A contradiction, I think, between "gender is a social construct" and trans-ness

[Consul]

If there is a neat list with a number of different definitions, I can deal with it.

I think we've all worked that out by now.

Have we? I don't think so. I myself have mentioned a few definitions of "gender" I found, but I haven't seen any neat comprehensive list. The same goes for the equally nebulous term "gender identity".

[Consul]

Here's a definition by a very woke person:

"Gender identity is the gender which the person identifies as. It is different from sex assigned at birth. Gender identity is how you think about yourself, how a person identifies themselves."

(Whitehead-Pleaux, Annette. "Queering Music Therapy: Music Therapy and LGBTQAI+ Peoples." In Arts Therapies and Gender Issues, edited by Susan Hogan, 22-36. New York: Routledge, 2020. p. 28)

"to self-identify = to believe or assert that one belongs to a certain group or class"
(American Heritage Dictionary of English)

So according to her definition, one's gender identity is the gender one believes or/and asserts to have. Here, gender identity turns out to be gender belief or gender assertion: "I believe/assert that my gender is male/female/whatever."

A naive question: When a male person seriously believes and asserts that he is female, isn't that a paradigmatic example of self-deception or self-delusion?

Anyway, the following shows that Whitehead-Pleaux doesn't know what she's talking about:

"This belief that there are two sexes is a fallacy as there are at least three sexes: female, male, and intersex. Sex assigned at birth is a descriptor of the person’s body, as depicted in the Gender Unicorn with a DNA icon between its legs."

(Whitehead-Pleaux, Annette. "Queering Music Therapy: Music Therapy and LGBTQAI+ Peoples." In Arts Therapies and Gender Issues, edited by Susan Hogan, 22-36. New York: Routledge, 2020. p. 27)

But I learned something from her I wasn't fully aware of until I read this:

"The T in LGBTQAI+ stands for Trans*. Trans* is an umbrella term that encompasses the many ways a person can transcend gender norms."

(Whitehead-Pleaux, Annette. "Queering Music Therapy: Music Therapy and LGBTQAI+ Peoples." In Arts Therapies and Gender Issues, edited by Susan Hogan, 22-36. New York: Routledge, 2020. p. 28)

So "trans" alone—written with or without asterisk—isn't used by woke people synonymously with "transsexual" or "transvestite", because everybody who "transcends gender norms" in some way or other is now called "trans" by them. It follows that homosexuals are "trans" too by transcending "heteronormativity".

It's also interesting to learn——that…

"Some trans* people experience their identity shifting from male to female, sometimes daily or even more frequently."

(Whitehead-Pleaux, Annette. "Queering Music Therapy: Music Therapy and LGBTQAI+ Peoples." In Arts Therapies and Gender Issues, edited by Susan Hogan, 22-36. New York: Routledge, 2020. p. 28)

My advice: If you experience identity shifts on a daily or hourly basis, go see a psychiatrist as soon as possible!

[Skepdick]

Nobody is everything! Nobody is nothing! So the question is: What kind of entity am I? My answer: I am a body, a biological kind of body: an animal organism (an animal).

Nobody is a "kind of entity" either. Everybody is themselves. That seems to be the only satisfactory answer.

But ofcourse some taxonomist could describe me in the vocabulary of "entities" and "kinds" because because taaxonomists keep taxonomising, but all taxonomies are reductionist.

If mereological essentialism were true, I would be necessarily identical with my body

If mereological essentialism were true, which "you"; which body are you talking about? The one in this very instant; or the one 1 zeptosecond ago?

as it is now with all its parts, and hence couldn't survive the loss of any part of me = my body.

You couldn't even survive the loss (or gain) of any new atoms. As you keep losing them and gaining them with the passing of every zeptosecond.

But I think mereological essentialism (especially about biological organisms) isn't true. An animal can lose body parts and continue to exist as one and the same animal.

And now you have yourselv a Ship of Theseus together with Sorite's Paradox situation...

