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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   38489 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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Should morphology be the tie-breaker for sexual categorization?

A common tact one sees in trans skeptical circles is to put forward gametes as the tie-breaker for sexual categorization. In some ways, I like the simplicity of this solution, even as someone who is fairly pro trans. I'm not, in principle, opposed to a categorization scheme that would occasionally split transwomen and ciswomen, since I feel there's always a basic lumpers vs. splitters problem in all categorization problems, and I'm comfortable with either tiny base categories with supercategories above them, or larger categories and smaller subcategories. It's all the same, and the choice between various models of reality seems largely to be a matter of what is useful and what traits we find salient in a given context where we seek to categorize.

But I've always had a slight discomfort with the gamete-focused definition of sex. Even if we allow that sexual categorization is based on a cluster of traits, like chromosomes, genitalia, bone density, face and body shape, etc., where we're just using gametes as the tie breaker, I think we run into some problems. First, a gamete-focused definition is not naturally a binary. There are only two types of gametes, but there are technically four possible ways those two gametes could manifest:

  • Produces only sperm

  • Produces only eggs

  • Produces neither sperm nor eggs.

  • Produces sperm and eggs.

The last situation has never been observed in humans, though it is theoretically possible for a human chimera formed from a male and female zygote to fuse into a single embryo and result in a human with functional gonadal tissue of both types. We do observe ovotesticular syndome in humanity, but 50% of such cases ovulate, and only two such people have been found to produce sperm. Maybe the reason sperm and egg producing intersex conditions haven't happened is for some complex set of issues that result from such a chimera, and so it is effectively impossible.

But even ignoring that, it leaves us with three categories, not two. Now, there isn't actually an a priori reason to expect there to be exactly two sexes in humans, especially when we observe fungi like Coprinellus disseminatus, which has 143 different mating types that can each mate with any of the other mating types besides its own, but most people's intuition before they do any fancy book learning is that there are two sexes, so it seems unsatisfying to have a tie breaker that seems to naturally produce three categories.

Now, it's possible someone will object here that I have framed the problem wrong. Maybe the true proposal for sex categorization is not to use gametes as a tie breaker at all. Given that there seems to be an impulse in some trans skeptics to say that, for example, a trans women who has had her testes removed is still a man, one might conclude that, while gametes are (one of) the most important factor(s) in sex categorization, it is not actually the tie breaker. Maybe they will say that it is a much more fuzzy, amorphous categorization scheme based on a a wide variety of traits, and even lacking the ability to produce gametes altogether doesn't result in a sexless/third-sex categorization if a person has enough other traits common to either of the two (only two) sexes.

Or, they might put forward that it is actually some abstraction like "natural tendency to produce gametes" that is the true tie breaker, and not a person's current ability to produce gametes at all. A eunuch is not sexless, or some third sex - they are always a man, albeit a maimed man. This might still leave us with some problems in classifying people who are naturally infertile and don't produce gametes as mature adults (especially in the case of intersex conditions like ovotesticular syndrome where infertility is common and sex characteristics are mixed), but if that abstraction is truly a tie breaker and not the entirety of sex it would still rescue the idea of there being two sexes in humans.

I grant that either of these approaches could, in theory, rescue a truly two sex humanity.

But there is another misgiving that I have with such a framing, and it applies to all three of these models.

If gametes or some abstraction of them are an important component in sex categorization, then we get an entire class of epistemological problems surrounding sex categorization. I do not have the time or means to sequence the DNA, collect the gametes or see the genitals of every human being I interact with. And yet, my intuition is that I'm reasonably certain about the sex of most of the people I interact with in everyday situations. Here one might be able to make some arguments from evolutionary psychology, or the likelihood that there is some sort of sex categorizing module innate to humans that needed to be fairly accurate in order for humans to successfully mate with compatible mates. Maybe the bias towards thinking there are only two sexes goes fairly deep into human biology and psychology.

But such a "sex categorizing module" doesn't really solve the epistemological issue. Evolution is "lazy" and frequently does a hack job with its solutions. I find women attractive, I love boobs and cute feminine faces and the like. But I still find f1nnst5r, a male crossdresser, attractive in many of his photos. It turns out, it's much harder to code a computationally light sex categorizer when your only lever is whether the genes for your sex categorizer get passed on to the next generation. As long as guys who are attracted to femboys tend to also have sex with fertile women, the mesaoptimzer within you doesn't need to be perfect - just good enough.

All this to say, we can do better than the sex categorizing module in our brain. But if we try this route, we are forced to conclude that we don't know the sexes of most of the people we interact with. Sure, we can go the Bayesian route, and say based on base rates of the sex categorization module in our brain, checked against population-wide data, we can be 98% sure of a person's sex, regardless of definition being used. It might even be an isolated demand for rigor to expect more than 98% certainty. After all, humans also have a "face recognition module" that sometimes sees faces in tree bark and clouds, and yet we trust it to see human faces all of the time.

But I think if we do go the Bayesian route of trying to justify using the "sex categorization module" in the brain, we have actually conceded that the most important thing is actually how a person looks, their sexual morphology. Now obviously, a person could want biological children, and so, for reasons separate from their sex categorization module, care about about whether a particular person they are with is able to carry children, or produce sperm, but that would be something that only matters for potential romantic partners. For ordinary shop keepers and people you pass on the street, the only thing that really matters is the "sex categorization module."

Now, I'll concede that if this is accepted, non-passing trans people would have to be classed as their assigned sex at birth. That's almost exactly what it means to be non-passing in the first place - most people's sex categorization modules see you as the sex you were assigned at birth. But in the case of passing trans people, it would tend to mean that we can lean in to our wonky evolution-addled brains, and accept what we see at first glance. Of course, when we're going to interact with people frequently in our social circle, we could accept nicknames and nickpronouns, and allow these to override our brain's sex categorization modules, but that is a separate discussion.

This starts so well- indeed I commend you on the points you draw attention to, but it fades in the later stages.

You initially point out that sex is binary, though the development and expression of this sex binary leads to different possibilities for individual organisms, male, female and intersex. This makes three sex categories but not a sex ternary, it is natures attempts to attain male or female with different developmental issues arising but there is no third sex capable of procreation.

We know that the body attempts to create male and female because of our scientific understanding of biology and evolution - the telos is inscribed by the actual history of the universe, whereby humans evolved to reproduce sexually, ie we all descend from mothers and fathers, eggs and sperm.

The essential aspect of how we assign sex is indeed not straightforward because of the genetic variation that is possible at each stage. But often categorisation is difficult, the complexity and philosophical difficulties don't undermine some essential reality just because it's hard to determine how to explicitly assign edge cases. To start the exploration, in humans it's the phenotype that leads to the development of functional elements that allow for reproduction, chiefly eggs and sperm, whether as potential future, current present, or prior capability. For most people this means a host of associated functional developments that are required and for most of us these line up nicely and we are functional males and females. For some, genetic anomolies occur such as failure for the placenta to develop or sperm that don't sperm. So functionally these people can not reproduce but it seems wrong to assign them as no-sex. But categories are not only formed based on a single rule, they can be based on family resemblances, or polythetic categories where not all members need to share every attribute. A single gene should not remove you from the sex category and the change certainly doesn't make you more like the other sex.

For intersex the change is more fundamental, earlier in the ontogeny and more prior in the phylogeny. The variation does lead to some change in the direction of the other sex and so for this group of people their sex is indeterminate, biologically speaking.

This doesn't exclude some people living as if they were a woman but finding out they were not in fact that sex, eg swyer syndrome.

So far so good. Im not a biologist but I think not only do we have knowledge of male and female sex from evolution as our basis for understanding it's reality, we could also construct a reasonable categorisation for individuals.

But you agree with this. The rest as far as I can tell is spurious thinking related to sex appearance and whether we can detect it. I don't know how to parse this as it doesn't seem at all confusing to me. Yes there are masculine woman and feminine men, but there is still the reality of whether they can reproduce or whether the similarity is just cosmetic.

The problem is that sexual categorization, like all categorization, is primarily functional. We define categories to serve some purpose. The boundaries we should draw are ones that should serve the function we want the category to serve. Sex categories serve different functions in different contexts and so it should be no surprise that people draw the boundaries in different places. Similarly this is why there is no One Ultimate Definition of sex categories that everyone finds sufficient for the purposes they want to put the category too. Notice all the people downthread who insist it is obvious what a woman is, that everyone knows, but apparently cannot articulate whatever it is everybody (themselves included presumably) knows.

To take your own comment, the criteria for what makes one "female" (in a biological sense of producing certain gametes) and what makes one "female" (in a sense of what linguistic term it is appropriate to use to refer to them) can be different! There's no reason these things have to be united, unless we want them to be for some reason.

To take a less politically charged example consider the humble Tomato. Botanically Tomatos are fruits (the seed bearing structure of a flowering plant) but culinarily (and sometimes legally) they are a vegetable. So, is a Tomato "really" a fruit? Or "really" a vegetable? You can pick one definition and call it the "real" definition but there's a reason people developed the alternate characterization and just arbitrarily declaring one the "real" one doesn't resolve the functional purpose achieved by the alternative categorization.

Frankly, this is one more reason I'm generally in favor of trans inclusive language. It replaces language with lossy or ambiguous referents with ones that are much closer to the relevant facts in the world in the appropriate contexts.

Notice all the people downthread who insist it is obvious what a woman is, that everyone knows, but apparently cannot articulate whatever it is everybody (themselves included presumably) knows.

I understand not wanting to read all the comments but if you aren't going to please refrain from commenting on their contents.

Can you link me the comment you think I haven't read? I re-checked your comment but it doesn't seem to give any definition for what a woman is.

A woman is one of the two natural categories that humans develop into if they don't have a very rare disorder or spend significant effort to specifically and intentionally to emulate men. Women are the thing that trans women are attempting to emulate. For trans woman to be a meaningful concept at all you must acknowledge that 'women' is not a null pointer and that the subset of people who you define as 'trans women' are some delta away from the core concept of "women", follow the vector of that delta back and you intersect "man".

It's maddening because while the actual concept is simple there is this shell game you can play. Where you pretend to not know about the thing you have to know about in order for transgenderism to even be a meaningful concept and then poo poo any simple definition with the weirdest edge cases imaginable because your strategy is just to discredit the concept of categories entirely. Oh yeah, "who are we to guess at how many limbs a human has?" or "we can't even decide if left handedness is variation or abnormality". As if the fact that no one has to time to write a definition that can cover 8 Billion cases at every possible intersection means we should give up on the entire idea of categories and just use whatever is politically expedient. Oh yeah, and by the way those things you called "women's sports" instead of "unaltered natal female sports" - that linguistic difference that no one ever considered before? We're going to go the direction opposite of what was the original intended purpose.

Women are the thing that trans women are attempting to emulate.

So what do you do when a trans woman manages to emulate womanhood better than many real women? Man and woman is not a binary; you have feminine men, masculine men, feminine women, masculine women. There are absolutely males who are so feminine they better encompass the "woman" concept than a good chunk of cis women.

Like this meme: https://old.reddit.com/r/traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns/comments/lnf0lw/conservatives_dont_really_understand_biology_smh/

I wouldn't want the person on the left to be in a woman's washroom tbh. And to a lesser degree, I wouldn't want the person on the right to be in a men's washroom.

So what do you do when a trans woman manages to emulate womanhood better than many real women?

This is nearly meaningless. There is more to womanhood than being attractive to men. There are other people in this thread arguing about whether trans women can "pass", I don't find that question all that interesting.

There is more to womanhood than being attractive to men, and some trans women embody that better than some cis women.

You've clearly not read the rest of this thread you're replying to. It is impossible for a trans woman to have a body that if not interfered with will develop into being able to bear children better than a cis woman.

What do you do if a male sexual predator wants to use the same restroom, bathroom as your daughter.

If you don't believe weird and dangerous men are taking advantage of gender self-ID, check out Grahem Linehan's (father Ted) Glinner Update where he details a steady stream of them (under the banner "This Never Happens", which points to the naive assumptions of a lot of progressives).

I think it does happen. I don't think there are easy solutions.

Tbh I think it might be best to make the new gender system "Woman" and "Other". Being a woman comes with privileges like access to protected spaces such as women's washrooms, and only biological females have access to it. Everyone else uses the "Other" category when it comes to stuff like sports and washrooms, whether they're trans women, cis men, or trans men. If individual groups want to say trans women are welcome to participate in their Women's category, they're free to, but you can't sue an organization for excluding trans women from their women's category.

A woman is one of the two natural categories that humans develop into if they don't have a very rare disorder or spend significant effort to specifically and intentionally to emulate men.

Can you tell me more about these natural categories? What features characterize them? Frankly, I am an eliminativist about natural kinds. I don't think there is any such thing. There are facts in the world but any categorization or groupings of facts are things we do as humans.

Women are the thing that trans women are attempting to emulate. For trans woman to be a meaningful concept at all you must acknowledge that 'women' is not a null pointer and that the subset of people who you define as 'trans women' are some delta away from the core concept of "women",

Sure, the question is what is "women" pointing at. Can you tell me?

follow the vector of that delta back and you intersect "man".

