Why Should Identity Claims Require Evidence?

TL;DR

A humane society should take people’s experiences seriously. Taking an experience seriously, however, is different from accepting every explanation offered for that experience as objectively true.

Human history provides sobering examples of what can happen when communities stop asking whether important claims are supported by evidence. Lysenkoism subordinated biological evidence to an ideologically attractive theory. The recovered-memory and Satanic-panic era transformed sincere feelings and suggestive therapeutic practices into confident assertions about events, many of which never occurred. Facilitated communication persuaded families, professionals, and institutions that profoundly disabled people were producing sophisticated messages, even when controlled testing showed that facilitators were unknowingly authoring them.

Gender identity raises its own questions and should be considered on its own evidence. Historical analogies do not prove that transgender or nonbinary identities are false. They demonstrate something more fundamental: sincerity cannot substitute for evidence, especially when a claim asks other people to alter their own descriptions of reality.

Epistemic curiosity asks, “What might explain this experience?” Epistemic humility asks, “What might I be wrong about?” Epistemic analysis asks, “What evidence would distinguish one explanation from another?”

Those principles allow us to remain compassionate without surrendering our responsibility to think.

Respecting a person does not require affirming every proposition that person believes about himself or herself.

The Difference Between an Experience and an Explanation

Imagine a teenager saying, “I hate my body. Looking at myself makes me profoundly uncomfortable.”

That statement describes an experience. The experience is real in the most important sense: the teenager is actually suffering.

Now consider a different statement: “My discomfort proves that I am trans.”

The second statement does something additional. It proposes an explanation for the experience.

That distinction matters.

A person can have genuine chest pain without knowing whether the cause is cardiac, gastrointestinal, muscular, or anxiety related. A child can genuinely dread school without knowing whether the underlying problem is bullying, social anxiety, academic difficulty, depression, sensory overload, or something happening at home.

“Lived experience” is therefore evidence of experience. It is not automatically proof of the explanation attached to the experience.

Gender-related distress deserves precisely the same intellectual seriousness. Someone may sincerely experience alienation from his or her sex, intense discomfort with sexual development, identification with the opposite sex, or a desire to exist outside conventional expectations for men and women. Those experiences tell us something important about the person’s psychological world. They do not, by themselves, tell us what caused those experiences or establish every metaphysical conclusion drawn from them.

The question “What does this experience mean?” remains open.

History Gives Us Reasons to Be Careful

The twentieth century provides painful reminders that human beings are capable of becoming extremely confident about propositions for which the evidence is weak.

Lysenkoism: When a Preferred Theory Became Reality

Beginning in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s, Trofim Lysenko promoted agricultural and biological theories that rejected important principles of Mendelian genetics. His ideas became politically attractive because they appeared compatible with Soviet ideological commitments.

Scientific objections became increasingly dangerous. Institutions affirmed the preferred theory. Contrary evidence became politically inconvenient. Soviet genetics suffered enormously.

The lesson is not that gender identity is “like Lysenkoism.” Such a comparison would be far too crude.

The relevant lesson is epistemological:

A proposition does not become truer because questioning it becomes socially costly.

Good epistemic systems protect questions precisely when a community feels morally certain that questioning should stop.

Recovered Memories and the Satanic Panic

During the 1980s and 1990s, some therapists and investigators became convinced that unexplained psychological distress indicated the existence of repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse or even organized Satanic ritual abuse.

Patients sometimes developed increasingly elaborate memories during suggestive therapeutic procedures. Children made extraordinary allegations after repeated, directive questioning. Adults involved in these cases were not necessarily lying. Many therapists, parents, investigators, and patients appear to have sincerely believed what they were saying.

Sincerity is not a substitute for reality.

Psychological science eventually demonstrated how suggestion, expectation, repeated questioning, and imagination influence memory. Spectacular allegations collapsed when subjected to external investigation.

The suffering was real. The explanation was generally not real.

That distinction should haunt anyone involved in mental health care. What exists between our ears is fragile and susceptible to inadvertent manipulation, let alone intentional techniques.

