The impossibility of an omnipotent, omni benevolent god has been show 2300 years ago:

Epicurus's quote does nothing to suggest an omnipotent, omni benevolent god (or a God as in the Abrahamic religions) couldn't logically exist. Especially the 3rd point, where there have been thousands of years of theodicity since then.

I actually think the argument that mathematics is somehow rooted in "white supremacist culture" (as the article claims) falls apart when you realize that Asians on average tend to have better math skills than whites. As someone from California, I wince that they are trying to take calculus out of the curriculum because it somehow causes some students to feel "naturally better/worse" at math. Ironic that this policy comes from a liberal California, where achievement gaps for Black, Latino and low-income students are the widest in the nation.

As Tom Loveless said, “The way you get social justice in mathematics is to teach the kids math...not by dressing up mathematics in social justice.”

Granted, there were plenty of mathematicians who were racist (R. L. Moore), and of course departments should do their best to counteract racism by faculty, other students, etc so those who have ability or work hard can succeed

LOL, now that’s a good point


It’s interesting, because in some ways I think the progressive left would actually consider (Neo)-Nazis to be an oppressed group and an underrepresented minority. Based on the theory, they are so socially stigmatized that they are unable to advocate for themselves politically or even be recognized as a group that needs political or social action taken on their behalf. They are marginalized, face discrimination in hiring, all the usual social justice buzzwords. However, unlike race or sex, they are an unprotected class by the law, so they are also institutionally marginalized as well.

Now, whether or not this is a good thing is a separate issue. But I’ve heard some liberal people say that, for instance, child molesters are an oppressed group.

It makes you wonder if the groups who are able to claim they are marginalized/underrepresented and be taken seriously aren’t quite as marginalized/underrepresented as those who do not have or cannot have a voice…

It’s an interesting question. Here are some ways I’ve thought about it. When the question was traditionally asked, I think it was implied that the question was “can God create a rock so heavy that He cannot lift it.” Obviously, this would be a strange statement, because if you believe God is omnipotent, then there is no limit to his strength; I.e. by his omnipotence it is impossible for there to be a rock that is so heavy that someone omnipotent cannot lift. Furthermore, since God is assumed to be outside of the physical world, maybe anything he creates in the physical world cannot contradict his omnipotence.

However, I’d we change the question a bit, we end up with some interesting formulations. Can God create something that he cannot move? Can God create something that contradicts his omnipotence? Can God create something that can destroy him?

Here’s an interesting analogy. Say I am a programmer, and I program a game engine for a video game. As a programmer, can I create an object I cannot move? Sure; I could create an object and “lock” it so I can’t move it. But then I also have the ability to “unlock” or “delete” the object if I choose. Can I create an object that can’t be deleted? Not necessarily, because I can always reset the simulation or delete the entire program. Even though I am omnipotent in the simulation, this omnipotence has its own constraints as to what I “cannot” do. Can I create something in the game that can kill me in real life? No.

Omnipotence has some interesting definitions, but many of the contradictions come down to “if you can do anything, can you do something that keeps you from being able to do anything.” In this way, if you are all-powerful, I think there are indeed a few things you *cannot* do, namely, things that would contradict your omnipotence.

Did the article always make such broad claims without citing sources? I like the beginning but I quickly got annoyed with statements like

the vast majority of atheists have made no attempt to reflect on more than one or two of the many legitimate concepts of God that exist both inside and outside of various religious communities [No citation]

the stereotype that New Atheism is religious or quasi-religious or ideological in some unprecedented way is clearly a false one and one that New Atheists reject

with a citation to Oxford Handbook of Atheism, which also says

For these authors, religion is ‘violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry’ (Reference Hitchens 2008, 56), and centred on a malevolent deity (Reference Dawkins 2007, 51), who inspires his followers to ‘lie and even to kill’ (Reference Dennett 2007, 338) for a destructive vision that threatens human flourishing (Reference Harris 2006, 227)... any ‘toleration extended by contemporary atheists is generally viewed as an interim solution, before religion eventually dies its natural, or induced, death’ (Reference Cotter 2011, 91).

which sounds pretty quasi-religious or ideological.

