Transgender activists care so much about pronouns for the obvious reason that they desperately wish for everyone else to believe that they are the opposite sex, but they can't actually change their sex, so instead they try to change everything else associated with their sex as a way to trick and/or demand that everyone else believe that they're the opposite sex. The pronoun is just one little thing in that collection of boxes to check, as you note, and a small thing, which becomes important precisely bc they thought it would be so easy to change. Unlike their sex, which is impossible to change. One is just a word.
I suppose the question it raises to me is WHY is it so critically, life and death important to a transgender person that other people believe they are the opposite sex (and to be clear, that is ultimately what they want, even if they know it's a stretch so at best they will settle for other people PRETENDING and acting as if they believe it, but what they truly wish for is for other people to believe it)? And if it is so important to them that other third party's hold certain beliefs about the transgender person's sex, then why shouldn't it be equally important to the third party what they believe in their own head? It is clearly critically important to a transgender person what others believe about them, yet they want those other people to take the same question lightly, and essentially not care what they believe and just be told what they believe. Surely you can see why this is a problem? The only reason this is so important is because a person's beliefs about another person's sex entirely inform how they are going to react to and treat that person, and whether they consider them a potential threat or potential mate or potential foe or friend or ally. If it wasn't for that, transgender people have no reason at all to care what anyone else thinks about their sex or "gender". It's because they want to be seen as a potential mate and not a potential threat, or the other way around, that it matters to them. But that's exactly why most people also have an equally strong interest in actually knowing someone's sex, and not being fooled about it, which is the cause of all the trouble to begin with.
I agree with you that in most social contexts where you're for example in a large city surrounded by lots of people, a person's sex does not immediately matter, because in large crowds, almost no one ever ends up mating or fighting or raping. However, our brains did evolve in a world with only about .01% as many humans as we have today, where people were often not surrounded by crowds, and there were no witnesses, and upon spying a new person, it was in fact immediately critical to identify whether they were a potential rival who might kill you, or a potential mating opportunity, or a potential raper who may try to impregnate you. Which is why the immediate, unconscious thing everyone does when they look at another person is instantly assess age and sex. Even animals do that. It might help the transgender activists if they just acknowledged this and then made arguments based upon something like overcoming these primeval wired in animalistic responses that are often no longer applicable in 98% of circumstances, and that we'd be doing them a really nice social courtesy to ignore those instincts, rather than trying to play language games that no one's buying.
> WHY is it so critically, life and death important to a transgender person that other people believe they are the opposite sex (and to be clear, that is ultimately what they want, even if they know it's a stretch so at best they will settle for other people PRETENDING and acting as if they believe it, but what they truly wish for is for other people to believe it)?
It's gender dysphoria, it's a strange mental defect. The question is whether it's a mental defect in the sense of homosexuality (in which case we shrug and say, ok, do your thing) or a defect in the sense of paranoid schizophrenia (in which case we say, no, there are no demons out to get you, why don't you have some haldol?). I think in many cases (i.e., the non-ROGD ones) it's lower-cost to society to go the former route—conversion therapy is hard, usually ineffective, and often weirdly cruel—and we should mostly just try to be respectful of the weird-mental-things that other people have and we don't have.
> It is clearly critically important to a transgender person what others believe about them, yet they want those other people to take the same question lightly, and essentially not care what they believe and just be told what they believe. Surely you can see why this is a problem?
I think part of this is just a normal bad-theory-of-mind-ish way for people to do political messaging. If I want you to believe the thing that I believe, it's best you not fill your head with Outgroup Bigotry first.
Even so, ultimately, there is an asymmetry between how much it matters to you and how much it matters to them—for another example, take the N-word. Black people really don't want you to use the N-word, and they also think it's pretty low-cost for you not to use it, and they're right. Or consider a waiter who really likes hearing "thank you" at the end of their customers' meals. Probably they would really want you to say "thank you" at the end of your meal, even if they also thought it didn't cost you much to do it. Where's the problem with that? Pronouns are just politeness rebranded! (My guess is the issue comes from trans activists blowing up the stakes: pronoun-usage has nothing to do with anyone's "right to exist" and that was a really terrible messaging move.)
> It's because they want to be seen as a potential mate and not a potential threat, or the other way around, that it matters to them. But that's exactly why most people also have an equally strong interest in actually knowing someone's sex, and not being fooled about it, which is the cause of all the trouble to begin with.
I really think a large part of this is a divide between cyberspace and meatspace. Online, it's just truly all about the language games: there's no mating or threatening to be done, physical reality is diminished, and "identity" feels really outsizedly important. In that context—a context trans people spend a disproportionate amount of time in—respecting preferred pronouns is actually pretty low-stakes. I guess the problem is that activists tried to losslessly port the online-behavior into the real world, where people care about whether they're having sex with a penis or not. In mate/threat-related physical reality, it definitely makes more sense to say "trans women aren't quite women, though obviously they're not *really* men either, I guess we'll just stick with 'trans women'."
I agree that the immediate, unconscious sex-assessment is what people are used to. I think trans activists are absolutely wrong to try to fight it so directly... but I also think it's stupid that now *anti*-trans activists are trying to fight it directly! (cf. https://mistakesweremade.substack.com/p/trans-women-are-women) My problem is with the people who insist that biological reality is more important *in every context* than what I can see with my own two eyes. That strikes me as wildly unintuitive, and I think that insisting on penis-importance comes way too close to that. Most of the time, who gives a shit, she looks like a woman!
I agree that in most contexts in modern life the biological reality is not actually important. But they're driving against instincts developed before modern contexts or the internet, and probably should recognize the inherent problem there and just acknowledge it directly rather than preferring to ignore it and just chalk it all up to bigotry. It really goes entirely against totally unconscious and automatic animalistic responses for people to not automatically categorize every person by sex (other than perhaps babies and the extremely elderly, who are both seen as essentially de-sexed). So that's a big hump to get over and an inherent friction that will always take mental effort, unless/until someone truly seemlessly passes.
