Why I Think Trans Women Are Women

And trans men are men

0 Introduction

I recently participated in a debate with Chris Date about trans stuff. The debate topic was a bit of a mouthful: “The terms 'man' and 'woman' are references to mature human males and females, respectively, rather than categories of gender as a sociocultural construct.” Chris was on the affirmative, I was on the negative. With light edits, what I have produced below is my opening statement from that debate. Hope you enjoy!

Let me first tell you what I think the terms man and woman refer to. There are a series of traits typically possessed by and associated with biological females. Not all women share all of these traits but having them is correlated with being female. These traits include:

• Possessing secondary sex characteristics.

• Using she her pronouns to describe oneself.

• Having long hair.

• Various personality differences. For instance, men tend to be more interested in things and women tend to be more interested in people on average. Women tend to be more nurturing and caring.

• Painting one’s nails.

• Having a high voice.

• Being born female.

And so on. In short, these feminine traits are what determine whether when you interact with a person, you think of them as a woman. Intuitively it’s easy to think of, say, Blaire White as a woman, even though she has small gametes. This is because she has a significant number of feminine traits. The same points apply, in reverse, to the word man—it refers to people with a significant number of masculine traits.

Chris, in contrast, thinks that the term woman univocally and unambiguously refers to members of the female sex. In what follows, I’ll give some arguments against that. But first, let me give an analogy for broadly how I think about the word woman.

For a while, the word parent referred primarily to a biological characteristic—namely, the person whose sex act produced a child. It comes from the Latin parens meaning “one who begets or brings forth.” But then over time, the term parent came to have a broader meaning and include, for instance, step parents. We saw that step parents are relevantly like parents in various important respects, and so the biological definition was too narrow. For this reason, the term was broadened to include those who fulfill a broader parenting role.

This was quite a fortunate development. Counting step parents as parents is quite a good thing! Because they should be treated like parents in all sorts of ways, broadening this definition was a good thing. It would be silly to insist that parent must be a biological term because it has been in the past.

I think the word woman is similar. For a while it was primarily used to mean adult human female. But over time, the definition changed, largely based on normative considerations. It would similarly be silly to cling to the old definition when the definition has changed.

1 Multiple usages

My first argument is that the terms man and woman are used in lots of different ways. At the very least, this should mean that the term is polysemous—having multiple permissible meanings—rather than, as Chris asserts, univocally meaning adult human female and male. When chemists talk about something being toxic, they mean something differently from when therapists do. But neither of them are wrong—there simply are two distinct permissible meanings.

Similarly, if all Democrats used the term “fish” just to mean “aquatic animal of some sort” that would start being a permissible definition. A definition is only impermissible if it goes overwhelmingly against common usage. But the definition that I’ve given simply doesn’t do that! Lots and lots of people use the term woman to include trans women and vice versa.

In light of this, it seems that at the very least there will be multiple permissible definitions. Thus, given that Chris is committed to the terms 'man' and 'woman' univocally reference biological sex, his position is implausible.

2 Better captures intuitions

My second argument is that my definition of the term woman captures linguistic intuitions much better than the alternative. Consider Blaire White, for instance. It feels highly unnatural to refer to Blaire White as a man. While Chris claims that treating trans people as the sex that they identify as stems from ideological commitments, one only treats Blaire White as a man if they are ideologically committed to doing so. Conservatives often struggle to refer to trans women as men because they seem like women so much.

Similarly, consider Buck Angel. Buck Angel sure does not seem like a woman. Yet Buck was born female. There are many people like this—Janet Mock, for instance.

There are all sorts of other ways that Buck Angel seems like a man. For instance, most people would hope that Buck would use the men’s restroom. But presumably it should be men that are using the men’s restroom. Similarly, if a male was attracted to Angel, they’d probably be gay. But being attracted to women generally doesn’t make a person gay.

Now, this isn’t totally dispositive. You can imagine cases where being attracted to a woman would be evidence that a person is gay—for instance, if the person looks really, really like a man. But if a person very consistently has a feature that makes one gay if they’re attracted to them and makes it so that they should use the men’s room, well, it seems natural to simply conclude that they’re a man.