This raises questions for epistemology and ethics, let alone aesthetics.
Does being a white male mean you have white male experience? I have no idea what that means.

To go back to your original point, which is a good point, say I am a white male. Then I can say that I have the epistemological experience of a white male with sample size n=1. If I am 100% white, then that means I have no epistemological experience of a black male (sample size n=0). In other words, in my case, I wouldn't claim to know what it is like to have the "experience" of a black male. However,
how can any person claim to speak/have the authority to speak for "white males" even if they are white, because as far as I know, nobody has memories of multiple lives? Now, this gets tricky. Say someone is a half white and half black male. Can they claim to have a white male experience and a black male experience? Or is the usual white experience also defined in terms of the exclusion of the experiences of other groups.

I think the idea of someone/something having an "X perspective" is tricky and fuzzy. Perhaps a better, more precise statement is "I am/identify X. I also believe Y." In order to claim that X's have "Y" experience, you have to first create or agree upon a category of X. Then you have to show that a randomly selected sample of them have "Y" experience (or enough of them do to make the statement compelling).

This is why I do not understand things like California's board diversity law (which I guess was just ruled unconstitutional). California tried to pass a law saying that boards of companies in California must have underrepresented minorities on it. Is the assumption that there simply needs to be more underrepresented minorities on boards (why?), or that the underrepresented minorities bring a different perspective (what would this be? Is this on average or overall?)

if there were any objective knowledge about the nature of god, after several millennia Theists would have come to an agreement. They obviously haven't. (There are 41,000+ denominations in Christianity alone.) Thus, they obviously don't know what they are talking about.

I think your idea of objective knowledge is too strict. We could also say philosophers have been arguing about the existence of the external world, other minds, whether moral realism is a thing, whether we have control/agency over our actions etc for thousands of years, and therefore philosophers obviously don't know what they are talking about. Maybe we don't.

Honestly, when it comes to metaphysical claims about God, the existence of the external world, etc our traditional idea of "knowledge" comes into question. For instance, what does it mean to "know" whether God exists? Now, J J C Smart describes it in terms of probabilities

Let us consider the appropriateness or otherwise of someone (call him 'Philo') describing himself as a theist, atheist or agnostic. I would suggest that if Philo estimates the various plausibilities to be such that on the evidence before him the probability of theism comes out near to one he should describe himself as a theist and if it comes out near zero he should call himself an atheist, and if it comes out somewhere in the middle he should call himself an agnostic. There are no strict rules about this classification because the borderlines are vague. If need be, like a middle-aged man who is not sure whether to call himself bald or not bald, he should explain himself more fully.

But how would one be able to assign a probability with any confidence about their belief in something, especially as it relies on other assumptions that may also have probabilities assigned to them? Furthermore, this probability is going to be conditioned based on whether or not I accept the existence of miracles, how I define god/God, whether I am a naturalist, etc.


Another way you can think about this is as a spectrum of god/God's knowability as well as one's position based on their belief on knowability.
[img]https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-d6e2454572b02492b1a53526f0b81d28-lq/img] Under this definition, I would be a De Facto theist or an agnostic theist. I don't think God's existence is even knowable/provable to humans (in the traditional, empirical sense) but I do believe in a God. For instance, there is a difference between me saying "I believe in God" and me claiming "God Exists" as a philosophical claim. There are interesting arguments on the theistic side as well as good rebuttals on the atheistic side so I do think the reasonable position is to be somewhat unsure unless you claim to have had a religious experience.

That is the picture we get from Science. Humans are agents, they have the capacity to gather information and improve their choices based on previous experiences..
Individuals are not in control of their actions or better they control a really small percentage of them but they can work on expanding their control!
This is where analytic thinking and reasoning can be helpful…Everyone should be hold responsible for his actions

Thanks for your insight. What bothers me is that metaphysical naturalism seems to imply that all (not just some or many) of our thoughts and actions are mechanistic reactions to the initial state of the universe, laws of nature, etc. In the sense that while we take in information from those around us, the traditional view of agency is incorrect. People cannot “choose” to believe in or do anything. As a result, I don’t understand how people can be held “responsible” for their actions-they did not “choose” their actions but simply, as part of the physical universe, mechanistically responded to their initial conditions. Under this view, with an accurate picture of the initial state of the energy of the universe and the laws of nature, every thought and therefore “choice” could be predicted or simulated with 100% accuracy beforehand.

