It may seem peculiar for a non-scientist, and a cis-male one at that, to wade into the debate over transgenderism. But that debate, as the foregoing suggests, isn’t really about science. It’s about language, logic, and intellectual integrity—without which science cannot function. Words must have fixed meanings for scientific inquiry to begin. Inductive and deductive logic must be continually operational for scientific inquiry to proceed. Claims must be falsifiable. You cannot permit methodological carve outs to ease the emotional distress of an interest group, no matter how sympathetic. Furthermore, given the professional stakes for scientists in our current hyper-politicized environment, you may need a non-scientist to point out such things, to say what’s obviously true but which professionals, for careerist reasons, cannot say or don’t want to say.
The first question that must be addressed, therefore, is why anyone possessed with a fair share of human compassion, a healthy curiosity about intellectual matters, and a determination to say true things should care whether the NHGRI inserts the weasel word “nearly” into their statement on the nature of identical twins as a sop to a politically favored interest group. Who’s harmed by the gesture?
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The answer is no one in particular… but all of us collectively. There is an intellectual price to be paid for intentional imprecision, for elevating people’s feelings over acknowledging objective truths, a bill that comes due as a consequence. What items appear on that bill? The conditions-contrary-to-fact you’re going to have to nod along with, the logical inconsistencies you’re going to have to ignore, the outright nonsense to which you’re going to have to pay lip service. Your willingness to pick up that bill is a function of your epistemology. How strong is your commitment to logic? How much weight do you attach to definitional limits and empirical evidence when gauging the truth value of propositions? How committed are you to the notion of objective truth?
You can, after all, redefine your way to believing that anything is true. Suppose, for example, you want to argue that four is an odd number. Four isn’t an odd number, of course, because it is divisible by two. But if you're determined to believe that four is odd, you can argue that the numeral "4" is kind of peculiar looking, and "peculiar" is another definition of "odd," so four is an odd number. (Welcome to deconstruction!) It’s unlikely that a reasonable person would make such an argument however because no one's emotions are tied up in four being odd. No one is desperate to believe it. No one's kid is going to have his feelings hurt if he's told that in reality four is an even number.
Yes, to be sure, language evolves. But it doesn’t evolve with the specific purpose of making what’s false true. We don’t redefine “flat” to mean “round” in order to spare the feelings of the members of the Flat Earth Society. The move to redefine terms such as “man,” “woman,” “boy,” “girl,” “male,” “female,” “sex,” and “gender” into their antonyms in order to pacify transgender people is the equivalent of conflating “flat” and “round” to pacify Flat Earthers. It may feel like benevolence, but you lose science. You lose the logical methodologies that undergird scientific investigation. You lose the capacity to say, “This much I know to be objectively true.”
Don’t believe me? Here are a few mental exercises to illustrate what must follow. Let’s start with a syllogism:
One characteristic of mammals is that only the female of the species gives birth to offspring. Humans are mammals. Therefore, only female humans give birth to offspring.
If both premises of any syllogism are true, and if the form of that syllogism is correct, then the conclusion must also be true. That’s a fundamental rule of logic. But once you step through the transgender looking glass, male humans are regularly giving birth—which, indeed, seems to be confirmed by recentreportsinrespected news outletsofmen giving birth. So are male humans in fact giving birth? Is so, which of the two premises is false? Is itnotcharacteristic of mammals that only females give birth? Are humans not mammals? Or have we stumbled across a formally correct syllogism in which both premises are objectively true, but the conclusion is false? Are we going to rewrite logic textbooks as well as biology textbooks in the name of inclusivity?
If I claim that I’m a woman, and I’m sincere, then I’m truly a woman; if I claim that I’m a woman, but I’m insincere, then I’m not a woman.
Again, transgender activists argue that transgender men are truly men and transgender women are truly women. The weaker argument—that they’re “men” and “women,” or men-with-an-asterisk and women-with-an-asterisk—undercuts the efforts to integrate transgender women into women’s sports competitions, women’s prisons, and women’s restrooms. That being the case, and there being no empirical test for transgender status, the sincerity of the transgender claim must be determinative. What other measure could there be? Clearly, I don’t become a woman by snarking about being a woman. But how can the sincerity of a claim affect the truth value of that claim? Wouldn’t that principle also apply, say, to climate change deniers and to climate change hysterics? But how could the sincerely held yet contradictory claims of both be true? What about racial essentialists? Holocaust deniers?
Suppose a transgender woman (i.e., a genetic man who identifies as a woman) applies for a job as a firefighter; how should the application be evaluated? Which physical standards apply, those for a male recruit or a female recruit?
If the answer is a female recruit, then why wouldn’t those become the default standards for all recruits… since transgender claims are, I repeat, unfalsifiable? Why couldn’t a cis-male recruit who fails the physical exam reapply as a female recruit? If the answer is he can’t because he’s not transgender, then you are explicitly saying that we can discriminate on the basis of gender identity.
On March 27, 2023, Audrey Elizabeth Hale, a 28 year old woman armed with a rifle and a pistol, walked into The Covenant School in Nashville, a parochial elementary school she had attended years earlier, and began randomly shooting students and staff. She murdered three nine-year-olds and three adults before she was shot dead by the local police. Audrey Hale, we subsequently learned, identified as a man and had taken the name Aiden Hale.
According to Statista, there were 151 mass shooters in the US between 1982 and September 2024, only four of whom were female. Does Audrey Hale bring that number to five? Is she an exception to the rule that mass shooters are overwhelmingly likely to be male? But on what basis do we reject her claim to be a man named “Aiden”? Isn’t the claim unfalsifiable? On the other hand, if we accept her claim and say than “Aiden” committed the atrocity, doesn’t that skew the proportion of male to female mass shooters? What is the true proportion?
I could go on with such examples, but you get the point. Desperately wanting something to be true does not make it one iota truer. Even if everyone on earth suddenly agreed that men and women could swap out their sexual classifications, the immutability of sexual classifications would remain. If you’re born genetically male, you’re going to die genetically male, and if you’re born genetically female, you’re going to die genetically female—regardless of how you present yourself.
I’d go even further. I’d argue that a general recognition that transgender people cannot change their sex is likely to elicit greater compassion for the distress they experience living in their own bodies—and a greater tolerance for their modes of presentation.
The bottom line is that we have two values competing for our allegiance: people’s feelings and objective truth. Most of us feel an allegiance to both. But at a certain point, inevitably, those two values will clash. It’s at that point that we must declare ourprimaryallegiance. Will it be to feelings or to truth? Scientists who ally with the former may be well-intentioned, but they’ve betrayed their profession.
Click here to return to Part One of this essay.
Mark Goldblatt is the author, most recently, ofI Feel, Therefore I Am: The Triumph of Woke Subjectivism(Bombardier Books).
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