[afiori]

I premise that your is a perfectly valid interpretation, he said the things your criticize him for saying.

I would disagree with calling this transphobic... On the topic of the statement "trans women are women" for example wikipedia notoriously offer an interesting position

Trans woman: A trans woman is a woman who was assigned male at birth.

Woman: A woman is a female human being.

This is not necessarily contradictory, but it as the effect that the statements "Trans women are women" and "Trans women are females" are linked together.

My assumption (which I believe you agree with, if you disagree with the next statement I would be interested in hearing your opinion on it) is that many people that (strongly) agree with "trans women are women" do not necessarily fully embrace "trans women are female"

I am not arguing for or against any of those statements (I am trying not to inject my opinions (if any) on them in this comment), but to me this says that the linguistic concept of woman is not intrinsically obvious in this phase of an evolving language.

In my opinion what Rogan says here is that in term of fighting he believe the only contextual concept of gender is similar to duck-typing: If you punch like a man, then you are a man.

Agree or disagree with that I believe it is (still) important to be able to express that concept without being transphobic, as in my opinion that would impede our ability to talk about the complex multidimesional bimodal distribution that is human sexuality.

What I am trying as hard as I am able to is to steel-man Rogan's position without straw-manning yours.

A short summary of what I am trying to say is that I believe that Rogan's position is not transphobic; maybe he is toxic, maybe he is poisoning the conversation with inflammatory language, maybe he is on the wrong side of history. And maybe he deserves being called transphobic for what he said; I am not trying to defend Joe Rogan the person, I am trying to find a small reasonable kernel of his position where I believe we can agree.

[CathedralBorrow]

> Agree or disagree with that I believe it is (still) important to be able to express that concept without being transphobic

I fully agree with this. But if he is viewed as transphobic then surely that falls flat?

[afiori]

I am not entirely sure what you mean, what I am trying to say is that if someone believe he was transphobic, then it would be enriching of the conversation if they took care not to use the fact that he is making that distinction as an argument for that statement.

Specifically I think it is in the interest of the side challenging the status quo to keep their arguments as precise as possible.

Otherwise conversations become extremely difficult and layered, like a relationship fight that stem from a resentment decades old. There are so many branches and so many directions that even if the core problem might be easy it requires a monumental effort just to get close to it.

Intrinsically examples of where I think this happened would be flamebait topics :)

[CathedralBorrow]

> what I am trying to say is that if someone believe he was transphobic, then it would be enriching of the conversation if they took care not to use the fact that he is making that distinction as an argument for that statement

Yes, I think I'm definitely not understanding you correctly. It seems like you're objectively stating that conversation would be of higher quality if people would construct arguments more like you do. But what if people do want to use that argument for their statement that they find JR transphobic?

"Don't use this argument; it's wrong and devalues the conversation" reads very strange to me when discussing something as fuzzy as "does this person exhibit transphobic behaviour?"

[fulldecent2]

One more reply just to make sure we hit the depth limit...

[afiori]

This is close to what I am saying. If people want to use that argument they are free to do so, I intend to keep butting and try to steel man the opposing position without strawmanning their argument.

In part I see this as trying to avoid the `Proving too Much` fallacy [ https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/13/proving-too-much/ ]

Also I need to confess that, no, I do not actually want people to argue like I do, I argue this way because otherwise I would make terrible, inconsistent, and vague arguments. Many other people are better than me and they do not need a whole paragraph where they preemptively state their intentions.

Overall I believe that there is great value in trying to find a common ground we can agree on and base the discussion. In my perception arguments in forums like this one should be the complete opposite of a debate. If I believe A is true and you believe B is true and they are mutually exclusive, I believe that the "proper" way to argue my position by exposing the basis of my opinion so that you can both understand why I believe A and explain me your interpretation of those positions.

Now I am devolving into rambling, but I think that shaping conversations as debate is indeed damaging. As an example if I am convinced of A by some internal reasoning and you prove not A to me then only half the job is done. We (or I) need to also resolve the conflict between my internal reasoning and what you are saying. Or at the very least take note of the fact that there is an internal conflict to be resolved.

There is no foundation in anything for this opinion, but I believe that the lack of this second step in the popular sciences made the scientific community elitist and was fertilizer for things like antivaxxers.