Why we can't redefine "man" and "woman" to conform to transgender ideology

Words mean things. This has always been the case.

At the heart of transgender ideology is in effect a re-definition of the terms “man” and “woman” to mean things entirely different from that which they have meant for many thousands of years. If you can refute these basic contentions of transgenderism then you can essentially scuttle the entire movement, and hopefully with it all its dangerous and unpleasant trappings, i.e., grown men in little girl’s restrooms, the genital mutilation of healthy boys and girls, etc.

Broadly speaking, transgenderism has taken what nearly everyone the entire world over has understood for millennia, namely (to use the feminine example),

A woman is a female member of the human species.

and changed it to

A woman is anyone who identifies as a woman.

Now, quite obviously, this explanation fails upon its own merits: You can’t define a word by referring solely to the word you’re attempting to define. This is an example of circular logic and it’s essentially a self-defeating exercise, at least if what you’re after is clarity, logic and understanding.

We should not discount the possibility that transgender activists are actually after none of those things and are instead aiming only for uncertainty, nonsense and incoherence. Many people within the ranks of LGBT activism seem interested only in a sort of freewheeling epistemic chaos where nothing really means anything at all. Nevertheless, we should still be familiar with how to refute these arguments. If we can’t persuade the people who seem intent on forcing this dangerous ideology down our throats, we can at least persuade the much larger share of the population that is uncomfortable with the whole thing; this is the demographic that, if made sufficiently aware of the dangerousness of this movement, will ultimately help keep unwell men out of little girl’s dressing rooms, which should be at the top of everyone’s to-do list.

Here is the crux of the matter: The word “woman” and its cognates have for the entirety of their existence quite obviously referred to a single, specific thing, i.e., a female member of the human species. It has been a distinct word rooted in biology rather than “identity.” For essentially all of recorded human history, and maybe with the exception of a few primitive indigenous tribes, that has been the only basis in which the concept has applied. Because it is a biological term rather than an identificatory one, changing the meaning of that word to signify the latter rather than the former is in effect not just a re-definition but a de-definition, wherein the word has ceased to have any meaning at all, even as a pretense.

Ultimately transgender activists would have you believe that every woman is only a woman because she “identifies” as one, which, again, creates a sort of circular definitional loop that collapses under its own weird weight: If the only basis of being a woman was believing that you are one, then “woman” itself would have no actual definition outside of the word itself, which is nonsense.

The ostensible workaround would be for activists to construct a sort of hybrid definition of “woman,” say: “A female member of the human species or anyone who identifies as one.” But this would lay bare the fundamental and incoherent conceit of transgenderism: On the one hand you have a concrete anatomical, biological signifier, and on the other hand you a subjective, delusional belief that “identifying” with that signifier makes you the signified in question. It would be quite like if someone came along and declared: “A redhead is a human being with red hair or anyone who identifies as having red hair,” or, “A polydactyl is any human born with extra fingers or toes or anyone who feels like they have extra fingers or toes.” Obviously nobody would take that seriously.

This is why transgender activists cannot, and will never be able to, re-define “man” or “woman” along the lines of transgender ideology: Because those words are already spoken for, because they mean things that are in fundamental opposition to transgenderism itself, and because any attempt to change those meanings to conform to that ideology ultimately self-destructs, comprehensively so. You can of course acquiesce to the ideology anyway if you simply don’t care about it one way or the other, but of course in the end that will still get you grown men in little girls’ restrooms and butcher doctors cutting out the reproductive organs of confused teenagers. So I think most right-thinking people want to see it squashed.