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Trans people make an impossible empirical claim as well. The claim that undergirds their requests are that they are actually able to tell that they are the opposite sex. That is to say they are claiming to be able to distinguish between the experience of "being a male who correctly thinks they have the internal experience of a female" and "being a male who mistakenly thinks they have the internal experience of being female". This is epistemically impossible as we each only have one experience and cannot triangulate reality.
To use an analogy: Richard Hanania has written about how civil rights law is the origins of what is called "wokeness." I've seen others talk about how American colleges and universities only started valuing "diversity" after the Supreme Court struck down one form of affirmative action, while signposting other forms of affirmative action that would be acceptable.
All of that to say, is it possible that the "empirical claim" that trans people make are more motivated by "what actually works" legally and culturally in our society? That they're falsifying their preferences, in an attempt to justify the way they want to live their lives to the gatekeepers and the masses?
Obviously, their efforts don't work for you and other trans skeptical posters on this forum, but imagine you found yourself in the following life situation:
You are a man, and you want to be a woman. It doesn't matter if that desire is caused by an intersex brain, or a paraphilia or is a whimsy you picked up as a result of your life experiences. You have this desire, and it is strong enough to make you want to do something about it. Maybe it has become what Scott Alexander calls a trapped prior - a nearly unchangable belief that doesn't respond to new evidence, like a phobia or an OCD obsession. You know that you can't become exactly like a typical woman, but you believe that with hormones, surgery and vocal training you can get close enough for your own purposes, at least physically. Heck, maybe you'll even get lucky and pass so well that for the vast majority of the people you interact with, you will be indistinguishable from a typical woman and you'll be able to live your life.
Either way, you need to convince society that they should allow you to get the hormones and surgeries, and that they should treat you in all ways like a woman, despite whatever doubts members of society might otherwise have about your claim.
I put forward that the "typical trans narrative" is like water filling the shape of the society it is arising from. All of the philosophical and metaphysical arguments are a smoke screen. They don't exist to get cis people closer to the truth of understanding what it is like to be trans - they exist to get enough important gate keepers in society to let the trans person live the life they want to live. Maybe parts of the "typical trans narrative" are close enough to being true for many trans people. Maybe they were gender non-conforming as a kid, or didn't fit in with other kids of their natal sex, or they couldn't cut it as an adult of their natal sex, but it is also the end-point of a long process of memetic evolution, where trans people collectively discovered the set of secret words and shibboleths they had to say to get what they wanted.
I think the modal trans person wants to look like, live as and be treated socially and legally as a member of the opposite sex. Whether that is a result of nature or nurture, or whether we realistically have any way of talking a person out of this once it has become a trapped prior for them, all other aspects of the "typical trans narrative" grow out of this simple truth. Because they want to live as and be treated as the opposite sex in all ways, it behooves them in the current cultural environment to make certain impossible-to-verify empirical claims about their internal experiences, about "feeling like a woman" or "knowing they were a woman."
That's how they get doctors and lawmakers on board with their desires, and after that it is a matter of keeping their heads down (if they pass), or cultivating cultural norms that minimize the friction of the way they're living their lives (if they don't pass.)
Long story short, while I'm sure many trans people actually do believe empirically unverifiable things about themselves, I think that in most cases those things matter much less than the simple pragmatism of saying whatever reduces the friction between them and the things they want out of life.
Sure, I think and have long thought this is the truth. But the commons they burn with the lies they live doom children. They are trapping the priors of others.
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Why do you think that there's such a thing as a unitary 'internal experience of a female', or that trans women think they have it?
Obviously every human has a different experience, I'm not really sure what your claim would mean.
Anyway, it sounds to me like you are adding circumlocutions to the whole thing. The claim is just 'trans women are women, trans men are men.' I'm not familiar with the specific extended claim you're making here being a common one, aside from in the again semantic sense of 'my experiences are a woman's experiences because I'm a woman'.
There being such as thing as being a woman separate from biology is foundational to trans people being a coherent concept. If there is no such "woman" qualia how can you actually explain dysphoria? A miss match implies a correct match which implies some category.
'Money' is a thing separate from the pieces of green paper and yet it's not a unique qualia.
