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The Trans Delusion: a Philosophical Nail in its Coffin



Philosopher Thomas Nagel

The arguments in philosopher Thomas Nagel’s seminal 1974 essay, What is it Like to be Bat? can help us answer the question of whether a human born with XY chromosomes and a male body can be, become, or know what it is like to be a woman, or know what inhabiting the world is like for a woman. Nagel — who randomly chose bats from the list of mammals — began from the premise that if an organism has consciousness, then there is something that it is like to be that organism, and his question was whether we could know “what is like for a bat to be a bat”.


 First, we have to acknowledge two things. The first is that to give a philosophical account of whether a man can ‘transition’ into being a woman, can flit between being male and female, transcending the sex boundary, or can ‘identify as’ a woman, is to give the matter way more than its due, and to accord those who make such claims more respect than they deserve.  The second is that that almost everyone does make those claims is lying.


What Nagel’s essay argues for is the wholly subjective character of experience, and how this subjectivity is dictated by differences in the physicality of beings. A creature shapes its Umwelt, or lifeworld, through its interactions with the world, and those interactions are determined by that creature’s body. Men and women inhabit similar, yet profoundly different Umwelt’s. The qualia of sensation — meaning the instances of subjective experience, such as what it’s like to perceive a colour, to taste an apple or hear a baby cry — are different for each individual human, but these differences are also sexed. The last is a good example, as the female body — and therefore mind — responds to a baby’s cry in a radically different way to a man. But there are also large differences in the way they experience running for five hundred metres, the colour red, having a nipple touched, and innumerable other things (almost everything, in fact). There are qualia that each sex experiences that the other will never be able experience at all, but which help form their consciousnesses. A woman will never get an erection, and a man will never have a clitoral or vaginal orgasm, menstruate, or give birth.


All of these ways of experiencing the world physically, along with anticipations of them, and memories of them, form a human being’s consciousness, its personality, its very being (or soul, if you like), who he or she is. If one, or even half a dozen of the physical particularities of a woman could be miraculously reproduced in a man (which they can’t), such as giving him the same muscle mass and bone density, a uterus, a clitoris, or a brain that reacts in the same way to temperature or noise, he still wouldn’t be a woman physically, or anywhere near being one. Everything, every molecule would have to be changed, and a lifetime of memories implanted. Surgery is merely an in-real-life filter, advanced dressing up, and transitions someone towards nothing except a sad state of infertile, anorgasmic botchedness.


So, a man can never become a woman physically, and thus cannot logically be or ‘identify as’ a woman, as you can only know what it feels like to be a thing if you are that thing. “Mental states”, Nagel adds, “are states of the body, and mental events are physical events”: the ghost is the machine, the machine is the ghost. To argue otherwise is argue that the mind and body are separate — which is philosophically 500 years out of date. Let’s look at a passage of Nagel and replace ‘bats’ with ‘women’:


“Even if humans [men] could transform over time into bats [women] their brains would not have worked as bats' [women’s] brains from birth, and could therefore never have the mindset of a bat [woman] … it is doubtful that any meaning could be attached to the supposition that I should possess the internal neuropsychological constitution of a bat [woman] … even if I could by gradual degrees be transformed into a bat [woman], nothing in my present condition enables me to imagine what the experience of such a future stage of myself thus metamorphosed would be like”.


and,


“To the extent that I could look and behave like a wasp or a bat [or a woman] without changing my fundamental structure, my experiences would [still] not be anything like the experiences of those animals [women]”.


It is then, the much vaunted ‘lived experience’ that mitigates against the possibility of trangenderism. Nagel goes on to give the example of trying to attain knowledge of what it is like to be blind or deaf (he could just as easily have substituted disabled, or schizophrenic), concluding that “the subjective experiences of a person deaf or blind from birth are not accessible to me … we cannot form more than a schematic notion of what it would be like".


Nagel says that “… the more different from oneself the other experiencer is, the less success you can expect in your guesswork”. So, men can come close to guessing what it is like to be woman. Men and women both experience hunger, sexual desire, boredom and aesthetic pleasure, but the way they experience those things is qualitatively different, and unalterably so. Nagel writes that “there are facts that do not consist in the truth of propositions expressible in human language”, and that “to deny the reality or logical significance of what we can never describe or understand is the crudest form of logical dissonance”. In other words, the subjectivity of other beings is ultimately ineffable and irreducible to language, and so the subjective experiences of men and women will always be unknowable for each other.


