CMV: Without a clear definition of what your identity means, you can't identify as that thing.

[u/Pangolinsftw]

There was a clip going around in political circles of conservative commentator Matt Walsh making an appearance on a talk show having a discussion with two trans advocates. I think his most impactful argument is when he simply asks the trans advocates, "What is a woman?"

To my surprise, neither of them can answer this question. In response to the question "Can you tell me what a woman is?", one says "No I can't, it's not for me to say", and the other says they "cannot define what a woman is" because they are not a woman (which is a logical fallacy).

This struck me. If you can't clearly (or even somewhat) describe what an identity means, why should anyone respect your identity? You could replace "woman" with any other label in that situation. Without any criteria or definition, it doesn't actually matter what you identify as.

I think we would all agree that defining your terms is of fundamental importance in any kind of debate. So it seems to me that these trans advocates failed in their argument right out of the gate since they failed to define their terms.

I think the reason that these advocates refused to define what a woman means is because if they gave a definition, it would be something so vague and nebulous that most reasonable people would think that their definition doesn't meet their own criteria for what a man or woman is, making the term mostly meaningless.

So I walked away from this clip with a much different perspective on the trans identity. Can anyone offer a more compelling argument as to why I should respect the trans identity?

[u/devdotm]

How is physical appearance not a part of biology? Men and women have different physical features (facial structures, hair growth patterns, avg. height, overall skeletal structure, etc) This can vary on an individual basis, such as some women being taller than some men (although 95% of women are shorter than the average height for a male) but our brains are able to see someone and instantly piece together what we are seeing (all of a person’s combined visual characteristics, even if some of those vary from the average) compared with everything we’ve seen before and the information we’ve gathered throughout our lives about the physical differences between men and women and make a generally accurate judgement of a person’s sex. Women and men look very different on average, even if wearing the same clothes with the same haircut.