Missed this while writing the other post, so addressing this now.
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Originally Posted by
Talakeal
Thanks! I will check those out, although I am worried that they might be a bit outdated given the publication dates.
Histories is the freshest, definitely. But Wittig is surprisingly relevant, even though she doesn't refer to trans people.
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Originally Posted by
Talakeal
I am saying that to deny I was ever a man would, by definition, make me a ciswoman. Which would be great if it words actually had the power to change reality, but they do not and a remain a transwoman, and to claim otherwise feels like trans-erasure.
I think it's perfectly plausible for a trans woman to say that she's not cis and also say that she was ever a man or a boy. "I was assigned male at birth. But I'm a woman. So I'm a trans woman." Being assigned male does not make her male, and people argue this point from a variety of perspectives.
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Originally Posted by
Talakeal
I think you are trying to make a post-modernist point here, but it really reads as either playing word games or being deliberately obtuse.
If it helps, I'm not a post-modernist or post-structuralist. I took you saying that a circular set of propositions is necessarily a meaningless one. I just disagree with you about that.
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Originally Posted by
Talakeal
I took both zoology and anatomy in college, and while it is acknowledged that there are always weird edge cases, there is a fairly simple process for keying out an animal's species or determining its gender. At the same time, most everyone has an intrinsic knowledge of what a cat or a woman is. I have never seen a cat (or a physical woman who was not trying to dress to hide her sex).
I'm kinda confused by your wording. "Intrinsic" is probably not the right word. I take you to mean instead that most people have a commonsense notion of what cats and women are. I agree. But that commonsense notion is socially constructed.
I'm not sure what you mean when you talk about never having seen a cat or a woman dressing to "hide her sex."
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Originally Posted by
Talakeal
Physically, when compared to the human mean, women have vaginas, an XX chromosone, have enlarged breasts which are capable of producing milk, cannot grow beards, are shorter, have less muscle tissue, have less body hair, have broader hips and narrower waists, have less dense bones, have different pelvic anatomy, have higher levels of estrogen and lower levels of testosterone, have fuller lips, have softer chins, and reproduce by producing eggs and gestating the young internally.
This is only a partial list, and obviously not every woman meets every criteria on the list, but most women meet most criteria on the list (I know I fail to meet any of them). These are the same characteristics which are targeted by gender affirming surgery. Obviously injury, age, birth defect, or medical intervention means that any woman is capable of failing to meet some of these criteria, but that doesn't mean that the whole category is meaningless.
Likewise, cats animals who are small, warm blooded, have nipples, quadrupedal, nocturnal, carnivorous, have retractable claws, foot pads, medium length straight hair, slit-pupils, rough tongues, sharp teeth (the precise shape of the teeth alone should be enough to definitively tell you if something is or isn't a cat). And I am sure countless other anatomical and physiological unique traits.
Okay, sure. I mean, I agree, so I'm not quite sure what argument you're tackling. Most women are cis. Most women have vulvas and so on and so forth. Right.
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Originally Posted by
Talakeal
I say it is meaningless because simply providing a circular argument with no actual context does not convey any information.
I agree here, too. I think you're addressing one of my arguments, or possibly an argument made by someone else, but I'm not sure which one.
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Originally Posted by
Talakeal
Animals came in male and female for hundreds of millions of years before humans appeared, so I am not sure what you mean by it being a human made concept. Unless you literally mean that we invented the words used to label it.
If you'll allow me to use jargon from the philosophy of science: what I'm saying is that sex is not a natural kind. Sex is a set of natural kinds, but that set is decided by humans and has changed throughout history. We invented the organizing principle that is "sex," but that set is not a natural kind.
As an interesting sidenote, Joan Roughgarden has this to say about sex in Evolution's Rainbow:
To a biologist, "male" means making small gametes, and "female" means making large gametes. Period! By definition, the smaller of the two gametes is called a sperm, and the larger an egg. Beyond gamete size, biologists don't recognize any other universal difference between male and female. Of course, indirect markers of gamete size may exist in some species. In mammals, males usually have a Y chromosome. But whether an individual is male or not comes down to making sperm, and the males in some mammalian species don't have a Y chromosome. Moreover, in birds, reptiles, and amphibians, the Y chromosome doesn't occur. However, the gamete-size definition is general and works throughout the plant and animal kingdoms.
