Guest post: True but irrelevant, or relevant but false
Guest post by Bjarte Foshaug.
Hardly anything has greater potential for introducing absurdities into an argument than using words in a different meaning than your opponent while continuing to act as if you were both still talking about the same thing. Now, obviously words don’t mean anything in themselves, but get their meanings from us. If someone wants to apply the word “fish” to what most people call “bird”, and vice versa, they are free to do so. But then it’s either disingenuous, or stupid, or both, to go on talking as if everyone else were using the words in the same way. It’s as if we were having a conversation about clubs for hitting baseballs (let’s call them “bats(1)”), and I suddenly started talking about flying mammals (let’s call them “bats(2)”) and how you’ve completely misunderstood baseball for failing to consider the relevance of Chiroptera to the sport.
We see this whenever atheists present arguments against the existence of a supernatural, intelligent creator of the universe (let’s call it “God(1)”), and “philosophically sophisticated” theists answer by pointing to the existence of Life, the Universe and Everything (let’s call it “God(2)”), as if this refuted the atheist position. And we see it whenever feminists present arguments for the equality of people with a strong preponderance of certain innate, physical traits more commonly found in mothers than in fathers (let’s call them “women(1)”), while trans* activists try to make it all about people who think or feel a certain way, or subscribe to certain cultural norms etc. (let’s call them “women(2)”).
I am sure we are all familiar with Daniel Dennett’s concept of “deepities”, but anyway: A deepity is an ambiguous statement with two possible interpretations. One of these interpretations makes the statement true but trivial, while the other makes it profound but false. I have identified a similar kind of phenomenon except that in this case the statement is either true but irrelevant, or relevant but false depending on which interpretation you choose. God(2) is no more relevant to a conversation about God(1) than flying mammals are to a conversation about clubs for hitting baseballs. The only thing that makes it seem relevant is the word “God” itself, which clearly doesn’t mean the same thing in the two cases. I would argue that the same thing goes for women(2) vs. women(1).
In both cases there is usually an element of trying – consciously or not – to have it both ways: If challenged, you can always fall back on the “safe” true but trivial/irrelevant interpretation, but for all other intents and purposes you take credit for the profundity/relevancy of the second interpretation. I can’t tell you how many religious people in my experience have attempted to first “prove” the proposition “God exists” TRUE by pointing to the existence of God(2) before changing the definition back to God(1) in order to make the proposition thus “proven” seem profound or relevant.
Trans* activist rhetoric seems to be full of equivocations like this:
• Being a “woman2”, is all about how you think or feel about yourself. Yet if a person who rejects the entire framework of “male” vs. “female” ways of thinking or feeling simply calls herself a “woman(1)” as a convenient shorthand for certain physical traits, she is still considered “cis”, which implies acceptance of that very same framework and identification as a woman(2).
• Being a “woman(2)” has nothing to do with physical traits, yet feminists who fight against discrimination of women(1) based on physical traits, are being inconsistent or hypocritical if they don’t change their cause entirely and turn all their focus towards the discrimination of women(2).
• Being a “woman(2)” has nothing to do with physical traits, yet straight men(1) or lesbian women(1) who are attracted to women(1) based on physical traits are being inconsistent or hypocritical if they don’t consider women(2) as potential partners.
• Etc. etc…
Ummm…shouldn’t that be “God(42)”? ;-)
The easiest way to deal with such equivocation is at the first sign of it, thank the person for conceding the argument and not your wasting time.
Bjarte Foshaug thank you for your entire comment. I am not familiar with Daniel Dennett but I will be doing some research.
Thank you, teslalivia. I guess I should make it clear that, apart from the reference to deepities, nothing in my comment is based on anything Dennett has said. While I loved Darwin’s Dangerous Idea and thought Breaking the Spell raised some interesting points, i’m not a big fan of Dennett in general because of his (as far as I know) continued support for Dawkins.
Srsly?
