Dawkins is spewing irrational, uninformed bigotry-fuel on Twitter again. I don’t think deliberately; he’s just a clueless fool. But the effect is the same. He even unknowingly chose the tired old bigot’s tactic of Just Asking Questions, in precisely the way as shows he is not researching anything anymore, but just spewing uninformed nonsense with total embarrassing arrogance and incompetence. This is what has become of him. Poor man. It’s not good for atheism or skepticism for so prominent a leader to fall so far down the hole of abandoning critical thinking, rationality, empathy, science, and evidence-based reasoning. He is no longer a model skeptic. And his fame only now makes that embarrassing and damaging. It’s unfortunate. But what to do about that is a different question, and one that others have already well-covered: I concur entirely with Seth Andrews; and mostly with Steven Pinker. I have no more to add on that particular point. Even the general point—people overreacting, and irrationally and self-destructively, to such behavior—I already treated in The Left and Anti-Left Both Have Much Still to Learn.

What I’m interested in covering here today is what Andrews and Pinker actually call for: reasoned, dispassionate criticism of what Dawkins said or implied. Regardless of what he meant (and his subsequent correction was important but not quite clear enough in cutting off this implication), what he implied (and thus what he has signaled to the public, intentionally or not) is that transgender people are all liars and con artists like Rachel Dolezal; that being “transracial” is the same thing as being “transgender” and therefore either we should accept Dolezal really is Black (she’s not) or we should condemn trans women and trans men as vehemently as we have Dolezal. Which has been for years a common transphobic talking point (a fact to which Dawkins seemed totally oblivious). But there is a reason why that equation is factually a false analogy. And insofar as people aren’t getting why, it’s the responsibility of philosophers to explain it (precisely the thing Dawkins didn’t do). So here you go.

The Dolezal Case

Rachel Dolezal is a liar and con artist who has repeatedly lied, and committed multiple documented instances of fraud (including welfare fraud…the most insulting of ironies). Wikipedia will get you up to speed. Relevant to the present inquiry, she repeatedly made the factually false statements that her biological father was Black, that she was biologically Black (e.g. insisting “DNA tests” would prove her ancestry, and altering her skin color and hair), and that she grew up Black, and that she had suffered serious hate crimes against her person for being Black (which the preponderance of evidence indicates she staged). None of those statements is factually true. She lied about them all. And she not only lied, as if just on some lark, but she used those lies to gain salaried jobs and influence and power and acclaim. And when she got caught, she changed her lies, as con artists will do: she started claiming instead that she only “identified” as Black, and started coopting the language of the transgender community to support this new lie. But we know that is a lie because until she told it, she had been claiming instead to be biologically Black, not just someone who identified as black, and she took steps to try and hide this fact from discovery—thus indicating she did not “just identify” as Black; rather, this was a new trick she was attempting, to save face after having been caught lying to and defrauding the community around her.

Rachel Dolezal is a morally reprehensible person; an actual fraud, in every sense of the word. That she uses her manipulative skills of lying and fabrication and even the telling of true but evidentially irrelevant sob stories to try and gain sympathy through articles and books and documentaries is the same shameless behavior other con artists and frauds employ. No competent skeptic should fall for it.

But fall for it many do.

Transgender vs. Transethnicity

I won’t name names, but at least one prominent wealthy atheist donor has insisted he has a relative who is “transethnic,” and therefore we should take claims like Dolezal’s seriously, as essentially the same kind of claim made by trans women and trans men, a nonsensical notion rightly denounced by experts. It’s not clear of course what that donor even meant, since race and ethnicity are not even the same social construct. Black is a racial category; Nigerian or Mestizo, for example, would be ethnic categories. Dolezal was not claiming to be Nigerian or Mestizo or to belong to any specific ethnic group, she was claiming biologically inherited skin color and body features and the life experience of being raised in a society that treats people with those features differently, none of which was true. She often claimed to be “African American,” which is closer to an ethnic identity (not all Black people are of African descent; not all Africans are Black; and Africa is a wildly diverse continent ethnically; but also, American Blacks do not have a monolithic culture, nor are they limited to only Black-originated cultures), but what she always meant by that was simply Black, i.e. a Person of Color. She was just co-opting the popular vocabulary at the time to run her con, just as she is doing now. So she is not even now claiming to be “trans-ethnic” but in some sense “trans-racial,” which is an even more nonsensical concept.

