Dawkins is spewing irrational, uninformed bigotry-fuel on Twitter again. I don’t think deliberately; he’s just a clueless fool. But the effect is the same. He even unknowingly chose the tired old bigot’s tactic of Just Asking Questions, in precisely the way as shows he is not researching anything anymore, but just spewing uninformed nonsense with total embarrassing arrogance and incompetence. This is what has become of him. Poor man. It’s not good for atheism or skepticism for so prominent a leader to fall so far down the hole of abandoning critical thinking, rationality, empathy, science, and evidence-based reasoning. He is no longer a model skeptic. And his fame only now makes that embarrassing and damaging. It’s unfortunate. But what to do about that is a different question, and one that others have already well-covered: I concur entirely with Seth Andrews; and mostly with Steven Pinker. I have no more to add on that particular point. Even the general point—people overreacting, and irrationally and self-destructively, to such behavior—I already treated in The Left and Anti-Left Both Have Much Still to Learn.
What I’m interested in covering here today is what Andrews and Pinker actually call for: reasoned, dispassionate criticism of what Dawkins said or implied. Regardless of what he meant (and his subsequent correction was important but not quite clear enough in cutting off this implication), what he implied (and thus what he has signaled to the public, intentionally or not) is that transgender people are all liars and con artists like Rachel Dolezal; that being “transracial” is the same thing as being “transgender” and therefore either we should accept Dolezal really is Black (she’s not) or we should condemn trans women and trans men as vehemently as we have Dolezal. Which has been for years a common transphobic talking point (a fact to which Dawkins seemed totally oblivious). But there is a reason why that equation is factually a false analogy. And insofar as people aren’t getting why, it’s the responsibility of philosophers to explain it (precisely the thing Dawkins didn’t do). So here you go.
The Dolezal Case
Rachel Dolezal is a liar and con artist who has repeatedly lied, and committed multiple documented instances of fraud (including welfare fraud…the most insulting of ironies). Wikipedia will get you up to speed. Relevant to the present inquiry, she repeatedly made the factually false statements that her biological father was Black, that she was biologically Black (e.g. insisting “DNA tests” would prove her ancestry, and altering her skin color and hair), and that she grew up Black, and that she had suffered serious hate crimes against her person for being Black (which the preponderance of evidence indicates she staged). None of those statements is factually true. She lied about them all. And she not only lied, as if just on some lark, but she used those lies to gain salaried jobs and influence and power and acclaim. And when she got caught, she changed her lies, as con artists will do: she started claiming instead that she only “identified” as Black, and started coopting the language of the transgender community to support this new lie. But we know that is a lie because until she told it, she had been claiming instead to be biologically Black, not just someone who identified as black, and she took steps to try and hide this fact from discovery—thus indicating she did not “just identify” as Black; rather, this was a new trick she was attempting, to save face after having been caught lying to and defrauding the community around her.
Rachel Dolezal is a morally reprehensible person; an actual fraud, in every sense of the word. That she uses her manipulative skills of lying and fabrication and even the telling of true but evidentially irrelevant sob stories to try and gain sympathy through articles and books and documentaries is the same shameless behavior other con artists and frauds employ. No competent skeptic should fall for it.
But fall for it many do.
Transgender vs. Transethnicity
I won’t name names, but at least one prominent wealthy atheist donor has insisted he has a relative who is “transethnic,” and therefore we should take claims like Dolezal’s seriously, as essentially the same kind of claim made by trans women and trans men, a nonsensical notion rightly denounced by experts. It’s not clear of course what that donor even meant, since race and ethnicity are not even the same social construct. Black is a racial category; Nigerian or Mestizo, for example, would be ethnic categories. Dolezal was not claiming to be Nigerian or Mestizo or to belong to any specific ethnic group, she was claiming biologically inherited skin color and body features and the life experience of being raised in a society that treats people with those features differently, none of which was true. She often claimed to be “African American,” which is closer to an ethnic identity (not all Black people are of African descent; not all Africans are Black; and Africa is a wildly diverse continent ethnically; but also, American Blacks do not have a monolithic culture, nor are they limited to only Black-originated cultures), but what she always meant by that was simply Black, i.e. a Person of Color. She was just co-opting the popular vocabulary at the time to run her con, just as she is doing now. So she is not even now claiming to be “trans-ethnic” but in some sense “trans-racial,” which is an even more nonsensical concept.
Unlike gender, whether someone has biologically inherited attributes is an objective fact independent of self-selected identity characteristics. This is why transgender and transsexual exist as words: they are specifically distinguishing between aligning gender with (what are often) biologically inherited attributes (the majority cases of what are referred to as being cisgender) and not doing so. In other words, a person who identifies as a trans woman is by that very fact not claiming to be a cis woman. These are two different kinds of women. They are both women. Just as tabbies and ocelots are two different kinds of cat; but still entirely cats. Similarly, natural born citizens and naturalized citizens of the United States are different kinds of citizen; but both are entirely American citizens. By contrast, race is inherently a biological fact—albeit not the biological fact racists think it is.
Race is a social construct insofar as one is, for example, tying “having dark skin and curly hair” and/or other conjunctions of physical attributes that cause people to perceive someone as Black (like nose and lip shape and so on) with other properties (like aggressiveness, intelligence, criminality, employability, indeed even ethnicity and cultural preferences) that actually aren’t tied to those things. For example, beating up a person who looks Asian because you “hate the Chinese” is inherently racist, not only because hating someone for “being Chinese” is racist, but also because of the assumption that anyone who looks Asian even is Chinese. They could be Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Indonesian, Vietnamese, even Taiwanese (an important distinction for any bigot keying their “hatred of the Chinese” on the decisions of the government of the People’s Republic of China that is most ironic for them to overlook). And so on. They could even be none of those things. If an American is an eighth generation descendant of a long-past Chinese immigrant, and was entirely raised as just another American, they could have no Asian ethnicity at all. They would simply be an American of Asian descent. If they looked Asian, that would reflect a biological reality of their descent; but if they are treated differently because of that, they are being targeted by a construct, not a biological reality. Nevertheless, that mistreatment is because of a biological reality: how they look, in consequence of their descent.
This is why race is understood in social justice science as an externality: it is not something you can ever choose; it is forced on you by society and its perceptions and assumptions, owing to a physical fact about you that you can’t easily change and that really has nothing to do with those other perceptions and assumptions. And this is in turn why race is connected so closely to lived experience: if you do not have the physical features socially categorized as Black, you won’t have survived or endured from childhood all the effects of living in a society that treats people differently because of those features, much less have inherited them (since “being Black isn’t simply a matter of internal identification; it is also a matter of how your community and ancestors have been treated by other people, institutions, and government,” often affecting even your starting economic and social position as a child, as explained in a smart article on this by philosophers Robin Dembroff and Dee Payton at the Boston Review—which is the only factor that is bypassed by actual transracial children, e.g. Black children adopted by White families). Thus, to claim you are Black when you (a) don’t have any sufficient conjunction of those genetic features so categorized and thus (b) haven’t endured or encountered any amount of pertinent racism your whole life (nor even inherited the socio-economic effects of any), you really are misrepresenting yourself to people. You are lying. Of course this is clearly true in Dolezal’s case as she didn’t “just” claim she was Black but claimed she was what would have to be called (in her own appropriated vocabulary) cis-Black: Black from birth.
Sure, one could say that’s more similar to a trans woman claiming to be a cis woman—but with one crucial difference: a trans woman attempting to pass as cis is doing so for a morally necessary reason, to avoid unjust prejudice and bigotry against their trans status. No one who is pretending to be biologically Black has any such moral justification; they aren’t “hiding their trans-Black status” to evade unjust bigotry, but merely to avoid being caught out as a liar. They are hiding from the consequences of their own fraud, not from any unjust prejudices of society. It is thus more similar to someone pretending to be gay in order to get jobs and accolades and influence only offered to gay people. That’s simply lying. And this is why it is morally offensive—and indeed inherently transphobic—to equate Dolezal with trans women and trans men: the comparison promotes the transphobic myth that trans women are just pretending, and merely in order to get advantages; that there is nothing sincere in their assimilation to a different gender than society had been imposing on them.
Of course, after getting caught, Dolezal “changed her story” into pretending that she was sincere in this, that she had been claiming to be “trans” Black all along, even fabricating and twisting into existence an entire new backstory to try and explain that (albeit illogically). And there are psychologists who attest to sincere people who delusionally believe they are a different race than they are, so such people do exist (Dolezal just isn’t one of them). But that is objectively delusional; as much as it would be objectively delusional of a trans woman to literally believe she has an XX chromosome and a functioning womb when she didn’t. But this is precisely the thing: trans women don’t believe that. To the contrary, that they “do” believe that is a distinctive component of transphobic ideology: it is a lie told about trans women, to denigrate and delegitimize them. Actual trans women know perfectly well what their actual biology is. They know they are trans and not cis.
The transgender argument is not that there is no difference between trans women and cis women (this is the false narrative of bigots, not the trans* communuty); but that what differences there are don’t and shouldn’t matter—that society should stop treating them differently. This is what it means to say trans women are women. It is not saying anything like “all trans women have wombs.” It is saying, rather, that “having a womb is irrelevant to being a woman.” As many a cis woman indeed does not have a functioning womb. So does treating them as “not real women” make any sense? Obviously not. Ergo it can make no sense to treat trans women that way. And just as with cis women, so with trans women: whether they have a functioning womb is none of your damned business. And if society were going to punish such women, driving even cis women to lie about whether they have a functioning womb, that would be a laudable evasion of bigotry, not running a con. Because discriminating based on that is immoral; ergo, evading it is self-defense. Dolezal was in no such position. She had ample opportunities to pursue as a White woman; no one was “oppressing” her for being White, “forcing” her to hide it.
This leaves one possible category to consider: someone who, unlike Dolezal, is always honest about their claim of being merely transracial. Presumably this is what that atheist donor’s “family member” is claiming—after all, since they know they are “transethnic” (whatever that means), they must be “out” about it. Does this make any sense? It is at least not lying. If one is honest about the fact that they have no racialized biology and did not grow up subjected to racial prejudices for it, nor inherited any of its effects, there is no fraud. But then what could they even be claiming? Since race is, like chromosomal sex, fundamentally biological, there is no possible way to be “trans” Black, any more than one could be “trans” chromosomal. The closest thing that exists is what the word transracial has been more correctly and traditionally used for: children adopted and raised by parents of a different race than themselves. But that’s a physical reality—it is objectively either true or false. If someone later in life starts going around claiming that of themselves when it isn’t true, they are back to lying again. So a sincere “transracialist” can’t be claiming that. What then could they be claiming? The most anyone can come up with is a sincere sympathy for the plight of a different race than themselves, saying things like “I identify strongly with what they are going through,” and the like. But that isn’t what the word trans means in the word “transgender,” so calling it “transracial” becomes a wholly misleading term, one that looks more like an attempt to coopt and appropriate another group’s language to “steal” the sympathy and support that goes with it. Which is back to being a liar.
