George Orwell wrote that “sheer humbug” proliferates because of “the fact that the average human being never bothers to examine catchwords”. In few matters is this more true than when it comes to ‘transgenderism’.
Even the very name is fraught with deep problems that are almost never seriously examined. They are simply presented as faits accomplis and everyone is expected – usually on pain of social media ostracism – to go along with the gambit. It’s the deceitful game that ideologues, from the Left most often, play all the time because they’re never called out on it.
Take, for example, transgender: what does that even mean? We’re told that it means ‘someone whose gender identity differs from that typically associated with the sex they were assigned at birth’. But hold on a minute: gender identity? ‘Differs from sex’?
Do you see what the above sentence did? It took as a given that gender and sex are two very different words. But they aren’t. They certainly weren’t for almost the entire time both words have existed. For over half a millennia, gender and sex were synonyms: the fact of being male or female.
To most people that’s still what they mean. The only people who disagree are ‘transgender’ ideologues. On what basis? Certainly not on natural language use. Even after sex fell out of polite usage for the fact of being male or female (and that in itself a very, very recent change: ‘sex’ meaning ‘sexual relations’ only dates back to the 1920s; even up until the 1960s it was still perfectly polite and legible to refer to ‘the fairer sex’, for instance).
It was in the late 1960s and early 1970s that a different conception of gender and sex began to emerge. Not naturally, though: it was a forced, top-down usage, bludgeoned onto the English language by a tiny clique of far-left, post-Marxist academics. But, as is too often the case, where the far-left fringe lead, the chattering left elite classes – the media especially – follow, witlessly chirping. Witness, after all, the sudden and inexplicable replacement of Aborigines or even Indigenous Australians with the imported American nonsense-phrase First Nations, when there was nothing even remotely approaching a nation on the Australian continent until 1 January, 1901.
But the ‘transgender’ ideologues are barely started, when it comes to unexamined (because to examine them would be to expose their essential phoniness) catchphrases.
How can gender identity differ from the biological reality of one’s sex? The only way this is possible is by adopting dualist metaphysics.
Dualism is a very old, indeed probably near-universal (until at least very recently, and most likely still), metaphysical belief. Put simply, it is the idea that there is a non-material ‘thing’, distinct from the physical body, that is the ‘true self’ of a person.
For religious people – which still means some 85 per cent of the world’s population – that is most obviously the ‘soul’. The idea that there is a deathless ‘self’ that transcends and outlives the body is an ancient belief. It’s an idea that’s been around for at least 10,000 years. Leaving aside debatable evidence from Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon burials, a stone burial slab from eighth century BC South Eastern Turkey contains the first known written reference to a soul, which is implied to inhabit the stone stele itself.
In more modern metaphysics, the idea of a soul has fallen out of favour in tandem with the decline in religiosity amongst the intelligentsia. But dualism wasn’t done for yet. Rene Descartes, in the 17th century, proposed a new kind of dualism: mind-body dualism, or substance dualism. Descartes argued that the mind is a non-physical entity that interacts with the physical body via the pineal gland.
Even in his own time, there were strong objections to this Cartesian Dualism (as it is now called). Most pointedly, how does a non-physical thing interact with the physical world? As time went on, investigations into the human body produced more and more stark evidence that physical events in the body, and especially the brain, were strongly correlated to mental events.
The opposite problem, monism, or mind-brain identity theory, has just as many problems of its own. Without going into detailed philosophical arguments, the idea that the mind is strictly limited to the brain is in almost as much trouble as Descartes’ dualism. Put bluntly, for all the hoopla over fancy science such as fMRI brain imaging, we’re really no closer to solving the mind-body problem.
But, of the two competing ideas, dualism is by far the least favoured. Especially by the non-religious, which is why it seems bizarre that an unspoken, unexamined, dualism persists in two ideologies which are fundamentally hostile to religion: transhumanism and transgenderism.
Transhumanism is the idea that humans are able to use technology to enhance their bodies and minds beyond the limits of evolution. This mostly takes the form of embracing all manner of technology to enhance and ‘transcend’ Homo sapiens as we’ve evolved. But many transhumanists also embrace the belief that technology will enable us to ‘upload’ human minds to other bodies, even machine bodies.
As I’ve found, the quickest way to enrage a transhumanist is to remind them that they’re a dualist. But they are: they must be. If a ‘mind’ can be transferred from its resident brain, then it must be some ‘thing’ separate from that brain.
A common rejoinder is to resort to the mind-as-software analogy. Which is itself a dualist argument: software/hardware, mind/body.
(If you really want to start a philosophical shit-fight, though, try telling a ‘Simulationist’, who believes that the universe is a holographic simulation, that they’re just espousing Creationism-for-geeks.)
