A December 11 ruling from a federal judge means that transgender individuals will (probably) be permitted to enlist in the U.S. military beginning on January 18. The news will predictably spark outrage in some circles, including arguments over whether transgender women are "really women" or "actually men". There is even a term, transgender-exclusionary radical feminism, or TERF, to describe feminists who do not believe that biological males who identify as female are "women".
One of the most widely shared and criticized articles on National Review's website in 2014 was the Kevin Williams piece, "Laverne Cox Is Not A Woman", referring to the transgender actress who co-stars on Orange Is The New Black. The article inspired many rebuttals along the lines of: "Laverne Cox Is a Woman, Despite What Some Dude Might Opine to an Audience of Millions".
What neither of these pieces acknowledges is that both sides are just arguing over the meaning of a word, which makes the whole debate pointless. Words don't have absolute meanings, the way that the diagonal of a right-angled triangle has an absolute length that can be determined by the Pythagorean theorem. Words only mean what the speakers of a language agree for them to mean. We refer to the color of a clear sky as "blue" and the color of grass "green", but if the whole English-speaking word agreed to switch the meanings of those words, so that we start calling the color of the sky "green" and the color of grass "blue", then those would be the new meanings of the words, and there would be no point in arguing over it.
Occasionally there are breakdowns in the agreement between different groups about what definition of a word to use, and that's all that's happening here. Transgender people and their allies define "woman" to include biological males who identify as women; other people do not. Myself, I'm inclined to go with the definition of a word that extends the most respect to people who identify as women; their self-identification does nothing to impinge on my freedom. But if I can't convince someone to go along with that definition, there's no point in arguing over it because we're not arguing facts, we're just arguing over the meaning of a word.
So, I'm disappointed whenever transgender allies argue for their meaning of the word "woman" simply by asserting it: "Yes, transgender women are women!" I support their efforts to gain more respect for transgender people, but being grounded in reality means recognizing when you're just arguing over a word definition, rather than arguing facts.
With the announcement that transgender troops will be allowed to enlist next year, there will be some debates over what affect this will have on troop morale, or even combat operations. While I think the anti-trans arguments in this case are on the wrong side of history -- a group of 56 retired generals issued a joint letter last August coming out against Trump's ban on transgender troops -- at least that is an argument about facts and concrete outcomes in the real world. It's not as silly as sitting around arguing over what a word "really" means.
