Ethics Presentation

Definition of Transgender according to OED - “describing or relating to people whose gender identity does not match the sex they were said to have at birth”

This definition reveals a key concept behind the transgender movement, that of the sex-gender distinction. Without this, one cannot make the claim to be changing one’s gender, because the terms gender and sex are intimately linked. But with this claim intact, the transgender movement can continue.

As Christians, we have two good reasons to reject the sex-gender distinction as put forward in the definition. The first is this passage of Scripture given above - Genesis 1:27.

The second reason is that there are simply no good arguments for establishing such a distinction anyway. All of the contemporary arguments for the sex-gender distinction fail.

Catholic Philosopher Tomas Bogardus has surveyed the most popular arguments for the sex-gender distinction in contemporary philosophy. His analysis shows that they are all flawed.

In this paper, he gives the “traditional definition of man/woman,” which is simply that a woman is an adult human female and a man is an adult human male (Bogardus 2020, p. 875). He contrasts this with other definitions, which he calls revisionary. These are various, but the point is that they all have the distinction between sex and gender at their root (Bogardus 2020, pp. 876-877).

He then lists several arguments used to establish this distinction between sex and gender, and shows that they don’t stand up to analysis.

Consider the argument from intersex people and gender-vagueness. Jennifer Saul (cited in Bogardus 2020, pp 881-882) argues like this: “The ‘folk’ view of human biological sex is that (a) there are two mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive categories of human, male and female; (b) people fall neatly and easily into these categories. This view is false—there are people with XX chromosomes but male genitalia, people with XY chromosomes and female genitalia, people with various mixtures of male and female genitalia, and various permutations of chromosomes, genitalia, and secondary sex characteristics… So, one problem for understanding “woman” as a sex term is that intersexed people show that it is far from clear whom the sex term “woman” refers to. Consideration of intersexed people, and the way that they are often medically forced into one of our two sex categories, also helps to motivate the thought that a strict division between sex (biological) and gender (social) is not as tenable as it may have seemed. Sex is arguably, at least in part and in some cases, socially determined.”

Bogardus (2020, p. 882) represents her reasoning in this passage like this:

1. If man and woman are sex terms, then any adult human is either clearly a man or clearly a woman and not both.

2. But some adult intersex people are neither clearly men nor clearly women.

3. So, man and woman are not sex terms.

The logic here is that if man and woman are sex terms as well as gender terms, which is to say, biologically determined as much as culturally determined, then people should fit into either category clearly, but intersex people challenge this clarity. Therefore, it seems that man and woman are not terms that are biologically determined.

How might we challenge this? There are two responses that are worth bringing up. The first is that there are no categories that do not admit of some grey area. The example Bogardus (2020, p. 883) gives is of baldness. When can we say one is bald? Another example is wetness. One can have had a single drop land on their head, have walked through a light drizzle, or fallen into a swimming pool. At what point is it appropriate to call somebody wet? Does the fact that we can’t say exactly invalidate the category? This seems unlikely. And this is not just true for conceptual categories. Biological categories are just as vague at the peripheries. There are certain creatures that fall precisely into the definition, and other more marginal cases. In no case, however, is that grounds for discounting the category. Similarly with gender. The fact that certain people have biology that makes categorising them challenging is not grounds for discounting the category at all.

Also, if vagueness is problematic, then the traditional definition of man and woman, which defines them biologically, does better than any other revisionary definition. For example, Judith Butler defines gender along the lines of ‘performativity’ – one is a woman if one behaves like a woman in society. But how is that any less vague than the biological definition? Another definition of woman that separates sex from gender is one where a woman is defined as one who has suffered the prejudice that women suffer. Again, if vagueness is a problem, this definition suffers greatly from that problem (cf. Bogardus 2020, p. 883).

Why would we tell you this? It’s because, as mentioned above, the transgender movement depends on this distinction between sex and gender. This distinction is assumed, but when we look at the arguments we see that they are weak. We have, therefore, shown that there is no good reason to accept this distinction, and therefore transgenderism is already an ideology that is reeling.