Activists and policymakers have made the term confusing
When you hear someone describe me as a trans woman, what do you think this means? Recent polling commissioned by an Edinburgh-based policy collective has found that four in every 10 people do not know. As politicians have stumbled over the astonishingly simple question, “what is a woman?” it was long assumed that we knew what a trans woman is. But evidently not.
The survey polled 1026 individuals on the trans woman question. Only 60% answered correctly — “someone registered male / a boy at birth”. Over a fifth (21%), thought it was someone who had been registered female, or a girl at birth, while 19% did not know. That matters when the term is used so widely — yet almost always without further explanation. When such a large proportion of the public does not comprehend the terminology, they are hardly going to grasp the issues associated with it.
That was not a one-off anomaly. Another group of 1008 people was asked the similar question, “when you hear someone described as a transgender woman, what do you think this means?” That cohort did slightly better — 65% realised that they belonged to the group that was registered male at birth — but over a third of the sample either did not know, or did not know that they did not know.
Let’s be clear: this is not a question of metaphysical beliefs about whether male people can be a type of women (spoiler: we can’t); this polling has found that over a third of the population either thinks that trans women are actually female, or they do not know whether they are male or female. Terminology so widely misunderstood is at best unhelpful, and can be downright misleading. With this new research, ignorance can no longer be an excuse.
On an emotional level, the descriptions trans woman and transgender woman register very differently to the term “male transsexual”, but they all refer to someone of the male sex. Indeed, the only people who cannot be trans women are women. But that sort of language is strongly discouraged by activists and those they have captured with their ideology. People have lost their jobs after denying that males can be women.
This should also be a wake-up call to anyone who reports on transgender issues. We must never again see headlines such as, “Trans woman Isla Bryson jailed for eight years for raping two women”. Both terms — “trans woman“ and “transgender women“ — were unknown until little more than 20 years ago. It’s beyond time that we returned to clear and simple English which everybody understands and, using that outrage in Scotland as an example, point out that a male called Isla Bryson was jailed for eight years for raping two women. Who can argue with that?
Debbie Hayton
* This article was first published by Unherd on 8 August 2023: Why is defining ‘trans woman’ so difficult?
Debbie Hayton 
12 replies on “Why is defining ‘trans woman’ so difficult?”
Debbie, this is the first article you’ve written that I find a little confusing. Are you suggesting that trans women always be referred to as male? You and I understand that that is what they ARE, but it seems disrespectful. In your case, I think that I would like you if I met you, and I certainly respect your writing and unselfish point of view, so I would want to call you whatever would make you most comfortable, and I assume that would be “woman, she, her”, etc. I’ve seen you argue against the concept of gender identity, and yet you would seem to be a man who indeed has a female gender identity. My objection to the term is that trans activists are trying to apply it to everyone and want to use it as a means to identify REAL women.
In an ideal world, a man could represent either as a man or woman, and no one would think twice about it. Unfortunately, the association of male appearance with male sex, and female appearance with female sex, is so deeply ingrained that the ideal situation I just mentioned may never exist. It’s possible, though.
Just as women can wear pants, it would be ideal if men could wear dresses and everyone would accept it. (I say that, and yet I don’t react well to men in dresses UNLESS they are presenting as trans. I remember seeing photos of some male celebrity wearing a dress, and I wasn’t impressed. I guess my sexual prejudices are too deep.)
What’s tripping us up is the word “real”. Most trans people want to be considered “real” as the sex they want to be. You say that you present as a woman because you feel most comfortable that way, yet you eschew the term “gender identity”, which seems a little odd. If you believed in the term “gender identity”, at least for yourself, then that would make sense.
I DO hold metaphysical beliefs. In at least some cases, I believe the soul chose the wrong sex before birth … but since metaphysical causes can’t be proven, there’s no point in discussing them.
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I agree Debbie. The language we’re using is very confusing to a lot of people especially as a lot of the more vocal trans women don’t seem to like women very much and appear to have little respect for them. So why do they want to be one? Well they clearly don’t, they want to be a different version of human being, so really they should have a different name. Do trans men act in a similar way to men? If so we never seem to hear about it. Or do they admire men and want to be accepted by them ?
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It’s difficult to know how much we, as a society, can retreat from the rabbit-hole of identity politics, but I imagine “trans man” and “trans woman” will probably be here to stay. The trans issue is just one aspect of identity politics and wider philosophical trends like Queer Theory, Critical Social Justice, Deconstructivism and Postmodernism.
So many ideas have just slipped into our consciousness over recent decades without us noticing or imagining they’re unequivocally good things, and I think a big one is the idea that we have a right to identify ourselves however we like. It’s a “nice idea”, it seems incontrovertible from a progressive stance, yet it is utterly unreasonable. Society, other people, identify us, whether we like it or not. At the very minimum, identification has to be a negotiation between an individual and society. Letting people identify however they like, and demanding we all comply with that, removes the distinction between reality and fantasy, sanity and insanity, and necessarily opens us to accepting that this “human right” is of limitless scope.
