A social construction can't be rejected by an individual feeling, or else it's not a social construction. — Harry Hindu

What are you imagining happens here? Like... are you literally imagining that someone says "I'm a woman" and then they become a woman? Is this the social process you're attacking? As if it's real?

Yes. There's two kinds of family. Biological and social.

That's the same difference between sex and gender. Sex is biological and cannot currently be changed. Gender is social, and thus can probably be altered.

In fact, gender has been altered over the centuries already. What a woman is supposed to act and dress and live like has changed.

I think the problems really only arise when SOME transgenders want to say biology is not real or that they are female or participate in female sports or say that they are and always were women instead of choosing to become a woman.

If gender is a social construction that is being rejected by an individual, then that makes that individual non-gendered.

Just as you disowning your socially constructed family makes you a non-son and non-daughter, disowning the social construction of gender makes you a non-man and non-woman.

If you are rejecting the social construction, then stop using the terms associated with that social construction.

If gender is a social construction that is being rejected by an individual, then that makes that individual non-gendered. — Harry Hindu

Now... what if instead of disowning the entire social construction of gender and throwing the baby out with the bathwater, a person came to disown the gender associated with their birth sex?

Now... what if instead of disowning the entire social construction of gender and throwing the baby out with the bathwater, a person came to disown the gender associated with their birth sex? — fdrake

Then at that point you've crossed the line to it being biological.

Actually, now that I think about it, that equates to disowning the social construction.

Edit: Harry's original post, which I should've quoted, contained the claim that someone can reject gender as a social construction and become non-gendered as a result (and this is fine), but someone cannot reject any particular gender and become another as a result of this identification. Yes, for those reading, the whole framing of this is stupid, because it's not a personal choice and personal choices are not sufficient for gender identity - people make a choice to transition or present differently because of lots of reasons, not some abstract on-off social identity, like changing your clothes to dress as a scene kid. Anyway...

So someone can disown the entire social construct of gender and become non-gendered, but they can't disown the gender associated with their birth sex. The first is not biological, the second is. Let's describe it some other way.

Let's paint a picture of gender where it's some {M, F} thing where each person gets branded with M or F. Now, what you're saying is that the only rejection of a gendered social construction which can happen is the rejection of {M,F}, and they thereby become non-gendered by rejecting the couple {M,F} as applying to them. Why can't someone reject a member of this set, {M,F}, and identify with the other one?

Why is rejecting gender so different from rejecting the gender you're wrongly branded with?

Let's just forget that you're treating social identity as a personal choice. Which, you know, you're simultaneously saying is a conceptual error making it logically impossible and claiming this is really what people are doing when they are trans (also see @Isaac 's position on the PLA and @StreetlightX's comment on it).

But you can adopt a new family....

I wonder if it really matters if it's a choice or not. Like, the LGB community used to insist on their rights because they said it wasn't. But now more people I think realize that it doesn't matter. Like who cares if someone chooses that? It's a legitimate path to pursue either way and nobody else's business really.

I don't personally care about whether it's a choice or not. To me that looks like the wrong framing entirely. @Harry Hindu is framing things that way, and I'm trying to follow him down his personal rabbit hole and place some landmines.

That's all understood, but it's just lazy writing on my part, not anything which undermines the position I'm taking. Something being a private language and therefore being meaningless is not materially different in implication here in this context from something that would be a private language if it were as it is claimed to be, and therefore cannot be so.

I'm happy to take a slapped wrist for sloppy writing, but I don't agree that it "badly misrepresents" the private language argument. The point is the much same. Wittgenstein was not claiming it was somehow physically impossible to attempt to use a word by what one imagines to be a private rule. In fact he gives an example of exactly that. The point is that it wouldn't function, not that one couldn't try.

If people are using a word, they must expect that it has a public meaning, otherwise the use is incoherent. That's the point I'm making. If someone uses a word to define themselves by criteria to which only they are privy, it is no different from Wittgenstein's example of sensation recording.

I'd also appreciate it if you would consider commenting me in when criticising my posts, I appreciate the opportunity to respond.

If people are using a word, they must expect that it has a public meaning — Isaac

A public meaning does not mean 'an already established meaning'. It refers to a meaning available to public use, or use by others. This could be the case if it is used by one person and not a single other soul on the planet. The 'community of language users' could all die in a fire and so long as a use is able to be learned in principle, then it is public. As I will never cease pointing out every time this misreading takes place, not even the very word 'community' appears even once in the PI. Frankly I think your use of Wittgenstein here is abominable, and does a mutilating disservice to both Wittgenstein and understandings of gender.

