That is not an explanation of the origin of the word. Neither does it come close to saying the word did not exist before. — I like sushi

Don't just deny it. Back and demonstrate your points with evidence and clear explanations.

Incoherent gibberish. bye bye

There were no such words as "transmale" or "transfemale" in ancient times. — Corvus

Well, the English language as it currently exists didn't exist in ancient times, so it's no surprise that many of the words we use today didn't exist in ancient times.

The people who changed their genders started to show up in the society, and then the word was made up and put on to the people. — Corvus

You should read up on transgender history. Obviously ancient people and ancient languages didn't use the modern English word "transgender", but transgender people have been recognized for thousands of years:

Accounts of transgender people (including non-binary and third gender people) have been identified going back to ancient times in cultures worldwide as early as 1200 BCE Egypt. Opinions vary on how to categorize historical accounts of gender-variant people and identities.

The galli, eunuch priests of classical antiquity, have been interpreted by some scholars as transgender or third-gender. The trans-feminine kathoey and hijra gender roles have persisted for thousands of years in Thailand and the Indian subcontinent, respectively. In Arabia, khanith (like earlier mukhannathun) have occupied a third gender role attested since the 7th century CE. Traditional roles for transgender women and transgender men have existed in many African societies, with some persisting to the modern day. North American Indigenous fluid and third gender roles, including the Navajo nádleehi and the Zuni lhamana, have existed since pre-colonial times.

Some medieval European documents have been studied as possible accounts of transgender persons. Kalonymus ben Kalonymus's lament for being born a man instead of a woman has been seen as an early account of gender dysphoria. John/Eleanor Rykener, a male-bodied Briton arrested in 1394 while living and doing sex work dressed as a woman, has been interpreted by some contemporary scholars as transgender. In Japan, accounts of transgender people go back to the Edo period. In Indonesia, there are millions of trans-/third-gender waria, and the extant pre-Islamic Bugis society of Sulawesi recognizes five gender roles.

In the United States in 1776, the genderless Public Universal Friend refused both birth name and gendered pronouns. Transgender American men and women are documented in accounts from throughout the 19th century. The first known informal transgender advocacy organisation in the United States, Cercle Hermaphroditos, was founded in 1895.

This doesn't seem like institutionalized-ostracism or social eugenics at all to you? Like how small people historically were considered inferior. Same with those who lacked muscle tone (in a warring society, strength was king). Or even the opposite in some rare enclaves of humanity: those that were muscled and hairier were likened to beasts of burden.

Take Ancient Greece for example where they consider male features now thought of in the modern age as "superior" as quite the opposite (this is talking about penis size):

"On the other hand, the larger ones were used to symbolize the idiots, often dominated by an animal lust and a complete lack of restraint. In Greek art, people with large penises were associated with animals that placed libertinism and obscenity above all else."

You don't see some sort of long-running inter-millennial feud between the meek (perhaps average) and the brawny (perhaps exceedingly average, everywhere but in the mind, thus leading the person to want to be worshiped for his size only to become disappointed and violent upon discovering humanity values more than size and physicality)? I do. Quite clearly, really.

Some ethnic groups and otherwise tend to have what can be likened to as "female" features or characteristics in comparison to others, particularly those whose ethnicity tends to retain youthful features.

Some ignorant, larger, muscled, hairier person (from a race of such) might call these youthful looking people "little boys" or "like women", without even intentionally being mean or vindictive. It's just, how they look in comparison. This happens today, friend. You can look it up and walk the streets and see it yourself. People never change, only the year does. And of course, when someone doesn't fit in, they get treated differently, which leads to mental incongruities, inconsistencies, and idiosyncrasies (ie. colloquially "mental illness"), which wholly and adequately explains any deviating or abnormal behavior.

My point is, people just make fun of people who look or act differently, often giving them titles seen as derogatory. I'm not sure if I'd consider the historic vindictiveness of human nature as some sort of "historic evidence" for transgenderism. At least, not one that "advances" any sort of positive cause or mission related to such.

the absurd position to polysemy means we cannot clarify our use of words. — AmadeusD

:up:

People seem to affirmatively want language to be as confusing and unclear as possible. Things are in flux. We all get that. Plus the context for things is amorphous and fluctuates too. We all get that too. Flux begets more flux. Including in the language it begets. We get that too.