So we end up returning to the distinction we started with, between race and ethnicity. Dolezal did not claim to be transethnic—she made an explicit biological claim to race—so that would be a false analogy if that’s all that atheist donor meant to refer to: a family member who merely identifies with a different culture than they grew up in, without making any biological claims to race. We haven’t heard from that family member so we don’t know what exactly they are claiming, but we don’t use the prefix trans– for people who adopt a new ethnicity or nationality. And one can’t just “claim” to have done that if they haven’t. You can’t honestly claim to be Nigerian unless you actually have Nigerian citizenship (as objective a fact as chromosome type), or to have been raised in a Nigerian community and into its languages or culture—another objective claim to fact that has to actually be true. But even then, if you were a White person who had undergone that, you would still be White, and just ethnically Nigerian. Even if you moved to Nigeria and assimilated into Nigerian language and culture later in life, and even acquired Nigerian citizenship, we still wouldn’t call you trans-Nigerian; and that still all has to have actually happened. By contrast, to go around saying “I like Nigerian culture and identify with Nigerians very strongly” would not justify calling yourself a Nigerian, trans or otherwise. You’re just an enthusiast for Nigerian culture. To claim more than that starts to look, again, like lying. Or insanity.
This simply isn’t what transgender people are doing. As I fully explained years ago in Attack of the Lycanthropic Transsexuals! (and as has since been even more succinctly and capably explained by the YouTuber Vox in just an hour and fifteen minutes): gender is not biology; it’s a preference-set. Being transgender is closer to adopting a subculture, like becoming a Goth or Country, only the culture in question is a social construct that has been strongly associated with biological sex, yet is actually not so connected, and in fact tracks sets of personality traits that one can grow up with one’s whole life irrespective of sex, until they realize the incongruity between who they are and what their culture is trying to force them to be. These are inherent personality characteristics, categorized by society a certain way. And yes, they can include feelings about what sort of body one would be most comfortable in—no differently than many a cisgender woman or man will feel with respect to tattooing or piercing their body, or pursuing plastic surgery.
Thus a trans woman, for example, will likely have been possessed of many of the gendered properties of a woman their whole lives; the decision to acknowledge this with, “You know what, according to society, I’m actually a woman,” is simply a realization of what is already a fact. There is no conceivable way this could happen to someone in respect to race, because race is imposed from outside: race is what others force on you for how you look, a look that is inescapably biological and thus one you cannot simply change; and then it becomes a history of whole lives living with that fact. But gender arises from within one’s own psychology. This is why what transphobes don’t (or won’t) understand is that gender is not sex. To say biologically manifest sexual traits are “just like” biologically manifest racial traits, “therefore” transgenderism (here meaning only the practice of recognizing transgender identities as authentic) should be the same as transracialism (which would then analogously mean the practice of recognizing “transracial” identities as authentic), is literally to assume the perspective of a willfully ignorant bigot. You simply are ignoring what transgender people are actually claiming about themselves. Indeed, it starts to sound at that point like you are using this comparison precisely as an excuse to ignore what they are actually saying. Which is not a good look for you. You need to ask yourself why it is so important to you to keep linking expressed gender to inherited sex. Because there can’t be any legitimate reason to be doing that. And that’s precisely what all this is about. You won’t get this, until you get that.
“But You Tricked Me!”-Style Transphobia
A lot of transphobia seems connected to this feeling bigots have of being “duped” by trans women. Fear of penises mostly (oddly, given that many trans women don’t have them). Which is also what seems to manifest in women transphobes, who obsess over how many penises might be in their bathrooms (oddly, ditto). But it’s actually no one’s business what someone’s genitals look like. We should be more concerned about your desperate need to look at them and see; even in restrooms apparently. I’ve been using men’s restrooms for fifty years and have never once seen a penis in them; nearly the only time I saw a penis in a public space was on the sidewalk directly out front of a Manhattan grocery store—where a naked man was busily taking a dump. I don’t see any bills being offered in congress to outlaw men on public sidewalks because of all the naked penises that might show up on them. So this penis-fear business seems a bit ridiculous. Nevertheless, a lot of transphobia appears to center around the “need” to know things about everyone’s genitals.
But even if we could get adults to grow up and stop acting like children with respect to penises and vaginas, there are still many transphobes who have even weirder hangups about being “tricked” by trans women. Notably, trans men rarely come up in transphobic rhetoric, except when it comes from a place of obvious sexism with thoughts like “how dare inferior women invade our manly spaces,” which is straight out of the 1950s and embarrasses even the people who say it. Otherwise, even the bathroom inquisitors seem wholly unworried about trans men using women’s restrooms, for example, even though that’s what they are fighting for (often without their realizing it). Instead, there is this superstitious thing I call “flesh taboo,” whereby somehow if someone was assigned male at birth, their flesh at that moment acquires some sort of invisible magical “man” fluid, such that no matter what happens thereafter, that flesh is always a “man’s” flesh and thus any man who touches it is automatically “gay” (and gets cooties or something); in the same sense that there are men (and I have met them) who think the number of penises a woman has had inside her also permanently “taints” her flesh in some similarly magical way, so also “this flesh was once a man’s; ergo if I touch it I’m gay” drives a lot of transphobia.
Which, yes, ties transphobia right back into homophobia. But it also links transphobia right back into plain old sexism: not just in its gender essentialism (because it is based on the quintessentially sexist belief that gender “must” track sex, because “science,” or something—even though all the actual science refutes that equation), but also in how this “flesh taboo” also generates fear of trans women: it is only because men feel entitled to have sex with any woman they see, that they could ever feel “betrayed” by some woman they are not dating and never actually will date having this magical “man” flesh it would be too “gay” for them to touch for some reason. But you can’t be “tricked” into having sex with someone you aren’t having sex with. So maybe just stop seeing women as sex objects; and then you’ll care a lot less which magical fluid inhabits their flesh. Or grow a brain and stop believing in cooties. Either way, you and the world will be better off. Trust me. We’re all just people; it doesn’t matter how many penises someone has, just as it doesn’t matter how many penises have been inside them. If you think either matters—indeed, if you honestly can’t even stop thinking about it—you are the one with the problem.
This irrational “fear of being duped” crops up even from women I’ve met, who for some reason think that a woman who is actually trans and not “out” about it is “therefore” pretending to be cis, and this is “dishonest” and thus just like Rachel Dolezal. These trans women are “conning us” somehow, we’re told. It’s hard to actually figure out how though. It does not matter whether they are cis or trans. I’ll get to the few exceptions, like athletics, shortly; but in almost every other case it really doesn’t matter. So why are you so concerned to know? If it’s none of your business to even know, much less ask, then they can’t be “conning” you by “passing” as cis. There is nothing here they are obligated to tell you. So your not knowing it does not make them a fraud. It would only be in the extremely bizarre case where a cis woman pretends to be a trans woman in order to gain position and influence and accolades as a trans woman that they’d be engaging in a fraud. Otherwise, it is the notion that trans women should be excluded from situations afforded to women in general that is fraudulent; not the other way around (see my article Some Philosophy of Homo- and Transphobia, Supreme Court Style). If you can’t justify excluding trans women from something, you can’t justify claiming to have been conned by them, can you?
Once upon a time (and still in some places) gay men and women had to lie about their sexuality and pretend to be straight, in order to avoid being mistreated, harassed, fired, beaten, or even killed. But no genuinely moral human being would say they were therefore “conning” everyone about their sexuality. They are legitimately hiding from societal prejudice. It is the prejudice they have to hide from that is the crime, not their having to hide from it. That’s just self-defense. Dolezal was not hiding her White race in self-defense. She does not live in a society where being White means you will be mistreated, harassed, fired, beaten, or even killed; even insofar as there may be dangerous enclaves of the world where that was true (I have, for example, been assaulted for being White, in one particularly rare and rough neighborhood), American society offers plenty of places for her to work and live where that’s not the case; and behold, she was never in one. So she has never had to “hide” her Whiteness to evade the injustices of racism. The only motive remaining for her to do that is running a con: she was just another White person stealing resources (money, jobs, attention, influence) from Black people.
This difference is ontologically and morally fundamental. Accusing trans people of running a con is like accusing closeted gay people of doing so too. It’s extremely insensitive to the reality of what they have to do because of bigotry. We should be fighting the bigotry; not calling the people who hide from it liars. Gay people who hide are not in the wrong. The people they have to hide from are. Likewise trans women and trans men. This is not Dolezal’s situation at all; nor that of anyone who could possibly be trying to contrive a “trans racial” identity for themselves.
Nevertheless, to stick to this “moral condemnation” model of transphobia, the transphobic narrative turns to straw man argumentation, insisting that all transgender people are “dishonestly” (or, in some variants, “insanely”) asking us to affirm a trans woman is 100% identical to a cis woman, that “every molecule” of their body is a “woman” in every possible sense (a perverse inversion of “one drop” racism, the most extreme form of racist ideology in history). If any transgender person is telling you that, they are a fringe whacko (and if it’s not even a transgender person you are hearing this from, you have even more reason to be suspicious of what they’re saying); listen to the vast majority of actual trans women instead: they will all tell you, they are talking about gender, not sex; they are not claiming to have changed the chromosomes in their cells; they are not claiming to have conjured wombs out of the ether; they are claiming you should stop caring about who has what chromosomes, who has a working womb, or any of that entirely private stuff that’s none of your actual business. And even in the few cases where it does matter, they agree it does. See the model policy positions endorsed by the LGBT Sports Foundation for high school athletics, the NCAA for college athletes, and the NWHL and NWSL for professional athletes: trans status must be known and licensed, and in most cases female body chemistry must be medically confirmed (recent articles at Scientific American and NBCNews cover the science). So yes, it would be a fraud for a trans woman to hide that status in an athletic competition whose rules require her to admit it; but everyone is on board with that. In consequence, instances of such a fraud are extremely rare. This simply isn’t what trans women are doing.
On top of all that, as Dembroff and Payton aptly put it, gender and race terms are also tools we use to track social realities. For example, “gender classification is used to track the recipients of sexism and misogyny,” and therefore “does not provide a population-level reason to exclude trans women from classification as women,” whereas racial classification is used to track not merely any recipients of racism but those who can’t choose to escape that racism (they can’t “revert to being White”), which includes both ongoing racism and any intergenerational effects of it one inherits. Because race is forced on someone without their consent. Victims of racism aren’t able to choose to be recognized as another race; whereas we can choose our gender if people let us. Accordingly, we can conclude “the importance of preserving these tools” of categorizing race and gender “vastly outweighs” any personal individual desire to “claim” an identity. Dolezal-style “transracialism” perverts and undermines the entire purpose of race as a classifier (whereby race can only cease to exist when racism does), whereas transgenderism does not have any such effect on gender as a classifier—particularly once you realize that gender has no fixed ontological connection to sex. And even in what respects one needs it to track such connections, a transgender person can indeed choose to meet that standard if they want to, e.g. when trans women athletes are expected to qualify at a certain hormone level to compete with cis women. Notably, they must identify as trans to do that; trans women athletes aren’t allowed to “pretend” to be cis women, and don’t want to. It is thus no different from what one must do to legitimately qualify for para-athletic competitions or an appropriate weight class. Hence even when it matters, no deception is occurring. And when it doesn’t matter, deception can’t even be a legitimate issue.
