The thought-terminating lie
The thought-terminating cliché strikes again.
Except that she’s not “challenging the humanity of trans people.” Not even close.
Disputing some of the truth claims made by some trans ideologues is not challenging the humanity of trans people. Rowling is not challenging any claims of the type “trans people are human” or “trans people are human and deserve human rights” or “trans people are human and should not be persecuted.” Not even close, not even slightly.
Fight fair for a change.
Fight fair? No chance, not from the likes of him.
I would love to see the step-by-step explanation of how putting trans women in the same marginalized-people category as gay men and transvestites — instead of the marginalized-people category which includes black women and infertile women — “challenges their humanity.”
People can be very, very certain they’ve experienced God, too. Questioning that doesn’t question their existence, or strip them of their rights and dignity, let alone humanity.
I take it Hemant has given up being friendly? I also take it he has adopted a new religion…
Oh, no, lying about what Rowling said is SUPER-friendly.
Rowling isn’t challenging their humanity. She’s challenging their womanity.
Mehta’s is a bizarre statement. Does he really think men are not human?
We’re living in a world where people have no qualms about saying A to describe not-A, and in fact will think A about not-A. Even when they should by all rights know better.
Strange times.
If someone told me 3 years ago there would be a group of people who would rival trump & crew in the ability to infuriate and befuddle me and that many of them are people whose work I was reading at the time, I wouldn’t believe it. Not to mention being concerned about anything JK Rowling had to say about anything.
This isn’t anything against Rowling, I just never had any interest in Harry Potter. I liked that she got a lot of young people reading which is always a good thing even if I’m not a fan of wizard stories, I remember people complained that she started writing while on the dole, and that was bad for some reason. Seems the government made a stupendous investment given the whole HP industry still going strong but what do I know.
Mike, I know. It feels like we’ve slipped sideways into an alternative timeline that we just know is wrong, but don’t know how to slip out of again. Black is white, up is down, The Onion looks staid beside ‘real’ news, The Simpsons and South Park are predictors of the future and dogs lie down with cats. it’s all just out of whack.
Yes, I certainly never thought I would give three figs about what Donald Trump was doing. I probably never thought about him one minute before he announced his candidacy. Now he dominates the news cycle, dominates the conversations, and sucks all the oxygen out of the room.
And ditto about J. K. Rowling. I was never interested in the Harry Potter series, I was glad to see a woman writer being read by young boys, perhaps it would be good for them, but nothing else. Now I am becoming an admirer, because she is standing up and saying what she thinks and not letting them intimidate her. And she is saying it well.
One of the worst things for me was how the atheist community collapsed into this. For the first time in my life, I felt like I found a group I could belong to, could fit with. That all changed, and I am back on the outside looking in again. And seeing the dark underbelly of progressiveness. I knew there was misogyny on the left; I never thought it would look like it does now.
iknklast: For realz, tho, I feel you. I, too, used to feel some small amount of community, or at least camaraderie, through the 00s’ atheist movement. I even made actual real-life friends because of it. It gave me something interesting to do with the excess of mental energy left over after spending 60+ hours a week coding.
It’s actually quite terrifying (and maybe horrifying, too) how a group so vocally committed to treating claims with skepticism and rigor could be taken in by this nonsense. And not just the trans portion, either. Somehow they’ve bought the entirety of the critical studies departments’ project hook, line, and sinker. From gender studies to fat studies to whiteness studies—it’s all accepted completely without the skepticism that was previously so exalted. How the holy hell did that happen, huh?
Re: Rob – The Onion comment reminds me of House of Cards which was in its penultimate season I think when Trump took office, and I could no longer suspend my disbelief to enjoy the show. Truth be told it was running up the ramp to the shark tank by then but still even though they killed off Francis I haven’t been tempted to finish it off yet. Maybe next year.