But in all this flux, we can control our language.

But does anyone really want to clarify our use of words?

———

Sex and gender are complex, taken individually, or as two aspects of a single, whole person. Granted. We need psychology, sociology, biology and philosophy at the very least to sort this out.

I stumbled across an instagram reel of a transwoman analyzing the question “Is it true that transwomen are women?” Her answer was no, and her argument was pretty simple, but interesting.

She asked, “what is the one thing common to all transwomen?” And her answer was “they are all men.”

Then she went on to say “transwomen who say they are women are taking rights and hard earned gains away from actual women” and that the notion of “cis woman” was something used by people to hijack and claim “women” for themselves, and take something away from women.

So I think this needs to be parsed and distinctions between ‘man, woman, trans and cis’ need to be clarified, but the long and short of it seems to be:

Men are males.
Women are females.
Transwomen are something new/distinct, being that transwomen are males who give a female presentation of themselves though they are (or were in the case of surgery) male.
Transmen, a fourth distinction, are females who give a male presentation. (Although she didn’t get into ‘transmen’ in her reel.)

This is at least workable and clarifies the use of the new word “transwomen”. Women’s rights and women are different than men and men’s rights (at least some rights are unique to women - special healthcare, special safe spaces). Neither women nor men should be allowed to infringe on the unique rights and needs of women. AND more importantly to the transwoman’s reel, transwomen should not be allowed to infringe on women’s rights either, because transwomen are not simply women and need their own unique rights.

This all cashes out to me. I agree with the transwoman in the reel. She is not exactly the same as a man or a woman - she is a man who presents like women, or in other words, the new gender called ‘transwoman’.

Things are only made more complicated than that because some transwomen don’t think they will have true equal rights unless they are regarded and treated exactly the same as women - same women’s sports and lockers, etc. According to the transwoman in the reel, this is denying all the work women did to stake out their own rights, and denying the fact that all transwomen are men who present as women; they are not simply “women”.

To cash this out further for sports and locker rooms, and protect rights of privacy and security and fairness among differences, for all, we would need 4 different locker rooms, and another sports league (or for all sports leagues look to biology alone to define eligible members since competition among females called ‘women’s sports’ is one key reason for the whole competition).

All seems logical and practical to me.

We can’t force people not to see the full beard and the penis on the transwoman who (otherwise) presents herself as a woman, just as we can’t see beards and penises in all of the females formerly called by our shared language “women”.

———

One result of this is, the notion of “I identify as x…” needs to be clarified (or tossed out as folly). This goes back to language. If words are to function, we can’t just link new things to old words, and privately redefine words, to thereby think we are redefining the things those words are used to refer to. Is a vagina also a penis? Is ‘XY’ thr same word as ‘XY’ yesterday, or is it now also tautologous with ‘XX’ today?

We don’t get to say “I think woman means ‘Y’ and I think I am ‘Y’ so that means you have to recognize that I am Y.”

Language doesn’t work that way.

So it never should have been a question “are transwomen, women?” The answer has to be no, because people who want to be trans need to be able to identify the gender to transition into, so that gender needs to be something for them to choose. That’s a man or a woman. And then for the person who transitions, in order for it to be a transition from X to Y, the transition is precisely changing what that gender already is to some new thing, namely a new gender needing a new word to speak of it without confusion.

———

So really we should invent a wholly new word (‘transwoman’ or ‘transman’ will do) to mean what transpeople precisely are calling people to recognize, and respect, and that is: “although we are different than males who are men and females who are women, we deserve the exact same human rights and protections.” If transpeople want to be able to communicate about what they want and who they are and what is being done to them by whom and by what, we all need to clarify our language, so we can speak, and actually communicate with understanding - and this begs for us to reject “transwomen are women” as an abuse of women and language, stemming from allowing people to define their own private identities (ie. “I identify as a woman”), as if we all can’t see for ourselves things that we already have identified and named together (like penises and breasts, and chromosomes and motherhood and fatherhood, and masculine men and feminine women, etc….)

