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It applies to me. All transgenders are wrong about a very obvious and easily verifiable fact. That is, literally, the definition of transgender. They confront proof of this wrongness every time they take a shower or use the toilet- hopefully, multiple times a day. They are, in other words, delusional, and playing along for the sake of their mental health is not actually any sort of obligation, except perhaps occasionally for actual mental health professionals, and not for the sake of increasing their comfort with their delusion but only for that of getting at and treating the underlying issues.
Now there are many lumped into the category of transgender who believe themselves to be something other than male and female, who identify as 'queer' or 'nonbinary'. I don't know what these categories are because these categories are not real, and while these people are wrong they're wrong about metaphysics- claiming to be something that isn't real on nonexistent philosophical grounds isn't falsifiable, it can't be delusional. But these people are not transgenders proper.
This stance does not, incidentally, actually determine whether people should be banned from transition. Not least, transition is sufficiently difficult to define as to make that hard.
I don't disagree with anything you said, but OP was addressing imaginary people who say "no one should be allowed to transition". It doesn't sound like you fit that mould. Of course, the pro-trans media will throw people who don't want kids to transition, or who don't want to be forced to pay for others transitioning, into that category. But that's politics for you; and you shouldn't do their work for them by self-identifying as such.
FWIW I don't think anyone should be allowed to transition in the same sense I believe nobody should be allowed to get an amputation of a healthy functional limb. There is a basic principle that physicians shouldn't facilitate self-harm by mentally ill people. Physicians are licensed and regulated by the State and it's reasonable (in my opinion) for the state to impose restrictions on the kinds of medical procedures physicians can do. Ideally this should be province of state medical boards and state medical associations, but there is a big enough problem of ideological capture by insane Leftism that it's appropriate for the legislature to step in.
That being said, the transitioning of minors is a far more outrageous and compelling issue than the general question of sex-change procedures. What's almost as outrageous (and compelling) is social and legal compulsion of people to play along with trans ideology. If the trans crowd would agree to (1) stop trying to trans people who are underage; and (2) stop forcing people to use the word "ma'am" with someone who is obviously a dude in a dress (and this includes coercing institutions into letting obvious men use the ladies' locker room), I personally would concede on letting consenting adults going through sex-change operations.
Realistically, though, this is always going to be a subjective judgement call. If you go to the extremes on this, then tattoos or even ear piercing should be illegal! Cutting off an arm is clearly a much worse (and more irreversible) level of harm than surgery on your genitals. Yes, the latter squicks me out, but given my libertarian leanings, I want the government to have a really compelling, almost-universally-accepted reason to outright ban something. Which amputation satisfies, but transition surgery does not.
The government could easily ban "social transitioning" where by a random school teacher and her danger hair friends in the school admin decide to treat your child as a different gender then conspire on the backend to keep you ignorant. I think that's where the current wokes in the trans movement really shot themselves in the foot.
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While the former would have a much greater impact on your day-to-day activities, never being able to have children seems like a really big imposition. It would be interesting to do a poll asking people if they'd rather lose an arm or all functioning in their genitalia.
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I don’t understand what’s the delusion? The vast majority of trans people are acutely aware of the reality of their biological sex, otherwise they would not be taking hormones and having surgery.
Being trans is about wanting to be the opposite sex, or at least being distressed by your own biological sex and sexual characteristics. What are they wrong about?
It’s like thinking overweight people who take GLP-1 antagonists are delusional about thinking they’re actually skinny. That seems… completely backwards? There’s anorexic people who take Ozempic but the delusion is thinking they’re being fat - the equivalent would be a cis woman taking estrogen because she has a delusion that she’s biologically male. A trans woman is 100% correct about not being biologically female, which is why she’d want medical interventions instead of doing nothing!
There’s an ontological debate over the definition of the words “woman” and “man” and the whole gender vs sex kerfuffle, and some activists’ definition of “woman” is circular to the point of uselessness, but that’s a separate issue and more of a debate around values, not facts.
