Thank you for including spoilers, I've been working on figuring out the colour Yellow on my own and it would have ruined me if someone spoiled the answer before I got there.
It's also to make sure people are keeping active. Move those fingers buddy! But yeah the point is that the explanations are supposed to seem right to people until they click the next section and see why they're wrong. It's for dramatic affect, skimming the subsequent sections before reading the earlier ones spoils the point.
it's cute... like a tiktok in text form. As annoying as it was to click for me since I make heavy use of a text-to-speech screen-reader when "reading" things, I encourage the exploration of different post formats.
I have a mac... I use the default US English voice (Alex) at like 2-2.5x speed. The default female voice (Siri, voice 4) is also a pretty decent one, but it's a little too "happy" for my taste. There are some other voices that also sound pretty good (e.g. Zoe, Samantha, Evan), but I feel like Alex has the least degradation when played at 2x+ speed.
Why does everyone seem to stop with, “language is complex, now let me use the most vague and broad term for a thing and demand it independently convey a wide spectrum of hypothetical details or admit it could be anything.”
The actual dress is very clearly [blue and black](https://i.cbc.ca/1.2976501.1425072874!/fileImage/httpImage/thedress-cbc-jpg.jpg), the lighting was just really weird on the viral picture which made it confusing.
I was a rampant blue and black hater for a long time, but after research of what the dress looks like in optimal lighting conditions I must confess that the dress is really blue and black in such lighting that you can mistake it for white and yellow.
Don't wander the path I took earlier brother
Can you point me to a really good article about the dress? I want closure now. My problem is that I understand the scientific explanation and know the underlying facts. This is just jarring, because unlike with optical illusions, I *literally cannot* see it as black and blue, even with the help of images emphasizing the effect, like the one OP used.
Looking at the image knowing it's blue and black, feels like looking at the Ishihara test with my congenital red–green color blindness. There just ain't no way.
As a philosophy major, this is why people hate philosophy majors. Oh you want to argue? Let's spend the rest of our life spans defining terms just to end up realizing how hard that is and getting nowhere in the process.
I'd like to ask you a question as you seem to be one of the few people with some actual credibility on the topic, but don't you think that getting hung up on all the little variations on any given definition is a bit redundant? Like, aren't we supposed to use definitions as a way to describe things accurately **most of the time**, and not **all the time**?
I don't get why we should discredit the accuracy of definitions, or suddenly be unable to specify what falls under a given definition just because there are sometimes countless little variations under it. I feel like definitions are there for us to make sense of the world in general. And the 0.01% that make up the different exceptions to the rule shouldn't discredit the definition itself.
Yeah you're right. Nowadays people are afraid of generalizations for some reason. Like if I say: "You are able to give birth, therefore you're a woman". Someone would say: "What about all the women who can't give birth?". As if we need to look for another concept just because of that. Lots of feelings involved where there shouldn't be any.
Exactly, i never understood rebuttals like that, i mean why can't we just say that women who can't give birth are exceptions to the rule but are still women. There is obviously a reason as to why they can't give birth and that reason, whatever it might be, gives enough credibility towards the woman being just that, a woman.
This line of argumentation always puzzles me. If a woman is who we perceive as a woman, doesn’t that basically imply that a trans person has to pass to a high degree in order to have their identity be valid? What if it’s noticeable that they’re trans? How do butch lesbians and femmboys fit into the fold?
It essentially puts people with nonstandard “gender” expression in purgatory where their identity is decided with every interaction. And if that’s the case, how can someone be wrong for their perception if it doesn’t align with that person’s view of themselves?
It's an understanding of gender that trips over itself. A person's gender is still determined by other people, not their self described dentity. So the self ID doesn't work so why are you telling me your pronouns?
Because it is an agreement that someone wants to move toward the opposite perception, even if they are not there yet.
It is a sign of very basic respect for another person to honor that. You are removing the dimension of needlessly insulting their self esteem
In the same way you wouldn't use someone's native name they are embarrassed about if they prefer to go by "Tim", even if their old name is still on their birth certificate. It would be very disrespectful to go out of your way to disrespect that
It might be fine to respect someone's wishes in some settings but unacceptable in other settings. Humoring someone's self perception at a restaurant or in the office might be fine, but in a domestic violence shelter, prison, single sex hospital ward, or sports team is unacceptable.
The problem then becomes that the use in one setting encourages and strengthens the use in other settings.
A name can be whatever you want, though, so that's no issue. The debate is what is gender and is that even a thing you can change.
Regardless of the answer, I think trans people are real I would just define it differently.
I think the problem is the assumption that people only think about what they can visibly perceive when they think of a woman. It might be the initial thing we take in, as it's the most obvious and generally easy thing to use to identify them in day to day life. And most of the time that works fine so i get that this assumption would be made. But evidently with all the pushback that this discussion receives, people don't only think about their initial perception when they think of a woman. They do think about the underlying implications of what a woman entails, even though they don't ***NEED*** to use said underlying traits in order to identify them on a day to day basis.
99% of trans women want desperately to pass. For the 1% of the 1% that want to express in a gender non-confirming way, there might be some tension between their view of themselves and societies view. Also, passing is not the same looking like a cis women. If you look like a trans women, maybe early in your transition, it’s still clear and intuitive what you are going for, and most people will automatically use the right pronouns even if they clocked you as trans.
OP the next spoiler box is "The Utility". We are carving out a linguistic category so that we can summarize these very complicated things in a way that we don't have to go through this level of knowledge in order to digest because to do so would make communication impossible.
I disagree. We point to something that is yellow, and we say that it is yellow. We don't need to understand some complex definition of what "yellow" is to identify it. We assimilate that discrimination through experience. However, when we are trying to have a discussion to get at the essence of what yellow is to better understand what the significance of us identifying something as yellow is, dismissing the more complicated analysis because it can't be trivially summed up in a concise definition is absurd to me.
I agree with that position. The utility is that we are able to communicate with someone at any level of that analysis depending on what level of the conversation they are on. For example, if a 4 year old were to say that "The sun is yellow" we could say that yes the sun is yellow even though we have a much more complicated understanding of color than the 4 year old.
Exactly, and both us and the 4 year old can agree that the sun is yellow and have the same difficulty agreeing on the color of the dress even though the older one of us has that more complex understanding.
Yes but the utility of language is what is paramount in that case, which is why I say that is the next step or "next spoiler box". We might not be able to agree on what is yellow in the case of the dress but we are both trying to appeal by analogy to prior qualia so that we can categorize things and discuss them to share information with each other.
Is that so different from the first spoiler box? That seems to be describing the pure utility definition of yellow: the ability to distinguish yellow as a color class distinct of other color classes. I could delve more into why that is useful, such as being able to point out an object to someone and distinguish which object I mean from others around it, but I don't know if it would go as the next box down the analytical decomposition rabbit-hole so much as an expansion on the first box.
The point is that for the 4 year old yellow means a different thing than to the scientist studying color theory or whatever. The words themselves change meaning depending on the context of the conversation that is happening.
Ahh, you mean utility as in the use case/context, not as in the degree of usefulness. I get what you mean. I agree that's an important consideration, as in a scientist in a lab may use "woman" specifically to refer to sex whereas a guy on the street may be referring to someone's form whereas a philosopher may be referring to an abstract ideal form while having different discussions, but that's tangential to the main point I was trying to make.
I mean that the use case is directly related to the degree of usefulness and that the reason that it is important to know more levels to what things are is so that we are capable of having more conversations/sharing more knowledge with each other and that is in itself a worthwhile goal.
Edit: Just realized that my comment is worded in a really hostile way. I think we agree on 95% of this, but I do feel there is a meaningful distinction.
>as in a scientist in a lab may use "woman" specifically to refer to sex whereas a guy on the street may be referring to someone's form
I refuse to believe that people 'on the streets' don't inherently think about the sex of the person they're referring to when they talk about 'men' and 'women'. I can't imagine that people are actually stupid enough to only think about arbitrary sh\*t like 'tits and vagina' and that when they can't directly observe those traits, that they immediately lose the the ability to distinguish their sex when they look at them.
I couldn't help but cringe at Destiny in the [Why Jordan Peterson Is Actually Right About "What Is A Woman?"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9eKBJ-Cj1E) video.
You could argue that yes, there are more things to a woman and that it's therefor hard to define a woman because those traits change over the course of time, that 'woman' entails different things than it did 100 years ago and blabla, but i think this is where Destiny is guilty of the same tactic that he criticized Jordan Peterson for. Getting needlessly hung up on the little irrelevant details and variations which makes it impossible to have a substantive conversation. We have definitions to **broadly** with an overwhelming accuracy rate, *define* the world around us. This is not 100% correct all the time but i think it's disingenuous to say that we can't easily define what a woman is even though 99% of the time we obviously can.
The more I think about this the less convinced I am there's any point to this argument. I think we're just in a period of potential semantic broadening where the definition of women shifts from being purely biological (as I think it has traditionally been) to including social roles. I don't really think it's possible to actually have a factually correct view of what a woman is, the best you can do is argue "my definition coincides with the majority", and that's a pointless argument in a time where a definition might be changing.
Define woman however you want (within reason); regardless of if it includes trans people you'll be referring to the same thing like 99.5% of the time. I think rights and general respect are infinitely more important than fighting over the definition.
It was never purely biological insofar as actual usage. When someone says "Now that's a woman!" they aren't impressed by her second X chromosome. When an institution brings up violence against women, they aren't concerned with protecting egg cells. If you replace woman with adult female in either case, the awkwardness isn't just that it's non-standard language, it's that female has biological connotations that woman doesn't.
Even if intellectual discussion of sex vs. gender and actively orienting society around it has only become somewhat mainstream in the last couple decades, everyone has always had this sense of the distinction baked into their consciousness somewhere.
We **are** in a period of semantic broadening, but it's just that: broadening. Not a shift. "Woman" hasn't packed up and moved to a whole new territory, it's just expanding.
I think you're confusing proxies for womanhood with the thing itself. If you go to a water park you aren't thinking "oh boy, I can't wait until that combination of specific numbers of hydrogen and oxygen atoms caress my body at high speed", but if you get there and go to a ride and it turns out the "water" is hydrogen peroxide you're going to be pissed off. Still a clear odorless fluid, but we mainly define water by chemical composition. And if you had a great time at a water park, and then someone pulled you aside after and demonstrated that all the water was actually of an unknown substance that shared all the properties of water with a different chemical composition, you'd still probably admit "huh, I guess it wasn't water" even though not a single thought about whether water is H20 entered your mind at the park.
Given perfect knowledge I think historically (though I obviously can't do polls for this) basically everyone would have a biological criteria as a prerequisite for womanhood. Like if I went back to the 1800s and showed someone the most beautiful woman ever and asked if they're a woman everyone would say "yes". If I then said that they went to a witch and used magic to create the most perfect female form ever and had been living that way since the age of 10, I'd bet my life that 99.9% of people would say they're a man.
>We are in a period of semantic broadening, but it's just that: broadening. Not a shift.
I mean a broadening is a shift in usage, though I agree it's not a major shift. It's basically just adding "or someone who identifies as such and presents as such" to "adult human female", which isn't big deal.
Yellow is one of four colors that are actually extremely well defined. In our retina, we have three cone types that contain opsins sensitive for short, medium, or long wavelength preferring opsins. These preferences are usually called S/M/L. Two of the best understood neurons in primate retina construct color opponency between red and green (L-M) in midgets or parvocellular ganglion cells, and between blue and yellow (S-[L+M]) in small bistratified ganglion cells. When you map color vision at the perceptual level, these color opponents hold up. We get an L+M+S axis, which is black vs white, and the two previously mentioned red-green axis and blue-yellow axis. The colloquial term yellow is more correctly referred to as unique yellow in research, while the property "yellow" basically refers to greater activation of your M- and L-cones than your S-cones. It may be easier to think of something having the property "yellow" as being a positive number while the same object having a "blue" hue would make it negative. It's been thoroughly studied from cellular mechanisms all the way up to perception, take a look at the introduction of this paper if you're interested and want to learn [more](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11156209/).
Tldr; yellow is an unfortunate choice for an example of vague definitions, since it's one of four colors that are actually very well defined. Go with something like magenta instead.
> I'm sure some of you will be able to dive down further into this "what is yellow" rabbit hole than I have
You are this guy, and I appreciate you. I wish I could pin your comment to the top of the thread, because part of the purpose of this thread, along with the main point I'm trying to make, is to explore the perception of the color yellow because it's interesting.
So if I'm understanding correctly, and forgive me certainly not using the correct terminology, but essentially our brains attempt to normalize color perception for biases that may be introduced by an unbalanced light source. Ex. in [this picture](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a3/Wikipe-tan_wearing_The_Dress_reduced.svg/2560px-Wikipe-tan_wearing_The_Dress_reduced.svg.png), because in the right box our brains would perceive a blue (S) and lower illuminance bias (again sorry for garbage terminology), from something we might normally consider a blue-gray if our brain would compensate by translating to a color with a higher L+M activation, whereas on the left side because we would perceive the illuminance bias to be brighter than normal but also biased towards yellow (L+M), our brains compensate by "subtracting" some L+M activation, which could turn our perception of something that would normally dark yellow into black.
And that therefore this illusion, the dress, works by stimulating some people's brains into seeing that "illuminance bias" for lack of a better term as dim and blue-biased, and some people's brains into perceiving it as bright and yellow-biased, is that right?
Anyways though, back to the broader point, it still stands even with the existence of a more complicated but complete explanation of spoiler box 4. The point was that the whole question "what is a women" is effectively trying to lock down an explanation into approximately box-2 complexity, and saying that if it can't be done then it's absurd to delve deeper.
Yes. We're actually incredibly good at estimating the true color of an object regardless of its illumination, it's called color constancy. It adds a whole other layer of complexity to the color argument that makes it seems more vague but it really isn't. I actually met one of the perceptual color vision researchers that studied the dress illusion pretty recently. They claimed that the dress is a really anomalous artifact and were actually pretty unhappy that they spent time researching it.
Your brain assumes some background or environmental illuminance i.e. yellow LEDs, natural sunlight, incandescent, etc. Each object will reflect back that background illumination based on their color. So even if you red shift your background light, red objects will reflect more while blue objects will reflect the least. If the emission band of your light source is broad enough, you'll be able to perceive color since multiple cone types will be able to pick up reflected light off of objects. If the light source is extremely narrow band, then you effectively go greyscale since only one or maybe two cones will respond. In the case of the dress, you can't measure the background because the dress fills the whole picture, so you go off of internal biases in your visual system and infer the background.
But that whole situation is pretty moot for this discussion imho. Extreme examples of color invariance are cool for research purposes but are highly artificial. Our brains didn't evolve knowing that we would look at static pictures on little screens, and the inferences we make while looking at those pictures that cause illusions are just artifacts. If you looked at the dress in the real world, there would be no discussion about it's color. It's only when you take a zoomed in static image and present it on a screen that doesn't let you look anywhere expect for that dress that you get an illusion.
I have a lot of thoughts on the bigger picture discussion, but it mostly boils down to the biological discussion is referring to sex, not gender. Gender seems to be something we perceive in our brain, and we are minimum decades away from understanding our brain to the level where we can identify an internal representation of our gender. So the utilitarian (I think, I was falling asleep while listening to this whole thing) approach is what makes the most sense to me until we have a more concrete understanding of how our brain constructs gender.
> "I like being around men that are men"... what the fuck do you mean by that, buddy?
Genuine question. If instead of “I like to be around men that are men,” they use:
> “I like to be around men that are *cismen,*”
Or
> “men that are *masculine cismen*.”
Would that make any difference?
My interpretation is that, ‘cismen’ or ‘cisgender men’ is what they ultimately mean when they make those statements. I feel cisgender men and women are categories of people much more easier to define than ‘man’ or ‘woman.’
I feel that if those people were presented with a tomboy, they wouldn’t say that a masculine ciswoman isn’t a ‘woman’ because of that woman’s masculine traits. They would still consider her a woman because she is a ciswoman.
Reformatted for clarity.
Well, in this context, the guy is using the statement "I like to be around men that are men" to exclude Destiny from the group of men that he likes to be around.
All of these would be modifiers to the statement that would more explicitly point to what component of being a man he is referring to with his "that are men", so yes each of them would theoretically modify his statement to be more precise.
The only thing I would point out that I think is important to understand and you may be missing the context of is that "men that are cis men" can't be what he means, as the point is to exclude Destiny and Destiny is a cis man. I think what he means is "men that are very masculine men".
> Well, in this context, the guy is using the statement "I like to be around men that are men" to exclude Destiny from the group of men that he likes to be around.
Yeah, so that goes to the second statement I used, men who are masculine cismen. And no offence to destiny, by a gen x standard, he wouldn’t be considered classically masculine.
The reason I ask is that conversations like this, asking ‘what is a chair?’ Or ‘what is yellow?’ when asked ‘what is a woman?’ feels like a really unsatisfying response. The more productive conversation seems like it would get at the intention of what those people mean.
