According to Elizabeth Spelman's 1988 book: Inessential Woman 'gender realism' is "the view that women have some social feature in common that makes them women" – so there is an official term for TRAs: gender realists

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[–]Vari4 4 insightful - 4 fun4 insightful - 3 fun5 insightful - 4 fun -  (6 children)

IMHO the best way to categorise gender theories is similar to the way that we can categorise metaethical theories.

  1. The semantic distinction: Gender cognitivism vs. Gender noncognitivism: If you think that gender statements (e.g. "I am a man" "joan is a woman" and so on) express beliefs that can be true or false then you're a gender cognitivist (99% of people would agree with this. If you think that gender statements don't express beliefs at all and nor can they be true or false because they express feelings instead then you're a gender noncognitivist. I don't see this as a particularly appealing view to anyone except that most rabid post-modern transtrenderists. Accepting gender non-cognitivism would more or less invalidate everyone's identity.

  2. The metaphysical question: Gender realism vs antirealism. Gender realists are people who think that there are at least some true first order claims about gender - that at least some people really are men or women. Gender anti-realists are those who think that there are no true claims about gender. They are either non-cognitivists who don't think gender claims assert anything or they are cognitivists who just think all gender claims are false because there's no such thing as gender.

Note: 'realism' here just means "that some statements about gender are true" - it doesn't say anything about what makes them true.

For those of us who are cognitive realists (which will pretty much be everyone - including most transactivists and GC people) there are further distinctions to be made.

Naturalism vs. non-naturalism and reductionism vs non-reductionism.

The natural/non-natural distinction is a common metaethical distinction with a few popular interpretations. Typically either (i) natural properties or facts are those that have causal or explanatory power or (ii) natural facts are those facts that can only be investigated through empirical methods.

Personally I think at this point the important distinction becomes about what sorts of things we are saying that gender claims refer to.

here we have a lot of options. Claims about gender could refer to

  • biological things like chromosomes, genitals, morphological features, a piece of neurology.
  • phenomenological things like; feelings, beliefs, desires, representations of one's sexed body, the feeling of being identified within a certain group.
  • sociologically constructed things; like belong to a social caste (which can include the consequences of this belonging like being disposed to be treated a certain way or being disposed to treat others a certain way).
  • something else (i.e. acting in a certain way)

tldr.

  1. With very few exceptions we are all gender realists because we all make truth claims about gender.
  2. the important distinctions are between different ways we reduce gender.

I dunno if i'm making sense anymore - but imma post this anyway.

[–]MarkTwainiac 7 insightful - 2 fun7 insightful - 1 fun8 insightful - 2 fun -  (5 children)

If you think that gender statements (e.g. "I am a man" "joan is a woman" and so on) express beliefs that can be true or false

The examples you give are sex statements, not gender statements. The words man and woman designate sex, not gender. Adult human male. Adult human female.

Male and female = sex, based on biology. Masculine and feminine = gender, based on sexist sex stereotypes. Sex is material reality, gender is ideology.

Throughout your post you use the word gender the way genderists use it, which is not the way "gender critical" people use it. We reject the ideas you appear to accept and take as a given. We are critical of gender and all the beliefs that go with it. Hint: it's in the name.

It's your prerogative to use genderist language and try to explain & advance genderist views. But maybe a sub called Gender Critical isn't really the place. It's not that none of of us have heard your points before, that we're too dense to understand and that therefore we need you to spell out and break down genderist thinking for us - it's that we are thoroughly familiar with these concepts and think they are without merit.

[–]Vari4 4 insightful - 3 fun4 insightful - 2 fun5 insightful - 3 fun -  (3 children)

The examples you give are sex statements, not gender statements. The words man and woman designate sex, not gender. Adult human male. Adult human female.

I think this shouldn't be taken for granted. It's perfectly reasonable to say that the terms "male" and "female" refer to sex and "man" and "woman" refer to gender. To be gender critical (or at least trans-critical) one just needs to assert that there is some type of close connection between the two.

I think you make a key mistake when you try to classify all gender critical people as believing in a common conception of gender or sex. I see us as more like athiests - we just don't believe in the possibility of transition.

For context - my own view is that

(1) there are inequalities between men and women - these inequalities are statistically significant and politically significant. They demand explanation. (2) Not all inequalities between men and women can be explained with references to mere biology alone (3) the differences between men and women that cannot be explained with reference to mere biology are explained by the fact that we live in a culture where male and female babies are separated at birth, treated differently, trained to behave differently, and trained to treat each other differently. It is this system that genders us. To be a woman is to be born female under patriarchy. (4) Without this system many the majority of the most obvious and important inequalities between men and women wouldn't exist. It may even be comprehensible to say that in such a world there wouldn't really be 'men' and 'women' anymore in a similar way in which in a world without law schools there wouldn't be any lawyers.

