Calling people degenerate is bigotry.

Even if it really is degenerate? This is the basic, colloquial definition of bigotry:

“obstinate or unreasonable attachment to a belief, opinion, or faction, in particular prejudice against a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular group.”

You are begging the question because you are presupposing that my belief that, e.g., “engaging in BDSM is sexually degenerate” is true is unreasonable and false; but that’s the whole point in contention here, and what you are doing is labeling me with a word that no one wants to be labeled with so that it is easier to evade contending with my claim.

Do you think engaging in BDSM, e.g., is not sexually degenerate? If not, then what would count as sexually degenerate under your view and would any concession of the possibility of sexual degeneracy be considered bigotry on your view?

 If I said theists are delusional and need to be cured of their magical thinking, that would be the same thing.

Firstly, I don’t think all members of the LGBTQ+ community are delusional. Secondly, you could very well make the claim that theists are delusional and I would ask you for your reasons why and contend with them without name-calling.

Notice that you haven't presented an 'argument' to refute.

This isn’t directly relevant to the OP: you ended up critiquing a claim I made to someone else on here. The natural ends of a sex organ, as a sex organ, is to procreate; which is exemplified by its shape, functions (e.g., ejaculation, erections, etc. for a penis), and its evolutionary and biological relation to the opposite (supplementary) sex organ of the opposite sex.

Your contention seems to be:

Now, even if we take a neutral view that human bodies evolved over time to have certain functions, that still doesn’t amount to an argument against using a penis for anal sex

A function is just the modern term for design; and I understand that I didn’t make an argument for why it is wrong. I was giving you an example to demonstrate that it is bad. Badness is the privation of goodness; and goodness is the equality of a being’s essence and esse. Rightness and wrongness are about behaving in accord or disaccord with what is good (respectively). If you don’t agree with me that it is a privation of the design (or ‘function’) of the human sex organs to be put in places they are designed to go, all else being equal, then we need to hash that out first.

 if it can be done, it's natural.

Not everything that is done is natural. By ‘natural’, in natural law theory, we mean that it flows from the nature of a given being.

Agency allows beings to freely will against their nature; so it can’t be true that every act is natural.

when a man puts his penis in a woman’s mouth, is that also a violation of design according to you?

Yes.

Or using fingers for typing?

Fingers are designed to be used to press, pull, and grab things: that’s there evolutionary purpose. That’s why thumbs are so awesome.

Who decides what counts as a violation of usage and who decides what counts as design?

Not who, my friend, what. The nature of a being is ingrained in them. We can come to know that nature through introspection, science, metaphysics, etc. E.g., we can see, through studying biology and empirically living in the world, that human’s are supposed to have two arms: this is a part of what it means to be a human being as opposed to, e.g., a dolphin.

Not really. If you say gay and tans people are deviant, you are saying bigoted things. You are presenting a moral judgment founded in bias and stigma. It's textbook bigotry.

You are just begging the question: why is it a bias and stigma? I presented non-biased, rational, and cogent reasons for, e.g., homosexuality being a privation of human nature. We haven’t dived into transgenderism as a mental illness that much yet; but the same can be done there too. Why do you so conveniently assume your opposition is operating under a bias and prejudice? What if I just assumed right back at you that you are being biased against my view and biased in favor of LGBTQ+?

That's just an example of argumentum ad populum. I'm sure as many Americans probably think the world is only 6,000 years old. Who cares how many think something?

I am not suggesting that it is true because a lot of people believe it. I was bringing that up because you seemed to be evading the discussion by name-calling and acting like this view is niche in America. I am just noting it is not niche at all.

Saying “the penis isn’t designed for anal sex” isn’t an argument; it’s just an unsupported assertion

My friend, every claim is an assertion; and every premise of an argument is an assertion. You ask me why homosexuality is bad and I give you a cogent example: it’s fine if you don’t agree with it and we can dive in deeper, but this idea that ‘because it is an assertion it is baseless’ isn’t legitimate. Every statement is an assertion. Reason works by working finitely at an argument: it starts with first-order reasons, then second-order, etc.

Anyway, I'll let you have the last word since this seems to be going nowhere. I suspect that we don't have enough in common to build a productive conversation. I have nothing against you as a person and wish you well. I have no doubt that you are sincere and doing the best you can with your thinking and I would say the same applies to me. I’d be interested in a thread soem time about how we can have conversations with people who don’t share basic axioms or frameworks, and how we can develop a society that allows for pluralism.

I wish you the best as well and I have no doubt that you are genuine and sincere in your pursuit of the truth. I think we could try to find some common ground if you would like.

I believe we have discussed this before. Allowing evil is itself a kind of evil. God permitted the Holocaust, for which he must take at least some responsibility.

I believe we did discuss this before too: allowing evil may be evil but is not necessarily evil. E.g., if I can only save a person from getting murdered by doing evil, then allowing the evil of that person getting murdered is morally permissible and, in this case, obligatory. You are omitting a crucial distinction between the moral evaluation of omissions and commissions.

This is an easy mentality for intelligent and learned people to fall into.

I agree with everything said here; but it doesn’t address my point. I am not trying to convey that we should have a superiority complex, posture, or gate-keep: I am saying that how one conveys message is contextual to the audience that they are trying to receive it. You have to convey things in a simplified way to the average person to get them to gravitate, or even think about, your view. If you sit down and give an elaborate theory philosophically in front of the average, hard-working American; they are not going to understand you: not because they are stupid, but because they lack the education on that specific topic. We are all affected by this too: there’s plenty of topics I am grossly uneducated on as well and someone educated on it would have to dumb it down for me too.

Having spoken with you over the years I am sure you have nothing but good intentions. However, this is a philosophy board and not a political one. Being simple in language is a virtue, but treating people here as simple is not. People want to be inspired by thinking about something in an enlightened way, not riled up against a perceived enemy. The enemy is not other people here, but unclear thinking captured by unwarranted assertions and unexamined assumptions.

