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PaperclipPerfector  23d ago (text post)   29829 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 17, 2025

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Is the economy good?

This takes the cake for the biggest load of nonsense I have ever read. It blusters a lot with only a few actual points made in defence of the notion that government economic statistics failed to capture true economic conditions post-Covid, all of which are very silly indeed.

My colleagues and I have modeled an alternative indicator, one that excludes many of the items that only the well-off tend to purchase — and tend to have more stable prices over time — and focuses on the measurements of prices charged for basic necessities, the goods and services that lower- and middle-income families typically can’t avoid. Here again, the results reveal how the challenges facing those with more modest incomes are obscured by the numbers. Our alternative indicator reveals that, since 2001, the cost of living for Americans with modest incomes has risen 35 percent faster than the CPI. Put another way: The resources required simply to maintain the same working-class lifestyle over the last two decades have risen much more dramatically than we’ve been led to believe.

In the first place I am disinclined to give this any credence because their calculations are very opaque. Even if you got to their website the 'data' section and 'white paper' for their 'True Living Cost' don't seem to give their actual weights or the changes in weightings (other that impressionistic statements like saying that 'luxuries' have been deweighted). However, even if I could trust their numbers it doesn't at all resolve the 'vibecession' question because based on TLC the Trump years were ones of economic decline too. However, the economic discourse in those years was uniformly positive. So what gives?

If you filter the statistic to include as unemployed people who can’t find anything but part-time work or who make a poverty wage (roughly $25,000), the percentage is actually 23.7 percent. In other words, nearly one of every four workers is functionally unemployed in America today — hardly something to celebrate.

Aside from the fairly preposterous gambit of saying that we can count some people in full-time employment as unemployed if their wage is too low (words have meanings, if you want to talk about wages then just do, don't crowbar it in to unemployment figures). More importantly though, what you will see again is that his 'true' unemployment figure tracks exactly the common U-3 figure over the years. So again it's totally worthless in explaining post-Covid dissatisfaction because the post-Covid 'true' rate was actually the lowest it has ever been since his data series starts in the 90s.

Here, the aggregate measure of GDP has hidden the reality that a more modest societal split has grown into an economic chasm. Since 2013, Americans with bachelor’s or more advanced degrees have, in the aggregate, seen their material well-being improve — by the Federal Reserve’s estimate, an additional tenth of adults have risen to comfort. Those without high school degrees, by contrast, have seen no real improvement. And geographic disparities have widened along similar lines, with places ranging from San Francisco to Boston seeing big jumps in income and prosperity, but places ranging from Youngstown, Ohio, to Port Arthur, Texas, falling further behind. The crucial point, even before digging into the nuances, is clear: America’s GDP has grown, and yet we remain largely blind to these disparities.

This is insultingly dishonest. Why does he say 'since 2013' in an article about the post-Covid economy? Because the trend doesn't hold true - after over a decade of sharply rising inequality, the 2021-23 period was actually saw bottom quintile income rise as a proportion of top quintile income.

This article is utterly irrelevant to post-Covid economic perceptions. What is might prove, if one believes the statistics, is that Americans ought to have been pessimistic about the economy throughout the 90s, 2000s and 2010s as well as post-Covid. But they frequently weren't. It still doesn't answer the question of why Americans get specifically upset in the post-Covid period.

What is a woman?

Couldn't resist just dwelling on this for a second too. Now, obviously no-one has to buy into avant-garde views of gender/sex, but to be simply unable to entertain the plausibility of a scheme of gender which includes trans women among women betrays a quite remarkable lack of intellectual imagination, and, frankly, intelligence.

This is talk radio 'why are my enemies all so thick' slop. Take it elsewhere.

90% of the OP is about the current state of Republican epistemology, not the Left. And yet this subthread seems to be determined to prove the very intro it is complaining about.

Couldn't resist just dwelling on this for a second too. Now, obviously no-one has to buy into avant-garde views of gender/sex, but to be simply unable to entertain the plausibility of a scheme of gender which includes trans women among women betrays a quite remarkable lack of intellectual imagination, and, frankly, intelligence.

To be clear, progressives don’t have an answer for this. The case for conservative views on trans is at least coherent enough to put in simple words- a woman is a biologically female adult human, trans women by definition are not that, ergo trans women are not women. The case for progressive views on trans is not that, and the inability to write definitions of ‘woman’ that are both meaningful and trans-inclusive is the reason why.

and the inability to write definitions of ‘woman’ that are both meaningful and trans-inclusive is the reason why.

This is itself a position. When I said 'scheme' I didn't mean a literal definition of woman, I mean a more expansive view of language as a series of context-dependent games. 'Female' and 'adult' themselves have context dependent clusters of meanings, and are not 0/1 binaries. Efforts to nail it down are always doomed.

