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In the trans debate, I encountered an argument the other day which to me reads like a textbook example of an unfalsifiable hypothesis. I would like to run it by you good people to see if there's something I'm missing.
My woke, far-left sister was complaining about a male person she knows who claims to be non-binary, and yet behaves in a manner entirely consistent with certain negative stereotypes about masculinity, specifically "mansplaining", the tendency of certain men to condescendingly talk down to women, even if the women in question are more knowledgeable about the topic in question than the man himself is. She said it was abundantly obvious from his demeanour that this person was a man, not something intermediate between male and female.
I thought to myself "wow, my sister's gotten redpilled somewhere along the way" and enthusiastically agreed with her, arguing that I think the concept of "gender identity" has essentially zero predictive power, and that self-declared trans people almost invariably behave in a manner more consistent with their natal sex then their claimed gender identity. The specific example I gave was that trans women are 6 times more likely than cis women to be convicted of a crime, and 18 times more likely to be convicted of a violent crime. Which is exactly what you'd expect on the basis of their sex, not their gender identity. If trans women are women trapped inside men's bodies, why do they commit crimes at the same rates as men?
My sister's rebuttal was that, even though trans women are women trapped inside men's bodies, they were still socialised to be male prior to their coming out as trans, which compels them to behave in a manner consistent with the masculine norm.
This strikes me as a perfect example of the adage "if a theory explains everything, it explains nothing". If a trans woman behaves in a manner consistent with how you'd expect a female person to behave, that demonstrates that she's really a woman. If a trans woman behaves in a manner consistent with how you'd expect a male person to behave, that demonstrates that she was socialised into behaving like a male person against her will. Under this framing, there is literally nothing a trans woman can do which can ever point away from her "really" being a woman.
What would it take to falsify this hypothesis? Is there some piece of the puzzle that I'm missing here? I'm sincerely looking for a steelman.
I think your sister's stated explanations are simply an attempt to rationalize her feelings. They're not a description of her actual underlying reasoning.
I think for a lot of everyday liberals who haven't thought carefully about this stuff, the reasoning goes like this: trans/NB people are oppressed, and oppressed people are good and virtuous. Therefore if someone (in my estimation) is not good and virtuous, then they are not "really" trans/NB.
You see this a lot. When a trans person is in the news doing something bad, then they're not really trans, they're faking it. Similarly, if a member of an oppressed minority group doesn't hold the right opinions or vote the right way, they're self-hating or not "really" an authentic member of their race, etc.
I think you’re definitely on to something, but I remember there being a lot of pushback when some people began “deadnaming” and “misgendering” the trans kid who shot up his/her former Christian school. I suppose this might just indicate a split between the everyday liberals and the true believers. The true believers happened to get the upper hand on that occasion, but the everyday liberals don’t always go along when it comes to trans rapists.
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So there's a difference here between being 'not really' X, and being an unrepresentative example of X.
I think most people are not really aware of this difference on a level where they could talk about it coherently.
But it's very very often true that, when some member of a group has been shown in the public eye to be bad, with an implication that this demonstrates how members of that group are bad generally or how this group is bad for society, that this individual has been adversarially chosen and is in fact not representative of their group.
Think about brutal and criminal police held up as examples of ACAB and justifications for Defund. It would be entirely sensible to argue that these are not representative examples and don't justify the level of hostility towards the larger group that they are being used to engender.
Of course, with police, defenders don't have the option of claiming they're not 'real' police, because there is a central authoritative agency which objectively determines that fact (eg, they have a badge).
But in cases where there is no such objective metric and claims of being 'not a real X' are in fact possible and sensible, it's not surprising to me that people fall into this rhetoric when trying to express the intuition that this attempt to tar a group with a bad individual is unfair and dishonest.
It's not good rhetoric, but most people have no training in rhetoric and are bad at it; you will always be able to find examples of someone saying something stupid online.
My point is I think it's a bad attempt at conveying a good and true logical point about what is happening. And it's worth engaging with the point instead of the rhetoric where possible.
