All memory is internal yes. Not all pain is in response to memory. Getting fixated on a memory of a passing painful thing is “internalizing” it, because memories are internal unlike the passing stimulus.

Not to disagree with anything you say but maybe to explain part of it: it’s always seemed to me that the language of “privilege” makes it inherently a difficult thing for those who have it to either understand or accept, because it is fundamentally an absence of something, but is discussed as though it were the presence of something. One group “has privilege” over another when the first lacks problems that the other faces. Fixing the privilege is thus not done by changing anything about the first group’s circumstances, but by changing the other group’s circumstances. It’s not a problem that white people don’t face the challenges that non-whites face, it’s a problem that non-whites face challenges that whites don’t. And that’s not fixed by taking away something good from whites, but by giving non-whites access to those same goods. Put in terms of the language of “privilege”, that translates to saying that it’s not bad that whites have privilege, but that non-whites lack it; that is, they lack the absence of the problems that they face. That double negation is I think the root of a lot of difficulty people have with the concept.

Internalization is what makes it trauma: when the stimulus that prompted the bad feelings is gone but the bad feelings continue anyway, the stimulus no longer being whatever external thing instigated it in the first place but some internal memory of that instead.

Is it possible to express in maybe three well-crafted sentences, no more, what this thread is about? — tim wood

Current discourse differentiates between "sex" and "gender". But "gender" has several different meanings in different contexts, causing some confusion and conflict. I propose also disambiguating the sociological and psychological properties that are each sometimes called "gender", leaving "gender" meaning the sociological property, and calling the psychological property now distinguished from it "bearing" instead; keeping the physical property "sex" still a distinct thing from either of them.

Next up on National Public Radio, sixty minutes of existential philosophy readings set to classical piano on: The Chopin Hour.

I've just started noticing the days getting shorter, and realizing the immanence of the winter time shift, of losing any light at the end of my days, makes me wish that it could stay spring forever.

There is technically not anything logically impossible about an omnipotent being creating something that it then cannot move. That's just equivalent to resigning a small piece of its omnipotence. Before the creation of the thing, it's omnipotent. Then it creates a limit to its omnipotence, which is within its power to do. After that it's not omnipotent anymore. But while it was omnipotent, it had the power to create limits to its own omnipotence, without contradiction.

Well put.

unless the nt = new testament and m = gospel of matthew, but that much is quite unclear at this point — Hassiar

OP wrote "MT" and "N", which are shorthand for modus tollens and negation, the rules of inference used in the argument.

On which point , the negation of "refer to God with exclusively masculine terms or feminine terms" isn't "refer to God with both feminine and masculine terms" because there are terms besides masculine and feminine; one could refer to God as "it" or "they", for instance, and comply with the edicts of line 3, while never using "he" or "she" and so violating line 4.

This is once again just the free will theodicy and like all instances of it depends entirely upon an incompatibilist conception of free will. On a compatibilist conception of free will, like mine, there is no reason that God (if he existed) couldn't have created humans to be always perfectly moral, and also have free will. In fact on accounts like mine, freedom of will is equivalent to the efficacy of moral reasoning on behavior -- your will is what you judge to be the best thing for you to do, and that will is free when it, not something else, controls what you do -- so giving humans freer will would have made them more moral, not introduced evil into the world.

Sounds like ... must've shrunk a nerve. — 180 Proof

Sounds like you can't even use an idiom correctly.

Thank you for making it so clear who can be safely ignored around these parts.

I'm having a hard time understanding you, but to clarify myself in case there's a misunderstanding there: I'm not at all saying that bearing is about "the opposition to social construction" at all. It's just a distinction from gender the social construct, a different thing we might want to talk about independent of the other thing.

You might like to think of it as one of the factors underlying gender the social construct, one step less removed than sex itself, since as I've said a few times already, it looks like bearing is sort of the glue between sex and gender identity: sex strongly influences bearing but the two can come apart, and bearing strongly influences gender identity but the two can come apart; so usually someone's gender identity will follow their bearing which will follow their sex, but someone might identify differently than they bear, and might bear elsewhere than their birth sex.

