Alex Byrne's 2020 paper might win the battle for the gender-critical movement, but it loses the war. Even if his conclusion is accepted, it offers little of value for contemporary feminist debate.
I don't think it's all that confusing or difficult to formulate a position in defense of woman's rights if you understand biology. Why are you desperate for a social constructivist position when id argue it's part of the reason why we're in this current mess, with people like Judith Butler taking social construction to extremes while just completely ignoring the reality of biological sex
Take DSDs such as CAIS, ie a male who may have been brought up as a woman. This isn't confusing, just because they are socially accepted as women doesn't make them women. For the purposes of sport they should be treated as men, because they are men and have a performance advantage over woman.
The rest is about social accomodation and legal fictions, not about definitions. We foolishly in retrospect allowed the idea that some people could exist 'as if' they were the other sex in law. That was accommodated because it was rare and there was a narrative that some people are 'born in the wrong body'.
Now due to social contagion there are many people who claim to be trans and they often don't even use born in the wrong body narratives.
So we need to revisit this social accomodation. I don't see what you're finding difficult about it.
Do you think that people with CAIS are women? If you think they're not, do you think we ought to permit them in women's spaces, refer to them with she/her pronouns, etc.?
No I don't think they are women, because they are biologically male. I would accept they might be brought up and live as women and would allow them to continue to live that way, generally speaking. I'd like to know more about how they feel themselves to be. Id use pronouns of their choice and use women’s spaces - they have female genitalia from my understanding. Sports should be sex tested as the existence of testes gives performance benefits.
But this isn't some slippery slope to accepting any man into women's spaces. Intersex, or DSDs, are an unrelated rare set of individual conditions that should be viewed separately. There are ongoing ethical questions around what is appropriate in terms of treatment, surgeries on children (prior to their consent) with these conditions that remain contentious. It is an issue for intersex people however, and many resent being brought in as political support for trans ideology.
I would say that male people with CAIS are women, as they share the same socialization and vulnerabilities female women experience. (It's possible that some people with CAIS are recognized as male early enough that they have a different psychological and social trajectory than female people, but I am confident that there have been some intersex males who lived and died without anyone even suspecting they were anything other than female.) What matters to me is that people with CAIS share those specific female experiences with other women. I don't think that an "XY" result on a karyotype test would invalidate that at all.
That, of course, doesn't mean that just any male person can self-identify as a woman and therefore exists in that category. Quite the opposite - most, if not all, trans-identified males have no experience of female socialization and are obviously not seen as actually female by the community around them. So my view would not say that they are women or that we have some sort of obligation to refer to them as such, permit them into women's spaces, etc.
But beyond that, I don't really understand your policy views here. It sounds like you think that we should allow CAIS male women into women's prisons or locker rooms as a sort of favor to them, or as an act of pity. But a trans woman might reasonably point out that they too should get the same treatment; it's not controversial to say that trans women are at higher risk of assault in men's shelters or men's prisons. So what explains the differential treatment? Your view, or Alex Byrne's view, doesn't clearly lay out a heuristic for why some male people should be treated "as women" while other male people (trans women) should not. And so I think it's your view, which ignores female socialization and female social realities in favor of a purely biological test for womanhood, that opens itself up to trans inclusion.
I didn't state a position on prisons - we would struggle to get enough data for such a rare condition but do we know if they're more likely to commit violence or sex offences than woman? In any case, this condition is 100% verifiable by biological testing and is a rare edge case. There are always edge cases as well as issues of practical implementation. It's not motivated out of pity (rather sympathy) - obviously if someone has been living their life as a woman due to this DSD then they have some claim to continue to do so, I might personally grant them this accomodation. But note that you or I or trans activists or progressive politicians shouldn't be the final arbiters, a social accomodation requires all of society to come to a view. Maybe each DSD requires it's own evidence and policy consideration? Any rule might meet at a gray area that could be criticized - most men are not sexual predators or violent and many are victims of domestic violence - you could probably consider such victims unfairly excluded from refuge shelters from a pure philosophical perspective but obviously we have better reasons to keep men out. And men can have their own shelters or options for sanctuary, just as trans people can have third spaces.
But a socialized woman is still not a woman- here we are both of us still not knowing much at all about CAIS- perhaps some CAIS always suspected they were different from other girls even from young? I think this condition means that post puberty they know they are not normal women as they don't menstruate.
Now a passing trans person could also use opposite sex toilets without being noticed- I don't advocate for sex testing at the door so practically we would always struggle to segregate on a sex based rule but we could easily make a practical rule around genitalia. And in other situations we can sex test. Note there is no empirical evidence of true trans, the kind of prototypical 'born in the wrong body' child that is so often brought up as the best available argument for trans acceptance (and which is increasingly dated in favour of narratives around transgender choice/rights and embodiment goals). We can't identify true trans but we can easily identify DSDs so there is already a difference. Is that not a practical heuristic?
Now let me address some of your points and problematise your female socialisation construct.
