Reviewing Vaush vs Bogardus Gender Debate With AY and Troy

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All right, so I got Troy and Avi here. So I guess a lot of people have been talking about this debate, and I got a lot of requests to look at it, at least more than usual. So I think we're gonna do that. Um, I don't know if there's anything you guys want to say at the outset, or should we just launch into it?

I'm good with launching into it. I'm going to get right into it. I haven't seen it at all, so I don't really have much uh background going into this, so it should be interesting. Yeah, Troy is unexposed to uh either of their views. He's like a fresh mind.

Women are women, and we're starting right now with Vash's opening statement. Thanks so much for being with us, Vash. The floor is all yours.

Hello, uh, I'm Vash. Okay, so there are two basic arguments here. First of all, the idea of sex and gender being distinct uh uh categories. They obviously are. I don't think anybody disbelieves this. There are obviously things that we refer to which are in the purview of the experience of being a man and a woman, which are not defined biologically. Whether it be light blue and pink being distinguished gender colors, clothing that we wear, the way we style our hair. These are things which are not derivative of our biology. They are derivative of social standards, which change. You can look at other parts of the world where they're different. You can look at different points in time within our own country, and they're different. There's no getting around that. It's not like biology is changing rapidly here. Two years, the factions do. If, if people don't like, you know, the idea of gender and sex being separate, then we can simply say that when I'm referred to gender, I'm referring to some other separate category that is not sex, but described social differences, um, that tend to be associated with sexual ones. And once you have that, you know, nailed down, the following argument is one of utility. Uh, we construct definitions. We do it to serve our own purposes as humans. The only reason definitions exist is because they serve.

1.5 is a bit insane for me. I think I might need to do 1.25.

We are their masters. And if I believe, as is the case, by the way, of many medical and psychiatric institutions, if we believe that the uh definition of woman, uh, being one tied entirely to sexual differentiation, is arbitrary, inconsistent, and harmful, um, and that there is a better, a more utility-serving definition, one to use, say, by self-identification, then that is the one that I will use. I have no interest whatsoever in abiding by some harmful, arbitrary standard out of a need to stick to tradition when there's a perfectly serviceable and better one that makes people more happy and hurts nobody. Lying right there. And that is why I say prescriptively that trans women are women, and descriptively, uh, they have been treated as women, uh, historically in our society, uh, in varying extents throughout history, depending on the culture and time period. It's a complicated business, but we can get there. You gotta.

Thank you very much for that opening, Vash. And if it's your first time here at Modern Day Debate, wanna let you know, folks, we're a neutral platform hosting debates, panels, and discussions on virtually every topic. Wanna let you know we hope you feel welcome, no matter what walk of life you were from. And I'm going to kick it over to Dr. Bogardus for his opening as well. Want to remind you, the speakers' views are their own. So the speakers are not speaking on behalf of any institution that they are affiliated with or have been affiliated with. And Dr. Thomas McCartis is an associate professor of philosophy. He earned his PhD from the University of Texas and works in the areas of epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of gender. You can find his publications on his website by Googling Googling his name. And both guests are linked in the description right now. With that, Dr. Dr. Bogardus, thanks for being with us. The floor is all yours for opening as well.

All right, can I share my screen? Okay. Um, so everybody can see that? Yeah. Yep. Okay. Um, so if you're unable to see this for some reason, you should know that the slides are available at tinyurl.com modern day debate June, uh, the month of June, and there's no spaces or capitals in there. Okay. I'm just going to start my timer right now. So, um, the topic of our conversation today is, um, this sentence: Trans women are women. Whether trans women are women. And what I want to try to do is explain why this is such a persistent philosophical question. I started thinking about this about six or seven years ago, and so I'm going to share some of the things I've learned in that time and try to convey to you the the landscape of the debate as I see it, in a way that I hope will be useful and interesting, no matter what your views are on this topic. And to try to explain why it's a persistent philosophical question. Um, specifically, what I'm going to do is try to show how on six common interpretations of this sentence, trans women are women, including five that Vash has explored and endorsed, the sentence turns out not to be true.

So, um, just a quick, I think obvious clarification. I think it's pretty obvious to everyone that, um, when people say trans women are women, what they mean is all trans women are women, not just some. So I think that's the question under under consideration, whether all trans women are women. Now, to see whether that's true or false, to evaluate whether that's true or false, I think we would have to get clear on what it means to be a woman. We have to think about the meaning of that word, woman, in order to see whether it's true that all trans women are women. And so now I'm going to consider those views I promised a second ago.

The first view is what we might call a biological view, according to which women are adult human females. Now, I think this is the sort of traditional, historical, ordinary sense of the word. This is what the word ordinarily means. There are a few reasons to think that we can talk about these in the discussion period if you'd like. Um, first of all, there's words for other species that we use for the adult males and the adult females of those species. It would be pretty surprising if we didn't have similar words for the adult males and adult females of our species. Uh, this is the definition that virtually all dictionaries give. Of course, dictionaries aren't infallible, they make mistakes, but the fact that this is what dictionaries say is some evidence that this is the way the word is ordinarily used. But most importantly, I think the strongest bit of evidence is that, um, as far as I can tell, virtually all trans-inclusive philosophers agree that this is the ordinary use of the word. Um, that doesn't mean they recommend it, but they acknowledge and concede that this is what people ordinarily mean. I'm not sure whether Vash agrees. He said some things, um, that sound like he might disagree. Just a few days ago, he said, um, there's so much arbitrary with how these terms get posed. I don't think that a biologically prescriptive attitude towards gender is the historically correct one. So possibly Vash disagrees with this, but as I said, a lot of trans-inclusive philosophers agree that this is the way the word is used in dominant mainstream contexts. So here are some quotations. I'll let you read those on your own, but Rob and Dembro, Mario Michael, Sally Haslanger, Jennifer Saul, these are all philosophers working very much from a trans-inclusive direction. Um, Simone de Beauvoir seems to use the word in this ordinary biological way as well. Um, again, that's not to me, they recommend this definition. A lot of these philosophers think that this is a problem and we need to change it because when you think about the question, whether all trans women are women, if being a woman requires being biologically female, then these philosophers think it's going to turn out that not all trans women are women, in fact, none are. And they consider that to be a problem. Here's a quotation from Catherine Jenkins saying as much, saying that if you fail to respect the gender identifications of trans people, that's a serious harm. And I think Vash would agree that that is a problem. Back in 2021, he said, if someone makes an argument that a person isn't a woman when they claim to be a woman, I would say that's transphobic. And then here's another quotation saying something similar. I'll let you read.

Okay, so as I say, a lot of philosophers wish to move away from this view of what it means to be a woman. And one alternative that they've explored is what we might call a social role view, according to which, uh, to be a woman is to be someone who functions or behaves or is treated a certain way socially. Um, now, sometimes Vash seems to endorse this sort of view. Here's an example from back in March. So he says, I am a gender abolitionist, so I don't want these designations at all. But as long as they exist, these designations, men and women, we're talking about social roles. And again, just a few days ago, so he says, um, given how arbitrary these definitions are, I think one where we acknowledge that man and woman, as we refer to it generally, is a social trend, something which refers to social roles and attitudes, not biology, that's probably the one that hurts the fewest, fewest people.

Okay, so that's the social role view. And now the question before us is, does this sentence come out as true or false on the social worldview? Will it be true that all trans women are women? Well, to figure that out, we have to know exactly what social role we're talking about. What is the social role that is taken to be definitive of womanhood? And it turns out it's pretty hard to say what social role we're talking about exactly, given, as Vash said in his opening statement, all the variation across time and culture. It's hard to say what social role is common by all and only women throughout time and place. But even if you found one and said, there, that's the social role that's definitive of being a woman, there's a problem because there's no guarantee that all trans women will play that role, will occupy that position in society. Catherine Jenkins again, a trans-inclusive philosopher, criticizes the social worldview on those grounds, saying there could, there may well be, and there easily could be, and there may in fact be trans individuals who do not present as women and so are not treated as women, don't play this role, don't occupy this position in society, or there could be trans individuals who do present as women but aren't read as women, or aren't taken seriously, or aren't treated as women, um, in which case they won't occupy the right position in society in order to count as a woman on this social role view.

So, um, my sense of the state of play and the current philosophical debate is, um, philosophers have moved away from the social worldview because it turns out false that all trans women are women on this view. And at least in the popular culture and even in the philosophical literature, the view that's sort of rising.

Yeah, okay. So, so when we, does the statement, all trans women are women, come out to be false on the social worldview? I don't see how it does because, um, what it means to be a trans, so I, I agree that some people who genuinely, um, say that they are trans, that they are trans women, they will, there's some percentage of them that on the social worldview, uh, will not be women. But that's in virtue of the fact that they are not trans women, uh, on the social worldview. And so the statement, all trans women are women, I'm not seeing how that results in it, uh, coming out to be false.

I wait, I'm not false. I don't follow what you just said there. Yeah. So, so he's, what he's saying here, um, is that, well, look, the issue with the social worldview is that all trans women are women comes out to be false. Why does it come out to be false? It comes out to be false because, uh, not all trans women, uh, play the role, not all trans women, uh, function, behave, or are treated in certain, uh, in certain ways socially, however we cash that out. Um, now, the problem, doesn't that depend on how you define woman? Well, yeah, yes. If all it is to be trans is to, or to be a woman is to play the role, yeah, all trans women, yeah, yeah. Well, wait, but then how, how do we define trans women on, on the view where woman refers to a social role? Oh, you, I mean, there's a lot of things you can fill in. I mean, let's just do something for argument's sake. Let's just say, let's just, this is just for the sake of the argument, but to simplify it down, let's just say we take it, we take the view as, um, uh, the view is that in, tr, what it means to be a trans woman, um, is to wear a dress. And because that's the social role, that's the, that's the presentation, um, that would mean for me being a woman, for being, for being, oh, for being, yeah. And for what it means to be a woman is, let's just, let's say they, uh, say, okay, well, you couldn't be that. They just include that as part of the sub, um, you know, that you can, you can have, uh, you can say, okay, there's a lot of things you can fill in for women, but let's just, whatever it is, we include, um, trans women as part of the subset, um, uh, oh, sorry, woman. It's a woman, someone who functions and behaves a certain way. Um, right, yeah, yeah. A trans woman would be a woman of that, like that, and also some facts about perhaps biological sex, something that they, yeah, exactly. You're right. Yeah. Now, now the issue that, now that just, now if someone wants to say, well, not all trans women wear a dress, um, on the view that what it means to be a woman is to wear a dress, then all trans women wear dresses. And if some people say they're trans, genuinely, but don't wear a dress, then, um, they wouldn't be trans women, but they wouldn't be, uh, women. But that's only because they wouldn't be trans women. And so it's still, it could still be true that all, on this view, that all trans women are women, if what trans women means is just some fact about their sex plus they wear a dress. Yeah, people are gonna have a hard time understanding that. And it's because they're gonna take their understanding of what trans means. They're not understanding, probably, that you're, like, you're going, what's true if we take this to be what it means, right? If all it means to be trans is to wear a dress, which is just a reductive way to say to play something like social role, if all it means to be trans is to wear a dress, then definitionally all trans people wear dresses, right? Um, and you can do the same thing, uh, or sorry, not to be trans, to be a woman, to wear a dress. If all it means to be a woman is to wear a dress, then definitionally, um, all women wear dresses. I mean, I might think about it this way. Suppose that, um, the condition for being a woman is playing some social role S, right? So if you play some that social role S, you count as a woman. And then the condition for being trans is some set of further facts, perhaps something about, um, biological sex, and maybe identification, I don't know, something further than that. Um, let that additional condition be, you know, why? Well, then a trans woman is someone that satisfies, uh, both of those conditions, the condition for being a woman, playing that social role, and that condition for being. And that's it, right? So just by default, if this is how we're thinking about it, by definition, there are no trans women that are not women because being a woman is part of a requirement to be a trans woman. Yeah, exactly. And now you could make other critiques of this view. You can say, well, this view isn't really capturing what we really want to mean, or what a lot of people mean by trans. It's not really capturing what a lot of people mean by women. There are other critiques you could make. But this is not a critique. The critique you can't make, uh, at least one that doesn't go through, is that it results in a view that all trans women are women, the statement coming out with the truth value of false. Yeah. So I, the thing is, I think that charitably, we have to go like, okay, we have like trans like T1 and trans like T2. Okay? And T1 is like trans as understood in the mind of like some like leftist pro-trans person. Um, now I think that we can, we can look at T2, which is like how it's defined on the social role view or whatever, and go, okay, if we understand that in the sentence, all trans women are women, those usages, the usages of the term women refer to T2, then it's going to be trivially true. But I think I think the force of what he's saying, he's obviously trying to get you to use T1 and notice that according to T1, all those trans people, right, according to that definition, not, not the social role definition, will not turn out, um, being women on the social role definition. Does that make sense? Do you follow the the distinction I'm drawing there? Hi, Paul. Yeah, like, because I mean, sorry, dude. Yeah, Troy. Sorry. No, continue. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, yeah, because I think like, I mean, I think it's a good observation, obviously, to go, okay, well, wait, like, if on, on this, on the social role view, as you were construing it there, it's just going to be like trivially true that all trans women are women because being a woman is a prerequisite for being a trans woman, right? Obviously, if being a woman is constitutive of being a trans woman, then you can't have a trans woman who's not a woman, right? So of course the sentence will be false. But yeah, I'm just saying that I think how this is supposed to impact someone is, you like, you picture the typical person who would believe this trans stuff that sounds, sounds like I don't like, think that makes sense, anything, but, you know, someone who, who's like pro-trans, they have a certain group of people in mind as trans people, that's like T1, right? And he's going, well, if the definition were T2, all those people in T1 wouldn't be trans, right? So it's just, we got a trivial truth if we interpret, um, trans as like T2. But on T1, you kind of see he's like going for a sort of reductio, something I will, hopefully, you guys get what I'm saying there. I think it, yeah, yeah. So there's, I guess we can continue, but I was just going to say, like, if there are other people, or there's some like existing people or people who have, um, perhaps identified in a certain way that we want to count as trans women, for example, um, I mean, it's a further question whether they count as trans women given this definition. Um, so I mean, if he wants to say that that's what we're tying a notion of trans women to, in part, it has to satisfy these attributions, uh, then it might be right that this definition in terms of social role is inconsistent with that. But, um, I mean, we don't have to stick with that definition, uh, where we have to capture these people as trans women. Can just, or at least there's nothing entailed from the social world view that results in that in having to stick with these extra commitments.