This is what a 'social construct' is. Social constructs are very real and important, they basically make up the majority of our thoughts about and interactions with society, culture, language, and each other.
There's a social construct of 'woman', it is applied to some people and not others, trans women would like it applied to them. They experience dysphoria when their own self-image or self-understanding is not reflected either in their own form and appearance or in how society treats and interacts with them.
Unique qualia are not needed for any of this. The experience can be and is built from a complex structure of normal qualia, just like most experiences.
We didn't socially construct the female sex. Females do not have higher estrogen, wombs, larger breasts ect because society decided they should. The gender "woman" is built up around the reality of a sexually dimorphic species which must deal with the reality that half of the population has meaningfully different abilities and reproductive role. The qualia of womanness is the internal female experience.
There is a claim that tran women have this qualia and not the compliment male internal experience. The mismatch in these qualia is what causes dysphoria.
Maybe you have some other justification for the existence of trans people but it is tiresome to have the same behavior explained by dozens of different just so stories that all seem to fall apart immediately upon examination.
Yup, and many many people who do not meet some or many of those criteria would be called women by you.
And by me.
I think maybe you are just using the words 'qualia' and 'experience' interchangeably, which they very much are not.
But if you just mean 'experience', sure, the vast and imprecise and fuzzy-bordered and non-exclusionary category of 'woman' includes some things about thoughts and experiences. No two women will have the exact same woman-related thoughts and experiences, and woman who don't have central ones aren't excluded from being women, and etc etc. But whatever, sure, lets stipulate something like that vaguely exists.
You seem to be saying that we can't know what experiences other people have (and therefore can't meaningfully claim to have similar experiences to another person) because we're not psychic.
But we are psychic.
I'm taking thoughts in my head, and using an external signal to put those thoughts into your head. Right now.
Our modern forms of telepathy do not have infinite bandwidth or fidelity, sure. But we use them to share information about what we are thinking and feeling and experiencing all the goddamn time, that's like a huge part of what art and culture and just talking to people is. And in other categories we do not question or reject claims like 'yeah I've felt that way before' or 'I agree with you' or 'oh yeah I recognize that feeling' or etc.
These are normal kinds of conclusions to draw about similarities in experience between people based on them just describing their experiences, and rejecting that method only here is an isolated demand for rigor.
Do you think you know what it is like to be a bat?
... I just gave a whole explanation about how we share our experiences with each other by talking about them and explaining them to each other, and your question is whether I understand the experiences of something that can't talk?
I sort of feel like you are firing off pre-cached arguments on this topic without closely reading or engaging with my actual arguments.
If you think described experience is sufficient to differentiate between the experience of incorrectly and correctly believing you have the same experience as someone then that's where we disagree and I'm not sure how we can go further. I'm aware we can vaguely hint at experience through language but it's an incredibly lossy thing.
I'm thinking this in terms of how I could actually prove to myself what gender I am and I am absolutely not satisfied that I couldn't argue myself either way. A child would have no chance, most of them believe in santa because they were told to by someone they trust.
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Hmm? I disagree that self-assessment is the be-all and end-all in gender, you have to pass as the opposite sex, but your analogy doesn't make sense to me.
Consider someone with phantom limb syndrome, say it's present since birth despite them lacking an arm (I know that's not how it works, bear with me). Are they allowed to claim that they are correct in having the sensation of a missing limb? They never had one in the first place. Or more prosaically, someone left-handed and raised right-handed who always felt that something was off, until they learned about dexterity or learned that in many places, it's a benign quirk that is easily accommodated instead of squashed.
I have also heard accounts of children who were raised as the opposite of their phenotypical/genetic sex, be it by an insane mother who wanted a daughter and made one out of her son, or a child with ambiguous genitalia or who had their penis botched around birth and were reshuffled off as female. Quite a few of such cases had the kids rebel against the perceived gender roles they were made to follow, even if that's how they'd been raised.
That's not to say that trans people are all like that, I think autogynephilia and a delusional memetic contagion account for most of it, so I'm arguing with the given reason for your conclusion even if I agree with the conclusion itself, mostly.
