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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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"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.