Guest post: An entire suite of interpenetrating systems
Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on Reasons.
Could we in principle change someone’s sex? Sure, but it would involve alterations so radical and so subtle that I don’t think it plausible, much less useful or ethical. Because what needs to change is not just a few body parts, but rather an entire suite of interpenetrating systems, all of which together compose the system we call sex. Transplant a functional uterus and ovaries into a man, and he’s still a man, because (a) that uterus is not from his body, (b) the eggs in the ovaries are not from his DNA, and (c) his body is not just unequipped to regulate those organs, it’s developed to maintain the complementary set of organs. Calling him a female or a woman would be even more laughable than calling a black man white because he got a heart transplant from a white man. Or saying that I have 20/20 vision because I wear glasses.
I don’t know if it’s still in use, but there used to be a very similar bad argument, named for a forum user, in online RPG discussions: the Oberoni Fallacy. People often try to argue that a particular rule is not dysfunctional/inconsistent/broken/problematic by appealing to the fact that the DM (dungeon master) can always modify the rule to make it work. (No, really. This is a remarkably common argument.) That this argument is fallacious ought to be obvious. It would be like if I were to say that your TV isn’t off because you can turn it on.
To be a particular sex means that your body is such that it is organized around the production of a particular sort of gamete. That doesn’t involve just the bare presence of ovaries or testicles; it involves every part of your body that is a product or component of the evolved system of sexual reproduction. Having wide hips is a part of being a human female, just as having broad shoulders is a part of being a human male, and this is not at all in tension with the fact that not all women have wide hips and not all men have broad shoulders. That this needs explaining to adults will never cease to amaze me. Losing is a part of playing roulette, but not every player will lose. Injuries are a part of contact sport, but not every athlete will get injured.
All this is to say that while the bar is high, a human sex change isn’t an analytic impossibility. One can certainly imagine a fantasy world in which some magic spell could effect all the necessary physical changes. I doubt technology will ever be so advanced as to be indistinguishable from that magic, though.
Of course, none of this touches on the psychological aspects of being and growing up and living as a male or female. It also doesn’t even begin to examine potential ethical considerations. Genderism is built on so many layers of sophist bullshit that peeling them away is actually frustrating, because it’s like cutting heads off mythology’s stupidest hydra. I genuinely feel dumber for having to do things like explain that saying all women are female doesn’t reduce women to their genitalia or limit the ways to be a woman. All triangles have three sides and three vertices, but there are infinite varieties of triangle. What none of them is, however, is a rectangle, because rectangles have four sides and four vertices. This means that there is a set of things that are true of triangles and things triangles can do, and this is not the same as the set of things that are true of rectangles and things rectangles can do.
Gah! WHARGARBL!!1!
Triangles and rectangles are just two of the wonderful infinite ways to be a polygon. Who are you to deny the polygonality of a trans triangle? TTAT!
It’s ironic when trans activists claim that “Sex isn’t simple!” or that “Sex isn’t binary!” “Sex is a spectrum!” This is in order to suggest that sex is vague and undefinable, and thus up for grabs by anyone who ticks off a few boxes of superficial resemblance. They obviously don’t have this “entire suite of interpenetrating systems, all of which together compose the system we call sex” in mind when they try to suggest that one’s sex is incidental and easily discarded. But point out how these systems give a natural advantage to cheating males and they don’t want to hear it. They’re only interested in complexity when it cuts in the direction they want it to go.
Even with such a technology, genetic sex would still give the game away unless we also have a tech that simultaneously deletes a sex chromosome while adding the other, to every cell, without engendering any immune system self-recognition problem.
Neither tech is remotely on the horizon.
Invoking the Theory of Evolution to deny the Mr. Potato Head Theory of Sex (take off penis, put on breasts, add a purse and big red lips = sex change) usually gets translated as “you obviously believe in some magical, mystical essence which makes Mr. Potato Head a man, no matter what.”
Great comment. It also fits with this whole concept about “hormones bathing our brains MUST create some differences!” Yes. Those differences are in relationship to sexual reproduction…we must make the right hormones, depending on whether we are creating sperm, or whether we are nurturing a child in our body. Our brain must make the proper adjustments to our body as needed, based on our reproductive cycle.
@not Bruce
Superficial is all they have. I just saw some fool TRA boasting on Twitter that they had won in Dublin because they had more fun. As if talking about abuse is ever fun. The more they’re pushed the shallower their arguments become.
Oh yes, you set the bar very high. As for the “analytic possibility”, I’m not so sure. As you said, you don’t think that an uterus transplant would produce a woman, with one of your reasons being that “that uterus is not from his body”. And it’s possible to interpret your words as *analytically* excluding every possibility of turning a man into a woman, even the magical one. After all, whatever the wizard’s spell is, the (new) uterus will certainly not come from the guy’s (old) body, at least not literally.
Anyway, I was curious where you (plural) would put the bar, so I asked the question and I got my answers.
I was wondering how I would answer it myself. Is it possible for a man to change sex? Or in short: are transwomen women? Yes or no? Ariel, answer immediately, or lose your place on Ophelia’s blog forever!
Please, forget for a moment about the parody versions. “Are seahorses horses” is off limits, ok? Here, at this moment, I’m interested in ontology, not in politics. And from this point of view, the question reminds me of another puzzle, namely:
Is artificial intelligence really intelligent? Yes or no? Answer quickly.
Both questions have rather trivial negative answers if we restrict our attention to the presently existing devices or people. (Ah, but this makes me a terf. How sad!) But is intelligent AI out of the question?
Both questions explore the limits of what can be artificially achieved (in the lab or on the surgical table). That’s the second similarity.