Over-simplification is not a virtue; but being able to convey a message in a contextually useful way that is simple for people to understand is...and that is what I am advocating for. I do see and agree with your point: I agree that we should be intellectually virtuous, and I am not suggesting we should do otherwise. I am pointing out that you have to make your message receptive to your audience, and also helpful for them to avoid semantic traps. Gender theory is a gigantic semantic trap—as you yourself even admitted (if I remember correctly)—and I am providing an alternative view that uses a different schema to help ward of that trap.

Since I think people on this forum (excluding some like yourself of course) seem to be incapable of dealing legitimately with an opposing view that they adamantly disagree with; I am going to rewrite the OP, while preserving the original content, to use the schema that conceptually separates gender and sex to help them understand my position better. At the end of the day I am only interested in furthering the discussion to get at the truth; so if rewording it helps then I am fine with that.

Declaring without a carefully reasoned and referenced view as to why trans people are sexually deviant is an attack on a section of people, which I feel we should all be careful in doing in a thinking forum. What makes them deviant?

Firstly, this wasn’t in the OP: I mentioned this to someone on a broader discussion about politics. This is not a claim I am making that is pertinent to the OP.

I think the LGBQ+ community is a community of sexually deviant people: they embrace sexuality in an grossly overly-exhalted way and engage in what would be normally considered sexually extreme or deviant acts. Granted, ‘sexual deviancy’ tends to be evaluated inter-subjectively (on what the social norms currently are); but having oral sex, anal sex, engaging in pornos, having orgies, enjoying sissification, BDSM, etc. are all sexually deviant acts that are a part of and quite closely connected to that community. Even in the case of less deviant people, like a less deviant homosexual couple for example, they tend to do deviant sex acts (like anal sex, for example). There are sexually deviant straight people too.

Philosophy is about questioning, exploring, and understanding. It is why I avoid politics in philosophical discussions, because I feel the two can rarely meet together properly.

The problem with this is that philosophy is supposed to inform politics. My metaphysics on gender and sex are informing my political views on gender theory and vice-versa for my opponents. Politics is not separable from philosophy.

Just a reminder not to get too wrapped up in passion that we forget the role of philosophy here. Careful definitions, attacks on words and not people, and listening to and addressing others concerns even if it appears they are not being charitable back.

Fair enough and I agree!

That's utterly irrelevant to what I was saying. I was arguing that inserting a penis in an anus violates the natural ends of both organs.

Thomson's violinist analogy is so obviously right in its conclusion

Is it?

I can't fathom the thought processes required to come to the conclusion that

Well, that’s a problem. I understand why someone would conclude that they could cut the cord...otherwise I couldn’t really say that I am right in my conclusion that they are wrong. How do you know I am wrong about it being immoral to murder the violinist even towards the good end of saving yourself if you don’t understand why someone would take that position?

Just to be clear, is that really your position?

P1: Murder is the direct intentional killing of an innocent person.
P2: It is wrong to murder.
P3: Directly intentionally killing the innocent violinist is murder.
P4: Therefore, directly intentionally killing the innocent violinist is wrong.

What you are saying is:

P1: Involuntary use of a person’s body is a violation of a person’s right to bodily autonomy.
P2: A violation of a persons’ right to bodily autonomy is wrong.
P3: The innocent violinist is using a persons’ body without their consent.
P4: Therefore, it is wrong for the innocent violinist to use the person’s body without their consent.

What you are failing to understand is that the violinist is not the one violating this person’s bodily autonomy: it is the person who hooked them up to them that committed the violation and consequently the immoral act. Now, the violinist and the other victim are stuck in a predicament: how do they go about resolving it? Can they do something immoral to resolve it? No, but you are arguing “yes”: you are saying this victim can murder the violinist to resolve the situation. That’s wrong: two wrongs don’t make a right. Wouldn’t you agree?

One's penis can go anywhere one chooses (with consent). But anal sex is not compulsory, right? No one is saying it is, although it's a common heterosexual activity. And a question of 'design' has not been demonstrated. A penis fits inside holes. Are you also against sticking a penis in a woman's mouth? Where do you get the idea that any particular kind of sex act is somehow wrong?

To clarify, are you answering “no” to my question?!? You really don’t believe that a penis is not designed to be inserted into an anus?

I get that ‘design’ might be a strong word for you; but wouldn’t you say it at least is contrary to the ‘natural functions’ of the penis?

I am saying a particular kind of sex act is wrong if it is contrary to the natural ends and teleology of a human. I think this even holds in atheistic views that are forms of moral naturalism like Filippe Foote’s ‘natural goodness’.

There is a moral arbiter here, but you've not identified him. He is the one always working behind the scenes to try to censor the things he disagrees with instead of arguing against them.

@Banno, I try my best to avoid making serious accusations against my opponents and I want to be as charitable to them as possible, but given the staunch hatred I am getting on this thread for trying to discuss a basic and prominent topic I am inclined to agree here. This thread has unintentionally exposed members of this forum that are pro-censorship and that favor name-calling over intellectual conversations. With that being said, I truly commend @Jamal for respecting free speech here, although they disagree with the OP.

I did no such thing.

I apologize: I thought Jamal said you did—I must have misunderstood.

However to be clear, if it were in my power I would delete the thread as failing, under the mentioned guidelines. But it's not my call.

Ok, but this goes back to my main point: it is saddening that you are so anti-free-speech. What you are advocating for is to censor anyone who comes up with an alternative view to gender theory. This is a discussion with major philosophical backdroppings that needs to be sorted out in America and has profound influence on the rest of the world.

"Quiddity" treats essence as a thing to be discovered.

Correct; and to be clear: you are an anti-realist about essences if you disagree with the above quoted statement. You would have to be nominalist...that’s not a trivial commitment to have.

How are we to understand quiddity apart from our conceptual apparatus - apart from our use of language?

