The basic problem with this whole argument is that it fails to acknowledge a very basic distinction: between Indicia and criteria. The former are the stereotypes by which we suspect someone belongs to a group, the latter determines groups membership. For example, if I hear someone speaking with an American accent I may suspect they are American. However, they may in fact be Canadian, or a British actor who perfected the accent etc. by contrast, millions of Americans have foreign accents. One can mention many other traits commonly associated with Americans, none of which determine group membership. As a matter of fact, American is whoever is a citizen of the United States, that’s the criterion.
The problem with your argument is that you don’t even propose alternative criteria for womanhood. You just keep being focused on Indicia, on what make one *seem* like a woman or *pass* for a woman, but that’s no definition at all. Your analogy for parents belies your notion: the reasons why step parents or adoptive parents may count as parents is because in most contexts the creterion for parenthood isn’t about begetting a child but rearing them.
The argument from politeness suffers from similar slippage. How we should treat people and what people actually are are likewise distinct questions! One may feel it polite or convenient to treat someone *as* a woman, but it doesn’t make her so. Nor are pronouns the correct way to go about it- those are about grammar or convenience but do not determine identity. In German a young woman is an “it” but it doesn’t make her any less of a woman. In English we may refer to a 5 year old girl or an adult trans woman as a “she” but nobody would argue that the former is a woman, and as to the latter we shouldn’t argue the same either based on the pronoun alone !
P.S.
It is not at all clear to me that a brain in a jar or in a robot is a man, rather a “former man” (or former woman as the case might be). As to a man’s brain implanted into a woman’s body, wouldn’t that case be a man turned into a woman (a genuine sex change)?
Finally- as others noted Superman is not obviously a man, he is rather a male kryptonian who happens to look like a man. Similarly Zeus isn’t a man but a god, even if he can “pass” enough to sleep with/rape and impregnate many women! What seems isn’t what is, and until you acknowledge this very basic distinction you can’t even offer the beginning of a counter argument on this topic.
The focus is on indicia because there are no clear criteria. If there were, none of us would need to be having this conversation, we'd already be in agreement.
The reality is that "man" and "woman" are concepts that evolved from thousands of years of human mating, and are quite intuitive concepts to anyone growing up in society, but are also quite changeable. For example, blue is currently associated with boys and pink with girls, but that's a recent development. The concepts are flexible clusters of features:
If there IS a criteria, though, it is this: Men are those that straight women and gay women would consider dating; women are those that straight men and gay women would consider dating; non-binary covers the fuzzy middle grounds. It's arbitrary, but that's what it's all about, isn't it?
By this criteria, trans women are women when they pass for women. Men might have a problem with dating them due to a desire for biological kids, an aversion to male genitalia, or hateful ideology, but none of that would impact the presence or absence of attraction.
But this criteria is too narrow, because we live in a society where gender is tied up with all sorts of other things, like identity, safety, community, etc. Because reality is complicated. So why the narrow focus on criteria? Your argument misses the forest for the trees.
I’m sorry but none of this makes sense. Criteria can be contested, but one cannot oppose one without proposing another. If one opposes the criteria of “adult human female” they ought to propose another. Your suggestion makes no logical sense as it is circular- it proposes to define man and woman using the terms man and woman…
That's my point, it IS sort of circular. The definitions are largely arbitrary, they're not neat boxes. It's like the definition of "mammal". It seems clear at first, but it's just a feature cluster, the "family resemblance" concept.
I'm sorry, no, that's petitio principii. The post tries to argue against a logically sound, non-circular definition "Woman is an adult human female." If you wish to argue against it you ought to supply an alternative definition which is equally logically sound (i.e. that actually means something). The argument "a logically sound definition is impossible" is refuted by the very premise of the debate (unless you can argue why "adult human female" is not logically sound or that it is otherwise nonsensical - to merely argue that it isn't good enough or normatively problematic is *insufficient* unless you have some alternative suggestion that makes some kind of logical sense and isn't implicitly dependent on the definition you ostensibly reject!)
P.S
Arbitrary =/= circular. Nor are "neat boxes" and "arbitrary" mutually exclusive. On the contrary, arbitrary is typically *too* neat. That something is arbitrary doesn't mean it doesn't exist nor even that it is impracticable. The age of majority (18) is arbitrary, but still logically sound and practically meaningful. The argument isn't whtehr one defition of womanhood is aribtrary, is whther you can propose a better one, or alternatively try to argue that we don't need that concept at all!
"Woman = adult human female" is overly restrictive, not matching situations as described in the original post. From a practical perspective, the looser definition is better.
It seems you're bringing in an extra requirement, something you believe is necessary for definitions, but that's... just generally not how language works, yo.
I will never under any circumstances date a trans woman. That is entirely out of the question given my sexual orientation. So by your criterion trans women are not women.
I wrote, "By this criteria, trans women are women when they pass for women. Men might have a problem with dating them due to a desire for biological kids, an aversion to male genitalia, or hateful ideology, but none of that would impact the presence or absence of attraction."
What I meant was "the presence or absence of initial attraction". Meeting someone in a public space, someone who truly passes, you wouldn't know anything about their genitalia or chromosomes. Once you become aware of that private information, then yes, your dating preference comes into play. I was more thinking of the usage of language in public spaces.
By that criterion, a mannequin is a woman and a grandmother is not. Is not a dating preference by the way, that’s insulting. It’s a sexual orientation.
Your mannequin analogy makes no sense, but the grandmother analogy is well taken. Hence: Strict criteria really don't make sense for definitions like these. I refer you back to the concept of family resemblance.
So are words like "mammal", "love", "dictator", "faith", etc. Lots of things in life don't fit strict, easy-to-define criteria. But they can still make perfect sense to us.
You can test it with thought experiments. Imagine a sci-fi future where a woman who has always been a woman since birth and is a woman by any definition imaginable goes through a machine that transforms her genes from XX into something else, XZ, but leaves her mind the same and her body outwardly the same. She would obviously still be a woman, even though no longer female. If that's true, then chromosomes aren't enough for the definition.
You can do the same sort of thought experiment for other individual criteria. For example, a woman who's had a tragic accident that leaves her with only her upper body would still be a woman despite the lack of female genitals. So again, just genitals aren't criteria enough.
The basis for the word is the vast majority of things that fit the category well. Beginning by being born with a certain set of chromosomes and sex organs. This definition applies accurately to will over 99% of people that have ever lived. If it doesn't apply to you, perhaps you're not that thing.
In the case of people who undergo transformation, I'd stick with what they were born with, assuming they want to be classified.
In the case of people who want to be classified even though their birth characteristics were ambiguous, I'm willing to let them self identify, so long as they behave in a way that is consistent with that self identification, and don't gain advantage over others by their choice.
In the case of those who perceive themselves differently, well, that's not reality, I'm sorry.
Trans people have been around throughout history. They are literal evidence to the contrary.
I've already shown that the criteria aren't complete, yet you still try to apply them as if they are. Why?
I think it's because we disagree over whether any trans people are experiencing real dysphoria, or whether it's all a sort of delusion, not because we disagree on how words work.
>The former are the stereotypes by which we suspect someone belongs to a group, the latter determines groups membership.
We never step outside our own perspective to observe that which "determines group membership." All we have is our own preferences for calling things what we call them. It's impossible to do otherwise.
That's incorrect. Rules or borders do exist, even if often arbitrary to an extent. Whether one is American or not is an objective legal question (even if you can find ambiguous edge cases). Whether one is "Black" or "White" would appear more subjective, but different societies can decide on different ways to answer that question absolutely (e.g., the notorious "one drop rule"). That criteria can be disputed does not mean they do not exist, quite the contrary.
In the debate Chris asks if you have examples of socially constructed identities (“something like parent…”) for which there is a word in virtually every human language. You replied that you wouldn’t be surprised if parent is one such word, to which Chris said it wasn’t on the Swadesh list of universal concepts.
But right after “woman” and “man” on the Swadesh 207 list are the words: child, wife, husband, mother, and father (the latter two of which are, of course, elaborations of and just as socially constructed as the term “parents”).
I think this is funny and also demolishes his argument that a word being on such a list of core vocabulary proves that it the word cannot have a sociocultural definition.
The top words on those lists are also pronouns and determiners - primarily associated with grammatical function and constructing well formed sentences rather than communicating meaning or reference.
I enjoyed this post. I found the analogy to “parent” especially illuminating – trans-inclusive philosophers should use this example more often!
I wasn’t convinced by your arguments, though.
My sense is that you think “woman” is coextensive with “sufficiently feminine adult.” For convenience, I’ll refer to this as your “definition” of “woman,” though what I have to say below applies whether or not it's supposed to be a definition, strictly speaking.
Your first argument for adopting this definition is that many people use “woman” to mean “sufficiently feminine adult,” and this implies that “sufficiently feminine adult” is a permissible definition of “woman.”
It’s not clear to me what this has to do with whether trans women are women. Your claim isn’t merely that it’s permissible to use “woman” to mean “sufficiently feminine adult” – your claim is that this is what “woman” means in English. You think that those (English speakers) who use “woman” to mean “adult human female” have misunderstood what a woman is, that their definition of “woman” is the wrong one.
To show that, it’s not sufficient to point out that many people use “woman” to mean “sufficiently feminine adult.” After all, it’s also true that many people use “woman” to mean “adult human female.”
Your second argument for adopting this definition is that it captures our linguistic intuitions. You focus on the cases of Blaire White and Buck Angel – it’s natural to call White a woman and to refer to them using feminine pronouns, and it’s natural to call Angel a man and to refer to them using masculine pronouns. (Yes, I’m avoiding using gendered pronouns!)
I agree that it’s natural to call White a woman and Angel a man. But that’s because White seems female and Angel seems male, and it’s natural to call someone a man who seems male and to call someone a woman who seems female. After all, someone who seems male is (or was, until very recently) almost always male, and someone who seems female is almost always female. Even when you know that someone who seems male is actually female, it still feels natural to call them a man – knowledge that they’re female doesn’t make the impression that they’re male go away.
In other words: the biological view of gender can easily explain our linguistic intuitions about White and Angel. We use feminine words to refer to females and masculine words to refer to males; White seems like a female and not like a male; and Angel seems like a male and not like a female. Using “man” to refer to males and “woman” to refer to females is not unnatural; what’s unnatural is for males to seem like females and for females to seem like males.
Your third argument is that your definition better coheres with certain normative considerations. As far as I can tell, those normative considerations are (a) trans men should not use women’s bathrooms and (b) we should not use masculine words to refer to trans women.
The biological view of gender can easily explain why (a) is true. Women are uncomfortable sharing bathrooms with males. Since trans men seem like males, women would be uncomfortable sharing bathrooms with trans men.
Similarly, the biological view of gender can easily explain why (b) is true. As you put it, referring to a trans woman as a man would be “pointlessly cruel” and “liable to upset her for no reason.” Isn’t that sufficient to explain (b)?
You object, “[I]f you can’t use pronouns without being a jerk, that’s a real cost of your definition!” But the biological view doesn’t entail that you can’t use feminine pronouns to refer to a trans woman. At worst, it entails that, by doing so, you misrepresent their gender. But it’s often permissible to misrepresent things to avoid being cruel – for example, it’s often permissible to tell a woman she looks beautiful, even when she doesn’t, to avoid embarrassing her.
