This is interesting, because it seems completely aligned with what I’m arguing. To treat someone socially as a certain sex is to point to the map and say “New York”. We aren’t saying that the picture on a map has an aquifer or a looming problem with coastal flooding, and we aren’t saying anything about Siri’s genitals. Neither are we suggesting anything about the biology of a female-presenting person who clearly signals that they wish to treated socially as a woman when we grant them that.
I was mistaken, Measure of a Man was from the second season:
My argument here is that these works of fiction reflect our existing social norms: we do in fact treat social sex and biological sex as distinct, as evidenced by our application of the concept to thing we acknowledge to be abiological.
A few thoughts to support my claim:
Most importantly, it just erodes the meaningful distinction between men and women. As you show, it becomes harder to make true general statements about women if the set of women includes people with penises etc.
But another way is that it shifts how people signal female-ness. One reason that drag queens go over-the-top in terms of femininity is that they are trying to overcome their biology: as drag queens are by definition not transsexual, they still have many male traits; a flamboyant femininity is one way to outweigh them, so be perceived as feminine despite their male physiology. Similarly, because biological sex affects gross morphology like the shape of the face and body, features which are hard to alter even with sex-reassignment, transwomen may wear more feminine clothes and more makeup to overcome those latent male signals. As a result, as trans people gain prominence, it may be that the most feminine-presenting people in society are trans, and that very strong adherence to traditional sexual roles becomes a weaker signal of biological sex. That means that biological women who want to signal not only their social sex but their biological sex will be incentivized to be less feminine. The example that comes to mind is of the ‘pixie cut’, i.e. very short hair typically only worn by very feminine-featured women. Short hair is a traditionally male signal, but it can be a strong female counter-signal that says in a sense, “I’m so feminine that I don’t need traditional social sexual signals for you to see that I’m a woman”.
I have gotten the impression that anyone who tries to have a rational and self-consistent position on these issues is considered loopy. And with the world being what it is, I have to admit that it’s a bit crazy to take the risk of even engaging in a conversation such as this. But it’s clearly a topic worth discussing, if only so we have a reasonably well thought out response when our kids inevitably ask.
While I think the disease comparison is question-begging, I will point out that we do treat different diseases differently on number of dimensions.
I haven’t taken any position here with respect to law. My argument here is that people who don’t pedantically correct anyone who e.g. refers to Data as a man also shouldn’t pedantically refuse to e.g. call Caitlyn Jenner a woman.
What laws and social consequences follow from that argument are a separate issue. I will say that I don’t generally endorse speech restrictions. There are many things that I would consider irrational or even morally wrong that I don’t think should be illegal.