> you are thinking life is logical and "discreet" because you are a programmer and this is what you were taught.
Perhaps I did not express myself clearly, but my point is _the exact opposite_! Life is indeed not logical and discreet, as witnessed by the fact that vaguely defined categories are clearly tremendously useful. But these categories become misleading when one makes the mistake of identifying them with logically defined sets (ie when one thinks in logically reductive ways, the style of thinking you attribute to me). This is the mistake that I claim to identify in listenallyall's post.
They make the claim that XX _equals_ female and XY _equals_ male. To be clear, I don't actually think that the statement "men have XY chromosomes and women have XX chromosomes" is wrong or must be qualified every time. It's "mostly right", in the same sense that Newtonian physics is "mostly right", and adequate for most discussions where you're not looking at the edge cases of sex or gender, which is most such discussions.
But when talking about transgender people (it has not been explicitly stated that this is the subject of our discussion, but given the context I think it's fair to assume that it is), we are arguing _exactly about the edge cases_ of the gender categories. listenallyall's argument boils down to: the "male" set and the "female" set are clearly, logically defined by sex chromosomes, therefore there are no edge cases, and (speculating a bit from here on about what their point is) trans people just have to suck it up and stop claiming they are what they are not.
This is an argument based on the assumption that life is logical and discreet, that the universe has some obligation to provide you with neatly defined sets to help you understand the world. My way of showing that this is wrong is by making two arguments:
1) Life is not logical and discreet, as I tried to illustrate with the rabbit example (and I think you and I are making exactly the same point there),
2) If you go along with this discreet, "logical" reasoning, you end up with absurdities (the XX-presenting male example). I think this is where my post perhaps got a bit confusing: I am _not_ arguing for this style of thinking, but I'm going along with it to show that it is unproductive. It is undeniable that if you accept listenallyall's argument, you must either insist that a male-presenting XX is actually a woman, or be logically inconsistent.
A far more useful way to see gender is like the rabbit example. You have a bunch of sex-related characteristics which are bimodally distributed, and from that you can have a "maleness" and "femaleness" value for every person. How you weight individual variables (like "broadness of shoulders") is a bit arbitrary. Sex chromosomes are just one variable among many in this equation, with no special status. In fact, they are for most discussions probably one of the least relevant factors, as evidenced by the fact that we got by with our "male" and "female" categories for millennia without even knowing about chromosomes, and in everyday life our views of sex and gender don't seem to be particularly informed by chromosomes. We can then move on and treat gender as a "duck typed" property: if someone presents as a certain gender, refers to themselves as a certain gender, etc, they are that gender.
In conservative circles, statements like "gender is a social construct" are basically a meme, a clear proof that progressives are detached from reality. To be clear, I'm not sure I fully agree with that statement either. But for _decision making_, this is clearly a more productive view than "gender = chromosomes". I have XY chromosomes (I think) and a penis, but this is for most practical purposes much less relevant than the fact that I interact with society through the "male" interface (although I appreciate that I can use urinals). Why should I be not be free to choose which interface to interact through?
The progressive argument to treat transgender people as their preferred gender is the stronger argument for any sort of practical decision making: to refuse to do so causes needless suffering in people who have done no wrong. Insisting that a trans woman is actually a man, should be treated as a man, should be referred to with male pronouns, etc, makes the lives of these people significantly worse, and makes no one else's life better. It is also no different than insisting a male-presenting XX is a woman, which I think is also obviously cruel.
The only conservative argument I've ever heard against this is based on precisely the reductive thinking you attribute to me: to insist that one variable (chromosomes) out of many is not just more heavily weighted than what is justifiable for any practical purpose, but actually _strictly defines_ gender, ignoring _all other factors_. They then throw themselves up as champions of science and reason, because clearly progressives are detached from reality. This style of thinking is both wrong (as in, it leads to inconsistencies and is based on a high school level understanding of science and epistemology) and unproductive (you don't gain anything in terms of practical decision making).
> Finally, this is also all bs so don't take it too seriously: I am a person on the internet.
No worries, I enjoy these kinds of discussion, otherwise I wouldn't spend any time on it. But I can't help but take it somewhat seriously too. The outcome of this debate doesn't affect me very much, but there are people whose lives will be worse if "my side" loses the debate.
