Trans Women Are Trans Women

A response to Bentham's Bulldog and Richard Hanania

By now, you’ve probably noticed we live in an age where the trivial must be litigated and the obvious must be defended, lest the mob accuse you of heresy against whatever orthodoxy is trending this week. God help us that we need to write essays on clown-world topics like this. Or that we have arrived, absurdly but inevitably, at a moment in history when the British Supreme Court felt the need last month to hold that a woman is an adult female. Yet here we are. Next on the court list, perhaps the justices will deliberate on another matter of profound legal gravity and find that water is indeed wet or that on the balance of probabilities, as they say, two plus two is four.

This isn’t a mere quirk of history either. It’s part of a larger cultural psychosis that I like to call performative epistemology, or the theater of knowing things, a sub-genre of virtue-signaling in which the appearance of truth-seeking is more important than its actual pursuit and any claim, however batshit, is true if it serves one’s political agenda. In late October 2023, the cover story of the British Medical Journal argued that the fields of health and medicine were polluted with “western scientific thinking” and “white male bodies” and had to be “decolonized.” As early as 2016, the South African fallist movement claimed “science must fall” and that traditional African medicine, such as the belief that having sex with a virgin can cure HIV, is more valid.

Of course, this lunacy isn’t exclusive to the left. In July 2020, Houston-based, Nigeria-educated doctor Stella Immanuel rose to prominence during the Covid pandemic after President Trump shared a video of her and America’s Frontline Doctors promoting hydroxychloroquine as a Covid treatment. Discussing this with a Trump supporter, I noted that Immanuel is a total quack who believes reptilian aliens run the government and claims gynecological problems such as vaginal cysts and endometriosis are caused by having sex with demons in one’s dreams. The woman I was speaking to replied that the universe is vast and our capacity for knowledge is limited, therefore anything could be true and I was arrogant to dismiss Immanuel’s dream-demon gynecology.

The lesson? Anti-science idiocy knows no partisan boundaries. Whether you’re decolonizing biology or making sweet love to phantoms in your REM cycle, there’s a war on reality being waged from every angle. Other lessons? Religious and political cult members will eagerly debate reality to prove their loyalty. As Vaclav Havel wrote in his 1978 masterpiece The Power of the Powerless, “The point is not that the citizen believe the lies, but that they accept them, live by them, and pretend to believe them. The power of the regime rests in this forced show of loyalty.” Also, replacing science with relativism in the service of politics results in propagandistic trash instead of truth. As Orwell wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four, “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

Orwell had a word for the process of distorting basic truths in order to further some political agenda or enforce ideological conformity. He called it doublethink. I often call it ontological gaslighting, like the scene in the book in which the Party finally gets Winston to accept that two plus two is five. This is how the book ends, because this is the final and greatest defeat of the human soul by an authoritarian regime. Namely, getting someone to deny an objective fact. As Winston writes in his diary early in the novel, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” To put that the other way around, slavery is the impulse to say that two plus two makes five. If that is accepted, all else follows.

Which brings me to the topic at hand. Biology teaches us that every species comprises an ontogenetic quartet, or four terms describing the juvenile and adult stages of development for males and females. Among horses, a colt becomes a stallion and a filly becomes a mare. Among pigs, a piglet becomes a boar and a gilt becomes a sow. Among humans, a boy becomes a man and a girl becomes a woman. Two plus two is four. But there are folks out here replacing basic science with relativism, debating reality to prove their loyalty to the woke cult, and asserting that our math is all wrong.

The other day, former Radicalist guest Richard Hanania shared an essay, noting his agreement with the author that adoptive parents are parents therefore trans women are women. As one reader replied, “That’s an interesting argument. So someone imitating Jesus is Jesus because parents adopt children.” Like many others, I’ve had a hard time clocking Hanania’s sincerity on any issue recently. But curious, I read the essay, “Why I Think Trans Women Are Women” by Matthew Adelstein, author of

Bentham's Bulldog

and a philosophy undergrad at the University of Michigan.

Before I get to my response, let’s review some modern linguistics history to better understand where this kind of thinking comes from. Trans ideology emerges from cultural Marxism and fourth-wave feminism, but it also includes traditions from linguistic philosophy, starting with structuralism and its founder Ferdinand de Saussure. He argued that the relationship between signifiers and signifieds, or words and the concepts they reference, is entirely arbitrary. There’s no natural or necessary link between the word “tree” and a perennial plant with a trunk and leaves.

Saussure was mostly correct that there’s no natural link, except for the momentum of etymology. We could theoretically call such plants anything we want because words only have the meanings that humans give them. But this treats all human behavior as unnatural, which it isn’t. A bow and arrow is just as natural as a beaver’s dam. We could have named trees anything, but humans living in the British Isles were working with the existing, naturally evolved terms they had just as they were building homes from the existing, naturally evolved forests they had. The term they already had for tree was treow from the Proto-Germanic trewwiz, which later became “tree” and, as a metaphor, “true,” because what is true is firm and steadfast as a tree.

Building on Saussure, Jacques Derrida developed poststructuralism, emphasizing that meaning is never fixed but always “deferred” to other words in an endless chain of signification. You look up the word “tree,” but then you have to look up “trunk” and “leaves,” and then you have to look up “photosynthesis,” and so on forever. Derrida believed all meaning is context-dependent and therefore definitions can always be reinterpreted or challenged. But this is only partly true, because many words are symbols for real-world objects such as trees. Language is not simply an intra-referential system that defers forever. It often rests on the solid ground of reality.

Finally, we have social constructionism, or the idea that language categories such as woman or nation are socially constructed through discourse. Michel Foucault famously argued that power constructs categories such as madness, criminality, and sexuality through institutional discourse. Judith Butler has famously argued that gender is not innate but merely performed. Yuval Noah Harari has popularized this idea by arguing in his phenomenally successful book Sapiens that humans are the dominant species on earth because of our unique ability to create collective fictions such as nation, money, or human rights. I reject that human rights are merely a shared myth with no basis in objective reality, such as biology and the raw fact of pain. But let’s park that.

What all these traditions have in common is that they correctly recognize language is not perfectly tethered to reality, then mistakenly claim it is not tethered at all, or that all language is a shared fiction that leads to no objective fact. As if that isn’t absurd enough on its own, there is yet a more extreme branch of this line of thinking, which states that language is the only reality we have and the underlying “real world,” as it were, simply isn’t there. Not only could we choose to call trees “cars” if we wanted, but there is no real thing that the word “tree” refers to — there is no botanical object in any forest that is a tree. There is only the word “tree.” Not even Harari goes this far, and is careful to acknowledge the factual existence of Homo sapiens even if the word “human” loosely fits onto that reality.

And this brings me back to Adelstein because that is essentially his argument. What follows is an edited excerpt of our exchange.

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Volodzko: Neither step-parents nor adoptive parents claim to be biological parents because in addition to biology, parenthood exists as a relationship to the child, a relationship that non-parents can form, whereas womanhood exists independently of social bonds.

Adelstein: But trans women are also not biological women.

Volodzko: Right, so we can agree that’s an absurd claim. My point is, womanhood is not a relationship-based identity, unlike parenthood. And though I agree with your point about polysemy and the normative use of language, it doesn’t necessarily follow that polysemous words should be redefined in ways that sever their link to material reality. It only follows that they can be. So while the Wittgensteinian use-theoretic model of meaning is largely true, there’s a catch. We can collectively agree to call women “apples” and that will be that, in so far as it goes, because language is a socially constructed set of signifiers. But the referent, namely women, has not changed. Calling women “apples” does not mean that they are actually apples. Nor does saying trans women are “women” change the fact that they are men.

Adelstein argues in his essay that the trans influencer Blaire White looks female, we should accept White as such because “It feels highly unnatural to refer to Blaire White as a man.”

Nor can we use intuitions about people like Blaire White as this confuses indicia (what signals something) with criteria (what defines something). A plastic apple is not truly an apple, but an imitation, like White. Also, correct me if I’m wrong, but you equate normative convenience and ontological truth, arguing that definitions ought to align with how we should treat people. Trans people, like all people, deserve love and dignity. But there is a difference between respect and reality. If someone claims to be an apple, or the king of France, I do not have to agree in order to be polite. I can, of course, politely disagree. Technically, it’s not even a matter of “disagreement” because it’s not a matter of opinion, but fact.

He also argues in his essay that a man’s brain in a robot’s body is still a man, therefore a woman’s brain in a man’s body is a woman.

Finally, the robot example — if I put my brain in a robot body am I still a man? — doesn’t persuade me because it is still your brain, every cell of which contains DNA indicating your biological sex.

Adelstein: But why should whether it’s a relationship-based identity matter?

Volodzko: Because you can become a parent by parenting a child but you cannot become a woman by womaning someone. You must be an adult female or we must semantically shift “woman” to include males. We can call women apples too, but this makes them “apples” not apples. As you say, “It doesn’t change the fact that they are adult human males.” Except that’s the whole ball game. A man who identifies as an adult female is not an adult female. Expanding the term to have a social role would mean that a man who identifies as a “woman” is anyone who identifies as a woman. Fallacy: begging the question, i.e. circular logic. This is also intellectually dishonest because when trans women say “a trans woman is a woman” they are not saying that a trans woman is a male who fulfills the social role of a female. The mantra “A trans woman is a woman” emerged in the 90s back when “woman” meant adult female. As well all know, trans women don’t identify as “women.” They identify as women. So this ends up becoming the motte in a motte-and-bailey fallacy:

A: I am a woman.
B: But you’re not really a woman.
A: I’m not really a woman but “woman” can also mean A, B, C.
B: In that sense, you’re a “woman.”
A: Now that we agree I’m a “woman,” let’s go back to my original claim.

But not every man who identifies as trans is delusional. Many are honest about being males who identify as females. We can play equivocation word games by saying that a trans woman is a woman and then altering the definition of “woman” to make it make sense, but we’ve done nothing to alter the truth of the original claim. A trans woman is not a woman. A trans woman is a man who identifies as a woman. A trans woman is a trans woman.

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Now let me share a few back-and-forths we had regarding individual points that I’ve selected from the discussion.

Adelstein: I don’t think you’re getting the point. Yes I agree that woman is a non-relational property and parent is. The question is: why think that is relevant to whether its meaning can morph into a social meaning? The difference between Blaire White and a plastic apple (funny sentence!) is that when people know that some apple is plastic, it no longer seems like a real apple. Not so with Blaire White!

Volodzko: It no longer seems like a real apple? That’s the funny part of the sentence, my friend. When people know an apple is plastic, they know it’s not real. And if you don’t equate the two then this brings us back to our agreement that trans women are not adult females, i.e. women.

Adelstein: What determines the right definition of the word woman will include who, say, ought to be allowed into women’s restrooms.

Volodzko: Women’s restrooms are for women and “woman” is defined by who ought to be allowed into women’s restrooms? More circular logic.

Adelstein: One who claims to be the king of France should not be treated as the Kind of France for important social purposes.

Volodzko: Exactly my point because the same applies to men who claim to be women.

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Finally, I concluded the discussion by addressing his definition of “woman” directly and explaining to him point-by-point why I do not find it at all persuasive.

Let’s consider the definition you gave at the top of your essay:

Let me first tell you what I think the terms man and woman refer to. There are a series of traits typically possessed by and associated with biological females. Not all women share all of these traits but having them is correlated with being female. These traits include:

• Possessing secondary sex characteristics.

• Using she her pronouns to describe oneself.

• Having long hair.

• Various personality differences. For instance, men tend to be more interested in things and women tend to be more interested in people on average. Women tend to be more nurturing and caring.

• Painting one’s nails.

• Having a high voice.

• Being born female.

And so on. In short, these feminine traits are what determine whether when you interact with a person, you think of them as a woman.

Three main problems here.

1. Possessing traits typically associated with a thing does not mean you are that thing, whether it’s being Chinese, a woman, or an apple.

2. When you interact with a person, thinking of them as Chinese or a woman doesn’t therefore mean that they are.

3. These traits are considered feminine because females have them. But they are not inherently feminine and therefore cannot bestow womanhood on men who have them. In fact, some of the same traits are masculine in some cultures so does that mean they bestow manhood on women? Of course not.

4. Not all trans women possess these traits, nor is there any number of traits one must have to qualify. Some trans women possess zero.

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He did not respond. At the end of Nineteen Eighty-Four, after Winston is brutally tortured and finally accepts that two plus two is five, Orwell writes, “It was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”

This line kept coming to mind as I was debating Adelstein because in order to claim that we should regard men as women because growing your hair long makes you seem like a woman clearly requires winning a kind of victory over oneself. You can imagine Big Brother Woke smiling from the telescreen. But notice that his argument even goes beyond Saussure or Butler to claim that a woman is just whatever we choose to call a “woman,” that it is merely a social role, that there are only “women” and no actual women. It’s an assault not just on women, but truth, reaching dream-demon levels of absurdity that are not only explicitly sexist but anti-Enlightenment, anti-science, and anti-reality. One reader who saw the discussion commented:

I find it fascinating that people are interested in spending this much time and effort splitting hairs over something that most of us understand clearly and have no need to precisely define terms. But whatever helps you sleep at night. Still, perhaps invest your intellectual energy on problems that actually need solving and would actually benefit humanity.

I understand where he’s coming from, and I wish there was no need to sit around and debate the difference between 0 and 1, or whether there even is a difference. But I do think it’s important, however well-intentioned, that when people try to pour cement mix over our feet and trap us in lies, we kick off the muck and assert basic facts. Hopefully, we won’t still be debating whether men are women, math is racist, or science needs to be decolonized in the years ahead. But so long as we are, I’m happy to be on the front lines. If that makes me a glory hound for the truth, proud to be one.

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If you enjoyed this, I recommend my recent discussion with

Mia Hughes

on the truth of the trans movement. As one listener commented, “I actually think this episode of yours is the most comprehensive trans conversation available right now. It’s what I would make people listen to if they wanted to be brought up to speed on the issue.”