Re: Iknklast* – Same, never thought I’d have to (literally) pay any attention to Trump. I mean I almost never watch or listen to him directly but luckily there is the Sarah Cooper filter for those rare times.
* I always type Inklast first sorry for misspelling you :)
In keeping with the theme of the “hey, a social norm of free speech and open discourse might be a good thing” letter and Ayaan’s tweet, I present this:
A man getting harassed and assaulted for holding a sign that says, “The right to openly discuss ideas must be defended.”
Yay?
Christ on cracker one of the commenters in NiV’s link “argues” that if you think only Nazis should be called Nazis, it’s because you’re a Nazi. I need a drink, the herbs aren’t cutting it.
Mike:
I assume you mean this?
He’s parodying Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, which works like this:
J K Rowling has taken stands in British politics as well, against Scottish independence. She lives in Scotland. She was swarmed over by the cybernats, who would have given her a taste of what twitterstorms are like. Her tone in debates is generally reasonable and polite, and of course this is not met with the same tone. She donated money to the Labour party then took the piss out of Jeremy Corbyn because of his waffly position on Brexit and the Corbynites raved at her. So she is used to controversy. She takes on groups which have highly virulent and totally unscrupulous extremes.
As for her books, I read the first Harry Potter as my boyfriend’s daughter was into them, and quite liked some of it, eg the sorting hat and the game of quidditch. I’ve visited Alnwick Castle where they’re filmed, which I’d recommend – it’s a cool castle. I’ve read her Robert Galbraith detective stories as well, and they’re pretty good on atmosphere of eg the rock music scene, though they could do with some shortening.
She is rich enough and successful enough not to suffer material consequences for speaking out, and good for her.
One argument I find sinister is that “people can say what they like but realise that they will be held accountable.” So at one time you could say that the bread and wine were /were not the body and blood of Christ and the accountability would have been to be burned at the stake.
That video was the kind of thing that seemed to have a backstory, so here it is, in two different accountings:
http://hackneypost.co.uk/alt-right-dalston-gallery-ld50-shut-protests/
And, by the fellow holding up the sign in the video, whose name is DC Miller:
https://medium.com/@dctvbot/no-platform-for-aristotle-867a04c5da50
I don’t like what’s going on in that video. It seems ignorant, and there is clearly assault happening while police do nothing. It is also worth noting that there is a history of provocation and response preceding this event.
I do not support or agree with everything that DC Miller says, though I do find some of the things he has to say thought-provoking. I do admire his bravery in making a point that needs to be made, and wholeheartedly support his right to say things, even things with which I disagree (sorry, no, DC, I do not believe that Weinstein was ‘crucificied.’)
NiV: Thanks for the update, I have no idea who Robin DiAngelo is but that is a terrible argument that could be applied to anything for any reason.
I should add that I’m not saying it isn’t sometimes true, or that the concept behind it doesn’t have valid points. I’m not a philosopher or anything but it just sounds like a lazy “you’re wrong because I said you are wrong” argument.
I’m wondering if Hemant would respond to people asking him to cite where exactly Rowling “challenged the humanity” of trans people. It is certainly not possible for him to actually cite such a thing, what with it not happening and all, but I wonder if he will even bother responding. Intellectual cowardice is a key component of this position, so I doubt it.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote this defense of Rowling a few weeks ago. I think it’s quite good, and I mostly agree.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/j-k-rowlings-lonely-fight-for-womens-rights
Re Robin DiAngelo and White Fragility: I read her earlier book, “What Does It Mean to be White?”, about five years ago, and found it well-written and helpful. I started reading White Fragility earlier this year, and couldn’t get into it. I think my views (and priorities) have changed somewhat in the interim, and that’s part of the problem.
From Papito’s quote of DC Miller on Medium (2017)
Funny how that reminds me — the Danish Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons (2005) led to the Akkari dossier that included an unrelated photo from a French pig squealing contest.