Linguistics isn’t identical to conceptualizations; but, beyond that, yes: if you are a realist about essences—if you are one of the many people in the world who think that, e.g., two humans really share a nature—then you have to explain how that works. The only way it works is if there is a unity—a whole—to a being which provides its intelligibility: there must be an actualizing principle. This provides the essences to things.

Possible world semantics makes no such metaphysical commitment

Your view seems very centered around possible world theory...which is fine; but, again, if you disagree that essences are real then you are saying that humans do not share a nature, two chairs don’t share a nature, etc.---viz., you are a nominalist.

This is just the age-old debate between nominalism and form realism rehashed.

as if it were a mere dogma of modality; it is, whether you like it or not, the very language in which modality is made coherent.

Firstly, I reject possible world theory (but we can discuss that if you would like). Secondly, why would we need to reject that, e.g., two humans share the same nature in order to accept that, e.g., possibly X is equal to X existing in some possible world?

And yet the result of that "purposeful collapse" is an inability to distinguish constructed social role from biological fact, and the claim to have demonstrated that biology determines social role

It doesn’t collapse in this way because I am claiming that the only social aspects of gender that are legitimate are those that are the upshot of one’s procreative nature; so there may, and usually are, social expectations and views of gender that are patently false that a society may have.

In your view and the modern gender theory view, it is impossible for a society to get a gender wrong; because it is purely a social construct. Sure, you may quibble with epistemically how to hash out when it is a true social norm that X gender does such-and-such and presents themselves in this-and-that manner; but fundamentally gender is inter-subjective on this view. It is anti-realism about gender akin to anti-realism about ethics: e.g., people who debate whether men should wear dresses are not giving judgments that express something objective no different than how people who debate whether killing babies for fun is wrong are not giving judgments that express something objective (under moral anti-realism).

You do no have to attend a drag show, but you have not given good reason to prevent others from doing so.

Because it is:

1. Harmful to children and incentivizes them to harm themselves;
2. Gravely harmful to the adults (participating); and
3. It exemplifies grave evil that society should not be condoning.

I'm not saying you are a bigot i said what you wrote was bigoted

This is an important distinction, but my rejoinder would be essentially the same. I don’t think you are writing bigotry by opposing stereotypical conservative values and beliefs. It seems way to convenient to label your most prominent opposition in America as all writing bigotry by noting that homosexuality, transgenderism, and sexually degenerate behavior is bad (for those participating in it).

 "Let's cure those deviants."

Imagine someone believed that transgenderism was a mental illness called ‘gender dysphoria’, akin to (but not identical to) someone with schizophrenia. Would you consider them a bigot or purporting bigotry by noting that we should help cure people with transgenderism just like we help schizophrenics???

 I think that’s fair; he was big on re-educating dissenters. What you think about Stalin is irrelevant to my point.

I don’t believe in re-educating dissenters. I am fine with free speech; however, it is commonly accepted that people who are extremely mentally (or/and physically) unwell need desperate help and they may be confined for a while for their own safety to themselves (like suicidal people for example). Should everyone who has a mental illness be put in a camp? No.

Wouldn’t you agree that being homosexual or transgender is a result of socio-psychological disorders or/and biological developmental issues?— Bob Ross

No, and this is another bigoted position.

Then you are, in fact, labeling your opposition as bigoted instead of refuting their position. I could easily say the same thing about your views: it doesn’t help further the conversation.

I don’t know you to establish how seriously you offer this, but that sentence reads like something a child would write, surely? I can't help but feel some compassion for you that your religion appears to have made you so reductive and homophobic.

Notice that you didn’t engage with what I said because it is obviously true. A sex organ is not designed to be inserted in an anus; even if you believe that it is morally permissible to do so. The fact you resort to name-calling as an evasion technique instead of rebuttling my position is saddening.

I could be wrong but from what I read here my view would be that it might benefit you to stop hiding behind theories, metaphysics, and fundamentalist religion, and get out into the real world. Spend time with lots of different kinds of people for a few years. Maybe some real-world exposure will help you understand the diversity and beauty in people who differ from your prescribed notions. And that perhaps what needs to change is you, not them.

Instead of making baseless assumptions about my life, begging the question, and name-calling; why don’t you just contend with the view?

That said, I’m glad you feel confident expressing your opinions here for us all to explore. It’s interesting to see what comes out in response, Perhaps it reveals a little more about the true nature of some of our members.

You do understand that the hugely popular conservative view right now in America is that transgenderism is a mental illness—right? You keep pretending like this is a crazy, outlandish, bigoted, and ‘transphobic’ position to take; and keep straw manning the position with name-calling and baseless assumptions to evade engaging in the discussion. Acknowledging that something is a mental illness does not entail that one hates people who have it….do you really not believe that???

With all that being said, I am always open-minded and would be glad to discuss the OP with you if you ever decide to engage with it instead of straw manning it with baseless name-calling. If not, no worries and I wish you the best Tom!

It is rather difficult to make sense of all this decarative definitional stuff, because your definitions are not clearly distinguished

What part of my definitions were not clear?

and at the same time fail to account for the variety of human behaviour and social relations

On the contrary, it accounts for the behavioral aspect of gender by noting that it is the upshot one’s nature; thusly avoiding the critical confusion of thinking gender is divorced from sex.

To be honest, I might just opt-in for the other schema I was playing with, of which I noted also depicts essentially the same ideas I am noting with the equality of sex and gender, that holds gender and sex as conceptually but not really distinct. That might help people avoid this (invalid) rejoinder that I am not accounting for the social aspects of how biological sex will tend to express itself.

Males can include gays, cross dressers, celibates castrati, none of whom tend to 'serve the role of providing, protecting, impregnating, etc. a female.'

Yes, but they are fully men because they have male souls; and they simply aren’t, in existence, properly living up to their nature.

I'm here, Bob.

I am glad to hear that, believe it or not (:

Next time, please tag me in the post so I get a notification. I just happen to see this post and otherwise wouldn’t have responded at all.