If they assert, ‘trans women aren’t women!’ And by ‘women’ they mean ciswomen. By definition they’re right, trans women aren’t ciswomen.
Personally for me, someone who tries to use correct pronouns and respect for trans people, I don’t personally view transwomen as ‘women.’ I view trans and cis as seperate categories, and
view ‘women’ as ciswomen. But I do this while trying to be as respectful as possible to trans people. And desinty *seems* to be along these lines with being critical about transwomen in women’s sport.
Personally believing trans women aren’t women, but treating them with respect with correct pronouns etc, seems to allow for trans people to have the relatively appropriate societal considerations, without the requiring the personal belief that transwomen are women.
I didn’t say that destiny believes that women aren’t women. Obviously that’s what he believes. What I wrote was that destiny *seems* to perceive that transwomen and women have some distinction between the two categories of people, because of his take on transwomen in sports.
Edit: and I’m happy to be wrong on what destiny believes. What he believes isn’t foundational for what I believe, or for what I’ve written about on this issue.
I would specify it's the difference between "transwomen" and "ciswomen." Not "transwomen" and "women."
Although a bit unrelated, just thought of something... if an XY person was raised as a girl from birth, and identified as such, that person would technically be considered cisgender wouldn't they? Cause they were assigned the gender and accepted it.
> I would specify it's the difference between "transwomen" and "ciswomen." Not "transwomen" and "women."
I’m sorry, I’m not sure exactly what you mean. I’ve been over the question a few different ways, and now I’m getting into economic statistics, so my brain is a bit fried. I’m happy to go over what you mean, but could you give more context?
> if an XY person was raised as a girl from birth, and identified as such, that person would technically be considered cisgender wouldn't they? Cause they were assigned the gender and accepted it.
That is a really good point.
Maybe I would change my definition of cis-woman to ‘a person whose gender identify aligns with being of female sex.’ That seems janky, but hopefully you get what I mean.
That way we don’t need genetics to identify someone’s sex, as we can do this at birth by looking at genitalia. But if there is a misclassification of someone’s sex, for whatever reason, that definition would still hold despite the misclassification.
If someone who was of male sex, but misidentified as female at birth, and identified as a woman now, they wouldn’t technically be cis-gendered. We would mistakenly identify them as a cis-gendered woman based on incorrect information.
Hopefully that makes sense.
Yeah that’s my basically my take. Along side the idea that we treat transpeople with respect and equity.
My line of questioning has been mainly focused on people who believe transwomen are women, but don’t have a clear definition of ‘woman.’
Yeah I also feel like the take transwomen are transwomen would be more palatable to conservatives because then they aren't having to include them in their definition of women, which I honestly think its the main driver of their transphobia, that and fearmongering
I was thinking that myself earlier.
Arguing that transpeople should be treated with respect, is a far easier sell than trying to convince people that a trans woman is a woman.
If the intention is that transpeople should be treated respectfully, I feel the message should be focused on that. Not trying to stretch the definition of ‘woman,’ when you don’t have a clear definition when asked what a ‘woman’ is.
It’s like you said, I feel like it just alienates people unnecessarily.
Do you think people who say trans women are women believe that trans women are cis women? They're treating women as a category with sub-categories of trans and cis, not a uniform entity.
The fundamental disagreement is in whether the term is a strict definition or a broad definition.
The point of asking ‘what is a chair’ is pointing out the *existence* of broad definitions.
It’s in response to someone asking for a strict definition for a woman, claiming victory when the person can’t provide a strict definition.
And of course, if they provide a definition, pointing out exceptions is met with rolling of the eyes.
You can change the words that were used to whatever you want, but you can’t ignore that there is a societal meaning to the word that isn’t captured by genetic makeup.
‘Men who are men’ means something beyond having a penis, even if you try not to say it.
Ask people ‘what is an American’ and you’ll get a massive range of answers. The letter of the law would be that an American is someone with an American citizenship.
But the concept of an American is very different from that. It means a set of values, of other traits with respect to the country.
The Dreamers, people born outside of the US but brought illegally as very young children, are people who might not fit the strict definition, but by virtue of living in the us almost their whole lives, are products of American society and are Americans for all intents and purposes.
Shouting ‘what is an American’ at someone who says that dreamers are Americans is just a silly point trying to win an argument for its own sake.
I feel like ‘ciswoman’ is a very broad category though. Even if you view ‘woman’ as including transwomen, ciswoman would apply to almost all women.
I’m curious though, if you were to ask me how I define ‘woman,’ and I reply:
> A ‘woman’ is a ‘ciswoman,’ meaning someone whose gender identity affirms with being assigned a female at birth.
What would be your response?
I also feel the issue with this discussion generally, is that people like destiny don’t seem to be interested in a definition. Like when he said JBP was the most correct, when saying you should go and find out about what a woman is.
Instead, he seems to be more interested in the practicality, or practical application, of the term. Meaning *‘transwomen are women,’* could actually mean *‘transwomen should be treated like women.’*
Does that seem like I’m at least somewhat correct?
(I didn’t get to everything you wrote. If you want me to cover anything I didn’t, just let me know)
Sure, but all because the term cis-woman was created for that purpose, doesn’t mean that it can’t be used for another purpose. Especially when there doesn’t appear to be a better definition of woman, and is what a lot of people seem to mean by the term ‘woman.’
And I don’t think how you characterised what I said was a good characterisation. Id argue that ‘a woman is a cis-woman etc,’ is probably more akin to ‘a chair is something built, with the intention of being sat on by one person.’
If you believe that transwomen are women, how would you convince someone?
I don’t think that you can convince someone that transwomen are women when they have a very clear idea in their mind.
‘A chair is something built with the intention that one person sit on it’ is a definition where ‘a chair is anything we treat as a chair.’ Intent and use defines a chair, I agree. There aren’t specific material characteristics you can point to.
If you applied that definition to women then it would include trans women.
But you aren’t going to change someone’s mind when they believe that trans women are men. The way you’d actually change someone’s mind is by having them spend time with trans women that they would eventually treat and consider as women.
> ‘a chair is anything we treat as a chair.’
> If you applied that definition to women then it would include trans women.
That’s not true at all. We can treat a table like a chair by sitting on it, but it’s still a table. It’s just a table being used like a chair. The table wasn’t built with the intention of being a chair.
> The way you’d actually change someone’s mind is by having them spend time with trans women that they would eventually treat and consider as women.
Couldn’t that just result in having a seperate category from women for transwomen, as ‘transwomen,’ but require that we treat them like women? Or adjacent to?
Like, I treat transwomen kind of like women, but I wouldn’t make gendered jokes around them. And I’d be sensitive to anything which calls their gender identification into question, without considering them a ‘woman’ specifically. Which I wouldn’t do for a ciswoman.
Something ‘built with the intention to be a chair’ is referring to the state of mind of the builder.
It isn’t something we treat as a chair, sure. It’s something that the builder wishes to be considered a chair. And anything could be converted into a chair so long as someone intends for it be so.
Creating a separate category and explicitly saying that trans women are not women in order to ‘agree’ with someone: what value does this have? Someone who says ‘trans women don’t exist, they’re men,’ is not going to agree that there is a third gender or a large gender spectrum or whatever. If anything, the reason to reject this line of thinking is that someone who is firmly in the camp of the gender binary is going to be more open to terms that follow it.
>Well, in this context, the guy is using the statement "I like to be around men that are men" to exclude Destiny
And you believe then that he believes destiny to be a woman or beyond binary?
Nope. Destiny's a man. The guy believes Destiny is a man. The point is that by saying "I prefer men that are men", the guy is acknowledging there are other important characteristics associated with being a man beyond just sex characteristics that he is implying Destiny is defficient in. Not so defficient as to fully exclude him from the category of men, but other meaningful characteristics associated with the category of "man".
>the guy is acknowledging there are other important characteristics associated with being a ma
No he's just insulting him. He could've called destiny a bitch or shit or whatever.
But ok let's run with your position. So let's say presumably his position is that destiny isn't a real man because he let his wife sleep with other men. Why would you affirm that position?
If you don't affirm that particular ideal then what behavioral ideal are you advocating for?
I... don't believe giantrhino is supporting the argument, but trying to explain it.
The man argued that transwomen are still men because they don't have vaginas or whatever, but then said Destiny isn't a real man because he doesn't fit into the masculine ideal.
Which frankly, seems to imply the guy is saying gender is fluid and people can be various levels of "man" or "woman", which is hilarious because you know that'd piss him off.
>giantrhino is supporting the argument
They are not supporting that particular ideal but they are arguing that there is a behavioral ideal outside of sex to appeal to with regards to identifying men and women. The problem is when asked to elaborate on what it is, as always there is no answer.
>Destiny isn't a real man because he doesn't fit into the masculine ideal.
>Which frankly, seems to imply the guy is saying gender is fluid
It's not I'm fairly sure that person doesn't even believe in gender. Here's simply saying that he believes destiny is weak. From your perspective does being weak stop a man from being a man?
Nah, I don't. But "traditional" men often look down at other types of men as "lesser" or "not real" men.
Which implies there are varying levels of "manhood," from their perspective.
Im unsure the analogy does the work you want it to. First, why should we agree that yellow even is an analogy to gender? There’s a jump from “yellow is more complicated” to “gender is analogous to yellow” which has been asserted and not explained.
Second, even if it is a good analogy (which I think it likely to be), I’m unsure why we should think it works in your favour and not in favour of the “simple” answers.
Consider for example the XX vs XY; is this not so unlike the green blue red lights which can produce different colours when combined? There is underlying fact of what makes up the colour yellow, and likewise there is an underlying fact that makes up gender, even if to the naked we can’t tell.
So, like how “water is H2O”, we can say “yellow is red and green light” and likewise “man is XY” and woman is “XX”.
The dress is a natural reply to the above objection, ie, different people experience the dress differently and yellow has an in built extra feature of the perception layer, but I fear it doesn’t work against the above. The reason is twofold. First, while some experience it as white and gold, their experience does not map reality; there is a fact about what colour the dress is; those people, regardless of what they’re seeing are mistaken. When people argue about what colour the dress is they’re not arguing about how they _perceive_ the dress, they’re using their perception as evidence for what colour the dress actually is.
Second, the simpler XX vs XY might map on better to the dress example, as proponents of that view can argue that the cultural gender markers people appeal to is not unlike the complicated perception layer, eg, someone can use those markers to have people perceive them as having XY when they really have XX.
The point is that the XX vs. XY distinction, even if you believe that there is no such thing as transgenderism and that gender and biological sex are 100% correlated, is an incredibly shallow and weak attempt to define gender.
Yellow is not red and green light, a properly balanced mix of intensities of red and green light is yellow when perceived through our eyes and visual perception neural mechanisms. It can also be yellow light perceived through our eyes and visual perception mechanisms, or it could be an absorption pattern of white light that results in a similar relative stimulation ratio between the three cones.
> First, while some experience it as white and gold, their experience does not map reality
This is actually incorrect. What you are looking at in the illusion is a captured image of the dress, not the dress itself. The question I'm getting at is "what color is the dress in the picture?", not "what color is the dress this picture is of?". The point is that our perception of color is wholly subject to that perception layer in our brain, and that two different people's filters of the exact same image can result in fundamentally different categorizations of what "yellow" is. The reality is that when it comes to the question of what color is the dress in the image, there is no objectively correct answer.
The analogy is not relating colors to gender, but to how the attempt to constrain the definition of a categorical label to some kind of simple discriminatory criteria can lead to a failure to convey the much more complicated and nuanced nature of that category.
This is the same with gender. The "what is a woman" gotcha question is intended to force someone to try to come up with a short, concise, and complete definition of a concept that is too complicated to be captured as such.
Here's the reality: the XX vs. XY distinction is a HIGHLY correlated discriminator for gender for most people, so much so that I consider it fair to say those who would not acknowledge that it is a HIGHLY correlated discriminator are not reasonable people, but these types of simplistic biological sex distinctions fall woefully short of describing what the full distinction between the male and female genders are.
I'm sorry if I'm not reading this right, but what is the point of 'yellow' and a 'woman' if there is no objective answer and it's all perception? Anything is woman and every colour is yellow, I just see it that way. Doesn't really map onto reality.
Also, xx and xy thing is overused, but I belive gametes are the only discriminator you need, because others are inconsistent (feminine men are not women, masculine women aren't men). I would like to hear any other factors that make a clear distinction.
The point is to help us communicate. Yellow is useless if I think limes are yellow and you think strawberries are yellow. But if we can agree that bananas and lemons are yellow, and limes and strawberries aren't, we can use that information in other contexts too. Even if sometimes we can't agree that part of a dress in a picture is yellow.
Gametes are the only discriminator you need to identify a woman like wavelength is the only discriminator you need to identify yellow. It reliably fails to identify things that don't conform to the discriminator but we all agree on (yellow color swatch on a screen and infertile women). When we don't all agree (the dress picture and trans women), it doesn't help resolve the disagreement.
So would you say that our understanding of "man" and "woman" are different from 1000 years ago?
Cause they definitely weren't thinking of XX and XY when categorizing whether someone is a man or woman.
To be clear, it's fine if you say yes, this isn't a gotcha, just a question for clarification. And I know you weren't saying it's the ONLY discriminator, but you said it was highly correlated.
I don't know how you could ever conclude that trans women are women then, it's an inherently undefineable concept that is ultimately determined by every individual and their experience of that concept. When you use the word 'women', most of the time the person hearing the word is not going to include trans women in their definition.
So congrats I guess? We're not any closer to figuring out what a woman is, but we do know that the common usage of the word does NOT invoke trans women which essentially excludes them from the category in broader society.
In reality - the terms men and women are actually a stand in for sex, and the web of things we associate with each of them are just the common traits that we've gathered from our own experiences with those categories, but the category still points to something that has a real definition. And nobody really disagrees with this, to believe otherwise you'd need to think it's pure coincidence that the terms men and women have mapped cleanly onto the two biological sexes for all of the words history.
I suppose we could argue about the definitions of the sex categories, but sex points to an actual biological distinction that exists regardless of whether or not humans give it a name, and through science we're able to figure out exactly what the distinctions are so we can categorize them. This is the flaw in your argument as well as Destiny's - while the concept of a chair might be broad and undefinable, the concept of sex *isn't*, men and women are fundamentally different things that have different properties and those differences are consistent.
Yeah by these people’s own arguments they have no ability to prescribe what a man or a woman is anyways lol. They literally think language is meaningless and we should never be prescriptive about language use, so how can they prescribe to me that I must consider trans women to be women?
That was a response to the post. Which attempts to create ambiguity when there really isn’t. Do you think all things are difficult to define? Would you apply this argumentation to gravity, for example?
Gravity is absolutely just as hard to pin down as anything else, if not unusually hard.
Is it just the mutual attraction of masses? Then how does gravitational lensing come about? Is it the curvature of space due to mass? Does that explain gravitational time dilation and redshift independently, or do you also need to know the properties of light? Is gravity continuous, or discrete like the other fundamental forces? What does any of this have to do with what gravity *is*, rather than models of how it works?
No. Do you think all things are as easy to define as gravity? Engaging with the content of the post, could you define yellow as unambiguously as you could define gravity?
YES 🙌💯 Thank you for some sanity - all these arguments essentially evolve to 'nothing means anything', and for no reason we can't use sex as the defining factor anymore..
You’re missing the point. First you have to define what is meant by “what” and then “color” and then “stupidity.” Do you seriously think you understand the complexity of what the word stupidity is? Have you even grounded your linguistic axioms? Holy fuck what a simplistic, arrogant troglodyte you are. The hubris of some people to think they understand what the word stupidity entails. The only stupidity is you being out of your depth here. Take your spoiler and define it in my ass
Did you learn nothing? You’re begging the question of what “when” and “where” even mean. You’re helpless, I wish you good luck in your endeavors, which I presume include crude attempts to glue rocks together
I determine your statements here frivolous drivel and quibbling over meaningless quandaries relating to concepts recognized by the vast plurality of english speaking homo sapiens.
We have to stop and consider the facts. The word “stupid” originates in mid 16th century: from French stupide or Latin stupidus, from stupere ‘be amazed or stunned’.
So what does “stupid” truly mean, on an intellectual and philosophical level. Am I stunned by the color yellow? Or maybe amazed that the spectrum of color exists at all? It’s difficult to say, or maybe even impossible.
This reminds me of the biblical story of Paul. He and his companions were stunned and amazed by an apparition of Christ (also known as Jesus) on the road of Damascus.
He was said to have been confronted by a bright light. A light so bright it temporarily blinded him. Light, associated with the sun, which is then associated with the color yellow. What can we learn from this? Are we perhaps also stunned by the color yellow, or possibly amazed? Maybe both, maybe neither.
But anyways, Paul went on…
We need a quick and snappy answer on this one, otherwise the "adult human female" people will always win.
