I agree with the overall thrust of the approach, and I think Scott Alexander articulated it really nicely way back in 2014, before "what is a woman?" was quite the hot button question it became:
That said, I probably disagree with your claim that in most contexts, if I ask "is that person a woman?" to someone who knows that the person in question is a trans woman, the most helpful answer for them to give is "yes". I also don't think the most helpful answer is "no". Rather, I think the most helpful answer is "she is a trans woman."
I think a natural correlate of the approach is that lots of binary classifiers that are reasonably useful in many contexts are less useful when applied to edge cases, and the sensible thing to do when faced with those edge cases is not to insist on deciding whether the binary classifier applies or not, but just to switch to a more fine-grained classification system. This is a pretty standard thought about vague language; if you're asked whether someone is tall, many times the most helpful answer is "yes" or "no", but for people on the border between being tall and not, it's often better to just say roughly how tall they are rather than trying to decide whether that height is enough to count as tall.
Same goes with asking whether some country is a democracy; for many countries, the helpful answer is "yes" or "no", but sometimes it's vague enough that it's better to refuse to answer the yes/no question, and say something about what the political system is like in a way that gives the listener an idea of why the yes/no question isn't straightforward.
There are a variety of interests people might have in inquiring whether someone is a woman, some of which would lead to grouping trans women with women, and some of which would not. Given that we have this other category, "trans woman", it seems to me almost always better to switch to that than to try to answer the yes/no question.
Crap, I've definitely read that SSC article before, and maybe totally s̶t̶o̶l̶e̶ developed my stance based on it... Accidentally doing bad versions of Scott Alexander posts from a decade ago is maybe a weirdly easy trap to fall into.
> I think the most helpful answer is "she is a trans woman." I think a natural correlate of the approach is that lots of binary classifiers that are reasonably useful in many contexts are less useful when applied to edge cases, and the sensible thing to do when faced with those edge cases is not to insist on deciding whether the binary classifier applies or not, but just to switch to a more fine-grained classification system.
Agreed, kind of—to clarify the point I'm trying to make: an earlier version of this post was called "Labels As Contextual Effort-Minimizers." So it's not just about what's most helpful, but what's least effortful—probably "trans woman" isn't even specific enough in many cases, and it'd be helpful to know when the transition happened, what medical interventions were involved (if any), and so on... But who's got the time! She's a woman, let's move right on...
As much as I'd like to know everything about everyone all the time, I also want to use pronouns that make sense. So sometimes I need to make snap binary judgments—even in slightly convoluted cases—and I think that the function which minimizes effort over probability space is to just say that, generally speaking, if she looks and walks and talks like a woman, she's a woman. So "trans women are women"—even though, yes, they also are specifically "trans women" and a million other things.
The extra syllable "trans" added to "woman" tells you a tremendous amount of information about the person. It's way more efficient than talking about the time of transition, medical interventions, etc. Not even in the same category. Saying you want to move on after "woman" because trans is inefficient is like saying that if someone is from New York, adding the word "City" or "Upstate" isn't efficient. For a huge number of questions, people from New York City and people from Upstate New York are more different than alike. It might be more informative to know that someone is from "city" than to know they're from New York.
For a lot of questions, knowing is_trans=TRUE is more informative than "man or woman". For instance, when trying to guess someone's religious views or political opinions.
"Gay marriage eventually became legal not because Middle America was browbeaten over opposing it, but because Middle Americans met gay people, got to know them, realized they were just normal good people, and decided to be nice to them."
I disagree. It was not due to meeting gay people. It was due to gay people being featured positively in media, especially in the music industry -- Freddie Mercury and Elton John stand out. Madonna promoted gay men heavily. Gay people have been "around" to "meet" before their image improved. It was top-down engineering from Hollywood, not spontaneous encounters on the street. If you don't actively promote LGBTQ, people aren't going to naturally accept it due to cultural inertia and mass conservatism.
Honestly, I'll defer to your knowledge here. (All I know is that my kindergarten & middle school teachers were the first gay people I met, they were cool, and they mostly made me think gay people were cool.)
I think the argument goes through regardless: we should platform non-insane trans people saying mostly non-judgmental things to their haters. Also it doesn't hurt to be a bit more interpersonally non-judgmental too.
Gay marriage continually lost at the ballot box, but it became legal when the Supreme Court said it had to be legal. The decision is pretty dubious as an interpretation of a text written in the 18h Century and periodically amended, but it hasn’t produced a lot of resistance. The Hollywood brainwashing you discuss probably is the reason most people have acquiesced in the decision and it hasn’t resulted in widespread resistance, unlike their similar ruling on abortion. I don’t have a problem with gay marriage, and I would have voted for it had I been offered a plebiscite, but it was, in fact, driven by an elite.
I will say that many Americans do have live-and-let-live instincts, and acceptance of gay marriage goes along with such instincts.
It's nice to see some more focus on passing. A lot of culture was animus over the trans issue stems from two main causes:
Pediatric transitions
Not quite passing trans people making the world a lot more confusing.
A basic conservative instinct is that the world is what I thought it was yesterday and anyone trying to convince me otherwise is probably a con man or something.
The answer is a picture of Blair White, not a discussion about language.
>Gay marriage eventually became legal not because Middle America was browbeaten over opposing it, but because Middle Americans met gay people, got to know them, realized they were just normal good people, and decided to be nice to them.
I don’t think this is one of the primary reasons gay marriage became legal. As someone living in the Bay Area before, during and after the movement, the reason it succeeded was of course multifaceted, but the two main drivers were:
1. The number of gay people openly and publicly expressing their desire to marry had gradually reached a tipping point where it became politically attractive for certain figures (like Gavin Newsom) to advocate for it. This put the specific issue in people’s minds and on ballots.
2. Once this desire became so visible, many formerly insulated straight people realized there was very little personal downside to allowing gay marriage. It was a private (and also practical) matter between two people and an expression of devotional love generally seen as societally beneficial. But maybe most importantly, straights saw that it would not negatively affect them. It was easy to feel good about it and get behind it.
This is not the case with linguistic idealism and people trying to attach moral weight to words that currently have neutral weight in common usage. “Woman” means what it means. It’s a far-reaching, foundational word. There is no way to capture its precise definition in a Substack post, or make it prescriptively mean something it doesn’t to most people through insistence and activism. This just leads to greater misunderstanding. I’m thoroughly tired of the language policing. The definition of woman will gradually change over time as all words do. Perhaps in unexpected ways. Let common usage do its work.
