The No True Trans Fallacy

Take your appeal to purity and shove it

Anyone who regularly argues with those who believe in a quasi-mystical essence known as a “gender identity” (a bastardized concept of the soul, in my opinion), knows that these true believers utilize a lot of fallacies. One of the most common fallacies that they like to employ has come to be known as “No True Trans.” This is when the definition of what “trans” is shifts magically around over the course of the conversation or debate.

The No True Trans fallacy is a riff off the No True Scotsman fallacy introduced by British philosopher Antony Flew in his 1966 book God & Philosophy, where he wrote:

In this ungracious move a brash generalization, such as No Scotsmen put sugar on their porridge, when faced with falsifying facts, is transformed while you wait into an impotent tautology: if ostensible Scotsmen put sugar on their porridge, then this is by itself sufficient to prove them not true Scotsmen.

Basically, what someone employing this fallacy is trying to do is defend a generalization by declaring that every counterexample is simply not a valid representation of the population being discussed, whether Scotsmen or trans people.

One would think that where you’d see this fallacy deployed is in the discussion around men in women’s prisons. For example, you would think and hope that the trans community would decry the often sexually violent male criminals seeking and winning access to women’s prisons as not really trans. But this is virtually never the case. In fact, the opposite happens. The trans community doubles down and accuses anyone who doesn’t consider these men to truly be women of transphobia.

It’s actually quite shocking.

I have participated in my fair share of protests around this issue. When we protest, our message is never about trans anything. Our signs are not about “trans women” or “trans people.” Our signs and our messages are about keeping men out of women’s prisons. Violent men first and foremost, but all men at the end of the day. We do not give one single lick about how these men identify. I do not care if these men experience gender dysphoria or believe themselves to have lady brains. I care only that they are men who have often committed violent and sexual crimes against women and are now being housed with them in prison.

But a curious thing happens. Trans activists see our signs, and when they read the words “men” or “rapists,” for example, their brain automatically translates this to “trans women.” It is essentially the inverse of the No True Trans fallacy. In fact, it is the slogan “You’re trans if you say you are” made manifest. These activists read our signs and correctly surmise that a man who is seeking access to a women’s prison is likely claiming a trans identity. They don’t care what these men have done, and they don’t care what may be motivating the claim. They simply accept the claim at face value.

It is baffling that they would not employ the No True Trans fallacy when it comes to such men. It is even more baffling that where they do most commonly employ it is against detransitioners.

It is an exceedingly common tactic for trans activists to claim that detransitioners are all liars. I’ve encountered this attitude myself countless times online and even in real life at the Edmonton roundtable to discuss Danielle Smith’s proposed policies about youth transition. After I brought up the topic of detransitioners, one of the trans activists there to speak against the policies said, with full confidence, that detransitioners were never really trans.

Now, at the end of the day, these are just semantic games. What does “trans” even mean and what does it entail to be “really trans”? Many detransitioners were “trans enough” to pursue medical transition and to now have to deal with the irreversible effects of it.

But even if we accept this activist’s statement and allow her to get away with the No True Trans fallacy, all it does is affirm the need for more gatekeeping in trans “healthcare” (in truth, it is anything but healthcare). If people who were never “really trans” can accidentally go down that path, does it not prove that the current model is a total failure?

Recently, I came across an excellent example of the No True Trans fallacy, which is what inspired me to write this piece. In early May, Julie Bindel wrote an article for The Sun about my friend Sinead Watson. Watson is a detransitioner who regrets the transgender identification that led her to take testosterone and get a double mastectomy. The piece details her story and her eventual choice to begin living as a woman again.

“Today,” writes Bindel, “Sinead is in permanent pain and discomfort as a result of taking the male hormone ­testosterone, and has scars where her breasts used to be.”

Watson went about as far as a “trans man” can go in pursuit of her identity. She was convinced for five years that she was making the right choice. She was as “trans” as you can get. And yet, long-time UK trans activist Stephen Whittle, a trans-identified female, had a wildly different take on this story. She decided to take to X and claim that clinicians can’t be blamed for what happened to Watson because they are not yet “mind readers.”

This is the No True Trans fallacy in its most distilled form. Watson was not really trans because she later realized that it is impossible to change sex and because the “treatments” she pursued caused her harm. Therefore, according to Whittle, she must have been lying to clinicians.

All this despite the fact that Whittle is a proponent of sex self-identification: the idea that you are trans if you say you are, or that you are whatever sex you declare yourself to be. This is a pernicious attempt to have it both ways—to encourage people to pursue their self-declared “gender identities” and then to chide them as not “really trans” and as liars if they later come to regret their decision.

And this is the true human cost of the No True Trans fallacy. It is more than just a fallacy; it is a fundamentally broken and inhumane way of looking at the world that causes real damage to real people. These are more than just word games. These are people’s—often young people’s—lives. Nobody should be fed the lie that a self-identification is who they really are because they are so much more than that.

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