One reason why it is good to listen to trans people first is because they have relevant facts. It's as if the villagers have a rumor about “the people who live on the other side of the mountain,” and one day someone shows up and says “I come from the other side of the mountain; what would you like to know?” and the villagers say, “No thanks; we’d rather continue examining our own arguments about whether it is possible for people to live on the other side of the mountain.”
Sometimes I witness cis people trying to figure out how trans people “ought” to live. They make a bunch of suggestions, like: this is how you should get checked out by a psychologist; handle your family, marriage, and job; what hormones and surgery are expected to do to your body; how you can or can’t use the restroom; whether your identity documents are legally valid; whether it’s OK if other people call you “he” or “she”; when you’re allowed to mention your identity and experiences; how you have to disclose your trans status to a new lover; and so on. And they are making all of this up on the spot. It is their 30-minute hypothesis. Maybe 30 seconds. While everyone’s experiences are different, many experiences will simply disprove the allegations as factually false. (“Yes, my birth certificate was legally changed.” “It is actually easier and more convenient for everyone if I use the bathroom of my current gender role rather than my former gender role.”)
Put in a different way: When I was majoring in philosophy (c. 2000), when we discussed “epistemology,” options for "how we know" included being able to touch something with our hands, reasoning it out through logic, and—just perhaps?—how our vocabulary or syntax biases us. I don’t remember anyone ever discussing identity (gender, race, nationality, etc.). More recently, however, I’ve seen scholars using “epistemology” in a more political sense: e.g. the colonizers who showed up last year have one way of knowing the land and its inhabitants, and the indigenous people who have always been there have another way of knowing. The indigenous people actually have a huge set of facts that the colonizers have never stopped to ask about or that the colonizers have actively tried to ignore, erase, and replace. “There is a footpath that goes around the mountain.” “We prefer to tunnel through the mountain.” “Given other relevant facts, tunneling through the mountain will cause problems.” “We will do it anyway because we inherently value digging tunnels and that is how we define progress.”
If the question is about trans people, trans people probably can offer a range of viable answers. Not making a specific effort to ask the people who are being discussed or who will be affected by the discussion is, itself, a kind of identity politics, in the sense that knowledge is about power, and every “way of knowing” is partially determined by our identities, and so knowledge is unavoidably political.
I don’t think it’s a matter of designating someone as “morally allowed” or “not morally allowed” to voice an opinion (though I might use that shorthand language when I’m not being nuanced or when I am being a little sarcastic). Sometimes it’s more important just to arrive at a good answer and/or to point at someone else and say: “They’re the expert. Ask them.” I realize that the question of "How should we determine whether an answer is good?" is perhaps the very point of all philosophy. What I mean is, for example, if the question is, “Is it good to harm people?” the correct answer is “No,” and what matters is that you give the correct answer, not whether someone has authorized you to give it. So if the question is, “Trans people: XYZ?” a valid answer might be “I don’t know! Ask a trans person!” which might ultimately be better than constructing an invalid argument and coming up with a wrong answer—the latter (arguing from non-knowledge) being an academic activity that cis men often feel allowed to do because they’ve been taught to do it and it’s part of their epistemology, but which is not ultimately good if it leads to guessing at and delivering wrong answers. (Other identities are also taught this: whiteness, for example. It is something I've had to unlearn as a white person. But it is definitely also specifically a cis man thing.)
Dawkins was trolling trans people on purpose. (I made this case in my longer article.) He hasn’t properly apologized nor embarked upon further study or discussion because he is happy with exactly what he said. It was understood the way he meant it to be understood. Plenty of institutions would be thrilled to host a forum featuring Dawkins and another person with a PhD who happens to be trans and thus is in a position to debunk his trolling. Alternatively, Dawkins could organize such a forum himself. He does not want to.