A piece of unsolicited advice: I hope you use your time in college to develop and mature as a thinker. You should definitely look into Yale’s “directed studies” program if you haven’t already. Many of your peers will prioritize networking and light weight coursework outside their pragmatic majors. That approach may perhaps even work well if your motivation is purely from a financial standpoint. And even good humanities and social sciences courses - and actual course quality and expectations varies enormously even at Yale- are grade inflated to the point you can probably pass or even get a fine grade without reading seriously. But college still does offer opportunities for intellectual growth for those wise enough to seek and seize them: choose quality courses over fads, do the reading seriously, go to office hours (!!), and ask for harsh feedback.
Hey, "unalive" is easier to interpret as meaning "murder" than "popped", and mafia members have been using the latter for years! (You could think both are confusing and bad, I guess, but I was just trying to prove that algospeak isn't worse than other kinds of slang.)
Anyway, back on topic...
I think my two major considerations when it comes to this issue boil down to this.
a) Calling a trans woman a man makes her very unhappy and sad and provides me with zero benefit. As a general rule, I don't like doing things that make other people very sad while providing me with zero benefit.
b) Like you note in your post, questions about someone's gender are often context-based, so that gynecologists considering the question in a professional capacity have a "...for the purposes of medical treatment" silently attached to the end. You mention that most people asking what someone's gender is have a "...in the context of fitting into a vague sociocultural cluster of womanly things" attached, and I fully agree with that interpretation. But I also want to mention that we often don't even care about that. Often, what we care about is something like "what pronouns should I use when talking about you" or "are you someone I can expect to date/be attracted to" or "when I buy you a new jacket for the company Secret Santa, should I get one in a men's or women's cut" or something like that. Phrased in this way, it's even less ambiguous that trans women ought to be classified as woman for these purposes.
Context matters! "Popped" is accepted among mafia guys to the point that it might be weird and confusing (and cover-blowing) to say something like "murdered." I guess you could equivalently say that "unalive" is widely-accepted among the youths? But it's clearly bleeding into larger culture without full context, which makes lots of people very confused and uncomfortable about it, which seems bad and non-effort-minimizing.
I have known dozens of trans people IRL in my life and not a single one of them fits into the "more like the opposite sex" category in my head. Definitely there are many in the "this person clearly wishes to be treated as the opposite sex and passed for it at first glance" category, but getting to know them at all, at best the FTMs in my life fit the category of "butch woman with baggage" and the MTFs fit the category of "twink with baggage." And that's ignoring the many who are pretty much sex typical for their birth sex, but some combo of internet exposure and neurodivergence led them to transition.
I know you pointed out Blaire White and Buck Angel as people who pass extremely well, but in my experience in the gay/queer scene of multiple cities, that level of passing and gender nonconformity for a trans person is extremely rare. And even then, I think twink with baggage and butch with baggage are fitting categories as opposed to woman and man for them.
I do call people by their preferred binary pronouns and I accept that they have made the decision to transition and that they care deeply about it and I try to respect that as much as I can. But, nobody has ever convinced me that they were actually more like the opposite sex on an interpersonal level once we moved past aesthetics.
Very interesting. This doesn’t really match my experience of trans people (FTMs with moustaches, mostly), but what you’re describing seems like a case where I wouldn’t have strong opinions about which pronouns you use. (Though I still think it’s probably nice of you to use their preferred ones, and it seems like it’s generally socially easier to do so.)
But, yeah, if someone’s experience is that + lots of overzealous language-policing, I’m sure they’d be pretty easily radicalized to much more extreme anti-trans views.
As far as I can tell you don't actually seem to explicitly disagree with any of my views on word meanings and concepts (unless I missed something?), more disagreeing with my normative stance. That is you don't seem to actually object to semantic nihilism (or normativism or whatever) and conceptual engineering, you're just against doing it badly. That's at least something to be happy about--yay.
On how we should actually encourage people to speak, I guess I don't disagree *too much* with you. We shouldn't go around shaming folks for misgendering people and whatnot, as that just makes people angry and hurts the cause, etc., etc. But that doesn't mean that we have some positive reason from The God-Given Words About Biological Categories to actively avoid counting trans women as women, which some (many) people seem to hold. It was mostly this latter idea I was arguing against.
Also I was to some extent just interested in the individual perspective about how *I* and *you* should use language. You suggest that we shouldn't call people who want to be attack helicopters attack helicopters. I'm not so sure. If they really genuinely would be hurt by being denied this, and they weren't knee-deep in some weird delusion which it hurts them to indulge in (and these conditions seem necessary to make the case analogous to trans people), then why deliberately call them something different? Whether you should force others to do the same is a less obvious question, but probably not.
(Sidenote: I think you got the chronology wrong. The BB v Date debate was a while before both my chat with Laird and my post. The fact that you can't even get the basic chronology right removes all credibility, and you have been utterly defamed!!)
> you don't actually seem to explicitly disagree with any of my views on word meanings and concepts.
lol, yeah.
> I was to some extent just interested in the individual perspective about how *I* and *you* should use language. You suggest that we shouldn't call people who want to be attack helicopters attack helicopters. I'm not so sure. If they really genuinely would be hurt by being denied this, and they weren't knee-deep in some weird delusion which it hurts them to indulge in (and these conditions seem necessary to make the case analogous to trans people), then why deliberately call them something different?
I think there's a point at which my ability to maintain coherent definitions is more important than respecting what you want to be called. I'm trying to make a much more pragmatic case than you are, maybe, so I'd take issue with the conditions you refer to: actually, I don't know if the attack helicopter is being genuinely hurt, or if they're being harmed by their delusion! My effort-minimizing word-use function needs to take these possibilities into account, and weight them against the unwieldiness of "attack helicopter" referring to both THOSE COOL THINGS FROM M*A*S*H and THIS WEIRD GUY.
The attack helicopter case, in my eyes, is analogous to self-id-extremism. If you, tomorrow, started demanding I use female pronouns for you without explaining yourself convincingly (i.e., something more detailed than "I feel like a girl now"), without changing your appearance, and without acting substantially more like a woman, I probably wouldn't start referring to you as "she"! I'd assume you were probably lying, or trying to mess with me, or were suffering from some kind of harmful delusion I shouldn't be exacerbating, and would choose instead to maintain the integrity of my concept WOMAN.
