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Notes -
(1) Yes.
(2) Yes.
(3) Yes, with the caveat:
This works similarly to anti-discrimination law. You're allowed to refuse to date any individual, but you aren't allowed to refuse to date people because they're transgender (or, more broadly, because you do not accept their gender identity). You can express preferences based on gender identity, and you can sometimes get away with expressing preferences based on physical traits, but you can't express preferences based on transgender status or things that obviously correlate with it (like "gender assigned at birth").
(You can't even express preferences in favor of them, that's called being a "chaser".)
Ok, thanks for responding again.
My next question is this:
What's the evidence that "gender" exists in the way you have defined it? Is there any evidence other than self-reporting?
Speaking as a very pro-trans person: I don't especially believe that "gender" "exists" in some objective sense separate from subjective preferences - nor that it needs to.
I think it might help you understand my perspective if we look at another marker of identity with huge emotional significance to individuals, but very little biological basis if any: names. If an individual whose legal name is William would prefer to be known as Bill or Tex or Archimedes, it's clearly the correct thing to do to call him by his chosen name. In some technical contexts it might be necessary to bear in mind that the name on his ID papers is "William", but it would be dickish and bizarre to chime in whenever he says "Hi, my name's Tex" and go "ackshually, your name is William; either you're lying or you're delusional". If one of Tex's coworkers keeps passive-aggressively calling Tex "William" no matter how many times he explains that he doesn't like hearing that stuffy-sounding name that doesn't feel like it reflects him as a person, that coworker would clearly be engaged in a kind of low-grade psychological harassment.
Social transition, to my way of thinking, works very much like this, except in addition to a "William" who would rather be an "Alice", it's a "Mr" who would prefer to be called a "Miss", a "he" who would prefer to be called a "she". It is clearly, I feel, the nice, the civil, the moral thing to do to respect that person's wishes; and it doesn't require anyone to be confused about what William/Alice has got in his/her pants. She can be a conversational "she" and a medical "he" in the same way that the first guy was a conversational "Bill" but a legal "William". It's just that, unless you're a doctor/an IRS employee, the underlying technicalities of Tex or Alice's identities are none of your business. If a guy tells you "I'm Tex" it's none of your fucking business whether it says "Tex" or "William" on his driving license, outside a few specific technical circumstances; likewise if someone tells you "I'm a woman" then it shouldn't be any concern of yours what she looks like naked, unless you happen to be a doctor, or a prospective date. To put it another way, under normal circumstances, the only relevance that the sex of a random person has to you, whatsoever, is by what titles and pronouns it would be polite to address that person; how you should refer to them if you don't want them to feel insulted or misrepresented. So if that person dislikes the pronouns and titles that their biological sex would normally entail, sex loses relevance altogether, trumped by self-identification.
And a similar analogy can be devised for medical transition. Let's say you like to shave your chin but keep a mustache. Is there some specific factor in your brain that makes you a Person Whose Inner Identity Is A Mustache Guy? Probably not. It's besides the point. It would still be dickish of someone to say "biology says the male Homo sapiens is meant to have hair all over his face, you're not allowed to shave your chin", or indeed "it's better for society if grooming norms are cohesive, shave that mustache as well or you're a hippie freak". How you want to style your facial hair-growths is your business; if it's emotionally important to you to present the face of a Mustache Guy to society, and you don't feel like yourself with a lumberjack beard or a full shave, then it would be dictatorial of society to force you to do otherwise; it would be rude and invasive of any private third party to tell you how they think you ought to be styling your body.
"Gender identity" is just a kludgy concept lumping together a lot of disparate preferences, positive and negative; and even when two trans people share a preference, they might have come to it for completely different reasons (much as you may like to shave your beard because you think a full beard makes you look like some kind of caveman, while I like to shave my beard because I don't like how sweaty and itchy it makes my neck). But all those preferences, individually, should be valid in any free, humane society.
Well, I would like to test this claim with a thought experiment or two:
Suppose it's the late 80s. You know a guy whose legal name is "Clarence Johnson." He is tall and black and he likes to follow the Chicago Bulls around, pretend to be Michael Jordan, capitalize on the similarity in appearance to get free drinks; to pass bad checks; and to pick up girls. He has told you that he prefers to be known as "Michael Jordan." You see him in a hotel gift shop and he says "Hi Wanderer" right in front the clerk as he is making out a check. Would you say "Hi Michael, how are you doing" in response? Is that clearly the correct thing to do?
