What We Talk About When We Talk About Trans Genocide

Consider the possibility that everyone is wrong about everything

US Air Force Staff Sgt. Logan Ireland, a transgender man. Source: Air Force Times

There can be no “middle way” in dealing with transgenderism. It is all or nothing. If transgenderism is true—if men really can become women—then it’s true for everybody of all ages. If transgenderism is false—as it is—if men really can’t become women, as they can not—then it’s false for everybody, too. And if it’s false, then we should not indulge it—especially since that indulgence requires taking away the rights and customs of so many people. If it is false, then for the good of society—and especially for the good of the poor people who have fallen prey to this confusion—transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely; the whole preposterous ideology, at every level.

This statement, delivered by Daily Wire host Michael Knowles at CPAC 2023, has made some people upset. How upset?

Alejandra Caraballo @Esqueer_

Michael Knowles is openly calling for genocide against trans people at CPAC. "Transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely."

Pretty upset. This, of course, is a very silly and inflammatory way of interpreting what Knowles said. And yet, it seems like a statement carefully crafted to be interpreted in a very silly and inflammatory way, such that those who interpreted it as such would sound silly and inflammatory. This makes sense, as conservatives need a flagship issue since the death of Roe v. Wade. Unsurprisingly, progressives are happy to lend a hand.

Consider the context: Knowles is obviously well aware that he has been accused by progressives of advocating genocide of trans people. He has, obviously, denied that claim, on the basis that:

1) “genocide refers to genes, it refers to biology…the whole point of transgenderism is that it has nothing to do with biology”

2)"Transgender people is not a real ontological category…there are people who think that they’re the wrong sex, but they’re mistaken. They’re laboring under a delusion. And so we need to correct that delusion.”

So a genocide against trans people is not simply not what Knowles desires, but isn’t a legitimate possibility because transgenderism is not a biological condition.

These are not good arguments; the first because it is factually incorrect, the second because it is logically incoherent. The first argument mistakes the definition of the term “genocide”: the root word of “genocide” is not “genes” but genos, the Greek word for “race” but also “tribe,” a term which often involves, but does not necessitate a biological relationship between members. According to the existing definition adopted by the United Nations and the International Criminal Court, genocide can be committed against “a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”

A problem obviously arises here: Knowles is wrong by this definition, but so are trans advocates who claim he supports genocide by supporting their “eradication.” And this raises the more interesting philosophical question, what sort of a group are trans people, anyway? They would presumably say that they constitute a gender identity. But what is that?

This brings us to Knowles’ second argument. Do trans people exist? Is transsexuality a thing, and not simply a persistent delusion our culture has decided to reinforce? This question suffers from the term “transgender” being ill-defined, and the definitions given by medical organizations would be ones Knowles would presumably reject as ideologically loaded (the American Psychological Association’s definition, for instance, is agnostic about the relationship between transsexuality and biological sex, but offers a distinction between sex and gender identity—I find it highly unlikely Knowles would accept this distinction). Based on his first argument, Knowles seems to be going with a definition along the lines of “transsexuality is a persistent belief that one is not one’s biological sex”. People who hold this belief therefore believe themselves to be transgender, the same way a person who believes in the truth of the gospel necessarily believes themselves to be a Christian. A belief (call it belief A) about one thing leads to a contingent belief (belief B) about one’s identity as a believer of that thing.

Knowles then argues that because belief A (“I am a man in a woman’s body”) is incorrect, then the contingent belief B (“I am transgender”) is incorrect as well. But belief B does not depend on the truth of belief A—it merely depends on the agent actually believing belief A. Knowles’ argument seems to be equivalent to me claiming that Christians such as Knowles don’t exist, because I believe Christianity consists of a set of false beliefs. Not only does Knowles believe what I think to be an untrue thing generally: that god exists; he also believes an untrue thing about himself: that he has (or maybe is) an immortal soul. But, of course, a belief does not need to be true for someone to identify as someone who holds that belief—flat-earthers are correct to identify themselves as flat-earthers because they believe the earth is flat, not because this belief is correct. We can be agnostic about whether trans people—who often (and maybe usually) accept their biological sex, which is after all the source of their dysphoria—do in fact have a “gender identity” (a fuzzy concept, to say the least), without denying that they do have the persistent belief that they have a gender identity which doesn’t match their sex, or even the belief that their sex doesn’t match their sex. This would seem to make them trans by more or less any definition.

