Do transgender people 'exist?'
A philosophical primer for a stupid question.
There is this irritating meme that transgender advocates like to deploy where they claim that, if you disagree with the fundamental tenets of transgender ideology—if you believe, for instance, that only women can get pregnant, and that the “trans men” who get pregnant are actually just women—then you believe that transgender people “do not exist.” Here is this argument making its way into the official congressional record this week:
Khiara Bridges: Do you believe that men can get pregnant?
Josh Hawley: No, I don’t think men can get pregnant.
Bridges: So you are denying that trans people exist!
It would seem very strange that we should ever have to counteract such a self-evidently stupid and silly line of attack, but then again we’re at the point where a law professor believes that “men can get pregnant,” so we are quite obviously well past the sort of stabilizing norms on which we all used to be able to rely.
In short, you can vociferously deny the contention that “men can get pregnant” without believing that transgender individuals “don’t exist.” On its face it would be a logical absurdity to believe such a thing anyway: If we’re arguing over the attributes a certain subset of people in the first place, then by necessity they must exist, else who on Earth would we be talking about? The argument blows up before it can even get out of the hangar.
But of course the purpose here isn’t logical or even, properly construed, epistemological. In truth what the transgender activist wants to accomplish with this weird pseudo-dialectic is twofold: First, it provides a punchy, quotable thing that you can bark at a senator when you’re being made to look foolish on satellite TV, and second, it paints your opponent as effectively genocidal—as the kind of person who wants to wipe out the “existence” of an entire class of people. It’s not that critics of transgenderism simply believe that only women can be pregnant, say, it’s that we have ambitions to be psychopathic mass murderers of some kind. And nobody wants to be one of those.
But actually—and, again, this is obvious—denying that “transgender men” can get pregnant does not somehow negate the existence of those individuals who identify as “transgender men.” Plainly those people exist. Rather we deny one specific quality that they themselves profess to hold, i.e., being a man. We believe they are women, not men—but in any case we do not deny that they exist in the first place. The same goes for “transgender women,” who are of course not women but who are nevertheless wholly existent besides that.
It would be the equivalent of denying someone’s contention that they are a blue whale: You can deny that while still passively affirming the actual existence of the individual in question.
This is easy, 101-level ontology here, nothing at all complicated about it. In saner times such a thing wouldn’t even need to be said, it would just be part of the existential foundation of a society. In any case, don’t be afraid of challenging bizarre and empty arguments like these. They are made by people who are not acting in good faith and whose ends are deeply nefarious and bad for everyone.