Transcript of Comprehensively DEBUNKING Trans Identity/Ideology in 42 minutes

this video is intended to explain why trans identity is an incorrect claim about reality comprehensively and reasonably concisely it's me explaining why I don't believe that biological males can be women nor that biological females can be men to begin here's a story i call it the tale of two Danny's on the left we have Danny Walbeck and on the right we have Danny Dvito i'd like to present some facts about these two gentlemen danny Wbeck is a professional football player he's 32 years old he's black he's English and he's 6'1 now none of these facts might seem particularly interesting but what is interesting is all of these facts are also true about Danny DeVito he's also a professional football player he's also 32 years old he's also black he's also English and he's also 6'1 now obviously these two Danny's thus have a lot in common but they don't seem that similar so we might ask the question what's the difference well the difference is quite simple see the expression of these facts is an identity you can identify as a professional football player you can identify as 32 years old and of course you can't identify as the rest of the things listed here but obviously when somebody identifies as anything they are making a claim about reality so the question is on what basis are they making that claim this is the difference see Danny Wilbeck is making these claims based on a material reference he's claiming to be a professional football player because he's made a living from playing football he's claiming to be 32 years old because the Earth has gone around the Sun 32 times since he was born he's claiming to be black because of his ancestry being quite immediately from subsahara and Africa and certain physical features consistent with that he's claiming to be English because he was born raised and has lived his life in England and he's claiming to be 6'1 because that describes the distance between the top of his head and the bottom of his feet when he has stood upright these are the material references for these claims by contrast the reason all these facts are true for Danny DeVito is because of a different reference self-identity self-identity meaning an arbitrarily made assertion about reality why is he black because he says he is why is he 6'1 because he says he is why is he a professional football player because he says he is i want to ask you a question do you think that fact claims based entirely on selfidentity are true do you think these statements are equally true for both these men what if one of them was claiming to be a woman some people might ask whether it's even possible to debunk an identity to this I would say yes of course it is identities are claims about reality and just like any claim about reality they can be debunked to clarify the fact that we can assess the accuracy of an identity is not to say that such assessments are entirely free from obscurity ambiguity relativity or subjectivity we may not have enough information to assess the validity of an identity the precise meaning of an identity might be complex and hard to pin down the identity might be contingent on criteria that varies with context or the identity might be based on an assessment that's more a matter of opinion than anything else while these caveats are worth bearing in mind they're present for any claim about reality so the overall point that trans identity should be viewed basically the way we view claims about reality in general still stands to me it's obvious that words mean things and we can talk about words having correct definitions this doesn't mean that there isn't ambiguity at all we can talk about whether a hot dog is a sandwich maybe a caton is a sandwich but a pencil isn't a sandwich if I ask for a sandwich and you give me a hot dog I'm not going to say you're wrong if you hand me a pencil then yeah you're wrong you're incorrect whenever I say that we can talk about people being wrong about what words mean I'll often have people simply accuse me of being a prescriptivist as if this is a rebuttal in itself i'd like to clear up an evident confusion on that point when we talk about linguistic prescriptivism verse descriptivism that's about linguistics as an academic discipline the purpose of linguistics is to describe and explain the nature of language rather than make pronouncements about how language should be this doesn't mean that linguists are forbidden from having opinions about language you can ask for a linguist's opinion on whether a hot dog is a sandwich and a linguist can give an opinion without the academia police showing up calling them a heretic i have opinions on language but in so far as I'm interested in linguistics I'm a descriptivist my formal education is actually not in linguistics but rather in international relations in international relations there is definitely an expectation of descriptivism international relations is the study of why international actors behave the way they do and in none of my academic work did I ever moralize the issue and talk about how international actors should behave because I was a descriptivist like most people in most academic disciplines however I hope you're not surprised to hear that I still have opinions on what international actors should do i'm not an opinionless robot ditto for something like history historians study how and why events happened in no real sense is the core conceit of history to make prescriptions about how people in the past should have behaved but that doesn't preclude historians from having such opinions you can't hand an academic linguist a sandwich when they ask for a pencil and expect that they'll be paralyzed from objecting by an academic commitment to descriptivism so given that everybody can have opinions about how we should understand certain words