However, trans advocates do in fact take this argument farther by arguing that a trans person is not merely someone whose gender identity is at variance with their biological sex, but that it is actually gender identity we are talking about when we talk about someone’s gender. To say that someone with a Y chromosome “is a woman” is to say a great deal more than “they are a biological male with a female gender identity.” It is not the “trans” part of the progressive refrain “trans women are women” which is ontologically problematic, but the “women” part, for here it makes a choice, not only to validate the sex-gender distinction, but to prefer one over the other. And this appears to add another potential definition for transsexuality-a state of actually being, not merely believing oneself to be, a gender at variance with one’s biological sex. And it is this, in my opinion cherry-picked definition of transsexuality Knowles uses when he claims that trans people do not exist.

But Knowles is not talking about “eradicating” this particular definition of transsexuality—he is talking about eradicating the concept entirely, even for people who identify as trans without accepting the extreme definition he is attacking. That is, after all, what it means to eradicate something.

Now, to do this simply would not be to commit a genocide. And yet, Knowles’ rhetoric feels calculated to sound uncomfortably genocide-ey. “There can be no ‘middle way.’ It is all or nothing.” “Transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely.” Imagine you’ve been accused of advocating genocide against this group. Would you choose this wording? If so, what sort of motivations could you have for doing so?

Is Knowles dogwhistling to the very real, genuinely genocidal portion of the right here, those who actually do think trans people should be lined up in front of a ditch and shot? Is he simply trying to provoke progressives on twitter, further inflaming the culture war and therefore getting more eyes and ears on his platform, and perhaps moving the trans issue to one which can give the GOP a platform to run on beyond Qanon-adjacent conspiracy theories? Whether he intended to do these things is unclear, but he may very well have achieved both of them.

To be honest, I have no horse in this race. Well, obviously I have a horse; the “let’s have no genocides and all be nice to each other” one. But my prior endorsement of the progressive party line on trans issues forced me to issue an embarrassing correction, because it led me to uncritically endorse a study which had deep methodological flaws. As a result, I’ve realized one has to be very, very careful when one tries to research trans issues, because the state of the research is. . . well, it’s complicated.

I’m far from the only person to make this mistake. On the left, we see a set of dubious philosophical claims about the nature of sex and gender and a very alarming enthusiasm for encouraging youths with gender dysphoria to transition (backed up by alarmingly little evidence and some very fishy attempts to generate it), even to the point of giving DIY guides to making non-prescription hormones.

But at the same time, “eradicating” transsexuality is a preposterous idea-to seriously propose the eradication of transsexuality demands that someone like Logan Ireland be forced to live as a woman, or that somehow through sitting down with a therapist, he could come to the realization that he’s not a man (as if he wasn’t already aware of the technical truth of this statement).

A large part of the problem is the genuinely deranged way major publications have handled this issue. Scientific American, a once respectable publication, has utterly debased itself in a truly anti-scientific embrace of postmodernist ideology to the exclusion of. . . well, science. One gets a flavor for the standard coverage the issue gets by reading a truly despicable op-ed by “transgender nonbinary” (apparently not mutually exclusive somehow?) medical student Nat Mulkey, arguing against doing scientific research because it isn’t ideologically useful. Take the article’s opening passage:

Scientists have been engaging for decades in an avid hunt for a biological explanation for why some people are transgender. This urge to find a biological explanation for the existence of trans, and, more generally, LGBTQ, folks was born out of the need to confront the harmful discourse trumpeted by some Christian Right organizations that being gay or transgender is a sinful choice people make.