Conclusion
Thus trans women are not conning anyone. Whereas what Dolezal did is just as if she pretended to be gay to gain sympathy and influence and advantage, and exploit the support of the gay community. That is not in any relevant way similar to a gay person hiding to avoid bigotry against gays. There is no difference between “gay” and “trans” or even “Black” in those two sentences: swap the words out and they remain identically true sentences. Check it:
- It’s just as if she pretended to be gay to gain sympathy and influence and advantage, and exploit the support of the gay community. That is not in any relevant way similar to a gay person pretending to be straight to avoid bigotry against gays.
- It’s just as if she pretended to be Black to gain sympathy and influence and advantage, and exploit the support of the Black community. That is not in any relevant way similar to a Black person pretending to be White to avoid bigotry against Blacks.
- It’s just as if she pretended to be a trans woman to gain sympathy and influence and advantage, and exploit the support of the trans community. That is not in any relevant way similar to a trans woman pretending to be a cis woman to avoid bigotry against trans women.
And that’s why comparing Dolezal to gay and trans people is offensive, and contrary to fact. Dolezal wasn’t hiding from oppressors, to conceal what isn’t anyone’s business anyway. She was lying to gain sympathy, influence, and advantage. That’s immoral. And that’s why equating what she did with what trans people do is insulting, and only inflames bigotry. It is effectively calling them immoral, liars, cons; it’s insinuating they are frauds—and doing it using the same dogwhistle tactics grossly exploited by the Republican party in America. Yet this bigotry only follows from the transphobic equation of sex and gender. It is the transphobe’s insistence that gender must track sex that is immoral and bigoted and wrong; and precisely what the trans-rights movement is endeavoring to cast down and put an end to. You should get busy helping them, not their oppressors. And to that end, before you publish or say anything about this issue, you should always be asking yourself the one question Dawkins has given up ever answering: Is this helping or hurting? And if what I’m about to say can aid and abet bigots, how can I reframe it to thwart them instead?
I could never really get One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, because I could never really empathize with the premise that it is easier and more rewarding to pretend to be crazy.
Similarly I could never believe the claim that intellectuals cobbled up leftism to seize power. It seems to me the Kissinger path, turning out apologies and “national security” advice or the Heritage/Cato/Mercatusetc. path of selling policies that attract rich donors was far more rewarding.
Allegedly Dillinger said that he robbed banks because that was where the money was. The claim that Dolezal was simply a crook is awfully close to claiming that there’s money in being woke. This seems doubtful, and possibly unwise.
So much of this article hinges on its reading of Dolezal personally it seems kind of skimpy on the issues. AT least I personally felt sidetracked into wondering why Dolezal didn’t find a high-paying grift.
At any rate, one issue is the distress and dismay at having the wrong body parts (gender dysphoria.) I am uncertain how much of this depends on accepting that gender and biological sex are in fact the same thing, that there are indeed two teams but some suffer for being assigned to the wrong team by their own bodies. And there is the contrary, where abiding by gender roles feels constricting, that the problem is thinking there are two teams with different uniforms, so to speak. (These contraries sort of blend into each other in real life/presuppose each other/are points in a slice of social existence or whatever, I suspect, But that kind of confused thinking I believe is rejected by the vast majority of philosophers as hocus pocus.)
There is always money in exploiting the oppressed. This is why charities are the number one targets for con artists. When a group is subject to abuse and discrimination, they and their allies help them, as well as fight back by organizing and making efforts to correct the injustice; which creates jobs, money-flows, and positions of influence and praise to exploit. The most famous example in history: churches in poor and disadvantaged neighborhoods, run by pastors driving Mercedes with timeshares in Tahiti. Or just, you know, the Vatican.
Likewise with Munchausen syndrome, people will literally poison or injure themselves just to gain sympathy (Munchausen by proxy, they’ll poison or even kill their own kids for the sympathy). This is how much merely “sympathy seeking” drives criminal behavior like Dolezal’s, although in her case she also really was in it for the money (witness: her welfare fraud scheme; and, likewise, before she decided to run the black con, she tried using woke culture principles to sue Howard university for discrimination against her for being white; now she is using a similar sympathy play on the transracial issue to sell documentaries and books).
It also is no argument to say “no one would run a medium payout grift.” That would be to pretend thousands of criminals convicted of doing just that didn’t exist. It’s an attitude contrary to reality. There are con artists who will run even low payout grifts just for the thrill and the attention, but simply also for want of access to better gigs. Indeed, Dolezal invested a lot in studying Black-White woke grifting long before she even decided to run this particular one, so it was in her wheelhouse already by the time she launched it. But her crime was not low level; she made a living. So that even low level grifting widely exists only proves the point a fortiori. This is well documented. It’s called petty crime (from pawn scams and employment scams to bums telling fake sob stories to wheedle people out of cash for cigarettes). And in Dolezal’s case, it’s not speculation; the evidence is extensive (her Wikipedia article alone surveys a lot of it, and I list some of the main examples of that in my article).
Body dysphoria is not sex. So I assume you mean, just, genetic. Since personality is also always half genetic, this isn’t a meaningful statement. Yes, gender is partly genetic, as all personality is. That is still not the same thing as sex, which is defined variously by either chromosome type, natural hormone levels, or phenotype (i.e. actual physical development, e.g. “grew a functioning womb,” or naturally developed a certain hip to waist ratio). A gender dysphoric person does not have a female chromosome type, natural hormone levels, or phenotype; in fact, that is why they are dysphoric.
Chromosome type turns out to be largely irrelevant to gender (as the genes for it clearly don’t track it but can appear in XY and other chromosome types); artificial hormone levels are a normal medical procedure and have been for half a century (and are actually what govern most of phenotypic development, which is why people with AIS develop ideal “female” phenotypes despite having an XY chromosome); and phenotype is an unreliable predictor of either (as plenty of ciswomen have, for example, no functioning womb or a waist to hip ratio in the same range as men, even if they are XX and have natural hormone levels in a typical range for an XX person).
Indeed, the neural development theory of body dysphoria illustrates all of the above: although dysphoria could arise environmentally (cultural associations could make someone who feels feminine desire to look feminine and then key on what their culture has defined that as—this is how most human tastes, repulsions, and preferences develop, which are all, once developed, just as neurologically permanent as inborn traits), on the neural development theory (which is the one you seem to be presuming), a person’s brain in the womb develops a body map corresponding to a female phenotype while the fetus itself does not develop that phenotype, producing a mismatch. This would entail XY chromosome sets can contain full encoding for what we call female phenotypes in a brain map while not doing so in the body development map. In other words, even phenotypal brain maps are detached from sex, as neither chromosome type nor any particular body chemistry reliably produce it.
Carrier: “The transgender argument is not that there is no difference between trans women and cis women (this is the false narrative of bigots, not the trans* communuty); but that what differences there are don’t and shouldn’t matter—that society should stop treating them differently. This is what it means to say trans women are women. It is not saying anything like “all trans women have wombs.” It is saying, rather, that “having a womb is irrelevant to being a woman.” As many a cis woman indeed does not have a functioning womb. So does treating them as “not real women” make any sense?”
Sex is not irrelevant. If you want to call woman a mere social category (virtually no one does, but okay), you’d still have to consider the social datum for its concept. Sex and sexual difference is built into the conceptual content of woman. Women’s rights and “oppression” were built on it. The fight for control and abortion was inescapably a women’s issue. The reasons to prohibit women’s vote largely pertained to sex and so do their sports and bathroom segregations (we don’t segregate based upon gender identity, Richard). Serious domestic violence is yet another women’s issue that cannot be divorced from sexual difference between men and women, specifically those relating to size, anti-sociality & disagreeableness, aggression, and strength.
Having a functioning womb is not irrelevant to being a woman. It’s part of the female anatomy and a natural norm for women who are of the reproductive age.
Your argument is – or at least should be- that female sex does not matter to the concept of woman. I respectfully disagree.
You almost never know what someone’s chromosomes or genitals or body chemistry are. So there is no sense in which you are gendering people by “sex.”
Not even when you decide who goes into which bathroom (we do not have valets guarding doors checking genitals to see who gets to go where). Nor was anyone doing so when the vote was restricted (no one was checking chromosomes or genitals or body chemistry to decide who was a woman and thus could not vote). Abortion is as much an issue for trans men as for cis women, so it is a circular argument to argue otherwise (and typical of a bigot to forget trans men are a thing).
Until you realize that, you will be trapped in the delusional worldview of a bigot, incomprehending of everything just explained to you. And attempting to defend bigotry only makes you a bigot. It does not defend you from the charge!
There are short thin weak men and tall heavy strong women. And many a man is abused by a woman. “But more” is not a valid argument here. It is simply bigotry to assume “more” means “all,” yet that is exactly what you just did. So as you here act like all women and men are the same, you are only defending the very essence of prejudice.
There are women by every definition (chromosomes, genitalia, body type, natural body chemistry) who do not have a functioning womb (in fact, quite a lot of them). So clearly it cannot be definitive of being a woman either.
And trans women get abused and beaten and killed to a rate even higher than cis women. So trying a bigot’s “oppression olympics” rhetoric here only makes you look even more callously bigoted.
Until you realize these things and stop defending false claims and prejudices in defense of your bigotry, you will never be in contact with actual reality, and your disconnect from reality will continue to drive your prejudices.
It is staggering that any of this needs to be said, when the attitude could just be “I’ll wait for someone to give me a scientifically-rooted reason to be judgmental, otherwise I’ll stay out of things that aren’t my business”.
I am so glad you made the trans-racial/trans-ethnic distinction. When one really thinks about it, Dolezal was fraudulently pretending to have an array of cultural experiences alongside shared patterns of social treatment that are common to the African-American experience. But anyone who thinks honestly about gender realizes that, except for the shitty way that people can be treated because of their sex and gender, people’s experiences with gender vary so massively that it isn’t anything like an ethnic experience. So when someone says “I’m experiencing things as a female”, it’s just not comparable to “I’m experiencing things as a person of color”.
It’s also hilarious to see the defenses of Dawkins. The idea that he spoke “off the cuff”, for example. Okay, fine, Richard (and your defenders), you spoke off the cuff. Maybe you should stop? If that isn’t anything but a limp-wristed excuse to seem like one is admitting fault without having to actually admit one was wrong, then what that says is that, on this topic, Dawkins was a shitty communicator. He said something that didn’t communicate his actual opinions, and even his actual opinions were misinformed. So maybe he needs to model the behavior of an actual skeptic and stop making pronouncements that aren’t defensible in retrospect.
But I suppose it’s anthropologically predictable that “skepticism” would become a new tribe or sect for people to cling to and defend rather than a value set one tries to live up to.
Those are all good points too. I concur.
