as long as we haven't, which might be a while, expect the Michael Jacksons of this world to want plastic surgery to lighten their skin and straighten their nose, and poor folks to bathe in bleach and straighten their hair with hot combs.
I think the dustbin of philosophical history.
You are absolutely right! It is impossible to understand the whole phenomenon as isolated from what is going on in the society. So many institutions and organizations, backed by mass-media are leading all the process of creating new self-identification of a transgender. Numerous talented young people see the
goal of their life in changing a gender and the whole movement is represented as a kind of revolution of nowadays. Yet, this "revolution" does not challenge any basic principles of our society.
Heh, sorry. I didn't mean to be patrionizing.
It seems to me that they don't quite fit, but that transgender still responds to patriarchy -- only in a different way. Rather than abolition it's reinvention. So gender stops being patriarchal, though it still has both social and psychological components.
Quoting Moliere
And I've been pointing out that your way of defining "gender" is incoherent. Doesn't that mean that you should maybe try a different tactic rather than throwing up your hands and blaming me for being to ignorant to understand your whack wisdom? Sounds like religion to me.
Quoting Moliere
You can persuade reasonable people with reasonable evidence. I was a "born-again" Christian, took my Bible to school, involved in my church, etc. but I began to question the very basis of what I believed. Eventually, after many years, I considered myself an atheist. I did a complete 180. I was persuaded with better arguments and consistent answers. Have you ever done that? Can you be persuaded, Moliere?
Quoting Banno
This is just another poorly veiled ad hominem attack. How does it follow from refusing to make the same distinction you are making to my arguments aren't worth considering?
I am using the terms as they are defined in the dictionary. You are not.
I have argued that your definition of "gender" is incoherent and arbitrary and your only defense is ad hominem attacks and more incoherent vagueness on the part if Moliere.
When you can't defend your own arguments, or even make an attempt to answer the questions I posed, it is you who aren't saying anything worthy of much consideration.
Where you say "or" here that is where the distinction between sex and gender lies. So as long as you understand that there are these two components -- physiological characteristics, and human expectations (of various sorts, behaviors are just easier to point to) -- then you should be able to understand the distinction between sex and gender.
Quoting Harry Hindu
I'm not blaming you. I said I don't expect to persuade you. Mostly because of past experience with philosophy -- if I'm being strict with myself then I should say I don't expect to not persuade you too as persuasion also happens, but I am a creature of habit and usually philosophy does not persuade.
I'm not sure how else to proceed other than ostensively, though. I don't have another tactic. I'm not throwing up my hands and blaming your ignorance, but I am ignorant on how else to proceed.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Yes, certainly. I've changed beliefs many, many times. But it's a process that happens over time, not in a single conversation. And, in the end, there was no one person who persuaded me -- it was me who persuaded me.
Perhaps it is that the gender of an individual is set by their mental and emotional characteristics, while their sexual characteristics are physical, 'set' by biology?
Our sense of experience of being a certain gender is based on how we view societies definition of the genders. If we feel that we are woman trapped in a man's body, we are feeling that our concept of experience is based around the experience we learned to be that of a man in our society. If the said person who feel trapped, were stranded on a remote island and hasn't had any contact with society and our values of gender, that person wouldn't feel trapped, they would just be themselves. People who have this view about themselves have this view because of their relationship with society and social norms, not because of their subjective experience. So feeling trapped is not out of knowing how the experience of being a man is, but by feeling more comfort in how they would be treated and act out according to what society has decided that the experience of a man should be, external and internal.
This is why gender has more to do with social norms than subjective identity. Most people are just who they are, but we are something else when we clash with what society has decided what people is. Whatever value we have on this subject matter, it's hard to deny that most of our sense of identity would be non-existent if we didn't have a society and norms around us to value and define them against.
But gender is a social construct, and that means it isn't set by sexual characteristics or by what they feel, but by what we (society) feel. So an interesting question is why and when society's feelings should over-ride the individual's in personal matters.
Seriously? So those with gender dysphoria are actually just making a lifestyle choice, based on what society thinks about gender? You don't put yourself through gender reassignment surgery unless you're really serious. Really, personally serious. :chin:
You may think that "an alternative identification" is your private enterprise; yet, it should be examined if it is really a private one. Almost any identification nowadays is a way of getting involved into a socio-political
mass movement.
Yes, we're all very serious about our identities. They're serious, and so am I, and so are those folk that feel to beat people up and murder them for their 'lifestyle' choices. What else is serious but identity?
Quoting Number2018
I may do, but I don't as it happens; I'm fairly conventional, in my male hetero-normality. But lose the paranoia, dude, penis amputation is not a mass movement.
While modifying the body is a dramatic change, I think that modifying the mind is equally dramatic when it comes to something as basic as identity.
Right now we have no such surgical power to modify the mind. We do not have that level of understanding. But what we do have is physical surgery. In a way physical surgery is actually easier because we at least understand the body and can perform physical surgery with relative safety.
But mental surgery? We're basically poking in the dark. We are largely ignorant of how the mind works, at least in comparison to our knowledge of how the body works. And any attempts that I've read about thus far usually end up hurting a person rather than healing them because of this ignorance.
So, relative to our time at least, it's actually more in the interest of a person's health to modify bodies to fit feelings on the basis of what it is we know and what we can accomplish.
In a theoretical future, when we have a better science of the mind, we could perform surgery on persons to modify their feelings -- to make them homosexual, to make them feel a certain gender-identity, to make them vote a certain way, to make them empathetic, to make them motivated to kill, to make them better workers, and so forth. It's a scary power to think about, but a science of the mind would allow for an engineering of the mind. We're just not there yet.
Let's hope we never get there, then. :chin:
If most of these operations got support and provided by a variety of publicly funded medical institutions,(which is impossible without previous intensive research) and many individuals considering the possibility of this operations get publicly funded guidance and support
(which is possible just in the presence of numerous qualified and trained staff), and all related issues
may become (I am not sure about it) a part of the mandatory school curriculum - how would you call it?
But it's worth talking about because 1) it's an end-goal of some scientists, so it's possible, and 2) it's basically what would be required if we were to medicate the mind, rather than the body, in the case of transgender individuals.
Gender dysphoria and gender reassignment surgery are socially situated phenomena. You don't get to make personal choices outside the prevailing social mythos without ending up in jail or a lunatic asylum. Or to put it another way, the communicable choices available to you are preset by your sociocultural context. In a hypothetical closed society where gender really does unambiguously equal what sexual equipment you display, the concept of gender dysphoria doesn't exist to be communicated and you can't have it. Just as up until recently you couldn't have ADHD. But in contemporary society, sex doesn't unambiguously equal gender and you can (which also makes an absolute equation of sex and gender either an expression of a lack of understanding of current social norms, or a misguided attempt to close the barn door after the proverbial horse has bolted).
But you could still have the symptoms of ADHD. You would just be called something else like "scatter brained" or a free spirt, or lacking in the character needed to see tasks through.
Conditions still exist regardless of what label society wants to use for them, or whether they're even recognized.
You could. And by the same principle you might, if you identified as being a member of the opposite sex, be considered in some societies as being possessed by the ghost of a woman etc. You couldn't have gender dysphoria though.
Your second question contains a false assumption. It can be either or both. And if it is set by what they feel, then these feelings typically relate to general characteristics associated with a particular gender. Otherwise these feelings would be nonsensical, but they're not.
My point has always been that gender is arbitrary - as in the various ways humans expect other humans to behave, while sex isn't. So, gender is meaningless in many circumstances, especially in a culture that supports the equal treatment and expectations of both sexes.
I also pointed out that these "transgenders" change their sex, not their "gender".
Quoting Moliere
Why don't you provide me the same courtesy I have shown you and try to address my points and answer my questions.
:razz:
Yeah, but it got your attention.
OK, so can we go with that? What might such gender norms look like? And how would they be separated from sexual differences.?
Quoting Harry Hindu
Rubbish. We are trying to play chess while you refuse to acknowledge that the white pieces are different from the black pieces.
This is the most ridiculous analogy I've seen.
No, Banno. It's not like that at all. We aren't talking about race.
Remember, for the 3rd time, I'm using the terms as used in the dictionary. You are not.
You could say that I'm the one using the rules, and you are the one trying to tell me that you can move the King like the Queen whenever you feel like it.
Keeping in mind that my focus has mostly been on interiority, and there are people in a better position than I to answer these questions --
Since we're talking specifically gender norms, as in the social dimension of gender, it seems to me that self-identification is one of the stronger norms. So I couldn't say to you that you are this or that gender-identity, but you could say so -- and you could change your mind, depending on how you feel. Another social norm is that one's gender-identity and the expression of that gender-identity should not play a role in social role. So regardless of what identity you identify with and express you should, for instance, be paid the same as someone who identifies differently.
Here's a list of genders embedded in an article about such terms. What do you make of it?
It seems to me that masculine and feminine are already separated from sexual differences. What does short hair, for instance, have to do with one's physiology? Sexual differences play a very minor role, at least when comparing the number of entities in the set of gendered entities, in marking what is masculine and what is feminine.
So removing them entirely from the set of gendered entities is all that would be required. Feelings, as vague as that term is, would be the arbiter of identity rather than physiology.
Gender is re-invented precisely because physiology is not important, and gender doesn't bind one to a social role -- but not eliminated because there are people who feel a need to express and identify as such.
You have asked questions? I noticed only assertions, and corrections of others' views. :chin:
But this is a topic where opinions are changing. Therefore the terms we use to describe it are changing too. The language belongs to the people, and all that. :wink: So dictionary definitions aren't necessarily helpful, as they necessarily lag the dynamic usage of terms. :chin:
EXCEPT when their interiority contradicts their exterior - as in when they believe that they are Jesus, an alien, or the opposite sex. Beliefs are interior and many of them are wrong. How do you go about consistently determining which feelings are accurate or not?
Quoting MoliereIsn't short or long hair PART of your physiology, just as being bald is? The length of one's hair does not determine sex, nor gender, as it varies across sexual and cultural boundaries. It is simply a human, not a "gender", trait of which both sexes can engage in.
Quoting Moliere
So then the feelings that believers have would be the arbiter of the truth for the existence of their god? Again, how do you consistently determine which wide range of feelings human beings are capable of, are the arbiter of truth and which are not - other than the fact that human beings have feelings about certain things that often come into conflict and contradict others' feelings, like in the debate we have right now?
And don't forget my question (one that I've asked half a dozen times with no answer (and no it's not rhetorical. I expect an answer if you expect me to understand what you mean about "gender")) about those that talk about how they feel like a different "gender", yet go about changing their sex via surgery?
If they feel like the opposite "gender" then why do they need go about performing physical changes to validate their feeling? Why would they need to change the length of their hair, their style of clothes, hormone therapy, replacing their genitals, etc. if their feeling is all they need to validate the accuracy of their belief?
It is physical, but it is not a sexual trait. It's not even a biological trait. Things like the maximum length hair can grow to are, but aligning short/long hair to masculine/feminine is not. There are myriad examples of non-sexual masculine/feminine entities.
Quoting Harry HinduQuoting Harry Hindu
It seems to me that you don't see a difference between feelings and beliefs. Before I said there is a difference between feelings and claims. There is a difference between feelings and beliefs as well.
Feelings are not true or false. Beliefs are.
If I feel hunger it would be strange to say that my hunger is accurate or not. What could be accurate is my belief about hunger -- I can be mistaken about how I feel after all. That is cognitive. That is in the realm of belief. My hunger can also be felt for reasons which are out of harmony, unnatural, or irrational; say in the case that I feel hungry any time I am bored even though I do not need food.
But the hunger is not true or false, in either case.
So if I feel like a woman then the feeling is not true or false. Or if I simply want to be a woman, even if I do not feel like I am one now, that feeling is not true or false. What can be true or false is my belief about my feelings. We can be confused about ourselves -- we are not infallible.
But neither is the clinician, and they don't even have the benefit of feeling my feelings to sort things out.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Quoting Harry Hindu
How do you know that every transgender person is seeking to validate their feeling by means of physical change? Or validate accuracy? That is a wild overgeneralization.
The simple answer is because someone desires to.
It's worth noting that not every aspect of human psychology is wrapped up in the game of accuracy, truth, evidence, and independent corroboration. You seem to believe that it is. But this is a false belief on your part.
EDIT: Just to highlight -- feelings are the arbiters of truth with respect to identity, not all beliefs.
I think not. Trump is POTUS, and the 'alt-right' are rising across the world. :fear:
...
...or are you making a joke, and I took it literally? :blush:
Go to academia and workplace in Western countries and try arguing in favour of any right wing policy.
Quoting Pattern-chaser
So? That has nothing to do with the right wing. There was a number of people who voted Trump only because they didn't want Clinton. The so called alt-right is a minority.
That's not what is in my dictionary. But then, i'm using the Oxford, not one I wrote myself.
Why does this language game require your attention? Is it causing trouble for you?
Why (is it worthy of further discussion)? Do these claims cause harm? No. Do they mislead or deceive? No. Does it matter at all if I, biologically male, ask you to address me as she/her or Ms? No. Not in the slightest. There is no issue to discuss here. How I identify, and how I request that you identify me, are choices that can be safely left to ... me. With no resulting harm to anyone. :up:
But that's not what's happening with the transgender movement though is it, and it's slightly disingenuous to paint it that way. What actually happens is John (a biological male) asks to be called by terms previously associated with biological females, he asks to use the rest-rooms previously reserved for biological females, he asks to have his notion that he "feels like a woman" accepted etc. Nothing at all wrong with any of that as you say. John's hair, title, dress and make-up are an important part of who he is so why should he be restricted in that?
The problem arises when Mary (a biological woman) answers "no thank you" to that request. When she says that her manner of speaking is an important part of who she is and would rather not be told how to apply 'Mr' and 'Mrs' but would rather the autonomy to apply them in the way that best expresses how she feels. When Mary politely says that in her world view there is nothing that it 'feels like' to be a woman so she'd like to politely disagree that John feels like woman. All this should be fine too, but it's not, she gets called an intolerant bigot.
[ Disclosure: I'm not one of those people who claims to have "transgender friends". I know one transgender woman, quite well. ]
Because Mary's choice of how to apply terms is her choice, it expresses a part of who she is no less than John's choice of hairstyle or dress. Why would you accept that it is meaningful to John to have words spoken to him in a particular way, but then deny that it is equally meaningful to Mary to speak those words in a particular way?
What is that difference? John would like people to to refer to him a particular way. He would like everyone to use the terms 'Mr' and 'Mrs' to refer to the way people act and feel. Mary would prefer to use the terms 'Mr' and 'Mrs' (or perhaps 'him' the and 'her' would be better examples) to refer to the biological sex of the person. Why does John's preference about how words are used trump Mary's? There are no other examples I can think of where this has been the precedent. If I was tall but would rather people refer to me as short, I don't get the final say on the use of 'tall' and 'short', just because they refer to me.
So now long-established conventions are what determine right behaviour? You can see where that leads in respect to transgender issues surely. For the sake of your own argument you'll need a better justification than that.
Notwithstanding the above, the form is asking how you would like to be addressed. I've already agreed that such a request is harmless. The form doesn't go on to make it a social or legal duty for everyone to comply with that request does it?
The thing that's being restricted is the act of speaking, the very personal construction of the world that is encoded in one's grammar. Language is what defines our species, it plays such an important role in constructing our world-view that some intelligent people have even argued that such advanced thoughts are not even possible without it. To dictate to someone how they must use their language is to dictate how they must form their world-view. It's no trivial matter.
Perhaps Mary would have an issue if John preferred to call her Molly. Or Mark. I think in these circumstances that it is definitely the case that Mary's self-identification is preferred. There does not seem to be a philosophical issue with people changing their name.
I guess part of the question is whether personal pronouns refer to individual people, categories of people, general sets of people, or something else. I guess if you want to talk to someone as if they are an object, then it does not matter what [I]their[/I] perspective is on the matter and you can call them according to whatever term you prefer. But if you intend to speak to someone as a subject or a person, should you not take this fundamental part of dialogue - their perspective of who they are - into account?
Not at all. One might consider it crucially important to one's world-view that proper names are bestowed by parents, not the person themselves. In that case, it would be imposing on that person's world-view for Mary to demand of them that they now refer to her as Molly. The clash would have to be resolved. Maybe by discussion, maybe by some compromise. What it wouldn't be resolved by is making it an act of violent bigotry against Mary simply to have (and wish to express in one's language) the world-view that names should be given by parents.
You're mistaking that fact that such a world-view is uncommon, and where present not vehemently held, for the fact of their being some ethical 'wrongness' to it.
The world-view that categorical 'genders' as a thing that one simply is, don't exist is not only a commonly held world-view, but it is very important to many people in defining who they are, particularly many feminists use the concept as a basis for their philosophy. To tell them that they are no longer allowed to express that world-view requires a discussion about relative harms, not a slagging match.
For clarity I am using sex, male, female; and gender, man, woman.
Hence a male who says they are female is ipso facto wrong. However there is nothing problematic in a male who says she is a woman.
Quoting Pseudonym
It's a question of common curtesy to address someone as they prefer to be addressed. Mary's refusal to show basic respect for another person tells us something about Mary. Perhaps that she has far too great a concern for the contents of other people's underwear. But also a fear of people who are just a bit different.
No it isn't. If someone wishes to be addressed as 'lord' it is not common courtesy to comply with that request. If someone wishes to be addressed as 'bitch' it is not common courtesy to comply with that request. Language is a two-way process of agreeing how we should refer to things. The agreements we arrive a say a lot (some would argue, everything) about who we are and how we understand the world. It is disrespectful of autonomy for one person to consider they have the authority to determine language use alone in the exchange.
What tells us something is that you consider yourself to be sufficiently authoritative to suggest that Mary's 'concern' for the contents of other people's underwear is 'too great'. Maybe, in Mary's world-view, addressing people according to the contents of their underwear is an important part of how she sees the world, maybe not hugely important (that would be weird) but as significant as the clothes she wears or the style of her hair. It may be that Mary would prefer not to acknowledge the concept of 'feeling like' a woman, and for her, the only way to do this is to apply gender terms on strictly biological grounds. If that upsets people, then some kind of compromise is required, but this doesn't make Mary a bigot, it's just part of how we try to get on with one another despite our differences.
Sure it is.
You think there is a symmetry between John and Mary. There isn't.
It might be what you think of as courtesy but I can assure you it most certainly is not 'common'. Try it and see how many people comply.
To expand the discussion to "worldview" is making matters murkier, I think. To respect the way an individual chooses to be addressed is common courtesy. And each individual chooses that for themselves (although their parents give them their names when they're born, as has been noted). That's how it works. I determine how I would like to be addressed, and you respect this. In return, you decide how you wish to be addressed, and I (and everyone else) respect your wishes in return.
Worldview is a separate matter, and does not (IMO) have the same force as someone asking us to address them in a particular way. The latter is much more personal than the former, I think. And this discussion concerns the latter, not the former. I'm sorry, but I don't believe that introducing 'worldview' is at all helpful here. :joke:
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/man
Man: An adult human male.
Woman: An adult human female.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/man
Man: an individual human; especially : an adult male human
Woman: an adult female person
As you can clearly see, I am using actual dictionaries. You have yet to provide any link to the definition you are using. So, who is it again that is making stuff up?
A man is a category for a particular sex/gender of a certain species, just as a buck and a bull are. Males are just a more general category that doesn't make a distinction between species - only between sex/gender.
Again, if both men and women can do something, like grow/cut hair and wear/not wear makeup, then there is no point in making a distinction of masculine/feminine between these behaviors. Again, the distinction lies in the boundaries between cultures, not between sex or gender.
Quoting Moliere
We already went over this :roll: Again, I refer you to our friend that believes that they are Jesus. We're just going around in circles. How do you break out of this circle of inconsistency?
You're just reiterating what I've already discussed with Banno without actually addressing the arguments. It is definitely not a matter of common courtesy to address people how they would like to be addressed. If I asked people to address me a 'lord' because I felt I was a god, it would not be common courtesy to comply with that request. Absolutely no one would comply. If I asked to be called by some word other people found offensive, absolutely no one would comply with that request. I don't know where you're getting this idea from that normal courtesy is to use all words that refer to people in the way those people prefer. It's simply not the case.
Words like 'him' and 'her' are used in different ways by different people and their use reflects the world-view of the people using them. I think you're mistaking 'not helpful' with 'not agreeing with me'.
There may not be a point to you -- but it would be foolish to believe that there is no such distinction. And, in fact, the distinction is very important to some people.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Well, this is where I pointed out that there are facts to the matter with Jesus, and you then said there are facts of the matter to gender -- but then proceeded to conflate sex with gender with gender-identity on the basis of, what I take from your above, that there was "no point" to these distinctions, and that I was offering something too vague for your taste -- that my view was "incoherent" on that basis.
The separation between the three being biological, sociological, and psychological facts and how we ascertain these things. There's nothing incoherent in applying different methods to determine different sorts of facts, though. It would be foolish to believe there was only one method for determining truth and to use other methods is inconsistent -- mostly because you'd miss out on the varied ways we do, in fact, determine the truth.
This I agree with. One cannot dispute the psychological fact of feeling, but feeling 'like you're a woman' applies a meaning to the term 'woman' that is not universal. So the psychological truth is that they feel something which they describe as "feeling like a woman". To understand and to be sympathetic to these feelings requires that we understand their meaning of the word 'woman'. But being sympathetic to their use of the term does not (should not) involve us using the term as they understand it in all our conversations with them. Conversations are a two way thing. One party does not simply dictate the meaning of the terms used to the other, and they certainly don't get to label anyone as a bigot for not complying.
