This debate came about after I wrote an essay, “Trans Women Are Trans Women,” in response to Matthew Adelstein’s essay, “Why I Think Trans Women Are Women.” I wanted to have the conversation for two reasons.
First, I’m a student of philosophy and former university lecturer of logic, debate, writing, and public speaking — basically, how to think and express those thoughts — so for me, civil discourse is a personal discipline much like chess or martial arts, two of my favorite pastimes. But it’s also a benefit to society because if more of us openly engaged in civil discourse over contentious issues by playing the game rugby-rough but, like all good ruggers, able to grab beers after — we’d be better off.
Second, because this slogan represents the most extremist form of woke ideology, alongside “math is racist,” and as I wrote, it’s profoundly dangerous:
Orwell had a word for the process of distorting basic truths in order to further some political agenda or enforce ideological conformity. He called it doublespeak. I often call it ontological gaslighting, like the scene in the book in which the Party finally gets Winston to accept that two plus two is five. This is how the book ends, because this is the final and greatest defeat of the human soul by an authoritarian regime. Namely, getting someone to deny an objective fact. As Winston writes in his diary early in the novel, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” To put that the other way around, slavery is the impulse to say that two plus two makes five. If that is accepted, all else follows.
Two plus two is five. Silence is violence. Math is racist. Men are women. Adelstein claims long hair or painted nails makes one more of a woman, and having enough feminine traits actually makes one a woman. But divorced from the female, such traits are no longer feminine and cannot confer womanhood. Samurai had long hair and Babylonian men painted their nails before battle.
He also defines “woman” socially but treats the phrase “A trans woman is a woman” in a vacuum. Yet trans writer Alyssa Ferguson, trans athlete Veronic Ivy, trans biologist Julia Serano, and trans philosophers Sophie Chappell and Talia Betcher claim trans women are female. Adelstein makes abstract assertions about a political slogan, like saying Sieg Heil simply means “Hail victory” or jihad just means “struggle,” but we all know that if we’d decided to call adult human females “apples” instead of “women,” we’d be here debating whether trans women are apples.
That’s because what trans women identify as only has meaning for them insofar as it denotes female. As I explain in the debate, trans women don’t identify as men who think they’re women. They identify as women who are women. Even Adelstein’s own definition of “woman” is fundamentally grounded in the female, as you’ll see. That’s why I said if we agree trans women are not females, as he and I do up front, the rest is definitional word play, which is where the debate immediately goes after that.
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