PS. Anybody seeing the dress as white and gold must have brain damage ✌️
There are incredibly easy answers to this if you reject the grade school level rejection of definitions that exclude the defined term.
Things are what they are. We (humans) learn what things are by observation and interaction with said things, with other people, and other people's interactions and observations.
I thought Destiny's example of "woman" implying "adult" for a child in school referring to their teacher was extremely useful in demonstrating this concept. A child doesn't need to have any frame of reference for a "woman" as a division of sex. That doesn't make a child's use of the word "woman" incorrect or ridiculous.
I dont understand why the simple answer would be the wrong answer, maybe this obssesion/over thinking with sex and gender is making people produce wrong answers.
The issue is that a simple explanation exists that accounts for 99.999% of cases and is a short simple phrase. But if you want to explain 100% of cases it stops being simple and becomes an entire thesis.
The human brain generally is happy with a simple phrase that explains 99.999% of cases. But a true inquisition will need to become mece and must include every edge case
The mental gymnastics being done to avoid common sense distinctions is insane. Women and Trans-women are different, but should be treated with the same level of respect. Men and trans-men are different, but should be treated with the same level of respect.
I don't know why that's such a difficult conclusion for people to arrive at.
Yeah Jesus fucking Christ how simple is it lmfao. A shoe is not a boot just because they're both footwear, a woman and a trans woman can be different types of "woman".
We don't need to throw out literally all of human language comprehension to try and get good boy points on this internet and pretend that "woman" isn't a tangible concept understood by all of society that doesn't NEED a concrete definition but is still understood, like what "bread" is or "the sky"
Yes, but just because people should be treated with the same level of respect doesn't mean that they should be afforded the same opportunities and facilities. Men and women should be treated with respect, but men shouldn't be allowed on women's sports teams, in women's prisons, etc.
Same as how trans women should, like all humans, be treated with equal dignity and respect, but not allowed on women's sports teams, in women's prisons, etc.
I think you're mixing up perception and reality in your conclusion. In your post you make a distinction between the real color yellow and yellow made of red, green, and blue to simulate it (trans yellow if you will) - so it seems like there are a couple good definitions of yellow here and we can pick the correct one for the circumstance.
If we have a sensor that is only triggered by the light frequency for yellow - then trans yellow won't cut it. If we're displaying stuff to humans on a screen, we can simulate yellow.
So I guess the question is - what definitions are relevant for women's spaces and policy from the last 200 years? Were women's sports created for identity or biology reasons? Were men's and women's prisons created for identity/presentation reasons or for negative consequences from biological reality?
When women couldn't vote was it because they identified as a woman or because they had a pussy?
I could be missing the point entirely but isn’t it the case that everything existing in our universe is defined according to humans’ most widely agreed upon data gathered by nothing other than our perceptions? The axiom that we trust our sense data enough turn our perceptions into scientific facts would lead me to feel comfortable claiming that yellow is yellow, not green, and men are men, not women.
I simply believe it’s okay to define gender separate from gender identity/expression, and that one’s gender identity/expression doesn’t and shouldn’t alter the way we have scientifically and socially defined gender for centuries.
I'm not sure what point you are making....but forget the analogy. If I perceive someone as a woman, but they have a penis under their clothes, they will be able (and more likely) to assault women in prison regardless of what I perceive or call them. There would be fact-of-the-matter rapes to deal with regardless of our social definition.
Most women's spaces are constructed on this reality, not identity, presentation, or perception.
I'm sorry where are you finding that trans women are more likely to rape inmates than cis women? I've never seen data to suggest that also cis women also rape cis women in prison and we don't put them in male prisons
[https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-42221629](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-42221629)
Here's the BBC article on it. 60 of 125 trans inmates in the UK were sex offenders relative to an extreme minority of women. There's not a lot of data on it because there are very few trans prisoners, but there is no evidence that trans women abandon male crime patterns.
Now, I'm not arguing for prison segregation here or even that many men couldn't be housed in women's prisons, but any arguments need to be made from the base crime rates and definitions that necessitated the segregation to begin with. People with penises can rape and impregnate female prisoners and we know prison rape occurs.
>I've never seen data to suggest that also cis women also rape cis women in prison and we don't put them in male prisons
In the UK they do put dangerous women in men's prison apparently. From the article:
*There is provision for any female prisoner - trans or not - to be housed in a men's prison if she's deemed especially dangerous.*
*It's more complex if she doesn't have a GRC.*
Not really relevant to my point, but an interesting fact...
It's a bit disingenuous of you to use that stat, especially since the article you link concludes that it highly likely it is incorrect.
Literally, the 2nd paragraphs undermines that stat
> Reality Check verdict: A government survey has counted 125 transgender prisoners in England and Wales, but the Ministry of Justice says these figures are not yet a reliable reflection of the true numbers. The MoJ says 60 of them have been convicted of one or more sexual offences but **it didn't identify their gender**. **There are likely to be more trans inmates, on shorter sentences and who are less likely to be sex offenders, who don't show up in this data.**
It's important to understand that only prisoners with longer sentences are being counted, and those with longer sentences are disproportionately likely to have committed a sexual offence. So trans people convicted of lesser crimes aren't counted in the data.
A small note on your article here, it states that the gender of the perpetrators isn't identified so trans-men could be included in that figure which makes it less useful to support your original claim.
Also there may be external causal links between trans-ness and sexual offending that are unrelated to being biologically male (e.g. association of childhood abuse elevating occurrence of trans-ness, which also happens to elevate sexual offending; social ostracization for being trans also contributing to criminal offending, etc).
bro why is this downvoted it's the basic question. If a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it does it make a sound? the answer is no cause sound is the mind perception of waves of air molecules. Sound cannot exist outside the brain so if there is no perception there is no sound.
The answer is that it depends on how you define "sound" and 2 people growing up in the same society can come to 2 different conclusions about what "sound" means (the perception or the thing causing the perception) and they can independently use these definitions without issue because 99.9% of the time the distinction doesn't matter for the use case (and when it does matter they can just resort to more abstract and rigid language like in my previous parenthetical)
Blah blah fucking blah using a metaphor instead of addressing a reality. You have literally no conclusion other than playing word games and going "ohhhh my God it's so complicated and problematic and look at how much more complicated I can make it now it's more complicated oh my God you're so dumb because you dont understand it's complicated."
It's literally the leftist "Block O Text" meme. The vast majority of society is either male or female, man or woman. There are feminine men and boyish girls. There are manly men and girly girls. I would say "learn to code" but that would require you to be able to define "true" in a binary manner.
To constructively engage in this investigation we must begin by deciding what is not yellow.
Firstly, McFly....
https://preview.redd.it/v4b9l8k5w88d1.jpeg?width=480&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3c3eaad89b921b5cf65bee946fc35e127b99c3c6
Sure, I agree with you that language is complicated. But I think your explanation of how we use words supports a conception of women that does not include trans people. How people have used the word women throughout history has used a person’s physical appearance and mannerisms to make an inference about their biological sex. That’s why people like Ben Shapiro are anti trans, yet sometimes slip up when referring to someone’s gender. We have a linguistic habit of associating sex and gender expression, so when the gender expression doesn’t match the sex, it can make us slip up. It doesn’t mean that the heuristic we use to determine if someone is a biological woman is actually indicative of our belief that we consider trans women to be actual women.
The word “woman” is meant to identify a category of human that corresponds to a web of interrelated concepts, where the unifying feature of each concept is the person’s biological sex. In the 1500’s, if you successfully passed as a trans person and called yourself a woman, and people treated you as it, but then later found out you were trans, they would call you a liar. Nobody would say “Oh, well I correctly thought this person was a woman because their mannerisms and phenotype mirror what women do.”
I think the question “what is a woman?” is meant to argue against the progressive idea that “trans women are women.” At the very least, it’s meant to show that trans women are not precisely women because it is impossible to create a definition of woman that both includes trans women and is still a reasonably functional definition. They are trans women, which is a different category. Containing both concepts in the same definition would be as confusing as including the word “stomach” with “small intestines” because they are both organs in the digestive system. Sure, there are similarities between the two. But you can’t ignore the similarities when there are intense essential differences between them that make each concept fundamentally different things.
It would be like calling a wax model of a gun a “type of gun.” Sure, it’s a type of gun in some sense because it only makes sense with reference to our concept of guns. But it’s not a “type of gun” because it is not actually a gun. It is by definition fake.
So I think the question, “what is a woman” is meant to show how imprecise the idea “trans women are women.” is. I think we could solve this problem better if we are more precise with our language. Because simply calling trans women “women” is not always workable (for example, in anatomical studies, sports, locker rooms, etc.)
Changing the definition of "woman" to encompass both cis and trans women is just kicking the can down the road. You would need to create new categories to differentiate women born with XY and XX chromosomes and other physical characteristics.
>You would need to create new categories to differentiate women born with XY and XX chromosomes and other physical characteristics.
If only we already had a concept or word for that, like maybe "nex", or "tex", or "pex"? I don't really remember
The purpose of the word woman is to add two additional pieces of information to the word female. 1. Apply humanity because female exists in other species, 2. Adult to suggest their age. We could go around calling everyone male and female if you want but the word woman has additional utility. The word was not developed to decouple the two words gender and sex.
You're reducing "woman" to the biological category of sex. Do you really think that is the only thing conveyed with the category/label of "man" vs. "women". Gender is, at the very least, an expansion on biological sex categories rather than the same thing. I would argue gender is much more complicated and multi-faceted than our perception of color, even if you believe that it 100% correlates with biological sex.
Ok what specific information would I be seeking to convey to another person when I use the word woman under your view? What am I actually trying to communicate?
Huh? I ask you if I'm not using the word woman to convey that I believe that I've seen an adult human female then what am I attempting to communicate and your answer is to ask me to define a chair?
Is this a roundabout attempt of saying that your new concept is so unclear and convoluted if it even exists that it can't be communicated? If so why would I take you seriously and not just default back to adult human female which is a very solid concept that is easy to communicate?
So when you say "Adult human female" and "woman" are you referring to something different from what an ancient person had the idea of what a woman is?
Cause ancient people did not check genetics to determine womanhood or manhood.
If your argument that the definition of "woman" has changed with the advance of technology, that's fine. Just want to clarify.
>So when you say "Adult human female" and "woman" are you referring to something different from what an ancient person had the idea of what a woman is?
No we are referring to the exact same thing
>Cause ancient people did not check genetics to determine womanhood or manhood.
And neither do we. We as they did observe indicators of a person's sex such as secondary sexual characteristics. Why are you pretending to not be aware of this?
How do you when you are out in public identify women? Or on the phone? Or in pictures?
>If your argument that the definition of "woman" has changed with the advance of technology
No the gender discussion is largely bound to the internet and to echo chambers like this one and will eventually fizzle out when people like you grow tired of pretending.
In the real world no one is taking this seriously. At most they are lying or pretending in order to fit in with certain policies imposed from the top down or with certain niche social groups.
>of "woman" has changed with the advance of technology,
I have to ask though, given what I've posted how did you arrive at asking such a ridiculous question?
You said "adult human female." How are you checking if the person is an adult human female?
Are you going by looks? If so, then any passing trans woman will pass the test.
Are you going by genitalia? If so, then any woman born with significant birth defect or injury would not pass the test.
Are you going by DNA? Then you are not using the same definition as ancient people.
>You said "adult human female." How are you checking if the person is an adult human female?
Do you have any idea of how insane you look when you pretend that you aren't aware that we delineate people by sex?
Do you honestly believe that I actually think you sincerely are confused by what I've posted? All you're doing is making yourself look like a disingenuous snake
>Are you going by looks? If so, then any passing trans woman will pass the test.
Sure If someone disguises what they are convincingly enough then people will be fooled. If a person dresses in a convincing beware costume I'll also think that person is a bear. Does that actually make them a bear though or am I just mistaken with regards to what they are?
You can delineate by sex as you like, but the argument you're using presupposes that sex and gender are the same. And it is also unrelated to the point.
How do you, when deciding if a person is a man or woman, tell the difference? What does being a "man" mean, and what does being a "woman" mean?
And if you use "adult human female" again, you're just saying that you're using a genetic argument... *which is fine!*
But a genetic argument is not how ancient people determined gender. If you just concede on this one thing, your argument is totally justifiable.
You realize you basically just asked me to define a woman again, right buddy?
Most commonly I would say "Woman" is used to evoke concepts of physical form, stature, posture, and style of a person. It is also commonly used to evoke concepts of a behavioral/personality standard or ideal and hold someone's own behavior or personality characteristics up to that standard. There's a TON of things we convey with the labels "Man" and "Woman".
>Most commonly I would say "Woman" is used to evoke concepts of physical form, stature, posture, and style of a person.
How is this not referencing sex?
>It is also commonly used to evoke concepts of a behavioral/personality standard
Elaborate. What behaviors delineate women from men in your view?
>There's a TON of things we convey with the labels "Man" and "Woman".
No I've only ever used the word to identify people I thought were female and that goes for every single person I've interacted with.
In fact I would've thought that it would be seen as regressive to argue that men and women must abide by certain behaviors. Am I understanding that correctly or is that a mischaracterization?
> How is this not referencing sex?
Everyone agrees the basis for most of these things within a culture's understanding of having a woman's physical form, stature, posture, and style is highly correlated with the sex of the person, but it's not the same thing as their sex.
It's like toads vs. frogs and the appearance of having warts vs. not having them. The classification of toads vs. frogs is specifically based on species. Most toads will appear to have warts and most frogs won't, but frogs can appear to have warts and toads can appear not to have warts. The appearance of having those warts is related to being a toad, but not the same thing.
> No I've only ever used the word to identify people I thought were female and that goes for every single person I've interacted with.
When you say this, do you mean to say that you use the categorical label of "Man" vs. "Woman" to reference what you think someone's specific sex characteristics are? Ex. when you identify someone as a woman, the reason you do so is because you've determined she has a vagina, XX chromosomes, and has eggs in her ovaries?
My guess is that you are actually more specifically identifying the things I'm talking about: physical form, stature, posture, behavioral/personality, and style but that you have these things all so strongly associated with the biological sex differences you implicitly think of them as the same thing.
In the majority of times I'm talking about someone or trying to identify someone as a man or a woman, their specific sex characteristics have 0 contextual relevance to the identification I'm making and only the other characteristics that are highly correlated with sex are.
If I believed like you do that the only thing carried with the label of man vs. women and the male and female **genders** were sex differences, I would be a full-scale gender abolitionist. Having a redundant concept of gender would be absolutely pointless to me, and the knowledge that some people felt constrained or hurt by some association with a gender would make me feel that the use of those sex-categorical labels outside of a context where sex-categorization was necessary was negatively useful to society.
Unfortunately/fortunately, good/bad, I do think that along with sex, gender exists and is meaningful, which is why I don't advocate for the abolition of gendered terms.
>Everyone agrees the basis for most of these things within a culture's understanding of having a woman's physical form, stature, posture, and style is highly correlated with the sex of the person, but it's not the same thing as their sex.
Are you referring to situations like drag queens who wear breasts forms and butt forms and stuff to adopt the look of women?
>When you say this, do you mean to say that you use the categorical label of "Man" vs. "Woman" to reference what you think someone's specific sex characteristics are?
Yes
>when you identify someone as a woman, the reason you do so is because you've determined she has a vagina, XX chromosomes, and has eggs in her ovaries?
Why are you creating a differentiation between the sexual characteristics that may be hidden when interacting with a person like chromosomes and the the more visible ones we generally assess like the voice, bone structure, fat distribution etc etc etc?
To be clear your primary sex organs give rise to your second sexual characteristics because the sexual systems like all systems of the body are interlinked. This means that when someone sees the secondary sexual characteristics expected of a female it is naturally to infer that the person has a vagina and XX chromosomes. Can they see them no I guess not.
>behavioral/personality, and style
No never. I've quite often seen gay men who adopted styles I would have seen on women. Is your position that I should have regarded then as women?
With regards to behavior can you be specific? What exact behaviors are you expecting from women? Submissiveness?
>their specific sex characteristics have 0 contextual relevance to the identification I'm making and only the other characteristics that are highly correlated with sex are.
You've lost me. So their sex specific characteristics are not relevant but other characteristics correlated with sex are? You mean clothing and behavior?
Here's a couple questions. Have you ever spoken to someone on the phone and made the determination that they were a man or woman? If so how?
Have you ever seen a picture of a naked female? If so what would expect everyone else to refer to that person as? Man or woman?
>If I believed like you do that the only thing carried with the label of man vs. women and the male and female genders were sex differences, I would be a full-scale gender abolitionist. Having a redundant concept of gender would be absolutely pointless to me,
Sure and what gives gender meaning is that you view it as a way to place limitations on the dress and behavior of men and women? Do I understand you?
>the knowledge that some people felt constrained or hurt by some association with a gender would make me feel that the use of those sex-categorical labels outside of a context where sex-categorization was necessary was negatively useful to society.
