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But this is just begging the question, isn't it? It's like Byzantine Christian monothelitites saying "I wish we could all just agree that Jesus' nature is Man but his hypostasis is Divine". To even get into the hypostasis debate is to concede to your interlocutor's point.
The correct response to the Byzantine Christian monothelitites is "hypostasis is just some term you made up to try and make yourself sound smart and smuggle in a bunch of theological assumptions in by connotation, Jesus was just a guy in a robe, he was born a Man and he's stuck as a Man only, that's just biology for ya, sorry, he doesn't get to be Divine by any measure even if he and you really really want him to be.'
You can probably see where I'm going with this but in the interest of plain speaking, the correct response to the gender theorists is "gender is just some term you made up to try and smuggle in a bunch of ideological assumptions in by connotation, Emerald Treespirit is just a guy in a robe, he was born a Man and he's stuck as a Man only, that's just biology for ya, sorry, he doesn't get to be a woman by any measure even if he and you really really want him to be.'
There is no such thing as gender, the way you act is contingent on the hormones in your brain and the hormones in your brain are contingent on your chromosomes. A man acting weird is a man acting weird, not a man filling the social role of a woman (or being the Messiah).
I feel like no smuggling needs to be done. If we taboo the word "gender", I feel like I can build up more or less the same concept from the concept of an "adoptive sex." By analogy with adoptive parents - normally parenthood is biological, but we have carved out a social/legal form of "parenthood" for adoptive parents. So too - normally sex is biological, but we have carved out a social/legal form of "sex" for adoptive men/women.
I think even if you're just being descriptive, "adoptive sex" is real. The federal government, and most states allow you to legally change your documented sex - so if one wanted to be a translegalist (= a person is validly trans if they have formally, legally transitioned) then I think everything would work fine. I think translegalism avoids many of the issues with the identification-only standards, and works better than other de facto standards like a "passing" standard, or a transmedicalist standard. I've circled around the idea of considering myself a translegalist, who extends pronoun and nickname hospitality to people who haven't legally transitioned, or who have no plans to ever legally transition.
This kinda supports exactly the point I am trying to make. Adoption is explicitly a legal fiction: it exists because you want do do something that you know is physically and/or logically impossible (that is, retroactively change someone's parentage), and adoption is just a way of telling lawyers "pretend you don't see the impossibility". Which is possibly fine for lawyers, but as someone who's trying to cleave reality at the joints (and/or arrange a blood transfusion), the scientifically correct answer is once again "No, I will not play your kayfabe, he's not your dad and no piece of paper can make it so, no matter how much state power you array behind it".
The government of Oceania can pass as many laws as it wants that 2+2=5, but paper ain't worth much.
I agree with your assessment if we're carving reality at the joints, but legal fictions are important in people's lives. If legal fictions are descriptively in favor of translegalism, then it matters a lot to how trans people can live their lives. You don't have to believe adoptive parents are biological parents to believe that the legal regime around adoption has a lot of effect on the lives of all the people involved in adoption.
Essentially, I think there are two separate questions here:
What legal barriers, or legal support is there for changing one's documented sex?
What do trans people believe that makes them want to change their documented sex?
Obviously, the main disanalogy between adoptive sex and adoptive parenthood is in the participants' explanation of what they are doing, and why they are doing it. Adoptive parents understand that they were not "parents" in any sense before adoption, and that the act of the court is the thing granting legitimacy to their claim of "parenthood." Adoptive men/women on the other hand, often claim that they have always been their adoptive sex in some sense, and are merely seeking medical, social and legal recourse to reflect this personal belief.
But I'm not sure if that difference matters in practice. The law can be relatively agnostic to the why of people transitioning - I'm sure a lot of adoptive parents' desire to adopt comes from a religious background, but the state shouldn't have to decide that metaphysical question before allowing them to adopt. Similarly, I think the metaphysical claims of many trans people (that they either have a soul/mind of their adoptive sex, or that they have a brain more in line with their adoptive sex) is kind of a side issue to the first question. I'm okay with considering this almost a religious question (I don't believe in souls, and a lot of the brain evidence is pretty mixed) and moving on with my life. I feel like my translegalism+hospitality approach lets me see reality at its joints just fine, while still allowing people some freedom to live their lives the way they want to.
When I read the italicized bit, I immediately thought of foster parents, who form a sort of intermediate case--they clearly have some of the rights and responsibilities of parenthood, but not to the same permanent extent as adoptive or natural parents. If someone were to ask me, "are foster parents a subset of parents?" I'd say...kind of? For some purposes yes, other purposes no?
