IIRC he did ask that at one point, and got a pretty interesting answer.
I also don’t see how that is a bad faith question.
I think in certain contexts the question “what is a Republican” would be important, for example the right wing has been trying to answer that since Trump ran in 2015.
It was never the question that was bad faith. It is that he pretends like there is only one definition to the word, so there’s never a fruitful discussion. His entire existence at these events is to get video footage to use as marketing for his political group, not to actually debate in good faith.
An informed take from Forest Valkai on Kirk’s “what is a woman?” Debate style:
No, Kirk used the same debate bro tactics about people who were very informed and nuanced about the biological facts. Forest Valkai has explained this ad nauseum.
Kirk was bad faith because he tried to distill a complicated, nuanced argument into TikTok clips.
He ran into plenty of college students who tried the thing you described, but he was equally dismissive of the people who knew more than him on the subject.
It's bad faith because womanhood, like (for instance) adulthood, is a social construct. If I ask you, "what is an adult," there's no simple and rigorous answer to that question. You can say, "you're an adult when everyone agrees you're an adult," but that's a bit circular, and it risks making you sound dumb. Or you could get into different cultural ideas of adulthood, what happens when someone who's an adult in one culture enters a different culture where they're considered a child, the role that legal systems plays in establishing an age of majority, the social agreements that give that legal system the power to enforce certain rules based on that age, and so forth. But that's not going to come over very well in a snappy debate video where the other guy gets to edit the footage of whatever you say.
If a progressive were running the debate, they would never ask a question like, "what is a woman." They don't care that Republicans think trans women are men. They'd ask, "why should your conception of womanhood be used to determine who gets put in a women's jail when putting transgender women in male prisons measurably increases prison violence?"
"What is a woman" is a nebulous cultural question with no real importance compared to the actual lives and freedoms of transgender women.
> It's bad faith because womanhood, like (for instance) adulthood, is a social construct.
And the Democratic Party still wonders why they lost. I’m saying this as not an American. The question is what’s 2+2 and the answer being it’s a social construct.
No, the question is “is Pluto a planet” and the answer is complicated, but if you take the time to read up on how the scientific community reached consensus, then chances are you’ll end up better understanding the nuance - and why the answer is simply “No.”
Define “woman?” It’s easy - it’s the traditional gender role for people AFAB. Do you understand how we arrive at that answer though?
Yes, precisely! Modern conservatism is almost primarily characterized by the way it holds traditional gender roles as sacred! Gender unorthodoxy is their main objection to progressiveness!
That’s the reason any of this is even an issue, conservatives still think cows are sacred, queers are hungry for steak!
I understand now all the complaints from regular people about how the democrats and colleges are out of touch with reality, it’s like another universe or twilight zone.
If you ask a biologist, you will find that categories like "woman" are not clearly defined. Even the concept of biological sex is really complicated. If you want to pretend that this stuff is all black and white, that's up to you but its not a scientifically literate perspective.
That's not the same as saying that "everything is defined by society/culture?" That's a strawman - no-one was claiming that.
> When biologists claim that sex is binary, we mean something straightforward: There are only two sexes. This is true throughout the plant and animal kingdoms. An organism’s sex is defined by the type of gamete (sperm or ova) it has the function of producing. Males have the function of producing sperm, or small gametes; females, ova, or large ones. Because there is no third gamete type, there are only two sexes. Sex is binary.
> Gender ideology seeks to portray sex as so incomprehensibly complex and multivariable that our traditional practice of classifying people as simply either male or female is grossly outdated and should be abandoned for a revolutionary concept of “gender identity.” This entails that males wouldn’t be barred from female sports, women’s prisons or any other space previously segregated according to our supposedly antiquated notions of “biological sex,” so long as they “identify” as female.
> But “intersex” and “transgender” mean entirely different things. Intersex people have rare developmental conditions that result in apparent sex ambiguity. Most transgender people aren’t sexually ambiguous at all but merely “identify” as something other than their biological sex.
Once you’re conscious of this distinction, you will begin to notice gender ideologues attempting to steer discussions away from whether men who identify as women should be allowed to compete in female sports toward prominent intersex athletes like South African runner Caster Semenya. Why? Because so long as they’ve got you on your heels making difficult judgment calls on a slew of complex intersex conditions, they’ve succeeded in drawing your attention away from easy calls on unquestionably male athletes like 2022 NCAA Division I women’s swimming and diving champion Lia Thomas. They shift the focus to intersex to distract from transgender.
Ironically, "trans women think they're women but I think they're wrong!!" is by far the least real problem being discussed here. Nobody's forcing you to have a nuanced discussion about gender. You asked how we define "woman"; this the answer.
You're proving his point. Discussion of Peano axioms or however you want to construct natural numbers is irrelevant to the question what's two plus two, which has a straightforward answer to anyone who isn't being intentionally obtuse.
A better point of comparison would not be a question like "what is 2+2," but "what is 4?" There's a superficial, circular answer ("What is 4? It's 2+2"), and there's a more complex and rigorous answer which doesn't look good on camera ("What is 4? Well, numbers are a social construct used to communicate and analyze etc etc, Peano arithmetic blah blah").
These questions also admit "straightforward" answers ("what's 4?" raises 4 fingers "this many") ("what's a woman?" points to a woman "one of those"), but these don't really answer the deeper question being asked. They gesture at a preexisting category and demand that it be recognized without actually explaining the nature of that category or its boundaries.
