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From Quillette, an MIT professor describes the outraged reaction from fellow philosophers when he argued that a woman is an adult human female.
Back in 2019 Alex Byrne wrote one of my favorite essays on the incoherence of gender identity and as far as I can tell no one has managed to offer a solid refutation. Byrne follows up by discussing the difficulties he's had in getting a chapter and a book published on the topic, and his travails are equal parts infuriating and hilarious. For example, consider how a fellow colleague was treated once the crowd got wind that her book might be a bit too critical:
This trend of protesting a book before anyone even reads it will never stop being funny to me. Byrne expected his book to go through several revisions and by his account he was happy to accomodate feedback. His reviewers, though, were not:
"What is wrong with my argument?"
"Everything."
"Can you be more specific?"
"Just all of it, it's just bad."
This is the kind of sophistry one would expect from random online arguments, and I'm sure you can identity similar instances even in this very forum. The take-away I'm generally left with is that Byrne's interlocutors are an amalgamation of intellectually fragile individuals. Conclusory statements rather than specifics are a transparent indication that you are aware your arguments will crumble when exposed to a light breeze. Protesting rather than arguing are a transparent indication that you are unable to defend your ideas on their own merits.
All this seems painfully obvious to me as an outsider, and I'm baffled why anyone engages in this ablution pantomime. Who could it possibly convince?
Freddie DeBoer recently put out a banger of a post called "A Conversation About Crime" about the absolute intellectual void behind the "defund the police" movement. The whole thing is worth reading in full, but I'll include the parting shot here:
Transgenderism is religious dogma taken to its logical extreme. The fundamental thesis of the religion is complete mind body dualism. They see humans as a blank slate sould that randomly attached to a body and thereby has had many constraints and suffering imposed on it. Their goal is to liberate the free soul from the constraints of the physical world. The view can't be understood outside their theology. HBD, genetic explanations for class our sex differences, are the ultimate heresy against their religion. They invalidate the core principle and understanding of their theology. The woke ideology is built on a worldview that free souls were created, they were bound to physical constraints through evil and the march of history is toward liberating the soul.
The more tech Silicon Valley take is that this will be done through genetic engineering/AI/fusion powered utopia. The more social science approach is through "justice".
Academia has fallen into a pit because academia consists of writing commentary to other peoples work. In the social sciences the commentary is to a large extent based on philosophers and thinkers that had ideas that are invalid. Rousseau doesn't live up to scientific scrutiny. Yet the ideas that stem from his thinking aren't tossed out. There needs to be a search algorithm that can search citations iteratively and redact those papers whose fundamental principles are false. Papers built on ideas such as "Existence precedes essence" are wrong since your DNA is at least as old as your existence, since you became you at the point of conception or later.
Wokeism in Academia is theologists arguing about the number of angels on a needle. They are taking religious ideas with weak scientific basis and arguing them to their logical conclusion. Transgender issues are so explosive even though they are marginal issues since they fundamentally are a clash of theology. Theologians could spend centuries arguing about the word "Filoque", we are seeing similar debates today centering around the new religion.
Identity is not dualist.
Identity is the thing you will look like post singularity when you have no limits.
It is your true self in that it is where you go when all resistance is overcome. Thus it is the direction your will points.
It's teleological.
This does not require mind/body dualism. In fact, the mind itself is also subject to this.
If I don't have the mind of a woman but want to, that is part of this.
This is completely objective. It can be true or false that the direction of a person's will and effort is towards being a man or being a woman.
It is a physical fact about their wants and goals, which is- from a physicalist standpoint, a fact about the neurons in their brain.
No souls required.
I'm not addressing academia in this comment.
So the only part of this view of identity this that is dogmatic, is the radical idea that it is bad that people aren't yet what they want to be.
And I want to be lots of things. The reality is that we are humans, a slightly more intelligent primate and a biological being. Accepting who we are and finding adaptive strategies for the ecosystem we are in are the reasonable way of handling these issues. Your body is you, there is no limit to overcome, you are the physical body.
I think @CloudHeadedTranshumanist would disagree. I hope that that identity (unmoored from any pronouns that could form a link to a body of any sort) will come clarify, but my interpretation is that the comment leans in to the meme. "YesChad.jpg, the only thing keeping you from being an attack helicopter is that we haven't made enough progress on the technology yet," I want to hear that identity say.