@Holms #19;
I don’t know what particular argument Hemant would make, but I’ve noticed that he tends to use a phrase when referring to people whom he considers transphobic — they “deny the existence of trans people.” From what I can tell, the reasoning may go like this…
They think the Gender Critical Position is:
1.) If someone is trans gender, then their body and gender identity don’t align. (If A, then B)
2.) There is no such thing as a body which doesn’t align with gender identity. ((Not B)
3.) Therefore, nobody is trans gender. (Not A.) modus tollens
Then:
If A is a transgender person and B says there’s no such thing as a transgender person, then B has denied the existence of A.
Then:
If you deny that someone exists, then you’re denying they’re a real human being.
Then:
If you deny that someone is a real human being, you have, at the very least, questioned their humanity.
There are some serious errors in this, but on the surface it might look like it holds. I don’t know.
Sack@20 Thanks for that, it’s a good read, and not just because I find it agreeable.
Sastra, I think the problem is that people don’t know the difference between “existential” and “epistemological.” I don’t believe that people such as JK Rowling pose an existential threat to transpeople so much as an epistemological threat.
Maybe “existential” sounds more fancy to TRAs, or more dramatic. They want desperately to be validated, but just like stolen library books, they won’t cease to exist because they’re not validated. Nobody is denying trans people (or stolen library books) exist, they’re just denying that trans people know what they think they know. That’s an epistemological quarrel.
The trans religion goes like this: in addition to the physical sex of people, people also have a quality called “gender.” The “gender” is unrelated to the sex of a person, but it is inborn, ever-present, intangible, unmeasurable, and vitally important. The “gender” is more important than sex. Whether a person is sexually male or female is almost irrelevant in trans religion; the important thing is their “gender,” which they are assigned at birth by foolish doctors who get it wrong a lot, and can then later decide to change.
The knowledge of which sex a person is can be gained through objective, scientific measures, such as whether a person has male genitalia or female genitalia, and whether a person has XX chromosomes or XY chromosomes. However, sex is irrelevant if you’re a transgenderist, and the knowledge of which “gender” a person is can only be determined by that person’s feelings and beliefs, not by any external or objective measure. According to the trans religion, “gender” is what makes a person a man or a woman: only bigoted people pay attention to sex, and claiming that sex is what makes a person a man or a woman is transphobic.
The principal dogma of the trans religion is that any person who feels they are a woman – whose sense of “gender identity” is that of a woman – is a woman. Being born of the female sex makes a person a woman no more than realizing at forty, after having two kids as a man, that one is really a woman. That is because knowledge of “gender” can only come from inside. The outside of the body is just an illusion, perhaps a temporary condition.
When TRAs bellow “TWAW,” they are insisting that the cardinal belief of their religion – that it’s “gender” that makes you a woman – must be unassailable. The denial of this dogma would mean that transwomen are not really women, but men dressed up as women. They don’t know they’re women, they just think they’re women. Denial of the result or the process makes their religion untenable. They characterize this denial as a threat to their existence; it threatens their self-concept even more than it would if you were to tell a Catholic that Mary wasn’t a virgin, or that Jesus was just a man.
Transgenderism is a relatively new religion. If it persists, it’s likely to change, as Catholicism has. Anybody remember Limbo? It’s where virtuous pagans used to go, along with unbaptized babies. When I was a little boy in Catholic school, we were encouraged repeatedly to pray for the souls of the poor little babies in Limbo. Limbo was a matter of panic for parents who bore sickly infants. No more, because it wasn’t really central to the Catholic faith. Catholicism dropped Limbo in 1992.
