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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. :(
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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.
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.
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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.
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).
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.
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.
That example is probably illustrative for me: I don't really care about celebrities who call themselves Women or call themselves Catholic. I'm concerned with the application of legal and social protections to people based on their self identifications.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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:
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.
I wouldn't tell either of them they're full of crap, no. Again, I think self-identification can be the ultimate hard boundary while not being the only salient point. Being a woman is strongly correlated with certain features, even though the presence or absence of any one of these features isn't make-or-break. Even if there's another trait that is the ultimate yes-or-no criterion, then when I tell you "this person is a woman" I am, colloquially, communicating useful information not limited to "this person identifies as a woman".
Frankly, I don't see why this is supposed to be some great defeater to my view when people who want to focus on biological sex have the exact same (non-)problem. In a few cases, the person with a vagina and XX chromosomes will be a muscular, bearded transman. But if a gender-critical colloquially tells me, "oh, by the way, the person you're going to meet for that business lunch is a woman", they obviously mean to communicate more than "stripped naked and put under a microscope, you can tell she's a biological female". Chromosomes and/or genital phenotype are their ultimate boundary which will make them come down on one side in edge-cases, but it's not the only thing that actually matters to them when they say someone's a woman in their everyday life.
(Other comparison: even if I say "an American is, ultimately, someone who has American citizenship", I will mean something more if I tell you "Bob is American". This remains true even if, faced with two identical Hispanic guys, neither of whom are assimilated into the culture or speak great English, I say "the one who has citizenship is technically An American, the other one isn't".)
If the presence or absence of even all other features put together cannot contradict self-identification, then those other attributes are not actually part of your definition. You literally and specifically define gender by self-identification and self-identification only.
There's no "cluster of attributes" that people may or may not "correlate" to, where the "presence or absence of any one" may or may not be salient. There's only one attribute, self-identification, that actually matters to you.
But that sounds bad and obviously circular, so we have to hear about all these other features even though the lack of them, even all of them, doesn't actually change anything. It's empty sophistry.
Because you guys are here to tell the rest of us that our definitions are somehow lacking or outdated, but when we ask for yours we're subjected to nonsense like @HaroldWilson trying to tell us words don't need to have meanings, or you listing all the other attributes that supposedly define a gender even though lacking all of them apparently doesn't actually matter.
Yeah there's the definition of X, and then there are other attributes that aren't definitional to X but may or may not be true in a given case. What's the problem? A coherent view of X still has a definition that includes some examples, excludes others, and isn't self-referentially circular.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
And I can tell them "stop being sexist". (Outside of the couple of specific contexts where the biological difference really does directly matter.)
Which progressives? I'm a progressive. My friends are progressives.
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.
Where does the British public stand on transgender rights in 2024/25?
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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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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