you seem to be saying that position B is essentially sexist. Would that be correct?
— Bartricks

Yes.

The idea that you can become the opposite sex ignores biological reality and embodiment. Women are the main losers because men who have dominated women for millennia can now claim to be women by wearing a dress and lipstick and undermine them and win at their sports and get women of the year awards and invade spaces designed for the protection of women against male violence.

Being a woman is then reduced to the superficial not biological reality. — Andrew4Handel

I don't think subjectivism about sex is very plausible. But I don't see why it would be 'essentially' sexist to endorse the view (stupid, perhaps, but not necessarily sexist).

I take it that one way to be a sexist is to think that women 'ought' to behave in certain ways, have certain attitudes and so on (and likewise for men). So, it is not a view about what makes someone a man or a women, but about what you 'ought' to do and feel etc, if you are one or the other. So it is that normative element that makes it sexist.

But to think that you are a man or a women depending on whether you hold those attitudes, behave in those ways etc, though quite silly as a philosphical position, is not itself sexist, as it is not a normative view. It is descriptive, not normative.

It's just that many who hold the normative view are led by it to endorse the descriptive view. They reason, presumably, something like this: this is how women ought to behave.....I am behaving in that way......therefore I am a woman. It's fallacious reasoning and has a sexist premise. To make the conclusion follow one would need to put in a premise expressing the truth of B. And thus the slightly more reflective sexist will be driven to endorse B. But that doesn't make B sexist, for the sexism was expressed in the premise that said "this is how women ought to behave; or ought to think; etc".

So I think B may be quite a silly view, but I don't see that it is essentially sexist, even though many sexists (of a certain sort) may end up endorsing it.

Well you have just found a problem with the notion of science. In what sense is any observation not a personal account? — Andrew4Handel

To intentionally use the pun, science has made controlling for all sorts of errors in personal accounts a science. Scientific observations would employ said controls. Your personal observations are most certainly not controlled.

But there is science as well. For example men are taller on average than woman. — Andrew4Handel

Sure; humans are sexually dimorphic. But note that you're immediately jumping to averages, because the dimorphism in heights isn't all that extreme. There are plenty of short males and tall females. This is child's play compared to the sexual size dimorphism found in spiders.

Lauren Laverne identifies as female and is much taller than Chase Strangio who identifies as male. — Andrew4Handel

This is also anecdotal. Incidentally, are you sure you really mean Lauren Laverne?

What I find problematic is the desire that everyone pretends that a male is a female (or vice versa) and even actually believes they have become a female/male because of self identity. — Andrew4Handel

Do you really think a biologically born female and a trans female lack recognition of their historical and current differences and that hey live in a delusional state, or do you think maybe they see as clearly as you do, but it's really a civil rights issue and a desire not to be treated like a freak?

If you think you're enlightening anyone with your clarity, you're not. You're just demanding a rigid classification system that will do nothing more than further ostracize, attack, and bully an already oppressed and vilified super minority. You bring no light to this issue in any sense.

Since I assume you don't live with the delusion that you will effectively scold the ttans community into submission to your will, can you at least acknowledge their existence is not being made more HEALTHY by your and your ilk's berating?

This is also anecdotal. Incidentally, are you sure you really mean Lauren Laverne? — InPitzotl

I meant Laverne Cox. Yikes.

. But note that you're immediately jumping to averages, — InPitzotl

How did humans create 7 billion of themselves? It is not an average it is a huge majority of humans displaying sexual dimorphism. Puberty blockers , hormones and genitals surgeries lead to the evolutionary dead end of infertility.

Unlike some species humans cannot spontaneously change sex and remain fertile.

Since I assume you don't live with the delusion that you will effectively scold the trans community into submission to your will, can you at least acknowledge their existence is not being made more HEALTHY by your and your ilk's berating — Hanover

I do not think trans people exist. No one can change sex. I have posted a video of a young man on here who had his penis destroyed to due to gender ideology. I have never met him or had any influence on him.
The number of detransitioners is far greater than trans activist propaganda will have you believe. Encouraging children to deny their biological sex is gross child abuse and gender "reassignment surgeries are mutilation. There is nothing healthy, progressive or truthful about this movement.

