The witchhunt continues...

[Clizby Wampuscat]

Why didn't you read the definitions that I gave and linked/ You really should know what a trans person is. if you do not understand it then you are only arguing against a concept that you do not understand. Or were you just playing silly games? It is a losing debate tactic either way.

Where? Sorry if I missed them. Every time I log on I have 15+ messages, I may have missed some.

 

[ImmortalFlame]

It is not a lie. Your definition is not a definition.

No, the lie you told was that I "REFUSED" to give a definition. That is a lie. I provided one.

Apologize for lying.

You said a woman is a person that identifies as a woman.

Yes. That's the definition that you claimed I "REFUSED" to give. Hence, you lied.

Apologize for lying.

See my other post as a response to this.

Doesn't explain or excuse your lie.

Apologize for lying.

Where did I do this?

You can see it in the very post I responded to. Do you want me to repost the part you deliberately edited out?

 

[Clizby Wampuscat]

Don't be silly, there are plenty of definitions of woman and of man.

Then please define the terms for me.

Is a child born into one family that didn't work out and was then later adopted into a second family a less legitimate member of the 2nd family than a natural-born child of the 2nd family?

No

What makes the adopted child a member of the second family?

Legal and emotional reasons. However, that child is still not their actual child.

 

[Clizby Wampuscat]

The Cambridge Dictionary has updated its definitions of man and woman, by adding the following (rather than replacing the existing definitions):

Woman: "an adult who lives and identifies as a female even though they have been born as a different sex,"
Man: "an adult who lives and identifies as a male even though they have been born as a different sex."

Then, I think we ought to consider whether we wish to treat others -- even transgendered others -- with respect. If we do (and I certainly do), we should treat them according to their gender identity, not their sex at birth. So, someone who lives as a woman today is called a transgender woman and should be referred to as “she” and “her.” A transgender man lives as a man today and should be referred to as “he” and “him.”

And I, for one, have no difficulty at all with that.

Wonderful but those are not definitions, they say nothing about what a man or woman are. If you identify as a man or a woman what are the characteristics you are identifying with? That is the real definition.

 

[ImmortalFlame]

Legal and emotional reasons. However, that child is still not their actual child.

What's the difference between being someone's child and being their ACTUAL child?

Is it not more reasonable to say that an adopted child IS the child of its adoptive parents, but they are just not the BIOLOGICAL child of their adoptive parents rather than "actual child"?

 

[Clizby Wampuscat]

It can, it's just that what it means is very varied and contextual. There is no one thing that renders a person "not a woman", and often these things are entirely personal. So, if you're going to engage the world factually, the best way to define such categories is so allow people to identify as the category themselves.

This is absolutely absurd. If everyone has their own personal definition of what a woman or man is then there is no real definition.

If I identify as a cat you know what I am identifying as
If I identify as a table you know what I am identifying as
If I identify as a clown you know what I am identifying as
If I identify as a woman you have no idea what I am identifying as.

????

Identifying as a woman is a characteristic.

No it is not, If I identify as a table that is not a characteristic of a table. Identifying as a woman is not a characteristic of a woman.

 

[ImmortalFlame]

Wonderful but those are not definitions, they say nothing about what a man or woman are.

See, this is why the "definition" argument comes off as disingenuous.

"Provide for me a definition of man and woman."
"Okay." (Provides definitions from the LlTERAL CAMBRIDGE ENGLISH DICTIONARY that include trans people)
"Those are not definitions."

I mean... Why are you making an argument from definitions of you're going to reject any dictionary definition you don't like, EVEN IF IT COMES FROM THE LITERAL CAMBRIDGE DICTIONARY OF ENGLISH??

If you identify as a man or a woman what are the characteristics you are identifying with?

Being a man or a woman.

That is the real definition.

No such thing as a "real" definition. Especially not if you literally reject dictionaries.

 

[Clizby Wampuscat]

No, the lie you told was that I "REFUSED" to give a definition. That is a lie. I provided one.

Apologize for lying.


Yes. That's the definition that you claimed I "REFUSED" to give. Hence, you lied.

Apologize for lying.


Doesn't explain or excuse your lie.

Apologize for lying.


You can see it in the very post I responded to. Do you want me to repost the part you deliberately edited out?

Do you understand what a conversation is? Sometimes we miss things or get things wrong. I never intentionally lied. I have explained why your definition is not a definition. If you want to respond to that fine. If not fine as well.