As we’ve seen, the limits aren’t just outside human sexes, but include behaviours normally and rightly thought of as dangerous for vulnerable people, like “minor-attracted persons”, or clearly bonkers, like the furries, or white people who identify as black. Society is being groomed as a whole to accept personal identification as sacrosanct.
We’re pushing back, and we’re unlikely to see demands for provision of water bowls and scratching posts in public buildings, for people to be able to take their “pet” on a bus without the “pet” paying a fare, because – y’know – they’re a “dog”.
But that’s where the logic goes as soon as we replace objective identification of people with their subjective claims. The latter encourages insanity and sociopathy.
Sorry, that wasn’t much in the way of a reply, and rather long, but your comment set me off in that direction!
I’ve started following some more radical commentators online, who say we need to scrap all of the wider stuff as well, the postmodern garbage and identity politics, the DEI nonsense that’s infiltrated academia and virtually everywhere else. And along with that is the realisation that we need to stop using all their fake terms. We need to return to objective language about things and people. It’s what Orwell warned us about: doublethink and Newspeak, and “wrongthink”. This way, if we’re not very careful, lies communism, seriously.
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I agree. Humans until recently have understood certain accepted truths that enable us to communicate and interact with the rest of the world. If these truths are taken away and we can no longer rely on our recognition of the people around us does this make us more or less confident in our ability to cope with the world. I would say less. How can this be a positive thing?
We are a community and as such it is important that we learn to fit in and operate within that group otherwise we fall apart and are then vulnerable to forces that do not wish us, individuals, to have any power at all.
United we win, divided we fall.
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I just want to say that none of these ideas slipped into MY consciousness over the years. They struck me as ridiculous from the start, and I rejected them from the start.
The only identity that no one can object to is homosexuality — and yet, that’s the one that all the religions are against. Being attracted to your own sex is not impossible at any level. All of these other identities — trans-sexual, trans-racial, trans-age, trans-animal, etc. — are all impossible, which is why I suppose the Bible never mentions them (people back then had a firmer grasp on reality).
As for DEI, accepting people with mental disorders as normal may in fact be doable — if you consider that we all have some form of mental illness. We have to be careful not to call them “normal”, however — although, given my belief in reincarnation, and my belief that a lot of trans people chose the wrong sex before they were born, people with genuine gender dysphoria could be considered normal to some degree — although how normal can it be when it compels people to medically alter their normal bodies?
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Pauline, I have written about the contempt that trans women have of real women, and I think I know why they feel that way. A man who has decided that he feels like a woman eventually realizes that he cannot be a woman. He may feel like a woman inside (or think he does), but at some point he has to accept that his male body cannot simply be dismissed, and that he will never actually be a woman because of his body. Thus, his identity as a trans woman evolves (not the identity of a woman, but a person who just FEELS like a woman). He recognizes that being a trans woman is distinctly different from being a woman, which means that real women are NOT his group. HIS group are trans women. Also, when he realizes that most real women resent his presence, he returns the resentment.
The bottom line is that trans women are envious of real women because real women have what a trans woman wants but can’t have: real womanhood.
(Sorry if my explanation is convoluted. I haven’t thought about this for a while.)
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It’s sad really because ‘ real womanhood’ isn’t all that great a lot of the time. I think the exception is when you give birth, which can be a truly extraordinary experience but it seems the scientific community want to reduce that to something that is managed by them.
If there was a group of people who decided they wanted the’ gay’ lifestyle. Dressed in a camp manner, behaved in an overly sexual way, harassed other gay men, hung around in their spaces but didn’t actually want to connect with them I think you might find that difficult to comprehend.
Before anyone screams transphobe’ I’m talking about the activists, the ones who turn up at women’s meetings dressed as bizarre stereotypes to intimidate and shout them down and the ‘bad apples’ who use trans as a cover and a distraction.
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So stop using their terminology. You’re not a “trans woman”. That is where the confusion arises, because it has the word, “woman” in it. You’re a man. Also, pronouns, in English, are important in distinguishing males and females, so you add further confusion by accepting female pronouns. Nouns, too, are important, like “son” and “daughter”, “father” and “mother”, yet you mix and match these, being the “trans woman” who is the “father” of your children. Debbie is just a name, but obviously adds to your female persona. You are essentially a man who presents to the world as if you were (i.e. pretends to be) a woman, while you criticise gender ideology and the trans train kids get put on. I’m not sure I get it anymore.
