Trans Women Should Be Women

And that's all that matters

OH NO! I have contracted the woke mind virus and don’t know what words mean anymore! Actually I really don’t know what words mean, because words don’t mean anything—but this has nothing to do with any possible viral infections currently attacking my brain.

A few days back, I had a chat with

Simon Laird

about animal ethics and whether trans women are women. It was a lot of fun, but I thought it worthwhile to properly explain my views on trans-womanhood in-the-print. You don’t need to have watched the conversation for this (though you should do so anyways).

In essence my view is that there are no facts about what words mean/what concepts they pick out. Rather we should determine our usage of words entirely off of normative considerations. The case is then straightforward:

• Step one: There’s no factual mistake in using the word “woman” one way or the other.

• Step two: There are good normative reasons for using the word “woman” to include trans women.

• Step three: Profit?

And God said “let ‘woman’ mean ‘adult human female’ in the English language.” And it was so.

Genesis 1:9 (the translation used here is contested)

Words don’t mean anything

In the context of talking about trans issues, it might just sound like I’m casting common sense out the window in the name of woke ideology. However, I just find the position that words don’t have meanings immensely plausible on its own terms.

It’s obvious that we can use words to mean things, and that we can interpret words as meaning things. I can use the word “water” to express the concept WATER, and you can hear the word “water” and interpret it as expressing that concept. Similarly I can use the word “oatmilk” to express the same concept, and decide to use that word for the rest of my life. If you knew that this is what I was doing, you would interpret me as expressing WATER whenever I said “oatmilk.” And if you didn’t know, you would interpret me as meaning OATMILK whenever I said “oatmilk,” and we would constantly misunderstand each other. This should be uncontroversial!

The question is then whether, on top of what we use words to mean, there is The Meaning of a word—i.e. whether I am making a factual mistake in the above example when I use “oatmilk” to express the concept of OATMI- I mean OAT- I mean OATMIL- I mean OA- I mean WATER. I am very doubtful! I can think of at least three reasons for this:

1. I’ll just report that I never find this real meaning anywhere. When I communicate with people in the wild, I never find myself “tapping into” the Real Meaning of the words we use. Rather it just seems like I intend to express something with the words I use, and when I hear or read other people’s words, I (perhaps subconsciously) assume that they mean certain things with them, as that’s what people usually mean with those words. There is no need to also invoke The Meaning of the word itself to account for my experiences here.
   
   This is especially clear when someone “misunderstands” what a word means, or uses it in a strange way. If I had a friend that constantly used the words “cat” and “dog” in the reverse way of what people usually do, then it might be confusing at first. But after some time I would figure out that they used these words in this idiosyncratic way, and the meaning would be conveyed by them regardless. This despite the fact that my friend would be using the “wrong words.” My view can perfectly account for there being conventional ways of using words, without saying that that also constitutes the true meaning of the word—and this true meaning adds nothing to the story.

2. The most common proposed ground/constitutive basis of word meanings—what competent speakers take the word to mean—seems to be quite problematic. To make it work it looks like you need to individuate languages, figure out what a competent speaker is, and figure out how many of the competent speakers are needed for the meaning to be fixed. I doubt any of these can be fixed very elegantly.
   
   The best solution I can imagine is to simply say that word meanings in a language are indefinite, and words mean different things to a higher or lower extent. This itself is very unintuitive to me, and appears to conflict with the vibe of the objectivist position: That languages are secure things with definite meanings. This isn’t too big of a problem, but absent sufficient motivation (which I don’t think there is) it’s surely unnecessary.

3. There is a plausible debunking argument to be made against there being any true meaning of words. For this to be the case, there must be some proposition that specifies the conditions for a word in a language having a meaning that's true, like “the meaning of a word in language L is the meaning given by competent speakers of L.” If there is no such truth then I would just win by default, since there would be no truths about what words mean.
   

   But what would happen if this were false and an alternative proposition were true like “the meaning of a word in L is what God decides it to be” or “the meaning of a word in L is what Jerry thinks the meaning of it is”? As far as I can tell, the world would be exactly the same. Laird would still be claiming that usage by competent speakers is what determines meaning,¹ and English speakers would use all the same words to mean all the same things, but simply be making factual errors every time. That just undercuts any justification for thinking that there are real meanings to words—or at least that we know them. I generally think these sorts of debunking arguments are very good.

