Transgender Despotism

Are you ready for some philosophy? After hesitating for a time I have decided to take a crack at Michael Robillard’s extended analysis of our pronoun wars on the Quillette site. (via Maggie's Farm) That is, the current debate-- if you want to call it that--over transgender rights.

I would frame the issue in slightly different terms. I would begin by pointing out that language, and especially the way it is used by individual speakers, is a public medium. It is not anyone’s private property. Moreover, the way words are used has evolved over millennia. I believe it is the closest we ever get to a truly free market. No government authority; no confederation of self-righteous pedagogues;  no band of motley clerics; no media mogul caucus defines the way we use language.

They might report on it. They might set an example by using it correctly. But, as  Wittgenstein famously remarked, philosophers can at best describe how language is used. They ought in no way to attempt to dictate how it is used.

We recall that the hapless David Brooks recently opined that we each have our own realities. This is dumb, even for Brooks.

In truth, if we each have our own realities, there is no science. You cannot create your own reality, one where the laws of gravity or the laws of thermodynamics do not pertain. Science, by definition, assumes that there is one and only one reality, and that it is objectively knowable. If such is not the case, we are each living in our own solipsistic absorption, and we will never agree on anything. For the record, we cannot offer rational assent to any truth whose value depends on who proposed it. The truth, if we are to embrace it, must be the same for all rational beings. 

So, Robillard begins his assessment of the current war against science, against objective truth and against rational thought:

Truth matters. Words matter. What is objectively the case matters. And insofar as our words and concepts can be about the objective world at all, then the shared set of words and meanings that we collectively use and are permitted to use to describe, navigate, and refer to that objective world matters. Such is the case for any society worth defending. 

In the midst of our retreat from reason and from objective truth comes the transgender movement. People have been canceled; people have been thrown in jail for failing to use the right pronouns to refer to people who believe that they have changed genders. It is tyrannical and despotic. 

Indeed, as claims of “misgendering” have swelled from being regarded as instances of impoliteness, to disrespect, to phobia, to hate, to intentional harassment, to threats, to actual violence, to warranting official legal penalty, to “human rights” violations (language previously reserved for exclusive use in reference to torture, genocide, atrocity, and crimes against humanity), the moral and metaphysical landscape and the linguistic and social institutions presumably about that landscape have been run over roughshod in public discourse with alarming speed and scarce pause for serious philosophical reflection.

An astonishing state of affairs, to say the least. Under normal circumstances we ascertain someone sex, even their gender, by a quick glance. This is true, in nearly all cases, even for those who have transitioned. The notion of a special class of people who should exempt themselves from this reference is rank absurdity. If you believe that assistant secretary of HHS, one Rachel Levine, is really a woman you have a very serious problem. 

It becomes effectively impossible to communicate with different people if we are required, in each individual case, to tailor our language to their personal and ultimately private beliefs. Unless they wear their private beliefs on a name tag that they affix to their chest, how do you know whether they think that they are really transgendered or are merely transvestites?

Moreover, to state the obvious, transgenderism is functionally a belief. It is a belief that deviates significantly from biological reality. About this there should never be any doubt. Yet, many people, in their earnest zeal to appear to be stupid, have decided that sex and gender are different, by which they mean that the codes of behavior that define manly and feminine behavior differ from one culture to another. From that their mini-minds have concluded that we can change gender at will, on the basis of a belief. And, moreover, that we can impose our beliefs on other people, regardless of the objective reality.

So, people have the right to force us to deny the evidence of our senses and to treat them as the beings that they believe they are. But then, what would happen if someone who holds a delusional belief, namely that he is God or that he is multisexual, tells us that we must worship him as God and treat him as a multsexual being-- will we be forced to do so? Does being multisexual mean that he or she or it can use any rest room he or she or it prefers or does it means that this individual is not allowed to use any rest room.

One understands that people who change genders, on the basis of a personal belief, and who undergo all manner of mutilation, biochemical and surgical, are seriously distressed. Even after suffering the pain of transitioning, they still do not really fool anyone. And yet, does anyone really imagine that the rest of the human species should defy its elementary sense of reality in order to pretend that they are what they believe that they are. And that their greatest anguish arrives when someone uses the wrong pronoun, that is, misgenders them?

One recalls that Humpty Dumpty once said that his words mean only what he wants them to mean. With today’s transgender people, such is the case. But the problem today is not about what they believe; it is about their tyrannical effort to impose their beliefs on other people and to force other people to address them in a certain way.

And let us not forget that gender is inscribed in each one of every human being’s trillions of chromosomes. No one has ever suggested that these chromosomes change their structure when an individual changes his or her mind about his or her gender.