I’d even add that it was also a little bit racist of the White Dolezal to assume that the ethnic preferences and behaviors of Black Americans conformed to the single mold she chose to emulate. Her pretended ethnicity was more fabricated than actual, an effort to copy what she thought she saw around her, to thus “pass” as racially “Black,” without a coherent identification with any specific actual coherent ethnicity. Thus she, like many a racist, assumed “Black” meant “an” ethnicity and that she “knew” what ethnicity that was.
And yes, what you observe is how any movement becomes the victim of its own success: once “I’m a skeptic” or “I’m rational” becomes so respected an identity that it becomes a form of virtue signaling to claim it, the actual content, of actually being a skeptic or being rational, can too easily just be abandoned. One can thus just keep claiming to be that, and telling others you are that, without ever actually genuinely embodying it, or even having any clear idea of what embodying it would really look like.
It’s just the same way Christians use “I’m a good Christian” to virtue-signal “I’m a good person” while behaving in no such way and promoting awful and toxic ideologies, even engaging in abusive, immoral, or even criminal behavior. If you can just “claim” to be a thing, and win praise for it, you never have to actually do anything to embody that thing in any praiseworthy way.
Meanwhile the rest of us take these identities seriously. I don’t want to just be thought of as a rational skeptic, I want to be one, and indeed to be the best one I can be. And that is not possible without continual self-criticism and improvement. A real rational skeptic always asks of themselves when things don’t go as expected, “How could I have done that better?” And then do it better.
“Dolezal was fraudulently pretending to have an array of cultural experiences alongside shared patterns of social treatment that are common to the African-American experience.”
Dolezal grew up with black brothers and sisters, went to Howard (a historically black university that has 70% African-American students), married a black man, has black and biracial children, and taught college sociology classes on race and blackness, and took a job at the NAACP helping black people. I’m certain she has much more first hand cultural experience of blackness than I do. If your spouse and child are black in America, but you are white, does that mean you don’t get scared when they go out? When your family gets pulled over by the police?
The fact that she lied to pass as black is something that must be explored and explained, it is not proof that she was a fraud in all areas of her life, or all areas relating to “transracialism.” Committing welfare fraud or claiming that your parents are black is not proof that you are only in it for the money. They are certainly factors to consider, but they are not conclusive of anything. On one extreme we might dismiss anyone who has ever drove over the speed limit or cheated on their taxes as a criminal and then assume anything/everything they do is for illicit purposes. On the other extreme, we might ignore everything they have ever done and consider only their professed motivations in a vacuum. In the case of Dolezal, her crimes and lies do not persuade me that she is a con artist and a fraud to such a degree that we must conclude she actually feels white inside but is lying about it.
In her wikipedia entry, and other sources, I did not see anyone claiming that she was fired or dismissed once the controversy came out because she was white and the job/position was only for black people. On the contrary, the people with first hand knowledge said she did a good job but they had to fire her or ask her to leave because she lied and because of the controversy surrounding her. So her jobs seem neutral as evidence. In fact, even if you can find evidence that she was unable to find “honest” work as a white person, it is still not conclusive that her lying and passing as black was not a fulfillment of her inner desires, and also helped her get work. Lying on a resume, for example hiding a criminal background, is something that a criminal who is looking to defraud a company might do, but it is also something that a person who has turned straight and wants to earn money to feed their family might do. So it is neutral as evidence.
Dolezal ran a con suing Howard for discriminating against her for being white (which went nowhere, but she tried it). She didn’t start pretending to be black (a reversal of essentially the same wokeness-parasitism) until much later. So no, just being a white person who studies Black cultures is not the same thing as living as Black your whole life. And she very certainly did not. She has a long history of cons and frauds (including literal welfare fraud). This is just one of them. No good skeptic should be falling for her con anymore now.
But even if you are that gullible, you are left with the second tine of the fork: she is delusional. She would actually have to believe things about herself that are literally not true, and to hide this even from herself she actively sought to prevent people finding out the truth (including outright lying about who her parents were and what DNA profile she had). If that’s not dishonesty, it’s insanity.
Dolezal as a petty criminal? But it’s treated as a huge, huge thing.
I do not understand the relevance of the rest of the comment to the situations where the transgender person has no desire for hormone treatment, much less corrective surgery. Maybe this is a false “fact” misleading analysis? Or to pick a trivial incident from recent days, is Harry Styles dressing as the Little Mermaid an instance of transgenderism? If so, is gender dysphoria involved? Is gender dysphoria even a part of transgender experience?
I did not say she was a petty criminal. Please re-read what I wrote, this time with more care and effort to actually understanding what I said.
As to your new question, acting is not being. So when people act like someone else, they are not being who they are. That’s the difference. A transgender person is being who they are. That deserves your respect.
As to why different people want to realize and express their gender in different ways, I have no idea what you are on about. Women vary enormously in all those metrics and in many others. Not all women look, sound, dress, act the same. Not all transgender persons experience gender dhysphoria in the same way or degree. Not all come to the same decisions on what to do about it.
I recommend you actually read and listen to more accounts from actual transgender people. You seem too isolated, like someone who has never actually explored their content. That’s well worth fixing. You can never understand people you never listen to.
The great emphasis on Dolezal, an outlier, confuses rather than enlightens. It functions as an ad hominem argument. But the people insulted as “wannabes” or those people whose (possibly imaginary) fraction of Native American ancestry leads them to go to powwows are not Dolezals.
As to listening to transgender voices, I’m not sure that transgender people don’t have their own disagreements with each other precisely on the issues you won’t address. I agree their voices would be more authoritative than yours. (The dig about not listening to them when you mean I’m not listening, that is, agreeing, with you is not appreciated, especially since the truth is that I’m not exactly disagreeing with you either, so I don’t understand the touchiness.)
Not being a trained philosopher my powers of contemplative reason are not able to penetrate the minds (or souls) of transgender people to perceive they are being, not acting. My theory of mind is not so perfect, and even tends to depend on behavior, mere “acting.”
Your formulation that true transgenders are being, not acting, also implies that true transgenders actually do have a woman’s mind in a man’s body (or vice versa.) The thing is, I’m not sure the notion of man’s brains vs. woman’s brains is valid, neural development theory, notwithstanding. As much as I respect your opinions on your fields of Roman science (I own both your books,) and well, what you might call Jesus studies, I am not going to study neuroscience from you. That is not an insult, but merely common sense, in my opinion.
Thank you for your time.
People who claim to have an ancestry because they were told they did and believed it are not claiming to be transracial. They are simply mistaken, and correct themselves when this is discovered. So you are the one using fallacious reasoning here. In this case, of false analogy and non sequitur.
As to transgender voices being where we should start and what we should become familiar with, that’s why I link to several trans authors, activists, and organizational sources in my article, and reached my conclusions only after a thorough acquaintance with these sources and what they’ve said. I recommend you follow my example, and thus become informed, rather than laboring up fallacious reasons not to.
And I recommend you stop using bigoted vocabulary like “transgenders.” You should know better. Your ignorance is showing here, as with everything else you’ve said. Please become an informed rather than an ignorant person.
Interesting, and well written. Who’s your target audience?
Any rational person who cares about getting the facts of the world right.
Ehhh not really. You’re just comfortable in your own ignorance with a sense of moral superiority for having contributed negatively to what you think is helping while being a gear in the decadent machine the modern west has become. You think you’re on the right side for being nicer, but realty isn’t nice and you can’t win rationality points by being nice. Until you adopt that worldview you could never be one of those rational people or truly be happy in life, as you live in kind ignorance.
Says the guy who hasn’t presented any evidence any of my evidence is false or any of my conclusions don’t logically follow from it.
To attempt an emotional ad hominem instead, really tells us all we need to know about you.
You wrote “rightly denounced by experts” and it links to Social Justice Wiki. The page starts with a quote about semantics, that the term “transracial” is used in some circles to refer to children adopted by parents of a different race. The page then gives a couple paragraphs each to the adoption meaning of the word, and to the fact that people have used it in the Dolezal sense to be jerks or anti-trans trolls.
There are a number of external links and references, but based on their titles and a quick read of some, all but one of them are articles about transracial adoption.
The 1 reference that appears to be about the Dolezal sense of the word is a link to upworthy.com, to an article by a blogger who writes about healthcare, sex, race, homophobia, etc. She is in turn referrubg to a vlog made by “artist and vlogger Kat Blaque” and goes over the basics of the situation and concludes that Dolezal hurt and confused people and raised her own voice over that of other black people, and so therefore it is not reasonable to compare her issues with race to transgender issues (which does not logically follow).
This does not look like denouncement by experts. Now, if this were a conservative Christian historicist arguing against you, and he used a link like that, I’m sure you’d rightly conclude that he is a liar for misleading his readers, or incompetent for not realizing his sources don’t say what he claims they say. I don’t think you are a liar or incompetent, but in this case your source is maybe 10% of what one might expect if actually looking for denouncement by experts.
I believe I am correct in this assessment, but I can’t wait to see how you refute it. Did I not read carefully enough? Am I literally mentally ill? Does one of the articles about transracial adoption actually talk about Dolezal and I needed to play incorrect link bingo until I found the right one? So exciting!
Oh, I had meant to add the link to the Wikipedia page on the peer reviewed debate. I have corrected the omission. Though Anyone who researches the matter would find the same outcome.
And no, I would not accuse someone who used that link of being a liar. Because anyone who checked on their own would discover the expert consensus is just as I said. Which is the opposite of lying. A link that isn’t citation complete does not rise to that bar. If the information checks out, it checks out.
This link is more problematic than the previous link. You wrote “we should take claims like Dolezal’s seriously, as essentially the same kind of claim made by trans women and trans men, a nonsensical notion rightly denounced by experts” and now link to the SJW site which gives a nice short introduction to the term transracial, and to a wikipedia article on the Hypatia transracialism controversy. According to the link, a peer reviewed academic article was published likening transracialism to transgenderism, and it received backlash on social media, but then the academic response was to support the author of the article and (maybe?) the contents of the article. The closest we come to seeing experts weighing in against it is that some people in the field signed the petition to have the article removed from the journal, but yet the overall academic response was supportive. This is again not a link that is terribly supportive of the sentence in which it was linked.
When I make a list of the points presented in this blog entry, and also the links in it that I have read (admittedly not all of them), and try to evaluate them all as evidence in discerning whether Dolezal is a total fraud when it comes to her identity – not whether her birth certificate says she is white, or her parents are white, but the way she feels – I see most of it as neutral, and a few things as generally supportive of her claims, i.e. having black and biracial children (and a black ex-husband) does give her some credibility as knowing what the black experience is, even though it does not directly tell us what her own self-identity is.
Similarly, when evaluating all of this as evidence for whether the transracial-transgender arguments are similiar, I see mostly unconvincing or illogical reasons for why they are different. There is a lot of argumentation (not from you, but down the rabbit hole on this issue) that race is not like gender identity because race is determined by other’s views of you, and that difference is significant/critical. That is unpersuasive, because exactly the same kind of argument was and is made about gender identity. It is just rejected now because we have established that sex and gender are different, and gender identity may not be reflected by your birth certificate or your sex-chormosomes. But the transracial claim is not that someone is literally “cis white” or “cis black” its that they are transwhite or transblack. Its quite similar.
