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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   38491 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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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.

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