Contra Aella on What a Woman Is
The trans debate is an ethical debate disguised as a semantic debate. Ethical debates have to incorporate more than just concerns about kindness.
Aella is a Bay Area rationalist-adjacent writer known for writing controversial Twitter polls and investigating issues related to sex and sexuality. She recently published a thought-provoking article entitled “What A Woman Is,” in which she discusses issues related to gender identity. The article begins with a discussion of language, following in the same vein as Eliezer Yudkowsky’s “The Cluster Structure of Thingspace” and Scott Alexander’s article “The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories”; the idea is that we assign words to “clusters of traits” which reappear again and again.
The semantic debate is a bit extraneous because it’s largely just papering over the actual debate of how we should treat transwomen. After arguing the issue for long enough, both sides will have modified their definitions of a woman until they’re free from glaring exceptions and incoherencies. One definition will be justified on the grounds that it’s more historically accurate and useful, and the other will be justified on the grounds that it’s inclusive and that defining woman differently is socially harmful.
It’s reasonable to say that there are at least two definitions of a woman because some people use the more historical definition, and some use the inclusive definition. Even if transgender activists believed that the true definition was the historical definition, they would likely still recommend changing our use of language or going along with the other definition for reasons of inclusivity. The semantic debate is largely tangential because calling a transwoman a woman is not contingent on the definition of a woman for them. This is the case with Aella, at least. Toward the end of the article, she explains that we should treat people as their preferred gender to be kind regardless of how womanly they are.
In general, I advocate for treating trans people as their preferred gender, regardless of how much they overlap with their desired gender cluster, because it seems like a kind thing to do. For example, misgendering is often very painful, and it usually takes little effort to use the correct pronouns.
If your grandmother with severe dementia keeps thinking you’re her long-dead brother, you’d probably have no problem playing along with it. I’m not saying trans people are demented, or that you’re being patronizing to them, I’m just trying to point out that we already have norms installed where we sometimes go along with narratives we don’t believe because we are kind, and if you tell me you won’t use someone’s preferred pronouns because of your unfailing commitment to the truth then I am doubtful.
To some extent, words are clusters in thing space, but sometimes there are essential qualities to objects necessary for classification, and there are certain qualities that are immediately disqualifying. For example, a cat can lose a leg and still be a cat. However, a trait like being a dog immediately disqualifies the object from being a cat. There is no object which is both a cat and a dog. Some argue that having XY chromosomes disqualifies someone from being a woman regardless of other traits. While you could say this is not true, it’s not necessarily a strange or perverse view of language.
Woman is a cluster of traits that kept reappearing over time. Some of the traits overlap a lot with the man cluster, like “wants their children to be safe” and “has two legs,” but some traits are very rare to find in the male cluster, like “has narrow jaw and large eyes”and “grew up with sexual attention from men” and “identifies with the woman cluster” and “greater interest in looking beautiful”
Trans woman is a cluster of traits that have some overlap with the woman cluster, and some overlap with the man cluster. In some ways they are very like women (identifies with the woman cluster, greater interest in looking beautiful), and in some ways they might be like men (has male biology, was socialized male as a child, wants to have sex with women).
Identifies as woman is not the core of being woman in our collective conceptspace, it’s one descriptor out of many for being a woman, because womanness is not fully described by identification. This aligns with why most trans women don’t consider it sufficient to simply identify as a woman - they also actively try to take on more traits that are unique to the woman cluster. The more unique it is to the woman cluster, the greater a signal it is - e.g., bottom surgery.
The most common pro-trans position is that genuine identification is sufficient to become a woman. An often derided and less popular stance of transmedicalism is that being transgender is legitimate but requires experiencing gender dysphoria or receiving medical treatment or both for a transition to be valid. From my understanding, most transwomen typically have surgeries to feel more comfortable in their bodies, and they would reject the idea that they weren’t women if they didn’t decide to get surgery or wear a dress.