I want to make like, kind of a broader point here, which is like, I consider what we're doing right now, semantic analysis, right? We're not really like looking at an argument or something, we're analyzing the meanings of terms and we're looking at the truth value of some proposition given different term meanings. Right? I think that that is something that people really struggle with. Like, I, I find whenever I get in debates and I have to do this kind of thing, which is often, if you get in debates about topics like moral realism, where there's lots of like gibberish words that get used, um, I find people don't appreciate or understand this. But yeah, I don't know, I guess all we can do is just do more and more semantic analysis and hope people kind of understand. Like, very often, solving a discussion just comes down to clearly understanding what's being said. Like, you picture all the work being in, like, working through arguments, but very often it's not. It's actually, you just do some kind of semantic work, and then the answer becomes obvious.

What seems to me this whole thing, it is a semantic question, right? I, I don't know if I want to say something that strong, 12 minutes in, but I, I think it's got a massive semantic component. Are all trans women women? Is that okay? I don't want to think about if that's necessarily purely semantic, but it's, it's got a lot of semantics. I'll, I'll at least give that much on first pass.

I view. I think that's, um, coming to be the most popular view, as I said, at least at the popular level. So on this view, um, we're told to be a woman is to be someone who identifies as a woman. And I won't be the first to notice that, oh, well, here's a quotation from Vash endorsing that, by the way.

Okay. Yeah, I should say, like, we've, for anyone lacking the context, we've spent like so long [ __ ] on how this just makes no [ __ ] sense. In fact, Troy, I don't think that I've heard your take on this. Everyone probably at this point knows what Avi and I think about this, but what do you think? Just on first examination, a woman is someone who identifies as a woman. When they say identifies as a woman, does that mean like utter the statement, I am a woman? It's, it's that's the sounds I have to make. No, they're, they're using the term. They're not mentioning it. They're using it. Well, actually, here, do both. Do both. Let's go, let's go with both. Do one where they're using and one where they're mentioning. Yeah. So, um, if the, if they have to say, I'm a woman, and they're using the word woman there in this meaningful way, in the same way that it's being used on the self-id view, then it just seems like it's going to be circular. I don't, I don't, it's not going to be, yeah, what is it going to mean when they're saying it then? That's it. Um, yeah, so it's regressive. It's a regressive definition. It provides no meaning, no matter how many recursions you take, right? And then the alternative would be, well, I guess there's multiple alternatives. One is that there's some equivocation going on, and they're using women in a different way, um, when they identify as such. But then we'd want some clarification on what that is to understand that, right? If it's not a case of, um, unifical or equivocal usage, and they're just making the sounds or something like that, you could, you could go that way, but it seems a little strange. A person who counts as a belonging to this category, someone who makes that particular sound. Um, I don't, I don't find that very plausible. I think it's like consistent, though. It's like, it doesn't involve a, yeah, like it's definition's not circular or something like that. But yeah, like, it's, it's not incoherent. It just seems like it's probably not capturing what people are trying to talk about. Like, if you picture some other possible world where everyone who you currently identify as trans, just like never identifies as such, but is otherwise mentally identical, like, you think that those people are no longer trans? Like, that seems like the kind of thing you have to say if you're using the term like that. I just don't think that's what a lot of people really, many people at all mean. I think it's like a, a mistaken attempt to be inclusive. Like, all you have to do is say it, but then you think about what actually follows given that it's like, I don't think that's capturing the right people anymore. Yeah. So there might be another way to.

Well, I don't know. I was thinking about this in terms of how it might just become another social rule. Never mind. Well, but yeah, we could leave that in there. But you appreciate, kind of, like, the, the reductio there on the, on the view that it's just about mentioning the term woman, right? When just uttering the sentence, I identify as a woman, where woman is just a sound, right? It's like, we can just take a parallel world where you have all the same people who you currently identify as trans, with all the same like struggles, the same, the exact same mind, same situations, just they never utter that sentence, or or the ones in this world who haven't, right? And you think none of their like mental processes, behaviors, like anything about their like struggle, any, none of that qualifies them as trans? It's like, that does not sound like what people are talking about. You could, you could bite the bullet and say that's what you're talking about. I just think you're gonna lose a lot of people. Be the first to notice that it looks like there's a threat of circularity here. We were asked, where we asked what a woman is, and the definition used the word woman when defining the term. But it may be that there's no actual circularity here if the word woman in the definition means something else than, um, the meaning we're supposed to get from the stephanie. I like, I like that he's actually like teasing out these things and noticing this. Like, he's actually going, okay, if we take this interpretation, we get this issue. If we take this interpretation, we don't get that, but we got some other kind of thing. So let me give you one example. Here's something, um, Vash said. He said, if you want, you can say a woman is a person who would like to internally and externally adhere to the social roles and expectations associated with a woman, or at the very least, a social archetype. So again, afraid of circularity because reason the word woman there. But suppose we meant women in the ordinary sense, adult human females. Just suppose that's what was meant. So it's not the very same sense to be defined. It's another sense. Well, the problem is that many women won't want that. Many women don't wish to adhere to the social roles and expectations associated with being an adult human female. As Catherine Jenkins has pointed out, a lot of women flout traditional gender norms. By Catherine Jenkins's, for example, not shaving legs. Elizabeth Barnes, another trans-inclusive philosopher, points out that there might be some women with cognitive disabilities such that they lack the ability to have this desire, to conceptualize this desire, to want to adhere to these social roles. And, um, more relevant for our purposes, it could easily turn out that some trans women might not like to adhere to these social roles or these expectations. For example, some trans women who say they don't owe you femininity. So the first point was just, if this definition's not circular, then whatever the word woman means in the definition, it's going to turn out that not all trans women are women. What if it is circular? What if we're told, no, to be a woman is to identify as a woman in the very same sense to be defined? So Vash is not so sure that there's a problem here. Um, back in May, he said, my definition of gender, which is just a woman is someone who identifies as one. People complain about it. How are we getting that if it's not circular? Then not all trans women are women. Yeah, that's, that's what's going to be one. There's two. One critique I have is that the same critique as the social worldview. Um, it's just, um, not an intern, if you, it, it's not gonna work as an internal critique on the self-id, on the equivocated self-id view. It's still going to come out to be true that all trans women are women. That's one. Wait, is it? It was, I need to, I haven't thought that through. Why? If trans woman is defined as a woman of that sort, of a certain sort? Well, yeah, obviously. Wait, is it, does it have to be constitutive like that? If it's self-id and not circular, woman is someone who invented? Well, if it's, he gave us the specific one he's referring to, one that Vash gave specifically. Uh, if you rewind a little bit. Oh, I thought, I thought he was quantifying over any non-circular, um, definition. Oh, there may be some other. Yeah, I mean, look, I don't know. You could, you might, there's that's a big quantification. But he put Vash's specific one and he said, suppose that Vash was talking about, uh, the biological view in place of woman. So supposedly, yeah, and then it was, it was in text a little bit previously in the video. So it's, uh, someone who wishes to, uh, uh, you'd be treated in the way or, I forget the exact, yeah, like conform to certain like social roles or something like that. And then that women do, which is just to say that adult human females, uh, do. And then, and then on that view, it's just gonna be, if we just take trans women to be, um, uh, yeah, the people we're trying to keep plus some, yeah, that, that definition of woman plus some other facts about their, um, uh, genetics or whatnot, um, then it's just gonna be trivially true that all trans women are women on the self-id, on the equivocated self-id view that's being presented here as well. I'm okay. I'm not sure I followed all that. I agree that if it's constitutive of, if, if something is constitutive of something else, then you'll get that, like, this is a trivial thing to say, all of those things are that other thing. But I, I don't know, whatever, I don't care that much about this. Let's get to the part where they start arguing. But I don't think that matters. So I think it does matter for at least two reasons that I'll try to explain. One is that a circular definition can't convey any meaning. It can't actually tell you what the word means. But secondly, even if the word has a meaning, it didn't get it from this definition, but suppose it has a meaning, the statement that to be a woman is to identify as a woman has to be false. It's necessarily false. So I'll explain these two in turn.

I'm not, that's that seems [ __ ] because I, I don't take a regressive sentence to be propositional. Yeah. No, I don't either. If it doesn't, it doesn't have anything meaningless. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, right. So I'm glad, I'm glad that he's pointing out, like, it's a breath of fresh air that he's distinguishing between the equivocated and non-equivocated sense of the president. Oh, yes, absolutely. There's such a nice pleasant change from like the stupid [ __ ] that I've had to hear for so long on this topic. So yeah, definitely. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I, I love all that. Um, the net, it's necessarily false thing. I don't know what that means. Is he referring to the definition, or is he just trying to say that all trans women are women will necessarily be false? In which case, I think that statement would be false. And I don't even know what it means for a regressive definition, or even lex, any lexicographic definition would be false. Wait, but did you catch Troy's point about meaning though? We both made it simultaneously. But if, if it doesn't have meaning, that's it. It doesn't have a truth value, right? It can't. Yeah, yeah, of course. It's not propositional, right? Yeah, yeah. So it's, yeah, this seems, this seems like a blender here then. Yeah. If it's circular, it doesn't convey meaning, and it's necessarily false. I mean, maybe you have some different theory of meaning where you can have, I, I don't [ __ ] know. Troy, do you see any way to rescue it? Not really, because if that's the definition, um, and it's something meaningless, and when we say the statement is, all trans women are women, which actually, by the way, you know, I mean, I want to make a point about this, um, then that statement is still going to be meaningless because women, as it appears in that statement, is meaningless. So I don't, why would we say that that's false? I don't. Yeah, I mean, I, I take it that if something's meaningless, it can't have a truth value. Like, it doesn't, it doesn't have a truth value if it's meaningless. Um, to, like, it seems like to have meaning is to be truth-apt, uh, well, for declarative sentences. Um, why for declarative sentences? What's the, what's the case where that's not? I like questions, commands. Oh, oh, of course. Yeah, sorry. Obviously, right. Of course, yeah. We understand, yeah, right. So meaning isn't isn't just, yeah, well, obviously there's a ton of philosophy, I'm sure, around what meaning is. Obviously, I don't mean that meaning is just to have a truth value. Well, I think what I mean is that to have a truth value means that something has meaning. You can't have a true failure. It's a sufficiency condition. It's not a necessary condition, but it's a sufficient condition for it to have meaning, right? Right. Yeah, yeah. And if not, then I am just so, one, probably lost on the notion of meaning that someone is using there.

Patients can't convey meaning. Here's one way to see that. What we're being told is that someone is a woman if and only if she identifies as a woman. But now, suppose we ask, well, what does it mean? What does woman mean there in the definition? What are you identifying as when you identify as a woman? On this alternative, we're being told the very same sense to be defined. So what you're identifying as is someone who identifies as a woman. That's what you're identifying as because that's what a woman is. But notice, woman shows up again in the. Yes, he's doing the term. So since there's no round of recursion, and now the definition says to be a woman, and you see that this will just keep going. We'll never eliminate the circularity. It goes on forever. We've got this infinite descent and there's this irredeemable void there in the definition, um, which means that the definition never expresses any proposition. It never actually tells you what the word means, which means it can't beat your false missing you a meaning. If you just do one more recursion, but you never get there. So that's one way to see why, um, circular definitions are deficient. Here's another way. It's sort of a little sillier, but, um, suppose I tell you that, you know, people collect baseball cards and pogs. I don't really know what a pog is. I collect blargs. And suppose you wonder what a blarg is, and I define it for you in a circular way. I say, look, a blarg is just anything that has this really cool feature. It's a blarg. So clearly, that's a circular definition. Now, if there's no problem with circular definitions, then you should be able to find me a blarg, especially if I give you a hint that there's one in the room with you now, and I offer you $50 if you could just find that blarg and bring it to me. So if there's nothing wrong with circular definitions, you should be able to find a blarg. You should be in a position to know what a blarg is. But obviously, you're not in that position. You can't find this blarg because the definition was circular. So that's another way to see why circular definitions are deficient.

