Tillerman wrote:Hj Hornbeck @6:
Since you seem to have blocked me on your Reprobate Spreadsheet, I thought to respond here to your “Watch Your Language” post, although Siggy may wish to and is certainly entitled to comment on it as well, particularly on the allusion to the concept of principal component analysis:
Saw your recent comment about the (supposed) differences between “gender” and “gender identity” over on Pharyngula, and thought to check out your elaborations and justifications. However, while there might be some justification for labelling “one’s sense of oneself as male, female, or transgender” as that [gender identity], it does seem somewhat “problematic”.
For instance, just because one “identifies” as one of those classes is hardly any proof that one has any “right” to claim the title. You really think that, for example, Zinnia Jones’ assertion, in a “
Gender Analysis” post some time back, that “Trans women are female” holds any water at all? Just because you “identify” as something, that doesn’t make it so. As
Cathy Young cogently put it in a tweet of hers several months ago:
Young: #BathroomWars 2020: Otherkin who identify as dogs challenge public urination bans b/c they should be able to piss on fire hydrants
Causes some difficulties if we lose sight of or elide the differences between appearances and substances, between surfaces and essences.
In any case, given
your apparent support for the assertion that
“Sex” refers to the biological and physiological characteristics that define men and women, I wonder, do you still agree with your much
earlier assertion that
Sex really is a social construct, then, exactly as the Transfeminist Manifesto claims?
No doubt there are a great many attributes that
correlate to a greater or lesser extent with whatever
principal component might be the essential element of the classes “male” and “female”. But it seems remarkably anti-scientific and anti-intellectual to insist that there isn’t one, that the terms can mean anything anyone wants them to. Apropos of which, you might check out the Wikipedia article on
gamete:
In species that produce two morphologically distinct types of gametes, and in which each individual produces only one type, a female is any individual that produces the larger type of gamete—called an ovum (or egg)—and a male produces the smaller tadpole-like type—called a sperm.
Seems rather clear from that, and from Google searches of “female definition” and “woman definition”, that the ability to actually produce ova is what defines, is the essential element or
sine qua non of, “female” and, by extension, “woman”. No way in gawd’s green earth that either Jenner or Jones, or their equally deluded ilk, have any claim at all to those terms.
Somewhat analogously and to emphasize the point, while the term “teenager” is “socially constructed”, and while there is a myriad of attributes that correlate to a greater or lesser extent with those inside and outside the denoted class, there is still a single objective criterion – i.e., between the ages of 13 and 19, inclusive – that determines whether one is a member of that class or not. It makes as much sense to expect an affirmative answer to the trans-purity test “do you believe trans women are women, yes or no?” as to expect the same answer to “do you believe trans teenagers are teenagers, yes or no?”
