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I'm not sure that I've heard the objective, scientific meaning of "man" and "woman" that doesn't fall prey to the Diogenes-style "behold Plato's man" objection.
I think a gamete-based definition is a strong option (and Trump seems to agree, based on his EO) or a cluster-of-traits definition. But even those have their flaws.
And even aside from core definitions, I think this ignores the way words often operate at many levels. A "bear" is centrally an animal, but if I call a bear-shaped toy or a fictional bear character a "bear", I'm stretching and skewing the word in a way that is immediately intuitively understandable to an English speaker, even though in a real, literal sense I'm not actually talking about any kind of bear at all.
A "woman" could centrally be an "adult human of the sex that produces large gametes", and we could still allow for stretched usages like calling a particular type of game piece in a board game a "woman", or granting trans women the status of honorary "women."
Sure, but when you start pretending the teddy bear toy is exactly the same as a live bear animal, and demand everybody must treat them exactly the same or face exile from the society, people are entitled to push back. There might be niche meanings and specific contexts where word meanings are stretched, but that's not what the controversy is about. The controversy is about applying that stretched niche maybe-sometimes-acceptable-if-you-squint-hard-enough meaning to all contexts and using cultural and legal and governmental coercion to suppress those who point out it makes no sense, or even just dare to discuss it instead of worshipping it. When we get rid of this - and we are in no way there right now - then we can go back to discussing which exactly rare and niche contexts we can recognize and how much stretching and squinting is appropriate.
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Such as?
While being broadly supportive of the definition of biological sex in Trump's EO, I touched on some of my reservations here.
Basically, it just seems obvious to me that the gamete definition of sex fails to create a two sex system, which seems to be a desideratum for a lot of anti-trans people. There are three natural gamete types in humans: type one produces small, mobile gametes, type two produces large gametes, and type three produces no gametes. Turning this into a two-sex model seems to require injecting a kind of Platonism into things, which is anti-empirical.
That is, the claim seems to be something like, "In some ideal sense separate from the raw biological reality of their situation, this person with Turner syndrome who produces no gametes, is actually a woman, even though womanhood is defined by producing large gametes, and they do not do this."
But if we're going to get Platonic with it, why couldn't we also say, "In some ideal sense separate from the raw biological reality of their situation, this transsexual person who produces small gametes, is actually a woman, even though womanhood is defined by producing large gametes, and they do not do this."
Put another way, I don't actually think the concept of a "defective woman" is actually scientific. It involves adding information to a raw, empirical reality in an undisciplined and unjustified way.
As for cluster definitions, I think the biggest objection is that they're "inelegant" and don't actually seem to do the thing we want to do, which is provide an easy membership test we can just apply to any new object in order to determine what category it belongs to. "Naturally produces small gametes" is an easy membership test. "Enough of their traits (chromosomes, anatomy, SRY gene, hormones, etc.) point in the right direction" is barely a test at all, even if 99+% of people are easily classified.
To me, it just seems intuitive that "this person possesses all of the traits we associate with members of category A but suffers from a medical condition which prevents them from producing large gametes, but for convenience's sake we'll include them in category A even though one could strictly argue they really belong in category C."
I mean, placing women with Turner syndrome in the category "women" makes the most pragmatic sense: virtually of the medical, psychological, criminological, physiognomy, sporting, sexual etc. predictions we would make about a "conventional" woman apply just as well to a woman with Turner syndrome (open to correction on this if women with Turner syndrome have some huge advantage in long-distance running or something). If literally the only predictive difference between members of category A and members of category C is that the former can get pregnant and the latter can't, but they are otherwise identical, it just seems inefficient to create a whole separate category. A rube with a battered corner is strictly speaking a separate shape from a conventional rube, but it's close enough that if rubes with battered corners only appear in 1 out of every 3,500 rubes, it would be inefficient to create a separate category.
