Ability of holding rules

wait until they find out about the p-spot!

What makes one think they have any interest in a woman's intentions with herself..? Intention is a loaded word and needs to pull over to the weigh station for inspection.

This knocks loose a memory for me. The instructor for the anthropology class that I took in college introduced the idea of natural categories versus cultural categories, and the example that he used was the category of things called "chair." It's a cultural category, which is defined as things that humans assign to the category somewhat arbitrarily.

A chair might be something for a human to sit on, like a wooden platform on four legs, with a vertical back for lumbar support. It may have armrests ("arms") or not. If it doesn't have a back, it's a stool. But stools can also have backs, like some barstools, if they have longer legs. But a director's chair has long legs, and a back, and is not a stool?! And then what of a papasan chair, with no legs, with the seat and backrest combined into one, curved platform?

If you sit on a stump around a campfire, that's kind of an improvised chair, defined more by the use than the shape. Then, put a collection of stumps around a table in a cabincore dining room, and now they are formally chairs.

In the other direction, the student union at my university is well-known for its colorful terrace chairs with a sunburst pattern on the back. It has a couple of 10-foot-tall versions for people to climb on (at their own risk!) for social media photo ops. Those are chairs, because of the shape, although they're not for a human to sit on.

And then let's not even get into lounge chairs, upon which you can be fully recumbent instead of sitting... Point is "biological female" is a natural category (sexually-reproducing organism bearing the larger of its species' gametes). It includes lizards and ferns, but not all of what we call women, because women is a cultural category. It's kind of arbitrary.

And yeah, intelligent people know this, and the "adult biological female" people are just trying to hide their bigotry. I just like to think out loud about it.

I'm sorry you found out this way. Prepare your preganante fund

grEGGnat

This is the same way i got picante too

Jesus stuff

We need AI to have non biological women.

Just have a strong AI identify as a woman and watch Transphobes heads implode.

trans people who want to update their sex in their passport, birth certificate drivers license etc are wild to me!

...that's an exaggeration; it's a much more complex issue that often involves public safety in ways that don't affect me as a FtNB. If I go into a women's bathroom people mostly just squint at me and if I went into a men's people would probably mostly do the same. And if they did accost me in the ladies' my plan is to show them my vagina then cry and ask how many women with their breasts surgically removed and no hair do they plan to do this to?

but somewhere deep down I can't help but to think gender markers should never have been on government documents to begin with. the government doesn't need to know what genitals I had when I was born or anything about how that may or may not have to do with the life I'm living now. massive governmental overreach if you ask me (and the bathrooms wouldn't be an issue if Americans had real bathroom walls and doors where you can't access others peeing like that anyway.

The question simply illustrates that there can't be a definition that includes all edge cases.
Therefore, passing legislation that criminalizes people using a woman's bathroom if they don't fit the definition doesn't make sense.
Unless your goal is to throw all women into a legal grey area, so you can better control them.

I think you don't fully understand the intention behind the argument. Rather than being part of some mathematical deeply logical proof, it is much more an appeal to someone's common sense or feelings.

Generally, the conservatives like to portray themselves on trans issues as the common sense side. Think of when they extend LGBTQ with all sorts of weird letters, rolling their eyes. Or think of Dave Chappelle's punching down specials. Or think of The One Joke. And this is a very successful starting point, because most people are not knowingly interacting with trans people, so to them trans issues are already a bit unfamiliar, or weird.

The idea behind the argument is to have the answerer realize that in fact their position is not the obvious one, and that their position is actually weird. And this is highly subjective. The point is not the answer, the point is the hoops they'll have to jump through to get to a satisfactory trans-exlusionary answer.

It's subjective of course, but it's very hard for someone to write a 20 page definition of gender and then follow that up with "duh". Or to write something like "producer of the large gametes" or whatever and feel like a normal person.

There's some context that's important to this whole argument that may clear things up for you a bit:

This whole thing started when TERFs claimed that trans women aren't women by the definition of what a woman is, and people asked them to define a woman. The original answer by the person who started this merry-go-round was "an adult human capable of giving birth."

It was immediately pointed out that this definition excluded a massive percentage of cis women, and TERFs have been in denial ever since and trying to come up with a new simple definition that excludes trans women from being women.

There is no intent to this other than saying that trans women aren't women.

You might be interested in this VSauce video on the philosophy of definitions, which isn't specifically about the trans argument.

But, I also side strongly with wpb's comment. The political advantage is to make them look silly, and not because we really care about the definition of "woman" any more than our simple "whoever wants to be one."

I'm not asking for my comment to be restored, I couldn't care less, but I just want to say anyone that read it could clearly see it was not gatekeeping. I was saying it's not a good argument that someone can't use a word based on whether another person can define it a certain way, not the other way around. Basically the opposite of gatekeeping. My other comment makes this even clearer.