Transgender Sticker Fallacy

Or why labeling debates are smuggling operations

BIRDS!

Let’s say you’re a zoo architect tasked with designing an enclosure for ostriches, and let’s also say that you have no idea what an ostrich is (roll with me here). The potentially six-figure question staring you down is whether to install a ceiling.

The dumb solution is to ask “Are ostriches birds?” then, surmising that birds typically fly, construct an elaborate aviary complete with netting and elevated perches.

The non-dumb solution is to instead ask “Can ostriches fly?” then skip the ceiling entirely, give these 320-pound land-bound speed demons the open sky life they actually need, and pocket the cost differential.

Your boss is not having it, however. When you inform him of your decision to eschew the ceiling enclosure, he gets beet-red and apoplectic, repeating like a mantra “But they’re birds! BIRDS!” and insists that ostriches belong in the aviary with the finches and parrots. I mean, he’s taxonomically correct (the best kind of correct) that ostriches are indeed birds, but it’s also apparent that he’s using the “bird” sticker as a fallacious shortcut to sneak in all sorts of nonsensical assumptions.

Designing an ostrich pen based purely on the “bird” label (and all the smuggled premises that label drags along) would be a disaster. The zookeeper’s real concern isn’t taxonomic purity but practical reality: How much space do they need? What kind of ground surface? What food? What climate? In the real world, ostriches end up housed with zebras and gazelles despite their “bird” sticker, because what matters is substance (the animal’s needs), not the label slapped on the cage.

Does this whole scenario sound farcical to you? I agree! And yet it’s exactly how the transgender discourse has been playing out.

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The ostrich story is a perfect encapsulation of what I termed the Sticker Shortcut Fallacy. To recap, the fallacy is the habit of slapping connotation-heavy labels onto contested premises in order to shortcut real debate. It involves three moves:

1. You have a premise that’s difficult to justify directly (“We should build a pointless and expensive aviary for ostriches” — maybe the boss wants the prestige project or has budget motives).

2. You find an adjacent, easy-to-accept premise (“Birds belong in aviaries”).

3. You slap a shared label onto your contested premise (“Ostriches belong in aviaries because they are birds! BIRDS!”) to smuggle in agreement without direct confrontation.

If this sounds manipulative, that’s because it is. In a second piece, I explained why this tactic is fallacious reasoning, showing how it mixes up composition and division fallacies while relying on slippery semantics. Even though I had very specific contentious examples in mind, I chose to obviate them to avoid a distraction. That bloodless approach was probably a mistake in retrospect because it avoided providing something tangible for readers to chew on. Let’s fix that now, let’s savor blood.

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People like sports. For whatever reason, humans have always gotten a big kick out of watching other humans slug it out. Athletic competition has been a cultural mainstay since our cave-dwelling days. But for the spectacle to be interesting, there needs to be some measure of competitive balancing. Watching a heavyweight boxer pummel a league of toddlers might lose its entertainment value after the sixth brain hemorrhage.

But there’s a tension of sorts: if your talent pool is your Dunbar tribe of 150 and you just want to know who’s the best spear thrower, there’s no real downside to open competition. Such a community is small enough that participation is within reach of a meaningful number of people.

But scale up to millions of people, and unrestricted competition becomes a problem. You end up with freakishly gifted elites dominating the field while everyone else withers on the vine with zero chance of winning anything. Interest dies, participation plummets, and the sport collapses.

The solution here is leagues. While you might not necessarily be the absolute best spear thrower in the whole entire world, you certainly can have a chance to be the best within an arbitrarily defined demographic.

But how you demarcate the leagues is also in tension. The obvious answer seems simple: rank everyone by skill and group them accordingly. Put the top 10 spear throwers in Division A, ranks 11-20 in Division B, and so on down the line. The problem is that we want competitors to be more or less evenly matched, but we can’t know if they’re evenly matched unless they already competed in even matches. Classic ostrich-and-egg problem.

You could theoretically conduct tryout matches but every rational actor has a massive incentive to sandbag their own performance. Why reveal your true power level during assessment when you could intentionally underperform, get placed in a weaker division, then trounce everyone when it finally matters?

Even if you solve the competitor’s dilemma, you still have an assessment paradox. If you somehow make your screening accurate enough to force people’s best effort, you’ve basically already run the competition. Why bother with the actual tournament if you’ve already determined the results? But if your screening is too weak or easily gamed, you end up with mismatched divisions where ringers demolish genuine novices. What you need is Goldilocks fudge factors:

1. Just enough assessment to create reasonably fair matchups

2. …but not so precise as to preordain the results.

3. Plus, whatever criteria you use need to be objective enough to safeguard against manipulation.

There’s no perfect solution because the whole point of spectacle is to avoid prescient analytical precision.

The ur-example that reasonably satisfies all three factors is weight-class divisions. Weight can be such an extreme determinative factor in combat sports that an untrained 250-pound couch potato could walk into any boxing gym and absolutely demolish a 100-pound opponent with decades of training. In pure striking exchanges, technique has little bearing when you’re getting ragdolled by someone several times your mass.

At the same time, weight isn’t so determinative that you’d expect every 150lbs combatant to perform identically. There’s still plenty of room for training, skill, strategy, and fighting style to matter enormously. And best of all, weight is objectively measurable, making it very difficult to game (obviously severe weight cutting is still a thing).

Every effective league division follows these same principles: find an attribute that’s predictive enough to create fair competition, objective enough to resist manipulation, but not so deterministic that outcomes become foregone conclusions.