To be clear, I use people's asked for pronouns and have no desire to disrespect or socially humiliate anyone, it's just the underlying arguments they advance that I think are bad and they would've been better off being more direct.
Most people would absolutely be on board with "it will make me feel terribly embarrassed and horrible about myself if you refer to me as if I'm my biological sex because I have a mental health issue that causes me to feel terrible shame and discomfort about it, so please make accomodations" rather than "I am the sex I want to be and referring to me or thinking of me as anything but that, even just by mistake, for any reason, is offensive". I'm not sure why they didn't take more of a disability accomodation type angle, it's much more sympathetic.
The figures you cited on how much more time trans people spend online in an abstract disembodied world are truly astonishing! Almost 40 hours more EVERY WEEK!?! I agree with you on that point, that it runs up against how things work in the much more sensory, instinctual manner in meat space.
I hate to say it (because I'm a fan of much else you've written), but this is a really bad argument.
As best I can tell, you're saying this:
1. We rarely determine whether someone is a woman by first determining whether they have a penis.
2. If we rarely determine whether something is an F by first determining whether it's a G, then being (or failing to be) a G is not essential to being an F.
3. Therefore, failing to have a penis is not essential to being a woman.
Premise 2 of this argument is clearly false. We rarely (if ever) determine whether a substance is water by first determining whether it's H2O, but being H2O is essential to being water. Water is H2O, even though we don't distinguish water from other substances by comparing their chemical compositions (except in highly unusual circumstances).
Why don't we typically check whether something is water by checking whether it's H2O? Because it's usually very hard to tell, just by looking, how something is chemically composed. Why don't we typically check whether someone is a woman by first checking whether they have a penis? Because it's usually very hard to tell, just by looking, whether someone has a penis (especially if they're trying to hide it, or if we're communicating with them over the internet). There's nothing even slightly mysterious about this. It doesn't show that women can have penises, any more than it shows that water can be NaCl.
Perhaps you're instead saying this:
3. Being perceived as a woman does not require being perceived as failing to have a penis.
4. If being perceived as an F does not require being perceived as (not) being a G, then (not) being a G is not essential to being an F.
5. Therefore, failing to have a penis is not essential to being a woman.
Premise 4 of this argument is clearly false. Being perceived as a human does not require being perceived as having DNA (most people don't think about whether something has DNA when judging whether it's human), but having DNA is essential to being human. Whatever else humans are, they are DNA-havers.
I'll add that these arguments aren't merely terrible, but transparently so. It's easy to see, with moderate reflection, what's wrong with them. I don't say this to be cruel -- I say it to warn you against making arguments like this in the future. (If you don't believe me when I say I'm not trying to be cruel, I don't blame you. But nevertheless, I'm not.)
I've noticed that many intelligent, clear-eyed, rational people in academia and on Substack lose their ability to spot bad arguments when discussing trans issues. Don't become one of those people. (Because you're generally intelligent, clear-eyed, and rational, you're in danger of becoming one of those people.)
This might sound a little too close to "losing ability to spot bad arguments when discussing trans issues" for you, but I think that gender is of a different kind than either human-ness or water-ness. Generally speaking, it's a socially constructed category (I base this mostly on Bentham's Bulldog's arguments [https://benthams.substack.com/p/why-i-think-trans-women-are-women], and would be curious if you disagree and/or why), and so the primary question is, in fact, whether society perceives someone as a woman or not. There's no truth-of-the-matter hiding underneath like there is in the case of water—if I see a trans woman on the street who looks like a woman, I'll probably consider her a woman regardless of whether she has a penis or not.
Now, if I then go and try to have sex with her, the penis becomes relevant and they're no longer really a full-fledged woman to me. But, per section 2, most of the time, the penis can pretty safely be ignored, and the person can be *treated as* a woman. Since it's a social category, I think "treated as" comes out to the same thing as "is."
Regardless, though, the two arguments I considered above fail for socially constructed categories, too. Being a one-dollar bill is a socially constructed property: things are one-dollar bills because we say they are. And one-dollar bills are essentially issued by the Federal Reserve. That's part of what it is to be a one-dollar bill. Nevertheless, we don't (typically) check whether something is a one-dollar bill by checking whether it was issued by the Federal Reserve. Instead, we check whether it's a one-dollar bill by checking whether it has the surface features typical of one-dollar bills. The reason we do this is because it's usually very hard to check whether something was issued by the Federal Reserve. (It takes a lot of work to bust counterfeiters!) It's much easier to check whether it has the surface features of a one-dollar bill, and that's a highly reliable way to identify one-dollar bills.
Likewise, even if gender is socially constructed, it doesn't follow that the surface features we use to discern someone's gender are all and only the features essential to their gender. Our socially constructed gender-categories could very well include biological traits, like having or lacking a penis, even if we don't often check someone's gender by checking whether they have those traits. Lacking a penis is to being a woman what originating from the Federal Reserve is to being a one-dollar bill: absolutely essential, though not a useful outward marker.
Relatedly, though being a one-dollar bill is a socially constructed property, being *treated as* a one-dollar bill is not sufficient for being a one-dollar bill. Counterfeit bills that are treated as genuine are nevertheless counterfeit. So, not all socially constructed properties are such that being *treated as* having that property is sufficient for having it. (Some socially constructed properties may be like that, though I struggle to think of examples. But you'd need to offer additional arguments for thinking that being a woman is that kind of socially constructed property.)
You say in your comment on BB's post that "it’s often permissible to misrepresent things to avoid being cruel." If you believe that, we might not really disagree very much? I wrote in my old post:
> I believe that trans women are women. I think you should too. But it’s also ok if you don’t—all you need to believe is that trans women are people. They’re generally good and decent and it costs you very little to be good and decent back.
And you seem to fall squarely into that latter camp, which I'm cool with. It seems like even if not-penis-having is essential to womanhood for you, you'd be willing to kindly-misrepresent that belief in most contexts, which is good enough for me.
