Men Pretending to Be Women

The Mystery of the Fifth Woman — Do “Transgender” Men Really Believe They are Women?

Do the people who believe in transgenderism really believe it’s real? Do faux-males really believe they are men? Sex has always been complicated, but now that the sexes are uncountably numerous “genders”, it’s way beyond merely ‘complicated’. But is it total lunacy?

Leftist males have always been effete. But with the advent of the Transgenderism Untruth, Leftist males began taking their effeminism to new extremes. But will that actually make them female? Let’s have a look.

Queer is not about being gay. Queer is a political act of rebellion against capitalism.

Karlyn Borysenko, “What Queer Really Means: What you must know to understand Drag Queen Story Hour, trans women in women's sports, and queering your kids in schools.” Substack, (2023)

What if the invention of the fake “genders” was a purely political act? A significant number of Rightist writers (including Douglas Murray, Dave Rubin, and Karlyn Borysenko, whom we quoted in the epigraph) are openly gay. So sexual preference is not Left or Right. But how many “transgenders” are not activist Leftists? Maybe a tiny few, but only enough to be the exceptions who prove the rule. (And given the opposition to transgender men by feminist women, the politics are intra-Leftist). Men being “transgender” is an effeminist act of political activism. That’s all. An act. The quintessential transgender male, as we all know by now if we have visited a public library lately, is the drag queen. A performer putting on an act.

What does it mean to believe something?

That might be the kind of question that you hate. You may be thinking, ‘That question has no answer.’ But we say that it does have a clear, final, and unambiguous answer.

We can state the question in another way, “If you believe that you are a woman, does that make you a woman?”

Or to put it another way, “What does it mean to believe that you are a woman?”

Or to put it yet another way, “Do the men who claim to be ‘trans’ women really believe that they are women, or are they pretending to be women?

The question came up in the comments of a Substack post of Euphoric Recall, “The Erasure of Women: How gender ideology and progressive dogma are robbing women of safety, opportunities, and dignity”.

A Dialog in the Comments Section of “The Erasure of Women”

The post quoted a poll that found, “A whopping 64% of Democrats believe a man can become a woman, as opposed to 10% of Republicans.” We made a comment that quoted that:

Rightful Freedom:

"64% of Democrats believe a man can become a woman..."

A man can become a man who PRETENDS to be a woman. That I believe.

Is that harsh? I believe that some of these men may wish they were women. Some are pretending to be women because it's fun, or it gets them attention, or, now, gets them into a protected group that gets legal privileges and rights, or to get into women's prison, or to win awards and fame by defeating real women in athletics.

But I doubt that any of them really believe that they ARE women. That's just a lie told by them and the rest of the leftists.

We got a thoughtful reply from the Substacker Becoming the Rainbow:

Becoming the Rainbow:

Some alleged transwomen may be gaming the system, declaring their identity for kicks or to gain some perceived benefit, but others do so for deep-seated psychological reasons. I may not want to call them women but they are identifying as women because that is what they sincerely feel themselves to be.

We replied,

Rightful Freedom:

"they are identifying as women because that is what they sincerely feel themselves to be"

Not arguing. But wondering how you know that?

Becoming the Rainbow:

How do I know that some people who identify as transwomen sincerely believe themselves to be women? I suppose I don't, not in an absolute sense. I'm not trans. I made the statement based on knowing a transwoman and impressions from my reading.

Becoming the Rainbow was right to say, “I don't [know], not in an absolute sense.” Because it’s true: To know for certain that someone is lying, or pretending, you would have to be able to read that person’s mind and, somehow, directly observe his thoughts. That is not possible.

But believing, it seems, is possible. So the answer to the question of whether men are pretending to be women or not may be more tractably phrased, “Do they really believe that they are women, or are they pretending to believe that?”

And when it comes to the difference between men and women, some very interesting research was done a long time ago about how men and women may believe differently.

A Famous Experiment: The Mystery of the Fifth Woman

Some decades ago, psychologists did an experiment on perception. It went something like this:

Five people entered a room where an experimenter awaited them. Unbeknownst to the subject of the experiment, four of the people were in on it, and had been coached what to say in answer to the questions. Through the window of the room some buildings could be seen outside. One of them, the taller of the two, was Building A and the other was Building B.

