Debunking the transgender myth
As a philosopher and a linguist I find it fascinating some of the statements transgender people make; for example: “I was born male but I identify as female.”
When I hear such words my mind immediatly forms that most basic of human responses ‘Why?’ Because I just don’t get it.
Imagine a snooker table with talking balls. The pink ball starts to tell you that he identifies as a blue ball. You would tell him that this is patently ridiculous because by its very nature – a blue ball is blue, and this ball is pink.
It is equally absurd for a man to claim to be a woman. Or to identify as a woman. The very word ‘identify’ is to note and observe a series of characteristics which allow us to label something as belonging to a category. For example… you see a flying animal and proceed to identify it…
Beak – check
Wings – check
Feathers – check
Flight – check
Object identified as a ‘bird.’
The category ‘female’ has an unambiguous meaning as there is a clear set of characteristics which define this category: these are a series of anatomical, neurological, genetic and hormonal features – unique to women. Think of a mildly gender dysphoric passing through the ‘female’ checklist (not an intersex person).
Vagina – negative
Menstruation – negative
Naturally ocurring oestrogen – negative
Womb – negative
Chromosones – negative
Raised in society as a woman – negative
Even if he tries to say he has female interests there are no such thing as female interests as these are social constructs. Even if he claims to have female qualities… such as empathy, communication and listening skills… a man can develop or be born with such skills. I could go on, but I think it is clear that the biological male has not one characteristic which allows him to identify as female. Thus we can can say his identifying as female has no basis in reason, logic or empirical observation. I have completely debunked the trans myth… it is a narrative of nonsense.

Paradoxically, it is at the point where you reveal the hollowness of a transgender’s claim to womanhood – that you achieve a phyrric victory. By showing that it is completely baseless for a man to believe he is a woman and that it defies all common sense that he believes he is a woman, you have only succeeded in defining the transgender condition. Furthermore, you are pointing out what a serious condition it is and why it needs solid clinical support: while it is glaringly obvious on every definition possible that the man in front of you is a man, and you have demonstrated to him conclusively that he’s a man… he continues to feel like a woman. That shows how deeprooted the condition is. It is a belief that lies at the core of his self and must have some neurological base.
Proving the intangibility of transgender claims also has another unsatisfactory side. This is because you have essentially argued that a man who identifies as a woman is suffering from a delusion (our word for self-identifications which have no basis in reason). You are saying that there is as much sense in the transgender’s identification as there is in a schizophrenic´s claim to be Napoleon Bonaparte. This feels wrong, somehow. Why?
It feels wrong because people who suffer from delusions are normally mad. In most cases, barking mad. Your average trans person, on the other hand, is generally completely normal – apart from their identification with a contrary gender. Secondly, grand delusions such as the belief you are Napoleon bonaparte are extremely rare whereas identification with another gender affects (depending on whose statistics you follow) 1 in 250 of the population.Thirdly, there is a high rate of suicide, depression and addiction amongst transgender people. Even if you could definitively prove that it is a delusion then so what? It still exists. There are still millions of people around the word suffering gender dysphoria and telling them it is all a delusion and that they should go home and get over it will not do anything other than push up the suicide rate amongst those who suffer the delusion. Whatever the cause of the condition the best treatment seems to be transition… so that’s what we have to provide.
There are some, however, who argue that a different narrative for transgenderism – ie. that it is a delusion – not a case of being born in the wrong body – could lead to new forms of therapy that do not require surgery or hormones, and maybe even lower the suicide rate.
Such therapies would help – in humane and unpatronising terms – the transgender person see that their identification is a delusion and therefore to reconnect with their natal sex.
First of all, I can’t be sure, but I suspect such a course of therapy would have about as much success as one designed to persuade gay peope that their sexuality was unnatural and that they should reconnect with the biologically correct and natural form of sexuality: heterosexualism. This is not because I believe transgendersim has anything to do with sexuality – but that a transgender’s sense of gender – however irrational you prove it – is as deep seated as a homosexual’s sexuality and it isn’t going to start moving around because of some clever words.