Okay, but suppose that somehow the word woman got meaning independently, maybe by pointing or ostension. That's a way that we define words commonly. I think still, even if the word does have a meaning, the claim that to be a woman is to identify as a woman, someone's a woman if and only if she identifies as a woman, that has to be false. And here's why. Um, on this view, on this proposal, if that phrase being a woman refers to anything, then we're told it refers to a very interesting characteristic, a very interesting feature. It's a feature that someone has if and only if she identifies as having it. There's this tight connection between having the feature, being a woman, and identifying as having the feature, identifying as a woman. But if you think about it, um, I think you'll realize that there simply is no feature like that. There's no characteristic that you could have if and only if you identify as having it. There's no way you could be if and only if you identify as being that way. Just think about ordinary features like, um, being funny, or being tall, or being rich, or something like that. It's one thing to be rich. It's something else to identify as being rich. You could be rich without identifying as being rich. You could identify as being rich without actually being rich, and so on. And this just holds generally for every feature, any property you choose, any feature you choose. Um, and so what that means, what one and two entail here is, on this view, the phrase being a woman doesn't refer to anything because there's no feature that answers to this. No such thing does this.

Are you guys also, I'm not really, yeah, I'm not, do we want to pause and think? He's pointing, I mean, yeah, at one point, like, he's the last argument feature about this, but like, um, I mean, okay, so he's pointing out there's some unique feature and there's no other, and it's going to be hard time to find other things that have this type of feature of this, um, of this definition. What about, can you, sorry, can you just tell me what, uh, I'm, I'm probably missing something here. What about the feature of identifying as being funny? Don't you have that if and only if you have the feature of identifying as being funny? Or am I, am I [ __ ] something up there? You don't, you don't. Wait, why don't you? Because you can be funny and not identify. No, no, no, no. Your teacher isn't funny. Feature is not.

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If and only if they identify as having it. You see. Oh, is there a bottom box there? Yeah, I see. You were trying to keep it like analogous to like his case, but no, I'm just, I'm just trying to go, I'm asking if that's, if that's, um, actually, uh, universally or even that doesn't work. Yeah. Is that, oh, well, yeah, go ahead. Because similarly, you can identify someone who identifies as, what is it, as being funny? You can identify someone who identifies as being funny without identifying as being funny. And the reverse. Okay, wait. The feature of identifying as being funny. Do you have that if and only if you identify as being having it? If and only if you, I don't [ __ ] know. I, pro, I have no [ __ ] idea if that's kitchen. I'd have to think about it. I'm just not convinced of this. Like, I'm trying to just thinking if there are examples. I couldn't think of one off the top. I don't. Yeah, I'm trying to come up with one. I don't know. Um, I'm, I'm not, I'm not sure if it's true though.

So the main point here is whether that works out or not. Um, the, the point by the way, I, I, it seems like we can, we can get into this if we need to, but I, I think that might work, what you said, Isaac. But even if it doesn't, um, the point is just that doesn't make the definition false. Even if, like, even if there's no other way that there's no other common feature from this definition, um, so what that just means it's a, it's some unique thing. It doesn't make, doesn't make it take out the truth value false. Like, you need to go from saying this is something that is unique to this is something that is false. Um, I don't know if I followed you on that. Did you, do you follow that, Troy? I'm not, I'm not sure I got it for that. I'm not, I was just thinking again about that. Well, the point, the point in the video is saying like, he's trying to expand on why it's necessarily false. All right. And then this is, yes, but while he's saying it doesn't convey meaning, and then it's saying is necessarily false, and then he's saying, let's, I'll explain why it's necessarily false, and then he gives this. And how is this showing it's necessarily false on this view? That's the whole, that's the point. I don't think it does show that it's necessarily false. It could be true. What he's saying could be true. Point one and point two could be true. It just, I don't see how it follows that that it's necessarily false would follow from this. If you put this in an argument, it would be that, you know, quote unquote, being a woman doesn't refer to anything, right? Um, it would just be a kind of modus tollens, right? Yeah, exactly. That conclusion of that is not that original statement is necessarily false. False. It contains a term it doesn't refer to anything. And yes, we would also want to say it's meaningless. But, uh, okay, right. Yeah, exactly. If this is, sorry, just quickly and frankly, for his purposes here, that seems to be good enough. I don't know why he's going on this road of saying it's false or necessarily false. But, um, yeah, interpretation of the self-id view, just meaningless. So it doesn't work. Yeah, I think I, I agree. He should just stop there because the false thing actually, firstly, it's, it's seems to contradict the idea of being meaningless, as we pointed out, unless maybe has some weird theory of meaning or something. Um, but also, it's, it's just, it's sufficient to show it's meaningless. I think that's like more damning when something doesn't even make enough sense to be false. Like, that's worse, um, at least in my opinion.

My kind of surprising result is on this view, it looks like there are no women and there are no trans women. Therefore, and for our purposes, what follows is, um, it's false that all trans women are women, or at least it's not true. Um, in fact, it looks like none are because there are no women at all.

Okay, um, here's a couple other views. I think those are sort of the big three, but here are some other views that have been discussed, uh, by Vash. One is gender abolition. On this view, ideally, there are no genders. So ideally, women don't exist. Here's Vash expressing that sort of view. I think gender is a destructive concept, he says. So eventually I want it gone. Sally Haslanger, a trans-inclusive philosopher at MIT, says something similar. She adopted a social role view. She thought to be a woman is to be oppressed all over the place. I'll just note that this is not actual, this is not a definition of a woman, like all have so far. We've had three definitions of a woman, but this one is not a definition of a woman. Yeah, right. It's not. It's just, here's a case where we don't even have one. Yeah, as a main, um, part of the project of feminism. But like, has Vash really made statements that align with like all these different views? But there's just something funny about it. I mean, he's quite, I mean, on the text, he's quoting them. I, I know, I know in this case, but I'm always like, unreasonably good faith, not like out of context or something. Yeah, exactly. But like, if, if these are all fair quotes and whatnot, yeah, that's, uh, that's just he's been, um, in favor of, um, at least he said things that means in favor of self-id and gender abolition.

Even though gender abolition is not a definite, sometimes I hear him. Yeah, like I think I've heard those too. And sometimes I hear him get into like weird, like Wittgenstein stuff. I don't know, it's a mishmash. It sounds kind of surprising. Um, but that was her view. So, um, I think we can at least agree that on this view, if you ask how things should be ideally, they would say, ideally, there are no women at all. And they would say, ideally, there are no trans women. So that's a kind of surprising implication of that view.

Here's another one, which I think Vash might want to defend today. He says, um, in his opening statements, that he says, prescriptively, trans women are women. So that's another view that I've heard expressed in his videos. Um, on this view, when you say "trans women are women," um, what you're actually doing is giving a kind of command or prescription. You're saying, "You should speak and act as though 'trans women are women' is literally true." You should speak and act as though "trans women are women" is literally true. And if you ask why, Vash said in his opinion statement, it's justified by utility, by good consequences, by benefits.

Um, so here's a statement of Vash sort of expressing that. So he says, "What people mean when they say they're women is, 'Woman is a social category I'd like to be a part of. I want to think of myself as as part of it and be thought of as part of it.'" Um, telling me, Bachelor Trans Philosopher, says something similar. In trans-inclusive and queer communities, gender presentation indicates how you want to be treated. So if you think that we should treat people how they want to be treated, then when you say "trans women are women," what you might be communicating is, "We should treat people how they want to be treated." We should treat trans women how they want to be treated. Okay, again, it's justified by utility.

So I'll just point out with respect to the prescriptive claim, whether this is something we should do, something that doesn't seem to enter into, um, everybody's moral calculations is whether or not what we're saying is true. And 60 seconds, 60 seconds left. Okay. And given what I've said so far, it looks like this statement, "trans women are women," is, uh, literally not true. And so we can at least agree on that. Strictly speaking, it's the same critique as the same critique as before. Um, I, I don't think I need to repeat it. Um, for the same reasons why I don't think it follows that that's, um, that the previous views will be false. On with respect to each individual view, it's not clear to me how all the statement, "all trans women are women," are going to be false. On the prescriptive view, except in this case, I, uh, actually this did provide some definition of what the statement means. Um, I'd have to, I have to see a little more clarity specifically about that. Woman, all the ones that are spelling out what woman means, they're just going to have some internal trivial way of making those statements true. "All trans women are women." I think, given what we've said, the view has to agree with, has to say no.

Okay, let's see if I can fit this in. I ran out of space on my slide, but sometimes Vash seems to be a nihilist or an anti-realist about gender. Sometimes he says gender concepts are arbitrary social designations, and in reality, there are no men, no women, etc. Here's a quotation from Vash back in 2019, saying, "All categories are socially constructed. They don't exist in nature. We built them." So if you hold that view, and then you ask, "Well, really, literally, um, are all trans women and women?" I think the view has to say no. In reality, no. Okay, so I try to, I don't, I don't think that's what people mean when they say things are socially constructed. But so that's the statement, "trans women are women" is not true on every view we've looked at, including five from Vash. Thank you for your attention. Thank you very much for that opening. And with that, we're going to jump into open conversation. Want to say, folks, thrilled to let you know we have a lot of upcoming debates. You don't want to miss them. So, for example, just confirmed today, at the bottom right of your screen, whether or not it is okay for kids to go to drag queen shows. With you betcha, Vash and Alex Stein, next Tuesday. You don't want to miss it. Hit that subscribe button so you don't miss it. Thanks so much, gentlemen. The floor is all yours.

All right, I'm sure that you won't mind after that if I take it. I'll just make a quick comment about a broad comment about regardless opening. Yeah, which is that you seemed to, like, first of all, the statement was interpreted as "all trans women are women," and then his critique kind of proceeded by looking at definitions and seeing if they were necessary and sufficient, um, for the truth of that statement. The definitions of, of, uh, women, seeing if they were necessary. Uh, of course, you didn't spend time looking at the definition of "trans woman," but whatever. Um, I kind of worry. I'm not exactly sure how to put this, but I kind of worry that this is being too strict. Um, it's not as if when we use these terms like "woman" or a variety of categories that we might use, that we're going to find some definition in terms of necessary sufficient conditions that's going to satisfy these strict requirements. Like, someone could point out that the same problem could arise in principle for, like, a biological view. Um, you know, "Oh, what are the necessary sufficient conditions for being biological women?" I mean, you could construct something, but it's not obvious that that's what we're getting at when we're using the term, something that's like given in terms of necessary insufficient conditions like that. And so, um, I don't know, maybe I'm not being so clear on what I'm getting at, but the worry is that he's setting the bar too high for the details of a definition for women when that's just not how the term is used. It's not amenable to that sort of definition. Does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah, I understand what you're going to say. Um, the other thing to to mention is, if you could run similar parallel, um, critiques against the traditional definition of woman. So if, if what, um, the critique critique is supposed to be is to say, "Well, look, if you adopt this definition, then you'll have all these, um, then you'll have some amount of genuine trans, genuine people who say they are, uh, trans women." I don't want to beg the question by saying they are trans. Um, if you have some other people who genuinely, they're not lying or anything, they say they're trans, and they say that they're women, and on this view, it won't, they won't be women. Um, well, that's going to be, that's also there's going to be similar issues with the biological, sorry, with the traditional account for what a woman is. So there's going to be some, uh, people who genuinely say they're women who are not. And if that's, if we're allowed, if it's allowed to say, "Okay, well, that's my point, that's that's okay," then why is it not okay for the other views? The other views, and I understand why people might say it's okay because people have this idea they want to be completely inclusive, um, in principle, even if it's not going to lead to any exclusivity practically for epistemic reasons. But the point is that someone who has the other view can just make the same defense. They can just say, "Well, um, if that's not, if it's not a problem for your account, then it's not a problem for my account."

I guess I also want to ask Troy, like, and when you're making your point, like, do you think that if you have worries like this, that they're actually going to exist for, like, just a ton of commonplace, like, everyday terms? And you're going to be left, like, languageless? Like, were you going that far with what you're saying? Like, we could probably do this same kind of thing with "chair." Well, I, I do think the worry that I brought up is a persistent one. I don't think it's necessarily, like, problematic or it's going to undermine meaning or language. It's just going to, yeah, I just mean like, it's like, you, you were, it sounded like you were worrying that he is having too high of expectations of of how, uh, we be able to define terms. And I think, like, you know, we have lots of like cluster concepts, like family resemblance concepts. And I thought you were kind of getting at, like, a broader worry. Like, I thought you were just saying, you know, like, if you set a standard like, like this, wanting this kind of rigid definition, it's just going to, like, you know, eliminate like some huge amount of our language.