Well, here I go being all contrarian again…
Do you seriously believe it is a significant part of trans activism to claim
– that cis means accepting the concept of innate gender?
– that straight men and lesbians should be attracted to women with penises?
– that feminists should “change their cause entirely and turn all their focus towards the discrimination of women(2)”; abandoning, for example, the fight for abortion access?
Maybe I just need to get out more, but the trans activists I know of (like Zinnia Jones or M. A. Melby) wouldn’t make any of these ludicrous claims.
It sounds much more like anti-trans scare mongering, similar to the “gay agenda” (homosexuals want to remake the whole education system and turn your kids gay!).
Silentbob:
On this particular point, at least, there’s evidence that it’s part. A “significant” part? I dunno. I’m not certain that was the original claim, though. Regardless, as to this point, it does happen. As one example, there was a discussion over at FtB/Lousy Canuck wherein a lesbian porn actress was excoriated for stating that she refused to do a scene with a transwoman, because penis.
This is quite the strawman. Not even trans activists insist that better abortion access is a bad thing (because, as has been repeatedly pointed out, transmen need access to abortion services, too).
Silent Bob, I once tried to see if a group of progressive people could agree on a definition of woman which was basically, in light of the above “woman(2) along with any members of woman(1) who have not clearly denied membership in this category”. That would have allowed for transwomen being women, transmen and other-gender people to be not-women, and all gender-concept-rejecting females to retain the descriptor woman.
No, one of my friends said, “A woman is someone who feels like a woman.”
So, yes, people are out there (and this person was not trans, but a general progressive) who *insist* that the only possible acceptable definition of a woman has to do with “feeling like a woman”, which I cannot understand in any way that does not indicate buying into gender.
Silentbob, I have definitely seen cybermobs of trans* activists gang up to pile on feminists simply for saying that they are not “cis” if being “cis” means identifying as the “gender” they were “assigned” at birth (or any other “gender” for that matter), and certainly not if belonging to a particular “gender” says anything about how they think or feel (As I have stated many times: This implicit claim about what’s going on inside other people’s heads is precisely the part that I for one have a problem with). I have also seen plenty of lesbian women get attacked for not considering people who feel a certain way about themselves while having physical characteristics more typical of your average father than your average mother potential partners.
If you think what I said about feminists changing their cause entirely is such a strawman, feel free to explain how abortion rights (or anything else relating to the discrimination of women(1) by men(1)) is specifically a feminist issue (as opposed to a general I’m-not-a-feminist-i’m-a-humanist-all-discrimination-is-wrong kind of issue) without saying the same kind of things for which my friends on twitter were portrayed as infinitely bigoted and evil “TERFs” who should make the world a better place by killing themselves. (Hint: You can’t) To be sure, trans* activists do indeed want feminists to fight for abortion rights, which is where the part about “having it both ways” (the main point of my comment, actually..) comes in.
[* With a few exceptions. Equating the very existence of trans* people with rape, strikes me as clearly over the line, and i fully supported the trans* activists who called transphobia on that one. But this is not the “TERF”-bashing that completely drowned out all other voices on my twitter feed before I finally left in disgust,]
This is my understanding of the history of our current ‘gender’ (the word) wars. Please feel free to correct any misconceptions I may have gathered through my experience, but please be aware that I spent the first 43 years of my life in England, and the remaining 15 years living in Ireland and Australia, so my experience is almost certainly very different to anyone who has spent the bulk of their lives in the U.S.A., whether they are trans or cis (‘cis’, here, simply meaning ‘not trans’ and not meaning to imply anything whatsoever about comfort with expected gender performance).
Once upon a time, the term ‘transgender’ was pretty much unheard of.