Mary says "you are not a woman" - meaning that the thing she associates with term 'woman' is something you're born with, it has meaning to her that womanhood is nothing more than your biological status because she (as a biological woman) wants to feel she can be anything she wants to be. She feels a bond with those previously oppressed for their biological status and its important to her to have her feelings about this definition respected.
How is one oppressed and the other a bigot?
Consider a man named William who prefers to be called Bill. Should someone else get to insist that since his legal name is William that they will continue to call them William on that basis? I'd say that Bill's demand to be referred to by his preferred nomination takes priority, in spite of the social nature of meaning. They just feel like a Bill -- down-to-earth, not making much fuss, not prissy; not like a William. Now in this example perhaps there is about one or two persons who he runs up against who are like this, and he finds them fairly annoying. But imagine a world where you have to argue for something as basic as your preferred nomination with a large percentage of the population. Might your demand, in those circumstances, often come across as a little bit brash out of sheer irritation for having to ask for this basic respect yet again?
But Bill and William are simply references, they have no other meaning, so the request is a neutral one. The meaning of the word William doesn't have any significant connotations, nor reflect any major world-view. This is not the case with - 'woman' or 'him/her', they are extremely loaded words with years of oppression, struggle and social demand packed into them. It is not a simple request to ask others to use them in the way you personally see fit.
Courtesy is a two-way thing. It requires 'decent' behaviour from all parties. So you, being courteous, would not make such an unreasonable request of others as to address you as "Lord". Courtesy allows plain speech without (?) it leading to violence. That's what it's for. And when someone makes a request - such as "please address me as she/her" - which harms no-one, there's no reason to refuse, is there? :chin:
But I've just given reasons to refuse, you've just ignored them without response. Why is it unreasonable to ask that I'm addressed as 'lord'?
If you don't know the answer to your question, there's little point in my explaining. Courtesy is a two-way thing, as I said, and it requires a little tolerance and flexibility on all sides.
Quoting Pseudonym
I hope not. :up: But the topic here and now is gender/sex, not worldview. There is no agreement here on how worldview relates to gender issues, or whether it's helpful in discussing them. You have introduced it as an external (to the OP) comparison, but why?
Some people's worldview leads them to want to address people with skin darker than their own using terms that are universally accepted to be offensive. In this case, worldview does not decide the matter. Perhaps this is also the case for gender issues? :chin:
Seems an odd response. I'd have thought that my no knowing the answer was pretty much the only case in which there would be any point in your explaining.
Still, the question was aimed to get at your reasons, I'm not assuming there's such a thing a the universal reason. My reason would be that 'lord' means something important to some people and I am not that thing. It would therefore be offensive for me to ask them to use the term in my way. But the same applies to 'woman' and you're happy for others to dictate how that term is applied. Hence I'm wondering what your reason could be.
Quoting Pattern-chaser
Beliefs about gender and sex are part of one's world-view. I don't understand the distinction you're making between the two.
Quoting Pattern-chaser
No, the difference is that those people wish to use terms which even they agree are offensive. Terms which they themselves would be offended by if they were used on them. The very purpose is to offend. Its not the same at all.
And I might observe that, as you say, lord describes a particular rank (or similar), and you don't hold that rank. It would not be offensive for you to ask to be called "lord", but it would be deceptive and misleading, and that's why it is unreasonable. Nothing to do (directly) with anyone's worldview.
Quoting Pseudonym
Beliefs are part of one's worldview, just as sex and gender are. So are political persuasions, loyalty to football teams or one's employer, animal rights, environmental issues, and so forth. Worldview embraces a huge amount of stuff, of which sex/gender are just one small component. It isn't helpful trying to use such a big term in such a small arena as this one. I'm not making a distinction, I'm arguing that the inclusion of worldview, something that applies to half the universe, in a small and contained discussion like this one, is unhelpful.
But that's only according to your definition of 'lord'. Mine is someone who is lordly as in 'our lord Jesus Christ' and so if I claim that's the way I feel, why would you (or anyone else) not address me ad such. And you haven't answered my point about offensive terms either. There's no 'fact of the mattter' about offensive terms so, if I asked you to refer to me by some word you find horribly offensive would you do so?
Quoting Pattern-chaser
Firstly, I meant 'that part of a person's world-view which relates to sex and gender' I just didn't feel it was necessary to write the whole thing out, but secondly I also note you've still not explained how it was unhelpful. What is the task we're trying to achieve here, and how does mentioning world-views make it less likely we'll succeed?
So we both use the term to denote a "particular rank (or similar)", as I wrote. :up: But you are no more God than you are a Lord of the land, so you would still be seeking to deceive or mislead, n'est ce pas? :wink:
Quoting Pseudonym
As for the task we're trying to achieve; ask @Banno, whose topic it is. :up: :smile: Bringing worldviews into a small and (one might think) contained discussion like this one is unhelpful because it's such a widely-applying thing. It applies to (nearly) everything. You might as well try to link-in living in a Western 'democracy', which would muddy the waters even further. :wink:
The 'fact of the matter' is that worldview is an external view, whereas I think we're discussing self-image here (or something pretty close to it), an internal or introspective viewpoint. The two might be seen as complementary, but that's their only relationship. On the one hand, we have the way someone sees themselves, and on the other, you introduce worldview, which is the way everyone else sees them. Two quite contrary perspectives, as I'm sure you agree. :up:
No, I'm using the term to describe someone who is deserving of that rank, not one who legally possesses it. So it remains possible for to request you refer to me as 'my lord' by my definition of 'lord'. Also, I note you still haven't answered the question about what you would do if I asked you to refer to me by a word you found deeply offensive. What about if I made up a new word with my own meaning, what about if I asked you to refer to my race as 'African' (I'm white, but I ultimately come from Africa), what about if I asked you to always describe me as very wise because I feel very wise and wisdom is not an objectively measurable thing? I could go on. The idea that I get to dictate how you use any language which refers to me is ludicrous.
Quoting Pattern-chaser
Yes, so why do the conclusions from one dictate language use and the conclusion from the other must be ignored because they're 'unhelpful' ?
To start with, almost nothing dictates language use. In this topic, we are (I think) discussing how people request others to address them in a particular way. It is not helpful to list possible objections that others may have, as you have done, and are doing. Such things are not, and should not be, "ignored". But you are extending a discussion before its fundament has been properly understood, which just makes the whole thing a lot more difficult.
When we are clear on how people should be addressed, and under what circumstances it is reasonable for them to ask to be addressed in a particular way, maybe then we can proceed to considering whether others might have difficulties with this, and whether this is reasonable of them?
I probably wouldn't do it. But why do you concentrate so heavily on breaking courtesy? It's not a difficult thing to do. But it is counter-productive. Courtesy is a two-way, co-operative, thing. It can't and won't work if all you want to do is to break it down. Courtesy is something we all must work at, because the alternative is a lot more violence, which achieves nothing.
If I ask you to refer to me as 'she/her', it's not like I'm demanding or mandating that you must call me "Pseudonym-is-a-fucking-prick"! I'm not looking to attack you, only to reflect the 'real' me, as I understand it. Will you not do me the courtesy, the favour, of doing as I ask? I will try hard to accommodate your needs in return, if that will help you decide? This is what courtesy is about, and this, I think, is what this topic is about.
[ Edited to add: I'm actually a cis male, and quite happy with being addressed as 'him/he', in line with the penis I carry in my trousers. But not everyone is happy with this, hence this topic. ]
Then they are entitled to be addressed accordingly. ... As long as they really are "deserving of that rank". :chin: :chin: :chin:
I really don't see anyone objecting to this first part, so we have almost universal agreement that people are entitled to make such a request. The part I'm concerned about is what happens next. When someone like Harry comes along and says, "no thank you, I'd rather not" and is labelled a bigot for doing so. The reasonableness of the objections of others to using the terms is the only point of debate.
Quoting Pattern-chaser
No, we can't work that way because the reasonable objection of some portion of the rest of the population surely must weigh in the decision about how people 'should' be addressed.
Quoting Pattern-chaser
Because you said it was common courtesy to call someone by the term they prefer. You brought courtesy up and now your complaining that I'm focusing on it?
Quoting Pattern-chaser
Exactly, so why is your definition of courtesy that I call you by whatever terms you prefer without asking or caring how that might make me feel? That doesn't sound very two-way to me.
Quoting Pattern-chaser
No, that's not what's happening here at all. People are being told to refer to trans men as 'her', they are being mandated (by threat of ostracisation and insult), no one is asking how it makes them feel or listening to their concerns, no one is trying to accommodate their needs in return. None of this is happening in this discussion. The demand has been entirely that we should all refer to people by their chosen title and if we don't we're intolerant bigots. No one's even asked how it makes us feel or what they can do in return.
Now that is a creative way of stating it! Harry has repeatedly denounced and condemned (I use those terms after careful consideration) trans-gender people as "deluded", and their feelings as "delusions". He has stated over and over his outrage at being 'forced' to pander to the delusions of others. I rather think it's this that brands him a bigot, don't you? :chin: :razz:
Not because you're focusing on it, but because you're trying to break it.
Social pressure is not reasonable or rational. It's red in tooth and claw, if I can steal a phrase from elsewhere. :wink: If we approve of it, we call it one thing, and if we don't, we call it another. In your case, mandation (??? :smile:) "by threat of ostracisation and insult". If we disapprove of the way our children are raised, we call it brainwashing, but if not, we call it education. It's the same thing. And social pressure is not subject to courtesy, sadly. :meh:
No, not really. I've certainly no sympathy for his views in this regard, but I don't think anyone should be labelled a bigot for theorising that believing yourself to be a woman (despite being born a man) might be a delusion in the same vein as believing yourself to be fat when in fact you are thin. Men may well wish to wear dresses, or make-up, but again, no one, including Harry, is denying that. What concerns some people is that the conviction one 'is' something which requires surgery to realise might be a harmful delusion. I don't share that belief, but I don't see how it's bigotry.
Quoting Pattern-chaser
No, I'm arguing that it has already been broken by dismissing the concerns of feminists that the hundreds of years of fighting against being told they are some predetermined 'thing', might be undermined by pressure to use language as if gender was predetermined.
Quoting Pattern-chaser
Now you seem to be throwing up your hands to ethics. Which is it to be? Are we talking about they way people should behave, or they way they do? You can't argue that people should use the preferred terms of reference and then respond to my concerns about inappropriate social pressure with a shrug.
Well, let's leave oppression to the side for now. My direct answer to the question would be that this isn't a dichotomy, that there are multiple classes of people who are oppressed, but this would take us pretty far astray.
Also, in the manner you are describing here -- in the hypothetical -- you're making the dispute about meaning, it seems to me. Where the argument is over the proper, right, or true meaning of the term "woman". So what we have is two people talking past one another. Naturally Mary is not a bigot. They're just confused about what's being talked about due to the phonetic similarities of the words they are using.
But I suspect that the phrases used in practice "I am a woman" or "You are not a woman" do not hinge on the meaning of "woman". They are words being put to use, and what is in dispute is the identity of a person.
Some aspects of identity are social. If I am a teacher then that means I hold a license to teach, I am given income and benefits for my efforts in teaching, and -- so we hope -- I actually do teach students.
Some aspects of identity are not social -- they are personal. They are impressed on and expressed by the person who is the identity. If I am a pluviophile it's something I know about myself, and I can tell you that I am a pluviophile but you won't feel the joy I feel when it rains. You can develop metrics of a sort to determine whether I am who I say I am -- perhaps you'd expect me to sit on the porch when it rains, or to treat you more kindly than average when it rains. But the metrics wouldn't be the feeling, and I would be the one in the best position to determine whether what I say about myself is true -- since I do, at least, feel my feelings, where you do not. After all perhaps I come from a culture where joy is expressed differently. I also may be wrong about my feelings, but I have the benefit of feeling them.
So I'd say the question here turns on one, how do we determine the personal identity, like the case of the pluviophile, of others?, and two, what is appropriate in such determinations? In short form my answer is: by asking to the former question and listening to the latter question. And that naturally leads me to say that Jane, formally called John, is in the right above, whereas Mary is in the wrong. Mary can say "I am a woman", just as Jane can say "I am a woman" -- and if they listened to one another they would both be able to express their identity and understand where they are coming from.
Transgender individuals being treated in accord with their gender-identity does not erase the very real struggles of women, or the identities of women. I'd say that it offers an expansion of identity that allows for the feelings of both the hypothetical Mary and John. Both Mary and John are accorded the respect they deserve as individuals with their own feelings on their identity.
Quoting Pseudonym
I am sympathetic to looking at how words have and are used through time, to the specificity of individuals, to details. I think that this is why I've been drawing examples such as depression, pluviophilia, race, sexuality, and so forth with respect to transgender identity. There are enough similarities here to see a kind of grouping with respect to how it is we determine so and so is this or that, as well as to attempt a generalization towards an ethic of identity.
I'd say that transgender identity is so unlike the belief that you are Jesus, for instance, that this is a case that falls by the wayside -- for the technical reasons I specified, such as historicity and the methodology in determining the interior lives of others, but also in a more commonsense way. They just don't seem related at all.
Though I'll admit that if someone really pressed me to call them Jesus, and I came to believe that this is really how they felt and it makes them feel happier to be called Jesus, while I certainly wouldn't believe him to be that Jesus -- given the historical nature of the man -- I'd be willing to accommodate them.
This is the case.
The crux of this thread's issue results from direct equivocation between terms (is and ought mostly)
Depending on how we use the term "gender" in any specific context, it points to different things: Sometimes it's the sociosexual role that an individual believes they ought to be, and therefore "are/is" deep down. Other times gender refers only to appearance (e.g: a drag queen in drag is a she when in drag). Still other times "gender" refers strictly to genitalia, and in the most rigid possible sense refers to one's chromosomes.
One side of this discussion is perpetually focused on gender as a kind of objective teleological/ontic category with necessary attributes, the objectively common causes of gender; the is' (chromosomes or genitals), while the other is focused on how gender expresses itself dynamically and with variability (social roles, hormonal disposition, and self-identification).
If none of us used the word gender and instead just said what we meant in that instance, there would be no disagreements:
A person with XX chromosomes will never know for certain exactly what life would have been like with XY chromosomes instead, but people want what they want regardless of how well informed they can be on the subject of their desires. A person with XX chromosomes can however experience the ramifications of hormones at levels typically found in individuals with XY chromosomes (some people are genetic/epigenetic/natural outliers and hormone therapy is available). A person with XX chromosomes can also have a good understanding of what the social/sexual roles typically associated with XY chromosomes are: they can observe them readily and try them out for themselves. A person with XX chromosomes can have an idea of what it would be like to have the genitalia associated with XY chromosomes, and they can be displeased with their own genitals, which doesn't make it completely unreasonable that a sex change operation could help treat associated dysphoria. A person with XX chromosomes can have a fairly informed desire to adopt the roles and attributes typically associated with XY chromosomes (and vice versa), and so if we go by a holistic definition of "gender", which would include genitals, social roles, physical attributes, and intent/self-identification (and perhaps chromosomes) then we wind up with a confusing spectra of many variables.
If we go by physical attributes (including genitalia) and sociosexual roles then people can objectively transition between genders (even against their will I should say). If we go by chromosomes alone then nobody has ever transitioned, and if we include it in a holistic definition, transgender individuals can be said to have the chromosomes of one gender, and the perhaps everything else of the (an?) other.
To show how breakable the present level of care given to these distinctions is, consider the following:
If absolutely everything about someone conformed to the opposite gender except for their chromosomes, how meaningful is it to base the definition of gender upon only chromosomes?
If we invented genetic therapy that could rewrite all of our cells to conform to the opposite gender, would there be any meaningful distinction left?
If I surreptitiously inject you with a vial of chromosome altering enzymes, but you for the most part retain your physique and attributes, would you actually be the opposite gender despite believing and living as though you are still the same?
One side derives an ought from an is (you were born X, are chromosomally X, therefore you ought to be X).
The other side derives an is from an ought (a want) (you ought to be X, are behaviorally/hormonally X, therefore you is X.
The solution is to realize that X means different things.
Especially the last two paragraphs. Thinking...
Gender is an objective demarcation, but consciousness is impoverished in these concepts; the richness is within the unconscious, in making oneself conscious of who or what they want to be, and what they themselves think something is--not with regard to impersonal definitions.
"The only truth is the individual." C G Jung
@Banno
Sure, and it might be part of someone's worldview that black people are lesser than white people, should fulfil an appropriate role in society as slaves, and should be addressed as "nigger" - but we don't always accede to the worldviews of others. I think that your line of thinking justifies all sorts of hateful or bigoted forms of address, whether that was your intention or not.
There are cases of forms of address that are inappropriate, and there are also cases where it is wildly inaccurate, and there are other cases that are neither. Picking them apart is a big part of the question we're discussing. But it is not as simple as saying, "Here is an example of a worldview that justifies x" because not all arguments are on the same footing here.
Part of this question might be about respect for others - both in a general, politeness sense, as well as more fundamental empathetic sense. When we treat others as objects, we can treat them exactly how we perceive them with an ignorance of their personhood - an assertion that who they is totally defined by us and not by them, and that our interiority is superior to theirs, so that our definitions of who they are is total. When we treat others as objects, then, we can justify referring to them any way we please that suits our worldview. But when we treat others as people, we are compelled to take into account their own interiority, and the smallest acknowledgement of that is respect for how they wish to be treated in forms of address.
I feel like there is a "slippery slope" here somewhere that you are angling towards, where we might have to acknowledge other types of claims apart from gender? And that perhaps we will not be able to reasonably assess the authenticity or potential future harm of all these claims?
I think this confuses the type of discussion we are having now with the practicalities of everyday life - we expect that murder is wrong without requiring that assailant and victim have a philosophical discussion and some sort of compromise first, but we are fully accepting of philosophical discussions such as this one here to occur regarding the justification of murder in various circumstances.
No, that's not really what I'm saying. I don't think there is a right meaning of the term "woman". It means different things to different people, and probably different things in different contexts too. What I'm arguing about is very simply that the effect on your identity of having a word used about you (which is what the trans movement are broadly concerned about in this regard), is no greater than the effect of using a word about someone on the identity of the speaker. They both mean something about the identity of both the speaker and the one being addressed, and there's no acknowledgement of this in the debate at all, it's all about the feelings of the person being addressed as if the act of speaking had no effect at all. Since our entire world-view is constructed from (or at least contained within) the language we use, I find that position disingenuous.
Quoting Moliere
Again, this misses the point of language. No-one is denying John/Jane's feelings that they are "something he refers to as a 'woman'. The feelings are not in question. What's in question is the use of the word to describe them. Mary's meaning of the word 'Woman' does not describe feelings of any sort, it describe a chromosomal arrangement. It would be like if John said "I feel like 16 centimetres". 16 centimetres is a unit of measurement, not a thing one can feel like, but John can't be mistaken about his feelings, we must take them as being true (for him) so the only conclusion we can draw is that he feels like something which he describes as 16cm, but which we wouldn't describe that way.
To use your pluviophile example, it would not have anything to do with the validity of you experience of rain, and yes, we might well treat you differently on knowing your affinity for it. It would be the equivalent of you saying that you were rain, and we thinking well 'rain' to me is the wet stuff that comes from the clouds so you can't actually be 'rain' to me, you must in my language mean that you are like rain, or that you feel a great affinity for it, or something like that. I could ask you more about your feelings and get a closer picture, then re-describe it in my language as best I can.
Quoting Moliere
Many feminists disagree strongly, and I understand their arguments. Women have been oppressed for hundreds of years on basis of nothing else but having been born a woman. Not on the basis of feeling like a woman, not on the basis of wearing dresses and having long hair, not even on the basis of sexual organs (since having them removed does not automatically confer equal treatment with men). On the basis of being born a woman. So what other people who are born a woman feel solidarity for and identify with are the group {people who are born a woman} and they have a name for members of that group - "women". It's important to them that they get to identify this group somehow, that they are allowed to give it a name. I don't suppose they much care what name they give it, just a name. Someone who would describe their psychological state as "feeling like a woman" is not a member of this group. A person born a man can secretly "feel like a woman" and still be treated as equal with other men. A person born a woman cannot secretly (or otherwise) "feel like a man" and be treated equally to other men. She is discriminated against solely because she was born a woman. I don't know how much you know about the psychology of surviving discrimination, but (I'll put this in bold so that it might finally get noticed) it is vitally important to the mental health of discriminated groups that they are able to identify with and show solidarity with other members of the same group. The group that is being discriminated against in this case is {people who are born a woman} and requiring that Mary use the term "woman" to describe anyone who "feels like" they're a woman, is taking away her ability to identify the group she feels most solidarity for. It really damaging to her mental health.
Not only that (although that would be enough). A massive part of the feminist struggle has been to have it recognised that being born a woman carries with it absolutely no further constraints or identifying features. That there is nothing more to being a woman that your chromosomes. Again, asking her to use the same term that is used to describe her to describe someone who "feels like a woman" is asking her to acknowledge that they belong in the same group, that's what nouns do, they identify groups by similarities. All things in the group "woman" must have similar features which define them. Mary does not want to be defined by anything that someone could feel, so why should she be forced to change her definition for the group she's naming "women". Her definition of that group is people born a woman (as in people born with XX chromosomes, or more likely those whose outward appearance would suggest such). John does not belong in that group, by her definition, and her definition is very important to her because it means no-one can tell her how she feels just because of the sex she was born. Calling John a "woman" deprives her of her term for this group, and so deprives her of a vitally important part of who she is.