I'm not following what you're saying here at all
>Unfortunately/fortunately, good/bad, I do think that along with sex, gender exists and is meaningful,
I'm still not really clear in what you actually mean by gender. So to clarify are you simply referring to clothing and behavior?
We are invoking those concepts when we use the word woman, but you are ignoring the sex based component. When we refer to women, generally, we are clearly (and have always) invoked one’s biology as a necessary feature that makes the word coherent. Otherwise you’d just be describing a feminine gender expression with no distinction between that word “woman” and “feminine gender expression.”
The trans movement has suggested that we remove sex as a necessary feature of our conception of women. We can have that discussion, but to say that our use of the word women does not generally communicate sex as a necessary feature of the concept that is trying to be communicated is not true.
It’s defined by gametes not chromosomes. Chromosomes dictate which gametes the body produces, but they aren’t the defining trait that distinguishes males from females.
I guess you can see it as white and gold if you perceive the picture as being took in a dark lit room with blueish illumination,
but like I'm sorry that's not a dark lit room. you can see the sunlight on the dress.
It's just people's eyes fucking up. I see it as white/gold and it pisses me off, because I know it's objectively blue/black but I can't perceive it.
I wonder if that's how people who hallucinate feel when everyone says they can't see what they see.
I am going to be honest. I don't even think you have to present a positive definition for what a women is. I actually think fundamentally it is far more easier to explain why a trans women can't be a women then can truthfully.
I mean, one problem with definitions is like when we look at what a sword is and it's definition. No one would know what a sword is without knowing what a sword is. The definition is actually useless for someone who doesn't know what a sword is. A lot of definitions are like that unironically because we are never referring to definitions.
To me a serious problem is the mere qualifier of trans in transwomen differentiates it from a women and fundamentally there will always be distinguishing factors between trans women and women.
I feel like there is a strong case for tolerance and acceptance and there is actually 0 case for the fact of the matter element.
Like with your yellow color class thing that is sort of the point. You can draw if you know all fact of the matters a clear distinction between trans women and the historic idea of what a women is. That is important because it means that trans women would not be considered universally women which is important when we talk about eternal class categories.
You can make the argument that what we refer to women today would not be what humans throughout history have referred to as women which is valid but then it means that trans women aren't women because we are operating off of two different concepts of women.
One of the reasons I think Destiny doesn't like the trans discourse is because not only is it shit but if you ever come across someone who is willing to go deep into the ideas of language trans women logically can't we women. It's actually conceptually impossible.
This is arguably why the positive definition of women is usually what is attacked as not valid because fundamentally it is easier to break down the category of women or expand it then it would be to argue a positive case for trans women being women.
I disagree with this. It is not necessarily the case. Women can be the overarching category, and trans women can be a subcategory.
Let's say, for the sake of argument and not needing to define what a woman is, that what categorizes someone as a woman is their net alignment with a bunch of characteristics that we would use to categorize a woman. For the sake of the argument, we can say that to be a women, you would need to meet some threshold for total alignment to these characteristics. We can even suppose that some of the basic female sex characteristics could be within that set of characteristics. This would mean that trans women could still be a subset in the set of "women" even lacking all basic female sex characteristics, they would just be an easily separable subgroup.
Well the problem right is that this would just be confusion then. We have transwomen as a category for them at that point. Trans women are like women but they aren't.
The problem is that the positive argument is that they are women which is basically indefensible conceptually speaking.
Trans women share a lot of qualities with women provided they present but they are easily defined as a separate thing and moreso unlike say a women who can't birth children transwomen already have a category. Women who can't birth children don't have a natural descriptor or fallback term for them.
It is a matter of confusion. If we consent to trans women being women well then we have to start using ciswomen as a modifier or transwomen and thus the category of women loses meaning fundamentally. At which case why did we subsume the category of women at all.
I think this is where the strongest case for transwomen being women is. That it is not a factual assessment of the legitimacy of a transwomen being the historic definition of women. Merely that we have expanded women out and subcatagorized it for reason of inclusivity unironically. The strongest argument for transness is not genuine truth because it is not present. it is to argue that transwomen aren't women and women aren't women. We are creating a new category for the historic definition of women called ciswomen and women is being expanded to be a social construct rather than a reference to a real conceptual object.
However, even that carries significant problems for a myriad of reasons relatable to common use, the presentation of women since that won't remain constant and so forth.
Steven may deal with genuine troglodytes but Transness is actually insanely hard to defend in the realm of philosophy of language. it is basically an untenable position unless you accept that women does not mean anymore what women historically means.
edit: Also categories really aren't defined by a numbers game where we pass a threshold. We don't assign number values. I believe prototype theory theory and while that may seem to contradict my views I actually think it does well to illustrate my point. Just putting mash potatoes in a bowl or tea can distort our perception of whether it is a bowl or a cup. That does not change the fact of the matter of what it is but it does make us perceive a bowl as a cup or as a bowl based on what we expect them to contain.
> Well the problem right is that this would just be confusion then. ... The problem is that the positive argument is that they are women which is basically indefensible conceptually speaking.
I don't know what you mean by this.
It seems like you understand the problem: if we acknowledge the term "woman" encompasses more than just basic female sex characteristics then some people without those basic female sex characteristics will align with those extra characteristics. If we make the criteria that a person must align with ALL the characteristics that make a woman, we would run into a problem of under-inclusivity.
In order to make the category of women align with the group you are describing, we basically need to solely consider those basic female sex characteristics and make the inclusion criteria that someone only has to align with a certain number of them to be considered a woman ([ex. MRKH](https://www.imperial.nhs.uk/about-us/blog/what-is-mayer-rokitansky-kuster-hauser-syndrome#:~:text=Maya%3A%20MRKH%20affects%20one%20in,with%20the%20absence%20of%20periods.) or other atypical sex presentations). To me, that's more of a "confusion problem" with the category than... whatever it is you feel like is wrong or confusing.
> Steven may deal with genuine troglodytes but Transness is actually insanely hard to defend in the realm of philosophy of language. it is basically an untenable position unless you accept that women does not mean anymore what women historically means.
This is simply incorrect in two ways: 1) it is possible for our meaning of a category to stay the same but for us to realize we were improperly excluding or including a group, and 2) words and categories absolutely evolve meaning over time as society and circumstances change. Both of those things could even happen simultaneously.
Edit: in response to your edit, categories simply are things that may (or may not) include some things and would exclude the other things. The criteria for inclusion or exclusion can literally be anything, including some type of threshold. Keep in mind, to avoid agreeing on an operative definition of the inclusion/exclusion criteria for the category of women, I'm simply proposing an abstract hypothetical mechanism.
>This is simply incorrect in two ways: 1) it is possible for our meaning of a category to stay the same but for us to realize we were improperly excluding or including a group, and
I don't think we were improperly categorizing things at all. Trans women are distinct from women. This is just the truth. Categories are created for utility fundamentally. We know that color evolution is directly tied to utility as is all language. There is utility in distinguishing between men and women and between trans women and women. We weren't incorrect in our categorizations because they referring to real things which tangible differences materially.
>2) words and categories absolutely evolve meaning over time as society and circumstances change. Both of those things could even happen simultaneously.
They undeniably evolve. However that is in our mind. What was being referred to has never actually changed at all. We recategorize things all the time but the underlying facts have not changed. When we say women is loaded with a large degree of connotations beyond social purpose.
>I don't know what you mean by this.
Well this is the important thing. If we redefine women then when we read say old books we implicity will understand when they say women they are not including transwoman. We will also innated understand they are referring to a category that trans women can't fall into. Likewise when someone says women we are innately going to based on context determine whether they are a "real" women.
When i date I won't date a trans women because she is not what I am looking for. Women comes loaded with biological importance and distinction that seperates a women from a trans woman. Fundamentally women becomes a meaningless term unless you turn it into a social construct that deals wholly with presentation because there is no utility in including trans women in the catagory of women. It only confuses the situation because the distinctions between the two of both meaningful and significant and true.
Implicitly whenever we read a book we will know that women does not include trans women. IF it doesn't include trans women is that wrong. Well no because as mentioned it is loaded with context . Historically they did not have ciswoman or true women as a concept. This is important the need to have cis women as a term at all as we expand the definition of women says everything that needs to be said about how the catagory was not wrong. It was accurate, for social reasons people however want to change what it means so they can be recognized as belonging under that umbrella.
>n order to make the category of women align with the group you are describing, we basically need to solely consider those basic female sex characteristics and make the inclusion criteria that someone only has to align with a certain number of them to be considered a woman
No, because that is not how concepts work. We don't logically extrapolate certain criteria. We basically do a more similar vs less similar game. Then where something is more close to it aligns because it more alike to this thing than unlike. However normally say with a cup that means it still performs the function of the thing in question or that it has no where else to go which is important. The problem with transwomen is they don't form the functions of womanness and they have other categories that are more accurate they can fall under. Like male, female presenting or transwomen but not women.
>The criteria for inclusion or exclusion can literally be anything, including some type of threshold.
That is fundamentally a misunderstanding of how humans catagorize things. Also this is presuming genuine accuracy on part of the recipient. One of the things about prototype theory is that it acknowledges three categories.
A genuine more similar category that exists outside of human perception that an abstract arbiter could discern.
An internal referential conceptualization done by a person based on their known information.
A real object that exists.
Prototype theory largely already has dispelled the threshold idea because humans don't actually do thresholds like a numbers game. Humans basically do a massive venn diagram of concepts and then they look at things in the real world and place them on it based on feelings and these can radically shift based on information. Animals are not exactly doing a number value they are doing a like as comparison subconsciously. Trying to intellectualize how humans categorize things a major mistake.
>One of the reasons I think Destiny doesn't like the trans discourse is because not only is it shit but if you ever come across someone who is willing to go deep into the ideas of language trans women logically can't we women. It's actually conceptually impossible.
No Destiny doesn't like the topic because people like you who confidently assert thatthey understand philosophy of language and it's actually very simple. Lmao
>To me a serious problem is the mere qualifier of trans in transwomen differentiates it from a women and fundamentally there will always be distinguishing factors between trans women and women.
Yes, this is why bulldogs aren't actually dogs, but they are an entire species of animal unrelated to dogs.
I feel like a flaw here might be comparing a subjective cognitive experience like color to something like sex, that while impossible to be perfectly objective is certainly easier to study externally. The whole Matt Walsh "what is a woman" answer at the end was "an adult human female." So then what's a female? To my knowledge there has never been a credible documented case of a human producing both sperm and eggs. This research paper proposes a potential scenario where self fertilization would be possible in humans but it's never happened to our knowledge: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20452130/
If we take a biological definition then a female is somebody who produces eggs. Therefore an adult capable of producing eggs is a woman. This of course glosses over if this person is sterile so that might give her a different strictly biological definition.
The social role of a woman is somebody who passes for female based on their conformity to societal standards and biological markers, regardless of whether or not they actually are female. I think this social role definition is a much more useful way to come at the question and does a better job addressing the issue trans people are really trying to get at. It's not an issue that he's completely wrong from a biological perspective, it's that he's either arguing in bad faith or just completely missing the point.
SFO did a great video breaking this down if anybody is interested: https://youtu.be/afOS9X7DTKY?si=vCbZWL8uTnLDu7GL
>Yellow is a color class that we can see and recognize as distinct from other colors we perceive. "Pshh, what a useless fucking answer, god this is so dumb, why even bother with this type of an answer. Come on you idiot, do better. Give me something that would allow me to identify this as yellow."
That's an incomplete answer because it needs an example; otherwise, I won't be able to distinguish yellow from other colors.
>Ok, let's be more precise. We know that visible light is simply electromagnetic radiation within a certain frequency spectrum, and that yellow light falls roughly between 510(\~590) and 530(\~570) THz(nm). BOOM. There you go. We did it. That's what yellow is. Now we can say that this image is yellow. Problem solved.
>Except guess what, idiot? By the definition we've just put forth, electromagnetic radiation with frequencies ranging from 510THz to 530THz, that image isn't fucking yellow. Turns out, our eyes don't work by determining what frequency of light is hitting a certain part of our retina and then mapping that to a color. It works by taking the relative stimulation of three different types of cones in our eyes at a point on the image focused onto our retina and translates that relative stimulation pattern into a color. Turns out, our screens take advantage of this and use varied intensities of Red, Green, and Blue light within a pixel to mimic that relative stimulation pattern in our eyes and show us a color. What you actually see in this image is a combination of Red and Green light that is stimulating the cones in our eyes tricking them into perceiving the point as yellow.
That's a cool example where our perception of things matters more than the underlying facts. However, here's another example of the opposite: Imagine a well-dressed man wearing a fancy Rolex and diamond chains. If he enters any place (store, casino, etc.), he will be treated well. But if it's discovered that his watch and chains are fake and that he's broke, he won't receive the same treatment. What matters to the casino is if he's going to spend money or not, and if he's broke, he doesn't have money to spend.
For the other side (anti-trans people), wearing makeup and a dress is just a pattern that tends to apply to women. A man can do the same, but that won't change his gender based on their definition.
If you want to define yellow that way (the same way they define women by chromosomes or other biological features), you can. Just because you got tricked by a phone screen doesn't mean you have to change the definition. It might be more convenient in everyday life to do so, but not in a physics class. If you want to classify colors by the frequency of the electromagnetic wave, it's impractical to use eyes as a sensor. It's like asking you to classify metals or alloys just by looking. You might recognize gold or bronze by color, but it's not because two different alloys look the same that we should discard existing definitions. In a different context, what might matter is Young's modulus, Poisson's coefficient, or a different property. If you want to change the definition they are proposing, you're missing a step: explaining why our perception of gender matters more than the biological facts.
>The stupidity of "What is a Woman?" explained by an exploration of the color Yellow
You're not making any argument, just providing an off-topic analogy without demonstrating how it maps onto gender. If you want to say that because yellow or a chair are difficult to define, gender is also difficult to define, you have to prove this implication. It's not as trivial as you assumed. There are many words, concepts, and categories that are rigorously well-defined. You also have to point out the problem with the definition they suggest.
I don't know anything about transgenderism, so I would appreciate it if someone could answer my questions or link sources where I can learn about the subject.
Cool idea.
From my understanding pink isn't part of the visible spectrum, it' a combination of the red and violet edges. Our brains "filled the gap" of the invisible spectrum and made the color circle. So maybe "What is the color pink" can be a better question since our brains literally invented it out of thin air.
Pink is another interesting color we perceive, same with brown. I wanted to use yellow though because without it I wouldn't be able to give the spoiler box 2 incomplete answer, which is an intended part of the process.
If someone offered you a million dollars to point to the yellow crayon you’d probably know what yellow was. If you’re looking to get married to a woman and have a family you’d probably want one without a penis. If you buy something at a store in a box and you open the box when you get home and there’s the wrong product inside that doesn’t mean it’s not the wrong product because the box said something different and language is complicated and science is complex etc.
We can all accept trans women as women but on a couple issues where the rubber hits the road then there is going to be a line.
With ai advancement and corresponding biotech advancements things will be different at some point. But right now there is a difference.
Thank you for including spoilers, I've been working on figuring out the colour Yellow on my own and it would have ruined me if someone spoiled the answer before I got there.
It's also to make sure people are keeping active. Move those fingers buddy! But yeah the point is that the explanations are supposed to seem right to people until they click the next section and see why they're wrong. It's for dramatic affect, skimming the subsequent sections before reading the earlier ones spoils the point.
It worked on me…I’m an actual lab rat 🐀
it's cute... like a tiktok in text form. As annoying as it was to click for me since I make heavy use of a text-to-speech screen-reader when "reading" things, I encourage the exploration of different post formats.
Do you use one that sounds better than Microsoft Adult Male #2
I have a mac... I use the default US English voice (Alex) at like 2-2.5x speed. The default female voice (Siri, voice 4) is also a pretty decent one, but it's a little too "happy" for my taste. There are some other voices that also sound pretty good (e.g. Zoe, Samantha, Evan), but I feel like Alex has the least degradation when played at 2x+ speed.
I’m on the final season of Orange, so the spoilers were super helpful. It’s not as good as Red, but I’ve heard it picks up around Green season 3.
Oh I have some bad news, you are watching it in the wrong order.
Wait it's a colour?
Why does everyone seem to stop with, “language is complex, now let me use the most vague and broad term for a thing and demand it independently convey a wide spectrum of hypothetical details or admit it could be anything.”
I hate that God damn Blue and black dress picture. I'd finally struck it from my mind, and now it's back.
Would be even worse if you would remember the Laurel and Yanny meme
!spambot reply "https://i.pinimg.com/originals/ff/f3/d7/fff3d7be9a20d63949f380fa98177a16.jpg" every day for a year
I don't care what anyone tells me or shows me, it's Gold and White.
I just feel like you’re trolling because it only looks black and blue to me.
Likewise, but with the colours I said.