The delusion is thinking that the hormones and whatever else actually make you a man/woman, rather than the opposite in a costume. It no more entitles he to she transgenders to use the women’s room than a naughty nun costume for a Halloween party does. People on ozempic are actually literally skinny, they can verify this with a scale. People on hormones are actually literally not the other sex.
Now like I said, this doesn’t have anything in particular to do with whether transition should be allowed. I would lean towards ‘no’, but that’s a separate point having to do with attitudes towards gender roles. It’s not some axiomatic conclusion from the point being made.
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Delusions such as "Now that I take artificially produced female hormones, I totally have changed my biological sex I am now indeed a biological woman just like other women". Delusions such as "One of the side-effects of taking hormones is abdominal cramping and pains. This is precisely the same thing as female periods, I am a real woman having real periods just like other women".
Ah, the happy days of "gender is not the same as sex and none of us are claiming that", how I look back wistfully upon them.
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I know, I know, nutpicking and all that, but I've encountered more than my fair share of trans-identified males who will complain about being described as "male" and who insist that they're every bit as female as any cis woman. I have no idea how common such people are, but they absolutely exist.
Regardless of how many people actually believe this, it's obvious that politically this is the line mainstream trans activism has to take, because otherwise to exclude trans people from spaces, all their opponents have to do is relabel them from, say, "women's sports" to "female sports", and that would defeat the entire purpose of trans activism.
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The delusion is in insisting that wanting to be something is exactly the same thing as being that something, which is obviously ridiculous. Honestly you are starting to sound wilfully ignorant which makes me think you are trans-identified yourself, because consistently denying reality and pretending not to understand things that have been explained to you ad nauseam is a key characteristic of trans-identified people and their allies.
But I'll bite and explain once more. According to mainstream gender ideology:
To apply this analogy, it would be like thinking that overweight people become skinny merely by expressing the desire to become skinny. And moreover, not only are they now skinny (even though they are objectively still fat), they have retroactively always been skinny, and if you deny this, you are a bigot and you will get banned for misweighting a stunning and brave transskinny person.
The fact that nobody actually thinks like this when it comes to fat people shows how ridiculous gender ideology is.
And sure, there is a type of trans person who actually tries to transition. They will take cross sex hormones, change out their wardrobe, change their behavior, and so on. Those people have at least some valid claim to be treated as the opposite sex. But importantly, gender ideology doesn't require anyone to do anything like that (claiming someone needs to transitions to be “valid” as a transgender makes you truscum which is practically as bad as being a TERF) and even if you go through all that trouble, obviously it doesn't change who you were before your transition, although gender ideologues will insist that who you were in the past depends entirely on what you identify as today.
@rae is trans, yes.
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My understanding of the matter is more:
The premise that gender is merely a separate thing from sex was used as a foot in the door twenty years ago. No modern gender ideologue operates on the basis that biological sex is real and important today.
If you disagree, I will ask you the same thing as I asked Rae: go ahead edit the fact that Imane Khelif is male and that Elliot Page is female into their respective Wikipedia pages. If you manage to do that, I will concede that gender ideologues in the real world separate sex from gender identity.
Sure, that's what gender ideologues believe, but why shouldn't it be? Especially if they use their false claim to get special privileges, like Imane Khelif falsely claiming to be a woman to compete in the women's boxing tournament.
Again, that's perfectly reasonable up to the point where they make false claims to access resources they shouldn't have access to. The analogy fails because people with embarassing skin conditions or missing limbs don't generally claim to have flawless complexions or complete bodies.
The closest case I can think of is someone like Oscar Pistorius who is a sprinter with artifical legs who was eventually banned from competing against natural humans because he had an advantage over regular athletes. If we can ban Pistorius from men's sports, why can't we ban Khelif from women's sports?
Imane Khelif isn't even trans! By all accounts, she has a vagina and was raised as a girl, and she and her entire family have believed she is female her whole life. Even if she does have XY chromosomes (not confirmed), a hundred years ago we wouldn't have even known that and no one would have questioned her womanhood.
Whether Khelif is trans or has a vagina really depends on which definition you use, but let's talk about something more interesting:
I'm willing to believe that Khelif and her family assumed her female until puberty, but after that, they must have noticed something was up.