No, we assess the harms that such a worldview might cause and come to some appropriate social consensus on their expression. So can you point to the assessment that's being carried out here of the harms? Because all I read is an assertion that trans people must be called by their preferred terms, not a discussion about the relative harms. No-one has written a single word in answer to the issue I raised about the meaning of the term 'woman' to some feminists and the harm that taking away that meaning might cause them.
Calling someone a "nigger" is actively designed to insult them. It's not a noun passively describing a group, there's already several terms for that group "Black people", "Afro-Caribbeans". The term "nigger" is an insult and always has been. To liken it to feminists wishing to reserve the term "woman" to define that set of people who were born with two x chromosomes, is utterly ridiculous. "woman" is not intended to be an insult.
Quoting angslan
This does not follow at all. What trans men (for example) are asking is that the same term applied to people born with two x chromosomes is applied to people who feel a way they would describe as "like a woman". It is exactly "an assertion that who they is totally defined by us and not by them". It is an assertion that the sets {those born with two x chromosomes} and {those who have a feeling they would describe as "like a woman"} are the same, or similar enough to share the same defining term and most importantly, are so similar that they do not even need their own individual defining terms. How is that not imposing a definition on who women are? It is literally saying that all people born with two x chromosomes are in some significant way the same as all people who have a feeling they would describe as "like a woman". That is imposing a definition on all people who are born with two x chromosomes.
Quoting angslan
I don't understand the point you're making here. We expect that murder is wrong because we all already agree that it is. All we might be interested in, from an ethical point of view, is why it's wrong. It is evident that we do not yet all agree that using a person's preferred terms is right or wrong, so that discussion needs to be had.
[quote=Pseudonym]No, we assess the harms that such a worldview might cause and come to some appropriate social consensus on their expression. So can you point to the assessment that's being carried out here of the harms? Because all I read is an assertion that trans people must be called by their preferred terms, not a discussion about the relative harms. No-one has written a single word in answer to the issue I raised about the meaning of the term 'woman' to some feminists and the harm that taking away that meaning might cause them.
Calling someone a "nigger" is actively designed to insult them. It's not a noun passively describing a group[/quote]
I just want to try and unpick some of the context of the argument here. If Mary prefers to be called Molly, you assert that there are potentially people who might find it crucially important to their world-view to call someone by the name that their parents have given them. I suggested that this was not a universal argument, as do not accept that it is universally appropriate to call someone "nigger" (or "bitch" or anything else). I think that part of your counterpoint here is that these terms might be "actively designed to insult" - but I can't help but note that this is a value-judgement that may not be shared by those using them, who might believe them appropriate terms. So I'm not convinced that this response is on target. It ignores, too, the fact that if someone addresses someone by a term that they know will cause upset or distress, then they are actively insulting them. So in either case, this does not seem to be a valid argument.
In terms of harms - this has definitely been raised. But perhaps no one has quantified the harm of being called by an inappropriate pronoun compared to the harm of "taking away" the definition of a word for some groups of feminists. (Not, of course, that the definition of a word can be "taken away" - if there is nonsense in this thread, this is it.) I am not sure how you would go about quantifying that harm. Would you add up the number of feminists who adhere to this definition and compare it to the number of people who do not, or what? Within feminist academia there is disagreement on this, so it hardly seems as if, at least on a level of theory, we are suggesting that we close off this set of terms to a strict set of definitions on the grounds of harm, lest we shut down the potential for discussion on this very issue.
I did raise the harm of denying personhood and interiority and treating people as objects - I may not have described this as a harm (which I hope has not confused you) because it seems self-evident to me that this is a harm.
I assume by trans-man you mean male-to-female? Of course this is nonsense - such a suggestion obliterates the logical possibility of female-to-male. And that is only within a narrow scope that is causes such problems; any theory of non-binary genders beyond this is also rendered impossible by your argument. And yet, of course, you recognise that these claims exist (thus our participation in this thread). So I think you would have to note that this formulation is wrong.
I'm simply saying that an appeal to discourse as a resolution is redundant, because that is what we are participating in. I am hoping you are not asserting that each and every time we encounter a trans person in the world we need to start the discourse afresh.
I've not denied its a value judgement, I've expressly said that society reaches some general consensus on the matter entirely because it is a value judgement. The point of labelling it an insult is to point out that it is an alternative term for a group already defined. No one is disagreeing about what defines that group. So, if the additional term is not necessary, and is used almost exclusively by people who have a negative view of the group it describes, is it really too much of leap to suggest that in the vast majority of cases it's being used as an insult?
None of these factors are true of calling a biological man a "man" as opposed to his preferred term "woman". There is no available alternative term to describe those born with two X chromosomes, so people using the term that way aren't obviously doing so with the intention to insult, they have no choice, there's no other term to use. The term "woman" to describe those born with two X chromosomes is also not used by a group with universally negative views of transgender people.
So,in the case of "nigger" there is a clear alternative word and the term is used almost exclusively by those who hold negative views about the group it defines. Maybe not 100% proof, but certainly enough evidence to go on that it's probably an insult.
In the case of using the term "woman" to describe those born with two X chromosomes, even if the person being addressed feels like they are a man, has no alternative word and is not used exclusively by those with a negative view of people who feel like they are a man. So there's very little reason to think its an insult.
Hence, there's good reason to ban the use of the term "nigger" (its most likely to be meant as an insult, and there are alternatives available to describe that group). There's not similar good reason to ban the use of the term "woman" to describe those born with two X chromosomes (its not most likely meant as an insult, and there are no alternative words available to describe that group)
Quoting angslan
If you're not sure how to quantify harms, then how have you reached the conclusion that people ought to be called by their preferred term? If you've not derived the 'ought' from minimising harm, where have you got it from?
Quoting angslan
Yes, and you seem to have ignored my arguments that insisting on the agreement (by language use) that there is such a thing as something it 'feels like' to be woman is equally imposing properties of personhood on someone born a women who may not wish to have herself defined that way.
Quoting angslan
I don't understand what you are saying here at all. I may have got the terminology wrong. By 'trans man' in the quote you cited I meant someone who is born a man but has a feeling they would describe as 'like woman'. Is that the wrong way round. If so, my apologies, please re-read the section with whatever the correct term is.
Quoting angslan
You and I have different definitions of discourse. Mine involves a to-and-fro analysis of arguments. What we had here was one side declaring what is 'right' and dismissing anything the other side had to say as intolerant bigotry. That's not what I call 'discourse'. Fortunately we seem to be past that now, so yes, what we are currently doing is exactly what I mean, not that we replicate this with each individual.
That's a strange, narrow way to think about insults - usually insults are used when they are going to be taken negatively by the recipient, not just because they are "alternative".
There's a difference between "relative harm" (as you have framed it) and other principles regarding harm. I've definitely suggested that treating others as having interiority avoids certain principles of harm. What I haven't done is compare the relative amounts of harm.
If a woman calls someone a "she", in no way does it define the speaker. This is akin to the argument that gay marriage somehow substantively affects straight marriage, even though none of the qualities of the marriage have changed at all. Moreover, respect of address doesn't even imply that the speaker has to agree that it is not some other category.
The point is this - male-to-females do not say that
You need to throw out this line of thinking and this assertion. Transgender people are specifically suggesting that chromosomes and gender-identity are not correlated in such a way. If they were, no one could be transgender! Your basis for the claims of transgender people is one that is incompatible with the fundamental point of their claims. In fact, their claim is specifically the opposite.
You don't think people have provided an analysis of your arguments?
Why have you cherry-picked this one property of terms used as an insult and argued against it as if it were the only property I ascribe? I've talked about a number of other properties shared by terms used as insults (they're usually used by groups who hold a negative opinion of the group they're describing, for example). At no point did I even imply that this was the only, or indeed, most important property of insulting terms. I'm simply saying that that in order to constitute an insulting term there must be an alternative term available to describe that group. If there's no alternative how can the person using the term possibly be accused of doing so with the intent to insult. If the term "woman" is going to mean {anyone who has feelings they personally would describe as being "like a woman"}, then what alternative term is available to somebody wishing to define the group {people who were born with two X chromosomes}? If there is no alternative, then how can it be an insult to use the term that way?
Quoting angslan
You may not have done, but my original comments were not directed at you, they were directed at those who considered the matter settled, that we should definitely address people by the gender terms they prefer. That implies that the weighing has already taken place (or they just don't care about the harms to others).
Quoting angslan
How are you so sure on this? The way we use language defines us. As I said in an earlier post, many intelligent thinkers have concluded that it is not even possible to have advanced thought like identity and personhood without language, so it's completely unwarranted for you to simply assert that it has no impact on defining the user. Words 'mean' something, that's their whole point. That means they 'mean' something to the speaker, not just the listener.
Quoting angslan
Gay marriage does affect straight marriage. It means that 'marriage' no longer refers to an act of union under God between a man and a woman. That's a positive change in my opinion but its ludicrous to suggest it didn't change anything.
Quoting angslan
So why are they asking that a term previously used to describe {people who, by appearances, were born with two X chromosomes} now also describe {people who have a feeling they describe as being "like a woman"}. If they're not making a claim that the two are the same, then why would they want to use the same word to describe both. This is not common language use. We commonly group thing under the same defining word because they share characteristics. Or are they simply wanting to appropriate the word entirely to only mean {people who have a feeling they describe as being "like a woman"}? If so, how are we to describe babies or toddlers, are we to ask them how they feel before addressing them? And what alternative word is being proposed to describe {people born with two X chromosomes}?
Trans people may believe they're not making this assertion, that doesn't mean they're not.
Quoting angslan
Not really no, I think people have just ignored the bits they don't have an answer to, stopped responding altogether when faced with a difficult questions and maintained their belief entirely without modification regardless of the arguments to the contrary, but I wasn't really expecting anything else. Some discussions I engage in to be part of the debate, but most I engage in to help sort my own ideas out (or just for fun) neither of the last two require anything of the other participants.
I never said there wasn't a distinction. I said that the distinction lies in the boundaries between cultures, not between sex/gender.
I conflate sex/gender precisely because you have yet to establish a real, objective distinction between them. All you do is keep going around in circles.
Quoting Moliere
Come on, Moliere. It is really difficult to have a discussion with someone who can't stay focused.
You said :
Quoting Moliere
The point I made about the person who believes that they are Jesus is that feelings are the arbiters of truth with respect to identity. Obviously, feelings with respect to identity can be wrong. So, feelings cannot be the arbiters of truth with respect to identity. Logic and reason are the only arbiters of truth, and you have yet to be reasonable or logical in this discussion.
Not only that, but in the same post, you said:
Quoting Moliere
So, at first you said that there is a difference between feelings and beliefs, yet when you added your highlight, you conflated them - a contradiction. Stop contradicting yourself so that we can actually have a meaningful conversation.
In his article, “What is it like to be a bat?” Thomas Nagel argues that there are facts about the conscious experience that are subjective and can only be known from that subjective perspective. Even if we know all the objective facts about bats, we may not actually know what it would really be like to be a bat. We might be able to imagine what it would be like to hang upside down, fly through the night, or use echolocation to track prey, but Nagel argues that we really couldn’t know what a bat’s experience is really like.
So, do transgenders actually feel like the opposite sex, or are they simply imagining what it is like, and want that and then go through the steps to acquire it (hormone therapy), so that they actually get some sense of what it does feel like, rather than just imagine what it feels like?
Not only that, but many of the people in this thread have argued FOR Nagel's idea in other threads, yet reject that in this thread. Take a long hard look at your worldview, people. It needs to be consistent across the board.
I didn't say it was the only property you ascribed, but I thought you made it sound like a necessary property, as you have repeated:
I don't think it needs to be part of the definition. Anyone can invent any category of people and make an insulting term for them, without regard to whether it is necessary to have such a category - it need not be an alternative term to a proper category. But this part of the conversation is getting pedantic and beside the point - let's stick to the interesting stuff.
Quoting Pseudonym
I don't think that someone who is confident in their identity is going to be confused about who they are by how they address someone else.
Quoting Pseudonym
It didn't mean that beforehand. And your description contains absolutely no change in straight marriage. A man and a woman who were in a union under God before gay marriage are still a man and a woman in a union under God after gay marriage - unless one of them changed sex or gender or the change in definition literally obliterated God.
Quoting Pseudonym
I want to point out that there are two different points here, and they are somewhat distinct. There is the original point about the connection between feeling and chromosomes, and now there is a second point about language.
As to the first point, the claim is not that chromosomes have a connection to the feeling. Such a claim, as I have said, is counter to the claims people with one set of chromosomes may feel the way that people with another set of chromosomes may feel. Clearly, then, the premise is that chromosomes and gender identity are distinct, and many of the problematic arguments you are raising become, as you note in this quoted text above, language issues.
Historically, sex and gender have been considered by many cultures as fused, and so one set of words only have persisted in language. This is also the state now. However, every day we are faced with words that have multiple, related or interrelated meanings, and yet we do just fine, so I don't think that this is primarily a language issue for you.
If I asked you to refer to me as "he" or "she" - would you need to check out my physiology before you felt it appropriate to use the term?
Yet you think someone who is confident in their identity will be upset by how they are addressed. This seems like an oddly arbitrary distinction to draw, especially considering I've already referenced parts of the feminist movement who quite evidently do feel like their identity is under threat by using words in certain ways, and there would clearly not even be a debate here if no one felt upset about having to use words in certain ways.
Quoting angslan
It's not the people who have changed (or not) it's the meaning of the word. The word "marriage" used to mean (to some) {the state of Union between a man and a woman as specified in the bible}. Those people now find it much harder to use the term that way and still be understood. In 50 year's time I think it will be almost impossible to use the term that way. I think that is a good thing because the term set up an institution unavailable to gay couples, and the world-view it preserved was one where God ordained things and I don't think that's morally helpful. In the case of the word "woman" however, I'm more persuaded by the feminist argument that its current use causes less harm than an expansion/alterations might. I'm at least persuaded to the extent that I think people should have the autonomy to use it as they see fit without undue social pressure.
Quoting angslan
Absolutely. I never have said that there is some connection between chromosomes and feeling. People with either set of chromosomes may feel any way. There are obviously general trends, some of which are mediated by biology (like hormones) and some of which are mediated by culture (like dress-wearing). But the very existence of the trans community (and the transvestite community), prove that these are only trends, not universal facts.
This is, however, the opposite of what is being claimed by the conflation of the term "woman". What this conflation implies is that there are some properties of having two X chromosomes which are intrinsically shared by those who feel like something they would describe as a woman. Deliberately asking that they be called the same thing is fundamentally making the claim that they share some properties. If I asked that tortoises were also referred to as 'cats' (in addition to lions and tigers and so forth) the very first question would be "Why? What have they got in common?".
Yes, there may be words which incidentally are used to describe two completely different things, but that's not what's happening here. The word 'woman' is being deliberately used to define both groups (chromosomes and feelings) which is making the strong claim that they are, in fact, related. That's the problem feminists have with it. They don't want the fact that they happen to have two X chromosomes to tie them to feeling a certain way. Yet if the term used to describe having two X chromosomes is deliberately also used to describe feeling a certain way, that's exactly what it implies.
Quoting angslan
As I said above, words might be incidentally used for different purposes but that's not what's happening here. The word "woman" is being deliberately used to make a link between the sex and the gender, to validate the claim that what transgender people feel like is actually the opposite sex and not simply something which they think the opposite sex is like. This necessarily makes the claim that there is something it is like to be a "woman", which necessarily implies that someone who doesn't feel that way isn't a proper woman (despite having two X chromosomes).
Quoting angslan
Of course not, what I don't know won't hurt me. The harm is if you (as an obvious man) told me (a woman, (for the sake of this example)) that you feel sufficiently like me and everyone else with my biological sex to be addressed in the same way because we're basing terms of address on feelings not observed facts.
Quoting Pseudonym
This is true of all types of people - this is in no way exclusive to trans people. The principle of respecting other people's interiority is that we respect them in the way we address and treat them. This doesn't mean we compromise the way in which we treat ourselves.
Quoting Pseudonym
To some. Is that the point that we were talking about earlier? I don't think so.
Quoting Pseudonym
I feel like I haven't heard the actual argument that you find convincing - just that you know that there is such an argument.
Quoting Pseudonym
Nor did I say you did - I said that you claimed trans people made such a claim. To wit:
Quoting Pseudonym
I would be very surprised to find out that the definition of "woman" popped into existence when humans discovered chromosomes and was not in use beforehand. If it was in use beforehand, then this definition you are supplying is a cherry-picked one for the purposes of your position. Why are you so focussed on chromosomes?
Quoting Pseudonym
I'm again not sure where you're getting your sense of these concepts from. Why would I have to "feel like you"? And why would the gendered term of address necessarily be based upon "observed facts"?
I feel like this argument is based upon some assumptions that need some real criticism:
(a) chromosomes are some fundamental component of gender or gendered words (such as "woman"). Criticism: Gender is separate, and the language-use of gendered words predates chromosomes - there is no primacy to the chromosomal definition as some etymological or factual truth.
(b) observable physiology has primacy over gender identity in forms of address. Criticism: If we consider that we are addressing a person (say, the inhabitant of a body) and not the body, then this seems odd.
(c) there is only one way to "feel like a woman", which means that any use of gendered words implies the addressees necessarily feel the same as each other. Criticism: there is more than one way to feel like a woman. We admit as such when we talk about "trends" and look at the varied cultural mediation across not only the present, but also the past.
This is what I feel is drawn out from your writing - how far off am I?
Quoting Pseudonym
I am attempting, in my own small way, to encourage courtesy. But I can't force someone else to be courteous, and I can't force anyone else to think courtesy is as important as I believe it to be. I observe that humans en masse act as they see fit, perhaps as lions (say) might do? What should people do? Well you know my opinion, because I've been stating it here, but there are plenty of other opinions, mostly different. What do people do? You don't need me to tell you that, you only need to look at the TV or Twitter or.... I argue that people should (IMO) be courteous, but I observe that they aren't, especially en masse. :sad: So I see no contradiction. :chin:
Quoting Pseudonym
:up:
Quoting Pseudonym
[My highlighting.]
When you put it that way, it sounds quite reasonable. But Harry didn't (put it that way). He did not and does not wonder if gender dysphoria might be a delusion, he asserts that it is, and that TG people are "deluded", which is used (as you know :up:) as a demeaning and contemptuous insult more often than it is used as a factual medical description.
Quoting Pseudonym
It's the words chosen that are bigoted, I think. Harry is not sympathetic, or any other friendly-type thing, he is offended and angry. His words do not betray philosophical curiosity, they seem hateful, ill-meaning and contemptuous. What word(s) would you use to describe such sentiments? :chin:
Yes, you keep restating this as if it were fact, but I don't agree. I've written in every post in every different way I can think of how the words you speak define who you are (your interiority, as you put it) as much as, if not more than, the words you hear spoken about you. Your response to this argument just seems to be "no it doesn't" without any reason why you think that way. That's absolutely fine, you're under no obligation to give me a reason, but there's not really anything more to say on the matter if you don't. So, if you can state relatively succinctly - why do you think that the words spoken to you can insult, and must be chosen carefully as a matter of respect, but the words you ask others to use have absolutely no emotional content at all and have no implications regarding respect?
Quoting angslan
Well, it was the point I was talking about. Evidently not clearly enough.
Quoting angslan
Really? I don't know how many more ways I can put it. Some feminists believe that to call someone a "woman" on the grounds that they feel like something they think is a woman and also call someone a "woman" if they have a the physiology associated with having two X chromosomes, it implies that those two things are related, they're in the same group. Obviously some people born with the physiology associated with having two X chromosomes do not want to feel like there's also a feeling which in some way defines them. They also feel solidarity with other people who have the physiology associated with having two X chromosomes because that group, not the group that 'feels like a woman' have been oppressed and to a great extent still are, in a particular way.
But I've said all this before, more than once, to have you still suggest that I haven't put forward my argument yet makes me feel like I'm wasting my time.
Quoting angslan
It's very difficult in a discussion over disputed terms to write out in full what you mean by the term you're trying to avoid using. I started out with 'appears to possess the features associated with having two X chromosomes' but got lazy typing the whole thing out each time I mentioned it. The point is that definitions are never clear, they're slightly fuzzy around the edges. I'm trying to get at the observable physiological features which, without a shadow of a doubt have been the properties used to define the category "woman" since the word began. The problem with simply using a list of physiological features is capturing the fuzziness. Someone with a penis would not be called a woman, but someone born, for some genetic reasons, without a uterus, but with breasts and a vagina would be. It's not that anything goes, just that the definition is not a simple list. Hence I went with the feature that underlies it all (having two X chromosomes) even though all categorisation is actually carried out by observing the features resulting from that basis. If I must, I could in future do as I have above 'physiological features associated with having two X chromosomes, but if I forget, you know what I mean.
Quoting angslan
See above. I really don't think there's an argument against the fact that physiological features have been the sole factor determing the use of the term "woman" for everything except the last fifty years. But I'm not hung up on primacy. It's just that at the moment "woman" is used to describe them too and some of them are upset about the association with a certain group of feelings. The solution to this problem you're advising seems to be just "put up with it".