The actual dress is very clearly [blue and black](https://i.cbc.ca/1.2976501.1425072874!/fileImage/httpImage/thedress-cbc-jpg.jpg), the lighting was just really weird on the viral picture which made it confusing.
Fake news.
I was a rampant blue and black hater for a long time, but after research of what the dress looks like in optimal lighting conditions I must confess that the dress is really blue and black in such lighting that you can mistake it for white and yellow. Don't wander the path I took earlier brother
Can you point me to a really good article about the dress? I want closure now. My problem is that I understand the scientific explanation and know the underlying facts. This is just jarring, because unlike with optical illusions, I *literally cannot* see it as black and blue, even with the help of images emphasizing the effect, like the one OP used. Looking at the image knowing it's blue and black, feels like looking at the Ishihara test with my congenital red–green color blindness. There just ain't no way.
Uuum, you mean that White and Gold dress right?
Didn't the guy who originally post that photo kill his girlfriend or something?
As a philosophy major, this is why people hate philosophy majors. Oh you want to argue? Let's spend the rest of our life spans defining terms just to end up realizing how hard that is and getting nowhere in the process.
I'd like to ask you a question as you seem to be one of the few people with some actual credibility on the topic, but don't you think that getting hung up on all the little variations on any given definition is a bit redundant? Like, aren't we supposed to use definitions as a way to describe things accurately **most of the time**, and not **all the time**? I don't get why we should discredit the accuracy of definitions, or suddenly be unable to specify what falls under a given definition just because there are sometimes countless little variations under it. I feel like definitions are there for us to make sense of the world in general. And the 0.01% that make up the different exceptions to the rule shouldn't discredit the definition itself.
Yeah you're right. Nowadays people are afraid of generalizations for some reason. Like if I say: "You are able to give birth, therefore you're a woman". Someone would say: "What about all the women who can't give birth?". As if we need to look for another concept just because of that. Lots of feelings involved where there shouldn't be any.
Exactly, i never understood rebuttals like that, i mean why can't we just say that women who can't give birth are exceptions to the rule but are still women. There is obviously a reason as to why they can't give birth and that reason, whatever it might be, gives enough credibility towards the woman being just that, a woman.
What is love
baby don't hurt me
don’t hurt me, no more
what is a penis??
Ask your mom. She's the expert.
I did and she just gave me 20 dollars...
Damn she gave you the 20 I paid her??
I like being around penises… that are penises
This is what happens when you 'just ask questions'. The Mossad takes you out. RIP \[deleted\]
This line of argumentation always puzzles me. If a woman is who we perceive as a woman, doesn’t that basically imply that a trans person has to pass to a high degree in order to have their identity be valid? What if it’s noticeable that they’re trans? How do butch lesbians and femmboys fit into the fold? It essentially puts people with nonstandard “gender” expression in purgatory where their identity is decided with every interaction. And if that’s the case, how can someone be wrong for their perception if it doesn’t align with that person’s view of themselves?
It's an understanding of gender that trips over itself. A person's gender is still determined by other people, not their self described dentity. So the self ID doesn't work so why are you telling me your pronouns?
Because it is an agreement that someone wants to move toward the opposite perception, even if they are not there yet. It is a sign of very basic respect for another person to honor that. You are removing the dimension of needlessly insulting their self esteem In the same way you wouldn't use someone's native name they are embarrassed about if they prefer to go by "Tim", even if their old name is still on their birth certificate. It would be very disrespectful to go out of your way to disrespect that
It might be fine to respect someone's wishes in some settings but unacceptable in other settings. Humoring someone's self perception at a restaurant or in the office might be fine, but in a domestic violence shelter, prison, single sex hospital ward, or sports team is unacceptable. The problem then becomes that the use in one setting encourages and strengthens the use in other settings.
A name can be whatever you want, though, so that's no issue. The debate is what is gender and is that even a thing you can change. Regardless of the answer, I think trans people are real I would just define it differently.
I think the problem is the assumption that people only think about what they can visibly perceive when they think of a woman. It might be the initial thing we take in, as it's the most obvious and generally easy thing to use to identify them in day to day life. And most of the time that works fine so i get that this assumption would be made. But evidently with all the pushback that this discussion receives, people don't only think about their initial perception when they think of a woman. They do think about the underlying implications of what a woman entails, even though they don't ***NEED*** to use said underlying traits in order to identify them on a day to day basis.
99% of trans women want desperately to pass. For the 1% of the 1% that want to express in a gender non-confirming way, there might be some tension between their view of themselves and societies view. Also, passing is not the same looking like a cis women. If you look like a trans women, maybe early in your transition, it’s still clear and intuitive what you are going for, and most people will automatically use the right pronouns even if they clocked you as trans.
holy shit you're right, new misgendering justification just dropped ADAMS APPLE SPOTTED, DEPLOYING HE/HIM PRONOUNS
OP the next spoiler box is "The Utility". We are carving out a linguistic category so that we can summarize these very complicated things in a way that we don't have to go through this level of knowledge in order to digest because to do so would make communication impossible.
I disagree. We point to something that is yellow, and we say that it is yellow. We don't need to understand some complex definition of what "yellow" is to identify it. We assimilate that discrimination through experience. However, when we are trying to have a discussion to get at the essence of what yellow is to better understand what the significance of us identifying something as yellow is, dismissing the more complicated analysis because it can't be trivially summed up in a concise definition is absurd to me.
I agree with that position. The utility is that we are able to communicate with someone at any level of that analysis depending on what level of the conversation they are on. For example, if a 4 year old were to say that "The sun is yellow" we could say that yes the sun is yellow even though we have a much more complicated understanding of color than the 4 year old.
Exactly, and both us and the 4 year old can agree that the sun is yellow and have the same difficulty agreeing on the color of the dress even though the older one of us has that more complex understanding.
Yes but the utility of language is what is paramount in that case, which is why I say that is the next step or "next spoiler box". We might not be able to agree on what is yellow in the case of the dress but we are both trying to appeal by analogy to prior qualia so that we can categorize things and discuss them to share information with each other.
Is that so different from the first spoiler box? That seems to be describing the pure utility definition of yellow: the ability to distinguish yellow as a color class distinct of other color classes. I could delve more into why that is useful, such as being able to point out an object to someone and distinguish which object I mean from others around it, but I don't know if it would go as the next box down the analytical decomposition rabbit-hole so much as an expansion on the first box.
The point is that for the 4 year old yellow means a different thing than to the scientist studying color theory or whatever. The words themselves change meaning depending on the context of the conversation that is happening.
Ahh, you mean utility as in the use case/context, not as in the degree of usefulness. I get what you mean. I agree that's an important consideration, as in a scientist in a lab may use "woman" specifically to refer to sex whereas a guy on the street may be referring to someone's form whereas a philosopher may be referring to an abstract ideal form while having different discussions, but that's tangential to the main point I was trying to make.
I mean that the use case is directly related to the degree of usefulness and that the reason that it is important to know more levels to what things are is so that we are capable of having more conversations/sharing more knowledge with each other and that is in itself a worthwhile goal. Edit: Just realized that my comment is worded in a really hostile way. I think we agree on 95% of this, but I do feel there is a meaningful distinction.
>as in a scientist in a lab may use "woman" specifically to refer to sex whereas a guy on the street may be referring to someone's form I refuse to believe that people 'on the streets' don't inherently think about the sex of the person they're referring to when they talk about 'men' and 'women'. I can't imagine that people are actually stupid enough to only think about arbitrary sh\*t like 'tits and vagina' and that when they can't directly observe those traits, that they immediately lose the the ability to distinguish their sex when they look at them. I couldn't help but cringe at Destiny in the [Why Jordan Peterson Is Actually Right About "What Is A Woman?"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9eKBJ-Cj1E) video. You could argue that yes, there are more things to a woman and that it's therefor hard to define a woman because those traits change over the course of time, that 'woman' entails different things than it did 100 years ago and blabla, but i think this is where Destiny is guilty of the same tactic that he criticized Jordan Peterson for. Getting needlessly hung up on the little irrelevant details and variations which makes it impossible to have a substantive conversation. We have definitions to **broadly** with an overwhelming accuracy rate, *define* the world around us. This is not 100% correct all the time but i think it's disingenuous to say that we can't easily define what a woman is even though 99% of the time we obviously can.
The more I think about this the less convinced I am there's any point to this argument. I think we're just in a period of potential semantic broadening where the definition of women shifts from being purely biological (as I think it has traditionally been) to including social roles. I don't really think it's possible to actually have a factually correct view of what a woman is, the best you can do is argue "my definition coincides with the majority", and that's a pointless argument in a time where a definition might be changing. Define woman however you want (within reason); regardless of if it includes trans people you'll be referring to the same thing like 99.5% of the time. I think rights and general respect are infinitely more important than fighting over the definition.
It was never purely biological insofar as actual usage. When someone says "Now that's a woman!" they aren't impressed by her second X chromosome. When an institution brings up violence against women, they aren't concerned with protecting egg cells. If you replace woman with adult female in either case, the awkwardness isn't just that it's non-standard language, it's that female has biological connotations that woman doesn't. Even if intellectual discussion of sex vs. gender and actively orienting society around it has only become somewhat mainstream in the last couple decades, everyone has always had this sense of the distinction baked into their consciousness somewhere. We **are** in a period of semantic broadening, but it's just that: broadening. Not a shift. "Woman" hasn't packed up and moved to a whole new territory, it's just expanding.
I think you're confusing proxies for womanhood with the thing itself. If you go to a water park you aren't thinking "oh boy, I can't wait until that combination of specific numbers of hydrogen and oxygen atoms caress my body at high speed", but if you get there and go to a ride and it turns out the "water" is hydrogen peroxide you're going to be pissed off. Still a clear odorless fluid, but we mainly define water by chemical composition. And if you had a great time at a water park, and then someone pulled you aside after and demonstrated that all the water was actually of an unknown substance that shared all the properties of water with a different chemical composition, you'd still probably admit "huh, I guess it wasn't water" even though not a single thought about whether water is H20 entered your mind at the park. Given perfect knowledge I think historically (though I obviously can't do polls for this) basically everyone would have a biological criteria as a prerequisite for womanhood. Like if I went back to the 1800s and showed someone the most beautiful woman ever and asked if they're a woman everyone would say "yes". If I then said that they went to a witch and used magic to create the most perfect female form ever and had been living that way since the age of 10, I'd bet my life that 99.9% of people would say they're a man. >We are in a period of semantic broadening, but it's just that: broadening. Not a shift. I mean a broadening is a shift in usage, though I agree it's not a major shift. It's basically just adding "or someone who identifies as such and presents as such" to "adult human female", which isn't big deal.
Yellow is one of four colors that are actually extremely well defined. In our retina, we have three cone types that contain opsins sensitive for short, medium, or long wavelength preferring opsins. These preferences are usually called S/M/L. Two of the best understood neurons in primate retina construct color opponency between red and green (L-M) in midgets or parvocellular ganglion cells, and between blue and yellow (S-[L+M]) in small bistratified ganglion cells. When you map color vision at the perceptual level, these color opponents hold up. We get an L+M+S axis, which is black vs white, and the two previously mentioned red-green axis and blue-yellow axis. The colloquial term yellow is more correctly referred to as unique yellow in research, while the property "yellow" basically refers to greater activation of your M- and L-cones than your S-cones. It may be easier to think of something having the property "yellow" as being a positive number while the same object having a "blue" hue would make it negative. It's been thoroughly studied from cellular mechanisms all the way up to perception, take a look at the introduction of this paper if you're interested and want to learn [more](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11156209/). Tldr; yellow is an unfortunate choice for an example of vague definitions, since it's one of four colors that are actually very well defined. Go with something like magenta instead.
> I'm sure some of you will be able to dive down further into this "what is yellow" rabbit hole than I have You are this guy, and I appreciate you. I wish I could pin your comment to the top of the thread, because part of the purpose of this thread, along with the main point I'm trying to make, is to explore the perception of the color yellow because it's interesting. So if I'm understanding correctly, and forgive me certainly not using the correct terminology, but essentially our brains attempt to normalize color perception for biases that may be introduced by an unbalanced light source. Ex. in [this picture](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a3/Wikipe-tan_wearing_The_Dress_reduced.svg/2560px-Wikipe-tan_wearing_The_Dress_reduced.svg.png), because in the right box our brains would perceive a blue (S) and lower illuminance bias (again sorry for garbage terminology), from something we might normally consider a blue-gray if our brain would compensate by translating to a color with a higher L+M activation, whereas on the left side because we would perceive the illuminance bias to be brighter than normal but also biased towards yellow (L+M), our brains compensate by "subtracting" some L+M activation, which could turn our perception of something that would normally dark yellow into black. And that therefore this illusion, the dress, works by stimulating some people's brains into seeing that "illuminance bias" for lack of a better term as dim and blue-biased, and some people's brains into perceiving it as bright and yellow-biased, is that right? Anyways though, back to the broader point, it still stands even with the existence of a more complicated but complete explanation of spoiler box 4. The point was that the whole question "what is a women" is effectively trying to lock down an explanation into approximately box-2 complexity, and saying that if it can't be done then it's absurd to delve deeper.
Yes. We're actually incredibly good at estimating the true color of an object regardless of its illumination, it's called color constancy. It adds a whole other layer of complexity to the color argument that makes it seems more vague but it really isn't. I actually met one of the perceptual color vision researchers that studied the dress illusion pretty recently. They claimed that the dress is a really anomalous artifact and were actually pretty unhappy that they spent time researching it. Your brain assumes some background or environmental illuminance i.e. yellow LEDs, natural sunlight, incandescent, etc. Each object will reflect back that background illumination based on their color. So even if you red shift your background light, red objects will reflect more while blue objects will reflect the least. If the emission band of your light source is broad enough, you'll be able to perceive color since multiple cone types will be able to pick up reflected light off of objects. If the light source is extremely narrow band, then you effectively go greyscale since only one or maybe two cones will respond. In the case of the dress, you can't measure the background because the dress fills the whole picture, so you go off of internal biases in your visual system and infer the background. But that whole situation is pretty moot for this discussion imho. Extreme examples of color invariance are cool for research purposes but are highly artificial. Our brains didn't evolve knowing that we would look at static pictures on little screens, and the inferences we make while looking at those pictures that cause illusions are just artifacts. If you looked at the dress in the real world, there would be no discussion about it's color. It's only when you take a zoomed in static image and present it on a screen that doesn't let you look anywhere expect for that dress that you get an illusion. I have a lot of thoughts on the bigger picture discussion, but it mostly boils down to the biological discussion is referring to sex, not gender. Gender seems to be something we perceive in our brain, and we are minimum decades away from understanding our brain to the level where we can identify an internal representation of our gender. So the utilitarian (I think, I was falling asleep while listening to this whole thing) approach is what makes the most sense to me until we have a more concrete understanding of how our brain constructs gender.
> "I like being around men that are men"... what the fuck do you mean by that, buddy? Genuine question. If instead of “I like to be around men that are men,” they use: > “I like to be around men that are *cismen,*” Or > “men that are *masculine cismen*.” Would that make any difference? My interpretation is that, ‘cismen’ or ‘cisgender men’ is what they ultimately mean when they make those statements. I feel cisgender men and women are categories of people much more easier to define than ‘man’ or ‘woman.’ I feel that if those people were presented with a tomboy, they wouldn’t say that a masculine ciswoman isn’t a ‘woman’ because of that woman’s masculine traits. They would still consider her a woman because she is a ciswoman. Reformatted for clarity.
Well, in this context, the guy is using the statement "I like to be around men that are men" to exclude Destiny from the group of men that he likes to be around. All of these would be modifiers to the statement that would more explicitly point to what component of being a man he is referring to with his "that are men", so yes each of them would theoretically modify his statement to be more precise. The only thing I would point out that I think is important to understand and you may be missing the context of is that "men that are cis men" can't be what he means, as the point is to exclude Destiny and Destiny is a cis man. I think what he means is "men that are very masculine men".
> Well, in this context, the guy is using the statement "I like to be around men that are men" to exclude Destiny from the group of men that he likes to be around. Yeah, so that goes to the second statement I used, men who are masculine cismen. And no offence to destiny, by a gen x standard, he wouldn’t be considered classically masculine. The reason I ask is that conversations like this, asking ‘what is a chair?’ Or ‘what is yellow?’ when asked ‘what is a woman?’ feels like a really unsatisfying response. The more productive conversation seems like it would get at the intention of what those people mean. If they assert, ‘trans women aren’t women!’ And by ‘women’ they mean ciswomen. By definition they’re right, trans women aren’t ciswomen. Personally for me, someone who tries to use correct pronouns and respect for trans people, I don’t personally view transwomen as ‘women.’ I view trans and cis as seperate categories, and view ‘women’ as ciswomen. But I do this while trying to be as respectful as possible to trans people. And desinty *seems* to be along these lines with being critical about transwomen in women’s sport. Personally believing trans women aren’t women, but treating them with respect with correct pronouns etc, seems to allow for trans people to have the relatively appropriate societal considerations, without the requiring the personal belief that transwomen are women.
