Oh it’s all so complicated
La lutte continue.
So I read the other guy’s 6 and 7 so that I’d know what Andy was replying to. I became very tired when I got to this bit:
In my first letter, I gave a definition of gender that highlights that it is a complex construction involving a wide range of inputs and outputs, and that we are still actively involved in the process of understanding how those factors interact.
No it isn’t complex, except in the sense that it’s become fashionable to misunderstand it and try to make a personality out of it.
Andy’s response to that part:
I am not going to pick apart your ideas on gender, but for the record, it looks as if you gave up on trying to define what a “gender” is and resorted to a “it’s complicated” type non-argument. And that leaves me with not a clear target to address. Science requires precision. And your approach, to be honest, looks more like mysticism and hiding behind the supposedly ineffable.
Precisely. It’s tiresome.
After he’s done talking about how complicated”gender” is, maybe he can explain what a “gender identity” is and why it’s more important than women’s (human females) rights to boundaries.
I’ve been calling the men who claim to be women just that.
I now refuse to call them ‘transwomen’ or ‘trans women’ (whichever term they’re using today (it’ll be transphobic tomorrow)); but, if I absolutely have to use the term, I shall be putting the gap between the o and the m. And perhaps I’ll be adding ke after the o.
Re #2
Not satisfied with winning the internet a mere few days ago, tigger_the_wing claims solid ownership yet again. “Transwoke Men” is perfect.
He also used, or began using the same guff with sex, also in the first letter.
This is part of the process of throwing doubt on whether sex is knowable at all. Nice try, but there is no ‘truly essential feature’, which I took to mean one single feature that means a person is definitely male or definitely female irrespective of the rest. The human body has a large collection of features which form two association groups – the sexes – called male and female; bodies that have some features of each are called intersexed. That is, they cannot be placed entirely in either sex, even if they look to be wholly female or male to the eye.
Importantly, the existence of such bodies does not mean male and female cease to exist as meaningful terms. The association between the various features still provides strong predictive power about the rest of the features of a body, and perhaps more importantly, cultural biases still presume that the sexes are real.
If the truly small number of difficult to classify bodies poses a problem for sex as a classification, I’d love to hear how such ambiguities are not fatal to the usefulness of gender identity.
The menu down at our local Chinese restaurant has a simpler range of choices.
For something as simple as sex dimorphism, the only reason to muddy the waters like this is to be tricksy. It’s to say “Well, since it’s so complicated, how can we really set boundaries for those we think of generally as men? Isn’t it kinder to err on the side of ambiguity so that we don’t exclude anyone from where they want to be?”
The idea of gender identity as a fixed property of humans is broken by the non-binaries and the genderfluids. Instead of terfing the radical feminists and gender skeptics, I think that serious gender scholars should be denouncing those classifications.
Ambiguous ineffability is the first red flag that should alert a skeptic. We are mammals, we know that the reproductve systems differ between males and females as much as we know to buy a mare when we want colts, or not to bring in a gelding to stud. But we don’t need to examine the external genitals of humans to determine men from women. We’ve evolved the ability to differentiate, not on any single characteristic but on a blending of characteristics, between human males and females. While men don’t have the elaborate plumage as in most birds, we can still see the difference except in rare cases.
Holms, sort of like when I’m telling my students what makes someone a mammal. Many of our characteristics are shared with other groups, such as what it means to be an animal, some of which are shared with plants, and so on. While we might “know it when we see it”, it requires more than one characteristic to define, and some members might be missing a crucial characteristic – such as my students love to bring up three-legged dogs whenever we talk about some mammals being quadripedal. Yes, but that is an easily identifiable abnormality. A dog does have four legs, but because it is a suite of characteristics, a dog born with only three legs is still a dog.
Just as I am still a woman though i have no uterus (uterus havers, anyone? Thanks for identifying me out of my sex without my permission). Woman is a mixture of genetics, physiology, reproduction, genitals…and not how we think we are. It is objective and identifiable, unlike gender identity where a bloke with a beard tells you to call him Susan and his pronouns are she/her/hers.
@iknklast,
One argument that gets made a lot is that defining women by their sex reduces them to their genitals. And yet the same crowd is happy to classify a group of people as “uterus havers”.
@Michael Haubrich,
I wonder, does the existence of mules mean that the donkey/horse binary is invalid?