It's not obvious to me that risks that trans people face are related to female socialisation if that is what you're saying. Trans people suffer a marginal existence for a range of reasons and are much more likely for example to be gay and to become prostitutes. Indeed some of the claims of risks to trans people are biased towards South American stats of violence and deaths of such prostitutes who clearly live in a dangerous predicament in such countries. But this is not the same as female socialisation type harms such as social norms allowing men to rape or beat their wives without consequence. The trans experience might be closer to effeminate gays living a marginal existence due to childhood trauma, homophobia and economic circumstances.
You were confused about my position but I am very confused about yours as a self-identifying feminist. I think you essentialise a construct of female socialisation when it is really a range of overlapping socialisations, interacting with each other and with actual biology.
So the above examples of violence are actually most strongly associated with economic deprivation and family trauma. This overlaps with biology so that men are able to physically overcome women and overlaps with social forces, historically patriarchy and now more contextual - police departments that are better or worse at following up rape cases and supporting women victims.
You seem to imply some homogeneous 'female socialisation' that acts on everybody and so presumably also acts on effeminate trans woman in the same way. But this ignores all the other factors. Trans-identified people are more likely to be gay for example and have more likelihood of trauma and mental health issues than women generally speaking.
Now this philosophical enquiry around DSDs and edge cases is always valid in it's own right. Perhaps we could move on to whether a lion and a tiger are really separate species when they can produce a liger? Or at what point a car becomes a truck in modern vehicle designs?
But it's also a side-show. I don't recall, perhaps haven't read, your position on the actual issues.
What do you think about rapists being in female prisons and commiting assaults, male inmates impregnating women in prison, victims of rapists being forced to use she/her pronouns in court when describing their rape, women no longer being able to associate with only biological women, women not being able to insist on having a biologically female doctor, therapist, or person conducting a strip search, girls having to share locker rooms and sports facilities with men with penises, children being taught an unreality that sex is not binary, not real and they can't assert their right to private spaces away from boys, children being given an experimental treatment of puberty blockers prior to meaningful consent that could lead to them becoming infertile when many would have grown out of it, and many would have been gay. Men self-identifying as women and taking jobs, scholarships and prizes away from women, the role of social contagion and online spaces confusing young people and putting them on a medical pathway, etc, etc.
I don't know your views so I may be wrong here but i fear you are so hung up on defending a particular view of female socialisation (lacking a strong epistemic basis in my view, check the case of David Reimer) as the basis of your feminism that you may be missing what is relevant. Ironically I am a male and have come to question quite a lot of what passes for feminist orthodoxy yet am a strong advocate for women ...
Sorry bit of a rant but it's a summary of many such online debates over red herring arguments around biology, DSDs etc
I'm sorry, I read this but I'm still unclear on what your position is on important policy questions. Can you explain what your view is if a person with CAIS is convicted of a crime - say, fraud - and they have to go to prison tomorrow? Where should they go?
If your theory can't answer this question, I would say that's a major strike against your theory! I could very easily answer this question.
I understand that you think you may need more information, but you haven't made it clear how that information would impact the decision you make. I really do feel like a lot of GCs hedge on this because they believe people with CAIS are male/men, but they can't bring themselves to say they should therefore by default be placed in men's facilities, because that's obviously a terrible idea. But it seems like an obvious consequence of your theory, so I'm not sure how you get around it.
Where do you stand in anything. Policy is about evidence and gray areas. I don't think female socialisation is homogeneous such that DSDs are just the same as women, and I haven't fully formed a view on DSD men. As a reactive decision I'd say put them in a men's prison but let's make men's prisons safer, eg for effeminate gay men as well.
Edge cases always exist and I am comfortable with some gray areas and pragmatic decision making. This doesn't mean men should be allowed in women's prisons. Would you allow some men into women's prisons because they looked like girls and we're treated as such? How would you identify such people
Why are you having gotcha moments on rare people (what is even the overlap with DSDs and prisoners?) while ignoring more important issues for women.
What is your final unproblematic policy solution for DSDs and trans and how could you distinguish on your socialisation basis?
The fact you didn't even address a single of the pressing feminist issues means you aren't even a feminist. By all means write about philosophy - maybe you could address whether species is a real concept given there are edge cases? Perhaps you're actually a man, or a troll, it's hard to tell at this point so I'll leave you with the last word rather than waste my time on a wall of text.
As per my recent comment, technically speaking those CAIS people are neither male nor female; they're sexless since they're incapable of producing either sperm or ova, the sine qua non for sex category membership.
Not exactly a popular opinion as many people -- not just the transloonie nutcases -- are rather desperately committed to making the sexes into identities, to the "idea", the rather serious "cognitive distortion", that sex is "immutable" and that everyone is either male or female from conception to death. Quite unscientific claptrap and incoherent twaddle.
But, fortunately, more than a few biologists are bravely endorsing that interpretation, in particular biologists Jerry Coyne and PZ Myers along with a trio of them writing in the reputable Wiley Online Library:
JC: "Those 1/6000 individuals are intersexes, neither male nor female."