  • -17

This is itself a position. When I said 'scheme' I didn't mean a literal definition of woman, I mean a more expansive view of language as a series of context-dependent games. 'Female' and 'adult' themselves have context dependent clusters of meanings, and are not 0/1 binaries. Efforts to nail it down are always doomed.

No other ideology I'm aware of resorts to this sort of hogwash when challenged on basic terminology. It's the hallmark of an intellectually derelict movement.

The position that ‘I don’t need a definition because words shouldn’t have meanings’ is, I guess, a position, but it’s not a coherent one.

Efforts to nail [language/meaning/words] down are always doomed.

Can meaning be refined and, albeit imperfect, made more exact?

You mention position but the direction matters too. There is a position where transwomen are not women, and there is a direction that when followed arrives at a point where transwomen are women. That is not the only direction meaning can travel, and that's not the point where that particular direction comes to a rest.

Recasting meaning so as to recategorise transwomen as women isn't bold intellectualism, it's sophism. If it was intellectualism it would pursue the direction until it could travel no further, but it always stops at that. one. point.

Words have meanings, if you want to talk about women then just do, don't crowbar it in to unemployment figures

I mean a more expansive view of language as a series of context-dependent games

Conservatives don't do this due to a "remarkable lack of intellectual imagination", they don't do it due to highly accurate pattern recognition that people who view things this way love to destroy civilization and law and order.

Just because I am able to entertain the plausibility of a scheme of gender which includes trans women among women does not mean I am required to treat as a reasonable position if, after entertaining it, I find it to still be ridiculous. I am able to entertain the notion that the world is ruled by lizardmen as well, fairly consider the evidence on offer, and then conclude that everyone who thinks that is a loon.

I agree that being unable or unwilling to consider if ideas have merit is slop, but no one said the refused to consider if it might be wrong, they just stated it clearly was wrong, just as the lizardman theory clearly is. Declaring that anyone who thinks you are wrong, quite wrong indeed, must just be to stupid or mendacious to even have considered the issue is assuming the conclusion. Take THAT somewhere esle.

The problem though, especially on a forum as partisan as this one, is that things descend very quickly into Bulverism, and more time is spent psychoanalysing your opponents than engaging with them.

  • -14

I don't really have much interest in the underlying psychological reason why people believe that "a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman" is a useful definition of the word "woman". I've spent countless hours immersing myself in these postmodern ideas trying to get my head around these concepts, and I've ultimately concluded that the relevant concepts are simply incoherent. Even if the trans activist movement was exactly as harmless and well-meaning as it purports to be, I still think their beliefs are incoherent and wrong. In much the same way that the concept of transubstantiation would still be incoherent and nonsensical even if no Catholic priest had ever behaved improperly with an altar boy.

more time is spent psychoanalysing your opponents than engaging with them.

Are you suggesting here that one of the ways to detect a conversation heading downwards is that you spend time psychoanalysing your opponents rather than engaging with them? For example, if someone said "My position is correct and anybody who doesn't agree with it is obviously stupid" that would be a sign that they're lowering the quality of the discourse, no?

Couldn't resist just dwelling on this for a second too. Now, obviously no-one has to buy into avant-garde views of gender/sex, but to be simply unable to entertain the plausibility of a scheme of gender which includes trans women among women betrays a quite remarkable lack of intellectual imagination, and, frankly, intelligence.

This is completely missing the point. Most people who are not academics do not live in a world of intellectual imagination, they live in a world full of practical concerns, and these questions need to be boiled down into yes/no policies, procedures, and judgment calls. When a teenager with a penis demands to use the girls locker room, you cannot handwave the issue and appeal to imagination! Do Democrats understand that they are running for control of the government, and not the English studies department?

Sure, but these practical problems are actually utterly irrelevant to the question of who is a woman. Trans women are women but shouldn't be allowed in female changing rooms is a perfectly coherent position. So the teacher or whoever doesn't need to take a position on the nature of womanhood at all.

  • -13

Trans women are women but shouldn't be allowed in female changing rooms is a perfectly coherent position.

Is there any other group of women who are forbidden from using female changing rooms?

I question the utility of changing the definition of words like this if you have to introduce additional epicycles to make sure the practical end result is indistinguishable from what it would have been if you hadn't bothered.

Again, ‘what is a woman?’.

Trans women are women but shouldn't be allowed in female changing rooms is a perfectly coherent position.

The thing is that we will just start using female when we refer to the real deal. Thans women will be women, but no one will give a fuck who is woman, because people will care who is female. Then you will go after the word female and we will switch to womb bearers or whatever.

This mythical beast known formerly as woman will continue to exclude trans, because you can't separate it from biology, no matter how much you try.

