Lyman Stone writes about trans people:
Most liberals who say “trans women are women” do not believe that a biological male who self-identifies as a woman can bear a child. This is surely a very uncommon belief. In my Substack notes there was a dustup because I noted that I actually do have a friend who refuses against all efforts to admit that trans women cannot have children, and who insists on statements that definitely imply trans women can have children, and thus I think it’s reasonable to think my friend believes trans women can have children. My noting this caused some confusion; readers appeared to think I was saying all liberals have this extreme belief. I don’t think that. Surely almost none do.
Yet they continue saying trans women are women, i.e. to reject the use of additional adjectival qualifiers to separate biologically female women from non-biologically female “women”! But the definition of the female sex in any species is indeed based on gamete size, i.e. reproductive capacity under healthy conditions! You can’t just used sexed terms then act like they mean something other than reproduction!
“Well but sex isn’t gender!” This is another thing many liberals say but don’t really believe, or at least I hope they are lying about believing it. If you ask someone “What’s your gender?” they will usually answer you based on their biological sex. They will rarely introspect and say, “Well, do I display masculine-typical or feminine-typical traits?” They will simply report a term corresponding to their genitalia. It’s not a spectrum.
The invention of the fraudulent concept of gender identity has complicated this, but less than you might think— some people who are of one biological sex will insist on a social gender at odds with that sex. But hold on, what is a social gender? If I say something is “masculine” what do I mean? Aggressive? Hairy? Likes football? What makes something masculine? The answer is simple: traits are masculine because they are typical of male-sex individuals. Thus, gender simply reduces to “stereotypes about sex.” There is no concept of gender which is non-sex-referential. Consider for a moment an analogy to political party: you can have a Democratic Party without a Republican Party! The Republican Party could go belly up and the Democratic Party could still be as coherent an entity as it is today.
But there is no concept of gender without sex. Genders just are designated kinds of stereotypical relationships to sex. If humans had three gamete sizes instead of two, we would not have a “gender binary,” we would have a “gender trinary,” because gender just is stereotypes about sex. That’s it, and that’s all. And gender ideas are highly arbitrary stereotypes. If a woman is a lumberjack does her gender change? Why not? If an individual actually has no masculine traits but identifies as a man? i.e. a fem-presenting-masc-identified-bio-female (I know one!). This is all nonsense. If I wrote that my gender is “demographer” you would say that’s absurd, that’s crazy, that’s not a gender, but why not? Why shouldn’t my gender be demographer? Because of course, we all recognize gender is just sex in a liberalism trenchcoat. That is to say, gender is a nonsense concept. It’s a classic case of actual philosophical bullshit. If tomorrow we invented a new category, “blurg” vs. “zorp,” and we assigned everybody as either blurg or zorp, those categories would be just as socially meaningful as gender-as-separate-from-sex is. You don’t actually have a notion of gender you can define without talking about biological sex, such a definition does not exist, because the whole concept of gender is really just stereotypes about biological sex.
This is all very obvious to anybody who has not had their brain fried by the particular psychoses of the extremely online west from 2005-present.
Now, there are questions that I think the trans movement is correct on, but where the case is genuinely difficult to make: questions like “why do we care about people’s squishy inner feelings?” and “are nontransitioning people the gender they identify as?” and “what exactly is a nonbinary person?” But Lyman Stone has very graciously arranged to have the argument on the territory where the trans movement is straightforwardly right.
Okay, sure, I produce eggs and therefore I am a bio-female. Sure. And I am pretty feminine in a lot of ways, and therefore I am fem-presenting. I will accept that.
But because I have biomedically transitioned:
I can grow a beard.
I have a deep voice (well, trans-dude-gay-frog-voice, but who’s counting).
I have body hair.
I don’t have breasts.
My body fat is distributed in a male pattern.
I am physically strong and it would be unfair for me to compete in most women’s sports. (But I’m unathletic enough that it mostly counterbalances it.)
I am at elevated risk of certain diseases more common among men, like cardiovascular disease.
My blood tests are run using different thresholds for certain biomarkers.
The word for these experiences is _______.