> The fact that you can't even get the basic chronology right removes all credibility, and you have been utterly defamed!!
Dude, be cool! I'm in the UK right now, that kinda talk can get a guy in real trouble on this shithole continent of yours...
I'm not sure there is a super strong reason to use simple consistent definitions across cases. Being confused is a bad thing, and it takes some mental load to use words in ways you're not used to. That's gonna count for something, but often not hurting others' feelings will outweigh that.
I don't think that the attack helicopter could reasonably demand that you call them that, just like I can't reasonably demand that you apologize after accidentally bumping into me so I spill my coffee. At the same time it would be wrong not to do so, just like it'd be wrong for you to pretend like nothing happened and not apologize after bumping into me.
But sure, it's gonna be a case-by-case thing, and if you meet someone where it's not clear whether it's more bad or good for you to call them what they want to be called, and where it will take a lot of effort to respect their wishes, it'd probably be okay to not do so. But in most actual cases of, say, trans women, I think it's pretty clear that it would really harm them to call them men. At the same time it won't require very much conceptual confusion to use the word for a self-ID concept rather than a biological one. In some cases it is, when the trans person really doesn't pass at all, but even so, I think the weight of your reasons is on at least trying.
This post isn’t good, and Bentham’s one was worse. You’re confusing an ontological question “what is a woman”‘which is a question of definition, with linguistic and pragmatic ones or evens phenomenonolical ones “who is called “woman” de facto” or “whom should we refer to as a woman” or “what is the semantic field of woman”
With regards to the original, ontological, question, however my critique of Bentham largely holds here so I shall repeat it (n. b. “you” below refers to Bentham)
“The basic problem with this whole argument is that it fails to acknowledge a very basic distinction: between Indicia and criteria. The former are the stereotypes by which we suspect someone belongs to a group, the latter determines groups membership. For example, if I hear someone speaking with an American accent I may suspect they are American. However, they may in fact be Canadian, or a British actor who perfected the accent etc. by contrast, millions of Americans have foreign accents. One can mention many other traits commonly associated with Americans, none of which determine group membership. As a matter of fact, American is whoever is a citizen of the United States, that’s the criterion.
The problem with your argument is that you don’t even propose alternative criteria for womanhood. You just keep being focused on Indicia, on what make one *seem* like a woman or *pass* for a woman, but that’s no definition at all. Your analogy for parents belies your notion: the reasons why step parents or adoptive parents may count as parents is because in most contexts the creterion for parenthood isn’t about begetting a child but rearing them.
The argument from politeness suffers from similar slippage. How we should treat people and what people actually are are likewise distinct questions! One may feel it polite or convenient to treat someone *as* a woman, but it doesn’t make her so. Nor are pronouns the correct way to go about it- those are about grammar or convenience but do not determine identity. In German a young woman is an “it” but it doesn’t make her any less of a woman. In English we may refer to a 5 year old girl or an adult trans woman as a “she” but nobody would argue that the former is a woman, and as to the latter we shouldn’t argue the same either based on the pronoun alone !
P.S.
It is not at all clear to me that a brain in a jar or in a robot is a man, rather a “former man” (or former woman as the case might be). As to a man’s brain implanted into a woman’s body, wouldn’t that case be a man turned into a woman (a genuine sex change)?
Finally- as others noted Superman is not obviously a man, he is rather a male kryptonian who happens to look like a man. Similarly Zeus isn’t a man but a god, even if he can “pass” enough to sleep with/rape and impregnate many women! What seems isn’t what is, and until you acknowledge this very basic distinction you can’t even offer the beginning of a counter argument on this topic.”
"What is a woman?" is not an ontological question. It's a question of the definition of the word "woman," which is linguistic, not ontological. I'm a bit confused by your comment because you seem to think that questions of definition are a type of ontological question, but no, that's the opposite of what an ontological question is. Ontological questions are about what exists, not absout definitions of words. And there is no coherent way to interpret, "What is a woman?" as a question about ontology that doesn't just presuppose one categorization scheme or another. Everyone already agrees, for example, that there is a biological category of adult human females, the question is just whether the word "woman" does or should refer to this category.
Your response to Bentham's Bulldog completely misses the point of his arguments and misunderstands how language works. The vast majority of concepts in natural language are not defined by an explicit definition giving necessary and sufficient conditions. Rather, they are defined by similarity to other examples of the concept, what Wittgenstein calls a family resemblance. This is why for most natural language concepts, it is impossible to come up with an explicit definition that correctly categories all cases. BB is arguing that "woman" is defined in exactly the same way as nearly every other concept in natural language. And he is correct. For the vast majority of the time that the word existed, we didn't even know that most women produce large gametes and most men produce small ones or that most women have XX chromosomes and most men have XY chromosomes, or any of the other definitions that people point to when trying to come up with the "true" biological definition of term. Some people who use the term "woman" today don't even know what those things are. So the word is clearly not defined by such criteria. You complain about BB supposedly not knowing the distinction between indicia and criteria, but this is actually just your own ignorance showing. He knows the distinction and is arguing that "woman" is not defined by explicit criteria but rather by similarity, i.e., sharing common properties with other examples and lacking properties of nonexamples. Meanwhile, you have just presupposed that the word is defined by explicit criteria, totally different from how almost all other natural language concepts are defined, and seemingly don't even realize what a massive assumption you're making, nor do you bother to defend it.
Your counter to his pragmatic argument also misses the point. How we define words is a choice, and given pragmatic considerations, we can decide to change it. Unless you have an actual argument for why such a change would be *bad*, shouting, "But that's not what the word means!" is a non-sequitur. Words do not have objective True Meaning outside in the world independent of usage, so if people decide to start using the word in a different way, then its meaning is now different. Similarly, words have different meanings in different contexts, based on pragmatic factors. Everyone acknowledges this in every area except gender. The idea that, "No, this word can't mean X in context Y because its True Meaning is Z," is completely at odds with how language works.
You might disagree with some of BB's examples to disprove the adult human female definition, but simply asserting that they're not examples because they don't fit the adult human male/female definition is circular and again misses the point. BB is arguing, correctly, that these things all intuitively fit the concept of a man/woman. Just about no one would say, "No, Superman isn't a man actually," except in a debate on gender where they had presupposed a definition that Superman is a counterexample to. Since the meaning of a word is defined by usage, the fact that everyone (except you and a few people who only use the word in an unnatural way just because of a dogmatic insistence on a certain definition) calls Superman a man implies that he is one. Even the vast majority of people who don't think trans women are women agree that Superman is a man.
