It’s not a social sex when it’s based on the biological sex. The biological female voice is used in the case of Siri.
It is when it’s not backed up by actual female biology.
To see this, imagine a technology where, as part of a sex reassignment, biological men could get a voice implant that generates female speech in the same way Siri does. Now are you OK calling them female? After all, they aren’t merely socially female when their voice is “based on the biological sex”, just like Siri…
I suspect you don’t find that compelling, but I think there is some tension between your positions.
Sure, I am oversimplifying. But earlier, in a general way, in the Left, message was more unified and less contradictory. And that’s just on the Left. Of course there were contradictions, but in general there was a core message that was not. Now there are much stronger contradictions in the Left.
Where I disagree with this, is that the same factions in the Left are self-contradicting. And they get a lot of air time and they are making polices in schools, governments, businesses.
But, then, so what. If my point was that the Right is better because the Left is self-contradictory, then fine. My point is that the Left has gotten more self-contradictory. Which means that if a child is primarily in that subculture there is a new problem. And since the Left is running with this new PC with incredible effectiveness, I think it is a big problem.
The Right has it’s own messes.
It’s a bit like when I used to criticize either the US or the USSR back in the Cold War. I would get the response that I sounded like a fascist or a communist, or a Reaganite or some radical anarchist. And the people would then tell me how bad the USSR was or the US was. As if this negated the problems of the other. As if, say, US foreign policy became better because Russia did X in Hungary or against its own citizens. Or as if, say, Russia was not so bad because of what the US was doing in South America. A process often mirrored, it seems to me with Democrats and REpublicans. In any case it was often quite funny to find the labels I got one hour to the next.
Pick a team, defend it, attack the other team. If you attack Team A, then you are on Team B.
I think it is meaningful to generalize. I don’t think its all up in the air as the above would imply. Sure, of course there are exceptions, but there are trackable trends.
I worry when I see young Leftists spout things that make no sense in relation to other things they say. I don’t remember that. Of course there is always naivte, but I can’t remember kids being bombarded by Leftists with ideas about their sexuality and gender in such a messy way. And kids tend to get swept up on one side of the spectrum. Which means they had a better chance of having some consistant view, at least about themselves. Sure, the advertising industry got in there and films. But I saw a base. Today I see a desperate rage and fear defending opposites.
It seems like you are saying that it cannot be different now, because the patterns were present before. Now, of course, I could be estimating incorrectly, but you seem to be ruling it out per se. I don’t see why. Is it impossible that the messages young people are getting aimed at them by the Left are more contradictory today and this is adding more stress? Is it possible that the ideas about women and men being pushed are adding more stress than when the Lefts main position was more like let’s not limit a girl or a boy based on traditional ideas about their strengths and weaknesses, interests and temperments`?
I don’t think that is impossible. In fact it seems likely to me. It seems experimental to allow teenagers and younger to block the natural development of their bodies before they really know themselves at all. And since we both seem to think that teenagers are with some regularity confused, why other than profits for some, allow them to block the hormones in their bodies at such early ages, especially given the Left’s contradictory ideas about ‘women’s feelings’ and ‘men’s feelings’
I think that changes in the messages can move in positive more easily integratible directions and also in a negative direction. I also obviously think it has gotten worse. Unfortunately this experiment with changing the physical development of children’s bodies and indoctrinating them even within one major political block with contradictory ideas about gender and biological sex, is likely going to take decades to sort out. Adn there is very little scientific evidence to support the values of the physical treatments they now use with increasing regularity on children. If this is pointed out, part of your response is: well, teenagers have always been confused. I don’t think that holds. And the very least some kind of precautionary principle seems the minimum critical response.
You already addressed the men as biological men which is at core the issue. They will always remain biological men and off of that we make our assessments in how to address them. Machines do not start out as biological men who are trying to socially qualify as women which is a point I made earlier about addressing a machine with a female voice as a male, that type of notion about social sex doesn’t align with reality. What you are suggesting we do doesn’t align with reality either.
My position: while transwomen are predominantly men and should be addressed and conceptualized as such, some of them are neuropsychological and to a lesser extent physiological androgynes (and both neuropsychology and physiology are socially meaningful) likewise with transmen).
They should embrace their masculinity, and femininity, perhaps cultivate them both, instead of denying, downplaying or repressing a side of themselves as the far right and far left would have them do, or attempting to obliterate their masculinity via dangerous sex reassignment steroids and surgery, just as psychologists encourage people suffering from body integrity identity disorder to refrain from amputating their limbs, to work on integrating that part of themselves which feels alien.
But the far left would much rather have specimens on which to radically experiment. Notice how the left pays very little attention to other forms of gender non-conformance. It’s like they want us to believe the only people who’re gender nonconforming want to mutilate themselves, even if that’s not their intent it’s likely very damaging.
