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.*
Correct, being trans has nothing to do with any claim to knowledge about a universal or singular "female experience"
However, being a trans woman is to have an awareness/ experience of self as being female (despite male registration at birth). This is a bio-psychological cognition analogous to hunger or sexual desire.
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.*
The problem is that 'being female' is not just one thing. Sex is not just one thing. Sex is a complex developmental process, with a number of components. Sex development starts with chromosomes, which drive the process of the development of internal gonads, these gonads then produce hormones, which operate systematically across the body/ brain to produce variable degrees of masculinisation and feminisation. Hormones also influences cognitive processes, including the development of cognitions in relation to sex.
We can use the word 'female' to refer to different things - but however we define it we run into complexities. We can define 'female' as registration at birth, but then you get individuals like Imane Khelif who gender critical feminists want to insist was "wrongly" registered at birth.
You can define "female" through chromosomes, but then you get into the problem that there are people, like women with CAIS, who are female in all ways that are meaningful, in society, law, medicine, but nonetheless have XY chromosomes. If you define these people as male you contradict the gender critical position that 'female' is a meaningful category in law and society. One of the things gender criticals love to claim is that 'sex' is immediately visible and obvious, I have known women with CAIS who've been in intimate relationships with men for years who have no idea that the have XY chromosomes. Some women with CAIS don't even know themselves that they have it.
So how do we define female? And how do we define it in a way that makes sense scientifically, medically and from the perspective of justice? These questions are not as obvious as the gender critical position would like to pretend they are.
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?*
As I've stated repeatedly, the psychological state of being aware/ experiencing one's own sex, has nothing to do with a broader claim about how other people experience that state. If I say I'm hungry, I make no claims to how you experience hunger, I just know that I am hungry.
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.*
I will answer these points together. As above, when a trans woman says they are female, they cannot possibly know what your experience of female feels like, they only know what their experience of female is.
For an analogy. this time take sexual desire, if I experience sexual attraction, I have no way of knowing whether what I feel is the same as what you feel when you experience sexual attraction, I just know what I feel.
There is no interpretation of other people's experience involved, it is a direct experience of self . The experience is a profound understanding/ awareness/ perception/ experience of self as being female, and yes this experience absolutely is embodied - a 7 year old once described it this 'I feel it in my body, my bones, and in my heart'.
You claim that there is no external reference for this, but of course there is! Take the analogy of colours. At a very early age children learn to label colours. When I see a blue object, I learn that the word for that is blue. I have no way of knowing what you see when you see the colour blue - does blue look the same to me as it does to you? Who knows? But I know there are things that look blue and the label for them is blue.
Now imagine their are green people and blue people in the world. A trans person is observed green at birth, but as they grow and learn about colours they perceive themselves to be blue. They know what blue is because they have learned the word and understand how to apply it to label all those around them. However, when they look at themselves, they don't see green, they see blue. They are not 'faking' , they are not 'lying' this is literally their direct perception of self when they look at their skin. They see blue. Not an idea of blue or a philosophical belief about what blue looks like, or a projection of what other people experience as blue. They just simply see blue. They can't help it, they can't change it, this is their direct perception/ experience.
You might say - well they aren't really seeing blue, they are colour blind/ deluded/ and have simply developed a set of false ideas/stereotypes/ projections about what blue looks like, and so they think they are seeing blue.
But this doesn't make sense, if this were true then trans people would miscolour all sorts of other people - they wouldn't really be able to identify who was blue and who wasn't - they'd always be relying on these same false stereotypes. But trans people have exactly the same ability as any other person to identify green and blue when they observe it on other people's skin. They are not colour blind, only when they look at their own skin they see blue.