We see this across the field. Little League lets kids compete by screening on age rather than forcing eight-year-olds to face grown adults. Minor leagues create opportunities for decent adults who can’t quite hack it against professionals, using severe salary incentives to eliminate sandbagging. Paralympic classifications account for different physical disabilities.

And, of course, sex-based divisions also follow this pattern because males in general have an overwhelming athletic advantage over females, with the other advantage being administrative simplicity in ascertaining sex (Or at least, it used to be — more on that later).

An illustrative graph of the gap between male and female athletic capabilities. Once humans hit puberty, almost any male will have a higher grip strength than almost all females. [Graph is via Reddit based on NHANES data from CDC]

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Why perseverate so much over sports? The point here is to emphasize that league divisions don’t appear arbitrarily out of thin air. Their purpose is as a means to an end, and they’re not the end itself.

League divisions can come and go depending on what you want to prioritize. For example, the early UFC tournaments (1993-1996) actually had no weight restrictions whatsoever — anyone could fight anyone regardless of size. Initially it was an absurd bloody spectacle with karate masters trying to land precise strikes against boxers or boxers getting taken down and having no idea how to defend submissions. Very quickly, people figured out that certain martial arts (namely Brazilian jiu-jitsu) were far more effective than others in unrestricted combat. And while it served as a fascinating real life experiment, UFC eventually got too predictable once people figured out the meta-game. Weight classes were then introduced not just for safety and regulatory compliance, but also to keep it interesting.

On the flipside, we could conjure up hypotheticals that demonstrate their obsolescence. Imagine cybernetic skeleton replacements become fashionable, allowing users to replace their entire skeletal system with lighter, stronger materials. A participant now weighs much less but can hit exponentially harder. The previously reliable purpose behind weight classifications suddenly evaporates because weight is no longer as predictive of performance. Insisting ‘but he’s really below 150 pounds!‘ is technically correct (the best kind) but still nonsensical — you’re mistaking the sticker for the thing itself.

The moment you lose sight of why a categorization exists, you become vulnerable to defending arbitrary lines in the sand while the world shifts beneath your feet. Categories are tools, not sacred principles — and tools are useless if they no longer serve their purpose.

Sports organizations adopted sex-segregation because it satisfyingly balanced multiple factors: predictive enough (clear athletic advantages between categories), objective enough (historically simple to determine), and not so deterministic (meaningful competition within categories). But maybe that’s no longer the case?

Regardless of whether you think trans is fake or whatever, it’s just undeniably true that cross-sex hormones and gonad removals are much more prevalent nowadays. We’ve always had overlapping “boundaries” across the spectrum of male and female athletic performance — after all, elite female athletes can outcompete plenty of males — but the distinctions are increasingly blurred. The sharp bimodal distribution we once had is becoming a flatter, more spread-out curve as increasing numbers of people occupy the previously sparse intermediate performance zones.

What does that mean for sex segregation in sports? This brings us back to the central point of this entire essay: it depends entirely on what purpose sex-segregation served in the first place. You cannot have a coherent opinion on how divisions should be drawn unless you can clearly articulate the underlying principles that justify those divisions in the first place!

It’s important to remember there is no universally “correct” answer, just like there is no universally “correct” weight class. Different sports organizations might reasonably prioritize different goals: some might want to prioritize preventing male athletic advantage from overshadowing female athleticism, others will favor administrative simplicity, others will want to elevate subjective identity over all else, some might emphasize revenue generation and fan engagement, and others might just say fuck it all and finally become the first horoscope league.

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This isn’t an essay only about sports. I went into detail to showcase that sports league divisions (or any other categories) aren’t divinely etched by the heavens on obsidian tablets; we literally make them up because they happen to be useful! The real tragedy is watching people defend categorical boundaries whose purpose they can’t explain, like our zoo boss insisting ostriches belong in aviaries (“BIRDS!”).

When it comes to sex segregation of any kind, the lack of curiosity on why the segregation exists in the first place is astounding to me. Should transwomen be allowed to go into women’s bathrooms? I don’t know, why are there separate bathrooms in the first place? Should transmen inmates be housed in men’s prisons? I don’t know, why are there separate prisons in the first place? Should transwhoever go into this bucket or the other bucket? I don’t know, what’s with the buckets? None of these disputes are resolved by a dictionary.

Label smuggling thrives because it’s cognitively cheaper. Humans are pattern-recognition machines; labels are handy shortcuts, reducing complex issues into easily digestible narratives. But humans are also lazy machines. We’re eager to outsource cognitive labor to emotionally charged words.

The reason the sticker shortcut fallacy is so prevalent is that it’s really effective at distracting people. The idiocy of debating the birdishness of ostriches as a guise to decide whether to build an aviary should be apparent, and yet there’s hordes red in the face arguing the definition of “woman” not realizing semantics are used to disguise contested premises.

For some, the confusion is intentional: there’s a conclusion they’re ultimately after, but it’s easier to smuggle via connotation rather than draw attention by openly declaring it at the customs checkpoint.

Remember, labels simplify communication only when shared definitions exist. Absent consensus, labels actively distort and mislead. Insisting on labels rather than attributes is prima facie evidence of malicious intent — someone trying to force a concession they can’t earn openly and honestly.

Next time you get lured into a sticker debate, stop. Use a label only if its admission criteria are crystal clear and uncontested. Otherwise, assume the label is moving contraband premises. Seize the cargo and answer the real question hidden underneath.