This week: the Nobel-winning psychology of why you've never once won an argument about trans people, and never will. Featuring Daniel Kahneman, Richard Dawkins, and the man down the flat-roof pub

For fifty years I said nothing. You learn a particular silence in the closet. Not just not speaking, but not letting yourself form the sentence in case it showed on your face.

So when I finally came out, I came out of that silence like a greyhound out of a trap.

I went straight onto X, and for the first time in my life I could say the thing. Every argument I’d swallowed for half a century, suddenly out under my own name. I argued with everyone. The gender-critical names with the blue ticks and the book deals, their followers, the trolls who’d wandered in for sport. Daily, for hours, with the manic energy of someone who’d just discovered the gag was off.

I wasn’t naive. I had a strategy. I knew I couldn’t change the minds of the people I was arguing with, so the point was the audience. The silent onlookers, the undecided, the people scrolling past. You don’t win by converting your opponent; you win in the minds of the people watching.

What I hadn’t costed in was what it would do to me. It is a specific kind of exhausting, building a careful, evidence-based argument while a thousand voices shout you’re a fucking man in a dress. Not because the insult stings, though sometimes it does, but because of the asymmetry. The insult is free: five words, no thought, fired and forgotten. My argument was expensive: evidence, structure, patience, nuance. I was running an engine that drank fuel by the gallon against people running one that ran on air. They could keep it up forever. I couldn’t. One day I understood that, and walked away from the spectacle.

But I didn’t leave empty-handed. Across all those bruising months, and in the harder encounters, with real people in real rooms, family among them, I’d started to see the machinery behind the faces. I’d gone in to persuade, failed, got hurt, and come out with something better than a win. I’d worked out how the thinking actually works.

And here is what it is.

The whole thing runs on one move, and once you’ve seen it you can’t unsee it.

Attribute Substitution

There’s a thing the psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls attribute substitution. When the mind meets a hard question, it quietly swaps it for an easier one and answers that instead, without noticing the swap. Ask someone “how satisfied are you with your life?”, a genuinely hard question, and what they actually answer, without knowing it, is “what mood am I in right now?” The substitution is invisible from the inside. They’re certain they answered the hard question.

Here’s how it runs with people like me.

The hard question is this: what is the actual risk of allowing trans women into women’s spaces, weighed against the actual cost of excluding them, in light of the actual evidence? That needs base rates, proportion, some moral seriousness. What harm has actually occurred, how often, compared against the harm exclusion causes.

Think about how we drive. Two cars approach each other on an ordinary road at sixty miles an hour, a combined hundred and twenty, with nothing between them but a painted line and a shared agreement not to cross it. Any driver could swerve across and kill everyone. We know this. We accept it. We don’t ban driving, because we weigh the real risk against the real cost and make our peace with the painted line. That’s what grown-up risk reasoning looks like. It’s never “could harm ever occur?” It’s always “how much, how likely, against what cost?”

So you make that argument. You bring the base rates, the proportion, the painted line. And the answer comes back:

But you’re not a woman.

There it is. The switcheroo. You asked about risk; they answered about definitions. And this is the maddening part, the part that took me a thousand arguments to see: they experience it as having answered you. They’ve swapped the hard question for an easy one, knocked the easy one over, felt the satisfying crunch of something falling, and assumed it was your point. You hand them an actuarial table; they think the conversation was about the meaning of a word.

The switcheroo

Now, I want to be careful here, because there’s a version of me that wastes the rest of her life disputing whether a man can become a woman, and I’m not her.

In one narrow biological sense, the sentence is true. I wasn’t born female. I don’t produce ova. I can’t become the kind of woman my mother is. Fine. Granted. I don’t need metaphysical perfection from the universe before I’m allowed to exist with dignity.

The problem isn’t the sentence. The problem is what they make the sentence do.

The whole model is just three rungs:

1. A man cannot become a woman.

2. Therefore a trans woman is a man.

3. Therefore a trans woman must be kept out of women’s spaces. And out of the sport, the prison, the changing room, the documents, the pronouns, the basic kindness.

Only the first rung does any work. The rest is supposed to cascade out of it automatically. And that’s the fraud. Not the biological claim, but the pretence that every social, legal and moral conclusion falls out of it for free. A person can be male-born without that single fact settling what risks she poses, what exclusion costs, or how a decent society should weigh competing needs. But the model doesn’t want to do that work. It wants the clean cascade. Grant the root and everything else is meant to follow.