Well, I don't know. But yeah, if the point is that all of the terms we used, people use, have to, you know, be amenable to definitions like this, something very strict, a stage vision condition, something like that, um, I mean, that's, we'd have to adjust a lot of the way we speak, at least. And perhaps it would undermine a lot, perhaps it's going to undermine all the language. It's another question. Um, yeah. And if the bomber said, if the bar is set lower, it's just not clear how the, how the, how these things are problematic. This is the other end of that one. Yeah. Well, well, they may be problematic for other reasons, but this, it's not, it's not clear that, um, they're problematic in virtue of meeting a bar they haven't met. They don't need to make it. Like, I, I get what you're saying, even like, you mentioned sex, like, like sex, there's different definitions for what, what biological sexes and in different contexts, we can use different ones because we're trying to capture it in a different way. Um, and if we insisted, "Well, no, like, this is the one true definition of biological sex," it just wouldn't capture things in other contexts the way we want to.

Oh, wait. Are you just making a point about language being like contextual? Like, our terms can vary in meaning a bit based on the context? Well, I was kind of more making a point about the, in a way, it's kind of a point about vagueness. Um, I don't, like, I think there's going to be many cases for a lot of the terms that we're using here, be it "woman," be it, you know, some, whether that's some biological definition or something else, and be it a large range of the terms that we might use, there's going to be a lot of cases where the way we're using the term, um, and kind of the rules governing its usage don't really return a clear answer, right? Whether such a thing counts as a woman or counts as a, whatever, like a chair, if you want, um, the, the term as we're using it, if you want, if you want to use concept, um, hasn't been developed to cover cases like that, right? Like, as a hot dog, a sandwich? Yeah. And that's because, like, the idea of, um, the term "sandwich," concept associated with that term, if you want, is kind of vague. It doesn't really tell us whether such a thing counts as a sandwich. And he's okay with vagueness. It's like, I've read his paper, like, he doesn't have a problem with words being. I've read one of those papers, at least. This doesn't have a problem with words being vague. Um, but if that's, if that's the case, I just want to make sure there's no inconsistent standard being applied for, uh, for what is okay and what is not okay for being vague when it comes to terms that are, um, when it comes to this discussion, right?

Yeah, like, because when I hear, when I hear Troy making his point, I just keep generalizing it. I keep going like, "Well, you're saying for other words in this discussion, like, like man or woman or gender or sex or whatever, but like, it just, it just seems like, wait, why aren't we just saying this about a whole ton of words? Like, like sandwich, right? Like, how did, like, I mean, I have a feeling I would have a hard time defining, you know, like chair or something, right? Chairs, like a classic one. So the analog to this might be like someone's saying, you know, "Dogs are sandwiches," and you have, right, guard as prime comes in and says, "Okay, so the claim is that all hot dogs are sandwiches. Let's look at the, you know, what's your definition for sandwich such that we can infer this truth?" There's, and the kind of bar for what can count as a definition there is something, you know, quite rigorous. And, like, what are you going to do? Something, what's what's going to be your rigorous definition for sandwich? And then so you can show that everything, every hot dog counts. I mean, you can offer, yeah, yeah, you could go in a really, really unpleasant package. But it's like, it's, in my view, you'd be constructing a usage there and not reporting how it's crazy being used.

Yeah, definitely. So, um, and if the goal is just to comment on how it's being used, which it might not be, as another question, um, the goal is to report on how it's being used, then, uh, the way it's being used isn't going to admit to a precise definition. Like the questions requiring something that's not requiring something unreasonable. Um, but there's a lot more to say on this. Yeah, I don't know if you want to just continue on. Yeah, I think we do want to continue on, but I think you made a good point. Take a moment to respond to your premises, as I have plenty to say, as it seems we both do. So the issue I have here is that every, I feel as though you've misrepresented some of my views and definitions here. And what's more, all of these views are incoherent. The, the construct I often find is that people treat the biological view as though because it's the traditionally accepted one, it's the coherent one. But in reality, it's nothing but. There's a reason why Nature, the arguably one of the most respected scientific journals in the history of the species, has been putting out article after op-ed about how the idea that sex and gender are the same, or that gender should be considered an extension of a biological category, is a historical, a scientific, and just false. And the reason for that is because what you obfuscate when you refer to the biological sex version of gender is the literal millennia of arguments and inconsistencies over what exactly it means to draw that line. Of course, for most of human history, we have no idea what chromosomes or even hormone washes are. So only recently has a full understanding of the actual things that differentiate biological males and females even known to us. But even leaving that aside, long-standing have been the practices of intersex people having their genitals mutilated by doctors who want to get them cleanly fit in one category or another, biologically male or biologically female, often to the psychological detriment of those people, because those doctors are trying to force people into a binary construct that just doesn't work. And the existence of intersex people at all simply destroys the concept of a sex-based gender, because a binary is just that, a binary. You can't have a system that you claim is coherent when it's like, "Well, 99% of people fit to it." Well, 99% of people leaves out millions. And what are those millions then? Aberrant counter-examples? No, the system never functioned, and it never made that much sense, and it never survived scrutiny. By the way, it's not as though medieval French peasants were undergoing significant sociological analysis of the concept of the social construction of sex. They didn't have sociology back then. It's a fairly modern construction.

When it comes to what we talk about, like with the prescription of gender, and all statements of definition are prescriptive, by the way, because we do create these definitions. We didn't unearth them in stone tablets written by God, you know. We had to make efforts to understand them. Um, all statements of definition are prescriptive because we had to make efforts to understand them. Did I mishear that? I think that's why I'm not quite sure I get that, because oftentimes the definition is just reporting how a term is being used. Uh, I mean, yeah, yeah, I'm not, I'm not following you there, Vash. What we're really doing is trying to find what serves us best now. There is meaningful utility in understanding the difference between a biological male and a biological female. There are categorical differences that are worth respecting in a biological sense. But that doesn't encompass the wide variety of social differences between most men and most women that are largely socially ascribed. So when you have this dissonance here, where so much of what it means to be a man isn't actually what it means to be biologically male, in both the modern world and throughout history in many cultures, there are differences between those two things. We have an issue. What is a consistent, rigorous, 100% of the time, effective, applicable mode of gender? What works? The answer is nothing. It simply doesn't. It's a stupid concept, and we really shouldn't be respecting it much as a social construct at all. As long as people do respect it, we should go by the definitions that hurt people. And this move is also like, okay, so I agree that it's, we shouldn't be setting like an incredibly rigorous standard. But the fact that we can't meet a completely rigorous standard doesn't mean the concept is stupid. Um, it doesn't follow from that. I mean, we have all sorts of useful concepts that don't meet the 100% rigorous standards.

Well, the least that is, after all, why we build our definitions to serve human utility. And to that effect, you call it the self-ID view, the prescriptive view. I don't think it's inconsistent, but I stand by this: what we mean when we say "woman," a woman is a person who chooses to adhere to a broad constructed collection of values, aesthetics, forms, roles, and perspectives that we consider to be a part of what it means to be a woman. There is no consistency here, and you'll never find it. No more than you could find consistency in the definition. Notice how he, we're still not clear if this is an equivocated or non-equivocated definition, um, for what he just said before. Vash said, "How I, I thought he was just giving a kind of social definition there." Yeah, but even in the social definition, he said, "What is a woman is someone who..." I'm like, "I don't know the exact." Oh, when, when "woman" showed up in the definition, I was assuming I was like, "biological female." No, he's not. He didn't. He never said that. Yeah, that's something that, yeah, I guess it's ambiguous. Well, but, okay, but charitably, he's talking about adhering to some set of roles. We have a rough sense of what roles he might be talking about. Yeah, I, I, I grant that you can tweak it and make it better. I just, I don't know. Yeah, based on what is said, I'm still not sure. Yeah, I agree. People need to stop talking like that. Like, just like using the word "woman" when you use it again in the definition. Is that what he did there? He used it again in the definition. And then it's like, "Okay, are you using it? Are you saying people who take on the rules that are like a woman, as in as the rules, like a biological woman?" In which case, it's kind of pretty clear what's meant there. I assumed that's what he meant. But yeah, what it means to be cool. You know, find me a fine line on that point in the room where the cool, you know, the cool protons are, or the cool radiation. It just, it's not present, and you'll never find it. Um, but still, we have very strong ideas about what it means to be cool, and we argue. But the arguments are for a purpose, because finding out who's cool, what's really cool, is socially useful, as is whatever definition we arrive at, which hurts the smallest number of people, um, concerning gender. And that is why I believe trans women are women, because all definitional statements are necessarily prescriptive. And as long as we are dealing with a system that is fundamentally concerned, I do not know what he means when he says that. Yeah, deadly absurd. We should at least refer to it in ways that harm people, um, in the, uh, to the least possible extent. Like, I think what he started, he's messed up on the level here. What he's trying to say is that, um, for, for all these definitions that we have, there were prescriptive motivations behind them, or else they wouldn't get there. You can say something like that. Like, if those definitions just don't appear, they don't operate, you know, onto parchment. Someone had some motivation to write them down. Someone had some motivation to write this specific one instead of another one. But that doesn't mean that the definition itself is of the prescriptive nature. The definition could just be descriptive. It could just be reporting something. Um, it could be reporting from common usage. Um, he's confused on, like, he's confused on a bit of a, a level, meta-level here. Yeah, like, it's, it's like, maybe he wants to say something like, "We have, there's some norm that we're trying to achieve by using a term in a given way, or maybe by creating a term, or something like that." Like, I could understand that, right? If you're saying there's some motivation for it, that's like a normative kind of thing. But, yeah, the definition itself, I don't, it wouldn't be right to call that prescriptive. Is what he was saying about coolness there, kind of similar to the point that I was making? I'm not quite sure what he was saying. I can back up dealing with a system that is fundamentally constructedly absurd. We should at least argue. But the arguments are for a purpose, because finding out who's cool, what's really cool, is socially useful, as is whatever definition we arrive at, which hurts the smallest number of people, um, concerning gender. And that is why I believe trans women are women, because forms, roles, and perspectives. When we say "woman," a woman is a person who chooses to adhere to a broad constructed collection of values, aesthetics, forms, roles, and perspectives that we consider to be a part of what it means to be a woman. There is no consistency here, and you'll never find it. No more than you could find consistency in the definition of what it means to be cool. You know, find me a fine line on that point in the room where the cool, you know, the cool protons are, or the cool radiation. It's just, it's not present, and you'll never find it. Um, but still, we have very strong ideas about what it means to be cool, and we argue. But the arguments are for a purpose, because finding out who's cool, what's really cool, is socially useful, as is whatever definition we arrive at, which hurts the smallest number of people, um, concerning gender. And that is why I believe trans women are women, because all definitional statements are necessarily prescriptive. And as long as we are dealing with a system that is fundamentally constructedly absurd, we should at least refer to it in ways that harm people, um, in the, uh, to the least possible extent. Okay, charitably, I, I feel like maybe what he wants to say is something like that we should select the definition that's utility maximizing. Referring to trans people in whatever given way is utility maximizing, therefore we should refer to them in that way. Yeah. And it sounded like the way in the question, and it sounded like the way in question was like, kind of social. It sounded like you said it's about if they play certain roles. That's not like incoherent or anything.

Okay, so you started that by saying you're going to respond to my premises, but I'm struggling to see how any of this responded to any premise of any argument I gave. So let's go through some of the things you said. Um, you said all of these views are incoherent. You said there's no coherent concept. Is that, is that right? Did I get you right there? You will not find me a definition of gender that is 100% consistent and all-encompassing and has no flaws in it. There are no such things. You'll see, it can't be found. So there's not answering the question. Yeah, it's, it seems like Vash will like throw around different things like "consistent," "all-encompassing." It's like, "Okay, wait, but there's very, those are very different things. What are, what are we talking about? Are we talking about one that perfectly captures, um, public meaning or something? Or are you saying you won't find one that does that? Are you saying you won't find one that's that's consistent, as in they are like contradictory?" Those are totally different kinds of claims to make. Consistent definition of gender. So no matter who I asked, if I asked anybody, "What is a woman?" no matter what they say, you think there's going to be some sort of impossibility or contradiction or inconsistency? You will always be able to find a hole or an exception. Whether they take a biologist, that's not what he asked. See, this is why he's not answering the question. This is why I don't like talking about it because he'll just ramble here, and you have to cut him off, and you have to go, "No, look, the thing I asked was about consistency. Is there a logical contradiction?" That's what I asked. Notice how he kind of says words, he quickly throws out other words that, like, a layperson is just kind of gonna not notice are not actually answering the question. Like, what do you do there? If I asked anybody, "What is a woman?" no matter what they say, um, you think there's going to be some sort of impossibility or contradiction or inconsistency? You will always be able to find a hole or an exception. Whether it's exceptions, that's not what he asked. Like, sounds like you're talking about what he asked, but you're actually not talking about what he asked. This is where I would cut in and say, "Wait, like, answer what I said." And then people would think I'm being so mean. A biological or self-ID, a social world, or an abolitionist perspective, there will always be. Well, gender abolition is a prescription, not a description of current gender states. But no matter what a person's definition of a woman is, there is always going to be something you can pin them on.

