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I don't believe that men can be women either. I get where it comes from - the left believes in reality being socially constructed and in wise experts -, the more they freak out the normies the wiser. Trans stuff is amplified for depopulation purposes, to make money in the medical industrial complex, to give more power for government to intrude in the family, etc. Demons inventing nukes, now that's an interesting new delusion.
That's not an axiomatic belief, it's a derived belief based on your definitions of "man" and "woman," which in turn descend from your beliefs about the duties and privileges a society should afford to members of each sex, which in turn descend from your beliefs about the optimal way to organize society, which in turn descend from... and so on and so forth.
I hate to make this a bravery debate, but that statement doesn't actually convey anything concrete about your beliefs, it just marks you as part of a particular ingroup. If you taboo'd the words 'man,' 'woman,' 'male,' and 'female,' you could actually have a productive discussion with leftists about whether people should be empowerd to advertise their sexual preferences via their mode of dress... about how we should create divisions within sporting leagues to balance inter-competitor fairness, the enjoyment of the audience, the marketability of particular sports... about the minimum physical capabilities we want in our soldiers... and so on.
I doubt you'd change your mind, or the liberal's mind, but "men can't be women" and "everyone is valid" are both equivalently vacuous statements that boil down to, "my view on the ideal distribution of responsibility and privilege is correct."
This is false. My definition of "man" and "woman" has nothing to do with duties and privileges a society should afford to members of each sex, and believing that it does already effectively means believing that men can be women relative to my definitions.
To the extent you could have a reasonable exchange of ideas with a person like that, those ideas would not be representative of what is actually being pushed by their political establishment. This person would not acknowledge what the establishment is actually doing, instead they would constantly sane-wash it into something palatable. If you provide evidence that the sane-washed version ins't what's being pushed, and the version you're objecting to is, two things might happen depending on the temperament of the person: conversion ends, or they'll the thing they just swore isn't happening is actually good. I don't think that's a productive conversation.
You're assuming people here are siloed off in an echo-chamber. Please consider the possibility that we've been having these conversations for a long time, and what you claim simply does not fit our experience.
Why are you conflating liberals with leftists?
Unless you want society to treat men and women exactly the same, then yes, it does. Alternatively, if you do want perfect egalitarianism, why do you care how "man" and "woman" are defined? They become just arbitrary streams of phonemes used to categorize different fuzzy phenomena, like arguing over whether a virus is "life" or "nonlife."
I'm a Roman Catholic. I care about the definition of "man" and "woman" because I believe men and women have different divinely-ordained privileges and duties. So as a society, it's important for us to define the meaning of those terms correctly so we can effectively promote said privileges and duties. But it would be ridiculous to expect, say, a Jain, to have the same idea of what those privileges and duties are, even if they concede that they exist in the first place. Their fundamental beliefs about the nature of god are wrong, and what I hope to change. But until I do, their derived beliefs are presumably self-consistent and therefore unassailable ... unless I can convince them that within their own moral framework, they should alter their behavior.
The same logic applies to convincing people who believe in gender self-identification*. You're making some claim that it's futile to meet them where they are because doing so doesn't shift them from supporting a particular political establishment... and you substantiate that claim by pointing to personal experience of debating people who support gender self-identification. But it's clear that you haven't been meeting them where they are, by the very fact that you're conceiving of this as a duel between opposing political establishments. There's a wide variety of underlying views about sex, gender, and culture which people negotiate in different ways. For just the bathroom-debate and sports-debate alone, you can come up with three different pro-transgender combinations that must necessarily derive from completely different worldviews. And since those three worldviews are part of the same political establishment, they're all fighting each other, all the time, on the inside of their filter bubbles. They each have some idea of what the "party line" is, and probably they all think it's wrong and they're right.
* I was using "leftist" and "liberal" as a shorthand for this, though I admit the groups don't all map onto each other.
No, sir. It doesn't matter whether we live under TradCath divinely ordained gender-complementarity, uno-reverso Amazonian matriarchy, or full-blown egalitarianism, my definition of "man" and "woman" stays exactly the same. My views on what their rights and duties are may vary, but a man is a man under TradCathism, matriarchy, or egalitarianism, and a woman is a woman under all 3 as well.
