What is the "point" of asserting some ontology of trans people over another?
It seems to me that these are at least some of the objectives we have when we assert some ontology of trans people:
- All else equal (AEE), we want the ontology to be well-received by trans people.
- AEE, we want the ontology to be such that, if it was accepted by society at large, it would benefit (or at least, not harm) trans people.
- AEE, we want the ontology to be compatible with some metaphysics that isn't problematic in its own right, e.g., one of the supposed critiques of the psychological view on gender (that gender is purely in the "mind") is that mind-body dualism itself is unpopular
The first two objectives I list seem to be purely ethical. That is, AEE, we should prefer ontologies that, when accepted by either trans people or society at large, wouldn't harm (hopefully benefit!) trans people.
And, at least from my surface-level reading of contemporary debates in gender, these two really do seem to be the primary vectors by which some contemporary conception of gender is critiqued.
Let me give a concrete example. in https://academic.oup.com/analysis/article/83/4/801/7204699?login=false,
>The no connection view implies that many trans women are not women. For instance, Haslanger’s version of this view implies that trans women who are not presumed to have female sex characteristics by those in their society are not women; so trans women who are not recognised as women, or who ‘do not pass’,5 are not women. This is because such trans women are not observed or imagined to have features that are presumed to be evidence of a female’s biological role in reproduction. There are many such trans women. So, no connection views such as Haslanger’s imply that many trans women are not women (Jenkins 2016: 398–402). Some have argued that this is an unacceptable result for a metaphysical view about the relationship between gender identity and gender, either because all trans women are women or because this view would marginalize trans women within contemporary feminism (Mikkola 2016: 100–102).
But I don't really see why it's important that the no connection view implies that, strictly speaking, many trans women are not ontologically women. Clearly, the no connection view does not say that gender self-identity is morally unimportant; we should treat trans people as their self-identified gender independently of whether they are actually that gender (whatever that might mean!). Why should we care whether some ontology literally respects the language of "trans women are women", rather than the principles that motivate the slogan, i.e., that we should treat trans women as women?
Maybe my confusion is because I think that at least one of the questions that an ontology of trans people is trying to answer *is* "Are trans women women?". And, at least to me, the proposition "Trans women are women" isn't some kind of basic intuition with methodological power, like how moral realists use the "primacy" of "Killing babies is bad" as an argument for or against particular moral theories. Rather, it basically amounts to saying "Treat trans women as women". After all, if we are supposed to interpret it as saying "trans women are ontologically women", what work is there even left to do? We already have an ontology; trans X are X.
I guess the crux of my question is this: what, then, is the point of an ontology of trans people as something distinct from an ethics of trans people? Is there anything sensical we can talk about with trans ontology, besides my third objective, that isn't related to ethics?