A definition that implies that Buck Angel is a woman and Blaire White is a man simply doesn’t fit with common usage. It would be highly unnatural, when asking about Blaire White, to say “who is that man?” I think it’s a desirable feature of language that you don’t have to use your language as a shibboleth to express your ideological commitments. When woke people use land acknowledgements, they’re doing little more than signaling their ideological commitments. Yet using woman in the way Chris thinks people should without signaling one’s ideological commitments is impossible and highly unnatural.

If you find yourself having to go out of your way to use pronouns different from the ones a person uses to identify themselves, something has gone badly wrong.

Notably, this is generally how we go about deciding upon definitions—looking at how terms are ordinarily used. If a person defined the term water as simply meaning “a clear liquid substance,” well, that would include apple cider vinegar. It’s therefore a bad definition. So if Chris’s definition also implies counterintuitive linguistic claims, that’s a bug not a feature!

3 Normative considerations

My third main argument is that Chris’s definition goes against various significant normative considerations. I think that the term woman, like many terms, has a normative component. If we’re arguing about who counts as a priest, for example, or what counts as marriage, our argument won’t just be about who most people use the term priest to refer to. Instead, it will be about who should be treated as a priest for certain relevant purposes—who, for instance, has valid sacraments. Most people with the traditional view on marriage would presumably hold that even now marriage doesn’t refer to gay marriage, and most people with the more liberal view would hold that even many decades ago, before gay marriage was widely accepted, nonetheless, the right definition of marriage included gay marriage.

Similarly, the term woman has certain important normative implications. You’ll find a great degree of correlation between who one believes a woman to be and who one thinks should be allowed to use the women’s restroom. Similarly, it seems who one believes to be a woman correlates with who should be permissibly referred to using she/her pronouns.

Think of it like the word parent. One reason why it’s right to call step parents parents is that they should have all sorts of roles associated with parents. Normative considerations are relevant to deciding whether step parents count as parents.

Now, this isn’t to say that trans women should be treated the same way cis women are in all contexts. Step parents are parents, but if one needs a blood transfusion from a parent, step parents won’t do. For that reason, even if you think trans women are women, you could still, in principle, hold they shouldn’t be allowed to compete in women’s sports—just as even though superman is a man, he shouldn’t be allowed to play men’s football.

I think in this way, using the term woman the way I use it better fits with our normative intuitions. Say what you want about Buck Angel, he shouldn’t be using the woman’s restroom! For many trans men—which is to say biological females who transitioned to be men—people would be very uncomfortable if they used the women’s restroom.

Similarly, I think that trans women should be referred to using she/her pronouns. Referring to a trans woman as a man is just pointlessly cruel—it’s just liable to upset her for no reason. My understanding is that Chris generally goes out of his way to avoid using pronouns to describe trans people when they’re around, because he doesn’t want to offend them by using the pronouns that he believes to be accurate. But if you can’t use pronouns without being a jerk, that’s a real cost of your definition! I’m perfectly happy to use pronouns to describe trans people—and for good reason! Talking without using pronouns is annoying and inconvenient.

Now, this isn’t dispositive on its own. If a person has Schizophrenia, it might be mean to call them a Schizophrenic to their face, even though it’s true. Sometimes saying true things is hurtful. But if a definition makes it almost impossible to permissibly use pronouns without being a jerk, to describe trans people, that makes it require a highly unnatural way of speaking. That’s a serious defect.

4 Far-off cases

My fourth main argument is that using the term woman to refer to adult human gets clearly the wrong result in certain far-off sci-fi cases. Now, this may sound irrelevant. If a definition gets the right result in all the normal cases, who cares if it gets the wrong result in weird science fiction scenarios?

But far-off cases are often used to assess proper definitions. When discussing the definition of knowledge, for instance, philosophers often discuss highly strange cases involving hallucinations and fake barns. When discussing the meaning of water, philosophers discuss cases where there’s a clear liquid made of different chemicals other than H20. If a person defined the word woman as “an adult human female in the observable universe” even though all actually existent women are in the observable universe, this would be a bad definition, because there could be women outside of the known universe.

Thus, if the definition of the word woman as “adult human female” has counterexamples in far-off cases, it is wrong.

Now, the first case that strikes me as an obvious counterexample is superman. Superman is clearly a man. But he presumably doesn’t have small gametes. Certainly he’s not an adult human male as he’s not even a male! Thus, the definition of men as adult human males can’t be right as there could be non-human men.

