Guest post: If a particular grandiose claim is supported by science
Originally a comment by Sastra on The same woo-woo bin.
If a particular grandiose claim is supported by science, the likelihood is that it would meet at least some of these criteria:
1.) It would have come out of science.
2.) It would answer more than one question.
3.) It would be testable and falsifiable.
4.) It would have been hotly debated for years.
5.) It would be consistent across disciplines.
6.) It would generate new hypotheses and research.
7.) It would use terms and explanations which are clear.
If the “scientific claim” can be brought to its knees by “define ‘woman,’” it’s not really a scientific claim.
The scientific consensus they talk about here involves DSDs: there are a small fraction of people who are very difficult to classify as either male or female due to malfunctions in the sexual development of the fetus. That’s pretty much it. It’s not new. It’s not groundbreaking. It’s not controversial.
From what I can tell, the only thing new is science popularizers taking these facts and extrapolating some Grand Truth about how fuzzy borders within a category means the category is unreliable and can be ignored in favor of what people know to be true about their authentic inner selves. Which is NOT scientific.
If these intellectual titans ever succeed in defining “woman”, next I want to hear their definition of “delusion”.
In other words:
Someone says, “Show me a clear boundary between sea and dry land.”
So I show them beaches, beaches at high tide, beaches at low tide.
I show them islands that sink and rise, with tides, with geology.
I show them estuaries, wet”lands”, cobblestone-strewn coasts, etc.
And I say, “Ain’t no clear boundary.”
Therefore, sea and land do not exist.
This hateful violent evidence-free bigoted, right-wing, nazi, body-essentialist, rigid enforcement of genderism that is actually KILLING KIDS has to STOP. You people want “science”?@?!? I’ve got a spiked baseball bat with “science” painted on it in pink and blue letters!
Note: Sarcasm
….
I actually love this post and it’s astonishing to think of the level of stupidity that is being celebrated and forced upon us.
Words have traditional meanings, and without those there would be chaos, and a linguistic dog’s breakfast. There has recently been an attempt by such as TRAs, DVDs, and ABCs through to XYZs to hijack the traditional word ‘woman’ and redefine it to suit themselves, in the hope that they can get away with it. But just because some individuals born with male genitalia think of themselves as ‘women’, it does not mean that the rest of the world has to. Science uses tradtional terms as defined in established dictionaries all the time, and would grind to a complete standstill if it did not.
Yes. But the answer I would get if I used this argument is that words evolve, and many words we use now are not used the same way they used to be.
In those cases, the new usage became established over time as society started using it differently; it wasn’t someone forcing a nonsensical use of a word on society, but rather the evolutionary process of words changing. There is a difference, a difference that can be wrapped up in the difference between gradualistic evolution and genetic engineering.
That isn’t to say one is superior (genetic engineering has a lot of good uses), but you cannot use the one to describe the other. In the case of the changing of the word woman (and about a gadzillion other words that the woke left insists on using in some weird way and forcing on all of us), there is no good reason to change the definition, the word actually is defined by the things that are the body structures of women and not men, and it is impossible to make any sense out of the word salads that spew from the lips and keyboards of the woke. In short, I don’t accept the facile explanation that words evolve. Nope. Show me why it must evolve, and how the evolutionary process happened. Has this new usage become standard practice? (No, most people in the world still use woman to mean adult human female; science still understands female the way it always has, and that is important). So go away and educate yourself, you ignorant woke bro.
Inklast #5 wrote:
Yes. It’s not so much that they’re changing the definition of “woman” as eliminating it by substituting definitions which are either circular, vague, inapplicable, or too narrow. For fun, I started gathering a list of proposed improved definitions, borrowing some from other lists and recording some I was given or ran across:
Woman:
“Whoever considers themselves a woman.”
“A woman is whatever society says she is.”
“ A useful shorthand for the entanglement of femininity and social status regardless of biology.”
“Anyone who is oppressed by the Patriarchy.”
“Someone who feels they are a woman.”
“ Every woman is a woman. Women are multifaceted, intergenerational, international. They are limitless, formless…women are the world.”
“ A complex, multi-dimensional and highly variable category. There isn’t one definition.”
“Someone is a woman, if they are systematically subordinated in certain respects (economic, political, legal, social, etc.), and if they are targeted “for this treatment by observed or imagined bodily features presumed to be evidence of a female’s biological role in reproduction.”
“ A Girl-flavoured person.”
“Any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another.”
“ A person who recognises that she has a strong sense of alignment with others who are also identified as women under the social constructs of gender.”
“ An adult human who identifies as female.”
“ A person who is happier when they say they are a woman.”