I find it hard to believe that even in a relatively poor country like Algeria, a teenage girl can go through puberty without ever menstruating or developing secondary sexual characteristics like breasts and hips, and nobody questions it or takes her to the doctor. Algeria is a poor country, but they're not that primitive. And even primitive peoples understand the basics of male and female anatomy pretty well.
And then of course there were all the failed sex tests: first by the IBA, and then by a private doctor in France in 2023, which Khelif later admitted confirmed he has male genetics and male typical testosterone levels.
Note that his was before the 2024 Olympics, when it became known that he had failed the IBA tests, but the results of his private tests weren't public knowledge yet. The IOC and various useful idiots spread the lie that the IBA results had been falsified by evil Russians. Khelif knew this wasn't true, because his own private results confirmed the IBA tests, but he never spoke up. This seems calculated.
Then later, in 2025, Khelif tried to participate in the boxing championship held in the UK, organized by World Boxing, the Western organization that was created to replace the IBA. They also required a sex test, which Khelif refused to take, despite being desparate to compete (he even sued the organization to force admission without doing the test, but lost). Why would a person who legitimately believes himself to be female refuse to take a sex test designed to confirm that fact?
So it's clear at this point Khelif knows he's genetically male, and that therefore he will never pass any test designed to screen out genetic males. He probably knew this at the 2024 Olympics, too, because he had already failed the IBA tests and had them confirmed by his own doctor. He was intentionally witholding that information.
A hundred years ago, she'd have been seen as a weird female. No one would have concluded she's actually male because she doesn't menstruate. She has a vagina! Or something that looks exactly like a vagina, if you want to nitpick. And what about people who have a set of chromosomes other than XX or XY? What about people with mosaicism?
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Photos from the Olympics clearly show Khelif being carried on their coach's shoulders and their coach's hands touching Khelif's bare skin. In theocratic MENA countries it's a big no-no for a man to touch the bare skin of a woman who isn't his wife (many women won't even shake hands with a man when meeting him). The coach definitely knew.
Strange, given Khelif has admitted it.
Algeria is relatively secular by MENA standards, and by no means "theocratic".
My bad, I haven't kept up with the news and it's not mentioned in the lead section of her Wikipedia article (it's buried at the bottom of the article).
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Sure, I'll happily keep my mouth shut about that should I ever encounter an obviously trans person in real life (by the way, that's another claim I've seen: 'you do know trans people, hundreds of them, you've met them, they're all around you'. Er, no.)
But when someone starts in about "how about we all share our pronouns?" or the likes and makes it about "let's not embarrass trans people by relying on visual identification where they don't pass, let's all share our pronouns so we're not outing anyone, even though we are in fact outing people" (and I'll admit that's often or mostly the allies, or some other branch of the LGBT+++ movement, not the trans people themselves doing it), then they make it about "I am clearly pretending to be something I'm not and demanding you openly accede to that verbally". If you're going to demand I say out loud "yes, Sally is a girl" then I reserve the right to say out loud "We all know Sally used to be John". I'm willing to exchange courtesy for courtesy and live-and-let-live, but not if I'm asked (or strongly encouraged) to participate in the pretence.
I did see an example in my own work life of someone firing off emails with their pronouns in the signature line, I don't know if this was something mandated by where they worked (because it was a couple of different people in the same organisation doing it) but thankfully that seems to have died a natural death. If you can't tell by my obviously female name what gender I present as, and we're never going to meet face-to-face, and you don't need to know my gender/sex/number of limbs, then why make a big deal out of it? I did not need to know that Susie was going by "she/her" in order to send back the completed form as requested per your last.
My mum argued that pronouns can be helpful, not for the purposes of trans inclusivity, but because sometimes she gets emails from people from foreign countries and isn't sure if their forename is a boy's or girl's name.
I pointed out that we used to have a perfectly effective means of solving this problem: Mr./Mrs./Ms. This seems like a great example of jugaad ethics.