...On why I think "woman" is a treated-as-means-as type of property:
I think "woman" is like "mother." In each case, the person being described fills some specific social role, based on various stereotypes, responsibilities, and challenges. Even if an adoptive mother hasn't gone through pregnancy, she's still *mostly* does the things a mother does, and we've all kind of agreed that it's rude and incorrect to call her anything else. Similarly, even if a trans woman doesn't menstruate or have a penis, she may appear to be and act very much like a typical woman. In those cases—the ones where we would intuitively say she "passes"—it seems rude and incorrect to call her anything but a woman!
I think the vast majority of actual radical feminists (as opposed to more generalized "gender critical" people or whatever) are not opposed to the idea that women can have penises for the reasons you give. It has much less to do with the idea that the specific organ will have some deleterious impact on the feminist project, and much more with a specific empirical claim that biological sex is the foundation of women's oppression - and if you accept that, then it does seem pretty reasonable to believe that any ideological movement devoted to obscuring that dynamic will be harmful for women and girls, right? Obviously, there are a lot of normative and even purely aesthetic considerations going into all of this. But I think people significantly underestimate the degree to which radical feminists simply *do not believe,* as a matter of fact, that the social categories of "man" and "woman" work the way you describe.
Moreover, the majority of classic radical feminists don't blame sex inequality on testosterone either. They blame it on a specific social arrangement of power that relates to sex but isn't inherent to it. And in that framework, again, it seems obvious that obscuring the connection between a male body and your placement in the gender system would be bad! Because what replaces it is, according to you at least, adherence to a collection of sex stereotypes. But those are exactly what radical feminists *don't* want defining womanhood, right?
No, I mean, I'm fully agreed that "biological sex is the foundation of women's oppression." All I'm claiming (in the last section) is that it's mostly via avenues that aren't penises... I'll admit this is ultimately a pretty lame semantic argument. Hopefully all the other more-descriptive "why do trans people care so much about pronouns?" sections come off as a bit wiser and more interesting...
Well sure, but that's the point I'm making - 90% of the time, actual radical feminists who talk about "penises" are using it (perhaps unwisely) as a synecdoche for sex in general. The problem radical feminists have isn't that people claim women can have this specific organ, but rather that they claim womanhood is unrelated to sex and instead determined by stereotypes those feminists find reductive and harmful. So while I understand and largely agree with those earlier points you're making about why some trans people would prefer to move away from body-based conceptions of gender to ones based in more nebulous social and emotional qualities, there are at least some good reasons (in an internal sense) that radical feminists have to think a shift like that is harmful, or at least no better than the strictly essentialist view that came before. And of course nothing in your piece contradicts that - I'm just trying to offer an alternate perspective here, since so often the critique *is* framed as just a sort of table-thumping insistence that having a penis makes womanhood metaphysically impossible.
This is fundamentally a debate about social technology. The technology of gender is deeply-ingrained. We’ve found a lot of stuff that’s no longer adaptive to have recently, though, e.g. the sexual division of labor into the public and domestic spheres. So there’s the question of how much more we can cut away to allow flex.
Any publicly-accepted change in the conception of gender has to be of minimal complexity compared to its previous state, and also has to seriously justify increases in complexity. Our world is very complex and difficult for most people, and gender is one of those really loaded-bearing technologies - analogous to income tax in a government’s budget. We’ve so far been doing things that mostly cut complexity. A lot of the difficulty with trans stuff, though, is that it raises complexity. The masses riot at tax rate increases.
And in this case, I think of us as the extremely wealthy and the concept of gender as a regressive tax. Everyone deals with gender all the time, and most people are impoverished for mental capacity. We can handle increases in complexity (if begrudgingly, or alternatively as a show of conspicuous consumption). However, the proles cannot.
I don’t think the updates to gender that you propose are viable changes to push. In particular, a) someone being one gender in some contexts and a different gender in different contexts is not viable, and b) there not being a single criterion which can be referred on to determine gender is costly, though maybe viable.
People are generally running a few subroutines at all times, and using heuristics because of this. For instance, women are often running their “is this a situation where I am at risk by being alone with this person?” when in proximity to someone, and making their decision using a simple gender yes/no to decide. But sometimes a penis is relevant, and sometimes athleticism is relevant, and if the gender yes/no becomes less reliable the heuristic has to increase in complexity. This isn’t to say that e.g. women’s risk profile of personal interactions is incorrectly calibrated, it’s that the calculation has to increase in complexity if we change this tech. The same goes for men’s basically-always-on subroutine of “is there a prospective mate present?”. This is often handled at first pass with a gender yes/no and then further refined. If he’s in a social setting and someone triggers woman, but then is not a woman for romantic purposes, then the error handling has to be refined and then the base heuristic. It increases complexity.
Welp, I accidentally wrote an essay in the comments. Anyway, my point is that we can handle short periods of increased complexity on a topic to decide on changes, but the proposed changes are too expensive for the mental lower- and middle- classes. The special interests who benefit from increasingly-large chunks carved from gender get diminishing returns. It’s just not viable to push past “a woman is always a woman”, and is probably not viable to push past “a woman’s body does not have a penis”.
I like this analogy a lot... my hope was actually to de-complexify, so if it came off not that way, then, well, shit.
I think context-specific gender-assessment is actually pretty simple: look at someone, decide if they're a woman or not, done. If they tell you you're wrong and ask you to use different pronouns, it's polite to, but I don't think you really have to. (I make this case at greater length here: https://mistakesweremade.substack.com/p/trans-women-are-women.)
And then the cases where it really matters are allowed to be more complicated—it's analogous to how when I see a really muscley guy on the street, I'll say "wow, he's strong" but then if he goes to a weightlifting competition, I'll want to test him for PEDs.
The point of *this* essay is to say that the penis tends to be pretty irrelevant to our simple gender-assessments: like, actually, when you're on the street, how often are you deciding whether someone's a man or a woman based on their bulge? It becomes relevant only in very physical, sexual contexts, but a) trans people exist in physical & sexual reality much less than anyone else and b) the physical & sexual context is pretty rare and exceptional in general! Once you get there, probably you will have figured out whether a penis is involved or not (or how many), so why worry about it until you've got to?