what does it mean for a definition to be correct the purpose of language is to communicate and thus a use of a language that fails in that capacity is clearly an incorrect usage when people in the past have suggested that it's ridiculous for me to talk about words being correct my temptation has been to respond with a random sequence of words constituting complete gibberish to show that words having meanings matters but maybe even while we might all agree that a guitar isn't a motorbike some might point out that words have changed in the past so we can't just shut down novel definitions by declaring them incorrect one example I've seen given before is the reclassification of Pluto to no longer being considered a planet admittedly I find it weird when people bring this up as analogous to changing language to affirm trans identity because such people argue that they don't need to justify this redefinition of the terms man and woman with arguments and think it's immoral to debate such things but the changes in language to which they appealed actually were accompanied by arguments for why we change the usage of these terms pluto is a useful example to discuss arguments for why definitions are correct and why we might change definitions to be even more correct in other words why correctness is a standard we can impose when discussing definitions see Pluto used to be considered a planet but planets have certain features that Pluto just didn't really share therefore if astronomers wanted to talk about planets they would have had to keep making exceptions for Pluto and consistently regarding Pluto as an exceptional planet only makes sense if there is a good reason to regard it as a planet at all so Pluto was reclassified to basically being part of an asteroid belt technically not asteroids but similar enough the point is that Pluto is a lot more like these other astronomical objects than it is like any of the planets so again to keep calling Pluto a planet we'd be having to make exceptions for Pluto in both directions scientists realize that it would be more coherent and concise to talk about the solar system and the objects within it if we no longer regarded Pluto as a planet at this point if you say that Pluto is a planet you're wrong of course outside of astronomy we could look to biology where the classification of different organisms is this incredibly complex process where we basically have to make the same considerations that we made regarding Pluto's planet status what matters is analytic utility you're probably familiar with the non-avian dinosaurs that went extinct some 65 million years ago and you're probably aware that we also have aven dinosaurs also known as birds why did scientists do this because non-avian dinosaurs and birds are similar such that it wouldn't make sense to pretend that they're different likewise birds are now considered reptiles because again there isn't a good argument for drawing a distinction between birds and other reptiles this might often seem kind of arbitrary and confusing as David Mitchell put it even though a chimp is totally in every meaningful way obviously it's a monkey it's not a monkey you know it's a special place that's been made by biologists for pedants to reside so that whenever anyone refers to a chimpanzeee as a monkey like you did then a pedant like me says "Oh no a chimpanzeee isn't a monkey." And I've started to hate myself for that of course in reality these distinctions aren't just there for the sake of pedantry they're there because there are substantial differences between monkeys and apes that warrant them being considered distinct groups so with all this in mind what about men and women what determines the difference between them well my contention is that the correct reference for the identity of being a man or woman is that of biological sex with biological sex being defined by how the phenotype is organized around facilitating the function of the large or small gameamt in sexual reproduction human beings are highly sexually dimorphic so the common critique that this is reducing sex down to one singular thing just doesn't make any sense rather we should be looking at biological sex in a holistic way with a mind towards how vast and all-encompassing the physiological reality of sexual dimmorphism in humans so often is within this context the anomalies caused by differences of sexual development are properly understood as not overriding the reality of the sex binary since differences of sexual development are variations within the binary they actually prove it conditions that cause differences of sexual development actually affect males and females differently so the sex binary is the best way to understand even these conditions some people try to force the variation of human sexual development onto a spectrum they have to arbitrarily and clumsily shove all of these different conditions onto a continuum as if they are separated by something quantifiable rather than being qualitatively different it's unsurprising therefore that no believer in the sex spectrum has the strength of conviction to actually elucidate what exactly the x-axis is they don't actually believe that maleness and femaleness are on a spectrum and that these differences of sexual development determine how male or female you are try to get them to substantiate what they mean by that and you will see they don't believe it the big issue for proponents of the sex spectrum is that they don't seem to realize what spectra even are their biggest mistake seems to be thinking that to show that biological sex is complicated is as good as showing it is spectral in reality complex does not mean spectrum and binary does not mean simple in a binary you can have limitless anatomical diversity while still having all bodies organized around facilitating the function of one out of two gameamtes and