In other words, if all along, all words were in flux because all identities are in flux, then the male once thought to be a man who wants to transition would have nothing new to transition to, nor anyway to talk about it whatsoever. So “transwomen are women” actually defeats both “woman” and “transwoman”, by not meaning something clear, and by confusing everything that is observable.

I've been sitting back and letting others discuss as I feel I've already made my point in this thread. Your post was particularly excellent, well said.

Well, the English language as it currently exists didn't exist in ancient times, so it's no surprise that many of the words we use today didn't exist in ancient times. — Michael

Yes, I agree.

You should read up on transgender history. Obviously ancient people and ancient languages didn't use the modern English word "transgender", but transgender people have been recognized for thousands of years: — Michael

It is neither my interest of topic nor my specialties in philosophy, so I don't have much to add on the concept itself. However, it seems words came much later after the existence of objects in the world.

And some words like "transmen" or "transwomen", we first understand what the objects are by listening to other folks talking about them, or reading up what the medias saying about them, and then understand the word. Not the other way around. These words seem also not coming from the Etymological foundation of the most other words. For example - "Artificial Intelligence" - if we try to dissect the word etymologically, we get not too far. That was my point.

The people who changed their genders started to show up in the society — Corvus

Check out the biography of Elagabalus. Or read about the The Galli. Or take a read of Of Gods & Emperors: Trans Experiences in Ancient Rome

:up:

It was basically a transwoman’s argument, so I thought it was worth considering.

Upfront, I don't really care to hear about anti-trans perspectives, I want to know from trans allies: are there not legitimate worries in uniting trans identities with their cis-identity counterparts? As in, is there no tension in claims that, for example, transwomen are the same as women? Are there not significant differences in experience between ciswomen and transwomen, such that their identities can't participate identically?

I have no qualms about trans identity, it being defined in terms of one's self, because thats the only way gender identity makes sense from my view (as opposed to how one presents for example), and I am not in support of women that do not accept transwomen's experiences, but I can understand ciswomen's concerns about their own identity, their experiences (perhaps girlhood for example, in contrast to a transwoman that may not have experienced childhood as a girl), and, of course, their physiological experiences. I am not the most informed, but isnt menstruation a big component of ciswomen? The ability to carry a baby? I can sympathize with transwomen in the sadness that they may not be able to live these experiences, but does that not simply mean their experience is unique?

As a final question, why does a trans person want to dismiss their trans identity in that way? Is it that transwomen are women, and ciswomen are women, but transwomen are not ciswomen? Perhaps a clarification of that distinction would help me.

Even having this topic open for discussion at all is something I find surprising because the rules of the forum say:

> "Racists, homophobes, sexists, Nazi sympathisers, etc.: We don't consider your views worthy of debate, and you'll be banned for espousing them."

And the "etc" pretty obviously includes a maximal dogmatic presumption that any challenge to left wing orthodoxy on any questions of social issues whatsoever is clearly disallowed, no matter how civil, no matter how educated. That is what this rule as written means and any disagreement with me on that point concerning what this text from the forum's rules in fact says is frankly dishonest, because words mean things.

Which means I may very well get banned for pointing this out:

The trans movement is fundamentally anti-philosophical and dogmatic. Dissent is not tolerated and even attempting to define the boundaries of orthodoxy so as not to stray from them is against the whole spirit of that community because what's valued there is a vibe, not an idea. Criticism is for apologists to dismantle outsiders with nihilism, not to show the movement itself a way forward. There will never be a genuine philosopher for the trans movement unless it grows past this stage early religions always have.

Saying the trans movement is a "cult" is actually intelligent if by "cult" you mean "early stage of a newly emerging religion" in a historical sense and not in the pejorative sense of the 20th century anti-cult movement. "Cult" after all, is the root word of "culture" and the historical root of cultures as well. It remains to be seen whether anyone within the deeply anti-conservative trans community will ever grow the conservative instincts necessary to conserve their own community in the long term, so that they can eventually grow from a cult into a religion and from a religion into a philosophy. (a process that typically takes at least something around 150 years)

Not that I even want this to happen: I just recognize the historical pattern.

But anyway, about the rules of the forum: this raises the question of why the trans question is being allowed at all. You're not allowed to question feminism or the gay movement, but you are allowed to question the trans movement? Why? What possible combination of philosophy and political theory allows for drawing the line at such a completely abitrary place?