It has relied on huge amount of deception, lies censorship, cancel culture, suppressing research etc.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/sep/25/bath-spa-university-transgender-gender-reassignment-reversal-research

If you think a penis can be turned into a functioning vagina I would question your sanity. It is a wound that will keep on trying to heal if you don't use a dilator this is probably why 70-90% of trans women keep their penises. Blaire White has kept hers and has used this description of the neo vagina.

My response to this conversation is.... Who the hell cares unless the OP is in the closet. I say live and let live.

I meant Laverne Cox. Yikes. — Andrew4Handel

That would have been who I guessed you meant.

How did humans create 7 billion of themselves? — Andrew4Handel

Not sure why you're asking me this question.

It is not an average it is a huge majority of humans displaying sexual dimorphism. — Andrew4Handel

What is the antecedent to "it" there? We were just talking about sexual size dimorphism. I specifically cited sexual size dimorphism in spiders to contrast. Now suddenly you're talking about all sexual dimorphism.

Puberty blockers , hormones and genitals surgeries lead to the evolutionary dead end of infertility. — Andrew4Handel

There's nothing normative about evolution. There is no "scientific mandate" to reproduce.

Can a male be turned into a female? How? — Andrew4Handel

IMHO, a male cannot be turned into a female (likewise, a female cannot be changed into a male). What can be done is a change of clothing, hair style, makeup, gait, and so on. Prescribed hormones can do what hormone disorders can do -- give men breasts and women mustaches. A surgeon can slice away unwanted giblets or can fashion wanted ones.

The upshot? The man is still a man. The woman is still a woman. Can they pass? They can, if they are good at it, Going back centuries, some men have passed as women and some women have passed as men. Were the fakes to be examined with a little care, their real sex would be discovered.

The credibility of a view is not affected by who endorses it - so the fact many sexists endorse subjectivism about sex isn't, in itself, evidence that the view is implausible.

So ignoring entirely who does and doesn't endorse it, is subjectivism about sex at all plausible? I think the answer to that is a pretty clear 'no'.

There are a variety of subjectivist positions available, all quite implausible.

For example, the view that you are sex X if you think you are sex X is incoherent. For thoughts have content, and so the thought that you are sex X needs to have some content - that is, the thinker needs to be thinking something. What are they thinking when they think they are sex X? Well, whatever they are thinking - whatever content their thought has - will express a view about what they think being that sex involves. And thus it will involve more than just 'thinking' you are that sex.

So that view - you are sex X if you think you are sex X - makes no sense and can be dismissed as incoherent.

Then there's what we might call the 'performative' view. A performative is where you make something the case by doing or saying it. So, "meeting adjourned" is a performative. For saying it will - if you are the chair - adjourn the meeting. Likewise "I promise to pay you $5" makes it the case that you have promised to pay $5. Sometimes, then, saying something makes it so.

Some subjectivists about sex take this idea and apply it to sex, arguing that sex is a performative (or that 'one' way in which you can qualify as a given sex is by performing a performative). Saying you are sex X is a performative (it is argued) and so just as saying "meeting adjourned" adjourns the meeting, so too saying "I am sex X" makes you that sex.

This view is not incoherent, but it doesn't seem to have anything to be said for it. Why on earth think sex is a performative? The brute possibility that it could be? That's not a good reason in any other context (the brute possibility you are a murderer is not good reason to think you are one). And in other cases of performatives - promises, marriages, meeting adjournments, pardons and so on - it is intuitively clear to virtually everyone that the saying of the thing makes it so. If being sex X is something that can be achieved via performative then we would expect it to be obvious to most reflective people that it is - that is, that saying "I am sex X" is away of becoming sex X. Yet it is far from obvious as the existence of heated debate over this matter testifies. And thus there just seems nothing to be said for this view. It has no evidence in its support.

Another version of subjectivism about sex would say that to be sex X involves having certain attitudes and dispositions. But it is quite easy to show this kind of view to be false: one simply imagines if there is something incoherent in the idea of a person of sex Y having those attitudes and dispositions. And if there is nothing incoherent about it, then the view has been falsified.

