Debunking The “If Gender Is Changeable, Why Isn’t Everything Else” Argument

“If You Can Change Your Sex, Can You Change Your Race?” reads the headline of a 6/29/2021 column on Townhall by Michael Brown. You might think Brown is asking an abstract, philosophical question, but he promises you he is not:

But this is not an abstract, philosophical question. Not at all.

Rather, as reported in the Daily Caller, “A white, British social media influencer began identifying as ‘transracial’ after undergoing 18 surgeries to transition his race and gender, according to a series of videos.

“Oli London underwent 18 cosmetic surgeries to transition into a non-binary Korean and resemble Park Jimin from the K-pop band BTS, the influencer shared in a series of videos posted Monday. The transracial influencer has begun identifying as Korean and goes by the name ‘Jimin’ with they/them pronouns.”

Writing in The American Conservative on 6/28/2021, Rod Dreher asked a similar question to his audience:

Oli London has a point. I’m serious. If men can have vulvas, and women can have penises, despite their biology, and despite their DNA, by what standard do we tell Oli London that he can’t be an ethnic Korean, despite having the DNA of an Englishman? I think he’s beyond bonkers, but if identity is a matter of self-perception and assertion, no matter what biology testifies, then Oli has a valid point. As did Rachel Dolezal, the fake black woman from a few years back. I think she was nuts, and not remotely black, but I see no logical reason to approve of transsexualism without approving of transracialism. Do you?

Being as “invested” in right-wing arguments as I am, I’ll say that I’ve seen Brown’s column a million times before. On 11/13/2018, Dennis Prager published a similar column called “If Gender Isn’t Fixed, Why Is Age?” in whic he argues:

Now, what exactly is wrong with [Emile] Ratelband’s [who tried to get his legal age lowered from 49 to 69, and said he was inspired by “the transgender movement”] argument? If sex doesn’t objectively exist, why does age? If feelings determine sex, why don’t feelings determine age? If we are to regard sex as “assigned” at birth, why don’t we regard age as “assigned” at birth?

I should note, there is a difference between saying something “doesn’t objectively exist” and saying that “feelings determine it.” Feelings determine our opinions, but while opinions may not be objective, that does not mean that opinions don’t objectively exist.

Every now and again, stories like this make their way around the right-wing websites. In 2015, a fifty-two year old Canadian man began to identify as a six-year-old girl and got a married couple to go along with the charade. In 2016, a woman in Norway said that she was actually born to be a cat and began to live as such. (For the sake of time, we’ll ignore the fact that many of these stories seem like nothing more than misplaced fetishism.) And I’m sure you can find thousands of other stories if you look hard enough — I’ve seen many more myself, these are just the first couple to come to mind.

Of course, when these stories aren’t present, the idea that if we allow people to identify as a gender unrelated to the one they were assigned at birth they’ll identify as random nonsense is still a popular hypothetical. During a Q&A after one of his lectures, Ben Shapiro asked a student challenging his views on transgenderism is she could identify as a moose, on another occasion he asked another student if she could identify as fifty. On 6/22/2015, Paul Joseph Watson released a video onto YouTube called “The Truth About Trans-Everything,” where he plays a character who spends all week identifying as random and usually absurd things (transgender, trans-racial, trans-able, and many more). For years, there was a popular meme among those critical of transgender and non-binary identities where they were identify as random things, usually attack helicopters.

Before we begin, we should get an Elephant out of the room: Almost all of these articles make no distinction between “sex” and “gender.” For those unaware, “sex” is used in reference to your biology, your chromosomes, and the way your body is built while “gender” is used in reference to how society sees you. No human being believes that you can change your sex, but it is widely believed that you can change your gender. (Hence why people use the term “transgender,” and not “transsexual,” in reference to someone transitioning from one gender to another.) Nobody believes that you can change your chromosomes or even fully change your genitalia, just that you can change the way society views you.

However, even ignoring that, the fact is there is simply no historical basis to compare these two things. Gender dysphoria, the condition that the vast majority of transgender people suffer from where they feel great discomfort with the sex they were assigned at birth, has been an incredibly well-studied phenomenon for multiple decades. The first person to ever get a sex-reassignment surgery was Dora Richter, who received a Vaginoplasty in Germany in 1931 (she was killed by the Nazis two years later while they were destroying the research of the Institute of Sex Research). In 1952, a World War Two solider named Christine Jorgensen became the first American to receive sex-reassignment surgery, an event which inspired the famously awful filmmaker Ed Wood to create Glen Or Glenda which was released the following year.

One can even find examples of what we would now call transgenderism in the ancient world. Elagabalus, a Roman Emperor who ruled from 218 until 222, was known for asking doctors in his time if they had some way to turn him into a woman.

“Trans-racialism,” “Trans-speciesism,” “Trans-ageism,” or whatever other thing some weird person does that makes the rounds on the right-wing media-sphere has no such a history. They are nothing more than weird things done by weird people because weird people do weird things, that’s it.

In order to transgenderism to exist all that needs to occur is the wrong brain needs to enter the wrong body. Considering we live in a world where a child could get 4,000 different birth defects and 6,000 different genetic disorders, the idea of a baby being born with a brain that doesn’t match their body is far from impossible. The sex we are born with is determined decency early during our time in the womb, but it happens in the womb nonetheless and the womb can certainly make mistakes. However, if any of things transgenderism is hyperbolic compared have a chance of making sense, we would have to believe that, somehow, a different combination of sperm and egg was supposed to occur. We would have to believe not that the womb made a mistake, but that the very conception of this human being was a mistake — we would also have to believe that, despite them only existing because of that sperm and egg combination, they can somehow tell what they’re “supposed to be” despite not having a way to know such information.

