One can use pejoratives (i.e., be insulting) and be making factual statements at the same time. Clarity maybe is debatable because pejoratives can get in the way. I can think of at least one example but it’s a bit of a distraction to pursue that discussion branch I think.
Hmm I can see your point a little more. I’m not sure exactly where I stand.
Can you point me to any?
I assume you would say that procreation is the main purpose of the organ.
Yes
There would be plenty of reasons it would biologically make sense that women grow vaginas even if they are infertile, […]
Besides it being simpler, what would some of those reasons be? (Keeping in mind that evolutionarily nothing in such genetic branches will ever directly be selected for)
[…] and that their vaginas don’t just shrivel up and become unusable when they are no longer fertile.
Right, but, evolutionarily, a lot of things aren’t selected for after infertility. Selfish genes come to mind as an exception but it’s hard to see how they’d apply here. So I wouldn’t expect reproductive organs to shrivel up unless they also did that before infertility in some situations.
I think these are mostly my own. I am taking some inspiration from other areas of philosophy but I can’t remember hearing these ideas in regards to bottom surgery. At least not in any kind of detail. I recall some general anti-trans stuff, and reading some experiences of detransitioners.
Here’s an example of an idea that I am borrowing from a bit (maybe erroneously): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ya1PrgkOO98 The one true philosophical theory of names - Jeffrey Kaplan [25:04]
From the description:
This is a video lecture in a course on the philosophy of language. It summarizes Gareth Evans’s theory of proper names that he puts forward in a famous 1973 paper titled “The Causal Theory of Names.”
Yes because I came up with how I characterized artificialness in an ad-hoc way. I don’t have a good reason to think that I was foundationally incorrect instead of superficially incorrect.
FWIW I can see the point about why it might be problematic but I am not sure that it actually is if it’s only done once or twice. Doing it lots of times is problematic (easy to vary / infinite theories), but arguing that something is wrong because it’s altered in this way once is also an error (or at least might be; we don’t know enough yet based on the discussion so far).
I’m not that confident about it. I’m drawing on a wide array of things, the earliest of which is a metaphysics course at uni more than a decade ago. So I don’t think the error is that deep because the way I’m thinking about artificiality is kind of ad-hoc.
The most general reason (I think atm) is my intuitive reaction, and my opposition to the erosion of meaning of words. We have names for ideas and my feeling is that a lot of stuff with lineage to postmodernism has little respect for those names and directly opposes what is understood by them. Sometimes it’s done quite deliberately which I think is a bit toxic when we could just make new phrases for things. (So gender identity and gender roles are fine, but redefining gender to not be about sex is not fine, especially when it’s done surreptitiously.)