What I'm guessing you mean is that the information about each person which is used to label them with a gender is done 'publicly', so it's something which has a social-behavioural-biological component which everyone has access to. — fdrake

Yes, that is pretty much what I think.

So when someone says they feel like a different gender, I imagine you imagine that they're taking their feeling 'I'm not this gender, I'm that one', and they're trying to put this feeling through the sorting machine above, and voila they're now whatever gender they desired as a result of their feelings. IE, their feelings suffice for the correct application of the identity label. — fdrake

I personally doubt there's a single thing a person would be expecting the labelling act to achieve. The point is, I can't see anyone committing a speech act without the intention to achieve something. Like with the toilet attendant, the women's group, the shop... They're all using the term 'woman' to do some job and if it fails to do that job we might reasonably say they've used the word incorrectly. It does its job by the response of others who know what the intended response is.

I say "duck!", you duck. I say "I'm a woman/man", you... what? The options seem to be

1) do nothing whatsoever - the word seems no more than a name, certainly not the intent behind "man gives birth".

2) treat me like a woman - the concern of the feminists, that there is a consistent thing that is 'like a woman'.

3) treat me only like a woman so far as the context seems to specify - genetalia for toilets, perhaps looks for the women's group, clothing preferences for the shop... With none of these being right or wrong, only contextual.

So unless you can think of a fourth response, I think 3 is the better. Which means "man gives birth" (and other attempts to solidify identity choices) is a stupid headline because the only reason it would be newsworthy is in the biological context which is the one context in which its incorrect to label the person concerned a 'man'

So unless you can think of a fourth response, I think 3 is the better. Which means "man gives birth" (and other attempts to solidify identity choices) is a stupid headline because the only reason it would be newsworthy is in the biological context which is the one context in which its incorrect to label the person concerned a 'man' — Isaac

You can keep the old notion of sex, bodily sex, birth sex, what reproductive organs people are born with and so on. No one is thinking that these will change (without transitioning surgery) due to some shamanic utterance (which never actually happens) of "I am a woman" decreeing for now and always in the stone tablets that make up social reality (apparently) that its utterer is indeed a woman since their speech act was sincere.

If you're analysing gender in terms of speech acts, this is all well and good, but gender identity itself is not determined by a self-branding speech act; "I'm a man" is something someone might say for a lot of reasons. I vaguely remember @Harry Hindu claiming to be an oppressed trans woman last time we spoke about this issue, so there are really a lot of reasons someone might identify as trans, or a man, or a woman, no? Gender isn't just talk about gender, it's bodies and performances too.

If you wanna Wittgensteinian gloss on it, start thinking of gender as a family resemblance of language games and their attended forms of life, rather than as a condensate of self identifying speech acts (alone).

The 'community of language users' could all die in a fire and so long as a use is able to be learned in principle — StreetlightX

So, with a use where 'woman' is a label based on a private feeling, how is anyone able to learn it's use in principle?

Yes, I did say that I don't imagine a single purpose behind "I am a man", what I'm asking is why, in some contexts, the correct response could not be "no you're not". Maybe you're thinking that would be OK, in which case we don't disagree, but my personal experience of talking about trans issues is that such a response is never OK, meaning context is removed, gender becomes one thing and one thing only and that is the expression of the private feeling of an individual. I don't take that to be coherent, for the same reasons Wittgenstein gives (in spite of StreetlightX's whiney protestations to the contrary).

So, with a use where 'woman' is a lebel based on a private feeling, how is anyone able to learn it's use in principle? — Isaac

It is no more a label based on a private feeling than the word 'pain' is a label based on a private feeling. And just as we learn to use the word 'pain', we learn to use the word 'woman' or 'man'. Or any other word for that matter. Words are not labels, this is literally the first lesson of the PI, literally the first thing broached in §1.

The rub is that private languages don't occur at all. They're not possible.

The conclusion is that a language in principle unintelligible to anyone but its originating user is impossible. The reason for this is that such a so-called language would, necessarily, be unintelligible to its supposed originator too, for he would be unable to establish meanings for its putative signs. — SEP, on the Private Language Argument

So it would be extremely surprising to find one 'out in the wild', no? Especially when people are talking about it. This is why I've focussed on how you're imagining gender rather than on the specifics of the PLA, because you seem to be imagining a world where trans people are... somehow... behaving in a way where they'd like a private language to exist? But yeah, they're really not.

gender becomes one thing and one thing only and that is the expression of the private feeling of an individual.