A Girl flavored person? Where did you run across THAT term? Do you hang out on cannibalism fetish sites?
(I kid. I kid. This is indeed an AMAZING list. )
@Brian M:
I
stolegot “girl-flavored woman” from Helen Joyce’s list athttps://thehelenjoyce.com/what-is-a-woman/
It’s similar, though, to a description of “gender identity” given by a TIM on a blog I used to frequent:
“ The gender identity I call that factor in the brain that gives the self a “gender flavor”. That is to say that the self can be male or female (or other) in its own right, independent of the sex of the body. This is the central point of transgenderism, and without grasping this point understanding transgenderism, I think, is simply impossible…”
Which is the kind of thing that shows a lot of the People of Gender confuse gender with personality. That right there? That’s personality, not gender. (For more see: Rebecca Reilly-Cooper.)
iknklast: @# 5:
Go back to the 19thC London of Dickens, and everything is 100% comprehensible to the modern reader. Back to Shakespeare’s England, somewhat less so. Back to Caucer’s time (1340-1400), and we definitely need a glossary of Middle English to visit the supermarket. Back on to Beowulf (~ 800-900 AD) and they are speaking a totally different language, and you can’t even fill up the tank of your car without the services of a translator. ;-)
Sastra #6
And once again, as many others have pointed out, the most revealing part is how there is no corresponding effort to redefine “man”.
Of course this makes any talk of ending the oppression of women a contradiction and probably (by TRA logic) advocating genocide:
Working for a world in which no one suffers patriarchal oppression
≈ working for a world without women
≈ ZOMG!!!! ADVOCATING GENOCIDE!!! JUST LIKE THE HOLOCAUST!!!
…and since TWAW…
Hurray for more bad puns. Also for abusing the Sorites paradox.
I really would like to see the parallel set of definitions in wokespeak for “man.”
Man-flavored brain indeed.
I’m still struck by the contrast between the medical clinic info signs advising “men” to get screened for HPV, but “vulva owners” to get screened for HPV. So much for “equality.”
I don’t know how to attach an image or photo.
I found one.
iknklast:
Precisely. I’ve written about this here at far too much length before, so I’ll spare you (much) more of the same. Gender identity extremists claim that since word usage changes over time, the particular change to the particular usage of the particular word they want is inevitable, predetermined. This is firmly in ‘not even wrong’ territory so it’s deeply embarrassing that so many people seem to take it seriously. ‘Seem’ to.
Sastra, there is almost no definition on that list that makes me a woman (except the oppressed by patriarchy). But I am clearly not a man. I must be…OMG…non-binary! Or…maybe I just don’t exist.
Omar, I was quite fascinated when I found out some universities teach Old English as a foreign language credit. Yeah, I can understand most of Shakespeare, but I spent hours (days, months, weeks, years) poring over his work, going to his plays, enjoying his writing, and learned the words that were used somewhat differently.
Some words are more recently changed, of course. For instance, when I read Robert Ingersoll, he uses wonderful not to mean great or good but something that inspires wonder – a better usage, if I may be permitted my opinion. But that doesn’t make him incomprehensible, because the context makes it clear. And it doesn’t lead to word salad. So, yeah, changing word meanings at random (or not really random, but to suit an agenda) is not the same as evolving words.
Just noting from above: I do know that Shakespeare was not Old English, though my comment probably appears that way, It was lazy writing and editing on my part, not providing a proper segue.
iknklast @# 18:
As Bill Shakespeare appaently knew very well, it is far easier to write tragedy, ie about people destroying one another in a wide variety of ways, than it is to write comedy. Falstaff IMHO is his finest comic creation, and a very fine one indeed, but Bill’s friend and rival Ben Jonson was IMHO the greater comedian. The Alchemist is IMHO Jonson’s finest comedy. But the immortal Bard of Avon’s most quoted stuff is from Hamlet, and MacBeth. and Julius Caesar, and Othello, and such; all tragedies.
Actually, the part-biographical film Shakespeare in Love was quite misleading, because it had Whatshisname, who played The Bard, speaking with more modern received pronunciation. But Shakespeare was born in Warwickshire, whose denizens I assume spoke then with an accent somewhat like that of the citizenry of Northamptonshire, just next door. And as far as I can ascertain, the most authentic speaker of modern Northamptonshirese is the wonderful comedienne Pam Ayres.
Try reading one or two of The Bard’s sonnets using Pam’s pronunciation, and you will arguably get as close as is humanly possible his own rendition on the day after he wrote it. My favourite for this exercise is Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? (Sonnet 18)
There could even be a play script or two in that. ;-)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4oydSZTAns