The far right arguably doesn’t have any power anymore when it comes to identity politics, it’s been on the defensive for some time, I mean when’s the last time you heard a rightwing politician or mainline talking head say transwomen should stop cross dressing because God forbids it or it’s disgusting, outrageous and perverse?
While not everyone on the left has an agenda/is incapable of having a fair and balanced conversation about this and related issues, I believe the progressive elite do, for reasons already given and more.
We’re not just dealing with competing visions of how to make society fairer and freer, we’re dealing with an elite that’s not only hostile to the people, but to life itself as we know it.
They will corrupt, manipulate and radicalize both aspects of the left, and right in pursuit of total dominance of every person, every life form, every cell on this planet.
That is true more generally if we were to say it’s a human voice… so ought we say Siri is human?
Being female and having a female voice are two different things… being human and having a human voice are two different things.
Having the courage of a lion and being a lion are two different things…
Carleas, this is common sense stuff and a tremendous red herring…
They do, they share some pattern… otherwise we couldn’t recognise it on the map or we would say the map is inaccurate.
What we mean is “you are the female of the species” in as accurate a way as we can discern that, which may or may not include genetics.
Yes if we INSTEAD mean something else… it would have other implications.
I can say “Carleas is from jupiter” without it being delusional IF we redefine the meaning…
But this redefining of gender as separate from biological sex is an ad-hoc invention because we don’t like the thought of participating in the establishing of a delusion.
If you called Siri an it instead of a she, you wouldn’t be in error, and sometimes we do, and no one objects.
Its femininity is artificial, figurative, metaphorical, semblative, not literal.
If a man is a woman in circumstances where he can pass for a woman, is a sociopath an empath in circumstances where he can pass for an empath?
Do we refer to and treat the sociopath as an empath in those circumstances?
Is a child an adult in circumstances he can pass for an adult?
Do we refer to and treat the child as an adult in those circumstances?
Would that not be deceptive, dangerous and cognitively dissonant to do so?
I’m arguing for continuity of identity as opposed to the fragmentation of it.
I don’t think that’s the best analogy. Because many do treat kids as adults if they show the right behavior, maturity, caution, knowledge or whatever the criteria are. It is harder for the law to do this, though it does do this, heck even the courts decide to try people as adults and decide that some adults really can’t be considered adults.
I share much of your concners in this through, though I do think there is a very small minority of people whose brains or souls, really make it so they thrive better living as the opposite sex. But I think these are few and far between.
Karpel Tunnel, Gloominary, I’m not interested in engaging farther on left vs. right, at least in this thread. I apologize for engaging as much as I have, it was a distraction from my argument here.
What if we take a Ship-of-Theseus style hypothetical, where attributes of biological sex are swapped one at a time, and at the other end the person has 100% of the attributes of the other sex. Do we agree that 100% of the attributes of the other sex makes them the other sex?
Assuming that’s so (because I don’t know what one would appeal to to deny it), there must be either some sufficient attributes or some sufficient proportion of attributes. You seem to want to say that something like chromosomes are that attribute: if a person has XX chromosomes, they are a woman. Is that right? All other attributes swapped surgically, someone born a man has a functioning womb installed but retain XY chromosomes, he’s a man?
This goes to a point Mad Man makes:
Most uses of “man” and “woman” aren’t statements about chromosomes. They aren’t statements about genitals. They aren’t statements about sexuality or reproductive usefulness or about anything biological. It’s not redefining anything to say that I have no idea what virtually all the men and women in my life have going on in their pants, and that that information isn’t relevant to whether I consider them a man or a woman.
As actually used, in practice, statements about sex aren’t statements of genetics or genitals. To insist that that’s so is to deny reality.
So, yes, it matters “what we mean”. And when we use sex to refer to Siri, we aren’t talking about genetics or genitals either. Really, it doesn’t matter if it’s representational or whatever, it conveys a social meaning about Siri to call her male or female.
Take the NY map example from the other direction: it’s meaningful to say that the map is NY, right? We know how to misinterpret that to make the statement false, and we know how to interpret it to make it true. Can the same be done with woman? We can do it with Siri. Is there no way to interpret “She is a woman” in a way that makes it true as applied to Caitlyn Jenner?
We’re fine with “He is a lion”.
We’re fine with “Siri is female”.
We’re putting our foot down with “Caitlyn Jenner is a woman”? Something else is going on.
Sure, we might treat a more mature kid a bit more like an adult but not as an adult by say like letting them drink and drive.
And if we were out at say a dinner party, and we refer to and treat an adolescent there exactly like an adult, when we know they’re not an adult, because they can pass as an adult, people who don’t know the adolescent so well, might get the wrong idea, and pursue an unhealthy relationship with the adolescent.