True, but also even academics with imagination have defended the idea that trans-inclusive gender schemes are incoherent

Yes but I don't think the author of that article would subscribe to the initial assumption that the reason some defend trans-inclusive schemes is because they are 'entirely disconnected from reality'.

Only those who (erroneously) claim that they have found a solution and predicate their support for various trans policies on transwomen being women in something other than a spurious sense right?

Couldn't resist just dwelling on this for a second too. Now, obviously no-one has to buy into avant-garde views of gender/sex, but to be simply unable to entertain the plausibility of a scheme of gender which includes trans women among women betrays a quite remarkable lack of intellectual imagination, and, frankly, intelligence.

Then why don't you provide such a scheme? Why so few on the left have given precise definition of a woman that got traction. The left keeps extremely vague on the topic what is a woman, the only concrete thing that they say is that trans women are women.

Then why don't you provide such a scheme?

Seconding this challenge. The left has collectively choked to death on the "what is a woman" meme and failed to even articulate any sort of attempt at an answer. Every single time I've ever deployed it anywhere I've gotten a bunch of circular logic and hand-waving in response, and nothing of substance.

It's embarrassing, really. They just have to acknowledge biology for the 5min it takes to write the definition. Is doublethink that hard, or does doing so threaten their social standing or something?

Well, I got none to lose, so why not?

A woman is a human who fits into a cluster typified by certain traits, such as 2X chromosomes, female reproductive organs (vagina, Ovaries, uterus, etc), breasts shaped to emphasize mammaries, the ability to lactate, conceive gestate and give birth to offspring, or else menstruate when not gestating, and to have achieved physical maturity (maximum height, full development of the mentioned features, etc.

The "cluster [...] typified by" part is how you include XY women, metapausal women, women with mastectemies or hysterectemies, and trans women. We're supposed to be good at word-games; can't we just, IDK, italicize cluster and typified by to make it clear that those are the cheatcode, and so that their friends can see what they're up to instead of canceling them like "OMG you said all women can have babies but what about metapausal XY women with hysterectemies?".

Cause, like, if it's that last thing, fair enough, but you do kinda forfeit the claim to being the smart team under those conditions. But if my experience is anything to go by ... yeah, it's that one. :(

circular logic

I refer you to my reply here. "A woman is someone who says they're a woman" is only as circular as "a William is someone who says their name is William", and I don't see why that's a problem. If you object "but then saying 'So-and-so is a woman' doesn't tell you anything else about that person besides this one bit of trivia about how they self-identify" I will yeschad.jpg you.

  • -12

You don't get to self-identify for anything. It's that simple. You say you are a woman? You're not. You say you are a man? You're not. You say you are a William or Katherine? You ain't. You are identified by others as what you are. You can't be Jack for 40 years and suddenly decide to be Bruce, you're just Jack lying about who he is. Ditto for all the gender shit.

If you object "but then saying 'So-and-so is a woman' doesn't tell you anything else about that person besides this one bit of trivia about how they self-identify" I will yeschad.jpg you.

How do they know whether or not they "identify" as a "woman" if that particular word isn't associated with any actual characteristics? You've reduced it to a meaningless noise. If you tell me you're a blorb and when I ask you what that means, you tell me it's anyone who says they're a blorb, you haven't conveyed any information.

I guess the definition that transgender people are actually using, the set of characteristics they compare themselves to in order to determine if this particular word describes their "identity" or not, is... what, a secret nobody needs to know?

Typical nonsense answer on your part, and clearly not a "definition" actually being used by anyone on any side. The one trans people actually employ to make decisions remains unspoken for another day. What a surprise.

If you tell me you're a blorb and when I ask you what that means, you tell me it's anyone who says they're a blorb, you haven't conveyed any information.

No, but if there are millions of self-identified blorbs, you can begin to form a gestalt impression of the sort of aesthetics blorbs are usually into, how they tend to dress, the sorts of interest they tend to have. A person who tells you they're a blorb won't necessarily be saying that they have all the features of the archetypal or median blorb, but they're asking you to look at their behavior relative to the common image of a blorb.

This works very well if you replace "blorb" with something like "punk" or "scene" or "goth". You could get a long way thinking of genders as very large (and as a result very hazily-defined) subcultures. The analogy also helps to explain what a butch transfem means by identifying as female even if she personally keeps dressing quite a lot like a man: picture someone who dresses normally but considers themself "a goth", because they're into goth media; like to hang out with more conventional goths by whom they don't want to be seen as an outsider but just 'one of the gang who dresses a bit weird'; think of goths as "their kind of people"; etc.

tldr: "Keith is goth" clearly means something, even though it doesn't actually tell you any specific thing about what Keith is like besides identifying as goth. (You might think it likely that he wears a lot of black clothing; but he might not! Similarly, if I say "Alice is a woman", it's reasonable to suspect that she has tits, but then again, maybe not.)

