Aaron Ross Powell ☸️One of the (dumb) arguments against acceptance of transgender people takes disagreement about the definition of “man” and “woman” as dangerous to a functioning society. Setting aside that this argument depends first upon confusion about the difference between gender and biological sex, the idea that we need to agree one this particular ontological fact is very odd when the people making the argument don’t say the same about other ontological (and metaphysical) disagreements.
It is not clear, for example, why a disagreement about the specific details of the definition of “man” or “woman” is the kind of unsettled claim that would “destroy society,” as anti-trans people frame it, while a disagreement about, for instance, the various characteristics of a divine being, the nature of the afterlife, etc., wouldn’t.
Yes I know that religious people have and do see these other disagreements as important, and many American Christians point to the lack of widely held belief in the truthfulness of their versions of them as signs of civilizational decline. But they don’t center them in the culture war the way they do, in this case, the rather less consequential definition of man and woman. They manage to get along fine with religious diversity, as long as the religiously diverse join them in hating trans people.
Alan Twigz@arossp I feel like the folks pushing the anti-trans narratives hardest probably *also* have very strong beliefs about definitions of, say, Sin, Virtue, and Damnation, but know that they can only get media play with less obvious bigotry