I understand the pull of this better than most, because building abstractions is my day job. I write software. My whole craft is climbing to the clean rule at the top of the tree and letting everything follow from it. I feel the seduction of the parsimonious model in my bones. There is something that feels rigorous about a world you can capture in three statements; the fewer the axioms, the more serious it feels. But any engineer who’s been at it long enough knows the discipline that makes abstraction honest: the model has to answer to reality. When the runtime behaviour contradicts your beautiful invariant, the invariant is wrong, and you climb back up and fix it. Evidence flows upward. The day you stop letting the world revise your model is the day you stop being an engineer and start being a priest.

That’s what this is. The root axiom was never derived; it was asserted, then sealed. No fact is permitted to climb back up and touch it. So when you argue rung three, the risk and the evidence, and they answer with rung one, the slogan, that’s the switcheroo in its native habitat. They retreat to the top of the tree because it’s the only rung that feels safe. The lower rungs wobble the instant you ask them to justify themselves.

A man can’t be a woman. Yes, in one sense. Fine. Now explain why that settles whether a harmless, transitioned, middle-aged woman buying a lipstick in Boots is a threat to public order. They rarely do, because explaining was never the point. Returning to the slogan is the point.

Three intellectual levels of TERF, same swictheroo.

You meet three kinds of person doing this, and they’re worth telling apart.

At the bottom of the tree is the flat-roof-pub patriot. “England till I die”, knows what a woman is, said it down the boozer and got a laugh. He doesn’t argue the axiom, he shouts it. There’s no machinery and no disguise. You say anything at all and back comes the slogan like a football chant. He’s at rung one before you’ve finished your sentence, because rung one is the only rung he owns.

In the middle is the podcast graduate. He’s done the reading, by which I mean he’s consumed four hundred hours of Jordan Peterson, Helen Joyce and the rest of the brigade, and he has mistaken agreeing with a confident presenter for having thought something through. This is the one who flatters himself on his intellect. He can cascade the model down with real fluency: man can’t be a woman, therefore men, therefore no spaces, therefore no pronouns. Because it has the shape of reasoning, he believes it is reasoning. But he didn’t derive the root; he absorbed it, pre-loaded, from someone with a microphone, and he’s never once let a fact climb back up and revise it. He has cut the feedback wire and called the silence rigour.

And at the top is ‘the scientist’, or real thinker. For our example, we will cite Richard Dawkins. The man who taught a generation to think in fine gradients about evolution, to distrust the easy story, to follow the evidence into the mess, reaches, on this one subject, for the hardest binary he can find. Sex is binary. Gametes. Chromosomes. True enough, in the context he means them. And deployed, with enormous authority, as an answer to the top of the tree dressed up as a verdict on the bottom of it. I have seen him do this on endless podcasts with Helen Joyce and the gang. The erudition isn’t the reasoning. The erudition is the disguise. And it’s worse from him than from the man down the pub, not better, because the credentials lend the swap a borrowed authority. The onlookers I was trying to reach see a famous scientist and assume the science has spoken. It hasn’t. He’s done exactly what the pub did. He’s just done it in a lab coat.

A chant, a cascade, a lab coat. Underneath all three, the same climb back to the top of the tree.

The deeper failure isn’t stupidity. It’s a kind of corrupted cleverness. The clever ones fall for it precisely because they’ve been trained to admire elegance: the clean model, the hard line, the feeling of stripping away fashionable nonsense to reveal the underlying truth. They mistake the satisfaction of a simple model for the validity of it.

But a model’s only job is to fit the territory. And the territory here is people.

A model of sex and gender that resolves to three rules got that clean the only way it could: by throwing away the data that didn’t fit. And the data it threw away has a face, and a name. It’s me, and the others like me. The elegance was bought with amputation. The model compressed the world by deleting the inconvenient parts, and the inconvenient parts were human beings.

Real life is the messy model. It always was, because real life is made of people, and people have never once resolved to three clean statements. Anyone selling you a tidier map has tidied it by leaving people off it.

I don’t argue on X anymore. I’d taken everything the arena had to give, and what it gave me was this: you cannot feed evidence into a mind that has swapped your question for a different one. So I stopped offering, and I spend my breath where the wire is still connected. There are such people. The ones for whom this is a real person, and she’s harmless, and she’s happy is allowed to edit the model. I’ve found them. Some of them surprised me.