Wiley Online Library: "For instance, a mammalian embryo with heterozygous sex chromosomes (XY-setup) is not reproductively competent, as it does not produce gametes of any size. Thus, strictly speaking it does not have any biological sex, YET. [my emphasis]."
"the traditional feminist view that the term ‘woman’ refers to a socially constructed category." No, that is not "the traditional feminist" view at all. How are you defining "traditional feminist view"? Cite the intellectual lineages that you think constitute the "traditional feminist view."
That's the view of Catharine Mackinnon, Andrea Dworkin, Shulamith Firestone, Sally Haslanger... I mean this was the standard view among feminists until the trans issue emerged.
Absurd! That's not at all what they wrote. If you have read any of their writings in depth -- which I doubt -- you would know that you are mischaracterizing the meaning of their words. Your comment reeks of bad faith.
You have got to be kidding. You think that Catharine Mackinnon wasn't a social constructivist? You have either never read her work or you have zero reading comprehension of what you read of her work on this subject. Where does Catharine Mackinnon embrace a biological view about womanhood?
Don't hide behind jargon like "a social constructivist." It obscures the messy complexity of history, which is much more important than academic in-group code. Feminism is not a dogma. Nor a monolith.
It's been a messy and contested historic process of many voices thinking together, disagreeing, and moving from ideas into real world action.
The few feminists you cite (or should I say cherry pick?)-- very, very few out of a much larger and more diverse movement -- were dealing with real world, pragmatic questions involving the lives of real women. They weren't snugly locked into a self-referential academic discourse. They were thinking much bigger than ossified concepts like "social constructivist."
Your language is far too narrow for the depth and breadth of feminist thinking.
Your comment reeks of worse. There’s a reason feminism is taught in Gender Studies now instead of Women’s Studies. And why sex crimes are now gendered crimes. And why TERFs were excommunicated from radical feminism. And why trans people never bothered arguing for gender’s existence, importance, and effective primacy over biology.
The trans movement wasn’t big or influential enough to do this by itself, or even with the rest of the rainbow. But second-wave radical feminists, with their resentment of all things male, (hetero)sexual, and/or reproductive were a perfect substrate in which trans-feminism/trans-gender studies could safely incubate until, about a decade ago, it escaped the lab and promptly replaced material reality and meaningful justice.
Feminism stole the modern notion of gender from early trans researchers. Men who opposed the rise of “gender feminism” were told this was an objectively regressive, biologically essentialist position.
I definitely see your point here. I'm increasingly feeling estranged from this kind of philosophy-based feminism, because as a detrans butch lesbian who often is read as male to strangers, it's kind of exhausting to be thinking about which argument should win here all the time. I don't want to change my appearance to wear womanhood like an accessory as some kind of feminist signaling, but as it is I am read as male a significant portion of the time.
Holding too close to this worldview, I'm stuck in a difficult position on a daily basis when the simplest of choices, like deciding which restroom to use, becomes a moral issue. In sex segregated spaces, I have to chose between using the women's restroom, reflecting the actual biological truth of my body (and potentially making women uncomfortable based on my appearance) or chosing the men's, where I'm likely to fit in better at a glance. Compared to that, the queer free-for-all seems better. I just want to live my life without worrying about this crap.
I think it's useful to appreciate that the trans movement made your life practically harder. There have always been feminine men and masculine women and while such individuals have their own journey in coming to terms with this reality, until recently there was no confusion socially because society has always understood their are effeminate men and masculine women. But because of the trans issue everyone questions appearance because there are enough people pretending to be a different sex that this is the existential question we face.
Trans ideology overly essentialises sex- because trans requires social proof-this is done by appearing as the opposite sex (or appearing sex neutral or whatever). This view actually hews to sex stereotypes. Biological sex however 'just is', it doesn't require social proof and so ironically offers greater freedom of expression.
It's trans ideology that has made your life harder and a modal mistake about identity. I'd wager few people would question your right to be in the woman's toilets 50 years ago.
I do agree that the trans movement made my life harder, but 50 years ago I would struggle to access professional jobs as a butch lesbian woman.
Also, I currently live in a place where trans ideology isn’t mainstream, and I have been getting directed to the men’s bathrooms since before I transitioned, so I’m not sure that you’re right that no one would question me.
I prefer the model of biological sex that you’re describing but the cat has been let out of the bag and I don’t think it’s going back in ☹️
Well that sounds difficult and I'd agree taking whatever approach causes the least fuss is natural. I'm speaking hypothetically but in my fantasy ideal of myself I'd like to think I might be a bit out and proud about it, ie I'm a biological woman, mind your own business, but that's me fantasising.
I would be happy to have a trans woman in the men's in a you do you style. I think we should honour our sex - it was there before we were even conscious humans and we can't change sex. But then express our gender freely. I appreciate that's a somewhat naive view given some people are just toxic about difference.
But Im not sure that all trans men are dying to go to the men's bathroom/toilet— in some circumstances they might actually be at risk of weird men so the bathroom rules are probably inconsistent anyway- much easier to go by biology otherwise we allow weird men with penises to live out their fetish among girls. That's the reality, even if the weirdos are relatively rare and it's why societies have private sex spaces in the first instance - pretty much a universal as far as I'm aware.