So what do we do if there are no real meanings of words? Well when we want to express something, we use the sounds and symbols that we have best reason to use. Usually this will overlap with what someone might identify as the real meaning of a term, since the point of communicating is often to convey thoughts clearly.

But sometimes there will be other reasons informing word choice. Perhaps people have thus far used the word “disease” to exclude mental health issues like anxiety or not being subscribed to Wonder and Aporia. There then might be very good reasons to use the term in such a way as to include these conditions, as they should obviously be taken seriously, and be able to be treated:

The most obvious objection to this idea—and one Laird also raised—is that it completely ruins the possibility of communication. If words don’t have meanings then what the hell are we even doing? Are we just throwing sounds at each other and hoping we figure out what we mean?

I don’t see any problem here whatsoever though—or if there is one, it’s a problem for everyone. As I explained above, when we communicate, there doesn’t seem to be any point where these objective meanings play a role. When you’re reading this, the reason you know what I mean is that you know… well, what I mean with the words. If you found out that my use of the words was wildly atypical, you would no longer extract the meaning from them that you initially assumed. Similarly, if you found out that all other English speakers than us two had started using these words differently, our communication wouldn’t be hampered by the fact that we were using the incorrect meanings.

This suggests that what’s actually going on in communication is that you assume that the communicator means something with the words, not that the words mean something. So communication works like this: I hope to convey some thoughts to you. To do this, I should use some words, and through experience I have good reason to think that using such and such words will cause you to have roughly the thoughts. Thus I choose to use these words. On your end, you know that such and such words are usually meant to convey these thoughts, and so you interpret them as such. Why should I also add that it is Actually True™ that these words mean this? There’s just no need!

Also it’s not that I can’t say true or false things with words. If I mean with the words “I’m above 6’, handsome, and have a great personality” what English speakers usually mean with those words, I’d be saying something true (hmu). It’s just that I could also have meant something else with those words, and although that would be very confusing, I wouldn’t be making a factual mistake.

And a final side note: I don’t think this view is incompatible with content externalism more generally. Basically, I can use the word “water” to express the concept WATER, or I can use the word “cat” to do the same, while the content of my thought is determined in part by external factors. This even though I’m making no mistake choosing either word.

I don't know if I'm just stupid or missing something, but it seems completely crazy to me that this is not the standard view! It just seems like everyone is under some illusion, ascribing all sorts of extravagant properties to things for no reason.

I can understand why you would be lulled into the illusion—it saves cognitive resources to just assume what you and your fellows mean with a word is The Meaning. Upon a moments reflection, though, it should be obvious that you just mean things with words, and there is no actual Meaning to them.

This makes me fear that I'm just misunderstanding what people mean when they say that something is the meaning of a word. How could this be widespread?! But I also can't figure out what else the view would be.²

A person is not a man who is one only outwardly, nor are penises merely outward and physical. No, a person is a man who is one inwardly; and penises are penises of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the written code.

Romans 2:28–29

Should Trans Women Count as Women?

Obviously yes! By not using the word “woman” to include trans women, you’re being needlessly cruel. You shouldn’t go around hurting people’s feelings for no good reasons, and seeing as you’re not making a mistake by including trans women, there is no good reason. Actually, even if you were making a factual mistake, you should probably still include trans women, all things considered.

There can obviously be contexts where you should distinguish trans women from women, such as when you’re at the hospital or something. Luckily we have the terms male and female for that—and besides, it’s very rare that’ll actually be relevant.

But if not adult human female, then what should we use the word “woman” to mean? Really, I don’t think the specifics matter very much, as you should be able to tell when to use it and when not to in most circumstances—just like how literally no one has the definition “adult human female” in mind in real world circumstances when they’re deciding whether or not to call someone a woman.

If someone were to push for a definition, I guess a good first pass is the self-identification definition: A woman is someone who identifies as a woman. This definition has come under attack, e.g. from woke blogger Bentham’s Bulldog, partly for being circular.³ And I agree that it isn’t a very good definition, but it gets the vibe across.