To conclude, recurring to wordplay and logic and other linguistic devices to discredit or disprove the transgender narrative is really a Pyrric victory… all you’ve done is show just how strong transgender feelings are… and sounded like a cunt in the process.
4 Comments
What defines a person’s self? Is it the body or the mind? If my body has one freckle that no one can see, I can call myself a freckled man, despite all appearance to you otherwise. I can get a red tattoo and say that blue is my favorite color, you look at my body and tattoo and claim I’m wrong because of the color of my tattoo? I could be a total corporate soccer dad and define myself as a biker because I ride on Sundays, but if I don’t fit in your category of what you see a biker to be, are you allowed to call me delusional?
Furthermore, a trans woman who starts early enough can tick off every box on your arbitrary list of defining characteristics except the menstrual cycle, however some cis-women also lack a menstrual cycle due to a birth condition. Are these not women either in your book? Are you going to demand that those women define themselves as men?
There are thousands of men in America born with XX chrome someday and developed as men because of hormonal imbalances, as well as thousands of women born with XY chromesomes. Really the XX and XY chromesomes do nothing for the entirety of your lifetime past the first 3 months of fetal development.
Your analogies are bad and insulting, leave people to be who they want to be. No one will question your ridiculous tattoos or piercings, so buzz off about anyone else changing their bodies for peace of mind.
I agree. Did you read the whole article?
The simple fact is that being transgender is not a delusion, because it doesn’t work like one.
When you operate under the delusion that you’re Napoleon, you do not realize that everyone else perceives you as not Napoleon, or dismiss that perception. Delusional people, generally speaking, are very certain of themselves, insistent and tend not to question their stance, as far as I’m aware. Or at least they have trouble understanding why everyone else contradicts them.
But being transgender is completely different. You may harbor a firm, unshaking conviction, a knowledge in your heart that you’re a certain gender, but not only are you perfectly aware that everyone else perceives you differently, you also understand why this is so. And this contradiction can easily make you doubt yourself. You are definitely not going to publicly insist you’re a certain gender when you don’t even remotely look like a normative example of it, unless you’ve already taken steps to transition and outed yourself (Danielle Muscato is a highly atypical case, but even she acknowledges the stark incongruence between her identity and her appearance).
For a delusional person in the Napoleon example to be like this would require them to be perfectly aware that people don’t perceive them as Napoleon, that they don’t look like Napoleon, that there are severe problems with the mere possibility that they could be Napoleon (his birth date, if nothing else), and that other people have good reasons to disbelieve their claimed identity, and they would instead rather keep mum about their conviction that they’re Napoleon despite all the evidence against it. But delusional people do not act like this; they tend to be bold, unwavering and unapologetic.
Trans people, on the other hand, experience cognitive dissonance: something inside their mind tells them something they cannot reconcile with everything else they know and accept. They accept that they do not appear like the gender they identify with, but they can’t help doing it anyway. They can’t shake the feeling that the appearance is deceiving, even though they’d like to. It’s more like OCD. Trans people, unlike delusional people, live in consensus reality. They accept that their feeling is purely subjective and cannot be decisively proven. That’s a quite fundamental difference between the two conditions.
And that’s why delusion, in fact, is considered a counterindication against a diagnosis as transgender. Which, if you think about it, makes sense. In fact, if you already believe you are not only a member of your internal gender, but also look like one, and it doesn’t matter what everyone else thinks, why would you want to transition in the first place? It would be completely unnecessary.
To be fair, even in delusional individuals, strength of conviction varies significantly. But being transgender involves the acknowledgment of an incongruence of internal conviction or perception with external perception. When you look into the mirror pre-transition, you are never convinced that you see a completely normative, unambiguously gender-conforming, member of your internal gender. There is a disconnect between the mirror image and the way you see yourself. The mirror is wrong. In a delusion, even if you have periods of doubt, you would at least sometimes really see a member of your internal gender (or Napoleon) in the mirror, or dismiss the evidence of the mirror, rationalizing it away as the mirror being defective or manipulated. That’s also why, unlike delusional people, transgender people are generally fully functional in society, in principle, even before transition.
I love how the comments on here show that neither read the article at all.
Otherwise neither wouldve left those comments lol