Thanks for this response. You seem to have misunderstood much of what I was trying to say. Let me try again more briefly: “Adult human female” need not be the only valid definition for woman. I am not trying to argue to is a natural or immutable definition. All I am claiming is that in arguing against it, one ought to propose a non-circular definition, i.e. one that is not some version of “a woman is whomever is called woman/seems like a woman/has womanly attributes”. My problem with such circular definitions isn’t that I don’t like them as definition for woman, it is that they are not definitions at all (a foreign language speaker learning English could have not the faintest idea what we are talking about based on such definition alone, it could be a way to define anything and everything).
"Womanly attributes" is just a stand-in for a bunch of individual attributes typically associated with the category of woman. BB's definition is not supposed to be something you can use in isolation to identify whether someone is or is not a woman. The point of him saying that womanhood is defined by having womanly attributes is that there is no such explicit definition, and that womanhood is defined by similarity along a huge number of dimensions, rather than a short list of necessary and sufficient conditions. If you wanted to make BB's definition more explicit, you could list out all of the womanly attributes and how much weight they have in determining whether someone is a woman - that would not be circular at all. However, he just uses "womanly attributes" as a stand-in for listing them all out because there would be a massive number of them, and putting exact weights on them is impossible for any human to do explicitly. We don't know exactly how our cognitive processes that determine when to apply the label of "woman" weight each attribute.
I'm sorry, but that's too many words that seem to boil down to "woman is whomever is recognized as a woman" that is no definition at all. Commonly accepted defintions of "Woman" *may* have changed throughout history, that's an interesting empirical question. What is beyond doubt, however, is that traits associated with women ("womanly attributes" as you/BB put it) vary enormously with time and place, and often that which is feminine in one culture is the precise opposite in another. In other words, BB and yourself have it exactly backwards. "Womanly" is that which is associated with woman, not the other way around. If you reject the "adult human female" definition —far from a novelty, by the way, it is simply that "female" has been traditionally understood in anatomical terms, rather than chromosomes— you are welcome to propose another. But please don't hind behind the vagueness of "a collection of attributes" or " a similarity on a number of dimensions". Which attributes? What dimensions? You cannot define them except by resorting to the idea of womanhood itself, that is to say, resorting to circular reasoning.
This isn't even a response, just an assertion of your original position. If we are debating the definition of a word, then "woman is whomever is recognized as a woman" is trivially true. That is how words work, they are defined by usage. So whatever is recognized as a woman by our concept of "woman" is in fact a woman.
> What is beyond doubt, however, is that traits associated with women ("womanly attributes" as you/BB put it) vary enormously with time and place, and often that which is feminine in one culture is the precise opposite in another.
This doesn't matter. It may very well be that the concept of a woman varies with culture and that people in one culture who consider themselves women wouldn't consider themselves women in a different culture. This is how all words work.
> "Womanly" is that which is associated with woman, not the other way around.
Are you just complaining about the use of the word "womanly" here, or do you have an actual objection to the idea that categories like "woman" are defined implicitly be resemblance to other examples of the category and by contrast with opposing categories? Everyone first learns what a woman is simply by exposure to various people called women, contrasted with others called men, and learns to tell the difference between the two that way. Only later on do kids learn about the biological differences. So obviously, there is *some way* to understand the term "woman" without an explicit definition, and it is easy enough to do so that every child in the world is able to pick up on it. Insisting that there must be an explicit, purely biological definition, or else the concept is meaningless, is therefore clearly false.
> If you reject the "adult human female" definition —far from a novelty, by the way, it is simply that "female" has been traditionally understood in anatomical terms, rather than chromosomes— you are welcome to propose another. But please don't hind behind the vagueness of "a collection of attributes" or " a similarity on a number of dimensions".
Okay, so you just entirely reject the idea of concepts being defined implicitly through resemblance, rather than through explicit definitions giving complete necessary-and-sufficient conditions? That is an absolutely insane position that makes every single language in the world meaningless. Even your definition of "woman" becomes meaningless, unless you can define "adult", "human", and "female" explicitly, without invoking anything vague or circular or admitting of exceptions.
We seem to speaking past each other, since it seems to me like you rule out the possibly of concepts and definitions. Besides that, it appears to me that you are for some reason aggressive and rude in every single comment. For both these reasons I’d suggest we end this here. I’d just point out that many people appeared to like my original comment to BB , so that if I took an “insane” position, it may be that the insanity is shared by many. Good day.
Let me make a point about the sociocultural definition of the word “woman.” When I was a kid, back in the 70s, there was a TV special, a record, and I believe a book called “Free to Be, You and Me.” This was about acceptance of one’s own unique personality and the breakdown of stereotypes. For example, it featured Rosy Grier, an NFL defensive lineman, singing a song called “It’s All Right to Cry,” encouraging boys to weep and denigrating the idea that boys who did so were crybabies. And it similarly told girls who liked to wrestle that this was fine. The height of enlightened seventies liberalism was the idea that stereotypes should be broken down and both males and females should be free to express characteristics and identities that contravened usual stereotypes.
The “sociocultural” definitions of “man” and “woman” reify the gender stereotypes that enlightened liberals once tried to break down. In fact, it uses them as diagnostic criteria for an actual medical condition. A girl who likes to wrestle and play with trucks isn’t just a tomboy, she’s, by this definition, an actual boy. And if a boy cries a lot and plays with dolls and just adores the idea of a tea party, he’s a she.
I’m not sure that hardening gender stereotypes is really social progress.
Without an appeal to Platonic forms or some sort of objective barometer, I think for these sorts of questions we have to default to some form of majority vote or consensus.
I sincerely doubt that more than 5% of America truly believes deep down in the hearts regardless of what they might publicly profess that a trans woman is truly a "woman" in the same ontological sense as a woman that produces the egg gamete, regardless of whether they even understand what ontological even means.
For this reason, I think you can only really profess to believe that trans women are women as a part of an intentional process to change people's minds about this by social pressure.
I agree with the overall thrust of the approach, and I think Scott Alexander articulated it really nicely way back in 2014, before "what is a woman?" was quite the hot button question it became:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/
That said, I probably disagree with your claim that in most contexts, if I ask "is that person a woman?" to someone who knows that the person in question is a trans woman, the most helpful answer for them to give is "yes". I also don't think the most helpful answer is "no". Rather, I think the most helpful answer is "she is a trans woman."
