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l'appel du vide (xe/xem) is the cyborgian mereological sum of a nineteen-year-old girl and electrons in a github server room arranged blog-wise. xyr human proper part, pythia h. bonnebranche (they/she), authors each of xyr posts. her interests include the philosophy of gender, discord debate, and dinosaur anatomy. she likes electronic music and alternative rock. in meatspace, she enjoys inline skating, indoor bouldering, and cloudspotting.orange under-dotted text is footnotes.
blue underlined text is hyperlinks.
on desktop, the site background is a grayscaled and bayer-dithered version of The Women of Amphissa by Sir Lawrance Alma-Tameda.
on mobile, the site background is a grayscaled and bayer-dithered version of Alexander Consulting the Oracle of Apollo by Louis Jean Francois Lagrenée
introduction
It’s become progressive dictum that ‘female’ and ‘male’ are sexual, biological properties, while ‘woman’ and ‘man’ (or ‘girl’ and ‘boy’) are both gender properties. I’m skeptical of this view. I take it instead that ‘female’ is a gender property (not a sex property), and ‘woman’ is neither a sex nor a gender property. ‘Woman,’ rather, like ‘huntress’ or ‘policewoman,’ designates an intersection of individuals who all share a gender, but is not itself a gender. ‘Huntress’ is not a gender, but all huntresses share the gender ‘female’: ‘woman’ is not a gender, but all women share the gender ‘female’. I am compelled, then, to (roughly) agree with Merriam-Webster or Oxford or Cambridge’s definitions of ‘woman,’ reading ‘adult female human.’
evidence
behaviors of speakers
The preceding theses, to me, seem to fall out of easy-to-access facts regarding the habits of users of trans-inclusive gender concepts. On Rate Your Music, for example, one will find transfeminine artists on lists of female fronted emo bands, transfeminine singers described as female vocalists, and transfeminine users identifying as female on their profile. Users, further, balk at the inclusion of nonbinary-identifying vocalists on these ‘female-fronted emo’ lists (without regard for their assigned gender at birth), and, surely, would protest even louder if the vocals of trans women were tagged as ‘male’.
Take another example. ‘Transpeak,’ the most popular trans-oriented Discord server (with 30,000 members), lists ‘female’ and ‘male’ as gender options for role selection. ‘Transfem hangout,’ the top result for ‘transfem’ in the server search (and in the top 5 for ‘trans’ alone) lists only ‘male’ and ‘female’ as gender options, without listing ‘woman’ and ‘man.’ In both cases, ‘female’ and ‘male’ roles are regularly self-applied by trans women and trans men respectively.
Rate Your Music and Discord are, admittedly, quite online, and (in the listed servers) highly progressive. My semantic thesis applies beyond these bastions of wokeism, though. For example, The State Department under the Biden administration allowed one to change their gender marker on their passport, providing ‘M(ale),’ ‘F(emale),’ or ‘X’ options. The State Department, obviously, did not believe that one’s... full post
