Should transwomen be legally treated as women?[W:165,1392]

Re: Should transwomen be legally treated as women?

Henrin said:

/facepalm

You know, there is a reason people evolved to have different skin tones and it was helpful to people to live in their environments. There is and there was any benefit to being intersex. It is a genetic disease, period.

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Deviating from societal norms isn't an inherent disease.

Re: Should transwomen be legally treated as women?

ReverendHellh0und said:

So this rare syndrome proves what? This is a biological condition.

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What it demonstrates is that basing the experience of being a woman on XX chromosomes is flawed because there are women with XY chromosomes.

Re: Should transwomen be legally treated as women?

Tsunami said:

You've demonstrated what the perception is of what being a woman means, but that's not the definition that matters. Biology matters. Perception can be changed.

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You have made a subjective value judgement based on what you want others to be. Not only that but the biological basis that you are so fond of is flawed. There are indeed women with XY chromosomes and who don't have the female organs necessary for reproduction.

Tsunami said:

Much better to base laws on actual physical reality that cannot be altered and has real-world reproductive consequences, than to base laws on stereotypes that are proven wrong every day and have no specific or persistent meaning and fail to define the issue in a useful, practical way.

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You are basing your assessment on immutable laws that don't exist.

Re: Should transwomen be legally treated as women?

Unrepresented said:

Deviating from societal norms isn't an inherent disease.

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Sigh. This has nothing to do with social norms. Please look up the condition you brought up. The genetic condition does have adverse affects on the individual.

Re: Should transwomen be legally treated as women?

MildSteel said:

What it demonstrates is that basing the experience of being a woman on XX chromosomes is flawed because there are women with XY chromosomes.

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Genetic disease. Seriously, do you guys have an example that's not a genetic disease?

Re: Should transwomen be legally treated as women?

Bob Blaylock said:

I spent eighteen years working as a data analyst I know something about evaluating outliers, and determining what significance, if any, to attribute to them relative to the normal data.

In this case, the outliers simply do not mean what you want them to mean.

There's a very clear, unambiguous process, by which sex-determination takes place in mammals. 99.8% of the time, it happens exactly as it is supposed to; the creature is conceived with XY or XX chromosomes, and fully formed during gestation and further during adolescence, to be either fully male, or fully female, respectively; leaving no rational basis on which to claim that there is any such thing as “gender” that doesn't match the biological sex. Even the “transgenders” who are the topic of this thread, are, in the vast majority of instances, products of a correctly-executed sex-selection, and their “gender”-related delusions and claims notwithstanding, their biological sex is unambiguous and undeniable.

The outliers in this case are caused by defects in the sex-selection process, resulting either from genetic abnormalities or hormone-related abnormalities. They are extremely rare, and the manner in which they differ from normal cases has no relevance to how sex-selection takes place in normal cases. They are “valid data” only in that they demonstrate that once in a great while, the process that normally occurs without a hitch goes rather badly astray, producing a freak result.

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Since you appear to know something about the scientific method here's something for you. If you just flew in from Pluto and knew nothing at all about cars and I told you that my car will not run without gas, it would be very easy to verify that. When the car runs out of gas, it simply will not run. Therefore we can most certainly associate the causality of the energy that makes the car run with the gasoline that is put into it. In this case, you want to associate the causality of being female with XX chromosomes. But we can indeed observe that there are females with XY chromosomes. This leads us to conclude that while the condition of being female has a strong correlation with the presence of XX chromosomes, we cannot assign the causality with such because we observe that there are females with XY chromosomes. That's the bottom line.

Re: Should transwomen be legally treated as women?

Henrin said:

Genetic disease. Seriously, do you guys have an example that's not a genetic disease?

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Do you have any idea what causality is? There are women without XX chromosomes, therefore you cannot associate the causality of being a woman with XX chromosomes.

Re: Should transwomen be legally treated as women?

MildSteel said:

Do you have any idea what causality is? There are women without XX chromosomes, therefore you cannot associate the causality of being a woman with XX chromosomes.

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You do know a woman with XY has a genetic disease, right?

Re: Should transwomen be legally treated as women?

Henrin said:

Sigh. This has nothing to do with social norms. Please look up the condition you brought up. The genetic condition does have adverse affects on the individual.

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Again, "adverse" involves context. If you're defining the context that isn't objective.

Re: Should transwomen be legally treated as women?

Henrin said:

You do know a woman with XY has a genetic disease, right?

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The fact is that there are women who have XY chromosomes. That tells you that the causality of being a woman IS NOT the presence of XX chromosomes.

Re: Should transwomen be legally treated as women?

