If some thing doesn’t exist but people very much think it does or wish that it did, then they may insist on its existence. For example, a man may believe, or at least wishes that you would believe, that he has magical powers. If you tell him that magic is a scientific impossibility, he may engage in subterfuge or sophistry to make it seem, perhaps to his sastifaction only, that he does in fact possess magical powers. Whatever you say to reinforce the truth of the scientific impossibility of such powers, the man remains confident in his claim that he possesses divinity and this makes him capable of performing miracles, such as turning one thing into another thing. He is helped in this delusion if what is transmuting is an invisible thing.
While you remain skeptical of his claims, you may find that there are others who are not so skeptical. Indeed, there are some who believe this man to in fact be divine and capable of performing miracles. When objective evidence of these powers is requested, his followers repeat and even contrive rationalizations as to why no such evidence appears—or they will connect in a spurious way some event or thing, often misconstrued, to the utterances or actions of the miracle man. A miracle, they will note, is defined as a surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore considered to be the work of a divine agency.
The attribution of coincidence to divine agency is an act of faith of course. You ask his followers whether faith is a strong belief in some thing, as in this man’s divinity, based on spiritual apprehension rather than evidence. You do this because you wish to put them on the path of scientific objectivity. No, they will say, faith is realized when you believe in something and on this basis come to know it its truth. Perhaps you have heard this convenient rationalization. Few clever persons who wish to deceive others fail to prepare their devotees to confront reason with clever-sounding sayings.
In this video, the man says he is a woman. He even declares that he is a biological woman. He is biological, he argues, because the standard dictionary definition of biological is some thing with “living processes” and his existence is obviously an instantiation of that definition. He then says that “a woman is basically any one who says they are a woman.” It’s a “social construct,” he says, “an internal sense of self,” “how that person wants to present themselves to the world,” and “how they want to be perceived.” “That’s all a woman is, he contends: “somebody who says they are a woman,” adding “and who truly means it.” So if a man says he is a woman and he “truly means it” (I don’t think he does or he wouldn’t have made the video), then he is a woman—just as the man who says he can work magic and “truly means it” is divine.
Suppose the followers of the miracle man, backed against the wall in their desire to appear reasonable, make the argument that his divinity is social construct, by which is meant a concept that exists not in objective reality but as a result of human interaction. It is some thing that exists because humans agree that it exists. The man is divine because his followers agree that he is. I define social construct differently, and I will come to that later, but gender ideology means to convey with this term some thing that has no objective a priori existence and, moreover, a thing that is true because we agree that it is. One can push this to the point where everything is socially constructed because everything only exists because we agree that it does, but the man in the video appears to accept biology as an objective fact, that’s because he insists that he is physically existing, a fact that nobody would deny, and therefore he is a biological entity. But what if I do not agree that gender is a social construct?
Used in the way the man is defining women he is presenting is a circular definition, i.e., a concept without any meaning. It’s exactly like saying a square is a geometric shape we identify as a square. Saying that a square is a geometric shape we identify as a square would mean that, if a circle is identified as a square, let’s call it a “trans square,” then a circle is a square. If a little kid gets it wrong, then he will be correct and hopefully educated. But if everybody around him insists he get it wrong, he’s bow being indoctrinated. “A trans square is a square,” I can hear the woke progressive geometrician chanting. But it’s not a square. It’s a circle. We know it’s not a square because the word “square” has a non-tautological definition; “a plane figure with four equal straight sides and four right angles.” (It’s a special type of rectangle.) Likewise, a woman is an “adult human female” (or “adult female human,” if you like). A man is an “adult human male.” Therefore, a man cannot be a female.