I think your example is really bad, because as noted by @FiveHourMarathon, trans is possibly the only subculture in which self-identification is the sole membership criterion. (In this regard it has more in common with a religion than a subculture, and even that's not absolute, as noted by @FiveHourMarathon below.)

In every other subculture (including all of the ones you gave as examples), membership is rigorously gatekept and wannabes will be derided as poseurs for any number of seemingly arbitrary reasons. This is one reason that some subcultures, like gangs, expect members to engage in costly signalling games to demonstrate their commitment to the subculture: all things being equal, a trap musician with facial tattoos or a punk with gauged ears will be presumed to be a more authentic member of the subculture than one without. The fact that there are no costly signals associated with identifying as trans is why it is so susceptible to entryism by bad actors (if one is charitable enough to assume that the bad actors are not the movement's raison d'être).

(In this regard it has more in common with a religion than a subculture.)

Nitpicking: Religions, and society, absolutely gatekeep religious affiliation wherever you accrue benefits from that religious affiliation. Traditionally, vaccine exemptions and Conscientious Objector draft status required a showing of genuine religious faith that had been consistently practiced for a period of time. Getting married Catholic requires you to submit your baptismal paperwork and go to pre-Cana classes. I've never particularly sought religious mutual-aid, but if someone were to reach out to me on the basis of our mutual Catholicism or love for early Black Flag or hatred for the Dallas Cowboys or whatever, there would be a certain degree of gatekeeping involved. Gangs use costly signaling procedures to gatekeep membership because both the gangs themselves and MOPs will be expected to treat you differently because of your gang affiliation, and it is important to keep that from being watered down.

Religions, and society, absolutely gatekeep religious affiliation wherever you accrue benefits from that religious affiliation. Traditionally, vaccine exemptions and Conscientious Objector draft status required a showing of genuine religious faith that had been consistently practiced for a period of time. Getting married Catholic requires you to submit your baptismal paperwork and go to pre-Cana classes.

Fair point. I was thinking more of e.g. a celebrity who announces that they are Buddhist after reading an article about it in a magazine.

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The problem here being that goths and punks are under no obligation to accept other people. They may choose to do so, or not. Subcultures are the location of constant infighting over who qualifies and who doesn't, and different people disagree on it.

The question of definition takes on a different valence when definitions are legally binding and screwing up the definitions can get you into legal or professional trouble.

Subcultures are the location of constant infighting over who qualifies and who doesn't

Yes, but such internal squabbles are generally regarded as silly intra-clique bickering. A non-goth, if he has any sense, will accept no other criterion, if asked if some random person is goth, than "well, do they call themself that?".

So, it only matters to the members of the clique, which is just *checks notes* 50% of the population. Shouldnt be relevant to public discourse then.

But I dont think even outsiders go by self-identification, I would expect them to call people goths for the appearance alone, even if those people themselves disagree. Though they tend include more rather than less. Thats because they dont really care about the subculture, whereas men and women are concerned with each other for obvious reasons. And if there were legal or social rules about goth toleration, obviously it would be different again.

What deference or privileges are expected from goth identification? What's the expected social or professional consequence of addressing a self identified goth as a prep or a jock?

The point at which I'm free to roll my eyes at transwomen claiming to be women, the same way I'm free to roll my eyes at a poseur-punk who doesn't know who Minor Threat is, is the point at which I no longer care about Trans issues one way or the other.

tldr: "Keith is goth" clearly means something, even though it doesn't actually tell you any specific thing about what Keith is like besides identifying as goth. (You might think it likely that he wears a lot of black clothing; but he might not! Similarly, if I say "Alice is a woman", it's reasonable to suspect that she has tits, but then again, maybe not.)

If I ask someone for a definition of the word goth, I expect them to produce something containing at least some actual attributes that I can compare with actual people in order to determine whether it applies. What I don't expect is for them to contort themselves in order to give a "definition" that contains absolutely no actual terms whatsoever, as you've done here.

The transgender movement clearly has some definition of the word "woman" that means something. People are comparing themselves to some set of attributes in order to determine that their identity is expressed by the word "woman" and not "man" or "blorb" or "fish" or anything else.

But apparently the nature of that actual practiced definition is some kind of secret that its advocates refuse to divulge even when loudly challenged on the matter for years on end. Kind of crazy, isn't it? I mean people might disagree vehemently with... say... Marxists or anarcho-capitalists, but at least those people don't start doing a desperate semantic tap dance the moment someone asks them what words like labor or property mean.

