Transactivism 1
Going Mental!
The series of pieces with the common title “Are Transwomen women?” (1, 2, and 3) concluded that statements like “Transwomen are (real) women” are at best misleading formulations of what the advocate for trans rights is striving to articulate. If we want to include a set of persons in an existing class—“real” women in this case—we need a clear idea of what criteria have to be met to secure membership. On the one hand, if what it is to be a real woman is to be an adult biological female then the claim is straightforwardly false. On the other hand, if what it is to be a real woman is be gender-identified as such then the claim is tautologous since it amounts to the assertion that “Transwomen (viz, people who are gender identified-as-women) are people who are gender-identified-as-women”. Moreover, we are left with the possibility that many people classified today as “woman” might not in fact meet those gender criteria. Finally, if we allow that there are two “ways” of being a real woman (our variation on the disjunctive solution) we’ll be compelled to admit that one of the ways is somehow more legitimate than the other. And note that even if we allow that gender-identity is a self-ascribed state that doesn’t change the problem. To pick up just one of the cases above, if what it is to be a real woman is to self-identity as a woman the overwhelming majority of women today would not on the face of it appear to meet that condition.
In order to advance the debate, then, I indicated that we should regard discourse about the status of trans people as a proposal to change the meaning of words like “woman” and “man”—to “reëngineer” the associated concepts—and that to do so would be to accept a new form of authority in the name of a newly acknowledged right: the right to self-assign one’s gender-identity on the basis that one is authoritative with respect to that identity. I associated such an approach with the following, future-retrospective formulations:
I'". What people used to call “women” are (really) women*, and
II'". What people used to call “men” are (really) men*
It’s important to keep in mind that the consideration here is not to establish a concurrent set of gender concepts (*)—ones that run alongside the existing sex-based classifications. That wouldn’t require acknowledging the existence of a specific right; indeed, it’s hard to see why it would be much different from insisting on the “right” to be a Taylor Swift fan rather than a Billie Eilish fan (if they are indeed inconsistent. Presumably one can be “nonbinary” here too…). The whole pointof asserting the right is to eliminate the sex-based categorisations “in favour” of ones that will serve something like the same function by allowing us to talk about something like the same thing. It is to say that sex-based categories are oppressive insofar as they acknowledge a source of authority that is outwith the subject, and that the new ones are better insofar as they liberate us from (possible coercion by) that external authority[1]. But they must be doing “something like” the same sort of thing as otherwise there would be no reason to say we’re talking about women as opposed to just changing the subject.
I’ll come back to this point about “changing the subject” below. For now the obvious question is why would we think that the sort of shift imagined by I'" and II'"—the elimination of sex-classifications in favour of self-identifications—would be better, and better for whom? This is not something that those who hasten to judge the opinions of others on this bother to examine in detail, but ours is an attempt to be judicious and to understand the sort of thinking which, if it doesn’t directly inform policy making, at least attempts to offer some retrospective justification for it. Rather than speculate, then, I’m going to look at a specific example by someone who identifies themselves as a trans philosopher and who works in this area—Talia Bettcher—and specifically at their piece Trans identities and first-person authority.
Bettcher doesn’t present their view in quite the terms I’ve recommended above, but it’s not difficult to see the correspondences. Firstly, Bettcher holds that trans people have ‘first-person authority’ over their own gender identity, and that this ‘ought’ to be recognised as the foundational principle of ‘trans politics’ (p. 98). There seems no principled reason to restrict this authority to trans people, so it amounts to the view that since all people have a first person authority over their own gender identity, there is a human right to self-identify. Secondly,
although Bettcher doesn’t imagine a future-retrospective (I'" and II'"), they do hold up as an ideal those ‘trans friendlier subaltern contexts’ (p. 98) where it is claimed that authority is already recognised and which can serve as a model of good practice for the less enlightened dominant culture. Finally, Bettcher holds that denying people first-person authority over their gender identity is denying who they are, a form of transphobia that amounts to ‘sexual abuse’ (p. 99). Notwithstanding the heightened level of accusation, this resonates with the contention in Transphobia and Language 2that the best way to understand transphobia is as the denial of the (human) right (TR) to self-ascribe.
As this stands, we are left with our Swift-Eilish thought. The only people who care much about whether someone is really a Swiftie or an Eyelash or merely pretending to be one are other Swifties etc. So if gender-identity talk is akin to pop-idol worship talk then there is no reason to think that it’s competing for the same space in language as sex-talk. And it’s not sufficient even to argue that classifying people by sex is a bad thing, because that would only warrant the need for a (as I put it in Transphobia and Language 3) “good riddance” (or “change of subject”) elimination, not the sort of “in favour” elimination that would justify continuing to use the terms “woman”, “man” etc. with their reëngineered meanings. To see if Bettcher is successful in meeting these conditions consider the following claims:
(P) Terms like “woman” and “man” are used to ‘circulate information about genital status’ (p. 106).
(Q) (P) is ‘sexually abusive’ (p. 99) and underpins the ‘mechanisms that construct transpeople as deceivers or pretenders’ (p. 107).
(R) The ‘representational relation’ implied by (P) ‘is part of a larger nonverbal system of communication that works to facilitate manipulative and rape-excusing heterosexual sexuality, as well as underwriting racial oppression’ (p. 105)[2].
