An analogy that doesn’t
I saw a reference somewhere yesterday (I wish I could remember where) to an analogy between trans identity and adoptive parents. I kept thinking about it off and on all day, finding it less convincing the more I thought about it. So I searched for it and found a piece by a philosopher, one Sophie Grace Chappell. Is Chappell trans?, I wondered as I read. I had to look hard to find out, but I did look hard, because…that name? Sophie Grace? Remember the also self-named cartoonist Sophie Labelle? Self-flatter much?
Anyway I did find out: yes, Chappell is trans.
Sophie Grace Chappell is professor of philosophy at the Open University, Milton Keynes, England. Under her previous name Timothy Chappell she is the author of Ethics and Experience (Acumen 2011) and Knowing What to Do: Imagination, Virtue, and Platonism in Ethics (OUP 2014). Her most recent book is the edited collection Intuition, Theory, and Anti-Theory in Ethics (OUP 2015).
OUP: a name to conjure with.
So, this analogy:
Maybe we should think of it like this: Trans women/men are to women/men as adoptive parents are to parents. There are disanalogies of course, and the morality of adoption is a large issue in itself which I can’t do full justice to here. Still, the analogies are, I think, important and instructive. [1]
An adoptive parent is someone who desperately wants to be a parent but can’t be one in the normal biological sense. (At any rate usually–there are families with a mix of biological and adopted children. But here I’ll focus on the commoner and simpler case.) So society has found a way for her to live the role of a parent, and to be recognised socially and legally as a parent, which kind of gets round the biological obstacle.
Chappell then goes through a long list of the things people don’t think about adoptive parents but do think about trans people, but what I kept thinking about yesterday was whether the analogy is a real analogy in the first place. I get the basic idea: adoptive parents are not literal, physical parents, but they function as parents, they live as parents, they are accepted as parents, and so on. I get that but it’s not all there is to it. Adoptive parents are parents if and because they do something. You have to adopt a child or children to be an adoptive parent. You don’t have to do anything to be a trans woman. A closer analogy would be “identifying as” an adoptive parent without actually adopting any children.
The adoptive bit is not just a label, it’s an action – and quite a big action, with large consequences that last for years; an action that entails many actions every day for 18 years/the rest of your life. Being trans can include some actions taken on the body, but we are assured it doesn’t have to.
I asked myself at one point yesterday what actions I would take if I decided I was a trans man. The answer was: none. Nothing would change. Not one damn thing. I mean, sure, I could get busy telling everyone I know, but that doesn’t count as an action entailed by being a man instead of a woman. There would be no chores or duties or visible behaviors I would have to adopt to conform to my decision.
And then there’s the fact that being an adoptive parent is about the children at least as much as it’s about the parent. There are parents who adopt and children who are adopted; adoption means both parties; it can’t possibly be a solipsistic activity. Being trans is very much the opposite of that – it’s about “an authentic self”; it’s about “my identity”; it’s about “my woman’s soul”; it’s about an Inner Feeling. It’s about one person and one person only. In that way the two could hardly be more contrary to each other.
This makes all Chappell’s points about the things people don’t think about adoptive parents but do think about trans people pretty much irrelevant, as far as I can see. Of course people don’t question the category of adoptive parents the same way some of us question the category of trans people (at least as currently dogmatized): they are radically different.
Until people start “identifying as” adoptive parents while remaining childless I don’t think that will change.
Funny you should post this. I was just reading Kathleen Stock’s piece on Medium on fallacious TRA arguments, and the birth/adoptive analogy is one of them.
https://medium.com/@kathleenstock/doing-better-in-arguments-about-sex-and-gender-3bec3fc4bdb6
reads it
Yes all that too.
Another difference which degrades the analogy: ‘parent’ is a necessary role, with responsibilities derived solely from the fact of being a parent, thus it is completely reasonable for the society at large to place behavioural expectations on the parent. By this analogy, Chappell is implying that ‘woman’ and ‘man’ are also societal roles which should exist, with different expectations placed on males and females solely derived from their respective anatomy.
Evidence #4332454 that trans theory requires and maintains sex based social roles.
In an article that clamboy linked to yesterday, they discuss this very analogy:
(Note to self–check comments before posting.)