A slightly better definition might be that a woman is someone who feels most comfortable in the social roles typical of females in their society. This is still hopelessly vague, and there are probably many intuitive counterexamples, but I think it points towards what matters, which is that it should capture both typical uncontroversial women and people with gender dysphoria. And I mean, the whole point of the position i sketched above is that you don’t need to have the right definition to be able to use the word. In fact barely anyone has definitions in mind for pretty much any word they use when they use it.

For the concept WOMAN is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.

Hebrews 2:12

Epilogue: What About Concepts?

Yeah, yeah! You can stipulate words to mean whatever you want, and there are no word-facts “out there.” But I’m just clearly missing the point! The question isn’t what concept we should put the label “woman” on, but whether the concept that we do put that label on includes trans women.

Actually, I do think word choice is a very important part. But fine, even if I go around policing the words people use, they might very well have concepts in mind that distinguish trans women from women, and through which they are more prone to interpret the world. The problem here is that the goal of a conceptual analysis trying to figure out whether trans woman are women is a completely different type of concept from the concept of women that people actually have.

When trying to conclude that trans women aren’t women on the basis that the concept WOMAN is that of an adult human female, we are talking about a concept with a classical structure, i.e. the structure of being composed of more basic concepts through logical connectives, each of which is itself composed in the same way.

But that’s super not the structure our everyday concepts—like the thing you actually have in mind when speaking of women—have. Firstly we don’t learn our concepts through being told definitions, but through seeing examples, so it’d be surprising if they had this definitional structure. This is also borne out in the fact that we have never ever ever “successfully” analyzed any interesting concept. Secondly the SEP tells me the psychology tells us that it also doesn’t seem to be what concepts are like—so listen to them!

More likely, our concepts have something closer to a prototype or exemplar structure, where we have some prototypical idea or set of examples in the background, and something falls under some concept to the extent that it matches these. But this doesn’t allow us to draw sharp lines between X’s and not X’s. There are just things that are more or less X-ish.

Looking at the classical side, there are a bunch of potentially precise classical concepts out there in logical space, each dividing all possible worlds neatly into two piles: X’s and not-X’s. But why think that there is one of these concepts that actually is the concept WOMAN. I mean, the concept we actually have when we think of women is not even of the same kind as these precise concepts, so it’d just be a completely ad hoc addition to say that one of these is then also just actually the true precise concept of WOMAN.

On the other hand, we have the vague things we actually go around with in our heads. Do trans women fall under this concept of woman? Well, I’m not sure that there is a fact here—not just because the concept is vague, but because it seems very improbable that there is a single concept here at all. Everyone will have looked at different examples, paid attention to different features and so on, when forming their concept, so clearly the concept will differ from person to person—and even throughout time for a single person. Ascribing these concepts identity over time and across people would require all sorts of arbitrary individuation and rules for how much a concept could stretch. So unless there is strong reason to do this (which I don’t see) we shouldn’t think there is a single concept.

Regardless of this, why should we bestow some special significance on the concept-cluster that many people currently pick out with the word “woman,” assuming it doesn’t overlap very much with trans women (something that’s not obvious)? There’s no sense in which it is more real or true than some cluster that also includes trans women to a greater extent, it just happens to be the lines people draw through the world currently.

We have expanded concepts like RAPE to include marital rape, and MARRAIGE to include same-sex marriage. Have we now landed on false concepts, or were the original concepts wrong to begin with? No! They were just different, and I can’t seem to make sense of the idea that there should be the concept of WOMAN that has any more import than others.⁴

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1. I’m not positive this is exactly his view.

2. I’m of course aware that I have been a bit hyperbolic when speaking of the view here, and that there are many different ways of fleshing it out. But I still just can’t seem to get the basic motivation for thinking that there are facts about what words mean.

3. I’m actually not fully convinced that the circularity is a real problem. There seems to be other identities that have a similar structure, such as national identity. I think I have a Danish identity, not because I fill out some sufficient number of family-resemblance characteristics, but simply because I identify as a Dane. What is the content of this identification? Just that I identify as a Dane—I don’t see there being any deeper content. You can of course point to all sorts of things that Danish people generally have in common, but those seem accidental, and the category itself seems circular in this way—and that doesn’t seem problematic. Mutatis mutandis for women.

4. Final sidenote: In the conversation with Laird, we got on a tangent about vagueness. I still hold the views on vagueness I expressed there, but it’s orthogonal to the trans issue. I don’t think this came across in the conversation, and we got a bit lost in the sauce.