Quoting angslan
I'm not saying that. I'm saying that people should be free to apply whatever primacy they feel comfortable with (which freedom includes freedom from undue social pressure). It's impossible to just address the inhabitant of a body that way. We are all different, the only way you could address the inhabitant of a body alone is to have a different term for each person. As soon as you use collective terms you are making a statement within your language community that you are more like the others in that group than you are like those outside of it. People wishing to be called "woman" are saying that in some way they are more like other people called "women" than they are like people called "men". If they're not saying this then the terms are meaningless as they don't define anything. Saying you are more like other people in a group than you are like those outside it is not only making a statement about you, it is also making a statement about the others in that group. It is disrespectful to ignore the effect one's requests have on others.
Quoting angslan
It doesn't make much difference to the argument if there is one thing it's like to be a woman or several things. The point is that it is a limited group. If it was not a limited group (and so neither was being a man) then there would be no problem with calling anyone a man no matter what they feel like because any set of feelings would be entirely consistent with either term. The claim that's implicit in a man demanding* to be called a woman is that the feeling they have is not one properly associated with the term "man". This necessarily means that a man who has those feelings is not a real man.
I simply would not try to assume someone's motives from something as vague as the tone of a few short thread posts. I get the sense from Harry's other posts that he's quite, shall we say, self-assured. But I think it's important in philosophical discussions to try and respond to the arguments as they are put, not the possible motive behind them. Most people do not remember each time to preface their arguments with "I think...", or "in my opinion..." sometimes that can come across as assertion (sometimes it actually is assertion) but it is the point that is being asserted that should we argue, not the fact of its assertion.
I'm far from perfect myself in that regard, so don't take it as criticism, just an explanation of why I took the position I did on the matter.
Quoting Pseudonym
Quoting Pseudonym
I know that you feel that I am just saying "no, you're wrong" to you, but this is, I think, the core of your argument, and I believe it to be wrong. I believe it to be wrong on the grounds of respecting the interiority of others without compromising your own - or if you want to put it in terms of harm, that treating people like objects is inherently harmful. You put the harm in the treatment of others potentially on par with the harm of compromising your own identity through language-use. But my argument, as I have put it forward, is that nothing actually changes in the treatment of oneself, so this perspective is flawed. Yes, people hold the position, but people hold incorrect positions all the time - I believe you accuse me of this.
We don't make concessions to neo-Nazis who want a purely white state, as an example, because their feelings about their own identity. We judge them on their treatment of others. You accept that marriage equality is good progress because it expands equal, respectful treatment to others even if it makes people feel less secure about their own identity. This respectful treatment takes into account the interiority of others. However, you feel that there are special conditions for gender (or, perhaps, by calling people by the name their parents gave them) that gives these groups who ask to treat people as objects more credence. I am not sure why. You can point to as many "some feminists" as you want, but that doesn't mean their argument is any better.
Quoting Pseudonym
You could use whatever term they feel is appropriate.
Quoting Pseudonym
Of course not. Just because I don't think that there is a completely valid argument here does not mean that I would say to people, "Put up with it."
Quoting Pseudonym
I think you are very much too hung up on categorisation of a certain sort here. Unless you can drop into the interiority of each person, how would you ever know? Authentic expression is the best tool we have for how someone is feeling. Obviously there are many strains of feminism that reject utterly such strict categorisation, but it seems that you, personally, don't subscribe to this when making an argument, even though much of your point about avoiding primacy is avoiding taking particular sides to resolve the issue. I think you are having your cake and eating it too.
I have to go, but I will respond to one more point when I have time.
Which is to say I don't find them very revealing; not useful.
That in itself is interesting.
(Edit: Even so, I prefer your posts to the long-winded dialogue that followed)
So I just want to try and clarify and cover what I believe to be your argument without this quoting back and forth, which sometimes gets me confused about whether we have sufficiently covered the ground we were aiming for or got stuck responding to particulars.
Some points we have covered
1 - The trans claim is not that there is a definitive or necessary connection between chromosomes and gender-identity. The trans claim is not that there is a definitive or necessary connection between outward appearance and gender-identity. If it were, the claim would insinuate that there are no trans people - a self-defeating claim. I think we might both agree on this issue - I am not sure.
2 - The use of gendered language predates critical interrogation of the distinctions between sex, gender identity, gender roles, and the like. There is not one true, physiological etymology or definition of "woman" and "man" in use over the past few hundred years - this word is bound up in the fusing of sex, gender identity and gender roles. Thus, the word today is the child of this "de-fusing". The claim that it historically denoted physical appearance and that this is the "true, correct" or "objective" use of the term is a little blind to the history of sex and gender (and falls foul of the etymological fallacy anyway). I think we might be able to both agree on this - but perhaps we are not there yet.
3 - Here, I think, is the point of divergence between us, so perhaps this is the point to interrogate the most in any further discussion we might have. We might call this the "other-treatment" and "self-treatment" issue.
I am going to try and be a little pedantic about this to see where it goes.
Theorising about addressing people
We have a speaker S and an addressee A. Both have some conceptual framework of identity, f(S) and f(A).
Where S follows f(A) when addressing A, they are acknowledging the interiority and self-identity of A in their address.
Where S follows f(S) when addressing A, they are not.
Now to see if there are any issues here. First, is whether the use of f(A) by S denies the interiority and self-identity of S. There are a few potential answers:
(a) Yes it does, because any utterance is a universal application of a framework and therefore S is also addressing S with the same framework.
(b) No it doesn't, because such a framework is oriented toward the addressee and does not necessarily apply universally. For example, even if S uses f(A) to address A, they use f(S) to address themselves (even just internally).
A second question is whether the use of f(S) by S denies the interiority and self-identity of A.
(c) Yes it does, because S is applying an identity to A that A does not identify as.
(d) No it doesn't, because A is mistaken about their own identity.
Obviously there are some objections to some of these. To (a) the objection is that we don't apply such frameworks universally already. The only way this would hold is if gender is a special exception. To (d) the objection is that A has special access to knowledge about themselves. This is two-pronged objection - first, that we believe people who make authentic statements about their identity, and two, that objective comparison of internal identities is impossible. That is, two women cannot sufficiently check if they both "feel like a woman" and, indeed, there are fundamental differences in the way that women "feel like women" (or if such a thing exists). I have more trouble finding objections for (b) and (c), so maybe this is where you can step in.
I feel that if we accept (a), then we might end up multiplying the number of people whose interiority we ignore. For example, a person who feels that gender is a social construct and that gendered forms of address are therefore inaccurate or generally misleading might want to address every as "xhe", which, I have no doubt, would make a lot of people feel that they had been addressed inappropriately and their subjectivity, interiority and identity ignored or denied.
Frameworks of address
I suggest that we can formulate two types of address framework: speaker-oriented and addressee-oriented. Speaker-oriented addressing would address each person by the framework of the speaker regardless of the interiority of the addressee. Addressee-oriented addressing would address each person by the framework of the addressee.
In speaker-oriented addressing the speaker always addresses themselves with consideration of their interiority, but without consideration of others interiority. Neither the speaker nor the addressee have a guarantee that they will be addressed in a manner that they feel is appropriate.
In addressee-oriented addressing, the addressee is addressed in a manner reflective and respectful of their interiority, including the speaker, who will also address themselves appropriately. Speakers and addressees will always be addressed in a manner they feel is appropriate, both externally and internally.
Claims of strict categorisation
I think that the biggest objection to addressee-oriented addressing is if (a), the universal application of frameworks through addressing another, holds somehow.
I think that you have expressed that some feminists feel that applying the word "woman" to someone outside of their conceptual categorisation of "woman" is compromising, or inappropriate to, their identity as women. I think that to make such a claim requires a strict categorisation of "woman". It also requires a protective approach to that categorisation. Such a strict categorisation requires a conceptualisation of (i) how it feels to be a woman, (ii) the experiences and circumstances of women, (iii) the treatment of women, or some combination of more than one. The reason that categorisation needs to be strict is that there is a resistance to permitting new members to the category (in some cases, as you note, the chromosomes you were born with and not even the sexual organs that you currently have - very strict!).
However, it is clear that not all women feel this way. A clear case is the set of female academic feminists who believe that gender is not associated with sex organs, or that there are more than two genders. The same case can be made for women (including, again, many female academic feminists) who do not share the circumstances, feelings, experiences or history that other academic feminists relate to this categorisation.
If we are to be strict about this, then, what do we call women who do not believe that they share the same qualities as required by this category? Do we call them something other than women? In either case, this strict categorisation produces the same problems - people who are addressed by other incorrectly, either in the circumstance of people who identify as women who would not be addressed as women (in this case, a group of female academic feminists) or a dissolution of the strict category of experiences/history, dissolves the basis for this objection (that people are telling "real" women that they feel like them because there is a general way women feel).
Quoting VagabondSpectre
A sharp knife is a good knife. We use physical characteristics to evaluate.
A person with specifiable physical characteristics is considered male. But this does not imply that they ought be treated as a man, regardless of their own disposition.
And contrawise, a person who wishes to be treated as a woman, may (must?) still be counted as male because of their physical characteristics.
Why does the physiology have primacy? Or are you restricting the latter part of this claim - the "counting" - to certain medical issues?
Firstly, this is a reiteration of Vagabond's observations.
Secondly, I am using sex, male, female; as distinct from gender, man, woman.
One cannot perform a hysterectomy on a trans woman. But that is no reason not to treat her as a woman.
Quoting angslan I didn't suggest that it did.
Quoting Banno
Ah - this is the bit I was missing. Carry on.
That doesn't really help Banno's case here.
Sex isn’t the body. There is a distinction between bodies, genitals, chromosomes and the use of sex categories. Take away sex categories, the body lose nothing. We can still each body perfectly well.
Despite the common insistence otherwise, the presence of a body doesn’t equal present of a sex category. Our bodies don’t means sex. Sex is, sometimes, a particular meaning of bodies. A categorisation of some bodies, but not defined by the presence of a body. To have certain hormones genitals, chromosomes, etc. is not how someone has a sex category. Sex identity is its own feature, sure of some bodies but not of others. One’s sex made by their sex, not their body.
We no doubt often use sex to mean certain types of bodies, but such a use of language is different the mere presence of a body being the truth condition of sex.
The language we use to mean about other things is distinct from those things. When I speak about a tree, it is not how the tree exists. If I speak about sex, it is not how a body I refer to exists. “Males” and “females” are not present be a presence of genitalia, chromosomes, hormones or any other biological feature.
But that's not so. There are two groups, male and female.
And distinct from that, there are the social roles of man and woman.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Having certain specifiable physical characteristics is being female.
But it is not being a woman.
Correct, there are two groups male and female (and many more). That's given by the definition of the identity terms.
We can even say that having certain identifying physical characteristics is being female. After all, every woman has specific physical characteristics which are here own.
The issue here, however, is supposing this group is only limited to a shallow set of specific characteristics. When we assume that being female only amounts to having XX chromosomes, a vagina, breasts, a womb, etc, we engage in a disgusting form of idealism.
We suppose we have these concepts which necessary set out the full range of female individual that might ever occur, without actually paying attention to who exists in front of us. We forget to the proper work of description (What biological features does someone how? What meaning of sex do those have in this instance? Do they even have a meaning of sex in this instance? ) and instead work only form ad hoc assumptions which demand it must be true. We forget other people not given concept/assumption of sex!
It's also this very issue of meaning at stake in the case of trans people with concerns about there body.
Why do they identify with the opposite meaning then society has assigned them? Because of how those social practices and categories represent the body.
Their trans identity is about being recognised in a way which reflects they body sense/ought to have. They are seeking others to recognise the body they ought to have in how they are socially categorised, to be understood as someone who is properly, female/male, not just a woman/man.
Interesting. So if I understand, we start with the assumption that there are males and females, and...?
Force everyone into one category or the other? I don't see why we should do that, and I agree it woudl be wrong to do so.
Only find males and females, because that is all we are looking for? But we can acknowledge that there are many different sexed bodies, yet still point out that most of them fall within two categories.
But one cannot perform a vasectomy on a trans man. Still, there is some sense in what you say.
Well, I was dealing with instances in which there were male and females.
You're right. We shouldn't assume there are males and females at all. There could be a moment, for example, where it was a fact no-one was of those categories, even if they had the same biological features as other people called "male" and "female."
In any case, we have to let the truth of an individual do the work here. To have males and females, the people and bodies who have that meaning have to exist. If we just just have a bunch of beings with penises who have "no sex," we will have no males.
(and this is why we mostly find sexed bodies, in most cases, it's a fact of us humans to belong to one. For most of us, it is true we have a sex. We are describing a fact of the people in question, just a fact given by a truth of someone's sex, rather than being a certain body ).
The bigotry isn't a question of specific intention. It's in the very concepts Harry is using. In taking a position trans people are deluded, they's taken a position trans people are mistaken, trans identities aren't real and values they ought to be rejected in favour of "telling the truth."
It's simalir to if I were to say: "Anyone named Pseudonym was deluded in claiming to be a member of The Philosophy Forum. The person targeted is rejected, they are positioned as a danger to trust or respect, they are set-up as a target, etc.
Then again, some (assigned in the usual discourses) males cannot have one either. :smile:
https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/congenital-bilateral-absence-of-the-vas-deferens
If someone asked what species you were, would you expect me to ask you what species you 'feel like', or would you find it entirely satisfactory for me to answer that you're Homo sapiens? If someone asked what colour your hair was would you expect me to ask what colour you 'feel like' your hair is, or would it be OK to just say the colour it looks like to me? I don't raise these points to argue that gender terms are definitely observable things like species and colour, I'm aware that this is disputed whereas species and colour are not. I raise them to point out that using words which treat people as objects is not in any way inherently bad. For (hopefully) well-meaning purposes such a positive discrimination, we have a description of a person's race based on physiological characteristics. We don't accept a person as part of a black minority group despite the fact that they are white as driven snow just because they 'feel like' a person of colour. It's really important to actual people of colour that membership of that category (as I say for hopefully well-meaning purposes) is strictly based on actual physiological membership, not on what a person 'feels like'. Imagine trying to establish a positive discrimination programme to undo years of pay discrimination but allowing anyone who 'feels black' to join that category. Again, just to re-iterate because I can sense the ease with which this can be taken out of context, I'm not arguing that gender is definitely a physiological thing (in the way the skin colour is), I'm pointing out that labels based on physiological characteristics are not inherently harmful, if they are to exist at all. They can be used to undo the effects of years oppression based on those characteristics,
More importantly though, I think this is the basis of community language. Words are based (insofar as possible) on features available to everyone, because words belong to everyone. It's not that physiological features have primacy because they're more important than how you feel. It's that physiological features have primacy because they are most available to everyone and language is a communal thing. Basing language on private facts undermines it's community nature (more on that later).
Quoting angslan
No, we do not agree on this one. The trans claim is implicitly that there is a connection between chromosomes and gender identity. If there were no connection, than a man (who feels like a woman) could still be called a man (based on his chromosomes) because there's nothing 'not man-like' about the way he's feeling. He wants to wear a dress - fine, there's nothing non-manly about wearing a dress. He wants to associate with other women in a platonic way - fine, there's nothing un-man-like about that. Whatever he thinks or feels requires no change to the label 'Man' because all of his thoughts and feelings are perfectly legitimate thoughts and feelings for someone with xy chromosomes to have.
But that's not what's being implied by the need for a new label. The need for a new label implies that there's something wrong with a man thinking and feeling that way. That a person thinking and feeling that way can't be a 'Man' they must be a 'woman', because that's one of the ways 'women' think and feel, not one of the ways 'men' think and feel.
Regardless of future intention. The word 'Woman' was used to describe those people with particular physiological characteristics. That's just an historical fact without any judgement value. A man who thinks and feels a certain way he calls "like a woman" has not chosen the term "woman" as his preferred label at random. He's chosen it because he wants to be considered as being in the same group as all the other people called by the same term. But all the other people called by the same term are those who have physiological characteristics of having two x chromosomes. He's making a very clear statement that he thinks his thoughts and feelings belong in the same group as those of people with two x chromosomes. Now why would he make that claim if he also wishes to make the opposite claim that there is no connection between thoughts/feeling and chromosomes? No connection at all would require a new word, one not previously used to describe those with certain physiological characteristics. A group which everyone could voluntarily join, in accordance with their preferences. But that's not what's being requested. Men who have these thoughts/feelings that they call 'like a woman' have requested that they be labelled by the term currently used as the default label for anyone with breasts and a vagina. This is not random. It's because they think there's a connection.
Basically when trans people want a label to describe their identity, they've deliberately picked a word which previously described the identity of anyone with the outward appearance of a certain set of chromosomes. They're specifically making the claim that their identity matches most closely that of this group. Essentially, the implicit claim is that identity and chromosomes are, in fact, tightly linked and they (being a rare exception) need to be re-labelled to more 'correctly' match this connection.
Quoting angslan
Yes, technically, but I'm not sure I agree with the scope, or the focus. I don't think the last few hundred years is at all correct. I'm no historian so I won't stand firmly by this, but I'm pretty sure that there was no sense in which "woman" was used to describe anyone other than a person with (at least some of) the physiological characteristics associated with two x chromosomes until maybe forty or fifty years ago? Nor do I agree with the scope, even today the word is still primarily based on physiological features even though there is a strong movement to de-couple it. When a midwife says "it's a girl" she's not doing a psych analysis.
Quoting angslan
That would be fine if we were talking about psychological profiles, but we're not. We're talking about language. I'm guessing (from your presence on this forum) that you're familiar with Wittgenstein's private language argument? The problem is that language is a communal exercise. A private language simply doesn't make any sense, how would you know if you were using the terms correctly? You can't necessarily trust your memory of the last time you used them, and you have no external reference to check. (it's a bit more complex than that, but I'm hoping you're familiar with it already).
So a term within a community language, based on a private feeling is problematic. How can anyone check if they're using the term correctly? This is simply not how any other aspect of language works and you would be asking that we make an absolutely unique exception for gender terms. If I wish to describe myself as 'tall', the way I do it is to experimentally use the word 'tall' in reference to myself and check that other language users understand me. If they do not, I presume I'm using the word incorrectly, maybe I'm not tall enough to be generally considered 'tall'. This is the same for literally all words. Except, apparently, the terms "woman/man" and "him/her". here, you're suggesting. If I want to refer to myself as "woman" I don't have to experimentally do so and check with other language users that I'm using the term correctly. I merely state that I think it's the correct use and therefore everyone else has to agree with me when they talk to me. This is simply not how any other word works. To use words this way undermines the whole community enterprise that language is. There's no consensus seeking, there's no inclusivity.
Quoting angslan
I don't understand how you are distinguishing the categorisation of the two claims here. Yes, the claim that some feminists are making (that their identity is being undermined by people claiming to 'feel like a woman') requires that the category "women" be defined. But so does that claim "I feel like a woman". There must be something it is like to be a woman in order for someone to feel it. It may not be a tightly defined thing, but it must be a thing otherwise there would be no cause to require a new label than the one given at birth. So it's not about categorisation or not. Both approaches require a category. It's about which characteristics define that category. I'm arguing that because of the communal nature of language, the characteristics which define a term should be widely, and publicly available as far as possible, not private matters which cannot be verified.
Yes. Some people are sometimes deluded. You're begging the question. If you start from a neutral position that it is possible for people to be deluded about things (to believe things which are not the case) then you cannot argue that the possibility of a group being deluded can't be discussed because to do so would be to argue that such a group are mistaken.
Anorexics are deluded. They think they're fat when they are not. They are mistaken. They're not 'really' fat such that we should put them on a diet. They're 'really' deluded so we should help then realise a position which is more 'true'. Agrophobics are deluded, they think wide open spaces are threatening when they are not. Depressives are deluded, they think that their circumstances contain more negatives than they do.
I haven't read anything in Harry's comments which suggests that trans people do not have a legitimate feeling. Nor that they do not have a feeling which differentiates them from non-trans people. The issue is with the claim that they 'actually are' the opposite sex in some way. This is unsubstantiated. They might be. We might at some point in time find a set genes which controls certain areas of brain development which would demonstrate that some people in male bodies do in fact have female brains. But until that time, it is perfectly reasonable to hold any rational theory about the facts of the matter. Including the theory that men who think they 'actually are' women, are deluded in the same way anorexics who think they 'actually are' fat are deluded.
At the moment, there are two options for a man who 'feels like' he is a woman to the extent that he wants to change his body. 1) have surgery to make that change, 2) have psychological help to find ways of living with that feeling in the body he has. It's not an unreasonable position to hold that 2) is the better option. It may not be your decision, but it's not bigoted, it's just an evaluation of the situation.
What I do find bigoted (if I may say) is the slightly offensive way you seem to be insinuating that needing psychological help to deal with some delusions is somehow insulting. Lots of people need psychological help with minor or major delusions, many people suffer from depression or anxiety (both of which create delusionary realities) and they seek help with it all the time. There's absolutely nothing wrong with needing a bit of help with delusionary thinking and I'd rather prefer you didn't keep implying that it's some kind of insult.
Quoting Pseudonym
As though we haven't been able to have some sort of discussion regarding what people feel like or who they are? This is another treat people like objects when completely unnecessary. I mean, the point of language is communication, so we might as well accept the utility of communication with other people in regards to their terms of address.
Quoting Pseudonym
No. This is a fundamental misunderstanding. If this is really the basis of your claims, then you are not doing the listening (or the reflection) that you are asking of others.