As far as I'm concerned, trans is just gay with extra steps. All these movements are a package deal, not meaningful to evaluate separately. And I've thought for years that, while I understand you need to have some rules to maintain some common ground, a philosophy forum which would ban Thomas Aquinas, were he alive today, can't be any good.

And the "etc" pretty obviously includes a maximal dogmatic presumption that any challenge to left wing orthodoxy on any questions of social issues whatsoever is clearly disallowed, no matter how civil, no matter how educated. That is what this rule as written means and any disagreement with me on that point concerning what this text from the forum's rules in fact says is frankly dishonest, because words mean things. — BenMcLean

The moderators on this forum I feel are usually fair. Is what you're discussing a genuine thing to consider and possibly be wrong about, or is it full of unwarranted presumptions with a clear bent towards an unsavory outcome instead of fostering rational discussion? This was a topic that needed to be discussed and I feel many people got an opportunity to explore it with a rational mindset instead of ideological stand point.

The trans movement is fundamentally anti-philosophical and dogmatic. Dissent is not tolerated and even attempting to define the boundaries of orthodoxy so as not to stray from them is against the whole spirit of that community because what's valued there is a vibe, not an idea. — BenMcLean

As we can find in any religion. But this is a broad stroke against a trans 'movement'. This is an assertion, and if it were to be a topic it would need rational backing beyond that assertion.

But anyway, about the rules of the forum: this raises the question of why the trans question is being allowed at all. You're not allowed to question feminism or the gay movement, but you are allowed to question the trans movement? Why? What possible combination of philosophy and political theory allows for drawing the line at such a completely abitrary place? — BenMcLean

Because this is a question of linguistics, and not an attack on any individual. I'm simply noting common language, and what is most rational for any English speaker to conclude based on the sentence structure. I am not denying that trans gender people exist, accusing them of being less than others, or insisting that gender does not exist. The question is mostly pointing out that the phrase in ambiguous without further clarification, and the most rational conclusion is to assume 'woman' not modified by any adjective, means 'adult human female'.

There is nothing wrong with addressing aspects of feminism as long as you have a good argument. Same with questioning policies that some gay people might want. The question is, is it an actual rational post, or a rationalization to attack other people? There must be a clearly identified problem, there must be an explanation for why its a problem we should consider, and a solution should be presented that can be discussed rationally without assertion. Most people are not good at this, and their motivation for opening up discussions is not to have a rational discussion, but assert their own bias in a way that rarely involves deep and self-critical thinking.

As far as I'm concerned, trans is just gay with extra steps. — BenMcLean

Its not. Trans can be due to trauma, trying to escape a sexist environment, heterosexual inversion (straight men who get sexual and romantic feelings from taking on femininity), and more. To your earlier point, that would be a poor topic lead. Philosophy is not about debating current science, but if the process of science works. Philosophy is not about debating whether trans people are all gay or not, but debating the nature of gender and if it is a reasonable basis for identity. It is about debating the underlying logic they may lead to certain topics, but is not a debate about the topic itself.

This place is not reddit, and as long as people understand what philosophy is supposed to explore, you can dive into any philosophical concept about any topic.

> "Because this is a question of linguistics, and not an attack on any individual. I'm simply noting common language, and what is most rational for any English speaker to conclude based on the sentence structure."

When it comes to gaytrans, language is the battlefield, not held in common at all.

If you go listing your preferred pronouns, then that act is the most definite public signal of your entire political platform that you can make. It guarantees which side you voted for and support in politics 100% of the time. It tells everyone all they need to know without any serious doubt about your stances across the whole slate of public issues, from abortion to zoo subsidies. Even an actual literal Trump hat isn't as clear of a one-sided partisan poltiical signal as that is.

And critically, it doesn't matter at all what the actual pronoun preferences are. Only the fact that you did it alone says everything. (I mean the rhetorical you, not you personally)

How we should use words is itself the critical question. There really isn't any neutral, objective standard of reasonable English to which you can appeal. English is what's on trial. It can't also be the judge.

> "I am not denying that trans gender people exist"

Are you a Catholic?

Do you believe that when the priest says mass over the bread and the wine, that they transubstantiate to become the actual literal body and blood of Jesus Christ?