Which parts do you need to lose in order to lose yourself.
If every part (every atom of your being) was replaced is you stil you?

Alternatively, if you regard bodies and organisms as four-dimensional (4D) objects having both spatial parts and temporal parts, then you can happily accept mereological essentialism about temporal parts of bodies or organisms. I as a 4D body would then be a mereological sum of numerically and qualitatively different temporal parts of me.

What's a "temporal" part and why is the adjective necessary? If everything exists through time what's a non-temporal part?

…and that my corpse will still be me.

I do think I will continue to exist after my death as a corpse. I will be buried or cremated when I am dead.

If you don't think you will continue to exist after your death how could you be burried or cremated?

If you are your body and your dead corpse is your body then then your dead corpse is you.

You are definitely confused about identity... The only correct answer to "What am I?" is "I am myself".

[Consul]

Here's an excerpt from the introduction to a forthcoming book, one of whose authors, Ray Briggs, is a professor of philosophy at Stanford U:

"We might as well get the awkward part out of the way: despite the title What Even Is Gender?, we're not going to tell you what "gender" is because this is a book built around the idea that "what is gender?" is the wrong question.
…
On a more abstract philosophical level, our central thesis is that "What is gender?" is the wrong question because there is no one thing that answers to the name "gender" (or, for that matter, to the name "gender identity"). One major purpose of this book will be to identify some of the different things that "gender" talk is often gesturing at, to suggest an approach to distinguishing among them, and to show how conflating them under a single heading does real harm.
…
This is a book about "gender" and some of its problems, written by two of its problems (more specifically, two nonbinary trans people). It is, in an important sense, written for our past selves. It is a product of years of deeply felt confusion and frustration, produced by our experience of trying (and often failing) to make sense of "gender" discourse and to find ourselves within its stories and conceptual frameworks.
…
"Gender" doesn't pick out any one thing; it equivocates among many."

(Briggs, R. A., and B. R. George. What Even Is Gender? New York: Routledge, 2023.)

[Trajk Logik]

The properties I gave are not distributed in the way shown in the table. Again, 99.9% of all humans fall neatly into one of two clusters given that they have one version of each of the five traits. Even intersex that have both types of gonads, one is under-developed. Using a definition of sex where you simply need to have more than half of the traits (3 out of 5), even intersex would fall within one of the two clusters because they would have at least three (more than half) of the traits.

You wrote:

"…This is why I propose that biological sex is based on a combination of traits:
- chromosomes (in humans, XY is male, XX female)
- genitals (penis vs. vagina)
- gonads (testes vs. ovaries)
- hormones (males have higher relative levels of testosterone than women, while women have higher levels of estrogen)
- secondary sex characteristics that aren’t connected with the reproductive system but distinguish the sexes, and usually appear at puberty (breasts, facial hair, size of larynx, subcutaneous fat, etc.)"

You are right, your fivefold sex-specific property clusters are found in most people, because the vast majority of people is sexually normally developed and equipped. Intersex conditions are even rarer than ~0.1%, because their frequency is only ~0.02%.

But the question is still whether the species-independent gametic conception of sex should be replaced with various species-dependent property-cluster conceptions. My answer—and the answer of virtually all biologists—is no. Such species-relative property clusters certainly do exist naturally in humans and other animals, but the fundamentally and universally sex-defining characteristic in the biological sphere is nothing but an organism's gametotype: which of the two types of gametes it produces determines its sex.

Yes, but if you want to talk about species-independent gametic conception of sex you can't ignore the isogamous and anisogamous distinction either. The fact is that even gametes can vary across species.

You are right to an extent. Seahorses are male or female based on their gametes, but male seahorses are the ones that are pregnant - that carry the offspring to term. Your definition then allows the wokesters to then claim - "See, males CAN be pregnant!" For this discussion we are talking about gender - a uniquely human concept and how it relates to human sex, not the sex of other species. So your definition is too broad and irrelevant to this discussion and opens a can of worms that does not help the conversation. After all, it is the five traits that I have proposed that trans-people attempt to change to affirm their gender (well, except for chromosomes).