And since gender itself can be broken down into more than just gender identity, but also gender presentation and role, we could further break down the chain within just "gender". And of course we could further break down sex as well. In the end we might have a picture something like:

Chromosomal sex strongly influences but does not completely determine
Gonadal sex which strongly influences but does not completely determine
Sex hormones which strongly influence but do not completely determine
External sexual characteristics which strongly influence but do not completely determine
Bearing which strongly influences but does not completely determine
Gender identity which strongly influences but does not completely determine
Gender presentation which strongly influences but does not completely determine
Gender role.

In other words, e.g. society will most probably treat as women people who present as women, who will probably be people who identify as women, who will probably be people who want to have female bodies, who will probably be people who were born with female bodies, who will probably be people with a low androgen ratio, who will probably be people without testes, who will probably people without Y chromosomes. But that's a lot of "probably"s, and there are exceptions every step of the way.

Are you trying to highlight body feelings in a discourse where performativity and social construction reigns? — fdrake

Pretty much, yes. I've just come across situations where those don't line up, and think it's useful to be able to distinguish between them in those circumstances, just as it's useful to be able to talk about how either of them don't like up with sex, for the circumstances where that's the case.

Also, as I mentioned when discussing TERFs in the OP, I think a lot of the argument between them and transwomen can be boiled down to conflation of sociological gender and psychological bearing. It's possible to be gender-abolitionist like TERFs are but also accepting of the reality of trans people's inner mental states, but it's really hard to say you're against one and accepting of the other if we use the same word for both.

I guess I wasn't as clear as I thought I was before. Bearing is meant to be entirely about how you feel about your physical sex, independent of social role and presentation. The example I keep using is a transwoman tomboy: male birth sex, female bearing, masculine social role and presentation and such. So it's not about wanting to wear dresses and take care of children and whatever other feminine social presentation and role stuff; it's just about wanting to have a body shaped like a woman's body.

Thank you for the constructive feedback. I did say in my OP that of course all three of these things have strong connections to each other, and elaborated later that those connections seem to be:

- Physical sex strongly disposes psychological bearing (most people want to be the sex that they are)

- Psychological bearing strongly disposes sociological gender identity (most people want to be categorized along with people of the sex they want to be)

That second point seems to be the point you're making, so I think we agree.

I'm having a little trouble understanding you, but it sounds to me like you're thinking of psychological bearing as being a feeling about sociological gender, when I explicitly mean it not to be; that's what "gender identity" already accurately describes. The reason I'm coining "bearing" is so that we can talk about the psychological feelings about physical sex apart from anything sociological (though they are still strongly coupled most often, see above). For example (to avoid talking about myself again), a tomboy transwoman (some of whom I've met), a person born male who aims to be a masculine woman. They just want the physical body of a female; they're fine with the male social stuff they're already living.

Aside from that, it sounds like you're maybe saying that wanting to be something doesn't make you that thing, and I have great sympathies toward that position and have argued for it in this context before. I think a lot of it comes down to whether "man" and "woman" really mean sexes or genders. I expect that most English speakers intend to refer to sexes by them, which is why people react to finding out a woman is a transwoman by saying she's "really a man". So from a descriptivist linguistics point of view, it seems like "man" does mean "male", and yes, wanting to be male doesn't make you male.

But if we accept the prevailing sociological status quo that "man" and "woman" refer to genders rather than sexes, then it's back to the "geek"/"nerd" analogy I made earlier: there isn't any reality to social constructs besides the acceptance of them, so in nominally disagreeing with someone's self-identification, you're not even putatively disputing a fact, you're just expressing non-acceptance of their self-image. So whether or not to recognize people as the things they identify as becomes a matter of politeness and kindness more than any kind of matter of fact.

Gender & Bearing are, subsequently (though not consequently?), social constructs — 180 Proof

Bearing as I've coined it is explicitly not a social construct. It's a psychological property, akin to orientation, that has no dependency on anything in society; it's just how you feel about your physical sex.

Thank you. :)

I don't think you know what you're talking about. I am actively going against "dogma" here and proposing that the current mainstream use of the concept of gender is a mixed up mess that needs to be teased apart and clarified. That you think words like "cisgender" are reflective of some kind of dogma just shows how uneducated you are on the topic. It's just a word. We need words to discuss these things.