 I held off because it looked to me as if 
↪Jamal
 might be about to do something in accord with the guidelines, but it seems not.

Unless @Jamal would like to make the horrifying but typical liberal mistake of censoring those that have different philosophical views than them that help further the discussion on major political issues in America, I would suggest that the best response to a view that one gravely disagrees with is to contend with it and dismantle it for all to see instead of trying to put it in pandora’s box.

I would like to also say that I am disappointed that you decided to report the thread instead of contending with the ideas; especially since this touches on a very interesting debate between liberals and conservatives in america right now—this isn’t a niche position I am taking here (at least in America). The fact you would prefer it get censored is disheartening to me.

You claim your approach is neo-Aristotelian, but apart from the name, there's nothing to indicate why

Good question! It is Aristotelian because I am using his metaphysics through-and-through here, albeit it more Aristo-thomistic. The key metaphysical distinction I am making between the form and matter of a human is Aristotelian; and the very concepts of ‘substance’, ‘soul’, etc. I used are Aristotelian.

You say sex is "a distinct type of substance", a very odd phrasing; as if we could put sex on a scale and measure it's mass, or wash it down the drain

Interesting you would say that, considering I am openly using Aristotle’s metaphysics. A substance for Aristotle is an essentially ordered unity that exists by itself (e.g., water, iron, etc.) as opposed to an unessentially ordered unity for another (e.g., a chair, a table, etc.). Essentially vs. unessentially ordered unities is an essential aspect of Aristotelian thought.

More recent work uses possible world semantics and talks of essential properties rather than substance. An essence here becomes a predicate attributed to an individual in every possible world in which it exists.

That’s fine, but this would also be true for an essence as used in Aristotelian thought if one accepts possible world theory. I personally don’t, but I am willing to grant it for the sake of our conversation to see what you are thinking. An essence is just a quiddity: it is that is essential to a thing that makes it that thing. This is perfectly compatible with your description (although it is not a definition), given possible world theory, that it is about predicates “attributed to an individual in every possible world in which it exists”. That is just to reiterate, without defining an essence, that an in every possible world in which a being exists it would have to have its essential properties.

That is a much more workable definition than the nonsense of "that which makes something what it is, and not something else".

It’s just a broader definition that doesn’t require possible worlds theory. PWT has many issues with it.

CC: @Leontiskos

Keep offering philosophy to those who don't rise above name-calling. :up:— Leontiskos
That had me laughing out loud. No way to talk about our god-king Horus, though.
…
Do you follow this? Should I dumb it down a bit more? 

If you and I were in the middle ages, I would imagine you as a priest and me as a peasant and you would be mocking me for not being able to read the Bible while also refusing to teach me how to read.

Sex is physical, gender is social. Your insistence that they are the same substance is ridiculous

I am not interested in throwing insults back and forth, but I do want to note that you suggested I am too stupid to understand possible worlds theory in modal logic and then blatantly used the term ‘substance’ incorrectly. Neither gender nor sex are a substance…

Irregardless: why do you believe gender is “social”? How would you define each?

The latin genus referred to the classification of nouns — masculine, feminine, or neuter. So historically, neuter is one of the categories that “gender” originally encompassed.The original meaning of “gender” already included the notion of “neither male nor female”

Yeah, but that wasn’t applied to people (except in rare cases); and it was used to refer to something other than a person that couldn’t be meaningfully given a gender. ‘Neuter’ doesn’t refer to an actual third gender: it is a lack of gender.

So again, you are stipulating that there are two genders, determined by sex, and then pretending that this is a discovery, that it could not be otherwise.

Banno, I noted many times in this thread that I don’t mind if someone wants to make a virtual distinction between sex and gender: I am purposefully collapsing them to avoid confusion. Someone could make essentially the same view I am but conceptually separate gender and sex. The issue liberals have is that they try to make them really distinct as opposed to virtually distinct.

You are right: I am claiming that maleness and femaleness are a part of the real nature of men and woman; and this is different than the modern metaphysics smuggled into biology (although I wouldn't say either are incompatible with biology).

As Leontiskos said here, a male has the essence of maleness independently of how imperfectly he instantiates it in his existence. There is a metaphysical distinction between the form (act) and matter (potency) being made here that really helps clarify how gender and sex operate (irregardless if one believes they are conceptually distinct or not).

You didn't even try to answer the question, because you know I am right that the sex organs are not designed to be put in the anus (irregardless if you think men will tend to do it or tend to like to do it).

Yes. You are suggesting that if the negative consequences of doing the right thing are too great, then we shouldn't do it. If I could only save myself from extreme torture as opposed to simply getting murdered by murdering someone else, that wouldn't magically make me murdering someone permissible. What if me murdering this person saved the rest of humanity from endless suffering? Still not permissible.

"Liberal agenda" in the true sense of the phrase

You are splitting hairs here. Everyone knows that liberalism as a popular movement in america has agendas just like conservatives do.

:up:

It's actually certain feminists (who tend to be overwhelmingly liberal) who reject the idea of transwomen being in their bathrooms, or getting social services as women...these women tend to be insulted as "T.E.R.F"s by trans supporters

That’s fair, but modern fourth-wave feminism tends to support transwomen. Traditional women that are of the earlier type of feminism are the one’s insulted.

 The bathroom issue is a liitle more dicey, because kicking them out of women's bathrooms means forcing them to use men's bathrooms, something people shouldnt do to each other

Why not? You are a man: you should use the men’s bathroom. You are a woman: you should use the women’s bathroom. Should we create a bathroom stall for every gender they make up? Should we have one family bathroom that everyone has to take turns using?

I dont get hostility towards putting something different on your drivers license or the drag shows: in the former, it just makes it even easier for the police to identify you 

It hinders the police in their investigations: every important trait of a person that they can generalize is tied to sex and not this ‘gender’ as a ‘personality type’. Police officers don’t care what you identify as or how you decide to dress or present yourself: they want to know when they come to scene if they are about to deal with a male or female to be able to tell how hard it will be to detain or arrest this person. Dealing physically with a male is generally wildly different than a woman.

 explicit trans labeling

I think there should be some record of people’s known mental disorders. It is useful for police to know, e.g., that this person is schizophrenic.