I’m just sketching this out, I don’t represent this as a complete argument or explanation. I would love to have a discussion about this, but back and forth comments here is not really ideal for me, so I’ll let it go at this. Thanks for the article and the replies.
You are acting very strangely here. I show you a controversy in which abundant scholars and experts weighed in against the conclusions of the article and even refuted it in open debate, and you come back here and claim I linked you to “social media” complaints from amateurs.
I suggest you fix whatever is broken in your epistemology and try again.
You also seem not to be even responding to any of my arguments and evidence (ignoring it all is more evidence of a broken epistemology) and that of the scholars and experts who refuted the Hypatia article (more broken epistemology).
If you won’t even engage with the evidence and arguments being presented to you, and just keep repeating arguments they already refuted, there can be no point in discoursing with you.
You wrote “rightly denounced by experts” and accidentally linked to an article that did not contain any experts denouncing it, and then you corrected it by linking to another article that concludes that academics supported the author of the article that made the transracial argument. If there is some other body of evidence, some mountain of experts and scholars weighing in otherwise, you did not link to them either time.
I’m concerned with this point, so I am engaging you about it. It doesn’t mean I won’t engage with you on other points, or that I am ignoring entirely the other points in your article. On the same note, I wrote that Dolezal has black and bi-racial children, and you “won’t even engage with” that evidence… but I can take this to mean that you are more interested in discussing some other point, rather than assuming you have a broken epistemology.
You wrote “and you come back here and claim I linked you to “social media” complaints from amateurs.” I didn’t claim that exactly. I claimed that you linked to wikipedia, which you did, and that it said there was a backlash on social media, which it does say, but that the academic community supported the author, which it does conclude. Anyone who is interested should read the actual links you provided and decide for themselves if I am accurately summarizing your links or misrepresenting them in some way, and then look at your replies and see if you are accurately summarizing what I said or misrepresenting it in some way (primarily the quote I just gave).
You are not reading what I am directing you to. This is proved by the fact that you have confused scholars supporting her right to publish the article with their supporting its thesis; they did not. They nearly universally rejected its thesis and even debunked it in open debate. That you don’t know this means you are just skimming and not actually reading anything.
This is what I mean by your broken epistemology. You are doing no work to understand anything here. Do better.
Also, don’t try to gaslight me. You said I appealed to social media. I did not. Trying to change what you said is dishonest. And silly, because the record of what you actually said is right here. So you can’t really fool anyone with tricks like this. It just exposes you as more interested in denying what has happened here, than in addressing what you need to do to fix your broken epistemology and stop making these mistakes.
You wrote: “You are not reading what I am directing you to. This is proved by the fact that you have confused scholars supporting her right to publish the article with their supporting its thesis; they did not.”
I was not confused at all. In fact, I specifically wrote when summarizing that article that it mentions academics supported the author. I didn’t write that academics supported the notion of transracialism. The only other thing in that article that is similar to the sentence from which you linked it was social media backlash against the author. That isn’t me claiming that you made an appeal to social media. It is me summarizing your link, and explaining why it doesn’t support the claim that experts denounced. You confused a wikipedia article mentioning that scholars supported her right to publish with some kind of reference to experts denouncing. Neither the original link nor the new additional link support the claim of the sentence from which they are linked.
I didn’t embellish the significance of social media in those links; I mentioned it as part of a brief, accurate, summary of what I found in the links.
I also brought up transracial adoption, but that doesn’t mean I am claiming that you made an appeal to transracial adoption; rather, it is what the article you linked is about, so I briefly mentioned it, in questioning/criticizing your choice of link.
I think you are in fact mischaracterizing my reply. I didn’t claim that you are making an argument from social media or that your position is weak or wrong because it relies on social media in some way. I did not claim that contrary to your assertion that experts support the transracial vs transgender comparison. I claimed that the sentence you wrote was not supported by the links you embedded in that sentence. If there are better links to some, many, the majority, whatever the case may be, number of experts and/or academics denouncing it, then by all means link to them! Or leave that as a homework assignment for interested parties, but don’t imply that you have linked to them by writing “rightly denounced by experts” and then linking to other things that (while pertinent to the big picture of your blog entry) are not experts denouncing things. Or rather, do whatever you want, but it would be more persuasive if you did this, in my opinion.
As to my epistemology, I am primarily writing about here is a statement with hyperlinks to articles that do not especially support the statement. So draw your conclusions about my epistemology on how I have approached that topic, if you must. I.e. I followed the links, read them, looked at their sources, contacted the author (you) about the links appearing not to be supportive, etc. If there is evidence that these links do what they claim to do, and I have missed/ignored it, then that is a problem. I simply was not attempting to discuss (or argue against) the whole blog.
The kind of correction I might have imagined at the start of this would be changing the links to point to something that mentions or summarizes experts denouncing it, or changing the sentence to “this is a known troll tactic” and then keeping the links the same, or removing the links and writing “google it yourself to find lots of experts denouncing it/her.” I was not expecting or asking for, “due to the insights of that reader comment, I have changed my stance on the topic of this blog!” Don’t get me wrong, I’ve read quite a bit of what you’ve written, so I would not have been surprised at all if you concluded I was lying or insane or (as you now say) my epistemology is broken, etc. If you can’t see my comments as primarily about a misleading link, maybe examine the mote in your own epistemology.
I want to stop responding, but I’m not going to say this is it. Good luck.
Dude you were just shown a link that names numerous experts who have denounced the study’s conclusions, and shows no examples of any experts defending them. You have persistently ignored and even irrationally denied this several times now. This is freakish. And now you try changing history, a history everyone here can see and thus won’t be fooled. You mistook my linking you to an expert debate as citing social media outrage. You ignored almost the entire content of that article and focused on one isolated section of it not having to do with why I cited that article; the rest is about the actual expert debate, hence why I cited it—along with the separate side question of whether a paper challenging that consensus should be published, on which most scholars sided in favor, which you carelessly mistook as scholars supporting the thesis of the article.
You now pretend all that didn’t happen. Rewriting history again.
If you want to actually name the experts listed in that link who have denounced the thesis and discuss their arguments, go for it. Indeed, nearly every author cited as supporting publication, also denounced the thesis as incorrect; all you have to do is follow the bibliography, which is why this is the best link to give. But don’t give me this bullshit line that none are listed in the link or that the general consensus isn’t thereby discussed there in the process. Your failure to actually read the article or check its references, your willful attempt to claim it was all about social media and contained no summary of the expert debate, your lazy confusion of supporting publication with supporting a thesis, are all catastrophic failures stemming from your broken epistemology.
Fix that epistemology. Please. It will do everyone in the world a favor. Including yourself.
Hey Richard,
If looking upon the content of a “social” concept such as woman, looking to see what it involves, we should look at how it is understood and functions within society (not how we think it should be used and function – this is not an ameliorative project). Is there any plausible analysis of that that does not include the female sex within the concept of woman? If so, I’d love to hear it. I think if we are looking that the ordinary concept of woman, the dominant social conception, it inescapably involves ideas about the female sex. My question to you is why we should prefer another?
That’s not an argument.
“An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a definite proposition… A contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says.”
You were told where to read the refutation of your assertion. You ignored that instruction and remained willfully ignorant instead. That is not rational behavior. Act like a rational person and actually look at the arguments you are just gainsaying here without arguments. These sentences are in the article you just claimed to have read:
Follow the links and read and listen to them. Stop choosing to be an ignoramus.
Is the open letter to Hypatia the experts denouncing that you are referring to? That is the only thing I see in either of those two links that could fit the bill.
I guess I initially didn’t think that was what you were referring to, because the open letter itself is “denounced by experts” both in the wikipedia entry and in other links I chased down looking for the experts denouncing (e.g. the wiki entry says in paragraph 1, prior to mentioning the open letter, that “scholars associated with Hypatia joined in the criticism” but the citation for that sentence is to a New Yorker Magazine article entitled “This Is What a Modern-Day Witch Hunt Looks Like” that is very critical of the backlash/criticism of Tuvel, and attacks the open letter with quotes from experts rebutting the claims of the open letter), but also, it isn’t the main point or focus of either article.
If it is the case that there is tremendous backlash against contents of Tuvel’s article in academia, I don’t think the wiki article captures that. It talks about the open letter under the heading “social media response,” and it gives a rebuttal to the open letter in the same section, and later under the “reception” heading summarizes academic reactions; but there it is primarily focused on the witch-hunt / academic freedom angle, not weighing in either way on the transracial arguments.
When you say experts denounce, I expected to see a link that is actually to experts denouncing, but maybe a link to an article about the controversy surrounding academic freedom is the best you can do.
I don’t think it is necessary to make a point by point defense against your accusations, but rereading our interaction, aside from the fact that I may have been missing the forest for the trees if the open letter is what I was supposed to take away from your link, you are full of shit about me gas lighting you or claiming that you were making an appeal to social media or lying about what I wrote in previous replies. I’m glad you have the guts to leave our posts up, though. Thanks
Dude. There is literally a whole section there on the academic debate and her refutation by named experts (which for some weird reason you keep pretending does not exist), and discussion of and link to a petition signed by over 800 experts condemning its thesis whose credentials are listed there (which for some weird reason you keep pretending is not mentioned or was just some sort of amateur “social media” thing), and numerous experts are named and referenced throughout the article, with footnoted bibliographies leading to numerous cited and linked articles explaining exactly what I’m telling you and what you keep claiming doesn’t exist.
Why you are ignoring all this, I have no idea.
I should have added to my last reply, I hope anyone who reads you saying “You ignored almost the entire content of that article and focused on one isolated section of it not having to do with why I cited that article” will read the wikipedia article and see for themselves if I ignored the contents of that article and focused on one “isolated” section, or if I accurately captured the gist of the article.
Also, I admit to responding hastily in some cases, but eh, I guess this is why I didn’t mention it before, I don’t care to go through it point by point. I’ll leave it at this.
As I just noted, you are the one ignoring tons of information in that article. And indeed, any rational person will be able to notice this.
So why you keep acting like that information does note exist in that article, I do not know.
Richard Dawkins is something of a hero to me; I have most of his books. It is sad that, in his dotage, he has stepped into the minefield of the transgender debate. My parents, also in their 80s and intelectual, don’t get it either but decide to stay silent on the matter.
A bit of a ramble, apologies in advance.
Carrier: “Unlike gender, whether someone has biologically inherited attributes is an objective fact independent of self-selected identity characteristics. This is why transgender and transsexual exist as words: they are specifically distinguishing between aligning gender with (what are often) biologically inherited attributes (the majority cases of what are referred to as being cisgender) and not doing so. In other words, a person who identifies as a trans woman is by that very fact not claiming to be a cis woman. These are two different kinds of women. They are both women. Just as tabbies and ocelots are two different kinds of cat; but still entirely cats.”