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Also, the euphemistic "should" in "should keep that to yourself" is playing the part of a motte. I have no problem with the idea that it's just as impolite to point out that a transwoman looks ridiculous as it is to call attention to somebody's missing arm (although I would hope the transwoman had someone in their life who was honest with them). The actual bailey is "you MUST keep that to yourself, or you are a declared Enemy and we will publicly advocate for doxxing you, getting you fired, and (in the UK, at least) jailing you".
I agree. Part of the problem with the skin condition analogy is that the issue doesn't normally come up in ordinary life. The way you address a person isn't normally based on whether the person has clear skin. By contrast, you normally call a person "sir" or "ma'am" based on whether they are male or female. Similarly, people don't use a particular locker room based on whether or not they have a skin condition.
I think A better analogy would be if people with serious skin conditions were given access to special resources, for example more convenient parking spaces during the summer months so that they wouldn't have to spend as much time walking outdoors. And if a person with perfectly healthy skin was permitted to identify as having a skin condition and take advantage of this special access. And if anyone who complained about the situation (or who didn't go along with pretending that the person had a skin condition) were ostracized.
Indeed. Another real-world analogy would be "service animals" vs "pets". Nobody disputes that there are people who genuinely need the help of animals to get by (even if your definition is narrow enough to only include guide dogs). But a sensible policy of allowing exemptions for them very quickly escalated to an extreme level of abuse.
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That’s my understanding as well. Maybe @MartianNight and @hydroacetylene don’t believe in the gender/sex distinction but it’s central to the mainstream trans viewpoint and it’s either a straw man or a misinterpretation to interpret “x was always a man” as “x is and always was biologically male”.
Progressives will be very sensitive about language and avoid explicitly calling a trans man a biological female, but they aren’t (completely) denying reality, they’ll just use euphemisms and softer language (like AFAB/AMAB, “presenting as female at the time”). If you don’t have hold the sex/gender distinction it’s easy to think it’s complete nonsensical absurdity and that they’re saying a man can will himself into having a uterus, as opposed to having this nebulously defined conception of the inner self as a woman.
There is no gender/sex distinction. Famously, Matt Walsh asked “what is a woman?”. Self ID doesn’t get you there because unless you have a platonic form there is no way one can in fact identify as a woman (what is someone identifying with if there is no form). So the only possible coherence is to look at the platonic form of a female and see if women maps onto it.
But then trans folks are basically claiming that doing certain activities are the defining form of being a woman (again if there is any coherence to trans ideology — one could say there are many ways to be a woman but trans people need there to be a platonic form). And by doing so, by saying “women are X, Y, and Z” trans folks are basically telling a bunch of females that they actually aren’t a woman (unlike the trans “woman” who is male). That is patently ridiculous. No, the woman who was born with women’s characteristics shouldn’t be told she isnt a woman by a confused man. Being a woman (based on sex) is easily defined and generally has worked for society for ages; yes there are extreme edge cases but far fewer than if the trans incoherence was adopted.
So even if you take the weak form of trans claims, they still fall apart into incoherent delusions since the only way to make any sense of gender is by tying it in to sex and therefore breaking the alleged binary.
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No it's not, and I've already pointed you to enough examples that I now believe you are being completely disingenuous the way all gender ideologues are always completely disingenuous.
If gender ideologues embraced the sex/gender distinction, Wikipedia's Elliot Page article would start with: "Elliot Page is a female actor who identifies as a man"
And Wikipedia's Imane Khelif article would start with "Imane Khelif is an intersex male suffering from 5AR2D who identifies as a woman..."
The Khelif article literally contains the false claim that "Khelif was born female" and for months contained the completely unsubstantiated sentence "false claims that she was a male circulated online": while these claims did circulate online, they were factually true, and this is still not acknowledged, though the sentence has been modified by replacing "male" with "man" which is still a lie since Khelif is a man in the trivial meaning of the word.
There is no "sensitivity" or "soft language" here. There is just a complete denial of objective reality. And it's not an oversight: this was one of the most-viewed articles of 2025. Many people tried to correct the "born female" and "false claims" phrasing; these people were all overruled by the gender activists that watch these articles like hawks and police the language carefully with the intent to maximally deceive the public.