In any event Robillard continues and points out that it is all like different people on one playing field playing by different rules. 

Since definitions within any language, like rules within a game, require fixity in order for the game to hang together at all, and since a wholly private language would have no such checks and balances to keep definitions fixed and stable (the private language user could just amend definitions in perpetuity with no restrictions), Wittgenstein concluded that a wholly private language was conceptually impossible and that for terms and definitions to have any fixed meaning at all required checks and balances provided by other language users. 

You cannot make the words mean what you want them to mean. Because at that point you no longer have a language and you no longer have anything resembling communication. You also do not have game. You have constant and permanent drama.

So, by the terms of the private language, no language ever really expresses what you have deep inside. The codes determine the meaning; your intentions or your feelings do not. The words you choose to express love or affection or enmity are no different from the words that your neighbor might use to express the same emotion. If you think that you are expressing love and other people think that you are expressing apathy, you are expressing apathy.

Put another way, meaning and language is fundamentally public. What’s more, language and meaning (and indeed the collective knowledge passed between generations via language) is not merely public with respect to just present persons but is also constituted by the deep, rich, and networked storehouse of meanings passed on from one generation of language-users to the next.

Robillard explains that the problem does not as much lie in the use of proper names-- which are often changed-- but with the use of pronouns. People get married and change their names. People can go to court and change their names. This act does not change grammar or syntax. It is not remotely comparable to the male felon who declares himself to be a female and thus demands to serve his sentence in a female-only prison.

And of course, pronouns are gendered. But it does not stop there. Roles within a family, mother and father, sister and brother, aunt and uncle, are also gendered. The structure of society itself is based on a gender binary, which defines roles, duties and responsibilities.

And while proper names such as “Bruce” or “Caitlyn” do technically fall within the purview of private determination and personal prerogative, indexicals within a language, such as “he” or “she” indirectly connote and refer to fixed meanings deep within our overall shared network of public meanings and are not similarly revisable according to individual personal preference. Insofar as our collective meanings are about our shared storehouse of collective human knowledge and/or about the objective world in some sense, such indexical terms are effectively “load-bearing” terms that do not or simply cannot be moved or amended so easily without logically entailing a complete and total overhaul of the entire network of meaning, every proposition within that network, and every referent in the objective world that each term ostensibly refers to.

And also:

Accordingly, indexical terms like “he” and “she,” or generic terms like “male” and “female” for that matter, are held relatively fixed within our shared network of nested meanings either in virtue of the restraints of logic, conceptual consistency, and interrelatedness (on a coherence theory of truth), the contours and joints of objective reality (on a correspondence theory of truth), or some combination of the two. Hence, when it comes to truth claims about nearly anything and everything under the sun, big and small, like it or not, logic has a say in the matter, other language users have a say in the matter, language itself has a say in the matter, and the objective world itself has a say in the matter.

As Robillard points out, the currently trendy notion of gender identity has produced this despotism. It is the direct consequence of giving out serious academic titles on the basis of ideological conformity but not of merit. It  grants each individual a right to define his or her own gender. 

If the theory merely suggested that manly and womanly behaviors are coded differently in different cultures, there would be no problem. But, the theory of gender identity suggests that “woman” is a category invented by the patriarchy in order to oppress a certain class of beings, and therefore that the characteristics associated with womanhood, like vulnerability and passivity, must be completely obliterated, because women are really strong and empowered. If women think that they are strong and empowered, then they are strong and empowered. If you say or even think otherwise, you are a toxic misogynist pig. Got it?

The second source and primary culprit of confusion within the present transgender debate, however, is the notion of “gender identity.” This is so since “gender identity,” on the gender theorist’s own account, is defined entirely by one’s own wholly subjective determination. Much like Wittgenstein’s hypothetical private language, this wholly subjective and internal pointing to some referent accessible only to the speaker, fundamentally severs the connection of the linguistic term (i.e., “he”) from both its publicly agreed upon analytic meaning (i.e., “a male” is, by definition, “a living organism with an XY chromosome pair”) as well as its publicly agreed upon synthetic definition out there in the world (i.e., “that particular guy over there is a man,” “that particular cluster of things under the microscope is an XY chromosome pair”). In so doing, this wholly subjective turn renders the meaning of the speaker’s utterance (i.e., “he”) completely meaningless, in terms of its analytic and synthetic definition, or, alternatively, completely vacuous.

The trouble is, unless you are J. D. Rowling you will have real problems dealing with the thought police and the representative of ministry of mind control. Yet, even Rowling, who has been widely excoriated on various media platforms, has only very rarely been defended by those who pretend to favor civil liberties.