Guest post: A sort of Turing test
Originally a comment by latsot on Sitting on the gender spectrum.
I’ve tried many times (as have others) to engage with gender identity fans on this point, asking them to state the GC position in such a way that a typical person broadly on the GC side would agree with it. A sort of Turing test. I’ve spent considerable amounts of time and effort on this and on trying to return the favour: on trying to state the TA position such that a typical TA person would agree.
You know what? I’ve never had the slightest success in either direction.
When they’ve even made an attempt to state the GC position with any honesty at all (rare), we’ve never got more than a few tweets in before the insults come out. Even where there’s been a reasonably respectful back and forth, at some point there will always come some obviously deliberate gross misstating, even if that contradicts what we’ve already agreed. From that point, insults will start flying, always from their side.
It’s as though they can’t help themselves. It’s as though they genuinely can’t bring themselves to state the GC position honestly. Or perhaps that in beginning to do so, they realise that the position is pretty sound and theirs is not. Or maybe they’re scared that people will think they’re catching TERF lurgy.
When it’s the other way around, deterioration is similarly rapid. It’s as though they’re looking for any excuse to kick over the board and storm out. They will take enormous offence at some statement or other, apparently at random and rather than working through a correction – as I’ve tried to do – they’ll say that there’s no reasoning with TERFs and end things in a flurry of insults.
In these discussions, have you at least gotten as far as agreeing on a definition of what a trans person is? In my own mind I can’t avoid starting with “a transwoman is a man who…” and that would seem to defeat a lot of trans-activist arguments right there. Or is their starting point “a transwoman is a woman who in all physical respects is male”? I would think that’s too absurd to say out loud.
I used to make the mistake of trying to put their views very simply, a common ground from which both sides spring. For example, “someone is ‘transgender’ if they don’t identify as their birth sex.” This could be because 1.) they were born with a different gender identity which makes them the sex/gender of their gender identity” or 2.) some other reason. I just received howls of protest: you have to put it ALL in or you DON’T UNDERSTAND AT ALL.
But even when I actually quote their own words back to them or pull definitions from major activist sites, there’s no guarantee. I’m constantly reminded of the via negativa way of describing God. He is so far above us, we can never say what He is; we can only say what He is not. And, in debates with theists, the thing God is not is typically “whatever definition the atheist is using.”
Deja Vu all over again.
As a (very confused) outsider, I would love to hear both sides put very clearly and honestly and succinctly….
@Mike B:
A quick attempt:
Two Positions
(Gender Critical)
“Human sex is binary & immutable, consisting of pathways organized to produce large or small gametes. Except in rare cases, it is observed at birth.”
(Trans Doctrine)
“Human sex is a spectrum involving numerous factors which may or may not overlap. It is assigned at birth based only on superficial appearance.”
(GC)
“A woman is an adult human female; a man is an adult human male.”
(TD)
“The term ‘woman’ has multiple definitions and applications, and which one we use depends on context. Same with ‘man.’”
(GC)
“‘Gender: Socially-constructed abilities & attributes assigned to men & women (masculine & feminine)
Transgender: someone of one sex who can identify in a range of ways with the other, from wanting to be treated as if they were that sex, to claiming to actually be that sex.
(TD)
Gender: Socially-constructed abilities & attributes assigned to men & women.
Gender Identity: the internal sense of being a man or woman; neurologically based & present at birth.
Transgender: someone who’s gender Identity does not match the sex assigned to them at birth.
GC: The best way to minimize sexism is to encourage the rejection of gender, allowing boys & girls, men & women to live & flourish according to their inclinations. When people reject their sex it’s often due to social messages, stigmas, trauma, or other psychological & factors. Sometimes there are neurological causes.. The best resolution is helping these individuals explore, understand, and cope through therapy while allowing them free range of expression. While it’s preferable to learn to accept one’s sex, for some it’s best to transition later in life. Some accommodations can be made, but not all women’s spaces & reserves should be open to transwomen.
TD: the best way to minimize sexism is to reject and break restrictive ideas on gender roles & sex, allowing people the self-determination to decide where they fit best and how they want to live. ‘Man, woman, male, and female’ are all social-constructs, with only internal knowledge and personal choice avoiding the arbitrary barriers which try to control others. Trans people are born trans & nobody should try to change them so they’re “normal.” They are who they say they are, need whatever they say they need, and should be affirmed & accepted throughout society, medicine, & law.
Sastra, that’s very comprehensive … and also kind of you.
The key definition seems to be that of “human sex,” at least for me, and I definitely think the GC view is accurate. The TD view is fuzzy.
Both the GC and TD views of “woman/man” are both correct in their own ways, but, again, the TD definition is fuzzier.