Transgenderists, of necessity, also espouse dualism. If one has a ‘gender identity’ that is separate from the body and its sex, that is an unambiguously dualist argument. The transgenderist must believe that there is a separate, non-material ‘thing’ called ‘gender’.
A religious person might call that a ‘gendered soul’, but are most transgender people, let alone transgenderism promoters, religious? It’s difficult to say, the one study I could find lumps all those surveyed into the ‘LGBT’ category. As if a lesbian and a tranny have anything in common apart from women’s clothing. But, even so, the majority of ‘LGBT’ people are non-religious. Given, then, that transgenderism is a fringe of the ‘LGBT’, it might be thought that only a very small minority are religious.
Which shouldn’t be surprising: most religions are pretty clear about sex/gender being immutable.
Islam, as is its way, is absolutely clear: according to the Sunnah, Muhammad flatly stated that ‘God has cursed men who imitate women and women who imitate men.’ Islam is clear that one’s ‘birth sex’ is fixed. This allows, by the way, for ‘gender-affirming surgery’ for those rare individuals born with genuine intersex conditions.
Iran, by the way, uses this belief in an, ahem, creative way, when it comes to homosexuality. While transgender advocates praise Iran for its high rate of sex-change surgeries, what they neglect to mention is why. Iran’s religious authorities have decreed that, homosexuality being an unforgivable sin in Islam, homosexual men have two choices: imprisonment and most likely execution, or, to accept that they are not really a man at all, but a woman – at which point they must submit to the surgery to prove it.
Christianity is markedly less prone than Islam to cutting off bits of the body as punishment, but just as adamant that there is no free-floating ‘gender identity’ separate from the body. From the Old Testament (male and female He created them – Genesis) and New (at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female’ – Matthew).
Perhaps the only religions congenial to transgenderism might be Buddhism or Hinduism and other Eastern religions which preach a doctrine of reincarnation. Except that, Buddhism goes so far as to deny a personal ‘self’ altogether. What, then, is it that is reincarnated if there is no ‘self’ is a much-debated metaphysical question in Buddhism.
Even so, each ‘reincarnated thing’ is born into a fixed body, be it a bug or a human being. Someone could no more claim a ‘gender identity’ at odds with his male body than an ‘animal identity’ at odds with his human body. Rather tellingly, even trannies tend to mock so-called ‘otherkin’ (not be confused with ‘furries’) who really do believe they are a non-human animal trapped in a human body.
As it happens, one prominent transgender ‘woman’, Simon ‘Sophie Grace’ Chappell, is not only a philosopher but, he says, a “Christian theist”. If anyone would have deeply pondered the questions of ‘gender’, dualism, and soul, it should be him.
Yet, when directly asked this by an interviewer, Chappell simply dodged. “I don’t think about it, it doesn’t matter.” A philosopher who doesn’t think about something seems rather like a carpenter who doesn’t have a hammer. From there, Chappell goes on to imply that anyone who asks the question has “a certain kind of discomfort with the situation”. Which, again, is an odd argument from someone clearly so uncomfortable with their own male body that he mutilated it into a grotesque mimicry of a woman’s.
Chappell also makes the argument that “our consciousness is both gendered and sexed”, which goes right back to the fundamental deceit of arguing that the two words refer to different things.
But Chappell admits that the physical body unavoidably shapes our consciousness, citing Thomas Nagel’s famous ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ argument (Nagel argues that it would only by being a bat that we could fully understand what it is like). But Chappell is arguing the reverse: that by ‘knowing’ he is a woman, he becomes one.
Perhaps aware that this is dangerous territory for him, Chappell then argues that the physical differences between the male and female body are small and unimportant. I’d challenge him to put that proposition to any woman who has ever given birth.
Yet, for all that, Chappell airily states that “consciousness is gendered”, without in the end ever really explaining how or why.
But it’s one thing for a British academic with a cross-dressing fetish to make such weak and contradictory arguments; it’s quite another for medical doctors to do the same.
Dr Deanna Adkins, professor at Duke University School of Medicine and the director of the Duke Center for Child and Adolescent Gender Care, argues that, “From a medical perspective, the appropriate determinant of sex is gender identity.” Astonishingly, Adkins claims that “It is counter to medical science to use chromosomes, hormones, internal reproductive organs, external genitalia, or secondary sex characteristics to override gender identity for purposes of classifying someone as male or female.”
Remind me to tell my GP, next time he sends me for a prostate test, that I identify as a woman, so I can’t get prostate cancer.
These, though, are just the sort of ridiculous knots ‘transgender’ advocates tie themselves into, when trying to justify their un-justifiable nonsense.
No wonder they never bother to examine their own catchwords: deep at heart, one could be forgiven for suspecting they know they’re just so much humbug.