I understand your complaint. I think the issue, and what I was trying to get at with the "goth" comparison, is a kind of motte-and-bailey about what we mean by "definition" - broad characterization vs boundary-setting. Being goth is clearly a cluster of characteristics beyond the self-identification tag. However, no one characteristic in that cluster is a clincher - no single feature is individually make-or-break. If I tried to define "goth" as "someone who wears black clothing and vaguely Satanic jewelry" you could find me someone who wears dark purple, red mascara and Egyptian jewelry that would still be recognizable as a goth; and so on for any set of traits. When I tell you "Keith is goth" I am usefully telling you that he probably has some combination of those traits, but there is no specific set of traits other than self-identification by which you could falsify my claim.

The progressive view of womanhood is that it's works this way. "Woman" is a trait-cluster that might include anything from "bald chin" to "likes romance novel" to "likes to be sexually penetrated" to "likely to wear white if gets married" to "has a uterus". Trans women typically try to take on a sufficient number of traits to place themselves firmly within that cluster, even though some of the most common traits (like "has a vagina") are beyond their reach. But you can't turn that trait-cluster into a technical 'definition' in the boundary-setting sense. Any definition that tries to pull some of the traits is, by necessity, too reductive: obviously one needn't have any one of such-and-such typical female physical characteristics or any one of such-and-such stereotypes of feminine personality and behavior to be a woman. Being a woman is just a predictor of probably having some combination of these traits. So the only hard boundary, the only trait that everyone in the class has in common, is going to be long-term self-identification.

Progressives asked to answer "What is a woman?" correctly recognize that they are being asked for a boundary-setting, technical definition; something on the basis of which a claim of the form "X is a woman" can be verified or falsified. So they avoid getting into the weeds of "What are some of the traits you might expect a woman to have?", although that answer obviously exists and is obviously important to trans women; because it's not what's being asked, and answering the boundary question with a set of traits from the cluster will rightfully draw ridicule. ("You say you're progressive and you define womanhood as conforming to Western female social norms like wearing dresses and crying at movies? Har! Har!")

Pardon me for responding to this a second time in order to ping your notifications, but out of everything said in this exchange this seems very salient:

Now imagine two people identical in anatomy and behavior. Say that both have vaginas and XX chromosomes, but are super butch and engage in absolutely no stereotypical feminine behaviors. One self-identifies as a man, and the other as a woman.

Are you willing to tell either of them that they're full of crap?

If not, then the bottom line is that self-identification really is your only actual criteria, everything else is just the usual hand-waving, and you're back to telling me a blorb is a blorb.

I'm quite curious whether you're willing to tell either of them that they're full of crap. If you'll never contradict sincere self-identification under any circumstance then it really is the only thing that actually matters to you.

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and answering the boundary question with a set of traits from the cluster will rightfully draw ridicule

Why is it better to answer with the entire cluster? It seems progressives should still object to western social norms defining "women" a moderate amount, just like they object to them doing so exclusively.

...lest all of this seem a bit to hostile, I dont remember hearing either the name or clique argument before. Thank you for participating.

If someone claims to be goth despite the fact that they look and dress like a Mormon, have a cheerful disposition, and listen to nothing but smooth jazz, I'm going to consider them full of crap. The definition might be fuzzy around the edges, but it isn't meaningless, and there is a point at which someone's self-identification becomes irrelevant.

Now imagine two people identical in anatomy and behavior. Say that both have vaginas and XX chromosomes, but are super butch and engage in absolutely no stereotypical feminine behaviors. One self-identifies as a man, and the other as a woman.

Are you willing to tell either of them that they're full of crap?

If not, then the bottom line is that self-identification really is your only actual criteria, everything else is just the usual hand-waving, and you're back to telling me a blorb is a blorb.

"Keith is goth" clearly means something, even though it doesn't actually tell you any specific thing about what Keith is like besides identifying as goth.

It actually doesnt tell you whether he identifies that way, it tells you whether the speaker identifies him that way. Indeed, pretty much all subcultures will explictly reject self-identification when they feel like it, usually to keep out the "posers" but occasionally also to "claim" prominent people. Persistent disagreements about such claims of inclusion or exclusion tend to fracture the subculture.

You can do this, but it doesn’t satisfy either side. The conservatives shrug and say, ‘fine, but we care about whether you’re a biological male so that’s how we’ll treat you’ and the progressives get furious that you haven’t defended a non-trivial interpretation of their femaleness. It just progresses the euphemism treadmill.

The conservatives shrug and say, ‘fine, but we care about whether you’re a biological male so that’s how we’ll treat you’

And I can tell them "stop being sexist". (Outside of the couple of specific contexts where the biological difference really does directly matter.)

and the progressives get furious

Which progressives? I'm a progressive. My friends are progressives.

  • -21

And I can tell them "stop being sexist".

Hows that working out for you?