A second counterexample: suppose that Jesus had become incarnate as a person who produced no gametes at all! Chris defines a man as someone with “a body developed toward production of typically small, motile gametes.” If Jesus himself made a body that didn’t produce small, motile gametes, it seems that his body couldn’t be “developed toward” production of small, motile gametes. After all, if God makes something for purpose X, it’s hard to see how it could be made for some purpose other than X. Similarly, if God made Adam without the ability to produce small motile gametes, and without some specific genetic defect preventing his production of small motile gametes, it would seem on Chris’s definition that Adam wouldn’t count as a man. But this is absurd!

A third counterexample: imagine that I, perhaps the single most masculine male in the history of the species, got into a serious car accident. My entire body was destroyed—only my brain was preserved. Scientists took out my brain and placed it into a robot body—one that produced no gametes but had traditional male secondary sex characteristics. Thus, I still had the same mind, looked male, and was functionally male in important respects.

In this case, I don’t think I’d have stopped being a man! Having a robot body doesn’t make one stop being a man! But on Chris’s definition, because I’d no longer have a biological body geared towards producing large gametes, I’d no longer be a man.

A fourth counterexample: Christians often think that between the resurrection and our earthly deaths, we are bodiless souls in heaven. Now, I know Chris doesn’t agree with this, as he’s a physicalist. But suppose that this were true. While in limbo, would men stop being men and women stop being women? Ironically, if this is true, then if this Christian view is correct, most everyone will be transgender at some point in their life.

Now, Chris might object that this scenario is impossible. Chris is a physicalist so he thinks that to have a mind you must have a body. Chris is, of course, wrong about this, but that’s not what we’re here to debate!

However, even if a scenario is impossible, it can still serve as a counterexample. Imagine if you defined the word number as “an integer except the number five if it is the second digit of pi.” Now, this would be a bad definition—if five were the second digit of pi, it would obviously be a number. But crucially, five being the second digit of pi is impossible. Nonetheless, this still serves as a counterexample. Similarly, even if disembodied minds are impossible, as a matter of fact, they can still serve as a linguistic counterexample if, were they to be possible, they’d falsify Chris’s definition. Similarly, it would be highly weird if to figure out whether someone was a woman, you’d need to know if physicalism about the mind was right.

A last counterexample: imagine a mad scientist took my brain and placed it into the body of a biological woman who transitioned to look male—perhaps Buck Angel. By Chris’s definition, it seems I’d stop being a man. But this doesn’t seem right!

5 Definitions

My fifth argument is that even if you don’t think my definition is right, you should still think that women aren’t adult human females. Chris is on the affirmative, so if we’re both wrong, then his position is still false in the debate. Now, I’ve given a series of objections to Chris’s view. Suppose you buy those objections but also buy Chris’s objections to my view. In such a case, I’d suggest, you should still reject Chris’s view.

It turns out to be famously tricky to define terms. Even innocuous terms like knowledge have generated thousands of years of philosophical debate as to the right definition. There’s often some obscure counterexample to every proposed definition.

People on Chris’s side of the issue like to ask people on my side what a woman is—and if they can’t answer, treat this as a major problem. Now, I’m obviously happy to discuss this subject—in fact, that’s what this debate is about. But even if you can’t define a word, you can know that another definition is wrong.

Philosophers now mostly agree that knowledge isn’t just justified true belief. If it were, that would imply that if you believe true things by accident and are justified, you have knowledge. For instance, if you justifiedly think that you’ll be hired for a job, and are named Fred, you might believe “Fred will be hired for this job.” If they hire someone else named Fred, while your belief was true and justified, it sure doesn’t seem like you had knowledge that Fred would be hired.

If defenders of the justified true belief definition asked laypeople what knowledge meant, they probably couldn’t get a very cogent definition. This wouldn’t mean that their definition is right—it would just be a cheap gotcha. Similarly, even if a person on the street can’t define the term woman, I don’t think that makes them necessarily unjustified in their belief that trans women count as women.

Thus, even if you end up disagreeing with my definition, so long as you think there are counterexamples to Chris’s, you should think that my side of the debate is broadly correct.

6 Conclusion

And with that, I conclude my opening statement. Excited to discuss these points more in the coming open discussion.