The Gender Identity is not that sort of peripheral belief in the transgender religion; it’s a fundamental tenet of the faith, like the Eternal Soul in Catholicism. Without it, the rest of the structure falls apart. Transgenderism could get rid of all the silly pronouns, or most of the 33 or 58 or however many genders claimed to exist these days. That wouldn’t be important to the faith. What transgenderism can’t get rid of is the idea that gender can only be determined internally, by feelings. Any attempt to assert that external sexual characteristics are important in determining who is a woman and who is a man is an attack on the epistemology of gender identity. When we say “you’re not really a woman, you’re just a man who thinks he’s a woman,” it tears apart their entire religion. It also deflates, for some, their sexual (auto-gynephilic) fantasy.
The degree of the claimed harm in “misgendering” strikes us as absurd. The manager of the building next door referred to me as “Ms…” in an email the other day. Was I irate? Deflated? Did I tweet angry things at his employer, or sob into my couch? No. It’s utterly unimportant to me, far more of an embarrassment to him than to me. Does it anger people that much to have their race mistaken? Based on my multi-racial family, no. It’s annoying if persistent, but more a cause for humor than anything.
That’s because it’s not our religion. I seriously pissed off a devout Catholic once – an educated grown up! – by saying I would have respected the Pope more if he was a go-go dancer when he was young, instead of just staying in the church and doing all that praying and stuff. I like the new Pope better, BTW. I’m not likely to be mad if someone makes fun of Mohammed to me, or the Pope, or Martin Luther, or transsubstantiation, or Ganesha, or the hilarious Book of Mormon. No more than my race is or my sex is, none of these things are my religion. Transpeople are different.
That’s one of those things that makes me sit up and go WTF when I hear progressives. Because up until Transgender took on the status it has, these were assumed to be wrong-headed ideas. Women aren’t born with an inherent attitude toward pink, or so nurturing and caring that they will put themselves aside for everyone else. They are taught these things. Shoving your feet into triangles while lifting your heels into the ozone is not born, it is taught. Prancing and being prissy and shrieking when you see a mouse (it isn’t fear of mice that’s taught, but how each person responds to that, with girls expected to jump on chairs and squeal) aren’t born, they’re taught. And people like PZ used to say this, too. The first time I saw him mention the innate gender of a transperson, I thought he was mocking or writing a spoof, but he was serious. He apparently ow believes we have an innate gender identity. I’m sure he would say that’s different than all that “woman brain” stuff, but I actually saw him use the term “woman brain” to describe a transwoman, so I would find his argument hollow.
The only beef I have with your argument is that they manage to separate the sex and the gender, and make the sex irrelevant. From what I see, it appears they have conflated the two. Sex has been assimilated into gender, to such an extent that they can literally make the statement “girl dick” without laughing or showing any discomfort at the ridiculousness of it. It isn’t that sex isn’t relevant to them; it’s that they believe that sex and gender perfectly align, and it is what is in their head, not in their pants, that determines both.
iknklast, I know there’s an incredible amount of conflation out there between sex and gender. I think mostly this happens accidentally, because the inherent absurdity of the trans cult makes it hard to keep straight. I think other times the conflation is strategic, as in: ‘oh, you want same-sex toilets, well then transwomen are the female sex too!’ But most of the time they’re still separate things.
I think that in the remarkable oxymoron “girl dick,” sex and gender aren’t conflated at all. I think gender is made into the only important factor (it’s the “girl”), and the sex element is determined to be inconsequential (it’s a dick, so what! It’s a GIRL dick!). I find that consistent with the religion as described.
I think it’s helpful to contemplate the relation of transgenderism to transhumanism. The goal of the transgender religion is to alienate every person on earth from their actual sex and make it unimportant, and foreground the idea of gender as primary. The goal of transhumanism is to leave our bodies behind entirely. For example, one of the founders of the transgender cult, Martine Rothblatt:
https://hplusmagazine.com/2009/10/05/transgender-transhuman-transbeman-uploading-martine-rothblatt/
Yes, once upon a time, when “gender” was an adjective (gather ’round me, young’uns), gender roles were seen as regressive things we would one day outgrow. The transgender cult has done great damage to progress in sexual equality in this sense, by re-solidifying gender roles. They’re one step away from saying “Shut up, women. If you want to earn as much as men, then declare you are men.”
