Whenever I look at trans activism, I think: For all your theories about the transformative powers of discourse and the mortal dangers posed by those of us who use the wrong words (somehow it’s always women's words that are the wrong words), language is not half as powerful as you’d need it to be to make the things you say true.
"You can say TRANSWOMEN ARE WOMEN all you want but you won’t make it true."
Indeed. ICYMI, you might enjoy a quip along the same line that is often attributed to Lincoln, a "famous riddle about the difference between a supposition and a fact:
How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg?
Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg."
*IF* we call a transwoman a woman then of course we have to grant them the same rights and benefits that are the "estate" of so-called "cis women" - as with transwomen such as Lia Thomas competing in swimming leagues against actual "women".
But that "IF" is a supposition based on rejecting a conventional or standard or biological definition for "woman" and attempting to replace it with some vague, idiosyncratic, logically incoherent, and politically motivated alternative.
Which raises the question as to just what we shall agree we mean by the term "woman" and, to a lesser extent, by the term "man". And one might reasonably argue that the only rational definitions for both are based on biology - "adult human female" and "adult human male", respectively.
However, those tend to be somewhat problematic since many people, women in particular, balk at the logical consequences of those definitions, insisting, as they often do, that there's some sort of immutable essence to those categories, that they're not predicated on the possession of quite transitory biological capabilities. Quite a good essay at Aeon by Paul Griffiths - university of Sydney professor, co-author of "Genetics and Philosophy" - that elaborates on the concepts and those consequences, to wit:
"Many people assume that if there are only two sexes, that means everyone must fall into one of them. But the biological definition of sex doesn’t imply that at all. As well as simultaneous hermaphrodites, which are both male and female, sequential hermaphrodites are first one sex and then the other. There are also individual organisms that are neither male nor female. ....
Nothing in the biological definition of sex requires that every organism be a member of one sex or the other. That might seem surprising, but it follows naturally from defining each sex by the ability to do one thing: to make eggs or to make sperm. Some organisms can do both, while some can’t do either. ...."
"Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg." That wraps it up. The professors statement however, that "some organisms can do both" probably needs to be qualified by the proviso that human beings most definitely are not one of these organisms, in case it should be misunderstood to imply that.
Having now cursorily looked at the professors article I can see that is indeed his mission. Conflating things which occur in the animal biological world with things that don't occur in the human biological world. He writes:
"In human populations, there are plenty of individuals whose sex is hard to determine. Biologists aren’t blind to this. The definition of biological sex is designed to classify the human reproductive system and all the others in a way that helps us to understand and explain the diversity of life. It’s not designed to exhaustively classify every human being, or every living thing. Trying to do so quickly leads to questions that have no biological meaning."
Ofuscation. This word "plenty" denotes exactly how many? Certainly less than one per cent and probably in the order of one in four or five thousand human beings whose sex is genuinely ambiguous. And even these few people don't produce both sets of gametes. Sex was never, is still not nor will ever be a "social construction". For 99.9% of humans born on earth sex is an immutable dimorphic physically objective reality, and however sad that may be for some people yearning to be accepted as the sex they are not, the truth is that none of us can physically swap our sex for another, and we need to be honest about that. What the professor is talking about when he talks about "sex as a social institution" is gender. And that is something other than sex entirely.
True enough. Something of a tricky process in phrasing definitions so as to cover all of the bases and for all the relevant cases, something I don't have as good a handle on as I would like. Something I've found quite useful in that regard:
However, it might also be emphasized that there are human "organisms that are neither male nor female" - the prepubescent for example. As Griffiths more or less asserts, consistent with standard dictionary and biological definitions, to have a sex is to be able to reproduce, to produce sperm or ova for reproduction. Which of course the prepubescent can not do:
Yes indeed you can take such lexicographical absurdity to any degree virtually limitlessly, as the woke have no compunction whatever about doing. An oak seedling isn't an oak tree of course. And is having an ability under development the same as not having that ability? That can only be a matter of opinion, and it still doesn't mean men can morph into women in either case. I suppose the point though is to give yourself the licence to not to be able to say "I have transitioned from man to woman" but rather "I never was a man, that was a mistake , I have always been a woman." Here the great problem and threat to the ideology will be detransistioners who are honest enough to announce that their belief was a delusion after all, and now they have accepted reality.
Eppur si muove
Very well said, as always. Glad to have such a clear voice of reason in the "reality" corner, and only wish I could write as well!