Suppose womanhood is a cluster of traits and not entirely dependent on genitalia or chromosomes. In that case, womanhood—not just femininity—must be partially defined by characteristics associated with being a woman. The idea that womanhood is to any degree contingent on having superficial traits like painted nails and long hair was considered regressive not too long ago. Without introducing these superficial traits as part of the woman cluster, there is no way to make a transwoman into a woman. The adherents to the identification definition needs them too. Without using stereotypes, the definition of a woman becomes recursive and incoherent; a woman is just someone who identifies as a woman. Without biology and stereotypes, the concept of a woman is empty.
Some trans women are indistinguishable from cis women in most aspects. And clearly there’s not 100% overlap in things like life history or medical care, but I find people who focus on this to often have double standards, because there’s lots of cis women who don’t 100% overlap in other aspects either. If you’re going to tell me Martha, a hefty butch lesbian with a hysterectomy who chops wood and smokes cigars, is a woman, then it’s strange to say that Nikki, an early childhood transitioner with long blonde hair and perfectly done nails and a sultry, feminine voice, bottom surgery, etc. - isn’t a woman.
This example makes it seem strangely exclusionary to not regard Nikki as a woman despite her feminine features. This isn’t strange if you believe that womanhood isn’t contingent on being feminine but on one’s biological makeup or gender identification. If Nikki had all those attributes but identified as a man, Aella would seemingly be in opposition to both the normal pro-trans and anti-trans sides by saying Nikki is actually a woman. But it seems as though Aella would use the working definition of identification for reasons of kindness, which is another example of how the debate about language doesn’t matter so much.
Furthermore, the cluster definition has unwanted implications for most pro-trans progressive-minded people. Using this definition, it’s hard to see why they don’t apply to categories such as race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, and disability. While I don’t know how Aella would respond to these arguments, we see how typical progressives view this argument. For example, Nkechi Amare Diallo—formerly known as Rachel Anne Dolezal—identifies as black, was an NAACP chapter leader, attended a historically black college, has a black-sounding name, and worked as a hairstylist specializing in weaves and braids. Rather than expressing a need to respect her identity to prevent emotional harm, many progressives in the media vilified and mocked her. Her identification didn’t count, even though she took on a bunch of stereotypically black traits.
Womanhood was able to semantically move from a more discrete biological category to a cluster of stereotypical traits, but defining race as a cluster of stereotypes is rather socially unacceptable, especially if the stereotypes are regarded as negative. Similarly, rejecting someone’s blackness on account of their behavior is also unacceptable. Imagine a black woman named Aliyah married a white man, moved to a white neighborhood, attends a predominantly white church, starts going by “Ali” and engages in a bunch of other stereotypically white behavior. Suggesting that Aliyah is far enough from the black cluster that she has become a white woman would be regarded as totally offensive.
Using language this way would be rather socially regressive, not to mention extremely confusing. If you want to make the cluster argument, you need to either bite the bullet or explain why other social categories do not work like womanhood. I think many would opt to argue that allowing identification across other categories would be socially harmful for various reasons; I think this would once again demonstrate that this is an ethical debate rather than a semantic debate.
Tech is only gonna get better, and in the glorious transhumanist future where people have fine tuned control over their own characteristics, we’re going to see a lot more mobility across clusters. There’s gotta be some threshhold where someone is similar enough to a woman that you’d be like “okay, you count as woman.” If not, then your issue isn’t womanness, your issue is transitioning itself; that no matter how womanlikesomeone is, even if every cell of their body is indistinguishable from a cis woman’s, as long as they had to move across clusters to get there, you will reject them.
This argument would also work for trans-racialism. I think few people would hold the view that if someone could step inside of a machine that totally transformed a man into a woman, they still aren’t a woman. But if someone believes a woman has XX chromosomes, then they will not be satisfied until someone actually has XX chromosomes. This doesn’t provide much insight because someone could create a machine that transforms humans into cats, but that has little relevance as to whether a human can become a cat with the present technology.
Many trans people don’t have the ability to transition, and this really sucks. I don’t think this has anything to do with the way we conceive of concepts - the shittiness of not being able to inhabit your preferred cluster does not mean you magically inhabit the cluster - but I do think it justifies our compassion and assistance in any way we can help.