I nominate Papito’s comment at #25 for a guest post!
Sastra @ 23:
That’s the basic form of the argument, yes. I think what’s going on here is a rather fundamental failure of language and logic. The latter is a fallacy and the former is … I don’t know what to call it.
Here is a non-quantified version of the GCF argument, where T(x) is a truth function and T(X) is a set. For instance, if we let T(X) = { x∈X | T(x) }, T(X) would be the subset of X for which T(x) is true.
Since TRAs are not logicians, they go from (2) off into crazy town, taking a petitio principii with them.
Not only is (3) an assumption, it contradicts (1), and that’s a problem. You see, the “GCFs deny the existence/humanity of transpeople” argument is essentially a reductio ad absurdum. It attempts to show that accepting the GCF hypothesis leads to an absurd—in this case, objectionable—conclusion. When constructing a reductio, one thing you can’t do is assume the falsehood of the hypothesis in question. The entire point of a reductio is to show that hypothesis, if true, leads to a contradiction, so assuming the hypothesis to be false begs the question.
In precise logical language, (2) says, “If T is true of s, then s is not an element of S.” If we translate that to natural language, it could easily be rendered as, “If you’re T, then you’re not S.” With the meaning put back in, that’s, “If you’re trans, then you’re not human.” The problem here, aside from the question begging, is that it confuses the predicate and its object.
We see this all the time. For example, ending obesity is called a genocide of fat people. If we eliminated obesity, then there would be no more fat people—fat people would no longer exist. Similarly, if no one is trans, then trans people don’t exist. This language game is so ridiculous that I often find it hard to believe that adults actually fall for it. If everyone in a room is sleeping, and I wake them up with some death metal, then by this logic I have erased sleeping people from existence. If I cure cancer and do some science fiction awesomeness that prevents anyone from getting cancer ever again, then I’ve committed genocide of people with cancer.
What utter rot. Person and the predicate are different. Making the latter stop applying to the former does not make the former cease to exist.
Pepito#25 wrote:
Not necessarily. I’ve heard advocates say neurologists ‘now can/soon will’ be able to tell who is transgender by doing a brain scan.
It’s like the concept of the “human energy fields” which adept healers claim to sense and manipulate with their hands. New Agers often say that “science cannot detect” these mysterious waves. Only other humans can find them.
Unless someone were to invent a machine on which they showed up, so that scientists would cry “you were right and we were wrong — HEFs exists just as you said they did!” NOW the energy fields can be discovered by something other than humans — because they were confirmed.
Trans ideology holds on to the idea that transgenderism can only be determined internally only because there’s no “machine” forcing skeptics to say “you were right and we were wrong!” They’d get rid of it immediately if there were. Some TRAs think this possibility is just around the corner.
(And yet, if a particular Human Energy Field Manipulator or Transgender individual did not find their claim validated, it will turn out that THIS form requires subjective confirmation.)
Sastra @30, suppose Papito @25 added ultimately
Your comment disagreed with only, but your last sentence seems to agree with ultimately only.
Sastra, I know transgender claim that, but the problem is, it isn’t true. They can’t do a scan of your brain and tell if you are male or female; they can’t do a scan of your brain and tell if you are trans or not trans. It isn’t likely they are going to be able to soon, either, because there needs to be reliably measurable differences in the brain by gender for that, and what few differences they find are tiny, there is too much overlap, and they do not reliably show up.
Sastra #23
I have a somewhat different interpretation of the “TERFs deny the existence of trans people” trope.
To me the logic seems to go something like this:
1. What I am is a woman. This is such a central part of who I am as a person that you cannot take it away and still claim that whatever’s left has anything to do with me. Anything that’s not a woman is not me.
