I've answered that.

Repeatedly.

How do you distinguish a "gravitational expression of gender" from a "personality type expressing gender"

Good question. There is no such thing as a gender expression that is an expression of personality (in the stereotypical sense of ‘personality’ which is [inter-]subjective) under this view: there are just gravitational and symbolic expressions of gender.

A personality trait is any trait that a person has as a matter of their psychological persona; whereas a gravitational expression of gender is the natural tendencies that a person has due to their sex. Since personality is influenced by natural tendencies, the personality of a person will reflect those tendencies to some imperfect extent (depending on various factors).

You seem to be importing a notion of morality people do not use

My friend, this is natural law theory and Aristo-Thomism: it is a very popular view in metaethics and normative ethics.

Since Divine decree won't cut it here you are relying on purported self harm.

Natural law theory claims that we are decreed by God to follow our nature; so the idea that you can separate out harm (in general: not just self-harm) from Divine Law is a false dilemma if the thesis stands.

 But if that were enough to substantiate immorality then eating desserts and mountain biking would also need to be condemned

They would not be immoral under Natural Law. Neither of those in and of themselves inhibit the body from realizing its natural ends. Now, depending on the context (e.g., dessert gluttony, rash biking, etc.) it may be immoral because it does inhibit it.

We don't generally consider minor harms associated with voluntary activities to indicate immorality, be they elevated cholesterol, sprains and breaks, or anal tears

You kind of smuggled in anal sex here; but it is nothing like the other examples you gave. Anal sex is like consistently drinking alcohol your entire life; or smoking. It has permanent damage that occurs over time. Even doing it once inhibits the anus for a while at doing its job.

This "immorality as self harm" reminds me of drug prohibition. Here too draconian punishments for even simple possession are justified in terms of self harm. Even though, little effort is taken to substantiate

Are you taking the position that self-harm is not immoral?

Please refer me to your answer, then.

Would it be fair, then, to say that you believe water is water, as opposed to something else, because of its structural (molecular) makeup (viz., H2O)?

Oh, Bob.

"Sex" and "gender" can be used to differentiate between those characteristics that are biological and those that are social. — Banno

You kind of smuggled in anal sex here — Bob Ross

Goodness - without consent? I hope not.

One thing to note is that I think we're a social species, for instance, so "social construct" does not thereby mean "not real" as is often mistakenly taken to be the case.

Well, it wouldn’t be real; because reality is objective, and socially constructed ideas are inter-subjective (even if they are expressing something objective).

Our agreement that vanilla ice cream is the best ice cream ever and that anyone who disagrees is an ice cream heretic has inter-subjective existence.

In the ontology of atoms and void the gods do not care about you and there is no afterlife so theological goods are distractions from pursuing our true nature

Ok, would it be fair to say that Epicureanism is the same fundamental, naturalistic project that Aristotle is doing but it focuses on well-being of the organism independently of an ordering to any higher goods? For example, it seems like Epicureans would say that sacrificing yourself as a father for your son is not good; because it goes against the immanent well-being of the father and there is no recognition of the higher good that relates to the father’s role as the father.

I tried to address your concerns in the preceding paragraphs.

You didn’t address it though. To be clear, you are both denying and accepting the existence of natures. Which is it?

Do you, on the one hand, believe that things have natures that they can realize to live a happy life (as you describe with Epicurus) or do you deny the reality of natures altogether? This seems internally incoherent to me.

That's perfect acceptable to me -- but then it seems you can't make normative claims like:

All of those are descriptive claims. The fact someone has a nature is not a prescriptive claim in the Humean way. I am simply stating that there really is a nature to a human, irregardless if one should follow it or not.

The nature of things is that obvious that we can just say, by looking at something, what it is for, what it's proper purpose is, what its essence is. But that doesn't seem like the sort of conclusion you'd want, either

I am not arguing that we can know everything about the nature of something at first glance: we’ve impacts the natures of many things over many thousands of years. It’s an empirical investigation: it is not a priori.

 If the latter then The Kinsey Report isn't "in the game"

Nothing about what people report about themselves is itself a normative claim, so I am not following you here.

 If we play the former we play Hume's Guillotine then I'm pointing out modern medical ethics. as well asIf we don't play Hume's Guillotine Epicureanism is a possible other way of thinking on the question of sex, gender, and boning.