In other words, in the discussion on determinism, metaphysical naturalists would, to me, be hard determinists because any idea of “free will” is an appeal to a supernatural “power of mind” outside of the natural forces in the universe

If we have libertarian free will, then it is plausible to believe that the occurrences of certain physical events have irreducible and ineliminable mental explanations. According to…[metaphyscial] naturalism, everything in the physical world is in principle explicable in nonmental terms. Therefore, the truth of naturalism implies that libertarian choices cannot explain the occurrences of any physical events.

Yeah, and I didn’t mean to imply that there aren’t Christian biblical literalists out there (as there certainly are). It is more that the version of Christianity that I often see attacked by antitheists is a version of textual literalism that is held by a minority (of a minority) of Christians. For instance, many of those who argue for biblical inerrancy claim inerrancy only applies to autographical texts (Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy).
If someone is arguing against biblical literalism they are in agreement with a majority of Christians on this point. There have been almost 2,000 years of Christian, Jewish, Islamic scholarship on the matter (Origen, Hippo come to mind) on how figuratively/literally to interpret different parts of the Bible which unfortunately seems to get ignored in online conversations.

I thought I'd step in and say I don't think I know any Christian or Jewish believers who literally think the Bible fell out of the sky, literally translated (in English). Pretty much everyone I've talked to has explained that Paul wrote the letters Corinthians, Ephesians, etc; different books, different authors, and of course, different historical contexts, which needs to be taken into account. I think it is all too easy for us, in a post scientific-revolution context, to expect early writers and those passing on oral history to preserve every small detail of the story as if it was some process to be able to replicate. This is not how history was told; for instance, battle records often exaggerated the number of troops on the enemy side. Historians know (and expect) this. Does this mean the battle didn't happen? No, simply that there may not have been a way to keep an accurate count, or that the exaggeration served a different purpose.
As Conrad Hyers said,

one often finds a literalist understanding of Bible and faith being assumed by those who have no religious inclinations, or who are avowedly antireligious in sentiment. Even in educated circles the possibility of more sophisticated theologies of creation is easily obscured by burning straw effigies of biblical literalism.

The sad thing is, this seems to be what is going on here, which frankly does not belong on a forum dedicated to philosophy.

Would prayer and meditation necessarily have different origins? Studies suggest both reduce stress, increase forgiveness, increase self-control, etc. I personally see it as meditation being the east's "discovery" of whatever it is and prayer being the west's.
As a result, perhaps animals do "pray," even if they don't have a concept of God/gods. I think it depends if prayer needs an idea of "god" or the idea of a reciever.

I remember watching a documentary about a guy who felt like his leg was not his leg

Yep, this is a documented disorder and it's not just for legs (although legs may be the most common). It's called body integrity identity disorder (BIID) or body integrity dysphoria. Its symptoms are:

[A] desire to have a sensory or physical disability, discomfort with being able-bodied

In some extreme cases, a person wants their entire spinal cord disconnected or removed. I believe the ethics of it are very complicated, especially considering the hippocratic oath. In fact, I have trouble differentiating between this disorder and gender affirming surgery (where, say, a "man" wants his penis removed and replaced with a vagina).

I think a lot of the arguments to justify allowing gender-affirming surgery could also be used to justify these sorts of amputations, and, by extension, assisted suicide or euthanasia (in the case of existential suffering). I have heard that one of the reasons all of these treatments are controversial is that they are some of the only psychological disorders that are treated with primarily physical, non-neurological, and non-reversible surgeries.