2. TERFs say that I’m something other than a woman.
3. Therefore they’re denying the existence the woman that’s me and putting something that’s not me in my place.
By this logic there can be no such thing as acknowledging a person’s existence while rejecting his/her self-identification, because it amounts to acknowledging the existence of something else instead of the person he/she truly is.
Bjarte in #33 seems right to me.
I agree with Papito’s description of a religion in #25, but I call it an ideology, “gender identitarianism” (or “identitarianism” for short). I also omit the word “trans” because “trans” is a special case of a more general principle. As Papito wrote #25,
Gender is elevated. Sex is deprecated.
For example, I see this principle in the wording of the Equality Act that the Democrats passed in Congress (as a modification to the Civil Rights Act (CRA) of 1964). If the Equality Act was really meant to add protections for “LGBTQ”, then you would expect it to add “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” to the list of protected characteristics (along with “race”, “sex”, “religion”, etc.). But instead, the Equality Act “queers” the definition of “sex” (as a protected characteristic) from the original CRA understanding (male/female) to a new definition of “sex (including sexual orientation and gender identity)”. The new definition would erase 50 years of settled case law, to say the least.
At some level of their leadership, the ACLU and the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) know exactly what they’re doing with this, to erase female sex as a political class.
I realised perhaps too late that I had been though all this before somewhere. Of course:
The Rocky Horror Show…!!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rocky_Horror_Show
As Yogi Berra famously said, “when you come to a fork in the road, take it.” The bacteria took a fatal fork (arguably having it both ways) that fatal day back in the early Precambrian when they decided to invent sex.
And so it comes to pass that some of us find ourselves today in this shambles of a schemozzle, awaiting the entry of a bunch of clerics of the Transgender Religion in hierarchical order chanting “What we bind on Earth shall also be bound in Heaven, and what we loose on Earth shall also be loosed in Heaven: but not in Limbo, not because we dropped and abolished that in 1992 or whenever because whoever lives in there is of no interest to us.”
@Dave Ricks #31;
Perhaps we could say that in theory transgenderism could get rid of the requirement that gender is only sensed internally, but in practice it could not. That is, TRAs couldn’t accept neurological confirmation as definitive unless they were willing to throw a lot of self-identified trans people under the bus. Scientific vindication brings back gatekeeping.
@iknklst;
Agree. But it’s what I hear on sites which are both pro-science and accepting of gender-identity.
Bjarte #33;
I think that’s a really good point. For one thing, it explains the strangely obsessive nature of trans ideology.
I once read a “de-sister’s” description of how she became comfortable again with her sexed body. She cut herself off from all her trans forums; she stopped reading transgender literature; she broke off with her transgender friends and just focused on the things she (used to) enjoy. She volunteered at an animal shelter; she got back into art; she read books and listened to music and took walks That fundamental aspect of who and what she was — her gender — was completely ignored. She wasn’t trying to be a Trans Man; she wasn’t trying to be a Cis Woman; she was just trying to be.
And it turned out that she was there.
FWIW, I’ve so much as said that I don’t think there are actual trans people. But in the context, it was referring to claims made by trans people to be (for example) a man in the body of a woman, and I said there is no such thing. A “trans” person replied, “Well, here I am, and you’re saying I don’t exist.” I said, “No, clearly you exist, you just are not what you say you are.”
It reminds me the arguments about the existence of Jesus; it depends what you mean by “Jesus”.
# Nullius in Verba #29:
Very frustrating. And another particularly apt example of this confusion between person and predicate of course is the common lament from the pious that atheists want to “eradicate religion.”
We see a false belief/ bad idea gradually discarded as people realize it’s neither true nor beneficial.
They see a Bataan Death March to a bonfire of Bibles and a human barbecue.
Bjarte @ 33: That definitely still seems like confusing predicate and object; i.e., WOMAN(i) and i.
Sastra @ 38: It’s bloody everywhere. How on earth does one get people to recognize a basic fact of language? It’s often hard enough (read impossible) to get people to recognize which noun is the subject for grammatical number agreement. (Example: “One of my dogs is sick” vs “one of my dogs are sick”.)