Meanwhile, what you're proposing is "this person possesses none of the traits associated with members of category A (except claiming to experience a "subjectively felt sense of category A membership", which the vast majority of category A members in time and space do not claim to experience) and all of the traits associated with members of category B - but being placed in category B makes them sad, so we'll place them in category A to spare their feelings." Even though 100% of the predictions we would make about a typical member of category B would predict this person's body and behaviour with greater accuracy. Personally, I don't think a completely typical blegg threatening to kill itself unless you put it in the rube box is actually a good reason to place it in the rube box, if you've been instructed to dispassionately sort bleggs and rubes into the appropriate boxes. "Rube with a battered corner" is a legitimate edge case; "emotionally manipulative blegg" is not.
Ultimately it sounds like you're doing a marginally more sophisticated version of the style of argument that trans activists seem to love so much: "the existence of a few marginal edge cases in your categorisation system proves that it's COMPLETELY useless, so we might as well just throw our hands up and make both categories elective". But unlike you, I am not willing to throw out babies with bathwater. A categorisation system which is more accurate than literally every medical test ever devised is worth hanging onto, a handful of complicated edge cases notwithstanding. And the "complicated edge cases" I'm referring to are intersex people, not uncontroversially male people who claim to be women nonetheless. The categories were made for man to make predictions, and "this person with Turner syndrome is a woman" conveys predictive power in a way that "this person with a penis, testicles and a prostate is a woman" does not. If you want to sort a person into category A, but for all predictive intents and purposes (medical, criminological, psychological etc.) you'll be treating them as a member of category B anyway, it invites the question of why you even bothered to pretend to sort them into category A in the first place. (And I hope you'd have a better answer to hand then "because I fell victim to emotional manipulation".)
The main difference is that I'm genuinely happy with gametes as the best "lie to children" definition of sex. I don't think it's completely useless, anymore than I think "The Earth is a sphere" or the Bohr model of the atom are completely useless.
You simply asked what flaws I thought existed with these models, and I gave my opinion. Plenty of flawed things are still useful, and worthy of being used.
Also, I hope it was clear - I reject the idea that transwomen are biological women. I was just saying if you're going to be a little unprincipled in category construction, you don't have as much room to prevent someone saying you should be even more unprincipled.
There's a ton of differences between Turner syndrome women and the modal woman. People with Turner syndrome have physical differences (low set ears, short stature, lymphodema of the hands and feet), they don't normally undergo puberty, often have issues with spatial visualization and mathematics, and are prone to certain diseases (heart defects, Type II diabetes, hypothyroidism, and conductive hearing loss)
There are degrees of "unprincipled", and I think it's abundantly obvious that my "unprincipled exceptions" result in a category system with vastly greater predictive power than simply making all categories elective.
Thank you for the clarification, I wasn't aware.
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It's whomever produces large or small gametes.
People who don't produce any are, in every case, a defective version of one or the other (yes this includes all types of intersex people). There's no example of true hermaphrodites in humans.
Why does that matter? Because the energetic economics of gamete size determine all the higher levels of abstraction over them. Up and including the forms of deceit you'd need to use to play at Diogenes.
I've actually always felt that this is kind of an odd abstraction from a philosophical stand point, wherever we do it - not just in the trans domain.
If we're talking about the "facts" about a person's biology, then shouldn't we actually talk about the empirical facts?
Like, if we want the central definition of dog to be something like, "Four-legged animal descended from wolves", then it seems a bit odd to me to say that a congenitally three-legged dog is "actually" a defective four-legged animal. It seems to me that it actually is a three legged animal, and while the central definition of dog might have four legs, it is actually fuzzier in the way almost all biological definitions are.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not stupid. I get the idea of human category making involving a central exemplar, and then making accomodations for difference. If I saw a purple horse, I would not lose all sense and go, "What kind of strange creature is this?", but I'd also be prepared to widen my effective definition of horses to include the possibility of non-central horses like a congenitally purple horse, the same way I do for albino or melanistic animals.
It kind of strikes me as a strange sort of epicycle to justify having any definitions at all in the biological space.
Like, by what metric is a person with Turner's syndrome (X0-karyotype) actually a "defective" woman? Sure, she'll have feminine anatomy, but she doesn't naturally undergo puberty and can't produce large gametes. If we're talking about congenital biology, that seems like a natal null to me, and our medical science is currently capable of pushing her body in a more womanly direction. But that was an intervention - it is not natural. How can we say she is a "biological woman", or a "defective biological woman" if we're using the gamete definition of sex? Surely, there would then be some ground to claim that a trans woman is just an extremely defective biological woman by the same token?