I wouldn’t say it needs to be a specific note on the driver’s license that they are trans or that they are mentally ill, of course; but when they look up the license it should tell them of any past history of mental illness (which I would imagine they already do).

 drag shows

I don’t think drag shows should be legal. They expose children to sexually degenerate, explicit, and dangerous content and behavior that is unhealthy for them. Likewise, I don’t think adults should have to experience that either.

Isn't this just the problem or flaw with monotheism? If everything flows from one entity, then that entity is responsible for everything. Since many events are evil, then that entity must be at least partly evil as we conceive it.

No. Evil is the privation of good; and other persons in the creation could be responsible for its introduction.

It doesn't matter that he was explicitly killing everyone in the OT

It matters because God then would be doing something evil as opposed to merely allowing the evil of someone else.

Sex - Expected social behavior based on biology. It is statistically more likely for men to be aggressive.
Gender - Expecting a man to be aggressive and thinking, "You're not a man if you're not aggressive" even though it is a statistical reality that there will always be men who are less aggressive than women on average. The expectation is not based on biological likelihood, but cultural prejudice and expectations despite biological reality.

That’s fine, but I don’t think that is how gender theory nor my theory uses the terms.

There is no biological reason for a woman to wear a dress or ribbons in their hair for example

There is. Women tend towards things that are feminine. You are viewing gender in a sense of something that is purely a social construct, which is what liberals want because they can make these exact arguments. If there is no biological underpinning for women wearing dresses, then it is irrational and prejudicial to socially condemn men that wear dresses.

I understand the idea and I cannot say you are right or wrong. Only that I do not believe in a soul, so cannot hold this view.

Fair enough.

If gender and sex are separate as defined, then there is absolutely zero rational connection between one's gender having any justification for being in cross sex spaces.

For liberalism, the argument tends to be that we should only care about gender for treating people. This is why they push for bathrooms to be segregated on the basis of gender instead of sex; allowing transgenders to put their ‘gender’ as the opposite on their driver’s licenses; allowing men to play in women’s sports; etc.

I completely agree with you that we should care about sex and not gender if we are using the term ‘gender’ to refer to something completely divorced of sex.

But does that justify control from a religious viewpoint to a secular declaration of marriage? I would argue linguistic limitations to control thoughts is wrong no matter who is in control.

I partially agree. Firstly, I think politics is an upshot of ethics; so this secular idea of making ethics a personal hobby doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t think ethics and the nation are truly separable, although I agree with the original intent behind “separation of church and state”.

I agree, secondly, that we should try to be intellectually virtuous in politics; but unfortunately, pragmatically, rhetoric is really important to explaining things to the average person. Normal people don’t do philosophy like you and I where we dissect ideas and follow rationally what we believe is correct: most people just listen to political debates online or on the media that are fully of fallacious thought and convince them of one position or another. Most people are sadly moved by emotion and not reason.

Think of it this way. If you needed to convince people in a public political debate of your position, you will not succeed by trying to have a robust conversation like we are doing now. You will succeed by using loose terminology, simplifying it down, and being a good debater (speaker). The consequence of using loose terminology is that you have to reject your opponents terminology instead of being charitable. I’ve learned that politics is a much muddier and bloody process than philosophy.

 I think the definition of words themselves as a means of control is wrong.

I agree in the sense that we should be aiming to provide precise definitions and get at the truth; but political debates don’t allow the time or resources to be able to have a super robust conversation like in philosophy. What I am doing here is attempting to help people by using language that helps them avoid the conflations and sophistry meant to deceive them in gender theory: I’m trying to help them but in an oversimplified way to reach the average person.

Fantastic discussion as always Bob! We may be taking different viewpoints on some of this, but I do understand where you are coming from. Your political views are your own and I am fine with whatever they are.

You too, my friend!

Banno, if you were paying attention, you would know I have noted many times in this thread that someone could make a virtual but not real distinction between sex and gender and I wouldn't have any major issues with it. The bottom-line is that gender is not a social construct.

To me they seem to be founded in bigotry, but no doubt you think I’m wrong too, so I guess we’re a microcosm of our times.

The difference between us, I would suggest, is that I don’t think you are a bigot for thinking there is a difference between gender or sex; or even holding stereotypical liberal views I reject (if you do). A bigotry charge is a serious accusation: why do you think people who disagree with your political views are all bigots? Or is just those who reject gender theory? Or perhaps my account of gender and sex?

The issue for me is that no one has the right to use another person’s body without their consent, even to preserve life. For the pregnant, this means a person is not morally obligated to sustain a fetus, regardless of whether it is considered a “person,” because a right to life does not include the right to forcibly use someone else’s body. And this principle applies universally: just as no one is required to donate a kidney or remain attached to life-support to save another, no one can be compelled to maintain a pregnancy, making abortion permissible on the basis of bodily autonomy and self-ownership.

I hear where you are coming from; but you are overlooking a consideration of how one can uphold their rights. You are not wrong that one has the right to not have their body used against their consent; but this doesn’t mean that someone can do anything they need in order to avoid their body being used against their consent. By analogy, I have a right to life: I have a right to not be directly intentionally killed when innocent. However, I do not have the right to do everything in my power to avoid getting murdered. For example, imagine someone is going to kill me but gives me the option to go murder someone else to get out of it; and let’s say I know with 100% certainty that I will get murdered if I do not commit this murder (so I can’t escape or something) and if I murder this other person then they will honor the agreement (thereby avoiding my own murder). Can I do that? No. The ends do not justify the means. What you are missing here is that a person is not permitted to violate someone else’s rights to uphold their own.