I have transgender buddies and of course will treat them/gender them the way they want to be treated. However I hesitate to call myself a "transgender ally" because at the end of the day it is hard for me to understand what justification will allow gender affirming surgery (which I don't really care about/doesn't affect me) but not be applied to medically assisted suicide in the case of no terminal illness (Something I feel strongly about, as I would have sought this out when I was suicidal for years but am now glad I did not).

THIS is the big difference why one ought not to believe that the Holy Books are Holy or even reliable for their claims of supernatural events. They are totally unverifiable

I think you are missing the point. The value of Holy Books or religion isn't only tied to the reliability of their supernatural claims. Like I said, I don't think people are going to church to debate the epistemologically of miracles. If anything, religion provides an accessible, "practical philosophy" for how people are to live their lives and treat other people. Even if the supernatural or miracle claims are unverifiable, the impact religion has on peoples' lives is verifiable. It improves health, learning, economic well-being, self-control, self-esteem, and empathy.

The problem is when the opinion holder who has no justification to his beliefs, proselytizes his opinion. If it is mere fantasy, it's good as a private thing, but disseminating fantasy as reality -- other than for entertainment -- is a moral crime.

This happens all the time: someone gets sent to prison who committed a crime, they find God or Jesus or religion in prison, turn their life around, and then start proselytizing about the transformation that they had. Would you say they have no justification for their belief in the "truth" of the claims behind their transformation? Or that their proselytizing to other inmates or sharing their transformation is somehow a "moral crime"?

I agree that knowingly disseminating fantasy as reality is immoral. But there is a difference between knowingly spewing fantasy as if it were reality, and sharing your experience because you believe it is true or your belief in it changed *your* life.

what makes a belief system a religion, has no basis...the premises are mere fantasy, nothing to do with observed reality

I couldn't disagree more. Most religions have some canonical figure or text(s) that forms the basis of their religion. Take Christianity-I'd say with very good confidence that there probably was someone named Jesus who lived, died, and taught stuff which was written down and was at least similar to what we see in the New Testament, etc. Even if you reject any of the miracle claims it certainly has something to do with observed reality. Furthermore, in my experience, most people who participate in religion or go to church aren't going to hear a lecture on the metaphysical probabilities that these miracles actually happened. Instead they are reflecting on how this text/story/teaching applies to their daily life. This, to me, is where it becomes extremely difficult to separate religion and philosophy.

If the stories in religious texts are mythological, I think it becomes even more difficult to separate them from philosophy, or the sorts of thought experiments that philosophy often engages in (that may have nothing to do with observed reality). I can imagine someone 1,000 years from now looking at the trolly problem and arguing whether or not there were actually 5 people laying on the track.

I think philosophy can start with any assumption it pleases to.

Exactly. For instance, say there's an atheistic philosopher who starts with the assumption that a certain god/gods exists and then tries to show that it leads to some logical inconsistency. I don't think this would fall under theology. But it does start with an assumption that god/gods exists as a premise. So I don't think the presumption of the existence of god/gods is what differentiates theology from philosophy. Maybe it is what is accepted as canon.

Yes, I was actually going off of some of the ideas in these threads. In particular you say

My contention, which remains strong, is that religion has no essence, nothing that is common to all, and only, the many variants

Which I do very much agree with. Anything to associate it with an idea like "belief" is going to be Judeo-Christian influenced and perhaps biased. For instance, many people consider Buddhism to be a religion, but it is also doesn't have any theistic beliefs (in fact I've heard it described as an atheistic religion).

But in general if a religion is making claims about the nature of reality (on ontological and epistemological grounds) they are open to philosophical argument

Totally agree. In many ways metaphysical claims that are often found in religions make it challenging to differentiate it from philosophy. And when we think of the "practical philosophy" that many religious figures (Jesus, Buddha, etc) have, it is hard (for me) to see them as different from other philosophers at the time before analytic philosophy became a thing.

But we see Aristotle through a Christianising lens, one that came via Islam and neoplatonism. I won't pretend to knowing what he really thought.

Yeah, especially with the work of Aquinas who sort of reconciled Aristotelean Philosophy with Christianity (similar to what Augustine did with [neo] platonism).

Exactly. Under the assumption that God exists he can bend/break the laws of physics at will.