Was it?! This claim, like the rest of the piece, goes unsubstantiated—the whole thesis being that evidence is unnecessary, after all. In the real world, it is true, scientists are human beings with ideological predispositions, and these predispositions play a role in their research uncomfortably often. But to say right off the top that a specific type of scientific research is being done specifically to achieve a political end is brazen, to say the least. It raises an obvious question: what do these avowedly biased researchers do with results that don’t produce the correct outcome? As we soon learn, the answer is apparently irrelevant, because even the right results do not necessarily lead to the desired outcome:

While the hunt for a cause marches on, the darker potential of the biological essentialism argument is becoming more evident. Biological essentialism, or belief in the claim that there is a biological basis for being transgender, does not equate to acceptance of transgender individuals. In 2017 researchers Boby Ho-Hong Ching and Jason Teng Xu exposed a group of university students to three articles of varying support for the idea that gender differences have a biological basis and then evaluated the students’ degree of transgender prejudice. Those exposed to the article with the most bioessentialist view demonstrated increased prejudice toward transgender individuals, compared with the other two groups. There has also been research showing that the isolated belief in the innateness of sexual orientation did not translate to positive attitudes toward sexual minority groups.

There is an explicit consequentialist tendency here: it’s not the truth of the role neuroscience in gender identity that matters, but how people respond to hearing it. What we should be doing, rather than scientific research, is reminding people that gender is a choice, and biology is simply irrelevant:

This view is more in line with a contemporary understanding of gender, not so much as something that is given to us, but as something dynamic and relational. Florence Ashley, a transfeminine jurist and bioethicist, wrote in Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry that “gender is not something given that we need to unearth, but something that remakes itself—the same or anew—over and over again as we gather new experiences of the world.... Transitioning is just another way we explore our gender.” The bioessentialist model encourages a flawed dynamic with clinical or academic individuals as the assessors of accuracy and the TGNB individuals as the justify-or-die subject. As Ashley states, “we must move away from attempting to assess the truth and authenticity of assertions of gender identity.”

This passage is the essence of what conservatives like Knowles are railing against. Not in good faith—the truth is that conservatives, for the most part, have a religious precommitment to a strict gender binary, and scientific discoveries of a potential biological basis for gender nonconformity as being the result of neurological differences in the brain which cannot be eliminated through therapy or other means would probably not be met with honest reappraisals of their position on the conscious incorporation of trans people into society.

Yet, in rejecting even the attempt to find a biological basis for the trans phenomenon, people like Mulkey and Ashley reveal themselves as pure ideologues. They don’t need to know why gender dysphoria is happening—both because they’ve already made up their minds on the matter, and because the outcome of scientific research into the subject would likely not be politically convenient. But how could this be the case, if one’s position on the matter were that the best possible treatment should be given to people with gender dysphoria?

Consider how useful finding a biological basis for gender nonconformity would be, from a clinical standpoint. The immense problem gender dysphoria poses for medical ethics is not in figuring out who feels trans today, but in predicting who will feel trans ten years down the road, once multiple irreversible decisions with lifelong consequences have been made. This problem is exacerbated by an explosion in the number of people, particularly youths and adolescents, being referred for gender dysphoria. It is these concerns that have led Sweden and Finland to walk back their guidelines on the prescription of puberty blockers for dysphoric minors, along with a lack of sound evidence for the benefits of these treatments. If one were able to figure out who was “really” trans—who would be most likely to identify as trans for their entire life, and therefore most likely to benefit from HRT and sex reassignment surgeries—one could avoid inadvertantly inflicting a great deal of harm.