That is so similar to what happened to me, though I did not ever try to identify as male. My therapist, knowing how I struggled with expected gender roles (as in hating them) asked if I wanted to be a man. I said, no, I just want to be able to be a woman in my own way and be okay with it. He nodded sagely, wrote it down in his notes, and we proceeded along that course.
Yeah, grammar check has trouble with that, too. So my students get it wrong all the time, because they don’t check their grammar check; that would require learning the grammar themselves. I only use grammar check to alert me to something I didn’t notice, which happens to all of us, sometimes even after five deep edits.
[…] a comment by Papito on The thought-terminating […]
Nullius in Verba, I think I get it now, but I have just one question for you at the end of this comment.
I can consider “Dave’s car is silver” (which is true) versus “Dave’s car is gold” (which is untrue).
• The subjects agree — Dave’s car — so there is no existential question about Dave’s car existing.
• The predicates disagree — is silver versus is gold — raising epistemic questions, e.g. how to decide whether Dave’s car is silver or is gold.
Similarly, I can consider “Caitlyn Jenner is a man” (as I might say) versus “Caitlyn Jenner is a woman” (as someone else might say).
• The subjects agree — Caitlyn Jenner — so there is no existential question about Caitlyn Jenner existing.
• The predicates disagree — is a man versus is a woman — raising epistemic questions, e.g. how to decide whether Caitlyn Jenner is a man or is a woman.
These examples tie everything together for me. Papito in #25 framed things as existential versus epistemic (or epistemological). Bjarte Foshaug in #33 captured the fallacious logic of a gender identitarian (as I see their thinking).
But just one question for Nullius in Verba. I can’t follow your #29, so I’m asking you to clarify what you meant in your #39, where you said the fallacy in #33 was confusing predicate and object. In my example of Caitlyn Jenner, do you mean the fallacious logic of #33 confuses the predicate is a woman with:
(A) Caitlyn Jenner being the subject of the sentence (that you might call the (logical) object of the predicate), or
(B) woman being the (grammatical) object in the predicate?
I think you mean (A). I’m asking because I want to clarify your point into something I could teach to my friends.
Dave:
Your examples show that you have the distinction right.
I was speaking of the logical predicate and logical object thereof. To show what I mean, let’s look at your sample sentence:
Representing this more formally gives us this:
If you have ever worked with functions in math or programming languages, that’s basically the way predicates are conceived in logic. In this case, the “object” or “subject” of the predicate “WOMAN(x)” is “Caitlyn”. The predicate “WOMAN(x)” is true if x is a woman, and false otherwise. This is crucial. The predicate is not a thing that exists. It is a property of a thing that may exist.
So when a gender critical feminist (GCF) says, “there exist no people who are trans,” they are not denying the existence of Caitlyn, they are saying that WOMAN(Caitlyn)=false. In other words, that the property woman is not something that Caitlyn has. Whether the predicate is false has no bearing on the existence or nonexistence of Caitlyn.
What the TRA does is treat WOMAN(Caitlyn) as the entity in question. That is, Caitlyn-who-is-a-woman becomes the entity rather than Caitlyn. Caitlyn-who-is-a-woman is a thing that may exist, or may not. You can put it into syllogisms, like, “Caitlyn-who-is-a-woman is human. All humans are mortal. Therefore, Caitlyn-who-is-a-woman is mortal.”
Imagine if someone using TRA logic told you they found largest-even-prime-number-greater-than-two. If you rightly say that the number is even and greater than two, so it isn’t prime, then you’re denying that largest-even-prime-number-greater-than-two exists. Likewise, if you deny woman-ness to Caitlyn-who-is-a-woman, then you deny that Caitlyn-who-is-a-woman exists.
I don’t know that I can explain it better. It’s an odd mode of thought to get your head around, because it’s insane.