Ok, now suppose it's 2026. You know a guy who, unfortunately, has had a mental breakdown and genuinely believes that he is the King of England. He has expressed to you that at some point, he would like to travel to London to "take out the imposter" who currently is residing in Buckingham Palace. His legal name is Charles Johnson but he has told you he wants to be known as "King Charles" or "Your Royal Highness." Would you call him by his chosen name? If so, is that clearly the correct thing to do?
Well, there was, of course, an implicit "all else being equal" in the sentence you quoted. In your thought experiments as stated, all else is not equal; but that doesn't impinge upon my point, which was that insisting on calling Tex "William" isn't necessarily the right thing just because it is, in a technical sense, "the truth". There can be other, context-specific reasons why it might be good to identify a person currently calling himself Tex as his legal name of "William" against his will - if he's a wanted murderer hiding under an alias, for example. Your Michael Jordan impersonator largely falls into that category. (And mind you, it could be the case that a tall black guy's legal name happens to be Michael Jordan (e.g.), and suddenly the ethical thing would be to only refer to him by a nickname where it might cause undue confusion! The underlying "truth" is besides the point!)
I don't think trans people are in this category in the vast majority of cases. The most crucial difference is that it is legitimate for a hotel to treat the real Michael Jordan differently than they would a random lookalike, whereas if people treat a random person differently depending on whether they believe that person to be a man or a woman, that's their problem for being sexist. Moreover, most trans people are not trying to pass themselves off as the real Michael Jordan. The typical trans woman puts a trans flag in her Bluesky bio and will start talking about her transition journey as light conversation - she will certainly mention it before a date gets to second base. The "trap" who passes perfectly and uses that to lead on a potential sex partner all the way to the bedroom is largely a creature of fantasy, and not behavior mainstream modern-day trans people would endorse (if only because it doesn't tend to go well for the trans woman herself).
Similarly, in your King Charles example, there is more at stake than politeness and self-identification. If Charles Johnson is suffering from a delusion that he is the King Charles then perhaps I shouldn't go along with that (unless medical professionals recommend going along with the delusion for the patient's wellbeing, which does happen with e.g. dementia patients, but that's another question). Nor would I go along with it if a trans woman started telling me about her uterus or a childhood memory of her first period. But normal trans people are not like this. They know they are biologically of the opposite sex; in fact they often advertise it. If my friend is an eccentric who knows perfectly well that he's not really a Windsor, but would like me to call him "your majesty" as a kind of 24/7 LARP (perhaps he's into micronations?), I'd happily roll with it - and if for some reason I refused, it would be absolutely fair of Charles to not want to be my friend anymore.
(This doesn't change if my friend has maverick philosophical opinions that lead him to defend the position that at the end of the day, the "king" of a micronation and the "king" of a real recognized countries are more alike than they are different, in the way that a trans woman might know perfectly well that she's not the kind of woman who has a uterus and a vagina, and simply defend the esoteric metaphysical point that she's still as entitled to the word "woman" as anybody else.)
There have been a surprisingly large number of "creatures of fantasy" convicted and imprisoned for rape by deception.
Curious, then, that the "rape by deception" Wikipedia article
Maybe Wikipedia is unrepresentative of the median opinion of trans people, maybe you move in different circles than I do, but I honestly cannot ever remember seeing a trans activist arguing that trans people have a legal and moral obligation to disclose their sex before getting into bed with someone.
A, Chinese robbers. B, neither of the two articles you link really pattern-matched to the "trap" archetype. Watkin was a social transitioner who frankly looks so clocky that I'm very much inclined to believe her defense that it didn't cross her mind that the guy might not have realized. Which is maybe not best practice, but we're a long way away from the sultry queen who suddenly whips out a penis. As for Newland, I honestly can't tell if she even identifies as male? It sounds like this could genuinely just be a lesbian who engaged in an improbable deception to get in a straight woman's pants. The article never claims that she identified as trans, it merely draws a possible legal analogy from how her case was judged to how this may reflect on trans cases. And either way, we're dealing here with someone who went by a wholly fake name and invented a fake backstory about an accident; the deceit goes well beyond a lack of disclosure even if Newland was indeed a trans man.
I feel absolutely confident that all my trans friends' judgement on these cases would be, respectively, "Watkin was not actually trying to deceive anyone", and "Newland was obviously trying to deceive the victim and the way she did so would constitute rape-by-deception regardless of the genders angle".