For example, if you were kidnapped by an evil scientist and this scientist surgically connected you to another innocent victim whereby you could live without being connected to the other victim but NOT vice-versa. If you were given the option to either surgically remove this other victim from you and thereby re-gain your bodily autonomy (assuming you do not consent to the situation) OR you have to continue to have your bodily resources being used to supply life to this other innocent person, is it morally perimissilbe for you to cut the cord? Of course not. You cannot violate this other person’s right to life to uphold your own rights: that’s a bad means for a good end.

Your idea that we can “cure” them seems antediluvian or Stalinist. Let’s cure gay people too, huh?

I don’t support Stalin: that’s a blatant straw man. Wouldn’t you agree that being homosexual or transgender is a result of socio-psychological disorders or/and biological developmental issues? Do you really believe that a perfectly healthy (psychologically and biologically) human that grows up on an environment perfectly conducive to human flourishing would end up with the desire to have sex with the same sex? Do you think a part of our biological programming is to insert a sex organ into an organ designed to defecate?

Do you get your moral views from a particular interpretation of Christianity?

I get it from Aristo-Thomism.

:up:

I don't know why @Banno never wants to engage. :confused:

Maleness and masculinity aren't the same and I never suggested otherwise: they are conceptually distinct. Gender and sex, under my view, are not. Being male is having a nature of the procreative type that serves the role of providing, protecting, impregnating, etc. a female: it is based off of sex. Masculinity is the traits that males naturally gravitate towards, but are not traits that only males could exhibit: same for femininity. Everyone that is male is a male fully in essence but is imperfectly one in existence.

Nature. Have you never heard of Natural Selection?

Yes I have: what’s your point?

And what do we actually mean when we say that "gender is a social construction"? Wouldn't that mean that for a person to transition between genders they would have to transition between societies (as in moving from one country to another, or from one region to another)?

Not necessarily; but I am not interested in defending gender theory. My position was against gender theory; and your role as a critic would be to defend it (unless you are agreeing with me or have an alternative theory).

And how is a social construction equitable to a personal feeling? By declaring gender as a social expectation we are defining gender as the expectations of society as a whole, not the feelings of an individual that run counter to those expectations

It’s a confusion of both. The individual sees that other people are treated differently than them based off of their nature (e.g., a man noticing a woman can wear a dress); they want to be treated that way (e.g., he wants to wear a dress); so he starts mimicking what normally would be associated with being female. Gender theory tries to rationalize this by saying that gender is just those social cues and expressions—not the expectations of society—and so someone can legitimately present themselves and thereby be that other gender (so now you are allegedly irrational for thinking the man should not be wearing dresses because he is a woman now qua gender). It’s sophistical nonsense.

The fact you will never engage with me on any topic and continue to gate-keep, superficially name-drop, and posture makes me believe, if I am being honest, that you don't have a metaphysical theory you adhere to.

I think I have built enough rapport with you for you to know that I am sincere in my efforts and I will happily and unapologetically concede any points I think are good from my opposition. You are saying, as many times before, that I am simply ignorant of some newer metaphysics that would swipe Aristotelianism off its feet and I am, as usual, asking you for what they are. You refuse to lead the horse to water, and the horse is parched....

Instead of making baseless accusations, I would challenge you to actually contend with the points I made. It is uncontroversially true in America that what I explicated is the liberal agenda (although, as I noted to @Tom Storm, some of the language they will disagree with [like calling abortion murder]).

Fair enough!

In my view the substantial form of the body, the soul, is what accounts for the nature of a human....

1) For individuals to live free of bigotry and for homosexuality and trans people to be able to live as they want.

True, but this is the underlying reason why they support some of the agendas I gave: you are just supporting my claims here. I understand some of my language they would not agree with because it begs the question (like calling abortion murder), but generally those claims do hold.

2) A woman's right to have bodily autonomy and self-determination.

Yes, at the expense of murdering a child. Having an abortion is like hiring a hit man to solve your problems. I’m tired of people acting like abortion is a niche and complicated issue: by historical standards of murder, it is murder. No one would argue that, e.g., I didn’t commit murder if I used someone against their will as a shield to jump out of a window of a burning building to successfully save myself from the excruciating suffering of burning alive...even if it was the only way for me to save myself...and yet if a woman’s life is on the line in pregnancy its fine to directly intentionally kill the innocent person in the women.

The only complex aspect of abortion is whether or not one believes personhood begins at conception—not if autonomy “trumps” the right to life.

. Trans people exist, have always existed, and will continue to exist, denying them serves no one. Why not simply accept this reality?

I am not, nor is any mainstream conservative, arguing that trans people don’t exist: that would be silly. Trans people exist as a person of the gender they have independently of which gender they want to be: they exist as mentally ill people who desperately need our help to cure them. They have really high anxiety, depression, and suicidality that is needs to be addressed. Now, a liberal might argue that pragmatically the best way to deal with those symptoms is to affirm their gender: to conform their body to their mind; for me it is to conform their mind to their body.

Minor issues, such as prisons, toilets, or sport, can be resolved and are distractions from the deeper question of identity. I'm not interested in how we choreograph prisons or sport to accommodate an evolving understanding of gender. Let's leave those to social policy processes.

For you, then, what are the ‘major issues’ related to transgenderism?

What do you have against trans people? Is it ultimately that you believe they go against God?

I have love for transgender people as all people. I want them to be able to live their best lives; but living a good life is relative to the realization of their essence in existence—not bending reality to what they desire. I think we should have government programs for studying transgenderism to cure it and they should have programs that help transgenders be cured. Admitting that affirming transgenderism is immoral does not mean that we should stigmatize it and make it completely illegal to talk about it. We need to make transgender people feel welcome and safe enough to get help; just like we do with schizophrenics.

Lmao. You always do this: you posture without actually engaging with me. If you think there is some metaphysical theory out there that is better than my own view, then I am all ears as usual. You never provide any.

To be clear, I am not interested you just name dropping a book: I want you to forward a position that you find plausible that I can discuss with you. If you aren't up for the challenge, then I don't get the point in you posturing.