Quoting Pseudonym
Only if feeling is external. It's not. You are actually begging the question here - this conclusion of yours is only possible is you necessitate a connection between chromosomes and feeling in the first place.
Quoting Pseudonym
You say this as if other people have to label people - what we are talking about is people telling us their authentic feelings. They are not saying, "I can't be called a man because men don't think this way." They are saying, "I feel like a woman."
Quoting Pseudonym
This is another fundamental misunderstanding - perhaps you did not read my post, or you haven't looked at the history of sex-gender terms and thinking?
Quoting Pseudonym
Not to be nit-picky, but just to point out the fuzziness of these sets - not all people with breasts have a vagina, and not all people with XX chromosomes have either or both.
Quoting Pseudonym
It was also associated with the female gender identity, and when complex situations arose people had difficulty expressing them. But that does not mean that it did not exist. It also does not mean that outward sex characteristics is the "true" etymology of the word and gender identity or gender roles is the "false" etymology. At some point in history these two concepts were critically reviewed and conceived of to be more separate than initially conceived. At this point we could have split up language more thoroughly (as Banno attempts to do in his posts, even if just for some clarity in this thread), but generally we did not.
Quoting Pseudonym
But she may not be making a commentary on gender as much as on sex.
Quoting Pseudonym
My argument was that compromising one's own identity by addressing others requires strict categorisation. But two women, with breasts and vaginas and XX chromosomes that they've had since birth and both of whom feel like women can feel completely differently to each other - and yet still feel like women. So I don't think strict categorisation cannot be the case.
Quoting Pseudonym
The same way you learn someone's name. How is this harder, or more morally complex, than that?
All of which is manifestly untrue of trans people: were they to mistake for their body for something it was not, they wouldn't have a problem. If they were deluded about there body in the way, they would encounter it and think it of a form they sensed. This is not the case. A trans persons dysphoric about their body knows how it exists. The trans woman does not mistake her penis for a vagina like they anorexic mistakes their healthy body for fat. She knows she has a penis. In this respect, their experiences is defined in not being deluded, in recognising their body is different to the one they sense.
I'm not begging any sort of question. I'm coming form a position which recognises the trans person cannot possibly be deluded in this way because their experience is defined in recognising the bodily states they have.
No, we clearly haven't. If anything certain can be said of this discussion (and the wider debate in society) it is that no one is certain about the meaning of the terms used and no one quite understands what the others are saying. I'd say this type of discussion was an absolutely classic example of the sort of mess that occurs when terms whose correct application should be public are made private.
Quoting angslan
Explain how this is only the case if feelings are external. You haven't provided an argument here, just a bare assertion.
Quoting angslan
Really, after the analysis you've put in so far the best you've got is "if you don't agree with me you must not be trying hard enough"? I obviously think that such a claim is implied. That's why I used the word 'implicit'. Therefore it's not about listening, it's about analysis. If you disagree with my analysis hen by all means present your argument. "that's not their claim because that's not what they say their claim is" is not an argument.
Quoting angslan
No, what we're talking about is absolutely and explicitly labels. I have never argued that a person should be somehow prevented from making the statement "I feel like a woman", have I? The entirety of my discussion on the matter has been about what label to apply to those making such a statement. Where are my comments about the value or otherwise of people telling us their authentic feelings. If you can quote me anything I've said on the matter then maybe I can understand why you think that's what we're talking about, but a cursory glance over that last dozen posts seems to reveal an awful lot of references on both sides to the correct terms of reference. I think it's pretty obvious that is what we're talking about.
Quoting angslan
Are you suggesting it's not true that the word "woman" was not, in the past, used to describe those people with particular physiological characteristics? As I said, I'm no historian, but I think such a eccentric claim should have at least some evidence presented. Can you provide me with your source material showing that two hundred years ago (or more) the word "woman" was being applied as a proper term of reference to people based on something other than their physiological characteristics.
Quoting angslan
Did I not say the exact same thing in my recent post. Why do you feel I need to have the fuzziness of these sets pointed out to me given that I wrote;
Quoting Pseudonym
Quoting angslan
So if a girl (who thinks she is a boy) is addressed as "girl", that would be fine because 'girl' is a sex distinguishing term?
Quoting angslan
No, they cannot, not according to the trans definition. According to the trans definition they cannot feel completely different to each other and still be categorised as "women", because if one of then feels a certain set of feelings they are a "man" and must be labelled as such.
Quoting angslan
A personal name is not a category. People called Bill are not claiming to be similar to other people called Bill. They're not claiming, based on private feelings to be part of the set {all people called Bill}, the only criteria for membership of the set {all people called Bill} is being called Bill.
The begging of the question is in presuming that position when it is not a given. It is not a brute fact that people correctly report their feelings and identity. You may believe that, but others believe differently. So a person who reports that they 'feel like a woman' (despite being biologically a man) could be considered to be reporting in error. That the feeling they are experiencing is not correctly categorised as 'like a woman' and should instead be categorised as 'like a transgender person'.
We do not all share your world-view I'm afraid, no matter how much simpler that would make your ethics.
We already know people can fail to correctly report themselves and their identity. It even happens with sexuality and gender stuff. Some people realise what they thought were was something they were not.
My point is the delusion argument does not make sense. Trans people to not mistake their bodies for something they are not. If people are going to be wrong about their identity category, it not on the basis of misunderstanding the biological states they have. If someone is going to be wrong about being a man or woman, it has to be on the basis of a given category itself. It has nothing to do with facing to understand what body they have or being "deluded" into think they have biological states they do not.
I also never claimed whether or not someone's feelings were accurate in the context of this point. My point is outside that context: that, regardless of whether their feelings are accurate or not, to describe them as deluded about their bodies is inaccurate.
I don't think anyone is suggesting it does are they? As far as I read it, Harry is stating his belief that people who think they feel like the opposite gender to the one traditionally associated with their body are incorrectly reporting this feeling. His argument for this is that the feeling of a gender is not a categorisable thing. People feel all sorts of different ways and it is false to categorise those feelings into two groups. Therefore anyone reporting that their feelings belong in one of these categories is doing so incorrectly.
Maybe I've misread Harry's argument, but that's what I got from it.
Quoting Pseudonym
I mean, you're really not representing trans claims accurately at all. No matter what I've said to you, you've gone back to the same set of misinformation regarding trans claims. How do you expect to have a genuinely engaging discussion about it?
Quoting Pseudonym
I'm not sure babies have such complex thoughts that they can clearly communicate to a midwife (which is the context of this statement).
Quoting Pseudonym
I feel that there is a clear decision here to ignore the things said in posts - you've heard my answer on this twice now. I don't know why, given this repetition, and the repeated inaccurate formulation of trans claims, we are expecting to get anywhere.
Quoting Pseudonym
This doesn't present to me why it would be more difficult or more morally complex to learn someone's gender from them than it is to learn their name, however. This is a pity, because I thought this area might be one where we get some traction.
The issue is about bodies because that's where the charge of delusion is brought. That's why it's identified as "false" and a "delusion." Trans people are supposed mistaking their feelings of a certain body for how their body exists (and so defining which sex/gender) they belong to.
Without reference to the bodies in this way, there is no longer a standard for their feelings being false in the claimed sense of delusion. They could be wrong about an identity category, but it would amount to no error in recognising their biological form. A delusion it is not.
Obviously, one can claim they are are mistaken about an identity category itself (hence my earlier point of how the bigotry/rejection/discrimination is within the very conceptual terms of this position), but it is entirely unclear as to why that would be or why you would assume that in the first instance. If a mistake about the body is not at stake, we no longer have a clear reason for saying someone feelings "are false."
One can pose it directly. We don't even need to consider trans identity to do this. I could walk up to anyone who feels they are a man and claim: "You're mistaken. You're feelings don't show the truth. You actually belong to the category of woman," a claim which is true on its own terms (i.e. the fact of whether this person was a man or woman), but the arguments here were couched in the context of being mistaken about biology.
Sex and gender identities aren't claiming to be part of that sort of set either. When someone sets out such an identity, they are only speaking for themselves. They are only talking about their feelings of sex and gender. If someone has feelings claiming to be a woman, said feelings don't act to report how anyone else is a women. Each woman has their own feelings which report (or do not report) the fact of their identity.
What ruler would you accept with respect to determining anyone's identity?
As for Nagel -- Eh, it's just a manner of speaking. There are more tools in the toolbox than hammers, and not everything is a nail. My world-view is not architectonic, but piece-meal and always changing.
So to call someone a woman is equivelant to saying I am a woman? There is not a difference between the third and first person uses? Is that what you're saying?
As for feminism:
If "born as" is the condition of womanhood, then aren't the trans individual and the cis individual actually the same then? If it's not even up to chromosomes, or sex characteristics, or some such but rather simply being treated differently because of who you were born as then there is even more similarity than what I was saying. "Trans", as a category, may be novel (at least relative to the history of patriarchy) but the basis for said category isn't. And patriarchy punishes trans women just as it punishes women for nothing other than how they are born.
Mary was born as a woman and is treated differently because of this, and yet she feels she should not be treated differently. She identifies with people who have been similarly discriminated against. But she does not recognize Jane as a woman, as someone who is discriminated against on the basis of being born a woman.
But why? If sex characteristics are set to one side, and being born a woman is all that is to be considered, then what includes Mary but excludes Jane? Shouldn't they actually identify with one another, given that both were born in circumstances against their choosing yet they are discriminated against for it?
I recognize that for some feminists it does not work this way, though I'd like to know why. But it's worth noting that for some feminists it [i]does[i].
I'm making an argument about what is logically implied by trans claims. I'm not trying to accurately represent the claim itself, nor am I presenting any empirical information that could even be 'misinformation'. It's an argument in logic (roughly), it's either valid or it's not. The only empirical information I'm basing it on is the claim that "it is proper courtesy for you to address me as a man because I feel like a man". If that is not the claim being discussed then my argument is not sound. If that is the claim being discussed then you have only to question the validity of my argument, further 'information' doesn't enter into it.
Quoting angslan
No, the point is that the midwife is using a term based on physiological features which, later on in life, you like us to use based solely on psychological features. Why on earth would you want to go through this rigmarole rather than just have two different words?
Quoting angslan
Yes, only this time I'm asking you for some evidence to back it up (a request you have conveniently ignored). You're making an empirical claim here. That the word was used a certain way hundreds of years ago. You can't just say we're not going to get anywhere unless I simply believe you.
Quoting angslan
It is more morally complex because a category name implies other members of that category, a non-category name carries no such implication. I can say "bill is an idiot" and be referring only to a particular person called Bill. This is because although there are other people called Bill, Bill is not a category, the other people are called Bill entirely incidentally. There's is no equivalent with the term "woman" I can't say anything of women without implying that the same applies to all women. This is because 'women' (unlike 'bill') is a category name. Other people called 'women' are not called so incidentally (as other people called 'bill' are) they are called so because they are deemed somehow to share characteristics of others in that group. What is said to about that group therefore is deemed to apply to all in that group. If I said "giraffes are tall" you would not immediately presume I'm only talking about one particular giraffe. If I said Bill is tall, you would not presume I was talking about all people called Bill.
I don't follow why you're assuming that only the physical can be a delusion. Agrophobics feel threatened by large spaces. The threat is a delusion it is not a rational response. I don't see why delusions have to result from a false belief about something physical.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Again I can't quite see how you've got here. 2+2=5 is 'false' by common usage of the term. Someone convinced that 2+2=5 might well be suffering from a delusion. No physical object need be involved.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
This is just bare assertion. Do you have an argument demonstrating how this is the case, or is it just a statement of what you would like to be the case?
No, I said that if one effect was no greater than the other, not one effect is identical to the other.
Quoting Moliere
Yes, I wouldn't claim to be speaking for all feminists, nor even the majority. I'm not trying to make a democratic argument, but a rational one.
Delusion usually implies some sort or misread phenomenological presence in the world. Seeing something which isn't there. Supposing threats which will impact upon you which aren't there. In this case, it also specifically mentioning in the context of supposedly not recognising the present body in some way.
If we are only talking about being mistaking about meaning or a concept, it loses this force. Since there is no longer something seen at stake, a person cannot be seeing what's not there. They are just wrong about some concept. Their error is outside the context of thinking an empirical manifestation "is what it is not."
I would have thought the logical inference at play was obvious... we are speaking about an individual's feelings about their own identity. The very concept we are using is limited to a feeling about her own identity. She not feeling about other women's identity in this instance. The feeling is a sense of her own.
Alright, then I'm still not following. Bring it down a little for me, if you don't mind.
Quoting Pseudonym
Which speaker are we talking about here? Jane or Mary?
Quoting Pseudonym
And here?
Sorry, I'm just getting lost in parsing this sentence.
Quoting Pseudonym
That's cool. Then what is the rational distinction to be made that includes Mary but excludes Jane?
No, you're thinking of hallucinations. Delusions are false beliefs which persist despite evidence to the contrary but which cannot be explained by predominant social influences or low intelligence.
At least, that's the textbook definition.
I can't find the relevant section of Harry's argument which claims that trans people are hallucinating a body which isn't actually there. Perhaps you could help me out with the bit you're getting that impression from.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
No, this is where the problem arises, with this idea that an entirely private definition of a word can exist. A private definition of a word is meaningless. Read Wittgenstein (if you haven’t already), or any modern philosopher of language really. To have the word "woman" defined by a private feeling, not observable by any other language speaker is a nonsense. How would a person be able to tell that the feeling which one day they consider attaches to the word "woman" is the same feeling they experienced yesterday? How would they ever know they were applying the term correctly? And even if they did, if the meaning of the word is entirely private, what would be the point in using it in discourse. What would be the point in the phrase "I'm a woman" if the definition of 'woman' being used was not within the public domain but contained privately in the mind of the person using the term. It is literally nonsense. What possible information could the expression transmit, if the meaning of the term is known only to the one speaking it?
No problem.
Mary, when she uses the term "woman" means by it those with physiological attributes usually associated with two X chromosomes. She may not know this, to her it might just be a fuzzy collection of visual cues, she might not have even given any thought to moot cases in rare genetic circumstances. The important thing is that it means other people like her in a way that does not restrict what she can do. There's no chance of her being chucked out of the group {women} nor can anyone claim to know anything psychological about her simply because she has this label.
John (now Jane), when he uses the term "woman" is describing a feeling he has, at least a large part of which is the desire to look and behave like the people he sees in his community with two X chromosomes. He has a slight dichotomy to balance in that the type of people he's referencing when describing how he feels he wants to behave are (in the overwhelming majority) those with two X chromosomes, but he wants his definition to be about the feeling not any likely biological precursor to it.
So, when Mary and John/Jane have conversation, every time Mary refers to him as a 'man' it hurts him because it makes him feel like he is not 'really' part of the group to which he wishes to belong (my major thesis was on group dynamics so I apologise in advance for bringing everything down to that).
I think we're in agreement thus far (except perhaps my armchair psych evaluation).
What I'm trying to say is that if Mary were to use the word 'woman' to refer to John/Jane. She too would feel pain. She'd feel the anxiety that the more a word gets used one way the more it's standard definition becomes that. She'd feel anxious that, should the term come to mean {people who feel a certain way} by repeated use, people might consider they know how she feels when she refers to herself as a 'woman'. She's concerned that it's frequent use this way might lead to people considering that she is not really a 'woman' if she doesn't behave that way.
Remember, John's definition is not random, it's not personal to him with other trans men/women have a completely different definition. Almost all trans women behave like stereotypical women in their community. They wear dresses, make-up, have other female friends etc. This is not stereotyping, it's intrinsic. If a trans woman behaved exactly like a stereotypical man, he would not have anything to transition to would he?
So Mary's concerns are not outrageous. If she agrees to use the term 'woman' of trans women on the basis of how they feel, she will not be applying for the term to a random and diverse set of feelings. She will be applying the term almost exclusively to feelings about wanting to wear dresses, make-up, have female friends etc.
So how might people start referring to her (as a default) if she likes to wear trousers, no make-up, short hair and enjoys football and beer. She doesn't want people to start thinking she's not a woman because they have gotten used to using the term to describe people's feelings which, in reality, are by and large not about those things.
So using the term that way makes her anxious. Using the term her way makes John anxious.
It's a very difficult dilemma, but personally the only way out of it I can see is for each community to use the term as they see fit and just try and be tough enough to handle the anxiety when someone from one community tries to have a conversation with the other. Like I do when I try to talk to young people.
I guess I would say to this proverbial Mary that there's nothing lost in including Jane. Mary is also included. And she doesn't need to adopt any behavior to be included, either, or even feel the same way that Jane does. It's not like all men feel the same about their masculinity, after all. Yet we still include them in the group "men" in spite of the large diversity of personal feelings, and social structures, surrounding masculinity.
That's the curious thing about gender and gender-identity: there is no essence that defines gender at all, nor something so simple as necessary and sufficient conditions. Yet people still feel like they belong to a group, or bond over said identity, or share similar experiences though there is nothing that moors gender (and not all people do, just large enough groups that it is a phenomena). Sometimes that is because of a collective sense of oppression, but not always and not exclusively.
So if that's the case -- what's lost by including Jane? The meaning of the term "woman"? But Mary is a woman. How do I know? I ask her, and she told me. The feelings are not identical between the two, but that's OK because feelings are rarely identical in such a large set as "woman". They are family resemblances, to use a bit of Witt. And even if Mary adopts all the stereotypical characteristics of a man, she may just be a non-stereotypical woman. But I treat both Jane and Mary the same -- I listen to what they have to say about themselves, and in most circumstances that's good enough for me.
EDIT: It might be worth noting that the violence experienced by women and trans individuals are both related and caused by patriarchy, too. So the oppression, though different in certain respects, is also similar in others in that the root social structure causing oppression is the same, and generally people feel like they are "born into" the group they belong to rather than feel like it's a choice they make. At least so I've gathered thus far.
Well, I was using both the contexts of references to bodies in earlier discussion and the examples of both anorexia and phobias you raised. The definition of "just being wrong" doesn't fit with the terms people have been using. The use of delusion I was referring to also differs from hallucination. It doesn't necessarily pose a phenomenalogical appearance. Sometimes the delusional idea about the empirical context which will happen (e.g. some phobias).
My point about the individual had nothing against the publicity of language.
Firstly, the truth of an identity isn't defined by a feeling. Feelings just report or do not report a turth of identity. Someone doesn't belong to an identity because they feel something, they have an identity and have feelings which reflect it or not.
Secondly, the point I was making about the individual was descriptive of a state of a person feelings, not a claim about if their feelings were right. It's point about who their feeling is about about, not whether it's accurate or not.
This point is defined by the publicity of concepts. A persons feelings about their identity reference them, not other people. In any case a person's feelings about their own identity only reference them. The feeling in question is only about them.
They are feeling they are a woman , not anyone else. This remains to whether their feeling is accurate or not. Like a name, their feeling they are a woman is only about them. The point isn't being made on them being right about their identity, it's about who their feeling is about.
I gather, from conversation, that telling a trans person that they are wrong would be on a par with telling someone with a phantom limb that they are "just wrong".
In a sense, both (assuming we are talking about trans people with dsyphoria) a sensation of a body and a realisation their body doesn't reflect this sensation.
I want to be a bit careful in such a comparison because phantom limbs is more focused just on a body state (a somewhat comparable concern would be someone with just a sensation of different genitals than they had).
Once sex and gender become involved, it's about more than just a sensation of body. It also about a specific order of social recognition and meaning.
Quoting Pseudonym
Except, as has been pointed out, your argument is incompatible with trans claims. So it doesn't seem to be based on trans claims at all. Yet you persist with it, apparently in good faith.
Quoting Pseudonym
The only problem I can see is determining which definition to restrict the existing words to (this may or may not be a similar debate to whether gay marriage is 'marriage'). But at the moment we don't have two different words, and I don't see that being problematic either.
Quoting Pseudonym
No. This is a continual confusion of sex and gender. I'm not advocating people use physiological or psychological features, I'm advocating that people address others according to their own wishes on the subject, regardless of whether they even consider a distinction between the two.
Quoting Pseudonym
Because you have provided so much evidence that the term was only applied to outward secondary sex characteristics historically? At least if you are going to ask for evidence you would think that you would also provide some information on the historical use of the term. Or is your assertion some sort of 'common sense'? Sex and gender were typically fused before feminist critique, especially that of the 1950s and 60s. There is a lot of literature on this critique.
Quoting Pseudonym
Yes you can. Not all women feel the same. Not all women are the same. This is fundamentally, and trivially, true.
To use your example, if I say "she is an idiot", I am not calling all women idiots.
I can't really lay out Mary's concerns any more clearly than I have, so if you still think they amount to "nothing" then I guess we'll have to just agree to differ.
The vague 'references' to bodies is materially different to characterising a claim as being bigoted because it presumes trans people are hallucinating a body which isn't there. Where is the actual claim you're basing this hugely significant judgement on?
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Can you see why I got a bit confused?
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
OK, so what does determine the truth of an identity? In what way is that truth publicly available?
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
So how does this relate to the public meaning of the term "woman"?
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
OK, so the feeling is about them and them alone. I don't disagree with that point. So if I feel feel a thing which makes me cry, makes me want to remove the cause, makes me want to seek the comfort of my friends or just curl up into a ball, I lose my appetite, can't be bothered to do anything, lose interest in the world etc. Those feelings are just about me and no-one else but me, right?