there's no difficulty there conversely in a spectrum you now have to take all of that limitless anatomical diversity and reduce it down to being described by a singular x-axis so that's the biological sex reference but you might be wondering why actually define man and woman by biological sex well firstly I want to point out that we need to define men and women by something when we look at society it is clear that these two distinct groups exist to deny that men and women exist would be to deny reality and it would just as much be denying reality to anchor our understandings of these terms in something elucory or superficial throughout history we see that men and women have existed as two distinct groups and moreover we often see that the biggest distinction to be found between men and women has been in economic roles extending from biology one of the earliest books exploring the origins of patriarchy by Angels pointed to patriarchy as an initially economic oppression rooted in women being biologically female if this oppression is a substantial part of why we today understand men and women as distinct groups would it not be denying reality to detach that distinction from biological sex but of course women's liberation is at least as important as women's oppression in terms of understanding the reality of women's existence but again when we consider women's liberation we see that women are biological females when the suffragettes campaigned for votes for women for whom were they fighting did women gain the right to vote in the early 1900s or was it just biological females who happened to identify as women in the present day consider the fact that the United States has never had a woman president now this speaks to a lack of representation and more than that it speaks to the structural inequalities and systemic oppressions that have led to a situation where it is so rare for world leaders to be women with this in mind would it have been an achievement for women if Biden had just decided to identify as a woman looking at the reality of women's existence as a social group would a biological male president simply identifying as a woman meaningfully speak to a representation or advancement for women i've mentioned the idea of analytic utility and I think in the case of most social groups this can be encapsulated with one word significance what correctly defining certain groups allows us to do is recognize the significance of what it means for somebody to be a member of that group a 2-year-old solving quadratic equations is significant but not if that 2-year-old is actually just an adult identifying as a 2-year-old gay relationships being celebrated is significant but not if in fact what's being celebrated is heterosexual relationships being mistaken for gay ones and of course a woman becoming president or in some other way breaking down barriers is significant but not if all we're in fact talking about is a biological male identifying as a woman so that's the case for defining the categories of man and woman with reference to biological sex but what are the alternatives well I would argue that the three most common ways of defining a woman lead you with three choices you either be incoherent you rely on sexism or you exclude biological males now excluding biological males is the definition we've already covered as that would just be the biological reference you can probably already guess that the incoherent definition is that a woman is anybody who identifies as a woman deep down everybody knows the issue with this definition but simply put if you include the word you're defining in the definition then you're not defining the word because if somebody then asked what the definition means in more detail you'd end up having to explain what it means to identify as a woman and suddenly you're stuck in a loop a woman is somebody who identifies as somebody who identifies as somebody who identifies as somebody who identifies and so on forever this definition is circular and therefore completely incoherent now you might try to base a definition for woman in something concrete that isn't biological sex but in doing so many people end up defining woman with reference to sexist stereotypes they'll say that a woman is somebody who lives as moves as is treated as sleeps as eats as dresses as or perhaps even washes the dishes as a woman defining a woman in this way is incredibly regressive and offensive now some people will try to claim it's not sexist by arguing that this is about more than just traditional conceptions of femininity however the double bind here is that the less they try to make it about a clearly defined womanly way of existing the more incoherent it becomes they might say for example that living as a woman doesn't mean living in a traditional sexist way it just means living any way that a woman might live but at that point you're returning back to the circularity of the previous understanding how do we know who's a woman to say how a woman might live now there is an alternative definition that maybe escapes this double bind trans identity could be an attitude towards one's biological sex this understanding is better simply because it utilizes the reference of biological sex which is a coherent definition but then simply adds an additional consideration of how one feels about it what is less coherent is the idea that somebody is a woman if they feel like a woman this makes no sense because it assumes that men and women have a particular feeling in terms of how they exist which would be an impossible thing to claim to know but even if this was true nobody could claim to feel like a woman because the only way they'd know how that feels is to know how other women feel and accurately identify that they feel that way too any attempt to resolve this becomes a circular claim that they know they're women because