At least GC and TD agree on definition of “gender”!
The whole idea that “sex” is “assigned at birth” is just bunkum, I believe.
Sadly, I don’t believe there will ever be accord between GC and TD on the issue of access to women’s only spaces.
But I’ve noticed that there is nary a scuffle about trans men having access men’s only spaces, or trans men competing in men’s sports, or the fear that trans men will impinge upon the rights of straight or gay men. Because…it just doesn’t happen? Why is that?
Is this not very telling?
I propose a simpler question to TRAs
“Show me a single example of any mammal that has changed from male to female or female to male.”
I generally never hear back from them.
The closest one got was a man who claimed he was a woman because he had breast tissue! Went away, never to be seen again, when I posted the stats on breast cancer in men.
I have also pointed out the homosexuality is observed in all mammalian species, but trans in only one. I was told that’s because other mammals lack speech, therefore proving that trans IS a social a choice, a social contagion, and performance.
Mike B #6 wrote:
Yes and no. Look at the definition of “Gender identity: “The internal sense of being a man or woman.”
What does the word “gender” mean there?
They insist it doesn’t mean “sex.” They call “man” and “women” gender terms, and would hotly deny our definition.
They also (confusingly) insist it doesn’t mean adhering to social stereotypes. That’s the definition for society: our gender identity is innate.
They also say that the stereotypes associated with being a man or woman aren’t innate.
So what does that leave? Nothing. They either can’t or won’t define it, with “gender identity” sometimes seeming to mean what sex you think you are, other times meaning which stereotypes you follow or want to follow, and at all times never meaning which one you think they mean.
As for the lack of scuffle with transmen vs men, that relates I think to the fact that men are generally more dominant, aggressive, and privileged. Men don’t have “safe spaces” the same way women do, nor do they have special awards or positions designed to combat past prejudice. Women joining men’s sports teams aren’t likely to take all the trophies, and while men are also modest, the social stereotype is that a naked woman in their locker room is fine & dandy.
Thanks.
On your last point: a hardy “yes.” That was my implied point: there are not the same issues with “trans men” in men’s spaces, sports, etc. because, well, trans men are women, and men and women have their differences (which should be honored).
Peter N @ 1
I recall seeing an video discussion between Debbie Hayton (a trans-identified male) and another trans-identified male about some aspects of the “trans rights” debate, maybe it was sports. Hayton is pretty firmly on the gender critical side. He started off talking about how they were both men, how they were both born male, trying to make some other point, and he couldn’t even get two sentences out without being interrupted and told how terrible he was being, how bigoted that viewpoint is. I expect this kind of reaction is typical; you can’t make that starting argument without being strenuously challenged before it is even out of your mouth.
Judging from what I hear from men I know, I suspect a naked woman in their locker room is fine and dandy if they are not naked themselves. It may just be that the men I know tend more toward the nerdy intellectual side and not the swaggering jock, but most of the men I know do not appear to be proud of their bodies.
I had a recent conversation spanning two weeks of back and forth with two other people, and got one of them to agree to a statement going something like “boys and girls should grow up free of behaviour expectations due to their sex. Gender is the problem, and ending it is the solution.” When I pointed out that this meant he was critical of gender and that this was a summary of the GC position, he derailed what had been a productive conversation by engaging less and spamming more.
According to him, the GC position is akchully that gender and sex are the same thing, and also that this is the same attitude that existed in the middle ages. There was no real communication after that, even though the conversation technically continued for several days. And this was a person that kicked off the conversation stating that he took pride in taking on and dismantling the arguments of the gender sceptics.
For many of them, there is no interest in dialogue except as a pretence at rational discussion. The battle lines and alliances have been made, and the enemies are wrong by definition.
#4 Sastra
In my experience, they rarely bother saying that last sentence. If I ask them for a generalised statement of what a trans person is, about 80% of the time they will only bother stating what a trans woman is.
iknlast, I can’t speak for all men (very unfair IMO), but outside of exhibitionists my experience is that you’re right. Most men are pretty modest in changing areas, toilets, or even changing/peeing outdoors. It’s considered crass, even rude, to flaunt your wang and definitely so to be caught glancing at someone else’s. As for not being proud of our bodies, doubly so in my experience. I don’t know about the incidence of eating disorders in men compared to women. My sneaking suspicion is that we tend to find comfort in food and beer. Being on the tubby side is more socially acceptable for men than women, so we can hide in plain sight, especially as we get older. Hell, I didn’t like my body when I was young, slim and very fit. I’m no longer any of those things and the hope of achieving two out of the three again is looking forlorn despite my best efforts.