If you deny that belief in transubstantiation as not being true, then are you attacking Catholics -- or Christ? Because you're certainly denying that the thing they believe in exists.

And for the trans movement, the eqiuvalent of that denial is blasphemy. It should get you ostracized. It should get you fired. It should get you stripped of any public credentials or authority. It should get you banished not just from the public square but from the universe itself.

There's no "separation of church and state" for the trans religion. No "two kingdoms" theory. There's just, ironically, iron clad dogmatic absolutes.

Or at least so far. They'd need to probably have some kind of schism so that they have to deal with significant sectarian problems within their own communities before they'd develop anything approaching liberalism.

That is, if we approach calling transgenderism a religion not as an insult, but as a genuine way of undersatnding their historical development. Which I think is key to comprehending what's even going on with this issue.

> "The question is mostly pointing out that the phrase in ambiguous without further clarification, and the most rational conclusion is to assume 'woman' not modified by any adjective, means 'adult human female'."

That really does entail denying that "trans people" exist. It clearly is saying "trans women" aren't really women: that only adult human females are real women. And that is clearly what the trans movement is explicitly against and has been very vocal about.

> "Trans can be due to trauma,"

Just like homosexuality.

> "trying to escape a sexist environment,"

Just like homosexuality.

> "heterosexual inversion (straight men who get sexual and romantic feelings from taking on femininity),"

This seems to literally be homosexuality? Unless I'm misreading you?

I obviously don't have a degree in gender studies so what I'm saying is not necessarily intended as sarcasm. I really do look at transgenderism as being based on homosexual tendencies that have merely been socialized and politicized under a new branding to manufacture a victim narrative identity, the same way that the "gay" identity was originally manufactured out of homosexual tendencies in the 19th century. (Proudly and openly at the time, I might add, by those who were consciously doing this. They said they were doing this: it wasn't a debate at the time whether this was the case or not)

> "This place is not reddit, and as long as people understand what philosophy is supposed to explore, you can dive into any philosophical concept about any topic."

OK, well, let's hope so, but when I saw that rule, my immediate thought was, "This is totally is Reddit." Reddit is exactly the site I thought of -- that this is just like Reddit, so why aren't these people just using Reddit? But I don't know that it's just like Reddit: I'm only saying that was my thought or suspicion.

More on this; Gabrielle Bychowski has done some interesting research. See Were there Transgender People in the Middle Ages?

The answer is no.
'Men' and 'women' regard sexually mature males and females, and changing sex is impossible. A man might appropriate the norms and stereotypes of women, but they are not female.
The ploy of such men is to occupy the social (discursive) position of 'woman' (an exclusively female category), and their central ruse operates through the discursive power of 'cis'. 'Cis renders women into a subcategory of their own sex so that 'transwoman' can be positioned as an equally valid subcategory of 'women'. This has been extended to 'women who are trans' to establish the categorical position. This is an exertion of power against all women and girls.
In formal discourse we hear such things as 'pregnant people' replacing 'women' and 'mothers'. Women don't like it. They don't want men on their teams, in lockers, prisons or on the Giggle for Girls app. Why can't a girl simply say 'no boys allowed' and have girl only things? Under the sexless-but-gendered story, the exclusion of males from female only spaces discriminates against 'women-who-are-trans' (male) and despite explicitly being told 'No', males manipulate social discourse to worm their way in. It is highly coercive behaviour that undermines female consent. If 'woman' doesn;t mean female, then 'No' doesn't mean no.
Most males have a protective instinct toward women and children, but we are neutered by the gendered narrative such that can't handle males-in-female-clothing (though undressed) who trangress female consent.
The men who disrespect female consent have already transgressed that boundary at the level of their own identity, and by affirming the fallacy that TWareW we are saying that it's not OK for women to have female-only spaces because 'women' are not exclusively female. We are saying a woman cannot say 'No' to males (who claim 'woman' identities).
Only men can be TW, and it's a 'No'

I do agree but there's more to it than this.

The trans ideology has an absurd premise that the word "gender" means what previously would have been understood as only part of gender role -- they posit that gender is just a social role. Never a biological role -- just a social role and that's all. And this is based on the further absurd premise that society is constructed so as to produce these social roles in a way which is arbitrary and elective, not essential or necessary and defintiely not determined even in part by a universal unchanging human nature.