I don't see how my conception of this exchange means I'm not meeting them where they are. Even the most unpopular policies from your list are currently in place and active all throughout the west, which means where the liberals currently are has little relevance on the rules imposed on us. That is determined by their political establishment, not by them. What's more, once they realize their views don't conform to their establishments, like I said, they will either drop off from the conversation, or turn on a dime, and endorse the establishment view.
Which is quite a bit of an issue. I rate my chances of having a reasonable (though not necessarily productive) conversation with a liberal, far higher than I do with a leftist (unless it's one of those old-school /r/stupidpol types)
Then you have confused the map for the territory. There's no point litigating what a "man" and a "woman" is just to change an entry in a dictionary. A definition is a tool, constructed to serve some particular personal or social end. If your definitions do not change when your goals and understanding of the world do, they are useless. If your definitions do not influence how you think and act, they are useless. Definitions do not exist in an abstract void-- they are the cognitive tools with which we understand and classify the world, so we can come to particular decisions and conclusions.
It looks like you still think, "meeting them were they are" means discussing the same object-level policy preference. (In this case, things like, "should transgender women be allowed in women's sports.) But that's way above the level of discussion I'm talking about! Before you can have a productive conversation about that, you need to have a conversation about what a "man" and a "woman" are... and before you can have a conversation about that, you need to have a conversation about why you would want to define the terms "man and woman" in the first place, and what goals we're trying to achieve by creating these definitions. That is to say, you need to have to conversation we're having right now.
If you just come at it from the level of, "men can't be women," and then try to have a discussion about the bathroom question, of course it's going to be unproductive. You say, "the political consensus you support wants trans women in bathrooms, but you don't," and think you're pointing out a contradiction between what they believe and what the establishment believes about the nature of men and women. But instead, they're just going to assume that they share the same fundamental values with their establishment, and consequently that said establishment (that they trust more than you) must have some information they don't about how allowing trans women in bathrooms actually serves that shared fundamental value better. No wonder you walk away frustrated!
On the contrary, definitions shouldn't be put the in service of a particular goal, they're basic building-blocks of sense-making. I can have different personal and/or social ends, and a constant definition makes it a lot easier to reason about which ones are more desiderable for me. It's the fluid definition that's useless.
Also, I think this pretty much vindicates my earlier prediction that your definition effectively means you think men can be women.
No, I don't. Their actions regarding policies are just a verification mechanism for whether or not I met them where they are.
First of all, do you have any idea how evasive progressives are about this question? There's literally a movie about it
Secondly, actually according to your approach to definitions, trying to decouple definitions from personal and social ends (i.e.: "object-level policy preferences") is pointless, because definitions are put them in order to reach a particular end to begin with. You literally say that in the following sentence.
Sorry, but you're not meeting me where I am. That's not how I approach these conversations at all. I can argue for my position even after tabooing all those words, like you originally suggested.
That's perfectly fine though, but if it's the case, is it too much for them to just say that?
By the way, you seem pretty convinced that you understand mine, and the hypothetical progressive's approach very well. What would the world have to look like for you to change your mind, and end up believing that my description of how progressives think is more accurate?
That is a particular goal you're putting your definitions in service of. If defining something changes how you sense the world around you, then how you define things becomes a question of how to optimally sense the world... which is downstream from other goals and priorities you have.
Either that statement uses my definition of "man" and "woman," in which case it's false, or it's using your own, in which case it completely fails to communicate any information.
What?
Policies are a means to an end, not an end in and of themselves. Obviously once you decide on an end, then it makes sense to talk about policies, but until then it's pointless. Your experience of talking with gender-ideology advocates differs from mine because you insist on talking policy without understanding goals, and the glib little propaganda piece you linked falls into the exact same failure state.
Okay, let's do that. My position is:
I believe God created humans with various differences in their biology so that they might each carry out their piece of the divine plan. Acting to serve the diving plan, and encouraging others to do so, is virtuous. The terrestrial authority on said plan is the Catholic Church, so we should behave ourselves and organize society in accordance with the church's decrees, in particular by promoting or discouraging certain behaviors based on the presence and function of reproductive biology.