Obviously I disagree.

It's maddening because while the actual concept is simple there is this shell game you can play. Where you pretend to not know about the thing you have to know about in order for transgenderism to even be a meaningful concept and then poo poo any simple definition with the weirdest edge cases imaginable because your strategy is just to discredit the concept of categories entirely.

I don't really see how the pro-trans crowds goal is to discredit the concept of categories entirely. Indeed, it seems a central feature of their (our) arguments that there is a meaningful category called "women" and that it includes trans women. The anti-trans crowd clearly does not like this fact but it seems obvious to me the pro-trans crowd is not anti-categorization in some general way. We just want more complete and accurate categorizations for the purposes we think they should be put towards.

Oh yeah, "who are we to guess at how many limbs a human has?" or "we can't even decide if left handedness is variation or abnormality".

I understand this sentence to be sarcastic but it's not clear to me why. Different people... do have different numbers of limbs! A universal statement about the number of limbs humans have is false. Less absolute statements ("Most humans have four limbs", "The typical human has four limbs") may be true but the universal ("All humans have four limbs") is clearly not. Similarly we regard left handedness as ordinary variation today but that has not always the perspective society had! So much so that we tried to beat left handedness out of children.

Oh yeah, and by the way those things you called "women's sports" instead of "unaltered natal female sports" - that linguistic difference that no one ever considered before? We're going to go the direction opposite of what was the original intended purpose.

I am not sure what the "original intended purpose" is or why it is relevant, nor am I clear on why the fact that no one has considered this linguistic difference before means it is not meaningful or interesting. Have all the distinctions it will ever be necessary to make already been made?

If nothing is excluded from being a woman then it renders the concept of transitioning null because any proposed exclusion will apply to transwomen, as it must because if they were already women they'd have no need nor potential to transition. If there are qualities that exclude a person from being a woman then they must and always will apply to transwomen.

Let me switch from the general to the specific.

If having a penis is irrelevant then we're all women. If being cute and girly is irrelevant then we're all women. If uttering the words "I am a woman" is sufficient then four words is all it takes to be a woman, which is effectively no barrier and could happen by accident while reading this post out loud. If having one, or the other, or neither of the possible gamete production capabilities is irrelevant then we're all women. If having someone call you a woman is sufficient then a trivial variation on four words is all it takes: "you are a woman". If putting on a dress is sufficient then all women cease to be women the moment they take their dress off.

Trans rhetoric is glaringly motivated by their central requirement to construct and alter a set of categories that serve only to justify their ends of becoming what they categorically and self-admittedly are not. That's why it's so inconsistent and contradictory. You can't be something and not be something and become something that you already are that you'll never be. It's desparate backpedalling and feigned ignorance all the way down. Their claims on sex and gender strictly start where they are and end wherever they can reach. That is by necessity the full extent of their epistemology, because any extension beyond that entails defeating the conscious objective of their claims.

[Hitting post now, I have an addendum brewing that is both more conciliatory and more condemning]

Can you tell me more about these natural categories?

Human beings, like all mammals, reproduce sexually. The process requires contributions from two distinct categories of humans. The process output is a human who will develop to resemble and be one of these two distinct catagories unless interfered with by a disease or intention effort. This is all fundamental to human reproduction, it is a fact about humans. We call one of these groups, the ones who develop overaries, female or women. Without this process humans would cease to exist and this process requires there to be a meaningful distinction.

I don't really see how the pro-trans crowds goal is to discredit the concept of categories entirely. Indeed, it seems a central feature of their (our) arguments that there is a meaningful category called "women" and that it includes trans women. The anti-trans crowd clearly does not like this fact but it seems obvious to me the pro-trans crowd is not anti-categorization in some general way. We just want more complete and accurate categorizations for the purposes we think they should be put towards.

I suppose it would be more clear for me to say you want to discredit the concept of natural categories. That categories can be facts about the world. You favor treating catagories as totally arbitrary so that you can draw the boundaries wherever you please. But it's wrong, natural categories exist. It's not just arbitrary whim that causes us to differentiate oxygen from carbon dioxide and there are whole processes, that are very important to humans, that rely on these differences. If you give humans carbon dioxide instead of oxygen they will die. If you don't give plants carbon dioxide they will die.

You can of course propose other methods of categorization but you won't be cleaving reality nearly as neatly at the joints. In fact, as I said before your definition of "woman" necesarily contains my definition to avoid being totally circular, you've just tacked on a "also anyone who we would call a man but identifies as a woman" at the end.

But what you can't do is, after making this new arbitrary categorization, name it the same thing as the category we've been using with my definition this whole time and retroactively apply all the systems and assumptions we've built up under the original definition without having to get wide societal buy in. Women's sports were conceived and are predicated on my definition of woman, not your new one. If you want trans women in women's sports you need to make that case, not just play around with words. People do not like being manipulated and this tactic is so transparent.

Different people... do have different numbers of limbs!

But humans naturally have 4 limbs. Instances of people with some other number are exceptions where things have gone wrong. If nothing had gone wrong it would be in their nature to have 4 limbs. For the same reason a centipede with 4 limbs has had its nature subverted. This does not make the centipede more human like, it makes it an exception to centipedes. A man who mimics a woman is an except of the man case, not the woman case because it is in his nature to develop as a man. We can call this man a trans women if you'd like and if people are so inclined they can decide to use she/her pronouns - I myself would and have - but she is not a woman and cannot become one.

I am not sure what the "original intended purpose"

This is where it gets maddening. Are you seriously expecting me to believe you cannot fathom why we created woman's sports leagues?

Human beings, like all mammals, reproduce sexually. The process requires contributions from two distinct categories of humans. The process output is a human who will develop to resemble and be one of these two distinct catagories unless interfered with by a disease or intention effort. This is all fundamental to human reproduction, it is a fact about humans. We call one of these groups, the ones who develop overaries, female or women. Without this process humans would cease to exist and this process requires there to be a meaningful distinction.

Can you be more specific? What is it these humans develop to resemble? I'm also a little unclear on what is meant by "disease" in your description. I read "disease" as a stand in for "anything that causes humans to be different than my model of normal", which seems like it makes your definition tautological. "Humans develop into one of these normal categories unless something happens that makes them develop otherwise."

I suppose it would be more clear for me to say you want to discredit the concept of natural categories. That categories can be facts about the world. You favor treating catagories as totally arbitrary so that you can draw the boundaries wherever you please. But it's wrong, natural categories exist. It's not just arbitrary whim that causes us to differentiate oxygen from carbon dioxide and there are whole processes, that are very important to humans, that rely on these differences. If you give humans carbon dioxide instead of oxygen they will die. If you don't give plants carbon dioxide they will die.

I think I have been clear since the beginning I don't believe in natural categories, but not believing in natural categories doesn't make categories arbitrary. Categories are useful at serving various functions and we should draw the boundaries of the categories so they serve the function we want them to. The boundaries of the category are not arbitrary, but decided by the function we want to put the category to. Categories like "oxygen" and "carbon dioxide" are very useful, because the particular atoms and molecules so described share many properties that let us make useful inferences about them and manipulate them in various ways to our ends.

You can of course propose other methods of categorization but you won't be cleaving reality nearly as neatly at the joints. In fact, as I said before your definition of "woman" necesarily contains my definition to avoid being totally circular, you've just tacked on a "also anyone who we would call a man but identifies as a woman" at the end.

I disagree.

But what you can't do is, after making this new arbitrary categorization, name it the same thing as the category we've been using with my definition this whole time and retroactively apply all the systems and assumptions we've built up under the original definition without having to get wide societal buy in. Women's sports were conceived and are predicated on my definition of woman, not your new one. If you want trans women in women's sports you need to make that case, not just play around with words. People do not like being manipulated and this tactic is so transparent.

What is stopping me from doing this? More generally, part of the argument by the pro-trans side is that gender based categorizations on the basis of the presence of secondary sex characteristics, or appearance, or similar measures more closely track how the term "woman" has been used than a definition based on chromosomes or reproductive capacity. After all, sterile women are still women and we had a concept of "woman" long before we knew anything about chromosomes or gametes.

But humans naturally have 4 limbs. Instances of people with some other number are exceptions where things have gone wrong. If nothing had gone wrong it would be in their nature to have 4 limbs. For the same reason a centipede with 4 limbs has had its nature subverted. This does not make the centipede more human like, it makes it an exception to centipedes. A man who mimics a woman is an except of the man case, not the woman case because it is in his nature to develop as a man. We can call this man a trans women if you'd like and if people are so inclined they can decide to use she/her pronouns - I myself would and have - but she is not a woman and cannot become one.

Frankly, this is entirely too essentialist about humans for me. If someone had, say, a genetic abnormality that caused them to develop a different number of limbs it seems to me it would be in that individuals nature to have that different number of limbs. There might be commonalities of human experience and existence but whatever our "nature" is, it is in us not some metaphysical model from which we deviate.

This is where it gets maddening. Are you seriously expecting me to believe you cannot fathom why we created woman's sports leagues?

Who is "we"? I am skeptical that every women's sport league that ever was created was for the same reason.

Frankly, this is entirely too essentialist about humans for me. If someone had, say, a genetic abnormality that caused them to develop a different number of limbs it seems to me it would be in that individuals nature to have that different number of limbs. There might be commonalities of human experience and existence but whatever our "nature" is, it is in us not some metaphysical model from which we deviate.

A common assumption in this kind of discourse, taking after Plato I presume, is that there is an abstract, immaterial essence of humanness or manness or womanness which actual humans and men and women in the material world may reflect more or less perfectly, but which nevertheless exists independently of any physical instance. I think you reject this assumption, and if so I agree; it's one thing to speak of a typical human that has four limbs as a useful generalization, but humans with three or five limbs exist no less than humans with four, they are just fewer in number. If a rule has exceptions, it's because the rule fails to describe reality in full, not because reality fails to conform to the rule.

Can you be more specific? What is it these humans develop to resemble?

Sure. The two natural categories of human develop different features to facilitate their different contributions to reproduction. Most primarily and obviously the woman side develops ovaries and eggs and the equipment around which to facilitate the man category's ability to get sperms in contact with these eggs as well as structural differences to allow for the incubation of the offspring, wider hips and a pelvis capable of pass a baby. In addition to these primary traits women also develop secondary traits that also aid in the production of offspring, one of which the category of mammal gets it's name from, mammaries or breasts to feed young infants. Men naturally develop a different set of features in order to perform their role in reproduction primarily the prostate and semen as well as the equipment meant to aid in getting the semen in contact with the woman's eggs.

All these natural differences cause the two groups to have distinct appearances.

I'm also a little unclear on what is meant by "disease" in your description. I read "disease" as a stand in for "anything that causes humans to be different than my model of normal", which seems like it makes your definition tautological.

Disease is the deviation from natural development that impedes healthy function and development. Heart disease is the category of things that prevent, or reduces the ability for, the heart from perform it's vital task of pumping blood throughout the body. Likewise anything that interferes with humans to develop in such a way that their reproductive ability is prevented or retarded is a disease.

It's not just different, it's different in a way contrary to the function that the organs developed, or would have developed if not prevented from developing, to support. If lack of key nutrients caused an infant's heart to not pump blood resulting in the infant dying we do not conclude that hearts aren't necesarily meant to pump blood because in some situations they fail to. Nor do we say that the infant didn't have a heart. They did, just not a functioning one. We say that hearts are meant to pump blood but can fail, if the heart did not fail then it would have become a healthy heart that pumps blood. Likewise if there is some intersex condition we identify what went wrong in development to cause it, because something must have gone wrong.

I think I have been clear since the beginning I don't believe in natural categories, but not believing in natural categories doesn't make categories arbitrary.

This just strikes me as confused. Do you agree that there are facts about the world? Because these facts necesarily imply categorization. If we agree that atom exist and that atoms can have different stable configurations and that these different stable configuration constitute different materials and those materials have different properties then a categorization system simply follows. Carbon is different than oxygen. This is a natural category.

Categories like "oxygen" and "carbon dioxide" are very useful, because the particular atoms and molecules so described share many properties that let us make useful inferences about them and manipulate them in various ways to our ends.

Carbon and oxygen do not need you to acknowledge their natural category to have one. Carbon and oxygen have been behaving as distinct things far before there were any humans to name them and will continue to do so if we are no longer here. The same is true of mammalian sex. There is no kangaroo word for woman and yet the joeys find the self in their mother's pouch anyways. In communication we are forced to use words which are only maps of reality, but the purpose of the words is to faithfully describe reality. Reality contains categories. You are using language for a reason other than to describe reality for some means you find just. I get it, people appear to be suffering from a condition and desperately wish reality was different - I see the temptation to just lie about the mapping between words and reality. But it's a lie, a kind of linguistic defection.

I disagree.

You disagree that your definition of woman necessarily contains mine?

What is stopping me from doing this?

I suppose nothing is stopping you from trying. Just like nothing is stopping you from attempting to enforce a category of "healthy food" inclusive of human excrement. But I'm not going to eat it uncoerced.

sterile women are still women and we had a concept of "woman" long before we knew anything about chromosomes or gametes.

