Transgender Issues, an Analytic Philosophical Perspective

I would like to make an attempt at a philosophical discussion of transgender issues from an analytic perspective. I can’t pretend that I’m overwhelmingly familiar with Butler, but she seems to be coming at this from a continental perspective, so perhaps it will be helpful to someone to get an analytic take. 

I have to wonder how much of this actually is a logical issue, rather than a social or religious one. I have some suspicions that many folk who would consider themselves broadly “anti-trans”, or what have you, actually understand conceptually where trans people are coming from, but have objections to the moral or social ramifications of what trans acceptance would suggest. Nevertheless, I am confident some anti-trans sentiment comes from an honest misunderstanding of trans issues. I believe that some folk, few though they may be, genuinely believe that transgender people pose some kind of threat to reason itself or something. Perhaps I can assuage your fears?

To begin with, I should mention that trans folk, almost universally, use the words “man” and “woman” in a very different way than conservative Christians might. Think of file names for word documents: you can attach any label you like to a word document and it doesn’t affect the document. You could imagine different documents with the same name, or two identical documents with different names. It’s not hard to imagine the same sound or glyph having very different meanings in different languages. In fact, it’s easy to manufacture: behold my new language where the glyphs “dog” mean what English speakers recognize as “spoon”, so that I would use a dog to eat cereal.

You might object that this is semantics, and I would agree: trans people in fact are differing in their semantics, that’s the point.

I suppose there may be a trans woman who might use the term “woman” to indicate something like “person who can become pregnant”, and I suppose it would be fair to tell this person that their own usage of “woman” would exclude themselves, but this seems like a kind of strawman, since I’ve never heard of this happening.

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And now I will digress into a larger discussion of how language works. Feel free to skip this bit, but please don’t. 

I think Wittgenstein was right when he wrote in Philosophical Investigations, " For a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word "meaning" it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language." In this sense we might prefer function or usage over meaning.

Which is to say: for any pattern of ink or gesture of hands or acoustic vibrations, we can use that however we want within our language. The nuances and complexities of all this are beyond the scope of this paper, but mentioning this in brief is essential. Ask yourself, what is the meaning of the word “damn” in the context of someone shouting that word after hitting their thumb with a hammer? Does it have anything to do with perdition in a direct sense? Or consider the idea of someone saying “shit” after discovering their car has been broken into. Consider the differences between saying “I apologize” and “I am sorry” (performativists have interesting things to say here.) Anyway, onwards. 

Matt Walsh has famously asked: “What is a woman?” I won’t pretend to have seen his documentary, but I wonder if he really appreciates the complexity of the question he’s asked. The question “what is a woman?” is part of a larger set of questions, the set of questions that ask, “What is X?” So we might ask “what is a cat?”, “what is God?”, “what is the best restaurant in town?”, “what is life?”. These questions touch on issues of ontology and epistemology and linguistics and probably many more disciplines and subjects that I’m forgetting to mention. To properly understand these questions, and how to answer them, we have to establish some background first.

Addendum 1, 4/27/23:

As a brief opener I might point out that questions of the type “What is X?” are plausibly a kind of elliptical sentence as Wittgenstein would use the phrase. Consider that, presumably, questions are asked of someone. Except, sometimes not so much it might appear. Consider speaking with a scientist who might utter phrases like “What is dark matter?” or “Science seeks to answer the question: how did life begin on earth?” Who are these questions asked of? On the other hand, if one asks of a coworker “Where is the stapler?”, this definitely seems to be directed at someone in particular. I think it’s possible that even though all these utterances have the grammatical structure of a question, they are quite different in function. The former questions are a kind of way of saying “We’re all trying to figure out what dark matter is.” or perhaps “We would like to know how life began on earth.” (so the question would really be a kind of statement perhaps), whereas the latter example is interrogatory. It’s not entirely clear to me in which sense Walsh is asking “What is a woman?”, but if it is a question meant to be asked of someone than what he’s really getting at is “How do you use the term “woman”?” It’s somewhat like as if I would ask of a Spanish speaker “¿Qué es un gato?” (God I hope Google translated that right) and they pointed at what I tend to call a cat. “Gato” is performing the same function in their language as “Cat” does in mine.

End addendum.

Philosophy and linguistics are inextricably linked. One might fairly suggest that philosophy is about ideas. But if an idea is to be communicated – possibly if it’s to be meaningful at all – it has to be expressed in language. This is part of why defining our terms is so important when we do philosophy: subtle differences in meaning in our premises can result in quite different conclusions. Awareness of language, of what’s really going on under the hood of language, is necessary to do philosophy. 