This kind of subjectivist might appeal to bundles of such attitudes and dispositions, but the same applies and plus such moves are always apt to look ad hoc.

So one doesn't need to appeal to any of the sexist motivations that lead some to endorse subjectivism about sex (and doing so is ad hominem anyway). We can just soberly assess it in the cold hard light of rational day and see that it turns out to have nothing to be said for it. (Which is, presumably, why it is the preserve mainly of the stupid and the sexist).

But still, the whole 'changing sex' issue is a red herring. FOr like I say, sex is only unchangeable if sex has an essential historical element - but it doesn't seem to. Different issues are being conflated here, then. Can one change one's sex? Well, yes. That seems metaphysically possible (and may well be practically possible too). But is sex subjective? Well, it doesn't seem to be. And thus changing one's sex requires something more than simply changing one's attitudes or thinking one has changed one's sex or some such.

The credibility of a view is not affected by who endorses it - so the fact many sexists endorse subjectivism about sex isn't, in itself, evidence that the view is implausible. — Bartricks

Subjectivism is fundamental to trans ideology. It is about feelings over biology. These feelings are deeply imbedded with sex stereotypes.

I find it hard to believe that 99.9% of people are unable to differentiate between a male and female. That by identifying a female I am being subjective, biased and undergoing a hallucinations. Denying the ability to differentiate between men and women is surely and illness is surely disorder like prosopagnosia?

The inability to remember peoples faces is prosopagnosia. But the inability to classify someone's (mental) gender is transphobia.

I have always been able to tell I use my ears. I can also tell when someone has had "gender reassignment" — Andrew4Handel

I find it hard to believe that 99.9% of people are unable to differentiate between a male and female. — Andrew4Handel

I smell shifting the goalpost here. I also smell black and white fallacy here.

You're quite a dramatic little fellow aren't you. Observing one person who has transitioned who passes is all it takes to make the leap from always being able to tell to not always being able to tell. But apparently that's enough for you to invent disorders to explain the outliers.

Methinks you need a sense of proportion.

Denying the ability to differentiate between men and women is surely and illness is surely disorder like prosopagnosia? — Andrew4Handel

I was recently playing around with a face manipulating app that gives you different options depending on whether (it thinks) you’re male or female. Depending on the picture it would identify me as male or female, and not because of clothes or hair, because my hair is the same in all of them, in some of the ones where I’m dressed en femme it thinks I’m male, and in others where I’m wearing an ordinary men’s t-shirt or no shirt at all at thinks I’m female.

Software trained on a bunch of male and female faces has some kind of disorder too?

Subjectivism is fundamental to trans ideology. It is about feelings over biology. These feelings are deeply imbedded with sex stereotypes. — Andrew4Handel

I don't think that's true even though I do think that sexism and sex stereotypes and homophobia is implicated in a lot of this.

Subjectivism about sex seems false. Once we just focus on it as a philosophical position and ignore all the noises-off, it seems to have next to nothing to be said for it. We can show this without mentioning sexism. Sexism is, I am sure, the reason why many endorse subjectivist positions about sex (not the only reason - lack of reflection and tribalism too, no doubt). But subjectivism about sex - though often motivated by sexist commitments - can be assessed on its own merits. And when assessed in that manner it just seems false.

That also means that view C - the pluralist view - goes down too. Leaving A - physicalism - and D - historicism.

I think A is true, both because I think D is prima facie implausible (and A is the only other option, once B - and by extension, C - are knocked out), and that A is independently plausible, given that there seems nothing incoherent in me discovering that I am a woman, despite my belief that I am a man.

But A is entirely compatible with changing one's sex. If A is true, then sex is a feature of my physical body. Well, I am not my body. And so my body can be changed - it can be changed from male to female, or male to neither male or female - and it will still be my body afterwards, it is just that now I will be a female rather than a male.