You might see this as if we fundamentally disagree - however i don't think we're that far apart. You reduce the concept 'gender' to a set of culturally constructed behaviours. I reduce it to the system that causes people to behave in these ways.

The key difference between us is that

(i) I tie the concepts of 'man' and 'woman' to gender whereas you tie them to sex. (ii) it appears that you believe it's possible for people to transition gender without changing sex. For example; if a man starts behaving in a feminine way then he may still be a man but you shouldn't have trouble saying that this man has transitioned gender! (question: is this correct? it appears to be what you are saying when you conceptualise gender as being unrelated to "man" and related to "sex stereotypes" - which are presumably stereotypes of behaviour.)

Personally, I don't think it's possible for a man to transition gender no matter what he does - even if he acts feminine or cuts off his balls he will have still been raised in a society that would have trained him to behave in a certain way which disposes him to treat women like shit and that's what makes him a man.

[–]SnowAssMan[S] 7 insightful - 1 fun7 insightful - 0 fun8 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Sex: male & female

Gender: masculine & feminine

Man: adult human male

Sex terms: male, boy, man, female, girl, woman

Gender roles: masculine & feminine roles

"Trans-womxyn" & "trans-men" are inaccurate terms. Basically changing language to serve their ideology, instead of reality. Trans people refer to men with a cross-gender self-identification as "women" & even "female", never male, nor men & not even as feminine. The only legitimate terms are the sex terms, which is why they have appropriated them to refer to the constructs: masculinity & femininity.

[–]Vari4 1 insightful - 2 fun1 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

I understand you're not the user that i was replying to.

But are you agreeing with them that it is true to say that "a man who puts on a dress and some lippy has transitioned gender whilst still being a man and an adult male"?

TBH I don't think it's accurate to call people like Bradly Manning or Bruce Jenner "transgender" because they haven't transitioned anything. They were men, they are men - they have transitioned nothing. At most they are transvestities.

[–]SnowAssMan[S] 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

According to Jenner he has had "the surgery", if that's what you were referring to. Changing sex isn't possible, but 'transition' is the trans version of coming out (when they refer to their transition as "coming out" instead, that's just appropriation). They transition by changing their name & pronouns. Nowadays they can "legally transition" too. Often they "medically transition" in addition to that. Once society starts treating them as if they were female, whether they pass or not (celebrities like Jenner will never pass because everyone knows the truth) that's when they have "fully transitioned". Transition is often used as a shorthand for medical transition, but we should probably distinguish between the two terms more often, in order to avoid confusion. Full medical transition would include genital amputation/inversion, which 30% get done.

Transgender people believe that people "are" or "have" a gender. They are confused. Gender doesn't work like that. You can't have masculinity, or femininity. They are using gender as a shorthand for gender identity, likewise they are using gender identity incorrectly too, as what they are actually referring to is a "preferred sex".

Transgender person: someone whose sex & preferred sex are mismatched

Transgender is an umbrella term & used to include cross-dressers, transvestites & transsexuals. Nowadays it includes transvestites & transsexuals, but excludes cross-dressers. The movement is androcentric, binary centric & centres trans medicalism. The assumed/default/normative transgender person is a gender dysphoric transsexual man who identifies as a woman & is on hormones & has had a number of cosmetic surgeries to alter his male anatomy to resemble female anatomy to the point where he passes – this demographic is the privileged social majority within the microcosm.

[–]Vari4 2 insightful - 3 fun2 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 3 fun -  (0 children)

Reply #2

Apologies for writing second reply (i know - poor internet manners!) but as i walked away from the PC I remembered just why I gave up on the idea of reducing the concept of "man" or "woman" to "male" and "female".

I don't think this reduction conforms with our intuitions about what makes someone a man.

We can demonstrate this with thought experements.

If you were to take the shittiest of shitty men - like Harvey Weinstein or Brett Kavanaghu and through some process change their body to a body that was physically indistinguishable form a natural born female - even down to the cellular level - do you think that these people would have become women?

I really don't think there is anything that can be done to a man that could possibly change him into a woman - anymore than changing Weinstein's body could turn him into someone who isn't a rapist.

When i've talked with the biologically reductionist GC people I've never been able to get a straight answer from them about these sorts of hypothetically. They typically try and dodge them by claiming that "science hasn't advanced this far" or that "it's not ethical to give these people uterus transplants" or whatever - but they seem to cut to the heart of the matter and explain if such a hypothetical person would be a man or a woman.

Even if you don't think it's physically possible for such a thing to happen it's still important to deal with the hypothetical because it's only through this sort of conceptual analysis that you can understand what your concepts really refer to!

Anyway that's my 2c