 

[ImmortalFlame]

This is absolutely absurd.

No, it's actually not that complicated. A lot of people have no problem understanding this.

If everyone has their own personal definition of what a woman or man is then there is no real definition.

Well, it's not so much that we all independently form individual definitions. We live in a complex, social society in which ideas are kind of collective. We associate certain labels with certain ideas. But we cannot say that any specific set of ideas are INTRINSICALLY attached to any particular label, so some individual understanding will occur. You can't really avoid everyone deciding for themselves, to an extent, what "being X" means, even if the social contexts may make some certain association's unavoidable.

If I identify as a cat you know what I am identifying as
If I identify as a table you know what I am identifying as
If I identify as a clown you know what I am identifying as
If I identify as a woman you have no idea what I am identifying as.

Yes I do. A woman.

Can you please provide a definition of a cat, a table, or a clown that is specific enough to refer ONLY to what IS a cat, a table or a clown, but which includes no overlap with literally any other category of thing?

No it is not, If I identify as a table that is not a characteristic of a table.

I agree. Because a table isn't a social label humans apply to themselves. Woman is.

I don't know why you keep comparing things that are not social labels to things that are social labels. Most people have no difficulty understanding this difference, but you have difficulty understanding it even after I and several other posters have explained it multiple times.

It's almost as if you don't WANT to understand the difference, or you are not capable of understanding it. I prefer to believe the former.

Identifying as a woman is not a characteristic of a woman.

Yes it is.

(Shrug.)

 

[ImmortalFlame]

Do you understand what a conversation is? Sometimes we miss things or get things wrong. I never intentionally lied.

Oh really? By that point in the conversation, not once had I "refused to give a definition".

So, where did that assumption come from?

I have explained why your definition is not a definition.

See? Here you are acknowledging that I GAVE a definition (even if you disagree it's inadequate), rather than REFUSING TO GIVE A DEFINITION.

If you had just said "you haven't given a definition" it would be excusable. But you didn't. You outright stated that I "REFUSED" to give a definition. You made a specific claim that I did something that I never did and that you have no reason, at that point, to believe I would ever do. That's the difference between a mistake that results from not reading far enough ahead, and an outright lie.

You lied.

Apologize for lying.

If you want to respond to that fine. If not fine as well.

I still await your apology. And not an apology for making a mistake. I want an apology for the false claim (lie) you said.

 

[Subduction Zone]

Where? Sorry if I missed them. Every time I log on I have 15+ messages, I may have missed some.

No, you asked for definitions and I gave them to you. If you refuse to look at the answers you demanded you cannot use such a weak excuse. This morning I had ore than 30 notifications. All you needed to do was to go back to the start of yesterday's posts and scan quickly down.

At any rate, I see that you started to reject definitions when provided by others so there is no need for you do even do that. You would just reject the definitions that I quoted and linked too.

 

[Subduction Zone]

I don't know why you keep comparing things that are not social labels to things that are social labels. Most people have no difficulty understanding this difference, but you have difficulty understanding it even after I and several other posters have explained it multiple times.

I know why. It is a form of a strawman argument. Many think that if they create a strawman and "refute" that that they have refuted the actual argument. Or even worse, many make a strawman because they know that they cannot refute the original argument. The first is merely very bad logic. The second is a form of actively lying.

 

[Clizby Wampuscat]

What's the difference between being someone's child and being their ACTUAL child?

Is it not more reasonable to say that an adopted child IS the child of its adoptive parents, but they are just not the BIOLOGICAL child of their adoptive parents rather than "actual child"?

Adopted children are not the result of sex between the parents. Their children are. This is reality. I think the adopted children are the parents children because they love them and take care of them just the same. But the reality is they are different.

 

[icehorse]

Good god you sound like an evangelical simpering over someone telling them that marriage is not in fact one man one woman.

Also, your post is virtue signaling lol. As is every other time when the alarmists drag up that phrase as if they're not injecting their own bigotry under the guise of 'protecting civilization from the extremists!'

But thanks for showing it's not really about protecting women, just about you don't like trans people.

Quite a few logical leaps here, and quite inaccurate. It's hard to imagine anything more fundamental than knowing what a man is and what a woman is. And yet, you seem willing to upend that most basic bit of society? Whether or not you see this as risky doesn't change how risky it is. I would say that you haven't really thought about the implications of claiming that a trans woman is a woman. I have to imagine you've heard that and you've just accepted that that's what people are "supposed" to say these days.