MildSteel said:

The fact is that there are women who have XY chromosomes. That tells you that the causality of being a woman IS NOT the presence of XX chromosomes.

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It tells me the importance of the SRY gene.

Re: Should transwomen be legally treated as women?

Henrin said:

It tells me the importance of the SRY gene.

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What is says is that you and others who advocate this position have manufactured these so called "immutable" biological laws that don't exist. If the causality of being a woman was indeed XX chromosomes, we would not observe women with XY chromosomes. It simply would not be possible.

Re: Should transwomen be legally treated as women?

MildSteel said:

What is says is that you and others who advocate this position have manufactured these so called "immutable" biological laws that don't exist. If the causality of being a woman was indeed XX chromosomes, we would not observe women with XY chromosomes. It simply would not be possible.

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All you're telling me is that you have no idea what the SRY gene does.

Re: Should transwomen be legally treated as women?

Henrin said:

All you're telling me is that you have no idea what the SRY gene does.

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What I am telling you that if you say to me that A causes B, and then I present to you a case where A does not cause B, then your case is finished.

Re: Should transwomen be legally treated as women?

Henrin said:

You do realize this is not a helpful mutation, right? Please stop arguing with the use of generic arguments and research genetic diseases.

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Hard to know. Over time, maybe it will be helpful.

But "helpful" and "unhelpful" are our subjective assessments. nature doesn't care.

Re: Should transwomen be legally treated as women?

Bob Blaylock said:

Perhaps you should leave it to me to express what my ideas are, and how they differ from what other ideas. KLess risk, that way, of embarrassing yourself by being caught saying something that is both wrong and incredibly stupid, as you just did.

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No, what I said wasn't wrong or stupid. If it doesn't match with your beliefs, that's up to you. That doesn't say anything about my ideas.

how about you stick to the thread instead of insulting other posters?

left-handedness is "deviant" from the norm. Are you calling it a defect? or is a deviance only a defect if you don't like it?

Re: Should transwomen be legally treated as women?

Henrin said:

You do know a woman with XY has a genetic disease, right?

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not a disease. a disparity from the norm.

Re: Should transwomen be legally treated as women?

MildSteel said:

You have made a subjective value judgement based on what you want others to be. Not only that but the biological basis that you are so fond of is flawed. There are indeed women with XY chromosomes and who don't have the female organs necessary for reproduction.

You are basing your assessment on immutable laws that don't exist.

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Where have I made a value judgement? Biology is objectively a better criteria. If anyone is defining people by what they want others to be it is you. You want to call them "women" because of how they act, or self-identify. But that's not a rational criteria, as I pointed out already. The only objectively meaningful subject here is reproductive function, defined by ovaries and testes. This is the only reason we need laws separating the sexes, and it becomes futile if we define it instead by gender.

Re: Should transwomen be legally treated as women?

paddymcdougall said:

not a disease. a disparity from the norm.

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No, XY women is caused by a mutilated or missing SRY gene. Sorry, but that is a genetic disease.

Re: Should transwomen be legally treated as women?

Tsunami said:

Where have I made a value judgement? Biology is objectively a better criteria. If anyone is defining people by what they want others to be it is you. You want to call them "women" because of how they act, or self-identify. But that's not a rational criteria, as I pointed out already. The only objectively meaningful subject here is reproductive function, defined by ovaries and testes. This is the only reason we need laws separating the sexes, and it becomes futile if we define it instead by gender.

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Your choice of criteria is a subjective value judgement and the fact that there are those that disagree with you demonstrates that. Moreover, that FACT that there are women who have neither XY chromosomes nor ovaries demonstrates that there is much more to the experience of being a woman that that.

Re: Should transwomen be legally treated as women?

MildSteel said:

Your choice of criteria is a subjective value judgement and the fact that there are those that disagree with you demonstrates that. Moreover, that FACT that there are women who have neither XY chromosomes nor ovaries demonstrates that there is much more to the experience of being a woman that that.

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This is nonsense. It's not subjective, it's biology. You are using circular reasoning to call these people without ovaries "women" which you say proves that it can't be the defining criteria. You are defining sex by secondary sex characteristics and ignoring the primary one.

I was watching Family Feud one day, and the question was "what is the largest state?" The #1 answer was of course, Texas. By your way of thinking, I got it wrong when I said Alaska, because "the fact that there are those that disagree with you demonstrates that."

Women are females beyond the age of puberty, and females have ovaries containing egg cells. This is the origin of the term and the entire reason we have binary gender classification, it was based on reproductive function. It's okay if you want to change that, but no new meaning will change the biological facts behind it. And the reason for our laws is also based on reproductive function. So if you want to use semantic arguments to claim the words "woman" and "female" as gender instead of sex, maybe we need new terms for the sexes, but it still makes more sense to define laws based on biology than gender.