Which is to say that the scribble, "gender" is useless because it could mean anything. It's just a scribble. If the scribble can mean anything, then just say what you mean instead of using the word and we could move the conversation along much more quickly and efficiently.

Being highly ambiguous, "gender" means many things to many people; but having many meanings doesn't mean being meaningless. If there is a neat list with a number of different definitions, I can deal with it. I just need to know which one on it is the one used by the person I'm having a discussion on gender with.

I said "useless", not "meaningless". What other words in the English language have such an ambiguous / multitude of meanings, and how useful are they if a majority of other English speakers don't use the word in the same way? I can think of one word - "god".

The whole point of using a shared language is so that we can communicate efficiently in that we all understand how the words are being used. We shouldn't have to ask someone how they are using some word, we use a dictionary. It should be obvious when participating in a shared language. Think about how inefficient communication would be if we had to ask every speaker and writer what they meant by each word and their definition differs from others, rather than just looking up the words we don't know in a dictionary.

[Trajk Logik]

If there is a neat list with a number of different definitions, I can deal with it.

I think we've all worked that out by now.

Have we? I don't think so. I myself have mentioned a few definitions of "gender" I found, but I haven't seen any neat comprehensive list. The same goes for the equally nebulous term "gender identity".

I haven't seen it either. And who is "we've all" that have worked it out?

The only definitions of gender that I've seen are ones that just use other ambiguous terms in the definition, as in "sex of the soul". What is a soul?

The other definitions contradict other acts and ideas of the proponents, as in claiming that sex and gender are separate yet "gender-affirming care" involves changing one's sexual traits, or they claim to be a "woman" or a "man" but then can't define what those terms are either.

[Consul]

Yes, but if you want to talk about species-independent gametic conception of sex you can't ignore the isogamous and anisogamous distinction either. The fact is that even gametes can vary across species.

The existence of sexes or more than one sex presupposes anisogamy.

"anisogamy. Sexual reproduction involving the fusion of gametes that differ in size and sometimes also in form."

"isogamy. Sexual reproduction involving the production and fusion of gametes that are similar in size and structure. It occurs in some protists, e.g. certain protozoans and algae."

"oogamy. Sexual reproduction involving the formation and subsequent fusion of a large, usually stationary, female gamete and a small motile male gamete. The female gamete may contain nourishment for the development of the embryo, which is often retained and protected by the parent organism."

(Oxford Dictionary of Biology, 8th ed., 2019.)

Oogamy is a kind of anisogamy!
Homo sapiens is an oogametic species.

For more, see: Difference Between Anisogamy, Isogamy, and Oogamy

"Anisogamy is the fusion of gametes in dissimilar sizes.
Isogamy is the fusion of gametes in similar size.
Oogamy is the fusion of large, immotile female gametes with small, motile male gametes."

I'm a little confused, because the author also writes:

"Anisogamy is the fusion of two gametes in dissimilar morphology: size and the form."

Given the other definitions above, anisogamy doesn't mean that there are only two types of gametes with different sizes; but here are statements by two of the leading scientific experts confirming that "anisogamy" is standardly used to refer to the occurrence of only two types of gametes with different sizes:

"Anisogamy is the occurrence within a population of two gametes types of different size, a very common condition both in plants and in animals."

(Bell, Graham. "The Evolution of Anisogamy." Journal of Theoretical Biology 73 (1978): 247–270. p. 247)

"It is generally assumed that ancestrally, gametes were small and isogamous (monomorphic). The evolution of anisogamy (gamete dimorphism) is a crucial transition in evolution: it represents the evolution of the two sexes, males and females. Following Parker et al. (1972), I favor defining a sex in relation to the type of gamete a sexual phenotype carries. A sex is thus an adult phenotype defined in terms of the size of (haploid) gamete it produces: in an anisogamous population, males produce microgametes and females produce macrogametes. A simultaneous hermaphrodite is thus both male and female simultaneously, and a sequential hermaphrodite transforms sequentially from male to female (or vice versa)."