Sterile women, if not afflicted by a disease, would have developed into healthy non-sterile women. They are unfortunate exception that do not in any ways undermine the category.

Who is "we"? I am skeptical that every women's sport league that ever was created was for the same reason.

Give me three different plausible justifications.

There is some equivocation in a lot of the discussion I think we can bring clarity to. It's apparent there is biological sex and depending on who you talk to trans woman aren't claiming this category, they are a different kind of woman, but still a woman in this other sense, let's call it a social category. Social categories can obviously be determined by social consensus. But what is it that gives trans woman to think they are part of this category. Well common narratives suggest it's because they 'feel like a woman' - but what is the woman property they are feeling like. There needs to be some content provided by something else to give woman meaning in the first place, and that meaning content is biological sex. Identifying as a woman, is definitionally dependent on sex itself. It is actually parasitic on sex, because it tries to undermine the sex category at the same time as depending on it.

Put another way, imagine biological sex is meaningless. I declare my sex to be that of a Novan- what does that mean? Well of course I can socially agree that it means someone who likes pottery and playing bridge but then we are then truly just constructing and believing in the sense of how we treat money. Sex is a different kind is category - there is a reality to it beyond assigning an arbitrary set of properties.

Can you tell me what facts about a person determine that person's biological sex? Specifically,what facts or set of facts determine someone is in the "woman" biological category such that all cis women are so places and no trans women are?

But what is it that gives trans woman to think they are part of this category. Well common narratives suggest it's because they 'feel like a woman' - but what is the woman property they are feeling like.

My present understanding is that it's some kind of body dysphoria related to secondary sex characteristics in combination with a desire to occupy certain kinds of social roles and relations that often go along with possession of those characteristics. Some of these things are related to biology and some aren't.

Sex is a different kind is category - there is a reality to it beyond assigning an arbitrary set of properties.

I don't agree. All categories are fundamentally social. The set of traits that determine whether someone is a "woman" or "man", is "male" or "female" are things we decide socially like all other categorizations. There are no groupings or categorizations of traits that are any more real than any other.

I think we're honing in to the right space, which is good. To start with the finish, re categories, there's a sense of course where you're right, categories are partly socially decided through language, culture. But there's a sense in which it's deeply lacking -- are the set of square numbers a human category? if socially constructed how do we decide the truth of a category, if we have no external reference beyond ourselves? I guess you might say, by its 'social justice' value, but this just raises another set of questions. If its only human, how would we resolve differences about category definitions -- it could only be consensus or power. Now many social categories are indeed resolved through our language and culture in a process through consensus and power but we also have science, or rationality, to bring to bear. The categorisation of chemicals post Mendeleev was much better than prior, it is even better now. Is it chance that all human societies recognize the categories men and women?

What is man and woman, you asked. Well, I could point to all your descendants, the people that heterosexual and homosexuals are attracted to, the people we most fear on a dark night. The people that suffer mood swings during menopause, bear children, endure pregnancy, suffer childbirth, those with prostate problems and morning glories.

Now of course formally because of the many variations then assigning sex to some individuals does give rise to difficult to resolve edge cases, but a fuzzy boundary does not dissolve the category. We know there are men and women because we were born. The definition is based on this basis, it is the phenotype that gives rise to this successful reproduction, which rather than an arbitrary set of characteristics is a coherent and coordinated set, which we share, with some variation in specific genetics, with the members of our sex. I can articulate a family resemblance, or polythetic, category which would include people with most of the machinery but perhaps lacking a key gene, which keeps them in their sex category even if they can not reproduce. But this boundary doesn't extend to intersex because they do not set up enough of these characteristics to belong to a single sex and they often have (non-functional) elements of both. I appreciate this is messy, but think of a bucket with a hole in it, is it a bucket? What about when it lacks the handle and the entire bottom?

Now this is biological sex, there is also a social category of sex, the way of living in that sex. Intersex live in one of these, whether by their choice, parental choice, or cultural convenience. That doesn't make them that biological sex. Could we then extend the social category to include trans. I think some accomodations were already made in that space, but now we can see a conflict between women's rights, based on sex, and rights of men, say, to self-ID as women. This is a different kind of accomodation- intersex have no choice but trans can be based on as little as the idea in someone's head. This needs to be resolved by negotiation- ironically self-ID has made it harder. Unlikely as it may seem, progressive politics has placed Muslim women at the bottom of the heirarchy of concern.

I don't really see how the pro-trans crowds goal is to discredit the concept of categories entirely. Indeed, it seems a central feature of their (our) arguments that there is a meaningful category called "women" and that it includes trans women.

Then what is the meaning behind the word "woman"? What conditions have to be met that when someone says "I am a woman" I can reply "no you're not" and have trans activists agree with me?

I don't really see how the pro-trans crowds goal is to discredit the concept of categories entirely. Indeed, it seems a central feature of their (our) arguments that there is a meaningful category called "women" and that it includes trans women. The anti-trans crowd clearly does not like this fact but it seems obvious to me the pro-trans crowd is not anti-categorization in some general way. We just want more complete and accurate categorizations for the purposes we think they should be put towards.

This was a misspeak on @aqouta's part, they meant discrediting the concept of certain categories, i.e. the ones that would place "trans women" in the "women" category.

I do agree with them that there is a certain game that's always played (and is a bit tiresome) where people attack a definition by pointing out edge cases. It's like, you say that men are born with a penis and women are born with a vagina, and then they point out the existence of intersex people who may be born with an amalgamation of both or neither.

Well, so, what if those people exist? Does that mean that it's wrong to use the category of "men" and "women"? I personally find no problem with using those categories as-is and going about my daily life with much bigger concerns to deal with than where I should properly place intersex people in my mind.

And besides, if I really end up needing to properly place a given intersex person (either in "men", "women", or some third category), maybe because I personally know them, this doesn't (and shouldn't) affect my original definitions of "men" and "women" - it was an edge case, so I dealt with it like an edge case, not by tossing everything out and starting completely from scratch.

The reality is, you can't expect people to give a tight, locked-down definition of anything, much less what a man and woman are. All they can do is give a general overview by a common case, maybe describe a few exceptions here and there, but certainly nothing that would stand up to infinite philosophical scrutiny.

And really, it's pointless, because the trans skeptical are simply not going to categorize "trans women" as "women", even though trans women share more attributes of women than most men share attributes of women. The reason for this is simple: They still simply share too many attributes with men, and we are not at an advanced level of technology yet to completely patch them out.

A trans woman has a penis - well, okay, so then they get gender reassignment surgery. But now a trans woman has a hole in their groin that must be kept open by dilation. Sure, a trans woman wears a dress or a skirt, maybe did some voice training to talk more feminine, grew out their hair, is interested in girl things. But a trans woman still has a male bone structure, male bone density, male facial features, male puberty (no, you cannot just "choose your puberty", that's a whole other rabbit hole that's just wrong), etc.

A trans woman has a whole host of very male-like things that can't be faked or changed as easily as their social characteristics.

Well, so, what if those people exist?

Generally the purpose of pointing out these individuals is to counter the notion that there is some Particular Trait that neatly and unambiguously divides humans into a sexual binary. If your understanding of sex or gender is more of a cluster structure that people can in-principle move between by altering sufficient traits I think that already makes you much closer to the pro-trans position than most anti-trans people.

And besides, if I really end up needing to properly place a given intersex person (either in "men", "women", or some third category), maybe because I personally know them, this doesn't (and shouldn't) affect my original definitions of "men" and "women" - it was an edge case, so I dealt with it like an edge case, not by tossing everything out and starting completely from scratch.

In general I am a fan of "I will use my judgement to decide how to act with respect to X" but there are some situations (legal ones especially) where people being able to understand in advance how they will be treated is important.

Generally the purpose of pointing out these individuals is to counter the notion that there is some Particular Trait that neatly and unambiguously divides humans into a sexual binary.

I mean, sure, it does that. But that doesn't necessarily mean the definition is wrong and needs to be tossed out. Oftentimes I see these edge cases pointed out by trans activists to argue in favor of a definition by self-identification (which is arguably even more wrong than "penis = man, vagina = woman").

If your understanding of sex or gender is more of a cluster structure that people can in-principle move between by altering sufficient traits I think that already makes you much closer to the pro-trans position than most anti-trans people.

I think most anti-trans people are in-principle like this too. If we lived in a magical transhumanist future where a man could genuinely become a woman, 99.99% of the time an anti-trans person today would see her as a woman and the question wouldn't even cross their mind as to what sex she is because she's unambiguously a woman. There'd only be a few nutcases who'd care too much about her past history as a man and would be very principled about that, but the case for trans people would be exponentially stronger than it is today if actual transition actually existed. Most anti-trans people don't have all this figured out though and when they see a trans woman, it just looks like a man to them, therefore their argument is that the trans woman's sex-based traits are immutable (which, today, is completely correct).

I feel like a lot of trans debates is obscured by a refusal to acknowledge that transition today with current medical technology is actually, really shockingly primitive.

In general I am a fan of "I will use my judgement to decide how to act with respect to X" but there are some situations (legal ones especially) where people being able to understand in advance how they will be treated is important.

Sure, we can carve out edge cases in the law for those people too. But the general definition should still remain.

Generally the purpose of pointing out these individuals is to counter the notion that there is some Particular Trait that neatly and unambiguously divides humans into a sexual binary.

But it doesn't work. There are indeed such traits, and any exceptions are so rare you can safely ignore them. All categories related to things existing on the physical world will work this way, only Mathematics offers perfect definitions.

Further the intersex edge case is useless for trans people, unless you wish to claim only intersex people can be trans.

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But I lose information content if I adopt your trans-inclusive language, a man identifying as a woman is more informative, than just woman. It's also true and scientifically provable. Why is this lossy or ambiguous - the trans inclusive language is ambiguous because it conflates gender identity with biological sex.

I mean, dropping an adjective always conveys less information than including it. "Woman" contains less information than "trans woman" but "man" also conveys less information than "tall man." The question is in what context the information conveyed by the adjective is useful. The "trans" adjective conveys useful information in some contexts and not others. Same for the trans inclusive language.

"Tall man" is just additional information: A tall man is for all intents and purposes a man, his height isn't affecting his man-ness.

"Trans man" is a qualifier. It doesn't just add information, it also removes information that is normally contained in the description "man". It's not just less information, it's also ambiguous.

"You're a man, so you should regularly get checked for testicular cancer" makes sense, because "has testicles" is part of "man". This is information you expect to have from "man", so the qualifier is required in the case of "trans man" to warn you that some qualities of "man" might not apply.

If you drop it because it doesn't seem useful in context (leaving aside that that's controversial almost everywhere) then you're still implying information that isn't there, and once it does come up, there will be confusion.

You don't say "president" if you mean "vize president" or "year" if you mean "half-year" either.

Substitute "sterile" for "tall" in my comment then. Or substitute "testicle-less" if you think having testicles is an essential component of being a man.

If you drop it because it doesn't seem useful in context (leaving aside that that's controversial almost everywhere) then you're still implying information that isn't there, and once it does come up, there will be confusion.

Am I also doing this if I refer to a man who has had a double orchiectomy as a "man", without the "testicle-less" qualifier? Should I be required to add that qualifier the same way I should add "trans"?

Fair enough, bad example from me, but there's a both qualitative and quantitative difference here. "Testicle-less" or any other example is just one property out of too many to list. Here the only reasonable thing to do is deal with exceptions as they come up. A trans man, however, is missing a lot of the properties of men, and a lot of what's there is artificial. Usually, a man naturally has a number of properties that can be deducted from knowing he's a man, with the exceptions being rare and surprising, because everything in nature has exceptions. A trans man does not. What's more, a trans man has a lot of the properties of woman, which in humans is the opposite of man.

Most of the time where it's not reasonable to distinguish between men and trans men, it's not reasonable to distinguish between men and women either.

Yes agreed, but the goal is not context-dependent usage, it's controlling choice of information conveyance in entire tranches of life, media, workplaces. It's implying this is the actual reality with no need to dig beneath. Why people would insist on the usage of third-person pronouns is perverse to me. People should be free to use whatever descriptors they consider useful.

I mean, the point is that they consider the adjective as not conveying any additionally relevant information. If every time I spoke about my coworker Bob I called them "Fat Bob" people might wonder why I was doing so, what relevance his weight had to the question. I think this is pretty analogous to how trans people feel.

If every time I spoke about my coworker Bob I called them "Fat Bob" people might wonder why I was doing so, what relevance his weight had to the question.

I think the issue is that, almost always, when "trans woman" is said, it's a context analogous to one in which Bob being fat is highly relevant (dunno, maybe discussing jobs involving going into tight alleyways to fix things?), and the default presumption was automatically that Bob would be skinny. Personally, I'm having a hard time thinking of a context in everyday social life to me where the "trans" in "trans woman" wouldn't add critically important information.

There's a lot of people who don't use the word "woman" to refer to gender, and who consider someone's sex to be relevant information. Insisting on using the "trans" qualifier is an attempt to meet you half way, but as with many things, doing so only seems to result in demands for courtesy being pushed even further.

