A personal blog on tech, politics, media, and anything else.
There has been a lot made over the years about transgenderism, gender ideology, and the concept that men can become women and women can become men. The entire idea has led to a demand that language and concepts be changed to accommodate the ideology. It has even been claimed that science and history support the existence of transgender people and there being more than two genders. What I hope to do below is explain why this is nothing more than a philosophical and ideological system, which much like a religion, can be rejected.
I will start with language itself. Gender ideology and the transgender movement states that a man can become a woman, or put differently, a woman can be a male. It is a changing of language through the separation of the words woman and man from a historical link to the biological, female and male. And this is where the entire gender ideology is relegated as just that, detached from science.
Language is a tool. It is a tool, developed by people for the purpose of communication. We have developed words to align with concepts. Once a word has lost its meaning, it ceases to be useful as a tool for communication. Take for instance, the word woman. A similar word has existed throughout many languages across history and has been tied to the biological, meaning adult human female. This was a given. Society may then place on top of it societal norms, stereotypes and expectations, but at its heart was adult human female. That means that the word has both a tie to the biological and social.
The gender ideology crowd seeks to disconnect the word from the biological be making it possible to be a woman whether you are male or female; however, this same crowd would often make the case that a person that identifies as a woman should be able to dress how she wants, act how she wants, work in any career, and have any temperament. She can be more masculine or feminine.
For example, a female can dress in a dress, have long hair, be a stay at home mother, and generally act very stereotypically feminine, and be considered a woman. A female can then also dress in jeans, work boots, have short hair, work in a stereotypically masculine job like construction, and even sleep with women, and still be considered a woman. However, a male can dress in a dress, get plastic surgery to have his penis made to look like a vagina, have long hair, and act stereotypically feminine, and be considered a woman if he wishes. If a male does everything to look feminine, but does not get the surgeries, he would still be considered a woman. So it would then make sense that a male could fulfill all the stereotypical masculine roles, not get surgery, and if he considers himself a woman, he is a woman.
This would mean that the word woman is completely disconnected from both the biological, since you can be a male or female and still be considered a woman. However, it is also disconnected from the social since you do not have to adhere to societal norms and expectations for woman, or man, to be considered one. But if it is disconnected from both, then if someone tells me that a person is a woman, what information have I gained? Logically, I should make no assumptions on what the person should look like, how he/she should be dressed, whether that person is male or female. If I were to buy into gender ideology, and the general leftist philosophy of deconstructing societal gender norms, then the word woman tells me nothing. But if the word tells me nothing, then it loses all utility. If it has lost utility, then why even have it.
But then, what should I use for an adult human female? The thing about language is that we create a single word to capture a concept so we can use fewer words when talking and make communication easier. By disconnecting Woman from both societal and biological, we would make language more difficult. And why? We are doing this to help make a smal segment of society feel better at the expense of everyone else.
And this extends to pronouns. We use pronouns as a short-hand to refer back to a proper noun. Language works be the speaker or writer assigning pronouns based on assumptions. If I look at a person and see a woman, I use she. However, if I look at a person, and see a man, I use he, whether that man identifies as a woman and wants to use she/her pronouns. By changing the way language works, I am expected to ask a person what his/her pronouns are, and then it responsibility is on me to remember and try to use the proper pronouns, despite my natural tendency to use what I think is the appropriate pronoun.
Part of the reason this gets rejected is that it is assumed that people must do this or be labeled a bigot and a bad person. People can be punished in society for not buying into the ideology. If one misgenders at a job, he/she can end up in front of HR, potentially losing his/her job.
People do not accept the ideology, but are expected to go along with it anyway. We are told that there is science to back this up in the form of brain scans, but I would argue that just shows that there can be a wide variety of brain chemistries between males and females.
Additionally, this is not kept in just gender. People in the movement also claim that males can become females and vice-versa with the appropriate surgeries and hormone replacement. There are calls to be able to change sex identification markers on things like passports, driver’s licenses, and even birth certificates. We even hear the phrase, sex assigned at birth, as though that can be changed.
It has also spilled into the dating world, complicating that. If one is a straight man, it is then claimed that because a transwoman is a woman, straight men should be willing to date that person, even if that person hasn’t gotten the surgeries. Further, that it does not make that man gay, even though gay = homosexual, which would mean same sex. And if becoming a woman does not change one’s sex, than by definition a male dating a transwoman would mean dating another male, and would make one a homosexual. And to have a preference for a ‘real woman’ with a ‘real vagina’ also makes one a bigot. And while I always hear that everyone can have their preferences, those preferences could still make one a bigot who should be shamed.
While the question. “What is a woman?” feels a little cliche, it is the perfect question. If you disconnect it from both the biological and social, it loses all meaning. And once we accept this as a society, the next step is accepting that male and female can be changed. If that can be changed, then what does it mean? What is the utility of the words if we remove the core meaning of those words? And all of this is a philosophical change, not tied to science. We choose what we want the meaning of words to be, and what their utility is. We could chose to keep woman meaning adult human female. And there could still be transwomen, and they would be transwomen, not women. They can still exist, not be discriminated against, and move through society, but always exist as that separate thing. But there is a group that wishes to break that distinction down and label anyone that does not participate in the ideology as a heretic.