Transgender? Ask an AI

An image of Aiden Katri uploaded to her Facebook page on Tuesday, March 29, 2016, together with a post explaining her decision to conscientiously object (Aiden Katri/Facebook)

Commenting on yesterday's post, "The 'is' and 'ought' of homosexuality", Roy suggested I should write something on the current hot topic of transgenderism.

As a topic this ranks with dissing the Religion of Peace, suggesting the Saudi ruling clique might have psychopathic tendencies or speaking out in support of Brexit.

Obviously I'm not going to go there .. . But wait! Let's be objective about this. We can ask an AI. Time to invoke SWI Prolog in theorem-proving mode.

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Let’s start by introducing a convenient acronym: marbiafl:

“Male As Regards Body - Identifies As Female Lesbian”.

The scientific approach would be to axiomatise the properties of the marbiafl and then appeal to Leibniz's law, the identity of indiscernibles. First we list the properties of heterosexual men, then the properties of heterosexual women (for simplicity just the 95% of the population who are straight) and finally, the properties of transgender people who are biologically male but who self-identify as lesbian females.

property(man, often_aggressive).
property(man, male_genitalia).
property(man, over_muscled_or_fat).
property(man, hairy_face).
property(man, wants_sex_with_women).

property(woman, often_agreeable).
property(woman, female_genitalia).
property(woman, often_slim_and_petite).
property(woman, smooth_face).
property(woman, romantically_inclined_to_men).

property(marbiafl, often_aggressive).
property(marbiafl, male_genitalia).
property(marbiafl, over_muscled_or_fat).
property(marbiafl, hairy_face).
property(marbiafl, wants_sex_with_women).

Now we ask: are transgender people (as defined above) men or women?

transgender_is(X, Y) :- findall(P, property(X, P), Plist), findall(P, property(Y, P), Plist).

This says a transgender person X is a Y (man or woman) if all the properties of X (gathered in Plist) are just the same as all the properties of a Y (a man or a woman). This is Leibniz's law.

Here is how findall works on the dataset already defined, using SWI Prolog:

?- findall(P, property(man, P), Plist).
Plist = [often_aggressive, male_genitalia, over_muscled_or_fat, hairy_face, wants_sex_with_women].

?- findall(P, property(woman, P), Plist).
Plist = [often_agreeable, female_genitalia, often_slim_and_petite, smooth_face, romantically_inclined_to_men].

?- findall(P, property(marbiafl, P), Plist).
Plist = [often_aggressive, male_genitalia, over_muscled_or_fat, hairy_face, wants_sex_with_women].

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We have now trained the AI and it's ready to answer our questions.

?- transgender_is(marbiafl, woman).
 false.

?- transgender_is(marbiafl, man).
 true.

Oh dear! A shock for activists, I wasn't expecting that.