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I think this is a little overdramatic. There are plenty of "lies" that come at very little cost in a society.
Lies like "these people may not be biologically related, but as a legal fiction they are parents and children" or "this person wasn't originally from France and isn't of French ethnicity, but now they're declaring their allegiance to France now so they're French." There are even fairly strong social taboos against pointing out the differences between adoptive parents and naturalized immigrants in most cases.
I think viewing the trans "lie" as particularly pernicious or destructive to society is an isolated demand for rigor.
But belonging to a country is a matter of allegiance more than of ethnicity. Would you argue that someone who has never lived in France, doesn't speak french and hates France is actually french just because his biological parents are? And anyway the person is french if society declares her french ( e g with an id or a passport), not if she self identifies as a french person. She can self identify as much as she wants, it won't change anything. The same is true for parenthood : your are the parent of a child if he declares you as his parent, not if you self identify as his parent. It means society expects you to take care of the child. When we think about parent, we think about that more than about the sexual act to make the child.
Transgender identity, on the other side, is meaningless because when we think about women, we think about people with a vagina, two tits, a menstrual cycle, who experienced that from their young age and can bear children. Men are free to wear make up if they want, a lot of men have, it won't make them women. Thinking you can become a woman is like thinking you can become King Charles: either you are born the first son of Elisabeth, or you're not. There is nothing we can do about it, even if you self identify as Charles.
All 3 of the "lies" share the common structure of defining two distinct ideas (gender/sex, legally related/biologically related, nationality/ethnicity) and then, when convenient, implying they are essentially the same thing.
They are ethnically French, but not French by nationality (In the same way a transsexual male is, following the progressive definitions, a "male woman")
But most people would not say either of these things. They would just say this man is French, and the transsexual is a woman. The race/sex is irrelevant, and if you want to know then you have revealed you are a racist who doesn't see immigrants as real French people / a transphobe who doesn't believe transgender women are women.
But the person never changes their race, just as the transsexual never changes their sex.
The point is that now this person is French by nationality, whilst no one would ever outright claim that she is actually racially French, it would be taboo to mention the fact she is not. The reasoning for this being that it hurts social cohesion.
I certainly do think about the upbringing aspect, but in my mind (and I think most others') the idea of the child being the genetic offspring of the parent is also an important aspect.
Because of this, whilst I do see an adopted family as being something similar to a family (just as I do see a passing transsexual male as something close to the category of woman), in my mind I certainly perceive that family as "not a real family".
But just as in the case of transsexuality, I would not say this out loud, because of the social taboo, and because it would upset the person to hear this.
Now you've selectively chosen characteristics that correlate to womanhood that cannot be achieved by a transsexual. Just as with the above, I do think of these things when you say the word woman.
But I also think of things like makeup, wearing a bra/panties, having longer hair, speaking in a feminine voice, having sex with men, crying in public, etc.
These are all things which can absolutely be achieved by a transsexual. Just as one could adopt a child that isn't biologically related to them and raise them to be a healthy, happy adult. Just as immigrant can love their new country, be a productive citizen and be elected to the highest ranks of government,
But the trans "woman" is still a male, the adoptive "parent" is still not biologically related to their "child", and the immigrant is still of a distinct race to the indigenous population.
This is the rhetorical trick. In the modern framing of sex/gender as distinct concepts, you absolutely do become a woman if you sincerely identify as one. You just never become a female (however it would be transphobic to point out this fact)
But again this is the same thing as with immigrants and adoptive parents. No amount of patriotism will turn you into the native race, and no amount of love and affection to the child will overwrite its DNA.
But you do get to call yourself a citizen of country X and the parent of the child, and it would be forbidden for anyone to mention the way in which you differ from a native or a biological parent (unless they want to argue that the difference makes you superior or somehow more of a parent/citizen)
I dunno, man. I mean, there's shit like this:
Similarly for the rest of your post, I imagine.
The article quotes a transgender actress Indya Moore. I've never heard of her before (despite watching quite a lot of US TV shows) and I imagine she is close to irrelevant.
This definitely doesn't feel reflective of the transgender movement. Indeed, reading the exact quote:
Moore is contradicting the logic of gender ideology. The adjective "female" is supposed to refer to sex not gender, yet here she clearly equates the two, despite the most important principle of the ideology being that sex and gender are completely orthogonal concepts.
Hence I do not think this proves anything. It is just an example of someone misunderstanding, or being more realistic, someone trying to downplay the existence of sex.
I mean, we have less obviously-ridiculous examples that still fit the bill:
No, Trans Women Are NOT ‘Biologically Male’
The Myth of Biological Sex
Which try really really hard to downplay sex even as they don’t explicitly deny it as per Moore, and engage in an absolutely heroic motte and bailey to pretend that “Trans Women Aren’t Biologically Male”, which tells me that progressives aren’t very interested in keeping the “male” part of “male woman” (or “female” part of “female man”, for that matter).
Like:
But you could certainly make an accurate guess!
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First thing. I'm not arguing against the fact that you should be polite and kind with trans people. If someone wants to be treated as a woman, I would use "her" and "she" if this is this person's preference. At least when the person is there (but it's exactly the same thing as being polite with someone by calling him Caius Julius, because he thinks he is Caesar). The problem with the transgender activism is that it requires a lot more than that. It requires that I never say what I think to be the truth, even on the internet, and as a general comment (not to offend anyone, but just to state that I don't believe transwomen to be actual women if it's relevant to the conversation). It seems to me that if you transpose your sentence "in my mind I certainly perceive that family as not a real family." to trans people, you would get in trouble in some places (e g reddit). And that is what I call enforcing a lie, and that is what I think is an important issue. Would you comply with your own requirement that "it would be forbidden for anyone to mention the way in which you differ from a native or a biological parent", your entire post could not exist. You need to be able to mention the fact that both differ to build your argument.