^ In this passage you highlighted the words “trans” and “cis”. Suppose (as I verified, and I’d be happy to elaborate), that this choice of terminology was quite arbitrary (and even erroneous, given the actual meaning of “trans” in Latin), – the fault of a German medical doctor in 1910, – then, would this entire debate (or specifically your post) still have sense? If we dropped the word “trans” (and “cis”) and adopted words that are accurate (in Latin), or perhaps invented entirely new words (which had no other meaning than the one you could assign to it), then would this be an irrational pursuit or even an act of bigotry (erasing a word like “trans”), or could help end/solve this debate?
There’s a tendency to reject the very demand of defining words (eg as simple as “woman”), because it’s supposedly too complex or even semi-authoritarian (aka; let a thousand definitions bloom), which I don’t subscribe to, but for the sake of argument (perhaps anticipating your dismissal of my above questions), I will suppose a term can be used without proper definition: eg the term “Semitism” in the word “anti-Semitism” (eg some say the term “Semitism” also includes Arabs, and they make the glib argument that Arabs could not be guilty of anti-Semitism, because Arabs are themselves Semites – uh!).
Without having a definition of “Semitism” (or even specifically a definition of a “Jew”), though here knowing the definition of “anti” and “philo”, one would not yet have definitions of “anti-Semite” and “philo-Semite” (there is actually quite a debate on what the definition of anti-Semitism at present should be). What is clear though, is that it would be foolish to claim that anti-Semites and philo-Semites are both Semites. There is no slogan that “anti-Semites (or philo-Semites) are Semites”. Note that this slogan can have a resemblance of applied meaning: there are black self-identified Hebrews (and perhaps some Christian replacement theologians) who claim to be Jews, and whom many (perhaps even they themselves proudly) consider to be anti-Semites. True, they go further and even say the “actual” Jews (which we leave undefined) do not really belong in the category of Semites as such, though they perhaps would still acknowledge that these undefined non-Semites are “philo-Semites” (also undefined). I give this credit to the black Hebrews: they would not use a slogan like “anti-Semites are Semites” in debate as a meaningful argument for anything.
Trans and cis are English derivatives. They have their own English definitions now. So what we’d say in Latin is not relevant.
But if you want instruction in what someone speaking Latin would say, it would be the same: trans- means across/change, which is what we are using it to mean in respect to gender: changing/crossing over from assigned to chosen gender, “crossing a gender spectrum,” same as “crossing a river.” Cis- is the antonym of trans, meaning “on this side/not across,” and thus signifies someone who remained the gender they were assigned at birth, someone who did not change/cross over from their assigned gender.
The only words we need are words that actually describe what has factually happened. Has someone, as a matter of actual fact, rejected the gender they were assigned at birth and switched to a gender they chose as more accurately describing themselves? Yes. So we would always need some objective vocabulary to designate who has, and who has not, done this. Trans- and cis- are the most economical way of signifying that.
I suspect you have simply not read my article or payed attention to anything said in it, or any of the resources it linked to, and thus you are still confusing sex and gender. If that’s the case, I can’t help you. You have to actually pay attention to be helped.
As for Anti-Semitism, that isn’t a state of being, so it isn’t analogous. It’s a hatred of Jewish genetics and customs/lifestyle, and indeed, manifests more as the latter: Jews who converted to Christianity have typically been let off the hook, and indeed were even forced to convert in many societies as a different kind of “Final Solution.” Someone who was “trans-Jewish,” not a word we have any use for, but as in, converted to Judaism (we just say “convert”; Hebrew has more specific terms), would also be reviled by Anti-Semites, thus proving the point that “Anti-Semitism” is more about way of life than actual genetics. The belief that a Jewish way of thinking is genetically determined is itself an Anti-Semitic belief (it has no basis in scientific fact).
Since this is not analogous to gender terms, which are states-of-being not hate-designators (Anti-Semitisms actual conceptual analog would be Transphobia, “hatred of trans-identifying people”), none of your weird convoluted babbling has any relevance to anything in my article. Which only confirms you did not actually read it. Or any of the pertinent resources it directs people to who don’t understand how sex and gender work.
Please actually read the articles you are commenting on from now on.
Carrier: “trans- means across/change, which is what we are using it to mean in respect to gender: changing/crossing over from assigned to chosen gender, “crossing a gender spectrum,” same as “crossing a river.” Cis- is the antonym of trans, meaning “on this side/not across,” and thus signifies someone who remained the gender they were assigned at birth, someone who did not change/cross over from their assigned gender.”
^ Indeed “across” is an accurate meaning in Latin (unfortunately, as I indicated, that is not as it was used by the original coiner in 1910, who wrongly gave “trans” the meaning of ‘opposite’: ‘entgegengesetzt’), and, fwiw, your choice of “change” is not one I find in the Latin dictionary (‘mutatio’ means change).
You drop the proper Latin meaning (“across”) quickly though, by adopting a definition of “trans” as a verb/activity (“crossing”): “… we need … words that actually describe what has factually happened. Has someone, as a matter of actual fact … switched to a gender they chose … vocabulary to designate who has, and who has not, done this.”
^ I appreciate your effort in mustering some (albeit impromptu) definition of “trans”, which I’m willing to follow, if I’m able to, but your latter word (this) in your sentence leaves undefined the activity which makes someone transgender, that is, you have not defined what objectively has happened, what a person has done. Or perhaps I have misunderstood you and you meant by “trans” not an actual “changing” or activity that happened in reality, but rather a changing in some metaphorical sense, of a “changing” in the “states of being”, which would seem to be a tautological definition of “trans”: “trans” is the “changing” from a “cis”-state-of-being to a “trans”-state-of-being.
Carrier: “Someone who was “trans-Jewish,” not a word we have any use for, but as in, converted to Judaism (we just say “convert”; Hebrew has more specific terms) would also be reviled by Anti-Semites, thus proving the point that “Anti-Semitism” is more about way of life than actual genetics.”
^ It was Sartre, as you probably know, who basically said that the anti-Semite (or anti-Semitic gentile society) defines the Jew, as Other – a suggestive insight as far as it goes, but for all that, the anti-Semite does not define the conversion process, which is defined by Jewish laws themselves; there is no defined conversion process (or even necessarily an actual one at all) for becoming a transgender person, supposing they themselves would be even willing to define this process, and so it seems the task of providing a definition of “trans” gets unloaded onto the transphobe. Moreover, while Jews reject the caricature they are accused of being by anti-Semites, the transgender person accepts and validates society’s registration (of deviation of gender norms from their biological body, as being the opposite gender) or society’s treatment, as true and important.
Conversely, if gentile society treated Jews as fake (eg being descendants of Khazars), – I brought up the curious example of the type of anti-Semitism of black Hebrews against Jews, – this peculiar form of anti-Semitism would be hurtful to some Jews probably more due to the displayed historical ignorance and accusation of being liars, than due to feeling attacked for being Jewish (a status, which is precisely being denied by the black Hebrew anti-Semites to the Jews). A modern transphobe, by contrast, does not doubt that transgender people exist, and would be quite happy to insist that they are just that, eg a transwoman is a only a transwoman, but not a real biological woman (and of course the transphobes don’t claim themselves to be the true transgender people – unlike in the case of the black Hebrews).
Carrier: “As for Anti-Semitism, that isn’t a state of being, so it isn’t analogous. It’s a hatred of Jewish genetics and customs/lifestyle … Since this is not analogous to gender terms, which are states-of-being not hate-designators (Anti-Semitism’s actual conceptual analog would be Transphobia, “hatred of trans-identifying people”), none of your weird convoluted babbling has any relevance to anything in my article.”
^ I could perhaps agree with your distinction between a state-of-being and hate-designators, but it’s not I who is drawing a conceptual analogy, which in my case is between “woman” (or “gender) and “Semitism”. My point is rather very simple (perhaps so silly, that in your kindness you overlooked how silly my ramble really was). I merely picked the word “Semitism” (as a word that is kept undefined, – perhaps it is a “state-of-being”, just is said about the words “gender” or “woman”, or perhaps it’s a totally meaningless word – invented by 19th racist ideologues) to decry the flawed reasoning of grouping words with the same term in them (like “anti-Semite” and “philo-Semite”) together under one common category, due to the fact that they have the same term in them (“Semite”). So nobody will invent a slogan like “philo-Semites are Semites” as an argument, meaningful declaration, or legitimate conclusion draw from the premises, namely that we’re willing to accept the premise of using “Semitism” as an undefined word, as well as leaving “anti” and “philo” (eg for what is really “love”?) unspecified.
I don’t care about your opinions of dead scientists. I am telling you how contemporary English language works.
Nothing you go on to ramble about has anything to do with how contemporary English language works.
And there is no discernible relevance to your attempted analogy regarding phobia/hate designators and identity/gender designators.
That they think transwomen claim to be “real biological women” (they don’t) or that someone’s being “a real biological woman” is anything they are entitled to know (they aren’t) is precisely what makes them a transphobe: like someone who wants to hunt witches or commies or “Jews,” they want to “out” whoever is “secretly” what they despise. If they were not transphobic, they would not care; and thus they would not equate the word “woman” with “a real biological woman,” but accept every kind of woman is a woman, just as every kind of cat is a cat. And thus they would not care who was trans or not.
They would if they needed the word. Since no one does, it hasn’t been coined.
By contrast, we actually do need the words transwoman and ciswoman (and likewise transman and cisman and so on), which is why those words were coined.
This is how language works.
Carrier: “like someone who wants to hunt witches or commies or “Jews,” they want to “out” whoever is “secretly” what they despise. If they were not transphobic, they would not care; and thus they would not equate the word “woman” with “a real biological woman,” but accept every kind of woman is a woman, just as every kind of cat is a cat. And thus they would not care who was trans or not.”
^ Yes, the outing of people as “trans” is what I meant the transphobe is happy to commit. Whereas in the case of (a lesser-known type of) anti-Semitism, the anti-Semite rejects that Jews are real Jews (instead Jews are called eg Khazarians), and so it not “outing” people as secretly Jews (but denying they are real Jews). I agree that the transphobe should not care who is trans or not, but my criticism is that, you assume that it is the transphobe who knows who is trans or not. moreover hereby you elide yourself the issue of giving a definition of the term “trans” (in context of gender) by more or less dumping that responsibility on the transphobe. I was charitable to you: there’s an insight there (about how hostile society impacts/defines the Other), but nevertheless, the basic notion of transgender people wasn’t ultimately invented by the transphobe (but rather, I repeat, by a sympathetic doctor in 1910). While in case of the Jew (which I address as your word “trans-Jew” implied some analogy, which I’m rejecting), the definition of Jew or the conversion process/requirements to become one is defined by Judaism itself (and not by the anti-Semite), and we don’t expect the anti-Semite to tell us who is a Jew or not.
You’re right, that every kind of cat is a cat, but cats have no use for words like “trans”.
Carrier: “They would if they needed the word. Since no one does, it hasn’t been coined.
