Trans identity compared to believing you are a different age
Robby Starbuck said:
“A 46 year old who says he's a 6 year old. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, he says he's trans aged. This is again another real mental condition. Trans age. It's a real mental condition... If we go down the same logic train you're on, then you have to believe that person having that experience and you have to treat them as such or you're causing harm.”
The argument has a surface logical symmetry: if we accept self-reported identity in one domain, why not another? To someone unfamiliar with the clinical literature it sounds like a principled reductio ad absurdum rather than a rhetorical trap.
The comparison only works if you already assume that gender identity is just as arbitrary as any other self-reported claim, but that is precisely what the evidence disputes. Gender identity is a stable, persistent phenomenon documented across cultures and across centuries, recognised by the World Health Organisation, the American Psychological Association, the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and every other major medical body with expertise in this area. There is no clinical literature, no diagnostic category, no professional treatment pathway, and no cross-cultural consistency behind the claim being used as the comparison. Lumping them together is not a logical argument: it is a rhetorical technique that borrows the appearance of symmetry to smuggle in a conclusion the evidence does not support. When that technique succeeds, it is trans people who pay for it, their real and medically supported identities made to seem as far-fetched as a deliberate absurdity, and the barriers to their care made a little higher.
What I said at the time:
“Transgender people are not mentally ill. So we cannot we're not doing a direct comparison here of your fictitious 46 year old who identifies as 6. We're talking about transgender people who identify with a different gender to the sex that they were assigned at birth. It's not hard.”
Trans people of all ages, whose medically supported identities are made to seem as implausible as a deliberate absurdity, reinforcing stigma and making it harder to access care.