Guest post: You don’t need to resort to palm trees to justify it
Originally a comment by Mosnae on Trans list.
The “appeal to nature” fallacy is well-known: the idea is, if something’s natural it must be good. Of course, this is ridiculous. What I think needs more attention is the converse fallacy eg. the idea that if something is good, it must be natural. You’d expect the silliness of this to be obvious, yet accross the political spectrum, there are constantly people who are trying to prove stuff is “natural” or “unnatural” just because they think it matches their political views.
Consider how homophobic rhetoric is ripe with claims that homosexuality is unnatural: that doesn’t automatically make it immoral, does it? Likewise, ancient civilisations usually being male-dominated isn’t convincing evidence for men being innately superior to women. Nor is it necessary to dig through History to find instances of powerful women in order to establish that sexism is bad. (Although it’s certainly enriching and informative.)
Really, reverse appeals to nature are an attempt to sidestep a real examination of the issue at hand. They’re nonsensical, but facile and unduly impressive. Now, evidently, their use doesn’t mean that the cause at hand must be wrong or unreasonnable; broken clocks can be right. A perfectly decent cause can have inept promoters, and indeed any movement that is large enough will be plagued by some amount of poor reasonings. But when practically all the discourse you encounter is focused on dubious claims about nature and History, none of which make much of a case for the movement’s actual goals, I’d say that’s a cue the movement is probably nuts.
If the concept of “gender identity” is good and legitimate and beneficial to humanity and whatever, you don’t need to resort to palm trees to justify it. If “gender identity” is good, you’re not demonstrating it by claiming that nature is [homophobic slur that starts with the letter Q]. You don’t need to legitimize it by exploring “the common patterns between biodiversity and gender identity,” whatever those are.
If “gender identity” is good, you can show it by explaining why it is good. In fact, I can’t think of any other way to show that it’s good. It’s really not too complicated, either. It’s even fairly straightforward.
Downplaying the importance of the “natural” is all well and good and true. But at the same time, we need to understand which things are natural and which things aren’t in order to correctly categorize them. And sometimes correctly categorizing something makes a huge difference in how it fits into our socially constructed, entirely unnatural moral social framework.
For example:
The fact that homosexuality is natural shouldn’t make a difference from a purely moral standpoint, because the act of two adults of any combination of sexes consensually rubbing various body parts together for pleasure cannot be the basis for a logical, reasonable moral objection.
So the moral case for legalizing individual homosexual sexual acts is neutral on the question of whether they are natural or not. So far, so simple.
But the fact that it’s natural for humans to distinguish between the sexes and react to people differently based on their biological sex is actually incredibly relevant to the argument against transgender extremism, because the extremists are trying to say that everyone should suppress their natural instinct to distinguish between the sexes.
This is an example of an argument where “natural” versus “unnatural” suddenly comes into play, and cannot be ignored.
One line of thinking says, if there’s no harm in people of any sex fooling around with each other, then there’s no harm in erasing the distiction between the sexes altogether. But the argument for allowing poeple to choose not to discriminate between the sexes when they choose their sex partners is one thing — it’s the foundation of bisexual rights. But the argument for allowing people to willfully discriminate between the sexes and exclude people based on their sex when choosing their sex partners is another thing: that is the foundation of straight and gay rights. And we need a basis to justify our willful exclusion and discrimination against specific individuals based on their sex.
And that basis is that the differences between males and females are NATURAL, salient categories.
We NEED to acknowledge that sex differences are not arbitrary or socially-constructed, because arbitrary, socially-constructed differences can be overcome through socialization, or anti-bias training, and natural instincts cannot. There IS harm in pretending the sexes are socially constructed, because we aren’t all naturally bisexual. And there IS harm in pretending that homosexuality is a social construct, because social constructs come in and out of fashion based on our social upbringing and other social factors.
That’s really the crux of a lot of people’s beef with the gender-critical movement: they have pulled so far back from the “natural” that the very concept puts them off. I’m of the (rather radical, I know) mind that we should lean back into the scientific, “natural” differences between the sexes in our arguments for feminism and gay rights. The salient, natural differences between the sexes are not feminism’s or gay rights’ enemy, even though in past decades they were treated that way. In the new paradigm, they’ve become tools to bolster our positions.
That is indeed the crux. For so long (for all of human history) the concepts of the good and natural have been so entwined that we, thinking ourselves to be specially and finally rational have decided to abolish them altogether. In that I disagree with Mosnae that the converse fallacy hasn’t been given sufficient attention. That the good is always natural is precisely the basis of the argument that being gay – and I mean the actual state of being gay, not homosexual acts – being unnatural is immoral. And so it’s not surprising that the gay movement has directed it’s efforts to invalidating that argument by disapproving the premise. But for those who identify as queer the violation of norms, and the natural is the ultimate norm since they were only half enlightened, is the core of their identity. So the bastard child of the two born into an age that sees itself at the end of history and thus fully enlightened (at least until the next update drops tomorrow) has a problem – a very big and very invisible elephant shaped one. They are rebelling against a nature they profess no longer to believe in (because that’s the game they’re playing) while reordering the perceptions of others which is simultaneously an indulgence in fantasy and exercise in boot-on-the-face realpolitik.