Just look at the absolute self own for the prog side that one school did recently when they forced a bunch of school girls to be present in the same locker room as a trans student while they were changing, that's after the girls were putting up a stink and walked out previously so as not to be in the same changing room as the trans student.

Hows that working out for you?

Where does the British public stand on transgender rights in 2024/25?

And I can tell them "stop being sexist". (Outside of the couple of specific contexts where the biological difference really does directly matter.)

What's being achieved here? You've proposed to turn 'woman' into an obviously useless appellation that doesn't capture any of the information people actually care about, and then when they pivot to different words you say, 'no, you can't do that'. What you seem to want to say is, 'there is no important difference between biological men and biological women outside a very small number of very specific contexts so it doesn't matter who wants to be what gender' but you know perfectly well that loads of people disagree with you on what these contexts are and how many of them there are. Which is how you end up litigating 'trans women' in female prisons and 'trans women' in female sports.

Which progressives? I'm a progressive. My friends are progressives.

I get into a lot of niche fan/SF/fantasy stuff, so I read a decent amount written by trans people to an audience of (assumed) trans people. This is not how they think. They want to opt out of maleness and into femaleness, they want to be 'one of the girls'. They are very definitely not happy if you call them 'women' as an appellation but otherwise treat them as male.

What you seem to want to say is, 'there is no important difference between biological men and biological women outside a very small number of very specific contexts so it doesn't matter who wants to be what gender'

Yes. Not only do I want to say it, I say it openly and have done so in the past. I got pretty deep in the weeds of trans prisoners in another culture war thread.

As for your second paragraph, you may want to read what I wrote out here.

  • -10

The problem with 'there is no important difference between biological men and biological women' and in turn with defining sex by cluster-of-traits is that humans are a sexually dimorphic species. This means that:

  1. There is a single, clear differentiating characteristic that distinguishes between and creates men and women in a causal way (XX vs XY).*
  2. That genetic difference is causal for a massive number of physical and psychological differences.
  3. Therefore it is very difficult to find a cluster of traits that includes genetic XX and trans XY but not cis XY. XY traits cluster and XX traits cluster.

This is why progressives don't usually go for sex-as-cluster-of-traits: you then have to start defining those traits. Upper body strength, height, testosterone, estrogen, propensity for violence, propensity for nurturing, thing-person preferences, womb, penis, voice pitch, clothing, OCEAN scores, pronouns, leadership styles, intellectual interests, hobbies, sexuality, etc.

Many of these traits are obviously relevant to the real world, especially the physical ones and the ones related to desiring women, which is why the biggest battlegrounds have been sports, prisons and shelters for battered women. Many others of these traits are directly observable, which is why people resent being forced to affirm in public that the tiny person with breasts and a high-pitched voice is a man and the big, bearded sysadmin with an anime body pillow is a woman.

So far, progressives have been unable to put together a convincing cluster of traits that doesn't look cherry-picked, doesn't sound conservative and doesn't exclude things that the majority of people think are relevant. This is how you end up with Keir Starmer's famous claim that "99.9% of women don't have a penis".

*I'm not going to cover intersex because there aren't enough of them to matter and they don't disprove the general case. A chicken born with a deformed leg doesn't mean that chickens don't have two legs.

Well personally I think the whole question is a little silly - a la Wittgenstein, policing the boundaries of words is a context-dependent exercise, a language game which is usually directed at some other end. When we say 'woman', sometimes we're gesturing at features which don't include trans women - ability to bear children, say - and sometimes we're gesturing at features that do - norms of personal presentation, for instance.

That is to say, I don't think there's any reason to suggest that it is the criteria of one game in particular that should be held up as the final and definite boundary to 'woman' in the abstract.

sometimes we're gesturing at features that do - norms of personal presentation, for instance.

I have it on good authority that "trans women don't owe you femininity", so I'm not even sure if this is relevant.

It is a little silly, and will probably be regarded with bemusement by future generations, like fake recovered memories from a generation ago. But it is also causing active havoc in the present, also like those "memories."

norms of personal presentation, for instance.

This is how we got terms like "tomboy" and "drag queen." Masculine and feminine are fine for more formal contexts.

"Drag queen" refers to a specific, sexualized behavior. A biological male who would like to be called "Alice" and "Miss" but dresses in understated, largely androgynous casual wear is not a "drag queen"; she is not even meaningfully a "crossdresser" or "transvestite". If you tell me "Alice is a drag queen" (or as the case may be "Mr Smith is a drag queen") I'll get completely the wrong idea. Calling him "feminine" wouldn't do either.

I think feminine or androgynous would be acceptable. "Trans woman" would also be acceptable. "Woman" would certainly give the wrong impression.

