 If we're talking about a trans woman has all of the male physical characteristics, so would that not be a male then? Couldn't we plainly say this person is a male? Well, I guess it's like, why are you asking the question? I think I wanna understand sort of why that's so important. So if someone tells you- Just to sort of understand reality, you know? Well, I mean, I think when someone tells you who they are, you should believe them. So if a person says that they're a woman or they're a man, then that's them telling you their gender is. I'm not so sure what social interactions would have to do with maleness or femaleness that we have. Well, I mean, I could think of a few. You know, one, I wanna have sex with you or not. You know, I'm treating you as your doctor. Those are two social interactions that where it would be relevant, what the genitalia that the person has are. At least for most of us, I think they are relevant. But notice how he's trying to completely evade and ignore the biological aspect. It's as if biology doesn't matter. They're telling you they're a female, that's enough. Most people don't lie. What's enough is what they tell you. What's enough is what they feel. What's enough of what they, they emote. Facts, reality, biology seems at least here to this guy completely irrelevant. It doesn't matter. I'm not even talking about social context. I'm just trying to start by getting to the truth, you know. Yeah, I mean, I'm really uncomfortable with that language of like getting to the truth again in social life. Why is that uncomfortable? He's uncomfortable with getting to the truth. Now, again, I don't know what happened before if he got the sense that Matt is trying to push him. I mean, hopefully he did some research on Matt before he did the interview, but it doesn't look like he did any given the interaction, but truth, facts, reality, biology don't seem to interest him. Comfortable. Because that, it sounds actually deeply transphobic to me. Any truth? Transphobic. I mean, notice, what does phobia mean? What does phobia mean? Right? Phobia means afraid of. So is somebody asking for the truth mean that they're afraid of homosexuals? How do you, I mean, whenever you accuse somebody of a phobia, you're telling them that they're afraid of the thing that you're saying they're afraid of. Homophobia, they're afraid of homosexuals, are they? I mean, they might, they might be a lot of people who unjustly, you know, I don't know, demean homosexuals, unjustly treat homosexuality, but does that make them afraid of it? The whole lashing out with phobias, transphobia, homophobia, Islamophobia, all these things as if there's nothing to talk about on these issues, there's nothing to discuss. It's immediately, well, you're a bad person because you're expressing this fear, which is a weird, the whole thing is a weird way of analyzing the problem, but I'm not sure this professor would say if somebody else, if they were talking about a different topic and somebody said, I want to get to the truth of this, he'd say, oh, well, truth is homophobic. It's the context. And again, I don't know what the context was before. We started showing this view, but it is kind of, this is spooky. This is spooky stuff. When the response to, I'm just trying to get to the truth about gender, about what gender means is what you're homophobic. Doesn't seem very intellectual, does it? I mean, the sky is a... And if you keep probing, we're going to stop the interview. If I probe about what the truth is? You keep invoking the word truth, which is condescending and rude. How is truth condescending and rude? How is asking somebody what they think the truth is about something condescending and rude? It's a complete rejection of reality. It's a rejection of the idea of fact. It's a rejection of reason. It's at the end of the day, what matters are the emotions of people. What matters are how people feel. And that's what I think this whole trans movement is about. It's about the elevation of emotions above all things, and it's about the destruction of reason, fact, biology, truth, reality. And again, this is not to say every trans person is this way, not at all. You know, the fact that you're a trans person doesn't mean you need to buy into this particular philosophy. Certainly, for example, I don't think Deirdre does, but this is what the intellectuals behind it are pushing. This is what the movement is pushing. And it's a nihilistic movement because the goal is not the elevation of no sex. The goal is the destruction of sex, the destruction of male and female, the destruction of sex. It's the negation. And it's, you know, you see the nihilism in the open hostility to the truth, to the concept of truth, not to the truth. I'm saying to you. How is the word truth condescending a root? Why don't you tell me what your truth is and you're walking on 30 seconds more of the nights before I get up? What my truth is? Well, I don't think I really have a truth. I think that there's just the truth, like the reality. And so we should begin by trying to figure out what the reality is. Uh-huh. And why are you concerned with when someone else tells you that they're a man or even if they use the word male, why