If we can admit comparisons and contrasts to the larger class as a non-central example, then it seems to me the limits of inclusion are social willingness and not any "objective" facts about the reference class.
Edit: Typo, flow.
If were trying to be empirical, shoudnt we actually take this as an opportunity to engage in philosophical reflection on what empirical facts really are, and reinterpret scientific findings into a different metaphysics based on that? IDK, but I guess thats what were doing. Topical.
The other way round: we say that dogs have four legs because the three-legged ones are defective. Generally in biology, you can tell that something is defective even if youve never seen the functional version. For example, if I got some species of mammal that youve never seen before, and I cut half its tail off, youll be able to see scar tissue and irregularly ending bones, blood vessels, nerves, etc. and know that its a defective tail. Congenitals defects similarly leave "scars" (sometimes literally if things grow in a very unfortunate way). You can immediately tell the difference between a pygmy and a dwarf for example. One is small, and the other defectively small, even though theyre the same height.
Turners syndrom patients dont produce gametes, but they have defective ovaries. They do not have defective male features.
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Culturally speaking, the alternative way of dealing with the problem of defective people is to put them in their own category.
Occidentals don't like to do this for reasons that take whole books to explain, but if you want to have a third social role made of eunuchs and other infertile people, it has ample precedent.
Biologically speaking however, Turner syndrome women do have female anatomy, which I find is too important to gloss over as you do.
A trans woman isn't a defective woman by this logic because all or most of the other abstractions carried on top of being the one that produces the abundant gamete type still apply. Such as risk taking behavior, for instance.
For the purposes of reproduction it's essential that people who carry the rare gamete are protected and easily identifiable, and most of the objections to muddying those waters come from that base reality. Not from people making themselves eunuchs.
Yeah, when it comes to biological sex, I think a three sex model makes the most sense: male, female, neuter. It just seems like desperate grasping at straws to insist that there are only two sexes, especially when the popular definition seems to be the gamete model (in that it is what Trump's EO uses.)
There are four ways gametes can be present in an individual: small, large, both, and neither. Humans do not naturally produce both gametes, therefore we are left with three categories. Attempts to avoid this conclusion just seem to be socially motivated ways to avoid putting a person in an "othered" category. The category makers would rather someone be a "weird woman" than a third thing that is almost a woman.
Then you could make a natural vs. artificial distinction. Today, we only have artificial neuters, though we have quasi-artificial females (with Turner's syndrome people who are given hormone therapy and possibly IVF with donor eggs still failing to be gametically female, but getting about as close as a human can be to female without being one.) Perhaps some day there will be artificial females and males, but we're not there today.
Well it's not just the popular one, it's the scientific one. When biologists or geneticists refer to sex this is technically speaking what they mean. And it's not a human specific thing.
I think the xx/xy chromosome one is actually more "popular" because this is what people remember from high school and it's true 99% of the time, but sex is not which chromosome you have it's the trait that conditions which type of gametes an organism produces.
Technically speaking it's improper to say organisms that produce no gametes have a "sex" since it's a category error, they don't engage in sexual reproduction and have therefore no such trait. It's like asking what color is the number 42.
But it does work for social purposes, so adding a null option to our boolean is a common implementation detail, but so is defaulting to the previous value or to some readily apparent characteristics when you're not sure.
Are you sure? I've always had the sense that cluster of traits definitions were most common in biology and genetics. While I don't like such definitions as the "lie to children" version we teach most people, I do admit that something like the following process:
Is going to be a fairly reliable method, and a scientist will be able to plug a new data point in and identify what cluster it belongs to the vast majority of the time. It just doesn't really produce an easy, human-learnable rule for dealing with edge cases.
I have considered that, but it doesn't work since Trump's EO eliminates the X category and mandates everyone either be classed as male or female.
No. I am certain.
Administrative sex is a social category that has different imperatives to the scientific definition. The healthcare and genetic identification implications are more important because for the purposes of government, sex bestows special rights and is used to establish identity.
