The suspect has been identified
Daniel Kaufman at the Electric Agora tries to figure out this “feeling like a ___” puzzle. He too starts from Alice Roberts’s Twitter claim yesterday –
If someone who looks like a man and has XY chromosomes tells me he feels female – I cannot tell her she is ‘wrong’. Would you?
What if someone who looks like a man and has XY chromosomes tells me he feels like a manatee, or a potato peeler, or a street lamp, or Lake Louise? Would I tell him he is ‘wrong’? I don’t know, it depends on the nature of the conversation, in what context it takes place, how free I am to escape, and similar contingent facts. But all things being equal, escape being readily available, and he asked my opinion? I probably wouldn’t tell him he’s wrong right off the bat, I’d ask him what he meant. If he meant it literally and never giggled even once, I’d just say he might think he felt like one of those items (or any other) but that doesn’t mean he is one.
Anyway, feeling like is one thing, and identifying as is another.
The use of ‘identify’ in the context of sex and gender is odd. A judge can order that a plaintiff not be identified, meaning that the person’s identity should be kept a secret. One can identify oneself with a political movement, by which one means that one should be associated with it. One can identify with the plight of a people, meaning that one has sympathy for – or even empathizes with – them. A doctor can identify the cause of a cough, meaning that he has found the bacterial or viral or other thing that is responsible for it. A suspect can be identified by the police, meaning that they have determined who he is.
But what could it mean to “identify as a man/woman”? From what I can discern from gender self-ID theorists and activists, it could mean one of two things, both of which strike me as untenable.
The first is reflected in the Alice Roberts quote, above: for me to identify as a man/woman is to feel like I am one.
But, he explains, there is no such thing.
…one is male or female, but one doesn’t feel male or female, just as one is a mammal, but one doesn’t “feel like a mammal.”
I can sort of get a grip on the idea of feeling like a mammal if I get to add “as opposed to a bird/reptile/fish.” I’m squishy like a mammal, earthbound like a mammal, unable to breathe under water like a mammal. I even have mammaries! But that’s a very attenuated sense of feeling like a mammal, and it’s certainly not the kind of thing one would bellow at people during Twitter arguments. It’s not political. It’s not what the dogmatists mean when they talk about feeling like/identifying as a woman.
The second pursues the line of gender: to feel like a man/woman is to feel masculine or feminine; manly or womanly.
And guess what that is. No prizes; it’s stereotype city, and no we don’t want to go there.
It would be regressive, then, to take this tack in trying to make sense of “identifying as” a man/woman and even worse to suggest that meeting these sexist expectations makes a person one or the other. For decades, feminists and other forward-thinking people have been fighting against precisely these sorts of expectations and rejecting the idea that such notions of manliness or womanliness should determine what one is or what one should do.
Or even how one should dress. No, putting on a dear little skirt and some red silk shoes won’t make you a woman if you’re not in fact a woman. Clothes are just clothes. You could put them on a horse, or a manatee, or a street lamp (not so much a potato peeler or Lake Louise); they don’t make you into anything (other than someone who is wearing those clothes for the moment).
The notion of “identifying as” a man/woman, then, is either incoherent or retrograde. It is the farthest thing from being liberatory or progressive, and I find it hard to understand why anyone interested in advancing the cause of trans people would want to have anything to do with it, let alone plant their flag in it. As I have argued many times, everything required to make a complete and compelling case for trans civil rights is already contained within the liberal tradition. And beyond the advantage of being grounded in a stronger, more rigorous, more universal set of principles, to pursue such a course would avoid the sexist logic and tropes that have done so much to put trans activism in conflict with its feminist and gay/lesbian counterparts.
Wouldn’t it be nice if people listened.
The first comment on that essay starts with several quotes on the concept of ‘self-identifying’, presumably designed to refute the author’s dissatisfaction with the term that you described in your post. I realised, reading the examples in the comment, that this idea of ‘identifying’ presupposes that the sexes (and I’d think women in particular, as it’s pretty clear in our culture why anyone would want to ‘identify’ into what’s perceived to be the culture of men, because that is our actual culture) have distinct ‘cultures’ with which individuals might desire or choose to ‘identify’, in the same way people might want to identify with the community of Jews, Arabs, believers, etc. (or Black people).