Adopting the conception as you propose does, in fact, simplify the way we refer to people compared to some alternatives. It’s simpler to say that someone is a woman in this context and a man in this other context than it is to say that they’re a woman who had a man’s body but now has some intermediate body. But simplicity in reference is different from simplicity in computation.
One example of this that I find really compelling is utilitarianism. Utilitarianism is incredibly simple in reference: just maximize happiness. However, it requires actual computation - the consequences of each action have to be added up and then compared to each other. On the other hand, Deontology is incredibly complicated in reference, requiring reams of specific rules, but incredibly easy to compute (Is this murder? Yes/no, etc.). This is why utilitarianism is for the cognitively rich and deontology is for the cognitively poor. It also explains why it can never be a universal philosophy. Gender, however, does have to be universally-adopted (minus small social networks), which means the cognitively poor need to be able to pay for it. They already budget quite a large portion of their capacity to it (perhaps too much, but gender is still pretty load-bearing, and gender norms make some types of decision-making/behavior/expectations much simpler than they would be otherwise), and can’t afford much more in this mental economy.
People are basically always running computations that implicitly rely on the gender of the people they’re around, and changing gender from a bit to a byte (basically what saying gender is male when x, female when y does) is surprisingly computationally expensive to base load.
I think you significantly underestimate the level of heuristic abstraction that most people live their lives using, and how necessary it is for them to do so. It really took me until midway through undergrad, because of the typical mind fallacy and the fact that almost everyone I ever interacted with was at least cognitively upper-middle-class. I basically think that what you propose is a like a perfectly standard Windows 11 constant background task, but most people are chugging barely running Vista.
Edit: in case it wasn’t clear, I basically agree with you in principle, especially with your previous post. It allows for clearer communication to say that someone is a woman in a professional setting but requires more classification in a sexual setting, and that the right thing is to basically call it like you see it. I just disagree with you in practice, like how I might like the idea of holistic admissions in a vacuum, but still think that a higher focus on test scores is better in practice.
2nd edit: whoops, I guess this would have been a better comment if I’d read this morning’s post beforehand. I’ll leave it as-is, but I would have said things a bit differently if I’d read that first.
Sorry, a trans” woman” is a man… someone born male and having a penis! Anyone with a penis claiming to be a woman is simply lying!
To say a woman can have a penis is ridiculous, goes against basic biology and , frankly , trying to prove this is tantamount to trying to argue as to how many angels can dance on a pin. The whole trans thing is a bunch of lies, but reams of junk have been written to try to prove that women can indeed have penises! Yawn!
This article is terrible, I mean, “penis-havingness”? Cross sex hormones do not change your sex at all - they just give you an endocrine disorder. A man on estrogen is just a man with gynecomastia and an highly increased risk for stroke, among other things.
What? I'm not saying that hormones change your sex, I'm saying that they give you secondary sex characteristics more like those of the other sex, which obviously they do. My argument is that that constitutes, in many cases, a change in *gender*—feel free to read my article arguing why (https://mistakesweremade.substack.com/p/trans-women-are-women), and to tell me where I went wrong.
There is no such thing as gender, it’s a totally meaningless concept invented by John Money in the 1970’s. 2 sexes, 0 genders, infinite personalities. Cross sex hormones can’t change a thing that doesn’t exist.
"Penis-havingness and the state of being filled with testosterone have historically been categories that mostly overlap. But with the advent of cross-sex hormones, that’s no longer true."
What does it say that the invalidation of this association requires a constant chemical treatment to maintain?
How are you thinking about "additive"? If a fat person takes Ozempic and becomes skinny, have they *added* something in a way that a man becoming a woman cannot?
I mean, maybe the problem is that I'm operating from a framework where "man" and "woman" are defined as contextually-dependent clusters. At some point, when a natal male goes on cross-sex hormones, he becomes more like a she than a he, and it becomes useful to call her a woman (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-u8bkyXTK4). I think of the Ozempic case as similar: a fat person gets closer to skinny than fat, and so they become skinny. In either case, where does it become relevant that stopping some treatment changes the definition?
(For a more extreme example: I am right now a hungry person. If I start to eat the bagel in front of me, I will become more of a satiated person. But if I stop eating bagels altogether, I'll go back to being hungry. Does this mean I was never *actually* satiated? Of course not!)
If Ozempic had to be taken for life, lest the patient immediately regain all of their fat, I would say so.
Hormones change some things. There is a lot of things they don't change. Hair loss in men is very common with age. All these natal men taking cross sex hormones will deal with that problem. Phenotypically, a man on hormones is far more likely to still be observed as a man, or a disgusting 'neither', rather than a real woman, and everyone who interacts with them offline knows this.
Your Ozempic bullet-biting is really bizarre to me: if they look skinny, why does it matter how they got that way? What if someone skinny has a very strict diet and exercise regimen, and if they stop doing that they'll get fat again? Would you say they were actually platonically fat? What if someone is taking medication for a mental illness, and it makes them gain weight? Are they actually platonically skinny? Why can't we just call people what they appear to be?
I think you made a very similar point about passing-ness on the Trans Women Are Women post, and my response will also be similar: if they *really* don't pass, then I agree that you don't have to call them a woman. (Though I still think it's kind to.) But my experience has largely been different, so I dunno how helpful I can be.
A better metaphor is the difference between someone 'being fat' and steatopygia. One can be fat or not be fat, for the latter, one can work on being less fat, but the condition is always there for fat distribution and this remains visible even if the person is skinny.
If one wanted trans women to be treated as they pass, then there would be little need for trans rights in the first place. Those who could genuinely fool people rarely got into trouble. But the reality is most people aren't fooled. Even for men who put in great effort to pass, something like their voice will give them away.
Transgender activists care so much about pronouns for the obvious reason that they desperately wish for everyone else to believe that they are the opposite sex, but they can't actually change their sex, so instead they try to change everything else associated with their sex as a way to trick and/or demand that everyone else believe that they're the opposite sex. The pronoun is just one little thing in that collection of boxes to check, as you note, and a small thing, which becomes important precisely bc they thought it would be so easy to change. Unlike their sex, which is impossible to change. One is just a word.
