- Joined
- Nov 16, 2021
As the post above demonstrates, the idea that there is some sort of authentic self apart from behavior (including thoughts) and anatomy is wrong. There's nowhere for gender identity to sit outside of the physical and behavioral tendencies that make up a person. Desiring to be a woman or man does not make you a woman or man, it does not change the observable traits that define the ontological grouping you belong to.
Social theorists aren't wrong when they say that gender is a social construct, but people take that to mean something far different than what is the actual truth. The social definition of men and women, the abstract concepts themselves, are symbols based on observable physical dimorphism and differences in behavioral tendencies in each sex. Now these symbols can be imperfect, for example it's hard for these social definitions to account for things like intersex people, and they can also carry a lot of arbitrary cultural baggage. But ontologicaly, they are representing reality, they are grouping humans categorically based on observable differences. Even if sexual attraction can vary, even if there can be men and women who exhibit more effeminate or masculinized traits than the average, the words "man" and "woman" still confer explanatory meaning by describing broad ontological groupings of different traits, much as the names of colors do. The trans argument at its core is an argument that red is actually yellow, and as evidence they will say that orange sometimes exists, and since colors exist on the spectrum anyway and you can't tell the exact point when red becomes yellow, anybody who says that red is red and yellow is yellow is a color bigot.
Social theorists aren't wrong when they say that gender is a social construct, but people take that to mean something far different than what is the actual truth. The social definition of men and women, the abstract concepts themselves, are symbols based on observable physical dimorphism and differences in behavioral tendencies in each sex. Now these symbols can be imperfect, for example it's hard for these social definitions to account for things like intersex people, and they can also carry a lot of arbitrary cultural baggage. But ontologicaly, they are representing reality, they are grouping humans categorically based on observable differences. Even if sexual attraction can vary, even if there can be men and women who exhibit more effeminate or masculinized traits than the average, the words "man" and "woman" still confer explanatory meaning by describing broad ontological groupings of different traits, much as the names of colors do. The trans argument at its core is an argument that red is actually yellow, and as evidence they will say that orange sometimes exists, and since colors exist on the spectrum anyway and you can't tell the exact point when red becomes yellow, anybody who says that red is red and yellow is yellow is a color bigot.