Uplifting. Thank you
"You can say TRANSWOMEN ARE WOMEN all you want but you won’t make it true."
Indeed. ICYMI, you might enjoy a quip along the same line that is often attributed to Lincoln, a "famous riddle about the difference between a supposition and a fact:
How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg?
Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg."
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/11/15/legs/
*IF* we call a transwoman a woman then of course we have to grant them the same rights and benefits that are the "estate" of so-called "cis women" - as with transwomen such as Lia Thomas competing in swimming leagues against actual "women".
But that "IF" is a supposition based on rejecting a conventional or standard or biological definition for "woman" and attempting to replace it with some vague, idiosyncratic, logically incoherent, and politically motivated alternative.
Which raises the question as to just what we shall agree we mean by the term "woman" and, to a lesser extent, by the term "man". And one might reasonably argue that the only rational definitions for both are based on biology - "adult human female" and "adult human male", respectively.
However, those tend to be somewhat problematic since many people, women in particular, balk at the logical consequences of those definitions, insisting, as they often do, that there's some sort of immutable essence to those categories, that they're not predicated on the possession of quite transitory biological capabilities. Quite a good essay at Aeon by Paul Griffiths - university of Sydney professor, co-author of "Genetics and Philosophy" - that elaborates on the concepts and those consequences, to wit:
"Many people assume that if there are only two sexes, that means everyone must fall into one of them. But the biological definition of sex doesn’t imply that at all. As well as simultaneous hermaphrodites, which are both male and female, sequential hermaphrodites are first one sex and then the other. There are also individual organisms that are neither male nor female. ....
Nothing in the biological definition of sex requires that every organism be a member of one sex or the other. That might seem surprising, but it follows naturally from defining each sex by the ability to do one thing: to make eggs or to make sperm. Some organisms can do both, while some can’t do either. ...."
https://aeon.co/essays/the-existence-of-biological-sex-is-no-constraint-on-human-diversity
"Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg." That wraps it up. The professors statement however, that "some organisms can do both" probably needs to be qualified by the proviso that human beings most definitely are not one of these organisms, in case it should be misunderstood to imply that.
Having now cursorily looked at the professors article I can see that is indeed his mission. Conflating things which occur in the animal biological world with things that don't occur in the human biological world. He writes:
"In human populations, there are plenty of individuals whose sex is hard to determine. Biologists aren’t blind to this. The definition of biological sex is designed to classify the human reproductive system and all the others in a way that helps us to understand and explain the diversity of life. It’s not designed to exhaustively classify every human being, or every living thing. Trying to do so quickly leads to questions that have no biological meaning."
Ofuscation. This word "plenty" denotes exactly how many? Certainly less than one per cent and probably in the order of one in four or five thousand human beings whose sex is genuinely ambiguous. And even these few people don't produce both sets of gametes. Sex was never, is still not nor will ever be a "social construction". For 99.9% of humans born on earth sex is an immutable dimorphic physically objective reality, and however sad that may be for some people yearning to be accepted as the sex they are not, the truth is that none of us can physically swap our sex for another, and we need to be honest about that. What the professor is talking about when he talks about "sex as a social institution" is gender. And that is something other than sex entirely.
"definitely are not one of these organisms"
True enough. Something of a tricky process in phrasing definitions so as to cover all of the bases and for all the relevant cases, something I don't have as good a handle on as I would like. Something I've found quite useful in that regard:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensional_and_intensional_definitions
However, it might also be emphasized that there are human "organisms that are neither male nor female" - the prepubescent for example. As Griffiths more or less asserts, consistent with standard dictionary and biological definitions, to have a sex is to be able to reproduce, to produce sperm or ova for reproduction. Which of course the prepubescent can not do:
https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/female
https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/male
https://academic.oup.com/molehr/article/20/12/1161/1062990
Yes indeed you can take such lexicographical absurdity to any degree virtually limitlessly, as the woke have no compunction whatever about doing. An oak seedling isn't an oak tree of course. And is having an ability under development the same as not having that ability? That can only be a matter of opinion, and it still doesn't mean men can morph into women in either case. I suppose the point though is to give yourself the licence to not to be able to say "I have transitioned from man to woman" but rather "I never was a man, that was a mistake , I have always been a woman." Here the great problem and threat to the ideology will be detransistioners who are honest enough to announce that their belief was a delusion after all, and now they have accepted reality.