If you disagree and you think the statement "Khelif was born female" was not meant to deceive the reader into thinking Khelif was born female (when in fact Khelif was born male) I would love to read your argument to that effect. But stop your bullshit about me not “believing” in a gender/sex distinction that obviously real world gender ideologues don't believe in either, considering that they're always intentionally conflating gender with sex, and never plainly state the sex of transgender/intersex people.
Intersex is a whole other kettle of fish, and I have sympathy there. But it's been hijacked as the "hit me now with the child in my arms" by the trans activists in order to go "well ackshully chromosomes aren't enough or assignment at birth isn't enough because what about this case and this case and this case of intersex people? checkmate, bigot!"
Someone with Klinefelter Syndrome is not the same as someone with functional sexual characteristics and two X chromosomes now declaring that they are the same as XY male for all intents and purposes. So what if I'm getting pregnant, I am the father of this child not the mother!
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How have I denied reality? I guess we can argue over the proportions of people with extreme beliefs about gender. I’m not even saying I agree with the mainstream pro trans position, I don’t, but I feel like you’re painting a straw man here.
Anyone who believes trans people literally become the opposite sex by self declaration is delusional and an idiot. That might be a big proportion of people arguing online about it, I don’t know, but I’ve thankfully never met anyone who believed that IRL.
That is so stupid it has so be a straw man or a minority of hardcore activists that don’t represent most trans people (which I have never encountered). Trans activists are all about separating gender from sex, and saying you being a man or a woman is different from you being male or female. That’s why there’s the whole “what is a woman” debate, otherwise how would that work, would they believe you can spontaneously manifest a uterus by believing you have one?
This is the vast majority of trans people I know, at least for hormones and wardrobe, behaviour is somewhat hit or miss.
Guess I’m as bad as a TERF then. If you make no attempt to present as a woman before going to the woman’s bathroom or locker room, obviously you might make people uncomfortable and they wouldn’t be out of bounds in asking you to leave.
I know that this feels like we're all piling on to you, but there are enough crazy people out there pushing extreme edges that most of us are frustrated. If it were just crazy people on social media declaring that they are trans masc non-binary female presenting two-spirit third gender folx, we'd roll our eyes and move on. But the craziness has real world consequences, from prisons to sports to encounters in everyday life.
This entire topic has become way too heated; first it was "trust the science, bigot" but now the science is inconvenient so that becomes "oh well they're all TERFs and no, that thing that happened never happened!"
I don’t even agree with mainstream transgender philosophy, I don’t believe in “gender” in the classic sex/gender dichotomy (it’s far too influenced by biological factors in my view). But everybody here is jumping to the least charitable interpretation of “gender ideology” and assuming I share those beliefs. You can’t call all trans people delusional, then when I ask what delusions I have, start bringing up straw men or viewpoints I don’t even have and have repudiated many times.
The same way the trans masc non-binary female presenting two-spirit third gender folx pushed people to the right, the “all trans people are delusional, trans healthcare should be banned, there should be laws and fines for going to the wrong bathroom” takes are gonna push people to the left. I feel like there’s already a vibe shift where the people are nostalgic for woke and seeing it as having been mostly silly and not that big of a deal. The they/thems didn’t start a war in the Middle East at least.
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What we're all is trying to drill into you is that the absurd things we describe are not strawmen. They are official policy and actual law in many places.
Yes! This makes you as bad as a TERF! Your common sense here is - and I want to emphasize that this is not hyperbole or exaggeration - against the law in California. You cannot ask a man not to use the women's shower, as this constitutes discrimination against their self-declared gender. The relevant law is the Unruh Civil Rights Act, which includes "gender identity and gender expression" as protected categories.
Here is one attempt to fix this with legislation. The site Trans Legislation Tracker declares that this is an anti-trans bill. Their own hostile summary includes this: "The Legislature finds and declares [...] Gender identity is fluid, and there is no ability for a commercial enterprise to determine if an individual's claim of a gender identity is sincere or is a pretext to obtain access to the opposite sex's intimate spaces." Which is absolutely correct! Just the acknowledgement that bad actors exist is treated as anti-trans!
You need to get your head out of the sand. Trans-aligned politics is absolutely bonkers. The vast majority of us allegedly "anti-trans" folks aren't being bigots; we're just trying to restore a measure of normalcy.