are you concerned with not believing them? Well, you keep bringing it back. Well, this is why I think Matt is weak, right? He could say, well, I'm a doctor and I wanna know or I wanna have sex. You know, I wanna know if there's a possibility of sex here. You know, I wanna know what league and sports to put them in. There were a lot of reasons why you would wanna know and he could give some of those, right? And I'd be curious what the professor would have said in those circumstances. So, you know, how do you respond in a social situation? That's what I do on the social scientist. Well, right, but we're in a university. This is a place of understanding truth, isn't it? Absolutely. We pursue truth and I'm a social scientist and that's what I do. You just said the truth is transphobic. That you would say, if you're saying the truth is that I get to say, you're not a man, show me your genitalia, that's transphobic. No, no, I don't wanna see anybody's genitalia. I just mean, someone can make a statement about themselves that could be untrue. Like for example, if I were to say that I'm a black man, could you, would you accept that or would you be skeptical? Are you black? Are you African-American or are you bray racial? I don't think so. Well, you don't look that and I don't think that's a, it doesn't sound like that's a genuine statement of who you are. Okay, so that's my point. I could make a statement about who I am that's incorrect. Of course, I think it's well-established that human beings can lie, yes. Or not even lie, I mean, I could just be mistaken. Yeah. I guess this all comes back, this all comes down to really one question. Especially women, gender and sexuality studies. So what is a woman? Why do you ask that question? I just really like to know. What do you think the answer to that question is? Well, I'm asking, that's why I came to a college professor who's, this is what you do. He doesn't wanna answer this question. What other kinds of answers have you gotten? A lot of like this where you're not answering and I've gotten a lot of that, so. I think it's interesting that you say that some of the people you've interviewed have been reluctant to answer it and I think that has a lot to do with the way, the questions that preceded it and the way that you've conducted yourself in the interview. How have I conducted myself? How do you think you've conducted yourself? Yeah. Well, this is partially ambiguous what happened before the interview that we've seen. You just really don't wanna answer the questions, do you? I came today very willing and enthusiastic about answering questions about women's and gender and sexuality studies, which is what I do. So you wanted to answer questions about women's studies and so shouldn't the first answer, you should be able to provide, is what exactly is a woman? Well, for me, it's actually a really simple answer and that's a person who identifies as a woman. But what are they identifying as? As a woman. So what is that? As a woman. Do you know what a circular definition is? I do. It's sort of like what you're doing right now where a woman is a woman. Well, because you're seeking what we would call in my field of work an essentialist definition of gender. I think it sounds like you would like me to give you a set of biological or cultural characteristics that are associated with one gender or the other. I'm not seeking any type of definition, I'm just seeking a definition. Yeah, and I gave you one. Yeah, I mean, a woman is somebody who identifies as a woman. That's a definition, right? That's what constitutes a definition. I mean, that's absurd, ridiculous, stupid. And now there are other reviews that are even worse in some sense, there's some really horrible people that he's interviewed. But that's a college professor, college professor. You know, and the problem with the various definitions that they provide, I've looked here at definitions that they've, you know, gender identity and what it means and what it means what people define women. And it all falls down to this circular, it almost always becomes this circular definition because one of the things they don't want to do, one of the things they clearly don't want to do is they don't want to provide a biological definition because that's problematic for them. But then they also don't want to define a psychological. So I feel like a woman. Well, what is feeling like a woman? What is that like? Well, does it mean that you're submissive and I don't know, passive and you like dresses and you're, wait a minute, but now you're stereotyping women. You're associating all kinds of psychological attributes to women that we don't like. Well, but then tell me, what does it feel to feel like a woman that is not that way? And I keep reading the stuff and they won't actually say it. They won't actually say it. This is why, by the way, there's quite a bit of feminists who are anti this trans movement because feminists have spent a lot of time trying to say women are not that different from men. The better feminists don't say that completely the same, but intellectually we're not different. In many ways, we're not different from men. We can do much of what men can do. And we're focused