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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?
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.
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.
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