One analogy that comes to mind is a programmer for a simulation or as video game-there are "rules" that exist within the game to the players but the developer can choose to disable them to change them to achieve a desired outcome at any point.

I guess the "rationality" part would only come in addressing whether the person claiming the miracle happened was lying, etc.

But for me their work is better understood as activism. Which could be about race or poverty, or in their case theisms

In this case, would you also hold that religious fundamentalists who believe that those they are preaching to could spend eternity in hell are also activists in a similar sense? Perhaps "after-life activists"? Furthermore, what about any activism based on such beliefs (i.e. pro-life stances)?

I generally see the work of Dawkins and co as fundamentalist busting - be they Christian or Islamic fundie views.

Yeah that's the way I see it too. Unfortunately, I think they take it too far and become alienating. This has been especially apparent in recent years as we see their work as a knee-jerk response to 9/11. Especially because Dawkins is like Trump on twitter “All the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge.” To the point that I don't even know if they're intentionally trying to imitate fundamentalist claims or have merged with the far right themselves. And I apologize that this article reads (and basically is) a tabloid.

Religions founded on meaningless claims (which cannot be substantiated) hold views and influence social policy in a manner which many consider to be harmful

I think I understand the point that you're trying to make. With that being said, the theist can counter by saying their religious claims are substantiated from their religious experience(s). But I don't think the particular issue is the fact that the claims are unsubstantiated. The issue is that the behaviors themselves are harmful (and like you point out, both plenty of other religious people and nonreligious people speak out about this).
I say this because I tend to fall onto the side of having difficulty substantiating any (objective) moral claims. Yes I do believe they exist, but I don't think I'd really be able to provide evidence as to why they exist or why someone should adopt them.

If God exists, then God isn't treating you unfairly. No matter what happens to you, God wasn't being unfair in allowing it to happen.

To me, there is a very clear distinction between (as you say) God existing and someone having free will to "piss in your milk and steal your honey." In other words, since God didn't actually piss in your milk, the fact that your milk was pissed in does not mean He is unfair. I tend to side with Plantinga on Plantinga vs Mackie on the Logical Problem of Evil (if I remember correctly, even Mackie thought so too).

However, I do wonder that if God intervenes in some cases (and for some people), is it fair for him not to intervene in others. For instance, is it fair for him to intervene in my life and, say, make sure that I meet my future partner, but not have Hitler choke on a piece of bread as a child or something?

I will say the theists I have talked to on this matter (mostly Christian) have given me suitable responses, so I do think their view is consistent.

Firstly there is no 'true atheism' - this is as erroneous as claiming there is one true Christianity, or one true American.

This is a good point, and there seems (to me) to be tension around whether the definition of athiesm is a denial of the existence of gods or an assertion that God/gods do not exist.

However I do want to point out that

Atheism is simply any view that holds that god claims are worthless

and (perhap the antitheist claim)

Some atheists think that religions cause harm

seem contradictory to me. Maybe you can assert that atheism is the view that god claims are meaningless (in a similar way to how moral non-cognitivists assert that ethical claims have no truth value). But if you assert that religions cause harm, then religious claims (and thus claims about God or gods) has the capacity to hold (in this case) negative worth.

And while atheism may not follow any teaching, there are followers of prominent atheist figures such as Dawkins, Dennett, JL Mackie, Russell, etc. In a sense, the evangelical nature of the new athiests (which to me are more antitheists than atheists) are a very interesting parallel to evangelical religions. Both host talks, publish books, give awards etc.

Ehrman seems to be following closely to Hume’s argument against miracles. There has been a lot of discussion on this and I tend to fall onto the side of thinking it’s a relatively weak argument in light of commentary on it (although I do like Hume).
Bayes Theorem (in statistics) was originally formulated as a direct response to Hume’s argument against miracles by Price in Four Dissertations. Apparently, Hume respected Price’s argument enough to respond, “I own to you, that the Light, in which you have put this Controversy, is new and plausible and ingenious, and perhaps solid.”

Both Price and Hume were (and are) incredibly influential philosophers, and based on their letters, good friends despite their philosophical disagreements.