 The experimenter asked each of the persons one at a time which building was the taller of the two. The four who had been coached all answered, “Building B” even though Building A was really taller. The subject of the experiment was the last one to be asked the question. Experimenters found that if the subject was a woman, she was more likely to say, “Building B”, to go along with the others. Male subjects were more likely to say, “Building A”, in spite of what the others had previously answered.

Ever since reading about that experiment, we have had two questions about it.

First question:

When that Fifth Woman looked at the buildings, did she really see building B as being taller than building A? I.e. was her real perception — i.e. what she saw — changed by what the first four people had said? Or was she lying? And she did see that Building A was taller?

But if she were here now, and we asked her, “Were you lying, or did you really believe that Building B was taller” and she said, “Yes, I really believed it. That’s why I said it”, should we believe her? Maybe she meant by the word ‘believe’ — i.e. the concept of ‘belief’ itself — that a lie is the truth if you believe it to be the truth? In other words, as some people claim to believe: ‘Everything you know is an opinion, and my opinion is as good as yours.’

Second question:

Do we want someday to be traveling on an airplane where, due to affirmative action and DEI hiring and promoting, that Fifth Woman from the experiment, the one who really sees Building B as being taller than Building A, had become an airline pilot, and is the pilot of the airplane we are in? Flying over buildings? I think you know the answer.

To phrase this in the context of men pretending to be women: Do these men see that they are women? Or do they see that they are men who want to be women and are pretending? The answer is that these men know that they are not really women. The post from Euphoric Recall links to a video. Linked to by Libs of TikTok. In it a man claims not only that he is a real woman but he is more of a woman than real women are. How, you may ask, could he say such a thing? 

Here is what the man pretending to be a woman says in the video, apparently addressing a real woman, a feminist:

“You are pretending that you know that you're a woman when the only people here who know that for sure are the ones who have put in the work to understand themselves, [i.e. we] the trans women. You [the real woman] have put zero work in actually understanding yourself. You are only a woman because everybody else around you looked at the same external factors that you look at and said, ‘Um, seems like woman behavior to me’. And … the only person making a mockery of womanhood is you because you do not fully understand what makes you a woman.”

Just making the claim that “trans” women are better at being women than real women are, is to make the claim that “trans” men are different from real women, which, of course, they are. And if they are different from real women, then they can’t be real women. Right?

But let’s take the man’s argument seriously, in terms of logic and philosophy.

(You might say that it is silly of us to do that, and you would be right, except that transgenderism is not silly, as in ‘inconsequential’.  The U.S. government is not just taking the claims of the transgenderists seriously but is turning those beliefs into laws, and imprisoning people who disobey those laws, and is drastically changing the way Americans live, work, and are allowed to speak.)

Some Logic and Philosophy to Take Away

The transgender man who said that transgender men are the real women is making the claim that being a thing is the result of understanding what that thing is. But that is false. Scientists who study butterflies don’t become butterflies. A drop of water is not a drop of water because it knows what H₂O is. A living

cell is not a living cell because it understands microbiology, but rather because it is a microbe. You are not a thing because you consciously understand the nature of the thing. In fact, the opposite is more true.

(Terence) Deacon’s principle of representation (which we discuss in long-form in Interlace: Emergence to Openism) says that a symbol may be anything but the thing that it represents. For example, if you write “1” on a chalkboard, that “1” can represent any one thing in the world, except itself. It can represent one house, one student, one classroom, one universe, but it cannot represent the “1” that is on the chalkboard.

If you understand a thing then you are probably not that thing. Some people have argued that this is why we cannot, and perhaps never will, understand consciousness. We are it.

So sorry, Becoming the Rainbow, but epistemology is not ontology. You cannot become a rainbow by understanding the refraction of the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Sad, I know. But true.

Believing can be powerful, but it is not the same thing as being. In fact, it may be the opposite. A thing is not a thing because it knows what it is, but because it is what it is. The men pretending to be women are men pretending to be women.

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