Of course, the reason why these stories get so widely shared is because the right knows they have lost the debate on transgenderism. Hence why, instead of actually trying to prove themselves right, they instead point to weird people doing weird things and go “this is just like that other thing I oppose.” This was also done with gay marriage, where we were warned that if we allowed gay people to marry each other, we would soon allow basically all bad things to happen. When Massachusetts legalized gay marriage, Bill O’Reilly said this on the topic during the 3/29/2005 edition of his radio show:

The judges in Massachusetts knew they weren’t going to be impeached when they said to the state legislature, “Gay marriage is now legal in Massachusetts because we say it is. We the judges” — they knew they weren’t gonna be impeached. They knew the legislature didn’t care. You get the government you deserve. In California, the prevailing wisdom is marijuana is no big deal, let’s legalize it. And since we can’t get that through the legislature, we’ll do it this way. And they did it! You see? And 10 years, this is gonna be a totally different country than it is right now. Laws that you think are in stone — they’re gonna evaporate, man. You’ll be able to marry a goat — you mark my words!

It has been sixteen years since O’Reilly made that remark, six more years than he thought required, and to this day no state allows you to marry a goat. As Joseph Amann and Tom Breuer wrote in their book Sweet Jesus, I Hate Bill O’Reilly:

The truth is, it’s highly unlikely that people will be marrying goats in ten years time. That would require a constitutional amendment, a sea change in cultural mores and ethics, and something along the lines of the Island of Dr. Moreau. It’ll be twenty years minimum. Minimum. Liberals will most likely shoot for human-primate unions first sand then work their way down the evolutionary chain. Indeed, we’ve been to the secret meetings and happen to know that the current liberal rallying cry is, “A Goat in Every Bed Before We’re Dead.”

O’Reilly, who liked to portray himself as a moderate when it came to the issue of LGBT rights, loved this argument. Going back to Amann and Breuer, this sometimes led to rather moments on his television series:

For example, Bill might do a story on how, if gays are allowed to marry, there will be nothing preventing people from marrying triplets or dogs. The Factor poll will then ask whether gays should be allowed to marry. Will they herald a grassroots movement in favor of bestiality and polygamy? Only his viewers can say for certain.

Of course, the most infamous example of this argument was used by Rick Santorum in response to Lawrence v. Texas — which struck down anti-sodomy laws nationwide — on 4/7/2003:

And if the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything.

Mind you, bigamy and polygamy are marital agreements and have nothing to do with sex positions, while sodomy is any sexual act in which a child is not produced. Incest and adultery are also in no way socially accepted and every state and federal territory that is part of the United States has some law against incestuous relationships, even eighteen years after Santorum claimed they would be legal and accepted.

Of course, this statement seems absurd to us now, (in fact, it was the interview in which Santorum said this — along with saying that marriage is supposed to exclude “man-on-dog” relationships — which led to Dan Savage’s campaign to redefine “Santorum” as “the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex”) but it should be noted that this was once a powerful argument. As Pat Buchanan noted while defending Santorum’s comments on 4/28/2003:

Consider. In his statement, Santorum expressed both a legal and a moral opinion. In the legal opinion, Santorum is saying that if the court overturns the Texas anti-sodomy law, and declares that a right to privacy protects all consensual sexual activity by adults, then all other laws that outlaw consensual sex — laws against incest, adultery and bigamy — also go out the window. Santorum is dead right. Indeed, it was fear of that result that led the court to uphold the Georgia anti-sodomy law in the 1980s.

(Again, do none of these people realize that “bigamy” isn’t a sex position?)

Of course, slippery slope arguments are considered a fallacy for a reason, not because it’s impossible that a slope will be slipped down, but because it has nothing to do with the topic at hand. Before gay marriage was legal, someone could ask — as many on the right did — “what’s next, allowing bestiality, incest, and polygamy?” Well, now gay marriage is legal and has been legal nationwide for six years, and if someone advocates for banning it you can ask “What’s next, banning interracial marriage? Banning cross-religious marriage? Banning marriage all together?” In both of these situations, nobody has actually mentioned the positives and negatives of having a culture that allows gay marriage — they’ve just danced around it and warned that other bad things will happen if the other side gets their way. Why is not possible to support that while opposing the hypothetical bad thing that could result from that? Once you realize the answer to that question is “it isn’t,” the entire point of these slippery-slope arguments starts to be seen: It’s just a tactic that waists your time.

For that matter, it’s always possible the very thing you’ll be worrying about us slipping towards is actually not all that bad. In one episode of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver showed a clip of a woman from Levittown, Pennsylvania warning in 1957 what would happen if “a Negro family” decided to move into her small town:

The whole trouble with this integration business is that in the end, it probably will end up with mixing socially. And you will have — Well, I think their aim is mixed marriages and becoming equal with the whites.

Yeah, so what? That’s a good thing, and if integration leads to it then I support integration as well.

With transgenderism, they at the very least have real stories of this happening, but the issue with the arguments is the same. They aren’t actually talking about the merits of transgenderism, they’re just moving the goalpost from if something is good to what might happen if a good thing happens.