[mildmotive]

> They didn’t even make a joke. They just called trans woman a man. It was hate speech, pure and simple.

It’s not a crime nor hate speech to acknowledge someone’s biological sex. That’s what we do in sports and when we select partners for example. Most, if not all heterosexual men would not consider a “trans woman” to be an actual woman. Our way of selecting partners is proof of that. To punish a natural, and biologically based viewpoint that most of humanity hold and follow is tyrannical and unsustainable.

[Zagill]

How are we this far into the modern trans rights movement and people still haven't wrapped their brains around sex and gender being two distinct concepts?

[Beltalowda]

Most people are not on-board with that at all. Most people also feel you can do whatever, including be a man or woman if you so desire, but the whole ideological stuff surrounding that: yeah ... not really. This includes many progressives on the left.

The entire concept of "treating me as a {man,woman} and also agree to my particular ideas about sex and gender or otherwise you're a hateful bigot!" is quite remarkable. It's like "you must agree with my preferred theory about the origins of homosexuality or else you're homophobic!"

[peyton]

It’s a distinction some guy just made up not too long ago. I can see why some people might not consider it a fact of the universe.

[Zagill]

Gender as a concept distinct from sex is a way of describing an existing social phenomenon. Gender, though traditionally tied to biological sex, changes over time. What we define as "masculine" and "feminine" traits change as society changes, and can even differ between societies, despite the fact that male and female chromosomes have not changed. Just because no one had described this distinction before the last century doesn't mean it isn't legitimate.

[umanwizard]

The terminology of the debate gets confused a bit because while indeed the expectations of people’s behavior, dress, etc. based on their sex is indeed a social construct and has been probably since the beginning of humanity, that wasn’t what “gender” meant until very recently. As far as I can tell, “gender” and “sex” were completely synonymous until 50 years ago, even in niche academic communities, and until maybe 10 years ago among the general public.

[Zagill]

I will agree that the terminology could probably be better. But my original point is that this is a pretty high-profile issue and has been for a while, so anyone taking a hardline stance of "I'm gonna deny trans people until someone makes a good argument why gender and sex are different" is willfully ignorant at best.

[hackerlight]

All categories are arbitrary distinctions that someone made up at some point, including the categories of biological sex, race, and your birth name. At the very least it would be bullying behavior for me to single you out and call you a different name or different racial group to what you actually are (as defined by the constructs that society has agreed upon).

[fleddr]

Biological sex is not a construct, it's a simple observable reality. Biological sex is factual and immutable.

[rekado]

It is observable but it is far from simple.

Sex is an emergent property of multiple genetic networks. This doesn't mean that it doesn't exist or that it is not bi-modal, but it is far from simple.

https://www.nature.com/articles/518288a

The fact that we don't go around performing genetic testing on people before we interact with them also raises questions about whether sex itself matters, or whether there must be different definitions for sexed categories dependent on policy purpose. (e.g. based on genitals when the concern is sexual violence; based on fertility for the purposes of reproductive medicine; based on gender performance; based on hormone levels, etc.)

[nprateem]

You either have a Y chromosome or you don't

[Zagill]

Are you aware that intersex people exist

[rekado]

The problem is that it's not at all straight-forward. It doesn't help that the word "gender" has been used to name a number of different and conflicting concepts.

See https://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/84795/ (copy available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZHkN2EYkl0v1oxhbd-5mnp9Fn1V...) for a discussion of the different concepts and the resulting confusion from a so-called gender critical perspective.

The distinction between sex and gender leads to interesting problems of performing gender and what it means for gender (and sex) to be socially constructed. And if both are socially constructed can the divide be upheld without requiring counter-intuitive definitions?

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-gender/#SexGenDi...

The haziness of the term "woman" seems to be a popular target for mockery among conservatives. And phrased as an ontological question ("what is a woman?") it is unsurprisingly baffling to many people who haven't kept up with feminism and who are not personally affected by the outcome of this philosophical debate. Equally unsurprising then for these people to consider "The Left" to be out of touch.

Expressing exasperation at our collective failure to wrap our brains around these concepts is an understandable reaction from someone well-read, but it does nothing to change minds.

[catiopatio]

I “still” haven’t wrapped my head around it because not once have I been presented with non-tautological replacement definitions for “man” and “woman”.

I will immediately change my mind and recant my views — here and now! — if someone provides:

- A specific definition of what “gender” is, if not a synonym for “sex”

- Non-tautological definitions of “man” and “woman” that are consistent with your definition of “gender”

[Zagill]

Gender is all about social interactions. For example, blue and pink being "masculine" and "feminine." Is there any relation to male or female chromosomes that would make blue appropriate for someone with X and Y chromosomes, and pink appropriate for someone with 2 X chromosomes? Of course not. Same goes for wearing makeup or high heels. At a different time in history, those things would have been considered "manly" but over time that's changed. None of the social flags that we use to determine a person's gender have anything to do with their genitalia or chromosomes, because we generally don't have that information when we see people in public. If gender and sex were really the same, it might be a bit more difficult for pre-op trans people to pass for a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth.

[rayiner]

What about wanting to quit their jobs and take care of babies? That’s social/behavioral, so part of what you’d call gender. But it’s also rooted in biology.

[Zagill]

It's not just cis women who want to do that though. And there are many cis women and trans men who don't. Not to mention, part of why it might be the case that women tend to quit their jobs and raise kids is because there's a lot of societal pressure to do that, and until relatively recently women (in the US at least) haven't really had the right to be independent at all.

[rayiner]

Women not only do, but express the preference to, stay home with kids at much higher rates than men. It's quite likely there is a biological reason for that, and that the social construct derives from that instead of the other way around.

The fact that some women don't want to stay home and some men do doesn't mean it's a social construct. Many biologically-rooted differences between men and women are expressed in the population as overlapping but not coextensive normal distributions. E.g. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00421-006-0351-1

[conradfr]

The science is a actually not settled on the reasons for the blue/pink preference.

Same for a lot of what trans activists want to pass as facts.

Tolerance and fighting discrimination is important but bullying people into a set of beliefs is doomed to fail, except on Twitter until today ;)

[jrmg]

Non-tautological definitions of “man” and “woman” that are consistent with your definition of “gender”

Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you’re looking for, but this seems like a non-attainable standard to me. Language is _so_ fuzzy. Do many nouns have ‘non-tautological’ definitions? Like, could you define ‘house’ or ‘boat’ ‘non-tautologically’?

[fleddr]

Not very far. It's not a lack of understanding, it's a rejection of plain falsehoods.

[bt4u]

Maybe because the person who came up with that idea is a crazy pedophile who drove 2 young boys to suicide. Yes, really. Maybe we should not blindly accept all of his ideas.