The Beetle, The Beard, and the Biological Kind: A Philosophical Critique of Gender Identity

Why the proposition “trans women are women” is a statement that logic and language cannot coherently support.

If someone had told me in 2010 that in little over a decade, our most respected cultural institutions, from universities and newspapers to medical boards and corporations, would be earnestly debating whether males could be mothers or if the word “woman” included men who felt a certain way, I would have found the proposition absurd. Yet here we are, navigating a new landscape where foundational concepts are treated as arbitrary.

This rapid, top-down re-engineering of our most basic human concepts is baffling to most people. When I first began to examine the claims of “gender identity,” I assumed that most objections were rooted in cultural conservatism or a simple dislike of “wokeism.”

However, I quickly discovered that there are profound conceptual problems with the idea of gender identity that have nothing to do with gender roles, bigotry, or animus toward trans-identified people. As my readers will know, my work is grounded in the analytic tradition and values liberal democracy. My undergraduate degree focused on analytic philosophy, and I taught logic and critical thinking for nearly a decade. Although I’ve never been a professional philosopher, due to my background, I value conceptual clarity above almost everything else. From that perspective, I find the new propositions surrounding “gender identity” to be not just factually contestable, but conceptually incoherent.

This distinction is critical. This is not a debate about rights, kindness, or acceptance. I take it as a given that all people, regardless of how they identify or live, deserve to be treated with dignity and respect and to live free from violence or harassment. Any decent, liberal society is built on that foundation (and there are reactionary forces currently arguing against it). This is not a throwaway line for me; my bona fides as a life-long advocate and campaigner for gay rights are unassailable. I was actively defending the rights of my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters at a time when doing so could get the crap beaten out of you (and did).

But that is not what is at stake here. At stake is a fundamental challenge to the structure of language and our shared understanding of reality. We are being asked (and increasingly, compelled) to assent to propositions that violate the very rules of how words create meaning. We are told this is a matter of “progress” or “evolution,” but it is closer to a logical breakdown that reduces words to mere political tools, rather than bearers of truth value.

This isn’t a political disagreement; it’s a philosophical one. That is what this article is intended to discuss: the fact that gender identity concepts break the basic rules of language and logic in a way that erodes our ability to communicate, discover truth, and sustain a functioning liberal society. If we are interested in freedom and the greatest good for the greatest number, ideas that destroy our ability to communicate will make that project impossible.

To understand why “trans women are women” is a statement that language and logic cannot support, there are (at least) four key philosophical errors that underpin the entire “gender identity” project.

1. The Private Language Fallacy (Wittgenstein’s Beetle)

2. The Fallacy of the Beard (The Misuse of ‘Family Resemblance’ and the Error(s) of Judith Butler)

3. The Category Error of Kinds (Kripke’s ‘Twin Earth’ and the Swadesh List)

4. The “Language Evolves” Canard (Confusing Organic Change with Ideological Compulsion)

The ‘Beetle in the Box’ (The Private Language Fallacy)

The central claim of the new gender ideology is that the word “woman” no longer refers to an ‘adult human female’. Instead, its meaning has been replaced. The new definition is ‘a person who has an innate, internal, private feeling or identity of being a woman.’

This claim is not just a redefinition; it is, I contend, linguistically impossible. The 20th-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein demonstrated why in his famous “Beetle in the Box” thought experiment.

Imagine a group of people. Each person has a box, and inside that box is something they call a “beetle.” Here’s the catch: no one can look in anyone else’s box. They can only look at their own “beetle.”

What, then, does the public word “beetle” mean?

Wittgenstein’s insight was that it cannot refer to the private thing inside the box. Why? Because it’s completely unverifiable. One person might have a scarab, another a woodlouse, a third a small blue stone, and a fourth nothing at all. Since they can never compare their private “beetles,” the word “beetle” in their shared, public language can’t possibly derive its meaning from that private object.

If the word “beetle” is to have any public meaning at all, it must refer to something public and shared: perhaps the box itself, or the act of holding a box. As Wittgenstein put it, “the ‘thing in the box’ has no place in the language-game at all... it cancels out, whatever it is.”