Related: Andrew Sullivan (a politically conservative gay cis man) wrote a terrible blog post last month in which he proposed specific legal/medical restrictions on gender transitions. He doesn’t have any expertise in this subject. He just invented a far-right side and a far-left side (defined as such in his imagination) and then proposed a compromise that he believes is moderate. Not that anyone asked him to do that, and not that his proposal is workable. Years ago, Sullivan said that a certain legislative proposal for LGBT employment nondiscrimination should delete the “T”; he reasoned that it wasn’t practically possible for the legislation to pass the U.S. Congress as long as the “T” was included. So, now he’s moved on to saying that trans people need to be restricted from transitioning. The reason I’m bringing this up is that it is related to the kind of thing Dawkins was tweeting. Dawkins tweeted something to make the idea of trans people seem ridiculous and untenable. When trans people are portrayed as weird and not-understandable, or when the idea of them being not-understandable is offered as a subject of “discussion” (as per Dawkins' tweet), it emboldens and enables conservatives like Sullivan—gay though they may be—to make specific political proposals to hurt trans people. It just deepens the delegitimization.
My justification for “trans men are men” is perhaps more experiential than it is “argument” or “narrative.” Everyone’s experience is unique. This is mine: I was born female. For all my adult life, I’ve had a beard, a flat chest, a deep voice, and a masculine first name with an “M” on all my legal identity documents. This applies to my high school diploma, my university diplomas, my job and credit history, my legal marriage, and my immigration. I worked at a corporate job for 11 years without ever telling anyone I grew up as a girl. I can’t get pregnant. I have not entered a women’s restroom since 1997, and people would scream if I tried. No one ever gave me permission to use the men’s bathroom because that’s not how bathrooms work. I use the men’s bathroom because it’s the correct bathroom for me. No one who meets me ever assumes I am trans, and I don’t usually bring it up. I don’t hide it; it’s right here on the Internet; but I am not important enough that anyone would ever Google me to investigate my gender. I am a man. I have a different history than most men have, but a trans man is a kind of man.
The act of explaining this is complex. It might be a sort of "speech act" in the sense of words that alter a shared reality. In my ordinary life, I am a man. When asked to explain exactly how I am a man, I tell a trans story, which reveals me more specifically as a trans man. A "trans man" (in my view) is not *less* of a man than a "cis man," but some people will automatically make that assumption. So, to them, I appear to be *more* of a man when I'm *not* explaining how I am a man. The Socratic-style "giving an account of my manhood" is actually working against me in other people's eyes, even though the account is sound.
Saying “trans men are men” is like saying “gay men are men” or “Jewish men are men.” The person has extra features that don't negate their gender. If people are confused by the phrase “trans men are men,” maybe it’s because they don’t have a mental image of what a trans man is, or maybe the image they have is an invention of their imagination. If they interacted with trans people, they would understand it easily. (Here, I"m talking especially about trans people who identify and live as men or as women. I recognize that some are nonbinary, but for the moment I'm just talking about those who are either men or women.) Those cis people would *experience* the trans person’s outward gender presentation from interacting with them on an ongoing basis, similarly to how a person experiences anyone else's gender, or their own gender while they are presenting it.
David Brooks had a column in the New York Times yesterday arguing that the word “cisgender” is too difficult for most people to understand. Since “cisgender” means “not transgender,” he may be implying that “transgender” is too difficult for most people to understand. It isn’t. The people are out there; their stories are out there. If people are having difficulty understanding “transgender,” it’s probably because they haven’t taken the time to think about it. Looking up “cisgender” in the dictionary ("not transgender") wouldn’t help much, and coming to recognize themselves as “cisgender” would blow their minds. These are also the people who might assume, “OK…so trans people are a third gender, and can't tehy just use the single-stall restroom in the basement?” and thus they don’t yet comprehend “trans women are women,” “trans men are men.” But if they put the time in to understand, they’ll get it.
Brigitte Baptiste, director of Universidad EAN in Bogotá, is a trans woman (she is out about this), but yesterday’s big newspaper article just has her talking about environmental sustainability, not about her gender. She’s a biologist, specializing in ecology. This is the sort of colleague who might be a good discussion partner for Dawkins (also a biologist), if he were actually interested. Baptiste is also the sort of person who people could identify with and look up to, regardless of her gender, because of the work she’s doing for ecological sustainability.
I understand people like Dawkins' (cis) perspectives on atheism. People might also like Baptiste's (trans) perspectives on ecology. Then, if—out of nowhere—Dawkins makes a rude and misinformed tweet about transgender identity, people therefore might not be so quick to identify with him, because they would also identify with the trans people about whom he was being rude.