The person in the video is indeed a biological entity. He is a mammal. A primate. This person is a male mammal. And the argument this primate is making is utterly ridiculous. Also utterly ridiculous is the language “gender assigned at birth.” A baby is not assigned a gender at birth. Gender is determined by the adults in the room and whoever that is gets that determination right almost every time. That’s because gender is a description of external anatomical features, which are objective. The adults in the room can make sure that these features are not superficially male or female by determining the karyotype (a check of the chromosomes) and/or looking at the internal reproductive organs. The adults in the room don’t usually do this because the external indication of the person’s gender almost always conforms to the gender of the person. Anomalies aside, since there are only two genotypes (everybody has a gender and gender is binary), it’s a simple thing to figure out. So usually folks just leave it at that.
And it’s not just the genitalia that marks males from females. We know this is a man not because he told us but because he doesn’t pass. Thanks to the evolutionary process, natural history has provided for us a gender detection faculty, which rarely fails us. It’s how we survived as a species: among other things, being able to tell the difference between males and females. Men can’t give birth. (This man probably can’t even get women pregnant.) Whoever this dude is, his lack of sophistication (and, really, the ideology is no deeper than this no matter how well dressed it is) is exposing the lie he lives by trying to convince you of something that’s impossible. Mammals can’t change their gender. Humans are mammals. Therefore, humans cannot change their gender. That’s not just a valid syllogism. That is a natural fact. Moreover, to note another natural fact, there is no such things as divinity.
Remember Nineteen Eighty-Four and how George Orwell told you that the Party would do this? That the Party would tell you that “2+2=5”? Here you go. The Party is doing that. Remember when Orwell told you that authoritarians would misuse language and engage in sophistry to trick you into believing falsehoods and destructive doctrines? Yep, you’re looking at a living instantiation of Orwell’s warning. The man in the video, like the miracle man, needs you to affirm his identity because he knows that he is not what he claims or wants to be. He needs your help to pretend along with him that he is a woman because only if everybody believes the lie can he go about the world being regarded as a woman. This type of attitude is seen in aggressive theocrats who demand you say that their god is real. You’ve seen it. They want you pray. They will harass, intimidate, and punish you if you criticize or deny that their god is real. But their god is not real. To be sure, it’s illusion not delusion only because millions believe it. But there are no angels or devils. There are no boys born in girl’s bodies. There are no gendered souls. There are no souls.
Both the miracle man and the man in the video are offering their publics religious belief. Reject it. Live in the light of scientific truth. Don’t let disordered and dishonest people disorder your consciousness and muddle your conscience. Don’t let them elevate their delusion to a societal-wide illusion. Don’t let them bully you into bad faith. Don’t let them make you lie. Integrity is not bigotry.
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Merriam-Webster gives as an example of a social construct class distinctions, defining social construct as “an idea that has been created and accepted by the people in a society.” However, class distinctions are objective features of society determined by one’s actual relationship to the means of production. He is not a worker because this attribution is accepted by the people in a society but because it is the term given to an actually-existing phenomenon. If one sells his labor for a wage, he is a worker. The worker would not cease to exist if we decided there were no such things as workers—just as we cannot no imagine away the poor. The worker just wouldn’t be called that. The worker would only cease to exist if the capitalist mode of production were abolished and with it necessary labor.
To say that class distinctions are created and accepted by the people in a society is like arguing that ecosystems, with their distinctions between plants and animals and so forth, only exist because people in a society created and accepted the idea of the ecosystem, rather than having come upon an ecosystem, contemplated it, and given it the name we use to refer to it today.
If gender is a social construct, then what’s with the insistence that we all accept gender ideology as true? If something only exists because we agree that it does, then being obliged to agree with others about this matter is also a matter of agreement—which, in a free society, should be voluntary. What is the objective basis upon which I am obliged to agree that gender only exists because we agree that it does and then agree with this purported consensus? Power. Is power also a social construct? Or is power the result of control over the institutions stood up to coerce people? It’s the same force that dispenses with the rhetoric of social constructionism and tells that the gendered soul is an actual thing. The use of power in this way is synonymous with tyranny.
freedom and reason 