I suppose the question it raises to me is WHY is it so critically, life and death important to a transgender person that other people believe they are the opposite sex (and to be clear, that is ultimately what they want, even if they know it's a stretch so at best they will settle for other people PRETENDING and acting as if they believe it, but what they truly wish for is for other people to believe it)? And if it is so important to them that other third party's hold certain beliefs about the transgender person's sex, then why shouldn't it be equally important to the third party what they believe in their own head? It is clearly critically important to a transgender person what others believe about them, yet they want those other people to take the same question lightly, and essentially not care what they believe and just be told what they believe. Surely you can see why this is a problem? The only reason this is so important is because a person's beliefs about another person's sex entirely inform how they are going to react to and treat that person, and whether they consider them a potential threat or potential mate or potential foe or friend or ally. If it wasn't for that, transgender people have no reason at all to care what anyone else thinks about their sex or "gender". It's because they want to be seen as a potential mate and not a potential threat, or the other way around, that it matters to them. But that's exactly why most people also have an equally strong interest in actually knowing someone's sex, and not being fooled about it, which is the cause of all the trouble to begin with.
I agree with you that in most social contexts where you're for example in a large city surrounded by lots of people, a person's sex does not immediately matter, because in large crowds, almost no one ever ends up mating or fighting or raping. However, our brains did evolve in a world with only about .01% as many humans as we have today, where people were often not surrounded by crowds, and there were no witnesses, and upon spying a new person, it was in fact immediately critical to identify whether they were a potential rival who might kill you, or a potential mating opportunity, or a potential raper who may try to impregnate you. Which is why the immediate, unconscious thing everyone does when they look at another person is instantly assess age and sex. Even animals do that. It might help the transgender activists if they just acknowledged this and then made arguments based upon something like overcoming these primeval wired in animalistic responses that are often no longer applicable in 98% of circumstances, and that we'd be doing them a really nice social courtesy to ignore those instincts, rather than trying to play language games that no one's buying.
> WHY is it so critically, life and death important to a transgender person that other people believe they are the opposite sex (and to be clear, that is ultimately what they want, even if they know it's a stretch so at best they will settle for other people PRETENDING and acting as if they believe it, but what they truly wish for is for other people to believe it)?
It's gender dysphoria, it's a strange mental defect. The question is whether it's a mental defect in the sense of homosexuality (in which case we shrug and say, ok, do your thing) or a defect in the sense of paranoid schizophrenia (in which case we say, no, there are no demons out to get you, why don't you have some haldol?). I think in many cases (i.e., the non-ROGD ones) it's lower-cost to society to go the former route—conversion therapy is hard, usually ineffective, and often weirdly cruel—and we should mostly just try to be respectful of the weird-mental-things that other people have and we don't have.
> It is clearly critically important to a transgender person what others believe about them, yet they want those other people to take the same question lightly, and essentially not care what they believe and just be told what they believe. Surely you can see why this is a problem?
I think part of this is just a normal bad-theory-of-mind-ish way for people to do political messaging. If I want you to believe the thing that I believe, it's best you not fill your head with Outgroup Bigotry first.
Even so, ultimately, there is an asymmetry between how much it matters to you and how much it matters to them—for another example, take the N-word. Black people really don't want you to use the N-word, and they also think it's pretty low-cost for you not to use it, and they're right. Or consider a waiter who really likes hearing "thank you" at the end of their customers' meals. Probably they would really want you to say "thank you" at the end of your meal, even if they also thought it didn't cost you much to do it. Where's the problem with that? Pronouns are just politeness rebranded! (My guess is the issue comes from trans activists blowing up the stakes: pronoun-usage has nothing to do with anyone's "right to exist" and that was a really terrible messaging move.)
> It's because they want to be seen as a potential mate and not a potential threat, or the other way around, that it matters to them. But that's exactly why most people also have an equally strong interest in actually knowing someone's sex, and not being fooled about it, which is the cause of all the trouble to begin with.
I really think a large part of this is a divide between cyberspace and meatspace. Online, it's just truly all about the language games: there's no mating or threatening to be done, physical reality is diminished, and "identity" feels really outsizedly important. In that context—a context trans people spend a disproportionate amount of time in—respecting preferred pronouns is actually pretty low-stakes. I guess the problem is that activists tried to losslessly port the online-behavior into the real world, where people care about whether they're having sex with a penis or not. In mate/threat-related physical reality, it definitely makes more sense to say "trans women aren't quite women, though obviously they're not *really* men either, I guess we'll just stick with 'trans women'."
I agree that the immediate, unconscious sex-assessment is what people are used to. I think trans activists are absolutely wrong to try to fight it so directly... but I also think it's stupid that now *anti*-trans activists are trying to fight it directly! (cf. https://mistakesweremade.substack.com/p/trans-women-are-women) My problem is with the people who insist that biological reality is more important *in every context* than what I can see with my own two eyes. That strikes me as wildly unintuitive, and I think that insisting on penis-importance comes way too close to that. Most of the time, who gives a shit, she looks like a woman!
I agree that in most contexts in modern life the biological reality is not actually important. But they're driving against instincts developed before modern contexts or the internet, and probably should recognize the inherent problem there and just acknowledge it directly rather than preferring to ignore it and just chalk it all up to bigotry. It really goes entirely against totally unconscious and automatic animalistic responses for people to not automatically categorize every person by sex (other than perhaps babies and the extremely elderly, who are both seen as essentially de-sexed). So that's a big hump to get over and an inherent friction that will always take mental effort, unless/until someone truly seemlessly passes.
To be clear, I use people's asked for pronouns and have no desire to disrespect or socially humiliate anyone, it's just the underlying arguments they advance that I think are bad and they would've been better off being more direct.