1. i personally think it has to do with differences in terms of what rights people think they should have have...for example, lots of completely heterosexual liberals want people to freely practice "those deviant behaviors", but are indifferent as to whether or not they do it, it's a matter of what they should be allowed to do, rather than enforcing homosexuality...etc.

Yes: this fits their liberal agenda of providing people with maximal choices to choose from and autonomy: the selling point of liberalism is that ethics is supposed to be divorced from politics. My point was that there are liberal agendas: you are shifting the goal-post.

2. transgenderism in a legal framework, no unified agreement...not something i hear a lot of liberals advocating besides transexuals and their supporters

What do you mean by transgenderism being a legal framework? It’s a ideological view that one can convert to a different gender.

Liberals are advocating for “transgender rights”, drag shows, etc. in America rit large: this is not a niche position that liberals support people having affirming gender care and being able to transition.

3. the "no enforcible immigration policies" is an extreme left-wing or anarchist point of view, it's not the kind of thing advocated by your typical liberal. Biden and Obama both intensely enforced immigration policy, the severe drop in mexican immigration we see now started at the end of the Biden administration...

That’s true; but right now we see people actively supporting illegal immigrants, even to the point of helping them evade ICE, and condemning mass deportations. Liberals don’t really support deportations in practice.

4. That's a fairly loaded way to discuss abortion, it's a purely moral framing as opposed to a consequentialist or ecnomic/social way of looking at the problem.

Consequentialism is a family of normative ethical theories; and morality is the only way to properly evaluate abortion. Economic and social aspects of the discussion only supplement the position one holds relative to ethics.

These are all differences in how people think policies should be shaped, none of them are really "agendas" unless you apply the same logic in reverse (i.e., opposition to gay marriage is a "conservative agenda"), it's a basic part of representative democracies for differences in opinion to exist.

An agenda is “the underlying intentions or motives of a particular person or group”. Unless you think that liberalism doesn’t by-at-large forward those positions, then I don’t know why you think it isn’t an agenda. Likewise, I agree that conservatives have agendas: I have agendas. Everyone has an agenda.

:up:

But since I am a male, and a man, and have procreated as proof, I declare that long hair and flowers are male traits and symbols, and whatever behaviour I demonstrate is by definition masculine behaviour

As a side note, I commend and congratulate you on having a kid (or kids): having kids is a wonderful and challenging thing.

Your argument is not valid, though ):

You are arguing that “if a father exhibits a trait, then it must be masculine”; but this divorces masculinity from the nature of man and swaps it for whatever subjectively any given father does. As a clear demonstration of this absurdity, it leads to obvious contradictions: if father A plays chess, then chess is masculine; and if father B is against playing chess, then chess is not masculine. Now in the event that A and B are fathers it follows that playing chess is both masculine and not masculine.

the old testament was likely part of some ruling class's doctrine on why they are superior; one part of the old testament that supports this is how Lot's daughters got him drunk in a cave and had sex with him to continue the bloodline of their family. It's a blatant appeal to lineage.

The old testament is an attempt at giving a narration of what they believed was Divine Revelation by God (even if it wasn’t); and recording lineages was an aspect of giving a historical account of what was happening.

I think it has to be a combination of my theory on it being used as part of a social control scheme and number 2#.

The idea that the Biblical scriptures were a product of insanity or elitism seems implausible given that they were recording as different times and over a long period of time. It was and still is a generation-by-generation effort. You would have to believe that these were historically unfolding for the purpose of aristocracy…

 If you have observed children, you'll see that they have spontaneous imaginations: when humanity was early, they just didn't have access to the type of accumulated knowledge we have today, so they stayed more childlike in terms of belief and explanation.

To some extent this is true, but this begs the question by assuming that the Bible doesn’t have truth in it.

Interesting. I just don't understand how that ontologically would work; other than if there is some atemporal connection we have to each other.

But no one is divorcing them, just distinguishing. But still, we hippy males like to wear flowers in our long feminine hair too

The fact that you called it feminine concedes that you do think gender is tied to biology….

Can you come up with examples of liberal agendas? There are liberals, there are agendas, but "liberal agenda" paints a unified conspiracy when political agendas always have to do with money and power.

Liberalism in America tends to want the social and legal acceptance of:

1. Sexually deviant, homosexual, and transgender behaviors and practices;
2. The treatment of people relative to what they want to be as opposed to what they are (e.g., gender affirmation, putting the preferred gender on driver’s licenses, allowing men to enter female bathrooms, allowing men to play in female sports, etc.);
3. No enforceable immigration policies;
4. Murdering of children in the womb;
Etc.

I appreciate your response!

I think, and correct me if I am misunderstanding, you are viewing gender and sex as distinct; whereas my model here admits of no such distinction. Granted, I think semantically someone could cut it up differently where gender and sex are virtually (conceptually) but not really distinct and I may have no major quibbles with it. I am purposefully retaining an equality between sex and gender to avoid ideological and political confusions and agendas.

 its not a gender expectation that you see most men being taller than women, that's a biological expectation

Under my view, since gender and sex are the same, it is a gender expectation that men tend to be taller than women. This view is making a metaphysical distinction between the form (act) and the matter (potency) of a human being; where the form is the actualizing principle, the simple unity, the soul, which informs the body of what it is supposed to be (relative to the essence or quiddity of a human being). The soul, this form of the body, is innately gendered: there are two types of human souls—male and female.

I think under your view, and correct me if I am wrong, human beings are just a collection of organic parts; and so sex is purely the collection of organs and organic parts functioning together to provide some specific procreative role (e.g., maleness or femaleness). At this point, if we stipulate gender is equal to sex then you end up with essentially my view with respect to everything that truly matters for the political side of things; but under your view I would imagine gender is not identical to sex. Gender, as far as I cant tell in your view, is the social expectations of a person with a particular sex—is that right? If so, then this is the meat of our disagreement; because I would say that, if I were to conceptually distinguish gender and sex, gender is the social expression of sex. This is important because an expectation is not necessarily the upshot of biology. I think true gender, if they be conceptually separable, is always properly connected back to biology; otherwise, like I noted before, it explodes into triviality, prejudice, and irrationality.

 if someone always expected every man to be taller than women or they aren't 'a real man'.

