Essay:Facts and logic support trans people

In an age where fake news and logical fallacies abound, more and more people on both the left and right are clamouring for facts and logic to be re-enthroned as the basis for formulating opinions and making decisions. When people of any political or religious stripe seek the truth with sincerity of heart, what they are doing is commendable. Seeking truth with sincerity requires that we avoid the relativist fallacy, in which falsehoods are protected under the banner of subjective feelings. It is in the context of this search for objective truth that some on the right have come to oppose transgender identifications as an affront to facts, logic, and science. For instance, conservative pundit Ben Shapiro has criticized the "transgender zeitgeist" as a "deliberate rewriting of basic biology, and the substitution of subjectivity for objectivity". Shapiro goes on to link this suppression of objective truth to "real world consequences" in dressing rooms and in the ability of people to engage in open discourse. To this, we may add similar real-world implications not directly mentioned in the cited editorial, including concerns over fairness in sports.

Shapiro's criticism comes from the right place. Objective facts should not be replaced by feelings; that would be an appeal to emotion, a logical fallacy. His criticism is particularly reasonable because transgender identity is indeed linked to "feelings", in that many people identify as transgender because they have gender dysphoria. Instead of being derided, his ideas should be taken seriously and analyzed through critical reasoning. By engaging with the ideas of Shapiro and people who broadly agree with him, we can come to know the direction in which the facts really point.

The fact that transgender identities are partly linked to transgender individuals' feelings does not mean that their validity is founded on them. Scientific and anthropological observations, though they do not directly prove the validity of transgender identities on their own, help provide strong backing for a definition of gender that validates them. These observations are often not addressed or acknowledged by conservative appeals to "common sense", which has caused many conservative arguments against transgender identities to become points refuted a thousand times that fail to engage at all with the best arguments on the other side. If the conservative wishes to conclude that facts and logic are truly on his side, it would be wise for him to heed the following proverb, and engage in substantive discourse that addresses the other side's arguments:

"He who pleads his cause first seems right; until another comes and questions him."

This essay surveys various criticisms of transgender identifications and political policies regarding transgender people and critiques them in an intellectually honest manner in order to demonstrate that the liberal viewpoint, far from being based solely on emotion, is strongly defensible using facts and logic.

Separating sex and gender
Liberals going into an argument on transgender identification tend to assert that sex and gender are different without providing much proof or a clear line of reasoning. Indeed, because the debate over being transgender is fundamentally a debate over whether people can be a different gender than their biological sex, assuming that it is reasonable to define sex and gender as different is basically a circular reasoning hat trick. This is one reason why some ham-fisted arguments for the validity of transgender identifications might appear elitist and unconvincing.

To make an honest case for being transgender, we must first provide a convincing reason for why sex and gender should be defined differently. It may be true that such-and-such sociologist defines them differently, but until there is a good reason to create such a distinction, the distinction remains a form of semantics, or even of equivocation.

To facilitate discussion, let us use the following temporary definitions that would allow sex and gender to be separated without necessarily claiming that they should be separated:


 * Sex: the ensemble of biological sexual characteristics, including chromosomes and genitalia
 * Gender: male, female, or other analogous identities with which a person should identify according to right reason

These temporary definitions provide separate pointers for sex and gender without circularly validating transgender identifications, as it could be that "right reason" would demand a person to identify as the same gender as his or her sex assigned at birth. In other words, these temporary definitions would hold true even under the most traditionalist interpretations of gender roles, since "according to right reason" can still be debated.

To demonstrate that it is legitimate to see sex as a concept linked to but distinct from gender, let us look at the example of intersex people, whose genetic, primary, and secondary sexual characteristics may not match up. Some transgender rights activists raise the example of intersex people without creating a convincing logical link between intersex and transgender people. This is because the logical link is small, and sometimes overemphasized by activists—after all, most transgender people are not intersex. Nevertheless, this logical link serves to decouple sex and gender; thus, it is an important but small logical step.

Intersex people are an example of how sex does not match with gender identification. Conservative Christian apologist Matt Slick, who disagrees with the act of gender transitioning, provides the following advice regarding intersex people: "It would seem best, then, to let the hermaphrodite grow and decide with which gender to side since he/she would know his/her own identity internally." While Slick goes on to indicate that in most cases, this identity would correspond to the intersex person's genetic sex, he does not state that it is theologically impermissible for an intersex person to identify according to their physical sexual characteristics. This is reasonable from an Evangelical standpoint, since the Bible does not say whether sex is based on genitalia or on genes. And to identify as a binary gender, an intersex person must make decisions that do not entirely match with certain sexual characteristics, which means that even from a conservative perspective, intersex persons can validly a be gender that may be different from their sex. To approach this from another perspective, we can conceive of two intersex persons with the same pattern of sex chromosomes and the same external sex characteristics, and Slick's gender criterion would allow the two persons to identify as different genders.

This argument shows that gender is valid as a concept distinct from sex. It does not, however, demonstrate that transgender identifications are also valid, since it may be that gender, according to right reason, should be the same as sex whenever a person's external sexual characteristics and sex chromosomes are unambiguous. In other words, we have made gender and sex separate variables that are theoretically capable of pointing to different objects, but there is currently no reason why they should point to the same object with regards to being transgender.

Biological evidence
In this section, we will use the allowance for intersex individuals to cleave out a justification for transgender identities that are supported by biological differences. This is called transmedicalism, and does not cover all people who identify as transgender. From this starting point, we will further expand the definition of gender to include transgender people who do not have gender dysphoria.

Is being transgender a mental illness?
Uncommon behaviours do not necessarily constitute mental illness. For instance, speaking in tongues, though uncommon, is a religious practice and not a mental issue because it is within the behavioural norms of certain religious communities, and because it contributes to a the spiritual life of believers instead of constituting a hindrance to their daily life.

Transgender and freedom of speech
People should not be forced to change their deeply-held religious or philosophical beliefs by the government, and the government should only restrict the expression and practice of such beliefs if there is a compelling state interest to do so.