I know I have been accused of this elsewhere in the thread, but I would argue that this use of “gender” is equivocation. First, it’s significant that the sex division is not binary, and isn’t strongly tied to biological sex: you note neuter gender in some languages; other languages have grammatical gender that isn’t divided by male/female, but by animate/inanimate or common/neuter; nouns can be of multiple grammatical genders or genderless; the gender for words with the same meaning differs across languages; words for clearly biologically sexed things (e.g. “woman”) aren’t always grammatically gendered to align with their biologically sexed referent.
But I think the example I used above to WendyDarling makes clear the difference: Changing Siri’s voice changes her perceived gender. Siri is the kind of thing which takes its gender from the social cues it gives off. That’s not the case for cars and couches, which retain their grammatical gender through such changes. We aren’t merely assigning a grammatical gender to Siri, we’re assigning a social sex.
I don’t find anything in particular to disagree with in the latter half of your post, but I don’t see that it’s at odds with my argument here. I agree that people make automatic judgments about sex, but even those automatic judgments are partly socialized and amenable to modification. That takes time, and, as I note, is harder for older generations than for younger ones.
Karpel Tunnel, I would caution against treating “the Left” as monolithic. There are factions within what’s typically included in the Left that disagree about how we should handle transexuality and social sexual roles. If “the Left” as a whole contains conflict, we shouldn’t conclude from that that than any one ideology that might be placed on the political left is necessarily committed to all sides of such conflict, and if there is incoherence in the whole set of ideologies, that doesn’t mean that any particular ideology is incoherent.
We can play similar games on the Right, e.g. pointing out that both the strong social conformist anti-body-modification Right and the strong self-ownership individual rights Right are both traditionally considered on the ‘Right’, express beliefs that are incoherent when taken as a whole, but which may each be internally consistent.
I also think that the Left/Right spectrum is undergoing a realigment. There are far-right trans activists and far-left transphobes. I don’t think we have much to gain by trying to figure out if “the Right” or “the Left” makes more sense, they’re both moving targets that mean very different things to different people.
Similarly to the above, kids have always had self-contradictory messages, given that kids aren’t born leftist or rightist and they look to all of society to understand how things work, and they cobble together a worldview from the competing messages from all sides. Society has always contained contradictory multitudes, we shouldn’t worry that the issues modern society is grappling with also result in contradictory multitudes.
Why not attribute this to the “younger people” rather than to the “on the Left”? Childhood’s stressful, confusing, enraging and frightening. That’s nothing new.
You aren’t. When you caricature your opposition in the all-or-nothing way you have in this thread, you are opting all the way in.
The sane outcome will need to be nuanced, so in rejecting nuance, you reject the possibility of finding sanity.
Because it’s often consequential. You act as though your are accepting my caveat, but your argument relies on all the cases that such a caveat is intended to carve out.
That isn’t true. Siri and a woman on the phone are both taken to be women because they literally have the voice of biological women (Siri’s female voice being recorded from a biological women). What I mean when I say that they are literally the same social cue, I mean, down to every particular, what makes Siri’s female voice female is exactly what makes the modal biological woman’s female. We can analyse it in terms of pitch, or cadence, or whatever other specifiable property of speech that makes it male- or female-sounding, and we will find that Siri’s voice is female in literally those ways.
NY-the-City and NY-the-drawing-on-a-map don’t have a similar literal correspondence. You might say, they both have streets, but one’s streets are concrete and the other’s are lines on paper. You might say, they have the same shape, but one shape is of lines on a paper, and another isn’t even actually lines and only exists in theory. So too with “he is a lion”: nothing about him is literally a lion, we are comparing a person to some metaphorically lion-like traits that real lions don’t actually display (bravery, nobleness, awesome beard having, etc.).
Siri’s voice is not trying to deliver a representation of a female voice, it’s trying to deliver a literal female voice (to the extent that such a concept is meaningful).
I don’t think this is true, but even if it were true as a statement of intent, it’s just descriptively false that it doesn’t entail certain social treatment.
If what we mean in addressing a person as “she” or “her”, is “you have two x chromosomes and a vagina”, then it’s a literal mistake to call a biological man “she” or “her”. If instead what mean is that for social purposes that don’t concern chromosomes or genitals, we should treat that person as female to the extent we treat men and women differently in that context, and we should expect female-like behavior to the extent behavior in that context differs on the basis of social sexual roles, then it’s neither literally a mistake nor is it delusional – such a use of the female pronouns can correspond with a literal description of the world, and with some existing uses of female pronouns.