And that assumption that society is arbitrarily constructed and that human nature is not fixed comes from their ideological grounding in Marxism. Marx posited that societies and social roles are products of the class system and that the class system can be changed to produce different societies and social roles. Marx saw social roles as determined, not by a universal unchanging human nature, but by economic determinism, or in other words, by money.

However, because the trans ideology gets its Marxism not directly from Marx but filtered through the heresy of the Frankfurt School, they substitute money for social roles being determined by sexual oppression instead. Still, the reason they were initially open to the idea of social constructionism is ultimately because of their historical / ideological heritage from Marx.

That's why, even though the transgender practices are very obviously a very capitalist product of Big Pharma, to make them reliable customers for life, they can frame this obvious exploitation as liberation, because their worldview says it isn't money that determines social roles: it's social systems of oppresion.

But here's where reality impacts their project:

Gender (or sex, which is in fact synonymous no matter what anyone says) is more than a social role. It's also a biological role. Humans are mammals, designed to send and receive signals concerning the feasibilty of sexual reproduction all day, every day. This is not a product of The Patriarchy bemoaned by feminists: this is either Creation or human evolution or both, depending on which propaganda mill you prefer to shop at.

And when you start engineering signals that intentionally disrupt how the process of sexual selection works for the whole community, then you aren't showing what a wonderfully expressive unique individual you are who sees through the oppressive system. Instead, you screw up and dump interference into the signals everybody else around you is sending all the time.

The most obvious example of this is that men can't be friends anymore, else all the women will assume they're gay, and so won't consider them suitable mates, thus disadvantaging (in sexual selection terms) any men who publicly maintain close male friendships, thus discouraging them from cultivating said friendships. Thus public homoeroticism kills public male friendship at not just a psychological but also at an institutional level. Not because anybody decided there was going to be a formal rule against male friendship in order to persecute gays, and not because they think they might be actively persecuted for being gay, (they won't be) but because you've manipulated and changed the baseline social assumptions about what the sexual signals everyone is sending mean, and in the process, destroyed something very precious and very human.

And that's just public homoeroticism. Transgender takes that effect and only magnifies it tenfold, so that now, overt signals of attraction between the sexes -- the exact kind necessary to carry on the human race at all -- become inherently suspect. Men and women don't know what the hell they're even supposed to be or look for on a visceral level. The new standards and practices this movement advocates don't liberate and support the one different individual and insulate them from xenophobia -- in fact, they jam and disrupt the social/sexual signals for everybody else!

This is a real problem -- not just a religious problem, but a very secular problem -- because it affects birthrates. Not birthrates among gay or transgender people, but across the whole society. The more sexual confusion you dump into the system by making deviant sexual behaviors "loud and proud" in public, the more difficult it becomes to navigate how the hell normal people are supposed to meet up and have babies. And the world is not overpopulated -- that's nonsense. This is killing us.

This is one of the many reasons why sexual deviancy needs to stay marginalized. Not necessarily persecuted, but definitely kept out of the public eye. Sexual norms have a social function which is critical for the long term prosperity and survival of any human community and cannot be modified within certain very narrow guidelines without widespread chaos and destruction in the long term.

In short, the conservatives are right about this.

Once more unto the breach dear friends...

“Transwomen are women. Transmen are men. True or false?” isn’t something we can answer by grabbing a biology textbook and pointing at chromosomes. Words like woman and man aren’t fixed labels; their meanings come from how we use them in our lives, in law, in society, in everyday practice. Language isn’t a static system of definitions—it’s a web of practices, habits, and shared understandings.

So when someone says “transwomen are women,” that statement can be perfectly true in ordinary English, in legal contexts, and in social reality, because those uses of the word woman include gender identity and lived experience. To insist it’s false because of some narrow biological criterion is to pretend there’s only one correct meaning, which there isn’t. We can’t just ignore the ways language functions in the real world.

