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Once again, the claim I am defending is not that someone "becomes male." It that they identify as male. A concomitant claim often is that society should treat those people the same as those born with penises (ie, of the male sex), but that does not necessarily follow. In other words, there are two claims: 1) sex and gender are different things; and 2) society should, in many instances, treat them as if they are the same. I am discussing only #1, which is true by the definition of "gender"
Well, not really. In standard usage it is a synonym for "sex".
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=gender
Most people are not engaging in feminist academic writing, and so they usually do not imitate their confusing use of "gender". Everything from conversations with normal people to news articles to government/corporate forms will use "gender" and "sex" interchangeably. Meanwhile the "identify as" definition is sufficiently new that it isn't even mentioned. Needless to say, people are not obliged to use that one either, especially since it is typically used to smuggle in the contested assumption that people have an internal feeling of "gender identity".
Then how does that follow from defining gender as "a set of roles, behaviors, etc, generally expected by society of the members of each sex"? Under this definition is it meaningful to say things like "Andriy falsely identifies as a man, since by fleeing Ukraine as a woman rather than staying she is refusing her society's able-bodied male gender role of staying in case she is needed to fight and die against Russia"? Or does it mean that gender self-identification is true by definition, in which case it is not a reflection of society's gender roles but of the "gender identity" definition?
I have discussed this ad nauseum elsewhere. You are referring to "gender identity" not "gender." And your Andriy example, yes that is fine. That is a claim about whether Andriy understands the societal norms, not about whether he actually has the belief that he is a man.
As for what the terms mean here is what Justice Alito, joined by Justice Thomas, had to say in the Bostock case:
And see Holloway v. Arthur Andersen & Co., 566 F. 2d 659 (9th Cir 1977) [refusing to extend protection of Title VII to transsexuals because discrimination against transsexualism is based on "gender" rather than "sex"]. That was 45 years ago. So this is not all that new a distinction.
I understand that terms are often conflated in the vernacular. Nevertheless, when pro-trans people use the terms, they mean them in the senses I have described. Hence, criticizing their arguments by using a different definition is not much of a criticism at all, because it does not address their actual claims.
The point is that "gender" meaning "gender identity" and "gender" meaning "gender roles" are different and incompatible definitions, and applying them to individual cases gives very different results. Under a gender-role definition of gender (which approximately nobody actually uses except in a motte-and-bailey fashion) Andriy is not a man due to defying the strict gender-role currently mandated by Ukrainian society with unmanly flight. Under a gender-identity definition of gender Andriy would be a man based purely on self-identification, even if the only difference from a stereotypical woman is a Twitter bio saying "he/him". Whatever definition is used it cannot coherently be both, and so "non-binary gender identity" is not meaningfully based on defining gender as "a set of roles, behaviors, etc, generally expected by society of the members of each sex".
The "difference between gender and sex" argument has actually fallen out of favor in trans-activist circles in recent years. It's now fairly common to see explicit arguments that trans people are whatever sex they identify as. But even before it was never really used consistently. For instance various governments have implemented plans to be more inclusive of non-binary people by letting people choose "SEX: X" on their driver's licenses, and apparently nobody involved in this process takes the opportunity to make it say "GENDER:" or even notices the distinction.
I don't understand what you mean. Gender is not used to mean gender identity. They are distinct concepts. See my citations elsewhere, and see eg the definitions on the Planned Parenthood page
As I have pointed out many times, this is actually a claim about how trans people should be treated. it is a claim, that transwomen should be treated AS IF they were people whose biological sex is female; it is not a claim that gender and sex are the same thing, nor that transgender women are of the female biological sex. If you have actual evidence that trans-activists now generally believe that the terms "sex" and "gender" mean the same thing, I would be interested in seeing it (note that I said "generally", not one nut job. There is always someone who is arguing something nutty, such as that sports in the US are all about white men feeling sexually inferior to black men - hence, baseball is about hitting little white balls with big brown sticks, and bowling is little white sticks being knocked down by big black balls. That doesn't mean anyone else believes it])
Because I see the opposite. eg: Genderspectrum.org says, "People tend to use the terms “sex” and “gender” interchangeably. But, while connected, the two terms are not equivalent."
Moreover, there is a whole Wikipedia page on the topic, and the only discussion of current criticism on the distinction is not by trans activists, but among psychiatrists who are engaging in a very inside-baseball argument about the relative contributions of nature and nurture to human behavior. And even that is posed not as a discussion of the terms "gender" and "sex' but rather "sex difference" and "gender difference."
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gender
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/male
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/female
Merriam-Webster changed those and similar entries in 2019.
Healthline:
BBC Three: Gender is what you feel, not what parts you have
There is of course also use of the "gender role" definition, though such use is rarely consistent. Rather, as I have been saying, definitions vary according to the needs of the argument or situation at hand.