So does that make me correct to describe my state as "joyfully happy"? No. Because the fact that the feelings are about me doesn't make a jot of difference to the fact that any words I use to describe them are part of public language and so must have a public meaning. If I use the word "happy" to describe feelings which make me act that way, I am misusing the word "happy" because the word "happy" does not publicly define a set of feelings which typically cause such behaviours. Still, no-one can see inside my head, no-one can determine the truth of how I'm feeling, but as soon as I decide to talk about it, I've agreed to the terms of the language game I want to play with the other people to whom I'm speaking, and rule number one is that the meanings of the words I'm using are publicly available.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
No, they are feeling like something. When they want to describe that something to other people, they must chose words whose meanings are publicly available otherwise the description is literally nonsense. I'll ask again (since you've chosen to avoid the difficult questions (a common theme here), what is the meaning of the expression "I am an woman", or "I feel like a woman". What information does is convey to the person being spoken to?
So what is the trans claim then? What is wrong with the definition of it that I provided in my last post. "it is proper courtesy for you to address me as a man because I feel like a man"?
Quoting angslan
You've completely lost me here I'm afraid. The first part of the paragraph opens "the only problem I see..." and the second part concludes "...I don't see that as being problematic either" suggesting that neither this, nor some other thing are problem. Yet there are only two subjects within the paragraph, one of which you've identified as a 'problem'.
Quoting angslan
So how are people's wishes not a psychological feature? Where are wishes contained if not in the psychology?
Quoting angslan
The burden of proof is usually carried by the person wishing to prove the positive, not the negative. It's basic courtesy (which I thought you were fairly au fait with). All you have to do to prove your assertion that the term woman has been in use for "a few hundred years" as a term to describe something other than physiological appearance, is provide a single reference (but preferably a few). In order to prove my assertion that it hasn't, I'd have to provide hundreds and hundreds. Providing one single reference of the word being used to describe someone according to their physical appearance would be trivial matter even now, but could not count as evidence of a negative assertion.
Quoting angslan
Why have you changed the word "woman" to the word "she" and then suggested that this proves something about the term "woman"? You do know they're two different words? You can't prove something about the word "woman" by showing how the word "she" can be used in a sentence. Substitute the word 2she" in your example sentence for the word "woman" (the word I'm actually talking about), and you have exactly what I just said. "women are idiots" makes a claim about all women. Honestly, this level of argumentation is really poor.
If "not all women feel the same" as you claim. Then how can someone 'feel like a woman'? There is not a feeling which being a woman is. There is not a small collection of feelings which, if you feel one of them, makes you a woman. There is not even a very large collection of feelings the sum total of which constitutes "womanhood". Women are not constrained in any way by feeling a certain way or a certain collection of ways. Absolutely any feeling at all could be constituted as 'feeling like a woman', and absolutely any feeling at all could be constituted as 'feeling like a man'. Which means that if someone currently a man says they 'feel like a woman' (and would be upset if other people did not acknowledge this) they have made an error. What they feel like cannot be necessarily 'a woman' because there is no cause to remove their feelings from those suitable for a man. They have no rational cause to be upset if others don't acknowledge this because it is not a necessary condition, so others are free to consider it one or not. Having an emotional response to something for which there is no rational reason to have that response is basically the definition of a delusion.
1. Any statement which begins "I am a..." is a statement which claims membership of a set. It is, by necessity, claiming that whatever properties you have, they are not inconsistent with those of the set you are claiming to be a member of. A simple counter-example to this would be a statement of the sort "I am a..." which somehow does not make such a claim, but I cannot think what such a statement might otherwise mean.
2. Sets must exclude something in order to be meaningful. A set which contains all things, or one which contains all things already described by an existing set is not doing any job of definition. It has no more meaning that the other set which also describes it. The set {homo sapiens} had exactly the same definition as the set {humans} and as such the terms are interchangeable and one has no more or less meaning than the other (in terms of sets). The set {women} must therefore exclude something in order to be a meaningful set. In addition here, it is currently understood that men/women is a binomial set pair. One cannot be both a man and a woman. Maybe this is part of the trans claim, but I've not heard it expressed that way.
3. Words must have public meanings in order to be useful in discourse. If I use a word which only I know the meaning of, then no communication event can take place.
4. From 1), the term "woman" in common language is the name of a set since it is used in a sentence of the form "I am a..." and all such sentences are declarations of set membership.
5. From 2), the expression "I am a woman" must be making an exclusory claim about the membership criteria of the set {women} because all sets must have exclusory criteria in order to be meaningful and the claim "I am a woman" is logically identical to the claim "I am not a man" since the sets are mutually exclusive. It is therefore, by necessity, a claim that at least some properties possessed by the speaker do not belong (are excluded from membership of) the set {men}.
6. From 3), the term "woman" being a word, must have a public definition in order to be of use in discourse, since without a public meaning it conveys no information.
7. From 5) and 6) the statement "I am a woman" makes a public claim about the membership criteria of the set {men} and likewise the statement "I am a man" makes a public claim about the membership criteria of the set {women}.
Now, if you disagree with 7), could you please explain which of 1) to 6) you disagree with and why?
The problematic definition you have been arguing - or, at least, the continued problematic claim that you have been drawing from this - is that there is a connection between outward sex characteristics and/or chromosomes and how one feels inherent in the claim. You have repeated this several times. If you have withdrawn this and I missed it, I apologise. If you have not, then let me refresh you on the problem: if someone with XY chromosomes and a penis claims that they feel like a woman, it is inherent in this claim that these chromosomes and outward sex characteristics are not necessarily correlated with how people feel about their gender. If they did, then the claim would be impossible to make in the first place. So any part of your argument that attributes this to the transgender claim is incorrect.
Quoting Pseudonym
Oh, I see - if that is way you are perceiving it, then yes, this is the way I am suggesting to address people.
Quoting Pseudonym
I didn't know we were stuck on one over the other. We were talking about forms of address - that was the part of my post you were responding to when you mentioned the private language argument. I don't normally address anyone as "woman". But you can rephrase it - saying, "This woman is an idiot" doesn't say something about all women.
Of course if you say, "Women are idiots" you are going to be talking about all women - but the same is true of you say, "All Bills are idiots" about Bills.
Quoting Pseudonym
You think someone can only feel some way if there is a strict categorisation?
Anyway, I'm going to read what I think is your more thorough post and treat it as a bit of a reset, maybe.
Quoting Pseudonym
I'm not 100% sure about this, but it might be determined by how you define sets. One alternative is the idea of a family resemblance, in which
Quoting Pseudonym
This relates to (1).
Quoting Pseudonym
True. But again, whether these public meanings are very strict or more fuzzy/family resemblance style definitions will affect the argument.
Quoting Pseudonym
Again, I can see where you are coming from, but as you note, this relates to claim (1).
Quoting Pseudonym
This is contested depending upon which conceptual framework of gender you subscribe to - there are binary, non-binary, and spectrum-based concepts of gender and sex,
Quoting Pseudonym
I mean, sure - but just as with a whole host of words, there is not one set definition is usage that all speakers agree upon at any one time. Language is constantly in evolution. There can be agreed upon meanings in certain circumstances that are strict (e.g. legal or academic definitions) but outside of that it is a bit fuzzy. I've seen a very elongated argument regarding whether a hotdog classifies as a sandwich or not, and a poll in which about half of respondents thought it was.
Quoting Pseudonym
So I think you might follow where I disagree about this strict set membership concept that you set up early in point (1).
This suffers from the problem that most replies here seem to me to suffer from in that it begs the question. You're starting from a presumption that the trans claim must be coherent and then arguing that because my conclusions do not match the trans claim I must be wrong. But this relies on the unproven assumption that the trans claims are coherent. If they're not (as I believe they're not) then it is perfectly possible for me to start with a claim they would agree with, end up with a claim they would not agree with and yet still be correct about their claim. If my logic is valid and yet reaches a conclusion they would not agree with, then the original claim is at fault, not my conclusion.
Quoting angslan
So how does the midwife address the baby then, or the parent address the toddler? If you're suggesting we address people on the basis of psychological traits, then how do we address those whose psychological state we do not have access to (for lack of complex language, for example)? Or whose report of their psychological state we do not believe?
Quoting angslan
No, this is just ignoring grammar. The claim in the expression "I am a woman" is not "I am this woman" so the equivalent use is not "this woman is an idiot" it is "women are idiots". Likewise, you don't say "I am a Bill", you say "I am Bill" so the equivalent claim is "Bill is an idiot" not "all Bills are idiots". You can't just ignore the grammar and claim that an attribute of the statement "I am a woman" applies to the statement "this woman is..." because the word 'this' changes the whole meaning of the sentence.
Quoting angslan
No, someone can feel whatever way they want. This is about language. It's about how they correctly describe how they feel, not how they actually feel. Maybe this is another fundamental point of disagreement, but I think there are 'correct' ways to use words. Using the word 'thin' to describe something wider than average is an incorrect use of the word. You seem to be arguing that "woman" is a special word which has no incorrect use, which anyone (when applying it to themselves) is simply automatically using the term correctly. I don't understand how a word can be of any use at all if it's correct meaning is held privately.
Great, thanks for looking through all that. It does seem like the whole thing hinges on 1) as everything else stems from there. I have to go out for a while and so will post a response to your comment on 1) when I get back.
The statement does claim membership of a set.
What the statement does not claim is that others belong or are excluded from that set. In a person's feeling they are a women, they only have a sense they have their own womanhood. It doesn't suppose anyone else is (or is not) a woman.
Within this claim, there is nothing exclusionary because the womanhood they are referencing (if they have one/their feelings are accurate) is only their own. In declaring themselves to be a women, they don't suppose any restriction or exclusion about who is a woman. All they are sensing is they are a woman. It it is only an affirmation they belong to the set women. No definition or action or exclusion has been applied. They aren't claiming other people aren't women or cannot be women.
I'll have to get to the your long responses to me another time because I've got to get to bed.
I like how you put this here.
I suppose my focus on feelings was mostly due to the epistemological questions on identity, but I think it's fair to say one's identity isn't identical to feelings.
Two things, firstly, the series of overlapping similarities is, crucially, a finite series. Wittgenstein is saying that no one feature is shared by all members of a set, but that all members will have one or more properties from a finite list of properties associated with the term. Secondly, the list of properties from which members need have only one must still be publicly available.
This is why I described the claim inherent in the expression "I am a..." as being only that your full set of properties are not incompatible with the set, not that you possess some property which is the essence of the set. Because the list of possible properties must be finite (in order for it to be a set at all (see 2)), a claim of set membership must imply the presence of properties for which it is possible to be absent and the absence of which would negate membership.
Basically, skip straight to 2) a set must exclude some properties which it is possible to posess otherwise it is not defining anything.
Quoting angslan
OK, fair enough. If it is possible to be both a man and a woman, then it would be the case that claiming to be a woman would not (on its own) constitute a claim that such features as were being used to support such a claim could not also be the features of a man. But anyone who really genuinely believes that would have no cause to claim either and no cause to take offense if either term were used. Remember, taking offence (or any other strong emotional response) without rational cause is one of the psychological definitions of a delusion.
Quoting angslan
Absolutely. I completely agree, and this is the position that I've held all along. There are some language users who will define "woman" by physiological features, some who define it by psychological features and this is a normal part of language. The problem, for me, arises when one group tries to tell the other it's using the word 'wrong' and must change, or when one group has an inconsistent definition that it is impossible to use.
Yeah... I thought by stating the argument in stages you might actually engage with it rather than just restate things you'd like to be the case as if they were actually the case.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Of course it does. Where on earth did they pluck the word "woman" from? If it's not already defining a set what is it doing in common language use? How do they even know what the word means? Are you suggesting they've never used the word "woman" before? If not, then how did they use it without knowing what it means? This is really just wishful garbage. Trans women know exactly what the word "woman" means and they want to be in that group, that's why they're so precious about people using the right terms, because it confers on them membership of a very clearly defined group to which they wish to belong. It really is psychology 101.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
I've said before, it's not about what they're referencing, it's about the correct use of the term doing the referencing. If you are referencing a feeling unique to you (your womanhood), then "I am a woman" is simply grammaticaly incorrect. "I am a..." Is a statement about membership of a set. You yourself admitted this clearly. So "I am a woman" is a statement claiming membership of a set {women}. That means;
1. That there must exist a set {women}
2. That it must be possible to not be in that set (otherwise the statement is meaningless, everyone is a woman).
3. That the set pre-exists the statement about membership of it
4. That the person making the statement has some idea of what the membership criteria are (otherwise their statement is just speculation)
So the womanhood they are referencing cannot be just their own. As you have already stated, they are making a claim about membership of a set and in order for them to do that rationally, both the set and it's membership criteria must pre-exist the claim. One cannot rationally claim membership of a set defined by the claim one is making.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
No. But they suppose a restriction and exclusion about who can be a man. Not them. If no such claim is being made (ie, their particular set of feeling could be those of a man) then there is no rational cause to take offence if I refer to them as such.
What does this even mean? How is what Nagel is saying not applicable to the present discussion? This is so typical of you. You disagree, but you don't offer any clear explanation of how or why you disagree.
Your world-view is always changing? You say that, but in this thread, you have yet to show it.
Quoting Moliere
Does not your physical relationships and your physical differences determine your identity? Does not your relationship with your family make you a parent, grandparent, sibling, etc.? Does not your relationship to others make you a friend or co-worker? Does not your relationship with others make you married or single? Does not your differences from others species make you a human being? Does not your physical differences that enable you to participate in procreating your species make you a male/female (man/woman)? Does not your physical development determine whether you are and adult or a child?
Another question:
Do you admit that others can influence someone into believing that they are someone that they are not? For instance, do you agree that there are cases where parents treat their son as a girl, which then creates an expectation of norms the child must adhere to and adopts? In this case, the child is not choosing their identity. The child is given their identity, a false one, by their misguided parents.
Children don't choose their identity. They simply acquire and understanding of how they are suppose to behave based on the rewards and punishments they receive from their care-givers, and that influences how they view themselves later in life.
Of course, the trouble with this is that the set would have to be voluntary (currently "women/men" is not, you are assigned one or the other at birth until you state otherwise). It could also carry any name at all, and that doesn't seem to be what trans people want, they specifically want the name of the gender that already exists, hence my doubting the sincerity of the explanation for their claims.
But since this is a philosophy forum, I thought I'd put it out there that I think such a set is philosophically possible.
That is not at all similar to what I'm saying. If you want to address what I've been saying, then READ what I've been saying.
There are cases where people are mistaken about their identity as a result of some physical defect, or psychological defect - like what results from your parents treating you like the opposite sex while they raised you. Take schizophrenics and anorexics. You don't seem to have a problem telling them that they are wrong, or mistaken about their identity or their bodies. You don't seem to have a problem questioning other's beliefs on this forum. I've been called a "hater" for questioning the beliefs of god-believers, so your tactics are no different than those who make claims and then engage in ad homimem attacks when those beliefs are questioned.
We should be able to question any claim, especially when it isn't consistent with our own experiences and especially when you cannot give a clear, consistent explanation of your argument and would rather commit ad hominem fallacies. Your line of thinking is what leads us down the road to authoritarianism.
I see applicability, but I don't think that qualia is the best tactic for understanding identity. Nagel highlights the problem of consciousness, but I don't think the problem of consciousness elucidates interiority or identity as well as others. What I've been drawing from here is mostly Levinas's exposition on interiority in Totality and Infinity.
Quoting Harry Hindu
So you'll accept something physical. That's what I'm gathering here. Yes? Some entity which, at least in principle, can be measured.
That's not what I have been proposing, so I guess my answer, in turn, is that these things do not determine identity. Physical relationships and physical differences do not determine identity. Your physical relationship in a family doesn't either. Your physical relationship with others doesn't determine identity with respect to marriage, friendship, or coworker-hood.
Species-hood, yes -- physical differences are what makes one a part of the species. And physical differences do not enable participation -- at least at the individual level -- in procreation, especially with human beings. Being a k-selected species makes it so that the purely physical facts don't stop an individual from participating in child-rearing, which is actually more prominent with humans than the mere facts of gestation.
And physical development only determines whether you are a physical child or physical adult. The transition from childhood to adulthood is determined by mental development and social structures -- so that adulthood can be gained as early as 13 or up to 18, in the legal sense. What counts as a mature person varies significantly, though the physical facts remain the same among persons.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Of course.
I also don't think identity is chosen. For anyone, really. The language of choice isn't appropriate here. Neither is the language of determinism. There is a mixture between creation and discovery when one sets out to know themselves. A libertarian identity just doesn't fit the facts -- we often are dealt a hand that we have to deal with, and we have to find out what that hand is. Determinism is also wrong for the simple fact that people change because they set out to change themselves. So there is a certain degree of autonomy involved, though it's not quite right to say that there is a choice involved too because we don't get to just say, hey, today I am [x] in the same manner that we might say, hey, today I'm going to the zoo.
But, on the whole, I think such cases are fringe.
It's not settled that there are differences in the brains/minds of males and females, associated with their biological differences? I think it is. I don't assert any specific difference, only that these differences exist, yes? And if they do, the possibility exists for the brain/mind to be 'misaligned' with the rest of the body, in the particular respect of this topic, yes? :chin:
We're close then, but I don't see how to concede that one could be mistaken about a wish to be part of a group the only membership criteria for which was 'wanting to be a member of that group'. I suppose one's decision would be made mainly on how much one wanted to be associated with the other members. I could conceive of someone wanting to be part of that group but later deciding against it, but they wouldn't be mistaken (at the time) just have changed their minds. I suppose if you were to take a view that our preferences are fixed and so if you think they are one thing one day and decide against it the next, one of those feelings has to be wrong, but you still wouldn't know which one.
But the main caveat, with respect to this actual thread is that I've seen no evidence at all that this is the claim trans people are making, so it's just a theoretical possibility, rather than an actual solution. Trans people (as far as I can tell) are not saying that they want to be part of a group whose only membership criteria is wanting to be a member of the group. They're quite clearly saying that they want to be a member of that exact group and for reasons which they are indisputabley born with but refuse to actually specify.
If they exist you should be able to assert what they are. How can something biological exist but defy definition?
Think about describing some mature, adult experience to a child that hasn't experienced it yet. You may be able to get a gist across, some kind of analogy or something -- but there is simply something missing from the child's knowledge that they won't have until they experience it.
I don't think these things defy definition. But I don't know enough about the biology involved even to hazard a guess. The fault is mine. I believe that human bodies are adapted to their sexual/gender differences because I can't see that one, er, configuration could adequately deal with both. Am I wrong? :chin:
Yeah, definitely. I imagine that it what the trans experience might be like, something I simply can't understand because the feelings are outside of my experience. But I don't tend to see it as mysterious so much as just like some people want to be Goths and I don't understand that either. What I don't like is the deifying of it beyond that which there is good reason to believe it to be. People state strong desires to be part of social groups. Some of the stories I've read in my research about the extents to which people will go to be part of the social group to which they wish to belong are seriously shocking. And this applies to cults and gangs as much as religion, so I see absolutely nothing to dissuade me from the simplest explanation that trans women are simply men who want to join the 'women' group. I know some have argued that they've got to be taken more seriously because they're literally prepared to undergo surgery to become a woman, but people cut their own fingers off to join gangs, they mutilate themselves to be part of religious cults, the desire to be part of a group is hellish strong.
Well, I don't know enough about biology either. Personally I'm with you on this. My default position in the absence of evidence to the contrary is that it would require a slightly different brain to 'run' a female body than to 'run' a male one. But brains are so malleable I doubt this would do anything but provide general trends and could easily be overridden by culture, or even just other desires.
But I can't deny your possibility, either. It is possible. It's just not my default belief.
Quoting Pseudonym
I am trying to grasp the grammar of your first sentence as clearly as possible, and I am having a little difficulty. I think this is unfortunate, because this seems like an important statement. Is there another way to phrase it that might help me out more?
It does make me wonder what you think of intersex people who claim male or female gender identity?
I am surprised at the claim that no offence should logically be taken - you rejected that idea for feminists who claim that addressing trans people compromises or threatens their own gender identity.
Quoting Pseudonym
I strongly feel that you should leave this part out of your arguments for the moment - this is a whole nother can of worms to debate whether this technically constitutes a delusion or not. The DSM does not consider gender dysphoria, for example, a delusion. What it does do it start to sound like some sort of attack against trans people, which I think is going to cloud your argument.
Quoting Pseudonym
This is why my argument engaged with respect in forms of address and not the universal application of words. None of these words are unique in their variability across times and places and people.
Quoting Pseudonym
Again, when related to forms of address, there are two consistent ways to apply this. We need not sort out the ultimate definitions of the words. Earlier you spoke about "relative harms", which is the type of subject I began engaging you with, and I proposed a framework where interiority, subjectivity and identity were respected in forms of address (and you could extend this to treatment in general). I've no particular concern to determine if there is truly cohesive, universally acceptable use of any of these words. I don't think either group uses them generally inconsistently or incoherently, though they certainly do not agree with each other. And I think that any strict definition is going to land someone in a logical quagmire where some level of coherency falls apart when using strict definitions to make claims.
Is this discussion about language? Or relative harms? How to treat each other? Or whether trans people are delusional?
