Dee: "The definition needs to reflect reality, you can’t change reality to conform to the definition."
Think you're putting the cart before the horse, though many people do. 🙂 Basically, many people don't realize that there are NO intrinsic meanings to the words we use, "male" and "female" in particular. For example, "female" used to mea…
Dee: "The definition needs to reflect reality, you can’t change reality to conform to the definition."
Think you're putting the cart before the horse, though many people do. 🙂 Basically, many people don't realize that there are NO intrinsic meanings to the words we use, "male" and "female" in particular. For example, "female" used to mean "she who suckles" -- by which Jenner and his ilk might qualify, though the milk is probably not fit for human consumption:
But there's no "reality" to those words. None of us can point to our males and females, say that their volumes are so many cubic inches, that they weigh so many ounces, and are located so many inches to the south and west of our livers. The words themselves are just abstractions, they're just labels that we more or less agree refer to certain properties.
For example, we agree "teenager" refers to those between 13 & 19, but we could agree it refers to those between 11 and 21. See my kick at the kitty of "What is a woman?" for some elaborations:
But similarly with "male" and "female". "Biologists" Colin Wright, Emma Hilton, and Heather Heying have created some rather unscientific if not anti-scientific definitions of their own that more or less correspond to what we might call "folk-biology", to what "common parlance" understands by those terms:
"Individuals that have developed anatomies for producing either small or large gametes, regardless of their past, present or future functionality, are referred to as 'males' and 'females', respectively."
Basically, they're saying that having testicles or ovaries that probably will produce, currently are producing, or used to produce sperm or ova is sufficient to qualify people as male or female, respectively.
But that is NOT what the biological definitions say -- as I've indicated above -- and the conflict between those two sets of definitions causes some serious problems.
Dee: "... not sure what you are hoping to accomplish by arguing that women over fifty aren’t women ..."
Really not trying to offend people, but a major part of the problem of transgenderism is that far too many people, on all sides, have made "male" and "female" into identities, often based on some "mythic essences" as feminist "philosopher" Jane Clare Jones once memorably, and rather cogently, put it:
But by the biological definitions, "male" and "female" are just labels that denote the presence of rather transitory reproductive abilities. Don't think we are going to resolve the transgender issue, and don't think society is going to be well-served, if we insist on policies based on rather unscientific and logically untenable definitions.
Dee: "The definition needs to reflect reality, you can’t change reality to conform to the definition."
Think you're putting the cart before the horse, though many people do. 🙂 Basically, many people don't realize that there are NO intrinsic meanings to the words we use, "male" and "female" in particular. For example, "female" used to mean "she who suckles" -- by which Jenner and his ilk might qualify, though the milk is probably not fit for human consumption:
https://www.etymonline.com/word/female#etymonline_v_5841
But there's no "reality" to those words. None of us can point to our males and females, say that their volumes are so many cubic inches, that they weigh so many ounces, and are located so many inches to the south and west of our livers. The words themselves are just abstractions, they're just labels that we more or less agree refer to certain properties.
For example, we agree "teenager" refers to those between 13 & 19, but we could agree it refers to those between 11 and 21. See my kick at the kitty of "What is a woman?" for some elaborations:
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/what-is-a-woman
But similarly with "male" and "female". "Biologists" Colin Wright, Emma Hilton, and Heather Heying have created some rather unscientific if not anti-scientific definitions of their own that more or less correspond to what we might call "folk-biology", to what "common parlance" understands by those terms:
"Individuals that have developed anatomies for producing either small or large gametes, regardless of their past, present or future functionality, are referred to as 'males' and 'females', respectively."
https://twitter.com/FondOfBeetles/status/1207663359589527554
Basically, they're saying that having testicles or ovaries that probably will produce, currently are producing, or used to produce sperm or ova is sufficient to qualify people as male or female, respectively.
But that is NOT what the biological definitions say -- as I've indicated above -- and the conflict between those two sets of definitions causes some serious problems.
Dee: "... not sure what you are hoping to accomplish by arguing that women over fifty aren’t women ..."
Really not trying to offend people, but a major part of the problem of transgenderism is that far too many people, on all sides, have made "male" and "female" into identities, often based on some "mythic essences" as feminist "philosopher" Jane Clare Jones once memorably, and rather cogently, put it:
https://janeclarejones.com/2020/01/15/unreasonable-ideas-a-reply-to-alison-phipps/
But by the biological definitions, "male" and "female" are just labels that denote the presence of rather transitory reproductive abilities. Don't think we are going to resolve the transgender issue, and don't think society is going to be well-served, if we insist on policies based on rather unscientific and logically untenable definitions.