Carleas wrote
You are not saying NY equals NY, you are saying Boston equals NY. If Siri has a male voice, should we call her female?
I mean, we’re also talking about calling some human a lion.
No. Do you think we should? How does this support your position?
Yet calling some human a lion wouldn’t be describing zebra like qualities. Transwomen have men’s voices, yet you say not to call them female.
Humans have human-like voices, not lion-like voices. It seems like to call a human a lion, you’re asking for a single metaphorically-plausible lion-like attribute, and to call a man a woman you need 100% of all attributes to be literally biologically female.
By extension we should call a butchy biological woman a man even if it offends her, is everyone comfortable with that?
I don’t think this follows exactly, but I take your point: if we expand the scope of “man” and “woman”, people who don’t want to be classified as men and women may be inadvertently mislabeled. Two problems would be that this could do whatever harm to those mislabeled individuals that we’re concerned is currently being done to transmen and transwomen, and, following Karpel Tunnel’s arguments, it could incentivize closer adherence to traditional gender norms.
I think this is not particularly problematic, for a few reasons:
First, I think we should give nearly dispositive weight to a person’s clearly expressed preference. Most people make efforts to communicate their intended social sex, they are generally successful, and we should assume that they are the local expert on the matter.
Second, there are already cases where social sex is just ambiguous, and people do OK with figuring it out. It’s also often possible to avoid any social sex-dependent behavior pending more information, or even indefinitely if the ambiguity persists.
And third, most people who are social sexually ambiguous are likely to be aware of it, and are not likely to be particularly offended if you get it wrong (further, those that do get offended by reasonable mistakes are likely to be easily offended anyway, so the difference from baseline in terms of harm due to offense is low).
This strikes me as an edge case to an edge case, but the absolute numbers of butch women vs transmen do make it possible that we would do more harm than good. But for the reasons I give, I find it unlikely.
Demonstrably false… we classify all sorts of life forms as male and female constantly.
There is next to nothing similar in either appearance or social treatment between us and trees and yet trees are meaningfully classified as male and female.
In fact, biology is arguably the most well defined and essential distinction we have between male and female…
Even you rely on it to generate meaning to your definitions of man and woman.
Why not apply the above rational to say Caitlyn Jenner is a male because he is LITERALLY a biological male?
You’d think that would be the logical conclusion as he doesn’t just have some superficial qualities that make him “similar” to a biological male… he LITERALLY is one.
We don’t interpret what people say so that they make sense, we try to infer their intended meaning from context.
Unless you indicate to us that you’re a crazy person, no one will think you are being literal when you call a ship or Siri “she or her”
But when you refer to people or even trees (or any biological life form) as she or her… we will think you mean literal biological female.
Because that’s the only context in which gender has a literal meaning.
And that’s EXACTLY why men who wish they were women would ask you to refer to them as such… so they can more easily forget the fact that they are not.
They want to live that fantasy… and I’m not saying we should necessarily deny them that… but we don’t need to do the sort of mental acrobatics that you’re performing here in order to do so.
If in fact we decide that’s the moral thing to do.
I disagree with your use of the word “literal”. Social sex is not the same as biological sex, so to say that someone is literally socially a man does not make a claim about that person’s biology. This is easier to see in places and times where social sexual roles were more rigid and distinct: Casmimir Pulaski was literally socially a man, and there isn’t anything that subsequent analysis of his skeleton can tell us that will change that he lived his life as a man and was recognized as a man and was granted access and honors and distinctions which simply weren’t available to women at that time – he was literally socially a man.
To deny that that is a legitimate, literal use of “man” is just question begging.
Right. And the intended meaning of a transman who communicates that he’s a man is pretty clearly not “I am a man in the same sense in which botanists consider certain trees male”. There are other senses of “man” that correspond to the social signaling of sex, that communicate mutual expectations about behavior and treatment, and that just aren’t about genitals or chromosomes or trees. We use those senses frequently and without confusion in similar contexts, where we ignore biology and defer to social signals, and there’s nothing but obstinate refusal to infer someones intended meaning that prevents us from doing the same here.
“Social sex” just means “The social treatment of a given sex” which becomes meaningless if that social treatment is no longer conditional on the person ACTUAL sex… then it’s just a social treatment.
But YOU do not get to dictate your social sex any more than you get to dictate your social intellect or social hair color.
Society decides how they treat people of a given sex or hair color or whatever other REAL characteristic we decide warrants a distinct “social” treatment.
We’re going in circles dude… we’ve been here, I’ve made my counter arguments to this line of thinking already.
Yeah… that’s why you felt the need to say “transman” and not just “a man”
That’s why we have a word for that already… you know, a biological WOMAN who would like to be a man…
The discussion ought to be about WHAT treatment being trans warrants… Not whether or not they are REAL men or REAL women, because they are not and that’s the fucking problem to begin with.