Yeah, I'd adjust my usage to just Bob as well in time, who wouldn't, but I don't want to be told off for telling a new person who doesn't know Bob that he's that fat guy with the long hair.

‘Sex categorization model’ is something that goes on in caveman brain. And let me put it this way- Grug not know what ‘trans’ is. Grug know there is man, woman, and freak. Sometimes Grug treat freak as woman or man to be polite, but whole tribe know freaks not men or women if it actually matter.

Everything past that is sophomoric mental masturbation. We don’t have to care on a deep mental level about drawing up some definition, because you can’t change caveman brain and it’s in the drivers seat. And honestly I don’t want to have to keep track of 56 genders, and I don’t want to have to do a bunch of sophomoric mental masturbation to justify that or to justify that no, a 35 year old natal male claiming to be a woman doesn’t get to shower with my teenaged daughter. If society tries to make me I’ll just declare 54 of them freaks that the tribe should make sleep at a separate fire, farther out where the wolves are, and tell them ‘have you considered being normal’ if they complain.

What do you do when trans people pass so well they fool the caveman brain?

e.g https://old.reddit.com/r/traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns/comments/lnf0lw/conservatives_dont_really_understand_biology_smh/

Trans people have always been with us. Nature is not perfect. I have heard it said that there were four genders: men, women, crackpots, and mutants. Separating crackpots and mutants is a hard thing to do with the medical science of 2023. Perhaps someone will find a way to do it, and the people of 2160 will look at us like we looked at the age before germ theory.

Everything past that is sophomoric mental masturbation.

Maybe, but you haven't added enough light to the conversation to justify the heat you're bringing. Assume for the sake of argument that the objectively correct response to transsexual choices, behavior, or advocacy is mockery: here at the Motte, you can argue that this is so but you are not permitted to actually deploy the mockery. You can say "we should call freaks freaks" but you cannot nakedly assert "these people are freaks." I assume that people find it challenging to walk that line since almost everyone I know, here and elsewhere, is really quite bad at it. But it is the line that has been drawn around this space so you need to adhere to it here.

What you or I think the tie-breaker should be does not matter - this is being adjudicated in courts of law and the current rule was made quite clear yesterday:

The elephant in the room should be noted at the outset. Gender identity is real. The record makes this clear. The medical defendants, speaking through their attorneys, have admitted it. At least one defense expert also has admitted it.

...

Despite the defense admissions, there are those who believe that cisgender individuals properly adhere to their natal sex and that transgender individuals have inappropriately chosen a contrary gender identity, male or female, just as one might choose whether to read Shakespeare or Grisham.

...

Any proponent of the challenged statute and rules should put up or shut up: do you acknowledge that there are individuals with actual gender identities opposite their natal sex, or do you not? Dog whistles ought not be tolerated.

Gender identity is real, the gender someone says they are is their real gender identity without respect to natal sex, and attempting to hedge will simply result in being legally overrun. Personally, I would have preferred to live with some detente, a Schrodinger's gender situation, wherein I agree to be polite and pretend to not see what I plainly see with my own two eyes and my easily clocked interlocutor agrees not to be too pushy about the matter. But no, that's not where we're at in 2023 - the legal status of this is going to demand that you either accept that trans woman are women, full stop, or stop dog whistling and declare openly that trans women are men.

As a sort of trans skeptic, I find this discussion to be missing the point. I have an internal notion of "men" and "women" which, however elegant, "just" or in correspondence with simple criteria like chromosomes it is or isn't, has served my model of reality quite well so far. Why does some political group arrogate to itself the right to replace this notion, or really any part of my map, with one that they favour? Maybe the median person is used to their concept space being dictated from above by teachers, journalists and politicians, but I thought of our social contract as entailing that adults at least in principle have the right to be persuaded rather than threatened into updating their thinking. No other element of the progressive policy package seems to go quite as far towards demanding submission in thought rather than merely in deed.

... but I thought of our social contract as entailing that adults at least in principle have the right to be persuaded rather than threatened into updating their thinking.

This ended when Gorsuch penned the Bostock ruling. Whatever you thought the social contract entailed, the law is that trans women are women and that treating them otherwise is discrimination, punishable in civil suits with the full weight of the government. You may be permitted to think what you like in your own head, but behaving accordingly will not be tolerated.

The contention is that the 'internal model' is possibly more pro-trans than anything else, since it says that a trans person who passed in your estimation would be considered by you to be their goal sex.

I don't actually think so. If you see a fake barn, and think that you saw a barn, that just makes it a very convincing fake. You're using the visual traits to infer the other traits. It correlates very highly (or there would be no point to doing so) but not perfectly.

Right, sure, but this isn't the case for any of the contentious cases I have encountered yet. Conversely, I don't think that if you told me any person I know well underwent karyotyping and were actually found to be the opposite chromosomal sex from what I took them to be, I would feel any urge to update my mental category for them accordingly (this is intended as a statement about how well my mental categories seem to predict on the set of people I know well); this would even continue being the case if they then announced that they will "socially transition" to their chromosomal sex (this is intended as a statement on how little the things people change when they "socially transition" actually overlap with the qualities that I care for when I use my m/f category as a predictor).

Yeah, all the biological stuff is besides the point. Gametes, chromosomes, whatever… I can tell a man from a woman without sampling his DNA.

Gametes are used in biology because it works across species, while chromosomes or morphology don't.

The two stable equilibria are large cells (eggs, high investment) or small cells (sperm, cheap and mobile). There are no in between sized cells.

All differences in the sexes stem from this fundamental point. It is the reason for sex organs being the way they are. It is why female mammals are the ones who get pregnant and produce milk (they are the sex who invests more)

Different sized cells lead to different life and reproductive strategies, which lead to different morphologies, in body and mind.

Morphology follows from cell size, to focus on human morphology is to lose the perspective that we are just one of many animal forms building on binary gametes.

I actually agree with you. I’m happy to call any transwoman who passes a woman.

However, I have never encountered a truly passing transwoman. Ever. Perhaps 5% can pass in (posed) pictures. Maybe 1% can pass on video. 0% in real life, where the tiny tells and minutiae of body language are a clear giveaway every single time. Put me in a room with 999 cis women and 1 transwoman, and after 5 minutes of conversation with each I’ll be able to identify the latter.

Go on /r/transpassing and sort by top all time. Even the MOST passing transwomen on Reddit as voted for by their own peers don’t pass. And that’s in posed photos!

Nobody truly passes.

Maybe you personally have an extremely good ability to detect trans women, but most people don’t. Plenty of trans women don’t arouse suspicion in their daily lives, some are able to go stealth, some are able to have medical professionals think they’re biological women and get asked about pregnancy/periods (a real anecdote). Have you not heard stories of straight men flipping out once they’re told the woman they’re attracted to/slept with is trans? E.g. this story of a teen flirting with a trans woman, them going to his hotel room, then going back to hers and violently beating her once she says she’s trans, because he had no idea and felt humiliated.

There are very very few trans people. The fact that any can be clocked in public is evidence that a decent portion of them do not pass. The Canadian census says they are only 0.3% of people age 15 and up (closer to 0.1% for those over 50). And that's including nonbinary (aka trend chasers). You are three times more likely to meet a schizophrenic than a trans person. If you are seeing enough to notice they don't pass, the fact that you're noticing them at all is proof that a large portion of them do not pass. I've been on /lgbt/, I've seen the photos on trans subreddits, profile pictures on twitter, and from lesbian dating apps. These are not cherrypicked sources, they are as close to the modal trans person as you can get. There is a sea of obvious men in dresses, and a few who are young enough/got enough surgery and drugs that they can fool someone, at least in a photo. This mythical mass of unclockable transwomen going about their lives incognito simply does not exist. This becomes even easier in certain male-dominated spaces. 100% of "female" doom modders and professional foreigner starcraft players are transgender. I wouldn't be surprised if 70-90% of "female" speedrunners are transgender. Certainly they outnumber ciswomen massively.

Have you not heard stories of straight men flipping out once they’re told the woman they’re attracted to/slept with is trans? E.g. this story of a teen flirting with a trans woman, them going to his hotel room, then going back to hers and violently beating her once she says she’s trans, because he had no idea and felt humiliated.

"Straight" being the operative word. I have about as much confidence in their straightness as that French spy who somehow didn't notice the Chinese spy he had sex with for years was a man (intact, even!) More likely they are deeply closeted gays, got drunk/high enough that they took a transwoman to bed after their inhibitions were lowered, then the cognitive dissonance became overwhelming, and they lashed out because they have deep emotional problems. Chasers claim they're straight too, doesn't make it true.

Chasers aren’t gay, they’re GAMP (gynandromorphile), meaning they’re attracted to the combination of female and male traits, generally a standard female body + male genitalia. Genital arousal studies have been made on this.

Also this reflects my experience, the type of man I attract as a trans woman is different from the type of man I attracted as a gay man. The former type is genuinely attracted to femininity - they love when I wear make-up, lingerie, or otherwise act feminine, whereas gay men don’t care about that one bit and are often actively turned off.

I’m fine dating bisexual men so I don’t care too much, unlike some trans women who are absolutely obsessed with getting straight men to validate their femininity. But I couldn’t date a gay man.

Just like the gay men who usually are turned off by displays of femininity so are most GAMP turned off by overtly masculine features.

I don't condone such violence and cried during 'Boys don't cry', but I think this points to something important that I'm not hearing in the debate. Being trans and trying to pass is a deeply ambivalent stance both for the trans person and those they engage with. Because I am a scientific realist I recognize the difference between someone appearing as a woman and being a woman. If a man appearing as a woman were to encounter me in a romantic sense and not disclose that, I would count it as a deep betrayal. I hope I wouldn't react violently but I would feel violated in some way. This is no judgement on the man and their choice necessarily but when the rubber hits the road, ie biology becomes relevant, then it's fundamentally dishonest to pass yourself as something your not.

Also the psychological stance of trying to pass and worrying about it seems burdensome for the individual and an example of iatrogenic harm. People that are clearly trans and don't pass actually are much easier to accommodate and I can imagine might find relationship building outside their immediate identity more psychologically natural, though this is just a guess.

What exactly is the harm in a trans woman passing as a woman? I agree that you should disclose to your romantic partner and medical professional, but otherwise, why do you owe work colleagues, acquaintances, random service workers on the streets the need to know your biological sex?

But out of curiosity, why would you feel violated if you were attracted to a woman and found out she was trans? By a romantic sense, are you talking about just going on a date, or having sex? In either case, how exactly were you harmed? You were attracted to her, had a presumably enjoyable experience (assuming she is post-op)… so what pushes you towards wanting to inflict violence on her?

I personally would always disclose to a romantic or sexual partner, and would keep doing so even if I was stealth and post-op, both out of principle and desire for my own safety. But I still don’t see how you are harmed in this interaction. There’s certainly straight men out there who have no problem having sex with trans women and don’t let it impact their sexuality, and some who aren’t into it at all but just politely decline and move on.

I have no problem with those that choose to experience sex with trans, all the power to them. It's not my cup of tea because I like women, real women, that sounds somehow prejudiced or old fashioned but if you believe sex is real then it actually means something. I viscerally would not want to have sex with a man, and especially a man pretending to be a woman. This is just me and is no reflection on the other person.

The harm I've tried to tell you is deceiving me with appearance. A man passing as a woman can not have babies, and is inhabiting a psychology of pretense that creates a distance that fails the test of intimacy at the first hurdle as far as I'm concerned. It's just not how I'm built I'm afraid.

Now if people disclose, that's entirely another matter. I have no problem with people in all their variety. I'd question whether the person couldn't have found another way that didn't involve medical intervention but I'd take them as they are, I wouldn't likely consider romantic involvement but Id be happy to partake in conversation if they're interesting. But the body to me is not just a sack of meat, it is the primary link to reality and a failure to accept it seems to me like a failure to truly accept oneself. That probably sounds judgemental but it's how I orient to life. Be gay, be a feminine man, be gender non-conforming but why change your body drastically with all the attendant risks, or if someone is trans why would they pretend to be something that they are not - if someone is not born a woman, how could they ever know whether they are a woman? The most one that person could know as far as I can tell is that they feel comfortable appearing as a woman. Well why would they hide that truth in the pretending to be a woman?

I like women, real women, that sounds somehow prejudiced or old fashioned but if you believe sex is real then it actually means something.

Sex alone doesn’t govern your attraction. You’re not attracted to ovary ducts or XX chromosomes, you’re attracted to the female phenotype. Otherwise you’d be attracted to the very good looking trans men I linked earlier.

I viscerally would not want to have sex with a man, and especially a man pretending to be a woman. This is just me and is no reflection on the other person.

Getting called a man, especially a “man pretending to be a woman”, is distressing for trans women. That is why many attempt to pass. It’s also a way to avoid the negative attention that being a visibly trans person can bring - many people are hostile towards trans women, but if they see you as a regular woman, you’ll be safer.

Personally, I’m hoping that one day we have the technology to have good enough sex changes that trans women are indistinguishable from cis women including in terms of reproductive capabilities. At that point, would you still say they are men pretending to be women, or would you agree that they are men who have turned into women?