Well, your trans friends would be wrong:
Why would a male person (who, by definition, cannot menstruate) falsely claim to be menstruating? Dare I say it's because he was trying to deceive someone?
My mistake on skimming and missing that bit. (Though I'm wondering about the impersonal "the court heard". From who? Does Watkin deny saying it?)
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I have to say: you've been spamming this line a lot, and at this point I don't think you know what it means.
I will remind you that I was responding to your claim that rape-by-deception trans people are "creatures of fantasy" i.e. that nothing like this ever happens. I never claimed that these two cases indicate that trans people commit rape by deception more often than average. I claimed that these two cases indicate that the number of trans people who have committed rape by deception is greater than 0 i.e. more than the amount you claimed.
When you claim that something never happens, and someone provides you with evidence that it does, in fact, happen, the appropriate response is "oh, my bad, I wasn't aware of that, thanks for letting me know". The appropriate response is not to dismiss me using a two-word rebuttal of a claim I never made.
It's really obnoxious for you to jump directly from "Group X never does this!" to "you have not presented compelling evidence that Group X does this more frequently than the typical rate in the general population" without even acknowledging that conceding the second point means that your first point was wrong.
I never said that; I said it was "largely a creature of fantasy", i.e. it might happen very occasionally but in statistically insignificant numbers.
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No there wasn't. There really wasn't. You made an unqualified statement, which you now (apparently) concede to be incorrect.
I don't even know what you mean by "all else being equal" here. The phrase "all else being equal" normally comes into play when one is comparing two or more alternatives. I think the qualifier you are trying to insert retroactively is "absent extenuating circumstances"
So my next question is this: Under what circumstances is it NOT clearly correct to call someone by their chosen name?
I'm sorry, but I think this all kinds of an isolated demand for rigor and that no one reading my post in good faith would come away with the impression that I have some sort of reverse-Kantian objection to identifying a murderer in hiding. If I said "If a man knocks at your door, explains he's starving, and asks for a crust of bread, it's clearly the correct thing to do to feed him", and I later clarified that obviously this statement takes all kinds of common-sense assumptions for granted (eg: "you" have some food to spare; "the man" is a stranger to you rather than a wealthy personal enemy of yours trying to discredit you with a hidden camera; etc.), only a pedantic logician would call that disingenuous.
I think they would come up with the impression that you hadn't really thought things through carefully. That's the most charitable interpretation. A less charitable interpretation would be that you were aware your generalization was limited, but you knew that inserting a qualifier would make your argument a good deal weaker. Because to do so would be to implicitly concede that there may be circumstances under which it's okay (or even preferable) to NOT indulge a trans person's desires in terms of name, pronouns etc. So instead you just hoped nobody would notice.
In any event, my question stands: Under what circumstances is it NOT clearly correct to call someone by their chosen name?
I don't believe there are any such circumstances, unless you contrive a situation where their "desire in terms of name, pronouns, etc." is unrelated to their actual transness (e.g. a trans man happens to currently be impersonating a specific biological man for nefarious purposes).
A variety of unrelated ones, much as there's a variety of unrelated reasons why you wouldn't feed the apparent starving beggar.
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There's a British anti-immigration activist who goes by the name Tommy Robinson. Whenever assorted progressive outlets like the Guardian or the Journal refer to him, they almost invariably include a parenthetical afterwards like "Robinson (whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon)..." It need hardly be said that both outlets scrupulously avoid referring to trans people by their "dead names".
In your opinion, is this "dickish" behaviour?
Yes. I don't think it's as dickish as deadnaming a trans person unless he's actively stated hearing his legal name spoken is painful to him - and conceivably he might be enough of a menace that being dickish to him is a defensible strategy in any case - but all else being equal, it's clearly not a nice thing to do, and the people who do it know that it's not a nice thing to do. A lot of anti-Ratsphere leftists make it a point to call Scott Alexander "Scott Siskind" and I think that's dumb and rude of them, too.
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It is smart way to discredit him in the eyes of his fans - double barrelled hyphenated name is very posh and (Norman) elite coded, not well fitting to champion of common Englishman born on common English street.
It ain't working well, but it is the best they have.
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A name doesn't claim to be a statement of fact about anything except an arbitrary designation. A term about sex does.