I think the EO has more to do with a reaction to the queer political strategy that expressly attempts to dissolve sex as a category by reducing its political expressions to absurdity. But we're leaving the topic of a coherent definition and entering that of politics.
Bacteria are not of neuter sex, they do not have a sex. It's the bureaucrat that is compelled to fill the empty square on the official document. Not the scientist, not the philosopher.
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Isn't that the very crux of the issue? The big problem for trans activists is that using woman to describe a trans woman isn't immediately intuitively understood. That's why they need to oppress people into it.
Calling an adoptive child "my son", or my wife's mother "mother-in-law" isn't intuitive either. It is a social convention concerning common ways we stretch and skew language.
Calling an adoptive child "my son" is cromulent in the majority of the contexts where it comes up, because a majority of the mind-independent facts about reality conveyed by the term (chiefly, the processes involved in parenting a child) are still highly correlated with the term's usage - and the cases where the distinction matters (medicine, childbirth, cultural/legal distinctions) come up infrequently enough that these contexts typically warrant a clarifying distinction (adopted son), if they're ever mentioned at all.
Calling my wife's mother "mother-in-law" could only be described as unintuitive in the sense that nothing is left to the intuition, because the obvious distinction between objective and intersubjective information is directly encoded in the term.
I'll grant that there are languages and cultures where the same term can be used for "mother" and "mother-in-law", or where it is inappropriate to refer to a ward as "my son", and these use cases feel unintuitive to someone brought up without these linguistic or cultural practices. But I suggest that those languages and cultures arrived at their way of expressing these relationships because some of the mind-independent facts about reality conveyed by the terms in those languages or cultures are also more or less relevant to communication in those languages or cultures. And what's relevant to communication in those languages or cultures has historically been a consequence of many evolutionary adaptations generated by divergent selective pressures, such as geography, resource availability, proximity to other cultures and languages, etc.
I think the extent to which the language is being stretched and skewed in your examples is greatly overstated. Compare with: calling an adoptive child or my wife's mother "my flesh and blood" isn't intuitive, because it's not correlated with the (much more specific) mind-independent facts about reality that this language usually implies. A tenuous argument can be made for the wife's mother, in the sense that a flesh and blood bond is formed through a biological child, but it's indirect enough to be unintuitive. For an adopted child, I can't imagine any usage other than simile or metaphor, which is again indirect enough to be unintuitive. Calling an adoptive child and my wife's mother (with the implied familial relations) "my flesh and blood" is quite a stretch for the language, and we must retreat to subjective experiences (how I feel about the emotional bonds I share with my family) or abstract metaphors (religious covenant) to make sense of it - or maybe it doesn't make sense, and it's a lie.
It is precisely the degree to which the language is stretched and skewed by a non-central usage, relative to the information conveyed by a central usage, that determines how likely we are to permit it into everyday parlance.
With all of that in mind, consider: I've been reading a bunch of your comments to get a better understanding of your model of honorary social statuses, and I think the choice of the word "honorary" adds an implied meritorious connotation that isn't actually present. In my model of communication, languages are locally-optimizing compression schemes for transmitting information, relying on a common set of shared mind-independent facts about reality and presumed-to-be-shared subjective experiences, preferences, and tastes; intersubjective contexts such as culture and law are transforms applied to the language to modify the correlation between terms and the set of objective and subjective information they compress. The primary driver of the evolution of language is communicative fitness, which tends to map more closely to things like efficiency or clarity, than to something like merit. This isn't to say that deliberate linguistic engineering is impossible, or even necessarily unusual; nevertheless, I think a lot of your default examples of "honorary status" are not some top-down special award conferred by society upon the edge cases which then filtered down into everyday parlance, but are instead "close enough" practical communicative terminology that eventually required special intersubjective considerations as the edge cases naturally bubbled up from everyday parlance and encountered gaps, contradictions, and disputes in existing cultural, legal, and societal frameworks. In other words, I think calling this phenomenon "honorary status" inverts cause and effect by implication of merit.
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Calling your adoptive child son and calling your wife's mother mom are exactly intuitive, and perfectly fine for everyday use. They might not happen immediately - the two parties involved have to develop a relationship and a sense of intimacy - but those phrases will be adopted naturally. However when the law and greater society is involved additional distinctions are required, so my son becomes my adopted son and my Ma becomes my mother in law.