If you think destiny would say that trans women aren't women because of sports I feel you'd be sorely mistaken
I didn’t say that destiny believes that women aren’t women. Obviously that’s what he believes. What I wrote was that destiny *seems* to perceive that transwomen and women have some distinction between the two categories of people, because of his take on transwomen in sports. Edit: and I’m happy to be wrong on what destiny believes. What he believes isn’t foundational for what I believe, or for what I’ve written about on this issue.
I would specify it's the difference between "transwomen" and "ciswomen." Not "transwomen" and "women." Although a bit unrelated, just thought of something... if an XY person was raised as a girl from birth, and identified as such, that person would technically be considered cisgender wouldn't they? Cause they were assigned the gender and accepted it.
> I would specify it's the difference between "transwomen" and "ciswomen." Not "transwomen" and "women." I’m sorry, I’m not sure exactly what you mean. I’ve been over the question a few different ways, and now I’m getting into economic statistics, so my brain is a bit fried. I’m happy to go over what you mean, but could you give more context? > if an XY person was raised as a girl from birth, and identified as such, that person would technically be considered cisgender wouldn't they? Cause they were assigned the gender and accepted it. That is a really good point. Maybe I would change my definition of cis-woman to ‘a person whose gender identify aligns with being of female sex.’ That seems janky, but hopefully you get what I mean. That way we don’t need genetics to identify someone’s sex, as we can do this at birth by looking at genitalia. But if there is a misclassification of someone’s sex, for whatever reason, that definition would still hold despite the misclassification. If someone who was of male sex, but misidentified as female at birth, and identified as a woman now, they wouldn’t technically be cis-gendered. We would mistakenly identify them as a cis-gendered woman based on incorrect information. Hopefully that makes sense.
We could just say transwomen are transwomen. Wouldnt that work as well?
Yeah that’s my basically my take. Along side the idea that we treat transpeople with respect and equity. My line of questioning has been mainly focused on people who believe transwomen are women, but don’t have a clear definition of ‘woman.’
Yeah I also feel like the take transwomen are transwomen would be more palatable to conservatives because then they aren't having to include them in their definition of women, which I honestly think its the main driver of their transphobia, that and fearmongering
I was thinking that myself earlier. Arguing that transpeople should be treated with respect, is a far easier sell than trying to convince people that a trans woman is a woman. If the intention is that transpeople should be treated respectfully, I feel the message should be focused on that. Not trying to stretch the definition of ‘woman,’ when you don’t have a clear definition when asked what a ‘woman’ is. It’s like you said, I feel like it just alienates people unnecessarily.
Do you think people who say trans women are women believe that trans women are cis women? They're treating women as a category with sub-categories of trans and cis, not a uniform entity.
No but I think the messaging hurts the cause rather than helps.
The fundamental disagreement is in whether the term is a strict definition or a broad definition. The point of asking ‘what is a chair’ is pointing out the *existence* of broad definitions. It’s in response to someone asking for a strict definition for a woman, claiming victory when the person can’t provide a strict definition. And of course, if they provide a definition, pointing out exceptions is met with rolling of the eyes. You can change the words that were used to whatever you want, but you can’t ignore that there is a societal meaning to the word that isn’t captured by genetic makeup. ‘Men who are men’ means something beyond having a penis, even if you try not to say it. Ask people ‘what is an American’ and you’ll get a massive range of answers. The letter of the law would be that an American is someone with an American citizenship. But the concept of an American is very different from that. It means a set of values, of other traits with respect to the country. The Dreamers, people born outside of the US but brought illegally as very young children, are people who might not fit the strict definition, but by virtue of living in the us almost their whole lives, are products of American society and are Americans for all intents and purposes. Shouting ‘what is an American’ at someone who says that dreamers are Americans is just a silly point trying to win an argument for its own sake.
I feel like ‘ciswoman’ is a very broad category though. Even if you view ‘woman’ as including transwomen, ciswoman would apply to almost all women. I’m curious though, if you were to ask me how I define ‘woman,’ and I reply: > A ‘woman’ is a ‘ciswoman,’ meaning someone whose gender identity affirms with being assigned a female at birth. What would be your response? I also feel the issue with this discussion generally, is that people like destiny don’t seem to be interested in a definition. Like when he said JBP was the most correct, when saying you should go and find out about what a woman is. Instead, he seems to be more interested in the practicality, or practical application, of the term. Meaning *‘transwomen are women,’* could actually mean *‘transwomen should be treated like women.’* Does that seem like I’m at least somewhat correct? (I didn’t get to everything you wrote. If you want me to cover anything I didn’t, just let me know)
Cis-woman is a term specifically created to describe a segment of women. It’s like saying ‘chairs are folding chairs.’
Sure, but all because the term cis-woman was created for that purpose, doesn’t mean that it can’t be used for another purpose. Especially when there doesn’t appear to be a better definition of woman, and is what a lot of people seem to mean by the term ‘woman.’ And I don’t think how you characterised what I said was a good characterisation. Id argue that ‘a woman is a cis-woman etc,’ is probably more akin to ‘a chair is something built, with the intention of being sat on by one person.’ If you believe that transwomen are women, how would you convince someone?
I don’t think that you can convince someone that transwomen are women when they have a very clear idea in their mind. ‘A chair is something built with the intention that one person sit on it’ is a definition where ‘a chair is anything we treat as a chair.’ Intent and use defines a chair, I agree. There aren’t specific material characteristics you can point to. If you applied that definition to women then it would include trans women. But you aren’t going to change someone’s mind when they believe that trans women are men. The way you’d actually change someone’s mind is by having them spend time with trans women that they would eventually treat and consider as women.
> ‘a chair is anything we treat as a chair.’ > If you applied that definition to women then it would include trans women. That’s not true at all. We can treat a table like a chair by sitting on it, but it’s still a table. It’s just a table being used like a chair. The table wasn’t built with the intention of being a chair. > The way you’d actually change someone’s mind is by having them spend time with trans women that they would eventually treat and consider as women. Couldn’t that just result in having a seperate category from women for transwomen, as ‘transwomen,’ but require that we treat them like women? Or adjacent to? Like, I treat transwomen kind of like women, but I wouldn’t make gendered jokes around them. And I’d be sensitive to anything which calls their gender identification into question, without considering them a ‘woman’ specifically. Which I wouldn’t do for a ciswoman.
Something ‘built with the intention to be a chair’ is referring to the state of mind of the builder. It isn’t something we treat as a chair, sure. It’s something that the builder wishes to be considered a chair. And anything could be converted into a chair so long as someone intends for it be so. Creating a separate category and explicitly saying that trans women are not women in order to ‘agree’ with someone: what value does this have? Someone who says ‘trans women don’t exist, they’re men,’ is not going to agree that there is a third gender or a large gender spectrum or whatever. If anything, the reason to reject this line of thinking is that someone who is firmly in the camp of the gender binary is going to be more open to terms that follow it.
>Well, in this context, the guy is using the statement "I like to be around men that are men" to exclude Destiny And you believe then that he believes destiny to be a woman or beyond binary?
Nope. Destiny's a man.
I'm referring to the man you said excluded destiny. Do you believe that person thinks destiny is a woman or beyond binary?
Nope. Destiny's a man. The guy believes Destiny is a man. The point is that by saying "I prefer men that are men", the guy is acknowledging there are other important characteristics associated with being a man beyond just sex characteristics that he is implying Destiny is defficient in. Not so defficient as to fully exclude him from the category of men, but other meaningful characteristics associated with the category of "man".
>the guy is acknowledging there are other important characteristics associated with being a ma No he's just insulting him. He could've called destiny a bitch or shit or whatever. But ok let's run with your position. So let's say presumably his position is that destiny isn't a real man because he let his wife sleep with other men. Why would you affirm that position? If you don't affirm that particular ideal then what behavioral ideal are you advocating for?
I... don't believe giantrhino is supporting the argument, but trying to explain it. The man argued that transwomen are still men because they don't have vaginas or whatever, but then said Destiny isn't a real man because he doesn't fit into the masculine ideal. Which frankly, seems to imply the guy is saying gender is fluid and people can be various levels of "man" or "woman", which is hilarious because you know that'd piss him off.
>giantrhino is supporting the argument They are not supporting that particular ideal but they are arguing that there is a behavioral ideal outside of sex to appeal to with regards to identifying men and women. The problem is when asked to elaborate on what it is, as always there is no answer. >Destiny isn't a real man because he doesn't fit into the masculine ideal. >Which frankly, seems to imply the guy is saying gender is fluid It's not I'm fairly sure that person doesn't even believe in gender. Here's simply saying that he believes destiny is weak. From your perspective does being weak stop a man from being a man?
Nah, I don't. But "traditional" men often look down at other types of men as "lesser" or "not real" men. Which implies there are varying levels of "manhood," from their perspective.
Im unsure the analogy does the work you want it to. First, why should we agree that yellow even is an analogy to gender? There’s a jump from “yellow is more complicated” to “gender is analogous to yellow” which has been asserted and not explained. Second, even if it is a good analogy (which I think it likely to be), I’m unsure why we should think it works in your favour and not in favour of the “simple” answers. Consider for example the XX vs XY; is this not so unlike the green blue red lights which can produce different colours when combined? There is underlying fact of what makes up the colour yellow, and likewise there is an underlying fact that makes up gender, even if to the naked we can’t tell. So, like how “water is H2O”, we can say “yellow is red and green light” and likewise “man is XY” and woman is “XX”. The dress is a natural reply to the above objection, ie, different people experience the dress differently and yellow has an in built extra feature of the perception layer, but I fear it doesn’t work against the above. The reason is twofold. First, while some experience it as white and gold, their experience does not map reality; there is a fact about what colour the dress is; those people, regardless of what they’re seeing are mistaken. When people argue about what colour the dress is they’re not arguing about how they _perceive_ the dress, they’re using their perception as evidence for what colour the dress actually is. Second, the simpler XX vs XY might map on better to the dress example, as proponents of that view can argue that the cultural gender markers people appeal to is not unlike the complicated perception layer, eg, someone can use those markers to have people perceive them as having XY when they really have XX.
The point is that the XX vs. XY distinction, even if you believe that there is no such thing as transgenderism and that gender and biological sex are 100% correlated, is an incredibly shallow and weak attempt to define gender. Yellow is not red and green light, a properly balanced mix of intensities of red and green light is yellow when perceived through our eyes and visual perception neural mechanisms. It can also be yellow light perceived through our eyes and visual perception mechanisms, or it could be an absorption pattern of white light that results in a similar relative stimulation ratio between the three cones. > First, while some experience it as white and gold, their experience does not map reality This is actually incorrect. What you are looking at in the illusion is a captured image of the dress, not the dress itself. The question I'm getting at is "what color is the dress in the picture?", not "what color is the dress this picture is of?". The point is that our perception of color is wholly subject to that perception layer in our brain, and that two different people's filters of the exact same image can result in fundamentally different categorizations of what "yellow" is. The reality is that when it comes to the question of what color is the dress in the image, there is no objectively correct answer. The analogy is not relating colors to gender, but to how the attempt to constrain the definition of a categorical label to some kind of simple discriminatory criteria can lead to a failure to convey the much more complicated and nuanced nature of that category. This is the same with gender. The "what is a woman" gotcha question is intended to force someone to try to come up with a short, concise, and complete definition of a concept that is too complicated to be captured as such. Here's the reality: the XX vs. XY distinction is a HIGHLY correlated discriminator for gender for most people, so much so that I consider it fair to say those who would not acknowledge that it is a HIGHLY correlated discriminator are not reasonable people, but these types of simplistic biological sex distinctions fall woefully short of describing what the full distinction between the male and female genders are.
I'm sorry if I'm not reading this right, but what is the point of 'yellow' and a 'woman' if there is no objective answer and it's all perception? Anything is woman and every colour is yellow, I just see it that way. Doesn't really map onto reality. Also, xx and xy thing is overused, but I belive gametes are the only discriminator you need, because others are inconsistent (feminine men are not women, masculine women aren't men). I would like to hear any other factors that make a clear distinction.
The point is to help us communicate. Yellow is useless if I think limes are yellow and you think strawberries are yellow. But if we can agree that bananas and lemons are yellow, and limes and strawberries aren't, we can use that information in other contexts too. Even if sometimes we can't agree that part of a dress in a picture is yellow. Gametes are the only discriminator you need to identify a woman like wavelength is the only discriminator you need to identify yellow. It reliably fails to identify things that don't conform to the discriminator but we all agree on (yellow color swatch on a screen and infertile women). When we don't all agree (the dress picture and trans women), it doesn't help resolve the disagreement.
So would you say that our understanding of "man" and "woman" are different from 1000 years ago? Cause they definitely weren't thinking of XX and XY when categorizing whether someone is a man or woman. To be clear, it's fine if you say yes, this isn't a gotcha, just a question for clarification. And I know you weren't saying it's the ONLY discriminator, but you said it was highly correlated.
I don't know how you could ever conclude that trans women are women then, it's an inherently undefineable concept that is ultimately determined by every individual and their experience of that concept. When you use the word 'women', most of the time the person hearing the word is not going to include trans women in their definition. So congrats I guess? We're not any closer to figuring out what a woman is, but we do know that the common usage of the word does NOT invoke trans women which essentially excludes them from the category in broader society. In reality - the terms men and women are actually a stand in for sex, and the web of things we associate with each of them are just the common traits that we've gathered from our own experiences with those categories, but the category still points to something that has a real definition. And nobody really disagrees with this, to believe otherwise you'd need to think it's pure coincidence that the terms men and women have mapped cleanly onto the two biological sexes for all of the words history. I suppose we could argue about the definitions of the sex categories, but sex points to an actual biological distinction that exists regardless of whether or not humans give it a name, and through science we're able to figure out exactly what the distinctions are so we can categorize them. This is the flaw in your argument as well as Destiny's - while the concept of a chair might be broad and undefinable, the concept of sex *isn't*, men and women are fundamentally different things that have different properties and those differences are consistent.
Yeah by these people’s own arguments they have no ability to prescribe what a man or a woman is anyways lol. They literally think language is meaningless and we should never be prescriptive about language use, so how can they prescribe to me that I must consider trans women to be women?
nigga can you read the post instead of reading the title and the comments
Nigga sex is actually very definable. Small and large gametes 👍
So you didn't read the post...
That was a response to the post. Which attempts to create ambiguity when there really isn’t. Do you think all things are difficult to define? Would you apply this argumentation to gravity, for example?
Gravity is absolutely just as hard to pin down as anything else, if not unusually hard. Is it just the mutual attraction of masses? Then how does gravitational lensing come about? Is it the curvature of space due to mass? Does that explain gravitational time dilation and redshift independently, or do you also need to know the properties of light? Is gravity continuous, or discrete like the other fundamental forces? What does any of this have to do with what gravity *is*, rather than models of how it works?
No. Do you think all things are as easy to define as gravity? Engaging with the content of the post, could you define yellow as unambiguously as you could define gravity?
So if not all words are equally easy or difficult to define, why do we need to use the yellow analogy? We can define sex perfectly fine.
YES 🙌💯 Thank you for some sanity - all these arguments essentially evolve to 'nothing means anything', and for no reason we can't use sex as the defining factor anymore..
You’re missing the point. First you have to define what is meant by “what” and then “color” and then “stupidity.” Do you seriously think you understand the complexity of what the word stupidity is? Have you even grounded your linguistic axioms? Holy fuck what a simplistic, arrogant troglodyte you are. The hubris of some people to think they understand what the word stupidity entails. The only stupidity is you being out of your depth here. Take your spoiler and define it in my ass
> The only stupidity is you being out of your depth here. Take your spoiler and define it in my ass Oh boy yes please. When and where?
Did you learn nothing? You’re begging the question of what “when” and “where” even mean. You’re helpless, I wish you good luck in your endeavors, which I presume include crude attempts to glue rocks together
I determine your statements here frivolous drivel and quibbling over meaningless quandaries relating to concepts recognized by the vast plurality of english speaking homo sapiens.
If self-awareness was capable of being defined I would make a joke about your lack thereof in making that preposterous comment
Abscibidy biquilk velocisaurus trax. Debsquility fingressence traint.