The vast majority of anti-trans people are not enacting minimum standards to use toilets or do other sex-segregated activities: they're banning trans people completely, regardless of how well they pass, how much effort they've put in, or how sincere they are. That is the mainstream anti-trans view. Your view, if you have described it accurately, is fringe.
I don't propose banning trans people (whatever that means). I don't propose rounding trans people and herding them into camps. I propose making people use the public facilities and compete in the sporting events that concord with their sex. I'm not saying "trans people can't compete in sporting events ever"; I'm saying "if they wish to compete in sporting events, trans people must compete in the sporting events corresponding to their sex, just like everyone else".
Read the entire sentence. They're banning trans people completely from using toilets or doing other sex-segregated activities. Let's set aside sports and consider only toilets. In what way are cis women harmed by sharing toilets with passing trans women? Note that women's toilets don't have urinals, only stalls. Users will never see other people's genitals. If the trans woman passes, other users won't even know she is trans. On the other hand, sharing the toilet with a passing trans man might actually be unpleasant.
I did read the entire sentence and, again, no they're not. Trans people are not forbidden from using toilets. No conservative politician is demanding that trans people be denied access to toilets of any kind. No conservative politician is demanding that trans people be forced to shit on the street. Conservative politicians are demanding that trans people use the toilets concordant with their sex, just like everyone else. You might disagree with this policy, but lying about what it entails helps no one.
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...unless they use the one given to them right there, same as everyone else.
It's like saying that you're banning me from using the toilet because I'm a compulsive germophobe and you refuse to have the bathroom extensively fumigated after each person goes in. The facilities are there for trans people, they're allowed to use them, they're throwing a massive tantrum at the way they're allowed to use them. That is not 'banning'.
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OK but that is literally the standard model of gender ideology in the real world, and if you argue for your interpretation you will get banned from half the internet and fired from every job in academia, hollywood, sillicon valley, and wherever else the woke reign supreme.
Go try and edit Wikipedia to reflect your belief that Elliot Page was a woman when he played a pregnant teenage girl. Heck, go on Wikipedia and edit the Elliot Page article to state that Page might be a man now but he still is biologically female and was born female (rather than merely being “assigned female at birth” by an ignorant doctor) If you manage to do that without getting banned or ganged upon by a rabid troupe of gender ideologues who will swiftly revert your changes, I might consider your hypothesis that gender ideology might possibly mean what you claim it means.
But who are we kidding? We both know that your conception of gender ideology doesn't exist outside The Motte. It's actually a fantastic example of the motte-and-baily fallacy. Only in The Motte, that wretched hive of scum and villainy, where people don't automatically agree that a woman is anyone who says they're a woman, does transwoman mean “person who wishes they are a woman but is a male in reality”. Everywhere else it means “woman, and if you deny it you're banned”.
You're just nitpicking about terminology. Everyone knows that "AFAB" is a euphemism for "born female". Do you campaign against euphemisms in general or is it this one specific pair of euphemisms that you consider the great political issue of our time?
No, I don't think it's nitpicking to point out that "born female" implies "born biologically female" much more strongly than the related but different term "assigned female at birth".
I understand AFAB is often used as a euphemism for "biological female" but that relies on the fact that most transgender people are the biological sex they were assigned at birth. The entire point of the Khelif controversy is that he was assigned female at birth despite being biologically male.
And although I do think an encyclopedia should avoid euphemisms in favor of clear language, I didn't bring the AFAB/born female distinction up as part of a cruscade against euphemisms on Wikipedia, but to support my point that Wikipedia does not use these words interchangably, and the choice to describe Khelif as "born female" was intended to falsely suggest that Khelif is biologically female.
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I’m surprised @MartianNight isn’t aware of the “AFAB only” spaces controversy which is the woke way of saying “biological female only”. Also “AFAB vs AMAB socialisation”.
Woke people are quite aware of biological sex. There’s probably some horseshoe theory thing at play where both woke and gender critical people end up with similar viewpoints and are both dismissive of trans people and physical dysphoria.
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