Totally with you there, if I lived in the U.S., I would 100% be out and proud about it. When I am in liberal areas I use the women’s and expect others to deal.
I really dislike using men’s toilets (I swear, male pee reeks and i can smell it strongly it’s so gross) and the only saving grace is that where I live single stall restrooms are the default in most places and even in men’s rooms the stalls are very private.
I wish there was a culture of honoring our sex. Even gender conforming females don’t do that, with modifying their bodies to look childlike or like a sex doll completely normalized.
I certainly feel your misery. If there’s anything i’ve learned in my 74 years it’s that body dysphoria is endemic among women. probably men too, (but it seems to me less so?) cf anorexia, bulimia, selfies, and the general media bombardment with garish depictions of femininity. not to bash Dolly Parton, Madonna, Taylor Swift, ad infinitum, but many of us among the unwashed masses feel awkward about our bodies. I certainly feel extreme but have had friends that seem ‘normal’ to me say they have reasons too. one wise friend: try to imagine how boring normal can be (just like everyone else 😔)
Can see, too, finding philosophical theorizing a bit much — there’s so much of it these days it’s hard to keep up. But in the end it’s a good thing! I want to read MORE women! Irony of posting this under some guy’s (Alex?) thread 😔
Given your extensive discussion of Byrne's paper and since you seem to have a predilection for philosophy -- particularly in its "intersection" with feminism -- you might have some interest in this PhilPapers article by a philosopher of science and biology, Paul Griffiths, on "What are biological sexes?"
Of maybe particular note is that Griffiths is not terribly impressed with Byrne's take for many reasons which I discuss in some detail elsewhere. But in particular:
PG: "Philosophers who have discussed biological sex, whether they seek to vindicate the idea (Byrne 2020) or critique it (Dembroff 2020), have not defined it in the way biologists do. The definitions of male and female they do consider are non-starters as general criteria to distinguish male and female organisms. .... The primary lesson of this article is that philosophical disputes about ‘biological sexes’ are not about the distinction between male and female organisms as it figures in biology. In a high-profile recent article philosopher Byrne defended the view that ‘human female’ is a biological category, where 'Biological categories are categories proprietary to biology.' (2020, 3784). He did not expand on what he means by ‘biology’ but nothing in his article suggests any acquaintance with the literature reviewed here."
Byrne, like too many so-called philosophers and biologists, is trying to mangle the biological definitions to make them into participation trophies, into badges of tribal membership with nothing in the way any biologically relevant or useful underpinnings connected to reproductive abilities.
Seems to be a more or less popular idea, at least within the narrow confines of the philosophical community, that the sexes qualify as "natural kinds", and they are defined the way they are -- i.e., as "produces large or small gametes" -- as a way of getting a handle on the "essence" of the phenomena, as a way of identifying the defining feature common to ALL females and ALL males of ALL anisogamous species:
And, finally, my kick at the kitty where I attempt to draw many of those threads together in a more thorough justification for the biological definitions:
"Rerum cognoscere causas; Mechanisms in Science: things learned at my mother's knee and other low joints"
You say he invented this term Complete Asexual Syndrome (CAS) which I, and not only me I think, misread as CAIS (Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome) and then you argue about the case for this invented condition. Is that not pointless?
No. Thought experiments are an important part of philosophy, and they routinely reference invented scenarios. If you don't understand their value, I have to suggest taking an elementary philosophy course.
No, I won't be doing a philosophy course, elementary or otherwise. I think if one is going to use a thought experiment it would be less confusing if the condition you discuss was clearly an invented one and not one with a very similar name to a real one. Or is that a feature thought experiments, too?
You should take your complaint to Alex Byrne, as he is the one who came up with "CAS". It didn't seem like GCs had a problem understanding it in his original piece defending the GC view.
The main mistake is not asking "should this natural category with little to no fuzzy gray area be used like this other natural category with little no fuzzy gray area?" the answer is no, despite how that will make some people uncomfortable. The categories, and how people naturally want to use them have no overlap. There's a good reason different cultures had special words for this sort of thing, and we should solve the problem similarly.
If you want to talk about CAIS just talk about CAIS, or proofread better. It's confusing to see you talk about male people with complete asexual syndrome and also see CAIS referenced on the diagram.
I don't think it's all that confusing or difficult to formulate a position in defense of woman's rights if you understand biology. Why are you desperate for a social constructivist position when id argue it's part of the reason why we're in this current mess, with people like Judith Butler taking social construction to extremes while just completely ignoring the reality of biological sex
Take DSDs such as CAIS, ie a male who may have been brought up as a woman. This isn't confusing, just because they are socially accepted as women doesn't make them women. For the purposes of sport they should be treated as men, because they are men and have a performance advantage over woman.
The rest is about social accomodation and legal fictions, not about definitions. We foolishly in retrospect allowed the idea that some people could exist 'as if' they were the other sex in law. That was accommodated because it was rare and there was a narrative that some people are 'born in the wrong body'.