> you are thinking life is logical and "discreet" because you are a programmer and this is what you were taught.
Perhaps I did not express myself clearly, but my point is _the exact opposite_! Life is indeed not logical and discreet, as witnessed by the fact that vaguely defined categories are clearly tremendously useful. But these categories become misleading when one makes the mistake of identifying them with logically defined sets (ie when one thinks in logically reductive ways, the style of thinking you attribute to me). This is the mistake that I claim to identify in listenallyall's post.
They make the claim that XX _equals_ female and XY _equals_ male. To be clear, I don't actually think that the statement "men have XY chromosomes and women have XX chromosomes" is wrong or must be qualified every time. It's "mostly right", in the same sense that Newtonian physics is "mostly right", and adequate for most discussions where you're not looking at the edge cases of sex or gender, which is most such discussions.
But when talking about transgender people (it has not been explicitly stated that this is the subject of our discussion, but given the context I think it's fair to assume that it is), we are arguing _exactly about the edge cases_ of the gender categories. listenallyall's argument boils down to: the "male" set and the "female" set are clearly, logically defined by sex chromosomes, therefore there are no edge cases, and (speculating a bit from here on about what their point is) trans people just have to suck it up and stop claiming they are what they are not.
This is an argument based on the assumption that life is logical and discreet, that the universe has some obligation to provide you with neatly defined sets to help you understand the world. My way of showing that this is wrong is by making two arguments:
1) Life is not logical and discreet, as I tried to illustrate with the rabbit example (and I think you and I are making exactly the same point there),
2) If you go along with this discreet, "logical" reasoning, you end up with absurdities (the XX-presenting male example). I think this is where my post perhaps got a bit confusing: I am _not_ arguing for this style of thinking, but I'm going along with it to show that it is unproductive. It is undeniable that if you accept listenallyall's argument, you must either insist that a male-presenting XX is actually a woman, or be logically inconsistent.
A far more useful way to see gender is like the rabbit example. You have a bunch of sex-related characteristics which are bimodally distributed, and from that you can have a "maleness" and "femaleness" value for every person. How you weight individual variables (like "broadness of shoulders") is a bit arbitrary. Sex chromosomes are just one variable among many in this equation, with no special status. In fact, they are for most discussions probably one of the least relevant factors, as evidenced by the fact that we got by with our "male" and "female" categories for millennia without even knowing about chromosomes, and in everyday life our views of sex and gender don't seem to be particularly informed by chromosomes. We can then move on and treat gender as a "duck typed" property: if someone presents as a certain gender, refers to themselves as a certain gender, etc, they are that gender.
In conservative circles, statements like "gender is a social construct" are basically a meme, a clear proof that progressives are detached from reality. To be clear, I'm not sure I fully agree with that statement either. But for _decision making_, this is clearly a more productive view than "gender = chromosomes". I have XY chromosomes (I think) and a penis, but this is for most practical purposes much less relevant than the fact that I interact with society through the "male" interface (although I appreciate that I can use urinals). Why should I be not be free to choose which interface to interact through?
The progressive argument to treat transgender people as their preferred gender is the stronger argument for any sort of practical decision making: to refuse to do so causes needless suffering in people who have done no wrong. Insisting that a trans woman is actually a man, should be treated as a man, should be referred to with male pronouns, etc, makes the lives of these people significantly worse, and makes no one else's life better. It is also no different than insisting a male-presenting XX is a woman, which I think is also obviously cruel.
The only conservative argument I've ever heard against this is based on precisely the reductive thinking you attribute to me: to insist that one variable (chromosomes) out of many is not just more heavily weighted than what is justifiable for any practical purpose, but actually _strictly defines_ gender, ignoring _all other factors_. They then throw themselves up as champions of science and reason, because clearly progressives are detached from reality. This style of thinking is both wrong (as in, it leads to inconsistencies and is based on a high school level understanding of science and epistemology) and unproductive (you don't gain anything in terms of practical decision making).
> Finally, this is also all bs so don't take it too seriously: I am a person on the internet.
No worries, I enjoy these kinds of discussion, otherwise I wouldn't spend any time on it. But I can't help but take it somewhat seriously too. The outcome of this debate doesn't affect me very much, but there are people whose lives will be worse if "my side" loses the debate.
> it was all cp and youthful arrogance.
What is "cp"?