Man, I don’t know what you think we’re talking about, but I’m talking about DoorDash and DoorDash drivers in reality as it is today. I do not own DoorDash, so you are not subsidizing my business. The service offered is just bringing your food to your door, there isn’t really any “good” service that can be used to justify a tip or vice versa. If people decide that the cost of a DoorDash delivery plus a tip is too much, they won’t close the app and go get their food themselves–they will just not tip like OP did and like you do and they will both receive a message like the one above. If you want to have your order picked up quickly, you have to place a winning bid.

THAT is what capitalism is–not some idealized pursuit of profit that refuses to exploit its workers; but a house of cards built out of dozens of competing contradictions, full of people hoping to leave someone else holding the bag when it all comes crashing down. I recommend reading Contradiction 7 of Seventeen Contradictions and The End of Capitalism, “The Contradictory Unity of Production and realisation”. It’s all about how capitalists are fighting the competing contradictions of wanting to sell their goods for as much as possible while paying their laborers as little as possible, and what the broader social impacts of that may be.

Why is it my responsibility to ensure they’re paid fairly by me directly?

Because the price you pay for a service is a reflection of the relationship you have with the person providing that service, and to believe otherwise is something known as commodity fetishism

"What is, in fact, a social relation between people (between capitalists and exploited laborers) instead assumes “the fantastic form of a relation between things.”

We are defined both individually and societally by the relationships that we form with other people.

If you can’t pay your workers fairly, why does your business deserve to exist?

It does not deserve to exist. However, it does exist, drivers drive for them and are not paid enough for their labor, and you continue to use it despite all of that. I’ll ask again: why don’t you personally be the change you want to see in the world and pay them more now?

Ok, call your extra payment whatever name you want, and get the ball rolling on legislating new regulations to ensure fair pay. They deserve to get paid more, and when/if those regulations go through the drivers will have a better future.

That didn’t answer the question, though. We both agree that drivers deserve to get paid more, so why not open up your wallet and start paying them more now? Why wait months or years for legislation to go through to force you to pay more, when the power to make sure your driver is paid well is sitting in the palm of your hand today? Your individual act of tipping or not tipping will do nothing to address the system at large, but it will do everything to ensure your driver driver gets paid fairly for the labor they perform while they serve you.

That’s why I used the word “most” :) I don’t want to invalidate anyone’s personal lived experience.

And I’m not saying that people have the full picture the second they’re born, just that once someone has that egg-cracking moment and looks back at the rest of their life suddenly, in hindsight, lots of mannerisms and desires and personality quirks make a lot more sense. That’s how I felt when I realized I was nonbinary-- I always felt the way I always felt, but I only recently decided to attribute the label of “nonbinary” to those feelings

It’s rare that I see someone type a comment that mentions everything I want to say. You rock!

Well, I’m glad you made this comment, poorly phrased as it is. I went back and double-checked the scientific definitions of the words I used, and I included a word as a synonym where it actually is not a synonym. I’ve gone back and fixed my comment to avoid spreading misinformation.

Now to answer your accusation and your question, in that order:

First, the accusation that this is “my position” and a “claim”-- that is not the case. This is the established consensus of the scientific and medical communities, and I am just repeating what they said. If you have a problem with that, go to your local hospital and argue with a doctor or something.

Now, for your question-- I didn’t say anything resembling that at all. I corrected their terminology from “biological sexuality” to just “sex” because that’s literally what biologists call it–sex. Then I made the points that sex is based on lots of traits, not just the one, and that there is a lot of variance in what we call “male” and “female”. That doesn’t deny the existence of sex, all it does is say that biology mostly operates in spectrums, not binary systems.

Imotali got it right, that is exactly how it works :) most people who are transgender know that they are transgender before they know the meaning of the word “transgender”. It also looks like you’re confusing two terms that sound a lot alike but mean two different things.

What you’re calling “biological sexuality” is really just called “sex” or “sexual identity”. It’s concerned primarily with categorizing a person’s physiology into one of two groups based on the average of several traits, with lots of variance possible between individual members of those groups. This is what TERFs incorrectly call being a “biological man or woman”. Note that it has nothing to do with presentation, performance, speech, and other non-physiological traits–those all relate to gender, not sex.

“Sexual identity” refers to the intersection of sex, gender identity, gender roles, and sexual orientation.

if other people were forced to treat my every feeling with rubber gloves, I wouldn’t feel respected

It’s a good thing that this isn’t what’s happening, then :) if people were treating trans people’s every feeling with rubber gloves, then we wouldn’t be four times as likely as a cisgender person to be the victim of a violent crime

We don’t want the rubber glove treatment. All we want is to have the same right to bodily autonomy as straight white American men do-- free to go where we feel comfortable AND comfortable in our own skin wherever we go, with no one trying to legislate away our mastership over our own bodies.

You aren’t the judge of when someone is or isn’t a woman, though. The only person whose opinion matters in that case is the woman herself.

Yes, I do. This is a space where trans rights and trans people are respected. That means that their existence is accepted as fact, not debated in the comment section.

There are numerous places and resources available for that person to educate themself, if they had chosen to do so before commenting. Instead, they chose to comment from a place of ignorance. We have no obligation to offer them that education here.

So, no contestants who have had their wisdom teeth removed? No one allowed who has had a C-section? No cancer patients who have had biopsies done?

I think the issue is that there is no such thing as a “biological woman”. Manhood/womanhood is an issue of gender, not sex, and gender is something that we collectively made up whose meaning varies from person to person and from culture to culture. The only person who is capable of saying “Person McFaceface is/is not a woman” is Person McFaceface.

Even if we were to interpret their comment to mean “sex”, that isn’t a simple binary yes/no kind of question. There is no single trait that determines maleness or femaleness, and lots of people have traits indicative of both sexes or of neither sex (or they were born that way then surgically altered shortly after birth), and sometimes those traits are so hidden and so internal that the person themself doesn’t know about it.