A Timely Example

I recently observed that empty classes have no morally salient properties, and that this represented a barrier to claims for accommodation on behalf of trans* individuals. Along comes an email from Athlete Ally which concisely illustrates exactly what I'm getting at:

From: Athlete Ally Info
Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2019 8:31:21 AM

As an organization, we are committed to upholding LGBTQ equality in and through sport, and advocating for the inclusion of trans athletes is a critical part of that work.

In her article, Navratilova stated that trans women are men who “decide to be female,” and that to allow them to compete with women is “insane and it’s cheating… it is surely unfair on women who have to compete against people who, biologically, are still men.”

Transgender or Trans people are people whose gender identity is different from the gender they were assigned at birth. Trans women did not “decide” to be female. Transphobia is perpetuated by misinformation such as this.

...

The argument that Athlete Ally is making relies on the idea that trans identity is intrinsic to an individual, rather than being something that is chosen. Except... recall Allison's response to Hj Hornbeck on just that topic:

It’s like when people run around “proving” that 1 = 0 — nobody sees any real need to “disprove” it, because it’s obvious that such a proof is BS. (It’s a reductio ad absurdum on the face of it.) But it seems like even those who believe in our existence feel the need to prove it. I was just reading HJ Hornbeck’s post about trans athletes, which has all kinds of “scientific,” “objective” evidence that gender dysphoria, gender identity, etc. are real. The problem with going down that path is not only that it concedes the possibility that it could be “disproven,” but also that trans people who don’t fit into the definitions and criteria in those “proofs” are then implicitly left out of the category “real trans.”

Allison explicitly rejects the idea that trans identity is (necessarily) intrinsic to an individual, and is deliberately and specifically leaving the door open for people who consciously choose a trans identity to be included under the umbrella of "real trans". This would seem to invalidate Athlete Ally's contention that trans individuals do not choose to be trans.

Allison and Athlete Ally are just convenient exemplars; there's nothing particularly unique about either of them. A more generalized form of the conversation above goes something like this:

• "A person is 'trans' if they say they are 'trans'", from which it follows that the class of trans persons has no properties apart from self-identification.
• "Trans people are X".
• "How do you know? Per the definition of 'trans', trans people can be anything."

This, in a nutshell, is what I'm getting at when I complain about "empty classes". You can't make any claims about them, because they have no properties.

This isn't what happens in real life; almost everybody says 'trans' in a way which suggests that the term is laden with meaning (ditto for the term 'woman'). So what gives? At least three explanations come to mind:

• Semantic disagreement: People don't agree what the term 'trans' means, and some significant fraction don't accept the "you're trans if you say you are" definition.
• Imprecision: When people says 'Trans people are X' they actually mean 'Some non-trivial fraction of trans people are X'.
• Motte and bailey argumentation: Some people are tactically fudging their definitions as necessary to achieve desired outcomes.

It's almost certainly a combination of all three, plus some more I haven't thought about.

Anyway, as I said before, definitions have consequences.