I enjoyed this discussion greatly. I really wish you all had not gone into the Trump/Fox/election issue as you did. I have no patience for Trump or Fox on it, but it is absolutely not irrational to have deep concerns about the many oddities and anomalies in the 2020 vote. I believe Trump lost and should have conceded immediately. But I also think skepticism about such matters as the Zucker Bucks money, the impact of the media suppression of stories about the Hunter Biden laptop, the massive increased use of absentee ballots, etc., raise legitimate questions that render any absolute certainty about the election results unacceptable. In any case, none of it has much relationship to the epistemological issues around the claims of trans people to actually BE the sex they claim to have switched to.
On that score, I only wish a bit more time had been spent on the idea of what a genetically male individual can even know about what an actual woman is as opposed to knowing the culturally shared images and stereotypes of what a woman is. In particular in the case of kids, what is the "man" a ten-year-old girl, say, thinks she will become? Brad Pitt or Henry Kissinger, John McWhorter or Glenn Loury? How much, that is, of the actual nature of the opposite sex is in any way at all accessible to such a child? I think what is accessible and what they are "identifying" as are largely culturally shaped stereotypes, not anything close to the realities of the opposite sex.
Your point about the ten-year-old girl even has a tie-in to the lived experience part of the discussion. She has no complete access to the lived experience of any man--from Pitt to Kissinger to McWhorter to Loury to me or to you.
I enjoyed this discussion greatly. I really wish you all had not gone into the Trump/Fox/election issue as you did. I have no patience for Trump or Fox on it, but it is absolutely not irrational to have deep concerns about the many oddities and anomalies in the 2020 vote. I believe Trump lost and should have conceded immediately. But I also think skepticism about such matters as the Zucker Bucks money, the impact of the media suppression of stories about the Hunter Biden laptop, the massive increased use of absentee ballots, etc., raise legitimate questions that render any absolute certainty about the election results unacceptable. In any case, none of it has much relationship to the epistemological issues around the claims of trans people to actually BE the sex they claim to have switched to.
On that score, I only wish a bit more time had been spent on the idea of what a genetically male individual can even know about what an actual woman is as opposed to knowing the culturally shared images and stereotypes of what a woman is. In particular in the case of kids, what is the "man" a ten-year-old girl, say, thinks she will become? Brad Pitt or Henry Kissinger, John McWhorter or Glenn Loury? How much, that is, of the actual nature of the opposite sex is in any way at all accessible to such a child? I think what is accessible and what they are "identifying" as are largely culturally shaped stereotypes, not anything close to the realities of the opposite sex.
Your point about the ten-year-old girl even has a tie-in to the lived experience part of the discussion. She has no complete access to the lived experience of any man--from Pitt to Kissinger to McWhorter to Loury to me or to you.