As you said, I think it really comes down to whether one believes in God (the sort of God who would intervene) a priori. But I guess I came here to advertise looking into Price and Hume.

If you believe the universe was created by God, then I think it is pretty easy to believe It/He/They are fair. In particular, the same causal, natural laws that God created, described, or “is” apply to everyone. As a result, I think my construction a Deistic God would be “fair” in that sense.

I think most theists don’t see the world itself as fair (some people are born into poverty, some die early or in childbirth, etc) but if they believe in judgement would believe such judgement to be “fair.”

Often times, by definition, God is ascribed the virtues of fairness or justice (perhaps by nature of omniscience) so in that case it is sort of a tautology.

I wanted to thank you for linking the SEP article. Very interesting read, and helped clarify some of the points Butler made (I enjoy reading Butler but since I’m new to the field I sometimes miss things).

I was also very much wrestling with the idea when I made the OP (this is from the article you linked): “feminists aim to speak and make political demands in the car name of women, at the same time rejecting the idea that there is a unified category of women”

Along with “to respond to oppression of women in general, feminists must understand them as a category in some sense.” This echos some of the concerns of feminists I have talked to recently that got me thinking about gender in the first place: without an idea of woman, the idea of “women’s oppression” is nonsense, and in some ways, feminism is self defeating if it rejects the category of women.

With that being said, perhaps some “fuzzy” category of women (where the “edges” are unclear but the critical mass is understood and agreed upon by most people) is all that feminism really needs to achieve its political goals.

Does this mean that I can identify as a chicken or a rabbit?

When an white person tries to act like a black person they are ostracized for culture appropriation. How is it not sexual appropriation when a man acts like a woman?

This point is worth addressing and not dismissing (in my experience, it often is dismissed when asked).
I have yet to hear a satisfactory response so I really hope some other people can chime in here.

There are two responses I’ve heard to this. The first one is an appeal to neuropsychology, which argues that trans brains are more “similar” to the gender they are transitioning to. To me, this is unconvincing because neuropsychology is very poorly understood, so defining this “similarity” feels (to me) like cherry picking. At the end of the day, the brain is also a biological system, so once again if someone’s “brain biology” doesn’t match their “genital/chromosomal biology,” which is to win out in our definition of gender?

Furthermore, this argument is directly opposed to (mainstream) feminism because it seems to imply gender or sexual determinism by arguing there are clear (enough) brain differences to categorize people into “man” or “woman” based on brain structure alone. Feminism, in my view, has tried to distance itself from these arguments as these were the same ones used to argue women couldn’t fly airplanes or shouldn’t be allowed to participate in politics. In this case, if someone who was born with a vagina and identifies as a woman but has a brain structure that is more similar to a man’s, should we call them a “man”?

Another way of approaching this is to argue that gender expression itself has a neuropsychological basis. However, if gender is a social construct (as many feminists argue), why would there be a biological or neurobiological basis for gender expression? And if there is, wouldn’t this imply that there is a biological basis for gender (and gender stereotypes) different than how we define sex?

The second response is that there are trans people in many societies throughout history. “Transgender people are known to have existed since ancient times…However…the modern concept of being transgender, and gender in general, did not develop until the mid-1900s.” This is more convincing to differentiate it from people who claim they are trans racial or trans species. However this does not address the question of whether or not transgender-ism should be pathologized. One could also argue that people born without a limb have existed since ancient societies and even in animals. However this is still pathologized as abnormal.

Ahh I see, that was my bad for misunderstanding what you were saying.

Interestingly, this could also bring up a conversation about what the pronouns “him/her” actually mean. Because if one thinks “him” or “her” refer to male or female (or man or woman) this could be seen as an affirmation of one’s claim that trans women are women. Maybe it’s a bit more removed than that though. Still, if someone asked me to refer to them by a specific pronoun I’d do my best to accommodate. But in a philosophical setting, asking someone to agree to the (according to Benno) political statement “trans women are women” would be different.