Okay, so then it sounds like your view entails there are no women because there's no true definition of woman. No, not at all. There are plenty of social constructions that I think have meaning and serve utility, even if there are no consistencies to it. I think cool people exist, but I don't think I could ever find a single definition of cool. I think it would have been way funnier if he asked Vash to establish that all possible definitions are contradictory. It would turn into like, Vash arguing against the trans case. Like he made a statement that was like way too strong against his own side of this argument. Like, I would have totally been like, "Wait, what? Show that what the [ __ ] are you talking about?" Perfectly delineates in all, like, categories and situations between cool and uncool people.

Okay, so you said the concepts are incoherent and inconsistent, but I think what you just mean is perhaps vague. So allow for borderline cases or difficult to articulate. I think maybe that's what you mean when you say all definitions are incoherent and inconsistent. All definitions on gender, anyway. I think what you mean is they allow for borderline cases. They'll be vague in various ways, um, and that's the second thing I said, vague in various ways and hard to articulate. Difficult to articulate. It'll be hard to come up with or express or verbalize a definition that includes everyone who should be included and excludes everyone who should be excluded. So that's the view. I guess I would agree with that. Yeah, definitions are hard to come by typically, and most of them, especially in biology, are vague and admitted borderline cases. But nevertheless, they may be true. There may be true definitions, even if they're difficult to express or articulate.

You give the example, one of your arguments against them. Should we talk a bit about true definitions? Yeah, yeah. You want to go ahead? I don't know what it means. Yeah, I mean, he probably means to say like statements involving terms defined in those ways can be. That's a charitable reading. Yeah, right? Like, because obviously we don't think definitions themselves are propositional. But yeah, like the idea is some, sorry, yeah, no, I just said, right, yeah, yeah. And, um, yeah, so, but obviously we can have, we can have statements like, you know, "all trans women are women." That's like a proposition, and that can be true or false. Um, but that's going to depend obviously on how the terms are defined. What I want to be careful about is talk of of true definitions. It often sounds like we're getting into some kind of like linguistic realism. I, I don't want to be, like, uncharitable or whatever, but if we take, so we'll be charitable and assume he's not literally saying definitions are propositional. We'll don't assume either way. Don't assume either way. Well, you could be charitable, but well, no, I'm just exploring one branch. I'm not, I'm not literally saying this is what I think is more likely. I'm just, I'm just saying if we go down that branch, so like, let's like be charitable. Well, I don't even know if it's necessarily being charitable. It's like, take that interpretation for a second, where he's not literally saying definitions are propositionally saying that statements, uh, like "all trans women are women," are, uh, propositional. We have a sentence like that. Whether that's true or not is going to obviously depend on how the terms are defined. But what I'm always a little worried about is that there's some notion of what makes it true, um, or what, sorry, what makes a definition correct. "True" is the wrong term to use. Um, so not propositional, but what, what makes a definition correct such that a sentence like, um, "trans women are women" or "all trans women are women" turns out being true, right? Um, and we might, we might say different things, right? We might say that the goal is to accurately capture public meaning, right? In which case, the correct definition is the one that achieves that norm. Or we might say that our goal is just to express our own meaning, right? So I'm just, I'm cautious whenever I hear "true definitions" start to come up. I'm like, "Okay, firstly, gotta understand the definition is not a proposition itself. And then secondly, we talk about what definition is like, correct. Let's use that word instead of true. Um, we need to be clear about what norm, um, we're talking about correctness with respect to."

In that context, the biological definition of, uh, woman. Was that we didn't know about chromosomes many years ago? Well, first of all, I don't think biological sex is defined in terms of chromosomes. Um, but let's just use the example of water. Maybe we could agree that water is H2O. Um, that was true even before we knew about chemistry. That was the definition of water before anybody knew anything about chemistry, before we knew about H2O. Back when Aristotle thought water was just an element. Nevertheless, it was true. I'm sorry, this isn't true. That water has not always been H2O. Sorry, wait, back up a second, because I think he either misspoke or just said something. Phones gave the example, one of your arguments against the biological definition of, uh, woman was that we didn't know about chromosomes many years ago. Well, first of all, I don't think biological sex is defined in terms of chromosomes. Um, but let's just use the example of water. Maybe we could agree that water is H2O. Um, that was true even before we knew about chemistry. That was the definition of water before anybody knew anything about chemistry, before we knew about history. Back whenever water was just an element. It wasn't the definition. It wasn't the definition of water, um, that it was H2O. So I don't, I guess I'm, you, you might have missed poker. Maybe he misspoke. Nevertheless, he could say it was true that water was H2O, even though that wasn't our definition. Yeah, it wasn't the definition, but it was the case that water was, is H2O before we, we knew about chemistry, right? So we may be saying the same thing here, like, um, women are some biological, what is a woman is something that has some biological feature features, even if that's not historically or even now how meant by the term. Right. Nevertheless, it was true. I'm sorry, this isn't true. That water has not always been H2O. Yeah, all you have to do is cross the Mexican border, and over there, it's aqua. That's H2O. Actually, it's not, right? And we're referring to terms and definitions here. No, I'm referring to water, the stuff that fills lakes and rivers. That's the weirdest back and forth. Like, what just happened? Not water. Aqua means water. Okay. It is water. So actually, it's ugly. It's not awkward, right? And we're referring to terms and definitions here. No, I'm referring to water, the stuff that fills lakes and rivers. Many things filled lakes and rivers. Wasn't, wasn't the, the disagreement there about whether we're referring to concepts or referring to, like, like the, you know, the referent, I guess, out there in the world? And then somehow Vash's come back was that there's, it's like there's fish and rocks and rivers too. I don't see how that had anything to do with the original thing he said a second ago about concepts. But okay, um, like, is the river filled with concepts? Do you honestly don't know what I mean when I talk about water? Or are you just a little? I think you, you made a mistake before you began that argument, which is that you said, "Just because people didn't always know something, it doesn't mean that it can't be true." Even this is that can't be the case when you're talking about definitions. Things that are true have constructed premises that lead necessarily to an an outcome, a resolution. But what is he saying? Wait, what? This is why I don't like listening to things that are true. Things that are true are constructed of premises that lead. It's like listening to like [ __ ] perspective philosophy. What are you doing? You made a mistake before you began that argument, which is that you said, "Just because people didn't always know something doesn't mean that it can't be true." But that can't be the case when we're talking about definitions. Things that are true have constructed premises that lead necessarily to an outcome, a resolution. But a definition is something applied presuppositionally. I do not. I'm, I'm not. What is that true? I'm actually writing a sound thing. I think he's trying to make the point that definitions aren't true or true for that. But he's like making that point. You know, that can't be the case when we're talking about definitions. Things that are true have constructed premises that lead necessarily to an an outcome, a resolution. But things that are true have constructed premises. Well, things that are true are propositions. And when you say that, here's the quote: "Things that are constructed of premises that lead necessarily to an outcome or resolution." That is just the weirdest, like, mumbo-jumbo sentence I've ever heard. Um, things that are, like, think of what it would actually mean. Like, things that are true have premises. Are we saying that every true proposition we have, like an argument for it, or something like that? Like, is, is that what you're trying to say? And when you say they have, they have premises, like it's not like some objective, like feature of propositions that they have, like, like other propositions attach them in argument forms that they serve as premises, right? It's like we, we might place premises in an argument before a proposition, but it's not like, propositions don't have premises like this, like, like I have, like a coat or something like that. You know, a definition is something applied presuppositionally. You can say, for example, "What's that?" Wait, what? It's like every sentence is just another layer of. I have no clue what the [ __ ] he's trying. Like, any one of these could turn into a discussion. He's like, careening through like a ton of these crazy sentences at once. At the light, the spectrum of light that we see, the visible spectrum of light is something that exists outside of our perception, and that is certainly true. But how we perceive it is not existentially correct. And what's more, the definition between red, orange, and yellow is not something that you can find proven, uh, anywhere, uh, in the real world. We have to arrive at arbitrary distinctions. Um, so that's, that's just asking for water there. What does that happen? Do you not think water is H2O? But I think we've come up with a term to describe what we refer to as water. There are other cultures. I agree with you. We came up with the term to talk about water, and that term is water. And we came up with terms to talk about hydrogen and oxygen. Um, but what's here? Here's a sentence: "Water is H2O." You know what those terms mean. Now think about what idea is expressed by the words. What's the thought that's expressed? We could express it in many different languages. Now think about the thought that's expressed by that sentence. That's true, isn't it? The thought that is expressed by the sentences "Water is H2O." What do you think? And it was long before we got here. Long before humans got here, water has always been H2O. Well, ice, of course, is also H2O. But water is defined as within a given, you know, space is also water. Now, what is that? What's the relevance of saying that, like, liquid water? Yeah, but colloquially, people refer to ice as ice and water as water. And whether or not they're going to use either of those deficiencies. He asked you, "Is it true that water is H2O?" And was that true, like, in the past, presumably before we had definitions, a definition of water including H2O? It's like, why isn't he just answering that? Sorry. Well, in a way, this is kind of a fair point, though, because, um, if the statement is supposed to be like, um, identification, it might be false. Um, where I know, but like, it's become a philosophical example that it's just, yeah, but that's that point is not being expressed by saying, by by bringing up that there's ice. Well, uh, you can, if you say that ice is something that doesn't count as water under the definition, I could clear colors or stick with blah blah, and ice has that chemical structure, so it can't be that, uh, water is identical with that chemical structure when something else has the chemical structure. Um, oh, are you saying that? Wait, wait, hold on. Are you saying so, um, I mean, I still haven't heard negative. I mean, here's one thing I'll just say, like, when you're when you're answering someone's question, yeah, just answer yes or no. Or like, if there is an elaborated, this is going to come down to context. And what about heavy water? 2H2O or deuterium oxide, which is referred to as water and is in fact a type of water, isotope. Uh, but it's not in fact H2O. There's an extra hydrogen atom holding on there, making the substance denser. That's that's more so there's no, there's no extra hydrogen atom, um, on there. So heavy water, I mean, you said it right the first time, at 2H2O, which is what heavy water is. It's, there's two deuteriums instead of two hydrogens. Um, a deuterium is just a type of hydrogen that has, um, a neutron and a proton instead of this proton. Yeah, an extraneous norm. Normally hydrogen has zero neutrons. It has a proton and an electron. But a deuterium has one proton and one neutron and one electron. Um, and so, uh, deuterium, uh, is heavier. It's, so the heavy water, that's why it's called heavy water. It's denser. But he said that it has an extra pro, extra hydrogen. It doesn't. It is, it's not, it's all deuterium. Hydrogen. It's hot. It's a, yeah, it's a type of isotope of hydrogen. It's a nicer. But yeah, it's actually, here's all said, isotope of water. It's not an isotope of ours. It's a water that has an isotope. But we don't represent it with an H, right? We do represent 42. Oh, okay. Well, then he's, yes. All right. Well, I tried. Sorry, Vash. This is, take me back to chemistry class. But, um, did you say deuterium? Is that right? Is that heavy water? If that's just an isotope, is it an isotope of oxygen that makes that? If that's an isotope, it's still oxygen, and it's still H2O, and that is still H2O. That's still there. That's a different chemical compound than water. Certainly, if people wanted the effect, it was a difference. It's a molecule. It's not. Okay. It's not a compound. It's a molecule. But it's, it's also not different. It's the same molecule. Um, I mean, my question, when we say H2O, are we saying any isotope of hydrogen? Two of those with any isotope? Yeah, any H2O broadly. Yeah, H2O can be any isotope. Um, and H2O has subsets. You can have, so within the set of things that are H2O, you can have water, you can have heavy water, which is with two to two, uh, deuteriums instead of two hydrogens, or you can have, uh, tritium. It can have the two neutrons and a proton. Um, somewhat open question when someone says water's H2O. I'm just talking about standard leaves in chemistry. Yeah, okay. So if, if someone is excluding deuterium when they say that, then it is not true that what something is water if and only if it's H2O. Do you want to add, though, that like, whether this is in fact chemically accurate is sort of irrelevant to the point? Like, let's just presumably there are some claims like this that are true, were true despite us not, like, knowing them analytically or something like that, right? Like, that's the point being made. It's not the specific chemical dispute that matters, right? That's why I think it has survived as a philosophical example, even though there's like some problems with like C fibers firing, other things that have survived, even though it's like, yeah, you might say it's not the real point and that, you know, why get into those details? But then you might remember that we're with Avi, not water. But let's say they chose the term "waterium." I don't know if scientists come up with "waterium." If they wanted to come up with a term like that to describe it, they would have a significant taxonomical distinction to refer to a different molecular composition. But we refer to it as water. You might say it's trans water, a bit of a difference, but fundamentally very similar.

