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Some people have argued that to affirm a trans person is lying. I sympathize with someone who says, "if I call a trans person by his preferred pronoun, it feels like I am lying." If this is all that is meant, then I suppose the rest of this post isn't relevant. To me, the stronger claim is, "if society calls a trans person by his preferred pronoun, society is lying." I never bought that claim, because I never encountered a contradictory set of definitions for sex and gender.
But recently I realized the term passing is actually transphobic according to the definitions laid out.
This is pretty clearly a woman. I can tell because of the hair and clothes. I infer she goes by "she." If I had to publicly address her, I'd do so with she.
People typically speak of passing as a woman. Since I can infer she is a woman, it follows that she passes as a woman. But as far as I can tell, nobody would describe her as passing, because she looks transgender (i.e. male). Based on how "pass" is used, it seems to really mean pass as cisgender. To see passing in this sense, as a good thing, is deceptive. It also seems transphobic. Surely a less transphobic worldview would suggest she passes as a woman because I can correctly infer her pronouns, and that her womanness is just as beautiful as a ciswomans.
Inb4 replies castigating me for just now realizing this: nobody had ever crystalized to me that passing meant to misrepresent a trans person as cisgender because most discourse talks about "passing as a woman"
Am I missing something? Can anyone else steelperson all this?
Both of them could be said to be lies.
If you have an essentialist definition of woman (something based on, for example, gamete size or the sort of body geared towards producing large gametes if it was healthy) it is not a lie to treat someone passing as a woman if you don't know they aren't. Once you do know, it would be a lie (just as it would be a lie to treat a black-passing Indian as a black American).
The difference is that, in the second case of the non-passing trans person, there is no chance of even an honest mistake. It must all be lies.
I suppose the difference is that I don't see the "standard" definition as pointless in the same way I see the gender philosophy definition as pointless (i.e. incoherent, leading to harmful real world outcomes with limited gain while ousting a simple and useful system).
I deliberately wrote it out in that stilted way to avoid standard gender ideologist criticisms ("well, what if she's infertile??"). A habit forged in the culture war.
Most people who do have an essentialist mentality wouldn't be as circumspect (they would likely default to "a certain body" or, if raised in a more scientific society, "estrogen" or "adult human female") which is why a lot of the tactics of trans activists work on them (e.g. just trying to force a random layman to draw the exact line where someone stops being a male, pointing out intersex counter-examples) in a form of philosophical shock-and-awe. I don't think it actually makes that much of a difference tbh but it can stump a person in the moment.
Hence I avoid it.
But I don't think it changes my belief in an essentialist definition or that I think most people have essentialist instincts and naive beliefs.
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