Most people would absolutely be on board with "it will make me feel terribly embarrassed and horrible about myself if you refer to me as if I'm my biological sex because I have a mental health issue that causes me to feel terrible shame and discomfort about it, so please make accomodations" rather than "I am the sex I want to be and referring to me or thinking of me as anything but that, even just by mistake, for any reason, is offensive". I'm not sure why they didn't take more of a disability accomodation type angle, it's much more sympathetic.
The figures you cited on how much more time trans people spend online in an abstract disembodied world are truly astonishing! Almost 40 hours more EVERY WEEK!?! I agree with you on that point, that it runs up against how things work in the much more sensory, instinctual manner in meat space.
I hate to say it (because I'm a fan of much else you've written), but this is a really bad argument.
As best I can tell, you're saying this:
1. We rarely determine whether someone is a woman by first determining whether they have a penis.
2. If we rarely determine whether something is an F by first determining whether it's a G, then being (or failing to be) a G is not essential to being an F.
3. Therefore, failing to have a penis is not essential to being a woman.
Premise 2 of this argument is clearly false. We rarely (if ever) determine whether a substance is water by first determining whether it's H2O, but being H2O is essential to being water. Water is H2O, even though we don't distinguish water from other substances by comparing their chemical compositions (except in highly unusual circumstances).
Why don't we typically check whether something is water by checking whether it's H2O? Because it's usually very hard to tell, just by looking, how something is chemically composed. Why don't we typically check whether someone is a woman by first checking whether they have a penis? Because it's usually very hard to tell, just by looking, whether someone has a penis (especially if they're trying to hide it, or if we're communicating with them over the internet). There's nothing even slightly mysterious about this. It doesn't show that women can have penises, any more than it shows that water can be NaCl.
Perhaps you're instead saying this:
3. Being perceived as a woman does not require being perceived as failing to have a penis.
4. If being perceived as an F does not require being perceived as (not) being a G, then (not) being a G is not essential to being an F.
5. Therefore, failing to have a penis is not essential to being a woman.
Premise 4 of this argument is clearly false. Being perceived as a human does not require being perceived as having DNA (most people don't think about whether something has DNA when judging whether it's human), but having DNA is essential to being human. Whatever else humans are, they are DNA-havers.
I'll add that these arguments aren't merely terrible, but transparently so. It's easy to see, with moderate reflection, what's wrong with them. I don't say this to be cruel -- I say it to warn you against making arguments like this in the future. (If you don't believe me when I say I'm not trying to be cruel, I don't blame you. But nevertheless, I'm not.)
I've noticed that many intelligent, clear-eyed, rational people in academia and on Substack lose their ability to spot bad arguments when discussing trans issues. Don't become one of those people. (Because you're generally intelligent, clear-eyed, and rational, you're in danger of becoming one of those people.)
Appreciate the kind words!
This might sound a little too close to "losing ability to spot bad arguments when discussing trans issues" for you, but I think that gender is of a different kind than either human-ness or water-ness. Generally speaking, it's a socially constructed category (I base this mostly on Bentham's Bulldog's arguments [https://benthams.substack.com/p/why-i-think-trans-women-are-women], and would be curious if you disagree and/or why), and so the primary question is, in fact, whether society perceives someone as a woman or not. There's no truth-of-the-matter hiding underneath like there is in the case of water—if I see a trans woman on the street who looks like a woman, I'll probably consider her a woman regardless of whether she has a penis or not.
Now, if I then go and try to have sex with her, the penis becomes relevant and they're no longer really a full-fledged woman to me. But, per section 2, most of the time, the penis can pretty safely be ignored, and the person can be *treated as* a woman. Since it's a social category, I think "treated as" comes out to the same thing as "is."
Thanks for clarifying! I don't think gender is socially constructed -- you can see my detailed thoughts about Bentham's arguments in my comment here: https://benthams.substack.com/p/why-i-think-trans-women-are-women/comment/113124632
Regardless, though, the two arguments I considered above fail for socially constructed categories, too. Being a one-dollar bill is a socially constructed property: things are one-dollar bills because we say they are. And one-dollar bills are essentially issued by the Federal Reserve. That's part of what it is to be a one-dollar bill. Nevertheless, we don't (typically) check whether something is a one-dollar bill by checking whether it was issued by the Federal Reserve. Instead, we check whether it's a one-dollar bill by checking whether it has the surface features typical of one-dollar bills. The reason we do this is because it's usually very hard to check whether something was issued by the Federal Reserve. (It takes a lot of work to bust counterfeiters!) It's much easier to check whether it has the surface features of a one-dollar bill, and that's a highly reliable way to identify one-dollar bills.
Likewise, even if gender is socially constructed, it doesn't follow that the surface features we use to discern someone's gender are all and only the features essential to their gender. Our socially constructed gender-categories could very well include biological traits, like having or lacking a penis, even if we don't often check someone's gender by checking whether they have those traits. Lacking a penis is to being a woman what originating from the Federal Reserve is to being a one-dollar bill: absolutely essential, though not a useful outward marker.
Relatedly, though being a one-dollar bill is a socially constructed property, being *treated as* a one-dollar bill is not sufficient for being a one-dollar bill. Counterfeit bills that are treated as genuine are nevertheless counterfeit. So, not all socially constructed properties are such that being *treated as* having that property is sufficient for having it. (Some socially constructed properties may be like that, though I struggle to think of examples. But you'd need to offer additional arguments for thinking that being a woman is that kind of socially constructed property.)
You say in your comment on BB's post that "it’s often permissible to misrepresent things to avoid being cruel." If you believe that, we might not really disagree very much? I wrote in my old post:
> I believe that trans women are women. I think you should too. But it’s also ok if you don’t—all you need to believe is that trans women are people. They’re generally good and decent and it costs you very little to be good and decent back.
And you seem to fall squarely into that latter camp, which I'm cool with. It seems like even if not-penis-having is essential to womanhood for you, you'd be willing to kindly-misrepresent that belief in most contexts, which is good enough for me.
