Maybe a bit moot. Methinks Shannon's definition for "woman" is just as subjective as those of her ex-husband and of many other transwomen, a matter more of feelings than of facts.
Big part of the whole problem with the transgender clusterfuck is that too many have turned "woman" and "female" into entirely subjective identities with no hard-edged criteria for category membership at all, just badges of tribal membership devoid of any meaning at all.
Moot exactly how that sad state of affairs has come about, though I think it's largely because most people don't seem to have a flaming clue that you can't be a member of a category if you can't pay the membership dues. See my post on "What is a woman?" for some elaborations on those themes:
Shannon: Something about him was fundamentally female, he insisted. Exactly what that femaleness entailed remained unclear.
I wonder what exactly is your background in computing. Given the concept of object oriented programming, one might reasonably think you had some handle on the concept of classes and categories.
And that you should thereby understand that there are generally "necessary and sufficient conditions for category membership"; see Wikipedia's article on definition types:
Wikipedia: "An intensional definition gives meaning to a term by specifying necessary and sufficient conditions for when the term should be used. In the case of nouns, this is equivalent to specifying the properties that an object needs to have in order to be counted as a referent of the term."
And the question is then less what "female" entails -- a great many things and traits depending on which species one has in mind -- and one of what are those "necessary and sufficient conditions" for sex category membership, that apply to literally millions of anisogamous species -- including clownfish. A question which you seem rather reluctant to answer let alone even grapple with:
But likewise with "the woman question". You're more or less justified to say that"... 'Woman' can be defined along many axes", but the question there is still one of necessary and sufficient conditions for (sex or gender) category membership. It seems that your definition, particularly in the absence of any such conditions, is no more than an entirely subjective one -- in which case various transwomen have as much claim to membership in that category as you might have, or as any "Mother of the Year" would have had, at least at one point in their lives.
You may wish to consider my exposition of the fundamental dichotomy between polythetic and monothetic categories, the former being a rough equivalent to the philosophical concept of family resemblances:
As long as you -- and too many others -- insist that "woman" is just a matter of quite subjective "family resemblances", as long as you refuse to specify any necessary and sufficient conditions at all, so long will you be faced with having to sit down to Christmas dinner with the Manson family -- so to speak ...
Good follow up to my questioning.
Maybe a bit moot. Methinks Shannon's definition for "woman" is just as subjective as those of her ex-husband and of many other transwomen, a matter more of feelings than of facts.
Big part of the whole problem with the transgender clusterfuck is that too many have turned "woman" and "female" into entirely subjective identities with no hard-edged criteria for category membership at all, just badges of tribal membership devoid of any meaning at all.
Moot exactly how that sad state of affairs has come about, though I think it's largely because most people don't seem to have a flaming clue that you can't be a member of a category if you can't pay the membership dues. See my post on "What is a woman?" for some elaborations on those themes:
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/what-is-a-woman
Shannon: Something about him was fundamentally female, he insisted. Exactly what that femaleness entailed remained unclear.
I wonder what exactly is your background in computing. Given the concept of object oriented programming, one might reasonably think you had some handle on the concept of classes and categories.
And that you should thereby understand that there are generally "necessary and sufficient conditions for category membership"; see Wikipedia's article on definition types:
Wikipedia: "An intensional definition gives meaning to a term by specifying necessary and sufficient conditions for when the term should be used. In the case of nouns, this is equivalent to specifying the properties that an object needs to have in order to be counted as a referent of the term."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensional_and_intensional_definitions
And the question is then less what "female" entails -- a great many things and traits depending on which species one has in mind -- and one of what are those "necessary and sufficient conditions" for sex category membership, that apply to literally millions of anisogamous species -- including clownfish. A question which you seem rather reluctant to answer let alone even grapple with:
https://shannonthrace.substack.com/p/what-is-radicalization/comment/16357301
But likewise with "the woman question". You're more or less justified to say that"... 'Woman' can be defined along many axes", but the question there is still one of necessary and sufficient conditions for (sex or gender) category membership. It seems that your definition, particularly in the absence of any such conditions, is no more than an entirely subjective one -- in which case various transwomen have as much claim to membership in that category as you might have, or as any "Mother of the Year" would have had, at least at one point in their lives.
You may wish to consider my exposition of the fundamental dichotomy between polythetic and monothetic categories, the former being a rough equivalent to the philosophical concept of family resemblances:
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/binarists-vs-spectrumists
As long as you -- and too many others -- insist that "woman" is just a matter of quite subjective "family resemblances", as long as you refuse to specify any necessary and sufficient conditions at all, so long will you be faced with having to sit down to Christmas dinner with the Manson family -- so to speak ...