It's important to recognize what level of strictness, as it were, we’re operating on when we do philosophy. At some level of strictness we talk of nominalist and realist approaches. Briefly, and I’m leaving out a lot, these are approaches to universals, or, perhaps one could say, approaches to categorization, and whether those categories exist in the world or only in the mind or in language. I am a nominalist. The basic idea of being a nominalist is that I deny the existence of true universals. I do in fact think almost all categories exist in the mind and in the language, but not in the world-without-us. In the strict sense I don’t think men or women exist, but I also don’t think cats or tables or musicians exist either. Indeed, recall that a cat evolved from a non-cat: where exactly did the switchover happen? It’s arbitrary. Math related categories might be an exception to this: cubes might meaningfully exist for example. Although I have a physicist friend who points out that atoms don't technically have a strict boundary edge, so whether or not a cube could actually exist in the world isn't clear to me. I saw a video once where Hank Green said electrons are a true category, and he would know better than me. For the most part, however, definitions fall apart when you look close enough. Some fall apart almost immediately and some are a bit more durable until you really zoom in. 

Of course, this level of strictness isn’t necessary, or helpful, for most day-to-day conversation. The level of tolerable ambiguity in language varies greatly depending on context. Suppose there is a box with a sphere, a pyramid, and an almost-perfect-cube. But the cube-like-object has a small nick in it, which technically means it’s not a cube (hence “cube-like”). Nevertheless, if I say to someone “hand me the cube from that box” they will likely do-the-thing-I-wanted-them-to-do.  We can examine a statement in the context of its effects.. I say, “Hand me the cube”, and you in fact do the thing I wanted you to do. The fact that it really isn’t a cube hardly matters. A robot might come back and protest “there is no cube.” Sometimes fuzziness in language is helpful. Contextually, just the opposite might be the case: when a surgeon gives orders to their assistants I imagine a large degree of precision in language is really quite important.

It will be helpful at this point for us to examine the mechanics of a particular instance of “This entity is X”. Let’s take a look at what happens when someone says, “I am a weightlifter.” Now, as with most self-descriptors it allows for a generous degree of vagueness. How many times must one lift weights to be a weightlifter? How much do you need to bench? Etc etc. But we use terms like "weightlifter" as a shorthand in conversation in order to convey a condensed amount of generalized information. Consider the mechanics of what happens when someone says to you "I am a weightlifter". Suppose you're on a date with someone and they say to you "I am a weightlifter". What happens next? Well, my brain would engage in a bunch of background processing, heavily weighted by context and life experience, and then generate a number of impressions and probabilistic beliefs. I might have the impression that "It's quite likely this person has lifted weights in the last week", "It's nearly certain this person has lifted weights in the last month", "This person likely owns protein powder", "This person likely has a gym membership." Now of course my date could spell all that out using hyper specific language "I have lifted weights six times in the last week", "I own protein powder", etc, but that would be tedious. So we rely on semi-vague descriptors to allow for efficient conversation. We use terms, with varying levels of vagueness, to front load a lot of information for conversation purposes. As the conversation continues, or as more conversations occur, increasingly specific information may be shared.

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Returning more specifically to philosophically examining being transgender…

As a brief aside, I will be using the terms “self-describe” and “self-descriptor” rather than the terms “identify” or “identity” for clarity’s sake. Many attempts I’ve seen to establish what one means by “identity” or “identify” are so nebulous that I feel using these terms detracts from my ability to communicate these ideas (as stated above, a certain degree of nebulousness isn’t always a problem, but in this case I think it might). When I think of the term “identify” it brings into my mind the notion of a botanist identifying plant samples. They would assess these samples for the presence or absence of certain traits and then, based on that, categorize these samples. Some usages for “identify”, in the sense of “I identify as X” follow that usage, but some do not. Therefore, I feel that using the terms “self-describe” and “self-descriptors” will be more helpful.

Now that we have that out of the way, we can turn our attention more specifically to the question: “What is a woman?” We will answer this question from three different lenses of analysis: 1. When is it rational for a person to declare that someone or something is X?, 2. What usage of a word grants the most utility from a social perspective?, and 3. Within a sample population, what does the typical usage for a word look like?


Starting with the first question: when is someone being rational in asserting that someone or something is X (where X is any category: woman, doctor, nocturnal, liquid)? And I answer: so long as the speaker’s usage of that word actually applies to the entity, they are being rational (whether or not their usage is useful or helpful). If someone says, “Dogs are cats”, and what they mean by cat is what I would mean by “mammal”, they are being rational in that usage. If someone asserts that they are a woman, they are being rational so long as their usage for the word “woman” actually applies to them. There may be, somewhere in the wide world, a trans woman whose usage of the word woman means “someone who can get pregnant”, and, barring interesting edge cases, you would be fair to pointing out to this person that their own usage of the word “woman” would exclude themselves. But I have never heard of this happening. There may be a variety of usages for the word “woman” among trans women, but this is fine: there is considerable variety in usages for many words: artist, athlete, hero, beautiful, good, etc.

