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[–]transwomanHesitantly QT? 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

As you mentioned, the definition that I would use for woman is "anyone who identifies as a woman" and for man it's "anyone who identifies as a man." While some might point to a dictionary to define these words, I think this is a very fallacious argument. We don't derive words from the dictionary, but we create definitions of words and then write the dictionary afterward. The problem with defining "woman" as "adult human female" and "man" as "adult human male" is that it effectively undermines the true sexist purpose of gender in a social context.

As a pragmatist, I see that gender is a social construct that has no other use in society besides to reinforce sexist stereotypes and gender roles, and believe that redefining gender to be based on self identification alone is an highly effective way to eradicate gender and make it a useless concept. In its uselessness, in a pragmatic sense, gender would eventually cease to exist (obviously this would take centuries because well, we're all socialized to accept gender as a concept under patriarchy and it takes a long time to undo all of that). I believe that the inclusion of transgender men and transgender women in the definition of their respective gender is a necessity to the end goal of abolition of gender.

[–]tuesday 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

but we create definitions of words and then write the dictionary afterward.

and yet, we don't just randomly assign arbitrary meaning to words tho. Classes of things can only considered to be in the same class as long as everything in that class possess the same characteristics.

The only way anybody could classify "penises" and "vaginas" as belonging in the same category is if they were describing "mammals". As soon as you start differentiating on the basis of "who's got the penises" and "who's got the vagina" then transwomen belong to group "male".

[–]transwomanHesitantly QT? 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

But now you're conflating sex with gender. Did I ever say that someone with a penis isn't male, trans or not?

While it seems counter-intuitive to redefine gender from "sex roles" to be based on self identification (as this makes gender seem arbitrary and unclear), it is the exact direction we should go in to abolish gender. If we want to get rid of something, we need to make sure nobody can find any pragmatic value in that thing. If gender is based solely on self identification, and we have pickles and ice cream genders, then evidently society will come to a point where there is no need for gender to exist.

In this redefining of gender, biological sex remains what it is today. I never proposed any changes to this. If you'd like to argue about how we classify biological sex and how we should do so, I think that would require a completely different thread, as we are strictly talking about redefining gender and gender abolition.