... and way downstream of all that, you get to specific policy prescriptions about, for example, what clothing is modest and immodest based on someone's biological sex. But you also get a mix of prescriptions and glaring-lack-of-prescriptions for how exactly a government should or shouldn't interfere with the business of enforcing morality. And I don't think a non-catholic government has the correct moral authority to legislate what sports teams do to make money or who's allowed in which bathrooms based off a non-catholic, non-consensus over gender and what the purpose of defining it is.
I'm not sure, because doing that requires us to exchange actual information first. I think we're arguing on completely different levels because we can't agree on terminology.
You keep criticizing me for how I argue with progressives without understanding where they're coming from, but you're not really practicing what you preach. Instead of listening to how I see and use definitions, it sounds like you're a lot more interested in telling me how I should see and use them.
I'm trying to tell you - it doesn't change how I sense the world around me. I can substitute my definitions for yours, or anyone else's, and the way I see the world will stay the same. It's useful to have symbols in order to reason about reality, but what what symbols are assigned for what is not a big deal, I can do substitutions in my head with little effort.
Ok, maybe I misunderstood something you said, let's go over this again:
I said my definition of "man"/"woman" is independent of the social order I, or the person in question, is living under. Your response seems to be arguing that this makes my entire approach to definitions wrong, because if what I don't change what I consider to be a "man" or "woman" depending on the social order I'm under, that makes those definitions useless. I don't know what other conclusion to draw from that, other than that a useful approach to definition necessitates that the same person can be a man in one social order and a woman in another. If you didn't mean to say that, than I honestly don't know what your response has to do with what I said.
Let's say you tell me "I'm for equality between the sexes", and because I'm cynical by nature, I don't believe you and suspect that this is something you want only for your own benefit. But then I see you advocating for something that would put you at a disadvantage, and benefit the opposite sex. That's an indication that I haven't met you where you are, and I should adjust my perception of you.
Your argument went:
If policies are a means to an end, and definitions are explicitly created is services of particular ends (see also: "A definition is a tool, constructed to serve some particular personal or social end.") then decoupling definitions from policies is a largely fruitless task. The only people who can have a productive conversation this way, are people who already signed on for the same end goals (except they won't even kno.
I don't see how. People should be able to answer a simple question like regardless of their preferred policies, or the end goals they're trying to reach. My views on this issue are more or less opposite to yours, we have to start with the definitions, in order to make sure we're even talking about the same thing. From there we can try to find out if we agree or disagree on questions of end goals or the means to achieve them.
On the issue of sports, my position is that the differences in reproductive biology correlate with a whole swath of physical capabilities, such that putting the group with one set of reproductive characteristics against another, will put one of them at a massive disadvantage, and physical danger.
On the issue of prison much the same arguments apply, except on top of them there's the risk of not only physically maligning prisoners of a group with certain reproductive characteristics, but subjecting them to the risk of sexual assault.
On the topic of medical interventions, I believe they need to be stopped because they don't meet basic medical ethics standards. People are being encouraged to participate in what is effectively a medical experiment, without being informed that this is what they're signing up for. This is particularly egregious when it comes to children, but even cases of adults aren't ethically in the clear.
The transgender debate touches on many other issues like education or parental custody, but this should be enough to demonstrate that what you said about definitions is wrong. I argue for my views even with the words tabooed, and it makes no difference to me what definitions we use.
Governments have been legislating on what people are allowed to do to make money, and how, since we had governments. Unless you're a hardcore libertarian or an ancap, I will need some more meat on the argument for why this is where we must draw the line on government intervention.
I don't think we've been arguing over the meaning of any particular word.
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That's a bunch of postmodern second-hand lesswrong rhetoric meant to let the camel's nose into the tent. Now the camel is halfway in and kids are being sterilised and/or taken away from parents who "don't affirm their gender". Let's get the camel back out.
You're trying to fix the debate around your particular framing, but if you are actually correct that's wholly unnecessary.
And anyways, convincing people to have a "traditional" views about what a man and women are doesn't even prevent kids being sterilized or being abducted from their parents. So it's doubly useless to argue from a position of privileging your own moral framework. You not only fail to convince people to adopt said framework, you also fail to make progress on the object level issue.
