Reasonable people know better than to take all assertions on faith
Miranda Yardley wrote a piece about the problems with what she calls transgender ideology the other day. It’s a list of “some of the things the things that transgender ideology needs to do so that it may support the lives of women.”
- Accept that feminism and other women’s movements do not and should not centre transgender people. At the moment, trans is dominating the discussions, even causing huge ideological rifts, within feminism, yet here in the UK today’s news (22 June) reports hospital statistics showing 632 new cases of Female Genital Mutilation in the West Midlands (apparently girls “are brought to Birmingham to be cut”) from September 2014 to March 2015.
That first item on the list all by itself would do a lot to end the ideological rifts. Have you noticed how no other political movement is expected to do this – to stop talking about its own issues and talk about other people’s instead? Have you noticed that it’s only women who are told to do that? And many women nod enthusiastically and do just that.
Of course seeing it that way relies on thinking that trans women aren’t women in exactly the same way that women are women. The ideology, on the other hand, is that trans women are women in exactly the same way that women are women, and that it’s the worst possible thing not to agree. But then if trans women are women in exactly the same way that women are women, then what does it mean to say feminism should center trans women? This gets us to Miranda’s second item:
2. Accept that innate gender identity is based on ideas with such a tenuous link to observed science it is barely a conjecture. The transgender claim to womanhood (or manhood) is completely dependent on this concept of an innate gender identity, and taking this away strips the movement of its cloak of being a civil rights movement, championing the fight of an oppressed minority, and instead reveals this to be the cross-dressing wolf of men’s rights activism, huffing and puffing at feminism and women.
It also relies on self-description, in other words on bare assertion. That’s a problem. Reasonable people know better than to take all assertions on faith. Reasonable people understand that mere statements are not automatically true just because someone makes them. It’s very far from clear to me why that commonplace and very useful understanding is set aside in the case of “self-identification” by self-declared trans people, very especially trans women. (It’s funny how comparatively quiet trans men are, isn’t it? Or maybe it isn’t, maybe it’s more that it’s completely unsurprising and predictable. Women aren’t raised to think they get to demand all the oxygen in the room.) The idea is that “trans women are women,” end of – but at the same time it’s not that any random schmuck gets to say “I’m a woman” and that’s that. No no – it has to be a trans women. It would be very wrong for a cis man to say “I’m a woman.” But how do they know? How do they know which ones are just saying it and which ones are trans? Or, how do they know that all the ones saying it are in fact trans?
I can’t for the life of me figure that out, and no one has explained it to me.
These two items in conjunction are causing a lot of dissension. It would be nice if we could have reasoned discussions about them, but we can’t, at least not yet.
As I said in my post #25 on the ‘Fighting this for decades’ post, it’s almost as though a certain section of the trans women community are saying ‘It’s o.k. we are penis-owners and therefore are naturally in charge; you vagina-owning women can step back now and leave the feminism to us’.
I find the second point to be too harsh. It’s quite clear that gender dysphoria is a thing. Or sex dysphoria. Something, anyway, that makes people feel deeply wrong until they do something to realign their bodies and social roles with their mental maps. Biological sex isn’t a simple binary, it’s a complicated construct of physiology, genes, hormones, embryonic development, mental body maps and more. It’s hardly surprising it goes wrong sometimes; biology is messy like that. People with this problem need help, not stigmatisation and violence. And since gender stigmatism is in the feminist remit, it does make sense that we have common cause.
I do agree that calling that feeling “innate gender” seems like a bad idea. “Sex” perhaps, but not gender.
Reminds me of this episode, good to see more people are catching on to it.
Ah yes Holmes, they were good times.
I think of trans people as people with their psychological sex and their body sex being opposites. Trans people thus experience themselves as being their psychological sex and having opposite-sex bodies. A transwoman experiences herself as a woman with a male body, and a transman experiences himself as a man with a female body.
The opposite of trans people is cis people, those with the same psychological sex and body sex.
I’m with Alethea on this, and would like to reiterate that the problem stemmed from years ago, when those who had surgically transitioned decided that the term ‘transsexual’ was their exclusive property and transsexual people who had not yet completed their transition could not use it. So dysphoric people such as myself had to cast around for another term, and ‘transgender’ did the job nicely until a couple of years ago, when people started to redefine the word and it all started to fall apart.
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This comment by Ophelia:
is something I encounter a lot in discussions on multi-faith/atheism discussion sites. In one particular Facebook group, we had a Roman Catholic who simply was incapable of seeing that a claim could not be considered evidence for that claim, even though several people tried every which way to explain it to him. He continued to insist, basically, that there was no smoke without fire* and simply didn’t seem capable of understanding that people lie.
