MarcusAu wrote: ↑Fri Nov 02, 2018 3:11 am
it's simple - anyone not currently producing the gametes required for reproduction is no longer part of the human Von Neumann communion.
LoL. Though I didn't think you were likely to be in the "feelz before realz" camp which that comment certainly suggests is the case.
Words are kind of useless if you can't or won't say what you think they mean - and won't stick with those that have been agreed to. And the definitions on the books for both "female" and "male" stipulate that, reproductively speaking at least, they mean "produces ova" and "produces sperm". You might note a recent
article at ArcDigital, which I've linked to in various tweets and which someone here may have provided orginally, that quotes a patron saint of "feminism", Simone de Beauvoir, saying that the sexes “are basically defined by the gametes they produce.”
Sure a lot of people who get their knickers in a twist in trying to deny or in refusing to face the consequences of those definitions - as demented as, and virtually identical to, someone getting bent out of shape when they're told, on reaching their 20th birthday, that they no longer qualify as teenagers. ALL that the terms denote are categories - anything else is demented woo ("I am WOMAN!! Hear me roar!! [rah, rah]) and identity politics writ large.
Apropos of, something from a book I'm reading (The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow; highly recommended):
Mlodinow wrote:Galileo's was a precise and practical observation [on pendula], and although simple, it signified a new approach to the description of physical phenomena: the idea that science must focus on experience and experimentation - how nature operates - rather than on what intuition dictates or our minds find appealing. And most of all, it must be done with mathematics. (pg 61)
Indeed, although intuition is not without some justification and value.
But while it is no doubt "appealing" to many #Transloonies and "menopausees" to be included in the august and exalted category known as "woman", the facts are that IF one accepts the fact that those categories - a fairly mathematical concept though the basics are readily accessible otherwise - are defined that way THEN they simply don't qualify as members. Moot how many special rights and privileges might attend that category, but one simply can not address that question without defining the terms at the outset - also a highly relevant and important concept in both mathematics and philosophy.