‘I Identify as a Jabberwock’ is Meaningless Anti-Trans Rhetoric

On slippery slopes and fallacies

CW: Offensive terminology

I recently read a piece here on Medium (I won’t link to it) that satirically argues for the essential epistemological equivalence of “transgenderism” and transspeciesism. My apologies to those readers who find the term “transgenderism” offensive. It was the chosen term of the author of the piece to which I refer, and I think it was not used accidently. The author explained how this example of argumentum ad ridiculum is superior to the ham-fisted, “I identify as an attack helicopter” trope. Because, I guess, animals are more closely related to humans than helicopters are.

Or something. To be honest, I didn’t read all the way through the explanation.

It struck me that this argument (not the one-upmanship toward helicopters) has a lot in common with Matt Walsh’s walrus argument. I haven’t read that one either, but I have read both favorable and unfavorable reviews, which is enough for me right now. The animal in question is different, but the gist seems to be much the same. There are no doubt some differences of nuance, and it looks like Walsh’s book addresses a number of contingent issues that are beyond the scope of the piece that inspired this essay.

The gist, to return to that — or rather the meat, the muscle and sinew of the argument — is that transgender experience is not essentially different from the experience of a hypothetical person who either believes, or pretends to believe, that they are in fact not human but some other animal.

To the two versions of the argument thus introduced, there are two swift and sufficient responses: to the first, no, you don’t actually believe you are an opossum; and to the second, transgender people that come to your attention are people who have stopped pretending to be walruses, not the other way around.

My purpose in writing this essay is not to refute these preposterous variations on a silly argument, but to make a point about how a common error of reasoning often figures in attacks on the validity of transgender experience, and a related point about transgender experience itself (as I know it).

Both the author who inspired this essay and Matt Walsh appear to have fallen into some variant of the “slippery slope” fallacy. In this instance, the slippery slope is a slope of choices: each choice brings the chooser deeper into a pit of absurdity, with adverse consequences both moral and practical. To chose to be a woman, when you are in fact a man (or vice-versa) is one step down the slope. To make such a choice one must abandon a certain quantity of common-sense — so goes the argument. Having done so, will it not be so much easier to take another step, and imagine, and rationally justify, oneself to be a beetle? And does the absurdity itself not call to you, so that to take the next step and the next are all but inevitable? So falls common sense, and reason, and society.

It should be said of the slippery slope fallacy, that the slippery slope itself is not an illusion, nor reference to it necessarily a fallacy. It is certainly easier to effect change in increments, where it appears impossible to do all at once. The fallacy lies in supposing that once started on a path, a thing must continue down it whether there is an engine to the movement or not.

Opponents of transgender acceptance who deploy this type of argument must see a change, a movement — whether an abstract one leading to ontological chaos or a practical one leading to social dissolution — a step down a slippery slope. That is what makes them incredulous, I think, and fearful.

On the slippery slope that would lead through transgenderism to transspeciesism, there is no engine.

For me, and, I should think, for many other people to whom their sex as seen at birth by others seems a grotesque imposition, and a foreign mark, like a cancer implanted at birth, there is no such movement. I have not changed, except as people always change through the years. My awareness of myself, my self-knowledge, have changed. My presentation has changed to be more in accord with my self-knowledge, as it should for every person if they wish to present themselves more honestly to the world. My contentment, and my ability to function as a productive member of society (if allowed to do so), have also changed, and much for the better.

But there is no engine to take society down the sinister, slippery slope from trannies to weasels to zebras, nor finally to attack helicopters. And there is no commensurability between these scenarios and reality.

Transgender people merely want what everyone wants: to be accepted on our own terms. And our terms are just like everyone else’s. There is no threat. There is no danger.

We are just people.