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PaperclipPerfector  11d ago (text post)   34037 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025

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The fact that Jack Lasota is a man and not a woman seems like an important fact about the world for us to know.

I think referring to Lasota as a transwoman is sufficient to convey that fact.

For the people that believe transwomen are women, they can infer that.

For the people that believe transwomen are men, they can infer that too.

From a flow of logic perspective, we could say that the node for transwoman is strictly upstream of both of these possible inferences. That makes it strictly more powerful as far as conferring facts.

I don't really think, however, that this is at all about denotative facts in a way that can be usefully answered by information theory. Language isn't entirely (or even primarily) about conferring facts -- and on connotative ground, neither set of people will concede.

The most I'm willing to defend here is that you should probably just say "Lasota is a transwoman". That does not require you to sayanything you think is wrong nor does it require you to conceal any facts about the world, nor does it deceive any of your readers. That is probably the best we're going to do about it.

Do you perceive bad actors and slippery slopes to be a problem? If so, how do you defend against them?

The cleanest path I've found about bad actors is simply to say is a bad actors and to intimate that because " are people" and "some fraction of people are " that "some fraction of are ".

For the people that believe transwomen are men, they can infer that too.

Surely by using the term 'transwoman' you're alrady ceding the field to the transactivists? The term implies that the person is a) in some way a woman and b) that it is possible for a human to transition between the sexes.

My preferred term is 'man in a dress'*, which may not involve any emotional cosseting of the individuals involved, but at least is completely unambiguous as to what we are actually talking about.

  • A term which I was recently surprised to hear my relatively right-on sister use. Apparently our family's tendency to speak frankly overpowered any political considerations.

Given that "trans women don't owe you femininity", "man in a dress" is a standard even many self-proclaimed trans women conspicuously fail to meet. Even my very trans-affirming brother and sister will cop to being a bit exasperated when one of their friends "comes out" as trans and refuses to change their wardrobe or even to shave their beard.

Gender-criticals use the term "trans-identified male/female" (TIM, TIF).

Surely by using the term 'transwoman' you're alrady ceding the field to the transactivists? The term implies that the person is a) in some way a woman and b) that it is possible for a human to transition between the sexes.

I don't think so. It is objectively true that some people claim to transition genders and just as objectively true that many do not see this as legitimate, or indeed as even sane. The sentence "Transwomen claim to be women but are not" uses the term and clearly doesn't cede anything -- it can't possibly be that the term itself is capitulation.

My preferred term is 'man in a dress'*, which may not involve any emotional cosseting of the individuals involved, but at least is completely unambiguous as to what we are actually talking about.

If we're being honest, it's no less ambiguous than "transwoman" as to the actual natal sex of the individual.

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