Ok. We aren’t discussing the ethics involved in the medical industry nor what should be the ethic there: we are discussing what gender and sex are. I think you are jumping to my ethical views on sexuality when I have not imported it into the OP’s discussion.

Likewise, Epicureanism may be an alternative: we would have to explore that; but it definitely doesn’t seem coherent with nominalism (which you accept since you reject essentialism).

Do you, on the one hand, believe that things have natures that they can realize to live a happy life (as you describe with Epicurus) or do you deny the reality of natures altogether? This seems internally incoherent to me. — Bob Ross

I deny that men or women have natures, that sex has a nature, and that gender has a nature but I think the concept of a human nature workable. And I wouldn't put "nature" in terms of "essence" either.

I don't believe in universal criteria for inclusion in a set, such as necessary and sufficient conditions, which specifies what a thing is.

But there could still be a use for "nature" in our thinking even if we're not adopting Aristotle's ontology.

I am not arguing that we can know everything about the nature of something at first glance: we’ve impacts the natures of many things over many thousands of years. It’s an empirical investigation: it is not a priori. — Bob Ross

You are arguing you can know the ends of things, though. Their teleology. Yes?

If that can come to be known over time then by what means do we infer the teleology of organs as you have?

This is the thing I'd deny empirical investigation can really do: We utilize teleological notions in biology but they're an organizing apparatus more than the ontology of speciation. Rather all we can do is describe -- at least if we play Hume's Guillotine.

If we do not then

Ok. We aren’t discussing the ethics involved in the medical industry nor what should be the ethic there: we are discussing what gender and sex are. I think you are jumping to my ethical views on sexuality when I have not imported it into the OP’s discussion. — Bob Ross

... it was explicitly your description of the anus' teleology that got me started on this line of thinking.

Likewise, Epicureanism may be an alternative: we would have to explore that; but it definitely doesn’t seem coherent with nominalism (which you accept since you reject essentialism).

This is your Argument 1. There is either Realism or Nominalism. Nominalism is not tenable, ergo Realism.

Epicurus' epistemology is one of direct realism. It's a naive epistemology with respect to the critical turn in philosophy heralded by the Enlightenment thinkers. I don't agree with it in specifics, though I think it's harmless in general -- its' major fault is shared by all other philosophical theories in that it is wrong.

I'm not claiming nominalism. I'm speaking in my own words and not as part of a category of people with such-and-such beliefs well known, unless nominalism really is nothing but the belief that essences do not exist.

I would say that we possess knowledge, though -- it is provisional and not ontological, but still knowledge of what's real. In that vein I think the poetics of Epicurus' ontology get along with what we know about the universe at present. But that's not the sort of knowledge which the Epicureans would have claimed -- they claimed to have the truth that all of reality is atoms and void.

Which I take ontology to be: not real but rather a poetics that allows us to comprehend and bring sense to the real. It does not encompass all of reality and we cannot deduce things about reality from our categories. However we define our terms the reality of things will always slip beyond our categories such that we cannot have deductive knowledge of the real, but rather provisional knowledge.

But that means the sorts of claims we find in Aristotle, Epicurus, the Stoics, the neo-Platonists, and on forward which make claims about reality as it really is cannot be treated like we know them. They're just ways of organizing what we know into sense for ourselves so that the absurd is manageable.

So, anti-realist with respect to ontological commitments, but realist with respect to reality, anti realist with respect to essences, realist with respect to nature, and explicitly agnostic with respect to ontology: Not only is it not known, but due to our position it cannot be known.

So sex, gender, and boning under this umbrella: Speciation roughly follows Darwinian evolution because some molecules formed at one time that started to self-replicate. Natural selection took care of the rest. Sexual reproduction is a method for mixing up genes, however that's done. There's no "natural" sex as much as there are methods for swapping genetic information such that the next generation has a mixture of genes. Male/Female is a rough, metaphysical speculation which we utilize to understand this infinitely complicated process.

Gender is social and inter-social and inter-personal and personal. Sex is our metaphysical belief about others' biology, and gender is the identification one has in all the previously designated senses. It functions as a means for understanding one's role, understanding one's place within a community, understanding what desires are acceptable and what are not acceptable for the kind of gender you have, understanding the sorts of desires that are had by said gender, all in order to then enact it within the social dance. This social dance is real, note -- not essentially so, but as real as you and I talking right now. People perform gender.