Okay, so you're resisting me on the claim that water is H2O. Um, let me try a different one. How about resisting you on definitional prescriptivism? I think that we have not prescribing any definitions. I'm just saying, "Water is H2O." True or false? And it sounds like you're reluctant. Yeah, I don't even understand what it's supposed to mean to be a prescriptivist about definitions. Like, what the [ __ ] is a sentence like that supposed to even mean? I think he's saying that like, um, when we're offering definitions here, we're deciding like how the term should be used or something like that. Okay, uh, at least something to do with guiding our future usage of that term, perhaps. Yeah, you're thinking he's, he like ascended to that view earlier and now it's like, like rejecting it. I don't even [ __ ] know. Please. I agree. The water, and we, we refer to H2O as water globally. Yeah, of course. I'm fine. So water is H2O, and it was H2O long before humans came along. Another example. Wasn't the concept back then? I know, but nevertheless, water was there. Actually, water's never been a concept. Water's always been a molecule. We have a concept of water, but the concept is not itself water. But our understanding of it, and the differentiations that we make when we distinguish it from things like heavy water, these are socially constructed, after all. You just said it's still fundamentally water. But we're talking about a different molecular shape now. That's because you've arbitrarily branched these two within a category that, because there's a relationship between them, but that's a social phenomenon. The universe doesn't give a [ __ ] whether you refer to heavy water as water or some other, you know, molecule entirely. It's utterly indifferent to your perception of reality. But we still choose to prescribe. And that, I think, a lot of people when it comes down to definitional games, you know, they start doing this, "Well, these things are these things," and, you know, we have a lot of power over that. Some animals are different species, but we distinguish what makes something a different species. The taxonomy for.

What refers to species differentiation? We made that up. We didn't. We invented it. We didn't discover it. Yeah, so I agree with you that species are, um, the distinction between species is less clear. H2O is a compound. It didn't, it doesn't have, it doesn't have an extra hydrogen atom. He's wrong about that. Um, but he's right when he says it's a compound. That, that is standard. Compound is just anything. Yeah, well, not anything. I mean, you can have like O2 is not a compound. It's, that's just a molecule because it has only one element. But, right, so any, any molecule with more than one element, yeah, is a compound. But, but he's incorrect when he says that it's, it, but that it has an extra hydrogen on it. Um, heavy water doesn't have an extra. In chemistry, so that's why, um, no surprise, I'm focusing on physics and chemistry.

How do we feel about the claim that gold is atomic number 79? I wish there was a bit more direction here in this discussion. It's kind of like, like going all over. Would you agree with that, or are you skeptical of that too? I, I think that's how we refer to it. As sure, I'll take your word, but I don't have the, the, the periodic table. Yeah, well, um, I'm benefiting from the fact that this is a bit of a commonly used philosophical example, so that's really why I know that. Um, but yeah, gold, that term in English refers to a certain element that has 79 protons. It's atomic number 79. So gold has been around for a long time, long before the word gold came on the scene. Gold, gold predates the word gold. So, yeah, this is just supposed to be an example of a definition that's true. And we went down a rabbit hole a little bit.

What do you mean by true? If we had taken another definition, if we had created another definition to say gold, and the term gold referred to a collection of, uh, of elements, so let's say gold and lead, and the term gold was something people use to refer to both, that definition would be as true as the one we used today for gold. They would have simply made the choice to include two different elements in their definition, just as you included standard water and the isotope of heavy water in the definition of water. That's just a definitional game. As long as they distinguish between the two subcategories of gold and iron with their respective atomic weights, the singular term, like how we have terms for metals, uh, we have terms for, uh, for the, um, the gases, the inert gases. Help me out, you know more than me. The, um, talk about the noble gases. The noble gases, yes. We invented those distinctions. These are the terms. The terms, yes, because the distinctions are only meaningful when we notice them. The universe doesn't care whether or not we think there's something meaningful or significant about noble gases versus the other stuff. But there's all those differences. There is a different. Oh, so we saw the differences. The differences were. This is actually that's a problem. Then we came along. The first question by Bosh. This is, this is, this is good. What do you mean when you say the definition is true? Um, because he really should be saying, it seems to me that that statement is true. But that's not the definition. The statement that gold is, uh, 79 is not a definition. That's just a claim about gold. Um, I mean, and if it were a definition, that gold is whatever is atomic number, then that would be a definition and not a claim. So, I, I don't know. Um, it's not either way, it's not really right to say that that's a true definition. It's either not a definition or it's not true. Yeah. And then there's the question of like, if we are more charitable and we take true to mean just correct with respect to some norm. What norm are we talking about there? Long and decided. You know, what we're going to name these differences. We're going to assign some names to these different elements. Agreed. Yeah. Okay, now I'm trying to remember why, why we started down this rabbit hole. Um, I didn't get very far through the things you said. Oh, it's, I just, the first thing I brought up was you had said all these views are incoherent. But then we kind of clarified that what you meant was, um, any, any of the popular views of women that have been proposed are vague and difficult. Just to be clear, I don't really think we clarified. I think that you offered a very charitable interpretation of Bosh. It wasn't even clear if he signed off on it or not. I'm sure he would have, just like, probably gotten annihilated if you just asked him to spell out the contradiction or admit that he misused the term inconsistent. I bet you he would like not back off the term. But also, um, yeah, I think, I think that would have been kind of a disaster goal to articulate. And then I guess I was just trying to point out that, um, a definition might exist. I don't like to let people off the hook for something like that. Someone says like, all these are inconsistent. I'm not gonna like push them on it. Realize they have no clue what they're saying. Push them again. Realize they still have no clue. And then go, well, maybe I'll just interpret them in this way, and they don't really even clearly sign off on it. It's like, okay, well, no, you like totally gave them the out. Like, I mean, maybe this guy's just nicer than me, but I would, I would definitely be looking for like, you know, concession on that first point. Either that, no, it's not a true statement, or that, you know, you meant something else. I, I just don't think he has debate experience. That's all. Sure. Yeah. There's a distinction between like, whatever his skills are and like knowing philosophy or wherever he has training. First debating, not the same thing.

It hasn't been articulated. Um, so like, rewind before humans came on the scene. I would have thought water was H2O, even before anyone was around to name water or to realize its chemical essence. Um, so I was just disagreeing with that point about, um, how definitions work. I don't think definitions, um, properly understood, are linguistic entities. I think there are facts out there in the world. But anyway, key point here. Wait, what definition? Let's try and play it again. I think he said definitions are not linguistic entities. There are facts out there in the world. I, definitions are not problems. It does. That's why I keep like, sometimes I worry I'm just being crazy. But it's why I always worry when I hear words like true, like true definition. I'm like, you just, we gotta be really clear about that because it's so easy to slip. The spooky realism. It's chemical essence. Um, so I was just disagreeing with that point about how definitions work. I don't think definitions, um, properly understood, are linguistic entities. I think there are facts out there in the world. But anyway, I have to challenge that. There are facts in the world. But definitions are categorically linguistic. We create them because we identify differences and things that we see in the world. The facts of the world. There are many. The spectrum of light that we consider to be blue contains within an infinite range of potential blue values, but we don't have an infinite number of names to describe them. There may be a set number of facts in the world, but the categories we use to separate those facts are entirely up to us and our perceptions. So another example of this before would be like in terms of gender prescription. There are cultures historically that have had third genders for a long time. Often the third gender is a biologically male, uh, a gender class that adopts roles that are much more similar to the biologically female. There are non-human animals that do this as well. You know, it's not, it's not unique to us. Um, and in that case, there's a separate category. And maybe they felt clearly, they felt that the categorical difference between these more feminized biological males and the regular biological males was something worth distinguishing in a gender-oriented taxonomical sense. But that's not any more right or wrong than what we do. They just see different meaningful differences and apply different terms. So you can't make these objective arguments about terms. Terms may refer to the facts of the world, but we draw the borders. The land on earth might be, uh, uh, you know, um, objective, but the borders of the nations that we build over them, those we rule on paper. We just have to be, you know, considerate of human need when we're describing what here we actually want to build. Yeah. Okay. Gosh, there was a, there's a lot to disagree with him there, but I'm trying to be, um, trying to be selective or efficient with our time here. Um, maybe let me just ask you this. Um, it sounded like in your response to me, you raised some objections to, um, the biological view that I expressed that women are adult human females. And you brought up, well, you thought you said, you know, we haven't always known about chromosomes. Again, I don't think that chromosomes figure into the definition of biological sex. You also mentioned intersex people. So it sounded like you were trying to argue against the, the reality of males and females. But then at other times, you say, you know, there are other cultures that have a third gender that are biologically male. And I think you might agree that there are animals that are biologically male and biologically female. So I guess, just let me, let me get clear on your view. Do you think that there are males and females? Of course, out there in the world. I believe it's bimodal. There are males and females, and most people will fall pretty solidly on either end of the spectrum. But I do feel there are a significant number of people who are closer to the middle in terms of intersex expression. Oh, well, if you also think that there are adults in humans, then, um, what exactly is wrong with the definition that women, women are adult human females? You believe in adults, you believe in humans, you believe in females. Is it just you think there are counter-examples to this definition? Is that the problem? My belief in the value of a definition, it should be said first, is not determined by its consistency. There are consistent definitions that are still morally wrong. For example, um, the Nazis grouped humans into taxonomical categories which at times were consistent, usually because they were very blunt and lacking in nuance. They were just monstrous and unnecessary. They were suitable to the Nazis in a political sense because they allowed for the dehumanization of large groups of people. But I don't think we review them in retrospect based on their consistency. Like, oh, well, they say any of the descendants of the 12 tribes of Israel are subhuman. Ah, well, that's easy to find out with 23andMe. Of course not. So I just, I'm not saying you're doing that. I'm only saying that my concern here, first and foremost, is not one of consistency. Even if the biological model was perfectly consistent, I would oppose it. But it's not, um, because chromosomal abnormalities are all it takes to throw this up for a loop. Especially because when you transition, you know, you do change your sex to an extent, not entirely, but certainly there are categories of sex that are altered. When you have chromosomes of a certain designation, it determines the hormone washes that you receive, both during puberty and, um, in the womb. And that determines the shape your body takes, the genitalia you form, the ways in which your body develops. But if you have a trans woman who took puberty blockers before she had puberty, then transitioned medically, you, a person who is, let's say, a doctor, would not call them a biological male in terms of the risk of breast cancer, prostate cancer, a wide variety of bone and heart related conditions. This is not a person who'd be going to the doctor and saying, yep, I'm a male, and the doctor would go, yep, your problems are male problems. It just, it just, it wouldn't. So if that's the case, you know, where does that line fall? What about people who have the XXY chromosomal abnormality, or people whose Y chromosome doesn't sufficiently inhibit the development of the X chromosomal female hormones they receive? These categories are not called for. And that's why traditionally doctors have just cut off the aberrant genitalia of intersex people, or try to force people into roles with any of these like sex definitions.

Do you think he didn't say? And I thought he asked him a question, didn't he ask him if he thinks there's a counterexample to the biological definition or something like? I might be a little bit cares about answering questions. Like, it's just so weird. Yeah, yeah. Your counterexample? Like, I don't even know he has him. What he thought was wrong with the example with that definition? And I think one of the things he said could be wrong was, do you have a counterexample to it? He offered that up too. Like, for example, do you have an inconsistency or a countdown? He said, he said something like that. I can go back in a second. I'm sure he did. I think we've watched some of your videos. I think what was saying is that it's like, it's consistent and you could use the word that way, but it doesn't capture. Yeah, there's going to be no, no. I think, I think his concern with it is something moral or something. Oh, that too. Yeah. Um, a may not capture and B, there could be, um, moral reasons to not use it. Maybe it's just saying it's like, it doesn't give utility. I, I just, I hate how some people speak. Like, if, if the question, what he asked, what he's like, here, we just want to play it back. Oops. Breast cancer. But if you have in the certain deadly. But it's, it's not, I was just not with the twenty, like allowed for. They were just categories. Morally wrong. You said you think there are counterexamples to this. You believe in humans. With the definition that women, adults, and humans, then, um, what exactly is wrong with the definition that women, women are adult human females? You believe in adults, you believe in humans, you believe in females. Is it just you think there are counterexamples to this definition? Is that the problem? My belief in the value of a definition, it should be said first, is not determined.