I think a natural correlate of the approach is that lots of binary classifiers that are reasonably useful in many contexts are less useful when applied to edge cases, and the sensible thing to do when faced with those edge cases is not to insist on deciding whether the binary classifier applies or not, but just to switch to a more fine-grained classification system. This is a pretty standard thought about vague language; if you're asked whether someone is tall, many times the most helpful answer is "yes" or "no", but for people on the border between being tall and not, it's often better to just say roughly how tall they are rather than trying to decide whether that height is enough to count as tall.
Same goes with asking whether some country is a democracy; for many countries, the helpful answer is "yes" or "no", but sometimes it's vague enough that it's better to refuse to answer the yes/no question, and say something about what the political system is like in a way that gives the listener an idea of why the yes/no question isn't straightforward.
There are a variety of interests people might have in inquiring whether someone is a woman, some of which would lead to grouping trans women with women, and some of which would not. Given that we have this other category, "trans woman", it seems to me almost always better to switch to that than to try to answer the yes/no question.
Crap, I've definitely read that SSC article before, and maybe totally s̶t̶o̶l̶e̶ developed my stance based on it... Accidentally doing bad versions of Scott Alexander posts from a decade ago is maybe a weirdly easy trap to fall into.
> I think the most helpful answer is "she is a trans woman." I think a natural correlate of the approach is that lots of binary classifiers that are reasonably useful in many contexts are less useful when applied to edge cases, and the sensible thing to do when faced with those edge cases is not to insist on deciding whether the binary classifier applies or not, but just to switch to a more fine-grained classification system.
Agreed, kind of—to clarify the point I'm trying to make: an earlier version of this post was called "Labels As Contextual Effort-Minimizers." So it's not just about what's most helpful, but what's least effortful—probably "trans woman" isn't even specific enough in many cases, and it'd be helpful to know when the transition happened, what medical interventions were involved (if any), and so on... But who's got the time! She's a woman, let's move right on...
As much as I'd like to know everything about everyone all the time, I also want to use pronouns that make sense. So sometimes I need to make snap binary judgments—even in slightly convoluted cases—and I think that the function which minimizes effort over probability space is to just say that, generally speaking, if she looks and walks and talks like a woman, she's a woman. So "trans women are women"—even though, yes, they also are specifically "trans women" and a million other things.
The extra syllable "trans" added to "woman" tells you a tremendous amount of information about the person. It's way more efficient than talking about the time of transition, medical interventions, etc. Not even in the same category. Saying you want to move on after "woman" because trans is inefficient is like saying that if someone is from New York, adding the word "City" or "Upstate" isn't efficient. For a huge number of questions, people from New York City and people from Upstate New York are more different than alike. It might be more informative to know that someone is from "city" than to know they're from New York.
For a lot of questions, knowing is_trans=TRUE is more informative than "man or woman". For instance, when trying to guess someone's religious views or political opinions.
"Gay marriage eventually became legal not because Middle America was browbeaten over opposing it, but because Middle Americans met gay people, got to know them, realized they were just normal good people, and decided to be nice to them."
I disagree. It was not due to meeting gay people. It was due to gay people being featured positively in media, especially in the music industry -- Freddie Mercury and Elton John stand out. Madonna promoted gay men heavily. Gay people have been "around" to "meet" before their image improved. It was top-down engineering from Hollywood, not spontaneous encounters on the street. If you don't actively promote LGBTQ, people aren't going to naturally accept it due to cultural inertia and mass conservatism.
Honestly, I'll defer to your knowledge here. (All I know is that my kindergarten & middle school teachers were the first gay people I met, they were cool, and they mostly made me think gay people were cool.)
I think the argument goes through regardless: we should platform non-insane trans people saying mostly non-judgmental things to their haters. Also it doesn't hurt to be a bit more interpersonally non-judgmental too.
Gay marriage continually lost at the ballot box, but it became legal when the Supreme Court said it had to be legal. The decision is pretty dubious as an interpretation of a text written in the 18h Century and periodically amended, but it hasn’t produced a lot of resistance. The Hollywood brainwashing you discuss probably is the reason most people have acquiesced in the decision and it hasn’t resulted in widespread resistance, unlike their similar ruling on abortion. I don’t have a problem with gay marriage, and I would have voted for it had I been offered a plebiscite, but it was, in fact, driven by an elite.
I will say that many Americans do have live-and-let-live instincts, and acceptance of gay marriage goes along with such instincts.
It's nice to see some more focus on passing. A lot of culture was animus over the trans issue stems from two main causes:
Pediatric transitions
Not quite passing trans people making the world a lot more confusing.
A basic conservative instinct is that the world is what I thought it was yesterday and anyone trying to convince me otherwise is probably a con man or something.
The answer is a picture of Blair White, not a discussion about language.
The question that matters is — can they pass?
(At least in the day to day.)
>Gay marriage eventually became legal not because Middle America was browbeaten over opposing it, but because Middle Americans met gay people, got to know them, realized they were just normal good people, and decided to be nice to them.
I don’t think this is one of the primary reasons gay marriage became legal. As someone living in the Bay Area before, during and after the movement, the reason it succeeded was of course multifaceted, but the two main drivers were:
1. The number of gay people openly and publicly expressing their desire to marry had gradually reached a tipping point where it became politically attractive for certain figures (like Gavin Newsom) to advocate for it. This put the specific issue in people’s minds and on ballots.
2. Once this desire became so visible, many formerly insulated straight people realized there was very little personal downside to allowing gay marriage. It was a private (and also practical) matter between two people and an expression of devotional love generally seen as societally beneficial. But maybe most importantly, straights saw that it would not negatively affect them. It was easy to feel good about it and get behind it.
This is not the case with linguistic idealism and people trying to attach moral weight to words that currently have neutral weight in common usage. “Woman” means what it means. It’s a far-reaching, foundational word. There is no way to capture its precise definition in a Substack post, or make it prescriptively mean something it doesn’t to most people through insistence and activism. This just leads to greater misunderstanding. I’m thoroughly tired of the language policing. The definition of woman will gradually change over time as all words do. Perhaps in unexpected ways. Let common usage do its work.
P.S.
