The Transgender Logic of Gender Fluidity Can Justify Absurdities

By William M Briggs Published on May 16, 2016

Gender, say some, is separate from sex. Few who say this seem to realize the absurdities that follow from this premise.

First, let’s get clear on what we’re being told. You’re a man in the sense of sex if you are a man biologically, which is to say, having the attributes, however imperfectly, which define the essence of a man. But supposedly you’re a man in the sense of gender simply if you believe you’re a man — if you feel like a man. So biological women can be gender-men by feeling that their biology is in opposition to their gender. A person whose gender is in opposition to biology is said to be transgender.

On this view, the match or mismatch between biology and gender need not be fixed and permanent in any one person; it may vary over time and circumstance. Hence the term gender fluid.

Now the proof of being transgender (or gender fluid) resides, as it must, with the claims of individuals. There can be no physical test of gender, as there is for sex. Being transgender cannot be a matter of biology, unless it be a malady, and this is because biology has already defined what is a man and woman. Indeed, the biological man who claims to be a gender-woman is relying on the biological definition of female: he has to know what a biological female is to assert he is gender-female.

Those who call themselves transgender are understandably loathe to admit to disease (mental or physical). Instead, they insist the transgender state is “natural,” even desirable. Again, the proof of this can only be raw assertion. This point cannot be overemphasized: Logically, the only possible check for transgender status is by asking and accepting the answer given.

Accepting raw assertion as proof has unexpected consequences.

Stature Fluidity

Suppose you claim to feel seven feet tall. It’s your identity. You are a tall man trapped inside the body of a shorter one. How dare anybody deny your tallness.

It does no good whatsoever to insist that a physical measuring tape “says” you are more than a foot shorter than this. You say you are 7′: not in height, but stature. Stature is not equivalent to height. Height is biological. Stature is separate from biological height and not equivalent. (Stature is also potentially fluid.)

You self-identify as 7′ in stature. This is your choice. Therefore it becomes my duty, say our cultural leaders, to agree with you. Indeed, if I insist otherwise, I am an intolerant bigot.

If we admit that the physical or biological measure for height has primacy over stature, then we must also insist on the biological measure of sex over gender. Conversely, and to maintain logical coherence, anybody who argues for the transgender position must agree that our hypothetical person who feels 7 feet tall is in fact 7 feet tall in stature and should be treated as a tall person.

Proof of stature is and can only be assertion, just as the only proof of one’s particular gender is and can only be assertion. To limit assertion-as-proof for gender only is to draw an artificial line based on personal prejudice. It is bigotry.

Yakety Yak

In an article elsewhere I argued, “I Self Identify As A Yak.” Every argument I used to justify my yakhood was parallel to the arguments men use when claiming to be women. This may seem absurd, but consider that many people do assert they are not human beings but animals of another species. Based on transgender-as-assertion logic, then, they are another species — not in the biological sense, of course, but in the same sense that gender is not sex and stature not height.

These people call themselves otherkin. Once again, biological or physical measurements are no use in designating otherkin status. All we have to go on is the assertion of the woman who says she is a cat. She is therefore, by the same logic of gender and stature, an otherkin cat.

Incidentally, her assertion should be enough for her to be allowed to get her medical care at a veterinarian, right?

These parallel arguments work for anything. A biological-and-gender-human-species male walks into a bar and says, “My maturity is 21. I feel 21.” Is it only out of maturophobia that the bartender refuses to serve the person, who is biologically 14, a drink? It must be if the bartender insists on physical chronology to assess maturity but then happily follows transgender logic to allow a biological male who identifies as a woman to use the women’s restroom.

This all works for citizenship status, too, hence the difference between the measurable “illegal alien” versus the assertion-status of “undocumented worker.” It’s not a coincidence that the same people who would welcome all comers across our borders as if they were citizens are the same people arguing for transgender “rights.”

The examples I gave are, and are meant to be, absurd. They seem preposterous — now. But that is only because most are still used to reality, and not mere assertion, as a basis of measurement. The danger is that the longer we take seriously “transgender” notions, the less absurd the examples will seem.

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