People who felt that they had been placed in the wrong sex for their brain, owing to their having a particular set of external genitalia, or ambiguous ones, were called transsexual. They had to spend a lot of time (and money) on psychiatric services for dysphoria, and then spend a minimum of a year ‘living as’ the ‘target sex’ before they would finally be granted access to the surgery and hormones which would make such a life remotely comfortable. Their behaviour during that year would be heavily policed for any ‘deviant’ behaviour (according to outrageously strict criteria that didn’t, even then, apply to anyone not wishing to change sex), and treatment, even once started, could be withdrawn at any time if the psych services decided that there had been an infraction. This is still the case in far too many places, and no doubt contributes to the high suicide rate.
Feminists helped to change that, where it has changed, by challenging the notion that gender performance was biologically based. They pointed out that there is nothing innate that requires people designated as ‘women’ to wear make-up, frilly dresses, high heels and a deferential aspect to those fortunate enough to be designated as ‘men’. They pointed out, correctly, that most of what the psych services were regarding as essential female behaviour was actually societally-imposed performance of femininity. In Ireland this year, that attitude won legal recognition – firstly, marriage equality became the law of the land, which means that trans people no longer would be forced to divorce in order to have legal documents changed, then the Gender Recognition Bill (PDF) passed, meaning that trans people would no longer be required to go through medical interventions in order to have their preferred gender recognised legally.
Meantime, in the ‘Language-Policing Sector, Overreach Department’, terms were changing. Faced with suddenly increased numbers of people declaring themselves to be transsexual without having gone through the harrowing procedures the law then required, some people started crying ‘foul’ on the use of the term, insisting that without having undergone hormone treatment and/or surgery (‘non-op’, or at least a clear intention to do so (‘pre-op’) A.S.A.P., then it was ‘co-opting‘ language to use the term ‘transsexual’ and was, in effect, diminishing the suffering of ‘genuine transsexuals’.
So the term for pre- or non-op people became ‘transgender’, and the term ‘trans*’, with the ‘splat’ (asterisk) came into use as shorthand for the phrase ‘transsexual and/or transgender’; firstly, since people may like to have shortcuts for cumbersome phrases that might be repeated frequently in a piece of writing and, secondly, since people were wanting to be seen as sensitive to the two minority groups.
As we have seen, here and elsewhere, using the word ‘gender’ in such a way has caused far more confusion in wider feminist discourse than it has helped with clarification by sub-dividing what is already a very small group of people (who would have done better, in my opinion, by going for mutual support instead of playing oppression Olympics).
The thing is, ‘transsexual’ is a very useful word. It is simple to explain – “Embryonic brains are influenced in their development during gestation by sex hormones, just as embryonic bodies are; the embryo that eventually became me got enough male hormones at the critical time to make my brain male, but my body developed as female. This has led to me feeling all my life that my body doesn’t match my brain. Since I cannot change my brain (at least, not without changing my whole sense of ‘self’) I’d like to change my body.”
People understand that. They may have different ideas about solutions (“Get surgery, then”; “Try hormones”; or even “Pray harder”) but they seem to have no difficulty with the concept.
Change it to ‘transgender’ though, and there’s suddenly an enormous argument, which cannot be settled, simply because of the many, many, different definitions of the word ‘gender’ and all the talking at cross-purposes which follows.
I’ve recently noticed people dropping the asterisk from ‘trans*’ when using it as shorthand. Unfortunately, I don’t think that this means that we are going to go back to using ‘transsexual’; ‘transgender’ has been taken up as the word-to-use by so many sections of society, I feel that that particular horse has bolted.
So I think that we need, instead, to be vigilant about all equivocation, and to call it out. I’m fed up with so-called ‘trans activists’ and ‘trans allies’ making my life more difficult by overreaching with the whole offence thing. They do not speak for me (or for most of the transpeople I know) when they take language control to such ridiculous levels that no-one can discuss gender performance, or sexual attraction, from a feminist perspective any more without being labelled ‘TERF’.
‘…i’m not a big fan of Dennett in general because of his (as far as I know) continued support for Dawkins.’
Another Purity Test.
Which Dawkins? The clear-writing biologist, the unapologetic anti-theist , or the addled fuddy-duddy on Twitter?