“Gender identity” is a paradigm example of Wittgenstein’s Beetle. It is defined as an internal, subjective, and private feeling. It is, by definition, completely inaccessible to anyone else. No one can feel your gender identity, verify it, or compare it to their own.

If “woman” means “a private feeling,” then the word has been rendered meaningless in public discourse. When one person says, “I am a woman,” and another person says, “I am also a woman,” they have no way of knowing if they are talking about the same thing. The thing in the box (the “identity”) cancels itself out.

This is not a trivial academic point. It has profound, real-world consequences. If “woman” is a private, unverifiable state, on what basis can we have any public conversation about women? How can we campaign for “women’s rights” if the subject of those rights, “women,” is an unknowable, solipsistic category? How can we have “women’s sports” if the category “woman” has no public, verifiable definition?

The answer is that we can’t. The very foundation of the “gender identity” claim is a private language fallacy. It is an attempt to define a public word by a private state, and language doesn’t work that way. It creates a word that points to nothing.

The ‘Fallacy of the Beard’ (Judith Butler and the Misuse of Exceptions)

This is the point at which the savvy advocate for gender identity, often educated in postmodernism or critical theory, objects. “Aha!” they say, “But you can’t define ‘woman’ either! What about infertile women? Women who have had hysterectomies? Women with DSDs [Differences in Sex Development]? There is no single essential trait, so ‘woman’ is just a vague social concept!”

This argument is a clever logical sleight of hand, but nothing more. It is an attempt to use a concept, often confused with Wittgenstein’s “family resemblance,” to prove that because a category has fuzzy edges, it has no center. The intellectual godmother of this specific application is, of course, the Berkeley philosopher Judith Butler.

In works like Gender Trouble, Butler (and her popularizers) put forth the idea that “woman” is not a biological reality, but a performative one. The argument, in simplified form, is that one is not born a woman, but becomes one by repeating a series of culturally coded acts, gestures, and performances. “Woman” is a social role, a script that one follows. This is where the conflation begins. Butler cleverly (or confusingly) mixes “gender” (the social scripts, stereotypes, and roles, which are variable) with “sex” (the biological reality of being male or female, which is not). MIT Philosopher Alex Byrne has written persuasively on this issue in his 2024 book, “The Trouble with Gender.”

The tool used to bridge this gap is the “family resemblance” argument. The tactic is to point to the exceptions—the woman with atypical chromosomes, the woman who cannot bear children—and declare, “See! There is no single, unifying biological essence to ‘woman.’ Therefore, ‘woman’ must be a social category, a performance... and if it’s a performance, anyone can perform it.”

This is a classic logical error that I used to cover in my Introduction to Logic and Critical Thinking Course: the “Fallacy of the Beard,” which is a variation of the Sorites Paradox. The paradox works like this:

If you have a man with a full beard, and you pluck one hair, does he still have a beard? Yes. What if you pluck another? Yes. If you continue one by one, you will eventually have a clean-shaven man. Does this mean there is no difference between a full beard and a clean-shaven face?

Of course not. That’s silly. The fallacy is in assuming that the inability to draw a precise line between “beard” and “no beard” means that no such things as beards exist.

The Butlerian application of this fallacy to the concept of “woman” is a textbook example. The existence of atypical members (like an infertile woman or a flightless bird [like penguins]) does not dissolve the category. In fact, these exceptions prove the rule.

We can only identify an “infertile woman” as such because we have a coherent, pre-existing concept of “woman” as the type of human for whom fertility is the biological norm. We can only understand a penguin as a “flightless bird” because we first understand birds as primarily flying creatures. These are what Wittgenstein calls paradigmatic definitions. Just because some examples fall outside the paradigm examples, we still understand what the word means.

The various family (or paradigm) traits of a woman—uterus, ovaries, XX chromosomes, gestation, female gametes—are not a random, unconnected cluster like the traits. They are a set of deeply correlated features that point to a single underlying biological reality: the female reproductive pathway (e.g., large gametes).