Facilitated Communication: When Apparent Testimony Wasn’t Testimony

Facilitated communication emerged as a seemingly miraculous intervention for people with severe communication disabilities, particularly autism. A facilitator supported a person’s hand or arm while the individual typed.

Families sometimes discovered what appeared to be a previously hidden, highly articulate person. Messages could be sophisticated and emotionally moving. Some included accusations of abuse.

Controlled testing produced a devastating problem: when the facilitator and disabled person were shown different information, the typed responses generally reflected what the facilitator had seen.

The facilitators did not appear to be deliberately committing fraud. Unfortunately, ideomotor influence can produce authorship without conscious awareness.

The ethical lesson is profound. Compassion made people want the claims to be true. Compassion does not make them true.

The more emotionally compelling a claim becomes, the more important careful methods of knowing become—not less.

What Would Count as Evidence?

Evidence should be capable of doing something beyond restating the claim.

“I know I am nonbinary because I feel nonbinary” is circular if “nonbinary” is itself the proposition requiring explanation. “I know I am a woman because I experience myself as a woman” encounters a similar problem unless we can independently specify what experiencing oneself as a woman means.

Evidence need not always be a laboratory measurement. Human knowledge includes observation, history, converging testimony, prediction, biological evidence, psychological evidence, and reproducible patterns.

Useful evidence should nevertheless help us discriminate among competing explanations.

A rigorous inquiry asks:

What exactly is the person experiencing? When did it begin? What preceded it? What makes it stronger or weaker? What other explanations could produce similar feelings? Does the proposed explanation make predictions that alternative explanations do not? What evidence would count against the explanation?

Those questions embody three habits I have repeatedly returned to in thinking about epistemic parenting.

Epistemic curiosity says: There may be more here than I presently understand.

Epistemic humility says: My preferred explanation could be wrong.

Epistemic analysis says: Let us compare explanations and determine which one best fits the available evidence.

None requires cruelty, and none should ever involve require ridicule.

They require only that compassion and truth remain partners.

Why Not Simply Take Someone’s Word for It?

We routinely take people’s word about matters to which they have privileged access.

“I am frightened.”

“My stomach hurts.”

“I feel lonely.”

“I desperately wish my body were different.”

The speaker has direct access to those experiences in a way that an observer does not.

Identity claims are different because they combine an internal report with an external proposition.

A male person saying, “I desperately wish I were female,” reports something about his internal experience. A male person saying, “I am a woman,” makes a claim about a category whose meaning is not established by his conviction.

The same difficulty arises with “nonbinary” if the category is treated as describing something more than a person’s rejection of sex stereotypes or discomfort with being categorized as male or female.

Other people are then being asked to participate in the proposition through language.

That changes the ethical problem.

A society in which every sincere identity assertion must be treated as objectively authoritative creates a principle that cannot easily be confined to gender. It teaches people that subjective certainty establishes external reality and that questioning an identity claim is itself evidence of moral failure.

That damages our collective capacity to reason.

It harms the claimant. Someone experiencing profound distress deserves investigation rather than automatic explanation. Depression, autism, obsessive thinking, trauma, sexuality, discomfort with puberty, social isolation, body-image problems, peer dynamics, rigid sex stereotypes, and many other factors contribute to how a person understands himself or herself.

Premature certainty closes doors that curiosity would have left open.

Taking someone’s suffering seriously is not the same thing as taking the person’s explanation of that suffering as settled fact.

What Do I Do at a Dinner Party?

Epistemic principles become considerably harder when they leave the page and enter ordinary social life.

Suppose a friend says:

“I’d like you to meet Sarah. She’s transgender.”

You do not need to announce your philosophy of sex and gender.

“Sarah, it’s nice to meet you.”

Nothing more is required.

You can use a person’s chosen name without making any declaration about the person’s sex. Names are social identifiers. Men and women have changed names for thousands of reasons throughout history.

Suppose someone says:

“This is Alex. They’re nonbinary.”

A perfectly courteous response is:

“Alex, nice to meet you. How do you know Susan?”

No confrontation. No pronoun debate. No affirmation of a proposition you do not believe.

The English language provides enormous room for this kind of gracious navigation.

When the Person Is Present

Imagine Sarah is male, identifies as a woman, and is sitting at the table.

