A good, not jargon-laden definition of "Female". really!

submitted by FlippyKing from self.GenderCriticalGuys

Below is a link to a video made by Trent Horn, a Catholic apologist and debat-er if that's a word. I don't know that I love his content but I've not seen that much of it. As his focus is Catholicism I can imagine he is very few people here's cup of tea. But here he is talking about Matt Walsh's appearance on Dr. Phil's show with some trans activists, and he sticks to just talking about how to make good arguments and being prepared when you go into these situations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVSH3XFqsr0

The advantage of this approach is that it avoids the traps and pitfalls in all the various complications they bring up, and gets right down to a function a body is designed towards. Trent describes his definition as teleological. This is a very practical approach to us who only use our own bodies or interact with each other's bodies based on their designs and how well they match the purpose of the design.

Why did my team win a basketball game? Well, it started with the fact that my team had bodies who's design better served the purposes required by the game of basketball. Once we were together we could block shots, pass the ball into the paint and dunk. On "D", we slowed the game down and waited to block or rebound. All of this took advantage of our height advantage over the other team. Thank God it wasn't a limbo contest!

So, I don't want to post his definition because it is worth hearing the context of where Matt would have benefited from having this approach available to him, and also for seeing how he dealt with it. I see something of how he dealt with it in how I do, and while I don't think it is a weakness, it is about context.

I've taken the tact to define woman as adult human female and female as someone whose body is designed towards the reproductive capacity of birthing children. It sidesteps the "what about barren women" or other bad-faith counters from tras. But, I would like to think I stress that what we're dealing with are two competing theories about these terms, or two competing world views. We should go with the one that makes most sense of the world. We use Newton's ideas on gravity in every day things, and only use Einstein's ideas when the need arises which is not every day things for most people. If our definitions of man and woman work in most cases, but tras see flaws in our ideas, they should explain the flaws better. Explaining mundane things differently but not better does validate their ideas. Instead, if their theory should supersede reality then they should be able to say what infertile women are-- that they know we're talking about women is a clear give away that they are not prepared to really debate the matter seriously though. So, I have wanted tras to tell me how to classify the sex of people who have these various issues, but this teleological focus on the definition (which is similar to saying well I know what a car is even if I dont' know if it has a catalytic converter or carb, or if its positraction or any of the other details) relieves us of a lot of BS we don't really care about anyway.

(this is similar to the response to tras who talk about being unable to define what a woman is because not all "cis" women fall under the same definitions such that trans women can be excluded. While that reasoning is BS, the jujitsu counter or wrestling reversal would be to say "that, that right there. How ever you're defining "cis women" in this usage is probably what we mean by woman then.")

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[–]Antarchomachus 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

Its simpler than this. A woman is a human that lacks a y-chromosome. This is basic biology.

This fella's argument leaves room for hermaphroditism and other abnormalities

[–]FlippyKing[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

I don't see how it leaves room for either, but I don't think hermaphroditism is a real thing at all. Other abnormalities is pretty broad and I can't claim familiarity with the details of many. Colin Wright has written a lot about these types of things, but they don't make for easy conversational refutations.

The tras would counter the chromosome thing with the fact that we do not see chromosomes, and we don't. Plus, aren't there some kind of people who appear to have female genitals but have some We see the sum of all the factors and more importantly we see and each individual with a functioning body knows, what their form is built for, what role their body is meant to serve in the order of things. I think this approach gives us a great tool to have in dealing with these issues.

How does he leave room for any such abnormalities? I'm not doubting you, but I want to be better equipped and hope to find a way to address them within this kind of approach.

I did find this, "46,XX testicular disorder of sex development is a condition in which a person with two X chromosomes (which is normally found in females) has a male appearance." So, I'll have think on this a bit. https://rarediseases.info.nih.gov/diseases/399/46xx-testicular-disorder-of-sex-development

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

Never heard of this particular disorder. I admit this may make things more complicated than what I read in a biology textbook.

You also make a point about not seeing chromosomes, we had a definition of gender before we even knew chromosomes existed.

but I don't think hermaphroditism is a real thing at all.