The important thing to note here is that does not then mean:

Well, it wouldn’t be real; because reality is objective, and socially constructed ideas are inter-subjective (even if they are expressing something objective). — Bob Ross

Since there's no underlying reality which defines the perfect specimen of a genus the performance is all there is to it: the surface is expansive and deep, but not undergirded by a purpose or soul. Rather it's something that arises naturally through coming to learn how to act with others: socialization.


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So I'm definitely taking the critical turn more seriously than the neo-Thomists are. And without some way to specify how natures are determined rather than offering a common-sense teleology it would seem to me that the neo-Thomists aren't so much overcoming the critical turn as ignoring it and stubbornly continuing in their tried ways.

Following up on this, two resources are the Girgis/George/Anderson document, “What is Marriage,” as well as Peter Simpson’s article, “Legalizing Same Sex Marriage.” The first document is helpful in many ways, but I think Simpson's piece is more incisive, not to mention shorter.

I would depart from Simpson’s conclusions by claiming that political forms should favor the ideal in one way or another, and that because of this his conclusions are premature. For example, I do not think that a contraceptive mentality departs from the ideal of marriage to the same extent that a homosexual mentality does, and therefore I see Simpson’s equating of these two possibilities as flawed. Indeed, Aquinas explicitly opposes Simpson's thesis in this matter.

But again, I see the objection from infertile couples as failing to recognize the difference between an exception and a rule. An infertile opposite-sex couple is an exception; whereas an infertile same-sex couple is a necessity. It is in no way out of the ordinary for law to track natural exceptions with legal exceptions.

Of course, that the LGBT advocate cannot see this is due to their post hoc rationalization, and Simpson’s conclusions may well be vindicated within a culture that is steeped in these forms of post hoc rationalization. He is surely right that if we make the novel definition of marriage coherent we will learn how significantly we have departed from the historical tradition.

Thanks for the link to "Judith Butler on Gender Performativity." Most illuminating (in a dark sort of way, if you know what I mean).

Yes, words change over time. As our understanding of mental health changes, so do the meanings of the relevant words. This does not mean that merely defining a word as it is used today is a substantive claim. It is definitional. Whereas, the claim "schizophrenia is not a mental illness" would be substantive. Accepting it would require a significant revision of our understanding of schizophrenia, and so to the meaning of the term. — hypericin

So you are now advancing the claim that, "Schizophrenia is a mental illness" is not a substantive claim, but, "Schizophrenia is not a mental illness" is a substantive claim. It seems that all you mean by "substantive" is, "contrary to the current widespread view."

@Bob Ross is presumably quite aware that the idea is contrary to the current widespread view, so there's no trouble there. And of course "bigotry" does not mean, "contrary to the current widespread view," so this notion of "substantive" doesn't seem to take us anywhere.

Indeed, the only philosophical significance of something being contrary to the current widespread view is that it has the burden of proof within that cultural context.

Amusing that you think you can know that. I will try to define only rhetorical bigotry, the relevant form here:

The ascription of negative qualities onto a population based on their group identity, which are not intrinsic to that group's membership criteria. — hypericin

Is this taken from some source or are you coming up with it yourself?

The problem with this definition is that it hearkens back to the same we've already been over. Your charge amounts to something like, "Ross has falsely ascribed negative qualities to a group." That's the question at stake. What is needed are arguments pro and contra. It does no good to simply claim that Ross has uttered a falsehood if you have no argument to back up your claim. Besides, this is not the definition of bigotry.

It is just historical reality that exactly these claims were leveled against homosexuals, that they were immoral and mentally ill. And which were used to justify repression, including forced institutionalization. Do you think those claims were merely the result of the inquiry of curious minds? Or were they both reflections of social prejudices and tools used to legitimatize repression? — hypericin

If someone uses a shovel to smash in a man's face, should we outlaw shovels?

The underlying problem is that you are imputing bad motives without good evidence. You must argue your case, not merely assert it.

Thanks for the link to "Judith Butler on Gender Performativity." Most illuminating (in a dark sort of way, if you know what I mean). — Gregory of the Beard of Ockham

You're welcome. I think it provides the sort of argumentation and rationale that @Bob Ross was after in the OP.