In any case, why should we think that a philosophical position is less likely to be true simply because it entails that you sometimes can’t use pronouns without being a jerk? As someone who regularly chastises ethicists for being too averse to revisionary moral conclusions, you should be unimpressed by this point.
Your fourth argument is that the biological view has counterexamples, like Superman.
But Superman is male – he has a son with Lois Lane, an adult human female.
Of course, we can imagine someone otherwise like Superman who has no small gametes (and whose body is not even designed to produce them). You say that it’s absurd to deny that such a person would be a man.
But why is this absurd? Why can’t the defender of the biological view just say that, although such a person would seem like a man, they wouldn’t be a man, since they wouldn't be male? I don’t have clear intuitions about this bizarre, counterfactual edge case. Even if I did, I wouldn’t trust them very much – at least, I wouldn’t trust them nearly as much as my clear intuition that, necessarily, women don't have (natural, non-malformed) penises.
One final note: Some of Marcus Arvan’s alleged counterexamples to the biological view have convinced me that “woman” does not mean “adult human female.” However, they have not convinced me that the biological view is false. At best, they show that “woman” means “adult female person.” On this version of the biological view, alien women, Elven women, etc. are all women, but trans women are not women. (One of Arvan’s counterexamples is a female ladybug, which he insists is a woman. But that seems clearly false to me – ladybugs are not women, except in a strained, figurative sense of “women.”)
P.S. You should arrange to speak with Thomas Bogardus. He's the best defender of the biological view, in my opinion. He's also extremely charitable and kind when discussing gender, which is unusual.
Good article. Clear and well argued. WRT your point about sci-fi cases, have you read Marcus Arvan's "Trans Women, Cis Women, Alien Women, and Robot Women Are Women: They Are All (Simply) Adults Gendered Female"? He explores those kinds of cases in depth.
Can you name one linguistic theory that associates competence of a language with ability to define words? What you're presupposing does not inform any approaches to language understanding that I've ever heard of. Were you given necessary and sufficient conditions for the use of the word "female" in biology class? How about for every other word you use? Did you have to study the dictionary beforehand?
Like some others here, I think this is one of your weaker posts—for several reasons.
Your argument can be fairly summarized as follows: generally, when a person appears very feminine, we refer to them as a “woman”; therefore, it is right to call all feminine-seeming persons “women.” But this line of reasoning is deeply flawed.
The first issue with defining “woman” as a cluster of feminine stereotypes is that it’s plainly regressive. A foundational tenet of feminism has always been to liberate female bodies from the burden of stereotype. So that if a female person undergoes a mastectomy, keeps her nails short, cuts her hair, and speaks with a deep voice, she is still, unambiguously, a woman.
Speaking of intuitions: I struggle to think of anyone who’d seriously claim that a female person who doesn’t conform at all to feminine aesthetics should be excluded from the category “woman.” And yet, as that example shows, the absence of any of the stereotypical traits you list often has no bearing on someone’s womanhood. Which means that, even in your own taxonomy of “woman-making” characteristics, the biological fact of femaleness clearly outweighs the others. More than that: the very presence of femaleness renders the other characteristics irrelevant, because they are not necessary.
This becomes even clearer when we consider your example of Blaire White. I kept thinking about it, and I realized your femininity-based model falls apart the moment we start tweaking her presentation. Suppose we slowly dial down her femininity—take away the makeup, the hair, the voice, the mannerisms—until she begins to register as masculine. At that point, what happens? She’s not female, and she no longer passes as feminine. So what is she now, within your model? Certainly not a woman. But this creates a strange problem: is Blaire, in your view, allowed to be a tomboy? Is a trans woman permitted, within your framework, to be masculine and *still* be regarded as a woman? The answer seems to be no. And that’s not a minor flaw—it’s a profound inconsistency. Because any coherent definition of “woman” has to make space for the many ways that womanhood is *expressed*. If being a woman doesn’t allow for a wide range of gender expressions, then we’re simply replacing one restrictive ideal with another.
Yes, there are social dimensions to how femaleness is expressed, and yes, these give rise to things we call femininity. But feminine norms vary wildly across cultures and time periods. Where I live, for instance, there are cultures that find tallness, baldness, or even visible body fat to be marks of femininity. In some cases, the complete absence of makeup or jewelry is itself seen as womanly. Yet, in all of these places, adult human females are still universally recognized as women. A visitor might think, “You don’t look like what I’m used to”—but the recognition remains. That’s because femaleness—not femininity—is the defining feature. It’s what grounds all the others.
There’s also a problem with the weight you place on “intuitions.” The problem with intuition is that it’s often wrong. It’s fallible. And that should be enough to make us question it as a reliable guide to truth. Those viral videos where hyper-realistic cakes are shaped like shoes or soap dispensers routinely trick people. The moment of shock—“It’s cake?!”—is precisely a demonstration of how easily our intuitions can be deceived. But imagine if someone said: “Well, I thought it was a shoe, so therefore it *is* a shoe.” That’s the logic you’re invoking here. And to make matters worse, you cherry-pick intuitive responses that support your case, while ignoring others. If we’re really going to appeal to intuition, then surely the widespread gut-level reaction of “hell no” when people are told “trans women are women” also has to count for something. And yet you dismiss that reaction as invalid.
Let’s consider a more generous hypothetical. Suppose Denzel Washington disguises himself as a woman: dons the hair and nails, pads his chest, softens his voice, walks with a sway, even perfects the gestures and intonations. Someone seeing him in passing might say, “That’s a woman.” But then they learn it’s Denzel, and their intuition shifts instantly. Suddenly, the same person is no longer regarded as a woman—but as a 'man dressed as a woman.' That shift is significant. It reveals that our intuitions aren't just visual, but also conditional. They’re provisional guesses, constantly open to correction. And once the underlying reality becomes known, the illusion collapses. This, to me, exposes a critical difference between what something *is* and what it merely *resembles*. Appearance may fool us temporarily, but it doesn’t constitute reality.
I have to say, your Superman example genuinely startled me—not because I disagreed, but because I’ve rarely seen you argue in such a lazy way. The problem begins with the fact that Superman, as a fictional character, was obviously modeled on the human man. He is not an independent conceptual invention. He is a stylized distortion of an already existing category. Without the human man, there would be no Superman. And yet you take this distortion and treat it as if it invalidates the very thing it was based on (where you argue that Superman is a man despite not possessing the fundamental characteristics of human men). That’s like inventing a fictional “Supervegan” from the planet Riga—someone who eats meat but calls it “cruelty-free protein” and still identifies as vegan—and then using that fictional distortion as evidence that *real* vegans can eat meat without doing moral harm. The metaphor breaks down under the slightest scrutiny. You can’t use a stylized deviation from reality as an argument against reality itself.
Even more to the point: nobody—literally no one I know in comic circles—believes that Superman is a “man” in the full human sense. At best, he’s referred to that way for convenience. But in any serious discussion, one of the first points that is raised is that he’s not a man but, effectively, a god. Superman is man-like, and that's accepted superficially—until we have to get to the fundamental brass tacks. It's not that Superman is a man that shouldn't fight other men, but that Superman shouldn't fight men precisely because he is NOT a man; Superman isn’t a man, so it’s not a fair fight. Thus, the moment stakes appear—questions of fairness, power, loyalty—people revert to distinctions that look past seemingness to engage substance. If your conceptual model of inclusion collapses the moment it has to do real work—like determining fairness, ethics, danger, rights—then it’s not a robust model.
There has to be a clear line between seemingness and substance. That line can blur, but it doesn’t disappear. In Lucifer season 5, God comes down to Earth in the form of a man. Even though His appearance is convincingly human and masculine, it feels wrong, in the context of the story, to say that God was a man. Odin is said to appear in human form as a wanderer; but no one says that, by sufficiently seeming to be a man, he is one. The substance of Odin's being triumphs over his appearance. In a famous Biblical story, Jacob wrestles a “man” through the night, only to learn later that it was an angel. It would feel wrong, in retrospect, to say he wrestled a man. The revelation changes the classification.
My point is: we are capable of distinguishing between what "looks like" something and what "is" something. We do this all the time. And while I’m not opposed to calling feminine-seeming men “women” for reasons of politeness, safety, or social ease—indeed, I think there’s great value in that—I reject the idea that these surface cues define womanhood.
We already live in a world full of benign delusions. We let people identify as “queens,” “goddesses,” “they/them,” “fae/faer,” and, as I've recently learned, as dogs and cats and fairies. That’s fine, I think. In most cases, it hurts no one. We go along with it for the sake of civility and inclusion. But what you’re doing is different. You’re not just advocating for kindness or social ease. You’re trying to redefine the category of womanhood on the basis of traits that are superficial, culture-bound, and, in many cases, entirely optional; trying to tie it to something as unstable and performative as femininity. This is conceptually shallow, and it misses the heart of what “woman” has historically meant, and still means, when the superficial is stripped away.
> But then over time, the term parent came to have a broader meaning and include, for instance, step parents. We saw that step parents are relevantly like parents in various important respects, and so the biological definition was too narrow. For this reason, the term was broadened to include those who fulfill a broader parenting role.
This analogy is problematic. Because of the broadening of the word parent, we have added modifiers/attributive adjectives to the word parent to account for the shift (birth parent, biological parent). And nevertheless, step parent—with its attributive adjective—is still more descriptive, contains more data, and is commonly used to clarify. I would never call the woman my dad married my “parent” or even “step parent.” She had nothing to do with me. I referred to her as my dad’s second wife.
In other words, being a “step” parent is a condition worthy of clarification.
One simply can’t prescribe new definitions by decree to existing words that have developed for another purpose. Language isn’t an engineering problem for which proposed solutions can be broadly applied and enforced. As the great Herbert Simon once said: “If men do not pour new wine into old bottles, they do something almost as bad: they invest old words with new meanings.”
If someone uses a common word in an uncommon manner, confusion of meaning results. Anyone is welcome to personally continue to use language in such a manner, but these people must then expect to misunderstand/be misunderstood more frequently by people who adhere to the greater utility of common usage. And the person who rejects common usage can’t reasonably expect others to do the same in their presence.
>This analogy is problematic. Because of the broadening of the word parent, we have added modifiers/attributive modifiers to the word parent to account for the shift (birth parent, biological parent).
Just like we've added prefixes 'trans' and 'cis' for the exact same purpose. The analogy is very straightforward here and works very well.
Oh okay. So this piece advocates for the use of an attributive adjective to woman in the case of trans women, just as we use an attributive adjective in the case of step parent? I’m in agreement on that. That wasn’t how I understood it, but maybe I misread it.
In my defense, the piece is titled “Why I Think Trans Women Are Women.”
The piece advocates that just like semantic category "parent" includes both biological and adoptive parents, semantic category "woman" includes both cis- and trans-women.
Right. And I’m saying it’s false that common usage supports using “parent” to describe your dad’s second wife whom you’ve never met. That’s just confusing. It’s inaccurate. “Parent” isn’t most commonly used as is being described. Certainly not on first reference. “Step parent” dispels the biological/relational confusion. I think “trans woman” is similarly clarifying and “woman” alone is similarly confusing.
I think there's also obviously a context thing here: how much of a parent a step parent is depends on the exact situation. My wife's half-sister was raised for a few years by their common mom's second husband; he's more of a parent then to her then if the second marriage had happened many years later.
Some step parents are for almost all intents and purposes parents; others basically aren't at all, and many others lie in between those extremes.