By contrast, we actually do need the words transwoman and ciswoman (and likewise transman and cisman and so on), which is why those words were coined.
This is how language works.”
^ Well “Semitism” (as well “philo-Semitism”) is an actual word that was coined:
Semitism (n.) 1848, “characteristic attributes of Semitic languages;” 1851, “characteristic attributes of Semitic people,” from Semite + -ism. From 1870 as “Jewish influence in a society.”
I could ask: was there an actual need to coin a word “to describe the characteristic attributes of Semitic people”? Could we not simply delete this word from the dictionary? I picked this word (Semitism), which I consider to be quite undefined, to make the point, that even if one accepts an undefined word/concept (as a premise), it would still not follow, that the construction of a slogan like “philo-Semites are Semites” makes sense. Words/concepts containing “Semite” do not, for this sole reason, mean that these words belong together under one category.
You simply assert that we actually do need the words (transwoman and so on). Evidence? The reason you give is, because they were coined. A true fact, and I pointed out who coined them (namely a German doctor in 1910), which seems to leave you indifferent, so perhaps it is not the fact that a word was coined (after all, psychological theorists create much new terminology), but that the word enters popular use that proves it need. I respect the fact of popular use (supposing the word “transwoman” and so on, are in use among widespread layers of the population) of a word, and so I understand, as you put it, “how language works”. How many religious words are in popular use! Perhaps your offered still another reason:
“the most economical way of signifying” (that someone “switched to a gender they chose”). As I said, this leaves undefined what the activity of “switching” means. It could even mean a metaphorical switching between (admittedly, economical short) words, from “cis” to “trans”. There is no need for such hypothesis, that an actual, meaningful switching occurs.
Nothing about your Antisemitism analogy is pertinent here. I’ve already explained why. If you choose to ignore me, I can’t help you further.
As to language, obviously if cats spoke languages, and if they had gender norms (i.e. a culture in which “gender” is constructed and imposed on people), they’d have use for transgender terms just as they’d have use for words for different kinds of cat. But if cats became intelligent and didn’t adopt any expectations regarding the gendering of people (if, in other words, these sentient cats simply didn’t adopt gender as a concept at all, such that there were no binary expectations assigned to anyone as to how they ought to look or think or behave, whether based on genitalia or anything else), then they would have no use for trans vocabulary—just as neither would we. But alas, that’s not the world we created. And we have to label and navigate the world we actually created.
If you want to understand that world—and hence all the evidence regarding how we have invented this construct called “gender” and keep trying to impose it on people—then do what I have asked you to do several times now: go to what I linked you to to specifically to educate you on that fact. If you want, you can start with reading my principal recommendation Attack of the Lycanthropic Transsexuals! or watching Vox’s very excellent one-hour primer on the subject. Ideally, both.
My simple point was not about a conceptual analogy to anti-Semitism, but about language, namely that, EVEN IF one holds your premise that a word (eg ‘woman’) is largely undefined and arbitrary (meaning female gender, and not biological female sex), the construction of the slogan (‘transwomen are women’) still does not follow. As you brought up animal species, I could make my point with another example: ‘elephant’ (instead of ‘Semitism’). If our premise is that the concept of ‘elephant’ does not mean a defined biological species (but instead pretty vague ‘attributes associated with elephants’ – like large body size and a big nose, ‘elephantness’), it still would not follow that we can construct the slogan ‘sea elephants are elephants’ (solely for the reason that the species of ‘sea elephants’ contains the word ‘elephant’ in it, or that sea elephants vaguely resemble attributes of ‘elephantness’). This is a very simple point, which I expect you find to be silly, but true enough. Meanwhile your analogy of the TWAW-slogan to cats (all different kinds of cats are cats) is invalid, and my objection to it is not about cats’ lack of the need for language, but about our (human) usage, in the naming of different kinds of cats, which has no (or no need) for the word ‘trans’ (ie your analogy of cats is invalid, because we humans don’t label any type of cat a ‘trans’-cat).
Carrier: “if, in other words, these sentient cats simply didn’t adopt gender as a concept at all, such that there were no binary expectations assigned to anyone as to how they ought to look or think or behave, whether based on genitalia or anything else), then they would have no use for trans vocabulary—just as neither would we. But alas, that’s not the world we created. And we have to label and navigate the world we actually created.
If you want to understand that world—and hence all the evidence regarding how we have invented this construct called “gender” and keep trying to impose it on people …”
^ The construct of “gender” as a concept originates in English language quite recently (after WWII) incidentally. There is no need for it, either (by which I mean: it provides no additional clarifying information, and actually obscures much). To describe the expectations assigned to the female sex one could do with the use of existing words, eg: ‘womanish’. The new terminology is not economical or clarifying. Just for example, if a lesbian adult female looks and acts what society associates with the male sex, one would, in the new terminology, still call her a ‘cis-woman’, as someone who chooses to identify with her biological sex (and not identify as a trans-men). It makes no conceptual sense to speak of “a choice of identifying” with one’s born sex, just as eg a black person can’t “choose to identify as” a black-born person, they just are (such phrase makes no conceptual sense, hence the true economical thing is to ditch such terminology).
You simply aren’t addressing anything that’s been explained to you by this point.
Follow the links you were instructed to, and educate yourself on the material difference between gender and sex. It’s real, and it’s established science.
Only then will you understand why trans- vocabulary has a function in present society.
I reject the use of the word ‘trans’ and don’t care for the analogy (of trans-woman to trans-black), but here’s my comment on it.
You write that Dolezal was “hiding” her “White race” (eg “altering her skin color and hair”). It is the very fact that her ‘biological” phenotype didn’t give her immediately away to onlookers, that highlights that one’s “looks” (in the common sense of alterable appearence) is not determined by one’s biological phenotype, and the perception of “race” by others is subjective (random judgements by different people). I’m not talking about Dolezal’s own claims about “race”, but, even mererly hypothetically, solely about the perception by others (even total strangers) of her appearance as “Black”.
You could retort that the onlookers/society viewed her “look” as only expressing one particular black ethnic community/culture, and thus not as racially “Black”, but I think, if the onlookers had made that distinction, they wouldn’t be conned in the first place (by her mere appearance).
You will grant, that if her mere appearance was able to “trick” some onlookers, it would not really have been any sin on her part, and then strictly she didn’t “hide” anything. Anyway, what would it even mean to “show” her “White race”?… If an onlooker didn’t know she was actually “White”, then, to quote you: “There is nothing here they are obligated to tell you. So your not knowing it does not make them a fraud.” Again, I’m leaving aside the particulars of Dolezal’s case (that she made false claims). The analogy-argument in its pure form is, that “Black” is also social construct, like gender. The very ability to “con” (if you want to call it that in case of Dolezal) by itself, ie by her mere appearance (and not anything she said in particular) would prove that Black is also a social construct.
In the pure form of the argument, what is significant is, that it is the onlookers who associated her cultural-ethnic disguise-act with Black race (and they weren’t even necessarily herewith assuming that solely this particular ethnic-culture was “inherent” to the “Black race”). How someone “looks” in itself (eg hair cut or hair color) or is perceived by others is alterable. A “white-race” person could look as Black (to some onlookers, for some time), which doesn’t mean they became racially (whatever that means) black, but it does mean that black is a social construct, – so the argument goes in its best form, as I understand it.
What arguments do you offer in favor of regarding the word “Black” as solely a race, and not (at least, also) an alterable social-ethnicity?
Carrier – “… race is inherently a biological fact ”
– “If they looked Asian, that would reflect a biological reality of their descent”
– “Since race is, like chromosomal sex, fundamentally biological, there is no possible way to be “trans” Black, any more than one could be “trans” chromosomal.”
– “…race is what others force on you for how you look, a look that is inescapably biological and thus one you cannot simply change;”
– “mistreatment is because of a biological reality: how they look, in consequence of their descent.”- -” This is why race … is forced on you by society and its perceptions and assumptions, owing to a physical fact about you that you can’t easily change”
^ Your phrasings (a “physical fact” that one “can’t easily change”, a “look” that one “cannot simply change”) is ambiguous. You could be making an acknowledgement, that there are physical facts/ looks of race, that CAN easily be changed, while others can’t be. In which case, if enough of such facts/looks can be changed, in order to be perceived as black by some people (not all onlookers) then, one would likely have to admit, that black is (also) a social construct. Or was your phrasing merely an inconsistency in your statement, merely an unnecessary moderation? You would have then actually meant to say, that race is a physical look, that “can never be changed at all, in any way”. But why not? Just as you find it somehow relevant to bring up the fact, that there are women who lose their womb, so there are black people who lose their skin pigment (vitiligo, like Michael Jackson suffered), or who were born with a white skin (as an albino) to black parents. Even with your purely racial interpretation of the word ‘black’, phsyical looks differ.
A white person can simply put on black face (like Robert Downey Jr. in Tropic Thunder), or go for skin injections to turn their skin quasi-permanetly black; or operate their nose. Perhaps you’ll call changes in case of racial look far less “easy” in comparison to sex-operations or hormonal injections, but it’s just a matter of degree. Maybe you should clarify what you meant by the phrasing that racial looks “can’t simply/easily change”.
I don’t see anything in your comment that addresses or even shows an awareness of what I argue in my article.
I thus cannot fathom why you think it even pertains.
I don’t see your argument for stating axiomatically “Black is a racial category”. The word ‘woman’ is a category of human sexual reproduction, yet in that case you feel it is permissible to define ‘woman’ as meaning also a ‘gender’ category.
Or why you assume, that people who think or say they’re “trans-Black”, delusionally believe that they’re Black in a racial-biological sense (whatever that even means), and not in a social-constructed sense. Such assumption on your part (about what they mean by the word ‘Black’ or slogan that ‘trans-black people are black people’) would be, according to your standard, just a bigoted assumption (mistake about what they’re actually claiming).
You also flatly assert, that we don’t use the word ‘trans’ in the case of ethnicity (“… but we don’t use the prefix trans– for people who adopt a new ethnicity or nationality.”). Well the donor’s family-member you mention, apparently did use the word ‘trans’, and perhaps if more people will do so, then “we” will start using the word ‘trans’ in this context as well. You yourself in a comment to me coined the word ‘trans-Jew’, which we don’t use, but then neither was the word ‘trans-woman’ used prior to the early 1990s (and ‘trans’ prior to 1910). You offer no reason, why there shouldn’t be simply the use of the word ‘trans’ here, except that anno 2021 it isn’t widely used. If the ‘trans-ethnic’ vocabulary will become more popularly used (in the next decades), or if you take serious the few people now who are using it, then you will have no argument against adopting it.
I don’t state anything axiomatically. That race is a biological category is empirically established by the fact that the construct is in general society biological, even when reality isn’t (racism, and beliefs about race, are always expressed in the form of “biological determinism,” and race is always identified by reference to biologically inherited markers, even when misperceived, e.g. a person who by accident of circumstances “looks black” can be treated differently, but that different treatment always follows as a consequence of a belief about their biology). Dolezal herself confirmed this when to defend her race she kept lying about its biological authenticity (e.g. claiming her dad was black and that she had black DNA). This is all made well clear in my article so I do not comprehend why I have to explain this to you. Perhaps you should actually read my article before commenting on it next time?
