five short poems about “what if people call themselves toasters now”
one
is this a problem in your life
toaster people
do you know many toaster people
do they cause you many problems
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two
a woman says she is a woman
a man says he is a man
a person says they are neither
and your thoughts turn to toasters
why
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three
okay, maybe some people are toasters now
this is okay
hi toasters
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four
i am not sure how to talk to a toaster, what they will want?
bread?
not bread?
but i am ready to listen
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five
Calling people “toasters” is a really cheap and frivolous argument when there are actual lives at stake here. It might make sense to pull out in some shooting-the-breeze theoretical debate, but trans people are not theoretical creatures of whimsy. We’re real people whose needs are human and include such extravagances as “peeing” or “being able to go to the doctor.” What fucking kind of person do you have to be to hear that people who come out as trans are losing their families and livelihoods and lives, and to think your fucking toaster joke is relevant commentary? Fuck.
I object in the strongest possible terms to the idea that you’re not allowed to consider the philosophical implications of a demand if you can prove that demand is important to somebody.
This is the same argument people are always using to justify every illiberal and dictatorial thing that’s happened throughout history: “Think of the children! The risk is too dire to do that thing where we take a moment to worry about stupid things like principles.”
(“How dare you natter on about privacy, that’s totally theoretical, but REAL PEOPLE are dying of terrorism RIGHT NOW and there are actual lives at stake here, you dipshits!”)
I will defend the right of transgender people to use whatever bathroom they want, and I’ll also defend the right of people who are not on board with reducing all definitions to self-identification to question whether that system proves too much.
(and then I’ll tell everybody that the correct answer is to taboo the question of whether this person really is a man, make laws based on the obvious utilitarian considerations, and then take up the definitional question later in some context where the people working on it will be people who really care about philosophy of language and not culture warriors)
(wow I wish I could snip posts for length)
I don’t think that when most people say “what next, people identifying as toasters?” in response to trans people, they’re seriously considering the philosophical implications of self-identification. I think they’re saying that a person identifying differently than their assigned sex is as absurd and hilarious and unworthy-of-consideration as a human identifying as a toaster.
To which my response is: (1,3,4) I’m actually just fine with self-identified toasters, as long as they don’t do anything otherwise to bother me, and in general I think fretting about unconventional self-identification is unnecessary. And (2,5) comparing trans people to toasters is a mocking and trivializing move, not a genuine attempt to discuss the boundaries of identity, and is really nasty for that reason.
I actually agree with your final answer, but I’m also pretty sure it’s not going to happen anytime soon in US society, so I’ll settle for “yes, really a man” as a useful if philosophically incomplete stopgap.
Also I was cranky because I had to spend the whole day listening to Fox News via patients’ TV sets. The “fucks” philosophically express the proposition of cranky.
And I’m cranky in the opposite direction because I’ve been reading Tumblr all day, so I’ll forgive you if you’ll forgive me. But I think I find the “toaster” objection much stronger than you do. To me it goes something like this (content warning: arguing about transgender):
A: Please let me into the men’s bathroom
B: But you’re not a man, you have a uterus and two X chromosomes and stuff.
A: But I self-identify as a man. That makes me a man.
B: No. If you self-identified as a toaster, that wouldn’t make you a toaster.
A: No, this concept can be divided into at least two axes: a physical axis based on chromosomes, genitalia, et cetera, and a social axis based on social role and self-identification. So because I self-identify as a man, I’m actually a man.
B: Hold on. Even granting your system, I think the word “man” should be used to refer to the physical axis, not the social axis. This is how we’ve used it for thousands of years and how most people understand the concept. I am happy to say you are a real woman who prefers to socially identify as a man, and to adjust the way I socially interact with you accordingly.
A: No, the real axis is the social role one. You should say I am a real man who happens to have female-typical chromosomes and genitalia, and then if you ever need to interact with my genitals you can adjust that accordingly.
B: I am pretty sure the real axis should be the physical one. Suppose you identified as a toaster. I would rather call you a human who happens to socially identify as a toaster, rather than a toaster that happens to have a human-typical body.
A: And I am saying I disagree with that. I would prefer you call such a person “really a toaster” but add if necessary that they have a human-typical body.
