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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.
I don't think there is a problem. It's just that, for the same reason, I don't think it's fair to claim that you only "have to hear about all these other features even though the lack of them, even all of them, doesn't actually change anything" because of "empty sophistry".
I say: "my technical definition of woman is [someone who calls herself a woman]", you say "but clearly Alice is a woman in everyday usage has to mean something more than that", and I say back "yeah, sure, but the other attributes don't constitute the definition". Therefore the "come on, trans women who says they are woman clearly mean something more than to tautologically say that they-identify-as-women" counterargument fails. The symmetrical counterargument could easily be levied against someone defending the "a woman is someone with XX chromosomes" definition ("clearly when you say Mrs Wiggins is a woman, you're not talking about molecular biology, therefore we see that gender-as-social-construct is a better definition") and the gender-critical could refute it exactly as I have.
With this mind, I don't see why the circularity is a problem. Why would it be? I don't think it "sounds bad", and I'm not trying to obscure it. I started out by giving just that as the definition - we only got into the weeds of the correlated attributes because of people bringing up the "but people mean more than that when they say woman" thing, it's not some deceitful rhetorical strategy I'm using to mask the circularity of the technical definition.
This isn't a technical definition somehow on par with the biological definition, both equally in need of context. It's completely meaningless noise. It conveys no information at all. If this is really all you have, then the critics are right and you have no actual definition.
When this is pointed out you gesture vaguely at a bunch of other attributes, but when put on the spot about whether these attributes then constitute your actual definition the answer is apparently no.
You've spent a week and umpteen words on the question and all you have to show for it are a "technical definition" that means absolutely nothing and a bunch of social attributes that you won't even put your foot down and claim as definitional.
You want a man who puts on a dress to be called a woman but don't actually want to define a woman as someone wearing a dress, so we get incoherence instead.
No, it really couldn't. That's an actual non-circular definition that refers to attributes external to itself. You can successfully hang a bunch of non-definitional context on to it, if you want, because it has something there to hold it up. People who use it aren't left claiming that the context somehow is the definition, but oops not really, the way you are.
There's a reason the tide has turned on this issue.
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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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