The Trouble with Gender | Alex Byrne

Does the biology you were born with trump self-identity when determining your sex or gender? Is gender innate, or can it change? And what can real-life cases of children being reassigned their sex at birth teach us?
Alex's Book: www.amazon.com...
Presenters: Mark Oppenheimer and Jason Werbeloff
Editor and Producer: Jimmy Mullen and Porter Kaufman
AV Wizard: Holly Lawford-Smith
Brain in a Vat bookshop (Shopify): smarturl.it/Br...
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Podcast: anchor.fm/brai...
Contact us: Mark.Oppenheimer[at]gmail and Jwerbe[at]gmail

[@cgpcgp3239]

Adult females who medically transition to men easily pass as men no matter what age they transition. Adult males who medically transition to women rarely pass as women. Medically transitioning children is about males being able to pass as women when they become adults.

[@user-fw2dd2cy3c]

In addition to being very clear, Byrne is a man of great patience. I've watched several such videos, and in each of them it's as if he has to spend an hour explaining why the sky is up and the ground is down, and to defend this "view" from a panoply of ridiculous, garbled arguments. Yet he always seems positive, engaged and charitable toward his interlocutors.

[@robertsaget9697]

I highly question this notion of a "sense of gender identity". It seems as imaginary and unsupported as having a "sensus divinitatus".

[@truthisnthate7034]

This is such a great comparison! I hadn't heard it before, thank you.

[@jacobderin1402]

What I worry about in using the word “woman” to describe trans and cis people is the question of what characteristics are common to all of them and only all of them. Constructing a category like “woman” requires drawing a boundary around the term in the shape of a definition. It seems to me you have essentially two choices for doing this if you want the term “woman” to include trans women: referring to self identification or referring to cultural context. Self identification is essentially circular, ie “a woman is someone who defines themself as a woman.” Cultural context will either be circular (“a woman is whatever society considers to be a woman”) or inevitably biological (“a woman is whatever role society assigns to human females”). I see people mostly using some combination of the latter two, though sometimes I see the self identification definition too. But it’s weird to say that a woman is just the role assigned to human females when that role is essentially biological and the whole point is to uncouple biology and gender. In other words, I don’t know what traits are shared by all and only cisgender and transgender women. I can make sense of the normative claim “a woman is one who ought to be treated the way female people are treated in this culture.” This is certainly true of trans women but it’s not a definition. There’s an odd fear of acknowledging this fact because it would somehow demean the transgender experience. But isn’t the entire point of the transgender identity that it isn’t exactly the same as the cisgender one? And there’s nothing about acknowledging the impossibility of giving an adequate definition of woman that includes trans women which implies you ought to do anything other than treat them with dignity and respect.

[@user-fw2dd2cy3c]

Well, "trans women" (i.e. men who misrepresent themselves as women) should *not* "be treated the way female people are treated in this culture." Because they are not female. So they should not, for example, be permitted into battered women's shelters, women's prisons, women's sports, women's public restrooms, etc. They should not be exempted from the draft. They should not be referred to as "she," nor as a woman. There are too many such examples to list, in fact. They simply are not women, and we generally have no obligation to act in accordance with falsehoods. The closest concept we have that covers both women and men who misrepresent themselves as women is *feminine*--though many men who misrepresent themselves as women do not fall under that concept either. We do have the term 'womanly,' though many are not accurately described by that, either. This is not to say that such people do not deserve to be afforded ordinary degrees of dignity and respect. People misrepresent themselves in all sorts of ways. We're pretty tolerant of some of that. If a man merely chose to dress and behave in feminine ways, that would be one sort of thing. Or an American who chose to dress and speak like a Frenchman from the 18th Century. In such cases we might well be tolerant to some degree...but that doesn't mean that we have to pretend that the falsehood is true.

[@mortagon1451]

Saying everyone has a gender identity is like saying everyone has a soul. It's a faith based claim not a factual one and I find it quite concerning that these ideas are finding their way into childrens science books.

[@Bangy]

There is not necessarily anything unsound about concepts existing which are not factual in nature. Your name for instance, is not “factual”, but is nonetheless useful. I’m not sure of anyone using gender identity as a premise in an argument or debate, as much as they’re using it as trivial background information.

[@bismillah5060]

What? Saying everyone has a gender identity is just like saying everyone has a racial identity, or any other kind of identity such as athlete, middle class, etc. It is a fact that people identify themselves with genders. Whether they actually are that gender is then a separate question.