I think that many TRAs might respond: “That is not a meaningful question. Non-human animals don’t have the cognitive ability to have a gender identity (or, if they do, they have no way of communicating it to us), and sex does not exist. So it is absolutely meaningless to speak of a ‘male animal’ or a ‘female animal’.”
TRAs will point to the various non-primates that are hermaphrodites in some way, or to seahorses where the male carries developing fetus, or otherwise ignore the fact that you specified mammals.
GW: how can one have any rational conversation with people who claim there are no male or female animals? The mind boggles. It’s like arguing with a Kabalah believer about the different emanations of the godhead.
Even when I was young and in top shape from sporting pursuits, I was still never comfortable undressing in locker rooms around other men. There were some men who flaunted their nakedness, although it always seemed to be out of primate posturing and dominance displays, rather than pride in their appearance (though that did play a part). They were more interested in everyone seeing how they didn’t care about being fully exposed, while other men in the same room were rather embarrassed at the whole scene. I would have been mortified to have women undressing in the same room, but those dominance-seekers probably would have jumped at the opportunity to embarrass and humiliate women in the same room. I suppose it’s the same thing that motivates flashers.
@Sackbut #15, I have lost count of the number of supposedly intelligent people with all their knowledge of biology that think Clown Fish are mammals. Because Clown Fish is about all they’ve got.
This document is the clearest thing I’ve read so far about ‘what is trans’ and ‘what are trans rights’:
https://sex-matters.org/posts/updates/principles-for-clarity-and-respect/
The definition they use is ‘someone who chooses not to disclose her/his sex’; therefore, ‘[i]t is not logically possible to access a space governed by sex-based rules while also demanding that information about your sex remain undisclosed.’
Back in the Before Times, around 2011 to 2012, when my wanderings had taken me most of the way through University and my lifelong sympathies to homosexual and liberal causes had softened me up for the then-emerging early tenets of the new elite religion, I began to notice a pattern that likely helped to eventually arrest my slide into full-on SJW cultism.
The SJW types would make some kind of ill-founded claim, mainly reasonable but a bit outlandish nonetheless, about how history or human beings worked. A cynic would take the outlandish portions of these claims seriously, and reason to the logical conclusion of the outlandishness, whereupon the SJW types would roll their eyes and scoff at how ridiculous and unthinkable such an eventuality would be. Then, some time later, more SJW types (and often the very same people who scoffed and scorned) would show up and make a new claim, taking the most extreme logical endpoint of their previous position as its founding assumption, and stretching the limits of the claim as far is it can go. And the cynics would once again take the outlandishness seriously, and would be mocked for showing concern for it. Only for…well, you know.
This cycle has repeated several times, throughout the history of ideologies and social movements. It is something of a process of the acolytes slowly revealing the truth of what they actually believe and the adherents congealing around a consensus, only for more radical members to jockey for social position within the movement by spurring it on to greater and greater flights of fancy. These phenomena don’t have a partisan valence, but instead emerge from the inevitable dynamics of mystery cults and secret societies (even when those secret societies operate in the open with the explicit goal of colonising the minds of unbelievers).
The SJW/Successor Ideology/anti-racist-fourth-wave-feminist movement is now several cycles into this process, where the cynics have been reduced to simply restating the explicit positions of once-lauded activist groups, only for bystanders to reflexively disbelieve them, even as a horde of adherents descends upon them for their lack of belief.
A decade or more ago, I remember resisting the cynics, wanting to think better of people; I liked to think people by and large actually believed in the first-order principles of fairness, and freedom, and equal opportunity, and equal reward for equal effort. I liked to think they would not turn the academic tool of intersectional social analysis into a weapon for accruing social status through making outrageous claims and out-and-out lies which recast people like them into perpetual hero-victims of our own day, much less that it would go on to form the principal bedrock upon which to found a new church in which those affinity groups were somehow ordained by the forces of history to have always been so.
But some time ago now I had to admit that I was wrong. I still believe in fairness, and freedom, and the two most fundamental principals of true equality (alongside equality before the law). But now these positions carve me out as something of a reactionary and a cynic in my own right. while the garde continues to avanti to parts and peoples unknown.
We’ll see each other on the other side, I suppose.
Der Durchwanderer,
I don’t think you’re wrong: I think senses of fairness and freedom are likely either innate or close to it in humans. Children are especially sensitive to fairness and you’d think that in this day and age, with childhood apparently extending well into the 50s, fairness would be a guiding principle for us all and the world much improved as a result.
I think a big issue is that this sense of fairness has become skewed because children have been encouraged to make themselves the centre of their worlds. I don’t quite mean to imply that people react with outrage only to perceived unfairness in which they’re the victim. I mean that what they regard as unfair seems to be constructed more from their own egos than from observable reality.
