Trans Rights and Houses

Once upon a time there was woman named Rachel. She lived in an overly traditional society where certain things were thought to be only for men and others only for women. Construction work, for example, was understood to be manly work. But Rachel liked to build things and she was good at it, so she petitioned the town council for a building permit to build her own house which triggered no small controversy among the council members.

Some were indignant at the thought of a woman doing a man’s job. Others were glad that someone finally had the courage to challenge long-held stereotypes. After much discussion, the council decided to grant Rachel the permit as long as she could explain what kind of house she planned to build. Rachel then proclaimed to the council that she didn’t want to build a house but that she had become a house, and what she actually wanted was official affirmation of her name change from Rachel to Rancher.

Most of the council members were disturbed and confused by this. They liked Rachel and wanted her to get some help to clear her head. But there were a couple who interpreted Rachel’s quest as one of justice. They were inspired by her courage to seek liberation from the reality of…well, reality. So, they began to accuse the others of hatred, making them feel that they needed to apologize for the bigotry that leads someone to believe that a person can’t be a house.

As a way of pursuing justice through penance, all the council members except one voted to pass a law requiring citizens of the town to refer to Rachel as Rancher. Her head was to be called a roof, her arms doors, and her feet were to be known as foundations, and anyone who would disrespect Rancher enough to refer to it as her would be banished. As the new law was being explained, the one dissenting council member began muttering something about sanity but was escorted out of the building before he could finish.

---

This parable is worth some reflection. The reasonable meaning of the argument that gender is a “social construct” is that gender “roles” are social constructs. An anthropologist could probably cite examples of matriarchal cultures where women fill leadership roles that would be shockingly unconventional in the west. Standards of male and female roles look differently in different parts of the world. Cultural norms about gender are not absolute, so, one might argue, a woman should have the opportunity to be a solider, a police officer, or a football coach if she likes. This may be a reasonable argument, but it is not what the “trans rights” movement is about.

Transgenderism is fundamentally different from the concept of a “tomboy.” The tomboy is a girl who wants to shoot guns or work on diesel engines. In that case, the female does something typically only males do, but she remains a female while she’s doing it. No “trans” element is necessary. We can have good discussions about whether it’s a problem for a woman to be masculine or a man to be feminine, but this is a different thing than the claim that a woman can actually become a man.

There is no reasonable argument that a woman can transition into a man, because the very notion that this is possible undermines reason itself. If someone cannot understand why anyone but bigots would oppose trans rights, this is why: To demand that I refer to someone as a male who is self-evidently female is to demand that I deny my most fundamental capacity of perception and cognition. This is quite literally mind control—and all the more so when the willingness to use “preferred pronouns” is posed as a test of one’s moral character.

The doctrinaire indignation of those who would condescend on people for having the heartless gall to say that a woman with a mutilated body in mens’ clothing is actually a woman with a mutilated body in mens’ clothing brings to mind a passage toward the end of 1984 after Winston has been imprisoned and tortured for thoughtcrime and is trying to re-educate himself:

“He could not fight against the Party any longer. Besides, the Party was in the right. It must be so; how could the immortal, collective brain be mistaken? By what external standard could you check its judgements? Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of learning to think as they thought…

He began to write down the thoughts that came into his head. He wrote first in large clumsy capitals:

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

Then almost without a pause he wrote beneath it:

TWO AND TWO MAKE FIVE

He accepted everything. The past was alterable. The past never had been altered…How easy it all was! Only surrender, and everything else followed. It was like swimming against a current that swept you backwards however hard you struggled, and then suddenly deciding to turn round and go with the current instead of opposing it…Anything could be true. The so-called laws of Nature were nonsense. The law of gravity was nonsense.”

Language is the most basic way of expressing rational thought, and the very nature of language requires that people acknowledge shared, fixed definitions. When I say the word “house” I am not referring to something that has four wheels and a transmission. And when I, and the entire mass of English-speaking people throughout history, say the word “woman” I am not talking about a human being who was born with male anatomy.

If I can choose my own unique definition of “house” or “woman” then these words are useless as words. I cannot use them to communicate with other people. In this case I would be isolated to a world that exists only in my own mind, a world where my understanding of reality is purely a projection of my own imagination. Among those for whom English functions as a common language, the word for this state of mind is “delusional.”

---

This week’s picture is of Utah Lake, taken from Big Baldy in Utah County, Utah.