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That would be perfectly self-consistent (if a transparent no true Scotsthey argument). What I don't understand is how she thought this one random dude isn't "really" non-binary on the basis of his toxic mansplaining, but a trans woman who commits a violent crime (up to and including raping a female person) is still a woman.
I do think that binary and non-binary trans are inherently different things, though.
Like, 'man' and 'woman' are legal categories with real effects, and they are coherent permanent social categories which include a lot of variance while retaining their core identity. It's entirely possible for a man to wear makeup or for a woman to mansplain, they will be unusual in that one regard but can still be unarguably a member of their larger category based on everything else about them (including their legal classification). There's also an established path to binary transition covering things like hormone therapy, changing your legal status, standard types of presentation changes, voice therapy, etc.
Whereas being nonbinary is not really a well-defined social or legal category in the same way. Saying you're nonbinary is not so much a declaration of 'I am in that stable well-understood category you already know about, as it is a declaration of intent to exhibit behaviors and presentations that don't match either of the established categories. There's no established path and no checkboxes to show that you're 'doing it right'.
In that sense, it sort of is possible to 'fail' at being nonbinary, in a way that's a lot less possible with binary trans (assuming you're making an effort at the established path). Someone can look at your self-invented steps and methods and say 'You really are not anywhere outside of the established binary, or even near the periphery.'
Of course, they don't have any authority to stop you and their judgement is not inherently more valid than yours, or w/e. But such judgement are abstractly more coherent, at least.
Sure, and my question is, what is the equivalent for trans women? What would it take before I can legitimately say "you really are not anywhere outside of the social category associated with your sex, or even near the periphery"? Looking like a cis man apparently doesn't invalidate a trans woman's self-declared gender identity; nor dressing like one; nor sounding like one; nor having male genitalia; nor behaving like a cis man - is there anything more quintessentially masculine than starting a drunken fight outside of a bar, or raping someone (a crime that, as I mentioned in another comment, is defined in many jurisdictions such that only male people can commit it)? "Trans women don't owe you femininity", after all - a trans woman is not obliged to do anything associated with the female sex or women, and must still be considered a woman no matter what.
To sum up: I don't understand why a "non-binary" gender identity is contingent, but a "trans woman" gender identity is axiomatic and unquestionable.
Oh, sorry, I thought that was clear: It's because we're currently engaged in a number of legal battles over the rights and status of binary trans people along many different axes, so the actual considered discussion of such topics is drowned out by political activists on both sides circling the wagons and offering extremist rhetoric to push their side of the ballot onto voters.
Yes, that's annoying, but it's approximately what always happens when any issue is being used as a wedge in elections and coming before legislatures.
Beneath that, and especially in offline spaces where real people are talking to real people, there's much more measured standards that consider all the stuff you're talking about in a holistic way. Although, with the caution that a lot of people are at the start of their transition process or have to stay closeted at work or at church or etc., and these are valid excuses for not already always ticking all the boxes.
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I think if you gave her a specific example of a trans person committing a sex crime, she would likely use the "they're not really trans" argument. But because you quoted statistics she can't do that as easily; it would imply large numbers of people who claim to be trans aren't really trans.
Also, as @Pynewacket alludes to, statistics don't hit "the feels" the way anecdotes do, so she didn't have the same emotional reaction to the statistics that she had in the case of her male NB friend. If she doesn't feel the same way about both situations, she won't interpret them as analogous and therefore won't feel the need to be logically consistent. This is a pretty common way for normal, average IQ people to behave. For example, people like this will often reject arguments by analogy they disagree with by saying something like "those two situations are totally different" without being able to articulate why they are different in any relevant way. They simply feel differently about the two situations and therefore refuse to see them as analogous.
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I feel like this is covered pretty well under @guajalote's third paragraph.
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One made her feel bad and the other is something that she might have heard of in the news or been told about by an acquaintance. And it's not about what she thought, it's what she feels.
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