The switcheroo is the tell. Make an argument about anything in the real and messy world, and if the answer comes back as a statement about what a word means, they didn’t answer you. They climbed back to the top of the tree, and they probably don’t even know they did it.

Once you can see the climb, you’re free. Not because you can win. Because you finally understand why you never could, and you can stop setting yourself on fire to keep a severed wire warm.

Another day, another germination of an uncomfortable thought.

It is almost Pride month again.

Pre-transition Steve used to look at Pride month and roll his eyes so hard they nearly detached from his skull.

I remember looking at Regent Street covered in Pride flags and thinking the Third Reich had moved back in, only this time in glorious Technicolor.

“The whole bloody month? Are you serious?”

That really was my attitude.

And if I am being completely honest, part of the reason I resisted transition for so long was because I had a profoundly uneasy relationship with the idea of being “in the LGBT”.

I still remember the day, in front of the mirror in my office, and I started repeating the words over and over to myself.

“I am transgender.”

Again.

“I am transgender.”

Again.

“I am transgender.”

Acceptance was hard.

Discovery was not hard. I had known for decades in the strange submerged way trans people often know things long before they admit them. But acceptance was another matter entirely.

The words felt radioactive.

Then, later, sat in front of my computer, something else hit me and I burst out laughing.

“Oh my God.”

“I’m in the LGBT.”

“What the actual fuck?”

I, Stephen Bennett, was in the LGBT.

This came as a considerable shock to Stephen Bennett.

You see, I had spent most of my life psychologically standing outside all of that.

I would see Pride marches and sometimes recoil from them. I would see leather outfits, gimp masks, fetish aesthetics, public sexuality, rainbow hair, shouting, slogans, and what looked to me like social chaos. And my reaction, if I am honest, was often something between discomfort and embarrassment.

Part of that was probably straightforward prejudice. Some of it was social conditioning. Some of it was class instinct. Some of it was fear.

But a large part of it, I now realise, was that I did not want any of it to have anything to do with me.

Because if those people belonged to the same category as me, then suddenly my problem stopped being abstract.

It became personal.

I also think I had a very specific discomfort with overt sexuality in public. I am actually quite prudy. I always joked about this in my early transition videos. Somewhere inside me there lives a slightly horrified 1970s school prefect and a small amount of Mary Whitehouse.

I do not like public sexual theatrics, regardless of who is doing them.

But here is the interesting contradiction.

At the exact same time as I was rolling my eyes at parts of queer culture, I secretly envied the living hell out of some of it.

Growing up in Britain in the 1970s and 80s, I absolutely loved those funny, cheeky, camp public figures who everyone knew were gay but nobody officially said were gay. Men like Kenneth Williams. Later people like Graham Norton and Alan Carr.

I loved the freedom of it.

The wit.

The looseness.

The theatricality.

The escape from rigid masculinity.

I wanted to sit at that table.

Not because I wanted public sex or fetish parades or slogans.

I wanted the release valve.

I noticed something throughout my life. Whenever I spent time around very camp gay men, if I trusted them, something in me relaxed. My guard dropped. I became softer. More honest. Less frightened.

Back in the 1990s, one of the very few people I ever came out to was a gay couple I knew in Nottingham. They gave me some dresses. I was eternally grateful for that.

That sounds like such a small thing, but it mattered enormously.

Around straight men, especially in the world I grew up in, there were invisible walls around masculinity. You did not admit softness. You did not admit femininity. You certainly did not admit wanting to be a woman.

But with certain gay men, the walls briefly disappeared.

They disarmed me.

I could breathe.

And then something else happened recently.

I was in Boots buying yet more hair nonsense, because transition appears to involve spending the GDP of a small nation on hair products, and there was another trans person in the shop.

Very visibly trans.

Rainbow-coloured hair.

Receding hairline.

Masculine face.

Standing out enormously.

Six months ago, maybe even less, part of me would have looked at that and thought:

“Why would you draw more attention to yourself?”

“If you are already visibly trans, why add rainbow hair on top of it?”

But this time I saw something completely different.

They were not making it worse.

They were taking it back.

And suddenly I understood something I had not properly understood before.

Not everyone survives this by blending in quietly and trying to look as socially acceptable as possible.

Some people survive by becoming louder.

More visible.

More deliberate.

By refusing shame.

And I realised something else too.

My experience of being trans has been easier than some people’s.

I pass reasonably well.

I live a fairly normal life.