The fact that someone feels emotional anguish from not being able to be sufficiently close to the woman cluster doesn’t necessarily warrant assistance in getting them there. We could be empathetic to those suffering from gender dysphoria while not advocating for helping them get closer to their desired cluster. This view would be much less defensible if there were no harm done by helping someone become more womanly. However, due to technological limitations and societal expectations, there are significant downsides to a transwoman becoming more womanly.
If being trans is not a mental illness, then eliminating the psychological belief of being of the opposite gender is not really worth considering. Through the trans activist’s lens, transwomen believe they are women because they are women, and the socially acceptable way to eliminate the associated dysphoria is not through eliminating the true belief but through social acceptance and transition. This is especially clear when people argue that transwomen have a woman’s brain in a man’s body. If the brain really is a woman’s brain, then it will always be out of place inside of a man’s body despite psychological counseling.
Whether or not we should assist people in transitioning is reliant on whether we believe it would be beneficial after we’ve considered all the relevant factors. This is largely dependent on the costs and benefits associated with medical treatments. But too often, arguments are entirely focused on emotional harm. Focusing on physical harm is avoided because that sort of discussion is emotionally upsetting. We can’t just say that transitioning makes people happy and therefore we should make people happy. These surgeries and the social difficulties associated with being trans are non-trivial, even if we continue to be more accepting.
[I] think the narrative “you are a woman if you identify as one” is cruel. It tells people that the power over their gender is entirely in their hands; it places the responsibility of womanhood on them, if they only believe it fully enough, and then expects them to survive in a world where gender is actually a list of clustered traits we spent millions of years evolving around. If they falter, “I’m not woman enough” then becomes a thought with enough power to make them not woman enough.
This narrative isn’t what the average trans advocate thinks. Their position is that identification is enough, and that belief doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if you don’t believe yourself to be womanly, you can rest assured that you are a woman. It’s actually the cluster definition that introduces the ambiguity which could create anxiety in transwomen. Notice once again that the issue at hand is not whether the narrative is true but the fact that it is cruel.
The world does revolve around a binary with regard to sex. We are a physically and mentally sexually dimorphic species. Similar to stereotypes, suggesting the existence of sex differences in brain structure is socially taboo unless you are making an argument for the existence of transwomen.
Some frictions can be resolved through social change, but some are likely unable to be resolved. Even with widespread social acceptance, few men will ever want to marry transwomen, especially considering couples will be unable to raise biologically related children. There will also be undesirable side effects from bottom surgery for the foreseeable future. And some transwomen are so masculine that they will always be recognized as trans and their body dysphoria will persist. These downsides will still exist even in an extremely socially accepting environment.
Trans people often talk about how their existence is threatened, and in a sense this is actually the case. If womanness exists in mind only, then it is actually existentially threatened by stuff like tweets or blog posts. I think this is at least to some degree an explanation for why some segments of trans people seem to be so aggressive.
My point is, treating womanhood entirely as an internal identity is psychologically fucked up and places trans people in a shitty position where they are forced to associate only with social realities that validate their identity, silence anyone who disagrees, or else risk being wiped out entirely. This seems like an unsustainable approach to womanhood.
This seems like an equivocation. If I said that I was a blond and someone came along and said that I was a brunet, saying that this person threatened my existence would be misleading because it uses some ambiguity in the word existence to make it sound like my life is in danger.
This happens again with the words “wiped out.” Wiping out a human population evokes thoughts of genocide, not changes in mental state. When Aella suggested that some people who identify as women are not sufficiently close to the woman cluster to actually be a woman, she would’ve wiped out thousands of trans people. This provocative language makes aggression seem more justified. Regardless, most of the pro-trans side believes that identification is sufficient and that comments on the internet cannot cause a waver in a transwoman’s belief therefore causing her to cease to exist.
Our brains have built-in senses of gender from a young age, and also have the capacity to go haywire in wanting to do things like cut off limbs or starve ourselves. It seems really obvious here that some people really, legitimately, end up with a gender identity at odds with their physical body, in a way that is either minimally or not-at-all a socially induced experience.
Is it a disorder? As many before me have said - maybe? Yes? Why does it matter? The fundamental question here is what is the most efficient way to be happy and fulfilled - and if taking a pill to ‘cure’ the ‘disorder’ works, then great. If transitioning is the way to do that, also great. Let people do what they want.