Last but not least, both issues provoke additional questions. Namely, (1) what would it even mean to be a successful specimen, and (2) what criteria could be applied to recognize it? In the case of AI, we don’t seem to have a well-defined notion of general intelligence, but at least Turing test has been proposed as a possible criterion. And my impression is that in the case of “artificial sex” the discussion – and the insights – are even less developed than in the AI case. Am I wrong?
While trying to answer the questions, I would avoid quick definitional stipulations. (Usually, I find such quick stipulations boring, uncreative, and – more often than not – ill-equipped for new challenges.) Don’t get me wrong. If it’s your thing to define away at least three ideas before breakfast, be my guest, I don’t mind. It’s just not my piece of cake.
Come now, Ariel, you old prevaricator. TWAW or not?
Hmm. Here is my disappointing answer. I do not know. (The same answer for AI, I’m afraid.)
One of the things that trouble me is the possibility (of course merely envisaged, not real at this stage) of modern medicine being able to produce people who are *functionally* women. By “functionally” I do not mean social role (apage politics!) but the biological reproductive role. The impact of this for the whole discussion would be (I think) comparable to an earthquake. The obvious question would arise: what is the point of insisting on a specific “entire suite of interpenetrating systems” if a possibly different suite of systems can sustain a very similar biological role? I’m not able to answer this question with any reasonable degree of certainty. Can you?
Oh, cool, I got guest posted.
Bruce C: But I’m not denying their polygonality, just their triangle-ness. That move definitely smacks of the charge of denying existence or humanity.
YNnB: Yep, selective application of principles is par for the course. Just look at all the instances where they use an argument while apparently oblivious to the fact that it works at least as well in the opposite direction.
Holms: Well, the magic would handle that via [insert handwavium]. If the cells in the target’s body are all such that that generate and regulate the attendant subsystems for a given sex, then the spell is a true sex change.
iknklast: Thanks. It’s certainly something how a social movement that nominally fetishizes holistic and systemic analysis also straight up ignores actual systemic complexity in favor of univariate explanations.
Ariel:
Eh, that’s getting into Ship of Theseus territory, which I think is a bit far. If we start down that road, there’s no really good, independently motivated rationale for determining when we should stop. Let’s just keep things on the intuitive level here and say that the wizard’s spell per se doesn’t replace any part of the target’s body. Instead, it alters every cell in place. We could even imagine that it causes the body, composed now of fundamentally altered cells, to generate all the appropriate equipment.
The particular spell I referenced here illustrates another point. Its duration is listed as “permanent” (given the right conditions), but the game has two different durations to represent the concept of permanency. Those are “permanent” and “instantaneous”. An effect with a permanent duration is ongong: it continuously maintains the effect. If the spell ends (i.e., is dispelled or dismissed) or is suppressed by an anti-magic field, everything returns to normal. A human turned into a dog via a permanent effect would revert to human form in an area of dead magic, for instance. Instantaneous spells, on the other hand, do their thing, and then the magic fades completely, leaving only the result. There’s no need for the magic to persist and maintain the result. A human turned into a dog via an instantaneous effect would remain a dog even in a dead magic zone. The question becomes which, if either, really turns the human into a dog. It’s quite reasonable to say that the permanent effect doesn’t alter the underlying nature of the target, in much the same way that hair dye doesn’t alter the underlying nature of someone’s hair. Of course, one could equally well answer the other way. The human is currently a dog, regardless of whether that would change in an anti-magic field, and hair dyed black is currently black, regardless of whether the dye can be washed out.
This is decently analogous to the sex change problem. If the alteration requires persistent support, there’s a case to be made that the alteration isn’t true, that it’s lacking in some way. This view is especially appealing when considering the means of persistence isn’t something linked to the goal state. Actual dogs don’t require a spell to maintain their dogness, all else being equal. Dogness is the state that they will tend toward when all external influences are removed. Likewise, actual women don’t need to mess around with colonic tissue in their vaginal canals, because they have vaginal tissue.
The question is poorly formed, I think. A better question might be, “Does intelligence entail natural origin?” I’d say no. There’s nothing about intelligence per se that is in principle at odds with an artificial origin. We could push on the concept of artificiality by incoming a scenario like in The Prestige and construct a device to create exact duplicates of a person. We could even introduce insignificant variations to the duplicates so that they are clearly our creations. One would be hard pressed to say that our creations were not both artificial and intelligent.
The real difficulty is in finding a definition of intelligence that fits our intuitions and can be tested. Most people don’t realize that this is the actual meaning of the Turing test. It’s not about ranking artificial intelligence by performance; it’s about defining what is to be intelligent at all. I’ve never been fond of it as such, myself. But then, I’m not fond of constructivist accounts in general, as they necessarily render phenomena as subjective.
Well, yes. Sex and intelligence are disanalogous. Sex is physically contingent, supervening on material reality. Intelligence is not. It doesn’t make any sense to speak of a bodiless entity as male or female, just as it doesn’t make sense to speak of invisible pink unicorns. Intelligence, though? Humans have little or no difficulty conceiving of bodiless, immaterial, even non-local intelligence.
Yes, I can. I think you could, too, were it not for what appears to be an implicit moral component in your reasoning. You frame the problem as an insistence to be justified in normative terms rather than a purely descriptive matter. Using a very loose sense of functional equivalency and adopting your form, we might ask the point of insisting on a specific sort of mechanical and chemical interaction (firearms) if a possible different form (powered slingshots) can sustain a very similar ballistic role? Firearms and slingshots could be said to be functionality equivalent, as they both send potentially lethal metal toward a target along a ballistic trajectory. Caan we really justify excluding slingshots from our concept of firearm?
Yes. Of course, and it’s such a silly question that my head actually hurts now. Analogy and metaphor are not logical identity, the material is not the immaterial, and a man with a female organ grafted onto his flesh is not a woman.