He asked for a specific example. (“Trans women are women, therefore trans women have uteruses” being a bad example, because no one was claiming that.) I quoted an article from the The Nation: “There is another argument against allowing trans athletes to compete with cis-gender athletes that suggests that their presence hurts cis-women and cis-girls. But this line of thought doesn’t acknowledge that trans women are in fact women.” Scott agreed that this was stupid and wrong and a natural consequence of letting people use language the way he was suggesting (!).
I wonder if the crux here is that Scott keeps thinking of the question as “what words should we use to describe things” and not “what internal categories should I use”?
Like, I could imagine thinking “It’s not really a problem / not that bad to say that transwomen are women, because I happen to have the category of “transwomen” and so can keep track of the ways in which transwomen, on average, are different from cis women. Given that I’ll be able to track the details of the world one way or the other, it’s a pragmatic question of whether we should call transwomen women, and it seems like it’s an overall pretty good choice on utilitarian grounds.”
Or to say it differently: we can unload some-to-most of the content of the word woman (however much of it doesn’t apply to transwomen) onto the word “cis-woman”, and call it a day. The “woman” category becomes proportionally less useful, but it’s mostly fine because we still have the expressiveness to say everything we might want to say.
I believe there is a blatant slippery slope there, and redefining “woman” is not so much a step onto it as jumping into a toboggan, so I see no point in considering a hypothetical world in which somehow, magically, there wasn’t.
I don’t think that solution accomplishes anything because the trans goal is to pretend to be women and the anti trans goal is to not allow trans women to be called women. The proposed solution doesn’t get anybody closer to their goals.
I wonder if the crux here is that Scott keeps thinking of the question as “what words should we use to describe things” and not “what internal categories should I use”?
Like, I could imagine thinking “It’s not really a problem / not that bad to say that transwomen are women, because I happen to have the category of “transwomen” and so can keep track of the ways in which transwomen, on average, are different from cis women. Given that I’ll be able to track the details of the world one way or the other, it’s a pragmatic question of whether we should call transwomen women, and it seems like it’s an overall pretty good choice on utilitarian grounds.”
Or to say it differently: we can unload some-to-most of the content of the word woman (however much of it doesn’t apply to transwomen) onto the word “cis-woman”, and call it a day. The “woman” category becomes proportionally less useful, but it’s mostly fine because we still have the expressiveness to say everything we might want to say.
Then they will come for the words “cis-woman” and “trans-woman” and say that it’s oppressive to make a distinction.
You can’t win a conflict by surrendering.
Fair enough, but is that a crux for you, or for Zack?
If you knew there wasn’t a slippy slope here, would this matter?
I believe there is a blatant slippery slope there, and redefining “woman” is not so much a step onto it as jumping into a toboggan, so I see no point in considering a hypothetical world in which somehow, magically, there wasn’t.
I don’t think that solution accomplishes anything because the trans goal is to pretend to be women and the anti trans goal is to not allow trans women to be called women. The proposed solution doesn’t get anybody closer to their goals.