Also, slightly tangentially, I’ve read a couple of articles explaining the political reasons why -T is tacked onto LGB and why people are so tenacious about insisting on the analogy between accepting people as gay (and not straight) and accepting people as trans (and not ‘cis’). But I can’t figure out why people don’t acknowledge that it is actually possible to demonstrate objectively that someone is gay or bi (should there be any reason to do so)–attach them to a machine that measures physical responses, show them same-sex porn, and see if/how they respond. If there were any ‘scientific’ reason to measure someone’s ‘gayness’ it could actually be done. There’s no way to measure someone’s ‘transness’ except to ask them.
I’m not sure it’s a “problem” that transness can only be ascertained by asking someone (instead of hooking them up to a machine that could detect or measure something-or-other). It’s that any affirmative answer would be opaque.
“Oh, you say you’re trans? What does that mean, exactly? What does it feel like to be a woman? How do you know that ‘woman’ is the correct label for your feelings or identity? If it’s not anatomy, and it’s not conformity or comfort with cultural assumptions and expectations, and it’s not the kinds of experiences that come from living in our society as a woman, what is it that you have in common with non-trans women?”
Are there illuminating answers to these kinds of questions? I don’t know what they could be, but maybe that’s just my failure of imagination.
I sort of agree with Ben on this, because I can see it like “identifying” as a Democrat or a Republican, a Christian or a Muslim. There are some very definite measurements on those, however, such as party membership or recognition of a particular church membership. I think in the second case, though, it holds exactly like trans for those who are not associated with a church but say they are Christians, even though there may be no membership proof. But at the same time, it is a problem, because people can always lie. I called myself a “Christian” for years after losing my faith for reasons of safety and ability to get/hold a job. In the same way, men can call themselves women for a number of different reasons, including gaining access to vulnerable women. So problem or not problem? I think it’s complicated.
I think the idea of women’s and men’s separate distinct culture is embedded into our society. The entire concept of “chick flick” “women’s magazines” “women’s work” “a guy thing” – all of these are signs of embeddedness.
It’s sort of like my playwriting group, when one of the men wrote a play about women and was asking the women in the group if he got the “language” right or if he had captured the “dialect”. Or the constant question “how do you write women so well?” No one ever asks me, or any of the other women who include men in their plays, “how do you write men so well?” because male is the dominant ”culture”, as guest said.
There was a time when I was a rather outspoken atheist, and it gave me great pleasure to read and eviscerate apologetics. One of the ones that stuck with me—due to its remarkable audacity—was Alvin Plantinga’s “reformed epistemology”, which resurrected the Calvinist notion of an innate divine sense (sensus divinitatis). The sensus divinitatis is analogous to our five fundamental senses (sight, hearing, etc.) but instead of picking out physical stimuli, it reacts to the divine.
Plantinga argues that beliefs based on the sensus divinitatis are properly basic, needing no more justification than those based on the other five senses. This sense is present in all humans, but it is warped or nonfunctional in a few. Those few are atheists, agnostics, and all others who deny or question the existence of the divine. Thus, nonbelievers should defer to the judgement of those whose six senses are fully functional.
I’m pretty sure it’s obvious how well this maps onto the current debate. The gender ID proponents claim that everyone has an internal sense of gender, it is innate. Any man or woman who claims not to have an internal sense of gender is merely admitting that his or her gender sense is flawed or nonfunctional.
It doesn’t seem possible to accept or deny Plantinga without doing the same with GID. So here’s the problem: how can there be nonbelievers (with respect to religion) in the GID crowd?
That is indeed the problem.
Part of the answer is just social forces – on the one hand threats, intimidation, insults, ostracism and the like, and on the other hand solidarity, friends, colleagues, allies, ideology, political values and the like.
And the reality is we don’t know how many people that part of the answer covers. Does PZ Myers really believe in the sensus gendertatis? Or does he just pretend to because of the social forces? I don’t know, and the same could be said of most “allies.”