self-ID ^sinnlos^ ?

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I first came to mumsnet for parenting advice, second time round as it were. I started reading FWR largely because I noticed discussion of 'self-ID' and related matters, which epitomised what I thought of at first as an amusing example of conceptual confusion I might use in teaching philosophy (I still do a little, although I am mostly retired).

But now I find I have become (if I am allowed) Spartacus, and a TERF.

Stimulated by mumsnet, I followed something of the wider (non-)debate about 'trans'. I do not engage with social media, so it seems I may have missed the worst. Nevertheless, I have been gobsmacked by the confusion I have come across, not least in public and political discourse. It has started to look dangerous.

Even seemingly literate and otherwise intelligent people seem not to be able to think this through. For example, a poster on another thread (who claimed to have written a 'dissertation' on related topics - probably just an undergraduate essay, but still) seemingly thinks a definition of 'woman' might coherently be ' an adult human female, or one who identifies as such '.

Can we try to be clear about this? The whole notion of self-identification as definitive of anything is a non-starter (even as a disjunct, for that dissertation writer).

To say that to be x is to identify as x says nothing about what x is. This is just true. I am interested why people do not find it obvious.

Perhaps it is the variable ('x')? Some people are afraid of anything that looks algebraic ...

... OK, try with examples: To say that to be a quoll is to identify as a quoll says nothing about what a quoll is. That is obvious. No? And its truth is not dependent on anything to do with what a quoll is or might be.

Well, but why would it be different if 'quoll' is replaced by 'woman'? To say that to be a woman is to identify as a woman says nothing about what a woman is. Why do people not see this is obvious?

I am interested (semi-professionally, you might say) in any answers to this.

[Maybe I should make clear this is not about whether we should treat as x those who identify as x, for some x. That is a different matter.

And, while I am postscripting, let me say I am severely disappointed with the extent to which mumsnet has aligned with the forces of unreason on this. It may have been for the best of reasons, but it is still a big disappointment.

And - finally - why ' sinnlos '? Check out Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. (Well, you never know, someone might get interested in the difference between sinnlos and unsinnig !)]

"So we (GC feminists) think that any classification based on identity is meaningless and potentially regressive...."

You have to keep clear the difference between the objective (which many people can agree on, that's kind of the point of objectivity!), and the subjective (which is personal). And causes discontent and issues when you try to force other's subjective experience to agree with your own, or claim that your subjectivity is actually objective.

Or to make laws based on the subjective..........

Blimey; don’t try to get people to differentiate between the objective and the subjective.

I’ve been pointing out that science works on data, not feelings for the last five million years on here... it seems to be a tricky concept.

thank you heresy.

So if I say that I have a gondola up my fanjo, have I? And can anyone in the forest hear the gondolier singing?

(Sorry, couldn't resist!)

PS Self-ID in terms of GRCs makes bugger all practical difference to anything. Literally none.

But why are people fighting tooth and nail for something that makes literally no practical difference to anything? I don't believe that people are desperate to get certificates from the government just to validate their own identity. I think that people want certificates from the government because they think it will make a difference, and that if they are reassigned as female (even having their birth certificate changed) then it will, in practice, be very difficult to deny them access to female-only spaces. And I think that unless we fight really hard against this, they are right.

As people are saying, the definitions of categories are changing to become essentially meaningless (I am X because I identify as X) and hence it becomes very hard to differentiate between people on the basis of these categories. Which means both that we lose female-only spaces (in the original sense of the word) but also that female oppression becomes invisible.

somedyke but language is not objective. Take dinosaurs and pterosaurs. We think they are distinct but that is because we have defined them that way. We could easily have had another categorisation which would place them in the same group. Naming the colours on the spectrum is another example. - What we are fighting about is NOT biology what what is the best way of categorises different sorts of people

Just wait till the tinned peaches start identifying as baked beans. Peaches are nice, but not so good on a full English.

Language needs to have common understanding and definitions. Of course it can change. We come up with new terms all the time, look at how quickly the transgender lexicon has evolved. We have to be able to use words to communicate with each other properly. If a male gets an amended birth certificate to say they are now female, does that actually make them female? How do we address the real concept of male/female in the anatomical/reproductive sense? Because these differences in biology will still exist. Half of the population will still be of the class that can get pregnant, and the other half will be of the class that can impregnate. Belonging to one reproductive class or the other will still impact on their lives, whether or not they "identify with" their biology.
The argument that is being made, from my point of view, is that currently the language that we use to classify groups of people is anchored in these real, visible, material differences. This is true for "man/male" and "woman/female."
If we completely divorce biology from what "man/male" and "woman/female" mean, it will render the terms functionally useless, because there are no longer distinct reproductive commonalities by which to group the people within those categories together. In my view, there has been nothing that consistently connects women as a separate group apart from their biology. Same goes for men. I don't see why we can't just use "trans women" and "trans men", as at least those terms are more descriptive. Saying people should be grouped together solely based on internal feelings or how they choose to dress that day is as useful to me as arguing we should classify people by their favourite colours.

The tension in this debate is that some people are trying to change the meaning of words very quickly, without the natural evolution word change undergoes, and other people are resisting this as the current meaning has not changed in their world view.
But it's not really about the words, it is the meaning that the disagreement centres on.
Universal understanding of words only comes about by agreed meanings.

I fear for the future of (reproductive) sex ed!

I am a snurgle and no-one can deny me my snugleness

Ah, but are you a boy snurgle or a girl snurgle, wimple?

The tension in this debate is that some people are trying to change the meaning of words very quickly, without the natural evolution word change undergoes, and other people are resisting this as the current meaning has not changed in their world view.
But it's not really about the words, it is the meaning that the disagreement centres on.
Universal understanding of words only comes about by agreed meanings.

