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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   25759 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024

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However, as the tomboys and the androgynous and crossdressers already sufficiently demonstrate, some traits of the category have more separational power than others.

Under the biology-based definition, this is meaningless. Taking from societies I know: a girl doesn't get out of wearing a hijab after puberty because her sports-playing makes her more of a boy than a girl.

I would not look at genetics first if I wanted to demonstrate definitional issues of gender. And showing that the category is broken in some cases even on genetic grounds strengthens, not weakens, my case.

Not really. Because the gender ideology is hiding the ball here: they created this dualist version of "gender" stripped from sex, and then take every deviation (which is inevitable once you remove the backstop) as proof of their thesis.

Many traditional views and the biology-based view simply don't run into the most excruciating version of this problem that gender ideologues insist problematizes the categories enough to justify their radical changes. "Woman" is both a sex and gendered term, both normative and descriptive, and the sex element is the sina qua non under this view. A woman can act unladylike, but she's still a woman due to her biology. You remove this and then it's much easier (intuitively) to argue that woman is arbitrary or infinitely extensible.

But it is a rewriting of history to act like this is the universal definition. It is, in fact, very contentious. They created the problem by first assuming that gender is totally distinct from sex and then solve it with an even more imperfect definition than the one we have.

In any case, I think we've already agreed that edge cases don't defeat a category - especially if no superior alternative has been put forward. On that point:

This is only a problem for non-exclusive leftist politics though. I'm entirely willing to accept that there are people who claim that they are trans but aren't, "in fact", trans under any meaningfully objective definition.

And what is this meaningful definition?

I have given you my definition of "woman" and we've plumbed the benefits and downsides. Seems to me that we have to first define "trans" before we can actually settle whether this is a more coherent position than the activist status quo?

But none of this invalidates the point that you can't argue for group membership on the circular basis of a criterion.

I don't see the circularity. And, at the risk of repeating myself, a significant part of the debate on maintaining traditional and biology-based definitions is that they are simply superior to the alternative , they carve reality better at the joints and focus on what we care about (which is why there's so much trouble now in so many domains when it's abandoned)

So, until we actually define "trans" are we really having a fair fight?

"what we care about"

I mean, that's exactly the problem with definition fights. What we care about is different. That's why there's little sense in attaching so much meaning to terminology, and why you cannot convince people by gesticulating at genes and genitals. When you say "obviously a woman is", and when I say, "well in my opinion a woman is", we use terms that have 99.9% the same coverage, because they almost cleave reality at the joints - which is why the few edge cases are so difficult. In a distribution where almost every property is correlated, it is very hard to see that actually people might be selecting on totally different properties. For instance, since I spend a lot of time online, voice is a dominant criteria for gender for me, and since I'm bi, genitals are a relatively low factor. I don't have the "whatever makes people want to found families", so genes and womb don't factor at all. But you wouldn't see this by looking at what I call "men" and "women", because it's almost entirely the same as everyone else.

edit: In fact, we could probably formalize this into a law: the more dimensions a group correlates, and the smaller the set of exceptions is, the less people will naturally come to agree about group membership of the exceptions.

I mean, that's exactly the problem with definition fights. What we care about is different

You're doing it again. I'm obviously aware. But I also said some other things like:

And, at the risk of repeating myself, a significant part of the debate on maintaining traditional and biology-based definitions is that they are simply superior to the alternative , they carve reality better at the joints and focus on what we care about (which is why there's so much trouble now in so many domains when it's abandoned)

And:

In any case, I think we've already agreed that edge cases don't defeat a category -especially if no superior alternative has been put forward

You cannot simply ignore explicit statements that show my underlying assumptions and then claim that my position is incomplete or simply failing to capture some points others care about (in the same manner you ignored elements of OP's post to better call his position circular) because it looks so without the underlying arguments. I know their position. I disagree and have provided reasons why.

I've made my position clear: it's not just what I care about, I find the alternate definitions less useful (in terms of the things we already know societies use sex-gender for like...sports and segregation - anyone can come up with "florgs" as an answer to "what is a woman" but non-private definitions obviously involve the inter-subjective) and even incoherent - and this belief is helped along by the fact that you never seem to offer this allegedly "meaningfully objective definition" that solves the problems I've raised about trans and its associated definitions like gender and woman.

You're not giving me news by saying people care about other things when they define things. I know, I don't care. I simply think it leads to problems and incoherence. I am not unaware that someone could define "life" as including the "joy of living" - nor would I consider it a productive conversation if someone ignored all of the reasons I gave for thinking this to remind me that people can come up with subjective definitions.

and when I say, "well in my opinion a woman is",

You haven't actually given us this "meaningfully objective definition", or any definition. I provided you with my definition of my terms and why I don't think some alternatives work. You mainly seem to want to knock down or critique definitions raised.

Which I admit is probably more fun but I don't see the point in playing this asymmetric game.

And I guess I'm just not very interested in the object-level debate, fair enough. To me, all the difficulty of the question arises from meta considerations, because if I sufficiently communicated why I think the assignments of load-bearing criteria were fundamentally arbitrary, the question would not be answered so much as recede in importance. I think to some extent "cleaving reality at its joints", while a strong metaphor, erases the vital detail of a high-dimensional space with many correlations, so that the axis of the joint is greatly overdetermined - such a thing simply does not arise in three-dimensional space. But I don't know how else I can try to express it either. We're not talking about which way the joint is turning but which sinews carry the most strain, which muscles the most force. Also in this metaphor the muscles are subjective to begin with. I'd say your position is "the muscles in the third and fourteenth dimension are clearly the only ones that matter centrally" and my position is "it depends on how the joint is trained."

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