Feeling≠being
Alice Roberts, Professor of Public Engagement in Science at the University of Birmingham and President of Humanists UK, has been Twitter-arguing with people who found the Natural History Museum’s tweets about queer giraffes and non-binary gorillas absurd.
This one is particularly interesting to me:
How I feel in myself has no bearing on what someone feels. 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?
— Prof Alice Roberts (@theAliceRoberts) June 19, 2019
It’s her reply that interests me, but I’ll just note about the quoted passage from her book…I wonder if she would write that now. I wonder if now she would stop, and think, and frown, and then censor herself. I wonder if she would stop to think about it and then decide that it would be “transphobic” to allow that sentence to appear.
That’s a hypothetical though. Her actual reply today says “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?” That’s what interests me.
Of course, first of all, it depends what she means. (I asked her but don’t know if she’ll reply.) Maybe she just means it’s not comfortable or polite and usually probably not even ethical to tell strangers they’re wrong about what they “feel” about themselves. But if she means it more generally and abstractly, that we can never think people are wrong about what they “feel” about themselves – that’s nonsense, and it’s antithetical to a scientific outlook. Why? Because people can be wrong about themselves, even if it’s an inner feeling, even if they feel the inner feeling strongly. Treating self-feelings as absolutely true and immune to rebuttal is sheer dogmatism.
That is, naturally, all the more germane when people are making factual claims that contradict what shows on the surface. Trump “feels” he is a stable genius, but there is much external evidence that points to a different conclusion.
Roberts’s hypothetical someone who looks like a man and has XY chromosomes may not be wrong about what he feels, but he’s probably wrong that what he feels=what he is. What we “feel” we are doesn’t necessarily determine what we actually are. It’s not that easy.
Practically speaking, in most situations, I wouldn’t say anything, for the same reasons I generally don’t get into discussions about very personal matters.
But if this were one of those conversations that is an exception for some reason: no, I wouldn’t say “you’re wrong.” But I would ask — with genuine curiosity — “how do you know? What does being a woman FEEL like to you?”
Because frankly, I wouldn’t know how to answer the question “what does it feel like to be a man?” [Insert jokes about my inadequacies here. You can’t ask for a better setup.] I could tell you a bit about how it feels to be treated as a man in society, or to interact with others on that basis. I suppose I could come up with an answer about what it feels like to have male genitalia. But those are different questions, as I would think trans people would be quick to point out. I don’t have some internal sense that tells me I’m male, or have a “male brain,” or anything like that, and I can’t even imagine what that would mean. As with pretty much everyone, I conform to some of our culture’s gender stereotypes and not to others.
I think I can wrap my head around gender-related body dysphoria, meaning that I can grasp the notion of having some feeling that your body should be different than it is. But again, we’re told that being trans doesn’t necessarily entail that. So I’m back to being flummoxed.
It’s like that claim that humans have a “sensus divinitatis” that gives (most) people a knowledge of god. I mean, I assume that people who claim to have a sense of god, in their brain or their heart or whatever, to be speaking truthfully of their subjective experience. And I’ve never had any interest in trying to talk someone out of a religious belief that is essentially “well, I feel it/Him/Her in my heart.” But I do insist on my right to object to a claim that a sensus divinitatis is an actual objective thing, and that therefore God exists because your subjective experiences tell you so. (To say nothing of the rather offensive related implication that atheists are either lying or brain-damaged.)
Exactly. Rebecca Reilly-Cooper pointed out several years ago that there is no “feeling like a woman” because there is only each person’s experience, one at a time. (That’s the gist; I hope I’m not butchering it.) I remember the lightbulb moment when I read that essay, along with feeling stupid because it seems so obvious once it’s pointed out. Or as The Electric Agora put it on Twitter, “I told her that there is nothing it is like to “feel male/female” just as there is nothing it is like to feel mammalian.” Ref: Thomas Nagel’s “What is it like to be a bat?”
From what I can tell, feeling like a woman amounts to acting like one thinks a woman should act. So it’s not really about bodily feeling and being transsexual, but about a gendered role that one wishes to adopt.
“Because people can be wrong about themselves, even if it’s an inner feeling, even if they feel the inner feeling strongly. Treating self-feelings as absolutely true and immune to rebuttal is sheer dogmatism.”
Thank you so much for this! Yes, people are often wrong about themselves and we need to be able to say that.
[…] a comment by Screechy Monkey on […]
Yep, that’s the key distinction to me. TRAs confuse the experience of being treated as a ____ as the feeling of being _____ itself.
Having no objective comparison, how can I really report the experience of being a man? Being white, is there an ‘experience’ that corresponds to the fact that I’m less likely to be shot by a policeman? And that’s just an example of things NOT experienced because of my category.
The real key is, if you were to “identify” as black, and put on blackface so that people believe you are black, then you would have to claim when you were shot by a policeman that it was because you are trans-black, not because you are now perceived as black and come in for all the shit you never realized was happening until you were actually black.
A round of applause for iknklast.
I’ve been reading that thread, and I guess she’s quitting Twitter and feeling hated. I understand the force of all the hundreds of people disagreeing with her must feel terrible. But it’s such a shame because their was very little harassment. most were great questions and plenty of concern for transgendered people’s well being.
That’s why I find the assertions of hate and bigotry so disingenuous. This is nothing like the anti gay rhetoric it’s so often compared to. It seems that most GC feminists and others on that thread (and apparently everywhere else) want trans to live as they feel but with the understanding that sex and gender are different and sex is based on material reality. How can atheists argue against that concept, no matter how complex they think biology is?
Yes – she’s not quitting Twitter but taking a break from it.
She’s a celeb with a lot of followers, so a torrent of replies is an occupational hazard. Some people state as a rule that one should never EVER contribute to a dog pile, which I suppose means that if you see a celeb tweet something questionable you should walk briskly away, because a dog pile is inevitable. But that raises the question: is asking genuine questions in good faith really a dog pile? I suppose it is in a sense, but I think a (social) rule against ever replying to a questionable tweet from a celeb would be a mistake. Don’t join a torrent of abuse, sure, but don’t join a torrent of questions? Doubtful.