Some arguments about trans validity...

On the surface, both the claims above are about Science. They use words like "biologically" and "chromosomal". This science is suspect – intersex people exist for example, and chromosomes influence gender through hormones, not despite them. However, these claims are also about what people ought to want. For this reason, I don't think chromosomes are the most important part of the story.

Below, I'm going to talk about what Science can and can't do, especially when we're interested in moral questions. I'll mention a little bit of the shape of some theological and religious arguments too, and about some things that can happen when you mix together some science-based arguments and some theological ones. Finally I'll talk about security, fear, and human communities.

Science can never make moral judgements. Science can help us predict the consequences of our actions, and it can help us better understand what things have happened in the past (the consequences of which are what we see around us). That's literally it. Science is about making predictions about measurable things, and following those predictions forwards and backwards through time. But the claims above used words like "should" and "designed". Those aren't science words. They're value judgements.

What I just said might be controversial in some circles. There are groups of people who treat science like religion, and try to get moral answers from it. I believe they usually end up amplifying whatever moral biases they had to begin with, and dressing them in scientific language. Kinda like how religious literalists sometimes dress their existing biases up with scriptural quotes. I've definitely made arguments from that sort of position myself, and it's taken a lot of (ongoing!) work to climb out of it.

So if science can't make moral judgements, does that mean science is useless when it comes to ethical issues? I think not. I think it's really useful to be able to predict the consequences of our actions. Let's take the "should" out of our first claim, and re-write it as something that science can talk about:

people should be who they are biologically designed to be

→

people will usually be happier if they behave like they were designed to behave

We still have that word "designed", which is problematic (designed by who?) but we can already start to use science to make a lie of this statement. We have large numbers of people who tried really hard to behave like the gender they were assigned at birth. They tended to be really massively unhappy, and lots of them killed themselves. That can be viewed as an experiment. Our results suggest that the hypothesis is false.

There are other places we could take that "should". It might not be about the happiness of the people who are "not being who they should", it might be about the happiness of the people around them. Maybe the existence of trans people coming out of the closet causes all the straights to get suicidally unhappy. Maybe it's best overall if the trans folks stay hidden? Take it for the team? That's a legit argument – but again, we can do experiments to see if the strategy is working. I think it's not. I suspect the folks who're unhappy to see trans folks out there would be unhappy anyway.

These are two science-laden arguments derived from the one at the top of the page. The science is all about consequences, and the value judgements are axiomatic. The first argument only works if you believe that the best thing is what makes the trans person happy. The second argument only works if you believe that the best thing is what makes the community happy.

The "should" in our argument could also be hiding a non-science-based opinion. It might just mean that God (or "nature", or some other authority) says trans people shouldn't be that way. If we're appealing directly to an authority that we can't talk to, there's no argument to be made. If the authority is something like the text of the bible, then we can make theological arguments based on the text. We can look for quotes about how people were treated, or what things people were forbidden from doing or rewarded for doing and so on.

This kind of argument is probably only useful if you believe the premise – that this authority is legitimate. For example, that God exists, is the arbiter of morality, and wrote the bible.

Let's imagine that someone we care for argues that gravity doesn't apply to them. We might argue really quite hard that they should change that belief. This might look like a pseudo-scientific theological argument:

• You say gravity doesn't apply to you
• The books say gravity applies to everything
• Therefore you're wrong, and should believe otherwise

This honestly isn't very convincing. There are a lot of books that say a lot of different contradictory things. Why are the gravity ones special? If your lived experience is otherwise, it's going to be hard to convince you by showing you books.

However, it might also be an argument about consequences: - You say gravity doesn't apply to you - If you're not worried about gravity, you might not recognise the danger of stepping off a high ledge - We do recognise that danger, and want to protect you from it - …so we want you to change your belief, or else we might actually physically restrain you.

This argument involves both authority (we know better than you about gravity) and consequences (you're going to get hurt). If we're wrong about either the authority or the consequences, then our argument doesn't hold.

The argument at the top of the page could have been of this form. Science says men are men and women are women AND science says that men who try to behave like women cause harm (to themselves or others) THEREFORE they should stop trying to do that. If someone really dispassionately believes this, then they ought to change their opinion if we can show them a large number of trans folks who aren't harming anyone. And who were actively experiencing harm before they came out.

The best arguments I know of against trans-rights are security arguments. What if a man raped women, then claimed to be a woman so that he could be locked up in a women's prison where he could rape more women?

That's a legit fear. People honestly do do fucked up things. And absolutely any rule you write down can be used as a weapon by someone. If the rule is that trans women go in women's prisons, then some man is probably eventually going to try to use that rule to abuse women. If the rule is that trans women go in men's prisons, then some man is going to eventually use that rule to abuse trans women.

In fact, we have hard data on the last thing. Trans prisoners traditionally get a horrendous experience.

At this point, the world would be much simpler if trans people didn't exist. So it's tempting to argue that they don't. Maybe they're all lying?

Because we're in a security-mindset now, we suddenly have to worry about people lying. We can start going over all the other arguments we've already covered, except we might want to discount the testimony of all the trans people we're talking to. Because they might be lying predators, trying to get access to our womenfolk.

These security arguments rest on the existence of an "us" and a "them". We need a well defined group to protect – like "real women" – and a group who means them harm. The calculus is very different if trans women are in the "us" group. Trans women are way more likely to get abused than cis women: In prison, and outside of prison. So trans-friendly folks often argue that we should protect trans women more than we currently do… And they can sometimes kinda imply that if this means a little less safety for cis women, that might be ok. Overall, we're still reducing suffering. We can also argue the numbers. For example that "little" might be so small as to be negligible, especially in comparison with the amount of harm done by the status quo.

This still misses something important though. The reason cis women need protecting in the first place is because they've been hobbled by a patriarchal society. The reason we have women's prisons in the first place is that we've built a society where women need protecting from men. (Ok, not the only reason – there are also lots of bullshit reasons, but let's be generous and assume that prison segregation is about protecting women). If we keep our society set up so that men are a threat to women, and then we start taking away some of the protections that women have, that sucks. That's real.

There's a sense in which the real answer is to re-shape society so that men are no longer so threatening that women need their own prisons. Then no-one will care about trans folks, right?

While we work our way in that direction, we're going to need a lot of messy compromises. One option is that trans women go in women's prisons, but trans women who have raped women don't. That's what Nicola Sturgeon talked about in Scotland a few weeks ago. I honestly can't think of a better compromise for that particular case. The trans woman in question was convicted of rape, and her name is all over the press. She is going to have a really awful experience wherever she goes, and might be a genuine threat to the safety of women (cis and trans, if there are any trans women allowed there at all) in a women's prison. I think it's a horrible compromise to make, and I hope smarter people than me can think of a better one. Even if they can't, I think it's clear that putting all convicted or detained trans people in prisons aligned with the gender they were assigned at birth would be needlessly cruel.

All the above is about science, philosophy, theology, and security engineering. That kind of thing sticks in my brain like a splinter until I've worked it through, but most of us don't have that tendency. In practice, I think most people are nice to the people they've met, and will accidentally tread on the people they haven't noticed.

If you're having this conversation with someone you trust, it's possible that they may not have knowingly met any trans folks. It's easy to look at all the apparently-cis people around you, and think that those trans folks in the papers must be imagining it, or lying. The only cure is actual trans stories. Ideally from folks that this person already knows and trusts. But that's an huge amount to ask of anyone. These conversations can be exhausting, or worse.

The next best thing I'm aware of is videos like this one.

Put on your own oxygen mask before assisting others.

Let's look after each other.