Unlike gender, whether someone has biologically inherited attributes is an objective fact independent of self-selected identity characteristics. This is why transgender and transsexual exist as words: they are specifically distinguishing between aligning gender with (what are often) biologically inherited attributes (the majority cases of what are referred to as being cisgender) and not doing so. In other words, a person who identifies as a trans woman is by that very fact not claiming to be a cis woman. These are two different kinds of women. They are both women. Just as tabbies and ocelots are two different kinds of cat; but still entirely cats. Similarly, natural born citizens and naturalized citizens of the United States are different kinds of citizen; but both are entirely American citizens. By contrast, race is inherently a biological fact—albeit not the biological fact racists think it is.

Race is a social construct insofar as one is, for example, tying “having dark skin and curly hair” and/or other conjunctions of physical attributes that cause people to perceive someone as Black (like nose and lip shape and so on) with other properties (like aggressiveness, intelligence, criminality, employability, indeed even ethnicity and cultural preferences) that actually aren’t tied to those things. For example, beating up a person who looks Asian because you “hate the Chinese” is inherently racist, not only because hating someone for “being Chinese” is racist, but also because of the assumption that anyone who looks Asian even is Chinese. They could be Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Indonesian, Vietnamese, even Taiwanese (an important distinction for any bigot keying their “hatred of the Chinese” on the decisions of the government of the People’s Republic of China that is most ironic for them to overlook). And so on. They could even be none of those things. If an American is an eighth generation descendant of a long-past Chinese immigrant, and was entirely raised as just another American, they could have no Asian ethnicity at all. They would simply be an American of Asian descent. If they looked Asian, that would reflect a biological reality of their descent; but if they are treated differently because of that, they are being targeted by a construct, not a biological reality. Nevertheless, that mistreatment is because of a biological reality: how they look, in consequence of their descent.

This is why race is understood in social justice science as an externality: it is not something you can ever choose; it is forced on you by society and its perceptions and assumptions, owing to a physical fact about you that you can’t easily change and that really has nothing to do with those other perceptions and assumptions. And this is in turn why race is connected so closely to lived experience: if you do not have the physical features socially categorized as Black, you won’t have survived or endured from childhood all the effects of living in a society that treats people differently because of those features, much less have inherited them (since “being Black isn’t simply a matter of internal identification; it is also a matter of how your community and ancestors have been treated by other people, institutions, and government,” often affecting even your starting economic and social position as a child, as explained in a smart article on this by philosophers Robin Dembroff and Dee Payton at the Boston Review—which is the only factor that is bypassed by actual transracial children, e.g. Black children adopted by White families). Thus, to claim you are Black when you (a) don’t have any sufficient conjunction of those genetic features so categorized and thus (b) haven’t endured or encountered any amount of pertinent racism your whole life (nor even inherited the socio-economic effects of any), you really are misrepresenting yourself to people. You are lying. Of course this is clearly true in Dolezal’s case as she didn’t “just” claim she was Black but claimed she was what would have to be called (in her own appropriated vocabulary) cis-Black: Black from birth.

Sure, one could say that’s more similar to a trans woman claiming to be a cis woman—but with one crucial difference: a trans woman attempting to pass as cis is doing so for a morally necessary reason, to avoid unjust prejudice and bigotry against their trans status. No one who is pretending to be biologically Black has any such moral justification; they aren’t “hiding their trans-Black status” to evade unjust bigotry, but merely to avoid being caught out as a liar. They are hiding from the consequences of their own fraud, not from any unjust prejudices of society. It is thus more similar to someone pretending to be gay in order to get jobs and accolades and influence only offered to gay people. That’s simply lying. And this is why it is morally offensive—and indeed inherently transphobic—to equate Dolezal with trans women and trans men: the comparison promotes the transphobic myth that trans women are just pretending, and merely in order to get advantages; that there is nothing sincere in their assimilation to a different gender than society had been imposing on them.