Okay, and like, it just turns into this massive tirade. It's like, why not just be like, I think the problem with that definition is that it decreases utility. You're like, okay, great. Why? And then you can explain why. Like, just, it's like, it reminds me kind of demon llama, just these long, rambling answers that seem like they might be on point because he says words that were in the question at some point in his response, but it's not really clear. And you're kind of left guessing whether it was really a response. Like, like he's just asking you, what do you think is wrong with the definition? You think there's a counterexample? And it's like, we're, this is supposed to be an answer to that. And by its consistency. There are consistent definitions that are still morally wrong. For example, um, so we know it's not consistency. That's, that's one thing. He grouped humans into taxonomical categories which at times were consistent, usually because they were very blunt and lacking in nuance. They were just monstrous and unnecessary. They were suitable to the Nazis in a political sense because they allowed for the dehumanization of large groups of people. But I don't think we review them in retrospect based on their consistency. Like, oh, well, they say any of the descendants of the 12 tribes of Israel are subhuman. Ah, well, that's easy to find out with 23andMe. Of course not. So I just, I'm not saying you're doing that. I'm only saying that my concern here, first and foremost, is not one of consistency. Even if the biological model was perfectly consistent, I would oppose it. But it's not, um, because chromosomal abnormalities are all it takes to throw this up for a loop. Especially because when you transition. Okay, so he's saying, okay, so he's saying he has a moral problem, but then he's also saying there's an inconsistency. He's saying if it was consistent, I would have a problem with it, but it's not consistent. No, no, he's, he's, I, I thought what I thought that he was just, what that's what he just said. He said, even if, even if there was, even if it was consistent, I would have a problem with it, which would be a moral one. Uh, but it's not consistent. Oh, yeah. Well, no, I mean, he was, he was asked about what the problem is. Do you think there's a counterexample? And for, for a long time, what I was hearing him say there was just, well, the problem isn't about consistency. Yeah, yeah. No, yeah. And from what he's saying now, it sounds like he has a moral problem, but now he's saying, um, even if it was, but he's now he's saying it as a further point, it isn't consistent. He's, okay, I didn't, I didn't, I didn't catch. Yeah, like, like it's okay. So we got that. The problem isn't about consistency. But maybe he's also saying it. We'll see. But it's not, uh, not one of consistency. Even the biological model was perfectly consistent, I would oppose it. But it's not, um, because chromosomal abnormalities are all it takes to throw this up for a loop. Especially because when you think about the model is not consistent. Okay, so his problem wouldn't, isn't about consistency, but it's inconsistent. So I still, still don't know what the answer to the question is, right? The question is, what is the problem? It's like, okay, we know that it's not about consistency. And now you're going on about whether it's consistent or not. But what it's like to answer something. Reading into it, he hasn't explicitly said it, but for my reading into it, it sounds like he has some moral problem with it. Yeah. But don't, I'm not saying that he's saying anything that doesn't make sense, right? Now, like what he's saying here might, when you condense it down, be fine. I'm just, I'm, I'm kind of questioning like, why would someone speak like this? It's just so hard. No, no, no, no. Of course. Yeah, like it's very, like you have to rewind and parse it out just to understand, like, just to get a grasp. But trying to understand what you said, of course, it's, it's like, uh, like, I don't know what else to say, but it's like it's grade 10 writing an essay. Like it's like filled with words and it's, it's, it's like it's so like voluminous, but just nothing in there. Like, come on. I, I just, there's something frustrating to me about like, I think about how I would answer that question, right? It's like, what's, what's your problem? Do you think there's a counterexample? I'd be like, okay, um, I do think there's a counterexample, or I don't. I would just answer that and be like, my problem is this. Like, why? It's just so much better to have a focused conversation like that where you clearly answer something. It's so bad for discussion to just go on these long tirades about like partially related things. The question, like maybe it's good if you want to create a general kind of mist around all your statements that you can always kind of like, you know, evaporate into when necessary. I guess that's maybe an uncharitable reason for thinking someone might talk like this, but I can't help but speculate. You know, you do change your sex to an extent, not entirely, but certainly there are categories of sex that are altered. When you have chromosomes of a certain designation, it determines the hormone washes that you receive, both during puberty and, um, in the womb. And that determines the shape your body takes, the genitalia you form, the ways in which your body develops. But if you have a trans woman who took puberty blockers before she had puberty, then transitioned medically, you, a person who is, let's say, a doctor, would not call them a biological male in terms of the risk of breast cancer, prostate cancer, a wide variety of bone and heart related conditions. This is not a person who'd be going to the doctor and saying, yep, I'm a male, and the doctor would go, yep, your problems are male problems. It just, it just, it wouldn't. So if that's the case, you know, where does that line fall? What about people who have the XXY horizontal? Now, now he's asking a question for melody, or people who's like, I have no doubt in my mind, if you just stopped Bosh right now and asked him, do you remember what the question was? He would not know. Right? Like that's just so obnoxious to me. I wish other people found that equally annoying. I'm sure some do. Ozone doesn't sufficiently inhibit the development of the X-chromosomal female hormones they receive. These categories are not. And like people, people act like you're being such an ass when you get frustrated at them for doing this, but like, I'm not interested in having a conversation where the other guy's just riffing. Like, I'm trying to actually interact. Right? I don't want riffing with like, occasionally touching the things I say. So I just want you to directly think about and reply to the thing I said. I don't want the extended, you know, partially related riff.