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Consider contingency. Take a seventeen year old, whose mother is a reckless driver. Their mother never crashes, though. Okay, he goes a good local college, where he likes biology, gets a bio degree, goes into medical school, and becomes a doctor. He's overcome all resistance - and lives his True Self as a doctor. He enjoys it, is happy he's contributing his community.
Oops! Wrong branch. The mother does crash. The father can't pay rent, so they move to a different neighborhood. The kid to a different, but still good college. Here, the bio professors are a bit less good and the psychology professors a bit better. So he becomes a therapist. Helps a bunch of people, enjoys it, has a purpose, living a True Self.
The point - what one does 'after resistance is overcome' is very contingent. What's the kid's identity at 17? Does he have one?
What explanatory power or use does the idea of an 'identity' have? He's someone who'd enjoy being either a doctor or a therapist. Why is there an 'identity' at all?
Your singularity bit is a twist on the usual ways people elaborate identity, but the same thing applies. Maybe contingency means you might go into the experience machine: porn edition, or you might play starcraft 7 forever. What's your identity then? And, again, what does 'identity' add to a simpler explanation?
Yes identity is highly contingent. This doesn't make it less simple.
The predictive power is extremely straightforward. If you see someone identify some way they are going to pursue being that way until they are deflected from being that way by outside forces.
There is still room here for many different ideological positions on the matter. Such as which methods of moulding and shaping identity are valid.
Its just the ethics of providing training data to and prompt engineering self-aware human minds.
The ethical positions around this do tend to be ideological.
The conservative parent wants maximum control of training data and prompt engineering.
The liberal tends to err on the side of 'it's unethical to censor the training set or mold people with violence until proven necessary'.
This seems to water it down from the lofty heights of post-singularity musings. Instead, it sounds just like regular, boring old desires/wants. Those things could be said to be just in the brain; this is at least a philosophical position that is plenty defensible and plenty defended by many thinkers. But then we already have a long history of thinking on the concept of boring wants/desires and how they can be distinguished from identity, the "I" that is thinking in the classic cogito. In fact, classical thinkers have even considered a whole taxonomy of multiple orders of wants/desires, some of which could satisfy this condition while not being.. uh, identified.. as the "I" of identity.
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As much as I want to avoid weakmanning, this does seem to me to be the most coherent description of gender ideology. People just happen to be born into the "wrong" body (for some reason, don't ask why) which clashes with their innate gendered soul. Thankfully we have medical technology to fix that I guess.
Yes, but without woo.
You insofar as you exist are a little light in a meat suit. Sometimes the processor of the meat suit is fucked up and throws errors (suffers) 'cause it's pins are set such that the suit should be a different model. Maybe this is from birth, maybe its chemicals, maybe it's fucking moths landing on vacuum tubes. Doesn't matter.
Since another fairly universal part of the processor compels you to give a shit about 'suffering' and technology currently cannot address the problem at the processor level, we have to do the jank shit to the suit to get the errors to stop.
Or, you simply decide that the errors are fake, or that the suffering is good in fact.
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Transgenderism is secular, godless materialism taken to its logical extreme. Its logical conclusion is biological essentialism and determinism. They see humans as animals with an unchangeable "gender-drive" - such that a biological man who wants to be a female must be so out of a material fact of their biology, rather than spiritual confusion or sin. Their goal is to chain humans to their base biological impulses and confusions, rather than liberate the soul to pursue individuality and God's plan. That a young girl might wear male clothing, cut their hair, wrestle, or be uncomfortable with puberty can't be an individual's contingent, flawed exploration of their self, but must be a fact of their biology to be physically treated with medicine.
... of course that isn't true either, it sounds like something a radfem would say, but it seems about as plausible as your claims? The bad parts of trans are maybe in some way analogous to mind-body dualism, but a lot of things are analogous in some ways to a lot of other things, and that doesn't make it one cause. "Liberate the soul from the constraints of the physical world"? What does that have to do with wearing dresses or doing makeup? And no trans people that I know of explicitly claim mind-body dualism, or even hint at it. "My brain is the wrong sex" is claimed to be a physical condition of development causing specific desires to be different, not something about souls. Being very wrong about philosophy and science, and getting mad at those who disagree, doesn't make something a religion, by that standard everyone is religious.
They don't. They reject any attempt to materially verify whether or not someone actually suffers from dysphoria.
I agree it isn't true, I was inverting OP's argument for effect (see first sentence of second paragraph), but it, like OP's first paragraph, mixes in a bunch of plausible statements with false statements
My point is that OP's statement is more defensible because they are against the material verification of dysphoria. Whether or not their beliefs are true or not is irrelevant to the conversation.