A parallel would be me saying “Happy Easter” to someone. If someone responded with “I don’t believe Jesus rose from the dead,” I think I’d be taken aback. I wasn’t necessarily asking them to agree with the statement that Jesus rose from the dead (if I was, I’d instead say something to the effect of “He is risen”). I was simply using Easter as a more “secular” (though Christian inspired, like most of Western society) holiday, and trying to be polite. To some people, that’s what Easter represents. To in this case, I think it depends what their definition of Easter is. Perhaps the same could be said about the use of “him”/“her.”

This makes me think that the root of the problem is not about trans. If it were, we would see approximately equal anxiety about either or any direction of transition.

This is a good point, and like Banno I also noticed the asymmetry but I don't think I had followed it to the conclusion that the root of the problem is not about trans, but I agree with you to a large extent now that I think about it. To a large part, I think I was influenced by my campus’s focus on “transphobia,” which unfortunately can be used as a straw man to remove nuance when people are discussing issues like trans participation in sports.

If the issue was truly transphobia, as you mentioned, then I think we’d expect to see equal anxiety. The fact that the focus is mostly on trans women probably comes down to anxiety about male violence and men in “women’s” spaces. This would also explain why some of these people are also against trans men being in “men’s prison” out of fear of sexual violence. In truth, it may be a combination of the two in some circumstances.


Yes, I agree with a lot of what you’re saying here, and I’ve seen some of the research you mention about “brain structure” (although I’ve yet to see anything conclusive and there’s still so much we don’t understand about the brain).

I was under the impression that “sex” (I.e. male vs female) was actually pretty well defined and agreed upon as which gamete an organism produced (and from my limited knowledge, there are no reported cases of humans who produce both sperm and ova, despite there being humans that have testicular and ovarian tissue i.e. true hermaphroditism). However it’s relationship to gender is certainly an interesting and very complicated one.

I have no issue with it either but many many people do have an issue with shared gender public toilets.

Me as well. Though I have a close friend who is Muslim and she can't fix her hijab in a shared bathroom space with men. So then the solution to this would be individual stalls with toilets, sinks, mirrors, etc. But this also has an economic impact as well.

Yes. A trans woman is referred to as her/she because it makes sense to say that not because I believe they are female...‘Woman’ is not how we refer to people anymore than man is in general conversation other than to say that ‘woman’/‘man’.

Where I am confused is you also say

if trans women competed in physical sports...[t]hey would break all the women’s records and rank high...Women’s sport dominated by trans women is not women’s sport

In this case, from what I can see, you seem to be using women to mean something different in these two places. Do you mean for the term women's records/sports is actually (or referring to) female's or women who are not transwomen's records/sports? Or are you using the term woman out of politeness but depending on context can exclude trans women. To me, the complication is the use of the same word "woman" to mean "female + trans women" and "female but not trans women" in different places.

You write that “Referring to a trans woman as a woman is just a way of accepting someone as they wish to be seen…it’s just a case of common sense and politeness” and I’m inclined to agree. Certainly one who goes out of their way to misgender someone says a lot more about them then the person they’re misgendering.

To me, where it gets more complicated, is when we start engaging with feminist literature and talk about epistemology, not how we behave in polite conversation. Take Simone de Bauvier, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” If one agrees that a crucial part of “being” a woman is being socialized as a woman, specifically at a young age, then (to me) one can reject the statement “trans women are women” simply because, in their view, trans women haven’t been through this crucial socialization process. Perhaps the person rejecting the statement would say “trans women are *partially* women” or “trans women are in the *process* of becoming women” or maybe even “trans women are missing a crucial part of what it means in my definition of woman but I will still call them a woman out of politeness.” This last statement in particular wouldn’t sit right with me, and I am interested in anything in response.

To be honest, I really struggle in my (hypothetical, I really haven’t talked to a lot of them) arguments against TURFs (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists).

We talk about “in terms of close relationships, medical reasons and physically competitive sports trans women are trans women. Outside of those areas trans women are women.” However, even in those categories the lines are being blurred, with some transwomen arguing that they are women and thus have a “right” to compete in physically competitive sports. I honestly don’t know where I stand on the issue.