There is no definition problem with transwomen

What is transgender ideology's definition of woman? It seems something of a puzzle: people cannot casually answer clearly, and academic effort addressing it is tentative and inconclusive. … But to think there is a problem here is mistaken. There is a simple and obvious answer to the question: the standard old everyday ‘biological’ conception, the very one suggested to be wrong. The way to be clear about this is to see what people actually do. Transwomen must apply to the usual definition to claim the identities/spaces/etc specified by it – they answer the question of definition by their actions, in claiming what they do. Any sense of some definitional problem is a confusion or a distraction.

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Just look. Transwomen do not in everyday life set out and explain their position by summarising unfamiliar philosophical disquisitions. They say “I am a woman”. That is the definition. A definition need not be an analysis, an encoding by some formal metric. It need only evoke the same understanding in others and it will be doing the definitive work: selecting the items concerned. Can you describe ‘blue’, can you define it? Yet, if you were asked, you could pick out a blue thing – the fact is the definition. You can simply point to something, and if all parties can recognise it and agree, that is all you need. And ‘woman’ as we already know it is precisely what they want to point out – what they want to identify as.

Look at how those concerned, transwomen, use the words, and what they do. They do not say that they are, and want to associate with, such-and-such complex refined cluster or intersection of this and that. They say that they are a woman, and that they claim access to women's rights/resources/spaces/etc. When they are directed to women's spaces/etc, they would not return with a correction, saying that was not quite what they meant, that the signage was wrong. They mean exactly what they say. What else could they mean? The word ‘woman’ is a common social token, it can only mean what everyone thinks it means. If you choose to use that word, you choose to prompt that set of responses that everyone has already learnt for it.

There is no definitional problem here. When a transwoman claims to be a woman, that only makes sense because we already know what a woman is. And they do not explain some new definition, because they need not: their claims are upon resources/etc set by the usual old meaning.

The motivation of this whole matter is to address a conflict of interests, and a conflict presupposes something shared. Disagreement over ownership of land is an agreement over which land is in contention – we would not be in conflict if we were concerned with different pieces of land. So the fact that there is conflict over status/identity/access means, where there is that conflict, that we agree on those boundaries, and that there is no problem of definition.

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We already have a perfectly clear and functional definition of ‘woman’. We need neither to clarify our understanding of it, nor adjust its perimeter.

Hypothesise how it could be changed. To avoid the current criteria that will disqualify transwomen, you need to find a definition of woman that does not route back to the biological, thereby receiving its pertinent meaning. You must find something else. But if you do produce some other, unrelated, factor/concern/etc, why would that ground any claim regarding the current biological categories and membership? In order to find some new definition, the only place you can search is somewhere irrelevant. The current social structures are built on the biological definition – if you look elsewhere, you will be talking about something else, something beside the point.

Imagine the following more concrete test. Whatever other criteria revisionists might give to expand the definition to allow them to qualify – social conventions, inner feeling, whatever – we set up a new separate space accordingly, for them only. Since they say that criteria qualifies them as women, they surely must accept it as a women's grouping, and that they are rightly placed. Now, if they accept, the broad problem is solved – the conflict of multiple claimants over one resource is settled (into two separate classes of allocation). And, notice, that effectively leaves the old definition untouched. But if they reject this, they will thereby defeat their own contention. They would show that the extra qualifier was spurious – it did not grant membership, and they are not women after all – and the real definition they are working from was the old biological one.

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From all this we can see that the definition fits its purpose, and transwomen mean just what they say: transwomen are women. If one wants that membership, one must accept that categorisation. The problem is that they are, by the attached criteria, wrong. They make an assertion about a known category and a particular instance, but the instance in fact does not fit the category. They require the biological categorisation to make claims on its associated resources, but that is the very category that discludes them. No ‘redefinition’, and no political rearrangement imagined thereon, can ever solve that because it is factually contradictory. And the prevarication over definition merely works to obstruct everyone else from the means to understand the bounds of membership and disqualify people appropriately.

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For more authoritative thoughts see:

• https://kathleenstock.com
• https://hollylawford-smith.org
• https://medium.com/@s.r.allen
• https://rebeccarc.com
• https://janeclarejones.com