So that's why I don't see subjectivism as essential to trans ideology. For one could be trans but agree that transitioning from one sex to another requires that one's physical body undergoes certain changes. And one could be trans and not be motivated by any sexist attitudes. So I think we need to be careful not to tar everyone with the same brush.

I grew up with three sisters (2 brothers) and a mother and my idea of who is female is subjective?

This is brainwashing.

Men cannot give birth or have periods or have vagina or menopause. Lying is not philosophy.

Philosophy is not PC or Woke.

You'd benefit from reading the UN primer on sex/gender and transgenderism. The concepts are a bit nuanced, but since you're a philosopher you're up to the task of understanding them.

No. I have never needed to know about someone's chromosomes to know whether they are male or female. — Andrew4Handel

I've never met a Hungarian. I guess there aren't any Hungarians.

...

I think that the link you provide is extremely useful, because it gives clear information. I believe if people wish to understand the topic it is worth looking at this link for clarity.

You cannot tell the difference between a man or a woman.? I have always been able to tell I use my ears. I can also tell when someone has had "gender reassignment" — Andrew4Handel

Most trans people do not pass ( I have known four) I don't need to look in peoples underwear. The one's that pass are a luck minority. — Andrew4Handel

If you accept that some trans people "pass" (which I assume you mean that their appearance does not indicate that they have had gender reassignment) then you can't always tell when someone has had gender reassignment. And you've already said that you don't care about chromosomes. So how do you determine the difference between a cisgender person and a "passing" transgender person?

A woman is not something superficial but a biological reality and the reason we are all here because only women can gestate, and give birth — Andrew4Handel

Not all women can gestate or give birth, so being able to gestate or give birth is not what it means to be a woman. Could you clarify what you believe to be the necessary and sufficient conditions to be a woman?

Philosophy is not PC or Woke. — Andrew4Handel

If you want to talk philosophy then a) essentialism is bullshit and b) meaning is use. Neither biology nor the definitions of words is black and white.

Aside from that, what does philosophy have to do with being transgender and having sex reassignment surgery?

And what, exactly, are you arguing? That transgender people ought be mistreated? That transgender people ought not be protected from discrimination for being transgender? That transgender people ought not be respected in their wish to be called a particular name or talked about using particular pronouns? That sex reassignment surgery ought not be allowed?

Has anyone read The Wasp Factory?

Have a look at what humans commonly do.

1. Club foot. A natural condition that without surgery and corrective plasters etc would leave the patient crippled for life. Few would argue against 'corrective' surgery in infancy when it is easiest and most effective.

2. Cleft palate. A natural condition that has some long term health implications, but huge social implications. Surgery is again much easier in infancy but is more 'cosmetic'. Likewise, the amputation of extra fingers or toes, or webbed digits.

3. Unusually heavy breasts A natural condition the appears at puberty and has some health implications but 'corrective' surgery is mainly carried out for cosmetic reasons.

4. Circumcision. A cosmetic mutilating amputation carried out for social and religious reasons.

5.FGM. A cosmetic mutilating amputation carried out for social and religious reasons.

6. Castration. No longer much practiced.

7. Dentisty. Universally practiced in the West for health and cosmetic purposes.

8. Skin-lightening. a non surgical intervention carried out for cosmetic social reasons.

It is surely clear that the distinction between health benefits and purely cosmetic reasons is blurred. It is surely clear that it is normal practice to make some surgical interventions in infancy for reasons of social conformity.

It is clear that humans spend a great deal of time, money and effort in the manipulation of their own and each other's bodies, mainly for reasons of tribal conformity and tradition, and (not separate) sexual identification and attractiveness.

There is a strong demand - social pressure - for gender conformity. This leads to the deliberate exaggeration of sexual tendencies, to the extent that, for example, a bearded lady is regarded as a freak and women go to great lengths to remove any trace of hair from face and elsewhere. And so on and on.

Folks here talk as though they are not immersed in this global cosmetic culture; as though there is no need to conform; as though it is not mandatory from childhood to hide one's genitalia and yet display by coded signals one's gender at all times. As though not being clearly identified as to sex were not seriously deviant behaviour.

Questions arise.

