3 ms·
We have ceded too much ground in this debate. When I say "trans women are women" I mean that, ontologically, it is really true that trans women are a subcategor
by citruscomputing 6mo ago
We have ceded too much ground in this debate. When I say "trans women are women" I mean that, ontologically, it is really true that trans women are a subcategory of the general class "women."
Like you say, we are searching for outliers. We don't cut women that are too strong or too tall. We shouldn't cut out women that happen to be trans. If all the top levels of women's sport end up dominated by trans athletes (something I don't see occurring, and that isn't supported by the data), then good, outliers found. We love to see women succeed.
(To avoid perverse incentives, though, the HRT requirement is critical. Otherwise you have trans women having to choose between being more competitive and receiving necessary medical care.)
- appreciatorBus 6mo ago[flagged]
- bit-anarchist 6mo agoBut that's not what they said.
- remarkEon 6mo agoYes it is. Note the parenthetical. >(To avoid perverse incentives, though, the HRT requirement is critical. Otherwise you have trans women having to choose between being more competitive and receiving necessary medical care.) This is incoherent as an argument. It conditions the category on checking off boxes on a medical treatment list. I hope it's not necessary to explain why this is absurd.
- space_fountain 6mo agoI read the statement as follows: There is a category called woman, it’s defined by something that’s identify related. Sports should only be segregated by this category, except that to remove perverse incentives it’s reasonable to require hrt I’m unclear on what you find absurd about this?
- rdevilla 6mo agoThis implies that males who identify as women but do not undergo HRT are not women in the context of sports (and their gender in other contexts remains ill defined, especially in the absence of perverse incentive). This is a form of misgendering, which is what we were trying to avoid in the first place. This is a position that one could take up, but it comes at a steep cost. It holds the societal acceptance of transgenderism hostage to a biological account of sex-gender. This is problematic for several reasons. Moreover, it is worth highlighting the problems with suggesting that sex, as biologically based, determines the gender with which one psychologically identifies [...] Second, whatever criterion is offered to ground this similarity would inevitably disqualify many women, for not all women share the same hormone levels, reproductive capacity, gonadal structure, genital makeup, and so on. (Tuvel 2017)
- space_fountain 6mo agoAgain I don’t take it be saying that. It’s saying that encouraging women to be forced to be in emotional distress to succeed at sport is problematic so we should require hrt so that elite sport doesn’t require trans women to skip hrt
- rdevilla 6mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47538165 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47538165 Such a common pattern, I'm tired of seeing it. "That's not what it's saying, those words actually mean..." again and again, ad infinitum. A perverse form of moving the goalposts. Your reply has no relation whatsoever to what was previously stated, it is a new argument entirely.
- space_fountain 6mo agoNope, I’m consistently saying the same thing. When have I said something else?
- whackernews 6mo ago[flagged]
- frumplestlatz 6mo agoIf we’re going to take an ontological approach, is there a stable non-tautological definition of “woman” that admits your definition of the subcategory?
- rdevilla 6mo ago> When I say "trans women are women" I mean that, ontologically, it is really true that trans women are a subcategory of the general class "women." I must now insist on pinning you to a particular philosophical position and indeed a citation, to avoid motte-and-bailey fallacies where, once your current stance is found nonviable, the definitions of words are, or the entire argument structure itself is, swapped around and re-defined post-hoc, such that "tails I win, heads you lose." Axioms must be seen through to their conclusions, not accepted halfway and then abandoned for some other set of assumptions the instant you start running into paradoxes. You cannot simultaneously use ZFC and the New Foundations (without Choice); the system must remain internally consistent and coherent, there is no mixing and matching. Ontology is found to be a subdiscipline of metaphysics (Wikipedia). Quoting Talia Mae Bettcher, a feminist gender theory professor: “transsexual claims to belong to a sex do not appear to be metaphysically justified: they are claims that self-identities ought to be definitive in terms of the question of sex membership and gendered treatment. They are therefore political in nature” (Bettcher 2014, 387). Do you agree or disagree with the above quote?
- nick_ 6mo agoDo you think sex and gender are the same thing?
- rdevilla 6mo agoI am not sure, since this article uses sex and gender in senses that are entirely inverse to the common ones in 2026. How do you define those terms? In particular, the 2026 senses are that sex is an immutable biological characteristic based on karyotype and gametes; gender is a social construct, and this is why it can be "transitioned." The cited article nonetheless uses the archaic terminology "transsexual" to refer to what we today know as "transgender." Now you see the linguistic ambiguity we are mired in? Can you clarify?
- olalonde 6mo agoThat ontological classification is a recent invention with almost zero roots in common language. For most people, woman means "adult female".
- NuclearPM 6mo agoNo.
- gizajob 6mo agoWhy, ontologically, are they not a subclass of men?