A piece of unsolicited advice: I hope you use your time in college to develop and mature as a thinker. You should definitely look into Yale’s “directed studies” program if you haven’t already. Many of your peers will prioritize networking and light weight coursework outside their pragmatic majors. That approach may perhaps even work well if your motivation is purely from a financial standpoint. And even good humanities and social sciences courses - and actual course quality and expectations varies enormously even at Yale- are grade inflated to the point you can probably pass or even get a fine grade without reading seriously. But college still does offer opportunities for intellectual growth for those wise enough to seek and seize them: choose quality courses over fads, do the reading seriously, go to office hours (!!), and ask for harsh feedback.
Your other comment is silly, but I appreciate this one...
Glad to hear it. Good luck !
Hey, "unalive" is easier to interpret as meaning "murder" than "popped", and mafia members have been using the latter for years! (You could think both are confusing and bad, I guess, but I was just trying to prove that algospeak isn't worse than other kinds of slang.)
Anyway, back on topic...
I think my two major considerations when it comes to this issue boil down to this.
a) Calling a trans woman a man makes her very unhappy and sad and provides me with zero benefit. As a general rule, I don't like doing things that make other people very sad while providing me with zero benefit.
b) Like you note in your post, questions about someone's gender are often context-based, so that gynecologists considering the question in a professional capacity have a "...for the purposes of medical treatment" silently attached to the end. You mention that most people asking what someone's gender is have a "...in the context of fitting into a vague sociocultural cluster of womanly things" attached, and I fully agree with that interpretation. But I also want to mention that we often don't even care about that. Often, what we care about is something like "what pronouns should I use when talking about you" or "are you someone I can expect to date/be attracted to" or "when I buy you a new jacket for the company Secret Santa, should I get one in a men's or women's cut" or something like that. Phrased in this way, it's even less ambiguous that trans women ought to be classified as woman for these purposes.
Context matters! "Popped" is accepted among mafia guys to the point that it might be weird and confusing (and cover-blowing) to say something like "murdered." I guess you could equivalently say that "unalive" is widely-accepted among the youths? But it's clearly bleeding into larger culture without full context, which makes lots of people very confused and uncomfortable about it, which seems bad and non-effort-minimizing.
Agreed completely on your topical points!
I have known dozens of trans people IRL in my life and not a single one of them fits into the "more like the opposite sex" category in my head. Definitely there are many in the "this person clearly wishes to be treated as the opposite sex and passed for it at first glance" category, but getting to know them at all, at best the FTMs in my life fit the category of "butch woman with baggage" and the MTFs fit the category of "twink with baggage." And that's ignoring the many who are pretty much sex typical for their birth sex, but some combo of internet exposure and neurodivergence led them to transition.
I know you pointed out Blaire White and Buck Angel as people who pass extremely well, but in my experience in the gay/queer scene of multiple cities, that level of passing and gender nonconformity for a trans person is extremely rare. And even then, I think twink with baggage and butch with baggage are fitting categories as opposed to woman and man for them.
I do call people by their preferred binary pronouns and I accept that they have made the decision to transition and that they care deeply about it and I try to respect that as much as I can. But, nobody has ever convinced me that they were actually more like the opposite sex on an interpersonal level once we moved past aesthetics.
Very interesting. This doesn’t really match my experience of trans people (FTMs with moustaches, mostly), but what you’re describing seems like a case where I wouldn’t have strong opinions about which pronouns you use. (Though I still think it’s probably nice of you to use their preferred ones, and it seems like it’s generally socially easier to do so.)
But, yeah, if someone’s experience is that + lots of overzealous language-policing, I’m sure they’d be pretty easily radicalized to much more extreme anti-trans views.
is this like a substack challenge where phil-slightly left leaning blogs make a post on why trans women are women
can i get a invite dawg
You don't need an invite, you can write one whenever you want.
I meant like really bad sarcasm
Thanks for the response!
As far as I can tell you don't actually seem to explicitly disagree with any of my views on word meanings and concepts (unless I missed something?), more disagreeing with my normative stance. That is you don't seem to actually object to semantic nihilism (or normativism or whatever) and conceptual engineering, you're just against doing it badly. That's at least something to be happy about--yay.
On how we should actually encourage people to speak, I guess I don't disagree *too much* with you. We shouldn't go around shaming folks for misgendering people and whatnot, as that just makes people angry and hurts the cause, etc., etc. But that doesn't mean that we have some positive reason from The God-Given Words About Biological Categories to actively avoid counting trans women as women, which some (many) people seem to hold. It was mostly this latter idea I was arguing against.
Also I was to some extent just interested in the individual perspective about how *I* and *you* should use language. You suggest that we shouldn't call people who want to be attack helicopters attack helicopters. I'm not so sure. If they really genuinely would be hurt by being denied this, and they weren't knee-deep in some weird delusion which it hurts them to indulge in (and these conditions seem necessary to make the case analogous to trans people), then why deliberately call them something different? Whether you should force others to do the same is a less obvious question, but probably not.
(Sidenote: I think you got the chronology wrong. The BB v Date debate was a while before both my chat with Laird and my post. The fact that you can't even get the basic chronology right removes all credibility, and you have been utterly defamed!!)
> you don't actually seem to explicitly disagree with any of my views on word meanings and concepts.
lol, yeah.
> I was to some extent just interested in the individual perspective about how *I* and *you* should use language. You suggest that we shouldn't call people who want to be attack helicopters attack helicopters. I'm not so sure. If they really genuinely would be hurt by being denied this, and they weren't knee-deep in some weird delusion which it hurts them to indulge in (and these conditions seem necessary to make the case analogous to trans people), then why deliberately call them something different?
I think there's a point at which my ability to maintain coherent definitions is more important than respecting what you want to be called. I'm trying to make a much more pragmatic case than you are, maybe, so I'd take issue with the conditions you refer to: actually, I don't know if the attack helicopter is being genuinely hurt, or if they're being harmed by their delusion! My effort-minimizing word-use function needs to take these possibilities into account, and weight them against the unwieldiness of "attack helicopter" referring to both THOSE COOL THINGS FROM M*A*S*H and THIS WEIRD GUY.
The attack helicopter case, in my eyes, is analogous to self-id-extremism. If you, tomorrow, started demanding I use female pronouns for you without explaining yourself convincingly (i.e., something more detailed than "I feel like a girl now"), without changing your appearance, and without acting substantially more like a woman, I probably wouldn't start referring to you as "she"! I'd assume you were probably lying, or trying to mess with me, or were suffering from some kind of harmful delusion I shouldn't be exacerbating, and would choose instead to maintain the integrity of my concept WOMAN.