I understand that you need an explanation which fits with your experience. As I say, I'm not trying to push a particular explanation, I'm trying to argue against the insistence that one particular theory is adopted wholesale whilst there are some who quite legitimately disagree with it. Personally, my experience is limited to a friend's dad who, one day, was dressed like a woman and referred to as such. No explanation was given, and just referred to 'him' as 'her' like everyone else was doing, and still do. I don't mind at all. What I do mind is the insistence of one world-view on groups who do care one way or the other, for perfectly rational reasons.
Quoting Moliere
You see this is part of the problem. "...absent any other sort of basis of inference" is entirely subjective, and essentially ends up meaning that you believe only those people you choose to believe. You, like anyone else, will be guided by cultural expectations and group dynamics as to what to find acceptable inferences to the contrary. If your daughter (hypothetically) came up to you and said "I really need to go to the Justin Beiber concert, you don't know how much he means to me, I really feel a deep connection to his work" I very much doubt you would take her word at face value and fork out for the concert tickets above all other calls on your finances. You'd presume that this was nothing but teenage infatuation with the latest famous singer, you'd assume you had some 'other basis of inference'. If someone said they can read your future and you should not go to work tomorrow because something bad will happen, you do not take their word at face value, again, the fact that you live in a world without future-readers means that you think you have some 'other basis of inference'. I've just expounded a perfectly rational theory, supported by at least some evidence, as to why trans people might make the claims they do. A theory which you admit is at least possible. You definitely now do have some 'other basis of inference', but you've decided it's not good enough to dismiss the claims you hear, that's fine, in itself, but one has to then allow that others might reach a different conclusion because the matter is highly subjective. It doesn't make anyone intolerant.
Let me try a metaphorical example. It is possible to be both a firefighter and a swimmer. There's nothing preventing you from being in both groups because the membership criteria are fighting fires, and being able to move efficiently in water, and these do not clash. It is not possible to be both a swimmer and a non-swimmer, because you cannot simultaneously be able to move efficiently in water and be unable to move efficiently in water.
It is traditionally held that whatever the membership criteria are for the group {women}, they are mutually exclusive to the group {men} (like swimming and non-swimming. Without even having to examine the nature of the membership criteria, we can tell that the trans claim involves this kind of mutual exclusivity because the whole reason for asking people to use a particular term of address is the upset it causes to have the alternative used. It is implied then, that choosing "woman" as the correct term, automatically makes "man" the incorrect one. The expression is "I prefer to be called a woman", but the implication (by your invocation of respect) is that calling them a "man" would be an insult or a harm. But the expression wasn't "don't call me a man" was it? It was "I prefer to be called a woman". The fact that not calling someone a man is implied in the request to call someone a woman means that the person is presuming the terms are mutually exclusive and so a request to be called by one automatically constitutes a request not be called by the other.
If I list my preferred title as 'Mr', it indicates that I would prefer to be called "Mr X", but if someone simply called me 'sir', I'd have no cause to mind. The terms are not mutually exclusive, I didn't, by asking to be called 'Mr', automatically preclude being called 'sir'. I did, however, automatically preclude being called 'Mrs', and may well take offence if someone does without reasonable grounds to do so.
Does that explain it?
Quoting angslan
Hopefully this is partly explained above. Once you've grasped what I mean above, I hope the fact that offence is reasonable in some situations and unreasonable in others is simple enough to be obvious.
Quoting angslan
Yes, I agree. I originally got involved in this whole discussion because I didn't like the way people were being branded as intolerant bigots for holding positions which (whilst I did not personally agree with) were reasonable, rational positions to hold. As I said to another poster, there's nothing insulting about having delusions, a huge portion of the population suffer from delusions of one form or another at some point in time in their lives. It's in support of this as a rational possibility (rather than a bigoted intolerance) that I come back to it occasionally, but the conversation between you an I has moved a long way from that and it's a distraction to include it now, you're right.
Quoting angslan
Two things; firstly, we come back to the (I think false) idea that respect is only one way, that respect constitutes only adhering to the way the addressee wants to hear a word, and not the way the speaker wants to use a word. I don't hold to that belief. Secondly, what I do think is unprecedented is the global nature of the social environment we live in these days. I don't think we can any longer rely on the "different words mean different things across cultures" argument. It is a legitimate concern that once a term is used in some way in certain environments, that it will rapidly come to mean that in every environment in the world. Global social networking makes it extremely difficult for one social group to maintain their own personal terms in any realistic sense. The world at large adopts terms as having a certain meaning and there is almost overwhelming pressure to conform. If 'woman' comes to mean {person who wants to be called a woman} in the workplace, the social networking sites, politics and media, then that's what it will mean, and the idea that any group who are offended by that meaning can just retain their own meaning within their own group is just nonsense. We are definitely talking about changing the universal meaning of the word 'woman', no doubt about that.
Quoting angslan
Yes, but I've presented an argument in fairly logical rational steps showing that the trans use of the term 'woman' is inconsistent and incoherent and you haven't actually refuted any point of it yet, so what I'm interested in here is not your opinion that neither group are using it inconsistently or incoherently, but your justification for that belief in face of arguments to the contrary. That's why this is on a philosophy forum. If you have a counter argument for any of the points I laid out, that's what I'd be interested to hear.
Quoting angslan
I think it's about all of them. Language use dictates and expresses a great deal (some would say all) of what we feel about the world and ourselves, including our identity. So language use is inherently tied to relative harms. I'm, broadly speaking, an ethical naturalist, so relative harms are intrinsically tied to how we treat each other (we should try to minimise relative harms). Where our desired treatment clashes, there needs to be some method of seeking compromise, and I believe that method should be rational thought. Delusions are beliefs held despite rational argument to the contrary, so the question of whether one set of beliefs might be a delusion becomes integral to the type of solution we arrive at to any conflict of interests. The only caveat, is that I personally have ruled out the possibility of trans people being delusional. You obviously do not think they are either, so you and I need not discuss that option. As I said, I only mentioned it because I think it's a legitimate theory to bring to the discussion and others seemed to want to just stonewall it, not because I personally hold it to be the case.
I don't agree that it is implied that the sets are mutually exclusive from the trans claim. In fact, the claim requires that they are not, as I pointed out earlier. Just because someone identifies as a woman does not mean that they have no qualities associated with the set {men}. In fact, in many instances people who make claims that they are a woman have a penis, so this categorically cannot be part of the claim. Drawing the implication that you continue to draw ignores a fundamental part of the trans claim, so I am sceptical that you fully understand the claim if you argue otherwise. I can see that if you start with the premise that the sets must be mutually exclusive then you can state that the claim is illogical, but I cannot see how in good faith you think that this is implied by the claim. Conversely, suggesting that the sets are mutually exclusive excludes non-binary and spectrum concepts of gender, intersex people, trans people, men who feel feminine and women who feel masculine, and perhaps even groups of women or men who believe that they do not feel like each other.
For some, the names "Bill" and "William" are relatively interchangeable and they do not mind being referred to as either. For others, "Bill" and "William" are distinct and they wish to be correctly addressed by the one that they prefer. But this does not mean that they believe that this is the case for all Bills or Williams. I think it is incorrect to suggest that preferring a certain type of address implies that the sets are necessarily mutually exclusive. I think it is even more incorrect to suggest that the level of offence taken is associated with whether the sets are mutually exclusive or not rather than whether the person addressing them is respectful.
Quoting Pseudonym
No, sorry.
Quoting Pseudonym
I mean, we're not. That is abundantly clear from the different and distinct uses that we have currently in discussions of various sorts.
Quoting Pseudonym
No you haven't, you have, at every turn, applied your own premises that ignore a fundamental part of trans claims - including the variety of trans claims (e.g. binary, non-binary, spectrum concepts of gender).
Quoting Pseudonym
You have a very good chance if you go back through my posts to see this - I've repeated it several times, including in this post. At this point I cannot tell if you are receptive to what other people write, because I don't believe you've ever responded to this content in my posts. This is, in fact, quite infuriating.
Quoting Pseudonym
Well, I put forward a suggestion regarding treating each other and the basic principle behind it. I haven't seen an argument from you regarding relative harms that suggests one set of harms is greater than the other, so I really don't know where you stand here.
Quoting Pseudonym
I've never said that respect is one way. I've said that how we treat (and address) people can either respect their interiority/subjectivity/identity or treat them as objects (i.e. defined and categorised by the addresser regardless of the interiority/subjectivity/identity of the addressee). I've made an argument that addressee-oriented addressing preserves self-respect because it preserves that speakers can address themselves (either explicitly and externally or self-reflectively and internally) according to the concepts that they feel are appropriate.
You have asked several times for "compromise" - but I don't know what you mean by that because all I have seen, generally, is a defense for feminists who feel that "woman" has a strict categorisation and arguments that trans claims are incoherent, which does not look like understanding or compromise at all. I think I've done a better idea of proposing a compromise.
Eh, I think that's a bit of an overstep. I granted that Mary was not intolerant. I don't think you are intolerant. But just because one can reach a different conclusion rationally that doesn't mean that people do do so. Intolerance can be inferred just by the simple fact that trans persons are treated as lesser persons -- they are the butt of jokes, they are objects of violence, they face workplace discrimination, and sometimes families are churches are not as accepting as other communities. Coming out as trans can sever one from friendships or families.
It's one thing to have a question and come to a conclusion but still treat people more or less fairly, and quite another to punish them for their difference. That's intolerance.
Quoting Moliere
You are inconsistent again, and it's getting old. So, your relationship with your family doesn't make you a niece/nephew, son/daughter, father/mother, etc.? You are aware that we take on different identities and none of them contradict each other?
I never said physical differences enable participation in procreation. I said that our differences allow us to participate in our own unique way in propagating the species. You cannot procreate with just females. You need males as well, and each one contributes in it's own unique way to the propagation of the species. Those differences are what make up one of your identities.
Quoting Pseudonym
And the trans-person claims that they understand the feelings that are outside of their experience (ie. a man claiming that he understands what it is to be a woman in order to make the claim that he is a woman.) How is it that the transperson has access to experiences that you don't when you are both same sex?
This is just a metaphysical puzzle. What does it matter that we count them as qualia or not? Either way we know what it is to feel, and we know that our feelings are specific to ourselves. You don't feel like I feel at the moment. It's this interiority that's important to the discussion at hand, and not the metaphysical status of feelings.
Quoting Harry Hindu
My physical relationship doesn't make me a niece, son, father, and so forth. What physical quantity would we measure to establish nephew-hood? Genes? But this is a filial relationship established in social practices. Kinship groups vary significantly between cultures. And it is possible to be someone's son while not being their biological child -- such as the case of adoption. It's also possible to be disowned by your family, and find a new group of people who you call family and said family is just as real as those who have physical genetic relationships with one another.
The relationship between persons is what counts, though. The physical, measurable quantities don't.
Quoting Harry Hindu
In the bright and gloroius gay space luxury communist future this will be superseded with SCIENCE!
:D
In all sincerity, it depends to what extent you identify with your physical capacities. Identity is a mental phenomena. There is a social side to identity, but that's not what we're talking about when talking about gender-identity.
I didn't say the full set of membership criteria are mutually excuse. I said that membership of a set is mutually exclusive on the basis that being labelled as a member of the opposite set is offensive. People do not make random requests just so that they can be offended when those requests are not met, they request that things which they think will offend them are avoided.
Thus it is reasonable to presume that being called a man offends a trans woman for some reason that other than idle preference (that would be ridiculous, to set up a request just so that you can be offended when it's not met).
Thus, a trans woman in saying "I am a woman" is either also claiming "I am not a man" (and so will take offence if you call me one) or is making the frankly ridiculous request that they are not referred to as a man even though they are one simply because they don't like it for no given reason.
Quoting angslan
The fact that uses are currently multiple on a discussion forum specifically about the multiple uses of the term really cannot be held up as evidence that the use is not changing, or will not change in future as a result of common usage in the media. This discussion is hardly an accurate reflection of the social mileau.
Quoting angslan
What premises have I applied which ignore trans claims?
Quoting angslan
Quoting angslan
So, we both know how it is to feel like everything we've written is just being ignored then.
Quoting angslan
Yes, that's one way. Where in any of that is there anything about the addressee's respect for the speaker? You've just written an entire argument which makes no mention whatsoever of anything the adressee had to do to respect the speaker and then claimed that this proves your idea of respect is two way. I'm baffled.
Quoting angslan
So what have you given up from your original position that people should be addressed by the terms they prefer? You do know what compromise means?
Absolutely. I don't want to poor cold water on such an impassioned exposition of how trans people are mistreated, but I said "it [others reaching a different conclusion about motives] doesn't make anyone intolerant", not "no one is ever intolerant about this issue"
Oh my god.
Quoting Pseudonym
When they address the speaker.
Quoting Pseudonym
Why do you think that people need to give things up in order to sort things out? Anyway, if people disagree on definitions, address-oriented addressing means that both will compromise when addressing the other.
Quoting Pseudonym
That doesn't mean that they are exclusive. I literally just wrote on this. I can't believe how much you are complaining that I don't listen when this discussion has already taken place and you have somehow ignored it.
Did you reply about intersex people and gender identity yet? Did you show your principles of compromise? Did you respond regarding your concept of what is more harmful in terms of denying identity? You bang on about these last two as though these are of critical importance, but I think you only ask them of other people and don't provide any responses yourself. That hardly seems good faith to me.
It's not a fair point because the intolerance is defined within the very concepts being used.
The moment we understand trans identity be mistaken or non-existent, we are engaged in the discrimination and intolerance against trans people. In our very concepts, we deny their meaning is part of reality which is valuable and respected. An effect which is not limited to instance in which trans identity is genuine. Even people were correct to reject trans identity in this way, they would be just as discriminatory and intolerant of trans people. Treatment of other people isn't defined by whether their identity claims are accurate its about how you treatment. It about how they are valued and treated.
Even posing the "alternative" is a form of intolerance because it doesn't respect there is a reason to respect trans identity. It's tries to consider a "neutral" position when the one which is absent intolerance understands there is reason not to reject trans identity..
In this respect, it like getting up and saying: "Well, it might be the case that children aren't valuable Perhaps we don't need to take care or them. Maybe."
The supposed "neutrality" of the position is just a rejection of a reason for taking an action. In the face of something we have a reason for accepting or enacting, it claims we have none.
Such "neutrality" only feeds the intolerant positions. When a position which identifies we have a reason for not being intolerant, "neutrality" supposes this isn't present. It takes no-one has a good reason for rejecting intolerance and the intolerance is just as viable of a position. It the definition of pouring cold water on those trying to point out we have a reason to reject intolerance.
It's not just about addressing. The terms 'woman' and 'him/her' are not used solely for addressing people. They are terms within a community of language speakers used for all sorts of purposes. For whom are the 'women' s' toilets set aside, those who are physiologically women, or those who think they're women? At whom is a positive discrimination programme requiring 50% women applicants aimed at, those who are physiologically women, or those who think they're women? Which group of people is women's studies investigating, for whom do women's rights campaign, who may join a women's support group, who is included in "women and children first", who is being referenced by the expression "women were traditionally oppressed", who are biblical and other religious texts referring to when they mention 'women', at whom should the WHO aim it's excellent women's health initiative?
Quoting angslan
Yes, I'm disputing what you wrote. Both you and Willow seem to have this bizarre concept that if you state something is the case that's the end of the debate on the matter, if I still disagree I must have not read you clearly enough.
I disagree with your argument that it doesn't mean they are exclusive, for the reasons given.
I disagree with your argument that the nature of the trans claim exclude strict categorisation for the reasons I've given.
I disagree with your argument that addressee oriented language is mutually respectful, for the reasons given.
I disagree that identity is paramount and known only to the person to whom it refers.
You keep repeating these assertions as if they were arguments. I provided a seven point argument in logic with which you disputed only one point (which I later provided a counter argument to).
What logical argument have you got which takes you (in logical steps, without further bare assertion) for interpreting the meaning of the claim "I am a woman", as referring only to non-exclusory membership criteria? Not just as statement that it doesn't, an argument, in logical steps, one following from the other.
Quoting angslan
I'm not discussing the claims of intersex people, so why bring it up? I'm discussing the claim, by a trans woman, "I am a woman". If an intersex person claimed "I am neither a man nor a woman" or "I am both a man and a woman" those would be two completely separate claims. Why would the trans claim be affected by them?
Quoting angslan
Yes, trans people (and those who agree with them) use the term as they wish, others use the term as they wish. No one demands anything of any group who do not wish to speak that way. Each group gets to speak exactly the way they want. If a women's support group wants to allow those who think they're women to join, it can, if it doesn't, it can exclude them. Letting people act as they see fit in so far as it is possible is a pretty basic ethical stance.
Quoting angslan
No, I don't agree with your premise that identity is defined by the person to whom it refers, so there's no argument to refute. If people are harmed by externally applied identity labels which they don't like, then they need to at the very least provide a coherent argument as to why. "I don't like it" is not good enough. Certainly "no one should ever apply externally derived identity labels" is an argument I find frankly ridiculous as it undermines thousands of years of speech practice for no observable gain. I don't believe the arguments given so far are sound.
Quoting Pseudonym
What an intractable issue! If only there were some field like intersectional feminism that didn't treat all women as identical, and then this type of categorisation wouldn't be a problem. We can only hope, I guess.
Quoting Pseudonym
You know that you and I both gave reasons, right? We didn't just state something and demand it was true. But I did critique your implications from the trans claim and for exclusivity, and I did give reasons for my position, and I've never really seen a response except for you to repeat yourself. So I think that this is probably as far as we'll get in this part of the discussion.
Quoting Pseudonym
I don't really think you provided a logical argument, but you did present it that way. But at the heart of it, you just stuck to a premise about exclusivity that you seem to feel strongly about. Your counter-argument was critiqued, if you look back.
I think it a bit of an odd numbers game to say that I disputed only one point - I critique the foundational point. This isn't a numbers game.
Quoting Pseudonym
Because it is relevant to the discussion of whether gender categories are exclusive.
Quoting Pseudonym
I'll admit that I've not seen this in our discussion, but maybe you stated it much earlier. I'm interested then, given the proposal I formulated for speaker-oriented and addressee-oriented addressing, why you think one is better than the other. Obviously I've given my reasoning regarding not treating people like objects. I note you made an objection, but your objection didn't propose that one was preferable to the other. What's the reason for adopting speaker-oriented addressing over addressee-oriented addressing?
Quoting Pseudonym
I'm not sure I said that.
Quoting Pseudonym
Your argument requires a premise that only admit exclusivity - and ignores non-binary and spectrum concepts of gender. You just throw these out the window. You throw these out the window despite the existence of intersex people, who are clearly non-binary.
You just throw out the claims of trans people, who make the claim that although they have characteristics normally found in one category, have other characteristics of people in the other category - i.e. a claim that the categories are non-exclusive - and then you turn around and say that somehow this claim implies exclusivity!
You start with the premise that these claims are wrong, because you start with the premise of exclusivity. I know you don't think you do, but my critique has been trying to show you that, in fact, you do. You throw out all of these things. You even seem to throw out the claims that not all women feel the same about what it means to be a woman.
You start with the premise that none of this is true - so of course you are going to conclude that it is not true. And then you turn around and say, "Let's be logical and philosophical about this."
You seem to have appealed to delusion, to some logic that can't possibly accept non-binary gender concepts, you ask for compromise regarding relative harms but one that has to prefer treating trans without respect if that's what we wish, and then you say, "but I made a 7-step argument" and "everyone who disagrees with me isn't listening"!
I am convinced, at this point, that your philosophy on this issue is a rationalisation for how you already feel.
I am willing to be convinced otherwise.
I was pointing out another one of your inconsistencies when I asked you that question, but you didn't seem to get it.
Quoting Moliere
I was talking about biological relationships. Sure, people can adopt and that would make the child their legal son/daughter, and that still supports my claim that relationships define your identity.
Quoting Moliere
It wouldn't be bright and gay. It would be rather dull and boring with everyone being genetically and behaviorally the same, or modified for specific tasks for Big Brother. There would be no individual identities.
Quoting Moliere
I already pointed out (and you keep ignoring it (the only thing you are consistent on)) that, if gender-identity is as you have defined it as the feeling and/or need to behave like the opposite sex, then what does it mean to behave like the opposite sex when all sexes can and have historically engaged in those behaviors? The only difference lies in how societies define how certain sexes should behave. And how does one sex know what it feels like to be the other to claim that they identify as the other?
Yes, and a male-oriented brain running a female body might explain gender dysphoria as something other than a delusion. :smile: :up:
Why would this type of categorisation no longer be a problem if we were careful not to treat all women as identical. Take, for example, a women's group who agrees that women can be very different from one another, different clothes, different experiences, different personality etc. Explain how that answers their question about whether to include people in their group on the basis of physiological or psychological features. Explain how that helps any decision they make avoid causing emotional harm to those who wanted it to go the other way. I'm not seeing how your comment is related at all. Unless a "woman's group" is going to exclude someone from membership, then it is just "a group". The people it includes can be hugely diverse, but they must have some things in common which are absent from those who are excluded. Someone's got to decide what those things are.
Quoting angslan
As far as I understand it, you said that there needn't be a single thing that all members have, but it could be a family resemblance type set of things. I said that didn't affect the argument because that set still needs defining and must exclude others in order to be a category. I haven't read anything from you countering that. The rest of the argument you had no direct counter to, so I'm left with no idea as to what grounds you dispute the argument on other than you don't like its conclusions.