And if starving oneself or chopping off the limb “works” and lets them feel “happy and fulfilled?” Obviously, there are some behaviors that we should not encourage because they are clearly harmful. If someone wanted to chop off a limb, we would want to get rid of that desire rather than focus on making that person feel comfortable about their decision and getting society to accommodate them as a self-induced disabled person.
Many on the anti-trans side are skeptical that the most efficient way to be happy for someone experiencing gender dysphoria is to undergo numerous body-altering surgeries to feel fulfilled, and that a better approach would be getting rid of the negative feelings. If chopping off your limb truly rid you of anxiety and depression, perhaps it would be warranted, but the evidence needs to be very strong that it works before taking a life-altering and permanent intervention. And it needs to be demonstrated that other more mild interventions don’t work first. Similarly, some believe that medical transitions don’t have sufficient evidence of efficacy to pass the cost-benefit test even if the medical interventions make people feel comfortable.
It’s really important if transgenderism is socially induced rather than a permanent feature of brain structure. It would mean that there is some environmental force that is inducing feelings of gender dysphoria and that we could eliminate the feelings of gender dysphoria by getting rid of the social force rather than physically transitioning. It also means clinical interventions could work. Since physically transitioning has so many downsides like potential sterilization and sexual dysfunction, we might find it better to change our social influence or try clinical interventions. Similarly, if millions of people started wanting to cut their legs off, perhaps we should stop doing whatever creates those feelings rather than cutting the legs off.
It seems reasonable to believe that the massive increase in transgenderism is a social phenomenon that is partially a result of social acceptance, and public discussion of transgenderism. Without the idea being discussed publicly, many people probably wouldn’t become transgender. Other societies do not have our level of transgenderism, and it’s not apparent that in a bunch of other countries millions of people are suppressing their gender dysphoria. Attempts to be more accepting by discussing transgenderism across the world could result in tens of millions of cases of gender dysphoria where none existed previously. If social approval of leg removal became common and resulted in a 10,000% increase in leg-related body dysmorphia, that indicates we should be careful how we go about being accepting. This isn’t to say that being unkind is necessary, but it’s worth considering ways of preventing gender dysphoria from arising in the first place.
Similarly, I don’t give a shit if trans women find it arousing to be a woman. You have a right to dress how you want, get surgery if you want, ask to be treated however you want, for literally any reason at all. Your reason is not my business. And the insistence that no, trans people are not autogynephilic feels to me like an implicit acknowledgment that being trans is not okay for autogynephiles. If someone derives sexual pleasure from the thought of transitioning and identifying as female, then they are not allowed, they are not valid. This bothers me. I think people should do what they want.
If someone is dressing and behaving like a woman to get others to call them a woman because they derive sexual pleasure from this activity, people should have the right to refrain from doing this. You shouldn’t be expected to participate in an activity under the false impression that it is for reasons of inclusion when it is actually for sexual gratification.
Imagine if a man told his female coworkers he went by “Dadi” because it made him sexually aroused to hear “daddy” from women, whereas the women merely think this is a nickname and they are being polite by calling him what he wants to be called. It would be understandable if the women found this deeply bothersome. You don’t have an obligation out of kindness to engage in a non-consensual sexual activity, and to willfully make others do that under false pretenses is immoral.
It also seems reasonable to treat trans people differently when they actually meaningfully do not share traits with cis women. Different medical treatment seems like a clear example. Sexual preferences too - lots of people have genitals really enmeshed with what turns them on, and it’s okay to not want to date trans women - or to want to date exclusively trans women! Sports are divided by biological sex for mostly good reasons, for now. And if you want to start a women’s discussion group to talk about being sexually harassed by men from an early age, it makes sense to request this be limited to women who were sexually harassed by men from an early age.
It also seems reasonable to hold the same wariness towards at least some trans women that exist towards men; if you don’t want to allow men into your bedroom alone with you because you’ve had experience with men being sexually pushy, it isn’t insane to not want a poorly-passing trans lesbian to stay out of your bedroom, because you’re processing her as having traits that overlap more with the male cluster than the femaleone.