> The fact that you can't even get the basic chronology right removes all credibility, and you have been utterly defamed!!
Dude, be cool! I'm in the UK right now, that kinda talk can get a guy in real trouble on this shithole continent of yours...
I'm not sure there is a super strong reason to use simple consistent definitions across cases. Being confused is a bad thing, and it takes some mental load to use words in ways you're not used to. That's gonna count for something, but often not hurting others' feelings will outweigh that.
I don't think that the attack helicopter could reasonably demand that you call them that, just like I can't reasonably demand that you apologize after accidentally bumping into me so I spill my coffee. At the same time it would be wrong not to do so, just like it'd be wrong for you to pretend like nothing happened and not apologize after bumping into me.
But sure, it's gonna be a case-by-case thing, and if you meet someone where it's not clear whether it's more bad or good for you to call them what they want to be called, and where it will take a lot of effort to respect their wishes, it'd probably be okay to not do so. But in most actual cases of, say, trans women, I think it's pretty clear that it would really harm them to call them men. At the same time it won't require very much conceptual confusion to use the word for a self-ID concept rather than a biological one. In some cases it is, when the trans person really doesn't pass at all, but even so, I think the weight of your reasons is on at least trying.
This post isn’t good, and Bentham’s one was worse. You’re confusing an ontological question “what is a woman”‘which is a question of definition, with linguistic and pragmatic ones or evens phenomenonolical ones “who is called “woman” de facto” or “whom should we refer to as a woman” or “what is the semantic field of woman”
With regards to the original, ontological, question, however my critique of Bentham largely holds here so I shall repeat it (n. b. “you” below refers to Bentham)
“The basic problem with this whole argument is that it fails to acknowledge a very basic distinction: between Indicia and criteria. The former are the stereotypes by which we suspect someone belongs to a group, the latter determines groups membership. For example, if I hear someone speaking with an American accent I may suspect they are American. However, they may in fact be Canadian, or a British actor who perfected the accent etc. by contrast, millions of Americans have foreign accents. One can mention many other traits commonly associated with Americans, none of which determine group membership. As a matter of fact, American is whoever is a citizen of the United States, that’s the criterion.
The problem with your argument is that you don’t even propose alternative criteria for womanhood. You just keep being focused on Indicia, on what make one *seem* like a woman or *pass* for a woman, but that’s no definition at all. Your analogy for parents belies your notion: the reasons why step parents or adoptive parents may count as parents is because in most contexts the creterion for parenthood isn’t about begetting a child but rearing them.
The argument from politeness suffers from similar slippage. How we should treat people and what people actually are are likewise distinct questions! One may feel it polite or convenient to treat someone *as* a woman, but it doesn’t make her so. Nor are pronouns the correct way to go about it- those are about grammar or convenience but do not determine identity. In German a young woman is an “it” but it doesn’t make her any less of a woman. In English we may refer to a 5 year old girl or an adult trans woman as a “she” but nobody would argue that the former is a woman, and as to the latter we shouldn’t argue the same either based on the pronoun alone !
P.S.
It is not at all clear to me that a brain in a jar or in a robot is a man, rather a “former man” (or former woman as the case might be). As to a man’s brain implanted into a woman’s body, wouldn’t that case be a man turned into a woman (a genuine sex change)?
Finally- as others noted Superman is not obviously a man, he is rather a male kryptonian who happens to look like a man. Similarly Zeus isn’t a man but a god, even if he can “pass” enough to sleep with/rape and impregnate many women! What seems isn’t what is, and until you acknowledge this very basic distinction you can’t even offer the beginning of a counter argument on this topic.”
"What is a woman?" is not an ontological question. It's a question of the definition of the word "woman," which is linguistic, not ontological. I'm a bit confused by your comment because you seem to think that questions of definition are a type of ontological question, but no, that's the opposite of what an ontological question is. Ontological questions are about what exists, not absout definitions of words. And there is no coherent way to interpret, "What is a woman?" as a question about ontology that doesn't just presuppose one categorization scheme or another. Everyone already agrees, for example, that there is a biological category of adult human females, the question is just whether the word "woman" does or should refer to this category.
Your response to Bentham's Bulldog completely misses the point of his arguments and misunderstands how language works. The vast majority of concepts in natural language are not defined by an explicit definition giving necessary and sufficient conditions. Rather, they are defined by similarity to other examples of the concept, what Wittgenstein calls a family resemblance. This is why for most natural language concepts, it is impossible to come up with an explicit definition that correctly categories all cases. BB is arguing that "woman" is defined in exactly the same way as nearly every other concept in natural language. And he is correct. For the vast majority of the time that the word existed, we didn't even know that most women produce large gametes and most men produce small ones or that most women have XX chromosomes and most men have XY chromosomes, or any of the other definitions that people point to when trying to come up with the "true" biological definition of term. Some people who use the term "woman" today don't even know what those things are. So the word is clearly not defined by such criteria. You complain about BB supposedly not knowing the distinction between indicia and criteria, but this is actually just your own ignorance showing. He knows the distinction and is arguing that "woman" is not defined by explicit criteria but rather by similarity, i.e., sharing common properties with other examples and lacking properties of nonexamples. Meanwhile, you have just presupposed that the word is defined by explicit criteria, totally different from how almost all other natural language concepts are defined, and seemingly don't even realize what a massive assumption you're making, nor do you bother to defend it.
Your counter to his pragmatic argument also misses the point. How we define words is a choice, and given pragmatic considerations, we can decide to change it. Unless you have an actual argument for why such a change would be *bad*, shouting, "But that's not what the word means!" is a non-sequitur. Words do not have objective True Meaning outside in the world independent of usage, so if people decide to start using the word in a different way, then its meaning is now different. Similarly, words have different meanings in different contexts, based on pragmatic factors. Everyone acknowledges this in every area except gender. The idea that, "No, this word can't mean X in context Y because its True Meaning is Z," is completely at odds with how language works.
You might disagree with some of BB's examples to disprove the adult human female definition, but simply asserting that they're not examples because they don't fit the adult human male/female definition is circular and again misses the point. BB is arguing, correctly, that these things all intuitively fit the concept of a man/woman. Just about no one would say, "No, Superman isn't a man actually," except in a debate on gender where they had presupposed a definition that Superman is a counterexample to. Since the meaning of a word is defined by usage, the fact that everyone (except you and a few people who only use the word in an unnatural way just because of a dogmatic insistence on a certain definition) calls Superman a man implies that he is one. Even the vast majority of people who don't think trans women are women agree that Superman is a man.
