No One Denies Trans People's Right To Exist
Or tries to "define them out of existence"
Many of you know that my views on trans issues are solidly left of center. I think that people can change their gender, that you ought to refer to trans people with the pronouns they wish you to refer to them with, and that they face a significant amount of unfair discrimination. I even suspect that many people’s views on trans people are largely driven by aesthetic revulsion, and that reasoning comes later to justify the initial feeling of disgust one has towards androgynous people!
But many people on my side can’t help but say stupid and hyperbolic things. I’ve heard people declare in left-wing spaces there’s a genocide of trans people, which is obviously ridiculous. Trans people are not being rounded up in camps and exterminated. No one wants to kill them.
Less perniciously but more commonly, the dominant view among those on the left seems to be that a man is simply one who calls themself a man. This is an absolutely terrible definition! It’s flagrantly circular because it uses the term it’s defining; a bit like claiming that a Glosh is whatever has Gloshy properties. What are they identifying as? Surely they’re not merely identifying as one who calls themself a man. For then they’d identify as one who calls themself a man, and one who calls themself one who calls themself a man, and so on ad infinitum, without the term man having any deeper meaning. But normally for one to call oneself a thing, they have some deeper idea of what the thing is!
(For the right definition, see here).
One of the more irritating features of those on my side of the aisle is their bizarre tendency to hyperbole. It isn’t enough to say that trans people are often treated unfairly—they must claim they’re subject to genocide. It isn’t enough to merely note that trans people commit suicide at disproportionate rates—they must repeat the falsehood that they only live to be 35 on average.
This isn’t good for either pushing trans rights politically or for trans people themselves. Telling people that they’re subject to murderous government purges isn’t good for their mental health. Sounding like hysterical lunatics is not the way to get policy reform.
Reading about the civil rights movement, one gets the sense of how ruthlessly tactical they were. They didn’t just complain about injustice, they thought carefully about the PR ramifications of their protests. The same is true of those who advocated for gay rights. Trans advocates, in contrast, seem to treat PR norms with derision. If people aren’t already on board, they’re thought to be irredeemable. Being outrageous and pushing for wildly unpopular programs like trans women being allowed to compete in women’s sports is seen as a minimum requirement for remaining pure.
One of the more irritating instances of hyperbole among trans activists is their use of the phrase: “define trans people out of existence,” or “denies trans people’s right to exist.” They usually use this to describe laws that don’t acknowledge the existence of trans people and suggest that whether one is a woman or man is solely determined by their sex.
These phrases are dumb.
Denying that a person has a property they think they have isn’t denying their existence. Donald Trump seems to think—or at least pretends to think—that he has the property of being the rightful winner of the 2020 election. I disagree! This does not mean I deny that he exists. I am well aware that he exists—much to my chagrin! I simply don’t think he has some property that he thinks he has.
Imagine how irritating it would be if Republicans began claiming that Democrats “deny people who were cheated out of the 2020 election’s right to exist,” or attempted to “define them out of existence.” This would be absurd—we deny that anyone has that property, but don’t deny that any existing person ought to be allowed to continue existing. Denying a person has a property that they think they have is not the same as calling for their execution.
Those who deny that trans women are women don’t think they should be killed. Nor do they think that, say, Contrapoints (a trans YouTuber) doesn’t exist. Rather, they simply think that Contrapoints isn’t the gender that she thinks she is. I think they’re wrong, but they’re not denying anyone’s existence.
Given how these activists use the phrase “right to exist”, no one has a right to exist! Certainly one has a right against being killed. But one does not have an inalienable right to be believed to have whichever properties they think they have. Many people are wrong about their properties. These people still exist!
Also, a person cannot be defined out of existence. Whether one exists is not a matter of definition. If the whole world began to define the term “exists” not to include me, I wouldn’t suddenly pop out of being. Similarly, if the government passes a law that claims that one’s gender and sex are the same, trans people do not pop out of being. We’re not talking about the ontological argument here! Defining something as real does not make it so!
The expression is quite easy to patch up. Instead of saying some law “defines trans people out of existence,” as if they’ll imminently disappear upon the passing of the law, simply say some law “declares there aren’t any trans people, in the sense of people whose gender is different from their sex.” This communicates precisely the same idea, without needing insane-sounding hyperbole.
The reason, however, that people use this pointless hyperbole is because of its crucial ambiguity. It manages to make the thing described sound far more flagrantly sinister than it is. Just as Republicans have begun calling the influx of mostly peaceful illegal immigrants an “invasion,” those on the left desire to use similarly bombastic language when describing such laws. As a result, they use the phrases “define out of existence” and “deny the right to exist,” because they sound as if they’re discussing genocide when they’re really discussing a shift in legal categorization.
It is the classic case of the Motte and Bailey, where one cloaks their extreme idea in the clothing of a moderate idea. The Bailey is that Republicans deny one can change their gender. The Motte is that they want to murder trans people. The use of this phrase helpfully allows one to ambiguously slide between the two different meanings. The utterance does not clearly pick out one over the other.
I’m against the laws that declare that one’s gender is the same as their sex. These laws seem pointlessly cruel and have harmful legal implications. But one should discuss those things—their legal implications—rather than merely hyperbolizing. An argument by bombastic rhetoric is not convincing, and should not be convincing.
While a mere shift in language can’t cause trans people to stop existing, it can cause this terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad phrase from existing. If trans activists want to win, they ought to stop using the phrase and try to be a good deal more pragmatic. Merely signaling the radicalism of one’s own stances doesn’t solve anyone’s problems.
This is a kind of intellectually dishonest rhetoric that I see a lot. I'm not sure if there's a name for it, but it basically involves using words and definitions to put certain intuitions in people's heads that the basic facts of the situation wouldn't. For instance, you might have a word like "genocide," for which people have some very extreme ideas in their heads. And people have tried to write down some definitions and criteria to capture these mental concepts referred to by "genocide." But then minimal satisfaction of the written criteria, often in a roundabout way, is used by people to argue that something is genocide, even though the actual reality of the situation doesn't match people's intuitions about what genocide means. But because those intuitions exist, people end up thinking the situation is much worse than it really is simply because someone convinced them that something technically meets the written criteria for genocide. You can make a case that certain trans legislation technically meets the criteria for genocide, but that doesn't really tell you anything because the intuitions you'll get from that will be wrong. As you pointed, the right does this for words like invasion. It's really quite a dishonest trick and people should stop doing it.
I feel like when people talk about denying trans people’s right to exist, they are talking about that persons right to exist *in so far as* they are a trans person. If being trans is an incredibly integral part of someone existence, and a legislative body renders living out that experience illegal, they are denying that person their right to exist (as a trans person). That implicit ‘as a trans person’ is really important though because of how inextricably linked it is to the individuals identity.
As an analogy a government might make it illegal to read or practice philosophy, and people might say they are denying the right to exist of philosophers. Likewise there is an implicit ‘as philosophers’ there, but supposing many philosophers are so connected to philosophy that it is an integral part of their identity, it seems like omitting that appended phrase isn’t actually that crazy.