- iwpoe
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Re: Sex and Gender
I don't see how one is to make the distinction between the the two accounts without having a libertarian or unexplained account of identity since "really being a woman" either answers to the fact of his having atypical sexual fantasies ('"men" who have those kinds of fantasies just are women') or is a second fact that explains the first which stands in need of its own explainer. If the explainer is to be choice or feeling then it's hard to see both how that should be plausible and how it should be thought to be free from any persuasive or mediating attempts.
After all, returning to my case, it would probably be better to persuade me to work out and find more amenable social groups for my personality or even to make the public better aware of a wider array of masculine paradigms than to permit me to undergo drastic surgery at will. If it's a mere choice issue, there's all the reason in the world to permit such persuasive and mediating attempts, since persuasion and environmental change affects choice all the time. If, however, identity answers to something else, then it does behove advocates to say what this is. "Feeling" is prima facie inadequate. Other cases of body dysmorphia are straightforwardly considered mental illnesses. Why is this an exemption? A short man who "identifies" as 10 foot tall is deluded and in need of counseling not stilts.
I suppose there may be perfectly good libertarian arguments in favor of permitting such drastic cosmetic surgery, but it's hard to see how that could amount to "treatment" for this disorder.
Fighting to the death "the noonday demon" of Acedia.
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It is precisely “values” that are the powerless and threadbare mask of the objectification of beings, an objectification that has become flat and devoid of background. No one dies for mere values.
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- Greg
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Re: Sex and Gender
Well, the account of identity deployed probably is "libertarian or unexplained." The reason people don't like theories that link being trans to autogynephilia is that they seem to have the result that what makes a person transgender is phenomenologically on par with what excites a fetishist.
But you are right, most of the candidates for what constitutes gender identity also render comparisons with just about any other dysmorphia pretty fishy, which is why (as I pointed out earlier) the common usage slips into psychological accounts of gender identity that make it about what one "personally experiences" and "feels". Those don't have much to recommend philosophically and seem in tension with the idea of gender as socially constructed, or as performance, or what have you. But they let people confidently assert in the public square that the transgender person is really the gender he professes to be.
I would like to see the term "identity" (as it's used in "gender identity," "racial identity," etc.) excised from use until someone explains it. Once, I was part of a discussion among conservatives who were mainly Christian. One asked another whether he "identified as Catholic," and he responded that he did not identify as Catholic, or know what that meant, but that he was Catholic. I thought it remarkable that someone broadly conservative felt herself tempted to use the word; it was particularly conspicuous because in the case of "religious identity," the term adds nothing. In "gender identity," it seems to add something, particularly because it obscures the relationship between a person's identity and the criterion of that identity.
Last edited by Greg (7/01/2016 7:33 pm)
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Thread Starter- iwpoe
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Re: Sex and Gender
There lives in 'identity' a tension between the world and the act: one identifies *as*. The word is sometimes treated something like 'believe': one identifies as, just as one believes in, anything possible to in some way grasp.
Other times, as when the president of the Spokane NAACP chapter Rachel Dolezal attempted to identify as black but was later outed as white with a perm and a tan, or in cases of delusional thought etc, it is treated as having some kind of veridical component.
That needs working out. One needn't use wholly imaginary possibilities to expose this. It does, prima facie, seem absurd to identify as say homosexual while also professing to neither have sex with nor sexually desire the same gender. One wants to say that the identifier is wrong or confused.
But if we'll admit that you can be wrong or confused about identity, then there is nothing protecting the trans case from being deluded. Then the question becomes if they're deluded, what is to be permitted to the deluded, and in what esteem to hold the deluded.
Fighting to the death "the noonday demon" of Acedia.
My Books
It is precisely “values” that are the powerless and threadbare mask of the objectification of beings, an objectification that has become flat and devoid of background. No one dies for mere values.
~Martin Heidegger
- ML
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Re: Sex and Gender
Greg wrote:
I mean that the sexes are defined by reference to the role they play in reproduction. There are, of course, infertile people; sometimes that is a result of sexual ambiguity and sometimes it is not. In the latter cases, at least, there are still organs that have some function in reproduction even if, by some accident, reproduction is not possible. In other cases it is probably hard to come up with a criterion for determining sex.
That makes sense. I tentatively accept such an account, and would explain difficult cases of sexual ambiguity as involving epistemic ambiguity. (I think Feser suggests a similar reply in his Youtube lecture on the perverted faculty argument.) But I'm not entirely satisfied with this approach to difficult cases, since it isn't clear what reason there is to think humans are either male or female, even given a functional account
I'm not sure that I take intersex cases themselves to be a reason to reject a chromosomal account. My concern is more about certain conditions where someone has XY chromosomes but the Y chromosome has always been inactive, so everything appears female. (I think there are cases where the person is fertile, on a bimonthly basis.) A chromosomal account says that person is male.
That's fascinating, would you recall the names of those conditions?
One could think that intersex cases render the sex binary untenable; the sexes (however their defined) have to include both, none, or some sort of spectrum. But I think that is just to put too much stress on non-focal cases.
I don't see what the notion of focal or non-focal cases does here. "Biological sex is a spectrum" seems perfectly compatible with "Focal cases are either male or female." As long as there are cases that aren't male or female, the denial of binary sex follows. It doesn't seem to matter whether these cases are focal or not.
- seigneur
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Re: Sex and Gender
There's no obvious difference between sex and gender. There is a difference between gender=sex and sexual/gender identity/orientation though.
Sex is a biological function, meant to reproduce the species. In human species, two genders, male and female, work like that. Insofar as no other "genders" work like that, there simply are no other genders besides these two. There are self-reported gender identities though.
Bi-, homo-, trans- etc. sexualities are not genders. They are self-perceived gender identities or sexual orientations or sexual behaviors. Insofar as they are biologically unworkable, in my opinion they can be straightforwardly said to be unnatural, dysfunctional, perverted.
Psychologically and intellectually too - it's irrational to want to be/have/become something that doesn't make sense or doesn't work. That should pretty much cover the whole topic.
- seigneur
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Re: Sex and Gender
Alexander Pruss has written something on this question:
"Even if the whole of the reproductive system were transplanted, including, say, a penis, testicles, and prostate, or a vagina, clitoris, cervix, uterus, fallopian tubes, and ovaries, these organs would not have the same meaning, because surely they would not be directed toward their purposes by the whole organism. A normally functioning, genetically male human body presumably does not direct anything toward its own pregnancy and a normally-functioning, genetically female human body presumably does not direct anything toward making another person pregnant. Hormones would not help, because they would still be an extrinsic directing rather than an intrinsic one. Moreover, if Casey, genetically a woman, receives a transplant of Fred’s reproductive system, then even if it can be argued that the system would be directed toward human reproduction, it would arguably not be directed toward reproducing Casey but toward reproducing Fred, since the genetic material therein derives from Fred. It may be that if it were possible to change the genetic identity of the whole body, the person would become capable of the sexual union indicated by the newly modified body. But it is not clear that a person could survive a change of an entire chromosome throughout the body. Even if clinical death did not result, it is unclear whether the resulting human being would be the same person after such a momentous change."
Thoughts?
Does the conclusion (and the objection to transgenderism) consist in stating that at the end of the procedure the Theseus' ship is not Theseus' ship? Am I reading right?