Quoting angslan
But I'm not discussing whether gender categories are exclusive, I'm discussing the implications of the claim that it would be disrespectful to call a trans woman a man. I think one of the implications of that claim is that there are criteria for being a man which the trans woman does not fit. The claim by intersexuals would be a different claim. I'm not trying to make a statement about the way things actually are, I'm exploring the logical implications of the trans claims. It's an "if... then" type of argument if that's easier to understand.
Adressee oriented speaking requires that the meaning of a term used by one person is contained in the mind of another. This goes right back to the beginning. The way we use words describes, perhaps even constructs, our entire world-view, so I consider it vitally important that speech is allowed to reflect that (when that world-view is a morally acceptable one).
But I think the problem goes further with this specific form of adressee oriented speech. If we were talking about two definitions of 'woman' and asking whose definition should be used during a speech act, I would be very sympathetic to the idea of using the addressee's definition. But that's not what's being proposed. Here we're talking about exchanging the speaker's definition (based on commonly accessible information) for a definition which is inaccessible to the speaker. It's that which I find most offensive. Language is a communal excersice, it troubles me deeply that some people are trying to make it a private one. That I could be using a term incorrectly until you personally tell me how to correctly apply it is not respecting the mutuality of language.
Quoting angslan
I mean that the only person who can correctly apply identity labels is the person to whom they refer. That's your entire premise isn't it?
Quoting angslan
No, the premise of my argument is the trans claim that it would be disrespectful to refer to them by a term other than their preferred term. The other steps are inferences or deductions from that premise.
Quoting angslan
Everyone's philosophy is a rationalisation for how we already feel. Anyone thinking otherwise is deluding themselves. The trick isn't to try and derive reality empirically from what you see, it's just to make sure that any theories which are wildly untenable are discarded and your favourites of any which remain are as sound as you can make them.
Yes, that would be the theory, but the science is a long way off. The point is that this still would not support the non-exclusivity that trans people are trying to include in their claims. This would make womanhood a matter of either having a woman's body, or a woman's brain (or both). Anyone with neither would not be a women no matter what they say about it.
Interestingly, you ignored the majority of things that I said you were already ignoring, so it is not a surprise that your last posts got us nowhere.
Speaking in terms of Jung, there is a masculine archetype and a feminine archetype of the "collective unconscious" or autonomous psyche. There is no inherited form, for archetypes are formless and do not have content. They are potentialities of formation for psychical manifestations. They are biological displays, in a sense, seen throughout the species. They are much like instincts, which is not to say that the anima and animus (these specific archetypes) are instinctual in the sense that they would be a teleological ratification of some sort: they are inherited patterns, tendencies of expression. There are many archetypes, and the knowledge of them is typically seen in art. Furthermore, as a result of the experience of the individual in a world where their externalities shape their conceptions of who they are, these archetypes become manifest according to the cultural, artistic representations at hand. Feminine qualities have become associated to many different things according to the culture, art and time. For instance, the high-heeled shoe used to be a very masculine sort of shoe in some places. Now it is more-so feminine. Within every person, however, is this display of masculinity and feminity: one becomes within and one becomes without, but both form together for a totality. Jung observed an old couple he knew for years and years. They began their marriage easily distinguishable in terms of masculinity and femininity, but after decades they began to look and seem interchangeable as if the modes of their psyches complemented one another. Their personalities were, in their late life, more-so androgynous, connected to one another for a sort of psychic complementarity. This is the state of affairs for the heterosexual, typically. The homosexual is more difficult to understand in terms of this theory of the mind. But the understanding typically relates to an undifferentiation of anima and animus or an undifferentiation of a more primordial androgynous archetype.
"The meeting of two personalities is like a chemical reaction: if there is any reaction, both are changed." C G Jung
I agree with this conception of gender and masculinity and femininity.
But perhaps it sounds weird or strange. I have heard that Jung is "esoteric."
Community agreement between the players of that particular language game. If meanings we're all based only on personal representation we wouldn't have clue what each other were saying. An apple is called an 'apple' because a significant enough majority of language users agree that the fruit of the Malus genus (or something we empirically believe to be such) is referenced by that word. If you had your own personal definition for 'apple' you simply wouldn't be able to use the word in conversation with another in any practical sense.
You're confusing fuzziness around the edges of a definition for total relativism. If I was handed something which looked very much like an apple but had one flaw (say, it was blue) I would have to make a personal decision about whether to call it an 'apple' or not, but in order to converse with my language community about it, we'd have to come to some agreement about whether to refer to this new thing as an 'apple' or not. That agreement could be based on its shape, its origin, its taste even, but it can't be based on the way the object makes me feel, or how I personally identify with it, because those things are not available to other language users. We can't all agree on the a definition by those metrics and so can't converse communally about it. And if we can't do that, what's the point?
If I say "I ate an apple earlier". What does that even mean? That is a complete abstraction. You know 'in a sense' what I mean, but this 'sense' is completely divorced from the truth.
Is this not what I have been saying all along - that this is the result of a defect in the brain (physical and/or psychological)?
What does it even mean to even say that there is a male-oriented brain running a female body when the brain cannot exist independently of the body and is considered part of the body?
What about the hormones testosterone and estrogen? Are they present in the body/brain in the same ratios as the opposite sex? Does the male body claiming to be a woman have a brain with the wiring for handling menstrual cycles? Your claim seems to expose a lack of understanding in basic biology. It is more accurate to call it a physical defect, or a psychological delusion, and there is nothing offensive about that. Just as it isn't offensive to say that it is a physical/psychological defect for anorexics to feel as if they are obese.
I absolutely agree that how people are treated is more important than whether or not what they say of themselves happens to be true.
Intolerance, as I've been reading and using it in this conversation, is the same as a disgust for individuals, or a pleasure derived from punishing individuals simply for who they are.
I would say there are degrees involved here -- not everyone who disbelieves the truth of a trans person's claim is disgusted with them or derives pleasure from punishing them for who they are. When I say "fair enough" I mean I can see the rational machinery at work.
Not all patterns of inferences or beliefs or actions, though rational, are necessarily other things -- like heartwarming, wise, endearing, good. But they don't need to be in order to count as rational, at least in accord with a particular kind of rationality. And I think a less nuanced approach is entirely warranted in the political field -- there are no philosopher-kings, and we are not doing politics here.
In the case of Mary what you have is fear. She is reacting out of fear for the death of her own identity because the trans identity calls it into question, makes her believe that her struggles will be lost and forgotten, that the social nature of gender, what should be abolished, will be pushed aside and all the gains and benefits from the previous 50 or so years will be forgotten. It's not disgust, but fear, and a fear derived from a challenge to her identity -- a kind of existential fear. Now, fear can lead to ugly places, but as we've set up the scenario here, at least, this is the basic concern.
In the case of @Pseudonym we have a kind of incredulity based on the fact that he has another explanation. Given that he doesn't mind accommodating trans persons in action I don't think there's disgust involved or a pleasure in punishing.
Also, something that @Pseudonym does not have, that I do, is the experience of trusting trans persons on a project of some kind, on equal footing, unrelated entirely to their identity. I'll tell you right now that I did not always believe that trans identity was an identity. It's not something I'm immediately familiar with. It was also not something that was of primary concern to me -- there were other, more important things going on. It seemed like the most respectful thing to do to treat them as they asked, and move on with other things. But after having trusted not just one, but many trans persons with things that are far more questionable than mere identity -- something which rarely comes into question for anyone at all -- and reflecting on that then it occurred to me that this was just inconsistent and was basically based on the fact that I like to see things before I believe them, and I hadn't seen this. The thing here being that I couldn't see it, since I do not have a trans identity. But if someone doesn't have that experience, either, then I really can see how it seems like an odd phenomena, since I thought the same, and how they might reject it out of a sense of incredulity.
So while I entirely agree that treatment is what is important, I think there's a midway point from bigotry to the pure acceptance of people and belief in them. That midway point may not be a praiseworthy place to be, but it's not exactly on the same level as workplace discrimination, cruelty, physical or emotional violence, and so forth, either. These differences do not need to be acknowledged in political discourse, as far as I am concerned, but given that this is philosophy I think the nuance is warranted.
Now something I'm most interested in is your statement:
This might take us a bit far astray for this thread, but I agree deeply that the correctness of statements is not as important as the treatment of persons. I'm tempted to say the truth doesn't matter at all, but then it also sometimes does so that's not quite right. I want to hear more though because you begin by saying the concepts themselves are violent and discriminatory, while still saying that the truth of claims is not important. There's a tension there that's intellectually interesting, and I have the general intuition that goodness is more important than truth, especially when it comes to others -- but hammering out the specifics is hard to do.
I am not neutral, so let's just get that out of the way. I don't think there's some superior neutral position. And I think that philosophy can certainly be used to post hoc justify bigotry while making it look like it might not be bigotry. Surely the middle ground between outright bigotry and pure acceptance would be exactly where one would mask their bigotry -- since the outright hatred is easy to identify.
But, all that being the case, I don't think that everyone who falls in-between the two qualifies as a bigot. I don't think that it's the job of political actors to try and specify this kind of delicate nuance. But, given that this is philosophy, I'd say that there is, in fact, a middle ground of sorts. Not that it's neutral or naturally superior to other beliefs, only that it's different from bigotry.
I was answering your question, which you seemed to want. It's not an inconsistency at all. Interiority can be parsed in various ways through ontology, but we're not talking about ontology. You can call feelings qualia, but nothing in that changes what I've said.
The closest that would come to would be to say that this man is claiming to be a woman without knowledge of the qualia of womanhood. But I don't think it works that way at all. We don't have knowledge of the male's (to use Banno's language) internal experience. So we can't say that this male does or does not experience what it is to be a woman.
It's as if you want to acknowledge that females have womanhood, and males and manhood, but since this male is claiming womanhood and you know that all males feel malehood they couldn't possibly know womanhood. But, since you aren't a male with womanhood, you yourself wouldn't know that either.
It's just a metaphysical puzzle, nothing to get all worked up about.
Quoting Harry Hindu
But then we have to ask -- how do you determine these relationships? It's not a measurable, physical entity. Biological relationships barely scratch the surface here. So your talk of biological relationships doesn't really explain relationship. What other physical entity would you propose to designate a son who is not a biological son?
Quoting Harry Hindu
Your latter supposition is trans-historical, whereas mine is not. What it means depends on circumstance -- micro-circumstance, in some cases, because even between individual families in the same culture these things can differ.
The claim isn't with respect to all others. It's with respect to oneself. Also, you're still conflating sex, gender, and gender-identity here. A whole sex isn't claiming to have a gender-identity. Certain persons with a sex feel elsewise from their assigned at birth sex, gender, and gender-identity -- because it often comes as a package deal. What's assigned by society is at odds with what is known about the self.
And the male who claims to have "womanhood" wouldn't know what "womanhood" is to say that he has it. You are attributing special powers to transgenders that they don't have. Why would one man know what "womanhood" is like and another not know what it is like?
Quoting Moliere
Did I not say that it is a legal relationship? Are relationships not established over time, with more time implying a deeper relationship? And what about the actions taken to maintain the relationship? Caring for a child that you adopted is what makes it a relationship as well. Just look at all the things that define your relationship with the people in your life, and how each relationship is different, and they are different as a result of the amount of and kind of things you do for each other. It has to do with the amount and types of actions you do with someone else, along with any physical relationship that might exist.
Quoting Moliere
In other words, it is arbitrary - like "god". Someone's "manhood" could be someone's "womanhood" and then where do those definitions that you and Banno seem so fond of stand? Doesn't that mean that gender is undefinable - non-existent? It's meaningless. Nonsense. Your own definitions and explanations defeat themselves.
This is closer I think. But what differs here is that these aren't physical quantities which are measured. There is a qualitative aspect to a relationship, something which isn't definable in the sense that a biological relationship is. You could get the gist across to someone about your relationship between yourself and your son, but if they don't have that experience then there is something missing.
It's worth noting here, too, that feelings of kinship also vary with time and culture. But that doesn't make them meaningless, nonsensical, or entirely undefinable. It does, however, mean that there isn't going to be some trans-historical account of kinship, or some objective measurable physical criteria which will enable you to independently establish kinship. At some point you just have to ask people and believe them.
The "manhood" or "womanhood" (or the "manhood and womanhood") is never going to be another's. In any case, it's a feature of an individual. I can no more have another's "manhood" or "womanhood" than I can be another person. Each person's "manhood" or "womanhood" is only ever their own. No "manhood" or "womanhood" is ever the same.
They aren't made arbitrary by this feature either. In any case, the "manhood" or "womanhood" is its own unique feature of the world (and can be understood by others; I can know who is a man, who is a woman, that the manhood and womanhood of each are different, how they are different, etc.), a feature which stands on its own as a presence in world ("the manhood/womanhood of..."), rather than being some sort of membership granted by having some sort of organs or behaving the right way.
Rather than "manhood" and "womanhood" being traits achieved by following a rule, they are a primary feature of individuals themselves, a significance of the given individual which occurs with their various traits (whatever those might be).
One is a man/women not because of specific biological or behavioural traits, but rather because they are a man/woman in the first instance.
The "arbitrariness" is a misunderstanding drawn from thinking that womanhood or manhood is granted in conforming to some rule of traits which make someone a man/woman. For any man or woman, we are already past any "arbitrariness" because their manhood or womanhood is already who they are.
The amount of time and types of things you do for each other can be said to be physical quantities. I could even say that feelings are physical as well, but I don't like to use those incoherent terms, "physical" and "mental". Everything is information. Your feelings inform you of the state of your body and can say that they are the relationship between mind and body. Relationships are a process. Nothing is either physical or mental. It is all process/information.
Quoting Moliere
In other words, you need to have faith that people's judgements of their own feelings are accurate - even though experience tells us that that isn't always the case. How - religious.
There was a lot more to my post that would keep us on topic, but you don't seem interested in facing tough questions.
This is just more nonsense. All you are talking about is our own individual preferences, not anything that can be called "manhood" or "womanhood". If anything and everything falls under some umbrella term, then that makes the term meaningless, as everything and anything could be that thing (manhood) and it would be inconsistent to call those things by another, opposite term (womanhood).
Does one's preference for chocolate or vanilla ice cream fall under manhood or womanhood? As a matter of fact, I don't see most of my actions or preferences as falling into any gender/sexual category. My preference for chocolate ice cream is not a representation of my manhood or womanhood. If it is different for everyone, then why call it manhood or womanhood? Why call it anything other than individual preference?
You people are simply pulling out these arguments from your nether regions without even processing them for coherence and consistency. This is getting boring. Your arguments are no different in structure than those made my religious people vehemently holding on to their irrational beliefs to the point where they become incoherent.
The important thing here is that these aren't measurable quantities that you can independently verify.
I'm not talking about just individual preferences. I'm talking about a feature of a person that is womanhood or manhood. This is an objective feature which will defy the preferences of some individuals.
If you want to use an "umbrella term" to look people into one particular notion of what manhood or womanhood might be, they objective feature of their manhood or womanhood will defy you. When you get up up spluttering: "Buuuutttt, they cannot have womanhood/manhood. They don't have these genitals/chromosomes/hormones/behave in the right way....," the objective fact of their womanhood or manhood will not care one iota for you preference for womanhood/manhood to be restricted to your preferred set of traits. The truth of womanhood or manhood itself will always win.
Why call it manhood or womanhood? It's the feature of the person we are describing. A woman, whatever her traits. A man, whatever his traits. We don't call it manhood or woman because we get told the specific traits someone (we have the precise descriptions of body part, behaviour, etc. for that) has, we do so because we are talking about the specific feature of belonging to manhood and womanhood.
Neither have ever been "umbrella terms." In the context of describing as belonging manhood or womanhood, they are descriptions that an individual has the trait of being a man or being a women.
The so called "umbrella term" has only ever been used by those who are interested in declaring men and woman have to be one thing or another, an attempt to institute their preference for men and women over the objective feature of being a man or woman. It's never what is referenced when someone is described as being a man or a woman.
Of course they are. Time is measurable and the things people do for each other are categorical.
Does the fact that I prefer chocolate ice cream fall under "manhood" or "womanhood"?
And if the notion of "manhood" and "womanhood" are of an individual preference or feeling, then how can you call someone who has a different notion of what "manhood" and "womanhood" are a "bigot"? You people just keep contradicting yourselves. Can you please filter your thoughts a bit more for consistency before posting them?
Stop creating red herrings and get back on topic.
Thus far you believe there must be some objective, measurable entity you can independently verify in order to take the claim that someone's identity is what it is seriously. I'm saying that this is inconsistent with how we do, in fact, determine someone else's identity. So rather than focus on the contentious claim I'm going to other parts of identity that you are likely to accept, such as nephewhood.
How do you determine nephewhood? You wouldn't focus on genes here for the simple fact that someone can be adopted into a family. So that leaves, in your list of acceptable criteria, things people do for each other and time.
I'll add in response to to your latest post that nephewhood can be measured by either genetic or legal relationships. While many might consider "legal" something non-physical, I would just fall back on my previous explanation of my dislike in using the terms, "physical" and "non-physical". Let's just say that they are measurable and categorical. Nephewhood still falls into the category of "son of your sibling", which could be biological or legal.
The objective feature is being a man or woman, that someone is of womanhood or manhood. My point issuing a man or woman is itself a feature of a person, a property of them as an existing being. We can pick it out and describe the presence like anything else-- e.g. just as we understood the presence of red hair, someone with six fingers, which one of us is John, that I belong to The Philosophy Forum, we understand the feature of belonging to manhood or womanhood through the concept which understands its a future of a person (e.g. "John is a man/has manhood). It is not a feature granted by others (e.g. have certain genitals, behave the right way, etc.), bur rather a fact of a person giving in itself ("X is a man/woman"). Being man/women is the objective fact referred to.
Preferring a certain sort of ice cream does not fall under manhood/womanhood. In any case, since you are a man, you will always be a man who likes the given flavour of ice cream. You will be a man no matter which flavour of ice cream you like, until such time (if any) it no longer a fact you are a man.
This is this a question of individual preference or feeling. So long as you are man, anyone who thinks you are not a man will be factually wrong.
In terms of bigotry, that is given on the basis of how an act is discriminatory, devalues and expresses power over a certain group, trans people in this case.
When you get up and claim their identities are nonsense, it forms a social environment hostile to them. It claims those expressing trans identity out not be valued has having a genuine position, that there is something inherently wrong with being a trans person who exists, like they aren't meeting the standard of what consists a proper human. This is defined in terms of how your actions affect the group. In this respect, the issue of bigotry doesn't actually depend on trans claims being accurate. Even if we were to consider a world in which trans claims are mistaken, your position still has this discriminatory effect upon them and would be identified as such.
Now we're getting back to those arbitrary cultural rules I was talking about before. Culturally, nephewhood could be anything. Biologically, it is only one thing. Cultures emulate "newphewhood " by creating laws. Cultures can create "gender roles" by creating certain laws that men and women are suppose to abide by, even though both women and men can physically engage in any of those behaviors, cultures will limit those behaviors to certain groups. Again, all we are talking about is how cultures differ, not how the genders/sexes differ.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
These two statements contradict each other. If we can pick out what it is to be a man or woman because it is objective, then how can so many people be wrong and only the transgenders are right?
Manhood and womanhood have to do with those objective features that differentiate the two, like in their physical structures the behaviors allowable by those structures. If you can't differentiate the two, then it becomes arbitrary, which is to say that is isn't objective at all.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
But if my individual preference is that preferring chocolate ice cream is a feature of manhood, then you'd be wrong - factually wrong (as you put it). Do you see where your argument is contradicting itself?
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Then why is it not considered hostile to tell a someone who believes themselves to be a special creation of "God", that they aren't?
Apologies, I missed a "not." That second statement should read, "It's not a question of individual preference of feeling."
As for how so many people can be wrong: lots of people sometimes make an error. This is the point: manhood or womenhood is an objective feature itself. To think it is made by the presence of physical or behaviours is an error. We don't have bodies which make us men or women, we are men/women with a body. We have manhood or womanhood not by having a bodily trait, but by having an objective feature of being a man or woman.We can always differentate the two: in itself, one man and the other is women.
Even when two people have similar traits we can tell this. By the objective feature of "a person who is a woman" we know it's different to an objective feature of "a person who is a man." Which, for example, why a man isn't a transwoman or vice versa, even though they both have a penis.
It is hostile to proclaim someone claiming to be the vessel of God is delusional. When we dismiss, scoff, laugh at them, we are discriminationating against them as a group. We are holding a position their understanding of themselves is incoherent, wrong and deserves no place of respect in society.
The difference in this case is not in the fact a discrimination occurs, but in that discrimination in this case is justified.
Exactly. We can be wrong about who we are. I have provided evidence of this.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
The only way I can differentiate between man and woman is by body structure and behavior. This is the same circular BS you said before. It is meaningless. I think you owe me and the readers of this thread an apology for wasting our time in reading your nonsense.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
I'm not discriminating against the person. I'm discriminating their beliefs because they are inconsistent. It IS okay to dismiss incoherent dribble, like what you, Moliere and Banno are posting. All three of you do it on this forum, and it isn't hostile. It seems hostile if you are delusional - which is a symptom of a delusion.
All you three have done is propagate this mass delusion of transgenderism as if it were a religion. The incoherence and ill-formed arguments are no different from those that attempt to defend their own delusions. It is obvious by the mental gymnastics you all performed that you simply don't want to admit that you are wrong. We all have to accept that we are wrong sometimes to grow as individuals - to evolve your identity.