Now due to social contagion there are many people who claim to be trans and they often don't even use born in the wrong body narratives.
So we need to revisit this social accomodation. I don't see what you're finding difficult about it.
Do you think that people with CAIS are women? If you think they're not, do you think we ought to permit them in women's spaces, refer to them with she/her pronouns, etc.?
No I don't think they are women, because they are biologically male. I would accept they might be brought up and live as women and would allow them to continue to live that way, generally speaking. I'd like to know more about how they feel themselves to be. Id use pronouns of their choice and use women’s spaces - they have female genitalia from my understanding. Sports should be sex tested as the existence of testes gives performance benefits.
But this isn't some slippery slope to accepting any man into women's spaces. Intersex, or DSDs, are an unrelated rare set of individual conditions that should be viewed separately. There are ongoing ethical questions around what is appropriate in terms of treatment, surgeries on children (prior to their consent) with these conditions that remain contentious. It is an issue for intersex people however, and many resent being brought in as political support for trans ideology.
What's your thoughts?
I would say that male people with CAIS are women, as they share the same socialization and vulnerabilities female women experience. (It's possible that some people with CAIS are recognized as male early enough that they have a different psychological and social trajectory than female people, but I am confident that there have been some intersex males who lived and died without anyone even suspecting they were anything other than female.) What matters to me is that people with CAIS share those specific female experiences with other women. I don't think that an "XY" result on a karyotype test would invalidate that at all.
That, of course, doesn't mean that just any male person can self-identify as a woman and therefore exists in that category. Quite the opposite - most, if not all, trans-identified males have no experience of female socialization and are obviously not seen as actually female by the community around them. So my view would not say that they are women or that we have some sort of obligation to refer to them as such, permit them into women's spaces, etc.
But beyond that, I don't really understand your policy views here. It sounds like you think that we should allow CAIS male women into women's prisons or locker rooms as a sort of favor to them, or as an act of pity. But a trans woman might reasonably point out that they too should get the same treatment; it's not controversial to say that trans women are at higher risk of assault in men's shelters or men's prisons. So what explains the differential treatment? Your view, or Alex Byrne's view, doesn't clearly lay out a heuristic for why some male people should be treated "as women" while other male people (trans women) should not. And so I think it's your view, which ignores female socialization and female social realities in favor of a purely biological test for womanhood, that opens itself up to trans inclusion.
I didn't state a position on prisons - we would struggle to get enough data for such a rare condition but do we know if they're more likely to commit violence or sex offences than woman? In any case, this condition is 100% verifiable by biological testing and is a rare edge case. There are always edge cases as well as issues of practical implementation. It's not motivated out of pity (rather sympathy) - obviously if someone has been living their life as a woman due to this DSD then they have some claim to continue to do so, I might personally grant them this accomodation. But note that you or I or trans activists or progressive politicians shouldn't be the final arbiters, a social accomodation requires all of society to come to a view. Maybe each DSD requires it's own evidence and policy consideration? Any rule might meet at a gray area that could be criticized - most men are not sexual predators or violent and many are victims of domestic violence - you could probably consider such victims unfairly excluded from refuge shelters from a pure philosophical perspective but obviously we have better reasons to keep men out. And men can have their own shelters or options for sanctuary, just as trans people can have third spaces.
But a socialized woman is still not a woman- here we are both of us still not knowing much at all about CAIS- perhaps some CAIS always suspected they were different from other girls even from young? I think this condition means that post puberty they know they are not normal women as they don't menstruate.
Now a passing trans person could also use opposite sex toilets without being noticed- I don't advocate for sex testing at the door so practically we would always struggle to segregate on a sex based rule but we could easily make a practical rule around genitalia. And in other situations we can sex test. Note there is no empirical evidence of true trans, the kind of prototypical 'born in the wrong body' child that is so often brought up as the best available argument for trans acceptance (and which is increasingly dated in favour of narratives around transgender choice/rights and embodiment goals). We can't identify true trans but we can easily identify DSDs so there is already a difference. Is that not a practical heuristic?
Now let me address some of your points and problematise your female socialisation construct.
It's not obvious to me that risks that trans people face are related to female socialisation if that is what you're saying. Trans people suffer a marginal existence for a range of reasons and are much more likely for example to be gay and to become prostitutes. Indeed some of the claims of risks to trans people are biased towards South American stats of violence and deaths of such prostitutes who clearly live in a dangerous predicament in such countries. But this is not the same as female socialisation type harms such as social norms allowing men to rape or beat their wives without consequence. The trans experience might be closer to effeminate gays living a marginal existence due to childhood trauma, homophobia and economic circumstances.
You were confused about my position but I am very confused about yours as a self-identifying feminist. I think you essentialise a construct of female socialisation when it is really a range of overlapping socialisations, interacting with each other and with actual biology.
So the above examples of violence are actually most strongly associated with economic deprivation and family trauma. This overlaps with biology so that men are able to physically overcome women and overlaps with social forces, historically patriarchy and now more contextual - police departments that are better or worse at following up rape cases and supporting women victims.