For the Nth time. I am not transphobic. But I disagree with some of the more radical thinking and practices that are happening in the trans world. Just because you're trans, that does not somehow magically make you and expert in social justice, or childhood development, or the long term effects of puberty blockers, or legal protections, and on and on.

I have spoken to many women who pay attention to how the trans world is impacting society, and they are quite worried. They see that many of these initiatives are actually quite misogynistic. The fact that you don't think so doesn't really matter to me.

I skim through all the side discussions that have to do with XX and XY and biology. And the common arguments are "there are exceptions to XX and XY". Of course, so what? Most categorization schemes allow of exceptions, and that does not render the schemes invalid.

Let me ask you this: How does it harm a trans woman to be categorized as a trans woman?

Should we start calling short people tall? We know that tall people have many advantages over the rest of us, and we know that short people have many disadvantages? Should we somehow try to warp reality and pretend that this is not the case?

And finally, for at least this post, many of my debating opponents on this forum trot out variations of "oh that's what the right says". Step back for a moment. Didn't you learn in your philosophy class that you have to separate the message from the messenger?

There are people on the right who are smart, worthy adversaries, not easily defeated, as we've all seen. Our worthy adversaries will look at our arguments and find the weaknesses. We cannot pretend that they won't. Sadly, many of the arguments put forth by trans activists are flawed. Me pointing out those flaws does not make me a member of the right.

The uncomfortable reality is that sometimes are opponents are correct. Occasionally our former president - the dumpster fire - was correct. It was always hard for me to swallow when that happened, but the answer is not to put our heads in the sand, or trot out some half-baked "guilt by association" nonsense.

We must look at the argument on their own merits.

 

[icehorse]

Um no. I'm asking you what your source is for your claim. I.e. What is your claim based on?

Stepping back, I see this sort of exchange happen a lot. Poster A says something that in good faith they believe is common knowledge, and Poster B asks for a citation.

What to do? Poster B could be a sea lion, we don't know.

But do we have to grind every debate to a halt to catch people up who haven't kept up with the topic in the world? Does every claim have to show citations? What's the standard? When is it reasonable to ask for citations and when isn't it?

In the last couple of weeks I've done a little experiment: when asked for a citation i've done an internet search. I usually get thousands of hits.

One claim I hear over and over again recently is a variation on: "i've never heard of this". Hmmm. What do you think your philosophy professor would make of such a claim? Weak? Virtually unfalsifiable? that's what I think. We're all voluntarily engaging in debates here. Shouldn't we understand how virtually impossible it is to prove that a thing does NOT exist?

I also see people regurgitating extraordinary claims. The propagandists know that when a claim is repeated often enough it's easy to lose sight of the nature of the claim. But we need to step back and try to look at claims objectively and see which ones are extraordinary, not just blindly accept that "if i've heard it before, it must be true".

 

[icehorse]

That's because you don't know how far back research and history actually goes.


Because they're cis-women being called men not conforming to conventional female standards. They're being harassed and questioned, they're very identity and self being challenged, denied and called a lie.
And it happens because of jackasses who are very sure of their ability to tell and because they are afraid of a minority. This too has been happening for a long time.

I noticed that a little earlier in this thread you accused someone of shifting the goal posts.

This is a long thread with a lot of interleaved conversations going on. So I might be wrong, but it seems to me you just shifted the goalposts?

Can you refer me back to the post that started this particular exchange, because I want to give your response some consideration, and I spent a few minutes and I could not find it. thanks!

 

[SkepticThinker]

Stepping back, I see this sort of exchange happen a lot. Poster A says something that in good faith they believe is common knowledge, and Poster B asks for a citation.

What to do? Poster B could be a sea lion, we don't know.

But do we have to grind every debate to a halt to catch people up who haven't kept up with the topic in the world? Does every claim have to show citations? What's the standard? When is it reasonable to ask for citations and when isn't it?

In the last couple of weeks I've done a little experiment: when asked for a citation i've done an internet search. I usually get thousands of hits.

One claim I hear over and over again recently is a variation on: "i've never heard of this". Hmmm. What do you think your philosophy professor would make of such a claim? Weak? Virtually unfalsifiable? that's what I think. We're all voluntarily engaging in debates here. Shouldn't we understand how virtually impossible it is to prove that a thing does NOT exist?

