Transgender Identity & Perception
Claims of Identity
Claims about transgender identity can be difficult to parse. When an activist says, “Transwomen ARE women!”, what precisely is the nature of the claim?
There are really two possibilities:
Activists are simply using an updated definition of the word ‘women’. Where once ‘women’ referred to biological women only, it now refers to both biological women AND transwomen.
There is some ‘essence of woman’ that isn’t revealed through biology, but only identity. This identity is known only to the person experiencing dysphoria.
Explanation #2 is fundamentally incoherent. I’m a man, yet I have no idea what it means to ‘feel like a man’. I know only what it is like to be me! What parts of my experience are attributable to me, and which can be attributed to my sex or gender seems unknowable. I will however grant that maybe a feeling like that is noticeable only when one’s biological sex and one’s gender are in conflict - this might be similar to how somebody who is always sated wouldn’t understand the feeling of hunger.
The bigger issue for explanation #2 is that being a woman has historically had nothing to do with particular feelings - it is a fact of biology, not a matter of particular feelings. In this sense, describing a feeling as ‘womanlike’ is akin to describing oneself as feeling like the number 10. Just as there is no obvious way in which one may feel like a number, so too is there no obvious way in which one may feel like a particular sex.
I think #1 is most likely what people mean1 - demands for increasing inclusivity escalated in progressive circles. Transgender people felt left out, and wanted to be treated as if they were normal women. People obliged, rhetoric escalated, and here we are.
Updating word definitions is fine, though it may confuse others and here is probably designed to be confusing.
I have more to say about changing definitions, their role in transgender ideology, and the resulting equivocation here:
The Incoherence of Transgender Identity
As recently as 5 years ago, the claims of transgender folks were easier to understand. They would describe their feelings as one of being ‘caught in the wrong body’. That is an implicit admission that they’re not the sex they wish they were, or feel like. There is no associated claim of actually being the thing they wish they were.
The current claims of identity, wherein the person claims to be the sex they feel like, do not make much sense. They also contain some inconsistencies.
For example, we are told that whether you have a vagina or a penis has no bearing on whether or not you are a man or a woman. That is to say, the matter of having a vagina is orthogonal to whether or not you’re a woman.
That’s certainly confusing. It also doesn’t add up. If having a vagina has nothing to do with being a woman, then why is it that so many males who announce that they’re female feel the urge to go and do stereotypically woman things, like have a vagina?
Having brown hair has nothing to do with being a woman, so transgender women feel no urge to go and dye their hair brown! If having vaginas isn’t relevant to whether or not one is a woman, then why the urgency to change one’s body? You can make similar observations about the way that transwomen dress (stereotypically female), the hormones they take, their hair styles, and the overall manner in which transgender women seek to mask their canonically male appearance.
Activists cannot have it both ways - if I can be a woman without having a vagina, then I should not need to go and get a vagina to affirm my womanhood.
An Explanation
Current transgender ideology is a combination of some classically liberal demands, along with some illiberal ones.
Of course, trans people should have the right to control their own bodies. They have every right to change the hormones inside of them, to have plastic surgery, and to change the manner of their dress. This is, at its heart, a set of liberal claims.
However, current demands that everyone else treat the e.g., transgender woman as an actual woman, are distinctly illiberal.
Identity Out, Perception In
The best way to make sense of these incoherent and conflicting demands made by transactivists is to see that modern transgender ideology is not about having an identity, but rather, what I call a “claim to a right of perception”.
In other words - transgender ideology insists that a (for example) transgender woman has a right not only to his/her self-identity, but more importantly, a right to be perceived as a woman. That person has a right, and therefore the rest of us an obligation, to see him/her as a her.
Once understood, this “right to perception” helps make sense of many other similarly illiberal claims:
The demand that others respect pronoun usage (especially when pronouns are often used in the 3rd person, and most often describe a person who is not present for a conversation). If the issue were one of identity, and not perception, then trans activists would have no reason to care so much about pronoun usage. After all, if you can be a woman with a penis, why not a woman with a male pronoun too?
Demands that a transperson be able to participate in society as a fully-fledged member of their chosen gender. That means in all walks of life that transgender person must be treated as if that person is actually the sex by which they identify, including in:
bathrooms
changing rooms
sports
prisons
Any attempt to deny accommodations to the transperson is seen as inherently transphobic, as you are refusing to honor your obligation to perceive the transperson as their preferred gender.
When a biological male says he ‘identifies as a woman’, it is fundamentally a claim to a right to be perceived as a woman.
Transgender claims are often confusing for people; I hope this post helps in clearing the air.
In truth, I doubt most people who say, “Transwomen ARE women” have *any* idea what they mean when they say it. Here, I’m referring to the small number of people who created transgender ideology.