I’m sure the analogy was offered in good faith, from the writers frame of reference. As they acknowledge, and comments above address, it is an imperfect analogy. My take is that trans people will fall on a spectrum. Some will make as a complete transition as possible and blend almost seamlessy into life in their newly chosen gender. They will perform the role so well that most of us will not even think for a moment they are not who they claim and appear to be. These are the equivalents of the adoptive parent. At the other extreme are the part-time trans. the guys who at work dress like a man, use a man’s name, act like a man and expect to be treated like a man; but on Saturday night they put on women’s clothes, change their name to Cindy and head of to a gay bar to demand sex from a lesbian. Let’s face it, they just even trying to be parents, adoptive or not. Stretched out between those extremes are all the others, trying (to a greater or lesser degree) and succeeding (to a greater or lesser degree). To stretch the analogy, they don’t even have a kid, so they’re not adoptive parents. They don’t even intend to get a kid, so they can’t be adoptive parents. But they want to be treated like adoptive parents and they (maybe) identify as parents. Some of these people are deluded, some are malicious, what none of them are is adoptive parents. At best they’re playing a role.
I suspect a good way to differentiate between the sad and the bad might be to look at how much attention they draw to themselves and just how much they attack gender critical feminists.
Well at least the adoptive parent analogy is better than the penguin analogy.
Originally here, by Rachel Anne Williams: https://medium.com/@transphilosophr/a-dialogue-between-a-trans-woman-and-a-gender-critical-feminist-652c25a9414a
Addressed by Jane Clare Jones (along with much else) here:
https://janeclarejones.com/2019/06/04/a-dialogue-between-a-trans-woman-and-a-feminist-who-isnt-just-a-figment-of-the-trans-womans-mind/
What terribly imperialistic and exclusionary thinking. As someone from a country where a flightless bird is our national symbol (and where but for extinction an even bigger flightless bird would almost certainly have been our national symbol), I deeply resent this assumption that ‘birds fly’ is the go to thought!
But yeah, what JCJ said.
Everybody pause a moment to remember the Moa.
And once you’ve paused for the Moa, have a thought for Harpagornis moorei, also known as Haast’s Eagle, which hunted Moas, and went extinct with the demise of its favoured prey :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haast%27s_eagle#/media/File:Giant_Haasts_eagle_attacking_New_Zealand_moa.jpg
Had it survived, I daresay it might have somehow found its way into the heraldry of New Zealand…
[pauses]
Yes, the Moa must have been delicious, since it was rapidly made extinct by the arrival of humans on these fair isles. As a consequence, Haast’s Eagle also became extinct shortly thereafter.
Haast’s Eagle might well have become our national bird, but I like to think that any nation that could contemplate laser kiwi or stick man on a bike as a new flag wouldn’t have gone for anything so obviously flashy.
Dammit YNNB, that will teach me to refresh.
Well that’s weird, my post’s not showing. Too many links maybe?
And don’t get me started on the seahorse analogy.
I do not know a Moa,
But if one were my pet
I’d name it Noah Moa
And take it to the vet.
Alas, they are no Moa;
Imagine my regret.
Yeah, I’ve heard this one. Seahorses don’t change sex. The sex roles merely call for shared parenting. A better analogy for the women who say there are examples that indicate the woman isn’t the one who does all the child care (catfish is another).
Even if it were about sex changes, we must repeat to ourselves: Humans are not seahorses. Humans are not seahorses.
Funny how many people reject Peterson’s stupid lobster analogy but accept the stupid seahorse analogy.
The usual seahorse analogy is that male seahorses ‘give birth’, rather than that they change sex.
And therefore…. women are men and men are women, somehow. Same thing. Apparently.
Except that they (seahorses) don’t and they (men and women) aren’t and it (the analogy) isn’t.
Other than that, it’s fine.
Yes, the seahorses analogy is so weak and ludicrous it is tempting not to even engage with it. Unfortunately, like creationists, if you fail to engage with their argument, you are unable to answer their brilliance. If you engage, you are a hateful bigot.
The part that really pisses me off is that seahorses are awesome.
It’s interesting that the male incubates the eggs (as do many birds and some reptiles) and interesting that they do it in a pouch in an octopuses garden. It’s brilliant and interesting and brilliant.
It’s like…. it’s like humming birds.
Look at a humming bird. It goes up, it goes down, it stays in place if it wants, it is covered in sequins. It is beautiful and amazing in every way, supremely adapted to stealing nectar from various flowers. Brilliant things, right? And yet we call them humming birds, as though the sound they make is the best bit.
Why don’t we call them awesome birds?
Seahorses are the same. Everything about them is great and yet the one thing certain people choose to focus on is only part of their awesomeness at best and at worst is not true.
Because cassowaries already took the name, sorry.
My magpie army will cause you to think differently.
latsot, I thought they were called the Toon Army. Anyway, how very dare you label hummingbirds as thieves? Some of those flowers have adapted to make access easy for hummingbirds alone.
Holms, if there is reincarnation, I think I’d like to come back as a cassowary.
I’d probably come back as a mayfly. Doomed to live the same life again.