Re: Should transwomen be legally treated as women?

Tsunami said:

This is nonsense. It's not subjective, it's biology.

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No, it is subjective. Your choice of the criteria of what is a woman is subjective and is based on your subjective values. For example someone could take a bus that was painted white and use it to pick up children from school. It is a school bus. But someone could say, well school buses are all painted yellow so it can't be a school bus. Yes most of them are yellow, but functionally speaking, a bus that is painted white that is used to pick up children from school is a school bus. Now the person that says it can't be a school bus because it is not yellow could say, well the bus is yellow and that is objective. Yes the bus is yellow, but the choice of saying that only yellow buses that pick up children from school are real school buses is a subjective value judgement and ignores on the primary function of a bus that used to pick up children from school.

Tsunami said:

You are using circular reasoning to call these people without ovaries "women" which you say proves that it can't be the defining criteria. You are defining sex by secondary sex characteristics and ignoring the primary one.

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No it is not circular. There are women who were not born with ovaries. Such persons behave like women and feel as though they are women. Therefore you cannot confine the condition of being a woman to someone who has ovaries, any more than one could say that a white bus that picks up children from school is not a school bus.

Tsunami said:

I was watching Family Feud one day, and the question was "what is the largest state?" The #1 answer was of course, Texas. By your way of thinking, I got it wrong when I said Alaska, because "the fact that there are those that disagree with you demonstrates that."

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The criteria for being a state of United States was a subjective value judgement made by lawmakers. IF one accepts that subjective criteria, if one were asked such a question, the objective answer would be Alaska. That is not the dispute in this case however. What I am saying is that your choice of the criteria for being a woman is a subjective value judgement, just like the criteria that the lawmakers chose for being a state of the United States.

Tsunami said:

Women are females beyond the age of puberty, and females have ovaries containing egg cells. This is the origin of the term and the entire reason we have binary gender classification, it was based on reproductive function.

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Again, not all women have ovaries that contain egg cells. That is one point. Moreover, that fact that you can take out a woman's ovaries and she would still be a woman means that the condition of being a woman is more than just having ovaries containing egg cells. IF that were all to it, removing a woman's ovaries would mean that she would cease to be a woman.

Tsunami said:

It's okay if you want to change that, but no new meaning will change the biological facts behind it.

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I am not changing anything. It is a biological fact that there were women born without ovaries before I was born and there will be women born without ovaries after I am dead. That is just the way it is.

Tsunami said:

So if you want to use semantic arguments to claim the words "woman" and "female" as gender instead of sex, maybe we need new terms for the sexes, but it still makes more sense to define laws based on biology than gender.

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Again the biology of the situation is that there are women who do not have ovaries, some of whom were not born with them.

Re: Should transwomen be legally treated as women?

MildSteel said:

No, it is subjective. Your choice of the criteria of what is a woman is subjective and is based on your subjective values. For example someone could take a bus that was painted white and use it to pick up children from school. It is a school bus. But someone could say, well school buses are all painted yellow so it can't be a school bus. Yes most of them are yellow, but functionally speaking, a bus that is painted white that is used to pick up children from school is a school bus. Now the person that says it can't be a school bus because it is not yellow could say, well the bus is yellow and that is objective. Yes the bus is yellow, but the choice of saying that only yellow buses that pick up children from school are real school buses is a subjective value judgement and ignores on the primary function of a bus that used to pick up children from school.

No it is not circular. There are women who were not born with ovaries. Such persons behave like women and feel as though they are women. Therefore you cannot confine the condition of being a woman to someone who has ovaries, any more than one could say that a white bus that picks up children from school is not a school bus.

Again, not all women have ovaries that contain egg cells. That is one point. Moreover, that fact that you can take out a woman's ovaries and she would still be a woman means that the condition of being a woman is more than just having ovaries containing egg cells. IF that were all to it, removing a woman's ovaries would mean that she would cease to be a woman.

I am not changing anything. It is a biological fact that there were women born without ovaries before I was born and there will be women born without ovaries after I am dead. That is just the way it is.

Again the biology of the situation is that there are women who do not have ovaries, some of whom were not born with them.

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You're not understanding me somewhere. You are saying I am the one defining a school bus by the color rather than the function? I am defining the sexes by reproductive function, you are the one choosing secondary criteria and elevating them above the primary and original meaning. A woman can behave any way she wants to and still be female. I find your way of thinking sexist.

