When I was a teenager, I was short and had a slight build. I stood approximately 5’6″ and weighed around 118 lbs in my senior year. I had long straight hair (all the way down to my butt), no body hair, and my face had not fully masculinized. Needless to say, I was misgendered all the time. Sometimes it offended me, since at that age I wanted to be known as a man. I wanted people to see me for what I was. But it happened so often that I learned to just let it go. Eventually my body filled out (too much these days) and I became hairy. I haven’t been misgendered in decades.
That type of misgendering offends a fact, namely that I am a man and feminine designations are therefore wrongly placed. Of course, I can understand how it happened, but it was still misgendering since the words used contradicted the reality. I am not “ma’am” because I am a man, i.e., a male human. Perhaps I should not have minded too much. Had I wanted to be a woman, I could have fooled a lot of people. But at the time there was no transgender phenomenon. We were either male or female with our masculinity and femininity on a spectrum—mine clearly ambiguous. It wasn’t something any of us even remotely considered.
However, there is another type of misgendering that occurs because a person correctly identifies the gender of a person. To avoid this type of misgendering, it is often (usually) required of the person being gendered to announce his or her or their gender, since it is not apparent by looking at the person. Tiffany Moore is a good example. I see a man. So do you. But if I address Moore as “sir,” then I will have misgendered Moore and Moore will become very angry. I am expected to misgender Moore because he thinks he is a woman. To navigate the new world in which things are not what they are, one has accept that we live in a world where people can say they are things they are not and have to agree with his, her, or their false presentation of self. Only certain false presentations, I hasten to add. I would not be obliged to agree with Moore if he claimed to be a black man (or women, as it were). In other words, I am expected to lie to Moore to avoid offending him based on a standard derived from a doctrine to which I do not subscribe.
We’re told that we must lie not to offend. Indeed, telling the truth about somebody’s gender is for some considered harassing and even abusive conduct (seeNIH and the Tyranny of Compelled Speech; Denying Reality: The Tyranny of Gender-Inclusive Language). But what is never discussed is the toll extracted from the person who is being asked to lie—in some cases compelled to lie. It is not harassing and even abusive conduct to demand a person deny reality or suffer marginalization and even punishment? Is there not something fundamentally dehumanizing by expecting or requiring a person to override their evolve nature? (See Neutralizing the Gender-Detection Brain Module. See also The War on Fact and Reason: More on the Problem of Compelled Speech; There’s No Obligation to Speak Like a Queer Theorist. Doing so Misrepresents Reality.)
Just a little while ago, CNN Sports carried the headline, “Megan Rapinoe says US has ‘weaponized’ women’s sports against trans people, ‘trying to legislate away people’s full humanity.’” “‘You’re taking a “real” woman’s place,’ that’s the part of the argument that’s still extremely transphobic,” Rapinoe told Time. “I see trans women as real women. What you’re saying automatically in the argument—you’re sort of telling on yourself already—is you don’t believe these people are women. Therefore, they’re taking the other spot. I don’t feel that way.”
Rapinoe is saying that telling the truth is transphobic, that one can only respect an individuals full humanity when one participates in upholding a fiction about that person, that they are what they are not. This is the same as being told that one is Islamophobic for denying that there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet. Like Allah and Gabriel of Islamic mythology, trans women are not real women. This is a fiction created by gender ideology. From a scientific standpoint, trans women are men. Tiffany Moore is a man. There is nothing that will ever change that. Even if we all agree to lie about who Moore really is. Even if we all convince ourselves that the lie is the truth. Tiffany Moore will still be a man.
Requiring people to lie without a good reason is abusive. It punishes them for living in the light of truth. This is the worst sort of wrong to perpetrate against a person. And to save the social justice types some time, I do not accept the claim that there are power differentials that require lying or that allegedly marginalized groups have a epistemic or moral privilege. I am under no obligation to accept abuse because of where I stand with respect to the myriad of oppressions imputed to me by weak egos.
freedom and reason 