I wish people would appreciate that we have all different experiences, different exposures, and different circles we travel in.
Just because you haven’t seen abuses doesn’t mean those abuses aren’t real. And just because they are uncommon today doesn’t mean they will always be. People who are speaking out don’t want the abuses to have to reach some critical mass before we can say something. They want them to be prevented before they even happen.
People like myself are speaking out because we are seeing warning signs. I’m not a paranoid person just looking for things to be frightened of. I wouldn’t even characterize my feelings as “fear” as much as concern. I’m concerned about where the discourse is taking us. I get that lots of folks aren’t. Maybe the ones who aren’t simply have a different vantage point than the ones who do. It doesn’t mean that anyone is wrong or bad.
I think we’ve had a good discussion here. I think excellent insights have been shared on both sides. I hope we can continue it.
And that’s simply because “parent” is also a social category expanding the biological category it’s derived from. Once you get beyond the explicit physical criteria demarcating concrete biological definitions, it’s social categories all the way down.
That’s not always true. The concept of claim rights is worth reading about. If we’re saying the only way trans rights can exist is if female athletes forsake their right female-only sports, then this is an erosion to women’s rights.
I get that. There are only so many positions to fill and yes, if a transwoman is considered for a position that would have gone to a ciswoman, I can definitely can see someone viewing it as unfair. But the argument as I see it is no different than the arguments against affirmative action, where white people get upset because a job they saw as rightfully going to them was filled by someone Black or Hispanic. I think that one example of the non-binary person being described as a woman for the sake of that award is wrong though, since they are only a woman some of the time.
Well, no. Its a little more like affirmative admissions programs were put in place for black people, and suddenly Asians, who already get admitted to colleges at a higher percentage, want those spots as well because they are minorities too. Which they are, but affirmative admissions programs in college weren’t designed to address the systemic bias in education faced by being Asian.
I think there is an analogue to Affirmative Action, but not the way you’ve conceived it.
Imagine how a black person would feel if a company advertised itself as having an upper executive workforce that was 13% African American, but 50% of those folks were white-passing individuals who had endorsed “black” on their job application without any vetting. That black person may try to console themselves with the fact that it is possible to have recent black ancestry and be white-looking, but it will be hard for them to not think that either the company was trying to pull a fast one on the whole “committment to diversity” thing or the company was being played by a bunch of people who were subverting the system for their own selfish purposes.
I know that if I were in that situation, I’d be wondering what is the point of Affirmative Action? Maybe it should be done away with, if we’re at the point where race doesn’t matter anymore.
If I’m fine with “gatekeeping” black as a black person, it would be inconsistent for me to not also “gatekeep” women. I wouldn’t do this (just) for myself, but so to ensure that my group continues to be taken seriously as a political group. I wouldn’t want Fox News edgelords to point to all the white-looking black folks getting preferential treatment in hiring and promotion to make a mockery of Affirmative Action for black folks, and I wouldn’t want the same edgelords to point at the male-passing women to make a mockery of Affirmative Action for women. As I said way upthread, as long as the fringe cases are truly fringey, there’s no problem. But if we suddenly have a critical number of male-bodied individuals who have only claimed “woman” for a few weeks scooping up, say, women engineering scholarships, all women are harmed by that because such mockery invites the question, “Why do we even need women engineering scholarships?!” And then those scholarships are taken away.
Wait, now you’re talking about circularity instead of the concept of “social category” itself, which is what I thought you were asking about, and what my “mother” analogy was intended to illustrate.
The analogy between “mother” and “woman” as examples of a social category derived from and expanding an underlying biological category is still applicable, even if you don’t like the circularity of this particular definition of the social category “woman”.
Mm. Your own definition for “woman” still hasn’t managed to determine whether physically intersex people are categorized as men or women, after three or four times of asking, so, y’know.
Simple definitions of large complex concepts are always inherently somewhat unsatisfactory in some way or other.
The difference as I see it is the expanded social category of ‘mother’ still means something. It means a woman who raises a child the same way most biological mothers do. That is very different from saying any woman who feels like a mother is a mother, and most people would rightly reject that definition.
Again, though, that’s an objection to the circularity of this particular definition, not a criticism of the concept of a “social category” itself. Whether you think a specific social category happens to be unsatisfactorily defined doesn’t invalidate the general practice of deriving social categories by modifying biological ones.
To take another example to which the “circularity” objection doesn’t apply, the term “adult” also has meaning as a biological category, although it’s a bit more vague than “mother”: it can mean an individual that has reached sexual maturity, or full physical growth, or some such condition.
As a social category, however, we’ve modified the definition of “adult” to mean an individual who’s at least 18 years of age. Clearly that criterion is not identical to the definition of biological adulthood and will include a somewhat different set of individuals. However, we use it because for social purposes it’s more convenient than the biological definition.
I’m not objecting to social categories in general, I’m objecting to definitions that don’t make sense/are crap. You’ve given two ways to define motherhood and I am happy to use either or both of them, but I’m not happy to say people who objectively aren’t mothers by either definition are mothers. I want words to mean something. It’s the same with gender. Either you fit the social category of woman, or you fit the biological definition, but if you don’t fit either, you ain’t a woman.
My beef all along has been the absence of workable definition for “woman” that isn’t circular (a person is a woman if they say they are a woman) or steeped in gender stereotypes (a woman is a person who wear dresses).
You asserted a few exchanges ago that defining woman as a social gender category could also be valid. But it is unclear what a social gender category means in relation to “woman”. That’s just another concept that needs to defined; it is non responsive to the question of “what is a woman”.