And then by circular reasoning you are saying I cannot define the sexes that way because historically we've called people women who didn't have ovaries. That's like saying Pluto is a planet because we used to call it a planet. Guess what, that criteria didn't make sense. There are not women by my definition born without ovaries. You can call them women out of sympathy, but it isn't meaningful as their lack of reproductive function makes them neuter. And making laws based on compassion over function is irrational.

Re: Should transwomen be legally treated as women?

Tsunami said:

You're not understanding me somewhere. You are saying I am the one defining a school bus by the color rather than the function?

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The point is that you are making a subjective value judgement that ignores based on chromosomes and ovaries that ignores many of the important aspects of the condition of being a woman. Women do many more important things and have many more important experiences that are centered on the notion of being a woman that are not centered on the notion of having kids.

Tsunami said:

I am defining the sexes by reproductive function, you are the one choosing secondary criteria and elevating them above the primary and original meaning. A woman can behave any way she wants to and still be female. I find your way of thinking sexist.

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Actually your way of thinking is sexist because you have restricted the primary criteria to that of having children. Although it is an important aspect of the condition of being a woman, it is not one that is so essential that one cannot be a woman without it. And the fact that there are indeed women who don't have ovaries proves that. Moreover again, if the reproductive function was so essential to the condition of being a woman, we should be able to observe that if you took away a woman's ovaries and uterus, she would no longer be a woman. Since that is not the case, your assertion that this is the critical criteria, without which one cannot be considered to be a woman, is flawed.

Tsunami said:

And then by circular reasoning you are saying I cannot define the sexes that way because historically we've called people women who didn't have ovaries. That's like saying Pluto is a planet because we used to call it a planet. Guess what, that criteria didn't make sense. There are not women by my definition born without ovaries.

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No it isn't circular because of the fact that you can take out a woman's ovaries and she will still be a woman. It's just like gas provides the energy that makes a car run. If I say that, I would expect that if there is no gas in the car, it will not run. And guess what? If there is no gas in the car, it will not run. As a result of the fact that you can take the ovaries out of a woman and she will still be a woman, AND because their persons born without ovaries who are function, look, and act as women, we can say that being born with ovaries is not an imperative condition for being a woman. Now you don't have to accept that, but that is a subjective value judgement on your part.

Tsunami said:

You can call them women out of sympathy, but it isn't meaningful as their lack of reproductive function makes them neuter. And making laws based on compassion over function is irrational.

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No it isn't out of sympathy, it is a recognition that women, behave and have essential functional value besides the role of reproduction. Your attempt to limit them in that way is very narrow minded.

Re: Should transwomen be legally treated as women?

MildSteel said:

The point is that you are making a subjective value judgement that ignores based on chromosomes and ovaries that ignores many of the important aspects of the condition of being a woman. Women do many more important things and have many more important experiences that are centered on the notion of being a woman that are not centered on the notion of having kids.

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The problem with this idea is that men also do many important things and have important experiences that are centered on the notion of being a woman. The only things men can't do are related to reproductive function.

Actually your way of thinking is sexist because you have restricted the primary criteria to that of having children. Although it is an important aspect of the condition of being a woman, it is not one that is so essential that one cannot be a woman without it. And the fact that there are indeed women who don't have ovaries proves that. Moreover again, if the reproductive function was so essential to the condition of being a woman, we should be able to observe that if you took away a woman's ovaries and uterus, she would no longer be a woman. Since that is not the case, your assertion that this is the critical criteria, without which one cannot be considered to be a woman, is flawed.

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It is the one that is essential, the only thing unique to females. Your circular reasoning astounds me.

No it isn't circular because of the fact that you can take out a woman's ovaries and she will still be a woman. It's just like gas provides the energy that makes a car run. If I say that, I would expect that if there is no gas in the car, it will not run. And guess what? If there is no gas in the car, it will not run. As a result of the fact that you can take the ovaries out of a woman and she will still be a woman, AND because their persons born without ovaries who are function, look, and act as women, we can say that being born with ovaries is not an imperative condition for being a woman. Now you don't have to accept that, but that is a subjective value judgement on your part.

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Lol I guess you might not understand what circular reasoning means. You are saying women aren't defined by ovaries because there are women without ovaries. The first part of your statement is only true because the second part says it is true. This isn't a fact, it's a definition, and not a very meaningful one.

No it isn't out of sympathy, it is a recognition that women, behave and have essential functional value besides the role of reproduction. Your attempt to limit them in that way is very narrow minded.

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I'm not limiting women to reproductive function, I'm determining sex by reproductive function. You can behave in any manner you want whether you have ovaries or not. By defining them some other way, you are the one limiting women to certain behaviors. What exactly determines whether a person is a male or female to you?