On Ideal Forms and Gender
I was recently told about a film that discussed gender that included anti-trans comments. I explained that people might struggle to define what a woman is, just as people struggle to define justice, or family, or being. For example, most families have a mother and father and biological children, but some families have only one parent, due to death or divorce, while other families have adopted, foster, or step children. Sometimes defining nouns is difficult. I added that just because some people are unable to define what a woman is, that does not mean that this man's definition of a woman is correct. If people can’t answer a math question correctly, that doesn’t mean that the person who asked the question is correct. Socrates struggled with defining what a chair is. Socrates described the form of ideals, where reality is a physical manifestation of ideal forms. A circle is a line that is equidistant from a point, but there has never been a perfect circle represented in the world. ...