they are women so how they feel must be how women feel what I'm interested in is the definition that basically defines whether you're a man or woman with reference to your enthusiasm for the biological sex with which you were born now there are still some issues for this definition the first is that even amongst trans activists it seems quite controversial many trans activists will dismiss this way of thinking about trans identity as being basically transmedicalism apart from this by saying that people's attitudes towards their bodies basically defines who they are you are functionally validating some harmful ideas people can have about themselves should we really tell people that if they hate their bodies then that hatred of their bodies should be a significant part of defining them is that really the message we should be telling anybody also this way of understanding trans identity seems to ignore the fact that especially many women might feel intense discomfort with the reality of their female bodies while nonetheless still recognizing themselves as women lots of women have issues of self-hatred regarding their own bodies and to suggest that this interfaces with whether or not they are actually women seems ridiculous and this leads to the biggest issue with this definition which is that I'm sorry but that's not what women actually are yes this definition is at least saying something coherent and it doesn't rely on sexist stereotypes but those are only two hurdles the other very significant hurdle is does this definition actually describe any sort of reality and the obvious answer to that question would seem to be no of course not of course women aren't defined as women by how happy they are with their bodies and while my main argument for this is just basic intuition it's worth noting that we don't have this attitude regarding basically any other identity black people are black people we understand them as black people due to their immediate ancestry from subsaharan Africa and certain physical features that likely reflect this ancestry being black describes this reality it does not describe the reality of being a white person who has negative feelings about being white likewise women are biological females what argument is there for including biological males who simply feel sad about being biologically male well let's look at some of the most common arguments given in defense of trans identity the first argument that might be given is what I'd call the accuracy defense basically arguing that the reason we should include biological males under the category of woman is because it allows us to be more accurate usually this argument involves positing the existence of a biological male who identifies as a woman and presents in a very typically feminine way the argument for trans identity is that most people if they're being honest with themselves would regard such a biological male as actually being a woman sometimes this is framed in terms of it being more socially expedient to refer to such a person as a woman when trying to identify them based on how they look so if everybody really would believe on some level that a biological male can be a woman then of course we can't define women as biological females biological males looking so convincingly like women is going to be exceptionally rare so this argument certainly has limited applicability but let's grant that sometimes the premise of this argument is valid that based on immediate looks people might recognize a transidentified male to be a woman while the bigger issue with this argument is that there is more to reality than an immediate look it might be easier to identify a male presenting in a feminine way as a woman and it might be easier to identify the Earth as flat when you're just looking around at eye level but that doesn't mean the world actually is flat when you look at reality more deeply you discover truths that you wouldn't have noticed at first glance if a biological male looks convincingly like a woman then so what that doesn't override the reality that this person is still biologically male and was still socialized as such it doesn't discount all the innumerable reasons previously laid out why recognizing the difference between men and women actually matters the social utility of calling such a person a woman must be weighed against the analytic utility of a less surface level definition again test this reasoning with the most obvious analogy if I looked convincingly like a black person does the fact that I might be identified at first glance to be a black person discount the reality that I am actually white a good definition should account for the entirety of reality saying that a biological male is a woman because they look like a woman on the surface doesn't account for the entirety of reality do you know what would simply identifying such a person as a man who looks like a woman that explains both the reality that this person is in fact a man and the reality that they might look like a woman all of reality is being described here so actually this example shows how the gender critical definition works way better we can also see this by the fact that sometimes biological males who look like women might not identify as women there are crossdressers and even males who've undergone medical intervention to look more feminine but also nonetheless don't identify as women if you're looking at the screen now you'll see I've included a picture of a famous streamer who at the time when I first started working on this video identified as a man despite presenting in a very feminine way now since then this streamer does identify as a woman so this example is out of date but the point is that for an extended period of time it would have been contrary to selfidentity to identify this individual as a woman despite initial appearances now honestly there