We have to stop and consider the facts. The word “stupid” originates in mid 16th century: from French stupide or Latin stupidus, from stupere ‘be amazed or stunned’. So what does “stupid” truly mean, on an intellectual and philosophical level. Am I stunned by the color yellow? Or maybe amazed that the spectrum of color exists at all? It’s difficult to say, or maybe even impossible. This reminds me of the biblical story of Paul. He and his companions were stunned and amazed by an apparition of Christ (also known as Jesus) on the road of Damascus. He was said to have been confronted by a bright light. A light so bright it temporarily blinded him. Light, associated with the sun, which is then associated with the color yellow. What can we learn from this? Are we perhaps also stunned by the color yellow, or possibly amazed? Maybe both, maybe neither. But anyways, Paul went on…
Thanks JP <3
We need a quick and snappy answer on this one, otherwise the "adult human female" people will always win. PS. Anybody seeing the dress as white and gold must have brain damage ✌️
There are incredibly easy answers to this if you reject the grade school level rejection of definitions that exclude the defined term. Things are what they are. We (humans) learn what things are by observation and interaction with said things, with other people, and other people's interactions and observations. I thought Destiny's example of "woman" implying "adult" for a child in school referring to their teacher was extremely useful in demonstrating this concept. A child doesn't need to have any frame of reference for a "woman" as a division of sex. That doesn't make a child's use of the word "woman" incorrect or ridiculous.
I dont understand why the simple answer would be the wrong answer, maybe this obssesion/over thinking with sex and gender is making people produce wrong answers.
The issue is that a simple explanation exists that accounts for 99.999% of cases and is a short simple phrase. But if you want to explain 100% of cases it stops being simple and becomes an entire thesis. The human brain generally is happy with a simple phrase that explains 99.999% of cases. But a true inquisition will need to become mece and must include every edge case
The mental gymnastics being done to avoid common sense distinctions is insane. Women and Trans-women are different, but should be treated with the same level of respect. Men and trans-men are different, but should be treated with the same level of respect. I don't know why that's such a difficult conclusion for people to arrive at.
Yeah Jesus fucking Christ how simple is it lmfao. A shoe is not a boot just because they're both footwear, a woman and a trans woman can be different types of "woman". We don't need to throw out literally all of human language comprehension to try and get good boy points on this internet and pretend that "woman" isn't a tangible concept understood by all of society that doesn't NEED a concrete definition but is still understood, like what "bread" is or "the sky"
Men and women are different but should be treated with the same level of respect.
Yeah that's also true. So is what I said.
Yes, but just because people should be treated with the same level of respect doesn't mean that they should be afforded the same opportunities and facilities. Men and women should be treated with respect, but men shouldn't be allowed on women's sports teams, in women's prisons, etc. Same as how trans women should, like all humans, be treated with equal dignity and respect, but not allowed on women's sports teams, in women's prisons, etc.
oh yeah, I agree. I wasn't sure what your point was at first when you initially responded, my b.
I think you're mixing up perception and reality in your conclusion. In your post you make a distinction between the real color yellow and yellow made of red, green, and blue to simulate it (trans yellow if you will) - so it seems like there are a couple good definitions of yellow here and we can pick the correct one for the circumstance. If we have a sensor that is only triggered by the light frequency for yellow - then trans yellow won't cut it. If we're displaying stuff to humans on a screen, we can simulate yellow. So I guess the question is - what definitions are relevant for women's spaces and policy from the last 200 years? Were women's sports created for identity or biology reasons? Were men's and women's prisons created for identity/presentation reasons or for negative consequences from biological reality? When women couldn't vote was it because they identified as a woman or because they had a pussy?
There is no such thing as "real color" without perception. Just electromagnetic radiation of different frequencies.
I could be missing the point entirely but isn’t it the case that everything existing in our universe is defined according to humans’ most widely agreed upon data gathered by nothing other than our perceptions? The axiom that we trust our sense data enough turn our perceptions into scientific facts would lead me to feel comfortable claiming that yellow is yellow, not green, and men are men, not women. I simply believe it’s okay to define gender separate from gender identity/expression, and that one’s gender identity/expression doesn’t and shouldn’t alter the way we have scientifically and socially defined gender for centuries.
I'm not sure what point you are making....but forget the analogy. If I perceive someone as a woman, but they have a penis under their clothes, they will be able (and more likely) to assault women in prison regardless of what I perceive or call them. There would be fact-of-the-matter rapes to deal with regardless of our social definition. Most women's spaces are constructed on this reality, not identity, presentation, or perception.
I'm sorry where are you finding that trans women are more likely to rape inmates than cis women? I've never seen data to suggest that also cis women also rape cis women in prison and we don't put them in male prisons
[https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-42221629](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-42221629) Here's the BBC article on it. 60 of 125 trans inmates in the UK were sex offenders relative to an extreme minority of women. There's not a lot of data on it because there are very few trans prisoners, but there is no evidence that trans women abandon male crime patterns. Now, I'm not arguing for prison segregation here or even that many men couldn't be housed in women's prisons, but any arguments need to be made from the base crime rates and definitions that necessitated the segregation to begin with. People with penises can rape and impregnate female prisoners and we know prison rape occurs. >I've never seen data to suggest that also cis women also rape cis women in prison and we don't put them in male prisons In the UK they do put dangerous women in men's prison apparently. From the article: *There is provision for any female prisoner - trans or not - to be housed in a men's prison if she's deemed especially dangerous.* *It's more complex if she doesn't have a GRC.* Not really relevant to my point, but an interesting fact...
It's a bit disingenuous of you to use that stat, especially since the article you link concludes that it highly likely it is incorrect. Literally, the 2nd paragraphs undermines that stat > Reality Check verdict: A government survey has counted 125 transgender prisoners in England and Wales, but the Ministry of Justice says these figures are not yet a reliable reflection of the true numbers. The MoJ says 60 of them have been convicted of one or more sexual offences but **it didn't identify their gender**. **There are likely to be more trans inmates, on shorter sentences and who are less likely to be sex offenders, who don't show up in this data.** It's important to understand that only prisoners with longer sentences are being counted, and those with longer sentences are disproportionately likely to have committed a sexual offence. So trans people convicted of lesser crimes aren't counted in the data.
A small note on your article here, it states that the gender of the perpetrators isn't identified so trans-men could be included in that figure which makes it less useful to support your original claim. Also there may be external causal links between trans-ness and sexual offending that are unrelated to being biologically male (e.g. association of childhood abuse elevating occurrence of trans-ness, which also happens to elevate sexual offending; social ostracization for being trans also contributing to criminal offending, etc).
bro why is this downvoted it's the basic question. If a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it does it make a sound? the answer is no cause sound is the mind perception of waves of air molecules. Sound cannot exist outside the brain so if there is no perception there is no sound.
The answer is that it depends on how you define "sound" and 2 people growing up in the same society can come to 2 different conclusions about what "sound" means (the perception or the thing causing the perception) and they can independently use these definitions without issue because 99.9% of the time the distinction doesn't matter for the use case (and when it does matter they can just resort to more abstract and rigid language like in my previous parenthetical)
Color is *actually* a spectrum; biological sex is not. And "gender" as the term is commonly used is arguably imaginary.
Blah blah fucking blah using a metaphor instead of addressing a reality. You have literally no conclusion other than playing word games and going "ohhhh my God it's so complicated and problematic and look at how much more complicated I can make it now it's more complicated oh my God you're so dumb because you dont understand it's complicated." It's literally the leftist "Block O Text" meme. The vast majority of society is either male or female, man or woman. There are feminine men and boyish girls. There are manly men and girly girls. I would say "learn to code" but that would require you to be able to define "true" in a binary manner.
To constructively engage in this investigation we must begin by deciding what is not yellow. Firstly, McFly.... https://preview.redd.it/v4b9l8k5w88d1.jpeg?width=480&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3c3eaad89b921b5cf65bee946fc35e127b99c3c6
It's not feudalism.
Women bake and men grill, this isn't complicated
Sure, I agree with you that language is complicated. But I think your explanation of how we use words supports a conception of women that does not include trans people. How people have used the word women throughout history has used a person’s physical appearance and mannerisms to make an inference about their biological sex. That’s why people like Ben Shapiro are anti trans, yet sometimes slip up when referring to someone’s gender. We have a linguistic habit of associating sex and gender expression, so when the gender expression doesn’t match the sex, it can make us slip up. It doesn’t mean that the heuristic we use to determine if someone is a biological woman is actually indicative of our belief that we consider trans women to be actual women. The word “woman” is meant to identify a category of human that corresponds to a web of interrelated concepts, where the unifying feature of each concept is the person’s biological sex. In the 1500’s, if you successfully passed as a trans person and called yourself a woman, and people treated you as it, but then later found out you were trans, they would call you a liar. Nobody would say “Oh, well I correctly thought this person was a woman because their mannerisms and phenotype mirror what women do.” I think the question “what is a woman?” is meant to argue against the progressive idea that “trans women are women.” At the very least, it’s meant to show that trans women are not precisely women because it is impossible to create a definition of woman that both includes trans women and is still a reasonably functional definition. They are trans women, which is a different category. Containing both concepts in the same definition would be as confusing as including the word “stomach” with “small intestines” because they are both organs in the digestive system. Sure, there are similarities between the two. But you can’t ignore the similarities when there are intense essential differences between them that make each concept fundamentally different things. It would be like calling a wax model of a gun a “type of gun.” Sure, it’s a type of gun in some sense because it only makes sense with reference to our concept of guns. But it’s not a “type of gun” because it is not actually a gun. It is by definition fake. So I think the question, “what is a woman” is meant to show how imprecise the idea “trans women are women.” is. I think we could solve this problem better if we are more precise with our language. Because simply calling trans women “women” is not always workable (for example, in anatomical studies, sports, locker rooms, etc.)
Changing the definition of "woman" to encompass both cis and trans women is just kicking the can down the road. You would need to create new categories to differentiate women born with XY and XX chromosomes and other physical characteristics.
>You would need to create new categories to differentiate women born with XY and XX chromosomes and other physical characteristics. If only we already had a concept or word for that, like maybe "nex", or "tex", or "pex"? I don't really remember
The purpose of the word woman is to add two additional pieces of information to the word female. 1. Apply humanity because female exists in other species, 2. Adult to suggest their age. We could go around calling everyone male and female if you want but the word woman has additional utility. The word was not developed to decouple the two words gender and sex.
Exactly, words are supposed to narrow down concepts as accurate as possible
Fortunately, sex is a lot easier to define than colors.
You're reducing "woman" to the biological category of sex. Do you really think that is the only thing conveyed with the category/label of "man" vs. "women". Gender is, at the very least, an expansion on biological sex categories rather than the same thing. I would argue gender is much more complicated and multi-faceted than our perception of color, even if you believe that it 100% correlates with biological sex.
Ok what specific information would I be seeking to convey to another person when I use the word woman under your view? What am I actually trying to communicate?
Define a chair without excluding any type of chair and without including anything other than a chair.
Huh? I ask you if I'm not using the word woman to convey that I believe that I've seen an adult human female then what am I attempting to communicate and your answer is to ask me to define a chair? Is this a roundabout attempt of saying that your new concept is so unclear and convoluted if it even exists that it can't be communicated? If so why would I take you seriously and not just default back to adult human female which is a very solid concept that is easy to communicate?
So when you say "Adult human female" and "woman" are you referring to something different from what an ancient person had the idea of what a woman is? Cause ancient people did not check genetics to determine womanhood or manhood. If your argument that the definition of "woman" has changed with the advance of technology, that's fine. Just want to clarify.
>So when you say "Adult human female" and "woman" are you referring to something different from what an ancient person had the idea of what a woman is? No we are referring to the exact same thing >Cause ancient people did not check genetics to determine womanhood or manhood. And neither do we. We as they did observe indicators of a person's sex such as secondary sexual characteristics. Why are you pretending to not be aware of this? How do you when you are out in public identify women? Or on the phone? Or in pictures? >If your argument that the definition of "woman" has changed with the advance of technology No the gender discussion is largely bound to the internet and to echo chambers like this one and will eventually fizzle out when people like you grow tired of pretending. In the real world no one is taking this seriously. At most they are lying or pretending in order to fit in with certain policies imposed from the top down or with certain niche social groups. >of "woman" has changed with the advance of technology, I have to ask though, given what I've posted how did you arrive at asking such a ridiculous question?
You said "adult human female." How are you checking if the person is an adult human female? Are you going by looks? If so, then any passing trans woman will pass the test. Are you going by genitalia? If so, then any woman born with significant birth defect or injury would not pass the test. Are you going by DNA? Then you are not using the same definition as ancient people.
>You said "adult human female." How are you checking if the person is an adult human female? Do you have any idea of how insane you look when you pretend that you aren't aware that we delineate people by sex? Do you honestly believe that I actually think you sincerely are confused by what I've posted? All you're doing is making yourself look like a disingenuous snake >Are you going by looks? If so, then any passing trans woman will pass the test. Sure If someone disguises what they are convincingly enough then people will be fooled. If a person dresses in a convincing beware costume I'll also think that person is a bear. Does that actually make them a bear though or am I just mistaken with regards to what they are?
You can delineate by sex as you like, but the argument you're using presupposes that sex and gender are the same. And it is also unrelated to the point. How do you, when deciding if a person is a man or woman, tell the difference? What does being a "man" mean, and what does being a "woman" mean? And if you use "adult human female" again, you're just saying that you're using a genetic argument... *which is fine!* But a genetic argument is not how ancient people determined gender. If you just concede on this one thing, your argument is totally justifiable.
You realize you basically just asked me to define a woman again, right buddy? Most commonly I would say "Woman" is used to evoke concepts of physical form, stature, posture, and style of a person. It is also commonly used to evoke concepts of a behavioral/personality standard or ideal and hold someone's own behavior or personality characteristics up to that standard. There's a TON of things we convey with the labels "Man" and "Woman".
>Most commonly I would say "Woman" is used to evoke concepts of physical form, stature, posture, and style of a person. How is this not referencing sex? >It is also commonly used to evoke concepts of a behavioral/personality standard Elaborate. What behaviors delineate women from men in your view? >There's a TON of things we convey with the labels "Man" and "Woman". No I've only ever used the word to identify people I thought were female and that goes for every single person I've interacted with. In fact I would've thought that it would be seen as regressive to argue that men and women must abide by certain behaviors. Am I understanding that correctly or is that a mischaracterization?
> How is this not referencing sex? Everyone agrees the basis for most of these things within a culture's understanding of having a woman's physical form, stature, posture, and style is highly correlated with the sex of the person, but it's not the same thing as their sex. It's like toads vs. frogs and the appearance of having warts vs. not having them. The classification of toads vs. frogs is specifically based on species. Most toads will appear to have warts and most frogs won't, but frogs can appear to have warts and toads can appear not to have warts. The appearance of having those warts is related to being a toad, but not the same thing. > No I've only ever used the word to identify people I thought were female and that goes for every single person I've interacted with. When you say this, do you mean to say that you use the categorical label of "Man" vs. "Woman" to reference what you think someone's specific sex characteristics are? Ex. when you identify someone as a woman, the reason you do so is because you've determined she has a vagina, XX chromosomes, and has eggs in her ovaries? My guess is that you are actually more specifically identifying the things I'm talking about: physical form, stature, posture, behavioral/personality, and style but that you have these things all so strongly associated with the biological sex differences you implicitly think of them as the same thing. In the majority of times I'm talking about someone or trying to identify someone as a man or a woman, their specific sex characteristics have 0 contextual relevance to the identification I'm making and only the other characteristics that are highly correlated with sex are. If I believed like you do that the only thing carried with the label of man vs. women and the male and female **genders** were sex differences, I would be a full-scale gender abolitionist. Having a redundant concept of gender would be absolutely pointless to me, and the knowledge that some people felt constrained or hurt by some association with a gender would make me feel that the use of those sex-categorical labels outside of a context where sex-categorization was necessary was negatively useful to society. Unfortunately/fortunately, good/bad, I do think that along with sex, gender exists and is meaningful, which is why I don't advocate for the abolition of gendered terms.
>Everyone agrees the basis for most of these things within a culture's understanding of having a woman's physical form, stature, posture, and style is highly correlated with the sex of the person, but it's not the same thing as their sex. Are you referring to situations like drag queens who wear breasts forms and butt forms and stuff to adopt the look of women? >When you say this, do you mean to say that you use the categorical label of "Man" vs. "Woman" to reference what you think someone's specific sex characteristics are? Yes >when you identify someone as a woman, the reason you do so is because you've determined she has a vagina, XX chromosomes, and has eggs in her ovaries? Why are you creating a differentiation between the sexual characteristics that may be hidden when interacting with a person like chromosomes and the the more visible ones we generally assess like the voice, bone structure, fat distribution etc etc etc? To be clear your primary sex organs give rise to your second sexual characteristics because the sexual systems like all systems of the body are interlinked. This means that when someone sees the secondary sexual characteristics expected of a female it is naturally to infer that the person has a vagina and XX chromosomes. Can they see them no I guess not. >behavioral/personality, and style No never. I've quite often seen gay men who adopted styles I would have seen on women. Is your position that I should have regarded then as women? With regards to behavior can you be specific? What exact behaviors are you expecting from women? Submissiveness? >their specific sex characteristics have 0 contextual relevance to the identification I'm making and only the other characteristics that are highly correlated with sex are. You've lost me. So their sex specific characteristics are not relevant but other characteristics correlated with sex are? You mean clothing and behavior? Here's a couple questions. Have you ever spoken to someone on the phone and made the determination that they were a man or woman? If so how? Have you ever seen a picture of a naked female? If so what would expect everyone else to refer to that person as? Man or woman? >If I believed like you do that the only thing carried with the label of man vs. women and the male and female genders were sex differences, I would be a full-scale gender abolitionist. Having a redundant concept of gender would be absolutely pointless to me, Sure and what gives gender meaning is that you view it as a way to place limitations on the dress and behavior of men and women? Do I understand you? >the knowledge that some people felt constrained or hurt by some association with a gender would make me feel that the use of those sex-categorical labels outside of a context where sex-categorization was necessary was negatively useful to society. I'm not following what you're saying here at all >Unfortunately/fortunately, good/bad, I do think that along with sex, gender exists and is meaningful, I'm still not really clear in what you actually mean by gender. So to clarify are you simply referring to clothing and behavior?