But the body to me is not just a sack of meat, it is the primary link to reality and a failure to accept it seems to me like a failure to truly accept oneself. That probably sounds judgemental but it's how I orient to life.

Why should I accept it when I can change it? The option is literally there, it’s not perfect but it made a noticeable improvement in my life.

If anything, accepting being trans is what took the most courage. I tried to deny it for years, and tried to be something I wasn’t.

Be gay, be a feminine man, be gender non-conforming but why change your body drastically with all the attendant risks,

Believe me, I’ve tried everything else. I couldn’t stand my body before I transitioned, now I can finally stand to look at myself in the mirror. Life is short, and the option not to have a body I despise is literally right there. Why shouldn’t I take it? What’s the upside of being miserable?

Now, I can have real relationships, I can enjoy sex, I can be a lot more intimately fulfilled than I used to be. I’m grateful for all the physical changes I am experiencing, a marked difference from how I dreaded puberty (I may not know what it’s like to be a woman, but I certainly know what it’s like to become more of a man by going through male puberty and male aging, and that was an awful experience).

Sex alone doesn’t govern your attraction. You’re not attracted to ovary ducts or XX chromosomes, you’re attracted to the female phenotype. Otherwise you’d be attracted to the very good looking trans men I linked earlier.

Right, he clearly isn't looking inside someone's chromosomes to tell what sex they are. I think @ShariaHeap probably thinks something like this:

He's attracted to the female phenotype, and maybe trans women can manage to fool him, by mimicking that. But there are other factors that he might want in someone attractive, like having ordinary genitalia, or maybe being able to bear children, or maybe just that he wants to be in a relationship with a woman on a level other than what's attractive, and doesn't think that passing is sufficient to count for that. (and knowledge can affect attraction, as well)

And then by passing and attempting to be in a romantic relationship with him, the hypothetical trans person would be wasting his time by holding out in front of the appearance of a relationship he wants, that in actual fact he can't have.

I'm not discounting your experience, it sounds like it is working out for you.

I am describing my private mental experience of finding out that someone who I thought was a woman, was not. Im not at all convinced that I wouldn't suspect it in any case.

Perhaps the man 'pretending to be' is overdoing it, 'identifying as' is kinder. And I'm not necessarily talking about public life, but private spaces. I don't know why someone would hide that info and I find it condescending, or even infantilising for people to agree that trans identified are that sex, and self-denying of the person to deny their actual situation.

More broadly on the topic, i think that society should change to be more accepting generally of difference. It feels like a regression from social liberal goals to accept that hiding as a woman is the best path. We also don't know enough about the effectiveness of transition to push it as a culture. Its not ubiquitous that people experience relief, some people suffer regret, ongoing medical problems and persistent dysphoria post-transition. I'm worried about the child safe-guarding implications of pushing transition to younger ages so boys can look more girlish and pass better and I think we should run solid research that tests other approaches and gives us a more robust evidence base. We should seek to understand body-identity issues better and investigate why the rates are increasing.

None of this happens if we adopt a trans-human stance and push trans as a solution as a culture. We are not even currently measuring the desistors well.

Sex alone doesn’t govern your attraction.

Yeah, it's a necessary but not sufficient condition for attraction. You can't claim it's bigotry just because it excludes you.

Getting called a man, especially a “man pretending to be a woman”, is distressing for trans women.

Aren't there a whole bunch of trans women who claim to have no dysphoria, and isn't using dysphoria for gatekeeping seen as bigoted?

Why should I accept it when I can change it? The option is literally there, it’s not perfect.

For the same reason we tend to think it's better for people with other forms of body dysmorphia to accept their body rather than change it. The option for them to modify their body is also literally there, and for a person who doesn't like their leg the result of amputation is probably more perfect than a typical result of transition.

I admit I always had trouble understanding dysphoria, but I can concede there's some amount of people for who transitioning is the best option. OTOH it seems obvious that the option to accept your body the way it is, is far superior when it's available.

If you had to put rough numbers on 'percent of trans people that pass' (among some specific groups of trans people, and for some specific groups of observers), what would they be?

the tiny tells and minutiae of body language are a clear giveaway every single time. Put me in a room with 999 cis women and 1 transwoman, and after 5 minutes of conversation with each I’ll be able to identify the latter.

Interesting that you mention this.

There's a pattern in certain "women-only" public online spaces (like lolcow.farm for example) where people get quite paranoid about trying to identify which posters are actually male and which aren't. "That's a male way of writing", "that's a male opinion to hold", etc.

On the one hand, it's not surprising that a dynamic like this would develop in an anonymous or pseudonymous online space. If you want to have a community for only X, but the only way to identify if someone is an X or not is by their writing, then that's fertile ground for people to start making accusations. The interesting thing rather is that it would be harder for this dynamic to take root in a hypothetical "male-only" forum. It seems to me that there is no particular male way of thinking or male way of writing - a man can be anything (except, perhaps, a woman).

Similarly with your example of trying to identify the one trans person in a room. I'm not at all confident that I would by able to identify the one FTM in a room of men (even trying my best to ignore the fact that T can make FTMs look very convincing on a purely physical level). I don't know of any special pattern of "male behavior" that I could look for. There are loquacious men and terse men, autistic men and flamboyantly gay men, frat boys and feminine types and everything in between. Maybe if I asked pointed questions about gender relations and politics then I could be pretty accurate. But if all I had to go on was "tiny tells and minutiae of body language"? No way. And I don't think that's just me being on the spectrum - I think men are just too varied in their presentation and comportment.

I think there's this idea, consciously or unconsciously, that women have a certain special "it" factor (an "it" that could, among other things, identify them as women to other women, as you suggest), and this idea helps explain both why some MTFs want to transition in the first place (they want to have "it") and also why people react so negatively to MTFs: they're transgressing on restricted territory in the social-symbolic space that doesn't belong to them.

FTMs don't draw the same ire because maleness is the position of universality rather than particularity. A man can be anything and anyone can be a man (sort of). It's a public park rather than a gated community.

I think there's this idea, consciously or unconsciously, that women have a certain special "it" factor (an "it" that could, among other things, identify them as women to other women, as you suggest), and this idea helps explain both why some MTFs want to transition in the first place (they want to have "it") and also why people react so negatively to MTFs: they're transgressing on restricted territory in the social-symbolic space that doesn't belong to them.

The "it" is basically automatic Wonderfulness, an automatic halo effect. Hence why MTF trans garner much more controversy than FTM.

MTFs are often viewed as attempting to steal the valor of women, attempting to co-opt the Wonderfulness, privileges, and protections usually afforded to women. In contrast, FTMs are attempting life on a more difficult setting, which may just garner an understanding pat-on-the-back from the bros.

Sometimes TERFs and the like have momentary blue screens of deaths where they wonder "Are we the baddies? Is my opposition to MTF transsexuals rooted in... misandry?"

FTMs don't draw the same ire because maleness is the position of universality rather than particularity. A man can be anything and anyone can be a man (sort of). It's a public park rather than a gated community.

Maleness is open league. Sports provide literal examples of open leagues, where “men’s” professional sports teams are actually sex-agnostic. It's not the case for women's sports, e.g., the WNBA, WTA, etc., spaces carved out for women to play.

Bathrooms are another example. Men using women's bathrooms is far less accepted than women using men's bathrooms. It's pretty much a regular occurrence in nightlife, that women will use men's bathrooms. It's also another opportunity for chicks to double dip in attention whoring and advertising their wares for male attention: Ugh, why are these thirsty scrotes staring at us while we elephant-walk past them to use their bathroom.

Sometimes TERFs and the like have momentary blue screens of deaths where they wonder "Are we the baddies? Is my opposition to MTF transsexuals rooted in... misandry?"

Doesn't sound reasonable, TERFS are usually down with the misandry.

Will your opinion change when technology advances enough that biological cis women are no longer necessary for reproduction?

Already you sure maleness has no privilege in and out of itself? By default, men are taken far more seriously in professional situations, have medical professionals disbelieve their medical conditions less often, get sexually harassed a lot less, and the ability to cooperate easily with other men is a certainly advantage. It depends on what you’re after, but if you’re trying to say, be a successful businessperson, being a woman can be a double edged sword - the extra attention you get from men comes with strings attached. As a male if you have an investor or customer interested in you, you can be pretty sure it’s because they’re interested in the business and not because they want to sleep with you.

Also, why does it make you angry? What impact is there on your life that some trans women out there pass and get treated socially as women?

Already you sure maleness has no privilege in and out of itself? By default, men are taken far more seriously in professional situations, have medical professionals disbelieve their medical conditions less often, get sexually harassed a lot less, and the ability to cooperate easily with other men is a certainly advantage.

Men are also more likely to be abandoned to their fate if they are marginal (see the homelessness rates) and I don't see why I'd give men "privilege" for the ability to cooperate with each other unless I also gave them a malus for being more likely to violently assault one another and attribute the absence of that amongst women to "female privilege".

IME few feminist or purveyor of privilege theory do this. In fact, they seem to do the opposite: men's heightened risk of assault and violence and longer prison sentences are the result of "toxic masculinity" (with the not-subtle implication that it is men's fault and issue, unlike problems that impact women) and women are EDIT: not privileged for avoiding it.

but if you’re trying to say, be a successful businessperson, being a woman can be a double edged sword

What if I, as a man, want to be a successful kindergarten teacher?

A stay-at-home dad?

you can be pretty sure it’s because they’re interested in the business and not because they want to sleep with you.

And what about all of the benefits that can come from leveraging sexuality? Or just the general "women are wonderful" effect?

Men are also more likely to be abandoned to their fate if they are marginal (see the homelessness rates) and I don't see why I'd give men "privilege" for the ability to cooperate with each other unless I also gave them a malus for being more likely to violently assault one another and attribute the absence of that amongst women to "female privilege".

“Privilege” is a loaded word and I personally don’t like it.

My point is that maleness has intrinsic advantages. So does femaleness. Those advantages may be more or less relevant to you, and it doesn’t mean there aren’t any drawbacks; an advantage in one area does not necessarily nullify a disadvantage in another.

Historically, men’s ability to co-operate in large hierarchical social structures was hugely beneficial, and the aggression was harnessed towards the “enemy”. That competitive streak can still be an advantage today.

In fact, they seem to do the opposite: men's heightened risk of assault and violence and longer prison sentences are the result of "toxic masculinity" (with the not-subtle implication that it is men's fault and issue, unlike problems that impact women) and women are privileged for avoiding it.

Men are generally more aggressive due to testosterone and a culture that perpetuates and encourages male aggression. Women tend to be hyper vigilant about the risks of being assaulted while men are the opposite - I had a lot of guys surprised at how I’m always paranoid walking alone at night or being suspicious of male strangers.

What if I, as a man, want to be a successful kindergarten teacher? A stay-at-home dad?

Women would be more likely to be successful at those, yes. Pros and cons.

And what about all of the benefits that can come from leveraging sexuality? Or just the general "women are wonderful" effect?

As I said, double edged sword. Not everyone is comfortable with leveraging their sexuality and there are risks; some men will blacklist you because you didn’t sleep with them, and sleeping your way to the top is a reputation hazard. Wouldn’t you rather be valued for your skills and abilities rather than your success be based on how much men want to have sex with you? The latter is quite dehumanising.

Wouldn’t you rather be valued for your skills and abilities rather than your success be based on how much men want to have sex with you? The latter is quite dehumanising.

Here's a claim I'll put out there: men are already largely valued by how much women want to have sex with them. Or speaking more precisely, there are certain markers of social fluency / status / desirability that matter more, when it comes to making snap social judgments regarding a man's value, than his skills and abilities. This is where you get anecdotes like this one related in Chapter 3 of Volume I of Feynman's Lectures on Physics, in which the nuclear scientist's girlfriend laughs at his attempt to demonstrate value through his (scientific) skills and abilities. Or alternatively, all the scoffing and schadenfreude-ing at Minecraft creator Notch for leading a life of loneliness despite creating the best-selling video game in history (although that can be argued to be driven by sour grapes ("I might not be friggin' rich like him, but at least I get poon!") and general antipathy towards his politics). Actually, it might be more apt to say in men's case that they are devalued by how much women don't want to have sex with them.

[ Note, by the way, that I'm talking about "value" here rather than "success" (the latter of which I'm taking to mean "success in a corporate / academic / career context", given that words like "skills and abilities" and "success" tend to be used more in that domain these days rather than, for instance "skills and abilities as a parent" or "skills and abilities as a Little League coach"), because I don't believe that career success and the like for women is all too tied to sex appeal. Here's an anecdote, but most high-achieving Women In STEM that I see are not lookers, to say the least. I've heard similar from people in other "intelligence-heavy" (so to speak) fields such as law. Now, maybe the situation is different in more public-facing or "soft-skills"-heavy roles like marketing or management - but frankly, we know that men in those areas are also selected for attractiveness. So if the claim is that women are only able to advance in their careers to the extent that they're attractive, then that's a claim that I personally don't buy. (I'm open to being persuaded otherwise.) ]

But returning to the original idea: if women value me because they all wanted to have sex with me - well, that wouldn't be the worst thing in the world by me. Of course, one could note that sex is for men what commitment is for women, and say that a fairer analogy would be to say "how would you feel if women valued you to the extent that they found you emotionally useful?" In that case, I wouldn't be quite as happy; but to say that this analogy would be fairer would be to ignore a key component of what it means for a man to be sexually attracted to a woman. It's the same component that's ignored when women get mad at guys for asking them on dates after a long period of friendship: "Uggh, he only wanted to use me for sex?" No: for a man (going by my own experiences and those of other men I know), when you're attracted to a woman sexually, then everything about her becomes more attractive. Her jokes become funnier; her insights more profound. It leads to a self-reinforcing feedback loop of attraction (because when these other qualities become more attractive, then this raises the level of physical attraction as well). Take that into consideration and being valued as a woman because a guy wants to have sex with you seems pretty nice, given that it comes as a package deal with him valuing you as an intellect and a wit.