Anyway, I'm not arguing that gender is a social construct. I'm pointing out the historical fact that the concept of gender was originally distinguished from sex explicitly as a social construct, for academic sociological purposes; specifically, to talk about how intersex children, who were not strictly male or female, were still socially categorized as "boys" and "girls" because our society categorized people into these two categories regardless of the physical biological facts; and later, to talk about how other societies have different such categorization systems that included third genders. Those are just the historical facts about the original use of the word "gender" as something distinct from "sex".

What I'm arguing is that that concept has been appropriated to talk about something else entirely, about things to do with trans people and such, and that we would do well to distinguish the concepts relevant to trans people (the thing I've called "bearing") from that older, sociological sense of the word "gender".

Glad I gave you some food for thought. Your three-dimensional analysis sounds pretty accurate to me for its part; I'm basically just proposing the addition of a fourth axis to it.

I'm glad you enjoyed it, and thank you for drawing attention to the connections between this and the topics of phenomenology and embodiment. I don't have any disagreement with anything you've said.


And maybe let's all just ignore Swan from now on.

Mission accomplished.

You just said all trans people suffer from a mental disorder. I’m just taking your opinion at face value. You don’t want to look like a bigot, then explain yourself better.

Oh I see now. Swan thinks trans people are all just crazy. Nice to know I can safely disregard everything else he has to say from now on.

@Bitter Crank, the site guidelines said you all don’t tolerate racists, homophobes, sexists, etc, which sounds broadly socially progressive to me, hence my impression.

Curious if that includes transphobes? Cause I’m usually the last to call for any kind of censorship but if Swan was unwelcome here I sure wouldn’t miss him.

Sounds to me like you’ve got some kind of defensive denial going on where it makes you really uncomfortable that people are even talking about this subject. How about you do yourself a favor and stop talking about it. Let the well-educated adults have a productive conversation about philosophical distinctions without you getting your poor sensitive little girl feelings all hurt by hearing people talk about things that make you feel funny.

Swan, you seem to be getting kind of upset, and also talking past me, saying some of the same things I'm saying back at me. I think you didn't read the complete OP.

Yes, the thing I labelled (2) above is about gender dysphoria or euphoria. I literally said in my OP that that's why I propose the name "bearing" for that property: because the root "-phor" means "to bear". (My username has nothing to do with that, BTW; the "Pfhor" are an alien race from a video game from my childhood, nothing to do with gender at all).

And no duh that most cis people don't have any particularly strong feelings about that thing, in the same way that white people usually don't have particularly strong feelings about their race. It's just not something that they're confronted with, not something that they have to think about; it's the invisible default. But you, being a ciswoman I take it, would probably not like the idea of being made male, I would guess? You may not normally think at all about preferring to remain female, because the question is never at issue, but if it were you would prefer to stay female, no? You wouldn't be completely indifferent if you somehow woke up a different sex one day; that's just something you don't ever need to worry about, so you don't think about it. Right?

Also, please don't say anything more about my situation in particular, because seriously go fuck yourself with that attitude. I'm trying to be sensitive to everybody here and only exposed myself like that because I thought this was a progressive community that might take bringing up this topic as a kind of transphobia, so I wanted to share that I have some personal stake in this too and am not just some cishet douchebag telling trans people they don't exist or something. But if you're going to be an asshole about it then just drop it completely. This isn't about me.

@BitterCrank thanks, that wasn't showing up right when I tried previewing so I thought that mustn't be it. ETA: Still not working it seems. @Bitter Crank Test? Okay now it works. Thanks again.

and it does seem to me like you are both trying to dive into talking about the unimportance of the sociological stuff, while missing that half the point of making the distinction I'm trying to make was so that we could avoid talking about the sociological stuff when it's irrelevant. Like Crank, nothing you're saying about the overlap of masculine and feminine traits is anything I disagree with, or anything to do with anything I'm talking about.

Maybe it was a mistake to mention the social stuff second and at most length, but it's chronologically second in the history of things and the thing people seem to have the most trouble with. Let me try again, shorter and in different order. There's:

1. Your physical sex
2. Your mental feelings about your physical sex
3. Social stuff about role and presentation that is associated with sex

I'm saying that while (3) is the original referent of "gender", for trans purposes it's often not the important thing; rather, (2) is the important thing.