on, we've been focused on getting rid of all the stereotypes that are associated with being a woman. And now you're telling us, and we've been saying these differences are not significant. Now you're saying they are significant. They're huge, they're big, psychological, because they're not physiological, they're psychological. How you feel, like your identity as, which is your feeling, and this is the conflict. So then there's somebody on the chat, Lo said, people based their evaluation of somebody as a woman or man based on their appearance. So Lo says here in the super chat, he says, a woman is a social category associated with, but not essentially caused by having female anatomy. But it clearly is not. Because a woman is somebody with female anatomy. It's not a social category. I don't know what a social category even means. A woman is a concept. It's a word that stands for a particular category in reality. It's not a social creation. It's not a myth that is just subjectively associated with something. It is dependent on and has real evolutionary importance because of reproduction. Women can have babies, men cannot. That's huge. That's a big, big difference. And I think a big difference manifests itself psychologically as well. But that's a big difference. That's not a social category. That's not a made up thing. It's not an arbitrary thing. Now, so a woman is a social category associated with, but not essentially caused by having female genitalia. But that's not a definition because even there, what is it? A social category of what? Of a way you dress and a way you behave and a way you emote. What is it? What is the thing that the category is associated with? Outward appearance, that's it. That's all that they care about? No, it can't be just outward appearance. Because again, there's this idea of gender identity. I'm identifying with a particular gender. That's not associated with just my outward appearance. That's associated with something deep in my psyche. So even your definition low is not a definition because it's leaving out the characteristic that make one that define the social category. And you see, this is the thing. They don't want to define. It scares them to define it. Because by defining, what are you doing when you define something? You delimit it. And modern epistemology refuses to do that. Low says categories don't exist in the world. We define them based on utility. We define them based on utility, but based on actual existence, actual reality, actual features that exist in reality. And that's why they have utility. The reason they have utility is because they exist in reality. And utility means our ability to deal with reality. So again, the utility of sex, the utility of biological sex is reproduction, is sex. It's medical treatment. I have to have a category of women and men to be able to deal with those. I mean, there are many other reasons one has to have this category, but that's one. Logos on, trans women are women because women in a social category, not a biological one. No, but that's completely random and arbitrary. Who defines what social categories are? They are, I mean, when you put two things next to each other, and if they're the same in fundamental ways, then they belong in the same category for a particular purpose. Let's say the purpose is to identify different types of human beings. Well, all human beings with different types of human beings, you put a man and a woman naked in front of you, they're different in fundamental, biologically fundamental ways. Fundamental biological ways that shape how they interact with reality, how they interact with other people. Trans women and cis women are different in fundamental, not in non-essential ways, but in fundamental ways. That affect how people will interact with them, rationally interact with them for the utility, whether it's reproduction or whether it's just sex. But this whole idea of a social category, concepts are not social. They're not arbitrary. They're not whatever you feel like they should be. They relate to specific characteristics, specific facts in reality. And the relationship to those facts to what you're trying to achieve. But so it's fascinating to me that people can think that trans women and cis women are in somehow the same category of women. They're fundamentally different and they're fundamentally different perceptual. This is not hard. And the utility of it, it does not apply for everything, for some things, it doesn't matter. I don't care. If for some things, I do care, right? For some things, I do care. For other things, I don't care. For the intellectual output, I don't care. Trans cis, it doesn't matter for sex. It very much matters, very much matters. Thank you for listening or watching the Iran book show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening. You get value from watching. Show your appreciation. You can do that by going to iranbookshow.com slash support. I go to Patreon, subscribe star locals and just making a appropriate contribution on any one of those channels. Also, if you'd like to see the Iran book show grow, please consider sharing our content and of course, subscribe. 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