Moving onto the second question: what usage of a word grants the most utility from a social perspective? Just because an individual is being rational in their usage of a word, that doesn’t mean that there is benefit to the widespread usage of the word in that way. The utility gained from using a word a particular way will vary greatly depending on context, both on the individual level and the society level. Someone might be rational in asserting “a dog is a carburetor”, if by carburetor they mean what I mean by “mammal”, but we get quite a lot of social benefit in collectively using the term carburetor in a specific sense. This is particularly true for the population of people called mechanics. (As a brief defensive aside, if someone objects with something like “If we had highly non-standardized usages for all words then language would fall apart”, I agree, but if someone just pierces their ears and lip they’ll be ok, while if they pierce every available inch of skin they’ll be in trouble.) In some cases we want to employ limiting factors: what should exclude an entity from being described with a word. How strict our limiters are depends on the utility we get out of those limiters. I think society gains an enormous amount of utility from using very strict limiters in the case of who we call a “surgeon.” One limiter, not the only one I’m sure, is that if you haven’t finished medical school I think it entirely fair to not refer to you as a surgeon, despite any protests you might have to the contrary. In other cases, more gentle limiters make sense. I would only call someone a skydiver if they had in fact jumped out of a plane at some point, but I’m not terribly interested in insisting on a certain number of jumps. In other cases, only the loosest of limiters make sense to employ. Much gatekeeping occurs around the concept of fandom, and this seems unhealthy and unproductive to me. If one were to say that they were a fan of Stranger Things, I would likely only grant that descriptor if they had seen at least one episode of Stranger Things (my apologies Vaush).. Anything past that is unproductive gatekeeping.

With this lens I believe the real issue comes into focus. I mentioned earlier that I think many folks actually understand trans people  just fine, they just object to the consequences of trans acceptance. This might stem from a belief that strict gender roles are necessary for human flourishing, or beliefs about the ontological or metaphysical nature of sex/gender. A full assessment of the question “what limiters, if any, are helpful for the terms ‘man’ and ‘woman?” would require an entire other paper. We could also ask “when should we grant the self-descriptor ‘man’ or ‘woman’”? My own take is simply that gender roles are destructive and should be done away with, and that we should grant these self-descriptors to anyone who wishes to use them. I trust trans men and trans women to be rational in calling themselves men and women because I trust their own usages of those terms apply to themselves. I would also say that these self-descriptors should be respected when it comes to social categorization and organization: that society is better if trans folk can use which bathrooms they wish, etc. But a full utilitarian breakdown of all these issues would be extensive, so that will have to be another paper..

Note that I am not necessarily saying it is the case that “A woman is someone who self-describes as a woman” in the causative sense. For some trans women, I have no idea the numbers, their personal usage of the word “woman” won’t be “A woman is someone who self-describes as a woman”. It might be that, and I have no objection to it, but it isn’t necessary in order to respect their self-descriptors. We are discussing “when will we, as a society, apply the term” and my answer is “Whenever anybody would like to have the term applied to them.”. If we extend our discussion of terms “male” and “female” things get even more complicated, more complicated than I can discuss here. 

Finally, we might ask: within the population of trans women and trans men what are some commonalities with respect to their usage of the words “woman” and “man”? Well, as mentioned before, there is a huge variety of usages, but frequent with overlap. This isn’t a problem in the slightest, of course. Think of the enormous variety of experience in what is meant by self-describing as an "athlete". Or consider the debates that could erupt if one asks what is a “sport” or “art” or “Christian”?  We perhaps could form some generalized indicator of what is meant, on average, by athlete, but failing to adhere to that generalized concept doesn't necessarily mean one isn't an athlete (although, as I said before, I suspect it’s most accurate to say there are no athletes in the strictest sense).

So, can we say anything at all? I suspect we can. I don’t want to speak for trans people, and I am willing to be corrected, but I have a sense that there are few phrasings that would be generally acceptable to a decent chunk of the trans population.

For some their usage of “man” and “woman” seems to be something like: “With respect to the cultural and social concept of “man” and “woman”, consisting of a loosely defined and shifting assemblage of factors, including but not limited too, aesthetics, behavior, pronouns, how one holds oneself, how one addresses others, social roles, etc, it is the case that when I call myself a “man” or “woman” what I am indicating by that is that I prefer, or feel most comfortable or happy, living mostly in accordance with the established social category of “man” or “woman””.

