Guest post: A category error an atheist should be familiar with
Originally a comment by Sastra on Any observable and consistent pattern?
So which other patterns exist in humans? Name one.
I copied this a while back:
Woman: “ A rich cultural artifact with many cues used to designate that aspect of their identity. Also: A complex, multi-dimensional and highly variable category. There isn’t one definition.” — PZMyers
I suppose we could use that a possible answer, but it’s still not specific. Suspiciously so. Because giving a list of those “cultural cues” would involve things like long hair, dresses, loving shopping and pretending to be shy. He wouldn’t want to imply that, though I don’t see how it could be avoided.
That second sentence looks to me like the transgender version of “God is the Ground of Being.” It sounds like it’s saying something deep and profound, but it’s empty.
Mostly, I see the acceptance of sex categories immediately followed by dismissing them as irrelevant as a form of Equivocation. “Yes, ‘female’ is a reproductive category but a WOMAN is MORE than someone who can have babies.” There’s a sudden switch from biological classifications to personal choices. It reminds me of creationists denying reductive physics because a PERSON is MORE than a bunch of atoms. “ We can’t get meaning from a blind process of evolution. “ It’s a category error an atheist should be familiar with.
Those who argue against creationism also ought to be familiar with the strategy employed by the Intelligent Design folks: pick little holes in the Theory of Evolution in order to convince others (and yourself) that it’s hopelessly inadequate, and then wheel in something with BIG holes as the satisfying replacement. All biology is fuzzy at the borders, but if there were no such things as species, evolution couldn’t take place. PZ doesn’t deny sex differences. Creationists agree that there’s “change over time.” After that, it gets murky.
Yes, it’s a category error and a quite deliberate deflection. The definition of the word ‘woman’ is ‘adult human female’. That does not suit the men who want to take all acquired rights and safe spaces away from women by pretending, and demanding that we pretend, that they are women too.
So they pretend that the question ‘what is a woman’ means something entirely different; they pretend that by answering ‘an adult human female’ we are actually preventing women from applying additional labels to ourselves, rather than admit that what we are doing is showing that the label does not, and cannot, apply to men.
Not necessarily a deliberate deflection, but one that might happen more easily if we’re focused elsewhere People in pain, people wanting to make their own choices, people being denied the right to know themselves better than others know them who are all being attacked by religious conservatives using methods they used on gays and lesbians makes a POWERFUL distraction.
“What is a woman?” should be answered the same way whether there are any transwomen or not. A solid scientific case for the existence and primary relevance of Gender Identity would alone be enough to overwhelm the prior habit of using reproductive pathways for the production of large gametes. Researchers would have been looking for explanations for the puzzling way people of each sex know they’re that sex.
If we can’t make a case for GI without using transpeople as examples of how it “goes wrong” then we need to be very, very careful our commitments to equality, inclusion, and social justice aren’t driving the science. Make a case for the primacy of gender identity and the inadequacy of sex by assuming there’s no burning social issue resolved by coming out on one side or the other.
If God exists, then we shouldn’t require that believing in God soothes people’s fears in order to demonstrate it. We shouldn’t even require the existence of believers.