Here's an example: I was arguing with my girlfriend about transgender people in women's sports. She's "pro," I'm a muddled sort of "anti."* I eventually discovered she held her position because she genuinely didn't believe that men had any advantage over women besides height and weight-- and that existing sex segregation was actually the result of discrimination against women. She actually thought women would do fine in men's sports, if they weren't excluded from tryouts, or something. So none of my appeals to fairness, or justice, or even entertainment value were working on her, because they were all made from a framing that she viewed as essentially incoherent. I eventually got her to concede that, were we to have true co-ed competitions at an elite level, and men consistently won, then it would make sense to keep males, including transgender ones, out of women's sports.
That's what it took to get the object-level issue resolved, and in the process I saw that currently-intransversible gap between our frameworks. Before I can even get her to care about the higher male genetic propensity for sexual assault, I'd need to convince her it was genetic in the first place, rather than culturally mediated. And in particular, to someone who believes most observed differences between sexes are due to cultural factors rather than genetic, it would seem trivially obvious that changing their cultural presentation of gender is changing their gender, because gender is all culture in the first place.
Anyways, altering your body is a natural right, in that it has no external victims and requires active government intervention to stop. Natural rights can be exercised poorly, but that doesn't stop us from having them. Parents have a justifiable authority to restrict the rights of their children, but the government doesn't have that right on their behalf. By the same token, government doesn't have leave to interfere with a parent's justifiable authority to restrict the rights of their child. So the hypothetical people you're arguing with are wrong, but you are too.
* I don't think "transgender women are women," but also I'm not really in favor of women's sports? So it's like, whatever to me. I don't judge sporting organizations for just doing whatever is going to get them the most viewers and therefore the most money.
Well, that's just plain nuts.
Why not? It bans tattoos for kids and FGM. Preventing child abuse is one legitimate government functions under minarchism, so if government is to exist at all it should do that.
Yeah, she's smart but also kind of naive. Honestly I think it's cute, and ironical male cynic + female idealist is a very functional set of traditional gender roles.
Parents have the justifiable authority to restrict rights, not to violate them. People have the right to, say, cut off their thumbs as a political protest. Parents should justifiably be empowered to prevent their kids from doing so. Parents do no have the right to cut off their child's thumbs as a political protest. Parents can assent to their kid wanting to cut off their own thumbs-- but in cases like this, where it's unlikely that the average child would actually ever want their thumbs cut off, it would be justifiable for the government to introduce intermediaries (child psychologists, judges) to mediate whether the child had genuinely come to desire that of their own volition and with an understanding of the costs and benefits.
With regards to cutting-off-thumbs specifically I suspect the intermediaries would almost always find against letting the child cut off their thumbs, and additionally find evidence of child abuse... but for less clear-cut (hah!) scenarios, like administering hormone blockers, tattoos, and sweet-sixteen double eyelid surgery, I could see the intermediaries allowing the procedure in many cases.
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I believe none of those are the reasons, though they're close.
It's not "in order to depopulate", it's "because we don't hold population as a virtue, it fails to apply as an argument to prevent this".
You think the average leftist cares about making big medical companies money?
I think this is a general mistake with attributing intentions to other people. Leftists don't think trans is good because it lets them strengthen the government's intrusion, they think the government being able to intrude is good because it lets them support trans kids.
If X has the result of "Y", while you think "anti-Y", it's common to say "they're doing X to support Y." But those disagreements are very often a question of relative ranking of X and Y; it's usually "they think X is more important than Y, so that they will accept an anti-Y result to bolster X". Compare pro-life vs anti-life, pro-choice vs anti-choice.
There are both true believers and cynical actors pushing any particular policy, like bootleggers and baptists both being pro prohibition as a classical example.
Well sure, but it's still wrong to say that baptists are pro-smuggling.
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Fundamentalist Christian memes being used as explanations by people who may not 100% practice fundamentalist Christianity is not that odd. These are elites but not part of respectable society, after all.
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Again, do you laugh at Simulation Theory? It used to be a reasonably high-status talking point in the rationalist community.
No.
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