James Taranto: SCOTUS Should Say It Plainly: A Man Cannot Become A Woman

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Actually, this is even slightly more fundamental:

Women cannot be male

Men cannot be female.

I spent way too much time on Saturday arguing in the WSJ comments with a paradigmatically loony progressive about this. He (or she?) didn't know even the most basic things about the issue. He just accepted the blue-team talking points. Foremost among his confusions--one of the most important bits of leftist dogma: that man and woman are "genders." As I explained--repeatedly and to no avail:

[a] Man and woman are species/sex/maturity kinds (or categories), like buck and doe, boar and sow, bull and cow, stallion and mare... We have such terms for almost every species that is important to us--humans foremost among them.

   Unfortunately, 'gender' is multiply ambiguous--and that's largely by design. It functions as an equivocation engine, and the left switches around among different senses in order to obfuscate. If we eliminate the obviously defective senses of the term, and keep the meaning fixed, their arguments collapse immediately.

   As I've said for a decade, there is a sensible, defensible sense of 'gender'--basically the first one used as a technical term in such discussion: that is: the genders are masculine and feminine. These not "cultural," but, rather, behavioral kinds (though culture spins them a bit--as it does so many things). Men are typically more masculine, women more feminine. If we stick to this meaning, some of the left's central claims actually turn out to be true: these things lie on a spectrum; there's an intermediate state that could be considered a third gender: androgyny; one can, to some extent, alter them at will--by acting more masculine or more feminine. However: they have nothing essentially to do with being a man or a woman: acting in masculine ways can't make a female a man; acting in feminine ways can't make a male a woman.

   This dude I was arguing with even denied that the following definition is circular:  a woman is someone who thinks himself/herself to be a woman. I had to explain that, if the definiendum appears in the definiens...then that's circular...

   There's nothing like being [a] a pompous jackass who [b] has no earthly clue WTF you are talking about...

   Anyway, Taranto is right, of course. But the denial that men can be female and that women can be male, is slightly more fundamental. So it would be slightly better to focus on that.