...On why I think "woman" is a treated-as-means-as type of property:
I think "woman" is like "mother." In each case, the person being described fills some specific social role, based on various stereotypes, responsibilities, and challenges. Even if an adoptive mother hasn't gone through pregnancy, she's still *mostly* does the things a mother does, and we've all kind of agreed that it's rude and incorrect to call her anything else. Similarly, even if a trans woman doesn't menstruate or have a penis, she may appear to be and act very much like a typical woman. In those cases—the ones where we would intuitively say she "passes"—it seems rude and incorrect to call her anything but a woman!
I think the vast majority of actual radical feminists (as opposed to more generalized "gender critical" people or whatever) are not opposed to the idea that women can have penises for the reasons you give. It has much less to do with the idea that the specific organ will have some deleterious impact on the feminist project, and much more with a specific empirical claim that biological sex is the foundation of women's oppression - and if you accept that, then it does seem pretty reasonable to believe that any ideological movement devoted to obscuring that dynamic will be harmful for women and girls, right? Obviously, there are a lot of normative and even purely aesthetic considerations going into all of this. But I think people significantly underestimate the degree to which radical feminists simply *do not believe,* as a matter of fact, that the social categories of "man" and "woman" work the way you describe.
Moreover, the majority of classic radical feminists don't blame sex inequality on testosterone either. They blame it on a specific social arrangement of power that relates to sex but isn't inherent to it. And in that framework, again, it seems obvious that obscuring the connection between a male body and your placement in the gender system would be bad! Because what replaces it is, according to you at least, adherence to a collection of sex stereotypes. But those are exactly what radical feminists *don't* want defining womanhood, right?
No, I mean, I'm fully agreed that "biological sex is the foundation of women's oppression." All I'm claiming (in the last section) is that it's mostly via avenues that aren't penises... I'll admit this is ultimately a pretty lame semantic argument. Hopefully all the other more-descriptive "why do trans people care so much about pronouns?" sections come off as a bit wiser and more interesting...
Well sure, but that's the point I'm making - 90% of the time, actual radical feminists who talk about "penises" are using it (perhaps unwisely) as a synecdoche for sex in general. The problem radical feminists have isn't that people claim women can have this specific organ, but rather that they claim womanhood is unrelated to sex and instead determined by stereotypes those feminists find reductive and harmful. So while I understand and largely agree with those earlier points you're making about why some trans people would prefer to move away from body-based conceptions of gender to ones based in more nebulous social and emotional qualities, there are at least some good reasons (in an internal sense) that radical feminists have to think a shift like that is harmful, or at least no better than the strictly essentialist view that came before. And of course nothing in your piece contradicts that - I'm just trying to offer an alternate perspective here, since so often the critique *is* framed as just a sort of table-thumping insistence that having a penis makes womanhood metaphysically impossible.
This is fundamentally a debate about social technology. The technology of gender is deeply-ingrained. We’ve found a lot of stuff that’s no longer adaptive to have recently, though, e.g. the sexual division of labor into the public and domestic spheres. So there’s the question of how much more we can cut away to allow flex.
Any publicly-accepted change in the conception of gender has to be of minimal complexity compared to its previous state, and also has to seriously justify increases in complexity. Our world is very complex and difficult for most people, and gender is one of those really loaded-bearing technologies - analogous to income tax in a government’s budget. We’ve so far been doing things that mostly cut complexity. A lot of the difficulty with trans stuff, though, is that it raises complexity. The masses riot at tax rate increases.
And in this case, I think of us as the extremely wealthy and the concept of gender as a regressive tax. Everyone deals with gender all the time, and most people are impoverished for mental capacity. We can handle increases in complexity (if begrudgingly, or alternatively as a show of conspicuous consumption). However, the proles cannot.
I don’t think the updates to gender that you propose are viable changes to push. In particular, a) someone being one gender in some contexts and a different gender in different contexts is not viable, and b) there not being a single criterion which can be referred on to determine gender is costly, though maybe viable.
People are generally running a few subroutines at all times, and using heuristics because of this. For instance, women are often running their “is this a situation where I am at risk by being alone with this person?” when in proximity to someone, and making their decision using a simple gender yes/no to decide. But sometimes a penis is relevant, and sometimes athleticism is relevant, and if the gender yes/no becomes less reliable the heuristic has to increase in complexity. This isn’t to say that e.g. women’s risk profile of personal interactions is incorrectly calibrated, it’s that the calculation has to increase in complexity if we change this tech. The same goes for men’s basically-always-on subroutine of “is there a prospective mate present?”. This is often handled at first pass with a gender yes/no and then further refined. If he’s in a social setting and someone triggers woman, but then is not a woman for romantic purposes, then the error handling has to be refined and then the base heuristic. It increases complexity.
Welp, I accidentally wrote an essay in the comments. Anyway, my point is that we can handle short periods of increased complexity on a topic to decide on changes, but the proposed changes are too expensive for the mental lower- and middle- classes. The special interests who benefit from increasingly-large chunks carved from gender get diminishing returns. It’s just not viable to push past “a woman is always a woman”, and is probably not viable to push past “a woman’s body does not have a penis”.
I like this analogy a lot... my hope was actually to de-complexify, so if it came off not that way, then, well, shit.
I think context-specific gender-assessment is actually pretty simple: look at someone, decide if they're a woman or not, done. If they tell you you're wrong and ask you to use different pronouns, it's polite to, but I don't think you really have to. (I make this case at greater length here: https://mistakesweremade.substack.com/p/trans-women-are-women.)
And then the cases where it really matters are allowed to be more complicated—it's analogous to how when I see a really muscley guy on the street, I'll say "wow, he's strong" but then if he goes to a weightlifting competition, I'll want to test him for PEDs.
The point of *this* essay is to say that the penis tends to be pretty irrelevant to our simple gender-assessments: like, actually, when you're on the street, how often are you deciding whether someone's a man or a woman based on their bulge? It becomes relevant only in very physical, sexual contexts, but a) trans people exist in physical & sexual reality much less than anyone else and b) the physical & sexual context is pretty rare and exceptional in general! Once you get there, probably you will have figured out whether a penis is involved or not (or how many), so why worry about it until you've got to?