(Parker, Geoff A. "The Origin and Maintenance of Two Sexes (Anisogamy), and Their Gamete Sizes by Gamete Competition." In The Evolution of Anisogamy: A Fundamental Phenomenon Underlying Sexual Selection, edited by Tatsuya Togashi and Paul Alan Cox, 17-74. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. p. 17)

So: anisogamy = gamete dimorphism

"dimorphism = the condition of being dimorphic"

"dimorphic = existing or occurring in two distinct forms; exhibiting dimorphism.
a. Bot. Occurring in two distinct forms in the same plant or species.
b. Zool. Of individuals of the same species (or of the same colony of polyps): Occurring in two forms differing in structure, size, markings, etc., according to sex, season, or function."

(Oxford English Dictionary)

You are right to an extent. Seahorses are male or female based on their gametes, but male seahorses are the ones that are pregnant - that carry the offspring to term. Your definition then allows the wokesters to then claim - "See, males CAN be pregnant!" For this discussion we are talking about gender - a uniquely human concept and how it relates to human sex, not the sex of other species. So your definition is too broad and irrelevant to this discussion and opens a can of worms that does not help the conversation. After all, it is the five traits that I have proposed that trans-people attempt to change to affirm their gender (well, except for chromosomes).

An individual's sex is one thing, and its sex role is another!
The gametic conception of sex doesn't entail that there are universally fixed, species-independent combinations of sex & sex role.
It is true that "so-called sex role reversals occur, such as in seahorses where the males “get pregnant” by having the female transfer her fertilized eggs into a structure termed the male’s brood pouch" (Source); but male seahorses cannot literally get pregnant like female ones, because they have no egg-producing ovaries (wombs), and so they cannot literally get pregnant by having their eggs fertilized by male sperm.

"pregnant = that has conceived in the womb; with child or with young; gravid. Const. with, of (the offspring), by (the male parent)."
(Oxford English Dictionary)

I said "useless", not "meaningless". What other words in the English language have such an ambiguous / multitude of meanings, and how useful are they if a majority of other English speakers don't use the word in the same way? I can think of one word - "god".

The whole point of using a shared language is so that we can communicate efficiently in that we all understand how the words are being used. We shouldn't have to ask someone how they are using some word, we use a dictionary. It should be obvious when participating in a shared language. Think about how inefficient communication would be if we had to ask every speaker and writer what they meant by each word and their definition differs from others, rather than just looking up the words we don't know in a dictionary.

I agree that the whole gender(-identity) talk that is currently so fashionable is an utter mess.

[Consul]

Alternatively, if you regard bodies and organisms as four-dimensional (4D) objects having both spatial parts and temporal parts, then you can happily accept mereological essentialism about temporal parts of bodies or organisms. I as a 4D body would then be a mereological sum of numerically and qualitatively different temporal parts of me.

What's a "temporal" part and why is the adjective necessary? If everything exists through time what's a non-temporal part?

Click on the blue link above!

You are definitely confused about identity... The only correct answer to "What am I?" is "I am myself".

I am myself, and I am what I am; but what am I ? I think I am a human animal.
(Animals are a kind of organisms, and organisms are a kind of bodies.)

[Skepdick]

Alternatively, if you regard bodies and organisms as four-dimensional (4D) objects having both spatial parts and temporal parts, then you can happily accept mereological essentialism about temporal parts of bodies or organisms. I as a 4D body would then be a mereological sum of numerically and qualitatively different temporal parts of me.

What's a "temporal" part and why is the adjective necessary? If everything exists through time what's a non-temporal part?

Click on the blue link above!

The link is not helpful. It provides no example of non-temporal parts. All parts are temporal so the adjective "temporal" is redundant.