Then again, this entire post is largely a "grass is greener"-type situation, now, isn't it. I do stand by the claims that "men are devalued by how much women don't want to have sex with them" and "being valued as a woman for your sexual attractiveness is pretty nice", but I understand that it's not necessarily all peaches and cream.

Wouldn’t you rather be valued for your skills and abilities rather than your success be based on how much men want to have sex with you? The latter is quite dehumanising.

I'm not sure if I'm just reading more into the word choice than is warranted, but I'm not sure how it could be dehumanizing. Men mostly aren't interested in having sex with non-humans, and furthermore, that's a pretty critical part of how we make more humans, which is a pretty significant aspect of being a human. Perhaps it'd be insulting in certain contexts, in that it feels better if one's own success in a field is from one's competence in the field rather than one's sexual attractiveness (holding incompetence constant, it's also an open question if it's preferable to have success in the field due to one's sexual attractiveness compared to having non-success in the field due to one's incompetence being accurately assessed). But I don't see how it's dehumanizing. I'd see it as the exact opposite, if anything.

I completely agree with you on FTM transitioners. They don't really interest me, they're not what the debate is about and nobody except butch lesbians upset that most of their peers are becoming transmen cares all that much about them as an issue.

I mean, I care because I want them kicked out of gay spaces.

Go on /r/transpassing and sort by top all time. Even the MOST passing transwomen on Reddit as voted for by their own peers don’t pass. And that’s in posed photos!

To be fair, this is not as strong a point as you're making it out to be, given that you already know that each of these people is trans by virtue of the subreddit's name. I agree that many of these pictures look obvious but I'm not sure whether I'd have the same confidence if these were presented in a gallery of portraits of random cis and trans people.

On the rest I agree entirely. It reminds me of this post by @Walterodim. For any given measure men can come arbitrarily close to the female standard, but combine multiple and the difference becomes clear as day almost every time. From a probably highly curated sample like the top posts from your link a number could plausibly be women going by the image alone, but I've never met someone in real life where the full package including voice, stature, body build etc. didn't tip me off immediately.

The obvious point is that you only notice the non-passing transwomen, so of course you can identify 100% of the non-passing transwomen whom you correctly identified as being transwomen.

I 100% agree that the posted photos of transwomen on reddit rely heavily on makeup, clothing, lighting, and camera angles. And even then, most aren't that great. However, it's my understanding that people who transition before puberty are in much better shape.

The obvious point is that you only notice the non-passing transwomen, so of course you can identify 100% of the non-passing transwomen whom you correctly identified as being transwomen.

You can notice a range of transwomen, some of whom pass better than others. Based on this, you can make deductions that extrapolate the size of the group that passes perfectly, even if you can't directly see them.

Ability to orgasm seems orthogonal to the quality of one's shape to me. Inability to reproduce seems more relevant, if we're talking about sexual function.

This downside pales in comparison to the downside that puberty might be one of the most likely things to naturally resolve the issue in the first. The false positive rate is hugely important here.

I’m not sure what you’re saying- that puberty takes away the ability to orgasm(uh, it kind of does the opposite for most people?)

I'm saying that puberty may be what cures some large amount of people of their gender dysphoria. The studies showing how few kids who go on blockers desist are evidence to this. And while not being able to orgasm is quite a problem I'd rank the possibility that we're committing many people who would have desisted to be trans anyways even higher.

However, it's my understanding that people who transition before puberty are in much better shape.

It’s very important to note that most trans teens on puberty blockers do actually start puberty before they go on them, so the effect isn’t total.

There are some very rare cases where a transwoman is ‘fully’ able to avoid male puberty. Jazz Jennings is a good example. Does she pass? I think it’s a more complicated answer than just ‘yes’; she has very broad shoulders as an adult for her build, at least from the 5 minutes of YouTube footage I just watched.

One thing that Jazz and quite a lot of very-early transitioners who are sometimes considered to pass (eg. NikkieTutorials) have in common is that they’re very much overweight. This obscures many minor and moderate physical differences between sexes, and softens out parts of the masculine facial structure.

This is deliberate effort to bring scientific sounding language into an already settled situation to confuse and muddle waters. It is also isolated demand for rigorous categorization, something that for instance is not required if the same person argues for let's say race-based affirmative action where OMB recognizes 6 races (Hispanic or Latino, White, Black or African American, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, and Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander), quite a shallow categorization of immensely diverse situation - don't you think?

As others said, everybody knows what man and woman is even with all the "subcategories" such as post-menopausal or infertile women and so forth. Everything else is unnecessary sophistry. I can use another more innocuous example as an analogy: what is a chair? There are so many subcategories. You have office chairs and kitchen chairs, you have chairs with multiple legs or even those designer chairs without legs. You can have metal chairs and plastic chairs, you have chairs with or without armrest and who even knows what is a difference between chair and stool and even table for that matter - you can sit on a table and you can eat from chair, can you not? It is all so fluid, chair is whatever you think it is. Except no. Everybody knows what a chair is for purpose of virtually all the conversations in human history. We are not interested in this kind of sophistry outside of some funny niche philosophical discussions, we do not have to bring it into the mainstream for sure.

Why is there a need for a single classification of sex that’s used in all instances? There’s clearly multiple concepts to which sex and associated words refer to: which gametes you produce, which chromosomes you have (karyotype), which morphology you have (phenotype), and which gender roles and social expectations you occupy. Why would you try to collapse all of the above into a single “real” binary classification instead of just using the appropriate concept for what you’re trying to communicate?

E.g., if you’re saying “look at that man over there” to refer to a passing trans woman, you will (at least initially) confuse your interlocutor, because as you said, humans categorise people as men or as women based off their appearance, and a passing trans woman gets put in the category “woman” for her social interactions by people who don’t know otherwise.

Or, if you, a straight man looking to date, ask me to introduce you to a woman your age, and I have you meet a (very good looking) 6’ bearded trans guy, will I have really fulfilled the request? What if I came with a very attractive woman with CAIS instead? Clearly, the words “man” or “woman” don’t refer to the person having XX or XY chromosomes in common usage.

At some level I guess this is an ontology debate - I’m firmly in the camp that believes categories aren’t real, but they can be useful, and they should always be understood as fuzzy. Take the “is a burrito a sandwich” debate - it’s clear that there is a property of “sandwichness”, which a burrito had less than a BLT but more than say, a soup.

There’s similarly a property of “‘maleness” and “femaleness” that trans men and trans women have different degrees of than cisgendered people, depending on their innate traits, how long they’ve been on hormones, what surgeries they had, etc, and that will impact what strangers refer to them as, and what gender-based expectations they get hassled with.

Or, if you, a straight man looking to date, ask me to introduce you to a woman your age, and I have you meet a (very good looking) 6’ bearded trans guy, will I have really fulfilled the request?

How many 6' bearded trans men who look like biological males are out there? The FTM photos I've seen range from "looks like a butch lesbian" to "is a short, dumpy, androgynously featured person who may or may not have a wispy goatee".

Is this the kind of woman you mean by "clearly the words 'man' or 'woman' doesn't refer to the person having XX or XY chromosomes in common usage"? Would you introduce Emily to your straight friend looking for a woman? For comparison purposes, when Emily was still Anthony.

Now, they've only been on HRT for a year. If they lose a ton of weight, get surgery, do the voice exercises to change how they sound, etc. then one day there may be "Emily passes sufficiently enough that you don't immediately go 'that's a guy'". But if you tell me that you'd uncritically introduce Emily to someone straight looking to date a woman, because "categories are fuzzy" and "we don't judge people on their chromosomes", I doubt it.

So yeah, we can tell men from women just by looking in the vast majority of cases. And just by looking, we're going to go "Emily is not a Real Woman in the sense of exactly the same as a cis woman". If "Trans women are real women" was happy to accept "but not the same thing as cis women", fine. Unhappily, there is a contingent who push for "exactly the same as a cis woman", citing "I have the biology of a cis woman; I'm on HRT, so are women who are post-menopausal; I may not have a uterus but neither do women who have undergone hysterectomies; they are accepted as women so should I be".

Surely you know how this game goes? You share non-passing trans people, I can share passing ones. What do you think about 6’3 Mitch Harrison who competed in the Titan Games? Sure not all trans men look like this (but most do eventually pass as short effeminate men), but they are out there - both me and gay men I know have dated trans guys who passed.

I wouldn’t introduce a passing trans woman to a straight man uncritically, because most straight men aren’t interested in trans women and many are downright threatened by the concept, genital preferences are a thing, and the cost-benefit ratio is too low. But, I could gently approach the subject and see if that particular person is interested - I have done so in the past, I’ve had straight friends say “if she’s hot and had bottom surgery, I don’t care”. And what do you think is more likely - that a straight man would be interested in a trans woman that looks like this, or for a trans man that looks like Laith Ashley? Which one do you think confuses gay men, and which one confuses straight men?

Trans women aren’t the exact same as cis women, and I’m happy to accept that. Both the “trans women are exactly the same as cis women” and the “trans women are just men in a dress and we can always tell” camps are wrong.

Or, if you, a straight man looking to date, ask me to introduce you to a woman your age, and I have you meet a (very good looking) 6’ bearded trans guy

I would think most straight men looking to date probably wouldn't be interested in dating someone who had transitioned in either direction.

Instead of just looking at passing, there's also the factor of hormones. Due to this, they start to actually have attributes of the other sex in ways that they previously did not, and that are not just makeup and outward aesthetic changes. Of course, that's still limited, and so they remain hard to categorize.

But imagine we had some perfect technology that could fully and perfectly, change someone's sex, down to a cellular level, etc. In that case, we should recognize them as being the opposite sex than they had, I would think. Current treatments are currently very far short of that, while still being something in that direction, which is one reason why there's all this disagreement over what we should do.

If technology is that sufficiently advanced we could presume there'd be a 'cure' for this population to allow them to be happy with their natal bodies.

Some trans people would argue that such a “cure” would fundamentally change who they are as a person, as opposed to say, plopping the same brain in a new body of the opposite sex. It would be akin to having a pill to cure homosexuality when you could instead just accept people for who they are.

I’m somewhat ambivalent about it because going from one sex hormone to the other also changes who you are as a person (I’ve experienced this as someone who went on HRT), and there’s reports of dysphoric biological female teenagers going on testosterone blockers and that significantly reducing their dysphoria to the point they no longer need to transition.

But, given the two options, I would probably go with the perfect transition, because it’s a lot more interesting.

fundamentally change who they are

In terms of fundamental change, happy as I am, seems a lesser / smaller change than the alternative.

I would think a pill to cure homosexuals would be popular. Though I can imagine there would be opposition. There's opposition by some in the deaf community to cochlear implants.

I’m much more averse to altering my brain than altering my body. To me a perfect sex change would be plopping my existing brain into a body of the opposite sex, while a dysphoria cure would involve fundamentally altering my existing brain structure.

Me with a different set of genitals is still me; me after a treatment that changes my self-perception and my sexuality… seems like a much bigger change.

To me the gender swap is the cochlear implants, whereas the curing gender dysphoria is like making you OK with being deaf and having you live in an idyllic deaf community. Sure, some of those people are very happy, and it’s better than being miserable because you don’t know what everyone around you is saying, but I would much prefer to be able to actually hear.

Hormones literally alter your brain structure, almost certainly more than altering whatever is causing dysphoria would. I can understand someone who has been trans for a while and has built up an identity around it, but once we have a pill that just removes the dysphoria that should be the last generation of trans people.

Some trans people would argue that such a “cure” would fundamentally change who they are as a person

So would cochlear implants. It hasn't posed a significant moral problem for us I think.

It is only a problem if you buy into the idea that an illness or deficiency has the same value as the natural functioning of the body. But that is putting the cart before the horse.

Given that transpeople are claiming that their dysphoria makes them suffer so significantly that care is mandated and most of their gains have been based on a mostly pragmatic desire to avoid this suffering they have less room here than many - e.g. homosexuals - to complain.

If such a technology existed, it would radically change how people conceptualize gender. I think it would be de-emphasized to meaninglessness. It would be akin to categorizing people by what color clothes they wear.

You'd still have whatever mental issues made them want to transition.

Is curiosity really such a mental issue? If you can change your sex more or less at will, I don't know why most people wouldn't jump at the chance for the experience: it's reversible after all, in the hypothetical. It seems no weirder than wanting to see what being a bird is like for a couple hours.

