As I have already said, you can be a sex realist, accept that e.g. there is a sense in which sex is determined at birth, but deny that that fact determines the plain and ordinary meaning of terms like "male" or "female". It is a claim about ordinary usage, not metaphysics. - ThreadSky

robertmullins.bsky.social • 100 days ago

As I have already said, you can be a sex realist, accept that e.g. there is a sense in which sex is determined at birth, but deny that that fact determines the plain and ordinary meaning of terms like "male" or "female". It is a claim about ordinary usage, not metaphysics.

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michaelpforan.bsky.social•100 days ago

No you’re missing my point: the ordinary meaning of the word is not tied to a question of how the word is used but what the word means. There have been findings affirmed in the Supreme Court that sex is binary and immutable except where the GRA is involved.

robertmullins.bsky.social•100 days ago

As for the Supreme Court, I will have to defer to your expertise, but I think there is a difference between acknowledging one way in which the terms are used and saying that that method of use determines plain meaning. Many words/phrases lack a single plain meaning.

michaelpforan.bsky.social•100 days ago

The fact that a word has become contested within social or political discourse does not mean that the ordinary (legal) meaning of that word in its legislative context has become contested.

robertmullins.bsky.social•100 days ago

It's not even that they are contested, though, it's that even lawyers plainly do use one when they mean the other and vice versa. Would it be better if it weren't so? Maybe! But that's not the way it is.

robertmullins.bsky.social•100 days ago

I'm sorry, but I am totally stumped with this: "the ordinary meaning of the word is not tied to a question of how the word is used but what the word means". Like many (most) linguists and philosophers of language I think that meaning supervenes on use!

robertmullins.bsky.social•100 days ago

I think you might be arguing that in spite of various patterns of use inconsistent with this meaning terms like "female" are natural kind terms. So "female" refers to the sex realist version of female sex just as "water" refers to H20. Is that right? I'm honestly just trying to understand you.

michaelpforan.bsky.social•100 days ago

The task of statutory interpretation isn’t primarily a linguistic one. It’s a legal one. References to ordinary meaning are to ordinary meaning of the words in their correct legal context. That legal context includes findings of fact in caselaw that conclude that sex is binary and immutable.

michaelpforan.bsky.social•100 days ago

If for example we had a stable doctrine that in English law the point of death is fixed at cardiovascular death rather than brain death, a reference to the death of a person in a statute would track that even if ordinary usage might vary within the community.

michaelpforan.bsky.social•100 days ago

The task of a judge interpreting statute is by default to find the ordinary meaning of the words in their legal context. That’s not an empirical task involving surveys of the general population. It’s a legal enterprise not an empirical one.

michaelpforan.bsky.social•100 days ago

By all means you can suggest that if you put evidence before the court that is different from what was presented in Corbett; that showed that medical intervention to change secondary sex characteristics in fact does change sex, you’d might convince it. But right now the position is of sex realism

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