I think you're completely over-estimating the role that "I am a woman" or whatever plays in the social process of identifying as any gender. No one would sincerely say "I am a woman" as a statement of their identity solely because of 'private feelings', they would feel a certain way about social relations and social roles which leads them to reject (or embody) the social branding and expectations. Whether they are motivated by personal feelings is much different from whether they are somehow imagining an impossible language whereby feelings alone can vouchsafe the meaning of words.

Really, the error in imagining you're having is that you're thinking of these things as 'feelings alone' or 'private feelings'. As if they're not also reactions to public phenomena.

If you lose your job and feel sad at the resultant effects on your life, you don't suddenly invent a language whereby 'I'm sad' = 'I lost my job' do you? Nah, these things interpenetrate each other, they correlate without conceptual reduction. There are manifest commonalities between trans experience, woman's experience, man's experience, points of overlap, effects of norms. We're in the same social world playing the same language games.

Except, perhaps, those who would consign the discourse of gender identity to meaninglessness. But that's not a game I'm gonna play.

I think you're completely over-estimating the role that "I am a woman" or whatever plays in the social process of identifying as any gender. No one would sincerely say "I am a woman" as a statement of their identity solely because of 'private feelings', they would feel a certain way about social relations and social roles which leads them to reject them. Whether they are motivated by personal feelings is much different from whether they are somehow imagining an impossible language whereby feelings alone can vouchsafe the meaning of words. — fdrake

A hundred times this. And maybe we can be done with the regressive, transphobic misreadings of Wittgenstein now, passed off as innocent language philosophy.

It is no more a label based on a private feeling than the word 'pain' is a label based on a private feeling. And just as we learn to use the word 'pain', we learn to use the word 'woman' or 'man'. — StreetlightX

No. We learn to use the word pain by observing the actions and reactions of people using the word. If we say "I'm in pain" every time we laugh, smile carelessly and skip about with joy, we are using the word incorrectly. Pain has to have external, publicly available signs for us to use it, otherwise it would be impossible to learn. It cannot be a private feeling alone.

Words are not labels — StreetlightX

Of course they are, they're just not only labels. What have I just put on my jar with the word "jam" if not a label? The word "jam" is serving as a label.

We learn to use the word pain by observing the actions and reactions of people using the word. If we say "I'm in pain" every time we laugh, smile carelessly and skip about with joy, we are using the word incorrectly. Pain has to have external, publicly available signs for us to use it, otherwise it would be impossible to learn. It cannot be a private feeling alone. — Isaac

And exactly what do you think those asking to be called women are asking?

And exactly what the fuck do you think those asking to be called women are asking? — StreetlightX

Personally I share the concerns of the feminist argument. I think a significant portion of what they're asking is to be treated like a woman. Which reinforces the idea that there is a treatment appropriate to women, an idea that feminists have spent years trying to break down.

The reason I think this is because the alternative (using the term to correctly identify a private feeling) is so incoherent.

Ah, so you're a gender abolitionist then?

I think you're completely over-estimating the role that "I am a woman" or whatever plays in the social process of identifying as any gender. No one would sincerely say "I am a woman" as a statement of their identity solely because of 'private feelings', they would feel a certain way about social relations and social roles which leads them to reject (or embody) the social branding and expectations. — fdrake

The second part of your sentence seems to contradict the first. It reads to me as - they would not do so because of feeling, they would do so because of some way they feel. Which is the same thing.

I'm looking for some publicly available criteria, something people could use to learn how to use the word correctly.

Really, the error in imagining you're having is that you're thinking of these things as 'feelings alone' or 'private feelings'. As if they're not also reactions to public phenomena. — fdrake

Again, a reaction is a feeling is it not? Unless you're talking about the request (number 2 in my options) which I agree is the real reason such a claim is made. But that runs into the problems of an 'appropriate' treatment for women.

I think you've both got the wrong impression of what I'm arguing. I'm not saying that the trans position is to make some kind of private language. I'm saying that the position it claims in response to accusations of gender stereotyping would do if it were true. I'm claiming that the trans agenda is very much at risk of gender stereotyping and its claims to the contrary are incoherent.

