Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Feb 08, 2020 6:22 pm
FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Sat Feb 08, 2020 1:39 pm
Could you please explain what "essence" means in your arguments.
It's very simple, actually.
For purposes of this particular argument it does not need to refer to anything so ambitious as, say, philosophical essentialism. All it needs to convey is that there is
something specific to "being male" that is not reducible to "being a kind of female," and something about "being female" that cannot be reduced to a subcategory of "being a kind of male."
I'm not sure that's enough. In the arg you made, you have this notion that if we reject gender essentialism we are rejecting the possiblity of having genders at all. Unless you can explain whether essence is necessary to gender only, or else applies to all categories including butt plugs, that involves a smuggled essentialist assumption.
In the other thread, you bounced around on that subject with some objects being defined by use not essence, but then they were just mangled instances of their former category whenever changed into a new object in a new category. But then God could change things from category to category, seemingly even when that was, by your argument, logically impossible to do without dissovling that target category. That was confusing, and you weren't very helpful in resolving any of that.
I do not argue that categories are arbitrary as such. I also don't hold with essentialism. By my count we divvy the world up into categories, this is a human activity, not a celestial one, and we only do it because categorisation is a useful way to view and interact with the world in which we live lives and get things done. The categories that can be said to exist are are those which we use - and when we stop using them they stop existing outside of history books. Consider the various agues and fevers that a 700 year old medical text would describe as bilious for instance. So categories - not REAL in an ontological sense, but artifical like the framework of concepts and language, of which they are a feature.
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Feb 08, 2020 6:22 pm
I'm happy to leave the "something" that people want to specify to their better judgments. But I'll tell you what my own view is, so you don't accuse me of being evasive. I think there are essential differences on several levels. For me, it starts at the genetic level...barring genetic abnormalities, a male is XY and a female is XX. That's basic. Then there's broader physiology, reproductive roles, and more contentiously, brain differences...but I don't care what people pick, be it physiological, psychological, sociological, moral or spiritual. I'll hear all arguments. Pick whatever you regard as "essential" to the difference, and let's talk about it.
That's an awful lot like the position I took. There are loads of differences between men and women, which is why we distinguish between those categories at all. Mitochondrial DNA is inherited through the female line, so with current technology only women carry certain genetic diseases. Women are far more likely than men to shave their legs, and much more likely to pee sitting down. In the technological conditions of our ancestors, only women could have vaginas, in our current state only women can bear children. But not all women can bear children, and some unfortunates are born without vajayjays either.
Whether an object belongs to any complex category is never a simple matter of holding a single specific essential characteristic of that class. If you cut a cancer out of a patient's kidney, it will have the same chromosomes as they do, but that won't make it a woman. A female antelope has XX chromosomes, that's insufficient to make it a woman.
For the avoidance of dount on my part, this applies to the other guys too. Closing your eyes and really really really believing you are a woman also does not make you a woman. A hypnotist who can make you believe you are a chicken cannot make you an actual chicken and the same applies if he makes you believe you are a woman. Some have assumed that I am of the belief that merely asserting womanhood makes for actual womanhood, I do not believe I have written anything to justify that assumption, but to underline the matter, I am comfortable going on record to say that would be entirely incompatible with my position on categorisation.
Entry into a complex class is usually more of a checklist affair. For Mannie and Henry, diagnosing gender dysphoria and proposing a treatment schedule seems like a very simple matter. But clinicians will want to
see multiple manifestations from an accepted set of symptoms before they even consider making recommendations. You gotta tick more than one box just to be a tranny, so to be something which so much more variety than that is going to take a lot more boxes, and many ticks. This may not be how it has to be, it's just the common set of rules for this activity of classification.
Such systems can be assumed to be imperfect, and imperfection is therefore no reason to get all angry at me about this. It is standard both for classification of some object to be controversial, and for accepted categories to adopt new criteria simply becuase people agree to change them. Pluto is not a planet today, but it has been in the past and may be so again one day. There's some other object I can't recall and don't care enoguh to google, but some people think it is the Earth's second moon, while others object because it isn't even orbitting this planet, it's just on a similar orbit around the sun so it only goes round in our sky because our world is spinning. It's too dim to see apaprently and the matter therefore doesn't affect me at all, so I don't care about who wins that argument...
Thus I restate the position I gave you before, which you refused me permission to hold. Obviously the categories of male and female are used because they are useful, and this implies there is a difference. There is clearly a mix of biological and social differences, and I see no reason why any particular one or any specific set would qualify as some sort of essence of womanhood.
There is also the possibility of exclusion with cause from a category by the way. So for instance a lawyer who does certain misdeeds will get disbarred. In such a case they have checked enough of the educational and other boxes to become a law spouting dude, but are expelled from that category. Somewhere on this forum (unless it was deleted) there is thread authored by a maniac called Trixie. That guy wanted to be addressed as a woman and I have no intention of doing so, request denied. He started some thread complaining about women and insinuating they deserve rape for rejecting his request to suck his dick. Seriously, he did all of that, he got friendzoned by a girl, didn't get his balls wet, threatened rape. For me, that doesn't seem ladylike.
But there seems to me some hard to define, movable line in the sand where a person is no longer reasonably to be referenced by their original gender. So either they can become their target gender, or there is an intermediate state of being less of one and more of the other, or there's multiple genders. I don't bother taking any opinion on this, the matter simply doesn't animate me. I see no reason why any of our opinions matters. I am cool with whatever gets agreed by people whos lives are actually affected by such matters. That's not me, and I don't think it's any of you either.
Some of you guys are having issues because you are operating according to an inflexible conceptual schema that cannot cope with complexity or uncertainty. I cannot recommend deploying vagueness in arguments to assert supremacy on behalf of a brittle object like that.
Can a man turn into a woman?