So you mentioned “mother” and pointed out that you can have biological mothers and “social” (adoptive) mothers. This is true, but only because “mother” refers to a role (parent) that applies to both variants.
What (universally and exclusively) applies to adult human females and trans women like the definition for biological and adoptive mother?
I don’t have a problem with this. Each society has its own definition, and we know it when we see it. The same way I would be happy to say a birth mother who gives her child up for adoption is a mother, and so is the adoptive mother who never gave birth, I’m also happy to say the butch lesbian who hates dresses is a woman by virtual of biology, and the transwoman who goes through hormone therapy, dresses and acts in a way to be perceived as a woman is a woman by the social category definition. What I am not happy with is the current non-definition that renders the word meaningless.
I repeat, for about the fifth time: Does your definition of “woman” classify physically intersex people as men or women?
I don’t think I’m the one who’s failing to address these issues adequately here. I’ve said clearly that I know that a definition like “A woman is somebody who identifies as a woman” is circular, and I don’t have a problem with that. That settles the definition question satisfactorily as far as I personally am concerned.
If you’re saying that such a definition is unacceptable because it doesn’t apply objective criteria “universally and exclusively”, then I think it’s also on you to confront the failures of the definition criteria that you prefer, which evidently doesn’t manage to distinguish women from intersex people “universally and exclusively”.
But it’s not on me to provide you with a definition of “woman” that you consider a satisfactory alternative to your preferred definition. You asked me to explain what I meant by “social gender category”, which I did. I didn’t promise that I would supply a definition for the social gender category “woman” that you would like.
It’s not unacceptable because it doesn’t apply objective criteria “universally and exclusively”. It’s unacceptable because it doesn’t apply any criteria at all! You’re not a mother because you say you are, you’re not a cop because you say you are, you’re not a woman because you say you are. You might be happy with a circular definition, but most people will find it nonsensical and object.
This isn’t a fundamental category shift; it is an abandonment of those words entirely. “A man is anyone who identifies as a man” is not a meaningful definition; it is literally meaningless. If I am a man because I identify as a man, what is it I am identifying as? If a man is just anyone who identifies as one, you’re effectively saying a man is, by definition, a man. It’s pointless.
What will happen if you get this linguistic shift is that people will simply use “ciswomen” and “cismen” to mean exactly what “women” and “men” meant up to about six or seven years ago. It’ll be an entirely pointless shuffling of words. People will not continue to use words that don’t mean anything. They’ll use the words that do, and pretty soon the usual suspects will demand to redefine “ciswoman.”
Yes, because all of them are. Intersex isn’t transgender and it’s disingenuous to pretend they’re the same issue. Virtually all intersex people will tell you whether they’re men or women and they have some basis in physical reality to tell you that.
You shrugging your shoulders and saying “I don’t care that the definition I’m using is circular” is silly (and an admission that it’s a big flaw in the TWAW/TMAM religion.) If nobody is really a man or woman - in in effect there’s no such thing as sex - what does it matter? Is there even a female or a male gender identity at all? Are people identifying as “men” and people identifying as “women” identifying as nothing, or as the same thing?
The horse has left the barn on the “woman is an adult female” argument. We have way too many individuals out in society who are treated like women and who are indistinguishably visually from other women for “man” to make sense for them, in a social sense. We have “male” if we want to describe them biologically. “Woman” works for them in a sociopolitical sense, IMHO.
But yep, we’re going have to do better than “women are people who think they are women” if we don’t want a bunch of women to push back on stuff. As long as the idea keeps being expressed like it’s fact and like you’re a hateful idiot if you don’t agree with it, then the fears/concerns laid out in this thread are going to persist.
Well, no. Not applying any criteria at all would be something along the lines of “A woman is anyone”.
Requiring that somebody self-identify as a woman in order to be considered a woman is in fact applying a criterion, although obviously not an objective one.
I think part of why this issue isn’t bothering me as much as you clearly think it ought to is that AFAICT, there just are not a lot of people who self-identify as a woman without having a pretty clear idea of what that means to them, and without having their idea of female identity tied to a whole lot of factors that we associate with femaleness, whether biological or cultural or both. People shallowly and fleetingly claiming that they identify as women just to reap some hypothetical immediate advantage is not something I’ve seen persuasive evidence for.
In other words, as you noted in your post #975, the definition of “woman” or female identity as perceived by individual people who identify as women—whether they’re cisgender butch lesbians with vaginas, or transgender post-transition women with conventionally feminine appearance, or some other kind of self-identified women—is generally related to some kind of pretty real and meaningful characteristics.
I’m just not comfortable with arbitrarily selecting some subset of those possible characteristics and declaring that every person who identifies as female must have some combination of them in order to qualify for the social gender category “woman”.
Yes, as far as explicit definitions go, that leaves me with nothing but circular formulations like “A woman is somebody who identifies as a woman”. I’m willing to live with that because AFAICT individuals who identify as women, whether cisgender or transgender, are doing a perfectly okay job of supplying meaning and depth to that identification on an individual level. Sure, there are some specific situations in which explicit restrictive criteria will be needed, but I think the broad definition of “woman” as a social gender category in the most general sense doesn’t require them.
Intersexed persons have elements of both male and female reproductive systems. But usually one type predominates. So when an intersexed person has their sex “assigned” at birth, it’s the predominant type that usually holds sway.
“Woman = adult human female” doesn’t preclude intersexed people because they do have a female reproductive system (by definition). It’s just mixed with male parts.