If you can change your sex more or less at will our conception of gender and sex norms would be completely different. It's possible a lot of what drives MTF/FTM to want to transition wouldn't exist in the first place.

The first point you highlighted is an example of a "trait cluster" sex model, and I think it can form one basis of accepting trans women as women.

How feminized does a male body need to be before it is "female"?

I do think you're right that some sci fi technology may come along to throw a wrench in the current form of the debate. What will people say when you can do gene therapy and grow a new set of genitals to order for a person?

How feminized does a male body need to be before it is "female"?

Orders of magnitude more than we can currently accomplish.

This is kind of a problem that paradoxes of identity have in general—it's hard to draw a clear line, since at every point the change is practically negligible. I don't know that I'm comfortable with handing out a bunch of criteria, since edge-cases are hard.

I think it might often be good to think about it, in those weird edge cases as "basically male in these ways, basically female in these ways, kind of in the middle in these ways, like nothing else in these ways," etc. But that doesn't distill things into a concise summary, and so isn't always useful.

I do wish that it wasn't praised in some subsets of society to try to push yourself into the messy middle.

Honestly this all seems super unnecessary. No one is actually confused at all about this stuff. Human beings naturally break into two groups if not fucked with by some unfortunate mutation/condition or fucked with by the various means of mimicking the other category. As cliche as it is, human beings naturally have two legs we don't need to blow up this useful assumption because of amputees or people with disorders that caused them to grow some other number of legs. The only reason these unusual conditions are brought up at all is because trans advocates want to conflate these unusual conditions with the intentional efforts used to mimic the opposite sex that trans people undergo. If we drop the abnormal conditions it just collapses to "sex is what you are identified as if you don't intentional put substantial effort into changing that perception", which is what everyone, even trans people and their advocates actually use as a category. If it wasn't the case then trans people wouldn't need to put in the effort and the concept of 'passing' would be incoherent. The major disagreement is on to what degree this mimicking should be humored.

Human beings naturally break into two groups if not fucked with by some unfortunate mutation/condition or fucked with by the various means of mimicking the other category.

The more I've thought about the concept of disease and disability, the more I've become convinced that there isn't actually a good philosophical grounding for talking about variation and difference in normative terms.

To take just one example, being left-handed is a variation that occurs in a minority of humans. Is it an "unfortunate mutation" or a "normal variation"?

Does it matter that it occurs in 10% of people? If being left-handed had instead occured only in 0.01% of people would it then be correct to say something like, "Humans are a bipedal, right-handed species"?

We can be descriptive and speak in generalities, but in a lot of cases I don't think we have a sound basis to say something like, "A human body should work this way, but yours is working wrong."

I think if we're being as pedantic as possible, the best you could say is something like, "Your body works in way X, most people's body works in way Y, but with a surgery Z we can make your body work in way Y as well."

there isn't actually a good philosophical grounding for talking about variation and difference in normative terms.

Normal doesn't mean "accounts for all cases". There is little doubt that those with very unusual disabilities or those that put substantial effort into mimicking the opposite sex are not normal. And that can be fine, people don't have to be normal. Abnormal doesn't even strictly mean bad. I do not understand this impulse some have to destroy the concept of normal to spare obvious outliers the small pain of accepting the obvious truth that they are not normal. Or at least the reasoning that does make sense for this impulse is very uncharitable.

To take just one example, being left-handed is a variation that occurs in a minority of humans. Is it an "unfortunate mutation" or a "normal variation"?

Sure, being left handed can be abnormal. It is either a, very slightly, unfortunate mutation or maybe a, very slightly, fortunate mutation in some rare cases like fighting or tennis where it can throw your opponent offguard. No one is surprised when a tennis couch says "normally when the ball is here and your opponent is here you'd expect it to come back in so and so way, but with a lefty so and so". These sexual mutations are much more straightforwardly unfortunate as they carry practically no benefit and quite a bit of downside.

We can be descriptive and speak in generalities, but in a lot of cases I don't think we have a sound basis to say something like, "A human body should work this way, but yours is working wrong."

In some cases sure, but being sterile is very clearly not how the body is supposed to work. The purpose of the reproductive system is to produce offspring, if it can't do that then it is defective. Being defective is about as dead center of a sound basis for declaring something not working correctly as I can imagine. If you can't rule this as abnormal then I question what you actually think normal could possibly mean.

Normal has a purpose, it lets us treat special cases as special cases and suspend normal treatment as necessary. Which is, possibly uncharitably, what I think is behind this whole shell game. You want trans people to be treated not just as normal, but as normal for their desired sex. Those of us objecting to this want to be able to treat trans people as abnormal members of their natal sex. And I think we have tremendously better reasons to do so. I think you want what you want for laudably empathetic reasons, you see them as suffering and that they deeply want to be treated as normal members of the opposite sex. But this violence you're doing to the concept of normal to try and force them to fit is ridiculous and cannot stand. It is wrong to enforce an incoherent worldview, even if done out if empathy. It can't even stand in its own legs, the norm of cis female needs to exist in order for trans women to even emulate it.

The more I've thought about the concept of disease and disability, the more I've become convinced that there isn't actually a good philosophical grounding for talking about variation and difference in normative terms.

To take just one example, being left-handed is a variation that occurs in a minority of humans. Is it an "unfortunate mutation" or a "normal variation"?

I mean, if we're going to question the concept of disease and disability why start there? Seems "convenient" to start on an edge case that most people would acknowledge (presumably because there's other factors at play that prevent one assuming that variation is disability - e.g. almost no impact on what we consider right and healthy functioning)

Seems like this easily collapses into a general challenge to the idea of health as a normative category.

So what about people born without an arm? Or many other actually painful congenital conditions? How do we know that's "unhealthy" or a "disability"? Do we just not? Is there no normative sheen to any of this?

I think this leads to strange places that are at least out of step with most people's intuitions.

If it doesn't, then I don't see how this point isn't subject to the same critique being made of this concept of gender: it's a deliberate attempt to occlude the fact of a generally accepted category by using edge cases.

You made a big leap from left-handedness to missing limb, which is commonly accepted as a disability, and ignored all of the in-between.

What about something like autism spectrum disorders? A mild case of autism can be beneficial; how many technological and scientific advances do we owe to people who had autistic obsessions in engineering, physics, programming, etc.? Some autistic people see “normies” as the dysfunctional ones and are able to be very successful and productive in the right environment - but there’s a point where it becomes entirely a disability. Where do you draw the line?

You made a big leap from left-handedness to missing limb, which is commonly accepted as a disability, and ignored all of the in-between.

Yes, it was deliberate.

Thats my point: OP criticized the very idea of normative categories due to biological deviations but conveniently picks one deviation that most people would now argue falls outside of the category of "disability" (because such people fall within the normative category of "healthy").

It seems to me that even in his attempt to "problematize" such categories he's trying to leverage their assumptions. Presumably because arguing that "health" as such is a meaningless category is a fringe position.

It's only a "leap" once I accept that there is such a thing as health and it doesn't exclude certain minor deviations but excludes larger ones. On the category skeptical view who is to say?

I want to push him to apply his logic consistently, to cases intuitively considered less thorny.

If he doesn't see this as a problem then I refer back to my OPs final paragraph.

I think the mistake is viewing categories as “real” things that exist outside of your mind. Categories aren’t “real”, they’re a fuzzy concept that humans invented. This doesn’t mean that they’re meaningless; they’re an abstraction through which to compress tons of information about a subject, allowing you to make decisions more effectively. Every category is like this, from species to planets to sandwiches to chairs.

So if you ask is “X a disease”, you should be aware that disease isn’t a thing that objectively exists outside of human interpretation. Most cases are clearcut so this doesn’t matter, but occasionally you do have ambiguities, like sickle cell traits which offer resistance against malaria at the cost of other health complications - it’s a disease in the western world, but in some African countries it can literally save your life.

I think the mistake is viewing categories as “real” things that exist outside of your mind. Categories aren’t “real”, they’re a fuzzy concept that humans invented. This doesn’t mean that they’re meaningless; they’re an abstraction through which to compress tons of information about a subject, allowing you to make decisions more effectively. Every category is like this, from species to planets to sandwiches to chairs.

So, if categories do carve reality at the joints sometimes, how does this square with:

The more I've thought about the concept of disease and disability, the more I've become convinced that there isn't actually a good philosophical grounding for talking about variation and difference in normative terms.

You're providing one potential grounding and justification of categories - they are tied to important things that are truth-apt. Why is that not enough for grounding, when OP's own examples seem to quite clearly show implicit use of "meaningful" categories?

I think OP is being inconsistently nihilist. He should either pay the full price of nihilism or accept that he's right there with the rest of us and can't just blithely dismiss categories via edge cases to avoid inconvenient exclusions.

Put it another way: can I use OP's argument to dismiss, I dunno, flesh-eating bacteria as a disease? If not, why not? How does the above argument not prove too much?

So if you ask is “X a disease”, you should be aware that disease isn’t a thing that objectively exists outside of human interpretation.

I don't see how that helps OP. First of all, it's debatable what's objective or not (or what we mean by it). Morality is widely considered objective by ethicists and is even more subject to this criticism.

For another: why does "disease" need to exist outside of humanity? Isn't it enough that OP seems quite clearly able to see that "left-handedness" is only weakly (or not at all) within the disease camp but flesh-eating bacteria would be? Why did he not leverage a more intuitively absurd example? If they know they can't, why do they think they can just dismiss categories when they're quite clearly guiding him?

I don’t agree with OP’s blanket dismissal of categories. “Disease” is a very useful category, my argument is simply to recognise that humans have a tendency to ask “is X a disease” when the real question actually is “should X be cured”, and focusing on whether X is a “really” a disease or not is pointless.

Flesh-eating bacteria neatly fit into the category of “disease”. But, is having sickle cell traits a disease? Is having parasitic worms a disease? You might scoff at the latter - but there’s potential evidence that over-sanitation and elimination of parasites is what is causing the huge spike in auto-immune conditions in the west. So it’s important to ask the real questions, which is “should we cure X”, or “how do we manage X”, not “is X a disease”.

More comments

Legally, this sort of thing could be relevant, I suppose, and it could be relevant in those relatively unusual cases, but yes, ordinarily it's not difficult.

However, transitioning probably puts the person into an unusual case, where it does take some work to decide how to handle things, because of effects of hormones.

I'm not sure I see what you're getting at here. I don't see why having a model that classifies people on the basis of their biology in some way conflicts with the fact that people sometimes present in a way that makes them appear to be the sex they are not.

There's no meaningful epistemological issue here. Yes, people can dress and generally display themselves in ways that will deceive others as to what their biological sex is, or just look relatively androgenous. As you say, this means that maybe 2% of the time, we are wrong about the sex of people we see on the street. But in the vast, vast majority of those cases, we could figure out their biological sex if we really needed to (say, to determine whether or not to allow someone into a sports competition limited to people of the female sex) relatively easily.

Is the implication of your model that if a biological man lets his hair grow out, such that some percentage of people confuse him for a woman, even if he hasn't actually changed what he "identifies" as, he "is" a woman in those interactions?

Does your argument apply to money? If it looks close enough it will do, and try not to look too closely?

Sure, I'd be okay with treating something like Bitcoin as money in some cases, since it bears enough of a resemblance to money.

He's asking if you'd treat something that looks enough like a hundred dollar bill as a hundred dollar bill.

Something that looks enough like a hundred dollar bill to be accepted as legal tender is a hundred dollar bill.

How would they send people to prison for making them if they are hundred dollar bills, and if fake hundred dollar bills aren't accepted as legal tender, why bother criminalizing them?

If the note was real enough to be universally accepted as legal tender, the forgery would never have been identified and reported, and nobody would go to prison. The history of paper money is full of examples of new security measures designed to combat the genuinely successful and broadly undetectable forging of notes.

However, as I note above, we’re a very long way from this being true in this situation.

If it was relatively inexpensive though nontrivial to switch sex - some kind of sci-fi lab grown body tier shit - what would happen? What would happen if it cost three months' wages to switch sex? That would be a hell of an interesting thing and an interesting environment to be in.

The issue is that's how likely something is going to be accepted is a question of how closely you look. A fake bill is no less a fake because someone accepted it.

We eventually found the Superdollars that most likely North Korea was producing, but those were good enough to remain in circullation until the Treasury drastically changed the look of the $100 bill.

I don't think I argued anywhere that the best tie breaker for money categorization is morphology.

Different categories have different kinds of resemblance binding them together.

It's just that arguing it's the best tie breaker for sex seems rather arbitrary. I don't see a good reason why it should work for sex and and not dollar bills.

Part of my argument is that this is de facto the standard you're using if you use your brain's sex determination module to get information about men and women in the world. Since the evidence on humans having pheromones is mixed, and the existence of porn seems to indicate that the mere visual presence of a woman is enough to arouse a man, I think the argument that there is something like a sex determination module that leverages visual information is pretty strong.

The visual information is based on a subset of the morphology of a person being looked at.