This is a real problem for the kind of metaphysical account of the body that I expounded for your view (which I do not profess is accurate of your position of course per se); but not a problem for mine. Why? Because in your view ‘sex’ is just a collection of parts operating towards some procreative role and, consequently, there is no embodied essence of being a male or female; as each person is male or female only insofar as they sufficiently have enough of those parts and organic functions to count as one or the other. Technically, under this view, if you swap out enough sex-related parts of a human then you could achieve a sex change.

Under my view, on the contrary, human beings have a real essence embodied in themselves. This ‘code of what it is to be a human male or female’ is not identical to DNA: it is really there in their soul, which is the form, the simple ‘I’, the unity, which guides their biological development. This means that each human has the full essence of being a human male or female since conception but developmental factors can thwart their essence being realized properly in time. A woman would is infertile, e.g., is still a woman because she has a human female soul: the essence is there—not merely an abstraction of a collection of body parts making her sufficiently female (e.g,. DNA, fertility, sex organs, etc.). Even if a woman were inhumanly materially changed to lack the vast majority of stereotypical organic traits of femaleness she would still be a female under this view because her soul is female and to truly transition sexes would require killing her and creating a new human of the opposite sex (because her soul is what in virtue of which she is alive).

A real man, then, is not one that is necessarily taller than a woman—because the biological process can be inhibited or altered in ways where a woman could be tall for a woman or vice-versa—but a human substance that has a male soul.

Words change meaning all the time

Your statement here and thereafter are very true; however, semantics do matter in colloquial and political settings. I am merely noting a political stand that we need to conserve the meanings of the words to avoid liberal ideology where men go into women’s bathrooms or participate in female sports. Of course, I recognize that one could make an apolitical (virtual) distinction between sex and gender and note that sex is what really matters: I don’t have major issues with that.

So, what ended up happening? We added an adjective to marriage to clarify what type of marriage it is.

This is exactly my point. Semantics in colloquial speech are tools, nay weapons, for pushing agendas. You control what the average person believes by controlling the linguistics they have at their disposal. For people like me who want to conserve the meaning of marriage and do not support gay marriage, it naturally seems like a rhetorical attack to try to morph the term ‘marriage’ to include other types. Of course, if someone agrees with the political agenda of giving people a wide range of marriage types, then by all means they should morph the terms.

 But it was never intended to be an honest switch. It was intended to hide the use of trans sexual and expand the legal and civil rights of cross sex identity to those who could not afford it or were willing to go through the surgery

Agreed. This is why I have chosen to explain the gender vs. sex distinction differently than conceptually separating them to avoid the liberal agenda of making them really distinct (viz., purely a social construct). If they are purely a social construct, then we need to completely restructure our society to be hyper-libertarian.

There was a psychologist named Leon Festinger who came up with a theory of cognitive dissonance.

This is very interesting, and I could see this happening with all sides of debates. Thanks for sharing!

although I would personally avoid the term 'iiberal' because I most people will equate that as a political issue instead of the philosophical classification you are using. This is an underlying attempt by a small faction to persuade society to accept them through deceptive and conflationary language.

My philosophy here is politically motivated, just to clarify. I am collapsing the two conceptually to avoid people confusing them as really (as opposed to virtually) distinct; while retaining the obvious differences between the expressions of sex (what they would call gender) and sex itself (what they would call sex).

I don’t think the idea that gender is purely a social construct is niche in liberalism: they tend to push agendas that affirm that gender expectations are irrational, immoral, and hateful because they are not anchored in sex. After all, if women wearing dresses is purely a social construct, then how could someone be justified in viewing a man wearing a dress as wrong? Gender theory is an attempt at ad hoc rationalizing radical freedom to push people into feeling bad for having expectations of gender roles and identities.

Because if we are to use this definition of gender is written, the obvious conclusion is: "If gender is purely cultural, then you do not have a viable reason to be in cross sex spaces. Gender and sex are different."

True, but liberals tend to view gender as what matters for public spaces—not sex. They see sex as this irrelevant nature between someone legs that should not dictate how their life should go.

Cardinal Sarah put it the best: “gender ideology is a luciferian refusal to receive a sexual nature from God”.

When we say "healthy" this should only mean biological

I was referring to biology there insofar as the human develops properly in accord with their nature ingrained in their soul.

Gender as a cultural construct can never be objective

Gender is the procreative type ingrained in the nature of a substance: it is not a cultural construct. What we know of and can expect out of the tendencies and expressions of different genders is culturally and individually determined, like all knowledge, but should be the upshot or expression of something objective—it should be grounded in facts about gender (sex).

This is fitting, as I am a merely a feeble peasant...

Agreed. I view gender as socially enforced/acceptable prejudice and sexism.

To a certain extent I could see that when it comes to the more loosely associated aspects of gender to sex (like hair style); but a lot of it seems to be legitimate to me (such as feminine vs. masculine traits and behaviors).

In post-modern society we are very inclined to treat people as if by being a person they are the exact same as every other person; but a “person” is an abstraction: not a kind of substance. Having personhood is an aspect of certain natures—not a nature itself. Although men and women have the same moral worth, they are not equal in nature. They have different roles (teleological) in the human species: they are the yin and yang that solidify the survival and harmony of the species. To discriminate based off of sex just means to differentiate—to treat differently—based off of sex; and this is not per se wrong. You get a woman flowers when you wouldn’t have if they were a man; you draft men and not women for wars; etc.

I mentioned to another poster here that the game is to get you to say a trans person is the other sex without having you think you're saying a trans person is the other sex

Exactly! Or it is a convoluted game of noting the superficial point that there are an indefinite amount of personalities that someone would express.