I walk around Cork buying makeup and hair products and coffees and nobody really bothers me very much.

And the uncomfortable truth is this:

Part of the reason I get to do that is because other people absorbed the social punishment first.

The flamboyant gay man in 1987.

The activist I rolled my eyes at twenty years ago.

The visibly trans woman walking into Boots anyway.

The people who were prepared to look ridiculous, threatening, embarrassing, political, weird, too loud, too feminine, too obvious, too much.

People suffered so that other people could quietly exist later with less suffering.

That does not mean I suddenly agree with every part of LGBT culture.

I still roll my eyes sometimes.

I still do not naturally think in group identities.

I still dislike ideological conformity.

I still do not trust groups not to colonise individual thought.

I still have a strong instinct toward independence.

And I do not believe being trans automatically makes somebody wise, moral, or correct any more than being straight does.

But I understand something now that I did not understand before.

You do not have to become identical to people to recognise what they carried for you.

And that, I think, is why I now find Pride month oddly moving.

Not because I have suddenly become a perfect Pride person.

God no.

But because I finally understand that I am not standing outside the glass anymore.

I am on the inside now.

Which means when I see irritated middle-aged men rolling their eyes at the flags, I sometimes laugh quietly to myself.

Because I know exactly where they are psychologically.

I used to live there too.

And despite all my instincts toward being a solitary creature, despite all my resistance to group identity, despite all my hesitation around slogans and collective language, I have finally arrived at the conclusion:

We are all in this together, aren’t we?

Since Bridget Phillipson gave her statement in Parliament following the Supreme Court ruling, I have avoided reading about it like the plague.

And I’ll tell you why.

Before I transitioned, I spent most of my life avoiding myself.

I did it with extraordinary sophistication. I looked outward instead. Economics. Politics. Federal Reserve policy. UK news. Interest rate probabilities. Endless YouTube videos about systems, governments, markets, civilisation, decline, progress, collapse. Anything, absolutely anything, except the thing sitting quietly inside me waiting to be looked at.

Then I transitioned, and one of the promises I made to myself was this:

Stop staring endlessly at the whole world and start paying attention to your own immediate one.

How am I feeling?

What is happening in my life?

How are the people around me?

What is actually in front of me?

So when this ruling came, and my YouTube feed filled itself to the gills with Helen Joyce’s grinning face and another forty-seven thumbnails explaining that civilisation itself now depended upon who pees where, I avoided it.

Not because I did not care.

Because I cared too much.

And because I have finally learned that not every public fire requires my private nervous system to be thrown directly into it.

But last night I sat down and thought about it properly.

And I think I am duty bound to speak.

Not because I want to join the screaming. Not because I want to perform outrage for a side. Not because I think every trans woman must become a full-time political combatant.

But because I think I have something useful to add here.

And yes, I am angry.

The Supreme Court ruling itself was actually narrower and more legally coherent than many people on either side pretend. The court essentially decided that for the Equality Act to function consistently, the definitions of “sex”, “man” and “woman” had to refer to biological sex. The government and EHRC guidance now flowing from that position claims to be doing two things simultaneously:

Protect trans people from discrimination.

And exclude trans women from female legal classification in certain contexts.

That is the actual terrain now, whether people like it or not.

And the thing that interests me is not the slogan war that immediately follows all of this.

Not “trans women are literally women.”

Not “common sense has prevailed.”

Not “this is genocide.”

Not “this is just biology.”

Honestly, most of the discourse surrounding this subject now resembles two cults screaming through a hedge at one another while normal people quietly back away carrying Tesco bags.

What interests me is something else entirely.

Trust.

Because society fundamentally runs on trust.

I walk into a supermarket and it would not exactly require Ocean’s Eleven levels of criminal genius for me to pick up a Mars bar and walk out with it. Society functions because almost everyone decides not to.

We stand in queues trusting they will not turn into riots.

We walk down streets trusting strangers will not attack us.

We drive at high speed towards one another separated by painted lines and mutual social agreement.

Civilisation is essentially an enormous distributed trust network.

And there are exceptions to this.

Airports do not run on trust. Anti-money laundering systems do not run on trust. Child safeguarding does not run entirely on trust. Certain edge cases carry such catastrophic downside risk that suspicion becomes systematised.

Fair enough.

But trans women were not historically treated as a catastrophic risk category.

For decades, most trans women simply existed quietly inside society’s ordinary trust model.

Then suddenly we were moved outside it.

And I think it is worth asking why.