So a cis man is:
1. Born physically male
2. Prefers to stay physically male.
3. Might have any social identity, role, or presentation. (Probably "masculine" ones, but not necessarily.)

While a trans woman is:
1. Born physically male
2. Prefers to be physically female
3. Might have any social identity, role, or presentation. (Probably "feminine" ones, but not necessarily.)

The reason I haphazardly use labels like "genderqueer"/"genderfluid"/"pangender" for myself in casual contexts is because I'm:
1. Born physically male
2. Kinda prefer to be more physically female, but not entirely or very urgently (less body hair, different body fat, vag would be nice, but penis is okay, tall and strong is nice).
3. Don't care about pronouns (call me whatever), wear clothes / do activities / etc without regard for whether they're "men's" or "women's".

Crank seems to be focusing on things like my (3) not making you a "different gender", and if you mean gender in the sense that we use terms like "transgender" and "cisgender" then I agree. The social stuff is not what makes the things that we call "gender" in those contexts; the psychological, mental feelings about your physical body does.

But the social stuff is the original referent of the word "gender", and in academic sociological contexts, as well as in some feminist context (and the plentiful overlap between those two), that's the way that they use that word. I think it's harmful to the trans community to have the sense of "gender" they're predominantly concerned with, the way people feel about their bodies, conflated with that social stuff. I think that's the origin of TERF complains that transwomen "treat womanhood as a costume", because the TERFs think the transwomen are using "gender" in the social sense, when they more often mean it the psychological sense.

There are of course strong connections between all three, as I said in my OP. People will usually prefer to remain the sex they were born, and prefer the social stuff associated with the sex that they prefer to be. But these things can come apart, and don't always align.

it sounds to me like you understand me correctly. Will have to respond to you in more detail another time.

(Technical question: how do you @ people here in a way that links like that?)

As a general response to everything you wrote, I just want to point out two things from my OP: the last line, "of course all three may have strong influences on each other"; and the fact that my whole proposal is that we distinguish the way that someone feels in their mind about the sex of their body, which I'm saying we should call "bearing" or "psychological gender", from any of the sociological stuff, which I'm saying should be the proper referent of "gender" or else "sociological gender" if needed to disambiguate. Of course the psychological thing about how you feel about the sex of your body is related to the sex of your body, which seems to be your whole point. But you're calling that thing "gender" (without disambiguation) and then using that to argue that gender isn't about sociological stuff, when my whole point is to be careful to distinguish the two different things so that people don't do exactly what you're doing.

Native American civilizations frequently had nonbinary gender categories such as Berdache and "two-spirit". Third genders are widespread throughout the world.

Also as to sports categories, my opinion is that those things should be based entirely on measurable abilities and characteristics, like weight categories in boxing, and genitals or pronouns or anything like that shouldn't factor into it at all.

It's probably useful to point out that the reason Money originally coined the concept of "gender" distinct from "sex" was to be able to talk about the intersex people he was studying when he did so. Intersex people are not unambiguously one or the other binary sex, but nevertheless in western cultures they are socially categorized as one of the two binary genders predominant in such cultures, e.g. we'll talk about an "intersex boy" who is not strictly speaking male but was assigned male at birth and is socially treated (and maybe identifies) as a boy. Different cultures have different schemes of social categories into which they sort people, once again not lining up perfectly with the biological sex of those people. The sociological concept of gender is useful for talking about those kinds of things, for talking about how societies categorize people. It is not so useful, I think, for talking about (what we call) transgender issues, but the terminology has nevertheless been co-opted for that purpose. I'm proposing in the OP that it would be better if instead we had separate terminology for the two things, and if nobody outside of sociology has need to talk about sociological gender, that's fine.

This is just Plantinga's free will theodicy, and it depends entirely upon an incompatibilist conception of free will. On a compatibilist conception of free will, there is no contradiction in God making humans in a way that they would never do evil, and allowing them free will; in fact, on my compatibilist take on free will (which is similar to that of Harry Frankfurt or Susan Wolf), free will is equivalent to moral reasoning having greater control over behavior, so giving humans freer will would make them more moral, not less.