“Woman” is not a vague, indefinable performance. It is a biological category with a clear, dense center. Judith Butler’s core error is a profound confusion of categories: she takes a biological kind (”woman”) and analyzes it as if it were only a social performance (”gender”). Using rare boundary cases to try to erase that biological center is an obvious logical error. A category with fuzzy edges does not mean it is entirely fuzzy; rather, it implies that its boundaries are not well-defined.

The ‘Twin Earth’ (The Swadesh List and the Category Error of Kinds)

So, if “woman” isn’t a private feeling (the Beetle) or a vague, performative cluster (the Beard/Butler), what is it, philosophically?

In the 1950s, linguist Morris Swadesh developed a list of the most basic, durable, and universal concepts in all human languages. The “Swadesh List” comprises words that are so fundamental to the human experience that they are found in every language, ancient and modern, and are remarkably resistant to change.

What’s on this list? “I,” “you,” “we,” “one,” “two,” “hand,” “eye,” “fire,” “water,”... and “man” and “woman.”

The presence of “woman” on this list is powerful evidence. It tells us that this concept is not a recent, local, or arbitrary social convention, like “bachelor,” “CEO,” or “ninja.” It is a core feature of human cognition, a concept that every human society has needed to describe the world around them.

Why? Because it refers to a fundamental, mind-independent reality. Philosophers Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam provided the philosophical machinery to understand how these “kind” words work. They distinguish between two different types of words:

1. Social Kinds: These are concepts defined purely by social convention. “Bachelor” is their classic example. The definition (’an unmarried man’) is just a set of social descriptions. If we all decided tomorrow that “bachelor” would now include long-term cohabiting partners, the definition would change. The meaning is descriptive and up to us (which is how we were able to change “marriage” to mean essentially the same thing).

2. Natural/Biological Kinds: These are terms that refer to a real, mind-independent substance or structure in the world. “Water” is the classic example. For centuries, people defined water by its superficial properties: ‘the clear, tasteless, drinkable liquid in rivers and lakes.’ But our word “water,” Kripke and Putnam argued, was always pointing at a real thing, even before we understood it. When we discovered its underlying structure was H20, we didn’t change the meaning of water; we discovered what it truly was.

Putnam clarified this with his “Twin Earth” thought experiment. Imagine a ‘Twin Earth’ identical to ours, except the clear, tasteless, drinkable liquid in their rivers is not H20 but a complex chemical, XYZ. They call it “water.” When we land on Twin Earth and analyze this liquid, what do we say? We would not say, “Oh, this is just another kind of water.” We would say, “This isn’t water; it just looks like it.” We might call it ‘2water’.

Why? Because the performance or “identity” of water doesn’t matter. Its underlying structure is what defines it. The word “water” is a rigid designator for H20.

The term “woman,” as its place on the Swadesh list implies, functions like a Biological Kind term. It’s like “water” or “tiger,” not “bachelor.” It is a rigid designator that points to a fundamental biological reality: the adult human female, organized around the female reproductive pathway.

From this philosophical perspective, a male who adopts the superficial, socially coded appearances of a woman (a performance, an “identity”) is analogous to ‘2water’. The term describes a different underlying structure, even if the superficial properties are similar.

The entire “gender identity” project commits this profound category error: it treats a biological kind (woman) as if it were a social kind (bachelor). It insists that ‘2water’ is water, simply because it “identifies” or appears as such. This is a philosophical mistake. You cannot identify as H20 based on appearance, and you cannot identify into a biological kind.

The Final Objection: “But Language Evolves!”

At this point, having seen the logical, linguistic, and philosophical problems, a final, desperate move is made (the fact that this conversation always takes the form of desperately trying to find a reason to believe in gender identity rather than a skeptical examination of concepts illustrates the motivated reasoning behind the entire project): “But language evolves! You’re just a prescriptivist. Stop trying to freeze language in time.”