B: But I think that misunderstands language’s role as a system of categorization. We have lots of reasons to want to distinguish between humans and toasters. If we define humans who identify as toasters as toasters, almost everything we want to think or talk about will use the categorization system [(humans and trans-toasters) vs. (cis-toasters)], and not the categorization system [(humans) vs. (trans-toasters and cis-toasters)]. For example, (humans and trans-toasters) can walk upright, talk, do math, write books, and should be legally obligated to pay taxes. (cis-toasters) can make toast and should be legal to smash with hammers if you so desire. The category toasters (meaning trans-toasters and cis-toasters) is totally useless. Because of this, every time we want to communicate useful information about toasters, we have to say “cis-toasters”, and every time we want to communicate useful information about humans we have to say “assigned-humans-at-birth”. I don’t know if there would be any reason at all to ever use the category “toasters” without the qualifier “cis”. So it sounds like all we are doing is replacing two perfectly clear words, “humans” and “toasters”, with two longer and more awkward words, “cis-toasters” and “assigned-humans-at-birth”, plus adding the possibility of accidentally saying “toasters” at the wrong time and so offending a bunch of people and maybe getting doxxed and fired.
But I don’t think even this would work. This isn’t satisfying our hypothetical person’s desire to identify as a toaster, it’s routing around it mercilessly. We’re replacing every instance of words that could possibly make the trans-toaster sound like an cis-toaster with a different, unambiguous word - essentially rewriting the dictionary to turn the word “toaster” into “cis-toaster” without admitting any philosophical implications. If the person were to stick to their guns at all, they would then demand to be identified as a cis-toaster, the word which means what “toaster” means now. They’d probably even say that they had terrible dysphoria if you didn’t do it, and that you were literally ruining their life. So what are you going to do? Keep coming up with ever more complicated linguistic circumlocutions like cis-cis-cis-toasters? Or lose the ability to meaningfully talk about humans as distinct from toasters at all?
A: I agree language is a system of useful categorization. But the thing we actually want to categorize people as, when we talk about gender, is social. Nobody except a doctor cares what genitals you have. But many people may want to interact with you socially. And even in a purely physical sense, many trans people are biologically more similar to their gender of identification (thanks to hormones, surgery, etc) than their gender assigned at birth.
B: I think you’re totally wrong about what we actually want to categorize people by. The vast majority of the population is either heterosexual or homosexual. Those people care a lot about compatible genitals, especially if they want to reproduce some day. Let’s face it, the most important thing about gender is who is or isn’t a potential relationship partner for whom. I don’t care whether you’re aggressive and love sports, or whether you’re domestic and love knitting. In fact, even if I did, your system would fail. There are many people who identify as a gender but do not follow that gender’s roles - for example, transwomen who are butch lesbians. If you wanted to use gender to communicate something about a person’s social interaction style or interests or something, that would be a totally different proposal than the one you’re making. The one you’re making is that people should be able to choose it through self-identification regardless of their chromosomes, or their body type and hormones, or the social roles they most often take. And none of this even comes close to applying to toasters. As soon as one person in the world declares themselves to be a toaster, we open a whole new can of worms.
A: I think you are misunderstanding language’s contextual nature. If there was only one person in the world who wanted to identify as a toaster, we could generally refer to cis-toasters as “toaster”, and only refer to toasters in a self-identification sense when that person was in the room, or we were talking about them, or something.
B: But this is why I always bring up that only like 0.3% of the population identify as trans. By your theory, we should be able to talk about “woman” to mean “cis-woman” unless we are in some context obviously related to specific trans people. But in fact I have heard people protest the existence of “Women’s Health Centers” to mean “gynaecology / obstetrics centers”, because they note that some people with vaginas and uteruses are men, plus some women have penises and don’t need those centers at all. Surely you’ve been on Tumblr and noticed conversations about gender constantly getting derailed by people objecting no, men don’t have male privilege, some men and some women have male privilege and other men and other women don’t, depending on what they were assigned at birth and how they pass and so on. Your theory that people are good enough at linguistic context to effortlessly code-shift is completely false. What’s more, it will be torpedoed by direct enemy action. I predict that as soon as one person anywhere in the world identifies as a toaster, anybody who makes the statement “toasters are appliances”, even in a neutral context, even far away from that one person, will get yelled at by social justice people, doxxed, and fired from their job.