I’m not saying “woman” means whatever anyone wants it to mean. Context matters. Meaning is negotiated, shared, and socially embedded. You can’t pull an abstract definition out of thin air and pretend it’s universally authoritative. The truth of these statements depends on which meaning of woman and man is operative in the conversation you’re having. In some contexts, they’re true; in others, they might not be—but that’s a property of language, not a reflection of some underlying “essence.”

In short: the slogans are true in the contexts where language and social practice treat them as true, and the only reason people think they must be false is because they’re secretly privileging a single, rigid, biological definition without admitting it. Words don’t work that way.

• Language is polysemous: multiple legitimate uses exist for “man” and “woman”.
• Meaning is contextual: truth isn’t fixed by biology alone nor reducible to private claims.
• Statements like “transwomen are women” can be true in some contexts (social, legal, identity based), and false in others (strict biological categorisation) depending on which use of the term is salient.
• Attempts to privilege one use as “the only correct one” ignore the plurality of language functions and tacit prejudices about what counts as “rational” uses of terms.
  
  

When it comes to gaytrans, language is the battlefield, not held in common at all.

If you go listing your preferred pronouns, then that act is the most definite public signal of your entire political platform that you can make. — BenMcLean

Another thing I do is not make political statements. I'm very apolitical in philosophy and life. I think it distorts actual thought. Politics is often times not about thinking, its about winning. Philosophical discussions should be able to be considered by anyone regardless of political background. They should be just as critical of itself as it should of the topic its pointed at.

And that assumption that society is arbitrarily constructed and that human nature is not fixed comes from their ideological grounding in Marxism. — BenMcLean

This is overly political and I see no evidence of this. No offence, but I'm interested in talking about the topic of the OP, and this is veering off.

Gender (or sex, which is in fact synonymous no matter what anyone says) is more than a social role. — BenMcLean

For the purposes of this discussion, gender is not sex. It is the social belief in how a sex should act in society. They really are different.

The rest is really off topic Ben. I mean this friendly, so don't misunderstand. Philosophy is not about griping about people. Its not about 'a group'. Its about universal concepts, about trying to construct a logical framework in whatever subject you're looking at. That takes careful building from basic premises to a conclusion. What you're doing here is taking a lot of things you personally believe about a group of people, then asserting things you believe this leads to. That's an opinion, not philosophy.

If you would like to practice philosophy with me, feel free to read the OP again and make comments about it. I've also written quite a few other philosophical papers and OPs, so you can get a feel for what philosophy is and isn't. Check out a few other posts if you're interested in learning what its about. But avoid the trolls. You know who they are. :)

> “Transwomen are women. Transmen are men. True or false?” isn’t something we can answer by grabbing a biology textbook and pointing at chromosomes."

Actually, it totally is and we totally can do exactly that.

> "Words like woman and man aren’t fixed labels; their meanings come from how we use them in our lives, in law, in society, in everyday practice. Language isn’t a static system of definitions—it’s a web of practices, habits, and shared understandings."

Uh-huh. And this fluid, ever shifting approach then applies directly to words like "child" and "adult" and "consent." We're no doubt supposed to understand these words, not as a static system of definitions, but as a web of practices, habits, etc, so that we can't point at a statute and say, "This person was underage" because words like "underage" can't be understood in such static, rigid terms.

> "This is overly political"

Yes it is but it's political philosophy and it's historically grounded. I am not using "Marxist" as an accusation or insult, but as the real, openly acknowledged political forebear of a modern political coalition.

> "and I see no evidence of this."

I wasn't aware that my pointing out the historical grounding in Marxism of current left wing movements would be factually controversial. I could definitely go do the research necessary to prove this point historically. Not that doing so would prove the movement false or bad, because I never accused them of being Soviets, just ideological Marxists or more precisely post-Marxists.

I'm anti-Communist on theoretical grounds, but I've grown far more open to socialist economics in the past decade. Some of Marx's critiques of capitalism stick! I would not claim that Marx is a barren field devoid of insight!

> "No offence, but I'm interested in talking about the topic of the OP, and this is veering off."

I really don't think one can really get into the substance of the claims of the transgender movement without getting into its anthropology and the historical development of that anthropology.

The movement is very, very overtly political and always has been. It's very situated in a very specific ideological stack, just as surely as the Pope is Catholic.

Yeah, ok. I'll leave you to it.