Whether or not calling your dad's second wife your "parent" is justified depends on the exact relationship, and also on what you're saying: if it's a doctor asking about medical history, no step parent should be counted as a parent; if it's who needs to pick you up when you're sick at a sleepover, then your step mom absolutely counts and it would be tedious and pedantic to say, "actually, I can't give you my parent's phone number but I can give you my step mom's".
I think it's pretty reasonable to think something similar is true for trans women: if you've been taking hormones for years, and have had all the surgeries, and live completely as a woman, then for all purposes other than competitive sports, medical testing, and a few other things, that trans woman is a woman.
If it's someone who has just decided, hmm, maybe I have some gender dysphoria, I should think about this, then they're not really much of a woman at all.
I agree. Step parents take on all kinds of roles, as do parents. As you say, some step parents are more involved than biological ones. I don’t think the term step parent precludes such close relationships, just as I don’t think “trans woman” precludes a trans woman from being more woman-like by many standards than a biological woman.
Clarity of meaning is foundational to communication and saying step parent to indicate the absence of blood-relation (at the small cost of adding four letters) provides additional clarity that doesn’t diminish a step parent’s role as intimate caregiver—it simply reflects a notable condition that makes them distinct from how parents are known in common usage. It’s different to use “parent” as casual shorthand for “step parent” than it is to falsely identify your step parent as your birth mother or father.
The word “woman” or “parent” is literally just a group of letters that stand in for meaning determined by usage. To retain the letters but reject the usage indicates, to me, a desire to leverage the very meaning that is being denied by the act of redefinition. It’s an attempt to retain impact that is no longer actually generated by the changed placeholder. I can understand the impulse, but I don’t think it leads to people better understanding each other.
Also a case study of (almost) full hermaproditism (depending on the definition you use) in humans. I remember reading one about a guy that had almost fully functioning reproductive sperm and egg functions but I can't find it in my history at this moment.
This sort of confusion (I don't mean that you're confused, but that the semantics are confused) is why I've felt for quite some time that the slogan "Trans Women are Women" would have been better off as simply "Trans Women are Trans Women". It avoids any implication of exact and perfect equivalence, but I think still captures the essence of defending trans women's womanhood.
Wrong. It doesn't work because you don't understand the nature of the "trans" fraud.
It is possible for people to get divorced, remarried, or to adopt. That's based on relationships.
It is NOT possible for a man to become a woman. It has never happened because sex is binary and immutable, no matter how much makeup the man wears.
This is like a man declaring himself a woman, then demanding that his children call him "mother" because he produced the large gamete and literally gave birth to them. That's a lie, perversion, and fraud, and those three thing is what "trans" is.
None of it is real, and it's cope for the low IQ to play word games to convince themselves that it is. When this ends, you're going to pretend you never did any of this.
At least one of us definetely does not understand quite a lot here.
> sex is binary and immutable, no matter how much makeup the man wears.
Makeup is indeed not relevant here. However, the concept of "sex" is not some singular thing. It's a simplified category, abstracting complex facts about chromosomes, reproductive organs, hormones, other nuances of brain chemistry and a bunch of other things. Nearly all these things are, in fact, mutable.
And then there is a whole different level of abstraction due to the fact that common usage of such words as "man" or "woman" is not just about sex. You do not demand that every person you interact with, provided you with their medical records specifying their chomosomes and hormonal levels before you gender them. You may pretend that this is what trully matters for you for political reasons, but the fact of the matter is that this is not the actual algorithm you follow. Your mind simply clusterize some people as men and some as woman based on appearance and social cues.
> This is like a man declaring himself a woman, then demanding that his children call him "mother" because he produced the large gamete and literally gave birth to them.
Likewise, most children have no idea about gametes and yet they use the word "mother" just fine. They may not even know how children are made and born and yet, their image recognition is capable of distinguishing "mother" from a "father". Again, see the case of adoptive parents, or lesbian couples, where "mother" clearly doesn't mean "a person who produced large gamete and literally gave birth to me".
> That's a lie, perversion, and fraud
A lie would be to claim that after taking hormonal therapy and some plastical surgery trans-women can give birth to children and have physiology completely indistinguishable from cis-women. To my knowledge not a single trans activist has ever claimed that. What they claim is that trans-women can be indistinguishable from cis women in social contexts, unrelated to these physiological aspects. And this seems to be true.
> None of it is real, and it's cope for the low IQ to play word games to convince themselves that it is. When this ends, you're going to pretend you never did any of this
I appreciate your public prediction. Here is my:
You are currently participating in an astroturfed moral panic perpetuated by conservative politicians so that they could aggregate supporters (which do, coincidentally, skew lower on IQ scale) on culture war issues and get elected despite having terrible policy. You will keep ignoring it, feeling as if you are fighting the righteous battle against the forces of evil, while playing right in the hands of your true enemies, untill the consequences of such policies significantly affect you personal well-being and maybe even further down the line. Then the political equilibrium will shift, the zeitgeist will move on and conservatives will find a new outgroup to scaremonger about, just like all the previous times. As for whether you'll be able to learn your lesson and generalize from experience or will you join the new hate bandwagon, I'm leaving it up to you. After all, you do, in fact, have the choice in the matter.
It's not an astroturfed moral panic that my wife and another woman were menaced by a fully grown man in a woman's locker room, who gained entry to a female-only space by using magic words.
It's unacceptable and you can't tell me that I'm being manipulated by shadowly forces because I've seen it with my own two eyes. Conservative politicians didn't make that happen, a man claiming to be a woman in order to intrude on protected spaces to indulge his own desires made that happen.
I'm sorry about the stress your wife and that other woman have experienced. This, however, doesn't make a moral panic less of a moral panic. To understand which we need to carefully disentangle facts from speculations.
From the information you've given me, the fact is that a person whom your wife has identified as a man was in a woman's locker room.
Then you speculate that:
This person was a trans-woman
This person gained access to the space by claiming to be a woman
This person "indulged in desires"
None of these statements necessary follow from the fact.
The person could just as well be a trans-man, in which case conservative politicians are diretly responsible for menacing your wife, as otherwise trans men would've used men's locker room. Or a cis-man who has either walked in woman's locker room by mistake or is a legitimate pervert, or a provocateur, in the latter case, once again conservative politicians are to blame.
With all likelihood the locker room was not guarded by a police force demanding that only people claiming to be women could enter. The so called "protected spaces" in truth are not that protected. Anyone who really wanted to get there - could've done it, without much trouble.
And unless we say that using the locker room for it's direct purpose is "indulging in desires", then you don't in fact know why this person was there. They could've been a pervert, but also they could've simply minded their own business.
Likewise, the fact of the matter is that you wife felt unsafe as a result of this situation.
It's possible that the person was harrasing her. However, as you didn't state so directly, it seems that she got frightened just because this person was there. To which a scaremongering propagated by concervatives is clearly responsible.
Both the existence of a person in the room and the emotional reaction of your wife could be the direct fault of the conservatives. However, I don't think you've even thought about it for a minute. From all the possibilities and interpretations of the situation it seems that you've immediately jumped to the cashed thought corresponding to the narrative pushed by politicians who has already prepared an outgroup for you to be outraged about. And that's exactly what moral panic does to a person.
The forces manipulating you here are not shadowy at all. They are very blatant, frankly. but as long as you are outraged in a different direction, you will keep not noticing it.
That's a wall of sophistry to try and excuse away the absolute fact that males in female spaces are inherently threatening and deleterious, and that you think it's ok for males to enter female spaces.
Why do you think it is a universal human custom to have sex segregated spaces for females, and why do you think they're no longer necessary?
If you allow some men to say the magic words ‘I'm trans’ and be exempt from the global civilizational rule that males should not enter female spaces, you've simply eliminated female spaces. It's not acceptable, and you are the one being manipulated by disordered men and their supporters. It's already the case that men are using people like you to enable their predatory and selfish behaviors in places like spas, prisons, locker rooms, and on sports teams.
Men who say that they are women are still men, and male, and they should stay out of women's spaces, full stop. This rule is well founded, has been for the whole of human history across the world, it exists to protect women from men, and there's no need to change it
“Why I think trans women are women and vice versa”. Presumably “vice versa” is intended to mean “mutatis mutandis (for transmen and men)”, rather than “(all) women are transwomen”?
(Is there a lesson here about trans supporters and the misuse of language?)
That's why "trans" men do not exist, since "trans" does not exist.
Those are females. They aren't men of any kind, so they don't ruin men's sports.
People like you lead to males being placed in women's prisons, sports, spaces, toilets, where they inevitably commit rape. I'll bet you're happy giving away women's identities so you can play low IQ intellectual online.
Girls in Afghanistan don't have that luxury, otherwise they could just opt out of being female.
That is why the only answer to this entire lie is NO. When this fraud ends, you're going to deny you wrote any of this.
I would suggest you delete this now to save yourself the shame.
I think you're being both hostile and confused which make an irritating combination. At no point in the article did I comment on women's prisons, sports, etc.
You say there's no other definition, but I gave one in my article!
But did you really not speak about women‘s prisons, sports, etc…? Doesn‘t it seem reasonable to put women into women‘s prisons and let women compete in women‘s sports? Therefore, I do think you are speaking about these issues and this feels like a motte and bailey. Maybe part of the confusion is caused by muddying the definitions, which is part of what is problematic about your case.
Rather than focus on silly hypotheticals where "adult human female is problematic", how about consider actual situations where the alternative is problematic. "Men can have babies" so "abortion isn't just a women's issue". How about "men can have babies too" as a rebuttal to "child bearing is a significant barrier to women's equal participation in the workforce". How about "men can menstruate too". A tad misleading?
If you think child bearing, menstruation and male on female violence are socially, economically and politically significant, then non-biological definitions of gender make communication harder, not easier. You are centering what should be a qualifying footnote, robbing women of easy language to describe some of the most fundamental aspects of their lives.
Your debate topic is a bit odd. Imagine if you debated the prompt “The term 'gold' is a reference to the substance with the atomic number 79, rather than based on sociocultural constructs.”
That is clearly false, because, for example, most of the time when we talk about "gold paint", we don't mean paint made of gold. But on the other hand, that doesn't mean that everything yellow and shiny is in any sense real gold (as you seem to think everyone caring and tender with long hair and painted nails is in some sense approaching womanhood).
The old “‘[wo]man’ means ‘adult human [fe]male’” argument. I recently had the privilege of attending a talk by Talia Mae Bettcher where she addressed this. She provided some interesting counterexamples to this claim.
1. Superman is a man.
2. Galadriel is a woman.
1 and 2 seem like common (nerd) utterances and true.
Let’s say one objects that 1 and 2 are false (fictional characters and all that). But, I think someone would be hard pressed to seriously deny the truth of:
I disagree. Superman *looks like* a man, but is an alien. Galadriel *looks like* a woman (sort of - in fact she is described as meaningfully distinct) but is in fact a female elf. This is in fact a good counter example. We have the term “passing” for a reason. Indicia and criteria are different. The former are what we use to guess at identity based on probabilities. The latter are what determine identity.
I'm confused here, both of those are fictional characters, literary devices not real people they symbolize parts of humanity as a person wrote those characters. But they're both fantasies, as a reader you could see them anyway you like. Place whatever meaning you wish onto them. Are there not better examples that exist outside of comic books or fantasy novels?
I did not bring up those examples. But the fact that they are fictional is neither here nor there. They are still useful as thought experiments, just like the brain in the jar (which also thankfully fictional). Fictional characters still have fictional "facts" about them supplied by the author. The case of Galadriel is easier because there is a very clearly delimited canon about her (Tolkien's writings). Superman is more akin to a Greek god in being at this point a commonly known cultural figure with different tellings of his story which include discrepancies. nonetheless, one may note core characteristics that appear in almost all tellings - his Kryptonian origin is surely on of those.
P.S.
Also note that the substack author does not wish to dispute those "facts" about Superman, but rather to use those facts for his argument. He says, Superman is an alien, and has different physical abilities than (homo sapiens) men, but is nevertheless a man because he looks like a man and often treated like one. I say, not so, he "passes" for a man but that does not MAKE him a man. That's the core of our disagreement and the fictional example helps sharpen it.
"Then she let her hand fall, and the light faded, and suddenly she laughed again, and lo! she was shrunken: a slender elf-WOMAN, clad in simple white, whose gentle voice was soft and sad." (476, emphasis added)
I have read it; I admit I haven't memorized it. But "elf-woman" is not "woman", Galadriel is distinct from human women in the way Legolas is distinct from men like Aragorn. (Although apparently Men [female or male] and Elves can have children together, so female elves are more women than transwomen, despite their having important metaphysical distinctions from Men like quasi-immortality.)
What do you call the fellow from Krypton flying about with his underwear on the outside? "Supermale"? "The male of steel"? "The last male offspring of Krypton"?
“Trans women should be and mostly are treated as women in the contexts in which they pass” is imo basically the correct position, you don’t have to single out men’s sexual attraction (although that is one of the contexts in question). As a woman, I’m fine rooming with a trans woman as long as she doesn’t have a penis. If she just wants to come to the girls night out, I don’t care if she has a penis or not. If trans women had crime stats similar to biological women, I would treat them like women when considering my personal safety. But my understanding is they don’t. And in sports, I happen to play an amateur contact sport and have played against people of all gender identities. The trans women I’ve played against all have bodies more similar to men than women in the context of the sport. If the opposite had been true, I would be fine with trans women playing in women-only leagues, but unfortunately it’s not. Maybe (hopefully!) in the future medical technology will improve and trans women can pass in more contexts. But at the moment, there are a lot of contexts where they generally don’t pass (and some who claim to be trans but don’t even try to pass), which limits society’s ability to treat them as their preferred gender as often as they’d like without compromising on basic principles of fairness. Of course none of this excuses discrimination against trans people in areas where we already don’t allow discrimination based on sex, like employment and housing, whether they pass or not, because in those contexts gender shouldn’t matter to begin with.
Fine, then I can sell fool's gold bracelets as real gold, and I shouldn't be charged with fraud, if the bracelets pass.
This is how stupid tr00n defenders are.
Btw, how many of these men pass? Counting everything--voice, hands, feet, stupid irrational male ego--how many out here?
Like zero. Does Dylan Mulvaney pass? Is he "treated" like a woman? How about Bruce Jenner? Does he pass? What about William "Lia" Thomas? Does he pass?
This is how I know TERFs will win. The people defending tr00ns are so stupid it's actually exhausting.
Yeah the singling out of male attraction was mostly a bit, although I think it can be a useful proxy for whether they pass. However, I think trans women can not completely pass while seeming more like women than men, in which cases I think it is natural to call them women (for instance, Hunter Schaeffer's facial structure and voice clock her, but she still seems like more of a woman than a man and 'passes' sufficiently).
I don't think it's porn brained to think that there exist trans women with secondary characteristics that put them above the 90th percentile of female attractiveness. Hunter Shafer is way hotter than the median woman, and it's more gay not to think that than to think that.
The "trans" lie is fully based on p0rn damaged losers and coomers, who overwhelmingly defend this lie and populate the internet with their subtarded irrational male thinking.
If a male obtains puberty blockers when he's around 11 and takes estrogen, he might pass. Now he's been sterilized--that's what tr00n defenders like you are defending? And you think you have moral high ground?
Hunter Shafer has a penis and testicles. Would you give him a blowjob or let him sodomize you? If you think he's hot and it's not gay, why wouldn't you?
I think it'd be more gay not to give Hunter Shafer head
I don't think it's obvious that male attraction to trans women is because of porn---that's just an assertion but regardless rationality and morality have absolutely nothing to do with this conversation. if it is the case that masses of porn brained men now find trans women attractive, that just seems like a reason that it's more natural to call them women
Not confused----it's clear that Hunter Schaefer is a biological male, but she's still more attractive than the median biological female. Sorry if this offends you, but it is more or less a fact, and any man who denies it has been castrated by modern, Victorian sexual moralism. Even attraction to so called "twinks" can be completely heterosexual in men---which is more feminine, a smooth, effete, 19 year old twink with a BMI below 17, or an obese, chain-smoking 40 year old "white trash" middle American woman? I'd take the twink any day, and I'm not even remotely gay.
I'm being like 85 percent silly, but I do think that how well a trans woman passes determines whether or not she seems to be a woman, which informs whether it seems natural to call her a woman. For instance, it seems extremely unnatural to call Blaire White or Hunter Schaeffer a man, but there exist many trans women who don't register as women who it seems unnatural to call a woman.
They're both men, and they're not attractive. That's the male p0rn brain take because you're all brain damaged.
They both have penises and testicles. Robert White makes YouTube videos about it. Hunter is not that attractive without tons of fake hair, makeup, lighting, etc, and he takes bikini pictures with his balls sticking out.
And this is what I mean, this is why men are stupid and p0rn damaged--"What's a woman? Anything I would stick myself into based on their weaves and makeup!"
This is why men should not be asked about this issue. You're all mentally ill and perverted due to p0rn.
Btw, if or when you get tricked, as men have, when they pick up males they think are female, and then commit murder when they find out the truth, don't cry that you should get mercy from a criminal court because the man tried to trick you. You're defending this.
The vast majority of these men never pass. Men are too stupid to cover up their aggression and lack of shame. Pointing to the gay man who took blockers early enough does not constitute a valid argument.
This is why "trans" is a fraud, its defenders are literal imbeciles with p0rn addictions, and this will be crushed. I know we're going to win.
And what is this subtard's article? High IQ stuff?
Robert White and Hunter Shafer are ugly gay men with penises and testicles. If you want to have sex with men, go do it. The HIV transmission rates are the same no matter how the men identify--because "trans" does not exist.
Take your p0rn brain elsewhere because your reading comprehension is clearly male in its tendencies. Go play Call of Duty.
I think the "normative considerations" are the crux of it, and the argument here is pretty weak.
First we are told that trans-men like Buck Angel should not use the women's restroom because people would be very uncomfortable. But if we are to care about bathroom discomfort, why should we not also consider those who are uncomfortable with non-passing trans-women in the women's bathroom (which I suspect is a statistically more likely occurrence), or even the men who aren't comfortable with non-passing trans-men in the men's bathroom? (Or those who are uncomfortable with the thought that there are passing trans-men/women in their bathrooms, even if they cannot be identified?) It doesn't seem that bathroom considerations point definitively in the direction of trans acceptance. (Off topic, but I think best solution to the trans bathroom issue is that there should not be one universal bathroom policy. A gay bar in Portland and a WalMart in rural Kansas should not have the same bathroom policies.)
Then we read that we should use transgender people's preferred pronouns because not doing so would upset them for no reason. But for many of us on the anti-trans side, using their preferred pronouns would at the very least be annoying to us, and perhaps would be upsetting to some of us. Given that there are far more anti-trans people than there are transgender people, why don't the anti-trans people's concerns win out?
Finally, there are some non-utilitarian considerations here. (If i recall, Mr. Bulldog is a utilitarian and will disregard this, but most of us won't.) When considering the proper course of action in response to someone being offended or upset, we should consider what kind of person the offense-taker is, and what their reasons are. For example, if an evil transphobic bigot is upset that he has to use someone's "preferred pronouns," we shouldn't care that he is upset. But by the same token, if a transgender "woman" knows on some level that "she" is not a real woman, but yet demands that others refer to "her" as such, and takes offense if they do not, we should not feel bad for offending "her." In my judgment, the latter scenario is more typical. This is a classic am-I-the-A-hole situation, and the trans-people are closer to being the a-holes.
This is one of the inconsistencies in any framework that prioritizes seemingness. Can a transwoman be masculine and still be a woman? It seems, given Bentham's position, that the answer would clearly be 'no.' And that's problematic for his framework because then it ties womanhood to a list of superficialities that are culture-bound and, in many cases, optional. It just seems obviously wrong to espouse a position that entails that transwomen who pass as women are women and those who don't pass as women aren't women. It's such a profound inconsistency.
You generally write and think fairly well, but this is one of your weaker posts. You are taking the definition of “woman” as strictly meaning “adult human female,” but are then arguing instead for a broader, more flexible understanding based on traits, usage, and normative considerations, and ironically reaching the opposite conclusion you should arrive at. A more flexible understanding of male and female should lead you to conclude that so-called trans women are not women, as I explain in the below articles.
You need to calm down. All I said was that BB's article was clear and asked him if he read another article related to this issue. Comparing me with a doctor doing lobotomies is a wild overreaction lol.
The basic problem with this whole argument is that it fails to acknowledge a very basic distinction: between Indicia and criteria. The former are the stereotypes by which we suspect someone belongs to a group, the latter determines groups membership. For example, if I hear someone speaking with an American accent I may suspect they are American. However, they may in fact be Canadian, or a British actor who perfected the accent etc. by contrast, millions of Americans have foreign accents. One can mention many other traits commonly associated with Americans, none of which determine group membership. As a matter of fact, American is whoever is a citizen of the United States, that’s the criterion.
The problem with your argument is that you don’t even propose alternative criteria for womanhood. You just keep being focused on Indicia, on what make one *seem* like a woman or *pass* for a woman, but that’s no definition at all. Your analogy for parents belies your notion: the reasons why step parents or adoptive parents may count as parents is because in most contexts the creterion for parenthood isn’t about begetting a child but rearing them.
The argument from politeness suffers from similar slippage. How we should treat people and what people actually are are likewise distinct questions! One may feel it polite or convenient to treat someone *as* a woman, but it doesn’t make her so. Nor are pronouns the correct way to go about it- those are about grammar or convenience but do not determine identity. In German a young woman is an “it” but it doesn’t make her any less of a woman. In English we may refer to a 5 year old girl or an adult trans woman as a “she” but nobody would argue that the former is a woman, and as to the latter we shouldn’t argue the same either based on the pronoun alone !
P.S.
It is not at all clear to me that a brain in a jar or in a robot is a man, rather a “former man” (or former woman as the case might be). As to a man’s brain implanted into a woman’s body, wouldn’t that case be a man turned into a woman (a genuine sex change)?
Finally- as others noted Superman is not obviously a man, he is rather a male kryptonian who happens to look like a man. Similarly Zeus isn’t a man but a god, even if he can “pass” enough to sleep with/rape and impregnate many women! What seems isn’t what is, and until you acknowledge this very basic distinction you can’t even offer the beginning of a counter argument on this topic.
Good comment.
The focus is on indicia because there are no clear criteria. If there were, none of us would need to be having this conversation, we'd already be in agreement.
The reality is that "man" and "woman" are concepts that evolved from thousands of years of human mating, and are quite intuitive concepts to anyone growing up in society, but are also quite changeable. For example, blue is currently associated with boys and pink with girls, but that's a recent development. The concepts are flexible clusters of features:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_resemblance
If there IS a criteria, though, it is this: Men are those that straight women and gay women would consider dating; women are those that straight men and gay women would consider dating; non-binary covers the fuzzy middle grounds. It's arbitrary, but that's what it's all about, isn't it?
By this criteria, trans women are women when they pass for women. Men might have a problem with dating them due to a desire for biological kids, an aversion to male genitalia, or hateful ideology, but none of that would impact the presence or absence of attraction.
But this criteria is too narrow, because we live in a society where gender is tied up with all sorts of other things, like identity, safety, community, etc. Because reality is complicated. So why the narrow focus on criteria? Your argument misses the forest for the trees.
I’m sorry but none of this makes sense. Criteria can be contested, but one cannot oppose one without proposing another. If one opposes the criteria of “adult human female” they ought to propose another. Your suggestion makes no logical sense as it is circular- it proposes to define man and woman using the terms man and woman…
I highly recommend this article, which may help you and others who see these comments to understand:
https://thepointmag.com/examined-life/performance-trouble/
That's my point, it IS sort of circular. The definitions are largely arbitrary, they're not neat boxes. It's like the definition of "mammal". It seems clear at first, but it's just a feature cluster, the "family resemblance" concept.
I'm sorry, no, that's petitio principii. The post tries to argue against a logically sound, non-circular definition "Woman is an adult human female." If you wish to argue against it you ought to supply an alternative definition which is equally logically sound (i.e. that actually means something). The argument "a logically sound definition is impossible" is refuted by the very premise of the debate (unless you can argue why "adult human female" is not logically sound or that it is otherwise nonsensical - to merely argue that it isn't good enough or normatively problematic is *insufficient* unless you have some alternative suggestion that makes some kind of logical sense and isn't implicitly dependent on the definition you ostensibly reject!)
P.S
Arbitrary =/= circular. Nor are "neat boxes" and "arbitrary" mutually exclusive. On the contrary, arbitrary is typically *too* neat. That something is arbitrary doesn't mean it doesn't exist nor even that it is impracticable. The age of majority (18) is arbitrary, but still logically sound and practically meaningful. The argument isn't whtehr one defition of womanhood is aribtrary, is whther you can propose a better one, or alternatively try to argue that we don't need that concept at all!
But... why though?
"Woman = adult human female" is overly restrictive, not matching situations as described in the original post. From a practical perspective, the looser definition is better.
It seems you're bringing in an extra requirement, something you believe is necessary for definitions, but that's... just generally not how language works, yo.
"the looser definition is better." Which looser definition? You did not propose any other definition. That's my whole point.
I will never under any circumstances date a trans woman. That is entirely out of the question given my sexual orientation. So by your criterion trans women are not women.
I wrote, "By this criteria, trans women are women when they pass for women. Men might have a problem with dating them due to a desire for biological kids, an aversion to male genitalia, or hateful ideology, but none of that would impact the presence or absence of attraction."
What I meant was "the presence or absence of initial attraction". Meeting someone in a public space, someone who truly passes, you wouldn't know anything about their genitalia or chromosomes. Once you become aware of that private information, then yes, your dating preference comes into play. I was more thinking of the usage of language in public spaces.
By that criterion, a mannequin is a woman and a grandmother is not. Is not a dating preference by the way, that’s insulting. It’s a sexual orientation.
No insult intended.
Your mannequin analogy makes no sense, but the grandmother analogy is well taken. Hence: Strict criteria really don't make sense for definitions like these. I refer you back to the concept of family resemblance.
They're not concepts, they're words to describe real things.
So are words like "mammal", "love", "dictator", "faith", etc. Lots of things in life don't fit strict, easy-to-define criteria. But they can still make perfect sense to us.
You can test it with thought experiments. Imagine a sci-fi future where a woman who has always been a woman since birth and is a woman by any definition imaginable goes through a machine that transforms her genes from XX into something else, XZ, but leaves her mind the same and her body outwardly the same. She would obviously still be a woman, even though no longer female. If that's true, then chromosomes aren't enough for the definition.
You can do the same sort of thought experiment for other individual criteria. For example, a woman who's had a tragic accident that leaves her with only her upper body would still be a woman despite the lack of female genitals. So again, just genitals aren't criteria enough.
The basis for the word is the vast majority of things that fit the category well. Beginning by being born with a certain set of chromosomes and sex organs. This definition applies accurately to will over 99% of people that have ever lived. If it doesn't apply to you, perhaps you're not that thing.
In the case of people who undergo transformation, I'd stick with what they were born with, assuming they want to be classified.
In the case of people who want to be classified even though their birth characteristics were ambiguous, I'm willing to let them self identify, so long as they behave in a way that is consistent with that self identification, and don't gain advantage over others by their choice.
In the case of those who perceive themselves differently, well, that's not reality, I'm sorry.
Trans people have been around throughout history. They are literal evidence to the contrary.
I've already shown that the criteria aren't complete, yet you still try to apply them as if they are. Why?
I think it's because we disagree over whether any trans people are experiencing real dysphoria, or whether it's all a sort of delusion, not because we disagree on how words work.
Evidence of what? Women claiming to be men, or vice versa? Even if it exists (where?), it doesn't change the definition of man of woman.
>The former are the stereotypes by which we suspect someone belongs to a group, the latter determines groups membership.
We never step outside our own perspective to observe that which "determines group membership." All we have is our own preferences for calling things what we call them. It's impossible to do otherwise.
That's incorrect. Rules or borders do exist, even if often arbitrary to an extent. Whether one is American or not is an objective legal question (even if you can find ambiguous edge cases). Whether one is "Black" or "White" would appear more subjective, but different societies can decide on different ways to answer that question absolutely (e.g., the notorious "one drop rule"). That criteria can be disputed does not mean they do not exist, quite the contrary.
Well reasoned, thank you 🩵.
In the debate Chris asks if you have examples of socially constructed identities (“something like parent…”) for which there is a word in virtually every human language. You replied that you wouldn’t be surprised if parent is one such word, to which Chris said it wasn’t on the Swadesh list of universal concepts.
But right after “woman” and “man” on the Swadesh 207 list are the words: child, wife, husband, mother, and father (the latter two of which are, of course, elaborations of and just as socially constructed as the term “parents”).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swadesh_list
I think this is funny and also demolishes his argument that a word being on such a list of core vocabulary proves that it the word cannot have a sociocultural definition.
That's a good point!
The top words on those lists are also pronouns and determiners - primarily associated with grammatical function and constructing well formed sentences rather than communicating meaning or reference.
I enjoyed this post. I found the analogy to “parent” especially illuminating – trans-inclusive philosophers should use this example more often!
I wasn’t convinced by your arguments, though.
My sense is that you think “woman” is coextensive with “sufficiently feminine adult.” For convenience, I’ll refer to this as your “definition” of “woman,” though what I have to say below applies whether or not it's supposed to be a definition, strictly speaking.
Your first argument for adopting this definition is that many people use “woman” to mean “sufficiently feminine adult,” and this implies that “sufficiently feminine adult” is a permissible definition of “woman.”
It’s not clear to me what this has to do with whether trans women are women. Your claim isn’t merely that it’s permissible to use “woman” to mean “sufficiently feminine adult” – your claim is that this is what “woman” means in English. You think that those (English speakers) who use “woman” to mean “adult human female” have misunderstood what a woman is, that their definition of “woman” is the wrong one.
To show that, it’s not sufficient to point out that many people use “woman” to mean “sufficiently feminine adult.” After all, it’s also true that many people use “woman” to mean “adult human female.”
Your second argument for adopting this definition is that it captures our linguistic intuitions. You focus on the cases of Blaire White and Buck Angel – it’s natural to call White a woman and to refer to them using feminine pronouns, and it’s natural to call Angel a man and to refer to them using masculine pronouns. (Yes, I’m avoiding using gendered pronouns!)
I agree that it’s natural to call White a woman and Angel a man. But that’s because White seems female and Angel seems male, and it’s natural to call someone a man who seems male and to call someone a woman who seems female. After all, someone who seems male is (or was, until very recently) almost always male, and someone who seems female is almost always female. Even when you know that someone who seems male is actually female, it still feels natural to call them a man – knowledge that they’re female doesn’t make the impression that they’re male go away.
In other words: the biological view of gender can easily explain our linguistic intuitions about White and Angel. We use feminine words to refer to females and masculine words to refer to males; White seems like a female and not like a male; and Angel seems like a male and not like a female. Using “man” to refer to males and “woman” to refer to females is not unnatural; what’s unnatural is for males to seem like females and for females to seem like males.
Your third argument is that your definition better coheres with certain normative considerations. As far as I can tell, those normative considerations are (a) trans men should not use women’s bathrooms and (b) we should not use masculine words to refer to trans women.
The biological view of gender can easily explain why (a) is true. Women are uncomfortable sharing bathrooms with males. Since trans men seem like males, women would be uncomfortable sharing bathrooms with trans men.
Similarly, the biological view of gender can easily explain why (b) is true. As you put it, referring to a trans woman as a man would be “pointlessly cruel” and “liable to upset her for no reason.” Isn’t that sufficient to explain (b)?
You object, “[I]f you can’t use pronouns without being a jerk, that’s a real cost of your definition!” But the biological view doesn’t entail that you can’t use feminine pronouns to refer to a trans woman. At worst, it entails that, by doing so, you misrepresent their gender. But it’s often permissible to misrepresent things to avoid being cruel – for example, it’s often permissible to tell a woman she looks beautiful, even when she doesn’t, to avoid embarrassing her.
In any case, why should we think that a philosophical position is less likely to be true simply because it entails that you sometimes can’t use pronouns without being a jerk? As someone who regularly chastises ethicists for being too averse to revisionary moral conclusions, you should be unimpressed by this point.
Your fourth argument is that the biological view has counterexamples, like Superman.
But Superman is male – he has a son with Lois Lane, an adult human female.
Of course, we can imagine someone otherwise like Superman who has no small gametes (and whose body is not even designed to produce them). You say that it’s absurd to deny that such a person would be a man.
But why is this absurd? Why can’t the defender of the biological view just say that, although such a person would seem like a man, they wouldn’t be a man, since they wouldn't be male? I don’t have clear intuitions about this bizarre, counterfactual edge case. Even if I did, I wouldn’t trust them very much – at least, I wouldn’t trust them nearly as much as my clear intuition that, necessarily, women don't have (natural, non-malformed) penises.
One final note: Some of Marcus Arvan’s alleged counterexamples to the biological view have convinced me that “woman” does not mean “adult human female.” However, they have not convinced me that the biological view is false. At best, they show that “woman” means “adult female person.” On this version of the biological view, alien women, Elven women, etc. are all women, but trans women are not women. (One of Arvan’s counterexamples is a female ladybug, which he insists is a woman. But that seems clearly false to me – ladybugs are not women, except in a strained, figurative sense of “women.”)
P.S. You should arrange to speak with Thomas Bogardus. He's the best defender of the biological view, in my opinion. He's also extremely charitable and kind when discussing gender, which is unusual.
Excellent take 🩵.
Good article. Clear and well argued. WRT your point about sci-fi cases, have you read Marcus Arvan's "Trans Women, Cis Women, Alien Women, and Robot Women Are Women: They Are All (Simply) Adults Gendered Female"? He explores those kinds of cases in depth.
He can't even define basic words.
This is a futile exercise in delusion, whataboutery, and low IQs.
When this ends, you're all going to pretend you didn't do any of this, just like doctors tried to pretend they didn't do lobotomies.
It's pathetic.
If you really want to know what's going on, read this.
Women are female. There is no male who is female too. End of story.
"Trans" does not exist. It's based completely on delusion because it's not possible.
It's possible to get remarried or to adopt. Nobody is basing that on lies.
https://kathighsmith.substack.com/p/trans-is-a-fraudand-it-always-has
Can you name one linguistic theory that associates competence of a language with ability to define words? What you're presupposing does not inform any approaches to language understanding that I've ever heard of. Were you given necessary and sufficient conditions for the use of the word "female" in biology class? How about for every other word you use? Did you have to study the dictionary beforehand?
did you sincerely read the article? if so, what is your definition of woman?
One who has XX chromosomes, you imbecile.
Like some others here, I think this is one of your weaker posts—for several reasons.
Your argument can be fairly summarized as follows: generally, when a person appears very feminine, we refer to them as a “woman”; therefore, it is right to call all feminine-seeming persons “women.” But this line of reasoning is deeply flawed.
The first issue with defining “woman” as a cluster of feminine stereotypes is that it’s plainly regressive. A foundational tenet of feminism has always been to liberate female bodies from the burden of stereotype. So that if a female person undergoes a mastectomy, keeps her nails short, cuts her hair, and speaks with a deep voice, she is still, unambiguously, a woman.
Speaking of intuitions: I struggle to think of anyone who’d seriously claim that a female person who doesn’t conform at all to feminine aesthetics should be excluded from the category “woman.” And yet, as that example shows, the absence of any of the stereotypical traits you list often has no bearing on someone’s womanhood. Which means that, even in your own taxonomy of “woman-making” characteristics, the biological fact of femaleness clearly outweighs the others. More than that: the very presence of femaleness renders the other characteristics irrelevant, because they are not necessary.
This becomes even clearer when we consider your example of Blaire White. I kept thinking about it, and I realized your femininity-based model falls apart the moment we start tweaking her presentation. Suppose we slowly dial down her femininity—take away the makeup, the hair, the voice, the mannerisms—until she begins to register as masculine. At that point, what happens? She’s not female, and she no longer passes as feminine. So what is she now, within your model? Certainly not a woman. But this creates a strange problem: is Blaire, in your view, allowed to be a tomboy? Is a trans woman permitted, within your framework, to be masculine and *still* be regarded as a woman? The answer seems to be no. And that’s not a minor flaw—it’s a profound inconsistency. Because any coherent definition of “woman” has to make space for the many ways that womanhood is *expressed*. If being a woman doesn’t allow for a wide range of gender expressions, then we’re simply replacing one restrictive ideal with another.
Yes, there are social dimensions to how femaleness is expressed, and yes, these give rise to things we call femininity. But feminine norms vary wildly across cultures and time periods. Where I live, for instance, there are cultures that find tallness, baldness, or even visible body fat to be marks of femininity. In some cases, the complete absence of makeup or jewelry is itself seen as womanly. Yet, in all of these places, adult human females are still universally recognized as women. A visitor might think, “You don’t look like what I’m used to”—but the recognition remains. That’s because femaleness—not femininity—is the defining feature. It’s what grounds all the others.
There’s also a problem with the weight you place on “intuitions.” The problem with intuition is that it’s often wrong. It’s fallible. And that should be enough to make us question it as a reliable guide to truth. Those viral videos where hyper-realistic cakes are shaped like shoes or soap dispensers routinely trick people. The moment of shock—“It’s cake?!”—is precisely a demonstration of how easily our intuitions can be deceived. But imagine if someone said: “Well, I thought it was a shoe, so therefore it *is* a shoe.” That’s the logic you’re invoking here. And to make matters worse, you cherry-pick intuitive responses that support your case, while ignoring others. If we’re really going to appeal to intuition, then surely the widespread gut-level reaction of “hell no” when people are told “trans women are women” also has to count for something. And yet you dismiss that reaction as invalid.
Let’s consider a more generous hypothetical. Suppose Denzel Washington disguises himself as a woman: dons the hair and nails, pads his chest, softens his voice, walks with a sway, even perfects the gestures and intonations. Someone seeing him in passing might say, “That’s a woman.” But then they learn it’s Denzel, and their intuition shifts instantly. Suddenly, the same person is no longer regarded as a woman—but as a 'man dressed as a woman.' That shift is significant. It reveals that our intuitions aren't just visual, but also conditional. They’re provisional guesses, constantly open to correction. And once the underlying reality becomes known, the illusion collapses. This, to me, exposes a critical difference between what something *is* and what it merely *resembles*. Appearance may fool us temporarily, but it doesn’t constitute reality.
I have to say, your Superman example genuinely startled me—not because I disagreed, but because I’ve rarely seen you argue in such a lazy way. The problem begins with the fact that Superman, as a fictional character, was obviously modeled on the human man. He is not an independent conceptual invention. He is a stylized distortion of an already existing category. Without the human man, there would be no Superman. And yet you take this distortion and treat it as if it invalidates the very thing it was based on (where you argue that Superman is a man despite not possessing the fundamental characteristics of human men). That’s like inventing a fictional “Supervegan” from the planet Riga—someone who eats meat but calls it “cruelty-free protein” and still identifies as vegan—and then using that fictional distortion as evidence that *real* vegans can eat meat without doing moral harm. The metaphor breaks down under the slightest scrutiny. You can’t use a stylized deviation from reality as an argument against reality itself.
Even more to the point: nobody—literally no one I know in comic circles—believes that Superman is a “man” in the full human sense. At best, he’s referred to that way for convenience. But in any serious discussion, one of the first points that is raised is that he’s not a man but, effectively, a god. Superman is man-like, and that's accepted superficially—until we have to get to the fundamental brass tacks. It's not that Superman is a man that shouldn't fight other men, but that Superman shouldn't fight men precisely because he is NOT a man; Superman isn’t a man, so it’s not a fair fight. Thus, the moment stakes appear—questions of fairness, power, loyalty—people revert to distinctions that look past seemingness to engage substance. If your conceptual model of inclusion collapses the moment it has to do real work—like determining fairness, ethics, danger, rights—then it’s not a robust model.
There has to be a clear line between seemingness and substance. That line can blur, but it doesn’t disappear. In Lucifer season 5, God comes down to Earth in the form of a man. Even though His appearance is convincingly human and masculine, it feels wrong, in the context of the story, to say that God was a man. Odin is said to appear in human form as a wanderer; but no one says that, by sufficiently seeming to be a man, he is one. The substance of Odin's being triumphs over his appearance. In a famous Biblical story, Jacob wrestles a “man” through the night, only to learn later that it was an angel. It would feel wrong, in retrospect, to say he wrestled a man. The revelation changes the classification.
My point is: we are capable of distinguishing between what "looks like" something and what "is" something. We do this all the time. And while I’m not opposed to calling feminine-seeming men “women” for reasons of politeness, safety, or social ease—indeed, I think there’s great value in that—I reject the idea that these surface cues define womanhood.
We already live in a world full of benign delusions. We let people identify as “queens,” “goddesses,” “they/them,” “fae/faer,” and, as I've recently learned, as dogs and cats and fairies. That’s fine, I think. In most cases, it hurts no one. We go along with it for the sake of civility and inclusion. But what you’re doing is different. You’re not just advocating for kindness or social ease. You’re trying to redefine the category of womanhood on the basis of traits that are superficial, culture-bound, and, in many cases, entirely optional; trying to tie it to something as unstable and performative as femininity. This is conceptually shallow, and it misses the heart of what “woman” has historically meant, and still means, when the superficial is stripped away.
> But then over time, the term parent came to have a broader meaning and include, for instance, step parents. We saw that step parents are relevantly like parents in various important respects, and so the biological definition was too narrow. For this reason, the term was broadened to include those who fulfill a broader parenting role.
This analogy is problematic. Because of the broadening of the word parent, we have added modifiers/attributive adjectives to the word parent to account for the shift (birth parent, biological parent). And nevertheless, step parent—with its attributive adjective—is still more descriptive, contains more data, and is commonly used to clarify. I would never call the woman my dad married my “parent” or even “step parent.” She had nothing to do with me. I referred to her as my dad’s second wife.
In other words, being a “step” parent is a condition worthy of clarification.
One simply can’t prescribe new definitions by decree to existing words that have developed for another purpose. Language isn’t an engineering problem for which proposed solutions can be broadly applied and enforced. As the great Herbert Simon once said: “If men do not pour new wine into old bottles, they do something almost as bad: they invest old words with new meanings.”
If someone uses a common word in an uncommon manner, confusion of meaning results. Anyone is welcome to personally continue to use language in such a manner, but these people must then expect to misunderstand/be misunderstood more frequently by people who adhere to the greater utility of common usage. And the person who rejects common usage can’t reasonably expect others to do the same in their presence.
>This analogy is problematic. Because of the broadening of the word parent, we have added modifiers/attributive modifiers to the word parent to account for the shift (birth parent, biological parent).
Just like we've added prefixes 'trans' and 'cis' for the exact same purpose. The analogy is very straightforward here and works very well.
Oh okay. So this piece advocates for the use of an attributive adjective to woman in the case of trans women, just as we use an attributive adjective in the case of step parent? I’m in agreement on that. That wasn’t how I understood it, but maybe I misread it.
In my defense, the piece is titled “Why I Think Trans Women Are Women.”
The piece advocates that just like semantic category "parent" includes both biological and adoptive parents, semantic category "woman" includes both cis- and trans-women.
Right. And I’m saying it’s false that common usage supports using “parent” to describe your dad’s second wife whom you’ve never met. That’s just confusing. It’s inaccurate. “Parent” isn’t most commonly used as is being described. Certainly not on first reference. “Step parent” dispels the biological/relational confusion. I think “trans woman” is similarly clarifying and “woman” alone is similarly confusing.
I think there's also obviously a context thing here: how much of a parent a step parent is depends on the exact situation. My wife's half-sister was raised for a few years by their common mom's second husband; he's more of a parent then to her then if the second marriage had happened many years later.
Some step parents are for almost all intents and purposes parents; others basically aren't at all, and many others lie in between those extremes.
Whether or not calling your dad's second wife your "parent" is justified depends on the exact relationship, and also on what you're saying: if it's a doctor asking about medical history, no step parent should be counted as a parent; if it's who needs to pick you up when you're sick at a sleepover, then your step mom absolutely counts and it would be tedious and pedantic to say, "actually, I can't give you my parent's phone number but I can give you my step mom's".
I think it's pretty reasonable to think something similar is true for trans women: if you've been taking hormones for years, and have had all the surgeries, and live completely as a woman, then for all purposes other than competitive sports, medical testing, and a few other things, that trans woman is a woman.
If it's someone who has just decided, hmm, maybe I have some gender dysphoria, I should think about this, then they're not really much of a woman at all.
I agree. Step parents take on all kinds of roles, as do parents. As you say, some step parents are more involved than biological ones. I don’t think the term step parent precludes such close relationships, just as I don’t think “trans woman” precludes a trans woman from being more woman-like by many standards than a biological woman.