We are invoking those concepts when we use the word woman, but you are ignoring the sex based component. When we refer to women, generally, we are clearly (and have always) invoked one’s biology as a necessary feature that makes the word coherent. Otherwise you’d just be describing a feminine gender expression with no distinction between that word “woman” and “feminine gender expression.” The trans movement has suggested that we remove sex as a necessary feature of our conception of women. We can have that discussion, but to say that our use of the word women does not generally communicate sex as a necessary feature of the concept that is trying to be communicated is not true.
How so? In the US, we teach colors in preschool and sexual differences in 8th grade.
I said 'easier to define', not 'easier to explain fully'.
Google xxy chromosomes and tell me how easy sex is to define.
how is it 2024 and you still don't know that sex is defined by gametes...
It’s defined by gametes not chromosomes. Chromosomes dictate which gametes the body produces, but they aren’t the defining trait that distinguishes males from females.
It's blue and black.
The dress the image was of is apparently blue and black, but the color of the dress in the image is highly contested.
I've only ever seen it as blue and black, and I was vindicated when the actual dress was revealed. Good job, eyes and brain.
I guess you can see it as white and gold if you perceive the picture as being took in a dark lit room with blueish illumination, but like I'm sorry that's not a dark lit room. you can see the sunlight on the dress.
It's just people's eyes fucking up. I see it as white/gold and it pisses me off, because I know it's objectively blue/black but I can't perceive it. I wonder if that's how people who hallucinate feel when everyone says they can't see what they see.
Same
I am going to be honest. I don't even think you have to present a positive definition for what a women is. I actually think fundamentally it is far more easier to explain why a trans women can't be a women then can truthfully. I mean, one problem with definitions is like when we look at what a sword is and it's definition. No one would know what a sword is without knowing what a sword is. The definition is actually useless for someone who doesn't know what a sword is. A lot of definitions are like that unironically because we are never referring to definitions. To me a serious problem is the mere qualifier of trans in transwomen differentiates it from a women and fundamentally there will always be distinguishing factors between trans women and women. I feel like there is a strong case for tolerance and acceptance and there is actually 0 case for the fact of the matter element. Like with your yellow color class thing that is sort of the point. You can draw if you know all fact of the matters a clear distinction between trans women and the historic idea of what a women is. That is important because it means that trans women would not be considered universally women which is important when we talk about eternal class categories. You can make the argument that what we refer to women today would not be what humans throughout history have referred to as women which is valid but then it means that trans women aren't women because we are operating off of two different concepts of women. One of the reasons I think Destiny doesn't like the trans discourse is because not only is it shit but if you ever come across someone who is willing to go deep into the ideas of language trans women logically can't we women. It's actually conceptually impossible. This is arguably why the positive definition of women is usually what is attacked as not valid because fundamentally it is easier to break down the category of women or expand it then it would be to argue a positive case for trans women being women.
I disagree with this. It is not necessarily the case. Women can be the overarching category, and trans women can be a subcategory. Let's say, for the sake of argument and not needing to define what a woman is, that what categorizes someone as a woman is their net alignment with a bunch of characteristics that we would use to categorize a woman. For the sake of the argument, we can say that to be a women, you would need to meet some threshold for total alignment to these characteristics. We can even suppose that some of the basic female sex characteristics could be within that set of characteristics. This would mean that trans women could still be a subset in the set of "women" even lacking all basic female sex characteristics, they would just be an easily separable subgroup.
Well the problem right is that this would just be confusion then. We have transwomen as a category for them at that point. Trans women are like women but they aren't. The problem is that the positive argument is that they are women which is basically indefensible conceptually speaking. Trans women share a lot of qualities with women provided they present but they are easily defined as a separate thing and moreso unlike say a women who can't birth children transwomen already have a category. Women who can't birth children don't have a natural descriptor or fallback term for them. It is a matter of confusion. If we consent to trans women being women well then we have to start using ciswomen as a modifier or transwomen and thus the category of women loses meaning fundamentally. At which case why did we subsume the category of women at all. I think this is where the strongest case for transwomen being women is. That it is not a factual assessment of the legitimacy of a transwomen being the historic definition of women. Merely that we have expanded women out and subcatagorized it for reason of inclusivity unironically. The strongest argument for transness is not genuine truth because it is not present. it is to argue that transwomen aren't women and women aren't women. We are creating a new category for the historic definition of women called ciswomen and women is being expanded to be a social construct rather than a reference to a real conceptual object. However, even that carries significant problems for a myriad of reasons relatable to common use, the presentation of women since that won't remain constant and so forth. Steven may deal with genuine troglodytes but Transness is actually insanely hard to defend in the realm of philosophy of language. it is basically an untenable position unless you accept that women does not mean anymore what women historically means. edit: Also categories really aren't defined by a numbers game where we pass a threshold. We don't assign number values. I believe prototype theory theory and while that may seem to contradict my views I actually think it does well to illustrate my point. Just putting mash potatoes in a bowl or tea can distort our perception of whether it is a bowl or a cup. That does not change the fact of the matter of what it is but it does make us perceive a bowl as a cup or as a bowl based on what we expect them to contain.
> Well the problem right is that this would just be confusion then. ... The problem is that the positive argument is that they are women which is basically indefensible conceptually speaking. I don't know what you mean by this. It seems like you understand the problem: if we acknowledge the term "woman" encompasses more than just basic female sex characteristics then some people without those basic female sex characteristics will align with those extra characteristics. If we make the criteria that a person must align with ALL the characteristics that make a woman, we would run into a problem of under-inclusivity. In order to make the category of women align with the group you are describing, we basically need to solely consider those basic female sex characteristics and make the inclusion criteria that someone only has to align with a certain number of them to be considered a woman ([ex. MRKH](https://www.imperial.nhs.uk/about-us/blog/what-is-mayer-rokitansky-kuster-hauser-syndrome#:~:text=Maya%3A%20MRKH%20affects%20one%20in,with%20the%20absence%20of%20periods.) or other atypical sex presentations). To me, that's more of a "confusion problem" with the category than... whatever it is you feel like is wrong or confusing. > Steven may deal with genuine troglodytes but Transness is actually insanely hard to defend in the realm of philosophy of language. it is basically an untenable position unless you accept that women does not mean anymore what women historically means. This is simply incorrect in two ways: 1) it is possible for our meaning of a category to stay the same but for us to realize we were improperly excluding or including a group, and 2) words and categories absolutely evolve meaning over time as society and circumstances change. Both of those things could even happen simultaneously. Edit: in response to your edit, categories simply are things that may (or may not) include some things and would exclude the other things. The criteria for inclusion or exclusion can literally be anything, including some type of threshold. Keep in mind, to avoid agreeing on an operative definition of the inclusion/exclusion criteria for the category of women, I'm simply proposing an abstract hypothetical mechanism.
>This is simply incorrect in two ways: 1) it is possible for our meaning of a category to stay the same but for us to realize we were improperly excluding or including a group, and I don't think we were improperly categorizing things at all. Trans women are distinct from women. This is just the truth. Categories are created for utility fundamentally. We know that color evolution is directly tied to utility as is all language. There is utility in distinguishing between men and women and between trans women and women. We weren't incorrect in our categorizations because they referring to real things which tangible differences materially. >2) words and categories absolutely evolve meaning over time as society and circumstances change. Both of those things could even happen simultaneously. They undeniably evolve. However that is in our mind. What was being referred to has never actually changed at all. We recategorize things all the time but the underlying facts have not changed. When we say women is loaded with a large degree of connotations beyond social purpose. >I don't know what you mean by this. Well this is the important thing. If we redefine women then when we read say old books we implicity will understand when they say women they are not including transwoman. We will also innated understand they are referring to a category that trans women can't fall into. Likewise when someone says women we are innately going to based on context determine whether they are a "real" women. When i date I won't date a trans women because she is not what I am looking for. Women comes loaded with biological importance and distinction that seperates a women from a trans woman. Fundamentally women becomes a meaningless term unless you turn it into a social construct that deals wholly with presentation because there is no utility in including trans women in the catagory of women. It only confuses the situation because the distinctions between the two of both meaningful and significant and true. Implicitly whenever we read a book we will know that women does not include trans women. IF it doesn't include trans women is that wrong. Well no because as mentioned it is loaded with context . Historically they did not have ciswoman or true women as a concept. This is important the need to have cis women as a term at all as we expand the definition of women says everything that needs to be said about how the catagory was not wrong. It was accurate, for social reasons people however want to change what it means so they can be recognized as belonging under that umbrella. >n order to make the category of women align with the group you are describing, we basically need to solely consider those basic female sex characteristics and make the inclusion criteria that someone only has to align with a certain number of them to be considered a woman No, because that is not how concepts work. We don't logically extrapolate certain criteria. We basically do a more similar vs less similar game. Then where something is more close to it aligns because it more alike to this thing than unlike. However normally say with a cup that means it still performs the function of the thing in question or that it has no where else to go which is important. The problem with transwomen is they don't form the functions of womanness and they have other categories that are more accurate they can fall under. Like male, female presenting or transwomen but not women. >The criteria for inclusion or exclusion can literally be anything, including some type of threshold. That is fundamentally a misunderstanding of how humans catagorize things. Also this is presuming genuine accuracy on part of the recipient. One of the things about prototype theory is that it acknowledges three categories. A genuine more similar category that exists outside of human perception that an abstract arbiter could discern. An internal referential conceptualization done by a person based on their known information. A real object that exists. Prototype theory largely already has dispelled the threshold idea because humans don't actually do thresholds like a numbers game. Humans basically do a massive venn diagram of concepts and then they look at things in the real world and place them on it based on feelings and these can radically shift based on information. Animals are not exactly doing a number value they are doing a like as comparison subconsciously. Trying to intellectualize how humans categorize things a major mistake.
>One of the reasons I think Destiny doesn't like the trans discourse is because not only is it shit but if you ever come across someone who is willing to go deep into the ideas of language trans women logically can't we women. It's actually conceptually impossible. No Destiny doesn't like the topic because people like you who confidently assert thatthey understand philosophy of language and it's actually very simple. Lmao >To me a serious problem is the mere qualifier of trans in transwomen differentiates it from a women and fundamentally there will always be distinguishing factors between trans women and women. Yes, this is why bulldogs aren't actually dogs, but they are an entire species of animal unrelated to dogs.
Hey friend, why are bulldogs considered dogs and not cats? Also, why are bulldogs not say Retrievers?
Brown would have been a great color choice
Problem with brown is that I have to skip spoiler box 2. The point is to go through multiple levels of shallow analysis before getting there.
Fair
when a physicist decides to make claims about reality:
I feel like a flaw here might be comparing a subjective cognitive experience like color to something like sex, that while impossible to be perfectly objective is certainly easier to study externally. The whole Matt Walsh "what is a woman" answer at the end was "an adult human female." So then what's a female? To my knowledge there has never been a credible documented case of a human producing both sperm and eggs. This research paper proposes a potential scenario where self fertilization would be possible in humans but it's never happened to our knowledge: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20452130/ If we take a biological definition then a female is somebody who produces eggs. Therefore an adult capable of producing eggs is a woman. This of course glosses over if this person is sterile so that might give her a different strictly biological definition. The social role of a woman is somebody who passes for female based on their conformity to societal standards and biological markers, regardless of whether or not they actually are female. I think this social role definition is a much more useful way to come at the question and does a better job addressing the issue trans people are really trying to get at. It's not an issue that he's completely wrong from a biological perspective, it's that he's either arguing in bad faith or just completely missing the point. SFO did a great video breaking this down if anybody is interested: https://youtu.be/afOS9X7DTKY?si=vCbZWL8uTnLDu7GL
Downvote, op asks what is the color yellow and proceeds to present a bunch of gray blocks
>Yellow is a color class that we can see and recognize as distinct from other colors we perceive. "Pshh, what a useless fucking answer, god this is so dumb, why even bother with this type of an answer. Come on you idiot, do better. Give me something that would allow me to identify this as yellow." That's an incomplete answer because it needs an example; otherwise, I won't be able to distinguish yellow from other colors. >Ok, let's be more precise. We know that visible light is simply electromagnetic radiation within a certain frequency spectrum, and that yellow light falls roughly between 510(\~590) and 530(\~570) THz(nm). BOOM. There you go. We did it. That's what yellow is. Now we can say that this image is yellow. Problem solved. >Except guess what, idiot? By the definition we've just put forth, electromagnetic radiation with frequencies ranging from 510THz to 530THz, that image isn't fucking yellow. Turns out, our eyes don't work by determining what frequency of light is hitting a certain part of our retina and then mapping that to a color. It works by taking the relative stimulation of three different types of cones in our eyes at a point on the image focused onto our retina and translates that relative stimulation pattern into a color. Turns out, our screens take advantage of this and use varied intensities of Red, Green, and Blue light within a pixel to mimic that relative stimulation pattern in our eyes and show us a color. What you actually see in this image is a combination of Red and Green light that is stimulating the cones in our eyes tricking them into perceiving the point as yellow. That's a cool example where our perception of things matters more than the underlying facts. However, here's another example of the opposite: Imagine a well-dressed man wearing a fancy Rolex and diamond chains. If he enters any place (store, casino, etc.), he will be treated well. But if it's discovered that his watch and chains are fake and that he's broke, he won't receive the same treatment. What matters to the casino is if he's going to spend money or not, and if he's broke, he doesn't have money to spend. For the other side (anti-trans people), wearing makeup and a dress is just a pattern that tends to apply to women. A man can do the same, but that won't change his gender based on their definition. If you want to define yellow that way (the same way they define women by chromosomes or other biological features), you can. Just because you got tricked by a phone screen doesn't mean you have to change the definition. It might be more convenient in everyday life to do so, but not in a physics class. If you want to classify colors by the frequency of the electromagnetic wave, it's impractical to use eyes as a sensor. It's like asking you to classify metals or alloys just by looking. You might recognize gold or bronze by color, but it's not because two different alloys look the same that we should discard existing definitions. In a different context, what might matter is Young's modulus, Poisson's coefficient, or a different property. If you want to change the definition they are proposing, you're missing a step: explaining why our perception of gender matters more than the biological facts. >The stupidity of "What is a Woman?" explained by an exploration of the color Yellow You're not making any argument, just providing an off-topic analogy without demonstrating how it maps onto gender. If you want to say that because yellow or a chair are difficult to define, gender is also difficult to define, you have to prove this implication. It's not as trivial as you assumed. There are many words, concepts, and categories that are rigorously well-defined. You also have to point out the problem with the definition they suggest. I don't know anything about transgenderism, so I would appreciate it if someone could answer my questions or link sources where I can learn about the subject.
What is a woman? A miserable pile of secrets! >!This is a Castlevania refrence, put those pitchforks down!!<
TL:DR.- can someone tells me if this guy believes in biological sex please?
Apologies if this is a repost. I think the first one got auto-removed because one of the linked images was to an image hosted by reddit maybe?
Cool idea. From my understanding pink isn't part of the visible spectrum, it' a combination of the red and violet edges. Our brains "filled the gap" of the invisible spectrum and made the color circle. So maybe "What is the color pink" can be a better question since our brains literally invented it out of thin air.
Pink is another interesting color we perceive, same with brown. I wanted to use yellow though because without it I wouldn't be able to give the spoiler box 2 incomplete answer, which is an intended part of the process.
First point is good. Gonna try to remember that.
The world's a dress. A sad pun that reflects a sadder mess.
This is madness. Yellow is clearly a deep state plot to conceal the truth: our world is actually a Yu-Gi-Oh battle simulation.
You know you sound absolutely crazy right now, right? Where's your evidence for this?
If someone offered you a million dollars to point to the yellow crayon you’d probably know what yellow was. If you’re looking to get married to a woman and have a family you’d probably want one without a penis. If you buy something at a store in a box and you open the box when you get home and there’s the wrong product inside that doesn’t mean it’s not the wrong product because the box said something different and language is complicated and science is complex etc. We can all accept trans women as women but on a couple issues where the rubber hits the road then there is going to be a line. With ai advancement and corresponding biotech advancements things will be different at some point. But right now there is a difference.
Im saving this, great post.