The Trans Delusion: a Philosophical Nail in its Coffin
- cmil1167
- Nov 24, 2024
- 10 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
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, can become, or can know what it is like to be a woman, or can 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”.
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 our anticipations 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 as a woman, 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. Consciousness is a complex feature of evolutionarily determined biological systems, the latter radically different for men and women, such that even their spatial and temporal perspectives for experiencing the world are differen.
For a man to become a woman everything, every molecule would have to be changed, and a lifetime of memories implanted. Each moment to moment sequence of experience from the womb onwards grows coherently out of those that preceded it, and determines those that follow it. Surgery is merely an in-real-life filter, advanced dressing up, and transitions someone towards nothing that meaningfully resembles a woman. To give one of thousands of examples: men have no Cooper's Ligament, which mens that after HRT thier breasts - which in any case are functionless - will be tubular and spaced very widely apart. Even the cells of men and women are biochemically different and determine, from before birth, very many things, including how each sex fights particular diseases. Every cell in our body has your male or femalness inscribed within it. Even if it were possible to change your hormonal sex completely (which it isn't) that would still leave your unalterable chromasomal sex and your genetic sex intact.
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. To argue otherwise, that there is another, 'real'self within us distinct from the bodily self, and that the mind and body are separate , is philosophically centuries out of date - Locke's Empiricism first put pay to Descartian dualism almost 350 years ago. “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. The hormonal impregnation of the foetus has a direct effect on neural circuits, creating a masculine brain and a feminine brain, which can be distinguished from each other anatomically, and biochemically, and cannot be housed in the body of the other sex, it being determined by the sexed body. 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, nor can they ever 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 women’ is visibly still a man. At best, after the surgical removal of his genitalia, a man will have a crude cavity, its position and condition of being a hole being the only things it has in common with a woman’s vagina, and is the only part of her reproductive system that it's even possible to crudely mimic. This is why the word 'trans' itself is inadmissable, as there isn't a transition towards or into anything.
The feeling inside that one is male or female is biologically determined, the idea of 'being in the wrong body' has no concrete, observeable, proveable basis: ‘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, of being non-binary is illogical, impossible, mad. The main differences between men and women lies in their reproductive organs, in their potential reproductive roles, and in the reproductive apparatus that produces sperm or eggs, 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. Arguments that sexual dimorphism can be overcome or does not exist are pure Lysenkoism, and matters of ideology, not science. Gender theorists wanted to separate sex and gender, but it simply can't be done.
Everyone is at points and to differing degrees ‘gender non-conforming’ , in that they veer towards and away from society's fixed ideas at any one time of what is masculine or feminine, 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.
To have given this matter philosophical consideration is to have given the it way more than its due, and to have accorded the adherents of trans ideology more respect than they are due, and has necessitated the bracketing of matters such as that its middle class adherents are all lying, the data showing that it is in part a social contagion, its roots in pornography and anutogynephilia, and that it is a multi-billion dollar business.
The one thing that trans ideology has done more than anything else, that will outlast it, is to have made a nonsense of the idea of human progress, other than technological-scientific progress. It is perhaps *the most profound manifestation of human credulousness and stupidity in history, outdoing even the witch craze of the seventeenth century. It is more egregious 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 its 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, sub-Lysenkoism. At its core is the irrational claim that feelings determine reality (which is how schizophrenics experience reality). Those declaiming that ‘trans women are women’, even if they have ‘Dr’ preceding their names, are no more advanced than a gap-toothed, illiterate medieval peasant expressing a belief in dragons, fairies and unicorns.
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*Disavowals of this ideology have begun, following the recent ruling of the Supreme Court. They will snowball, but slowly. There are several factors that will serve to inhibit the abandoning of this ideology. First, there is the fact that is so profitable, a multi-billion dollar concern for Big Pharma, surgeons ant therapists. And on top of this are by now countless jobs, grants and salaries - at NGOs, consultancies, 'charities', training companies and so on - that depend upon its continuance.
Secondly, there are lots of trans women and trans activists emplyed in HR and DEI departments, as well as staff in the activist LGBTQ+ staff groups in public bodies. Every single one has at least one such staff association (as welll as race-based staff groups) and they have been and are very powerful. It is from these groups of people that most of the defiance and continued activism and propagandising comes. Staff associations and DEI staff have been key to spreading the contagion and played a large part in cancel culture, too.
Third is the difficulty of giving up what has become for many part of their social identity before any of their peers do; cowardice and craven belonging-need will play the same part in disavowal as it did in in adoption. What will make this easier is if something else comes along to replace trans, which will deflect attention away from quiet disavowals and evidence-removing.
Finally, to disavow is to admit to one of two things, either that one is immensely stupid, or that one has beenlying about the issue. No previous social contagion or collective madness in history has been characterised by its pure stupidity in the way trans ideology has; you can draw attention to any other of its elements - its roots in porn and autogynophilia, its profitablity, its homophobia, its permission-giving for misogyny - but the thing that characterises it the most is that it si utterly moronic, and not worthy of even a moment's credence, something that never was able to reach even the stage of being speciously convincing for a while.
This represents a problem for those who'd like to disavow it. They are all middle-class. A middle-class that has become increasingly pompous regarding being 'educated', concurrently with it becoming even more comically doltish after thirty-five years of steady cultural and educational decline (for which this class is also responsible). How can someone one element of whose social identitiy is being 'intelligent' or an 'intellectual' admit to being infintley manipulable, to walking around in a propaganda-induced state of irreality, to having agree to a crazed refutation of objective-reality, something so stupid an unlettered peasant of 500 years ago would have thought it hilarious.
Who would want to read a novel by, view an artwork by, read journalism by, be taught by someone who had said, repeatedly and insistently, something as unutterably, almost unfeasibly stupid as 'trans women are women'? What would you be going to their works for? Surely not for some power of insight above the ordinary? Why voluntarily read books or experience art produced by the demonstrably stupid? Having uttered this statement renders every work they've produced or will produce worthless. Such people committed mass respecticide and should be forever disdained. Never forget who they were. And if you were take the view that this or that person didn't mean it, and are not really that stupid, but that they merely lied, then this renders their works and views equally worthless, because it shows that they are willing to speak and write in complete bad faith.
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