That’s how we seem to be living in a world in which *checks notes* it’s fair for giant men to compete against women in swimming events, but it’s not fair to point out that that’s not fair.
Some of the people involved are, I’m sure, genuinely outraged at what they really do perceive as transphobia against Thomas, but this is because their idea of what’s fair and unfair is based on abstract notions of what is important, in principle, to them rather than on the observable suffering of others.
Certainly it seems that only “woman” is in danger of erasure in political and public discourse; there’s no equivalent backlash against the use of the word “man”.
You’d think though, that there would be concerted effort to find an organic, biological basis for “gender identity” and try to find its evolutionary origins. There are few human traits and capabilities (language, tool use, etc.) that are completely without non-human exemplars or precursors. If astrology were a thing, you’d see astrologers conducting research in order to work out the implications of new discoveries (the discovery of moons around the planets of our own solar system, mass/energy equivalence, our existence in a universe of galaxies, extra-solar planets, dark matter… hell, pretty much ANYTHING after the rise of heliocentrism) for their practices. How do you even start to research the biology of something as ill-defined as “gender?” It’s a feature and a bug at the same time.
Astrologers were a bit non-plussed that they were not consulted in the deprecation of Pluto to a Dwarf planet.
https://astrologynewsservice.com/news/dont-tell-this-astrologer-pluto-doesnt-belong/
Sastra #4
(Gender Critical)
“Human sex is binary & immutable, consisting of pathways organized to produce large or small gametes. Except in rare cases, it is observed at birth.”
Something that is a bit more than a quibble:
I would replace binary with bimodal.
Some people (about 1% ?) are born with anatomy that is not clearly male or female. There are also the exceptions to the chromosomes determining sex.
If the Gender Critical don’t recogize the existence of ‘intersex’ they will be rightly criticized & it weakens the Gender Critical position.
GC: on minimizing sexism I totally agree with
In atheist forums I often promoted an unpopular opinion: the religious were no less ethical than we were. On the whole, they share the same values and moral goals. Even the Nazis didn’t really differ in their sense of right & wrong, or commitment to fairness, from the people they persecuted.
Because change what you thought were the facts, and you change what’s right and wrong. If God was a God of Love and homosexuals subvert the Loving Natural Order, thus harming not only themselves but leading whole nations into damnation, then gay marriage is wrong. And fighting against it is right. It does no good to see my opponents as wicked, immoral, demonic, or cruel if I would do the same thing if I believed what they believe. The problem was dogma, ideology. The problem with the religious was religion.
Sure, there’s a disturbing portion of psychopaths and people who really are cruel. But if there’s a position that’s popularly held it’s very unlikely indeed that it’s believed only by the sort of people who enjoy torturing others. Look at the facts they’re working from: what looks like a moral problem may be a problem in reasoning.
When I made this case I noticed that, over time, fewer and fewer people agreed with me. It used to be a standard position in skepticism and a respectable position in atheism. But the more emphasis placed on social justice, the more the religious were seen as reveling in hatred. Till it became… like it is now. Dark vs Light, Good vs Evil, the Saved vs the Damned. It’s come full circle. We’re not just like the religious — we’re like religion.
Jim Baerg@
Yes, I have other problems with “binary.” I’ll accept “bimodal.”
Jim Baerg, Sastra, I prefer the term biologists use: dimorphic. We can certainly include people with DSDs in our activism, but they should not be required to be in the definition. They are whichever sex they are, we can determine that through DNA testing and other means, and there is no other disorder we consider as part of the standard definition.
A dog is considered to be a quadruped; if a dog is born with only three legs, or with five, it is still a dog. It isn’t an interCanis, or a trans-Canis, or a non-binary Canis. It is simply a dog.
Acknowledging the people with DSDs (they don’t like being called intersex) is important, but it is not rightfully included in the male/female distribution. In short, basically binary with exceptions that are referenced as medical conditions. And dimorphic is the term I will continue to use.
[…] a comment by Sastra on A kind of Turing […]
@iknklast
“Dimorphic” it is.
“Dimorphic” sounds appropriate to non-biologist me. “Difficult to tell which of the two sexes best applies to an individual” is not at all the same thing as “this individual has a sex that is somewhere between the two sexes”. There are still only two sexes. DSDs don’t create a third sex or a half sex.
OK Dimorphic is fine.
I had to Google DSD to find it equals “Disorders of Sexual Development”.
I’m mildly surprised at “the people with DSDs (they don’t like being called intersex)”.
However, euphemism treadmills seldom if ever make any sense.
“Intersex” implies, by definition, “between sexes”. People with DSDs are male or female, with a few cases being difficult to determine.