(July 1, 2024 at 8:06 pm)Foxaèr Wrote: Psychology is considered to be science, and typically one has to see a therapist before beginning the transition.
That's true. But seeing a therapist isn't something that confirms truth claims, is it? What objective standards does the therapist use to demonstrate that the person making the claim is in fact the gender they claim to be?
I remember when I started posting on forums like this one, when the New Atheists were still new. At that time we talked a lot about what distinguishes science from other types of activity. One of the main aspects of science that people pointed to was falsifiability. The idea was that any truth claim must be falsifiable to be scientific, and if it's not falsifiable it's not science.
Some people were pretty adamant about this, and went so far as to say that unfalsifiable truth claims were meaningless, or "illegitimate."
At the time I was skeptical about such assertions. I think there may well be ways of speaking true things that are not falsifiable. Not all claims are scientific claims, and not all ways of knowing are science ways.
Personal claims about gender are obviously not falsifiable.
If someone who has the type of body which was traditionally associated with being female (boobs, uterus, two X chromosomes, the whole bit) says "I am male," then we accept that. There is no way to demonstrate in a scientific, objective, empirical way that they are not in fact male. So it's not falsifiable, and therefore it's not science.
So I think we've identified a significant exception to the argument that used to get made so often -- that only falsifiable claims have truth value. Claims concerning a person's gender are to be taken as true, without the ability to show those claims to be false even in theory.