But people in this camp seem profoundly uninterested in any approach to treating gender dysphoria which doesn’t treat transition as the first and last option. It is this attitude which led Ashley to write such Tumblr-worthy publications as “Gatekeeping hormone replacement therapy for transgender patients is dehumanising” in the Journal of Medical Ethics. The actual position being articulated here is unclear: somehow, gender is something one is simultaneously compelled to experience at variance with one’s biological sex (therefore making it “given” and “immutable”, as Ashley describes it elsewhere), but it is also being “explored,” is “dynamic,” and is constantly “remaking itself”. But if gender is remaking itself, why would it be beneficial to treat someone for the dysphoria they have today with irreversible changes to their body, when the dysphoria could turn into something completely different tomorrow? All of this would seem to benefit enormously from scientific research into what is actually happening here. That is, if we wanted good outcomes for people, even if those outcomes resulted in them not transitioning and living their lives as cisgendered people. This is the danger of doing research for a biological cause—in doing so, we may find out that some portion of self-described trans people are not trans, are in fact delusional or the subject of a social contagion, and would be best treated by non-affirming therapeutic methods which will doubtless be labeled “conversion therapy” by opponents. Unfortunately, part of gender ideology is insisting that there is nothing undesirable about being trans that isn’t solely the result of bigotry—having to undergo extensive surgeries, lifelong medicalization, the use of hormones and puberty blockers with significant side effects, and having extensive psychological comorbidities including a massively inflated suicide risk (yes, even after sex reassignment).

I would like to propose two things. One, we do not understand what is happening to people with gender dysphoria (an excellent overview of the state of the research is given in the Cass Interim Report submitted to the NHS in the wake of the Tavistock Clinic closure). We don’t know why they are experiencing it, and we don’t know how best to treat it. Different age cohorts experience gender dysphoria at different rates, suggesting there may be different causes. It may be entirely social, it may be biological, it may be some mixture of the two, with different groups experiencing it for different reasons. Regardless of the cause, it may be immutable, or it may not—again, this may differ between groups. A further problem is that we don’t actually know what the source of “gender identity” is, or if such a thing even exists. The experts disagree, so the independent observer cannot coherently take a “believe the experts” approach, because this would require believing multiple contradictory things. People who claim to know what is happening, in other words, are full of shit.

Second, until we understand what it actually is we’re talking about, all ideological claims about how trans people should be treated, both in a clinical setting and in daily life, are premature. When Michael Knowles claims that “a man cannot become a woman,” he is foreclosing the possibility that trans people are neither men nor women in the traditional sense—that is, they may possess biological traits of both sexes. When Florence Ashley claims that gender is a fluid and dynamic process which changes over time, they are similarly making an ideological claim which is not evidence-based. Both are opposed to the very idea of gathering evidence, because both believe that doing so would be harmful to society—the one because it runs the risk of demolishing gender norms, the other because it runs the risk of reinstating them.

Obviously, Knowles is incorrect—there absolutely is a “middle way” on the trans issue; he denies its existence because it is obviously the most sensible. In this view, we can prioritize the wellbeing of people with gender dysphoria and try to understand what its causes may be, and allow for the possibility that different treatments may be best for different groups. It seems quite plausible that there is a certain group of trans people who are “immutably” trans, for whom no amount of therapy would resolve their dysphoria, and for whom a full transition is the best approach. For these people, a claim like “I am a man in a woman’s body” may have real merit, as there may be a real mismatch between their biological sex and their gender identity. This is not a “bioessentialist” claim-the source of the immutability is irrelevant, though it certainly should be understood the same way we would seek to understand the source of any disorder. There may be another group who is undergoing a more common identity crisis of the sort most people undergo in their adolescence, and who have turned to gender identity to supply an answer because it occupies a major space in youth culture at the moment, in the same way punk culture afforded young people an identity in the ‘80s, or grunge culture in the ‘90s. For these people, it may be that treating other mental health issues will resolve their dysphoria and save them a life of medicalization and elevated suicide risk. Or something completely different could be happening! At the very least, we should not be giving gender dysphoria special treatment because of its unusually elevated position in cultural discourse, and rushing any patient, particularly kids, through to transition is an obviously insane approach. As the Cass report explains:

5.14. When it comes to gender dysphoria, there are no blood tests or other laboratory tests, so assessment and diagnosis in children and young people with gender-related distress is reliant on the judgements of experienced clinicians. Because medical, and subsequently possibly surgical treatments will follow, it may be argued that a highly sensitive and specific assessment process is required. The assessment should be able to accurately identify those children or young people for whom physical intervention is going to be the best course of action, but it is equally important that it identifies those who need an alternative pathway or treatment.

Of course, neither side can embrace this position, because its outcome is unclear. In other words, neither position is capable of listening to reason, and should therefore be dismissed.