I get the sense that you--and others--mean more than this when you talk about sex. (Is someone who doesn't make any gametes sexless?)
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Originally Posted by
Talakeal
Ok. So why is it so hard for people to explain which meaning of gender they are using? And why are they so quick to vilify people who are using it in a different way?
I have no special social insight, so I have no idea. I think this is a loaded question, though.
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Originally Posted by
Talakeal
And why is that?
It depends on the person and what they mean by "biological sex." I've cited a biological definition of sex above. If people are using that definition, it would have to be a real specific convo for it to be relevant. In some circumstances, I wouldn't mind. In others, I might be irritated: perhaps because it's none of their business, or perhaps because they're using it for transphobic means.
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Originally Posted by
Talakeal
Why is it such a taboo subject?
Well, it's really not taboo at all. People do it all the time when they insist that a trans person is really a man or a woman.
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Originally Posted by
Talakeal
And how are people supposed to have meaningful conversation about trans issues if they aren't allowed to mention it?
Another loaded question. Ignoring the loadedness, I honestly dunno how to respond to this! It's, uh, real easy. You just have conversations. About trans issues. And then you don't use the concept of biological sex. Is there a reason why you think people wouldn't be able to?
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Originally Posted by
Talakeal
That's quite a claim, and runs contrary to both all of the research I have ever done as well as common sense.
Just the other day I was reading about how Roman laws had separate legal categories for men, women, and hermaphrodites.
That's an interesting point about Roman law. Do you have a citation?
History often violates our commonsense expectations. Citing at length Laqueur in Making Sex:
For thousands of years it had been a commonplace that women had the same genitals as men except that, as Nemesius, bishop of Emesa in the fourth century, put it: "theirs are inside the body and not outside it." Galen, who in the second century A.D. developed the most powerful and resilient model of the structural, though not spatial, identity of the male and female reproductive organs, demonstrated at length that women were essentially men in whom a lack of vital heat--of perfection--had resulted in the retention, inside, of structures that in the male are visible without. Indeed, doggerel verse of the early nineteenth century still sings of these hoary homologies long after they had disappeared from learned texts:
though they of different sexes be,
Yet on the whole they are the same as we,
For those that have the strictest searchers been,
Find women are but men turned outside in.
In this world the vagina is imagined as an interior penis, the labia as foreskin, the uterus as scrotum, and the ovaries as testicles. The learned Galen could cite the dissections of the Alexandrian anatomist Herophilus, in the third century B.C., to support his claim that a woman has testes with accompanying seminal ducts very much like the man's, one on each side of the uterus, the only difference being that the male's are contained in the scrotum and the female's are not.
Another fun excerpt:
All of this evidence suggests that in the construction of the one-sex body the borders between blood, semen, other residues and food, between the organs of reproduction and other organs, between the heat of passion and the heat of life, were indistinct and, to the modem person, almost unimaginably--indeed terrifyingly--porous. "Anyone who has intercourse around midnight," warns a text attributed to Constantinius Africanus, "makes a mistake." Digest (concoct) food first before straining the body to give the final concoction to the seed. Fifteen hundred years after Aristotle and a thousand after Galen, Dante in the Purgatorio still plays on the fungibility of the body's fluids and the affinities of its heats. "Undrunk" blood, perfect like a dish (alimento) that is sent from the table, is redistilled by the heat of the heart, sent down to the genitals, from which "it sprays in nature's vessel, on another's blood."
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Originally Posted by
Talakeal
Just because this sentence is a spectrum rather than a binary, I fail to see how that is evidence that red and blue don't exist and its actually just black and white.
I don't disagree, but I'm not sure what you're addressing.
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Originally Posted by
Talakeal
IMO that is a classic logical fallacy rather than a valid argument.
With all due respect, it's really not. It's just modus ponens. There's no fallacy whatsoever. I'm genuinely confused why you would think it is. Do we really disagree on something as basic as the logical rules of inference?