Of course, after getting caught, Dolezal “changed her story” into pretending that she was sincere in this, that she had been claiming to be “trans” Black all along, even fabricating and twisting into existence an entire new backstory to try and explain that (albeit illogically). And there are psychologists who attest to sincere people who delusionally believe they are a different race than they are, so such people do exist (Dolezal just isn’t one of them). But that is objectively delusional; as much as it would be objectively delusional of a trans woman to literally believe she has an XX chromosome and a functioning womb when she didn’t. But this is precisely the thing: trans women don’t believe that. To the contrary, that they “do” believe that is a distinctive component of transphobic ideology: it is a lie told about trans women, to denigrate and delegitimize them. Actual trans women know perfectly well what their actual biology is. They know they are trans and not cis.

The transgender argument is not that there is no difference between trans women and cis women (this is the false narrative of bigots, not the trans* communuty); but that what differences there are don’t and shouldn’t matter—that society should stop treating them differently. This is what it means to say trans women are women. It is not saying anything like “all trans women have wombs.” It is saying, rather, that “having a womb is irrelevant to being a woman.” As many a cis woman indeed does not have a functioning womb. So does treating them as “not real women” make any sense? Obviously not. Ergo it can make no sense to treat trans women that way. And just as with cis women, so with trans women: whether they have a functioning womb is none of your damned business. And if society were going to punish such women, driving even cis women to lie about whether they have a functioning womb, that would be a laudable evasion of bigotry, not running a con. Because discriminating based on that is immoral; ergo, evading it is self-defense. Dolezal was in no such position. She had ample opportunities to pursue as a White woman; no one was “oppressing” her for being White, “forcing” her to hide it.

This leaves one possible category to consider: someone who, unlike Dolezal, is always honest about their claim of being merely transracial. Presumably this is what that atheist donor’s “family member” is claiming—after all, since they know they are “transethnic” (whatever that means), they must be “out” about it. Does this make any sense? It is at least not lying. If one is honest about the fact that they have no racialized biology and did not grow up subjected to racial prejudices for it, nor inherited any of its effects, there is no fraud. But then what could they even be claiming? Since race is, like chromosomal sex, fundamentally biological, there is no possible way to be “trans” Black, any more than one could be “trans” chromosomal. The closest thing that exists is what the word transracial has been more correctly and traditionally used for: children adopted and raised by parents of a different race than themselves. But that’s a physical reality—it is objectively either true or false. If someone later in life starts going around claiming that of themselves when it isn’t true, they are back to lying again. So a sincere “transracialist” can’t be claiming that. What then could they be claiming? The most anyone can come up with is a sincere sympathy for the plight of a different race than themselves, saying things like “I identify strongly with what they are going through,” and the like. But that isn’t what the word trans means in the word “transgender,” so calling it “transracial” becomes a wholly misleading term, one that looks more like an attempt to coopt and appropriate another group’s language to “steal” the sympathy and support that goes with it. Which is back to being a liar.

So we end up returning to the distinction we started with, between race and ethnicity. Dolezal did not claim to be transethnic—she made an explicit biological claim to race—so that would be a false analogy if that’s all that atheist donor meant to refer to: a family member who merely identifies with a different culture than they grew up in, without making any biological claims to race. We haven’t heard from that family member so we don’t know what exactly they are claiming, but we don’t use the prefix trans– for people who adopt a new ethnicity or nationality. And one can’t just “claim” to have done that if they haven’t. You can’t honestly claim to be Nigerian unless you actually have Nigerian citizenship (as objective a fact as chromosome type), or to have been raised in a Nigerian community and into its languages or culture—another objective claim to fact that has to actually be true. But even then, if you were a White person who had undergone that, you would still be White, and just ethnically Nigerian. Even if you moved to Nigeria and assimilated into Nigerian language and culture later in life, and even acquired Nigerian citizenship, we still wouldn’t call you trans-Nigerian; and that still all has to have actually happened. By contrast, to go around saying “I like Nigerian culture and identify with Nigerians very strongly” would not justify calling yourself a Nigerian, trans or otherwise. You’re just an enthusiast for Nigerian culture. To claim more than that starts to look, again, like lying. Or insanity.