Also, as regard "natural evils" like bugs and such as you list (and, you know, natural disasters and so on), that amounts to just denying premise 2 of the first premise, by saying that those things are not actually evil, since they're "for the best". Same thing really for the man-made evils, IMO; yeah maybe God allows innocent children to be sold into sex slavery, "but it's for the best, honest."

There is extensive philosophical debate about whether moral knowledge, if such is possible, is necessarily motivating, especially at that connects to weakness of will. If moral knowledge is necessarily motivating, then it would seem like there should be no such thing as weakness of will, because if you believe something to be the right thing then you can't help but do it. If weakness of will is possible, then God (if he exists) might know all the reasons to do something (if there are such things) but then find himself failing to do it anyway, because his will is weak; or possibly for other reasons, who knows. By specifying that God is omnibenevolent, you rule out any such complications, and say that his behavior is always good, some way or another, regardless of any complications like that.

Christians should treat animals the same way everyone should treat animals.

Choosing is just a mechanical function. You could build a machine that chooses things, that functions according to ordinary physical causality. Evolution can also build such a machine, like our brains. There's nothing special about the kind of causation, the only thing that's special about willing freely is the kind of function implemented by that machine.

I just took a walk around Krotona today.

I'm not referring to myself as an authority, just pointing to an already-written argument elsewhere so as not to fill this thread with off-topic argument about that point.

Also, your face is absurd. :p

Why are we pointing this out? Does this prove your case somehow that slavery has caused white privilege? — Hanover

I'm not making that case. I just saw an exchange that looked like someone else stating that opinion and admitting that they don't have sufficient evidence to convince you of it, and you telling them that they should therefore discard it themselves, and called foul on that.

You do not understand the burden of proof sir.
I know what you are saying seems a reasonable standard but its not, it is burdened by a myriad of absurd and ridiculous claims/beliefs that get smuggled in with any good ones that pass the standard.
You DO need to have evidence for your own opinions/beliefs in order to be justified in them, even if its just evidence only you have access too. You should NOT hold opinions/beliefs without evidence, whether you can present it to others or not. — DingoJones

If those absurd and ridiculous beliefs are so absurd and ridiculous it should be easy to provide evidence against them, beyond merely the lack of evidence for them. You're epistemically free to say "I don't see any evidence for that and it doesn't seem to be true to me", but they're equally free to rejoin "it just seems true to me, even though I can't prove it conclusively to you", and until one of you can show the other wrong then it's just a disagreement between each others' intuitive perception with no rational ground to say one is by default right and the other is by default wrong. If you said that some opinions were by default right, that would be tantamount to religious faith; and if you said that no opinions are right unless they can be conclusively proven from the ground up, then you'd end up in nihilism because it's impossible to establish anything from the ground up.

I just linked an essay of mine on the topic before because I didn't want to derail this thread into an off-topic conversation, I was just calling a quick point of order on Hanover.

You're confusing one's epistemic liberty to hold an opinion with others' epistemic obligation to agree to it. You need evidence to oblige others to change their opinion; you don't need evidence to have an opinion in the first place, and if others want you to discard your opinion they need more evidence than "you have no evidence". Two people are free to hold disagreeing opinions until either can show the other evidence that they are wrong.

The burden of proof is not "hold no positions until there is sufficient evidence of them" but "hold no positions that there is sufficient evidence against". — Pfhorrest

Nonsense. — Hanover

Critical rationalists beg to differ, because the contrary entails that nobody should ever believe anything.

The burden of proof is not "hold no positions until there is sufficient evidence of them" but "hold no positions that there is sufficient evidence against".

You have a point about checking the soundness of ability testing, but again, I am not talking about measuring opportunity directly, just checking if it is indeed uniform by comparing ability and outcome.

Distribution of various kinds of ability is measured in many varied scientific studies, straightforwardly. I don’t know what more to say about that. And that entire previous post was about measuring distribution of opportunity by comparing distribution of ability to distribution of outcome.

But I do think too many people assume that equality of opportunity can somehow be established without ever looking at outcomes, past or present. — Echarmion

In support of that: if outcome is the product of opportunity and ability, and ability has a normal (gaussian) distribution as most statistics about human characteristics seem to, then if opportunity had a uniform (equal) distribution, we would expect outcome to have a normal distribution as well. Seeing a non-normal distribution of outcomes (as we do, since success is heavily right-skewed) is therefore evidence of some inequality of opportunity or another.