This is newer, less mainstream, and even less coherent than defining gender as gender identity, it's me commenting on what anecdotally seems like a growing tendency in pro-trans arguments rather than something mainstream enough to be in Merriam-Webster. I said that it had become fairly common on social media to see arguments basing sex on gender identity as an illustration of what seems like a broader move away from the "gender and sex are two different things" argument, which at least still treated biological sex as a legitimate concept. (Probably because of those adopting the trans-activist "gender vs. sex" distinction in order to argue that things like sports should be based on sex. Some of which already have regulations or laws which happen to use the word "sex".) Most don't explicitly make that argument, they just use "gender" and "sex" interchangeably the same way normal people do while basing both on "gender identity". But some do make it explicit, and for them often the structure of the argument is something like 'sex is a social construct/complicated (argued in a way that equates those with 'meaningless', the same way 'gender is a social construct' was used) and therefore 'sex' is either best defined based on gender identity or abandoned entirely".
Deanna Adkins, director of the Duke University Center for Child and Adolescent Gender Care:
Autostraddle: It’s Time For People to Stop Using the Social Construct of “Biological Sex” to Defend Their Transmisogyny
Nature:
Forbes: The Myth Of Biological Sex
Or the controversy a little while ago about a fictional Warhammer 40,000 sourcebook mentioning biological sex:
Goonhammer: Transphobic Language and the Horus Heresy
An Open Letter to Games Workshop
This is not anything as coherent as trans-activists all switching to a new definition, and some of those explicitly say sex is biological to the extent that they recognize it as a legitimate concept at all. Rather it's that the previous "gender vs. sex" redefinition left a loophole in that people could still say "sex" if they knew and cared about the redefinition, so now doing so is associated with the enemy and there is an effort against it employing various arguments/redefinitions/accusations-of-transphobia.
Those things really don't say what you think they do. The Merriam-Webster definition c) is listed after b) : the behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits typically associated with one sex; the fact that it is listed after b) indicates that it is less common. More importantly, dictionaries are descriptors of both technical and vernacular usages.
Going back to the beginning, the question was: what do** leftists/gender acivists/whatever** mean when they refer to gender? You said, "The point is that "gender" meaning "gender identity" and "gender" meaning "gender roles" are different and incompatible definitions," - well, yes, that is true, but not relevant if the terms are not used that way. The fact that you found a few people being sloppy does not change the fact that gender is a sociological concept that means something other than gender identity.
See [here}(https://open.lib.umn.edu/sociology/chapter/11-1-understanding-sex-and-gender/)
and here
and here
and, the whole last part of your post seems to be about something else - For example, I don't understand the relevance of the quote, "The idea that science can make definitive conclusions about a person’s sex or gender is fundamentally flawed."
Finally, the declaration from Deanna Adkins is about justifying sexual reassignment surgery:
characteristics.
outward expressions of the person’s gender identity and bringing the body into alignment with that identity to the extent deemed medically appropriate based on assessments between individual patients and their medical and mental health providers. These treatments have been very successful.
appropriate medical course is to re-assign or re-classify the individual’s sex to align with gender identity.
So, when she says that "From a medical perspective, the appropriate determinant of sex is gender identity" she is not saying that gender identity = sex; she is saying that gender identity is the determinant of what sexual organs doctors should give to patients who are transgender or who were given surgery as infants because they had both types of primary sexual characteristics.
The point reiterated across the conversation is that there is strategic equivocation between the "gender identity" and "gender roles" definitions of gender used by trans-activists. (Both in what definitions is explicitly stated and what definitions are implicit in how they use the word.) I have no idea how you think that point is contradicted by them sometimes saying one of the two definitions being equivocated. What it does contradict is your claim that "Gender is not used to mean gender identity."
No, the classification of which sex someone is by gender identity is regardless of having had surgery or any other traits besides gender identity.
Again, she seems to me to be clearly talking purely in the context of deciding whether or not to perform gender-reassignment surgery.
Not in the original post. The original post, IIRC at this point, claimed or implied that sex and gender mean the same thing. And see my previous post, in which I said:
In other words, the original post seemed to say, not trans activists engage in strategic equivocation, but rather that their claims are wrong or even nonsensical, even when read in the most sympathetic way possible. And, as I read that post, that argument was based on a conflation of "gender" and "gender identity." (or perhaps it was "sex" and "gender'). Hence, I merely pointed out that the claims of trans-activlsts are not intrinsically wrong; they are intrinsically wrong only under the vernacular understanding of "gender," one which is not normally used in sociology, nor by the many pro-trans sources I have cited. Is it possible that you are correct that some trans activists sometimes use the term differently, as part of a rhetorical strategy? Sure. But, again, that is not the original claim that I took issue with.
So, basically, I think we are arguing about two different things.
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