Not to mention it central presupposition completely disregards Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.

You are definitely confused about identity... The only correct answer to "What am I?" is "I am myself".

I am myself, and I am what I am; but what am I ?

You are yourself.

Why do you ask the very question that you just answered?

I think I am a human animal. (Animals are a kind of organisms, and organisms are a kind of bodies.)

That's just a linguistic description of you in some vocabulary or another - it's definitly not what you are.

Unless you subscribe to the logicentrist delusion.

[Consul]

The link is not helpful. It provides no example of non-temporal parts. All parts are temporal so the adjective "temporal" is redundant.

This is off-topic here, so I just want to add the following for the sake of clarity: "Temporal part" doesn't mean "temporary part", and spatial parts of 4D objects are non-temporal parts of them. However, temporal parts of 4D objects have spatial parts. For example, my body-1993 is a temporal part of my 4D body, and my head-1993 is a spatial part of that temporal part of my body.

[Skepdick]

The link is not helpful. It provides no example of non-temporal parts. All parts are temporal so the adjective "temporal" is redundant.

This is off-topic here, so I just want to add the following for the sake of clarity: "Temporal part" doesn't mean "temporary part", and spatial parts of 4D objects are non-temporal parts of them. However, temporal parts of 4D objects have spatial parts. For example, my body-1993 is a temporal part of my 4D body, and my head-1993 is a spatial part of that temporal part of my body.

Looks like you've already conceded the point. You are talkng about "your" 1993 body, "your" 4D body. "Your" 1993 head...

If there's only one "you" and many bodies/parts then you can't be your body.

The "temporal" is that which experiences change. All matter experiences change so everything is temporal which renders the distinction is superfluous.

And now you find yourself trying to re-invent an unchanging "you" amongst all the change.

[Gary Childress]

Oogamy is a kind of anisogamy!
Homo sapiens is an oogametic species.

I'll go with those definitions. I would just like to know what is the purpose of a "female" human or "male human" claiming to be of the opposite gamete?

To me, it all comes down to biology. "Men and "women", "Males" and "females"; they are different physiologically from each other. There is a (for lack of a better word perhaps) "natural" reason for that. What is the purpose of confusing that distinction?

Again, I'll go back to the example of a man walking onto a construction site in a suit and tie and claiming to the construction workers on site that he works for the head office of the construction company (when in fact he is not). How is that beneficial to society? How is that not adding more confusion (=trust issues) in society?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Consul]

I'll go with those definitions. I would just like to know what is the purpose of a "female" human or "male human" claiming to be of the opposite gamete?

No (non-psychotic) transwoman/transman seriously claims to be an egg-producer/sperm-producer; but most of them claim to be women/females or men/males, believing that sex/gender isn't defined in terms of gametes. From the biological point of view, the phrases "egg-producing man/male" and "sperm-producing woman/female" are contradictions in terms; but they are not from the perspective of postmodern (trans-)gender theory, which doesn't care about biological facts.

[Consul]

I just noticed that the Cambridge Dictionary has gone woke by no longer defining "woman" exclusively as "adult female person/human (being)". It now contains a second meaning that makes it possible for transwomen to literally be women: "an adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth"

See: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictio ... ?q=woman_1

[Gary Childress]

I'll go with those definitions. I would just like to know what is the purpose of a "female" human or "male human" claiming to be of the opposite gamete?

No (non-psychotic) transwoman/transman seriously claims to be an egg-producer/sperm-producer; but most of them claim to be women/females or men/males, believing that sex/gender isn't defined in terms of gametes. From the biological point of view, the phrases "egg-producing man/male" and "sperm-producing woman/female" are contradictions in terms; but they are not from the perspective of postmodern (trans-)gender theory, which doesn't care about biological facts.

OK. I'm more interested in facts and honesty. If postmodernism is against that, then they can do what they want if that's what they're going to do regardless. Just don't ask me to join their insanity.