Whether or not it's reasonable to call Alice "Miss Smith" will probably depend on how well he passes for female. Going by the description, it sounds like people who don't know him will feel confused, and try not to use gendered terms of address, and people who know him well will simply call him "Alice," and introduce him to acquaintances as "Alice Smith." Unless they're schoolchildren, I suppose? I would prefer that he not be allowed to pull schoolchildren into his preferences, and would likely refer to him in front of my own children, in private, as Alice or Mr Smith, but not as miss.

When we say 'woman', sometimes we're gesturing at features which don't include trans women - ability to bear children, say - and sometimes we're gesturing at features that do - norms of personal presentation, for instance.

Is this supposed to be a descriptive claim about how people are using these words?

How do you deal with both naive and committed essentialists?

A person could respond that he doesn't mean the same thing when he calls a man a woman, as in a bitch, compared to if he calls them a mother. In the latter case, he may happily be corrected with a birth certificate and brush it off as irrelevant in the former case. He may also not see any contradiction between gesturing to feminine behaviors that women are assumed to generally possess without ever granting that a person is a woman if they possess those traits but lack certain other, more specific characteristics.

How do you avoid the charge that you're helping such people along to a conclusion they don't actually share?

Our view is that whoever says they are a woman is a woman. You can argue all you like that this is overly permissive, socially corrosive, whatever, but you can't say it isn't simple.

  • -13

By and large, the only people who are familiar with the tenets of gender ideology are affluent Westerners (and only a subset of them endorse it). For the overwhelming majority of female people outside of the West, the question "do you identify as a woman?" would be an incoherent question, analogous to asking a medieval peasant if he stores his documents locally or on the cloud. I think a significant proportion of people, when asked a yes-or-no question they don't understand, would simply answer "no".

Is your position then that the category "woman" affirmatively includes all males who describe themselves as such, but affirmatively excludes anywhere from tens of millions to hundreds of millions of unambiguously female people around the world who don't consider themselves "men" but who are simply unfamiliar with the concept of "identifying" as anything?

Socially corrosive is putting it lightly. "You must have read this much Judith Butler to be considered a sexed individual, others need not apply" is a hell of a hot take.

Thought experiment.

A female baby is born with a traumatic brain injury which puts them in a vegetative state. Not only is this child completely unable to move or communicate in any way, the child's brain activity suggests that they are minimally conscious and lacking in self-awareness. The child's parents are heartbroken, but elect to keep the child on life support. Eighteen years, the child reaches the age of majority.

Is the person a man or a woman?

That implies that whoever doesn't say they are a woman isn't a woman. Or at least that we are incapable of knowing who is a woman until they declare whether they are or not.

It's not that it's simple, it's that it's simplistic. It's intellectual garbage. Accepting it sincerely is corrosive to the very meaning it seeks to assume. It naively installs a back door to womanhood at the cost of collapsing the entire structure. What good is saying you are a woman if being a woman holds no more meaning than a kid saying that he is a t-rex? Should we alert the local zoo that we've discovered a living dinosaur? Why not?

That implies that whoever doesn't say they are a woman isn't a woman. Or at least that we are incapable of knowing who is a woman until they declare whether they are or not.

It implies that we cannot state for sure that they are a woman. We can assume it based on all sorts of cues and circumstantial evidence.

An individual claim is only one piece of circumstantial evidence. It's also trivially faked and so provides an incredibly weak basis for the epistemic confidence of our assumptions and should be weighted accordingly.

"A woman is anyone who says they are a woman" prejudicially privileges the weakest evidence over all the other evidence.

Simple? I still don't know what they are saying they are.

"A woman is someone who calls herself a woman" is as simple as "a William is someone who calls himself William". "Yes, but what is a William" is a nonsense-question and has no other answer than "someone called William".

  • -10

It's not a nonsense question. "William" is an example of name, an arbitrary label we out on people that makes it easier for us to communicate who we are talking about, or who we are addressing when we talk. Are you saying "woman" is also an arbitrary label? Why not just say thatz if that's what you mean?

In contrast most definitions, the way progressives try to talk about what is woman is incoherent, and far from simple.

‘What is a William’ is not a nonsense question- the answer is ‘someone named William’. That individuals can generally use whatever first name they choose as a form of address, at least as adults, is a convention. To say ‘he is a William’ would be lying if he generally went by John. The statement would come off as odd(the normal formulation would be ‘that’s William’ or ‘he is William’), but it would be understood as meaning he would like to be addressed as William if you spoke to him.

Likewise, ‘she is a woman’ tells us this is an adult of the female sex. It’s entirely possible for the statement to be lying.

‘What is a William’ is not a nonsense question

I obviously meant, in the wider context of my [checks notes] two-sentence-long post, that it's a nonsensical follow-up question to ask once someone has already told you that "a William is someone who calls himself William". Obviously it can be true or false in that narrow sense, but then so can "does this person identify as a woman or not".