If you have a theory of language which appears to break down as soon as you swap out a few simple nouns, then I'd say that's a pretty strong argument against your theory of how we should be approaching language.

Words mean things! Or, as Richard Weaver put it, "Ideas have consequences"!

I recently encountered on another forum a really absurd argument, that, "It's not politics: it's human rights."

That's just so completely absurd, because human rights are the most political thing in the entire world. There's literally nothing more political in all of human capacity for thought than the concept of human rights.

Our society has normalized a great deal of what I call "category laundering" to pretend that the most obviously political things aren't political, right along with the absurd category laundering of men being women and vice versa.

If you have a theory of language which appears to break down as soon as you swap out a few simple nouns, then I'd say that's a pretty strong argument against your theory of how we should be approaching language. — BenMcLean

Ok.

Has someone done that?

In the past (back in my day), transexuals made no claim beyond the true story about being a male who presents as a female. There were bigots that had irrational ideas about that, but most of us just thought it peculiar. It wasn't inherently deceptive and manipulative, so we didn't care and everyone loved the Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Since then, academic theories that amount to TW are W contradict what is observable in nature. I'm a plants guy. In all my years, I have never sexed a plant incorrectly. Somehow I 'misgender' people all the time, but I know what it takes to select for seeds or make a human baby. Conception.
Never mind how the world works. If I say it is true, no matter how preposterous, you are compelled to validate my gender, use my pronouns, and above all, pretend it's legit.
I went to my Niece's soccer game. The opposing side had 5, no less, males on their team, and all us spectators stood around pretending we don't even notice.
TW are W is so preposterous a claim that no one at all believes it. Most people pretend to because there are repercussions for negating the discursive operations of power. If I exclaimed, 'There are men on the field,' I'd be crucified for breaking ranks, banned from all future attendance and disgraced and scorned by all. The counter narrative (true story) is categorised as bigoted, transphobic, and the narrator misrepresented as facist, far right, Nazi, genocidal or what have you, but the reality is, I simply don't believe claims that are so easily falsified.
A TW is a man who identifies as and appropriates stereotypes of women. Doing so is fine but deception is not.
The girls said 'No' and they don't have to justify their boundary, so the entire argument supporting TWAW is nothing more than a coercive tactic to undermine the very principle of consent.
The answer is No. It's not a negotiation. It's final. What now?
The disregard of consent becomes ominously apparent when they prescribe 'gender affirming care' to children. Starting at the youngest possible age, they indoctrinate children with lies about gender. When they approach puberty, this intensifies because the sexual development pathway is about to go turbo. They give them strong drugs and surgery despite them having no discernible ailment, and cause them to be stunted, sterilised and too far down a path of no return.
A child cannot consent to that. Their sex is not a choice in the first place, but to uphold the deception of mutable genders, they disrupt and prevent normal, healthy childhood development. It is truly abhorrent. The discourse is extremely harmful to them.
I was androgynous as a child. People had to ask me if I was a boy or a girl, but there was a truth. I was a boy; not a girl. Now I am a man (my body is male). If so inclined, I could appropriate female stereotypes. Some men like that and more power to them. I like it, but there is a true story: Females cannot be TW because what's true is incompatible with what isn't.
Thanks for explaining all the Marxist stuff. I can't comment or elaborate because I know nothing about it. I'm a Foucault guy, so my narrative tends toward discursive power.

'TWAW' is not rational, but circular. Redefining 'women' to accommodate males sounds something like, 'A woman is a person who identifies as a woman'. So, what is a woman? That's circular.
This is why: females cannot be trans women ergo trans women cannot be female. That dichotomy necessitates the circular statement in question.

The movement is very, very overtly political and always has been. — BenMcLean

And this post is an attempt to get away from that. Its about putting the knives down on both sides and asking some rational questions just about language. Linguistically, the phrase, "Trans men are men," is not detailed enough to truly communicate what it intends, "Trans men are women who take on the gender of a man." If people want to debate the meaning of the later, that's fine. But the point here is that the original phrase is ambiguous and does not clearly convey its message in broader communication apart from its very limited cultural context.

If you wish to post something of your own on the political philosophy of trans ideology, feel free. But its not really what this thread is about, and staying someone on topic is good etiquete and practice.

:victory: