It is common in contemporary culture for those within the homosexual and so-called transgender movements and for their advocates in the broader society to portray themselves as crusaders seeking justice for supposed marginalized groups, successors to the champions of suffrage and racial equality in times past who simply want a more just society. While it is right to crusade for justice, what separates the movement for racial justice in the 20th century was that they were advocating against injustice based on the genetically determined trait of skin color, something they had no choice to receive. In contrast to this, advocates of the so-called transgender and homosexual movements are waging war against the just condemnation of their repeated intentional choice to engage in and celebrate morally depraved sexual activity in the one case and reality-denying language and behavior in the other. The cause for racial justice and the homosexual and transgender movements are separated by the morally relevant distinction between unchosen biology and chosen behavior.
These chosen behaviors were once kept back from the mainstream of society, as most of the culture recognized that the sexual depravity and biology-ignoring behavior and speech in which the movements' participants consciously engaged deserved the moral stigma and scorn that the participants now try to portray as some sort of injustice. Unfortunately, in contemporary Western culture, where the only sin of sexual ethics is to acknowledge that there are sexual sins and concrete limits to what we can do with our bodies sexually, the advocates of these movements now succeed in the attempt to call good what mainstream culture once rightly recognized as evil.
The celebration of evil as good and condemnation of good as evil has in recent years come to the fore in contemporary society in ways that ordinary Westerners find shocking. Grown men dance in thongs at drag shows in front of children who are encouraged to put money in what skimpy clothing remains on the men's bodies. Teachers work behind parents' backs to transition kids into a supposed opposite gender and usher them towards surgeries that will chop off healthy body parts and towards hormones that will harm their health and reproductive system, ultimately leaving them unable to have children of their own. Librarians equip their libraries with sexually pornographic books meant for kids, and school administrators approve the teaching of similarly sexually graphic material in the schools. Yet the parents who protest such perversion are demonized and treated as if they were actual or potential domestic terrorists. Hundreds in a pride march declare, 'We're here, we're queer, and we're coming for your children', and yet an objection to the movement's attempt to sexualize children is enough to get one cancelled. Attempts to reason or dialogue with those in the movement are shouted down with trite chants of youth whose binging on Netflix and video games leave them insufficient time to enlighten themselves beyond the indoctrination they received from activist college professors. The penchant of these mobs of youth for physical abuse of those wanting to argue for the truth is justified by the absurd claim that words are violence, thus throwing under the bus the constructive discussion that has been at the heart of higher education from the Greeks onward to the present. So egregious is the vitriol, violence, hate, and perversion of children and adults in the two movements that many who once were spiritually skeptical struggle to find a better explanation than a powerful demonic force operating in and through the two movements, as if the moral decline of our culture left Satan free to finally show himself without disguise.
The transgender movement wants to go beyond even this, however. It is not content simply to let each person decide that he is male or female or whatever other gender he wants to make up or use. Instead, the transgender movement insists that whatever that person decides about himself, everyone else must agree that he is what he claims to be. We sanely do not insist that other people must describe us by our preferred adjectives when talking about us in the third person, and so even if a man declared that his adjectives are 'intelligent' and 'handsome', none of us are forced to refer to him as that 'intelligent, handsome man' when talking to him or about him. But when it comes to sex or supposed gender, if a man decides that he is a she, everyone must also call him a she. If a woman decides that she is now a man, everybody else must now call the woman a man, and the person who refuses to do so and insists that he treat pronouns as we all treat adjectives is smeared as a hateful bigot. This advocacy of compelled speech inflicts still further harm onto society beyond those harms just described.
In the eyes of the contemporary transgender movement, one of the worst possible sins is to "deadname" someone, to call them by the name they had before they supposedly changed genders and adopted a new personal name to go with it. The sibling to deadnaming is "misgendering", to call someone a male when they now self-identify as a female (or vice-versa), or more generally (since purportedly we can now make up any gender we want), to call someone by a gender that is not the gender to which they ascribe. It is said that to use a person's adopted pronouns is to be kind and loving and to show respect to the transgender person. In contrast to this, the traditional usage of pronouns and of words denoting the male and female sexes, a practice that goes back to the dawn of mankind, has been to use such words to denote objective features of reality. Such usage sorts human beings into two classes based on certain objective biological features that are readily discernible.
Problems for the Transgender Movement if Gender is Tied to Biological Sex
In response to this push of the transgender movement to redefine language, there are several standard responses. If we continue to define male and female as they have been defined for the entirety of human history up to the current cultural moment, then the transgender movement runs into absurdities from which it cannot escape. No amount of bodily surgery, nor any amount of hormones put into the body, can change a person's biological sex. Those surgeries and hormones can make a male or female into a deformed or mutilated male or female, but the person's sex remains constant and unchanged. To say that a man is a woman, that a she is a he, or to use a pronoun that conflicts with the person's biological sex, is to participate in promoting a lie, and such advocacy of a lie is never respectful, kind, or loving to the transgender person in question or to anyone else. Rather, it harms that person and harms those who participate in the lie.
Problem #1: Inconsistency with Other Cases of Delusion or Confusion
If the transgender person is a man who does not believe that he is a woman, but is taking advantage of the cultural situation by calling himself a woman, then he is being evil in stating what he knows to be false in order to gain whatever benefits that are enticing him to calling himself a woman. If, in contrast, the person is a man who is truly confused and sincerely not convinced that he is a a biological man, or who is under the sincere delusion that he is a woman, it is still not respectful, kind, or loving to call the man a woman if he claims that he is now a woman. To the contrary, it is harmful to that man to play along with the lie that he is a woman. Calling such participation in a lie gender-affirming care, as advocates of the movement love to do, is the opposite of care: denial of the truth is denial of care.
Not only is it harmful to the confused or deluded person, but acquiescing to the person's delusion is also inconsistent with how we normally and rightfully deal with persons who are confused or deluded about objective realities of their bodies or the world. For an example of how we normally and rightfully deal with such delusion or confusion, we may consider the comparative case of a woman whose anorexia has reduced her to skin and bones, and who yet believes that she is fat and overweight. In that case, we recognize that it is not kind, respectful, or loving to encourage her in the delusion that she is fat. The most kind, respectful, and loving thing to do is to tell her the truth, help her see that she has a distorted self-perception and is sickly skinny rather than fat, and try to bring her to a healthy recognition of the reality of her biological condition. Encouraging the mental disorder of anorexia is not loving, and so we rightfully do not encourage the delusion. To be consistent, if a biological man genuinely does not believe that he is a man, or a biological woman does not believe that she is a woman, we also should not encourage that delusion. In such cases, telling the biological man that he is a man (and the biological woman that she is a woman) is the most loving thing to do, and telling them the opposite does real harm to them.
Although the preceding comments deal with the hypothetical case of someone who is deluded or confused, it should be recognized that in the great majority of cases (over 99.99%?), those who would call themselves transgender really know that they are still a man if they were born a biological man and still a woman if born a biological woman. Nearly all those in the transgender movement are not deluded about the truth and are instead evil for advocating what they know to be a lie. The foregoing comments about delusion or confusion are given for the sake of argument, included to show that even if one were to grant the contention that some persons in the movement were confused or deluded rather than liars, it is still not good, kind, or loving to entertain their delusions if they think that they are something different than the biological sex of their birth.
When it comes to youth, while the foregoing words are in large part still true, there are often other factors at play, as evidenced by the very high percentage of those youth who grow out of the phase of identifying as transgender. Common sense and the massive rise of youth identifying as trans highlight the reality of social contagion and of identifying as trans for reasons that have nothing to do with body dysmorphia. Kids often want to be seen as cool or rebellious, and so can identify as trans to look edgy. Kids are sensitive to peer-pressure and so conform to the massive pressure to accept or be part of a movement that major cultural forces celebrate. Some kids want help or attention, and see trans-identification as a way to get noticed or heard. In all these cases, body mutilating surgery and body altering hormones or drugs are not the solution, since they do not address the root issue. Even if it were not morally wrong and unloving to encourage them in the lie of trans-identification, for most of these root causes, trans-identification will not solve the root problem, and even joining the trans-community to be seen or heard does not offer attention and community that the youth can not find in non-trans groups.
Problem #2: Reductio Ad Absurdum from Comparable Cases of Animals, Race, Height, Age, Weight, and Disease
If one did not see the patent absurdity in disregarding biology when determining who is a he or a she, or who is a man or woman, perhaps it would be clearer if the same principle were applied in other areas. A white man could say that he is black, or a black man say that he is Korean, and doing so would be no different (and no less absurd) than saying that a man is a woman. A short child could say that he really does have the minimum height necessary to ride the roller coaster, even though plain observation shows that he is nowhere close to it. A person might identify as a cat, and a child identify as a frog, and they would have just as much claim to being a cat or a frog as a man claiming to be a woman. A diabetic with an A1C of 9% might claim that it is 5% and that he is not diabetic in order to avoid the increased insurance premiums, and the insurer would not have any more reason to take a man's claim that he is a female more seriously than it would the diabetic's claim. A morbidly obese man might claim his weight is hundreds of pounds less than it is for the same purpose, and for him it would likewise be true that his claim has no less reason to be treated as true than the claim that a woman is a man. The person infected with AIDS or some other sexually transmitted disease might object that he should not be prosecuted for the crime of infecting a sexual partner whom he did not inform of his disease since at the time, he identified as disease-free. If he did not have the disease, he of course was not able to pass it on to someone else. All such claims would be plainly false and insane if offered in genuine earnestness, and evil if offered in full knowledge that the person was not what he claimed to be and yet meant to impose his falsehood on the speech of others. But all of them also have as much warrant to be taken seriously as a man claiming to be a woman. If we must accept that man's claim, we should accept these other claims, too, which would be ludicrous.
Some add to this reductio ad absurdum the idea of identifying as a different age than one's real age. A 20 year old might identify as a 70 year old in order to get a senior citizen discount, or the 50 year old pedophile identifies as a 16 year old in order to avoid criminal charges. If a man can call himself a woman and everyone must treat him as a woman, then these absurd claims of a 20 year old being 70, and the 50 year old being 16, have just as much warrant as the claims of a man being a woman. So if we accept the claim of a man being a woman, we should also accept these other absurd claims about age. But we don't accept these claims, and so we should not accept the claim of a man being a woman.
These clear cases work because we can tell simply by examining the 50 year old's body that he is not 16, and by examining the body of the 20 year old that he is not 70. In these clear cases, as in the cases of males vs females, and of snakes vs humans, biology easily gives us the answer. But there are other cases in which the disparity is not so clear, and in those cases, unlike the case of whether someone is a man or woman, or snake or human, no amount of biological examination will give us a definitive answer. If the contrast were not between 20 and 70, but rather whether someone was 34, 35, or 36 years old, biology will not help us. There is nothing in our cells or bodies that we can look at that tells us exactly how old is one of those cells or the body of which it is part. No amount of looking at someone's bodily characteristics is going to tell me that someone is 35 rather than 34 or 36.
In contrast, we can interact with someone and look at their biological characteristics and know that they are man or woman. This is where the two cases are not sufficiently similar. If someone claims to be a certain age, what we check is not their biology, but historical record(s) and testimony. What does it say on the person's birth certificate? What does the Mom say about when the person in question was born? If all the relevant historical birth documents were destroyed and the relevant testimonial evidence were lost (the mother and father who were there at the birth died, the person in question lost his memory, etc.), we would not be able to answer the question of a specific age. However, it still remains true that, while looking at someone might not allow us to make fine distinctions in age (34 vs 35 vs 36), it would allow us to make judgments about bigger gaps in age. Someone who is 70 is obviously not 13. The situation here is similar to that of the Sorites paradox, where one can clearly tell just by looking that a couple grains of sand is not a heap and that a million grains of sand is a heap, but can't tell at exactly what point it crosses from being a heap to not being a heap.
Problem #3: Definition by Exception vs Definition by Categoricals
All of these absurdities were avoided in the historic definition of a woman. That defined a person by reference to biological features and had no significant challenge through all of human history up until now. There were a plethora of physical characteristics that one could use to define a woman. A woman has two X chromosomes in cells of her body. She has female sexual genitalia. She has demonstrable differences from males in brain and body anatomy, physiology, and neurochemistry. She has very different levels of hormones in her body that resulted in observable outward differences from males. After puberty, she would menstruate. She is capable of becoming pregnant and giving birth to a child.
In the list of characteristics just given, there are a number of features that one might be tempted to leave out. The characteristic of giving birth and the characteristic of having female sexual genitalia are two. The reason for this is that many in the transgender movement would attempt to use these as argumentative wedges to break apart a definition of male and female from reference to biological characteristics and thus to arrive at the hallowed insistence that sex and gender are two completely disconnected things that must not be confused or linked together. If sex and gender are two different things, and if words for males and females refer to gender (whatever that is supposed to be) rather than biological sex, then persons in the transgender movement might feel that the movement can avoid the absurdities highlighted above.
Consider the abnormal case of Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (CAIS). When born, persons with this disorder are phenotypically female in regard to genitals, and show no signs of genital masculinization. And yet they have a 46 XY karyotype. They have XY chromosomes, but they have female genitalia. There are three possibilities to deal with this situation. The person is a male, a female, or a third thing. If one decides that the person is a male because of the XY chromosomes, then a male can have female genitalia, and so female genitalia is not a 100% guarantee that a person is female. If one decides that the person is female because of the female genitalia, then a female can have XY chromosomes, and so XY chromosomes are not a 100% guarantee that a person is a male. If one decides that we have neither male nor female, but some third type of person because of the unusual biological characteristics, then one breaks free of the sexual dichotomy and can ask why we should not let other anomalies be used to add even more categories beyond the customary male and female binary.
Whatever one of the three options one chooses, the transgender advocate will contend that certain genitalia or chromosomes cannot be an essential feature of a particular sex. The very notion of an essential characteristic or property P of some object O is that P is present in all instances of O. If there exists an object O that does not have the property P, then P is not an essential property of O but rather what is called an accidental property. And the transgender advocate demands that a definition of a particular sex be one of necessary properties or characteristics of that sex. Hence, if a person affected by Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome has XY chromosomes but female genitalia, and is deemed to be a female, the transgender advocate will claim that, since chromosomes do not determine biological sex, our definition of male and female should not make reference to chromosomes.
Those who hold to a common-sense view of sex that would include chromosomes in the definition of males and females often complain that the transgender advocate is letting the exception rather than the norm determine the rule, and that it is improper to do this. While this might be true, it does not clearly show why the transgender's elimination of accidental properties from a definition of something would be inappropriate. After all, it rightly is standard practice in philosophy to define the identity of something by its necessary properties and not include its accidental properties. So why should we not also exclude accidental properties in the definitions of the sexes and only include essential properties? Saying that we should not let the exception determine the rule does not clearly answer this question.
To see why the transgender's approach at defining human sexual categories by essential characteristics is flawed, we can consider a real-world case of something other than male or female sex as an illustration of the fact that, for living beings and other things in the physical world, the insistence on using only properties shared by all members of a kind for defining what constitutes being a member of that kind is contrary to reason and contrary to our normal, correct practice. Instead of considering what it means to be male or female, let us consider the question of what is a human being. Further, let us consider the case of someone born without a pinky finger, or, as in the case of the evangelist Nicholas James Vujicic, someone born with tetra-amelia syndrome, which is a condition of being born without arms or legs.
The same logic of the transgender movement about chromosomes and genitalia can be applied to the missing finger and the absence of arms and legs. Is the person born without a pinky finger a human being? If we say that he is, then applying the logic of the transgender movement would mean that we should not define a human being as having ten fingers. It says that if someone is born with female genitalia but XY chromosomes, then either we must say that we can't use the presence of male genitalia in our definition of a man (if we deem the person with CAIS a man) or that XX chromosomes can't be used to define a woman (if we deem the person with CAIS a woman). Well, what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If just one person with abnormal genitalia or chromosomes is enough to eliminate those features from the definition of the sex to which the person belongs, then the person born without a finger prevents us from defining human beings as having ten fingers, and Nicholas Vujicic prevents us from defining human beings as having any legs and arms at all.
More than that, just about anything in the human being that we can eliminate and the person would still survive would mean that we would not be able to use whatever was removed in the definition of a human being so long as a single human being was living without it. Some people have donated or lost a kidney, so the transgender's approach to the definition of the sexes would not let us define a human being as having two kidneys. If someone lost their eyes and vision, we would not be able to say that a human being has two eyes and can see. Some people can't hear, and so we can't define humans as being able to hear. Some people survive without a stomach and so we can't define humans as having a stomach if we adopt the transgender's approach to defining the sexes.
In fact, since even the ability to remove something from the body and have the human being still survive would mean that having whatever was removed was an accidental property and not an essential one, there does not even have to be a single human in existence who lacks the characteristic in question for it to be inappropriate to use that characteristic in the definition of a human being. Were it possible for us to live as a brain in a vat, then we would not be able to include most of the human body in the definition of what it is to be human.
What these examples show is that the transgender's method of only allowing characteristics that every member of a kind has in the definition of that kind leads to absurdity if applied elsewhere in the physical world beyond the male and female sexes. In the characterization of kinds of beings in the physical world, we do not in normal practice define things by eliminating from our definitions of kinds of beings any feature that a rare member of that kind might fail to possess. We instead employ the concept of deformity or defect. We recognize that select members of a kind may fail to fully instantiate the definition of a member of that kind due to some abnormality or problem, but that the members are still members of that kind. They are simply deformed or defective members.
Rather than employing only predicates that every member of the species has for our definitions, we instead use what are called categoricals, definitions that are not universal quantifiers but are more than just existential quantifiers. Being more than existential quantifiers means that something more is meant than that at least one of the members of the kind has the characteristics in question. Not being universal quantifiers means that not every member of the kind must have every characteristic that forms the definition of that kind. This makes room for the concept of defect or deformity and the ability of some members of the kind to only partially realize the definition of a kind while still being members of it. Categoricals establish the basis by which defect or deformity is determined and the norm by which the extent of that defect or deformity is measured.
Our use of categoricals and the concept of defect or deformity is ubiquitous in the ways in which we characterize, categorize, and define the objects of our experience in the world. The whole category of the disabled is an acknowledgement that a normal human being has the ability that the disabled person lacks, while simultaneously acknowledging that the disabled person's failure to meet the norm does not take away his status as a member of the kind human being.
When it comes to human beings, this practice of ours in treating those who fail to fully realize the norm defined by categorical definitions is extremely important. One may recall from earlier that, for the person affected by Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (CAIS), who has XY chromosomes and female genitalia, one possibility for defining such a person was to put the person in a third category that is neither male nor female. Advocates of the transgender movement find this attractive and push for it, because it is a beachhead into characterizing sexuality as a spectrum of factors that is not limited by the sexual binary. If we make a third sexual category for those with CAIS, we are now free to use other physical abnormalities or factors in creating still more categories, and the transgender advocate would feel that he has broken free of the chains of our binary sexual nature and entered into a rainbow spectrum of sexuality, all without making any appeal to gender.
As already indicated, this approach of definition by exception leads to absurdity when applied elsewhere in the physical world, and ignores our standard practice of defining physical beings and objects by categoricals. But there is a much darker side to this approach. This approach says that the failure to have some characteristic in our definition of a kind means that the thing in question no longer is that kind. Instead, it is something else, something different than the kind itself. This type of reasoning has been used in the past to justify the dehumanization and murder and torture of untold numbers of people. In the days of the third Reich, it was the contention that Jews and others did not have the features of supposedly evolutionarily superior Aryan "race", and were somehow less valuable or had less dignity than blond-haired blue-eyed Germans. They were viewed as sub-human. In the enslavement and torture of black persons, the darker pigment of their skin and other features that were different from whites were used to justify treating black persons as animals that were not the same kind of being as whites. People like my nephew with Down syndrome, born with an extra copy of chromosome 21, have been treated as less than human because their genetic defect was used as justification to put them into a different non-human or sub-human category rather than being treated as a full human born with a particular chromosomal defect. It would be tedious and perhaps somewhat depressing to go through the annals of history and recount how the physical or behavioral differences of groups of human beings were used by others to dehumanize them, portray them as some kind of being that was different and sub-human, or non-human, and then to move forward with some twisted sense of justification that the mistreatment of the group was somehow morally acceptable.
While it is true that the concept of defect or deformity necessarily involves the idea that the lack of the deformity or defect is better in regard to the fulfillment of the categorical definition, it nevertheless remains true that the defect or deformity does not expel the person in question from the kind or group that the categorical is defining. Using categoricals to define human beings thus shuts the door to the justification of dehumanization and its associated injustices, whereas the method of the transgender movement that defines us by exception and abnormal characteristics and that then puts people into different groups rather than treating us as the same kind opens the door wide open to the dehumanization that has been used for the murder or mistreatment or torture of millions, if not billions, of people in world history.
In the end, the presence of sexual abnormalities does not provide an adequate basis to exclude chromosomes, genitalia, and other physical characteristics from the definitions of males and females. Rather, using abnormal cases to constrain definitions of the physical world leads to absurdity and is against the universal (or nearly universal) practice of using categoricals for definitions and of employing the concept of deformity or defect for those abnormalities that fail to fully realize those categorical definitions. So, despite the attempts of those in the transgender movements to use rare abnormalities to argue for a spectrum of sexuality and the separation of sex from gender, those rare cases of sexual abnormality will not succeed in accomplishing those tasks. It accordingly remains true that insisting that males can become females (and vice-versa) and that they should be treated accordingly leads to absurdity and should be rejected by all those who care about truth or who care about science.
Problems for the Transgender Movement if Gender is Not Tied to Biological Sex: Biological Imitation, Sexual Dimorphic Determinism, Linguistic Solipsism, and Circular, Meaningless Definition
Against all these examples in which pronouns and words for males and females are taken to refer to biological sex, the advocate of the transgender movement would say, despite thousands of years of human usage in which pronouns and words for men and women were used to refer to the biological sex of a person, that pronouns should now be used to refer to a person's gender, whatever that is, not to their biological sex. On top of ignoring the totality of human history and the practice of most adults even in the present time, this change in meaning of basic pronouns and words has its own problems. First, if gender is determined by biological sex, and if it is impossible to change one's biological sex, then it follows that one cannot change one's gender. Pronouns, therefore, can't be detached from a person's biological sex, and there is no basis or reason to change the normal usage of pronouns and words for men and women. That would mean that we should continue using pronouns and other sex-specific words as they have been used in the whole of human history, to refer to a person's biological sex. If pronouns referred to gender rather than biological sex, then as long as gender were attached to biological sex, it would still be a lie to use a pronoun that did not agree with the respective person's biological sex (and it thus would still be morally wrong and neither loving, nor kind, nor respectful to the person involved to use that pronoun to refer to that person).
Problem #1: Biological Imitation
If, as advocates of the transgender movement contend, gender is indeed a social construct completely detached from biological sex, then the movement faces an internal inconsistency and also an insurmountable problem. The inconsistency is that in practice, those in the transgender movement do not believe what they claim. Those biological males who transition to being "female" almost invariably seek to imitate the biological characteristics of biological females, in addition to their social characteristics. They get surgery to augment their chests (top surgery), or have genital/bottom surgery. Aside from the fact that such mutilation of the body does not make a male truly female (or vice-versa), the problem of such a pursuit is that it gives the lie to the claim that gender is completely detached from biological sex. If being "female" is completely unconnected from the biological characteristics of having breasts and a vagina and vulva, and unconnected from the social characteristics of wearing dresses and lipstick and makeup, there is no reason apart from statistical frequency why the person claiming to be "female" should seek surgery for fake breasts and a fake vagina rather than faux imitations of the anatomical features of animals. Why breasts and not the stubby horns of a royal antelope implanted onto the skull, and why a vagina instead of a deer's bushy tail surgically attached just above the rear end? The same questions hold true for dresses and makeup and lipstick. Why look to those customs of the biological female instead of drawing inspiration from the animal kingdom or doing nothing at all?
The fact that most transgender persons imitate the biological and social characteristics of biological females (if born a man) is a clear acknowledgement that the characteristics of a woman are in fact the characteristics of biological females, which is to say, that being female is tied to biological sex, that having a female gender is tied to biological sex. The transgender movement vehemently denies this. But that is what is involved in so-called transitioners mimicking biological females' bodily features and social characteristics.
Problem #2: Sexual Dimorphic Determinism
Someone in the movement might say that adopting these characteristics is simply following the social convention of those who identify as females. In that case, the definition of a woman is simply a numbers game. Since most people who identify as female have the bodily features and social characteristics of biological females, then transgender persons are just following the herd. Being a woman in this instance is the result of a democratic vote or simple majority.
This definition of a woman would be socially constructed (that is, determined by majority vote), which is what the transgender movement wants, but the problem for the movement here is that this still ties the definition of woman to biological females. Statistically, biological females constitute and always will constitute the great percentage of people who call themselves women. So even if being a woman is determined by majority vote, then biological females, and thus biological sex, will still determine what a woman is. If the transgender person chooses to get his chest augmented and bottom surgery done because a majority of people identifying as female are biological females with the relevant body parts, then the transitioner is again letting biology dictate what being female is, which is inconsistent with the claim that gender is completely independent of biological sex.
The transgender advocate might claim that this democratic determination of what is a woman only indirectly ties womanhood to biology, and that it makes it so that the physical and social traits of biological woman are not necessarily tied to the definition of a woman. After all, he might claim, if we were to convince most biological women to identify as males and enough males to identify as females, we would get the definition of a woman to include having male body parts; so, determining gender by majority vote does not contradict the claim that gender is completely independent of biological sex.
There are two problems with this response. First, if the majority of people self-identifying as gender X determines the definition of what it means to be gender X, then we are still going to end up with definitions that boil down to essentially insignificant variations of two groups, those male-majority groups who are thereby defined by the biological and social characteristics of biological males and those female-majority groups who are thereby defined by the biological and social characteristics of biological females. You can slap hundreds or even thousands of gender labels on these groups, but in the end, sexually dimorphic biology will still collapse the definitions of those "genders" into essentially two groups: biological males and biological females.
The second problem is that advocates of the transgender movement in general revolt at the idea that a majority gets to determine what gender they are. Their gender is whatever they want it to be. But if my gender is whatever I want it to be regardless of my biology, and if words for male and female refer to gender and not biology, to call myself female should have no bearing whatsoever on whether I wear a dress or not, or whether I wear makeup, or whether I get breast implants (aka top surgery) or genital surgery (aka bottom surgery).
Engaging in those activities in response to calling myself female is to admit that biological sex does determine gender, in which case the man supposedly transitioning to being female is simply a cross-dresser, not a real female. It is to deny the very basis of the transgender movement. If a man supposedly becomes a woman, and being a woman has no connection to biology, there is no reason whatsoever for him to change his appearance, and certainly no reason to spend tens of thousands of dollars and risk surgical complications, infections, and early death to mimic the appearance of a biological female. That there is a whole industry devoted to so-called sex-change procedures is a self-incriminating confession that the movement's claim that sex and gender are not inherently connected is a lie, and that claim should therefore be rejected by someone who loves the truth.
This implicit submission to the link between biological sex and gender is deeply ironic, given the transgender movement's insistence on "my truth" and on a person getting to define his own gender. If we define our own gender and what that gender is, then there is no reason that the characteristics that people ascribe to the gender that they have made up should conform at all (let alone conforming as closely as it does in practice) to the traditional characteristics of biological males and biological females. The fact that the chosen genders do conform closely to the characteristics of the standard sexual binary shows how inescapable are biological sex and its physical and social characteristics.
Problem #3: Linguistic Solipsism
There is more than just this inconsistency, however. If we took the concept of living out "my truth" in language to its logical endpoint and everyone did make up their own gender unattached to biological reality, the problem with this approach is the solipsism of individual genders is incompatible with the communicative purpose of language. For language to succeed, there must be shared meanings to the words we use, but the individual's ability to change the meaning of the pre-existing or made-up word that he uses to designate the supposed gender that he has chosen means that there is no stable signification to the word he does use to denote his gender. If there is no stable signification to the word, we would not be able to communicate confidently with that word, since the person could decide to change the meaning on a whim. Transgender individuals thus adopt Humpty-Dumpty's untenable view of language that a word "means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less". The insistence on "my truth" and making up what my gender is and what that gender means thus makes reliable communication with that person about the person's gender impossible. Linguistic solipsism is the antithesis of successful communication.
Problem #4: Circular, Meaningless Definition
Defining gender as something completely separate from biological sex would mean that there is no objective reality governing what being female means or what being male means. This would leave us in the unenviable position of not being able to provide any adequate definition of the word 'woman' or 'man' that does not commit the cardinal sin of dictionaries, which is the circular definition, using a word to define that same word. When asked for the definition of a woman, to say that it is someone who has characteristics of a woman is to use in one's definition the very word that one is being asked to define. But this circular definition is no definition at all.
If we cannot define a woman or man by reference to biological characteristics but rather are to define it as a socially constructed phenomenon, and if we are going to avoid the error of defining a word with the word itself, there is no adequate, non-circular definition for what a man or woman is. This inability is evident in cases where transgender advocates have been asked the simple question 'what is a woman?'. In those cases, they have no good definition to give, and often resort to the circular definition that a woman is someone who identifies as a woman. Because this uses the word 'woman' in the definition of the word 'woman', it is a circular definition that tells us nothing about what a woman is. It is like saying that the definition of some word A is A, or that God is God. As definitions, such identity statements don't help at all. Rather, they leave us right back at square one, having expended our energy to define something and made no progress at all.
One attempt to avoid facing this problem of defining what is a woman or man is to claim that only those who identify as a man can define what being a man is, and that only those who identify as a woman can identify what being a woman is. And from there, the male would decline to provide a definition for a woman, and the female would decline to provide an answer for what a man is. The problem with this view as an attempt to avoid giving a definition of a man or woman is that it is self-defeating. If the questioned person is indeed a woman, then under the person's own principle, she should be able to provide a definition of what a woman is, and for the definition of a man, in order to even say that she cannot provide a definition of what is a man, she must assume the ability to tell that she is not a man. That is, implicit in the denial of the ability to define what is the opposite gender is an affirmation that one does indeed know what the opposite gender is.
This might be seen more clearly if we continued with the definition of males and females based on biological sex, and if we also included the question of what defines an animal, given that some people have identified as a specific animal. If I asked someone, "Are you a snake?", a sane person would obviously say no. But saying that one is not a snake presupposes that one can know what a snake is without being a snake. The very denial of being a snake presupposes an ability to know what a snake is without being one. The same would be true for males and females. If I asked a woman if she were a man, and if she said no, she would simultaneously be affirming that a woman can know what a man is without being a man (and the opposite would of course also be true). The same is true if we define males and females by whatever it is that gender is supposed to be. If I say that I can't know what a woman is because I am not a woman, my claim that I know that I am not a woman is a claim that I can know what a woman is without being a woman. That contradicts my simultaneous claim that only a woman can know what a woman is. One cannot therefore decline to answer the question of what is a woman by saying that only a woman can answer that question and that one is not a woman. That is self-contradictory.
Separating sex from gender means that there is no physical characteristics of our bodies that limit what gender is. That is exactly what the proponents of the movement want, as those lack of physical constraints on gender mean that gender is entirely a mental construct and thus becomes whatever the person wants it to be. The problem with this unmooring of 'gender' from physical reality is that gender becomes a meaningless term that refers to nothing at all. Yes, gender is defined as the socially constructed characteristics of men and women, and girls and boys. But if we can't define 'men', 'women', 'girls' and 'boys' by their biology, and instead by these terms mean 'those who identify by those terms', such that a person of gender X is 'someone who identifies as gender X', then not only have we relapsed into the cardinal sin of dictionaries (which is defining a word by using the word itself), but we learn nothing at all about the person himself by saying that the person is gender X. We only learn that the person likes ascribing one or more syllables or letters to himself.
Erasing longstanding ethical and societal norms by changing the meaning of words and providing no replacements for their signification
By itself, this ascribing to oneself one or more syllables or letters that have no meaning would not be a problem. That is what names often do. While many parents name their children because of the name's meaning in some language, often names are just signifiers that, apart from a typical indication of biological sex, usually tell us little or nothing about the person. They do serve a useful purpose of identifying one individual among others. They would permit someone to get up in front of a large crowd and ask if a person having a certain first, middle, and last name were present. Statistically, if that person were in the crowd, there is likely not more than one other person in the crowd by that name.
If proponents of the transgender movement wanted to make up syllables to apply to themselves like names, it might seem odd and a poor waste of time, as we already have names for that. But in itself, that would not be too problematic. What is problematic, however, is that the movement wants to take syllables or combinations of syllables (which includes pronouns) that formerly served a useful purpose of marking out people in the world with certain biological characteristics, co-opt those syllables for their meaningless word games, and then provide no alternative words to mark out those biological characteristics.
Even if the movement did seek to provide alternative words to mark out those biological characteristics, it would be ridiculous to make a societal crusade of redefining the pronouns and other words marking out biological characteristics such that those terms now refer to nothing at all, and then tell people that we are to use the alternative words to mark out those same biological characteristics. The more sensible thing to do would be to let pronouns and other biologically identifying words continue to mark out biological characteristics (as they have done for centuries), and then the transgender movement would get to use for their word games remaining syllables and letters (and combinations thereof) that are not already being used for some other purpose in the respective language.
But that is not what the transgender movement is seeking to do. Instead, it does want the meaning of pronouns to be changed so that they do not mark out biological characteristics, and there is to be nothing that replaces them. This serves two useful purposes for the transgender movement. It makes it easier to reinterpret past laws and judicial rulings that meant one thing and force into those decisions and laws a very different meaning. They can abolish existing law and make up new law without having to go through the democratic and legistlative process. That is a very convenient way to change society.
There is a second and more profound purpose that is served by co-opting biologically marking words and providing no alternative words in their place. The point of having separate words for two things is that there are relevant differences between the two that are worth calling out, and the two separate words permit us to highlight those differences. By erasing the meaning of pronouns as identifiers of biological realities through its co-opting the pronouns to mean nothing at all and its providing no alternative linguistic signifiers for the biological realities marked out by those pronouns, the transgender movement effectively maintains that biological differences between sexes are not relevant for anything.
This insistence on the irrelevance of biological differences between sexes is evident in the push to erase longstanding ethical and societal norms that are based on biological sexual differences. The movement wants men to be able to be naked in female locker rooms, and females who object to that invasion of their privacy and the loss of modesty are enemies of transgenders everywhere. Males are to be permitted into female prisons or female only shelters for women who have been sexually abused or raped, and the trauma and physical danger of sexual violence that the presence of those males impose on females must be ignored. A woman getting raped in prison by her male cellmate or in a protective shelter by a sexual predator is simply the price to pay for equality. Young females who have dedicated their lives to sports lose out on state competitions, trophies, or scholarships because mediocre male athletes get tired of losing to their superior male peers and instead want to compete against people who by birth and biology are at a distinct disadvantage. So, in the name of equality for posers who make up a miniscule percentage of humanity, half the population is robbed of an equal playing field in sports, competitions, scholarships, and the fulfillment of their dreams. Parents are robbed of their rights to protect their children from bodily and genital mutilation, and immature children make permanent life-altering decisions that defy the order and purpose given their bodies by their Creator and have foisted on them soul-distorting denial or lifelong regret.
The many ways in which the transgender movement puts real women in physical and sexual danger, invades their privacy, takes away their modesty, and strips them of opportunities for equality with males makes it an anti-feminine movement that is damaging and destructive to real women. It hates biological females, which is why there are many otherwise liberal women who are part of a counter-movement that is derided with the epithet TERF - trans-exclusionary radical feminist. These women recognize that to erase ethical and cultural norms associated with biological differences of the sexes does great harm to biological/real women, and so they push back.
The Logical Precursor to the Transgender Movement
A major problem for otherwise liberal-minded women who are TERFs is that their approval of homosexual sexual activity undercuts the very basis that they have for pushing back against the transgender movement that is doing tremendous harm to members of their own sex. To say that homosexual sex is morally acceptable is to deny the teleological ordering of the world in which men and their sexual organs are created for women, and women and their sexual organs are created for men. Homosexual sex is wrong because it violates and is contrary to that purpose for which the sexual organs and the bodies were created and for which they exist.
To affirm that homosexual sex is morally acceptable is to affirm that there is no human nature that dictates what the purpose of our bodies and sexual organs are. Rather, human nature and the body are simply social constructs. That claim is at the heart of the homosexual movement's advocacy of homosexual sex. From that claim, it logically follows that the very ideas of male and female as ethics defining norms are also not objectively rooted in the physical world and nature, but are socially constructed. And if we are the ones who defined what it means to be male and female, then we can redefine them to be what we want.
We thus come to gender as being a social construct completely unconnected to biological sex. Male and female are simply what we say that they are, and nothing more. Since there is no sexually dimorphic biological reality undergirding male and female, there is no need to limit ourselves to just the male and female genders, and we get the alphabet soup of however many genders the count is up to by now. The acceptance of homosexual sex as morally permissible is accordingly the logical precursor to the acceptance of transgender ideology.
The Evidence for Souls and for a Designing Intelligence as a Barrier against Using Materialism to Justify Transgenderism
Although the criticisms given earlier show that there is no coherent, defensible rationale to support the transgender movement, there is still one final play that an advocate of the transgender movement might make in order to justify the movement's efforts. The advocate might contend that there is no God, that we have no souls, and that all that exists is physical. In other words, materialism is true. Thus, even the idea of male and female is just a human-created construct that we can be free to change if we feel like doing so, and all the ethical norms associated with biological sex are just groundless impositions that have no moral force.
If atheism were true, such that there is no reality beyond the physical, no souls, and no immaterial beings, it would follow that there is no inherent human nature that dictated what the purposes of our bodies and sexual organs should be. Thus, we would not be able to act contrary to or violate that purpose, which is what homosexual sex does. Further, it would follow that any norms or ethics attached to the sexual dimorphism of the human species was entirely socially constructed and had no grounding in objective moral values or truths. In that case, one would concede to the transgender movement that having pronouns and words to mark out certain biological characteristics was simply a societal choice to value those biological characteristics, and any attempt to wed those characteristics to ethical norms or values was entirely made up by humans. If those norms are entirely made up, we can remake them as we see fit, or abolish them altogether, which is what the transgender movement wants to do.
There are two problems with this view. First is the claim of many homosexual and transgender advocates that they are experiencing or have experienced a real injustice that needs to be fixed. Their fight for so-called equality is given in absolutist moral terms. Others ought to agree with them, and everyday citizens should call them by their preferred pronouns. But this is in direct contradiction to the fact that if materialism is true, there are no absolute moral values. Outside of power or force, there is no reason to listen to them if materialism is true.
This brings us to the second problem. Those in the homosexual and transgender movements know that this is not the way that the world is. Their demands for so-called justice are an implicit denial of materialism and an affirmation that we have souls. We know that our bodies are designed and have purpose, that we have immaterial souls, and that there is a powerful immaterial being distinct from us. One can cite here a plethora of evidence of which each of us has first-person experience. We have rationality, which is inconsistent with everything about us being pre-determined and physical. We persist through time and are morally culpable for past wrong choices, such that the 'me' of 5 minutes ago is the same me as five years ago. In virtue of that, we are guilty for morally wrong choices that we have made in the past. This persistence through time and the culpability for past actions, which we assume in real life and know to be true of ourselves, is inconsistent with us being completely physical beings with no souls. We have free will, a fact inconsistent with us being purely physical beings. There are objective moral values, which is inconsistent with atheism, and our knowledge of those objective moral values demonstrates that we have souls and are not completely material beings.
Further, given that every time we have traced complex specified information of a certain size to its source, we have found intelligence, we are justified in making an abductive inference from the complex specified information that we see in the microscopic level of biology and in the cosmic level of fine-tuned parameters of the universe to the conclusion that the best explanation for that information is intelligence. If the evidence were only on the level of biology, it would be theoretically possible, though unreasonable, to suppose that the intelligence in question were from within the universe, that is, that the source of the intelligence was aliens, and that these aliens were responsible for the complex specified information we see in biology. However, in light of the fact that there is little or no evidence for aliens that we have never seen and the fact that we know there is an immaterial intelligence capable of producing complex specified information in the biological realm, it takes more faith to believe in the alien hypothesis than in the hypothesis of a designing immaterial intelligence. The attempt to promote the hypothesis that the complex specified information in biology is from aliens is unreasonable and is more likely driven by a desire not to acknowledge one's Creator and submit one's life to Him.
As for us, we do have sufficient evidence from first-person experience to know that each of us is an immaterial soul, and that an immaterial being must have created that soul or causally connected it to some part of the physical world, namely, some part of our body. From that alone, I am more justified in my belief in an immaterial Creator (if he created my soul) or immaterial being of immense power (if my soul always existed and he causally connected my soul to some part of my body) than someone would be in his belief that aliens that he has never seen are ultimately responsible for the creation of earthly life in its informationally rich and varied complexity. Moreover, as the immaterial being preceding me has power to impact this physical world as evidenced by him giving me the power to impact it, I have good evidence to know that this immaterial being is sufficiently capable to have produced the complex specified information in nature.
On top of this, when it comes to the complex specified information in the finely tuned parameters of the universe, it is salient to observe that the universe logically and temporally preceded the existence of aliens and that aliens would therefore have had no part in affecting its finely tuned parameters. Aliens within the universe are not a possible explanation for the fine tuning of the universe as a whole. The simplest explanation for the fine tuning of the cosmos, and also the complex specified information of biology, remains an immaterial being who is "outside" of the universe.
Granted that, the best scientific explanation for our bodies and ourselves is that they are the product of an immaterial designing intelligence. They have been created with a nature and with purpose. Acting contrary to that purpose and nature are thus morally wrong. Our nature as human beings thus does impose ethical obligations on the use of our sexuality, and cannot be changed by any amount of surgery or hormones injected into the body. Those who are born biological males cannot become females, and their nature as biological males imposes ethical obligations on them, including that having sexual intercourse with another of their own biological sex is wrong.
If we are moral beings whose nature is best fulfilled through doing what is right and avoiding what is wrong, and if our biological status as male or female dictates what actions are morally allowed and forbidden to us, then for our own good, it is paramount that the distinction between biological male and biological female be maintained and upheld. This is what pronouns as markers of biological characteristics have done for the entirety of human history. The transgender movement's attempt to erase this distinction and the distinction's recognition of what is good for us as human beings has the effect of diverting us from what is good and leading us towards harm. That is, the transgender movement and its attempt to change the meaning of pronouns and words for men and women is evil, and participating in using pronouns and those words in a way that does not reflect our biological nature and its attendant ethical obligation is not loving, kind, or respectful.
In light of the foregoing, appeal to a materialistic naturalism cannot be used to justify the claims of the transgender movement, and we are left with having to recognize the reality that our bodies are designed and have purpose and a nature. The transgender movement is wrong because it refuses to recognize this design, nature, and purpose of our bodies, and anything that refuses to recognize the truth and reality of the world in which we live is in error.
Conclusion
However, this refusal to recognize the truth of the world in which we live was a downstream effect of the homosexual movement's (and the culture's) acceptance of homosexual sexual activity as morally permissible. If it is clear and apparent that our bodies are designed and have purpose, and if acting contrary to the purpose and nature of one's body is morally wrong, to say that homosexual sexual activity is morally acceptable is to deny that design, nature, and purpose of the human body. Those who approved of homosexual sexual activity were at least implicitly denying that our bodies have a fixed nature that dictates its purpose and what can and cannot be done with it.
If our bodies have no fixed nature, nor a purpose that is set by that nature that imposes ethical obligations on what can be done with the body, then it follows that our use of words to describe men and women are not recognizing a pre-existing reality about the nature of men and women. There is no such pre-existing reality to be recognized if the homosexual movement's denial of the nature and purpose of our bodies is correct. If there is no such pre-existing reality, then our concepts of what a man is and what a woman is are merely creations of our own minds. Since our minds created what it is to be a man or woman, we can recreate the idea of man and woman to be whatever we want them to be, which is what the transgender movement seeks to do.
Further, if our concepts of man and woman were our creations rather than a recognition of a reality already pre-existing in the world, the male/female biological dichotomy that formerly limited us to just two categories need no longer do so. If we are the ones who determine what it means to be a man and a woman, we can make up however many categories we want to place alongside whatever we come up with for our new definitions of man and woman. That is how we get the alphabet soup of the LGBTQIA+ movement.
Fortunately, we do live in a world in which we have bodies that have been designed with a purpose, bodies whose nature sets ethical limits on what can be done with those bodies sexually. The nature of those bodies is not something that we create with our minds. Rather, our minds recognize a pre-existing nature of our bodies and sexual organs that we did not create. That nature makes homosexual sexual activity morally perverted, and it makes transgenderism's denial of the sexes a denial of reality that should be rejected by anyone who loves the truth.
In 2 Thessalonians 2:10, the apostle Paul says that "They perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved." He makes it clear that failure to love the truth would keep someone from being saved from the wrath of God. Elsewhere, in the letter to the Romans, he specifically connects exchanging the truth of God for a lie to homosexual behavior. In Romans 1:24-27, he says:
Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator — who is forever praised. Amen. Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.
Christians love those in the homosexual and transgender communities. They love them so much that they want homosexuals and transgender individuals to escape from the eternal wrath of God in hell and have the eternal life that Jesus gives to those who put their faith in Him for the forgiveness of their sins. But in order for them to receive that eternal life and escape that wrath, they must acknowledge the truth. They must turn away from the approval of homosexual sexual activity and stop denying the biological sex that God gave to them when they were conceived and born. In 1 Corinthians 6:9-11, Paul included homosexual behavior in the list of sins that would exclude someone from the kingdom of God, but after giving the list, he goes on and says, 'And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.' Whether you are a homosexual or heterosexual, transgender or someone who accepts the biological sex given to you, we all have sins in our past from which we need to be cleansed if that has not happened already. Jesus left heaven and came and died for sinners so that they do not have to bear the punishment for those sins and can have their consciences and souls washed clean of the guilt of their sins. Believe on Him and accept his free offer of forgiveness for your sins. Repent of your sin, be cleansed of its guilt, and embrace the hope of eternal life that is found only in Him.
Endnotes:
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