For Bettcher, the existing use of “woman” and “man” as sex-terms[3] is solely for the purpose of exposing what variety of genitalia people “have”: of presenting someone as having, say, a penis or a vulva. When Talia says she’s a woman, then, she’s “constructed” as a deceiver or pretender because her use of “woman” is taken to represent possession of a vulva rather than the penis he in fact has. And since denying that she speaks the truth is denying her authority over who she really is, the genitalia-tagging/representational use is what undergirds transphobia. Now, there are doubtless concrete situations in which someone vulva-less who says that they are a woman is subsequently accused of being a deceiver. But even accepting for the purposes of argument that “woman” and “man” are used presently to circulate genital information one might equally conclude that the person is not so much as a deceiver as deluded or—more likely—just has false beliefs due to some specific (tacit or explicit) theoretical commitments. However, the contention that (P) is the root cause of poisonous heterosexuality and racism is a charge of an all-together more extravagant order. It’s not at all clear how one might go about either justifying such a claim[4] or attempting to rebut it. It has the air of a cultish tenet.
Fortunately, for present purposes we don’t need to peer too closely down into this particular rabbit hole. Since we’ve already established that Bettcher holds that the terms of interest are used one way now and ought to be used another way (as exemplified by those “subaltern” subcultural practices), promoting a use of “woman” and “man” that does not “circulate genital information” is the key to addressing both (R) and (Q). And since that new use is one that acknowledges the authority to self-ascribe gender identity we’ve associated with the TR, the best way of evaluating Bettcher’s non-P proposal is from the perspective of an “in favour” elimination. That is to say, Bettcher’s proposed explication involves a migration of authority from the usage to be impugned—“woman” and “man” as used to convey physical (specifically, genital) information—to a use that acknowledges the authority of the self-ascriber with respect to their gender identity. And indeed, Bettcher is very clear about what that involves: self-ascriptions of gender identity are reports of specific mental states. In other words, Bettcher is proposing the following version of (I'"):
EEB What people used to call “women” and “men” (people with particular genitalia) are (really) women* and men* (people who have a particular mental state).
Back in Transphobia and Language 2 I noted that Stonewall defines “gender identity” as ‘a person’s innate sense of their own gender’, where the clearly conveyed conviction is that a person is authoritative with respect to their own identity. And what Bettcher offers us here is a clear philosophical justification for that definition. One is authoritative with respect to one’s gender identity because one’s gender identity is a mental state, and one has privileged access to one’s mental states (like beliefs and desires, pains and intentions).
From a philosophical perspective at least, this image of the subject’s transparency to itself is most strongly associated historically with Descartes. Essential to Descartes’ epistemological method is that although one can be wrong in what one believes etc., one cannot be wrong about what one believes (etc.). Although I can doubt that I’m looking out of the window (because I might be dreaming) I can’t doubt that it seems to me that I’m looking out of the window. How things seem to me are things about which I’m “incorrigible” because they are—as it were—“inside my head”: mental states, as opposed to physical states. Now, Bettcher is aware that the idea that subjects have indefeasible access to their own mentation—that they cannot possibly be in error—is no longer considered supportable. But as we’ve just seen, the shift in authority here is essential. Even if one accepts that (P) is true, genital identifications are answerable to objective standards; and if they are to be displaced it must be in the name of some other standard. The claim that one could not have one’s self-ascription of gender identity overridden because it is an avowal that one has or is in a certain mental state that one could not possibly be wrong about would be such a standard. But if we can be wrong about which “state” we’re in, then that implies either that there’s some other source of (ultimate) authority (someone who says “you may think that your gender identity is that of a woman but you’re in error”) or that there’s nothing to be right or wrong about in the first place!
Bettcher does have a response to this concern, and that is to deny that the authority in question is epistemological at all, but rather ethical. In my next pieces I’ll explore this option and explain why it doesn’t work.
[1] The notion that self-identification is the key claim takes us back to Transphobia and the Law 2, where it was concluded that making a simple avowal of one’s gender identity the sole criterion was the only consistent approach. And unsurprisingly given their influence on the Scottish Parliament at the time, we find that approach in, for example, the Green Party’s statement on “Trans Rights” which hinges on their support “for the right for individuals to update their legally recognised gender by self-determination, the only requirement being a statutory declaration, to how they would describe their gender, including having the option to change their name on all documents” (RR531).
[2] It’s not clear from the context if Bettcher thinks that “heterosexual sexuality” is essentially and/or uniquely “manipulative and rape-excusing”.
[3] Bettcher refers to terms like “woman” as gender terms, not sex-terms. But this insinuates that the connection between the use of the word “woman” to pick out “genital information” was always arbitrary. I take up this point later.
[4] Bettcher repeats it here, from which this quote is taken: “Yet once we square with the fact that transphobia is fundamentally a part of (hetero)sexual systems of violence and rape mythology, we must immediately accept the view that it is also fundamentally imbricated in systems of racial oppressions, sexual violence, and racist rape mythology.” (p. 57). Since I don’t really understand the first part of the sentence I can’t see why I must “immediately accept” that transphobia is connected in this way, nor what sort of connection “fundamentally imbricated” signifies.