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Being versus feeling: feeling is not a fact

A man *can* feel like a woman — but that does not make him a woman. The difference between "being" and "feeling" is not a detail; it is the heart of the gender discussion. A girl with anorexia genuinely feels fat — and is thin. No one will validate her feelings by helping her lose weight. With gender, precisely that confusion is enforced as truth.

The semantic slip

In normal language, we distinguish "X feels Y" from "X is Y". Someone who feels unhappy does not necessarily have to be unhappy. Someone who feels too fat at 50 kg is not too fat — has a distorted body image. Someone who feels rich without money has a feeling, not wealth. With gender, this elementary distinction is abandoned: feeling becomes being, and whoever names the difference is called a hater.

The counterexample: anorexia

Anorexia nervosa is a paradigm. The patient genuinely and intensely experiences themselves as too fat, even when severely underweight. Clinicians do not take this feeling as a reason to help the patient lose weight. The same applies to body integrity dysphoria (BID): the desire for the amputation of healthy limbs is, in regular care, not granted on demand (source). Only with gender is the opposite model—confirm the feeling, cut into the body—presented as a concern. See also denial of reality .

The phenomenology of feeling

What does "feeling like a woman" mean? A man who has never been a woman has no access to the female domain of experience. At most, he has an idea of what he *thinks* a woman feels — a stereotype. Women do not become women by dressing femininely, wearing makeup, or adopting a submissive attitude; those role expectations are precisely what feminism fought against. Blanchard's typology offers autogynephilia as an explanation for the "woman experience" in part of the adult-onset cases (source); the theory is contested. See Blanchard typology .

Category error

Gilbert Ryle identified the "category error": placing an idea in the wrong logical category. "Being a woman" belongs in the category of biological and social facts. "Feeling like a woman" belongs in the category of subjective experiences. The second does not imply the former — just as "feeling like I am flying" does not imply that I am flying. See also ontology of identity and circular reasoning .

The damage of elevating feeling to fact

When feelings are given the public status of fact, others are forced to accept unverifiable claims as true. This underlies puberty blockers in children and legal self-identification. For minors, systematic reviews (Cass Review 2024; Ludvigsson et al. 2023) found no high-quality evidence that puberty blockers and hormones improve mental health in the long term, and some people detransition, although research on them is still young and methodologically limited.