[@mortagon1451]

With gender identity I specifically mean it in the way the gender ideologues present it as a sort of innate gendered soul meaning your sex isn't what defines your gender but your innate sense of self. It is rather obtuse and I have yet to hear a good explanation for what they mean and some of them don't even believe in biological sex. But you are right that people can identify themselves as whatever they want, but that doesn't necessarily make it true. @@bismillah5060

[@justmy2cents652]

@@bismillah5060 I really don't get what it actually means to "identify with" a "gender" different to your sex. In my understanding this could only mean identifying with regressive cultural stereotypes in which you don't conform to those associated with your sex: Internalized homophobia (it would be not okay to be same sex attracted), severe body dysmorphia or a fetish. I recognize that I am a woman because I AM a woman: My only (potential, naturally) pathway to reproduce is to get my eggs fertilized and to gestate. Therefore I have the features of the female sex in my dymorphic species, evolved with one of the two very different strategies to reproduce; I have to deal with female medical issues and, of course, with cultural implications. I just recognize those facts. My feelings about that, my position within the Bell Curve concerning various features or my likes and dislikes of certain aspects are not what makes me a woman.

[@bismillah5060]

@@justmy2cents652 I didn't ask

[@scottbuchanan9426]

To explain what he means by "living as a woman", Byrne uses the analogy of someone living as (or pretending to be) a doctor. Perhaps a better analogy is a real-life example, given to us by the journalist, John Howard Griffin. He's dead now, but 60-odd years ago, he sought to discover what it was like for African-Americans living in the deep South of the United States. So he devised a radical experiment: he used sunlamps and medication to darken his skin, and lived temporarily as a black man so that he could try and understand what it was like "from the inside". Of course, he wasn't black, but socially speaking he was, for a time, considered to be black.

[@user-fw2dd2cy3c]

Great example.

[@uncleskipsprairiejustice9367]

sorry but this is really badly argued. It seems obvious that David Reimer didn't have some kind of gender identity "epiphany" and realize that he was actually a boy. He probably just grew up and sometime around puberty, realized that he did not have functional female reproductive organs, wanted to know why, found out and no doubt recoiling in horror, spent the rest of his tragic life trying to cope with this nightmare. I don't think it's an argument for innate gender identity at all. This is a huge gap in the discussion. Very disappointing. TTFN.

[@patricknoble3090]

^^ agree 100%. This really isn't very complicated. He gets to a certain age and comes to realise something is physically/ medically wrong with him. Upon asking why, he realises the horrible experiment that was performed on him. And the reality of it all completely wrecks him psychologically. Pretty simple really. And so horrible. Poor kid.

[@CasualPhilosophy]

Gotta say Byrne's speaking rhythm makes him hard to focus on at times

[@razertron]

I have enormous worries about Byrne's thesis, aside from his essentialism (which is a massive problem for him that was barely touched here). It renders trans people and their allies delusional, albeit an "okay" type of delusion. To him, it is like someone who thinks he is a cop and living like a cop but is not, in reality, a cop. In addition, it renders any talk on trans people that most people think is true utterly false. For example, the term "transitioning" is incorrect or doesn't make sense since people can't transition from male to woman. Similarly, terms like "de-transitioning" are false or don't make sense since people can't de-transition from a woman to a man. Yet most people working with trans people or those who know some trans people do commonly use terms like that. In addition, I wonder what he thinks about hormones. Are they not biological? Does it not change people's biological bodies? Or maybe he thinks they are biological but don't make up the essential properties of sex (there are huge problems with that, unfortunately).

[@paulhalf]

In the book he writes about essentialism or biological determinism. It's not a massive problem for him. Anyone who thinks in terms of materialism is going to be able to separate the biological and therefore determined aspects from the performed and therefore contingent. As to your "cop" analogy - all analogies are poor in this issue, but yours is contradicted by what you write later in the same paragraph. So if someone is pretending to be a cop, and then they stop pretending to be a cop, then they could be said to have "de-pretended" - they have stopped pretending to be a cop. Your argument seems to be - again, showing why analogies only ever seem to be intended to mislead - that if someone imagines they're a cop and performs as a cop then they're actually a cop. Your analogy would then be that if someone pretends to be a woman then they're a woman and it doesn't make sense to talk about them stopping pretending because it doesn't need a word?

[@FireHeatLight]

They are delusional. It is a delusion.

