Women + transwomen is a contradictory group

Eliciting the classification

Trans ideology must have a classification of men, women, and how transwomen and transmen fit. It may be implicit, but it will be guiding behaviour – telling people what their identification means by telling them what to do and where to go, etc. Trans people are claiming particular statuses, rights, access, of one side of male/female and not the other. To make those claims presupposes that classification. Without it, the terms ‘transwomen’ and ‘transmen’, become meaningless, and there is no detectable practical difference of men and women, and no group/status/rights of that kind to claim.

So how can we elicit this classification? Forget all the words and symbols for things, and pose the following concrete scenario: we ask transwomen to show us which group they are a member of, pick out the people. (And this will also show the group they are not members of, as those not chosen.). Now, they cannot answer with any form of ‘people who feel/dress like X’, since the circularity only brings us back to our original demand for a material distinction: show us which are the ‘X’s, point them out.

This is a more general version of the question: how do transwomen know they are in the right place? In discussion, they often challenge the common notion of female/male, saying that the science has advanced, that a binary division is outdated, and so on, that it is all more complicated and unclear … but then, since it is all so confusing, we might begin to wonder: how do transwomen themselves know where to go? Imagine a foreign land, the signs are strange, the language opaque – how would they know they are in the right changing rooms/etc? This is how we bring out the truth.

A contradictory grouping

Imagine that the groupings have now been pointed out. When we look carefully at everyone, carrying out an audit on their apparent properties, we find two things. First, the two groups – chosen, and not chosen – match our notions of female and male: those two body configurations appear nicely separated into the two groups shown to us. Second, the transwomen actually fit in the exact opposite group to the one they said they did – the groupings are of body type, but the body types of the transwomen do not fit the group they chose, but instead the one they did not. Transwomen will pick, as their group, women, that is, females – in the usual meaning of the word that summarises half of the objective physiological pattern of reproductive dimorphism. (And so implicitly men as the complementary group.). Yet by those very groupings they chose, they themselves do not fit the side they declare themselves to be.

The problem is that transwomen's claim of membership in the group ‘women’ is backed by nothing real and substantial. The example filters out the circular fallacy of a claim of a status being the grounds of that very status – of a mere utterance being a proof of itself. Clothing/conventions/etc we take to be also filtered out in an unfamiliar culture, but even if not, what would be picked out? The fact that someone can wear female clothing while being male proves exactly that female clothing does not guarantee that one is female. Such a classification would be merely about the superfices of clothing etc.

Proportions and clarity

What if the people they choose includes transwomen: is the categorisation altered by the proportion of transwomen included with the women? There are three important cases:

• <50% TW – gives normal classification of M/F, TW are M;
• >50% TW – gives swapped M/F classification, TW are M;
• =50% TW – gives confusion, no classification of M and F.

In the first case, the evident clustering is female/male, although there is substantial noise in the signal. Is there something in common in the mostly women and some men? We cannot discern it; what we are left with is the traditional female/male concepts. In the second case, this is swapped. The same clusterings emerge, but are simply named the other way around to traditional terms: the primary grouping is of males, yet is named female (and vice-versa for the implicit group). In the third case, both groups have equal numbers of both feature-sets – there is no apparent clustering, nothing distinct between the two groups.

So varying the proportions does not change the classification, only how discernible the classification is from none at all.

Self-ID is an exemption

Because there is no material fact to being trans, the criterion is self-ID: one is something simply by saying one is. But then is self-ID really the overall rule here? Is that what everyone is following? What would strict self-ID look like?

If a transwoman goes to what might be a women's space, but all the women there speak up and self-ID as men, surely the transwoman must acknowledge this, see that they are in the wrong place, and leave. Is not self-ID the rule? Otherwise, what could the transwoman's complaint be? That these women are not genuine, that we should not believe what people self-ID as? Or that people should not be permitted to use self-ID to misrepresent themselves? …

If one set of people can ‘deeply feel’ that they are a member of a group, why cannot others ‘deeply feel’ that they are not? And what is being identified into is not a physical place. If the local women all built somewhere new, and left the old place behind, what would the transwomen do – stay there or claim access to the new place? The latter.

What does self-IDing-as mean? If it is not checked against anything, it has no limits, and anyone can claim it. It purports to express some hidden fact, some obscure phenomenon, but it has no objectiveness, and no substance. A reply might be that there are many such people, and across history – but that grants no substance, it only says there are many people over time with that substanceless claim. It is claimed to be real, but what is the real thing here?

Conclusion

The group ‘women + transwomen’, selected by self-ID, is either meaningless or contradictory. If only a special minority are permitted self-ID, the grouping is functionally contradictory – it admits against its criterion. And if everyone uses self-ID, the grouping is functionally meaningless – it picks out nothing. The difference is just in the probability of any instance not following expectations.

One set of people are supposed to be locked to their physical form, and not use self-ID, yet the other set of people have a waiver by use of self-ID. The only real thing in self-ID is this behaviour attached to it. Transwomen are allowed to choose which places to share with others according to their body-type (women), but those others (women) are not permitted that same choice. An instance of one rule for some, another rule for others. The structure here is that grouping by physiological male/female-ness is the rule, and self-ID is an exemption to the rule, and one grounded on nothing.

Further

For more authoritative thoughts see:

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