Definition isn’t reduction
No that’s not it.
It’s not “reducing” people to anything to know what definitions are. Nobody says female body parts are the sum total of women, are what women are about, are all there is to know about women. They’re just the basic equipment, that’s all.
Feminism has challenged the assumption among advertisers and sexist men that tits and ass are all there is to women, but that doesn’t entail saying women don’t have tits.
Blinks. I find it utterly baffling that an intelligent and articulate person can so completely dishonestly summarise the arguments of people they disagree with. Would take a level of wilful ignorance to make that claim.
I bet she’s also in favour of saying abortion is an issue for ‘people capable of becoming pregnant’, pap smears as necessary health care for ‘people with cervixes’, and so on through the dreary list.
And of course this whole line of attack, ‘gender criticals are bio-essentialist’, is made in complete defiance of how language works. We have a class of words, nouns, that refer to things. Physical things, conceptual things, collections of things, there is probably a noun for it. And obviously there will be differences between those things. If those things are biological in nature, then the differences will be biological. A dog is not a cat, and we can point out biological differences between the two without the ridiculous accusation. A labrador is not a chihuahua, and the same applies.
This accusation is solely reserved for discussions of sex, and solely deployed in one direction: to smear those that would recognise the word ‘woman’ as a reference to the female sex.
How can trans advocates define “woman” without being reductive?
This is obviously the escape hatch for men who want to be called women so they can date lesbians. “Bottom surgery! No, i don’t need bottom surgery to be a transbian. Why are you reducing me to my body parts?”
See also: trying to change the definition of bioessentialism to mean gatekeeping.
What is reducing, and what is expanding?
Trans ideology wants to reduce womanhood to a fetish, or an attitude. But people are so much more than attitudes, or personalities, or fetishes. Feminism wants to expand the definition of female to the entire person, the entire group of people, in all their grand diversity of attitudes, personalities, and fetishes, who by happenstance of birth are female.
Again, to define something is about the opposite of “inclusivity”. The whole point of a definition is to demarcate the cases in which a label does apply from the cases in which it does not. The definition of a “lefthanded” person is supposed to provide the bare minimum that separates “lefthanded” people from non-“lefthanded” people. Of course, lefthanded people have different personalities, life stories, interests, talents, strengths, and weaknesses, as well as different ages, sexes, ethnicities, nationalities, professions, ideological persuasions etc. etc. But guess what: Those things are irrelevant to being “lefthanded”. To insist on bringing all these other factors into the definition, complain that the mainstream definition “reduces” lefthanded people to their hands, or insist that some righthanded people must be included in the definition makes “lefthanded” a meaningless term. Same with “man” and “woman”.
Great comment, Bjarte. I was about to say essentially the same thing, until I read your comment. Definition is reductive. It is also necessary, because if we can’t define anything, we can’t communicate. “Hand me that apple.” You hand me a hammer. “That’s not an apple; I can’t eat that.” “I call that an apple, so it’s an apple. Can you define apple, please? While being inclusive and not reductive?” Use hammer to knock myself out because of ridiculousness sending my brain into a whirl.
No doubt Rachel Dolezal can’t believe that people want to reduce blackness to trivial things like ancestry and phenotypic traits.
This whole “but you’re reducing people to body parts” argument is right out of the religious handbook.
Atheist gives scientific explanation for some phenomenon.
“But you’re reducing everything to nothing but the material! If there’s no God — it’s just matter in motion! We’re just animals. Our minds are just brain activity. A rainbow is just light refraction. There’s no beauty, there’s no love, there’s no consciousness! An atheist universe is a universe without meaning!!” And so on, and so on …
I have seen atheists who spent huge swaths of time and effort eloquently denying teleology — and passionately refuting the idea that an evolutionary explanation of human beings somehow reduces the worth and dignity of human life — suddenly spin on a dime and equate classifying men and women according to sexual reproduction pathways with saying “women are nothing but baby-making machines.” Jesus wept.
Ain’t that the truth.