Because I do not believe the answer is aggregate evidence.

I do not believe British society woke up one morning drowning in statistically overwhelming evidence that trans women as a population had violated the social contract to such an extent that we uniquely required permanent suspicion.

I think something else happened.

Firstly, the internet happened.

Or more specifically, algorithms happened.

The public did not meet ordinary trans women quietly trying to get on with their lives. They met the loudest, strangest, most performative, most narcissistic, most inflammatory examples imaginable because those were the examples the algorithm selected for maximum emotional engagement.

The internet rewarded outrage, spectacle and category confusion.

And some of the people elevated by that machine were, frankly, ridiculous.

Not representative.

Not typical.

Not even particularly sane in some cases.

But human beings are pattern-matching creatures. If you show people the same extreme examples repeatedly enough, eventually they start believing the edge case is the category itself.

And then, if I am being honest, activists made this worse.

There was a version of this conversation the public was broadly willing to have.

“Please treat trans people kindly.”

Most people could handle that.

“Please allow people dignity.”

Most people could handle that too.

But somewhere along the line, parts of trans activism stopped asking for social tolerance and started demanding epistemological surrender.

People were suddenly expected to affirm things that many ordinary people simply experienced as obviously untrue.

That trans women are literally biologically female.

That sex itself is essentially meaningless.

That there are no meaningful physical distinctions whatsoever.

That anyone questioning any aspect of this framework was motivated entirely by hatred.

And this was catastrophic politics.

Because moderate people who might otherwise have extended ordinary social trust and compassion suddenly felt they were being asked to deny observable reality itself.

Once that happened, the entire debate became poisoned.

And then came what I privately think of as the Holy Trinity.

Women’s spaces.

Sport.

Children.

Every conversation eventually returned to one of these three things.

Now, on sport, if I am honest, I think some activists massively overplayed their hand. Human beings understand physical asymmetry intuitively. Pretending otherwise was never going to survive contact with reality.

But even here, I do not think these issues entirely explain what happened.

I think underneath all of this lies something older, more primitive and much less flattering.

Revulsion.

Or perhaps discomfort is the kinder word.

The discomfort people experience when confronted with category ambiguity.

A trans woman interrupts a deeply embedded social heuristic. Human beings are constantly sorting one another into categories unconsciously and at speed. Male. Female. Familiar. Safe. Threatening. Normal. Unusual.

And when those heuristics become unstable, some people experience genuine psychological discomfort.

I honestly think this resembles, in some ways, the reaction visibly camp gay men once triggered in previous generations.

Not because they were dangerous.

Because they disrupted expected social patterns.

And I think a huge amount of modern “risk language” surrounding trans people is, at least partially, a socially respectable wrapper placed around that discomfort.

Because here is the thing that keeps bothering me.

Liberal societies are supposed to individualise guilt.

We are not supposed to generalise entire populations based upon symbolic edge cases amplified through media systems.

At least, not if we wish to remain liberal.

And yet trans women increasingly became a category for whom ordinary civic trust was suspended.

Not because most people had personally encountered dangerous trans women.

Not because statistical reality dramatically shifted.

But because visibility shifted.

Algorithms shifted.

Activism shifted.

Institutional rhetoric shifted.

And the entire emotional equilibrium around the issue collapsed.

No population is risk-free.

No human category is entirely harmless.

There are manipulative trans people. Violent trans people. Predatory trans people.

There are also manipulative accountants, violent yoga instructors and predatory men called Keith who own jet skis.

That is not the point.

The point is proportionality.

The point is whether trans women, as a class, genuinely forfeited the ordinary trust upon which civil society normally operates.

And I do not believe we did.

The tragedy of this entire debate is that most trans women did not set out to become symbols in a civilisation-scale argument about sex, language and metaphysics.

Most of us just wanted to disappear quietly into ordinary life.

This morning, my Chihuahua puppy, Colonel Chesterton, was standing proudly on top of a stuffed sheep chewing a bone like a tiny Victorian landlord defending inherited territory from peasant revolt.

And I looked at him and burst out laughing.

Because while the internet increasingly demands that every trans person become a full-time combatant in an endless symbolic war, my actual life is here.

It a dog.

Coffee.

Music.

Hair appointments.

Ordinary mornings.

And perhaps that is the thing trans people must remember most carefully now.

Our inner lives matter more than the argument.

Because if we surrender those completely to politics, then the culture war has already taken everything worth protecting.