Not sure of the prevalence in humans, but it seems to at least exist in the medical literature. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/bf02000779

How does he leave room for any such abnormalities? I'm not doubting you, but I want to be better equipped and hope to find a way to address them within this kind of approach.

I was thinking that a hermaphrodite calls into question whether you can define a 'female' as anyone having certain female sex organs.

Also somewhat unrelated to humans, but in sea-horses the males are the ones that bear the children. So again, I think this somewhat complicates such a biological argument, although it is true that this is certainly not the case in humans.

I guess this seems like it should be easier to define objectively than it is

[–]FlippyKing[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I was thinking that a hermaphrodite calls into question whether you can define a 'female' as anyone having certain female sex organs.

Oh, yes without a doubt that would. I guess my belief that there are not human hermaphrodites was rolled into what I was saying there (in my own head anyway, where many things are all rolled up, in a ball, in the corner of my mind, hoping to be left alone by my mind)

As for seahorses, I'd just assume leave them and clownfish (and all the projecting of what individual cells might do onto what fully grown humans can do) to the anime-avatar crowd.

The link is interesting, I would have to do a bit of work to makes full sense of all of it, but the bulk of what I think interests us in this quote from it: "Histologically the testicular tissue was described to be immature and only twice was spermatogenesis reported while the ovarian portion often appeared normal. This coincides with 21 pregnancies reported in ten true hermaphrodites while only one true hermaphrodite apparently has fathered a child."

My attention is drawn to the phrase "often appeared normal". One question off the top of my head is this: does "spermatogenesis" mean producing fully functioning sperm, or can it include something short of that? The reason for the question is just if they are addressing what we'd think to address or if they have other wider criteria they are wrestling with. I don't know from reading it that the ones who bore children can also father them (or just appear to be able to) or if the ones who can father them can also bear them. I guess another quick off the top of my head question is just: what do these bits look like? Would someone look at them and say "yeah, that's a normal enough looking bit" or would one of the group of bits look like ... well something to avoid. Since male bits do not take up as much room as female bits and our exterior, just the whole placement seems problematic and the hormone system that drives them ... well it gets real complicated. But if they these individuals really have dually functioning bits, and not just what appears to be both sets of bits where only one actually functions, matters.

Finally, and taking a step back from these cases: how far back in history do reliably documented cases of fully function (and dually functioning?) hermaphrodites go, and what causes it? Causes matter. If the cause is environmental, as the book from the 90s called Our Stolen Future details (and they keep a website that was updated till maybe 2006 and they direct people to environmental health news for more recent info) we are messing with our endocrine systems with the chemicals we use everyday.

But, the possibility of a fully functioning (but it must be dually functioning for it to really matter) hermaphrodite has little to do with the trans debate, and only impacts our side if we take up the challenge others refuse. We can define what something is based on some criteria. Can we define everything? the answers can only ever be "that remains to be seen", or "no". That is not a weakness of a GC point of view, it is a reality of everything. The test is not if we can define everything, but if our world view explains things better and more usefully than another world view. If there are hermaphrodites that break our definition, that only matters if their world view can make better useful sense of the world while dealing with hermaphrodites better. It is not enough to say "here's the gap in your knowledge" or "here's where you're wrong", this is true for GC, economics, social organization and everything. It is easy to throw stones and complain, easy to make empty promises of solving a problem where everyone just assumes everything around that problem wont' go to hell in a hand basket while some aspect of that problem is addressed. We don't have to concede thing if we can't accommodate this problem in a way that satisfies us (and we don't need to satisfy critics).

The other thing is that we can define men and women easily, hermaphrodites do not break this system and do not suffer from their nature because of our categories. A hermaphrodite in Africa does not justify a guy at an Ivy league school swimming on the women's team and creeping in their lockers. The hermaphrodite does not make a man in a dress a woman. It is a red herring with regard to gender, as it has everything to do with sex. That sex is immutable is not changed by a hermaphrodite, they were born that way and did not change from one to the other-- immutable.