This simply isn’t what transgender people are doing. As I fully explained years ago in Attack of the Lycanthropic Transsexuals! (and as has since been even more succinctly and capably explained by the YouTuber Vox in just an hour and fifteen minutes): gender is not biology; it’s a preference-set. Being transgender is closer to adopting a subculture, like becoming a Goth or Country, only the culture in question is a social construct that has been strongly associated with biological sex, yet is actually not so connected, and in fact tracks sets of personality traits that one can grow up with one’s whole life irrespective of sex, until they realize the incongruity between who they are and what their culture is trying to force them to be. These are inherent personality characteristics, categorized by society a certain way. And yes, they can include feelings about what sort of body one would be most comfortable in—no differently than many a cisgender woman or man will feel with respect to tattooing or piercing their body, or pursuing plastic surgery.

Thus a trans woman, for example, will likely have been possessed of many of the gendered properties of a woman their whole lives; the decision to acknowledge this with, “You know what, according to society, I’m actually a woman,” is simply a realization of what is already a fact. There is no conceivable way this could happen to someone in respect to race, because race is imposed from outside: race is what others force on you for how you look, a look that is inescapably biological and thus one you cannot simply change; and then it becomes a history of whole lives living with that fact. But gender arises from within one’s own psychology. This is why what transphobes don’t (or won’t) understand is that gender is not sex. To say biologically manifest sexual traits are “just like” biologically manifest racial traits, “therefore” transgenderism (here meaning only the practice of recognizing transgender identities as authentic) should be the same as transracialism (which would then analogously mean the practice of recognizing “transracial” identities as authentic), is literally to assume the perspective of a willfully ignorant bigot. You simply are ignoring what transgender people are actually claiming about themselves. Indeed, it starts to sound at that point like you are using this comparison precisely as an excuse to ignore what they are actually saying. Which is not a good look for you. You need to ask yourself why it is so important to you to keep linking expressed gender to inherited sex. Because there can’t be any legitimate reason to be doing that. And that’s precisely what all this is about. You won’t get this, until you get that.

“But You Tricked Me!”-Style Transphobia

A lot of transphobia seems connected to this feeling bigots have of being “duped” by trans women. Fear of penises mostly (oddly, given that many trans women don’t have them). Which is also what seems to manifest in women transphobes, who obsess over how many penises might be in their bathrooms (oddly, ditto). But it’s actually no one’s business what someone’s genitals look like. We should be more concerned about your desperate need to look at them and see; even in restrooms apparently. I’ve been using men’s restrooms for fifty years and have never once seen a penis in them; nearly the only time I saw a penis in a public space was on the sidewalk directly out front of a Manhattan grocery store—where a naked man was busily taking a dump. I don’t see any bills being offered in congress to outlaw men on public sidewalks because of all the naked penises that might show up on them. So this penis-fear business seems a bit ridiculous. Nevertheless, a lot of transphobia appears to center around the “need” to know things about everyone’s genitals.

But even if we could get adults to grow up and stop acting like children with respect to penises and vaginas, there are still many transphobes who have even weirder hangups about being “tricked” by trans women. Notably, trans men rarely come up in transphobic rhetoric, except when it comes from a place of obvious sexism with thoughts like “how dare inferior women invade our manly spaces,” which is straight out of the 1950s and embarrasses even the people who say it. Otherwise, even the bathroom inquisitors seem wholly unworried about trans men using women’s restrooms, for example, even though that’s what they are fighting for (often without their realizing it). Instead, there is this superstitious thing I call “flesh taboo,” whereby somehow if someone was assigned male at birth, their flesh at that moment acquires some sort of invisible magical “man” fluid, such that no matter what happens thereafter, that flesh is always a “man’s” flesh and thus any man who touches it is automatically “gay” (and gets cooties or something); in the same sense that there are men (and I have met them) who think the number of penises a woman has had inside her also permanently “taints” her flesh in some similarly magical way, so also “this flesh was once a man’s; ergo if I touch it I’m gay” drives a lot of transphobia.