is actually a part of me that sees somebody wearing makeup and presenting in a feminine way and automatically does think such a person must be a woman but I would argue rather than viewing this instinct as indicative of some deeper reality that the categories of man or woman are defined by makeup this is rather an objectionable instinct I should resist because of course describing reality isn't the only point of definitions we should also consider are certain definitions morally offensive in my view saying that somebody is a woman just because they trigger a regressive part of my brain that associates women with stereotypes of femininity would be highly offensive however trans activists would argue that actually if morality should be a consideration in definitions at all then this works in their favor the basic argument goes something like this language is a social construct social constructs exist to maximize human happiness affirming trans identity does maximize human happiness so therefore we should affirm trans identity this argument seems to rely on the assumption that the only point of language is to make people happy which I'm not convinced of at all advocates for this argument will often try to argue that there is no truth to language and therefore the only purpose of language is just to make people happy but of course I've already shown that language has the purpose of describing reality and this means we can make truth claims about the usage of language remember if you say that a pencil is a sandwich then that is untrue the funny thing is that most actual transidentified individuals seem to agree with me here i've seen plenty of such people argue that they don't want people to affirm trans identity just to be polite or to be kind they only want people to affirm trans identity because they really believe it's accurate so it seems like most transidentified people to their credit don't want trans identity to be affirmed purely out of pity regarding the claim that trans identity would even maximize happiness I often find people who make such arguments to be deeply incurious they seem to think that because in our current society with all of our messed up ideas about gender people feel like they can only be happy having their gender identity affirmed it therefore follows that affirming it is the best we could aspire to meanwhile people like me would argue shouldn't we aspire to combating these anxieties about being men and women in the first place most people who affirm trans identity probably wouldn't call themselves conservatives but their absolute lack of interest in working towards a world that challenges the fundamental premises of our gendered society is most definitely a conservative attitude i don't want to live in a world where my son who has anxieties about being a boy could have the option of identifying as a girl i want to live in a world where we don't encourage kids to think about the categories of boy and girl in such a way that they could develop anxieties and of course this means challenging the imposition of sexist expectations placed upon boys and girls and later men and women entertaining this idea that we should affirm trans identity for moral reasons is counterproductive because it's validating the attaching of moral value to the designation of people as men and women if you are saying that I have some kind of moral obligation to call someone a man or woman you are arguing that there is some moral significance to being a man as opposed to a woman or vice versa and that is sexist now some people might say that actually this is just talking about psychological discomfort with biological sex they're not basing their view on some kind of social roles or anything so explicitly sexist but even still why are you attaching a moral value to these categories such that you're going to tell me I have some kind of moral obligation to affirm trans identity such a notion is utterly contrary to the principles of feminism how can we have feminism when we have people saying that being called a woman is morally offensive to them how can we have feminism when there are biological males claiming that there is some unique moral significance to being regarded as a woman rather than a man to help demonstrate this point I'd like to make a brief analogy we relatively recently in the Western world have been redefining a marriage to include same-sex relationships some people might say that since this fight for marriage equality was largely framed in moralistic terms this means that if we condemn framing trans identity in moralistic terms we must also do the same for same-sex marriage however marriage is a fundamentally different thing from the categorization of people as men and women for one thing the fight for affirming same-sex relationships as marriages really didn't have major issues in terms of its accuracy yes the argument was framed in moralistic terms but there is a pretty strong argument that it objectively makes sense to call committed monogous gay relationships marriages i personally believe that the most important thing about marriage is it being a committed monogous relationship between two people who love each other and there isn't really a good argument for why the sex of the two people involved matters that much but let's assume that the argument for marriage equality had to be made exclusively in moral terms well this really wouldn't be such an issue because marriage does have moral value for better or worse it's considered a sacrament and basically a way of conferring some amount of moral legitimacy on a relationship certain terms do have moral values attached to them and this is perfectly fine i've also had a similar argument made about citizenship and redefining that to include certain groups but yeah there is a moral dimension to being considered a citizen however what if the campaign