Certificates determine reality
Gillian Keegan has said men who undergo gender reassignment are women.
Last month, the Education Secretary told The Telegraph that she would no longer say that trans women were women, saying her understanding of the issue had “evolved”.
But in an interview with Radio 4’s Today programme, she said it depended whether the person was self-identifying as the opposite sex or whether they had actually obtained a gender reassignment certificate from a doctor.
That’s so idiotic. You might as well say it depended whether the person was self-identifying as an airplane or whether they had actually obtained an object reassignment certificate from a doctor.
A doctor issuing a “certificate” doesn’t and can’t make a man into a woman. That’s something that can’t be done. Changing appearance just changes appearance, it doesn’t change the underlying reality. Sometimes appearance is all there is, but being a woman or a man is not one of those times.
To gain a gender recognition certificate, a person must have a signed report from a specialist doctor showing they have “gender dysphoria”, which means they are distressed because of the mismatch between their biological sex and their gender identity.
Being unhappy about being X does not make you not X. You could be unhappy about not being a plant or a house or a sandwich, but that wouldn’t make you a plant or a house or a sandwich. Issue all the certificates you like, but it won’t change that.
Grilled on the subject by new Today presenter Emma Barnett, Ms Keegan said she had “always known that trans women aren’t women”.
She said there was a “huge difference between self-identification, people who want to identify but still have a male body, biologically are male: and then there are a very, very small number of people … who do have and have had gender reassignment and reassignment surgery”.
Which still doesn’t make them women.
Asked if she would say that people who had gone through gender reassignment were women, she said: “Well, this is what we should say. I personally believe if you have gone to that level of, you have got the gender recognition, you have got the reassignment, then you are legally and medically allowed to say that you are a woman.”
But that’s a different thing. Being allowed to say you’re a woman is not the same as being a woman.
Labour’s shadow education minister Catherine McKinnell said: “Teaching children about the facts of the world in which they grow up must include an understanding that there are people who are transgender, that people can go through a process of change of their gender, and that the law provides for that.”
No, it mustn’t. That’s a stupid fantasy and there’s nothing educational about it.
It’s interesting to push people on a claim like this, because they didn’t when they accepted it. They have to work backward to the justification on the spot, which isn’t easy when there’s no valid argument that can get you there from sound premises.
Honestly, that’s a distinction I think she was actually trying to include in her statement. I think the Telegraph overstated her position in their lede. Now, what ‘legally allowed to call yourself a woman’ includes is still up for discussion, but it’s still a step forward.
-asked someone to write it on a piece of paper.
Having failed to think very long or hard about trans “rights” when they took them on board means they’re having to defend claims that are impossible and extreme.
Humans have gender identities.
Humans can be “born in the wrong body.”
Gender identity over-rides sex.
In humans, sex is a spectrum.
Humans can change sex.
Each of these claims about the nature of material reality requires evidence and proof on its own, yet they’re usually sold together as a package, and discussed as if they were self-evidently true and necessarily connected. It’s not a single claim, but a whole mess of them, all of which are bullshit. Even if there were such things as “gender identities” none of the other claims would follow from that fact. There is nothing about the existence of putative “gender identity” that overturns the immutable, binary nature of human sexes. Even if being “born in the wrong body” was a thing, the brute fact of two, unchangeable and unchanging human sexes stands. Why wouldn’t it? Genderists still have all their work ahead of them. As an analogy, proving the existence of a god or gods would not prove the existence of Jesus. It could be that the gods are the Olympian or Hindu pantheons, or some other yet to be (or no longer) worshipped deity. Christians would still have to demonstrate the existence of their particular god before they could claim victory/hegemony/whatever.
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Body capable of producing small gametes – Male? TICK
Body capable of producing small gametes with gametes production removed – Female? CROSS. Still Male.