This is, of course, partially true. Language is a living river, not a frozen monument. It does evolve. We used to use “awful” to mean “full of awe,” and now it means “terrible” (just as “terrific” used to mean “inspiring terror”). But the argument for “woman” to include males is not an argument for organic evolution. It is a demand for top-down, ideologically driven compulsion, and the change it demands is not one of clarification, but of contradiction.

Two types of linguistic change need to be distinguished here:

1. Organic Evolution (Bottom-Up): This change bubbles up from the populace over time. It is decentralized and driven by utility. It sticks because it enhances communication—making it more efficient, precise, or better adapted to new realities. The singular “they” for unknown referents is a perfect example. It’s useful. The word “Googling” is useful. This type of change enriches the language.

2. Ideological Compulsion (Top-Down): This change is pushed by institutions, activists, and authorities. It is centralized and driven by a political imperative. It is not concerned with clarity, but with enforcing a specific worldview. This is what we see with the language of “gender identity.” Terms like “birthing person,” “chestfeeder,” and the redefinition of “woman” are not bubbling up from common use; NGOs, HR departments, medical journals, and media style guides are pushing them down.

More importantly, this change does not clarify meaning; it destroys it. Organic evolution expands or shifts a word’s meaning in a way that makes it more useful. The redefinition of “woman” to include “males who identify as women” is instead an act of semantic demolition. It takes a word with a clear, specific, and useful meaning (adult human female) and redefines it to mean “adult human female and also adult human male.”

This is a logical contradiction. It’s like “evolving” the word “vegan” to include “people who eat chicken.” It doesn’t expand the word “vegan”; it annihilates it. It’s like “evolving” the word “solid” to mean “solid and also liquid.” The word becomes useless.

This is not evolution; it’s an Orwellian inversion. It’s an act of semantic theft, taking the name of one category, with all its attached social, political, and historical meaning, and applying it to its exact opposite. To call this “evolution” is to abuse the term. It is a forced appropriation of a word to make its original meaning unsayable. In my most cynical moments, I suspect this is exactly the point. Instead of a liberatory goal, sex abolitionists want to make dissent from gender ideology impossible under the guise of “kindness” and inclusion.

Conclusion: A Defense of Clarity

The new propositions on gender are not a “more evolved” understanding; they are incoherent on four distinct philosophical counts:

• They are based on a Private Language Fallacy (The Beetle), attempting to pin a public word to an unverifiable private feeling.

• They are defended using a Fallacy of the Beard (Misusing Family Resemblance), an error rooted in Judith Butler’s conflation of performative gender with biological sex.

• They are built on a fundamental Category Error (Confusing Kinds), treating a universal biological reality (like “water,” as evidenced by the Swadesh List) as if it were a mutable social description (like “bachelor”).

• And finally, they are shielded by a Fallacious Appeal to “Linguistic Evolution,” confusing organic linguistic change with a top-down ideological project to enforce a logical contradiction.

This analysis is not an act of animus; it is an act of clarity. As I have argued in my posts on Critical Theory and epistemological parasites, a liberal society can’t survive the destruction of its most basic means of communication. Language is our primary tool for making sense of the world, for persuading each other, and for engaging in cooperative action for the common good. When we are forced—by social pressure or law—to use words in a way that severs them from reality, we lose our ability to think, to debate, to govern ourselves, and to improve our shared social reality.

We can, and must, be kind and tolerant to all people, while absolutely refusing to surrender our shared reality to an ideology that is, at its very root, philosophically and logically incoherent.

And, finally, I do hope this is the last time I’ll need to write about this topic. I focus on it because it’s such a central and egregious attack on our tools of communication, and I’m sorry that both postmodernist leftists and social conservatives have used a marginalized group to advance their political agendas. It’s not fair to people who have gender dysphoria to be treated like a political football, and it’s not the fault of people who were trying to quietly live their lives rather than undermining the entire substrate of human communication (thanks, Critical Theory!). This overreach by the extreme left has given the most regressive forces on the right a toehold against not only trans people, but lesbians, gays, and bisexuals as well. By returning to a more concrete, rational set of tools, I hope to focus on other, more nuanced ideas that stem from political extremism and a lack of philosophical sophistication.