You seem to imply some homogeneous 'female socialisation' that acts on everybody and so presumably also acts on effeminate trans woman in the same way. But this ignores all the other factors. Trans-identified people are more likely to be gay for example and have more likelihood of trauma and mental health issues than women generally speaking.
Now this philosophical enquiry around DSDs and edge cases is always valid in it's own right. Perhaps we could move on to whether a lion and a tiger are really separate species when they can produce a liger? Or at what point a car becomes a truck in modern vehicle designs?
But it's also a side-show. I don't recall, perhaps haven't read, your position on the actual issues.
What do you think about rapists being in female prisons and commiting assaults, male inmates impregnating women in prison, victims of rapists being forced to use she/her pronouns in court when describing their rape, women no longer being able to associate with only biological women, women not being able to insist on having a biologically female doctor, therapist, or person conducting a strip search, girls having to share locker rooms and sports facilities with men with penises, children being taught an unreality that sex is not binary, not real and they can't assert their right to private spaces away from boys, children being given an experimental treatment of puberty blockers prior to meaningful consent that could lead to them becoming infertile when many would have grown out of it, and many would have been gay. Men self-identifying as women and taking jobs, scholarships and prizes away from women, the role of social contagion and online spaces confusing young people and putting them on a medical pathway, etc, etc.
I don't know your views so I may be wrong here but i fear you are so hung up on defending a particular view of female socialisation (lacking a strong epistemic basis in my view, check the case of David Reimer) as the basis of your feminism that you may be missing what is relevant. Ironically I am a male and have come to question quite a lot of what passes for feminist orthodoxy yet am a strong advocate for women ...
Sorry bit of a rant but it's a summary of many such online debates over red herring arguments around biology, DSDs etc
I'm sorry, I read this but I'm still unclear on what your position is on important policy questions. Can you explain what your view is if a person with CAIS is convicted of a crime - say, fraud - and they have to go to prison tomorrow? Where should they go?
If your theory can't answer this question, I would say that's a major strike against your theory! I could very easily answer this question.
I understand that you think you may need more information, but you haven't made it clear how that information would impact the decision you make. I really do feel like a lot of GCs hedge on this because they believe people with CAIS are male/men, but they can't bring themselves to say they should therefore by default be placed in men's facilities, because that's obviously a terrible idea. But it seems like an obvious consequence of your theory, so I'm not sure how you get around it.
Where do you stand in anything. Policy is about evidence and gray areas. I don't think female socialisation is homogeneous such that DSDs are just the same as women, and I haven't fully formed a view on DSD men. As a reactive decision I'd say put them in a men's prison but let's make men's prisons safer, eg for effeminate gay men as well.
Edge cases always exist and I am comfortable with some gray areas and pragmatic decision making. This doesn't mean men should be allowed in women's prisons. Would you allow some men into women's prisons because they looked like girls and we're treated as such? How would you identify such people
Why are you having gotcha moments on rare people (what is even the overlap with DSDs and prisoners?) while ignoring more important issues for women.
What is your final unproblematic policy solution for DSDs and trans and how could you distinguish on your socialisation basis?
The fact you didn't even address a single of the pressing feminist issues means you aren't even a feminist. By all means write about philosophy - maybe you could address whether species is a real concept given there are edge cases? Perhaps you're actually a man, or a troll, it's hard to tell at this point so I'll leave you with the last word rather than waste my time on a wall of text.
As per my recent comment, technically speaking those CAIS people are neither male nor female; they're sexless since they're incapable of producing either sperm or ova, the sine qua non for sex category membership.
Not exactly a popular opinion as many people -- not just the transloonie nutcases -- are rather desperately committed to making the sexes into identities, to the "idea", the rather serious "cognitive distortion", that sex is "immutable" and that everyone is either male or female from conception to death. Quite unscientific claptrap and incoherent twaddle.
But, fortunately, more than a few biologists are bravely endorsing that interpretation, in particular biologists Jerry Coyne and PZ Myers along with a trio of them writing in the reputable Wiley Online Library:
JC: "Those 1/6000 individuals are intersexes, neither male nor female."
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2023/06/04/sf-chronicle-sex-and-gender-are-not-binaries/#comment-2048737
PZM: “ ‘female’ is not applicable -- it refers to individuals that produce ova. By the technical definition, many cis women are not female.”
https://x.com/pzmyers/status/1466458067491598342
Wiley Online Library: "For instance, a mammalian embryo with heterozygous sex chromosomes (XY-setup) is not reproductively competent, as it does not produce gametes of any size. Thus, strictly speaking it does not have any biological sex, YET. [my emphasis]."
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.202200173?af=R
"the traditional feminist view that the term ‘woman’ refers to a socially constructed category." No, that is not "the traditional feminist" view at all. How are you defining "traditional feminist view"? Cite the intellectual lineages that you think constitute the "traditional feminist view."
That's the view of Catharine Mackinnon, Andrea Dworkin, Shulamith Firestone, Sally Haslanger... I mean this was the standard view among feminists until the trans issue emerged.