Clarification on the TRA and the Case of the Even Prime Greater Than Two:
For the TRA, largest-even-prime-number-greater-than-two is the number, not something said about the number.
They’re not saying, “Hey, there’s this number c, and it’s true that c is prime, even, and greater than two.”
They’re actually saying, “Hey, there’s this number largest-even-prime-number-greater-than-two, so naturally largest-even-prime-number-greater-than-two is prime, even, and greater than two.”
I like that our discussion here is below the line where Ophelia split off Papito’s guest post, so our discussion is like an after-party.
In pseudocode, Caitlyn exists, and we can evaluate:
> P1 = IS_MORTAL( Caitlyn ) returns TRUE
> P2 = IS_IMMORTAL( Caitlyn ) returns FALSE (or EMPTY)
> P3 = IS_WOMAN( Caitlyn ) may return FALSE (or EMPTY)
One TRA logical fallacy is taking P2 or P3 values FALSE (or EMPTY) to mean Caitlyn does not exist. TRA complains look like that on the surface.
But your clarification #44 goes deeper. The TRA claim is they have a Caitlyn that passes TRUE for IS_IMMORTAL and IS_WOMAN, therefore more people exist that can pass IS_IMMORTAL and IS_WOMAN. Is that what you mean?
Hm. Well … Hm. If I can use pseudocode to explain, this actually gets a whole lot easier.
The TRA argument doesn’t change if we abstract a bit, so let’s do that.
1: S is a transwoman iff S is [stuff]. (Maybe “stunning and brave”.)
2: No one is [stuff], therefore no one is a transwoman.
3: P is a transwoman
4: 3 is a counterexample to 2, so we reject 2.
5: See, P is [stuff]!
When the TRA says 3, they don’t mean “[stuff] is true of P”. That would be to treat transwoman as a predicate. They just mean “P is an instance of transwoman”, and now that we know that P is a transwoman, we can deduce that [stuff] is true of P.
Hopefully, pre blocks work here, otherwise all my lovely whitespace will perish.
// Representing just the argument in pseudocode
// 1.
bool IsTranswoman(Person s) { return IsStuff(s); }
bool IsStuff(Person p) { if ([stuff] applies to p) return true; else return false; }
// 2.
Collection everyone; // Whenever a Person object is created, it’s added to this collection.
int CountStuffPeople() {
int count = 0
foreach p in everyone {
if IsStuff(p) count++;
}
return count;
}
print CountStuffPeople(); // prints “0”
// 3.
class Transwoman extends Person;
Transwoman p;
// 4.
int CountTranswomen() {
int count;
foreach p in everyone {
if (GetClass(p)==Transwoman) count++;
}
return count;
}
print CountTranswomen(); // prints at least 1, because p.
// 5.
bool IsStuff(Transwoman t) { return true; }
Les sigh.
What about code blocks, I wonder.
This is a test of the text formatting system.
This is only a test.
If this had been a real comment, you probably would have been sad.
Thank you. I copied and pasted your comment #47 into a word processor, then I printed it, so I can see it all on one page just fine.
TRA steps 3, 4, 5 look something like PZ misusing a “swan argument” here. In a valid swan argument, an inductive generalization that all swans are white can be disproven by observing a black swan (empirically). The definitions of “black”, “white”, and “swan” are never in question (analytically). PZ tried to settle an argument involving a definition of “woman” (which is analytical) by observation (which is empirical). That mixing of analytical and empirical is not the form of a swan argument.
Thank you again for your help.
Yeah, PZ fails at logic there. His argument is that “all swans are white” would be refuted by a counterexample of a white swan painted charteuse. It’s still a white swan, PZ. Painting it a different color or plucking all its feathers doesn’t change that.
And I suppose the TRA could be said to be pointing to a painted swan in 3.
Interesting analogy.
Thanks and you’re welcome.