to fight for gay marriage didn't just want gay marriage they wanted their marriages to be considered straight heterosexual marriages well now there is a strong argument that it's simply wrong to redefine straight in that way but I think worse than this is that if they said that gay relationships should be considered straight because this would be some kind of moral affirmation of gay relationships what are they implying there that the designation of straight has moral value they're arguing that straight relationships are morally superior to gay ones that is the only foundation from which they could argue that there is some moral case to be made for redefining gay marriages to be straight marriages and of course it's the same for people who want to redefine woman the only premise by which that makes sense is assuming that the designation of woman has a moral value attached to it and such an idea is highly regressive and sexist finally I want to briefly point out that even if there was a good moral argument for affirming trans identity would that outweigh the negatives of affirming it i'm not really going to try to do justice to the impact on women's rights as an aside in this video regarding women's personal experiences listen to them listen to what they're saying but more objectively speaking obviously all meaning of woman being eroded will make it impossible for women to campaign for their rights and to properly call out sexism for what it is very much related to this of course is lesbians gays and bisexuals lesbians are women so their experiences being told that they need to unlearn their genital preferences and develop some kind of enthusiasm for men's penises is very much an intersection of misogyny and lesbophobia moreover we need to consider the fact that trans identity has its origins in some really harmful ideas about gay men and still to this day in Iran gay men are made to undergo sex reassignment it's not surprising that lots of people are worried about the effort to trans the gay away and of course this then leads to the issue of dransitioners who regret their decision taking wrong sex hormones is really serious and has long-term effects a lot of this stuff is not reversible and what's worse is that many dransitioners find that when they announce that they're dransitioning they are immediately told to shut up lest they give ammo to those who have concerns about the rising number of young people transitioning at the center of a lot of this is children who just deserve special mention because they are obviously uniquely vulnerable another group harmed by transact activism is gender non-conforming people gender non-conforming people are pressured into transitioning which we can see from looking at how frequently trans activist organizations basically conflate gender non-conformity with transition however the other issue is simply how gender non-conforming people just get ignored based on this conflation i've seen people argue we need to fight for trans rights because of biological males getting attacked when they present in feminine ways but what does that have to do with trans rights that's talking about gender non-conformity there are so many males and females of varying levels of gender and non-conformity who get in contact with me specifically about the fact that they feel their issues are being completely ignored because trans activism has bulldozed over the reality that many people who don't want to conform to traditional gendered expectations also don't want to deny that they're still men or women based on their sex now the way trans activism hurts all these marginalized and vulnerable groups is very sad but it's also worth noting anyone interested in having open honest dialogue is affected when you start saying that nobody is allowed to challenge trans identity because it might hurt people's feelings you're restricting the freedom of everybody to explore ideas and consider how it makes sense for us to understand the world but finally I'd argue that transidentified individuals themselves are also negatively affected by affirming trans identity i simply can't believe that such people are actually meaningfully happy when their happiness is so transparently based on controlling other people's language and insisting that everybody conforms to this ideology i engage with transact activist arguments a lot and in doing so I see a lot from transidentified individuals and I'm immediately struck by how deeply unhappy they seem i'm not at all convinced that even if I did let them shut me up and they were able to finally stop anybody from disagreeing with them that they would be happy so the argument is that we should affirm trans identity because on the surface people claim that affirming trans identity increases the happiness in the world i've already shown that moralizing the terms man and woman in the first place is objectionable but even if we did accept the idea that this is some kind of utilitarian moral calculation i'm not sure when looking at all of these issues with affirming trans identity that this calculation even would come down on the side of affirming trans identity i'm quite sure in fact that it wouldn't i oppose trans identity because I genuinely think that a way of addressing the anxieties and negative feelings of transidentified individuals could be found that respects reality other people and even trans people themselves on a deeper level so the final argument for trans identity isn't really an argument but basically trying to win the consolation prize of showing that the biological sex reference doesn't make much sense either this relies on references to what trans activists often call interex people who supposedly exist between the two sexes in reality this term is quite misleading and it makes a lot more sense to use the term differences of sexual development because of