Now, it has been a broader trend in science to move away from morphology as a primary basis for classification, as we have developed more sophisticated tools for observing "hidden" things like DNA, hormones and microscopic structures, so I understand why genetic or gametic models of sex are popular among people who want solid and fixed definitions. But part of my argument is that the "hidden" things we can now measure are less psychologically fundamental than the visual (and thus morphology-based) sex determination module in the brain.

Part of my argument is that this is de facto the standard you're using if you use your brain's sex determination module to get information about men and women in the world.

I think that's a sleight of hand. It's like saying a stick bug is de facto a stick, because my brain's bug determination module is using that standard about bugs and sticks in the world.

I find all this excessive academic-isation and navel gazing over this stuff to be kind of tiresome these days.

Everyone knows what a man and a woman are. Every single human has known, for thousands of years. Pretending you don't and then splitting hairs over exact definitions to try and gerrymander a group onto the other side of the line because it fits with your politics is just... I don't know. Extremely blatantly the same kind of nonsense as trying to redefine racism so that you can't be racist to white people.

Appealing to extreme edge cases like the tiny fraction of a percent of people with serious intersex conditions and people who have suffered accidents, and then arguing that because nobody can find a perfect rule that includes all of these cases, we should scrap everything we ever knew and start over, is assuming we need to come up with a rule in the first place. We just don't. A man is a man, and a woman is a woman, in the same simple and uncomplicated way that they have been for the preceding centuries of recorded human history. Finnster is not a woman. Even if he doesn't appear as a man at first glance, you being successfully deceived does not change the essential nature of an thing. An old person scammed by an indian phone scammer into buying an "antivirus" that is nothing of the sort, even if they really and truly believe the software is protecting them from threats, did not actually buy an antivirus.

the sex you were assigned at birth.

Sex is not assigned, it is observed. The essential nature of the person... is observed.

So before I debate anything else you've said, you're going to have to convince me that these attempts to make nice, neat, perfect rules are necessary in the first place.

Millions of people go to college every year, they all need to be taught by PhDs. Few of the PhDs have pure teaching positions, so we need armies of professors who's job it is to teach future office workers to write.These professors need to publish research, so we end up with an endless torrent of "well actually papers" and iterative hair splitting.

Agree there’s no reason to even think thru the current fashion. We’ve known a man and a women for thousands of years. There’s no reason to over think common sense.

Unless there’s really some pesticide going through our environment messing with peoples hormones(which the pronoun would hate finding a real reason). But in that case we should get rid of the chemical messing with gender stuff.

For thousands of years people also "knew" that the Earth was the center of the solar system. I too think that the conventional notion of men and women maps better onto the actual distribution of human characteristics than the trans activist notion does*, but appealing to common sense is not a good argument for it.

*With the caveat that it is actually a distribution rather than a pure binary distinction. However, the distribution is so dominated by the two clusters of "men" and "women" as traditionally understood that the conventional notion of men and women does not lose much from a pragmatic perspective even if it is not technically accurate.

I don’t think earth was center of universe is a useful comparison. Humans well are humans and being male or female is intrinsic to being human. The earth we had no way of viewing.

So before I debate anything else you've said, you're going to have to convince me that these attempts to make nice, neat, perfect rules are necessary in the first place.

I don't think even my proposal was "nice, neat and perfect", but I can touch on why I think well-made categories are important (if not "necessary.")

I think that the issue you're going to run into with poorly conceived categories is that "everyone knows what an X is" only actually gets you so far. Language is a tool for communication, and communication is harder if everyone is using different definitions, which is kind of the default if people haven't made a formal convention of some kind to get everyone on the same page.

It's obviously not a very serious example, but the argument that people sometimes have over "Is a burrito a sandwich?" can illustrate some of the problems. Everyone knows what a sandwich is. Everyone knows what a burrito is. But in spite of "everyone knowing that" there are people who seriously argue that burritos are sandwiches, and people who argue that burritos are obviously not sandwiches. If we have all this confusion with a trivial subject like sandwiches, imagine what it is like for something more important, like who you're going to spend the rest of your life with.

Finnster is not a woman. Even if he doesn't appear as a man at first glance, you being successfully deceived does not change the essential nature of an thing.

I agree - Finnster is a man. He's never denied this, and I'm not even sure he's trying to deceive anyone, since he's open about being a cross-dresser. To the extent that he "deceived" me, it was at the same subconscious level that a cloud might "deceive" me by resembling a face.

But I'm not sure your "essential nature" thing gets off the ground. If we're getting into a philosophical concept of "essence", then it should be possible to create a "nice, neat, perfect" set of rules that define an essence of manhood and womanhood. If we can't do that, where do we get off claiming we all "know" anything about these topics at all? I don't think you can claim to implicitly know someone's essence, and not also be prepared to explain what the criteria for that essential nature are.

I think a person should be prepared to put forward their metaphysical commitments. Was Casimir Pulaski, who was "observed" to be a man, lived as a man all his life, and who was only discovered after death to possibly have had congenital adrenal hyperplasia, a man? You might say that all his contemporaries were deceived or mistaken, and he simply was a woman with an intersex condition, or you may say he was indeed a man - but either way you can't just wave him away as a weird edge case. Either you know what the essential nature of a man is, or you don't. A single edge case is all one needs to make the case that thinking there's an "essential essence" to something much more fuzzy, in spite of how much we might want the world to consist of nice, neat, and perfect categories.

Categories are imperfect, sure. But what’s being defended by most people against the “trans agenda” is the idea that physical intersexual bodies are a statistical anomaly so small as to be bordering on anecdotal, and that gender dysphoria is a rare mental disorder resulting in a delusion, not an oppressed minority identity deserving of protection.

It follows from that perspective that altering gendered language in laws, issuing puberty blockers and sterilizing children, teaching children about gender identity in socially contagious ways, and issuing punishments for calling a male body in a dress “him” are absurd, cruel, malicious, and tyrannical, and evidence of a malign undercurrent trying to force those with eyes to deny what they can clearly see.

For the sake of argument, let’s imagine that it became politically relevant that of all the decimal numbers starting with 2, only 2.0 + 2.0 exactly add up to 4.0. Academics start discussing how the vast percentage of numbers which are approximately 2 do not precisely add up to 4. News shows start discussing the “2.3 paradox” nightly, and calling people who focus on 2.25 and below “anti-mathematical”. “Even 2.2 added to 2.45 makes 4.65 which anyone can clearly see is 2/3 of the way to 5,” says one top pundit, carefully reading from a TelePrompTer to avoid misspeaking. New math books are issued to younger school grades to ensure that five-year-old children never again blithely and ignorantly claim that 2+2=4. Pretty soon it’s accepted fact among news-watchers that only the small minority of numbers starting with 2 add up to 4 at all, and anyone who says “2+2=4 is common sense math, obviously true” is to be shunned and possibly fired.

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. [Winston’s] heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended.” - Orwell, 1984

If we're getting into a philosophical concept of "essence", then it should be possible to create a "nice, neat, perfect" set of rules that define an essence of manhood and womanhood. If we can't do that, where do we get off claiming we all "know" anything about these topics at all?

Then that also leaves trans people hanging out to dry, since their main argument is "I never felt like/I don't feel like I am my biological sex, I feel like I am the other sex". So what does it mean to "feel like" a woman? Especially since there is a subset arguing that you don't need to feel dysphoria about your physical body and you don't need to 'pass' to be trans - a woman can have a penis! a man can get pregnant!

"Feeling like a woman" means you didn't want to play with boy's toys? You wanted long hair and makeup and to wear skirts? But those are all gender roles, and there's no reason why men can't wear makeup and skirts and have long hair and still be men.

Unless we're going to bite the bullet and say "transgenderism is a mental illness; not feeling like you belong in your biological sex category doesn't mean you are the opposite sex, it is a form of dysphoria like the people who want to amputate healthy limbs" and treat it as such - even if people transition and are legally now female (or male) that does not mean "trans woman is exactly the same thing as a cis woman down to biology", then we're stuck with "well there is no definition of what is a man or what is a woman, so trans people can't 'feel like' a woman since there is no such thing as 'feeling like a woman'" and then where do they go? They seem pretty sure, for all the talk about intersex conditions and not judging on genitals, that they know what being a woman and being a man is meant to be.

I think that the issue you're going to run into with poorly conceived categories is that "everyone knows what an X is" only actually gets you so far.

But "gets you so far" means "gets you as far as you want to get in pretty much every case where someone isn't trying to fudge it."

Pointing out that it might fail when someone is trying to fudge it doesn't change that.

Given that about 1,600,000 people in the US are trans and there are various legal standards that rely on gender rather than sex; we do need to define this shit.

If a support only fails under load greater than X where X is a possible load 1/250 times; that shit needs to be fixed.

If a support fails under load when people are deliberately pounding on it trying to make it fail, but otherwise does fine (and if the support failing for one person didn't make automatically fail for everyone else, unlike a real one), what needs to be fixed is people deliberately pounding on it, not the support.

communication is harder if everyone is using different definitions, which is kind of the default if people haven't made a formal convention of some kind to get everyone on the same page.

The words were used perfectly well for hundreds of years, and only really came under fire lately because a bunch of people started demanding to formalise and change the definitions. To me, this seems like a conflict caused by an impulse to precisely define things, and I'm not so sure that resolving it by doing just that isn't simply de facto conceding the point.

If we have all this confusion with a trivial subject like sandwiches, imagine what it is like for something more important, like who you're going to spend the rest of your life with.

I just don't think anyone is confused about who they will and won't spend the rest of their life with, and I definitely don't think anyone will be changing their opinion on whether they will spend the rest of their life with someone based on the gerrymandering of definitions of man and woman.

If we're getting into a philosophical concept of "essence", then it should be possible to create a "nice, neat, perfect" set of rules that define an essence of manhood and womanhood.

Should it? Why is it necessary, given those words were used perfectly fine for hundreds of years without one? Why is it actually necessary, other than that trans people want to be considered as the one they are not? What, other than that, was wrong with the way they were used up until this point? Everyone already agreed that a man who lost his penis in an accident was still a man.

If we can't do that, where do we get off claiming we all "know" anything about these topics at all? I don't think you can claim to implicitly know someone's essence, and not also be prepared to explain what the criteria for that essential nature are.

When you pass a person on the street, do you know if they're a man or a woman? Despite knowing absolutely nothing about them? Despite never interrogating their internal world or genetic structure, or ever once consciously referring to whatever explicit definition of those terms you might hold? The calculation happens faster than the speed of conscious thought, you know what the stranger is on a deep and instinctual level without even having time to ponder about it.

You might even be deceived, but the initial assessment happened faster than you could even think about it. You know what a man and a woman are.

But I've always had a slight discomfort with the gamete-focused definition of sex. Even if we allow that sexual categorization is based on a cluster of traits, like chromosomes, genitalia, bone density, face and body shape, etc., where we're just using gametes as the tie breaker, I think we run into some problems.

The strongest form of the gamete definition is not gamete-focused around a cluster of traits. The strongest form only concerns gamete contribution to sexual reproduction, which is binary in mammals. Sexual reproduction is a well defined process at the core of sexual selection, which has been known since at least the publication of On the Origin of Species. Examples of a species in class 1 are male. Examples of a species in class 2 are female. Examples of a species that are in class 3 are sterile. Examples of of a species in class 4 are hermaphrodites.

Primary sexual characteristics are the organs that produce the gametes.

The things you see at first glance for clothed individuals are secondary.

The use of the generic "trans" rather than the specific "transsexual" or "transgender" only adds to confusion when determining exactly what people are discussing.

The strongest form of the gamete definition is not gamete-focused around a cluster of traits. The strongest form only concerns gamete contribution to sexual reproduction, which is binary in mammals. Sexual reproduction is a well defined process at the core of sexual selection, which has been known since at least the publication of On the Origin of Species. Examples of a species in class 1 are male. Examples of a species in class 2 are female. Examples of a species that are in class 3 are sterile. Examples of of a species in class 4 are hermaphrodites.

I think the issue is that this biological definition is rarely relevant in a human context.

First, humans in the anglosphere (at least) tend to think sex is salient even for prepubescent children who are unable to reproduce. We presumptively use "he" and "she" for kids even though we know that 9% of men and 11% of women experience reproductive issues. Even after a person has become physically mature, we don't generally say they're "not a man/woman" just because we discover that they don't produce gametes properly, or can't reproduce for any number of other reasons.

I agree that your four classes are a categorization scheme that should exist somewhere in the English language. It's very useful to biologists, and an important idea for people to understand.

It also seems to have only a weak correlation to how we colloquially use language.

This is exactly why people talk about biological sex, presenting sex, and gender. That does not change the definition of biological sex. Using the terms interchangeably does nothing for clarity. He, she, man, and woman when used colloquially are typically used with an associated gender. That gender is correlated with sex (when describing people in English), but does not necessarily have the same definition.

Reproductive issues in the form of infertility is not identical to sterility. Yes, the normal usage of man or woman would typically still hold. No, sterile people cannot become biological fathers or biological mothers.

Those four terms exist exactly to describe the cases in your bulleted list.

The correlation is strong. The r value is larger than 0.7 which is the threshold used to determine if a correlation is strong in the sciences, including biology.

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