Well, I’d rather be defined by my genitals than classed based on whether I am rational, how I dress, whether I simper, how nurturing I am, whether I prefer cooking to sports, etc. On that list, by the way, only two would classify me as a woman, and how i dress is up for debate because I rarely wear skirts. But my pants are female cut, and the styles I favor are considered more feminine than masculine.
Defining me by XX chromosomes is fine with me. Recognizing other characteristics, such as reproductive structures (whether I still have them or not), is actually fine with me. It’s real, it’s true, it’s objective, and it makes sense. And it doesn’t say anything about whether I am nurturing (not), simpering (not), prefer cooking to sports (do), or have long hair (yes, actually I do). Being reduced to my genitals is much to be preferred to reducing me to a set of arbitrary stereotyped characteristics designed to make sure I ‘stay in my place’ (won’t).
Part of what bothers me with the TA arguments about definition of “woman” is the confusion between “this defines a class” and “these are ways in which we can tell whether something is a member of the class”. Women are adult human females, that’s a definition. What biological markers, or heck even what behavioral and cultural markers, we can use to determine to varying degrees of certainty that someone is a woman, that’s not the same thing as a definition. Some of these characteristics are ironclad certainty; some, many, are not. But “has a uterus” is not the definition, it’s a characteristic we can use to help determine if someone fits the definition. “Wears dresses” has a pretty good accuracy rate, with a lot of false positives (and even more false negatives), and is again not a definition.
Perhaps classification for sports could be based on whether or not the warmups have usable pockets.
Problem. Solved.
All in good time, I’m sure. Right now they need all the useful idiots they can get.
Purity after Victory.
YNnB, that is almost certainly why they have invented the notion of ‘TERFS’, and fabricated (from a tissue of lies) what it is that ‘TERFS’ are doing and saying. There is already so much in-fighting that, without an easily-identifiable (and safe; ‘TERFS’ aren’t actually dangerous to them) outside ‘threat’, the movement would have collapsed already. The more I think about it, the more I agree with those who have recognised that this is a quasi-religious cult, complete with a hierarchy, believers, apostates, heretics and non-believers, and an army of hostile creatures who threaten their very existence.
That exchange of letters actually seemed fairly productive to me, but it went off the rails in Rabinowitz’s Letter 9. That’s where, for me, the ratio of good faith to bad faith arguments plummeted. (Notably: the claim that objections to trans women’s participation in women’s sports — objections that Rabinowitz seems to concede may have merit — are somehow silencing or disrespecting those cis women athletes who express approval of trans participation, and the possibly facetious claim that since statistics indicate that more girls are transitioning to male than vice versa, then surely this is “clearing the field” for women athletes.)
I share the observations made by other commenters that there seems to be an odd attitude on Rabinowitz’s part towards the significance of anything that isn’t a strict, 100% rigid, binary. At times he seems to be suggesting that the existence of even one person who doesn’t fit neatly into one of two categories means that the categories are meaningless. But of course TRAs don’t think that the categories are meaningless; I don’t think Rabinowitz would argue that women’s spaces shouldn’t exist, or that we shouldn’t have categories of “men” and “women.”
I came across a TRA bot on Twitter which regurgitates definitions in order to show up that they DO TOO have definitions!
Here’s “woman:”
“A woman is an adult female human, including trans women. But why? “Woman” is a gender identity: the relationship between your understanding of yourself within society and the abstraction of sexed behavior and physical characteristics.”
I saw no attempt to bring in the “female” bit, other than stating “ Biological sex classification is just another classification system like gender. ” Gender?
“ Gender is an umbrella concept that refers to any understanding of people that is “sexed”, but exists completely as a cultural/social construct. The most prominent example of this is gender roles or gender norms: men are expected to do this, women are expected to do that.”
But Gender IDENTITY isn’t gender STEREOTYPES because transwomen don’t always follow stereotypes!
This is hopelessly confused. They can’t (or won’t) provide a list of elements which would be included under socially-constructed ideas of sex-related behaviors. That’s not because it’s impossible to do without being sexist. It’s because “it’s different for everyone.”
How you understand yourself as a man or woman is likewise different for everyone.
Self-reflection is different for everyone.
We are all individuals.
You can’t tell me I’m not a woman.
You’re not the boss of ME.
It IS “different for everyone.” Particularly for us in the transgenera and transwhateverpopualtions, who identify as giraffes.What about us? I demand an answer.!
Omar: just Google a bit. Your (joking) comment has passionate advocates.