We have many sex-segregated women’s spaces in our society: women’s sports, shelters, prisons, parking places, gyms, sorority houses, colleges, clubs, changing rooms, bathrooms, awards, organizations, events, etc. If we exclude transwomen from some of these places, it’s going to make their lives more difficult and every time there is an ambiguous case, there is going to be a public upset, and transwomen are going to be brought to the forefront of attention where their belonging will be questioned; this will induce the feelings of exclusion that we wanted to avoid by using the correct pronouns.
When is kindness insufficient? Why shouldn’t that woman’s discussion group tolerate the rare instance of a transwoman in order to not make her feel included? Why shouldn’t trans athletes be permitted to play in women’s sports if they actually are women? What if a transwoman was extremely athletic and her exclusion from competing in women’s sports makes her extremely sad to the point of contemplating suicide? I’m not suggesting that we should or shouldn’t include transwomen in these situations. My point is that there is always going to be a bit more radical trans activist also asking you to go along with a narrative for reasons of kindness and inclusion. Where do you draw the line?
But most circumstances seem to hold no meaningful difference, and I suspect lots of people overly focus on the above examples as excuses to justify an unexamined disgust reflex.
Many probably do highlight these because they feel disgust. I think that people mostly take these examples because they are either edge cases or instances in which there will be conflict. People see it as an injustice when a trans athlete performs significantly better than a cis athlete because it appears they have extreme advantages, which call into question the fairness of the competition. In cases where there isn’t friction, apparent injustice, or danger, many on the anti-trans side seem not to care as much or behave politely as they would regularly. There is a rare group that is just rude to transwomen generally, and that is not okay.
Cause let’s be real, I think a lot of anti-trans sentiment, much of it disguised as ‘neutral’ trans skepticism, would not exist without some deep, ingrained disgust. If you magically eliminated the disgust, my guess is most people’s concerns for our children or whatever would suddenly become forgotten. Much like the anti-gay movement of decades past, people get an “ick” reaction and interpret this as danger - and if they can’t see any concrete harm, they argue for vague, general harm that must be corrupting our society in some hard-to-pin-down way. There’s going to be societal breakdown, our children will be traumatized, we’ll normalize some other thing we have an even greater unexamined ick reaction to, etc.
A lot of the anti-trans side are probably disgusted by transwomen, but I think that many are concerned about unfairness—particularly with regards to sports—and significant and lasting harm—with regard to body modifications, especially with children. Some non-vague harms include the risk of bad actors using trans acceptance as a means of sexually assaulting women in bathrooms or prison; another legitimate harm would be gender-affirming treatment resulting in sterilization or mutilation. While I do see a lot of pointing and laughing from the anti-trans side, I also see expressions of legitimate concern about harm. Perhaps they are overblown statistically, but I think they are at least worth discussing.
It’s not purely ick, but does ick count for anything? Lots of women have ick around “creepy” men. A woman can feel ick from being stared at in the gym or being approached by a guy in a bar. A highly sexual email from someone in a faraway country may induce feelings of ick despite not indicating a plausible threat. Being in a bathroom with a man might cause feelings of anxiety or ick. And being in a bathroom with someone that seems like a man might cause feelings of anxiety or ick. Maybe you could argue that women’s ick is justified, but transphobes’ ick isn’t because men are actually a threat statistically and transwomen are not. But would you change your mind if that were not true? I think there is a politically correct ick that counts for progressives and a politically incorrect ick which doesn’t. It seems largely dependent on one’s political views rather than the plausibility of danger.
If you take one thing away from this article, let it be that the debate about womanhood isn’t so much about language. It’s about ethics. Be polite to others is generally a great rule, but we can’t only consider kindness in an ethical debate. There are physical, psychological, and social difficulties associated with becoming transgender that will persist even in the most kind and accepting society imaginable. Life-altering and permanent interventions should only be encouraged if it can be demonstrated that other more mild interventions are ineffective and that it is worth the downsides. The current narrative is that people who take my view are unkind, but I think that fewer people should go along with narratives they don’t believe to appear kind when they are potentially harmful. The so-called kind choice is not always the most caring and ethical choice.
Well done.
Really thoughtful article - thanks for writing it