I am as unbothered by trans folk existing as I am by left-handed folks existing. I hereby offer the following to assist those of you who are not yourself trans but who struggle with acceptance of trans folk.
Let us start with an analogy.
If a fully grown adult person who stood three feet from head to toe told me they identify as “tall,” I would accept that. I myself would probably say to myself, “Huh. I wouldn’t have said that, but I suppose they are using different criteria to define “tallness” than I am. Perhaps they mean it metaphorically, because they have achieved so much. Perhaps they mean they are tall compared to other little people, or to children. We’re just using the word ‘tall’ differently.”
Now, if that same person were to claim they are six feet in height and demand I agree that this is so, I would have to politely but firmly deny that. There’s a difference between “I define a term differently than you do” and “I am not living in reality.”
And now, let us get to the real issue.
If a person who was born as a man (with male genitals, an XY chromosome set, and the other biological markers we have come to associate with maleness) told me they identify as a woman (or, for that matter, simply said they were a woman) I would be back where I was with the “tall” example. I’d just simply accept that they are using the word “woman” differently than I do, and then we’d go for lunch or go to the art museum or the monster truck rally or do whatever it was we were going to do in the first place.
See, it seems to me that If our born-male human adult with all the characteristics I laid out earlier identifies as a woman, think of ALL the characteristics they share with being a woman: they have arms, legs, toenails, a four-chambered heart, an all-but-useless appendix and tailbone, a spleen, two kidneys, were born live (not from an egg), have 23 pairs of chromosomes, are warm-blooded, have a central nervous system, a spine, they fart, and so on and so on and so on. Virtually ALL the characteristics you could list about a human adult female would be present. The disagreement–if there is one–has to do with a tiny percentage of factors. In the overall scheme of things, the “checklist” of what we traditionally consider a woman is, for all practical purposes, full.
(This is why, by the way, the asinine and bad faith “argument” of “well, then–I identify as an attack helicopter” doesn’t work. The imbecile who uses this argument forgets that they share almost none of the same characteristics with their Apache and their claim can therefore be dismissed.)
To those of you who demand a set list of rigid, concrete, measurable characteristics to define “woman” (as so many right wing pundits seem to demand), I can’t help but notice that none of you, NONE OF YOU, have asked to define “human.” Surely, if Matt Walsh demanded of me I define “woman,” he means “human woman,” right? So, then, we should probably define “human” first. I wonder what he’d say?
Would he fixate on the physical characteristics? Like saying a human has two arms? If so, right away there are a huge number of people we’d have to classify as “nonhuman.” Babies born without one or both arms, folks who have lost one of both arms in the course of their lives, and I suppose a very small number of people who have more than two arms (the clinical term for this is polymelia, by the way). And yet, I don’t think any of us would dare to tell one of those folks they are not human. The same would be said for legs, or organs in the body, or senses, or just about any physical characteristics we normally associate with being human.
All right, then–perhaps being human isn’t about physical characteristics but of behavior. What behaviors would qualify a person as being human? Speech? Animals use language. Complex speech? Infants cannot speak–are they not human yet? Walking upright? Many animals do this, and again, infants do not. In fact, I would challenge anyone to come up with a list of behaviors that ONLY humans do and indeed ALL humans do.
What’s left? Biochemical? Which part? DNA? We are around 99% identical to chimps in our respective DNA structure. So, in order to define “human,” we had to use microscopic data that no one other than a scientist who specializes in a very narrow field understands and can only be found by using precise, advanced equipment.
Seems to me that definition is pretty close to useless.
Why not go with, “an organism is a human when and if it declares itself to be.” Sounds good, right? Almost elegant in its simplicity. And it will function for us in 99% of cases when we need it to. There are no doubt some very technical cases when we’d need to go to the DNA test to see if something is indeed human, but for virtually every ordinary case, we can easily get by with the “humans are who they say they are” definition.
Why not use the same for women and men? Yes, yes…in some very rare cases, I can see that it might be necessary for a trans person to make a distinction (I can imagine a medical emergency that somehow would be treated differently depending on male or female physiology) but I would imagine those would be as rare as it would be for a person to declare they have only one kidney. In the vast majority of interactions with others, it simply is a non-issue.
So, if you are the sort of person who struggles to accept the existence of trans folk, and demands people have strict, rigid definitions of what “man” is and what “woman” is, consider what I’ve said here. I hope it helps you come to an understanding that you are making a demand that you simply do not make in regard to virtually any other aspect of human interaction. You do not make the same demand to know if someone is a human–you simply take their word for it and move on.
I know that many of you will say, “but…but…there are issues involving public spaces! Or sports!” and I don’t want to dismiss your issues. But this blog post has gone on long enough, so I will save my thoughts on that stuff for a later time.
Be seeing you!
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