course that's what we're talking about here a biological female who has had a slightly different sexual development is not interex she's a woman now I don't have time to get into the complexities of various differences of sexual development but of course you might immediately notice that this has nothing to do with the trans identity most transidentified people don't have these differences of sexual development they don't actually believe that the existence of people with differences of sexual development validates trans identity so the actual argument transact activists are trying to make here is that the complexity of biological sex means it can't possibly function as a reference for calling somebody a man or woman because it's too fraught with exceptions now I think one mistake here is a misunderstanding of how definitions work there are some very complicated concepts that are really hard to define and many people are content to say that trying to define these concepts is a pointless endeavor however the very fact that we are assessing the quality of definitions proves that we on some level all understand that there is an actual correct definition that these imperfect definitions we might find in the dictionary are seeking to describe there must be some standard by which we are assessing the quality of a definition and this standard can only logically be the correct definition when I give a faulty definition for concept Y and you say "Well that can't be right because that would include X and X obviously isn't Y." You are assuming the existence of an actual definition for Y by which you can conclude that X is not Y so no matter how imperfect our definition is for man and woman or any other concept the very fact we can recognize it as imperfect shows that we do on some level have a conception of a perfect definition the standard set by which is what we use to judge all definitions provided this contradiction can be most obviously seen with the popular trans activist argument there is no way to define woman that includes all people who are women and excludes all who aren't the problem of course with this argument is well how do you know if there is no perfect way to define woman then what definition are you using by which you can conclude with confidence who is or isn't a woman such that you can say no definition could include them i agree that it would probably be hard to come up with a definition that accounts for every single edge case but if such edge cases function as a test for the definition then necessarily such edge cases must either be women or not and therefore we are assuming a definition of women when we take for granted that such edge cases are still women so when we encounter these edge cases we can refine our stated definitions and work towards a point where the stated definition for all concepts reflects the actual reality we're all aware of in our heads as to what these concepts are in fact describing there will always be complicated definitions this will never be a reason to pretend that we don't know what words mean indeed often transact activists will try to prove that definitions are hard by asking people to define mundane objects like chairs or whatever but they don't seem to realize that they're refuting their own point because even if we can't perfectly define a chair no sane person would argue that this justifies completely abandoning the idea that there should be some exclusivity to what can be considered a chair so even the analogies they provide disprove their point biological sex might not be the simplest thing in the world to describe when trying to account for every difference of sexual development but this is no good reason to abandon it as a reference for who is a woman chances are that at some point when you were quite young you were introduced to the basic idea of feminism and you probably thought of feminism in the way that it most immediately makes sense to think of it that you can act feel or present in any way and that has no bearing on whether you're a man or woman to suggest that a woman is somebody who does certain work has certain emotions or wears certain clothes would just be anti-feminist but obviously men and women are still different if men and women were the same then the entire idea of equality between men and women would be incoherent so men and women are different but not because of actions feelings or presentations what's left well biology and that's why I think a lot of people actually do recognize on some basic level that the belief that a woman is an adult human female functions perfectly as a foundation for all other feminist beliefs if I say that a woman is biologically female then am I setting myself up to undermine feminism at all well certainly who is a woman is quite easy to understand in the overwhelming majority of cases so we don't have an issue where positive affirmations about women become meaningless obviously women can definitely be anything since biological sex isn't changed by a decision a woman might make so no matter what a woman chooses to do she will still be a woman butch women are women lesbian women are women single women are women childless women are women some might claim that the biological definition brings with it the suggestion that women should feel some obligation to have children but of course this isn't true at all there's a basic idea in philosophy called the is ought distinction there's a difference between saying something is the case and saying that something ought to be the case sexual reproduction was always going to be relevant in defining biological females but that doesn't mean any woman should feel an obligation to have children i like the idea that women don't need to feel restricted by being women and because of that I like the idea that I can know what I'm talking about when I talk about women and I can