Philosophers distinguish between natural kinds (e.g. tiger, rip tide, vulcano) and social kinds (e.g. money, marriage, age of majority). We have little control over the former (except for classifying them); we simply encounter them (in nature). Social kinds, on the other hand, are constructed by us. We made up the kind ‘age of majority’ (you will not find it in nature) and we can, for example, change the age of majority from 21 to 18, we have control over it. But we can’t change the roar of a tiger, or to make it sound like a pussy-cat. In contrast, we have changed the social kind ‘marriage’ to include same-sex couples.
Robin Dembroff realises that accepting transracialism would threaten transgender ideology. Black people will not stand for it, whereas many women repeat the slogan: Transwomen are women. Dembroff’s solution is to ‘construct’ a difference, so that the former can be rejected, but the latter remains: “Unlike gender inequality, racial inequality primarily accumulates across generations. Transracial identification undermines collective reckoning with that injustice.” This is tenuous, at best.
The argument implodes if you realise that the social category ‘woman’ has a biological foundation: ‘woman’, understood as a natural kind. The social kind supervenes upon the natural kind, i.e. the social role ‘woman’ has an underlying material basis: being of the female sex. There is no such foundation to being a transwoman, it supervenes on the social kind, the social role, of ‘woman’. One social role (transwoman) supervenes on another, itself supervening, social role (woman). The concept ‘transwoman’ is supervenience squared, or supervenience of supervenience. It is indeed an ethereal creature, born of the imagination of trans-friendly academics. This realisation – there is only supervenience and no substance – is a thorn in the side of trans activists. For this reason they attack sexual dimorphism, or they claim that that gender-critical feminists believe in ‘biological essentialism’.
Trans activists want to kick the biological foundation from under the concept ‘woman’. The aim of trans activists, and their supporters in academia, is to make both concepts (women and transwomen) free-floating, supervening on nothing. Only if they could get rid of the foundation of the concept ‘woman’, would the slogan ‘Transwomen are women’ be true.
Dembroff claims that just as women experience misogyny, transwomen experience ‘transmisogyny’. But this is a misnomer. Transwomen experience hate, mockery and discrimination because they are males who play the social role of ‘woman’, not because they are female. The correct term for this would be ‘transmisandry’. Only those transwomen who pass as ‘women’ might experience misogyny, e.g.: Women can’t join this club, it’s gentlemen only! In contrast, ‘Transmisogyny’ is the hate which trans activists direct at women who question trans ideology (like J.K. Rowling).
What Dembroff says about men and women is a strange take on the history of gender inequality (better: ‘sex inequality’) – it has of course accumulated over millennia. There is a long history of violence, oppression and discrimination by men against women. Dembroff sacrifices good reasoning for the right outcome, which will support trans ideology.
“The danger for trans women is that if wearing what are traditionally women’s clothes becomes the norm for men too, then trans women will no longer be able to rely on these props to help them display a female gender identity – and for many, that could be a serious problem.”
Miroslav Imbrisevic 