People who have this sort of pro-trans viewpoint would probably argue a term like "woman" isn't anything except an arbitrary designation either, the trouble is this does not really match how the term has been used colloquially throughout history, during which it has been synonymous in almost all cases with "female." Pro-trans people arguably are attempting to break that association whereas anti-trans people either don't understand this and believe the pro-trans side literally think transwomen are female, or they don't want to surrender the association because doing so would be extremely unintuitive and/or make it difficult to prevent males entering women-only spaces.
Well here's a thought experiment. Suppose that society reaches a point where the trans folks win on words like "man" and "woman" and everyone agrees that a "woman" is someone who self-reports to be a woman and a "man" is someone who self reports to be a man. Suppose further that a couple new words come out: "X24" and "X25" which are defined basically the way "man" and "woman" are traditionally defined. It's gotten to the point where even traditional Christian ministers will say something like "This X24 and X25 would make a great husband and wife" Nightclubs will have signs up saying "Free Entry for X25"
Ok, would trans advocates be happy with this situation? I am pretty sure the answer is "no." I am pretty confident that they would try to commandeer the words "X24" and "X25" just like they are trying to commandeer the words "man" and "woman."
So it's inaccurate to say that "Pro-trans people arguably are attempting to break that association." I mean, it's true, but that's not the actual goal. The goal is to coerce people into pretending that trans-identifying-men are women and vice versa.
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There have been relatively low-quality MRI studies that attempt to draw physical evidence of the concept of gender identity, but mostly it is by definition a self-reported trait, so the fact that people are self-reporting it is the evidence.
A common argument is to ask the person you're arguing with, "If you woke up this morning and found you had been transformed into a stereotypical example of the opposite gender, how would you feel about that?"
If you would prefer that to your current body, this means that you are transgender.
If you would feel negatively about this change, this demonstrates that you have an innate gender identity, and it's at least possible to imagine your body not being aligned with that identity. It just so happens that your body happens to be aligned with your gender identity. Lucky you!
If you would genuinely feel ambivalent (are you sure you're not repressing anything?), then... okay, that probably exists and is a valid category of gender identity. But lots of other people do have strong feelings about that, and gender ideology is the most inclusive way to support those people.
This is a terrible argument, though. I would personally prefer it, but that doesn't mean that I'm transgender, it's just an indication of my autogynephilia. Or perhaps my assessment of gender roles in society. All this argument proves is that different people can have different preferences about hypothetical fantasy scenarios, and then maps it onto "gender" which is fine as it is, but is also trivial and tautological.
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Ok, thank you. So it seems there is nothing to distinguish trans people from those who self-report as being Jesus; or who self-report as having been abducted by aliens; or who self-report as having been spoken to directly by some deity; etc. Agreed?
I think this argument proves too much. If I woke up tomorrow morning and found that I had been transformed into a man who looked pretty much like Henry Cavil and was 25 years old, I would be pretty happy about the change. That doesn't say anything about my innate identity as a short mediocre-looking man in his 50s with graying hair, though.
I think the assumption here would be that there are people who would basically go crazy and try to tear their skin off every time they looked in a mirror and saw Henry Cavil. Like, the fact that you would be personally fine with it is not necessarily a generally true fact about how identity works.
(Sadly, we'll have to wait until the singularity to properly test this.)
There may be people like this, but I'm not. (But I'll make it even easier. If I woke up tomorrow morning and I was transformed into a 25 year old version of myself, I'd be delighted. ) This single counter example disproves the entire generalization.
Unless of course, what transgender really means is that the person desires to be the other gender. Which I strongly suspect is pretty close to the truth.
Nobody in this thread is saying it's universally true though. In fact lots of people, me included in the comment you're replying to, say that it isn't.
I strongly disagree. Here's what the person had said:
This person is clearly making a universal generalization. He doesn't say "this probably means that you are transgender" or "this might mean that you are transgender." Rather, he says "this means that you are transgender" without any qualification. Therefore a single counter-example is sufficient to disprove the entire argument.
But okay, obviously you are not on the hook to defend another person's argument. So let me ask you this:
Under what circumstances is it true that a desire (or preference) to "wake up as a woman," indicates that the individual is transgender?
Hang on, how is this in contradiction? If you have a strong sense of gender perception, then the test works? If you don't have a strong sense of gender perception, it's unclear in what sense the concept of transgender even applies to you.
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These other claims all, to varying degrees, depend on external facts to be true. For example by asserting you've been abducted by aliens, you're asserting that aliens exist.