*The particular example he used was that of a schoolkid telling a teacher that another kid had pushed him over – he said that the claim itself was evidence that the other kid had done something, and the more kids that say they saw it, the stronger the evidence. Religion poisons everything, even the concept of ‘evidence’. If the church can convince someone utterly that ‘eye-witness testimony’ is evidence, then we have a big problem.
tiggertwing, you seem a bit confused yourself about what consitiutes evidence. The proposition “John pushed Jim over” is clearly not evidence for itself, however if Jim claims that John pushed him then that clearly is evidence for the proposition. Evidence of this sort is accepted as being evidence in courts of law every day; otherwise why bother with having witnesses? Whether it is very good evidence is an entirely different matter, and surely it must be the case that corroboration can only strengthen its evidential status. The problem with the notion that there is “no smoke without fire,” at least in a case like this, is not that it leads one to accept as evidence that which is not evidence but that it prejudges one’s evaluation of such evidence.
Of course mere repetition of a claim, i.e. a repetition other things being equal, doesn’t strengthen its evidential status. But other things very often are not equal; there are indeed cases where it might seem reasonable to take a repetition of a claim as strengthening its status as evidence. Examples would be where one might loose financially or incur punishment by so doing. A case in point would be that of a convicted prisoner who insists on maintaining his/her innocence in spite of the fact that this may scupper any chances of parole and, in consequence, might add years to the sentence.
To get back to your Roman Catholic friend, I take it that he/she would say that the fact that the Bible says that Jesus walked on water is evidence for the proposition “Jesus walked on water.” As far as I can see that is correct; the former is evidence for the latter; it’s just that it is not very good evidence.
You end up by saying “If the Church can convince someone utterly that ‘eye-witness testimony’ is evidence, then we have a big problem.” I’m sorry, but eye-witness testimony just is evidence, indeed, many would take it as a paradigm case of evidence. I don’t see what is to be gained by denying this.
Evidence in a court of law and scientific evidence are two very different things.
Ophelia, I am confused. We do hear the voices of trans men, where do the requests for using language like “people with uteri” come from, certainly not from trans women…
And again, asking for rock solid scientific evidence before taking seriously people’s claim about their experiences sounds somewhat reminiscent of the kind of crap Dawkins likes to pull out. I thought you fought him on this.
Otherwise, I tend to agree with the fact that trans women joining and seeking acceptance in the feminist movement should rather do so as women and avoid trying to neuter the language. It would also probably be better to recognize feminism as, at its roots, a gender abolitionist movement and fighting this is probably not a good idea.
On the contrary, mostly from trans women and “allies.” They’re speaking for trans men.
Well I didn’t say anything about rock solid scientific evidence. I said “Reasonable people know better than to take all assertions on faith. Reasonable people understand that mere statements are not automatically true just because someone makes them.” That’s different. And is it wrong? Is it claiming too much? Is it really a norm that we should accept all assertions as true, no matter what?
Of course it’s not.
Also, the issue isn’t (as you said) “people’s claim about their experiences”; it’s people’s claims about their identity. It’s not claims such as “Some guy cornered me in an elevator the other night” but claims such as “I am African American” or “I am a neurosurgeon” or “I am from the gas company and I need to come into your house and look around.” Those are two different kinds of claims.
Also, I’ve never made any blanket claim that anything anyone says about her experiences should be believed. I would never say that, because it would be fatuous. Some people swear they were abducted by aliens.
So it depends. It depends on the kind of claim, the circumstances, background knowledge, possible hidden agendas, and so on.
I disagree with you, Bernard.
A claim is just a claim – it is not evidence at all. Now, people may put more or less weight on the claim, depending on perceived honesty of the claimant perhaps, but that assessment would be based on evidence.
Even in law, testimony carries the lowest weight of all the presentations to the court, and will be ignored if it contradicts material evidence.
It wouldn’t matter if fifty people claimed in thousand-word statements that they saw John Smith crash his blue car into the white van, if the paint marks left on the van are red every word will be thrown out. Nobody would be running tests to see if automotive paints can change colour so dramatically.
Wait. Testimony is fallible – but that’s not the same as not being evidence at all, is it?
Evidence isn’t all one thing; there are categories of evidence. Also, as amrie said @ 8, it means different things in court and in the lab.
There are criteria for evaluating testimony, but again that doesn’t mean it’s not evidence at all.
We talked about this a lot during the Shermer Wars.
I dunno. When people say they’re gay, you kind of have to take that on faith. Somebody could be lying about that, but is it necessary to be skeptical or demand proof, or say being gay is a made-up or fake identity because you can’t prove it (at least if you’re celibate) and it has to do with your internal feelings?
The current trans-fascist tropes depend on gender-essentialism of a kind that would be obviously reactionary in ANY other context.
‘It would be very wrong for a cis man to say “I’m a woman.” But how do they know? How do they know which ones are just saying it and which ones are trans?’