Thanks for this response. You seem to have misunderstood much of what I was trying to say. Let me try again more briefly: “Adult human female” need not be the only valid definition for woman. I am not trying to argue to is a natural or immutable definition. All I am claiming is that in arguing against it, one ought to propose a non-circular definition, i.e. one that is not some version of “a woman is whomever is called woman/seems like a woman/has womanly attributes”. My problem with such circular definitions isn’t that I don’t like them as definition for woman, it is that they are not definitions at all (a foreign language speaker learning English could have not the faintest idea what we are talking about based on such definition alone, it could be a way to define anything and everything).
"Womanly attributes" is just a stand-in for a bunch of individual attributes typically associated with the category of woman. BB's definition is not supposed to be something you can use in isolation to identify whether someone is or is not a woman. The point of him saying that womanhood is defined by having womanly attributes is that there is no such explicit definition, and that womanhood is defined by similarity along a huge number of dimensions, rather than a short list of necessary and sufficient conditions. If you wanted to make BB's definition more explicit, you could list out all of the womanly attributes and how much weight they have in determining whether someone is a woman - that would not be circular at all. However, he just uses "womanly attributes" as a stand-in for listing them all out because there would be a massive number of them, and putting exact weights on them is impossible for any human to do explicitly. We don't know exactly how our cognitive processes that determine when to apply the label of "woman" weight each attribute.
I'm sorry, but that's too many words that seem to boil down to "woman is whomever is recognized as a woman" that is no definition at all. Commonly accepted defintions of "Woman" *may* have changed throughout history, that's an interesting empirical question. What is beyond doubt, however, is that traits associated with women ("womanly attributes" as you/BB put it) vary enormously with time and place, and often that which is feminine in one culture is the precise opposite in another. In other words, BB and yourself have it exactly backwards. "Womanly" is that which is associated with woman, not the other way around. If you reject the "adult human female" definition —far from a novelty, by the way, it is simply that "female" has been traditionally understood in anatomical terms, rather than chromosomes— you are welcome to propose another. But please don't hind behind the vagueness of "a collection of attributes" or " a similarity on a number of dimensions". Which attributes? What dimensions? You cannot define them except by resorting to the idea of womanhood itself, that is to say, resorting to circular reasoning.
This isn't even a response, just an assertion of your original position. If we are debating the definition of a word, then "woman is whomever is recognized as a woman" is trivially true. That is how words work, they are defined by usage. So whatever is recognized as a woman by our concept of "woman" is in fact a woman.
> What is beyond doubt, however, is that traits associated with women ("womanly attributes" as you/BB put it) vary enormously with time and place, and often that which is feminine in one culture is the precise opposite in another.
This doesn't matter. It may very well be that the concept of a woman varies with culture and that people in one culture who consider themselves women wouldn't consider themselves women in a different culture. This is how all words work.
> "Womanly" is that which is associated with woman, not the other way around.
Are you just complaining about the use of the word "womanly" here, or do you have an actual objection to the idea that categories like "woman" are defined implicitly be resemblance to other examples of the category and by contrast with opposing categories? Everyone first learns what a woman is simply by exposure to various people called women, contrasted with others called men, and learns to tell the difference between the two that way. Only later on do kids learn about the biological differences. So obviously, there is *some way* to understand the term "woman" without an explicit definition, and it is easy enough to do so that every child in the world is able to pick up on it. Insisting that there must be an explicit, purely biological definition, or else the concept is meaningless, is therefore clearly false.
> If you reject the "adult human female" definition —far from a novelty, by the way, it is simply that "female" has been traditionally understood in anatomical terms, rather than chromosomes— you are welcome to propose another. But please don't hind behind the vagueness of "a collection of attributes" or " a similarity on a number of dimensions".
Okay, so you just entirely reject the idea of concepts being defined implicitly through resemblance, rather than through explicit definitions giving complete necessary-and-sufficient conditions? That is an absolutely insane position that makes every single language in the world meaningless. Even your definition of "woman" becomes meaningless, unless you can define "adult", "human", and "female" explicitly, without invoking anything vague or circular or admitting of exceptions.
We seem to speaking past each other, since it seems to me like you rule out the possibly of concepts and definitions. Besides that, it appears to me that you are for some reason aggressive and rude in every single comment. For both these reasons I’d suggest we end this here. I’d just point out that many people appeared to like my original comment to BB , so that if I took an “insane” position, it may be that the insanity is shared by many. Good day.
Buck Angel is a bad example. And since when does makeup and camera angles define a woman?
Let me make a point about the sociocultural definition of the word “woman.” When I was a kid, back in the 70s, there was a TV special, a record, and I believe a book called “Free to Be, You and Me.” This was about acceptance of one’s own unique personality and the breakdown of stereotypes. For example, it featured Rosy Grier, an NFL defensive lineman, singing a song called “It’s All Right to Cry,” encouraging boys to weep and denigrating the idea that boys who did so were crybabies. And it similarly told girls who liked to wrestle that this was fine. The height of enlightened seventies liberalism was the idea that stereotypes should be broken down and both males and females should be free to express characteristics and identities that contravened usual stereotypes.
The “sociocultural” definitions of “man” and “woman” reify the gender stereotypes that enlightened liberals once tried to break down. In fact, it uses them as diagnostic criteria for an actual medical condition. A girl who likes to wrestle and play with trucks isn’t just a tomboy, she’s, by this definition, an actual boy. And if a boy cries a lot and plays with dolls and just adores the idea of a tea party, he’s a she.
I’m not sure that hardening gender stereotypes is really social progress.
Without an appeal to Platonic forms or some sort of objective barometer, I think for these sorts of questions we have to default to some form of majority vote or consensus.
I sincerely doubt that more than 5% of America truly believes deep down in the hearts regardless of what they might publicly profess that a trans woman is truly a "woman" in the same ontological sense as a woman that produces the egg gamete, regardless of whether they even understand what ontological even means.
For this reason, I think you can only really profess to believe that trans women are women as a part of an intentional process to change people's minds about this by social pressure.
I wonder where Matthew got his views from!
SMH though, if you're gonna copy the source at least take on the part criticising "reference" theories too!
What if I'm an alpha male?!?!