August 13, 2025
One of the most common responses among philosophers and others to the question “Are transwomen women?”—those neither convinced that the answer is yes nor willing to say no—is that the word “woman” can be used to mean different things, and on one of these meanings, “transwomen are women” is true. This is not a good response to the question “Are transwomen women?” for several reasons. Perhaps the simplest is that it is not an answer to the question. For someone who asks “Are transwomen women?” wants to know whether transwomen are women. The response “There is a sense of ‘woman’ on which transwomen are women” does not tell them what they want to know.
Here is an analogy. Suppose that, ingenuously, you ask your friend whether her family is rich, and she responds: “the word ‘rich’ can be used relative to different standards, and relative to some of these standards, ‘my family is rich’ is false”. This response is an obvious dodge. Instead of answering your question, your friend has found a way to avoid answering it. For all she said, her family very well may be rich—that is, rich relative to the standard that was relevant when you asked “Is your family rich?”. The fact that there are other standards relative to which the word “rich” can be evaluated is irrelevant to the question you actually asked.
Here is another analogy. It is uncontroversial that the first-person pronoun “I”—which is what linguists and philosophers of language call an indexical—can be used to refer to different people. For instance, when I use “I”, I refer to me with it, whereas when you use “I”, you refer to you with it. Yet this banal fact about the word “I” is irrelevant to how I should answer you if you ask, “Am I good-looking?”. If I were to respond, “Well, ‘I’ can be used to refer to different people, and as some people use ‘I’, ‘I am good-looking’ is true”, that would obviously be a non sequitur (to the point of likely registering with you as a joke). For when you asked “Am I good-looking?”, you were wondering whether you were good-looking—not whether the first-person pronoun can be used by some good-looking person or other, which is all that my response tells you.
As the preceding examples illustrate, language is sometimes a bit complicated. One and the same word can sometimes be used in different senses or to refer to different things. But even when a word admits different readings, it can still be used to pose relevantly clear and specific questions. Returning to the example involving “rich”, for example, suppose further that your friend’s family is in fact worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Hundreds of millions isn’t billions, let alone hundreds of billions: if she is in a room with Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, your friend may feel relatively poor. But that doesn’t make it any more reasonable for your friend to equivocate over whether her family is rich. People who are worth hundreds of millions of dollars are clear cases of being rich, relative to normal standards on applying the word “rich”, even if some people are richer. In simpler terms, such people are clearly rich. That “rich” can (arguably) be used to pick out a standard on wealth that they don’t meet doesn’t make a difference to this observation.
Analogously, suppose that your brother is 6’6” and a colleague at work, having regaled you with some of his envies concerning his own brother, asks you “Is your brother tall?”. Admittedly, 6’6” isn’t 7’6”: if he is in a room with Shaquille O’Neal and Yao Ming, your brother may feel relatively short. Nevertheless, the fact that some people are taller than your brother doesn’t mean that it would be reasonable for you to equivocate over whether your brother is tall. People who are 6’6” are clear cases of being tall, relative to normal standards on applying the word “tall”, even if some people are taller. In simpler terms, such people are clearly tall. That “tall” can (arguably) be used to pick out a standard on height that they don’t meet doesn’t make a difference to this observation.
Here is yet another example, just to drive the point home. Suppose you point at the Empire State Building and say “that is a skyscraper”. The simple little word “that”—which is what linguists and philosophers of language call a demonstrative—can be used to refer to just about anything. You can use “that” to refer to an elephant (“do you see that?”) or the number thirteen (“that’s an unlucky number”), a place on the other side of the world (“that is where I want to go”) or the neglected sandwich on your friend’s plate (“are you still eating that?”). This exceptionally varied range of possible uses of “that” has no bearing at all on the truth or clarity of the statement you made pointing to the Empire State Building, “that is a skyscraper”. For what you said when you said “that is a skyscraper” is that the thing you were point to, the Empire State Building, is a skyscraper—which, indeed, it is.
In abstract philosophy-of-language terms, the underlying point of such examples is that we must take care not to project distinctions drawn in the theorist’s context—the context in which we reflect on all the things that a word might mean—back onto the speaker’s context—the context in which that word is used by a relevant speaker. More specifically, it is that even if the overall practice of using a certain word is messier and more complicated than one might at first have realised, that in no way shows that specific uses of the word fail to determine specific meanings. One more example of this ubiquitous phenomenon: if someone is giving you directions and says “OK, walk two blocks uptown, then turn left at 42nd St”, she has told you to go in a specific direction when you get to 42nd St, even though if she had told you “walk two blocks downtown, then turn left at 38th St”, she would have been telling you to go in the opposite direction using the same word “left”.
On reflection, it should not be surprising that words with multiple meanings can be used to ask specific questions or make specific statements. For many words have that feature. But we are nevertheless able to ask specific questions and make specific statements. In other words, the phenomena that linguists and philosophers of language know as ambiguity, polysemy and context-dependence have less dramatic ramifications for the nature of our beliefs and knowledge than philosophical novices sometimes think. Indeed, indexicals like “I” are sometimes used to articulate paradigms of knowledge: for instance, one of the things I know for sure that I know is that I am me.
Where does all this leave the response we started off with to the question “Are transwomen women?”. The first moral, the one I have been emphasizing, is just that “Well, ‘woman’ can be used to mean different things” on its own isn’t an answer to the question, any more than, say, “Do you mean ‘us’ as in the nation of America? ‘Us’ as in Yankees fans? Or ‘us’ as in you and me?” is an answer to the question “Is our couch on fire?!”.
A second moral, implicit in several of the preceding examples, is relevant, too, however. It is that even when a word can be used to mean different things, it is not like anything goes. Even though you can use the word “I” to refer to yourself, I can’t use “I” to refer to you. If the Empire State Building weren’t in front of us, I would find it harder to refer to it with “that” (though I could if we were looking at a picture of it). And, even if there is some sense of “rich” on which multimillionaires aren’t rich, it is not plausibly the one normally in play when people ask questions in terms of “rich”. In fact, on further reflection, it is hardly clear that there is such a sense. Your friend may feel poor if she is in a room with Elon Musk—as, for that matter, might the average billionaire. But isn’t such a feeling naturally explained as a mere artefact of comparing oneself against an artifically inflated standard? An analogy: the mathematician GH Hardy may have felt a bit stupid when he compared himself to Ramanujan, the Indian prodigy, but that hardly implies that there is any sense in which Hardy was in fact stupid.
It cannot be taken for granted that there is any sense of “woman” on which transwomen are women, let alone one in widespread circulation, or relevant in contexts in which the question “Are transwomen women?” is asked. The claim that there is constitutes a non-trivial theoretical commitment, the taking on of which—as many on social media will have found out the hard way—is scarcely less likely to leave one above the fray than a straight yes answer would have. But if you’re going to embroil yourself in disagreement anyway, why not give actually answering the question, as it stands, your best shot?
Daniel Kodsi holds a PhD in Philosophy from Trinity College, Oxford and is editor-in-chief of The Philosophers’ Magazine.