Do you think this fits into the adoptive sex metaphor?
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If it could be experimentally demonstrated that certain males experiencing gender dysphoria do in fact have unusually high levels of oestrogen in their brains compared to the cis male baseline (e.g. a comparable mechanism to how prenatal endocrine influences sexuality), would this provide a biological underpinning to the transgender paradigm, in your view?
No.
My Popperian falsifyability criteria are as follows:
Levels of neural estrogen equal to or higher than cis females.
Levels of neural testosterone equal to or less than cis females.
Research not performed in The Current Year (given the large ideological incentives for researchers to massage the figures in a pro-trans direction in The Current Year)
With you on points #1 and #2. You lost me on point #3. I don't believe that every neuroscientific study published in 2022 is automatically garbage, even if many (or most) of them are.
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Historical precedent is that there is such a thing as gender, in the definition of "social role strongly defined by sex yet not entirely contingent on it". Sure, modern progressives wouldn't want Ancient Greece's gender roles, but once we've established that such a thing exists the rest is just haggling over the price.
There's no historical precedent for the divine.
No, I do not grant your premise. As [another post which I can no longer find] remarks, the wounded octopus is not a septopus; nor is the crossdressing man a demigirl. The determination to define this behaviour as a whole new axis instead of a pathology on one axis is precisely what I object to.
This seems like the worst possible angle of attack given that there is tremendous historical precedent for the divine. "What is the sun and why do those stars move faster than those other stars?" is a question that demands an answer any time anyone looks up, and it's what led all historical human cultures down the divine rabbit hole. "Why do 0.001% of men want to wear skirts?" is not a question which anyone has been required to consider until modernity, an for such rounding errors and answer of "idiopathic madness" seems satisfactory.
It is only slightly less modern than trans ideology to consistently think of men and women as something that is immutable from birth. The expression "a real man" would not exist if a penised-and-testiculed fertile male's manhood could not be in question.
DOES the expression exist in any language other than English? That mongrel tongue cobbled together from the detritus of four other languages and thus should not be particularly expected as being first for purpose?
Anyway, even if it does, this is a tremendous stretch. You're taking as literal that which is figurative. That the phrase "a real man" exists does not imply that the insulters really believe that the object of their mockery might be "an egg", or whatever the term is for an undiscovered trans-woman; or even that they believe such a thing is even logically possible. When I call my little brother "a stinky booger" this doesn't mean I believe that it is genuinely possible that a 50kg pile of dried mucous could be perambulatory.
Yes.
I'm taking statements about one's social role and status as something that was apparently really fucking important back in the day.
No, they probably didn't believe that specific thing, I already said the gender role climate wasn't what it's like today. It did exist, though. I'm confident that when someone said "man" in the era I'm talking about (hell, such societies still exist), they meant not "adult human male" but "human male who met all the social criteria to be called a man, optionally past puberty". The rest is haggling over the price.
People have accept your premise, for the rest to be haggling over the price.
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That's a pretty strong claim. So you believe that all gendered behavior is 100% in our chromosomes, and 0% socialized?
I am sure you can see the difficulty in asking a person who has just staked out the position "there is no such thing as gender" a question "So you believe that all gendered behaviour..."
Is this a question can be coherently rephrased with the g-word under taboo?
Okay, let me rephrase: do you believe that all behavioral differences between men and women are 100% determined by our chromosomes?
We're not on reddit anymore, we don't have taboo words. You're going to have to explain the relevance to me, though.
Re: taboo - I think they were referring to this old rationalist chestnut.
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Your last paragraph implies that once someone is on hormone replacement therapy we should consider them transitioned, is that your intent?
There is no such thing as hormone replacement therapy.
There is a thing that is called hormone replacement therapy, but it's a misnomer, because it is actually hormone supplementation therapy.
Swimming in biogenic testosterone + supplemental estrogen is not the same as swimming in just biogenic estrogen.
Also:
There is much uncertainty about the degree to which injected supplemental hormones can cross the blood-brain barrier, so they may well not be great at influencing behaviour
Hormones have a profound developmental effect on the brain as well as an acute effect at the time of injection. Therefore unless you've been taking them... in utero since conception, your ship has already sailed.
Yes transwoman on HRT do have somewhat different hormone profiles than ciswomen but they also certainly have different hormone profiles than cismen So if we use the framework that hormone profile determines gender, cismen, ciswomen, transmen and transwoman should all be 4 distinct gender clusters and in fact you can add a 5th for bodybuilders on AAS. You can call us super-males.
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