The idea that someone, by adopting the outward and trivial indicators of femininity, can suddenly thereby have access to that knowledge is preposterous. We can only guess, and approach knowledge through empathy, imagination and the testimonies of women themselves. “Nobody has yet devised", Nagel writes “an objective phenomenology not dependent on empathy and imagination — that could describe, at least in part, the subjective character of experiences in a form comprehensible to a being incapable of having those experiences”. Men and women are restricted by the resources of their own sexed minds, their consciousnesses made sexed by their sexed bodies. To deny that they are sexed is not only contra accepted biology, as well as common sense, it would also completely undermine the discipline of evolutionary biology.


For instance, men do not have breasts, nor could they ever have them, just things obtainable via hormonal treatment and surgery that look like them: they merely have nipples with muscle and adipose tissue underneath, cannot produce real breast milk, nor do men have the profound ocular-brain relationship with babies that women have.


The belief that ‘trans women are women’ makes a belief in magic seem sophisticated, because belief in magic or miracles explained effects for which causes could not (yet) be identified, but there was at least an observable effect to be explained. Likewise, when people believed erroneously that the world was flat, they did so because the world looked flat. With trans women, there is no such observable effect. What you have before you after saying the magic formula ‘trans women are woman’ is visibly still a man. At best, the poor wretch’s cock and balls will be gone, replaced by a crude cavity, as close to a woman’s vagina and reproductive system as a star to a turd. He will have to dilate this Dr Moreauish abomination regularly to stop this ever-festering, excremental smelling, sometimes even maggot-ridden, wound from healing up. The degree of delusion needed to think that this horrendous hole is anything like a woman’s vagina is insanity-level. In fact, my nostril is closer to a woman’s vagina than a neo-vagina, because it is a bodily cavity I was born with and that has a function.


Feeling inside that one is male or female is biologically determined, making a nonsense of the idea of 'being in the wrong body': ‘male’ and ‘female’ are ‘assigned’ at birth, but by Nature, not by a doctor or midwife. One cannot move from the fixed point of being male or female and back again, so the idea of gender fluidity is absurd and illogical. Words such as genderqueer and non-binary refer to nothing with concrete, proveable existence in the real world. The main differences between men and woman are in their reproductive organs, and in their potential reproductive roles, so that ultiately all social determinations regarding gender are biologically determined. This is why, until very recently, sex and gender were used interchangeably: for there to be a third gender, there would need to be a new, third reproductive function, and new organs to go with it.


Everyone is at points and to differing degrees ‘gender non-conforming’ regarding how they are expected to behave as men and women in their historical period, society or milieu: but this changes nothing substantial about their gender or their sex. A liking for cut flowers, Emily Bronte and fancy soap, or even a prediliction for wearing dresses, makes a man neither gay nor a woman, and a girl's obsession with climbing trees or football, or wearing her hair short, doesn't mean she is a boy inside a girl’s body, or a lesbian.


The one thing that trans ideology has done more than anything else, that will outlast it, is to have shot to shit any notion of human progress, other than technological-scientific progress. It is perhaps the most profound manifestation of human stupidity and credulousness in history, outdoing even the witch craze of the seventeenth century. It is more imbecilic than any previous superstition or mass insanity because it is has come well after the end of the age of superstition and the Enlightenment.


The 'truths' of science have always been subject to suspicion and revision, but trans ideology has never had this Hegelian 'moment' of temporary truth that was later abandoned as more information came to light. Quite the oppostite; it is wholly retrogressive, an attempt to replace biological knowledge with magical thinking, humanity regressing to something lower even than pseudoscience. The middle-class, midwitted nincompoops declaiming ‘trans women are women’, even if they have ‘Dr’ preceding their names, are no more advanced, are perhaps less so, considering their education, than gap-toothed, beshitten and illiterate medieval peasants’ belief in dragons, fairies and unicorns.


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