The argument ‘from continuity’ is interesting and original. It establishes a necessary condition of being a woman but is not a logically complete account of the meaning of the word ‘woman’. It raises the question of “what is a girl” and the identification/recognition of sex is inescapable somewhere along the line (typically at the beginning of the process of social integration). By sex I mean the kind of body capable of fulfilling the binary biological function of producing male or female gametes and for successful procreation at some point in life; this definition allows for dysfunctional exceptions that may or may not approximate one side of the sexual function better than the other. Either way, ‘a girl’ is recognised as such on that basis, and this is what we generally mean by the word. Another way we can approach this problem is to take gender as a property of language and sex as a property of bodies. We can thus describe humans of a particular sex and stage of sexual maturity with human-specific gendered language; ’female’ is a more general term than ‘woman/girl’ insofar as it applies to all sexed species.
as always a much appreciated and philosophically tighter response than my piece itself (which I wrote last night because its probably going to be shorter and easier to punch out than the final instalment in the ministry of truth series on one hand, and because the gender culture wars are getting in the way of other things). Some of the points you raise are covered in the larger 2019 rant bio-alchemy with link in text. in 2019 I was of the mind children cannot be allowed transition and all debate is to be forever philosophical, taking a libertarian approach to the case of adults who wish to transition. In a sense this is preserved, though I'm hardening a bit on the adult side too. In defining a justification to the baby girl as girl and not boy trapped in a girls bodies, I'm in total agreement there is a key anchor to an approximation to the girl point on the biological binary (as opposed to a girl possibility on a continuous spectrum and she/he/they will tell us later when the indoctrination machine gets to them). In the longer article I argue intersex doses not prove a spectrum, the exceptions never really intermediate and the exceptions proving the binary rule. Perhaps the sentimental (or forgive me religious) part of me thinks biology isn't enough, nor the other anchors that make up the gestalt (as in when the village says its a girl its a girl). If we are to speculate into religious territory, there's only the binary and the telos is set from the beginning. On the political side, we are further on the road to clown world than even 2019. Are we playing by enemy rules even to enter into argument? Slippery slopes and all that. Will we next be entering into a dialectic on paedophilia, deconstructing all the elements of potential harm, criteria of consent and so on to argue its wrong. With ethics supervening over the dialogue, the better answer is a refusal to argue the point its manifestly depraved. same with trans in kids. Ps your work is brilliant.
It is a sound principle not to rely on the loaded terms of reference imposed by an ideologically motivated adversary. In this case, I am afraid the cat is out of the bag. When teachers at the primary level explicitly tell kids that anyone can choose whether to be a girl or a boy, when someone can lose their livelihood for not accepting someone else’s claim of ‘gender identity’ as a legal fact, when the same idea is put into law and subject to legal liability and enforcement, the only defence that I can think of is to engage with the terms of discourse in order to disable them. My approach is to utilise the legal protection of gender identity to demonstrate that the compelled recognition of trans-identity violates the gender identity of everyone else: https://michaelkowalik.substack.com/p/gender-identity-on-trial P.S. Thank you!
Israeli epigenetic research
https://geoffpain.substack.com/p/gender-identity-disorder-caused-by
The argument ‘from continuity’ is interesting and original. It establishes a necessary condition of being a woman but is not a logically complete account of the meaning of the word ‘woman’. It raises the question of “what is a girl” and the identification/recognition of sex is inescapable somewhere along the line (typically at the beginning of the process of social integration). By sex I mean the kind of body capable of fulfilling the binary biological function of producing male or female gametes and for successful procreation at some point in life; this definition allows for dysfunctional exceptions that may or may not approximate one side of the sexual function better than the other. Either way, ‘a girl’ is recognised as such on that basis, and this is what we generally mean by the word. Another way we can approach this problem is to take gender as a property of language and sex as a property of bodies. We can thus describe humans of a particular sex and stage of sexual maturity with human-specific gendered language; ’female’ is a more general term than ‘woman/girl’ insofar as it applies to all sexed species.
as always a much appreciated and philosophically tighter response than my piece itself (which I wrote last night because its probably going to be shorter and easier to punch out than the final instalment in the ministry of truth series on one hand, and because the gender culture wars are getting in the way of other things). Some of the points you raise are covered in the larger 2019 rant bio-alchemy with link in text. in 2019 I was of the mind children cannot be allowed transition and all debate is to be forever philosophical, taking a libertarian approach to the case of adults who wish to transition. In a sense this is preserved, though I'm hardening a bit on the adult side too. In defining a justification to the baby girl as girl and not boy trapped in a girls bodies, I'm in total agreement there is a key anchor to an approximation to the girl point on the biological binary (as opposed to a girl possibility on a continuous spectrum and she/he/they will tell us later when the indoctrination machine gets to them). In the longer article I argue intersex doses not prove a spectrum, the exceptions never really intermediate and the exceptions proving the binary rule. Perhaps the sentimental (or forgive me religious) part of me thinks biology isn't enough, nor the other anchors that make up the gestalt (as in when the village says its a girl its a girl). If we are to speculate into religious territory, there's only the binary and the telos is set from the beginning. On the political side, we are further on the road to clown world than even 2019. Are we playing by enemy rules even to enter into argument? Slippery slopes and all that. Will we next be entering into a dialectic on paedophilia, deconstructing all the elements of potential harm, criteria of consent and so on to argue its wrong. With ethics supervening over the dialogue, the better answer is a refusal to argue the point its manifestly depraved. same with trans in kids. Ps your work is brilliant.
It is a sound principle not to rely on the loaded terms of reference imposed by an ideologically motivated adversary. In this case, I am afraid the cat is out of the bag. When teachers at the primary level explicitly tell kids that anyone can choose whether to be a girl or a boy, when someone can lose their livelihood for not accepting someone else’s claim of ‘gender identity’ as a legal fact, when the same idea is put into law and subject to legal liability and enforcement, the only defence that I can think of is to engage with the terms of discourse in order to disable them. My approach is to utilise the legal protection of gender identity to demonstrate that the compelled recognition of trans-identity violates the gender identity of everyone else: https://michaelkowalik.substack.com/p/gender-identity-on-trial P.S. Thank you!