The Trans Discourse and Gender Differences: The Liberal Way

Welcome to The Liberal Way, a series where we will discuss what the liberal way for dealing with various cultural and social controversies should look like. I think this is needed because too many people have lost sight of what the proper liberal way is.

In this episode, I want to examine society's current inability to have a rational and objective discussion about gender differences, the flow-on effects on the discourse around trans issues, and how we can fix all this. In the previous episode, I stated that liberals believe in seeking out the objective truth first, and then seeking to build a good order based on what we know about the objective truth. The order here is important, because we need to know the objective facts before we make any value judgements, and this requires us to be open-minded in our quest to know the world as it is. Unfortunately, this has not been the case for wider society, when it comes to sex and gender issues.

Men and women, on average, differ on not just physical properties, but also in psychology and behavior, and at least some of these differences are by nature, rather than environmental conditioning. If by sex we mean biological sex, and by gender we mean the social and behavioral aspects, then the two are certainly highly correlated, even if there is also a large range of overlap. This is true even if we take LGBT people into account, because they account for only a small fraction of the population. Indeed, the exception (LGBT people) proves the rule (non-LGBT people) here. All this should not be controversial at all.

In fact, accepting these objective facts would go a long way towards understanding trans people. It is in refusing to accept at least some of these facts (that there could be differences between men and women outside of the physically observable) that anti-trans gender critical feminism becomes possible. It is in refusing to accept even more of these facts that a postmodern approach to trans issues, that ignores the centrality of gender dysphoria in trans lives, becomes able to speak over objective evidence from clinical medicine. In turn, this has led to trans identity being seen as akin to a lifestyle choice, leading to right-wing culture warriors calling for restricting trans rights and taking away funding for transition related medical treatment. All this means the critical theory worldview, in its rejection of the objective truth on sex and gender, is at the root of the current sorry state of the trans discourse. Which is why it must be challenged as a matter of priority.

To start fixing things, we must demand that we be able to talk about the objective truth when it comes to sex and gender. For too long, the critical theory worldview has made such discussion taboo, by assuming that any talk of differences would be a tool of the patriarchy to oppress women. However, this assumption is not objectively sound at all. The view that objective facts can be a tool of the patriarchy is ultimately rooted in the worldview that ideas are primarily defined by power relations, and objective truth is less important than power relations. While this worldview had existed before postmodernism, it was arguably the work of Michel Foucault that took it to its logical conclusion: that knowledge itself is always a product of power relations. Once you embrace this worldview, there is no going back to looking at the objective facts neutrally. Hence, this worldview is completely incompatible with being committed to what the scientific facts actually say.

In accepting the basic objective facts about sex and gender, one can clearly see trans people's plight in simple terms, as long as one is not already biased by religious dogma (like many right-wing culture warriors clearly are, even if they do not say it aloud these days). To put it simply, there is a mind-body mismatch happening. Of course, this is an oversimplification. However, this at least gets the basic point across. Given the current dire situation facing trans people and trans rights, I think there is a good case for going back to the basics here. And we can only do that by putting decades of academic philosophy aside, and returning to the objective facts.