Clarity of meaning is foundational to communication and saying step parent to indicate the absence of blood-relation (at the small cost of adding four letters) provides additional clarity that doesn’t diminish a step parent’s role as intimate caregiver—it simply reflects a notable condition that makes them distinct from how parents are known in common usage. It’s different to use “parent” as casual shorthand for “step parent” than it is to falsely identify your step parent as your birth mother or father.
The word “woman” or “parent” is literally just a group of letters that stand in for meaning determined by usage. To retain the letters but reject the usage indicates, to me, a desire to leverage the very meaning that is being denied by the act of redefinition. It’s an attempt to retain impact that is no longer actually generated by the changed placeholder. I can understand the impulse, but I don’t think it leads to people better understanding each other.
There's one requirement to be a woman--to be female.
Males cannot be female.
It's not playing semantics. The girls in Afghanistan aren't playing semantics. This is biological reality.
I don't care how men feel about this.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermaphrodite
Trivial counterexample to your assertion of biological reality from... biology.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3418019/
Also a case study of (almost) full hermaproditism (depending on the definition you use) in humans. I remember reading one about a guy that had almost fully functioning reproductive sperm and egg functions but I can't find it in my history at this moment.
This sort of confusion (I don't mean that you're confused, but that the semantics are confused) is why I've felt for quite some time that the slogan "Trans Women are Women" would have been better off as simply "Trans Women are Trans Women". It avoids any implication of exact and perfect equivalence, but I think still captures the essence of defending trans women's womanhood.
Wrong. It doesn't work because you don't understand the nature of the "trans" fraud.
It is possible for people to get divorced, remarried, or to adopt. That's based on relationships.
It is NOT possible for a man to become a woman. It has never happened because sex is binary and immutable, no matter how much makeup the man wears.
This is like a man declaring himself a woman, then demanding that his children call him "mother" because he produced the large gamete and literally gave birth to them. That's a lie, perversion, and fraud, and those three thing is what "trans" is.
None of it is real, and it's cope for the low IQ to play word games to convince themselves that it is. When this ends, you're going to pretend you never did any of this.
https://kathighsmith.substack.com/p/trans-is-a-fraudand-it-always-has
At least one of us definetely does not understand quite a lot here.
> sex is binary and immutable, no matter how much makeup the man wears.
Makeup is indeed not relevant here. However, the concept of "sex" is not some singular thing. It's a simplified category, abstracting complex facts about chromosomes, reproductive organs, hormones, other nuances of brain chemistry and a bunch of other things. Nearly all these things are, in fact, mutable.
And then there is a whole different level of abstraction due to the fact that common usage of such words as "man" or "woman" is not just about sex. You do not demand that every person you interact with, provided you with their medical records specifying their chomosomes and hormonal levels before you gender them. You may pretend that this is what trully matters for you for political reasons, but the fact of the matter is that this is not the actual algorithm you follow. Your mind simply clusterize some people as men and some as woman based on appearance and social cues.
> This is like a man declaring himself a woman, then demanding that his children call him "mother" because he produced the large gamete and literally gave birth to them.
Likewise, most children have no idea about gametes and yet they use the word "mother" just fine. They may not even know how children are made and born and yet, their image recognition is capable of distinguishing "mother" from a "father". Again, see the case of adoptive parents, or lesbian couples, where "mother" clearly doesn't mean "a person who produced large gamete and literally gave birth to me".
> That's a lie, perversion, and fraud
A lie would be to claim that after taking hormonal therapy and some plastical surgery trans-women can give birth to children and have physiology completely indistinguishable from cis-women. To my knowledge not a single trans activist has ever claimed that. What they claim is that trans-women can be indistinguishable from cis women in social contexts, unrelated to these physiological aspects. And this seems to be true.
> None of it is real, and it's cope for the low IQ to play word games to convince themselves that it is. When this ends, you're going to pretend you never did any of this
I appreciate your public prediction. Here is my:
You are currently participating in an astroturfed moral panic perpetuated by conservative politicians so that they could aggregate supporters (which do, coincidentally, skew lower on IQ scale) on culture war issues and get elected despite having terrible policy. You will keep ignoring it, feeling as if you are fighting the righteous battle against the forces of evil, while playing right in the hands of your true enemies, untill the consequences of such policies significantly affect you personal well-being and maybe even further down the line. Then the political equilibrium will shift, the zeitgeist will move on and conservatives will find a new outgroup to scaremonger about, just like all the previous times. As for whether you'll be able to learn your lesson and generalize from experience or will you join the new hate bandwagon, I'm leaving it up to you. After all, you do, in fact, have the choice in the matter.
It's not an astroturfed moral panic that my wife and another woman were menaced by a fully grown man in a woman's locker room, who gained entry to a female-only space by using magic words.
It's unacceptable and you can't tell me that I'm being manipulated by shadowly forces because I've seen it with my own two eyes. Conservative politicians didn't make that happen, a man claiming to be a woman in order to intrude on protected spaces to indulge his own desires made that happen.
I'm sorry about the stress your wife and that other woman have experienced. This, however, doesn't make a moral panic less of a moral panic. To understand which we need to carefully disentangle facts from speculations.
From the information you've given me, the fact is that a person whom your wife has identified as a man was in a woman's locker room.
Then you speculate that:
This person was a trans-woman
This person gained access to the space by claiming to be a woman
This person "indulged in desires"
None of these statements necessary follow from the fact.
The person could just as well be a trans-man, in which case conservative politicians are diretly responsible for menacing your wife, as otherwise trans men would've used men's locker room. Or a cis-man who has either walked in woman's locker room by mistake or is a legitimate pervert, or a provocateur, in the latter case, once again conservative politicians are to blame.
With all likelihood the locker room was not guarded by a police force demanding that only people claiming to be women could enter. The so called "protected spaces" in truth are not that protected. Anyone who really wanted to get there - could've done it, without much trouble.
And unless we say that using the locker room for it's direct purpose is "indulging in desires", then you don't in fact know why this person was there. They could've been a pervert, but also they could've simply minded their own business.
Likewise, the fact of the matter is that you wife felt unsafe as a result of this situation.
It's possible that the person was harrasing her. However, as you didn't state so directly, it seems that she got frightened just because this person was there. To which a scaremongering propagated by concervatives is clearly responsible.
Both the existence of a person in the room and the emotional reaction of your wife could be the direct fault of the conservatives. However, I don't think you've even thought about it for a minute. From all the possibilities and interpretations of the situation it seems that you've immediately jumped to the cashed thought corresponding to the narrative pushed by politicians who has already prepared an outgroup for you to be outraged about. And that's exactly what moral panic does to a person.
The forces manipulating you here are not shadowy at all. They are very blatant, frankly. but as long as you are outraged in a different direction, you will keep not noticing it.
Yawn.
That's a wall of sophistry to try and excuse away the absolute fact that males in female spaces are inherently threatening and deleterious, and that you think it's ok for males to enter female spaces.
Why do you think it is a universal human custom to have sex segregated spaces for females, and why do you think they're no longer necessary?
If you allow some men to say the magic words ‘I'm trans’ and be exempt from the global civilizational rule that males should not enter female spaces, you've simply eliminated female spaces. It's not acceptable, and you are the one being manipulated by disordered men and their supporters. It's already the case that men are using people like you to enable their predatory and selfish behaviors in places like spas, prisons, locker rooms, and on sports teams.
Men who say that they are women are still men, and male, and they should stay out of women's spaces, full stop. This rule is well founded, has been for the whole of human history across the world, it exists to protect women from men, and there's no need to change it
"Trans" is a fraud and it's based on playing idiotic word games because none of it is real.
https://kathighsmith.substack.com/p/trans-is-a-fraudand-it-always-has
>Language isn’t an engineering problem for which proposed solutions can be broadly applied and enforced.
Yes it is. Programming languages for example almost exclusively do work in this paradigm.
I’m glad programming languages (one-way instructions directed at machines we created ourselves) work that way.
“Why I think trans women are women and vice versa”. Presumably “vice versa” is intended to mean “mutatis mutandis (for transmen and men)”, rather than “(all) women are transwomen”?
(Is there a lesson here about trans supporters and the misuse of language?)
:)
Do you ever wonder why "trans" men don't cause problems in men's sports and prisons, or threaten men in men's toilets?
Gosh, that's a mystery.
It's because "trans" does not exist, and men are male. There is no other kind.
Playing word games won't save you.
You lost.
https://kathighsmith.substack.com/p/trans-is-a-fraudand-it-always-has
Generally biological males are more prone to aggression and have great physical strength.
The term male is biological in and of itself.
There are no "non-biological" males.
Men are males. There is no other definition.
That's why "trans" men do not exist, since "trans" does not exist.
Those are females. They aren't men of any kind, so they don't ruin men's sports.
People like you lead to males being placed in women's prisons, sports, spaces, toilets, where they inevitably commit rape. I'll bet you're happy giving away women's identities so you can play low IQ intellectual online.
Girls in Afghanistan don't have that luxury, otherwise they could just opt out of being female.
That is why the only answer to this entire lie is NO. When this fraud ends, you're going to deny you wrote any of this.
I would suggest you delete this now to save yourself the shame.
https://kathighsmith.substack.com/p/top-10-stupidest-definitions-for
I think you're being both hostile and confused which make an irritating combination. At no point in the article did I comment on women's prisons, sports, etc.
You say there's no other definition, but I gave one in my article!
But did you really not speak about women‘s prisons, sports, etc…? Doesn‘t it seem reasonable to put women into women‘s prisons and let women compete in women‘s sports? Therefore, I do think you are speaking about these issues and this feels like a motte and bailey. Maybe part of the confusion is caused by muddying the definitions, which is part of what is problematic about your case.
Rather than focus on silly hypotheticals where "adult human female is problematic", how about consider actual situations where the alternative is problematic. "Men can have babies" so "abortion isn't just a women's issue". How about "men can have babies too" as a rebuttal to "child bearing is a significant barrier to women's equal participation in the workforce". How about "men can menstruate too". A tad misleading?
If you think child bearing, menstruation and male on female violence are socially, economically and politically significant, then non-biological definitions of gender make communication harder, not easier. You are centering what should be a qualifying footnote, robbing women of easy language to describe some of the most fundamental aspects of their lives.
Spot on, this.
Philosopher (and trans woman) Sophie-Grace Chappell made a similar argument some years ago:
https://blog.apaonline.org/2018/07/20/trans-women-men-and-adoptive-parents-an-analogy/
I have always found it a very strong case, myself.
Your debate topic is a bit odd. Imagine if you debated the prompt “The term 'gold' is a reference to the substance with the atomic number 79, rather than based on sociocultural constructs.”
That is clearly false, because, for example, most of the time when we talk about "gold paint", we don't mean paint made of gold. But on the other hand, that doesn't mean that everything yellow and shiny is in any sense real gold (as you seem to think everyone caring and tender with long hair and painted nails is in some sense approaching womanhood).
Fool's gold is gold if it tricks everyone.
That's what this dolt is arguing here.
These men are so dumb it's exhausting.
The old “‘[wo]man’ means ‘adult human [fe]male’” argument. I recently had the privilege of attending a talk by Talia Mae Bettcher where she addressed this. She provided some interesting counterexamples to this claim.
1. Superman is a man.
2. Galadriel is a woman.
1 and 2 seem like common (nerd) utterances and true.