Or perhaps. consider the example of the weightlifter.  The terms “man” and “woman” are sometimes used in that sense. It would be tedious for someone to spell out "I like wearing dresses and I like knitting and I also like monster trucks and I like hunting and here are another thousand facts about me and I'm masculine in these ways and feminine in these ways". If gender (gender roles, social expectations of experience, social expectations of behavior) is a spectrum (or perhaps it’s what Wittgenstein would call a cluster concept, consider the idea of what a “game” is), it implies that, at some level of strictness, that there are no men or women so much as there are people who are - with respect to any number of traits - more or less masculine or feminine. But saying "I am a man" or "I am a woman" front loads a lot of that and provides a kind of a general "here is how to think of me on an immediate level but while allowing a lot of nuance and variability." Notably, it isn’t a problem if this isn’t how any particular person uses the terms “man” or “woman”, as mentioned above I advocate for no limiters on the terms. But it can be helpful to say what someone might often mean by those terms within a population. I could imagine for some trans men they would say that what they mean when they self describe as a man is “With respect to the loose collection of factors that comprise the Western concept of “man” I am closer to that than the Western concept of “man”, or something like this.

If this seems at all strange, recall the frequency with which we see phrasings of the kind “You’re not a man unless you can change a tire” or “You’re not a real man unless you can do x, y, z.”, none of which have anything to do with physiology. If you interrogated the folks who say such things they would likely protest that what they were getting at was how men are supposed to behave, rather than how they inevitably do, but such phrasings are part and parcel of the cultural archetype of man that some trans men may be responding to. As much as folks might protest and try and emphasize simple factors like “penis or vagina” or “XX or XY”, it’s undeniable that, culturally, we have larger symbolic and thematic ideas of what it means to be a “man’ or ‘woman” beyond physiology. 

We might be running into some degree of “beetle in a box” type issues (thanks again Wittgenstein). Some trans folk may be experiencing some kind of qualia I simply have no access to. I might just not be able to understand exactly what a trans man is getting at when he insists “I am a man”. It might be a little like trying to describe color to someone born blind. But I think it’s safe to trust trans people when they are relating their inner worlds to us. At a minimum, it’s simply undeniably that there appears to be percentage of the human population that necessarily - for their own happiness and wellbeing - must differ in some factors (perhaps many) from the cultural script assigned to them on account of what kind of genitals they were born with. Trans people have existed across time and and cultures, and many cultures have developed some kind of third (fourth, fifth, etc) gender scripts for them. I could mention muxe in Mexico, bakla in the Philippines, hijra in the Indian Subcontinent, femminiello in Neapolitan culture (Western!), or two-spirit people in indigenous American cultures (which itself is an umbrella term). The idea that trans people are some kind of contemporary Western invention is deeply ahistorical.

At this point it feels pertinent to bring up the concept of sexual dysphoria, humans who feel distress, often considerable, as a result of the kind of body they have, particularly with respect to sexual characteristics. Among such individuals, medical intervention, such as puberty blockers and HRT, seems to be the only reliable way to provide psychological relief. I’m sure this is wildly inaccurate in a strict sense, but the notion of “the brain expecting a different kind of body” might be helpful as a starting point to understand this. Many trans people will not experience this, but many will, and sexual dysphoria (sexual because it strictly is referring to sexed characteristics rather than gender roles or expectations) is necessary to discuss to fully elaborate on a philosophical take on trans issues. For many trans people their own usage of “man” or “woman” as it applies to themselves may conceptually involve the kind of body they feel most psychologically comfortable with. In the context of a society without gender roles, there would arguably be no trans people with respect to gender (because there would be no gender in the sociological sense, gender being arguably just an amalgamation of gender roles), but there plausibly would still be individuals who, for whatever reason, experience psychological distress as a result of their sexed characteristics. 

This may sound somewhat nebulous, but in fairness, all definitions (or almost all at a minimum) fall apart at closest examination. Hence, nominalism. Some folk use the term “woman” to reference something like “adult female human”, but that also falls apart at closest examination. We have to ask “what’s a female”? And this might seem relatively straightforward at first, but precisely what do we mean by “female”? We can’t mean “the ability to become pregnant”, unless people born infertile are excluded from being women. This could also exclude post menopausal women from being women.  We can’t mean “people who are shorter and less hairy than men” , because some men are short and quite hairless, while some women are tall and more hirsute. We could mean “those who produce the gametes called ovum”, but this could exclude folks who have been through menopause or those who weren’t born with functional reproductive organs. You could go with “those who lack a Y chromosome”, but then you have individuals with androgen insensitivity syndrome, who can be born with a vulva while having XY chromosomes, so then you have to bite the bullet and accept that some men are born with vulvas. Indeed, intersex conditions conceptually provide a number of issues for the attempt to equate “woman” with “adult human female” or “man” with “adult human male”. 

I’m not sure I know how to end this. I feel that I’ve said what needs to be said.