This just in: Men and women are different. This is something humans have known since, well, since there have been humans. This is something that all mammals have some instinctual grasp of, at varying levels; mammals are sexually bipolar, as are most vertebrates; with some snakes, lizards, and amphibians, the line can sometimes be a little fuzzy. But humans? Aside from a few very rare, usually debilitating genetic disorders involving polyploidy of sex chromosomes, meaning that one has one or more extra copies of these chromosomes (XXY, XYY, and the like), human sex is binary: XX is female, XY is male.
These are facts.
That's why, to a biologist, the whole "transgender" thing is more than a little bemusing. One can claim to be anything they like: A man, a woman, a three-spirit nonbinary forest elf, a ham and cheese sandwich, or the Virgo Supercluster, but the mere assertion doesn't make it true. And that's the big problem: Activists are fond of shouting "Transgender women (men) are women," but the differences in the sexes, from the moment of conception, make the experience of womanhood impossible for a man, and vice versa.
This brings us to an interesting take on the issue from Chris Milton, who writes at The Daily Sceptic and examines this issue from a philosophical standpoint.
The arguments in philosopher Thomas Nagel’s seminal 1974 essay ‘What is it Like to be Bat?‘ can help us answer the question of whether a human born with XY chromosomes and a male body can be, can become or can know what it’s like to be a woman, or can know what inhabiting the world is like for a woman. Nagel — who randomly chose bats from the list of mammals — began from the premise that if an organism has consciousness then there is something that it is like to be that organism, and his question was whether we could know “what is like for a bat to be a bat”.
Nagel’s essay argues for the wholly subjective character of experience, and how this subjectivity is dictated by differences in the physicality of beings. A creature shapes its Umwelt, or lifeworld, through its interactions with the world, and those interactions are determined by that creature’s body. Men and women inhabit similar yet profoundly different Umwelts. The qualia of sensation — meaning the instances of subjective experience, such as what it’s like to perceive a colour, to taste an apple or hear a baby cry — are different for each individual human. But these differences are also sexed. The last is a good example, as the female body — and therefore mind — responds to a baby’s cry in a radically different way to a man’s. But there are also large differences in the way they experience running for five hundred metres, the colour red, having a nipple touched, and innumerable other things (almost everything, in fact). There are qualia that each sex experiences that the other will never be able experience at all, but which help form their consciousnesses.
That's rather a lot to absorb, especially if you struggle with pure philosophical arguments (and who doesn't?) But we can boil it down to this: It's impossible to experience something without being something. The late, great Rush Limbaugh, responding to someone commenting that a dog "thinks it's people," said, "The dog doesn't know it's a dog!" But the dog does have some experience that no human can comprehend; its sense of smell, for one thing, is something humans can't begin to understand. It represents a fundamental difference in how the animal perceives the world. We humans, for example, primarily experience the world through our eyes, but a dog? Through its nose, which is something we humans can't just decide to experience for ourselves. We can't.
The same applies to men and women, and the treatments and surgeries pushed by transgender activists can never and will never be anything but poor substitutes.
For a man to become a woman everything, every molecule, would have to be changed, and a lifetime of memories implanted. Each moment-to-moment sequence of experience from the womb onwards grows coherently out of those that preceded it and determines those that follow it. Surgery is merely an in-real-life filter, advanced dressing up, and transitions someone towards nothing that meaningfully resembles a woman. To give one of hundreds of examples: men have no Cooper’s Ligament, which means that after HRT their breasts – which in any case are functionless – will be tubular and spaced very widely apart. Even the cells of men and women are biochemically different and determine, from before birth, many things, including how each sex fights particular diseases. Objective, unchangeable, sexed physical states partially determine subjective states; lopping off this or that part of the body or appending a functionless simulacrum of another will in no wise change the quality of those subjective states.
Ay, there's the rub.
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This is where those stubborn biological facts reassert themselves. Hormone replacement therapy, as I have explained many times, can never replace the standard-issue endocrines that have been shaping a man or woman's body since conception. This is particularly true in sports, where we are still seeing the hideously unfair practice of letting "transgender women" - men - compete on women's sports teams. And even more than hormone treatments, the "gender-affirming" surgeries can only produce poor substitutes for what nature provides, and those surgeries always require constant, long-term care to maintain even the poor semblance of function; the people who receive these surgeries will never have normal sex lives.
A body cannot be redesigned with chemicals or knives.
Back to the lived experience argument: Mr. Milton presents Nagel's argument, replacing "bat" with "woman," and what do you know, it still applies.
Even if [men] could transform over time into [women] their brains would not have worked as [women’s] brains from birth, and could therefore never have the mindset of a [woman]. … It is doubtful that any meaning could be attached to the supposition that I should possess the internal neuropsychological constitution of a [woman]. … Even if I could by gradual degrees be transformed into a [woman], nothing in my present condition enables me to imagine what the experience of such a future stage of myself thus metamorphosed would be like. To the extent that I could look and behave like a [woman] without changing my fundamental structure, my experiences would [still] not be anything like the experiences of [women].
That's the problem. That's the rock on which the "transgender women are women" argument will always founder. These people can never be women, and vice versa. Sex is determined genetically at conception, and from that moment on, it shapes every experience, every thought, every emotion, everything. No treatment or surgery, no sign-waving and shouting will ever, ever change that. Men are men, women are women, and never the twain shall meet. We are mammals, and mammals are sexually bipolar. These are facts. They always have been facts, and they always will be facts.
And to that, I can only add, "Vive la difference!"