As I pointed out to you elsewhere, this is true if and only if "a woman is anyone who calls herself a woman" is the only statement about "woman" that you will ever use, with no connection to any other statement or issue allowed, ever.

This sort of hermetic formulation is not what people generally expect from a definition, and pretending otherwise makes it difficult to take you seriously. And this is why people with more at stake than you hem and haw and rely on squid ink when asked in the real world: they can't just retreat to forum anonymity when asked to apply or extend their definition in even the simplest ways.

This mysteriously isn't a problem when we need to convey that people are called William. (Also, I realize that by definition I cannot prove it, but I have made this point before IRL.)

Thats because there usually is only one person called William thats relevant to any given statement, and things do in fact go south pretty quickly when you cant keep it that way.

Within philosophy of language more broadly, proper and personal names are always a bit of a pain point. If you dont have a revisionist theory of them (and your argument relies on not doing so), then you generally need a much more fragmentary theory in general, where the pieces are sensitive to more parameters then we would usually expect, and then trying to generalise from personal names to something else would require a lot more checking to see if the situation is analogous, which its definitely not in this case.

This mysteriously isn't a problem when we need to convey that people are called William.

There are no athletic competitions ringfenced only for people named William, because people named William are systematically weaker and slower than people who go by other names. Williams do not get their own bathrooms, prisons and changing rooms because Williams are at vastly elevated risk of sexual assault compared to people who go by other names. There are no academic scholarships or grant programs ringfenced for people named William, in recognition of the historic discrimination they have endured at the hands of non-Williams.

Elective membership in a category only makes sense if there are no consequences associated with membership in said category. Which is obviously not true of the category "woman". Which is why so many trans-identified males want to join the category.

A teacher lines students up to use the water fountain:

"Line up by reverse alphabetical order this time. ...Aaron, it's reverse alphabetical order, you should be at the back." "I've decided that I'm called William, actually."

What should the teacher do?

Again, "people are called William if they want to be called William" is likewise not a problem if and only if no action or statement ever depends on or is connected to this definition in any way. When we try to actually do things with this information, allowing the data to be completely arbitrary breaks whatever we try to use it for. We do not, in fact, generally allow people to arbitrarily change their own names; to the extent that we allow name changes, we do so through legible processes, because names are important in a lot of ways.

What should the teacher do?

Allow it this once, but observe whether William actually lastingly goes by William in other social contexts, and/or if he switches back to Aaron when drinking order switches back again. Take appropriate disciplinary action if you get conclusive evidence he's doing it frivolously.

  • -12
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If you haven't already, you have to approve this to make it visible. You really gotta start looking more closely, man.

I hate the filter so, so much.

Even mathematical induction terminates. Even recursion terminates. And yet the circular definition of woman never terminates. That is only possible if the word woman has no intrinsic meaning. So is severely intellectually disabled person with normally developed female reproductive organs a woman? She can't say she is one, or even comprehend? What does your simple definition says about it?

What does your simple definition says about it?

It does indeed yield that she isn't one. (We might call her one anyway for practicality's sake, either purely for our benefit like calling a female dog a "girl", or on the presumption that if she understood the question, she would probably identify as such - being that being a biologically female human is a strong predictor for identifying as a woman. But we cannot categorically assert it.)

Would you agree that the simplest, most obvious solution to the wage gap and indeed every other politically significant, statistically-measured gender gap in existence is for all men to say they are women?

That is to say, "whoever says they are a woman is a woman" is indeed simple, in atomic isolation. It is also completely incoherent with, at a minimum, the entire edifice of Feminism. When people say that the progressive position is not simple, they do not mean that the definitions offered have too many words, but rather that the position is evidently incoherent, and that this incoherent state is only maintainable in a safe space and with an ocean of squid ink.

Would you agree that the simplest, most obvious solution to the wage gap and indeed every other politically significant, statistically-measured gender gap in existence is for all men to say they are women?

Hah, this immediately made me think of Dr Seuss's The Sneetches. That'd be an interesting state of affairs to live in.

Would you agree that the simplest, most obvious solution to the [gender] wage gap?

Only in the sense that it would decouple the gender wage gap from the sex wage gap. The sex gap would still exist. "Feminism" is too broad a church to say that any one idea is or isn't coherent with it, but replace the term with "anti-sexism" and it's instantly clearer that it can coexist happily with transgenderism. (Transgenderism cannot coexist happily with biological-female supremacists, but since when do we like them? Trans activists certainly don't pretend that Radical Feminists are anything but their enemies. There's no incoherence there, just open rivalry.)

Also:

when people say that the progressive position is not simple

Actually, lizzardspawn, to whom my reply was directed, was very much accusing the progressive position of lacking a detailed definition at all; not complaining about it being insufficiently simple.

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