[@razertron]

@@paulhalf Hey Paul, Sorry, I didn't see your reply! I'm talking about biological essentialism in contemporary philosophical literature, for example, Marc Ereshefsky, Hull(1965, 1978), Sober(1989), Kutcher (1984), Boyd(1999), Griffiths (1999), Wilson (1999), Millikan (1999) and so on. Traditionally, essentialism claims that there is a kind, and every member of the kind has to have a property of that kind, which is unique to that kind. Usually, people talk about species, but some people take their arguments against or for essentialism and apply them to other properties like woman, sex, gender, illness, or even love. The problem is that some things have an essentialist kind, like the chemical property of gold or physical objects like protons. However, for biological kinds, it is accompanied by a few different problems, partly because everyone in our species is different for good evolutionary reasons. This includes women, and some organisms in our species don't have a property yet are still the type without having the property. Every species has some polymorphism in it, unfortunately for the essentialist. There are standard problems with biological essentialism that are remarked on by several professional philosophers, but Alex Byrne is just skipping over everything as if it doesn't exist. I also don't know what you mean by saying that essentialism is about biological materialism and that people who are anti-essentialism are against biological materialism. Many of the above people would say that they are more about biological materialism than others because they don't cling to Aristotalist or Thomasist ontologies and are full-fledged Darwinists. In addition, most people are making claims about biological reality in general, whether it is anti-essentialism or essentialism. Also, my cop analogy wasn't mine; it was Byrne's at about 25:00, and I was being slightly satirical. I'm glad that you found some problems with it! I did, too. Ergo, Alex's cop analogy is not a good one, leaving much to be desired, just as you seem to correctly state. I don't think you and I disagree with what I said about what Byrne proposed. From what I gather, to Byrne, trans people are pretenders, and you can't " transition" for "detransition." To him, these terms don't make any sense or are false because to transition, you have to be biologically one way and change or transition to another way. To him, to be a woman, you must have a body type that produces certain types of gametes, and nobody can change those. So trans people don't change their sex or their Maness or Womaness. At best, they pretend to be that way. He is basically saying what Kathleen Stock, Holly Lawford-Smith, and their cohorts say. I happen to disagree. I am not a biological essentialist, and I also think that trans people do transition and other people detransition. I would argue that it is a biological reality.

[@paulhalf]

@@razertron Sticking to your last point - I agree with you that "some people transition" - it seems to me to be a historically demonstrable fact that there have always been people who sincerely wanted to live as the opposite sex (and did so by adopting the behaviours and some of the secondary characteristics of the opposite gender), and - cutting to a conclusion - it is right for us to treat them sympathetically even if we don't understand why they want to live the way they live. However, there's another, consequentialist argument to be had here. We can summarise those consequences as "women's spaces and services, and same sex attracted people's self definition". SO the sincere desire might be adequate to gain sympathetic treatment, but it's entirely correct that we ask "where the rights of the group they sincerely want to belong to are different from general human rights, should they be able to claim these rights as their own?". Now no matter how we argue that issue, we have to accept that it's legitimate to have that discussion, yes? But because we are not dealing with one thing - gender dysphoria - but are dealing with two - dysphoria AND identity - we are now being steered towards "any discussion of these two conflated issues is unsympathetic". So to circle back to the original point - essentialism and determinism are being conflated here to dismiss the argument that "only women have the material capacity to gestate children" which is a materially determined fact, in so far as males definitely don't have that capacity. (do me a favour, don't do the "if every meber of a class doesn't have all the qualities of members of that class then they can't be members of that class" argument, we both know it's spurious)

[@user-fw2dd2cy3c]

First, it's not really essentialism (or, if it is, the essentialism is inessential). It's realism. Second, you are wrong about what most people think about "trans" people. Most people think--rightly--that men misrepresenting themselves as women are, well, misrepresenting themselves. Sometimes it's a delusion, sometimes it isn't. Many people that might currently be called "trans" do not, in fact, believe themselves to be the opposite sex. This is just a fad, really. Most men who represent themselves as women have not, in fact, believed themselves to be. However, eg a man who does believe himself to be a woman (and vice-versa): yes. That is a delusion. This fact strikes some as unpleasant, but it *is* a fact. The hormones question isn't difficult, actually. But I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader.

[@mausperson5854]

What it's tracking is neurology... It's been shown in studies with sexual reassignment that those who have a particular 'female' brain state to the point of dysphoria do not suffer phantomb limb syndrome. Thats a very crude synopsis, but Sapolsky brought the research to my attention in a lecture seeies in the topic. When better understood I think this is going to be significant in the debates that have become sotediously ideologucal and ground it in a more emprical narrative. Of course the findings will still be used to support whatever pressupositions people hold.

[@paulhalf]

You're right that empirical approach may or will reveal more, and I have a lot of time or Sapolsky's work. However I would invite you to consider the wild disconnect at this time between the tenuousness of the empricial case versus the zealotry and certainty of the gender ideologue conduct. So for instance the demands to change laws in the absence of the empirical case which you talk about, where in effect ideologues are filling the rationale gap with a load of supposition and incoherent argument, coupled with a sometimes violent pressure that their demands be met. The content of the gender movement is only interesting in passing - their conduct however should be resisted at every turn. Sometimes resisting the conduct means showing the flaws in the reasoning.

[@mausperson5854]

@@paulhalf I tend to agree with most of that.