This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
I don't understand why this matters if the attributes are trivia about molecular biology. Why can't the definition be self-referential? You keep saying it can't, but you haven't actually said why this is a problem! It's not a problem that the social norm as to who gets called "Bill" is "people who tell you 'Call me Bill'". Why should it be a problem for the social norm as to who gets called "Mrs" to be "people who tell you 'Call me Mrs'"?
And I don't "want a man who puts on a dress to be called a woman", I want anyone who asks to be called a woman to be called a woman whether they wear a dress or pants or a spacesuit. The contextual attributes, being ultimately subjective, simply explain why as a matter of fact someone might want to be called a woman, particularly. Compare: "Bill" has social connotations relative to "William", explaining why a William might prefer to be known as Bill, but that doesn't mean that only people who match the vibe that "a guy called Bill" evokes in a vacuum are allowed to ask that people call them Bill.
Other useful point of reference: "transwoman" itself, separate from whether you think a trans woman counts as "a woman". Surely you don't think "transwoman" is a meaningless term lacking a proper definition. You see perfectly well what we've been talking about all throughout this thread, there's no ambiguity, no case where you'd be helpless as to say whether WandererintheWilderness would consider a given person "a trans woman" or not. And yet - how else would you define it than "someone who identifies as a trans woman"?
Ultimately, I'm just being kind. I want people to get what they want, I want them to get to be who they want to be. Or try, anyway. Pursuit of happiness and all that. You want to talk about sophistry, it's the gender-criticals' harping on about the definition problem which strikes me as in bad faith. The trans usage of "woman" or the pronoun "she" are using those words in perfectly understandable ways that don't misrepresent the physical facts of their biology, any more than calling a boat "she" implies it has breasts: it uses "woman" as the supercategory including both "cis woman" and "trans woman". It's only a shift in language, not a lie or factually incorrect or whatever nonsense. And with that established, I see no other valid reason whatsoever why trans people shouldn't be called what they want to be called. Talk of tides all you want, I don't think cruelty will ultimately prevail. I've got more faith in human nature than that.
Because it literally doesn't mean anything. When people ask for your definition of woman you're functionally just making animal noises and then acting surprised that people say you don't have one.
You genuinely don't have one. You've said as much. You've compared the word to proper nouns that convey no attributes. When someone says you can't define the word woman you should just tell them they're right and that you think that's okay. Maybe you don't want to come off as some kind of crazy gender abolitionist, but that's the bed you've made for yourself by refusing to assign any traits to them.
And when everyone rolls their eyes at your personal rendition of "words don't have to have meanings" and considers the meme lived up to, that's your problem too.
Even a substantial majority of Dem voters don't want them in the women's locker room, and since the election the leadership has started to catch on that this isn't a winning issue. The progressive lock on the internet that let them get this far in the first place was an aberration that has now ended.
More options
Context Copy link
It's not a problem for Bills only as long as it's not an imposition on the others to call them Bill. Right now, it is not. As references to people go, given names such as "Bill" are pretty close to the most efficient way to refer to people.
I see the argument about the trans definition of "woman" being circular as the bailey that's not really the central objection. The central objection is that "woman" is one of the words that mean things, unlike "Bill", and the meaning that includes "people sharing key traits with the 'human females' cluster" is the most useful one to most people, rather than "anyone who says their pronouns are she/her". It is no more cruel to refuse that "mere shift in language" than to impose it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link