But it's not been only about the fact that it's changing fast and people can't keep up. It's about the fact the changing the definition of the word had real-world implications, specifically 1) there must be something that unites everyone in the category, otherwise it's not a category, and if it's not biology then what is it? It's hard to get away from the ideal that it's essentially ladybrain/'female essence', which many women view as deeply misogynistic; 2) there are lots of facilities / crime statistics etc that were developed using the previous definition of the word, and it's unclear how this change of definition will apply to them, and the change is likely to apply to them in ways many women find very worrying; 3) there now appears to be no word to define people-of-the-class-who-produce-eggs, and that's a huge problem.

It's not Friday, so I'm a girl snurgle

"somedyke but language is not objective. "
Yes, but I believe reality is .

Proper species names are objective, in that the linnaean system is supposed to represent what we now understand as common descent. So all mammals are mammals because of our evolutionary history, even if some of the hairy little buggers insist on laying eggs!

It's our perception or understanding (hence our naming of them in language), that is flawed, not the thing itself.

Interesting, I didn't know that Linnaeus also proposed a classification system for minerals! The animals and plants one worked pretty well, since it turns out that various structural similarities do map to common descent (like why do we all have 5 toes, and what happened to the 8-toed fish Acanthostega then!).

I think my motivation is that this scientific objective viewpoint, you learn more, you understand more. Messing about with language and colliding the objective with the subjective, seems to me to lessen understanding.............

And if you can't even name the thing you want to talk about, you can't talk about it!

I find it interesting how TRAs often describe GC feminists as 'self-identified feminists' as though self identity isn't credible. What does that say about self-identified (trans)women?

And if you can't even name the thing you want to talk about, you can't talk about it!

Yes and trans ideology has no word for biological women apart from afab, which doesn't really cover it because it means the opinion of the person doing the assigning, not material reality. Potentially someone could assign female to a male bodied baby.

iismum
Yes. Agree.

Thanks SomeDyke.

" Tautologie und Kontradiktion sind sinnlos. "

Yes, I have wondered if part of the reason for people missing the senselessness of self-ID might be that it is sinnlos in the way tautologies and contradictions are, rather than being unsinnig (like, e.g. 'Socrates is identical', see TLP 5.473). 'Senseless' rather than 'nonsense'?

But I feel I am clutching at straws with this. It remains unclear to me why people find it difficult to grasp.

RatRolyPoly, yes, apologies for not citing you properly. I was just a bit too lazy to look it up.

But help me out here if you will. What is it about To say that to be x is to identify as x says nothing about what x is that you think makes it false?

Still genuinely interested in reading an answer to OP's question, if anyone has one.

"To say that to be x is to identify as x says nothing about what x is. This is just true. I am interested why people do not find it obvious."

If that is all you say about x, then it really says nothing about x. It should be obvious. I think it is only supposedly not obvious because people are understanding it is as instead:

"the set of all people who identify as x (where we all have some secret inner understanding of what x actually is, we just aren't telling you!)"

OR:

"the set of x for which we have some definition and the union of that with the set of all people who identify as x. (Except we then pretend to forget the definition because that would exclude those we are trying to add!)"

or perhaps some sneaky combination of the two that morphs from one into another as appropriate!

For me, looking at this in the abstract is helpful, because it strips away to some extent the emotional or other attachments you have to x if x is given a specific name, and lets you see the structure of the actual argument.

SomeDyke
' For me, looking at this in the abstract is helpful, because it strips away to some extent the emotional or other attachments you have ... '

Yes, for me too -- it is not always best to move to more abstract level, but doing so often clarifies matters considerably. It is easier to spot logical fallacies when focus moves to the abstract argument structure, and being able to do so is an important part of learning to argue and criticise one's own and others' arguments.

Problems arise, though, when many (perhaps a majority of?) people do not have the facility to analyse argument forms in that way.

As you say, ' some sneaky combination of the two [meanings] that morphs from one into another as appropriate' can be what misleads. And without the capacity to analyse more abstractly, it may be difficult for people even to notice that they are equivocating in a way that negates their supposed conclusion.

That surely happens in this debate, particularly given the emotional energy involved.

I wonder what to do about it, given that pointing out logical fallacies has no discernible effect. The problem with democracy?

Thanks to all who responded here.

Just one more thing. On another thread (sorry, again too lazy to check out the exact citation) a poster castigated a reference to Kathleen Stock because she is not a scientist. (She is a philosopher who has done sterling work on this, for those who do not know). That someone can even consider that philosophical/logical analysis of arguments in such a sphere is irrelevant tells us much about that someone's understanding of what is going on wrt the argument in question. Is such lack of understanding prevalent?

Scientists on FWR have done great work reminding all and sundry of what should, but sadly often does not, go without saying, such as that changing sex is impossible and what epigenetics can (and more importantly cannot) tell us about sex and gender. ( bowlofbabelfish, in particular, I add my thanks to those of others. But other people too.)

Scientists do a good job of countering the non-scientific basis of ideological standpoints, once they can be bothered. But what of those whose ideology rests on logical error? How to counter those who believe, not because they are mistaken about facts, but because they do not understand? (Here I include people such as ratrolypoly, a seemingly educated and intelligent person, who stands proxy (sorry, rat) for the many of that ilk.)

This is a brilliant thread If only it possible to make policy makers understand the issues in this way

"It remains unclear to me why people find it difficult to grasp."

If it's not clear to you why people find "I have wondered if part of the reason for people missing the senselessness of self-ID might be that it is sinnlos in the way tautologies and contradictions are, rather than being unsinnig (like, e.g. 'Socrates is identical', see TLP 5.473). 'Senseless' rather than 'nonsense'?" then you're not as bright as you think you are.