By the way, I don't think nationality is a "social version" of ethnicity. It's not in the US, it's not in France, and it's not in most countries. Sure, some countries might decide that their nationality is about ethnicity, just like they can make it about religion. Would you say that someone is or is not "ethnically vaticanese"? Both parenthood and nationality are about law more than about identity. Your nationality gives you some rights, being recognized as a parent gives you some rights. From the political viewpoint, "nationality" and "parenthood" is just those set of rights (anyone who has them is a citizen or a parent). Being a woman gives you no special rights. The only special rights of women are actually rights of females, related to biology, like being accepted in a maternity hospital or competing with people with less testosterone in sports (female sports has never been about gender, but only about biological sex). All the rights that could relate to your gender (like the right to vote) have been extended to women, at least in the West, so being a "legal woman" is not a thing, because a "legal woman" is exactly the same thing as a legal man, as men and women have the same rights.
To be clear, I agree with you that transgender activism enforces a society-wide lie, so I agree that I would get in trouble.
My point is that you would also get in some trouble for saying that an adoptive family isn't a real family (But, thinking about this again, I must concede that you would get into significantly less trouble for it than for saying trans women aren't women)
This feels like a straw man. Throughout the conversation we have implicitly been referring to saying these ideas in general society (in person, reddit, etc).
I can also say that trans women are not women here without facing any repercussions (as can you)
But in the advent of transgenderism, many of these "female rights" have now become "women's rights", in the modern conception of the word (a trans woman can compete with a cis woman in many competitive sports, use the women's restroom, go to an otherwise female school/university, etc
This is in direct analogue to how now someone of a non-native race can be a citizen of their new country, and enjoy all the same rights and privileges of any other citizen.
I think the only reason that these feel different to us is because the fact that a nation does not have to be racially homogenous is now well-established, and opposition to that idea is outside of the Overton window.
I believe that in less than 10 years time (if that sounds fast, remember that gay marriage was only legalised in the west about 10 years ago, and nowadays it would be considered unacceptable to even debate the issue) the same thing will happen to transgenderism.
The issue is that you are advocating for some rule, such that enforcing the rule would weaken (or void) the case for the rule. And it wouldn't weaken it because it makes it less necessary, but because it forbids some arguments about it. It seems to me it is weird.
What I am trying to say, is that while there is a need for nationality even without ethnicity (even in a world where everyone has exactly the same DNA, there would still be different nations due to cultural and geographical differences), and there is a need for parenthood in a sexless world (assume children are fabricated, they still need people taking care of them), there is no need for genders in a world without biological sex. Genders are all about sex, and that is why transgenderism is a lie. You might say, look, genders are unrelated to sex, they have started to invent other genders than men and women (e.g. non-binary). You are right, but then this path leads absolutely nowhere, excepted in a place where everyone has his own gender because everyone has his own identity. And it is so because gender, outside of biological sex, is absolutely nothing.
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These are good examples of the 'we define social categories' argument so let's explore them.
Parent and national are multifaceted social categories, additionally with legal requisites based on observable characteristics. There is an element where people might disagree and a negotiation on the boundary decided politically, but there is a substantive requirement for belonging to the category, beyond just the desire to belong to it. You can't self-ID your desired nationality or declare yourself a parent because in both these cases the legal definition takes precedence. Both do have a social and self-ID component (I feel like a US citizen etc) but this does not guarantee membership as far as others are concerned.
The boundary of a legal category is a political negotiation but what we have in the current mileu is an attempt at top down enforcement without negotiation. While widening the definition of nationality does create potential conflicts, over resource allocation and who gets a say, it doesn't create a fundamental rights conflict. Existing nationals maintain all their rights. Widening the category of women does create a fundamental rights conflict because some rights are based on sex, and gender identity seeks to take primacy legally over sex.
There are philosophical distinctions as well, gender is actually parasitic definitionally on sex, whereas nationality is definitionally based on other characteristics.
Sure, but I wasn't proposing a self-ID regime.
I'm okay with legal hoops comparable to adoption or naturalization.
For people who haven't yet undergone the legal hoops, people can still treat them as honorary members of their identified group, the same way people might say, "You might not be my daughter, but I already feel like I'm your mother", or a close friend might say, "You still have some legal hoops to jump through, but you're just as French as anyone else in my book, and I'll fight anyone who says otherwise."
My point was that we already have many malleable socio-legal categories in society that amount to "lies" if taken absolutely literally. I fail to see how legal gender transition poses any notable risk to society's foundation.
I personally would accommodate trans people in their desire to live as the opposite sex if it were a thorough process - the self-ID laws, which my country already has, make accommodation much more difficult.
I would take issue with the lies implication. It's well understood what kind of categories those examples are and there's no issue with understanding, for example, that there are real and meaningful differences between different citizens.
A trans woman in my view is a kind of woman in the social category sense where we can accommodate them in the category- I am free to form my opinion as to what they can know of womanhood in comparison to a biological woman, just as an eighth generation American can contrast themselves to a recent immigrant.
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