@Tandora , again please do engage with the direct points.
1) “They’re not making any claims about your experience/body; they’re telling you something about themselves.”
That concedes my core point. If the claim is only about a private inner state, then it isn’t knowledge of female experience. It’s a self-description. Calling that state “female” still borrows a public category (the sex class female) without access to its embodied reference point.
2) “To be a trans woman is to be registered male at birth but to understand/recognise/know oneself to be female.”
Two options, neither supports the idea that a male knows “what being female feels like”:
- If “female” means the biological sex class, inner feeling cannot make that true.
- If “female” is redefined to mean “my gender identity,” then the claim is circular: “I know I’m female because I feel female,” which tells us nothing about women’s embodied experience.
3) “It may seem impossible to you… but it’s a real feature of human diversity.”
Diversity of inner life is real. It still doesn’t answer the epistemic question: how could a male know a state equals “being female” without ever being female? Diversity doesn’t grant comparison data. How?
4) “It’s a direct experience, not a reasoned stereotype.”
Directness doesn’t settle correctness. Many inner states are vivid yet mislabelled (anxiety as excitement, phantom limb pain as limb). The labelling of a raw feeling as “female” depends on social learning and imagination. Without access to female embodiment, the label remains an interpretation, not confirmed knowledge. It's not direct, as they are not female, it can't be.
5) “It’s not about stereotypes, essence, or a claim to anything in common with you.”
If there’s no claim to commonality with females, that again concedes the point: the person isn’t claiming to know female experience, only their own private sensation. That supports my view: a male can think he feels like a woman; he cannot know what being female feels like. There is no way for them to know that private sensation is anything like the feeling of being female. They cannot know.
6) “It’s like hunger: a personal, pervasive, automatic sensation.”
The analogy fails in the key respect. Hunger has clear interoceptive signals, measurable correlates, and a known object (energy deficit). Everyone can validate it against shared physiology. “Feeling female” has no independent test and no shared interoceptive target for males: ovulation, menstruation, pregnancy risk, menopause, and sexed development are outside male embodiment. A felt state can be real as a feeling and still be wrongly named.
7) “The feelings/material distinction is false; psychological states have physiological underpinnings, so it is with gender.”
That a belief or feeling has a neural or hormonal basis makes the feeling real; it doesn’t make the content true. Pain is real when someone believes a phantom limb hurts; the limb still isn’t there. Likewise, “I am female” is a proposition about the world. Its truth isn’t secured by the sincerity or biology of the feeling.
Where we now agree (implicitly)
By saying the claim is “entirely personal,” “not about stereotypes,” and “not a claim to anything in common with you,” you accept that a male is not claiming knowledge of women’s lived, embodied experience. That is exactly my position: a male can only say what he thinks “feeling female” is, from a male perspective. He cannot verify that this matches what it is like to be female, because he has never been female and lacks any internal standard for comparison.
Bottom line
- The inner feeling may be real and important to the person.
- Labelling it “female” is interpretive, not actual knowledge of women’s experience.
- Private sensations cannot redefine a public sex class or substitute for sex where sex matters.