A: And I think your prediction is wrong. I’m sure there’s already someone somewhere who so identifies, and I haven’t seen any firings yet.
B: That’s just because the activists are too busy getting other people fired for other things. As soon as those issues go away, they’ll be able to focus on the toaster people. In fact, I would accuse them of hypocrisy if they didn’t. What, do they have some standard like “You must be greater than 0.29% of the population in order for us to insist everyone switch the way they use language because of you”? Even that wouldn’t work, because they still insist on the trans thing in countries that are lower than 0.29% trans.
A: I think there is a big difference between the number of people who identify as transgender - probably in the millions worldwide - and the number of people who identify as transtoaster - probably less than a dozen. A quantitative difference that large is as good as a qualitative difference.
B: What about otherkin? I bet there are thousands of people who identify as foxes. But having to replace our term fox with “cis-fox” seems just as silly as having to replace “toaster” with “cis-toaster”. What’s more, I think if we start providing incentives, these things will change a lot. Trans-women are put in women’s prisons? If I committed a crime, I think I’d much rather be in a woman’s prison than a men’s prison, given what I’ve heard about the sorts of people in the latter. If anyone identifies as a trans-fox or a trans-toaster, eventually they’re going to start demanding some kind of rights - the right to live in national parks, the right to not pay taxes - and at that point either we’re going to have to say “Sorry, guys, you’re not really foxes and toasters”, or a heck of a lot more people are going to want to identify as such.
A: Tell me honestly. If we let trans people use the bathrooms they want, do you really think that fifty years from now the government will be tying itself into knots trying to figure out whether trans-foxes should be allowed to live in national parks, and we’ll have people identifying not just as toasters but as cis-cis-cis-toasters?
B: Honestly, no. I expect people to be shameless hypocrites. All the same people who get enraged when a dentist hunts a lion but see nothing wrong with millions of cows being tortured in factory farms for their entire lives - these people will arrange for anyone who doesn’t support transgender people to be doxxed and fired, and for anyone who does support trans-toaster people to be doxxed and fired, and the horrible unprincipled monkey politics that are our society will keep ticking along regardless. Probably a few people - both idealistic leftists and idealistic conservatives - will notice the contradiction from one direction or the other, speak up about it out of genuine concern with truth and justice, and be doxxed and fired in their turn. If another equally thorny problem comes up, it will be also be settled by whoever is able to doxx and fire people the most people, and we can only hope that the process continues to produce moral progress regardless.
A: I admit that would be unfortunate, but is it as unfortunate as people being forced to suffer from gender dysphoria for their entire lives?
B: No, but I don’t want to do that either! I think there are ways to solve this which would also solve the potential future problems in a slightly more principled way. For example, we have two sets gender binary terms, man/woman and male/female. It would be easy to take one of these to refer to the social role and another to refer to the biological axis. Then it will be very obvious that a trans-man is a “real man” but not a “real male”, or vice versa. Pronouns are a problem specific to this issue that can be recast to refer to the social role. Then for future toaster-related issues we could just append trans- or -identified, eg “this person is a trans-toaster” or “this person is toaster-identified”, and leave the words “toaster” and “real toaster” (if you must) to refer to physical toasters. That would help solve the linguistics. We could decide all legal questions on a utilitarian basis. If there were millions of trans-foxes suffering intense species dysphoria for not being able to live in national parks, and they were able to convince the government that they wouldn’t damage the parks in any way, and nobody expected it to lead to so many new trans-fox-identifications that it screwed up the park system, then sure, let them be in national parks. Since this will never happen, this is an easy concession for me to make. And if it does happen, I can still be pretty satisfied with the result.
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In my opinion anything stronger than this (ie saying that transwomen are “really women” and ”really female” and that any attempt to connect them to maleness at all is just objectively wrong ignorant misgendering - is in fact vulnerable to something like the toaster objection. If you disagree I would like to hear your reasoning.
I’m not saying that everyone making the toaster objection has thought about it as deeply as (A). But I also don’t think everybody objecting to the toaster joke has thought of it as deeply as (B), and maybe if they actually engaged with the argument and took it seriously, it would lead them in that direction. In my experience the only thing that has ever helped me get more sophisticated about anything is taking people I disagree with seriously (steelmanning if necessary, because lots of people who disagree with me are idiots) and adjusting my beliefs in order to survive their challenges.
worldlypositions