Gender ideology views gender claims as being more similar to someone saying "I had a dream about aliens last night." If you're talking to some weirdo who's never had a dream before, you may need to convince them that it's possible, but to most people it's obvious that the claim is both plausible and not really possible to disprove.
What external facts need to be true in order for a person to be Jesus?
What external facts need to be true in order for a person to be black?
What external facts need to be true in order for a person to be a cat?
To be Jesus: Jesus needs to actually be the religious figure he is depicted as in the Bible. (Or, I guess it's possible that Jesus was just an ordinary guy, but reincarnation is possible more generally.)
To be Black: The definition is usually something like "My ancestors were born in Africa [during some specific time period]", but it is more difficult to nail down, and different people often mean slightly different things.
To be a cat: Some people do accept that you can be a cat in the same purely-internal-identity way that you can be a woman. Other people would draw a line based on genetics or physiology in a way that's acceptable to do for species but not gender.
I don't get this. They rejected trans-race on this grounds, but sex is far less clinal than race, and it's funny, because it's the same type of people who point this out in the HBD debates.
To be a woman, you need to have two X chromosomes.
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Who gets to decide what the "usual" definition is of such a category? And would you agree that a big societal change in the definition requires a compelling reason?
I'm asking about the mainstream progressive view. If there is no such view, I am asking about your views.
Who gets to decide what's "acceptable"?
Gender ideology holds that these definitions, and the boundaries of what's acceptable, are obvious and self-evident. They're just what Good People believe, and if you don't believe them you're a Bad Person.
In practice this means that they're set by the people who have enough persuasiveness/social power/etc to successfully ostracize the people who don't believe in them. To the extent that gender ideology internally acknowledges these people at all, it mostly credits them in the same way you'd credit a mathematician with "discovering" or "communicating" some inherent property of numbers that was true even before the mathematician published the proof.
I think that both "you can identify as a cat" and "you can't identify as a cat" are within gender ideology's Overton window at the moment. I lean "can't" at the moment, but it's better to avoid committing to that in case new obviously self-evident truths get discovered in the future.
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That thought experiment seems to prove to much - would you accept transracialism if people would be happier transformed into a different race? Let alone other identity features such as age, nationality, weight, sexuality, etc.
Maybe I’m reaching a bit, but if you think about it, progressives do support an equivalent of trans “ethnicicity”, in the form of immigration!
In this case “biological sex” would map to race, which is unchangeable, but gender would map to nationality. For a conservative, a German is someone that’s born German, but leftists say that a Middle Eastern immigrant that gets German citizenship should count too.
I don't recall "I don't have white privilege, I live in a black neighborhood" being accepted as a valid argument.
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You can not become trans-ethnic short of marrying into an ethnos and having children. An ethnicity encompasses religion/culture and shared genetics.
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Sexuality is definitely another one of those unobservable things that you have to take people's word on.
On the other hand, weight is straightforwardly an observable physical trait, and age is a straightforward historical claim (the date on which you were born). Race and nationality are social constructs that are hard to pin down, but generally people agree that they involve some combination of physical and historical traits.
"Racial identity" does exist, but it is not considered very useful most of the time; it's mainly used as a tiebreaker when the physical/historical facts don't fit nearly into the categories. A lot of gender ideology boils down to a values claim that "gender identity" is a much more important concept that everyone should care about.
There are many people who wish they could change their sexuality magically - but does that mean they "really" are of the desired sexuality rather than the one that corresponds to how they are attracted?
You say that race and nationality incorporate physical traits. Are you claiming that gender does not?
I will say that one of the main things that broke me off of accepting transgender perspectives was how credulously accepting advocates are of transgender self reporting while being completely unaccepting of the idea of transracialism (e.g. Dolezal). Race is, to me reckoning, far more socially determined than gender is, but the political left sees it as immutable and sacred.
Yes. Gender ideology axiomatically defines "gender" as not requiring any physical traits. Some physical traits are typical of some genders, but they're not a requirement.
(FWIW I think nationality is often primarily a historical question, along the lines of "what country were you born in" or "what country has granted you citizenship", which is also something that "gender" is defined as not being.)
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Yeah, I made a similar point before I saw this comment. But now that I think about it, the argument is rather telling. Because I strongly suspect that most, perhaps all, trans identifying men are simply men who really enjoy the fantasy of being a woman.
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