There’ll have to be an Inquisition to unearth the Morescos among the Conversos. I’m sure it’s on the way already.
Sorry, I still don’t see claims as being evidence of any kind. Now, that isn’t to say that courts can’t rule on conflicting claims – obviously, they do that all the time.
We are used to balancing claims and counter-claims. They are common facts of everyday life. They may even feel like evidence, since we are used to trusting what people say they saw or did, unless the claim is extraordinary (like alien abduction). We are so used to trusting one another, in fact, that scammers use that trust to dupe people; and the people they dupe are often so sure of their judgement that they will continue to trust the scammer in the face of actual evidence that they are being scammed. Witness the success of so-called alternative ‘medicine’ in the face of mountains of evidence that it is at best useless, and at worst lethal (either due to toxicity, or if only by keeping people from genuine treatment that would save their lives).
The process of transition used to be far too arduous, but I think that there should at least be some kind of medical/psychiatric assessments before anyone can be treated as their target sex, if only to protect vulnerable women from predators simply claiming to be trans in order to get access to them. Such as the rapist trying to get into a women’s prison.
Agreed in principle. More than just “in principle,” even. I’m at least tentatively open to asking for ID, for example. Disclaimer, though: I have no idea what’s involved in getting a new ID as the sex not assigned at birth. There may be legitimate problems with simply demanding a “female” ID as a blanket requirement.
But this bit about declaring oneself trans in order to get into a women’s prison. In practice, has any rapist (or any other man) actually attempted such? Have they come within a mile of getting assigned to a women’s prison? Is the bar so low today that a person can check off the “W” box and be sent to the land of captive potential victims? Do judges look uncritically at claims by men with washboard abs and a street name of “Killer Mike” whose facebook profile contains zero pictures of “Killer Mike” in a dress? Or is the risk confined to fine-boned cross-dressing rapists named “Pat” and “Chris” and “Terry”?
Dan @ 13 – sure, but the two are not the same.
This is the story currently making the rounds…
http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2016/03/04/transgender-woman-sentenced-to-eight-years-in-male-prison-after-raping-teenager/
The person raped a fifteen-year old in 2004; ten years later in 2014 was convicted of possessing huge quantities of child porn – and started transitioning. No surgery yet.
To AMA@17:
In the US this varies between states. For Federal documents (passports, certificate of naturalization/citizenship, social security card) the person would need a formal letter from a doctor saying the person completed appropriate clinical treatment for gender transition. There is no requirement to detail what the treatment was, so it is up to the doctor to decide what counts. (If the doctor doesn’t find the statement appropriate there is an alternative where the doctor states that the person is in the process of treatment for gender transition, in which case the person gets a passport with limited validity and has to apply for a full validity one at a later point, presumably after completing the treatment.) In some states requirements are more specific, resulting in people who are legally transitioned on their Federal documents but not on their state ID.
In Israel the case used to be that surgery was an absolute requirement for legal gender transition, but in recent years this has been removed. Still, they apparently want some kind of declaration from a doctor that some kind of irreversible change has happened.
Can someone, anyone, tell me what “psychologically a woman” means? What is it that women can feel or think or want that men cannot feel or think or want? I need concrete examples. For all the idiots braying about “sex is not binary,” you all know how babies are made. You all know that your mother was female and your father was male. If the definitions of female = ova-producer and male = sperm-producer are somehow no longer admissible because a tiny number of people are intersex, please tell me the definition for psychological womanhood and psychological manhood for which the exceptions are not greater than the rule. Also, please tell me the acceptable language for “that 50% of the human population that does 99% of the work of procreation and which has been discriminated against for millennia by the 50% of the human population that does 1% of the work of procreation.” THANKS.
#22 MHG,
No, they can’t. There’s biological sex and there are gender stereotypes. One is a physical reality and the other is a social construct (although very real nonetheless). Neither is psychological.
@MHG and Cressida,
A person may have a sense of their biological sex that is at odds with their body, caused by a glitch in the brain’s body-mapping, or something like that. I suppose that could be expressed as “psychologically a woman.”
But if that’s what they mean, it’s a misleading way to put it, and an antifeminist, gender-stereotype supporting one.
@ 23 Cressida
Thanks for clearing that up. I’m sure actual researchers in the field will by fascinated by your insights.
#25 Silentbob, I don’t trust media representations of scientific studies. If you can point me at an original scientific publication that argues against what I said, I will read it and comment.
#24 Lady Mondegreen, that’s really my point though. What is a “sense” of biological sex? What is a “sense” of having male/female sex characteristics, chromosomes, and gametes? Because that’s all biological sex is.
@Cressida–I did not know the correct term for it, but this is what I was referring to:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortical_homunculus
[shrug]
@Cressida,
Uh huh. That was implied in my choice of the word “may.”