I continue to be presented with 'transgender people are real because brain scan studies' every few weeks in internet arguments! They're against material verification of dysphoria because it bigotedly implies someone isn't trans, not because of a principled metaphysical stance. Material verification is fine when it's wholesome and trans-positive
They might use that argument when suitable but ask them if more men become engineers because of developmental differences.
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Ok, so tell them "no gender affirming care for you, unless the brain scan test comes back positive" and see what happens.
This statement makes no sense. Material confirmation that you only accept when it gives you the results you want is not material verification.
That may or may not be reasonable depending on the specifics of the brain scans. As an analogy, if trans peoples' heights were typical for the gender they identify as that would be material evidence, but it would be unreasonable to say "no gender-affirming care unless you're shorter than 5'6"" since the height distributions for men and women overlap significantly.
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same response as here. I agree it isn't actually material verification, and it's not actually dualism either, it's a third dumber thing
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The claim that gender dysphoria, and by extension transgenderism, is explicable by reference to a disorder in the physical substrate (e.g. exposure to unusually high levels of prenatal estrogen/testosterone) is widely seen in the trans community as a "truscum" stance to take. In these circles, arguing that only male people with neurologically "female" brains are truly trans women would likely result in accusations of gatekeeping and denying trans people's "lived experience". In my experience, it's far more common to encounter claims that everyone has a "gender identity" known and knowable only to themselves, completely independent of their underlying neurochemistry, unbeholden to social influences, and that being diagnosed with (or even experiencing) gender dysphoria is not a prerequisite to being authentically trans. Such a conception of what a "gender identity" is seems functionally indistinguishable to the traditional conception of an immaterial soul.
In my experience, the internet trans community is happy to use 'brain scans of trans people are more like desired gender than birth gender' in arguments, which is what I was referring to.
Other than the immateriality part (a gender identity, here, is a set of gender-related perceptions or desires rather than something supernatural), the soul part (no communication with supernatural entities, no life-after-death, no creator, etc), and everything else in the traditional conception? Yes, both gender identity and immaterial soul have big problems, and they are vaguely similar in some ways, but that's not 'functionally indistinguishable'.
Right, but have you ever heard a member of said community arguing that "until someone's divergent neurochemistry has been confirmed by MRI or CT scan, you are not obliged to address them by their preferred pronouns"? Even truscums don't go that far: a clinical diagnosis of gender dysphoria by a psychiatrist (without an expensive MRI or CT scan) is considered sufficient.
In the Internet trans community, the alleged similarities between the brains of trans people and the typical brains of people of their desired sex is treated as an interesting fact, not as a rule-in criteria for who is "really" trans and who isn't.
Right, they pick different arguments in different contexts because their beliefs about what trans is (specifically referring to the All Trans People Are Valid ones) aren't particularly coherent and partially come from a desire to validate other 'trans people'. Trans brain mean trans is real (good), denying hormones on brain scan means an individual trans isn't real (bad). This isn't either materialism or dualism, it's an entirely different thing.
In much the same way that non-consequentialists sometimes reflexively fall back on consequentialist arguments when trying to persuade consequentialists, dualists sometimes resort to monist arguments when trying to persuade monists, even though they themselves are not monists. In the past, I've argued with Christians who've claimed that when you perform brain scans on people in states of religious ecstasy (speaking in tongues etc.), these brain scans look completely different to people having seizures or any other comparable neurological state. I have no idea whether this is true, and in fact whether or not it's true is beside the point: even if this finding was decisively invalidated, it wouldn't impact on these Christians' belief in an immaterial soul or an afterlife one iota. Likewise, trans activists argue that brain scans prove that there's an anatomical basis for gender dysphoria and hence transgenderism, but even if this claim was decisively proven false, that wouldn't actually result in any of the people making the argument to change their minds. In their view, "gender identity" is something fundamental to a person's essence, knowable only to oneself and hence impossible for an outside person to invalidate. This belief doesn't depend on factual evidence from MRI or CT scans; at best, those are just a helpful bonus to bolster a belief which is essentially unfalsifiable.
Their view is that if you say you're trans, you are trans, because denying that would be incredibly mean to a trans person and being trans is cute and valid. There aren't any essences involved. Like, what identity-essences does a genderfluid person have, or someone who wants to be a boy sometimes and a girl at other times? It's just 'you are trans if you say you are and you get to do whatever you feel like', which doesn't seem particularly dualist, just dumb.
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