The second part of your sentence seems to contradict the first. It reads to me as - they would not do so because of feeling, they would do so because of some way they feel. Which is the same thing. — Isaac

I'm sorry I have no idea what you're saying because the reasons are just in your head.

Ah, so you're a gender abolitionist then? — StreetlightX

Pretty much, yes. I'd certainly prefer that a woman can act and ask to be treated in any way conceivable without that implying that she belongs to some group which also happens to be the one anyone with a penis is presumed to belong.

I think you've both got the wrong impression of what I'm arguing. I'm not saying that the trans position is to make some kind of private language. I'm saying that the position it claims in response to accusations of gender stereotyping would do if it were true. I'm claiming that the trans agenda is very much at risk of gender stereotyping and its claims to the contrary are incoherent. — Isaac

I dunno, I can be sympathetic to the idea that removal of all gender archetypes is pretty good, but to me it seems like "I don't want immigrant rights and acceptance because I don't believe in borders", I mean maybe politically it's a different thing for you.

This comes with it's own problems. For now, I'll only refer you to this piece:

"An embrace of unintelligibility ... of a rejection of meaning and stability might have presented a useful method of resistance, if gender operated merely at the level of ideals and ideology. If gender was nothing more than the belief in stable ontological identities, then perhaps a rejection of that belief might be enough. But gender is more than a belief. Gender represents a material reality which divides the world not just at the level of the ideal but at the level of labor, economics, and life itself. Gender divides the world into those who do specific types of labor and those who don’t, into those are financially independent subjects and those who are financially dependent. This division does not occur merely at the level of ideals but in the day to day material matter lives of individuals.

If gender operates not merely at the ideological or symbolic level, then a response which does operate only at that level is inadequate. As such, I am quite convinced that the model of resistance proposed in Gender [abolishionism] needs to rejected, and a new model developed on the basis of a material investigation into the material base which produces the ideologies of gender and difference".

Yes, there are complications, probably more than I know (I have only a passing interest in gender issues related to some work I did years back), but it's still my gut feeling until overwhelmingly condradicted. I will have a read of the article, and respond to it properly when I have more time.

Thanks for the article, it was a very good read. I'm not sure I see in it any significant opposition to what I've been talking about her. I think the author is making a similar point to the one FDrake's made about immigrants lacking representation the moment we are nihilistic about borders. I'm not talking here about representation. Yes the category 'woman' already exists but it has several, not one single function in our society. I get that simply refusing to acknowledge it is not going to undermine those functions which are oppressive. I agree that to do so we must look to the mechanisms and causes.

But there are ways and means to do that which do not involve further re-enforcement of those structures. As I said earlier, the word 'Woman', even just when used as a means of categorisation, a label, already does large number of jobs. there's no need for anyone entering the 'Women's' section of a clothes shop to imagine they have to have female genetalia, the label is categorising a clothing style. Not so for someone entering a 'Women's' changing room. Here clothing style is irrelevant, but genetalia is hugely important. As language users, we don't have any trouble at all with recognising different uses in different contexts. So it is a doomed political strategy to try and unify contexts under one use. A 'man' did not give birth, a 'woman' did. In the context of "giving birth" the relevant distinction is an ovary/womb. That same person might shop in the 'Women's' section of a clothes shop (if that's what they prefer). They might even be accepted into a 'Women's only' safe-space, if the people there are mostly concerned about avoiding testosterone-fuelled behaviour. Appearance, body-shape, behaviour... all different ways of understanding what counts as being a 'woman' in different contexts.

We're seeing people wanting their birth certificates corrected, wanting access to changing rooms, wanting to be referred to by the same gender word at all times. Basically there is a move to base all categorisation contexts on the same nebulous distinguishing criteria and that is to the poverty of language, and a very poor political strategy if undermining oppressive forms of categorisation is the aim. We already have in our lexicon the means by which we can use categorisation terms differently depending on context. That's a good start, that means we can have 'women-only' safe spaces and 'women-only' jobs (women's prison warden, for example) refer to two different means of categorising gender. The moment we accept the discourse that only one means exists (the feelings of the person concerned) and that such a method must be applied in all cases, we lose those markers of progress.

Ought to add for etiquette, I just wanted to get his response down, and you may or may not care, but I'm only intermittently able to respond further for a while, so if you do have any response, I'm unlikely to respond to it for a few days.