I also see people regurgitating extraordinary claims. The propagandists know that when a claim is repeated often enough it's easy to lose sight of the nature of the claim. But we need to step back and try to look at claims objectively and see which ones are extraordinary, not just blindly accept that "if i've heard it before, it must be true".

It's not common knowledge to me. Hence my questions. I've not heard anyone, nor read anything indicating that what you've said is true. You say something is a problem, I'm trying to figure out if it is. You don't want to show me that it is? Okay, we're done talking about it then, I guess.
I don't want to "blindly accept if I've heard it before, it must be true."

Also, we're in a debate forum where people are expected to back up their claims. This isn't a classroom. We're not having a coffee together at a restaurant. We're in a forum called "Political Debates."

 

[ImmortalFlame]

Adopted children are not the result of sex between the parents. Their children are. This is reality. I think the adopted children are the parents children because they love them and take care of them just the same. But the reality is they are different.

But the reality is that they ARE their children, just not their BIOLOGICAL children. They may be different to biological children, but they are STILL their children.

Do you understand why saying a child who is adopted by loving parents is "not really their child" might come off a bit cold? Can you not just say that they ARE their child, but just not their BIOLOGICAL child?

 

[Kenny]

But who is going to make that decision for others? you? me? the government?

No rule can change the heart. We can make the law "Thou shalt no commit murder" - and there will still be murder. However, does that mean I should passively keep quiet when murder has been committed? I am not equating murder with any single object that we are talking about but rather just the principle. A life without guidelines, imv, is the basis of anarchism.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

A woman is a person who identifies as a woman, a man is a person who identifies as a man.

Yes, that is the most recent definition of a woman in popular usage. The interesting thing for me here is why anybody objects to this. What is it they are resisting and why? It's more than how a word is used. Likewise with this use of the word lie here. What motivates that? These are visceral reactions that suggest that the objector feels threatened or is offended. Is there any other reasonable explanation for why people behave like this? They don't seem to be language purists.

Another word that makes many bristle is transphobia, which leads to analogous semantic quibbling and etymological fallacies about what the suffix -phobia is allowed to mean. But that's what this is - an aversion to transexuals that goes beyond not dating one to a refusal to be kind or polite.

The problem is that activists are indeed trying to force us to use new definitions.

I don't think anybody minds if you never use the word woman to refer to a M-to-F transexual. It's enough to understand that others do so that you understand what they mean when they use the word that way.

XX is XX. Any attempt to make XX an XY, or visa versa, is a lie.

Straw man. Nobody at all is arguing otherwise. For starters, it would be impossible to remove all of those Y-chromosomes from somebody born with them. You also seem to be fond of calling people whose language you don't like liars but can't actually identify a lie.

All you have done is state that transwomen are women but you cannot define what a woman is. What makes a transwoman a woman?

Her female psyche.

You have refused to define the words woman and man.

He's given you the non-biological definition more than once. "A woman is a person who identifies as a woman, a man is a person who identifies as a man."

Once, there were only guitars. They generated music through resonance. Then, guitars that made sound by sending an electronic signal from a pickup to an amplifier speaker. They were called guitars, too, but now it was necessary to add the word acoustic or electric to be clear. Likewise with the word woman. "Trans" and "biological "do that for us here. "You see those two women over there? One's a biological woman, the other a transexual woman." What does the word woman mean in that comment? Go ahead and define what that word used that way means to the speaker. Not what you mean when the use the word. I presume that you would say something more like, "See what looks like two women there? Only one is a woman" That's a different meaning of the word. It's the biological definition.

What if I said I feel like a cat and want to be referred to as a cat. Would you think that is ok?

Fine with me. Why shouldn't it be OK? Are you referring to mental health issues, as in would I think you're OK? Nice avatar, by the way. Is there a story

Would you believe I was a cat if I said I feel like a cat? If I said I was a cat would you believe me?

No. Do you realize that that is a different question? Now, you're claiming to be a cat, not just feeling like one.

Your definition is not a definition. You said a woman is a person that identifies as a woman.

How's that not a definition? Did you mean not yet in widespread usage? Did you mean that that definition is tautological? If so, I disagree.

If you identify as a man or a woman what are the characteristics you are identifying with? That is the real definition.

Did you mean first definition? There is no real definition if by that you mean that there is only one way the word may be used.