BASED
Absurd! That's not at all what they wrote. If you have read any of their writings in depth -- which I doubt -- you would know that you are mischaracterizing the meaning of their words. Your comment reeks of bad faith.
You have got to be kidding. You think that Catharine Mackinnon wasn't a social constructivist? You have either never read her work or you have zero reading comprehension of what you read of her work on this subject. Where does Catharine Mackinnon embrace a biological view about womanhood?
Don't hide behind jargon like "a social constructivist." It obscures the messy complexity of history, which is much more important than academic in-group code. Feminism is not a dogma. Nor a monolith.
It's been a messy and contested historic process of many voices thinking together, disagreeing, and moving from ideas into real world action.
The few feminists you cite (or should I say cherry pick?)-- very, very few out of a much larger and more diverse movement -- were dealing with real world, pragmatic questions involving the lives of real women. They weren't snugly locked into a self-referential academic discourse. They were thinking much bigger than ossified concepts like "social constructivist."
Your language is far too narrow for the depth and breadth of feminist thinking.
Your comment reeks of worse. There’s a reason feminism is taught in Gender Studies now instead of Women’s Studies. And why sex crimes are now gendered crimes. And why TERFs were excommunicated from radical feminism. And why trans people never bothered arguing for gender’s existence, importance, and effective primacy over biology.
The trans movement wasn’t big or influential enough to do this by itself, or even with the rest of the rainbow. But second-wave radical feminists, with their resentment of all things male, (hetero)sexual, and/or reproductive were a perfect substrate in which trans-feminism/trans-gender studies could safely incubate until, about a decade ago, it escaped the lab and promptly replaced material reality and meaningful justice.
Feminism stole the modern notion of gender from early trans researchers. Men who opposed the rise of “gender feminism” were told this was an objectively regressive, biologically essentialist position.
The social constructivist view does not commit itself to trans inclusion. Some social constructivist feminists have embraced it, but others have not.
I definitely see your point here. I'm increasingly feeling estranged from this kind of philosophy-based feminism, because as a detrans butch lesbian who often is read as male to strangers, it's kind of exhausting to be thinking about which argument should win here all the time. I don't want to change my appearance to wear womanhood like an accessory as some kind of feminist signaling, but as it is I am read as male a significant portion of the time.
Holding too close to this worldview, I'm stuck in a difficult position on a daily basis when the simplest of choices, like deciding which restroom to use, becomes a moral issue. In sex segregated spaces, I have to chose between using the women's restroom, reflecting the actual biological truth of my body (and potentially making women uncomfortable based on my appearance) or chosing the men's, where I'm likely to fit in better at a glance. Compared to that, the queer free-for-all seems better. I just want to live my life without worrying about this crap.
I think it's useful to appreciate that the trans movement made your life practically harder. There have always been feminine men and masculine women and while such individuals have their own journey in coming to terms with this reality, until recently there was no confusion socially because society has always understood their are effeminate men and masculine women. But because of the trans issue everyone questions appearance because there are enough people pretending to be a different sex that this is the existential question we face.
Trans ideology overly essentialises sex- because trans requires social proof-this is done by appearing as the opposite sex (or appearing sex neutral or whatever). This view actually hews to sex stereotypes. Biological sex however 'just is', it doesn't require social proof and so ironically offers greater freedom of expression.
It's trans ideology that has made your life harder and a modal mistake about identity. I'd wager few people would question your right to be in the woman's toilets 50 years ago.
I do agree that the trans movement made my life harder, but 50 years ago I would struggle to access professional jobs as a butch lesbian woman.
Also, I currently live in a place where trans ideology isn’t mainstream, and I have been getting directed to the men’s bathrooms since before I transitioned, so I’m not sure that you’re right that no one would question me.
I prefer the model of biological sex that you’re describing but the cat has been let out of the bag and I don’t think it’s going back in ☹️
Well that sounds difficult and I'd agree taking whatever approach causes the least fuss is natural. I'm speaking hypothetically but in my fantasy ideal of myself I'd like to think I might be a bit out and proud about it, ie I'm a biological woman, mind your own business, but that's me fantasising.
I would be happy to have a trans woman in the men's in a you do you style. I think we should honour our sex - it was there before we were even conscious humans and we can't change sex. But then express our gender freely. I appreciate that's a somewhat naive view given some people are just toxic about difference.
But Im not sure that all trans men are dying to go to the men's bathroom/toilet— in some circumstances they might actually be at risk of weird men so the bathroom rules are probably inconsistent anyway- much easier to go by biology otherwise we allow weird men with penises to live out their fetish among girls. That's the reality, even if the weirdos are relatively rare and it's why societies have private sex spaces in the first instance - pretty much a universal as far as I'm aware.
Totally with you there, if I lived in the U.S., I would 100% be out and proud about it. When I am in liberal areas I use the women’s and expect others to deal.
I really dislike using men’s toilets (I swear, male pee reeks and i can smell it strongly it’s so gross) and the only saving grace is that where I live single stall restrooms are the default in most places and even in men’s rooms the stalls are very private.
