Episode
Debate: Is a Trans Woman a Woman?
- Podcast
- The Radicalist
- Published
- May 18, 2025
- Duration seconds
- 8702
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://www.theradicalist.com/p/debate-is-a-trans-woman-a-woman
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Summary
This debate came about after I wrote an essay, “ Trans Women Are Trans Women ,” in response to Matthew Adelstein’s essay, “ Why I Think Trans Women Are Women .” I wanted to have the conversation for two reasons. First, I’m a student of philosophy and former university lecturer of logic, debate, writing, and public speaking — basically, how to think and express those thoughts — so for me, civil discourse is a personal discipline much like chess or martial arts, two of my favorite pastimes. But it’s also a benefit to society because if more of us openly engaged in civil discourse over contentious issues by playing the game rugby-rough but, like all good ruggers, able to grab beers after — we’d be better off. Second, because this slogan represents the most extremist form of woke ideology, alongside “math is racist,” and as I wrote, it’s profoundly dangerous: Orwell had a word for the process of distorting basic truths in order to further some political agenda or enforce ideological conformity. He called it doublespeak . I often call it ontological gaslighting, like the scene in the book in which the Party finally gets Winston to accept that two plus two is five. This is how the book ends, because this is the final and greatest defeat of the human soul by an authoritarian regime. Namely, getting someone to deny an objective fact. As Winston writes in his diary early in the novel, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” To put that the other way around, slavery is the impulse to say that two plus two makes five. If that is accepted, all else follows. Two plus two is five. Silence is violence. Math is racist. Men are women. Adelstein claims long hair or painted nails makes one more of a woman, and having enough femin…