What are the limits of surgical and related interventions in infancy?
At what age does body autonomy prevail?
Are there any limits to individual's freedom to modify their own body?

And so on. The interrelation of personal identity and autonomy with social identity is fraught

Not all women can gestate or give birth, so being able to gestate or give birth is not what it means to be a woman. — Michael

My first wife killed herself because she was unable to give birth and felt that she was a failure and "not a real woman". Gender and sexuality are not just a matter of physics or of definition, but of identity. "What it means to be a woman" is always contested. It changes. But @Andrew4Hande articulates a feeling that women (and many men, vicariously,) often have, largely socially and historically formed, that means that they define femaleness primarily as childbearing.

Can a male be turned into a female? — Andrew4Handel

I recently heard on NPR that all clown fish are born male. At some point the biggest male in a group turns in to a female, because the biggest female can hold the most eggs.

Given that most of us here are clowns, I think we have a good chance of making this work. I wanna be Jennifer Anniston, would that be OK?

If I would say: have always want to become - transform into Immanuel Kant and have his brains and if I wish hard enough and they give me some drugs and everyone says I am - then and only then I will be even if I will never be?

I find this sort of wishful thinking very hurtful for the person who is in the middle of it and lives - for real - as if the protagonist of the emperor's New Clothes.
The cruelty of society, the mockery and the jokes and these poor creatures who want something that physically - at the core of what we are and can be - is deeply hurtful.
I suffer this charade and this insanity. Because I do think that humans believe in this and this is real for them.

The heartlessness is astounding when we do not say: you are who you were born to be according to your DNA and the chromosomes that are in every cell of your body regardless of your wish and the apparent appearance of something else - and you will know, and that knowledge, of your own core being in spite of the exterior, will make you miserable.
Not even I can stomach doing it.

But I hope that those within this bubble will find their way out and understand that biology is not as we sometimes wish for.

I think that your point about your wife killing herself because she felt unable to be a 'woman' because she felt unable to give birth to children is important. We live in a society in which ideals about the body are ranked as important. I think that on this site, the focus is often upon transgender people, and overlooks how many other people feel uncomfortable with aspects of their bodies, and how they measure up to ideals and about masculinity and femininity, as well as other ideals. Gender dysphoria is only one aspect of misery over bodily appearance and sex changes are only one form, among many other aspects, of bodily modification.

you are straight on it. All the operations for other noses, for other bodies, for plastic breasts and whatnot - "enhancing" oneself to become a copy of someone else is insane.

I believe that is a rather shallow understanding of cosmetic surgery. My own experience of knowing people who have had many forms of cosmetic surgery, including gender reassignment, is that it can enable them to feel more at ease with themselves. Of course, some forms of treatment are more successful than others, and some may be less satisfied with the results, but why criticise people who choose to have interventions to help them to feel happier? Surely, they should be encouraged not criticised.

I would rather think that teaching humans to accept themselves as they are is a better option than to lure them into believing "if you only get this or that - THEN you will be happy"... what is happiness when it is endlessly fleeing and we need more and more of that poison?

I believe that cosmetic surgery - when not done for someone who has been in an accident or was born with a defect that is really tremendous and help them - is just a way to think you will become more attractive on a market where your body is the main attraction.
This is what I perceive of the world and it has become insane.

I don't think that teaching people to be happy works, even with the help of psychotherapy interventions. If you go down that line of thinking, you might as well argue that people should only be taught how to be happy rather than being offered antidepressant medications. I believe that people may benefit from cosmetic interventions but may need psychotherapeutic interventions as well. It does not have to be one or the other, and individuals probably need guidance and support in looking at all available options.

well now - before TV and all the stars and stuff and all we SEE and that enters our eyes - as still is the case in countries where people on the countryside have no time to bother about their nose being to small or big or if their breasts are attractive on the flesh market --- you will find that without psychotherapy and the lot they do no have no problem accepting themselves as they are...
funny is it not?
strange... that there are people out there unaffected of the endless exterior "perfection" looking like porn stars mostly...
:rofl:
I know - I am cruel as is reality...