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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   33924 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025

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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"

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.

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.

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)

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 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.

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)

Thank you for the clarification, I wasn't aware.

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