This is why defying the public construct of race as biological without admitting you are not in that social category is lying (hence Dolezal explicitly lied about her biology); unlike transgender status, which is honest, and just not your concern. For example, a transwoman, by so identifying, is thereby admitting they do not have a womb etc.; they are not lying about it. The ensuing dispute is then over whether a “woman” needs to tell people whether she is trans* or cis*, not whether those are biologically identical (no one is saying they are). In other words, since we know sex is not gender, and the term “woman” in general discourse is a gender construct, there is no legitimate basis for assuming anyone identifying as a woman is a ciswoman.
By contrast, race has always been a biological construct in social understanding—such that if it ceased to be, it would cease to be race at all and become ethnicity (about which I have a whole paragraph in my article, the article you appear not to have read). If we lived in a society in which it was generally understood that claiming to be Black simply meant an assumed ethnic identity and not a claim to biological inheritance, then no one would be surprised or bothered by Dolezal—except racists who refuse to accept ethnicity wasn’t biological (by analogy to transphobes who refuse to accept that gender is not sex). Because then we would all understand that anyone claiming to be Black might just mean ethnic and not racial identity; and indeed, for that very reason, in that world Dolezal would have simply said so from the start. That she had to lie instead exactly evinces the contrary fact: we do not live in that world; we live in a world where race has become a biological construct.
Judaism is a religion (an ethnicity), not a race. Only racists construct it as racial (and thus impose biologically determinist views on “the Jews,” though they will also attack non-Jewish “collaborators,” like converts, yet for exactly the same reason). The Jews themselves don’t claim those things about themselves. Only Israel as a state requires a biological inheritance (and only a matrilineal one) for automatic citizenship, but not for everyone (a lot of Israeli citizens are Arabs and naturalized citizens without a matrilineal claim). But that’s a nationality category, not a racial one. It’s not much different from the United States allowing automatic citizenship by biological inheritance. Yet we have no need of “trans-American” as a label for someone who becomes American, ethnically or nationally. Likewise someone who becomes “trans-Christian” or “trans-Muslim,” as if we had to say so when people convert. We already have adequate terms for distinguishing these things; the trans/cis vocabulary has no utility there.
But imagine Dolezal lying about having a Jewish mother in order to secure Israeli citizenship and benefit from their national healthcare system. That would be lying. There is simply no analogy here to a woman being, unknown to you, a transwoman. You ought to know already that any woman could be a transwoman. And it is caring whether she is that is transphobic. This was never the situation Dolezal was in.
And finally, evincing again that you didn’t actually read my article, we actually do have a legitimate trans-ethnicity vocabulary. I discuss it in the article. The article above. The article you are commenting on. The article, apparently, you never really read.
What I understand the best (ie sincere, from a ‘trans-black’ person’s standpoint, as Dolezal now identifies like) form of the argument to be, is not the implication, as you put it, that “we should accept Dolezal really is Black (she’s not)”, but that we should strive to a society in which the word Black doesn’t necessarily mean a racial-biological markers. That is, we should strive toward what you sketch here:
Carrier: “If we lived in a society in which it was generally understood that claiming to be Black simply meant an assumed ethnic identity and not a claim to biological inheritance, then no one would be surprised or bothered by Dolezal”
^ You observe that this isn’t the case in present society (“we do not live in that world”), – this is what I meant by your axiomatic statement. The sincere argument is, that we should strive toward such a world, in which the word ‘Black’ doesn’t mean biological markers. Would you oppose striving toward such (re-)definition of the word ‘black’? Put positively: would you be glad to see a political/social effort to educate/explain to the population, that they you need to adopt the new definition of the word ‘black’? The analogy-argument is, that your answer must be positive.
Carrier: … the term “woman” in general discourse is a gender construct ..
^ No, only in connection to the word ‘transwoman’. In general society, without connection to the word ‘trans’, ‘woman’ is a category of human sexual reproduction. If you want to define ‘woman’ as a social construct everywhere, that requires striving toward a world where people understand it like that. Or do you claim that the word ‘woman’ was and has always been understood by general society as a gender category (in which case striving for a new definition would be unnecessary)?
Dolezal is a proven liar (even before and after this incident). So in no way can she be offered as an example of anyone trying to “sincerely” do anything. But what she is disingenuously trying to do is create a new category that does not correspond to any social category in use, as a means to “dodge” what she actually did, which was coopt an existing category and lie about her belonging in it. There is no point in trying to philosophize into existence any worthwhile goal there. My article explains in detail why. I recommend you actually read it.
The only way we can get to a society in which race no longer exists as a category is when racism no longer exists as a thing. So you have to defeat the latter—completely (even inadvertently systemic and noncognitive racism must expire, and that’s the most difficult goal of all). Only then will we no longer even use words like Black or White, because they won’t refer to anything. There is no such thing as a monolithic “White” or “Black” culture, as there are in fact countless cultures enjoyed by people of color and countless cultures enjoyed by caucasians; and even what has come together as an available American “Black culture” some but not all African Americans adhere to is a resistance culture: it exists solely as a response to the racism suppressing Black people, past and present.
Once we get to that society (we are nowhere near it, and Dolezal is doing exactly nothing to get us there), there couldn’t even be Dolezals, except persons faking their identification with a culture, which will then be a more trivial offense (more something pathetic than offensive) as there will be no ethnocentric bigotry prevailing against that culture that one would be unconscionably pretending to have been a target of their whole life. If instead we get to a different place where all racism is replaced with ethnocentric bigotry, i.e. instead of discriminating against skin color we all start discriminating based on specific cultural assimilations, then we’d still have Dolezals: people unconscionably lying about having endured such bigotry their whole life, when in fact they have endured no such thing. The alternative would be admitting openly that that is not what one is claiming by newly identifying with a culture; precisely the thing Dolezal did not do (until she got caught; then she tried realigning to a new scam).
Meanwhile, “woman” has been a gender construct for thousands of years. Long before we started developing words to refer to different kinds of women. Hence transwomen predate the word “transwomen,” by literally thousands of years. You are confusing the false equation of sex and gender as “woman was always been a sex category.” That’s precisely what’s false. Gender has never tracked sex; so the belief that it has is false; and trying to force it to is bigotry (sexism or transphobia, depending on its target). Recognizing this falsehood is what trans* vocabulary is all about. And recognizing this bigotry is what combating sexism and transphobia is all about.
That you don’t know this and keep trying to insist “woman” is a biological category tells me you still are refusing to actually read anything about this. Persistent ignorance is not a good look on you. Get up to speed. Watch that one hour Vox video I directed you to. And/or read that article of mine about this that I directed you to. And don’t post in ignorance here about either again.
Carrier: ‘you don’t know this and keep trying to insist “woman” is a biological category tells me you still are refusing to actually read anything about this.’
^ This is just an indication, that in your own mind, a lot of people, – the general discourse, – aren’t up to speed, that the term “woman” is to be understood as a gender construct. One could hold the position, that the majority of people are bigots and wrong, and that this shouldn’t imply acceptance of their bigoted understanding of the term “woman”, but rather serve as a spur, that they should educate themselves about the proper definition of the term “woman”. That educational effort would not be necessary if, as you put it now, ‘“woman” has been a gender construct for thousands of years.’ If people in “general discourse” always understood it like that, if the dictionary simply defined the term “woman” like that, then there wouldn’t need to be a one hour Vox-video about it, or you wouldn’t have needed to write this blog-article.
If you reject that the above is an accurate sketch of your position, then, yes, the analogy (the alleged parallel of the logical structure, in the best form of the argument) wouldn’t hold, that we should strive to educate society to adopt a definition of the word “black” (as not meaning a racial-biological category). There wouldn’t have been such an educational effort for understanding the term ‘woman’ as a gender construct, and so, those striving to gather support for an educational effort to redefine the term ‘black’, can’t justify the legitimacy of their effort on the basis of something that didn’t happen (no social-political-educational campaign to teach people to understand the word “woman” as a gender construct).
You seem still to be laboring under the very confusion that is trying to be explained to you: that gender is a construct is an objective fact. That people are unaware of this is the problem (all sexism and transphobia results therefrom).
So continuing to cite sexists having sexist false beliefs about women does not “change” the material reality: that those beliefs are false and therefore sexist. Until you comprehend this, you won’t comprehend anything we’ve been discussing here.
You will be able to comprehend this if you would end your willful ignorance and actually do what I have asked you to do multiple times now: watch the Vox video and/or read my article on the subject.
Carrier: … that gender is a construct is an objective fact. That people are unaware of this is the problem
^ Your stress on these two phrases implies the existence of an opposition between the two, but to be clear (or to disagree with you), a problem can be an objective fact. Eg, if the objective fact is that the majority of the population believes in god, we can recognize this to be a problem, and if we succeed in solving that problem (eg by atheist education efforts), the objective fact (that the majority of the population believes in god) would cease to be an objective fact.
So, that hitherto most people are unaware of the objective fact that the word ‘woman’ means a gender construct, is itself an objective fact (a material reality) as well. You interpret this statement (about the fact that the majority of people’s understanding of the term ‘woman’ is that of a simple biological category, of human sexual reproduction) as an indication, that I’m endorsing/rejoicing at this objective fact, and that this objective fact (material reality) can’t or shouldn’t be changed. Such interpretation however is a projection of what I previously called your own axiomatic thinking, about how the word ‘black’ is a biological-race category, because in today’s world that’s the majority of people’s understanding of it. It’s you who hold that the “objective fact”, that the term ‘black’ is being understood as a biological category in today’s general discourse, is already in itself enough justification, that this “objective fact” (of public’s understanding of the word) can’t or shouldn’t be changed. Or that it would be pointless, etc.
It might very well be a pointless pursuit to campaign for a change in the public’s mind of the meaning of the word ‘black’. That’s very likely the main reason why the whole analogy is made!
But just because it’s pointless, doesn’t mean yet, that it’s morally wrong. And to be fair to you, you have not explicitly or fundamentally opposed the idea of such a campaign (for redefining the word ‘black’).
That’s a careful move on your part, because if you did oppose it and gave certain reasons, then, for the sake of consistency, those same reasons (for opposing it) would be applied to the effort to get the word ‘woman’ understood as a gender category by everyone. You have not stuck your neck out.
What you have hinted at (namely that ‘black’ would then become understood as a mere category of ethnicity, and not race) is no more an objection, than stating that the word woman will come to be understood as a mere category of gender (obviously, yes, that’s precisely the intention of the educational campaign), and not of sexual reproduction.
Okay, you clearly have no interest in actually reviewing any of the evidence for the ontological realities of gender and sex. Since you are disinterested in facts, there is no point in continuing this conversation.
In some future day when you care about what is actually true and thus actually want to know how the world works, watch the Vox video and read my article on the gender-sex distinction. Then if you have any further questions, ask. But you won’t even know what we are talking about here, until you do that.