Which, yes, ties transphobia right back into homophobia. But it also links transphobia right back into plain old sexism: not just in its gender essentialism (because it is based on the quintessentially sexist belief that gender “must” track sex, because “science,” or something—even though all the actual science refutes that equation), but also in how this “flesh taboo” also generates fear of trans women: it is only because men feel entitled to have sex with any woman they see, that they could ever feel “betrayed” by some woman they are not dating and never actually will date having this magical “man” flesh it would be too “gay” for them to touch for some reason. But you can’t be “tricked” into having sex with someone you aren’t having sex with. So maybe just stop seeing women as sex objects; and then you’ll care a lot less which magical fluid inhabits their flesh. Or grow a brain and stop believing in cooties. Either way, you and the world will be better off. Trust me. We’re all just people; it doesn’t matter how many penises someone has, just as it doesn’t matter how many penises have been inside them. If you think either matters—indeed, if you honestly can’t even stop thinking about it—you are the one with the problem.

This irrational “fear of being duped” crops up even from women I’ve met, who for some reason think that a woman who is actually trans and not “out” about it is “therefore” pretending to be cis, and this is “dishonest” and thus just like Rachel Dolezal. These trans women are “conning us” somehow, we’re told. It’s hard to actually figure out how though. It does not matter whether they are cis or trans. I’ll get to the few exceptions, like athletics, shortly; but in almost every other case it really doesn’t matter. So why are you so concerned to know? If it’s none of your business to even know, much less ask, then they can’t be “conning” you by “passing” as cis. There is nothing here they are obligated to tell you. So your not knowing it does not make them a fraud. It would only be in the extremely bizarre case where a cis woman pretends to be a trans woman in order to gain position and influence and accolades as a trans woman that they’d be engaging in a fraud. Otherwise, it is the notion that trans women should be excluded from situations afforded to women in general that is fraudulent; not the other way around (see my article Some Philosophy of Homo- and Transphobia, Supreme Court Style). If you can’t justify excluding trans women from something, you can’t justify claiming to have been conned by them, can you?

Once upon a time (and still in some places) gay men and women had to lie about their sexuality and pretend to be straight, in order to avoid being mistreated, harassed, fired, beaten, or even killed. But no genuinely moral human being would say they were therefore “conning” everyone about their sexuality. They are legitimately hiding from societal prejudice. It is the prejudice they have to hide from that is the crime, not their having to hide from it. That’s just self-defense. Dolezal was not hiding her White race in self-defense. She does not live in a society where being White means you will be mistreated, harassed, fired, beaten, or even killed; even insofar as there may be dangerous enclaves of the world where that was true (I have, for example, been assaulted for being White, in one particularly rare and rough neighborhood), American society offers plenty of places for her to work and live where that’s not the case; and behold, she was never in one. So she has never had to “hide” her Whiteness to evade the injustices of racism. The only motive remaining for her to do that is running a con: she was just another White person stealing resources (money, jobs, attention, influence) from Black people.

This difference is ontologically and morally fundamental. Accusing trans people of running a con is like accusing closeted gay people of doing so too. It’s extremely insensitive to the reality of what they have to do because of bigotry. We should be fighting the bigotry; not calling the people who hide from it liars. Gay people who hide are not in the wrong. The people they have to hide from are. Likewise trans women and trans men. This is not Dolezal’s situation at all; nor that of anyone who could possibly be trying to contrive a “trans racial” identity for themselves.

Nevertheless, to stick to this “moral condemnation” model of transphobia, the transphobic narrative turns to straw man argumentation, insisting that all transgender people are “dishonestly” (or, in some variants, “insanely”) asking us to affirm a trans woman is 100% identical to a cis woman, that “every molecule” of their body is a “woman” in every possible sense (a perverse inversion of “one drop” racism, the most extreme form of racist ideology in history). If any transgender person is telling you that, they are a fringe whacko (and if it’s not even a transgender person you are hearing this from, you have even more reason to be suspicious of what they’re saying); listen to the vast majority of actual trans women instead: they will all tell you, they are talking about gender, not sex; they are not claiming to have changed the chromosomes in their cells; they are not claiming to have conjured wombs out of the ether; they are claiming you should stop caring about who has what chromosomes, who has a working womb, or any of that entirely private stuff that’s none of your actual business. And even in the few cases where it does matter, they agree it does. See the model policy positions endorsed by the LGBT Sports Foundation for high school athletics, the NCAA for college athletes, and the NWHL and NWSL for professional athletes: trans status must be known and licensed, and in most cases female body chemistry must be medically confirmed (recent articles at Scientific American and NBCNews cover the science). So yes, it would be a fraud for a trans woman to hide that status in an athletic competition whose rules require her to admit it; but everyone is on board with that. In consequence, instances of such a fraud are extremely rare. This simply isn’t what trans women are doing.