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Originally Posted by
Talakeal
However, whether or not it is a fallacious argument is irrelevant, the issue is that it doesn't actually impart any insight into what a man is or what it means to be one.
I disagree on two fronts. The first is that it does impart insight: it tells us that men must have the belief that they're men to be men. (We might disagree, of course.)
The second is that what is necessary for manhood does not define all of manhood. Many men have many common traits. Most of them have penises. Most of them were assigned male at birth. Men in general are construed as tough and less sensitive and there are all these other expectations. So on and so forth.
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Originally Posted by
Talakeal
No, because sexuality describes a set of feelings and behaviors.
I would however, be equally puzzled if a man claimed to be gay, but only felt attraction to and had relationships with women.
Right! But why doesn't gender "describes a set of feelings and behaviors"?
I don't get your analogy. Which parts of the sexuality analogy correspond to which parts of gender?
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Originally Posted by
Talakeal
That's a hypothesis, not a theory.
And yes, it would be scientifically unethical to demand everyone adhere to a hypothesis without proof.
No, a hypothesis is a part of a theory, but it's certainly not the whole thing. You can have a hypothesis without a theory. A theory accounts for some part of the data and then makes further predictions (i.e. hypotheses).
Presumably the best and strongest proponents of neurological gender believe that their theory accounts for some part of the data about gender. They also believe that the predictions about gender neurology are somewhat supported and will continue to accrue support.
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Originally Posted by
Talakeal
People have long been making the argument that a person's biology determines their personality. Racists, classists, and sexists love it. Phrenology is a classic pastime of bigots. Lots of people used the "innate tendencies" of the female brain to bar women from "men's work". Similar arguments were (and still are) used to justify slavery and segregation.
There is weak evidence to support it, and there is weak evidence to disprove it.
As a philosophical humanist, I am opposed to using ill defined pseudo-scientific hypothesis to label people or try and limit their behavior.
In my opinion, while there likely is some correlation between gender and brain structure, the human brain is far too plastic, and individual humans are far too varied, to make any sort of definitive claims about it, certainly not at our current level of technology.
On a personal level, this just feels oppressive and hurtful. It reminds me of when I was a kid and my parents and teachers forbid me from taking part in traditionally female activities (and usually questioned my sanity or sexuality in the process). But also as an adult, when my friends tell me that I am not "really trans" because I still enjoy many traditionally male activities.
Not being a proponent of neurological-gender-from-birth, I won't defend it. Others who participate in this forum might be. They can defend it better than me.
I will say that the "born this way" argument is popular not only for gender but for sexuality, too. Likely for similar reasons: a defense from supporters of conversion therapy and from homo- and transphobia. Whether or not it's a good defense is a different matter.
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Originally Posted by
Talakeal
How wouldn't it?
If someone had a female brain structure in an otherwise male body, I would label them intersex just like if they had, say, ovaries in an otherwise male body.
Cuz "intersex" refers to sexual characteristics. Like genitals and chromosomes and hormones. Hence the name. It doesn't refer to neurological characteristics.
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Originally Posted by
Talakeal
So, it seems like you are making a correlation between filling out a birth certificate and forcing gender roles on someone.
I have never seen it. I have had people try and force gender rolls on me countless times in my life, and not once have I ever had to tell them what was on my birth certificate, or what a doctor or my parents "assigned" me.
Would someone who was born in a developing nation without doctors and birth certificates still be "assigned" a gender at birth? What if the society has rigidly enforced gender rolls or no gender rolls at all? What if said person moved to a developed nation later in life and we tried to enforce out gender rolls on them? What if a "biological" girl was born to a mother who was stranded on an island and they had to fulfill both gender rolls as there was nobody else to rely upon, but they had never seen or even been told of the existence of males, is she still AFAB?
No, I wasn't talking about birth certificates at all. That was Juniper. We're different people and believe different things. :smalltongue:
Sure, your gender marker on your birth certificate is a part of it, but that marker is neither necessary nor sufficient for the phenomenon of coercive gender assignment.