know that this way of talking about women doesn't at all limit them for the record the transidentity debate is about whether trans identities are accurate when a biological male claims to be a woman is that an accurate claim about reality many will suggest that because we disagree with the claim that a biological male can be a woman we must therefore also oppose people being gender non-conforming by presenting themselves however they wish now this really isn't true gender critical people are critical of gender and therefore often actively infused by seeing people reject traditional gender signifiers now there is a slight complicating factor some feminists do have criticisms of men in drag so I do want to mention three reasons for that the first and admittedly a bit simple is that they might just find it aesthetically unappealing saying that people should be allowed to present however they like doesn't mean that people have to be enamored with the idea of me wearing bright orange socks with bright blue sandals for many women there might be a negative association while not all men who wear drag are transidentified and for this example I'm assuming they don't identify as trans the fact there is that association might mean some women respond negatively to drag because they associate it with the wider harmful claims of trans identity but of course in reality such women wouldn't have a problem with men who are gender non-conforming in this way if it wasn't associated with the harms of trans ideology and finally there's simply the rather appropriate analogy to cultural appropriation yes people should be allowed to present however they like but this doesn't mean social context immediately goes out the window if I dress up in a cultural stereotype then people might be offended there is a wider context here i'm part of a privileged group performing a stereotype of somebody in a marginalized group for fun of course this is very comparable to drag it's men arguably mocking women by dressing up in a stereotype of womanhood you can't blame some women for being offended by that the other issue is men undergoing surgery to look more typically like females and women undergoing surgery to look more like males this again is a related but not equivalent issue to the matter of trans identity whether a biological male can be a woman isn't the same question as whether a biological male can undergo cosmetic surgery to appear more like a female and it's actually such a different question I don't even feel the need to have a firm opinion on it there are several men who are fans of my content who have undergone various surgeries to look more typically like females but they accept that this doesn't make them women these men will often call themselves transsexuals which I think is a perfectly sensible name to describe somebody who makes such an effort to look like a member of the opposite sex these transsexuals aren't claiming to be women and therefore I don't have any strong disagreement with them indeed I get along with them quite well based on our mutual recognition of reality in a world where a lot of people refuse to accept it there's something sad about people feeling unhappy with their bodies in contrast to a world where everyone could simply love themselves for who they are but I certainly don't think these surgeries should be illegal and I really have no issue with the people who have undergone them people ask me whether I endorse these surgeries and I often respond with this analogy imagine a shop that sells globes now one day an employee starts saying that maybe they should sell maps too and they make good arguments for why maps might be worth selling but then the shopkeeper discovers that this employee is an advocate for the flat earth and at that point they might be a little hesitant to endorse selling maps even though there's not any reason why selling maps is necessarily a bad thing the issue is that they're now inclined to recognize the desire to sell flat representations of the Earth as a desire to push for the idea that the Earth is in fact flat i often think about that with regards to these surgeries i have no reason why I should necessarily view them as a bad thing but within the current context of people claiming that biological males can be women it seems like people pushing these surgeries are comparable to the person who wants to start selling maps as part of advocating for the idea the earth is flat people can have surgery that might make a male look like a female just as people can sell maps that make the earth look flat but the earth is not flat and a male is not a female anyway everyone I hope you enjoyed this slight departure from my usual format i figured it was good for a comprehensive debunking like this to be me reading a script verbatim so that I could plan out my wording in advance much more so but as you don't know I usually write a full script out in advance but then when I actually deliver the lines I go with whatever delivery feels natural for me to say because honestly I feel like I sound a little robotic as I'm reading a script so hopefully this wasn't too dry since this was a departure from my typical format I didn't thank my Patreon so I will do that now and say you're all very appreciated and also unless I'm very much mistaken I believe that the week this is coming out I won't have done my Patreon bonus video because I was away when I would ordinarily record it so no clip from that this time however if you'd like to give on Patreon you'll find a link in the description right now hope you all enjoyed and feel free to share this video especially to those who might currently be transaffirming i'd be interested to see any responses to this because I mean this is my quite definitive argument against trans identity if my arguments don't hold up here then I'm in big trouble not too worried though