On top of all that, as Dembroff and Payton aptly put it, gender and race terms are also tools we use to track social realities. For example, “gender classification is used to track the recipients of sexism and misogyny,” and therefore “does not provide a population-level reason to exclude trans women from classification as women,” whereas racial classification is used to track not merely any recipients of racism but those who can’t choose to escape that racism (they can’t “revert to being White”), which includes both ongoing racism and any intergenerational effects of it one inherits. Because race is forced on someone without their consent. Victims of racism aren’t able to choose to be recognized as another race; whereas we can choose our gender if people let us. Accordingly, we can conclude “the importance of preserving these tools” of categorizing race and gender “vastly outweighs” any personal individual desire to “claim” an identity. Dolezal-style “transracialism” perverts and undermines the entire purpose of race as a classifier (whereby race can only cease to exist when racism does), whereas transgenderism does not have any such effect on gender as a classifier—particularly once you realize that gender has no fixed ontological connection to sex. And even in what respects one needs it to track such connections, a transgender person can indeed choose to meet that standard if they want to, e.g. when trans women athletes are expected to qualify at a certain hormone level to compete with cis women. Notably, they must identify as trans to do that; trans women athletes aren’t allowed to “pretend” to be cis women, and don’t want to. It is thus no different from what one must do to legitimately qualify for para-athletic competitions or an appropriate weight class. Hence even when it matters, no deception is occurring. And when it doesn’t matter, deception can’t even be a legitimate issue.

Conclusion

Thus trans women are not conning anyone. Whereas what Dolezal did is just as if she pretended to be gay to gain sympathy and influence and advantage, and exploit the support of the gay community. That is not in any relevant way similar to a gay person hiding to avoid bigotry against gays. There is no difference between “gay” and “trans” or even “Black” in those two sentences: swap the words out and they remain identically true sentences. Check it:

  • It’s just as if she pretended to be gay to gain sympathy and influence and advantage, and exploit the support of the gay community. That is not in any relevant way similar to a gay person pretending to be straight to avoid bigotry against gays.
  • It’s just as if she pretended to be Black to gain sympathy and influence and advantage, and exploit the support of the Black community. That is not in any relevant way similar to a Black person pretending to be White to avoid bigotry against Blacks.
  • It’s just as if she pretended to be a trans woman to gain sympathy and influence and advantage, and exploit the support of the trans community. That is not in any relevant way similar to a trans woman pretending to be a cis woman to avoid bigotry against trans women.

And that’s why comparing Dolezal to gay and trans people is offensive, and contrary to fact. Dolezal wasn’t hiding from oppressors, to conceal what isn’t anyone’s business anyway. She was lying to gain sympathy, influence, and advantage. That’s immoral. And that’s why equating what she did with what trans people do is insulting, and only inflames bigotry. It is effectively calling them immoral, liars, cons; it’s insinuating they are frauds—and doing it using the same dogwhistle tactics grossly exploited by the Republican party in America. Yet this bigotry only follows from the transphobic equation of sex and gender. It is the transphobe’s insistence that gender must track sex that is immoral and bigoted and wrong; and precisely what the trans-rights movement is endeavoring to cast down and put an end to. You should get busy helping them, not their oppressors. And to that end, before you publish or say anything about this issue, you should always be asking yourself the one question Dawkins has given up ever answering: Is this helping or hurting? And if what I’m about to say can aid and abet bigots, how can I reframe it to thwart them instead?

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