If I reduced transness to desire to undertake hormone therapy with no justification needed or given with no further implications what percentage of the trans activist community(or trans community writ large) do you think would sign onto it? What percent do you think would call me a transphobe?
... if you actually intended to allow that and grant legal recognition and full rights and no persecution or mockery? I think most would be fine about it.
The reason for all the more complicated narratives is to try to come up with something that will convince conservatives to give them rights and leave them alone. The gay rights movement went through the same thing with Ellen and 'born that way' and etc., it's all politics.
Legal recognition of what? Which rights are people missing? To go with the gay rights metaphor I was in favor of taking the state out of marriage and building out civil unions to be the state equivalent with no reference to gender. I'm deeply suspicious that what you're implying is you want to use the state to enforce some views you have on gender and sexuality and not just as a meditating body for letting people live peacefully with those who disagree with them.
I'm not talking the modern real world, I'm responding to the hypothetical you're proposing.
Yes, trans people do have most relevant rights today in real-world USA, the world in which they used the tactics I'm outlining (and which I think you're objecting to? Kind of hard to parse) to get them.
They never didn't have rights. These tactics have done nothing to advance them.
???
Regional court cases about people wanting to change their sex (or just change their name to one common for the other gender) didn't start to get won until the mid-70s, and most federal agencies didn't update their policies to officially allow these changes until the 2010s.
Unless your point is the trite 'gay men and straight men had the same rights in the 1980s, they were both free to marry women' thing.
These were not the tactics used in the mid 70s, this is an extremely new phenomenon.
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That's entirely orthogonal to my point, I'm saying that the standard you're using invalidates far more than just claims of gender dysphoria. I don't deny that what you describe wouldn't be palatable to most trans activists.
One can attempt use of both the left and right hand. One has other limbs to compare the feeling of missing a limb to, or if a quadraplegic at least a plausible biological explanation for the sensation. The Reimer story you reference is packed with alternative explanations besides internally felt 'gender' being real.
I was trying to avoid getting bogged down in the weeds of examples because I think your understanding of this, while I also think is wrong, is not representative of the trans movement at all. It's the rickety motte inhabited by you and two other people surrounded by a kerosene soaked Bailey filled with people who make claims like "we can tell a 2 year old is trans if they don't like wearing a certain type of dress."
Attempting to use one's right hand isn't the same as being right-handed! A person who is left handed can very well claim that they're so, without anyone asking how they're quite so confident in that fact, since they've never experienced the internal qualia of being right handed so they can claim that they somehow know that's not what they're feeling in the first place.
It's not news to me that this isn't the stance or primary concern of trans ideologues, I oppose them myself after all, it's my specific objection to your use of the fundamental inability for us to inhabit many counterfactual mental states as the primary criterion for denying the existence of innate senses of gender, regardless of whether that's a real thing. It has far too much collateral damage at the very least, as I've attempted to show.
Yes, a left handed person and right handed person cannot possible experience the other's qualia directly. But yes after trying both methods of writing they can without much consequence choose a preference. If we're bringing this back to gender than I've already conceded the ground that people can decide that they prefer to be flush with estrogen or testosterone as they see fit, I have no qualms with this so long as it brooks no costs or at least trivial costs on broader society. What I object to are the claims that this is anything but a recreation.
There is a version of liberal freedom of form that you espouse that seems something I could coexist with but it feels like two liberals in mao's China discussing whether a public option is communist just before the liberation army breaks down the door and puts a bullet in both our heads. We're barely even discussing the same subject as the trans advocates.
Trust me, if they're coming for us (they haven't come for me yet, India hasn't succumbed to wokism), I'm more than happy to close ranks. Consider this more of a dispute about epistemic standards than anything else.
After all, while I am OK with the nominal goal of trans people of changing sexes, and even endorse it from the perspective of transhumanism as just as valid as any desire to change the limitations of one's flesh, I demand they pass biologically before I will accept them as actually now the opposite sex, mere self-identification works for football clubs, not sex.
In other words, I think there is a non-negligible subset of trans people who feel genuine distress at being their natal sex, and would likely have that distress relieved by physical transition, but I have no issues with AGPs either, I simply resent being dictated that they're now women without possessing the relevant attributes of femininity.
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