But that’s not really a problem because postmodernism tells us that there are no real problems, just narratives to “be questioned” until they fall apart of their own accord and it doesn’t tell us that we shouldn’t behave like the ultimate careerists, corporate or fascist, as long as we do it within the walls of institutions while presenting ourselves as happy players of games in public so let’s all just do that.
Fortunately there are people, let’s call them women, because that’s a name that somehow still manages to refer, who understand biology as destiny as a threat and therefore very much real in the real sense of ‘real’. Well, not fortunately,
since threat is the problem and has always been the problem. But the pampered Disney-bred players of games can never recognise that and therefore never win no matter how much pain they inflict before their defeat.
There are people blaming genderism on feminism, saying that if feminists hadn’t pushed so hard to be seen as the equals of men, we wouldn’t be in this mess. That is, of course, a misinterpretation of the feminist position. Yes, some feminists quite likely do believe that fighting for equal rights and liberation from patriarchal constraints entails claiming that there’s no difference between the sexes at all, but that’s far from the majority opinion and is as nonsensical as the genderist position that the sexes are mutable at will. I believe that is a deliberate distortion of the feminist position, likely originally promulgated by powerful men in media and politics who didn’t want anyone understanding the true position. “Look at these silly women, claiming that they are the same as men!”
The actual feminist position which most feminists of my acquaintance espouse, is that in most spheres of modern human endeavour – such as on the shop floor and in politics and the boardroom – there is no Earthly reason for women to be excluded from career progression (and paid less in the meantime) for doing the same job just as well as a man. As I pointed out to management at one temporary job (I didn’t last long – I walked out), that unless they had a particularly odd forklift truck which required a penis to be inserted for it to work, there was no reason for them to require us to wait (sometimes for ages) for a male forklift driver to become available when my female colleague had a forklift licence and the machine was parked, unused, right by the pallets we were sorting. It is that kind of egregious sexism which is still going on (that particular incident was in 2007, but it still goes on).
No second-wave feminist I know would claim seriously that because women should be allowed to operate machinery, then men should be allowed to compete against women in sports, and rapists should be locked up with women too poor to pay their TV licence.
I actually have an article about appeals to nature being an unsatisfying source of argumentative support, and I’m happy to see some of my ideas reflected in Mosnae’s ruminations.
To wit,
Perhaps the rest is also of interest here.
For every single person who says “natural doesn’t matter” I ask:
What is the basis for my moral right, as a homosexual, to willfully and deliberately EXCLUDE members of the opposite sex from my sexuality? This includes my willful, deliberate decision to REFUSE entry of females into spaces that I deem NATURALLY unfit for my sexuality.
I want male-only bars and male-only sex dens to exist. I EXCLUDE females from them. On the basis that my NATURAL sexuality causes me distress in the presence of females.
Tell me I’m wrong.
Arty, wouldn’t that be the same right (I refuse to use the word ‘moral’) that justifies us excluding people from our lives for any reason (including but not restricted to, sexuality). I remember being accosted on a bus by a young man who decided I should have a conversation with him because he thought I looked interesting. For a brief moment I felt something of what it must be like to be a woman (though there was no physical threat – there were other passengers and he was half my size.) I think I was justified in refusing the conversation which is to say I don’t believe I had any ethical duty to meet his demands but I’m struggling to see how an appeal to the natural would help there. I mean there is the minimal duty not to do harm which is based on our understanding of psychology but that’s usually satisfied by basic politeness. Beyond that I don’t know.
Arty, whether your sexual orientation is natural or not shouldn’t matter. I realize I am espousing perfect worldism here, but if the world worked right, even if homosexuality were a choice, so what? A person should be allowed the right to choose their sexual partners, barring such barriers as age, disability, and failure (or inability) to consent.
I think it is a weakness of the stances most of us have taken, homosexuality as natural (which I have no problem accepting). There should be freedom of choice, just like in women’s reproductive rights. It doesn’t hurt anyone, and doesn’t do any damage to society, if you choose to have a sexual partner your neighbor does not approve of.
So I usually avoid the ‘natural’ argument on this, as well as on other things. I honestly don’t think it was the argument that it is ‘natural’ that won over the populace on gay rights. I think for a lot of people it was finding out how many gay people they knew, and liked, and knew were not dangerous. Eventually people just sort of started to shrug; so what, they said. None of my business. Obviously we don’t have that in every person, or in every sector, so there is work to do, but I think the choice argument is as strong an argument as the ‘natural’ argument – stronger, because if someone were to show it was not ‘natural’, the choice argument still stands. In a free society, making a choice of sexual partners should be accepted (given the above caveats).