Someone asks:

“Has she been to this restaurant before?”

You can answer:

“Sarah was here last month.”

Someone says:

“Didn’t she order the salmon?”

You might say:

“I think Sarah had the salmon.”

Someone asks:

“Is that her coat?”

You can respond:

“I think that’s Sarah’s.”

Repeated use of a name can occasionally sound conspicuous, so ordinary sentence construction can also help:

“That coat belongs to Sarah.”

“I think the salmon was the choice last time.”

“Someone at the table mentioned that earlier.”

The purpose should never be to make the person notice that you are avoiding a pronoun. Courtesy works best when it is almost invisible.

The same principle works with a nonbinary-identifying person named Alex.

“Are they coming with us?”

“Alex is coming.”

“Did they drive here?”

“Alex drove.”

“Is that their drink?”

“That one belongs to Alex.”

Nobody needs to be corrected. Nobody needs to be embarrassed.

When the Person Is Being Discussed but Is Not Present

Greater linguistic freedom exists when you are having a substantive conversation and the person is not present.

Suppose Sarah is biologically male and uses a female name. Someone asks:

“Is Sarah coming tomorrow?”

You might say:

“Yes. He said he’d arrive around seven.”

Using the chosen name while retaining sex-based pronouns separates two different acts of courtesy. You are recognizing the person’s ordinary social identifier without asserting a belief about sex that you do not hold.

A similar conversation concerning Alex might sound like:

“Alex said he won’t be able to make dinner. He’s working late.”

Someone may object:

“Alex uses they/them.”

A calm answer is enough:

“I know. I’m happy to call him Alex.”

Then move on.

No lecture is necessary.

A prolonged argument would usually defeat the very principle we are trying to preserve. Epistemic integrity does not require turning every social gathering into a seminar.

You can decline to say something you believe is untrue without demanding that everyone around you agree with you.

What If Someone Demands Affirmation?

The most difficult moment occurs when avoidance is no longer possible.

“Why won’t you call me a woman?”

“Why won’t you use they/them for me?”

A humane response should focus on your own linguistic boundary rather than diagnosing or attacking the other person.

“I don’t want to be disrespectful to you. I also try not to use language that communicates something I don’t believe. I’m very happy to call you Sarah.”

Another possibility is:

“I understand that this matters to you. I don’t want to turn it into an argument, and I don’t want to embarrass you. I would rather use your name.”

Someone may remain offended.

Courtesy cannot guarantee agreement.

Respect in a pluralistic society has to work in both directions. A transgender-identifying person should not be humiliated, mocked, harassed, or treated as socially contaminated. Someone who does not accept the underlying theory of gender identity should likewise not be required to make declarations he or she believes are false as the price of ordinary social participation. It is similar to religious honorifics, no one need address Pope Leo as “Your Holiness.” The religious honorific extends beyond the objectively valid title—saying “Your Holiness” says far more. Though even I would have difficulty not extending it as I recognize, even as an atheist, the profound commitment and sacrifice that Leo has undoubtedly made. It begs the question if the best popes might be mimicking the bodhisattva path of the Buddhists.

The goal is peaceful coexistence, not compulsory agreement.

The Principle Is Bigger Than Gender

This discussion ultimately concerns something much larger than transgender identification.

Human beings possess an extraordinary ability to believe things.

We detect patterns that are not there. We conform to groups. We rationalize desires. We defer to authority. We reinterpret memories. We mistake confidence for knowledge. We become most certain precisely when our communities reward certainty.

Science developed elaborate methods because human beings discovered, painfully and repeatedly, that sincerity was insufficient.

A civilization that cares about reality therefore needs citizens who can say two things simultaneously:

“I believe that you are sincerely experiencing this.”

“I am not yet persuaded that your explanation of the experience is true.”

Those statements are not contradictory.

Together, they represent one of the most important forms of compassion available to us.

The alternative is to redefine kindness as agreement and disagreement as harm. Once that happens, evidence becomes optional precisely where emotions are strongest.

History gives us ample reason to resist that temptation.

Human dignity requires that we listen to one another.

Human fallibility requires that we continue asking questions.

Human flourishing requires both.