And that's why traditionally doctors have just cut off the aberrant genitalia of intersex people or try to force people into roles that best made them to the binary. It just doesn't always work. Okay, yes. Um, I have watched some of your videos and I've heard your views on biological sex. And, um, I think it's a commonly held view. I love sex. What biological sex consistent? Um, I think it's based on a misunderstanding. I don't think that biological sex, um, is defined in terms of chromosomes or genitals or hormone levels. And you can see that by just considering the full range of the plant and animal kingdom and how, um, the sexes are realized across the plant and animal kingdom. And you'll see that there's no, no facts about genitals figuring the definition, nothing about hormones, nothing about chromosomes. Um, so we can talk about that a little more if you'd like and try to get clear on what biological sex really is. But I just kind of happen to point out the definition. It'll take, um, that it's based on large and small gametes. Um, the small gametes are sufficient a criteria for male, and large gametes are sufficient to see criteria for females. He would take that would be it. By he, you mean, uh, doctor? Regardless. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I argued was on all these proposals. It turns out that not all trans women are women. On every proposal, it is false that all trans women are women. So I'm not really in a position that I need to defend the biological view. If you want to beat up on it and criticize it and reject it, okay. All I said, but oh, wait, was if this is what woman means, then not all trans women are women. And I guess we agree on that. Um, but I thought it would have been more pressing, given your views, to try to defend the charges that all those other proposals also entail that not all transfers. Yeah. So to, to a little tip to Bosh, you have to remember what you said before, right? Like if you ask the question, it gets a big rambling non-answer. It's very powerful to just remind the other person that like, I asked you a question, right? It really does convey clearly and fairly because it's actually what's happening that the other person is just kind of riffing at you and they're forgetting what you even asked like halfway through talking, right? So when someone does that, it's like, well, you can tell, like he's just kind of reacting freshly to what Bosh said. It's very easy when someone rambles at you like that to forget the context. Like halfway through, it's very hard to hang on the whole time to at what point is the answer to my question coming, right? It's almost like if you start really, really thinking about the riffs he gives you, it's going to be almost impossible to remember your question. So you get kind of forced with this like dilemma of like, do you hold the question in your head? This is what I do. Hold the question in your head and then either cut them off or go back to it the second they're done talking, or do you hear out their ramble and then end up on some riff that's like unrelated to the topic? It's like, I don't know. He kind of [ __ ] either way. I'd rather have people, um, actually like respond to me. So, you know, I'd advise this guy to remember what he asked before and then re-ask it instead of like just falling into Bosh's riffs. Because notice it's an infinite escape hatch, right? Like Bosh can just do this anytime you ask anything, right? You need like a countermeasure to that. And the countermeasure is just staying on topic and remembering your question, asking it again, not getting lost in the riff. And as far as I can tell, you haven't tried to do that yet. So descriptive, would you like to talk about biological sex, or should we move on to something a little more relevant? Uh, well, the biological sex thing, if it's something you feel the need to defend, we can. I assume this is your, you're the belief, of course, that a woman is defined by biology. Um, if you are asking me, what does the word ordinarily mean? Then I think those, um, trans-inclusive philosophers that I quoted are correct. That is what the word ordinarily means. I think that's what it ordinarily means. What do you think? What does it mean to be a woman? What does it mean to be a woman? Well, I, if you would ask me, what does it mean to be a computer or a television or, I'm just pointing at things in the room. I would take that question to be asking, what do those words ordinarily mean? Yeah, I was about to say, like, what's, what's the distinction? When you say, what does it mean? Well, meaning is always like with respect to someone. Someone's like intention, right? Like, what does it mean to this person or to that person or to this group of people, right? So asking, what does it mean? It's like, if, just, just saying the question, what does it mean? As if that's, that's adding more clarity. Like most people just interpret that as, what does it ordinarily mean? Okay, what do most people take it to mean? Right? If, if I say like, are you asking, what do, what does it ordinarily mean? And you reply by going, no, what does it mean? It's like, well, if, when you say mean without further qualification, you're not talking about the general meaning. I don't know what the [ __ ] you're getting at. I don't know what do you mean. I have my own private language. I communicate. I communicate using a public language that we all share. And so if you ask me what a word means, I would, I mean, and I didn't know, I might check the dictionary to see what this word means. It's entirely informed by tradition. You're, you're aware, of course, of the fact that the majority of Americans today believe in accepting the identity of trans people by a slim margin. In 20 years, my view will be more popular than yours. Will you switch over then? Are you going to defer entirely to what you see in the dictionary? Then it would no longer be true that's what the word ordinarily means. So, okay, well, then sure, then that's fine by me. If we're here, if we're here to make prescriptions, then sure. Um, I haven't made any prescriptions. You define some descriptions of others. All definitions are fought for from the from the definition of soil in the books of geologists to the definition of skyscraper in the book of civil engineers. Everything is fought for. And I will fight for the definition. Um, the prescriptive view that trans women are women, because there is harm and inconsistency present in other definitions. Can you, can you tell me what the definition is that you defend? Sure. I think the woman, like the concept of woman is an arbitrary and vague collection of aesthetics, values, roles, uh, a bunch of social constructions that are typically tied to sex, uh, that just sort of float in the public conscious. They vary depending on where you are. What a woman is expected to be in the Bible Belt South is very different from what they're expected to be in like Seattle or whatever. Hold on a second. So when you said in the Bible about South, there's something that a woman is expected to be. Can you tell me who it is that's expected to be this way? What did women mean in that sentence? Whoever they would consider to be a woman, which overwhelmingly would be biologically female people. Whoever they would consider to be a woman. Um, and what did women mean there? When you said, like, let's check what they would consider to be a woman. What do you think they already said? Biologically female. You don't need a prompt. I already said it. Biologically female. Yes. Oh, adult human females, you mean? Well, we are talking about adult humans, I assume. Okay, so you're saying what woman means is it's this collection of aesthetics, rules, and perspectives, um, that are associated with women. And by women, you mean adult human females. Yes. Typically the role of. That's crazy. Yeah, no, that's not even that doesn't mean that it's prescriptive. Or to give another example, you're going to see types of music preferences which are heavily associated with people's racial groups or nationalities. He just needs to be more clear about what he's saying. Like, sometimes it sounds like he's buying into just the social stuff. I've heard him do the regressive stuff, but yeah, this is like way more in reasonable territory. But that doesn't mean that there's an inherent, uh, prescriptive association there. Only that circumstantially, these arbitrary associations came to be. Or to put it another way, the type of music that you're going to hear in Thailand hit, like number one charts, is pretty different what you're going to hear, like number one charting over here in America. But that doesn't mean that people over there are biologically inclined to that music as opposed to ours. It's due to proximate bias. People in that area of the world listen to that music because that's the music they have. And because that's the music they have, they pass it down to other people who are around who happen to be people in that part of the world. And likewise, you know, you have an example here of woman, a sort of broad definition that we do prescribe to biological females. But that's precisely my argument. See, I'm a, a libertarian here in the classical sense. I don't believe it's right to impart roles and responsibilities onto a person based on their birth genitalia. It's very weird to me. I'm not looking for an end to sex. Biological sex is always going to be a category we have to deal with, you know, for the foreseeable future at least. What I'm against is the idea that some arbitrary hormone washes you received while in the womb should decide a massive category of expectations and behaviors that are assigned to you afterwards. And that's what I'm talking about prescriptively. I don't think we should be saddled with that. True identity should be self-described, which in this case, I believe they are. So this sounds like a view that I, that was expressed in one of the quotations I provided in my slides. It sounds like you're giving voice to a social role view, according to which to be a woman is to, as you said in that quotation, um, want to internally and externally adhere to a certain set, a certain set of aesthetics, rules, perspectives, etc. That's what it is to be a woman. Um, to want to or to actually occupy, um, a certain social role or a certain social position. It's associated with women. I don't think it makes you a woman though. Oh, but I had asked you what your definition of woman is. What makes someone a woman? That's, I thought you had answered that, but now we're going to get a different answer. These go into what woman is. The concept of woman in my prescriptive view is simply a person who prefers to be associated with that broad range of archetypes. Any person who prefers to be associated. Right, yeah. That's a social review. So what do you make of my argument that on that definition, not all trans women will be women? No, they would pref, they want to be associated with that broad range of archetypes. But that's what means identity is dependent on fulfilling those roles. Well, not all trans women, not all trans women will want to be associated with those aesthetics and rules and perspectives or whatever. But they are nonetheless, by choosing to refer to themselves as women. Do you, do you want to adhere to these expectations and rules and so on? I would have thought it's totally possible and probably actual for some trans women to say, no thanks. I mean, some women, some women say no thanks, right? Some cis women. Um, so then won't it follow then on this view that you're expressing that not all trans women are women? No, because they still subscribe to the archetype. The archetype nearly contains the collection of social values that we associate with women. There are cis and trans women who, for example, want to be women but fervently reject elements of what women are expected to be. But this doesn't make them any less of women. I'm only saying they've still chosen to associate themselves with that archetype, much as I choose to associate myself with the archetype of being a man. And there are roles associated with being a man that I'm not interested in adopting or fulfilling. Okay, so there's this archetype, archetypal woman. And I guess if I'd asked you, what is this archetypal woman? Archetypal woman is, you would say, where's a dress and where's pink? No, no, it's just, what would you say? It's a collection of categories. I don't think there could be one archetype of women because there are so many. Uh, I was gonna be really viciously stereotypical. No, no, there can't be one woman because these concepts are arbitrary and stupid. For example, well, when you say transfer and subscribe to the archetype, what is the archetype? The archetype is defined by its name. And all we tied to it. To give you an example, a woman, a stereotypical woman can be a very maternal, motherly, kind, gentle person. But they can also be like a Jersey Shore, like bratty, mall-hopping, selfish type. Now, those are two archetypes of woman and femininity that are completely contradictory. You can't simultaneously be calm, caring, and motherly while also being, you know, selfish, [ __ ], and like, you know, money-grubbing. Those don't fit. But nonetheless, they're both considered archetypes of femininity. So it's about associating yourself with the collection of categories rather than representing the singular archetype of those categories. Okay, so you had said a woman is anyone who subscribes to the archetype of woman. And then when I said, what is this archetype? You said, is it, is it defined by the name woman? I guess the collection of all we associate with it. Yeah. And we associate many things with woman, very few of which, I think, have to do with biology. There's a whole lot of social crap on top that you kind of layer over there, you know. Um, there was another quotation I didn't include where you said something like this, and a way to avoid the circularity worry with a self-ID version of, um, a self-ID definition of women is to say that, uh, woman is anyone who identifies as obvious. I am glad that the self-ID stuff is like coming up more and more. We did tell people that what's gonna happen. We totally predicted this would happen. We did check back in the history now. Hopefully, I, I don't think also, I don't, this guy doesn't know us. So this wasn't like a self-fulfilling prediction. Like he didn't know, see our [ __ ] and then just observing like, oh, I'm gonna run this argument. Um, it's just we observed more people saying, we predicted, hey, this is, this is a problem. It's a huge problem with the self-ID view. It's gonna come up and people are gonna get wrecked in debates on this. Oh, imagine demon llama debating this. Someone who commits more fully to that kind of stuff. It would be like, well, actually, I guess maybe I don't know if we got her out of it or not. That it sounded like it, but did she really get it? I don't know. But yeah, there's people who just get completely destroyed because they do commit hard. Like Bosh is sort of, he, he seems to waffle around on what he means. But at least a few minutes ago, he gave like a reasonable enough death and then mention the word. Don't use the word. Just mention the word. Anyone who is willing to say things like, I am a woman. Um, anyone who's willing to, um, yeah, this guy's word to this is aware of the use-mention distinction. When you use an equivocal, um, definition, so then you avoid the circularity worry. But as I said, I zooped, I zoomed around. Well, as I said in my opening statement, if this definition isn't circular, then whatever you, whatever the definition means, um, it's going to exclude some trans women. And see that, that I don't know about. So I think he's talking about trans women as they are in the minds. This is the same problem. This is just going to be the same issue with what we said at the beginning of the video. It's the same critique. Yeah, I don't, I don't think. I think he's trying to make his his point a little too strong here. Like, yes, if it's equivocally defined, woman is someone who defines this woman, that's a use of the term woman and the same term woman, right? Then you get this regression and it's meaningless. And if it's meaningless, that does not mean it's false. It actually can't be false. It's just good that it's meaningless, which is bad enough. Then on the other branch, you should just be saying something like, you know, well, I guess you can, you can do the branch where it just is a mention. And in that case, I gave like, kind of reductio as you get with something like that before. Um, or you might say maybe it's used in some other way, but it's, it's a usage nonetheless. And in that case, it's just not clear what that usage is and whether it's capturing, um, public meaning. Yeah, that that would be the best. Yeah, that's the response that should be given. But, but he's taking a responsible. If it's some other way, then it's just the not all trans women. It tells that not all trans women are women, right? And there's a level of ambiguity around even that statement. All trans women are women. He, like, if he's a philosophy prof, he really should be being clear about this kind of stuff. He probably understands the distinction. If you point out to him like, I mean, you don't want to be analyzing a sentence like, all trans women are women, where it's not clear if inside of the sentence, when you say, not all trans women are women, you're, you're talking about on the definition you've given, or in the minds of the people who would want, um, a certain group to be trans, right? Yeah, it seems like you, you should have made that separation really explicit because like, if we take, well, we've already kind of been through this, but like, yeah, if we take the, um, interpretation where you're using the term under the definition that you're talking about, like by the biological one or the social one, on some of these, you'll get the sentence being trivially true and not false. And then on the other hand, if you're saying, not all trans women are women, where trans women is understood as referring to the group of people that, you know, Bosh would typically want to capture, whoever exactly those may be. Well, if that's what you, you mean, you should just be clear about that in the sentence, right? So people kind of understand that that level of ambiguity is like frustrating for me. Here's how it's gonna work in this case. Um, this, this definition you just provided is going to, going to make it so that being a woman is an English-speaking affair. So there are no women outside of the English-speaking world. You would have to be familiar with the word woman attributed to yourself. And so an implication is there are no non-English speaking women. Um, and there were no women before English came along. Um, I find those to be pretty implausible implications. I think that the category of woman didn't really exist in the form that it does as much as six months ago, let alone all of human history. You know, the, the archetype I'm referring to this broadcast. It's like he thinks he thinks that a proposition doesn't have a true value at a time before humans have a definition for a term. Like that's just the weirdest thing to say, right? Like obviously something like water is H2O. It's like obviously that was true before we had a definition of water, right? We know what that proposition means. We can look at that and we can say that was true, you know, 2,000 years ago or some [ __ ] right? Bosh seems like confused by that. He seems to think that that like things like, like, you know, like gravity exists, like, but that's not a true proposition before we have, um, meaning to the terms. Now it would be true that if we currently weren't assigning meaning to those words, then it wouldn't even be a proposition at all, right? We can look at it now, understand the meaning and say that it was true in the year like 10 or something, right? Is that I referred to as like the woman that we, that women associate themselves with? You're right, it may not exist to people who don't speak English. But by the time they learn, there will be a different one. And it's different in every culture, in every neighborhood, and every society, at every point in time. It will constantly shift. I don't think there's an objective definition here. But if you're looking for some truly exclusionary stuff, I would agree that any person who was raised by wolves in the forest and had never come into contact with human society could not be described as having a gender. I think their gender would have to be a some kind of, uh, recursive, um, it would have to be like a product of their engagement with social roles and expectations that they would have to develop, even if you could easily identify their sex. But that's the only case I think where a human has no contact with gender roles because they're pretty ubiquitous all over. We've got to jump into the Q&A shortly. So maybe, oh goodness, time flies when we have fun. Okay, well, let me just respond quickly to a couple of things you said. You said, um, it seemed like you were willing to concede that the category of women didn't exist six months ago. You said, not this category. Yeah. So then it sounds like you agree with me that your view does entail there are no women outside of English-speaking contexts. And in fact, you might even agree there were no women eight months ago. Um, so these are these are surprising implications to say the least. With respect, wait, if I may, with respect, not to get into linguistic traps here, because the concept changes. That doesn't mean that there weren't equivalents across time, culture, and society. German have a concept of Frau, you know, the Spanish of mujer, whatever the [ __ ] the Spanish term for for a woman is, you know, um, I don't literally mean the arc of the concept, you know, the, the social collection popped into existence here. But you're right, because depending on what word you use to refer to women, whatever word you have for that collection, who would you be referring to there? You said, whatever word you used to refer to women, who would you be referring to there? Well, anyone. Any, anyone. Yeah, because this is anything. No matter what you use. Because, because then if you want to say that it's not only English-speaking, then what's the mention exactly? If it's, when you say woman, if it's not just woman is in the English label, woman, you can, what's the mention? Is it the label woman or other languages or what? What does it refer to? What's the, what is the mention? It's a big disjunction. Like, you're, you're a woman if you mentioned that you're a woman or a femme or, uh, whatever that is in other languages than French and English. Yeah, but it's, this is the right move though. You have to, you have to specify. You have to make him specify what the mention is in order to check if it actually escapes circularity.

And then look at other implications on the view. Uh, yo, what up, James? Um, we're reviewing one of your debates right now. Yeah, I, I, I got you on that. Yeah, we have to. It will. And even if you make a big disjunction that includes, you know, the, um, whatever the word is for woman in all these different languages, it seems like even then you can just go to some possible world. Like, you can always just go to the next, next possible world and just say, well, they still have all the same mental properties, all the same attitudes, blah, blah. They just never have heard of those words. Like, add something else to the disjunction and then you just get a kind of like an arms race between creating new possible worlds where they haven't heard of the term. And then, I mean, you can say like, yeah, I mean, then you can start saying like, oh, well, anyone who uses a word with that same mental state or a similar enough mental state or something like that. But, um, but yeah, the, the approach is right. Yeah.

But the second that you start getting into that, you're starting to edge into a definition that actually makes sense, right? It's starting to become about what their actual mind is like, right? You're starting to talk about actual like features that they have other than them just identifying with an empty label. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, so yeah, that, that is an okay way to start saving it. That's exactly like the point, basically. That's the kind of direction we'd say to move in. You have to start, you know, talk. And then, but then it starts becoming irrelevant that they call themselves a woman. I, I mean, that's like, that's like part of the picture to me. It's like, you know, one of, one of many things, but it's not like a necessary condition or something. Yeah. If you say it's a necessary condition, you get like weird reductios. Yeah. Like the non-English speaking one, or you can go to other possible worlds where they just don't know whatever the set of terms are. You can always generate a counterexample like that. Refer to women as an archetype, as that will inform to an extent what you imagined women to be. And this is self-evidently true. Go to India. They don't have the word woman for woman, but they have very different expectations of what it means to be a woman over there than we do over here, massively so. And they have a lot of women there despite the fact that the weird woman doesn't exist.

Um, yeah, I agree with, with respect. I feel like I don't know how you're interpreting what I'm saying here. They don't use the term woman, right? They have, I don't know what the Indian term for woman is. Yeah, some of them do speak English, but right. When I say the term doesn't exist outside the definition of woman, what I'm saying is that it is a multi-faceted gem that changes with time. And we see it from different facets depending on where we are and what we are. What a woman is is so different to like a southern conservative bell than it is to a progressive living New York City. In fact, there's such different concepts in terms of the social roles involved that they, they're practically two different genders, honest to God. Um, that's all I'm referring to. So I'm not literally saying that the archetype, the range of concepts popped up into existence six months ago and exclusively exists in English. I'm only saying it's so multivariate, so arbitrary, so meaningless that there are a million variants of it right now and there were a million more yesterday.

This might be a decent time to jump into the Q and A. I know that you've got another round in the chamber ready to fire. I love talking with you. I'm sorry, both of you guys. I know you do, but I do want to jump into these because folks, I got to tell you too, I tried to spam the chat and notice that we don't have an answer to the question. We don't have the answer to what, what the dimension refers to. Yeah, no, I think Bosch just never really answers questions. More questions. We've gotten a ton of questions. We have a limited time for the Q and A. These are both busy guys. Want to get them out of here at a decent time. So we're going to jump into it right now. Thanks very much. Oh, yeah. Do we want to cut it here? There is, if, do we want to watch into these questions? Oh, god, no. I don't want to watch the question. Yeah, unless, yeah. Do you have any last [ __ ] you want to say, Troy? Aubie, either of you? No, not really. Not more than covered. I, I think this was just generally, can you get close to your mic, man? Enjoyable. Sorry. Can you hear me? Yeah, that's better. I was just saying that I thought just overall this was not, not, uh, not a very good debate and interaction on this. I mean, I have my complaints on both of them. Most of which have been, I mean, we've discussed everyone through it, but, uh, yeah, I don't know. Yeah. Bobby, what about you? I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna echo Troy here. And I will echo your echoes. All right. Um, thanks, guys. Appreciate it. And, uh, yeah, maybe you can talk to Dr. Bogardus in the future. I know that you're trying to set up a conversation there, obvi. So anyone watching this, you know, feel free to politely let him know obvious looking.