If I may make an observation without reading the entire thread first:

Any system that helps people in proportion to their disadvantages without regard to demographic grouping like race etc will automatically provide more support to demographic groups that are statistically more disadvantaged exactly in proportion to the degree that that group is thus overrepresented among the disadvantaged and only for such time as they continue to be thus overrepresented.

So if we institute a race-agnostic policy to help all poor people, and black people are disproportionately poor, such a policy will automatically provide disproportionate help to black people, but only until such time as they are no longer disproportionately poor. We don’t have to do “reverse discrimination” to make up for past discrimination, because just helping everyone in need will automatically work out to that in effect.

I'm sorry your autism gives you difficulty with this. I've long suspected I might be somewhere on the spectrum too so you have my sympathies in that regard.

I find the principle of charity actually quite helpful when it comes to figuring out what assumptions to make. Natural language is ambiguous, the same words can mean different things to different people, and I often find myself facing a statement or question from someone that I can see multiple different interpretations of, and that makes me really uncomfortable because I'm afraid to assume one of those interpretations and maybe make a false assumption. I find that the principle of charity helps with that conundrum because it basically says to pick the interpretation that makes the other person seem to make the most sense, which is simultaneously the assumption that's most likely to be correct (as in accurately understanding what they mean) and also even if it's not, the one least likely to upset them, because at worst you'll have assumed they're smarter than they are.

For example, in my job as a graphic designer, I often get requests for things that, on my first (and to my ear, most literal) interpretation of things, sound like requests for things that are impossible or at least really obviously bad ideas. But rather than write back and say that, I ask myself, what might they have meant by this that would be possible and not a horrible idea, even if I think that the actual words they used would be an awful way to put that? More often than not, what I guessed ends up being what they wanted, and when it's not, the feedback is usually "oh wow, no that's not what I meant but this makes so much more sense!"

You can think of it, if you like, as "what mistakes did this person probably make to end up saying this nonsense when they surely set out to say something that was supposed to make sense?" Like, for a trivial example, if you see someone say that "the cat brought it's pray to me as a gift", the literal interpretation "the cat brought it is beseech-a-deity to me as a gift" makes no sense at all, but it's easy to see that they probably meant "its" and "prey", and then they make perfect sense. The principle of charity is like that, but for things besides just grammar and spelling.

I'm a hard core atheist myself, and I do have serious qualms about liberal interpretations of supposedly authoritative holy texts to willfully reinterpret them in a way that is more acceptable to the modern ear while also claiming that they are the inerrant word of God, but I don't think the principle of charity requires you to do that. You can still think that someone is saying something false. It's just a matter of trying to make sure you understand what they're trying to say, and if it seems like they're saying something that would probably seem obviously false even to themselves, then that's probably not what they're trying to say. In the case of religious texts, the authors lived thousands of years ago and lacked much of the knowledge we have today, so it's more reasonable to think that they were saying things that we know are false, but might not have been obviously false to them. In some cases, it does seem reasonable to imagine that they might have been speaking poetically or metaphorically. (For example I was just writing an essay on existential dread and such, which included a note on the possibility that the story of Adam and Eve "did not know death" until eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil could be a metaphorical way of saying that people were carefree and worry-free and had no knowledge of their impending deaths and other dooms back when they were all unthinking animals, and it is the cognitive ability that defines modern humanity that also dooms us to existential dread and such, a metaphorical loss of the paradise of ignorance).

But I guess I'm basically saying that you need to try to get inside the other person's head and think of things from their perspective, and I know that's something that autism makes very difficult, so maybe that's not something I can so easily ask you to do.

It's a different matter when we're talking about political officials who should know better as part of their job, but I have a first-hand anecdote about people using things that were very intentionally created as dog-whistles without realizing they were doing so. You know the triple-parentheses thing that racists do around the names of Jewish people, like "(((Zuckerberg)))" and such? I ran across someone on a gaming discord using it, and when I confronted him about it and cited a website describing its usage and origins, he was aghast because he had just seen other gamers using it and thought it was basically a form of emphasis like *asterisks* or /slashes/ or something. Had no idea he was making himself look like a racist and thanked me for informing him.