Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on What is up for debate.

It’s difficult to represent the strongest form of their argument, not because their argument is bad, but because they have multiple arguments pointing to multiple conclusions that are mutually exclusive. The ends of their motte’s arguments are different from the ends of their bailey’s arguments. The arguments deployed in the motte are actually logically incompatible with those deployed in the bailey, so we’d have to handle each of those separately.

Even restricting our attention to just the motte or just the bailey, however, we find mutually exclusive arguments in terms of both premises and conclusions. In the motte, for instance, some arguments proceed from the premise that gender has no biological components, while others proceed from claims about neurology. Some conclude that we ought pretend that TWAW; others conclude that TW literally AW. Some don’t even go as far as pretending TWAW, and instead retreat past the gender motte all the way to freedom of belief.

We can’t steelman conclusions. We steelman arguments for given positions. It’s fundamentally impossible to steelman an argument for a position until you decide what that position actually is. Genderists intentionally don’t do that, in the same way and for the same reasons that the Karen Armstrongs of the world, the apophatic theologians and apologists, refuse to take a defined position on the nature and attributes of God. By leaving their conclusion formless and void, they’re free to deploy whatever arguments they want according to rhetorical expedience, and perhaps more importantly, they’realways free to say that their interlocutors are not engaging with their actual conclusions.

If you’re paying attention, you’ll have realized that this is precisely the motte and bailey. Make an argument for a conclusion and retreat when pressed, accusing your interlocutor of attacking a phantom. The trick works because we do on occasion misinterpret people’s intent. So we do have to acknowledge that sometimes our opponents really were always in the motte, and we only imagined that they’d attempted to occupy the bailey. (It’s a big reason I tend toward pedantry: it minimizes, but unfortunately doesn’t eliminate, this sort of honest misunderstanding.) Apologists, whether theists or Genderists, exploit this necessary conversational concession.