This misses the point. Rather, knowing that their bodies have no biological sex to speak of, we still happily use gendered pronouns to refer to them.
Yes. There’s an episode in the first season of Next Generation called “Measure of a Man”, the title referring to Data, and the plot revolving around a tribunal to decide whether Data has rights (the question isn’t whether he’s a man vs. a woman, but a man vs. a machine). This is also one of the episodes that establishes the shape of Data’s genitals in canon.
But Data is almost always referred to by male pronouns, and when he’s referred to as ‘it’, it’s deliberately to disparage him and reflects badly on the speaker in context.
Karpel Tunnel, I agree with your points, there’s absolutely a tension in PC culture between demanding the use of chosen gender pronouns and demanding equal treatment for all genders. But my response would be that, in practice, we don’t treat men and women equally, it is a true descriptive statement that there are social sexual roles. Whether or not that should continue, while it’s the case, we should be open to letting people choose their sexual role. There are arguments that this will tend to reinforce those roles, but I think it’s more likely that it will continue to erode the distinction and increase equality. And, in any case, if there’s less stigma attached to switching roles, there’s less problem with those roles existing anyway.
I also agree with your point about drag and blackface, and I’m under the impression that there are people that consider it as similar in both degree and kind (I would bet that there are TERF scholars who take this position). But I also think the Rachel Dolezal case (the white woman who lived as a black woman) was not as straightforward as it was made out to be. Like with sex, there are dimensions of racial difference that have eroded over the past half century in ways that make those cases more likely. Take for example Black English Vernacular, which is spoken by people of all races that grow up in cultures in which that dialect is spoken. Certain elements of race are actually derived from culture, and where race and culture were once more reliably aligned (at least in the US), the correlation is much weaker now, but the concepts surrounding them have lagged. If someone grows up in a culture that would have historically only been open to people of a certain race, there’s a live question as to whether they will identify primarily by their ‘biological race’ or their ‘cultural race’.
I think this is beside the point. First, to your latter question, one big difference is that there are a lot of people who identify as a sex different from their biological sex, and not so many (if any) who identify as a dog or a tree.
Second, how we should fund healthcare is a distinct a complicated question. What counts as a discretionary procedure extends far beyond sex reassignment: Vasectomy? Vision correction? Sleep apnea? Cleft lip? There’s a lot of grey here, and it’s not helpful to inject all that grey as an impediment to resolving the simpler question: There are plenty of pre-op trans people who only ask to be acknowledge in social contexts as the sex that they signal through their speech, dress, behavior, etc. We should grant that to them.
Well, I’m not talking about women or female models, I’m talking about a disembodied voice on a phone.
I should clarify that I don’t think this is usually deceptive. A person anecdote: I grew up in Boston with a bit of the local accent, and my parents have fairly strong accents. I went to school in California and over a couple years, my accent shifted. My friends tell me that when I would go home for holidays, my accent would come roaring back. That wasn’t a deliberate choice on my part, I can’t even perceive the difference myself.This is a common thing, people tend to unconsciously mirror the people their around, in speech, behavior, body posture, etc. It’s part of human social communication, and likely aids cooperation and community.
Another finding I read about recently is that people shift the pitch of their voice in ways that signal their place in a social hierarchy. This happens rapidly, and people’s private evaluation of group dynamics strongly track the changes. This seems more closely related the selection of a social sexual role: people signal how they should be treated by the group. It’s not duplicitous, if anything it’s quite honest.
I’m avoiding it because there’s not a single answer, and in a social setting you will never know why a specific person wants that. You have to make a choice in the absence of that knowledge. I’m arguing that in many other contexts, we make the choice to assign a social sexual role that is not tied to biology. We do that all the time, and so we should be willing to do it for people.
If I know that a specific person is doing it for a bad reason, e.g. to scam the government, or that some other response will be better for them, e.g. they think they’re the queen of England and I’m their shrink, then we can of course make exceptions. But the general rule should be the one we already use in assigning social sex distinct from biology, i.e. go ahead and accept the role they are signaling.
Except that culture and biology evolve separately. We’re talking about a cultural change, and conversations like this one, and the behavior changes they engender, are how cultures evolve.
That relates to how we use social sex. It shows that we already conceive of social sex as distinct from biological sex.
I think this is a fair critique of my position, though not a defeater. The question is, if we remove biology from sex, should we remove it from species? If we treat Siri as human, do we then accept that humanness is not about biology? But my response is, yes. We treat Siri as a human because she’s designed to be interacted with in a human-like way. But we know that we don’t have to feed her or let her vote. Similarly, we treat her as a woman to the extent that it matters, e.g. caller her “her” (and, arguably, ordering her about).
In the same way, we can treat female-presenting biological men as women in social contexts to the extent that it’s relevant, without assuming that they have periods or get pregnant.