Vide Rationale

I want to do two things here: (1) explain what gender is and (2) explain why the question of whether trans women are real women is a moral question instead of a descriptive one.

Let’s start by noticing that in the animal kingdom, each species has two kinds of bodies: males and females. They have different physical markers, behaviours, reproductive organs etc. And so is true for human beings as well; we too have males and females. We call these sexes.

There is one exception where people are born with a mix of male and female characteristics known as intersex. They’re a tiny percentage of the population, but since there are seven billion people in the world, there are tens of millions of intersex people. They can’t be neglected from our discourse.

Our current matter is slightly different. We notice that just as in the case of the animal kingdom, the two types of human sexes on aggregate have different behaviours, interests, and ways of being. You can call them broadly as masculine and feminine.

These amorphous collections of what people of different sexes do is what we can call gender. They’re not categories with sharp boundaries. If you can imagine plotting all human traits on some higher dimensional space, they’d cluster around two centres. One need not have all the traits of a certain cluster to be that particular gender; that is not even possible since these clusters aren’t well defined. But people generally gravitate to one side, influenced heavily by their sex. Females typically identify with the feminine gender, while males identify with the masculine gender.

But human beings are quite versatile, and have a wide capacity of self expression. So it’s no surprise that occasionally you’ll find males that express themselves and feel internally like females usually do (and vice versa). Those are the trans people. They have genders that are different from the gender usually associated with their sex.

If you’re not such a person, it might be hard to understand how one can ‘feel’ like any particular gender. You might not yourself feel that you’re either a man or a woman. You could search your own consciousness for gender markers and find no evidence; nothing that can conclusively tell you via introspection which gender you are. So how can a trans person do it?

As far as I can tell, they can’t. They also don’t have any special gender markers in their minds. What they have instead is a feeling of being in the wrong body, of wanting to be treated by society differently from how they are treated, of belonging with a group of people different from the one they’re supposed to belong with. And they feel much happier when these concerns are erased.

Since gender isn’t just about how one feels and expresses but also about how society reacts to it, without changing social norms they can’t fully experience being their preferred gender. People on the Right aren’t generally sympathetic to this project since they think trans people are just delusional. They say “Men can’t be women”, confusing gender and sex.

This is understandable because the Left is also similarly confused and pollutes the discourse with their nonsense. If you ask them what a woman is, they’ll say someone is a woman if they identify as a woman. Not seeming to notice that this definition is circular; or if they do, they don’t care for its significance.

There are some kinds of things which you can become by simply self-identifying as it, conditional on you being sincere. For example, you can self-identify as a Beatles fan and become one. By doing so, you’re claiming membership in a group, whose members are together just by virtue of having self-identified this way. But you can’t self-identify and become a bucket or a tiger or a unicorn.

The Left thinks, at least implicitly, that being a woman is similar in this sense to being a Beatles fan, all you have to do is sincerely self-identify to become one. The Right thinks it’s like identifying as a bucket; it simply doesn’t make any sense to them. No effort is made from either side to clarify this.

The Left’s catchphrase “trans women are real women”, on the face of it seems to be a descriptive statement, so the Right tries to fight back using science. But it is actually a prescription of what these words should mean in the first place. The suggestion is that women and men aren’t things that you just are (like being a human) but something you can become through sincere self-identification (like a Beatles fan). It’s not about biology, it’s about meaning of words.

Since society already has views on how women should be treated, these linguistic suggestions aren’t just a semantic point, they are indeed prescriptions of new societal norms. Women already have their own bathrooms, dorm rooms, expectations of clothing, pronouns, exclusive sports competitions etc. – so now the ask is that these norms and rules apply as per the new definition of woman.

Then the phrase “trans women are real women” actually translates to “treat males who self-identify as women like how you would treat females”.

And the argument for this prescription is on moral grounds. It’s stems from an understandable desire to integrate trans people into society. It is not a metaphysical or scientific claim. It’s a moral call to action. Changing the definition of words like “man” and “woman” is only a means of serving this moral goal.

If you doubt this, ask how the trans community has reacted to the idea of trans-racials: people who are born in one race but identify as another. Granted this is an insignificant minority, but one can imagine this as a logical possibility. Given that both gender and race are social constructs (at least according to them), it should be no problem identifying as a different race. But this is objected to saying that it isn’t good for society, that it is offensive, that it’s appropriation, that one can’t just pretend to be another race, and that thus we shouldn’t encourage any of it. I’ve heard it said “Don’t make trans race a thing” – implying that it can be a thing but let’s collectively agree to not make it one. They have no logical objections, only moral ones.

Despite the Left’s intolerance towards any questioning of their orthodoxies, my sympathies still lie on the trans isle. They have a difficult life and we should try our best to make it better, while also being careful not to harm the rest of society as a result. Easier said than done, I know.