“Male transsexual” is hardly any better, because nobody can change sex. I think the problem is with pronouns, and definitely with buying into ANY of the gender newspeak like “trans” or “transwoman” or “gender identity”.
I have long thought that men should be able to put on makeup and wear dresses and high heels, but I’m starting to wonder, since it just adds to the confusion, and can lead to encroachment on others’ spaces. It’s also a kink for some.
Is there a reason you don’t detransition, even socially, Debbie? Most of the kids who realise it was all nuts detransition. They feel “gender dysphoria” as their new fake self. They want to get back to how they were, and have to live without the bits they can’t get back.
You seem to argue that kids shouldn’t take the route you took, while you remain at its destination. You argue that the terms are confusing, while you keep using them.
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I think I understand where Debbie is coming from. On the one hand, something compels her to want to be a woman or, at least, to present as a woman. And yet she is a logical scientist who doesn’t feel the need to justify it with illogic. She is too much of a Vulcan to be dishonest. As I say at the end of one of my own articles, Debbie has the attitude that all trans people should have: “I am a man who, for whatever reason, feels like a woman. I would appreciate it if you would treat me as a woman so that I can live my life the way I want to” (and similarly for transgender men). I suspect that Debbie doesn’t try to figure it out any more, any more than I try to figure out why I’m gay.
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As I see it, homosexuality and transsexualism are variations on typical human sexuality where the sexes signal to each other and are attracted to each other. If that were not the case we would not have survived as a species. Throughout history, humans continued to have sex, and therefore have children, even during the most difficult of conditions.
• Homosexual people are one variation where they are attracted to the signals from their own sex.
• Transsexual people are another variation where we signal like the opposite sex.
Both are instinctive and – I think – innate variations in the individual. We could ask the question, why would they do that? But I think a better question is why do so many follow the typical behaviour? I think that is the product of evolution, but I am open to suggestions.
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That makes a lot of sense, Debbie, and thanks for clarifying. I don’t see how the “better question” is why so many signal heterosexually, since that is what evolution requires for continuation of the species. The problematic condition for evolutionary theory is that which we might think doesn’t lead to procreation, although there are several explanations for homosexual behaviour, from giving selective advantage to close kin through socialising behaviour, to the simple null position that any feature can persist if it isn’t selected against sufficiently to cause it to go extinct (IIRC, it’s a while since I read up on it).
I wonder if your two categories – homosexual and transsexual – might actually be one, or closely related. Someone hypothesized that “transgenderism” is an extreme form of homosexuality, or a type thereof, where a person takes on the appearance and behaviour of the opposite sex because this is a way to signal sexually to their own sex (hence all the detransitioners realising they were just gay). This all gets confusing in my small brain, but seems to assume that the other – signalled to – is heterosexual, for the signalling to be of use, and yet, of course, the signal is false, so perhaps there is some bisexuality or kink involved for it to be successful (or it’s just a shock when the other finds out!).
I guess, from what you’ve said, that you would say transsexualism or transgenderism (including use of hormones and surgery) is ethical where informed consent is valid. That would honour adults’ right to autonomy, including body modification, as part of their sexual signalling or just preferred life choice, with (a) gatekeeping against ill-informed choices where possible, with therapy, etc., and (b) the understanding that nobody changes their actual sex. And you’ve made it clear that many social behaviours should be based on sex, not “gender”, e.g. in sport, toilets and changing rooms.
That, on the face of it, looks reasonable and commendable, but it’s a challenge to where I’ve got to in thinking about all this. My problem is working out where the line should be. If someone wants to behave and be accepted as the opposite sex, and passes well, should they use the opposite sex bathrooms? Or should we get used to what, for all the world, look like women walking into the men’s, whether they have to sit in a cubicle for a pee or whip their penis out at the urinal? I suppose we should. Will women become happy with their fellow women walking in looking like a man, bearded and butch? Will we all be happy with opposite-looking-people, as long as everyone knows what biological sex we all are?
What about beauty pageants? Shall we ignore the sexes who enter those or enforce them? Usually they are sexed, Miss Whatever (and…is it Mr Whatever?) – should those be like sports, excluding “transwomen” who might otherwise win a women’s beauty contest (as, indeed, they do)? Or are these cases refusing to allow people to live as they wish to?
My tiny noggin hurts, but my overall feeling is that blurring the boundaries between how we look and act, men and women, will throw up problems whatever we do – whether we know what sex we are or just call transwomen women. The only logical solution I can see is a kind of “Please, will everyone just stay in your damn lane!” avoiding all attempts to look and behave atypically, keeping everything nice and simple – yet that is obviously impossibly authoritarian and totally unethical!
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You responded with some very interesting ideas, Debbie. Believing as I do in reincarnation, I tend to default to that as an explanation for basic things like this which are hard to figure out.
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