I wish there was a culture of honoring our sex. Even gender conforming females don’t do that, with modifying their bodies to look childlike or like a sex doll completely normalized.
Yes that's a good point, body modification and reinforcing stereotypes run across the board, which is sad.
I certainly feel your misery. If there’s anything i’ve learned in my 74 years it’s that body dysphoria is endemic among women. probably men too, (but it seems to me less so?) cf anorexia, bulimia, selfies, and the general media bombardment with garish depictions of femininity. not to bash Dolly Parton, Madonna, Taylor Swift, ad infinitum, but many of us among the unwashed masses feel awkward about our bodies. I certainly feel extreme but have had friends that seem ‘normal’ to me say they have reasons too. one wise friend: try to imagine how boring normal can be (just like everyone else 😔)
Can see, too, finding philosophical theorizing a bit much — there’s so much of it these days it’s hard to keep up. But in the end it’s a good thing! I want to read MORE women! Irony of posting this under some guy’s (Alex?) thread 😔
Given your extensive discussion of Byrne's paper and since you seem to have a predilection for philosophy -- particularly in its "intersection" with feminism -- you might have some interest in this PhilPapers article by a philosopher of science and biology, Paul Griffiths, on "What are biological sexes?"
https://philarchive.org/rec/GRIWAB-2
Of maybe particular note is that Griffiths is not terribly impressed with Byrne's take for many reasons which I discuss in some detail elsewhere. But in particular:
PG: "Philosophers who have discussed biological sex, whether they seek to vindicate the idea (Byrne 2020) or critique it (Dembroff 2020), have not defined it in the way biologists do. The definitions of male and female they do consider are non-starters as general criteria to distinguish male and female organisms. .... The primary lesson of this article is that philosophical disputes about ‘biological sexes’ are not about the distinction between male and female organisms as it figures in biology. In a high-profile recent article philosopher Byrne defended the view that ‘human female’ is a biological category, where 'Biological categories are categories proprietary to biology.' (2020, 3784). He did not expand on what he means by ‘biology’ but nothing in his article suggests any acquaintance with the literature reviewed here."
https://philarchive.org/rec/GRIWAB-2
Byrne, like too many so-called philosophers and biologists, is trying to mangle the biological definitions to make them into participation trophies, into badges of tribal membership with nothing in the way any biologically relevant or useful underpinnings connected to reproductive abilities.
Seems to be a more or less popular idea, at least within the narrow confines of the philosophical community, that the sexes qualify as "natural kinds", and they are defined the way they are -- i.e., as "produces large or small gametes" -- as a way of getting a handle on the "essence" of the phenomena, as a way of identifying the defining feature common to ALL females and ALL males of ALL anisogamous species:
"Are sexes natural kinds?"; Muhammad Ali Khalidi
https://philarchive.org/rec/KHAASN
Kathleen Stock, in her Material Girls, at least genuflects in that direction of "natural kinds" without getting too deep into it:
https://www.amazon.com/Material-Girls-Reality-Matters-Feminism-ebook/dp/B08LK8TY5S
https://helensaxby.com/2021/05/11/the-butler-did-it-a-review-of-material-girls-by-kathleen-stock/
https://lcp.law.duke.edu/article/the-importance-of-referring-to-human-sex-in-language-stock-vol85-iss1/
A snippet from the latter by Stock in a paper at Duke Law -- which apparently caused a great deal of consternation there:
KS: "... the sexes (the two underlying natural kinds that partly give rise to the social meanings) ..."
You might have some additional interest in the concept:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/natural-kinds/
And, finally, my kick at the kitty where I attempt to draw many of those threads together in a more thorough justification for the biological definitions:
"Rerum cognoscere causas; Mechanisms in Science: things learned at my mother's knee and other low joints"
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/rerum-cognoscere-causas
You say he invented this term Complete Asexual Syndrome (CAS) which I, and not only me I think, misread as CAIS (Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome) and then you argue about the case for this invented condition. Is that not pointless?
No. Thought experiments are an important part of philosophy, and they routinely reference invented scenarios. If you don't understand their value, I have to suggest taking an elementary philosophy course.
No, I won't be doing a philosophy course, elementary or otherwise. I think if one is going to use a thought experiment it would be less confusing if the condition you discuss was clearly an invented one and not one with a very similar name to a real one. Or is that a feature thought experiments, too?
You should take your complaint to Alex Byrne, as he is the one who came up with "CAS". It didn't seem like GCs had a problem understanding it in his original piece defending the GC view.
The main mistake is not asking "should this natural category with little to no fuzzy gray area be used like this other natural category with little no fuzzy gray area?" the answer is no, despite how that will make some people uncomfortable. The categories, and how people naturally want to use them have no overlap. There's a good reason different cultures had special words for this sort of thing, and we should solve the problem similarly.
If you want to talk about CAIS just talk about CAIS, or proofread better. It's confusing to see you talk about male people with complete asexual syndrome and also see CAIS referenced on the diagram.
Complete Asexual Syndrome is the (imaginary) analogue to CAIS given in Byrne's paper.