And if trans activists had followed that process instead of compelling people to pretend they already had that level of intimacy with a bunch of strangers in wigs, I doubt we'd see the opposition we do today.
Edit: for flow
I suppose when I said "intuitive", I meant that it wasn't something that virtually every human culture would come up with independently.
I would assume virtually every human culture has the concept of "toy animals" or "animal statues", and that in many languages, you might colloquially refer to it as the animal in question.
Given that there are large civilizations without Western-style adoption, like the Islamic world, I take that to be a demonstration that adoptive children are only "intuitive" insofar as one is raised to consider it so.
By that same token, once transness becomes more than an emerging social role, I think it will be equally "intuitive" to consider trans women honorary women in the relevant contexts for a given social milleu. But it is not "intuitive" in the same way animal statues being the represented animal is "intuitive."
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The problem is that transgenders are inconsistent. They'll argue for the strength of definitions when doing so suits them, and for the weakness of definitions when it suits them, and against both whenever it doesn't suit them. They don't care about definitions, they care only about what suits them. They want something they can't have, leaving them to clutch at whatever they can wrest, while ignoring that their taking possession negates any significance.
I'm not sure that I've observed this inconsistency.
What are some instances where you think the definitions are strong, and on trans people's sides that they tend to bring up?
In many ways, the core of my adoptive sex model is one that sidesteps definitions all together. Sure, call trans women "men" if you want - that has absolutely no bearing on whether they're an honorary woman, because honorary statuses exist in the social realm not the empirical realm.
A pretty clear example of this is how depending on what is convenient to attack or defend at the moment, trans activists will switch from "gender and sex are different things" to "trans women are women" which are contradictory positions.
Now, I understand this also stems from internal dissentions between transmeds and tucutes, but I have seen activists from both sides argue both of these despite the logical contradiction. At the end of the day it's hard to reconcile this behavior with anything but a lust for power.
Well, I'm neither a transmed nor a tucute. My socio-legal sex model doesn't even really care about "gender" or "gender identity", though there are certainly comparisons with "honorary sex" within my model. The difference is relationship and emphasis - "honorary sex" is explicitly a social construct built in relation to biological sex.
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It's not something we can know for sure without checking, but my suspicion is that "we'll acknowledge that transwomen are women in a way similar to the Queen in chess being an honorary woman" would be welcomed by people insisting that transwomen are women. For instance, almost no one would bat an eye at someone using "it" to refer to the chess piece, implying that the speaker sees it as an object, whereas TRAs would tend to object to someone using "he" to refer to a transwoman (one who doesn't idioysncratically use masculine pronouns, anyway), implying that the speaker sees him as a man who identifies as a woman.
Besides that, of course there are a whole host of demands about what claiming that transwomen are women imply about rights and privileges transwomen are entitled to, with respect to woman-only spaces that doesn't apply to chess pieces. Since chess pieces aren't sentient or have will, the parallels break down, but to use the other example, when a child accidentally rips open his teddy bear, we don't treat it as if he just murdered his pet. When he doesn't feed it while keeping it constrained in his bedroom, we don't treat it as if he's being neglectful of or cruel to his pet.
I just don't think "transwomen are women by stretching the definition of women, but they're men in every other way we treat them in society" is a position that many people would support, certainly not among TRAs. The central conflict here has little to do with word games.
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Sorry, this is just tired philosobabble, which I have no patience for. All the biological ways to define man and woman agree in >99% of cases, and agree with what humans instinctively know, too. If you want to pretend that obvious things aren't obvious for the sake of your political goals, I'm not going to play along. That's anti-intelligence.
I don't think you can avoid doing a little philosophy when you are talking about rigorous scientific definitions.
I think you and I are in near complete agreement as far as empirically verifiable reality surrounding trans women or biological sex is concerned.
Fair enough. Sorry, I think I reacted too harshly, because it pattern-matched too closely to the pro-trans anti-scientific argument. When dealing with any field of
applied applied physicsbiology, even though it's still "science", your definitions are basically always going to have a little fuzz around them. As you aptly pointed out here, governments should be open to litigation for borderline cases.More options
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