Thread by @EveKeneinan

Trans ideology is a legacy of Descartes — and Kant — in that it holds there is some kind of sexed “spirit” or ghost that lives inside the sexed body, and can be sexed oppositely to the body.

One claims to be a woman if one’s “ghost” is “female” — even though one’s body is male.

No one, as far as I am aware, has ever come ever close to giving a coherent account of what it MEANS to say “My living body is male, but I am not male. I am in reality a female, despite my factical embodiment.”

What could this possibly mean? One has a sexed “spirit”?

It isn’t clear, if one’s body is male, what it could even mean to say that one is “really” female. What is female? Not one’s body, by definition. What, then?

One’s soul/spirit/ghost in the machine? Is that what an “identity” refers to? Really?

An “identity” is a way in which one is IDENTIFIED and IDENTIFIABLE. One has the “identity” of such-and-such if one IS such-and-such.

What does it mean “to identify as” such-and-such if one IS NOT the such-and-such in question?

Sounds like giving a false identity.

I give a FALSE IDENTITY when I identify myself as someone I am not.

Isn’t it similarly giving a FALSE IDENTITY to “identify as” something I am not?

If I am under 6 ft tall (and I am), isn’t “identifying as” someone over 6 ft tall simply PUTTING FORWARD A LIE ABOUT MYSELF?

No one has yet answered the question “If a man can validly identify as a woman, why cannot a member of the white race identify as a member of the black race?”

This is because it has no answer.

There is no reason whatever than one “works” while the other does not.

The act of “identifying-as” has exactly as much power to transmute a white person into a black person as it does to transmute a man into a woman — more, even, since race is more weakly grounded in biology than sex is.

Or again, no one can change his biological species by an act of “identifying-as”.

If a human being “identifies as” a dog, he is not a dog, but remains a human being.

One’s sex is, ontologically, as essential as one’s species. But are case of WHAT ONE IS.

Our species-being — human nature — is a case of essence. One’s sexed being is also essence: to each person belongs their sex as a MODE of their species-essence.

This is similar to the way in which it belongs to the essence of the natural numbers to have the modes EVEN or ODD.

Or again, to the essence of (Euclidean) TRIANGLE, its what-being, i.e. its WHAT-IT-IS, belong the MODES of acute, right, and obtuse.

An essential mode is essential in kind, it pertains to essence as what-being: it is what something is:

An essential mode is accidental qua the species-being, but is not accidental in regard to the entity.

That is, “triangle” as such isn’t acute by triangle-essence, but an acute triangle is essentially acute — because the mode belongs to the essence.

So in the case of human beings, one’s sex is accidental QUA human nature, i.e. being-human alone does not determine one as male or female, but rather that one is one or the other, as the two MODES of being-human.

A given person *is* essentially male or female, as much as human.

To note that neither “maleness” nor “femaleness” ALONE belongs to human species-being, is far from sufficient to make being-male or being-female accidental simpliciter. On the contrary, it belongs to human species-being, human essence, TO BE AS ONE MODE OR THE OTHER.

My essence belongs to my facticity, and is not in my control.

Being-a-human-being is not up to me. I cannot *cease* to be one without ceasing to be as such. Most of the things about my body belong to my facticity, and are not up to me: my age, my sex, my DNA, etc.

The fallacy of gender ideology is to point out that one’s sex is accidental qua essence simpliciter, that is, that human being, just as such, doesn’t determine one to be male or female but to OVERLOOK that being human does determine one to be EITHER male OR female as MODES.