Does Transition Exist?

On the futility of mere semantic debates

Me when I was in the middle of my transition

I have noticed a pattern whereby some on the gender critical side of things will tell me “You’re not a detransitioner because you never transitioned in the first place so therefore you could not possibly have detransitioned. Transition doesn’t exist because it’s impossible for males to ‘transition’ into a female.”

This strikes me as a rather sophistical argument, as I will demonstrate below. It relies on a naive, literal understanding of how language works, depending on the false idea that words can only have a single, literal definition instead of how language actually works, which is words having multiple connotations with different meanings.

Suppose you have two males. One of them says, “I have transitioned” and the other says, “I have not transitioned.”

On the basis of this statement alone, would we be able to make any predictions about how these two males might differ from each other? Yes, of course. We might make the following predictions about the male who says “I have transitioned” compared to the male who says “I have not transitioned.”

• They have on their medical record a history of being prescribed estrogen

• They have on their medical record a history of surgical intervention such as facial surgery, breast augmentation, or penile inversion

• They have initiated the legal process of name change

• They have initiated the legal process of have their gender marker changed

• They prefer to cross-dress and wear women’s clothes in their day-to-day life

• They have received either electrolysis or laser hair removal on their beard

• When asked how they identity, they are likely to not identity as their natal sex

• When asked whether the term “trans” they identity with, they’d say “yes”

All these things are concrete, measurable, empirical changes in the real world. None of these things require the belief that the male who “transitioned” actually turned into a female.

And yet, nevertheless, if we are told one male has transitioned and the other has not, we would be able to reliably pick out which is the transitioned male and which male has not transitioned.

Why? Because in common English vernacular the term “transition” has come to refer to a variety of similar such concrete actions that are undertaken by people who dislike their natal sex and wish to embody the opposite sex or at least move away from the associations of their natal sex.

Regardless of whether the males who transition actually change into females (they don’t) the word “transition” nevertheless has definite, concrete meaning insofar as it reliably picks out a clearly demarcated referent in the world. And when a word clearly picks out a demarcated referent in the real world and is used by native speakers, we can be sure that word as a definite meaning.

Words gain their meaning by being useful in social-linguistic contexts. The term “transition” has become useful precisely insofar as it is used to refer to the concrete actions I listed above. That’s just what the word means.

Now, is it true that some trans people believe “transition” also means that they have truly transitioned into females? Yes, of course. But it’s quite common for words to have multiple, conflicting definitions and one definition can be factual and another grounded in fantasy without thereby stripping the factual, concrete definition of definite meaning. And we need not buy into all the claims of gender ideology in order to use words like “transition” or “detransition.”

So what is detransition? It varies from person to person but depending on which of the concrete steps above they have taken, it involves walking back some of those steps however much as possible. For example, if Bob legally changed his name to Alice as part of his transition, then detransition would involve changing his name back to Bob and going by that name socially. Or if Bob started a prescription for hormones as part of his transition, detransition would involve stopping that prescription.

This is all rather elementary and it’s incredible that it even needs to be spelled out so basically.

But a lot of gender critical/TERFs are the ideological mirror of radical trans activists insofar as they have extremely rigid ideological politics that forces them into highly contorted mental gymnastics and sophistry in order to justify taking extreme philosophical positions that are “hard line” and lacking in any kind of nuance.

I find this mentality to be rather counterproductive and alienating to regular, intelligent people who are sympathetic to the gender critical movement but not so ideologically hardline.

I hope I have convincingly demonstrated the futility of trying to argue that “transition” does not exist.