Unicorns. Leprechauns. Sasquatch. Pro-life Democrats.
These are all things that do not exist. We can add one more mythical creature to the list, however. Transgender people are not real. They are as fantastical a creature as the Leviathan, the Loch Ness Monster, the Abominable Snowman, and Elizabeth Warren’s supposedly Cherokee grandmother.
There is one primary reason transgender people do not exist, and the reason is purely scientific and biological. Transgender people do not exist because no one in the history of the world has ever transitioned their gender.
This is not a religious argument. I am not asserting that transgender people are bad morally. I am asserting that transgender people do not exist scientifically.
The word trans is a prefix in English that serves as a morpheme. It stands for transitioning, transitioned, transforming, or transformed. We see this prefix in words like transportation (to go from one place to another), to transfer money (to take it from one account to another), or transparent (to see from one end to another).
A variant prefix of trans is
Certain things can be trans, and certain things cannot. One of the things that cannot be trans is gender. It’s a scientific and biological impossibility.
The word gender is derived from the Latin genus, which refers to a biological kind or variety. Scientifically, a genus is tied intrinsically to biology and objective fact.
For thousands of years, people have understood that ones’ gender was the same as their biological sex. Biological sex is not dictated by external anatomy, but by DNA. We recognize this in our use of the terms for men and women in English, including Mr. and Mrs. or Miss (the term Ms. was invented in 1900 to designated ambiguity regarding a woman’s marital status).
Although the term has been redefined in dictionaries within the last several decades, there is no question as to what gender has always traditionally and scientifically meant. The first person to claim there was a distinction between sex and gender was a sexologist in 1955 named John Money. In fact, prior to Money, the term gender was applied almost exclusively to language studies (languages have ‘genders’) and not people.
It wasn’t until the 1970s that it became slightly more common to make a distinction between sex and gender, taking a grammatical or linguistic designation and applying it to the physicality of human beings. Scientists do not apply this understanding consistently, as in animal studies today – almost universally – the terms gender and sex are used synonymously in veterinary science.
It wasn’t until 1993 that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration – under Bill Clinton – began to refer to ‘gender’ rather than ‘sex.’ Then, it wasn’t until 2011 – under President Obama – that the Food and Drug Administration actually distinguished (supposedly) between gender and sex. Until that time, for at least the last six thousand years of human history, gender was sex and sex was gender.
That being the history behind the term, the science is also compelling.
No one has ever transitioned from male to female or female to male. Gender is tied intrinsically to biology, and biology is written in our DNA.
If a man cuts off his penis, he is not a woman. He is an emasculated man. If a woman adds a penis, she is not a man. She is a deformed woman.
If a man puts on makeup, it doesn’t make him a woman. Likewise, if a woman takes off her makeup, it doesn’t make her a man.
Battles are won and lost by the art of propaganda. Every time we use the word ‘transgender’ we concede that transgender people exist. They do not. Confused people exist. Odd people exist. Self-deceiving people exist. But transgender people do not exist any more than tooth fairies or chupacabras.
A man can no more be ‘transgender’ than he can be a woman. It’s an impossibility.
We should refuse to use the term.