Let’s say one objects that 1 and 2 are false (fictional characters and all that). But, I think someone would be hard pressed to seriously deny the truth of:
1*. Superman is represented as a man.
2*. Galadriel is represented as a woman.
I disagree. Superman *looks like* a man, but is an alien. Galadriel *looks like* a woman (sort of - in fact she is described as meaningfully distinct) but is in fact a female elf. This is in fact a good counter example. We have the term “passing” for a reason. Indicia and criteria are different. The former are what we use to guess at identity based on probabilities. The latter are what determine identity.
I'm confused here, both of those are fictional characters, literary devices not real people they symbolize parts of humanity as a person wrote those characters. But they're both fantasies, as a reader you could see them anyway you like. Place whatever meaning you wish onto them. Are there not better examples that exist outside of comic books or fantasy novels?
I did not bring up those examples. But the fact that they are fictional is neither here nor there. They are still useful as thought experiments, just like the brain in the jar (which also thankfully fictional). Fictional characters still have fictional "facts" about them supplied by the author. The case of Galadriel is easier because there is a very clearly delimited canon about her (Tolkien's writings). Superman is more akin to a Greek god in being at this point a commonly known cultural figure with different tellings of his story which include discrepancies. nonetheless, one may note core characteristics that appear in almost all tellings - his Kryptonian origin is surely on of those.
P.S.
Also note that the substack author does not wish to dispute those "facts" about Superman, but rather to use those facts for his argument. He says, Superman is an alien, and has different physical abilities than (homo sapiens) men, but is nevertheless a man because he looks like a man and often treated like one. I say, not so, he "passes" for a man but that does not MAKE him a man. That's the core of our disagreement and the fictional example helps sharpen it.
Galadriel is a female elf. She isn’t a woman just as Legolas isn’t a man.
This is how stupid "trans" is.
You idiots have to rely on fictional characters because you're too pathetic to deal with reality.
This is why everybody hates all of you.
Thank you, Kat! Very cool!
Someone hasn't read Fellowship,
"Then she let her hand fall, and the light faded, and suddenly she laughed again, and lo! she was shrunken: a slender elf-WOMAN, clad in simple white, whose gentle voice was soft and sad." (476, emphasis added)
I have read it; I admit I haven't memorized it. But "elf-woman" is not "woman", Galadriel is distinct from human women in the way Legolas is distinct from men like Aragorn. (Although apparently Men [female or male] and Elves can have children together, so female elves are more women than transwomen, despite their having important metaphysical distinctions from Men like quasi-immortality.)
Tolkien also uses the word “woman” to refer to Goldberry, clearly not a human.
I’m still curious what you call the bloke who can leap tall buildings in a single bound.
What do you call the fellow from Krypton flying about with his underwear on the outside? "Supermale"? "The male of steel"? "The last male offspring of Krypton"?
"Trans women who pass well enough to appeal to male sexuality are women" is the true but horrific sounding take IMO
“Trans women should be and mostly are treated as women in the contexts in which they pass” is imo basically the correct position, you don’t have to single out men’s sexual attraction (although that is one of the contexts in question). As a woman, I’m fine rooming with a trans woman as long as she doesn’t have a penis. If she just wants to come to the girls night out, I don’t care if she has a penis or not. If trans women had crime stats similar to biological women, I would treat them like women when considering my personal safety. But my understanding is they don’t. And in sports, I happen to play an amateur contact sport and have played against people of all gender identities. The trans women I’ve played against all have bodies more similar to men than women in the context of the sport. If the opposite had been true, I would be fine with trans women playing in women-only leagues, but unfortunately it’s not. Maybe (hopefully!) in the future medical technology will improve and trans women can pass in more contexts. But at the moment, there are a lot of contexts where they generally don’t pass (and some who claim to be trans but don’t even try to pass), which limits society’s ability to treat them as their preferred gender as often as they’d like without compromising on basic principles of fairness. Of course none of this excuses discrimination against trans people in areas where we already don’t allow discrimination based on sex, like employment and housing, whether they pass or not, because in those contexts gender shouldn’t matter to begin with.
Fine, then I can sell fool's gold bracelets as real gold, and I shouldn't be charged with fraud, if the bracelets pass.
This is how stupid tr00n defenders are.
Btw, how many of these men pass? Counting everything--voice, hands, feet, stupid irrational male ego--how many out here?
Like zero. Does Dylan Mulvaney pass? Is he "treated" like a woman? How about Bruce Jenner? Does he pass? What about William "Lia" Thomas? Does he pass?
This is how I know TERFs will win. The people defending tr00ns are so stupid it's actually exhausting.
Yeah the singling out of male attraction was mostly a bit, although I think it can be a useful proxy for whether they pass. However, I think trans women can not completely pass while seeming more like women than men, in which cases I think it is natural to call them women (for instance, Hunter Schaeffer's facial structure and voice clock her, but she still seems like more of a woman than a man and 'passes' sufficiently).
That's what men are saying.
It's their p0rn damaged male brains talking.
Fool's gold is not gold, no matter how many people it tricks.
They're still men--male.
I don't think it's porn brained to think that there exist trans women with secondary characteristics that put them above the 90th percentile of female attractiveness. Hunter Shafer is way hotter than the median woman, and it's more gay not to think that than to think that.
The "trans" lie is fully based on p0rn damaged losers and coomers, who overwhelmingly defend this lie and populate the internet with their subtarded irrational male thinking.
If a male obtains puberty blockers when he's around 11 and takes estrogen, he might pass. Now he's been sterilized--that's what tr00n defenders like you are defending? And you think you have moral high ground?
Hunter Shafer has a penis and testicles. Would you give him a blowjob or let him sodomize you? If you think he's hot and it's not gay, why wouldn't you?
I think it'd be more gay not to give Hunter Shafer head
I don't think it's obvious that male attraction to trans women is because of porn---that's just an assertion but regardless rationality and morality have absolutely nothing to do with this conversation. if it is the case that masses of porn brained men now find trans women attractive, that just seems like a reason that it's more natural to call them women
Not confused----it's clear that Hunter Schaefer is a biological male, but she's still more attractive than the median biological female. Sorry if this offends you, but it is more or less a fact, and any man who denies it has been castrated by modern, Victorian sexual moralism. Even attraction to so called "twinks" can be completely heterosexual in men---which is more feminine, a smooth, effete, 19 year old twink with a BMI below 17, or an obese, chain-smoking 40 year old "white trash" middle American woman? I'd take the twink any day, and I'm not even remotely gay.
This is the BASED take
It's horrific if we assume that it's a necessary condition of womanhood. But that's not the case.
I'm being like 85 percent silly, but I do think that how well a trans woman passes determines whether or not she seems to be a woman, which informs whether it seems natural to call her a woman. For instance, it seems extremely unnatural to call Blaire White or Hunter Schaeffer a man, but there exist many trans women who don't register as women who it seems unnatural to call a woman.
They're both men, and they're not attractive. That's the male p0rn brain take because you're all brain damaged.
They both have penises and testicles. Robert White makes YouTube videos about it. Hunter is not that attractive without tons of fake hair, makeup, lighting, etc, and he takes bikini pictures with his balls sticking out.
And this is what I mean, this is why men are stupid and p0rn damaged--"What's a woman? Anything I would stick myself into based on their weaves and makeup!"
This is why men should not be asked about this issue. You're all mentally ill and perverted due to p0rn.
Btw, if or when you get tricked, as men have, when they pick up males they think are female, and then commit murder when they find out the truth, don't cry that you should get mercy from a criminal court because the man tried to trick you. You're defending this.
The vast majority of these men never pass. Men are too stupid to cover up their aggression and lack of shame. Pointing to the gay man who took blockers early enough does not constitute a valid argument.
This is why "trans" is a fraud, its defenders are literal imbeciles with p0rn addictions, and this will be crushed. I know we're going to win.
Most of this is just insane babbling
LOL
And what is this subtard's article? High IQ stuff?
Robert White and Hunter Shafer are ugly gay men with penises and testicles. If you want to have sex with men, go do it. The HIV transmission rates are the same no matter how the men identify--because "trans" does not exist.
Take your p0rn brain elsewhere because your reading comprehension is clearly male in its tendencies. Go play Call of Duty.
You sound kinda mad
I think the "normative considerations" are the crux of it, and the argument here is pretty weak.
First we are told that trans-men like Buck Angel should not use the women's restroom because people would be very uncomfortable. But if we are to care about bathroom discomfort, why should we not also consider those who are uncomfortable with non-passing trans-women in the women's bathroom (which I suspect is a statistically more likely occurrence), or even the men who aren't comfortable with non-passing trans-men in the men's bathroom? (Or those who are uncomfortable with the thought that there are passing trans-men/women in their bathrooms, even if they cannot be identified?) It doesn't seem that bathroom considerations point definitively in the direction of trans acceptance. (Off topic, but I think best solution to the trans bathroom issue is that there should not be one universal bathroom policy. A gay bar in Portland and a WalMart in rural Kansas should not have the same bathroom policies.)
Then we read that we should use transgender people's preferred pronouns because not doing so would upset them for no reason. But for many of us on the anti-trans side, using their preferred pronouns would at the very least be annoying to us, and perhaps would be upsetting to some of us. Given that there are far more anti-trans people than there are transgender people, why don't the anti-trans people's concerns win out?
Finally, there are some non-utilitarian considerations here. (If i recall, Mr. Bulldog is a utilitarian and will disregard this, but most of us won't.) When considering the proper course of action in response to someone being offended or upset, we should consider what kind of person the offense-taker is, and what their reasons are. For example, if an evil transphobic bigot is upset that he has to use someone's "preferred pronouns," we shouldn't care that he is upset. But by the same token, if a transgender "woman" knows on some level that "she" is not a real woman, but yet demands that others refer to "her" as such, and takes offense if they do not, we should not feel bad for offending "her." In my judgment, the latter scenario is more typical. This is a classic am-I-the-A-hole situation, and the trans-people are closer to being the a-holes.
Trans identification is a Utility Monster but the author does not address the obvious fact.
Where does your argument leave us with regard to trans-people who clearly DONT pass and aren't even trying to? Like Jesse James Rose?
This is one of the inconsistencies in any framework that prioritizes seemingness. Can a transwoman be masculine and still be a woman? It seems, given Bentham's position, that the answer would clearly be 'no.' And that's problematic for his framework because then it ties womanhood to a list of superficialities that are culture-bound and, in many cases, optional. It just seems obviously wrong to espouse a position that entails that transwomen who pass as women are women and those who don't pass as women aren't women. It's such a profound inconsistency.
You generally write and think fairly well, but this is one of your weaker posts. You are taking the definition of “woman” as strictly meaning “adult human female,” but are then arguing instead for a broader, more flexible understanding based on traits, usage, and normative considerations, and ironically reaching the opposite conclusion you should arrive at. A more flexible understanding of male and female should lead you to conclude that so-called trans women are not women, as I explain in the below articles.
https://philosophicalmuser.blogspot.com/2023/11/why-i-think-we-can-do-away-with-term.html
https://philosophicalmuser.blogspot.com/2023/03/taking-gender-off-agenda.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCammtoFJC4&t=189s
You need to calm down. All I said was that BB's article was clear and asked him if he read another article related to this issue. Comparing me with a doctor doing lobotomies is a wild overreaction lol.