Adopting the conception as you propose does, in fact, simplify the way we refer to people compared to some alternatives. It’s simpler to say that someone is a woman in this context and a man in this other context than it is to say that they’re a woman who had a man’s body but now has some intermediate body. But simplicity in reference is different from simplicity in computation.
One example of this that I find really compelling is utilitarianism. Utilitarianism is incredibly simple in reference: just maximize happiness. However, it requires actual computation - the consequences of each action have to be added up and then compared to each other. On the other hand, Deontology is incredibly complicated in reference, requiring reams of specific rules, but incredibly easy to compute (Is this murder? Yes/no, etc.). This is why utilitarianism is for the cognitively rich and deontology is for the cognitively poor. It also explains why it can never be a universal philosophy. Gender, however, does have to be universally-adopted (minus small social networks), which means the cognitively poor need to be able to pay for it. They already budget quite a large portion of their capacity to it (perhaps too much, but gender is still pretty load-bearing, and gender norms make some types of decision-making/behavior/expectations much simpler than they would be otherwise), and can’t afford much more in this mental economy.
People are basically always running computations that implicitly rely on the gender of the people they’re around, and changing gender from a bit to a byte (basically what saying gender is male when x, female when y does) is surprisingly computationally expensive to base load.
I think you significantly underestimate the level of heuristic abstraction that most people live their lives using, and how necessary it is for them to do so. It really took me until midway through undergrad, because of the typical mind fallacy and the fact that almost everyone I ever interacted with was at least cognitively upper-middle-class. I basically think that what you propose is a like a perfectly standard Windows 11 constant background task, but most people are chugging barely running Vista.
Edit: in case it wasn’t clear, I basically agree with you in principle, especially with your previous post. It allows for clearer communication to say that someone is a woman in a professional setting but requires more classification in a sexual setting, and that the right thing is to basically call it like you see it. I just disagree with you in practice, like how I might like the idea of holistic admissions in a vacuum, but still think that a higher focus on test scores is better in practice.
2nd edit: whoops, I guess this would have been a better comment if I’d read this morning’s post beforehand. I’ll leave it as-is, but I would have said things a bit differently if I’d read that first.
Sorry, a trans” woman” is a man… someone born male and having a penis! Anyone with a penis claiming to be a woman is simply lying!
To say a woman can have a penis is ridiculous, goes against basic biology and , frankly , trying to prove this is tantamount to trying to argue as to how many angels can dance on a pin. The whole trans thing is a bunch of lies, but reams of junk have been written to try to prove that women can indeed have penises! Yawn!
Point, laugh, and mute.
This article is terrible, I mean, “penis-havingness”? Cross sex hormones do not change your sex at all - they just give you an endocrine disorder. A man on estrogen is just a man with gynecomastia and an highly increased risk for stroke, among other things.
What? I'm not saying that hormones change your sex, I'm saying that they give you secondary sex characteristics more like those of the other sex, which obviously they do. My argument is that that constitutes, in many cases, a change in *gender*—feel free to read my article arguing why (https://mistakesweremade.substack.com/p/trans-women-are-women), and to tell me where I went wrong.
There is no such thing as gender, it’s a totally meaningless concept invented by John Money in the 1970’s. 2 sexes, 0 genders, infinite personalities. Cross sex hormones can’t change a thing that doesn’t exist.
"Penis-havingness and the state of being filled with testosterone have historically been categories that mostly overlap. But with the advent of cross-sex hormones, that’s no longer true."
What does it say that the invalidation of this association requires a constant chemical treatment to maintain?
...Very little?
When I put on a hat, I become a man with a hat. To remain a man with a hat, I have to keep the hat on... but I'm still a man with a hat!
Man with a hat is an additive category. Trans woman is additive. But Trans women just want to be women.
How are you thinking about "additive"? If a fat person takes Ozempic and becomes skinny, have they *added* something in a way that a man becoming a woman cannot?
I mean, maybe the problem is that I'm operating from a framework where "man" and "woman" are defined as contextually-dependent clusters. At some point, when a natal male goes on cross-sex hormones, he becomes more like a she than a he, and it becomes useful to call her a woman (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-u8bkyXTK4). I think of the Ozempic case as similar: a fat person gets closer to skinny than fat, and so they become skinny. In either case, where does it become relevant that stopping some treatment changes the definition?
(For a more extreme example: I am right now a hungry person. If I start to eat the bagel in front of me, I will become more of a satiated person. But if I stop eating bagels altogether, I'll go back to being hungry. Does this mean I was never *actually* satiated? Of course not!)
If Ozempic had to be taken for life, lest the patient immediately regain all of their fat, I would say so.
Hormones change some things. There is a lot of things they don't change. Hair loss in men is very common with age. All these natal men taking cross sex hormones will deal with that problem. Phenotypically, a man on hormones is far more likely to still be observed as a man, or a disgusting 'neither', rather than a real woman, and everyone who interacts with them offline knows this.
Your Ozempic bullet-biting is really bizarre to me: if they look skinny, why does it matter how they got that way? What if someone skinny has a very strict diet and exercise regimen, and if they stop doing that they'll get fat again? Would you say they were actually platonically fat? What if someone is taking medication for a mental illness, and it makes them gain weight? Are they actually platonically skinny? Why can't we just call people what they appear to be?
I think you made a very similar point about passing-ness on the Trans Women Are Women post, and my response will also be similar: if they *really* don't pass, then I agree that you don't have to call them a woman. (Though I still think it's kind to.) But my experience has largely been different, so I dunno how helpful I can be.
A better metaphor is the difference between someone 'being fat' and steatopygia. One can be fat or not be fat, for the latter, one can work on being less fat, but the condition is always there for fat distribution and this remains visible even if the person is skinny.
If one wanted trans women to be treated as they pass, then there would be little need for trans rights in the first place. Those who could genuinely fool people rarely got into trouble. But the reality is most people aren't fooled. Even for men who put in great effort to pass, something like their voice will give them away.
So, it’s “kind” to lie?
Too bad they can’t! Reality bites!