Student: Everything that you have said on gender identity,
gender expression, John Money, pronoun usage...
What else... sex-gender distinction.
You are a hundred percent correct.
I don't know if you've ever heard
that from a trans person before.
Student: So I'd like to say that I'm actually a part
of that organization that was going to come
and try and derail you tonight.
I didn't hear a single thing though
that constituted an attack on queer
or trans lives or an attack on me personally.
So, I don't know what they were on about there.
Moreover, everything that you have said on gender identity,
gender expression, John Money, pronoun usage...
What else... sex-gender distinction.
You are a hundred percent correct.
I don't know if you've ever heard that
from a trans person before. I identify as a trans woman.
You are a hundred percent correct on that.
It is an absolute travesty
that the trans community bases everything
on such vacuous concepts.
My thing is though, is I don't agree with your conclusion.
I don't agree with it.
But more
so the reason why I don't
is less a matter of argumentation
and more so a matter of method.
You've stated time and time again that your approach to
this is to try and keep things simple and uncomplicated.
As in, you don't try and engage
with the nuance of the position of trans people,
but that's exactly how my org treats you.
They don't think your
arguments are worth looking at
because they cast you as a transphobe.
I did otherwise,
I looked I'm like, yeah, no
this guy's absolutely correct on all these things.
Walsh: So wait, which conclusion are you...
You said you disagree with my conclusions.
Student: Well it's the conclusion
of the model that you're postulating of gender.
You have man women, they're
biologically contingent.
My question is
do you think that defaulting to simplicity,
if this is the most dire issue of the age,
which is something else that I agree with you on,
do you really think that a method
of simply re-coursing to the most simplistic matter
of approach is what we should be doing here?
Walsh: Yes.
Student: Really?
Walsh: Yeah, I do.
I appreciate,
I appreciate everything that you said
and I appreciate your attitude.
I very rarely encounter your attitude from that
side of the of the ideological aisle.
So I appreciate, I appreciate that, but yeah.
I do think that making it simple is the right approach
because to my view, it is a very simple question.
Now, if you want to get into the personal experiences
of each individual and, you know, someone who
is experiencing gender dysphoria and
what do we do to treat that problem?
Sure. There's all kinds
of personal subjective nuances and things like that.
And if my child came
to me and said that they were confused about their identity
I wouldn't just say, ah, get out of my face,
I would want to sit down and talk to them.
And that's when
that becomes a sort of an interpersonal exchange.
And so you get into some
of those personal nuances and everything, and that's fine.
But the underlying fact, the underlying reality is simple,
that there are only males and females in the human race.
There are no other categories.
There is no third sex.
It doesn't exist.
Even though we hear about intersex people,
an actual intersex person would be
someone who has the reproductive capacities
of both men and women, males and females,
such a person has never existed ever.
So what I see here
is a binary system and in that way, it's very simple.
And I think that has to be our message.
Student: I would still even say respective to that
that even if from your standpoint,
there's only this binary,
there's two, there's complexities and nuances
even within social navigation that still
might be worth you looking into.
I would also say that a lot
of your facts also are off respective to, for instance
the first sexual reassignment surgery actually
happened in 1920s.
So that's before John Money.
Walsh: Well, I didn't say his was the first.
Student: What?
Walsh: I didn't say his was the first,
it was probably the first one done on a two-year-old but,
I said he was the one who invented.
We started by saying, you started by saying, you agree
with everything I said, and now we're going back and you...
I'm a little confused now.
Student: My point is that if you
have it to where you can get
to a different conclusion from the same arguments, it means
that there might be something deeper going on here.
That people who are actually philosophers
not rhetoricians need to be dealing with.
Walsh: Okay, let me, I'll just,
we got to move to the next question
but let me just ask you this so we can clarify where we are.
Student: Yeah.
Walsh: Do you agree that there are only males
and females in the human race?
Student: No.
Walsh: Okay, so you definitely don't agree with my
conclusion then at all,
we actually are totally on opposite sides of this question,
it turns out. So what are the other categories
if not male and female?
Student: We are going to be here all night
if I have to do that, you know?
Walsh: We're not because there's none
that you can list.
So it's actually very short conversation.
Student: All right well, you're wanting
to say that you have these
other social categories, right?
It's a question of... you're saying "are," right?
So the question here for me would be one of ontology
in so far as we're trying to posit that there is some kind
of specificity, right?
And you would look at something like intersex and say
that this is like some kind of weird border case?
That's a question of the kind of continuum that would allow
for one to come into an embodiment that you
would cast as male or female.
But, something that's really interesting is you said
that something like age makes more sense to identify as.
You at one point had
female genitalia when you were in utero.
So you've passed through that.
And what happens to intersex people is
that there's just some kind of different
development that occurs there.
So respective to us talking about these categories,
it's not a case that there being this hard line thing.
The reason why we also are not going to get anywhere
here is because I actually would
agree with you that something
like woman is what would, in a technical sense
be called a floating signifier, so it doesn't have
this particular designated meeting to it.
Walsh: All right.
Student: So that's why we're not going to go anywhere
to talk about that.
Walsh: That's pretty clear, but I appreciate it.
Thank you for, thanks for the question.
Student: Thank you.
Walsh: There's just two quick
quick follow ups on that.
One thing I think, this is a tactic that you encounter
on the left all the time when it comes to gender,
which is to try to obscure it and make it sound complicated
and to throw a lot of these sort
of abstract ideas into it, and from what I've discovered
and this conversation didn't change my view at
all on that is that that's the only tactic they have, right?
It's just try to make it seem complicated.
But yet,
while also not offering any alternative answers at all.
And the final thing on intersex, because
maybe someone else will bring this up.
Just so we could get
that question out of the way, because it always comes up.
Number one, intersex...
that category has nothing to do with trans, right?
Trans woman
is a biological male who identifies as a female.
So even if I were to agree
that intersex people are some sort of exception,
that would do nothing to vindicate the trans man
because that's a different category.
But as it turns out, intersex people are not an exception.
These are people who suffer from a deformity
from a condition. Just like someone might be born
with one arm rather than two, that does not negate
or undermine the fact that human beings have two arms.
But if someone is born with only one,
then you know that something went wrong along the way.
They ought to have had two
but they didn't because something went wrong.
So a deformity or a sickness doesn't undermine
the principle that we're dealing with.