le=”font-size: 11pt”>The reason that such care has so widely been felt necessary is the recent salience of adult males who say that they are women, and who there is intense social-political pressure to take at their word. Crucially, some such adult males are fully sex-typical, in roughly the sense that by almost all interpersonally accessible criteria, they are indiscernible from typical adult human males. For instance, as well as being adult males, they look and sound like adult males, have the usual male genitalia and male levels of testosterone, are exclusively sexually attracted to females, and grew up being perceived and treated by everyone around them as male.
These males insist that they are women, with the well-worn slogan "trans women are women" – which boils down to “a woman is anyone who says that they are a woman”.
How could so simplistic a slogan have become so influential, in philosophy as elsewhere? Much of the story will likely have to do with broader social-political developments. But some of it may have to do with squeamishness about the activity of sex. After all, it is often not very nice to attend to the specificities of human male sexuality. Yet the temptation to look away from variant forms of male sexuality may underlie some of the difficulty in understanding why there are sex-typical heterosexual adult human males who not only say that they are women but sometimes make significant personal sacrifices to look the part. More specifically, it inhibits properly addressing a latent challenge for the sex-based account of woman: if such males are unequivocally men, then why do they want so much to be seen as women? For in salient cases, the candid answer turns out to be: because they are sexually aroused by simulating being female.
Bingo. We got there.
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