Many readers and listeners of BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY will recognize that the title of this post includes the question that trans philosopher Talia Bettcher posed in a YouTube video of the same name which she produced and circulated on Facebook earlier in the week. When I saw the Facebook post about the video, I was worried. When I watched the video, my worries were unpleasantly confirmed. In the video, which Bettcher intended to be the first part (i.e., Part I) of a negative response to the question “Are Trans People Delusional?,” she initiates her response to the question in a manner typical of an analytic philosopher:

First, she sets out to show that trans people are not delusional by identifying the criteria for someone to count as delusional, that is, she addresses the analytic philosopher’s questions of “What is it?” “What are its properties?,” drawing on the DSM to do so. Next, she illustrates these criteria and properties by offering a vivid hypothetical example of someone–“Doug the Teapot”–who meets these allegedly authoritative conditions. Then, she clarifies what it means to fulfill these criteria and possess these properties by distinguishing someone who can (and should) be regarded as delusional–namely, Doug who believes he is a teapot–from someone who is not delusional and should not be regarded as such; that is, she distinguishes someone–Doug–who is actually delusional from trans people who are wrongly perceived as delusional by virtue of their trans identification. While Doug meets the criteria for someone to count as delusional, the trans person by virtue of their trans identification alone does not satisfy the criteria.

As I watched the video, I became increasingly horrified and angry. My horror and anger were exacerbated by the fact that dozens of feminist philosophers and other oppositional thinkers indicated their approval of the video with praise and affirming emojis on the Facebook post that promoted it. How was it possible that none of them recognized that the video was deeply ableist in a variety of ways? How was it possible that they could overlook that the video generously employed ableist language about so-called intelligence; used a mocking example; and was motivated by ableist assumptions about and understandings of (among other things) the ontological status of the categories of normality and abnormality? How could they miss that, once again, a nondisabled philosopher called upon the apparatus of disability to amplify a certain conception of normal and a certain exclusionary set of people who should be classified as such?

I felt frustrated and annoyed with myself. The argument of the video followed the same formula of argument, had the same goals, as comments that I attempted to dispute on Talia’s post at Daily Nous in February 2025, a formula and goals that I have, in the interim, encountered in publications by trans philosophers and other endeavours in which trans philosophers are engaged. Although, months ago, I had committed myself to address the issue in a BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY post, the commitment waned and I pursued less toxic terrain. Perhaps if I had clearly articulated my objections here, I might have circumvented the subsequent events.

I sent an email to Talia in which I conveyed my dismay that she had made a video that was so deeply ableist and offensive. She responded in short order and we engaged in a brief exchange that led her to delete the video from YouTube and offer an explanation for doing so on her Facebook page. In the course of the exchange, I noted that it was ironic that a philosopher who often expresses frustration about how horrible the profession of philosophy treats a social group with which she identifies would subjugate another group of marginalized philosophers. Yet I also pointed out that this problem (of ableism) in trans philosophy was not solely of her making.

On the contrary, this problem of ableism in trans philosophy is a problem of ableism in the broader profession of philosophy which the profession has presented as an assertion: namely, Trans people are delusional. Mainstream philosophy (and hence mainstream philosophers) traffics in ideas about mental (in)competence, insanity, lucidity, and delusion (to name a few) as if these ideas and the terms that signify them refer to natural kinds, are uncontestable, unproblematic, transcultural, and transhistorical states of being that philosophers and scientists can accurately represent. Nothing could be farther from the truth; yet, at present, when trans philosophers take up the question “Are Trans People Delusional?” in order to debunk it, they assent to the ontology and epistemology that the question assumes and the terms of engagement that it comprises, terms of engagement that mainstream philosophy has put in place, including the derogation of disabled people that these terms entail.

If trans philosophers wish to continue to engage in this line of argumentation, they must expand their method of doing so in ways that encompass a critique of these terms of engagement and the subjugation of disabled people (some of whom are trans) on which they invariably rely. No trans philosopher should appeal to the DSM to bolster her argument. Rather oppositional philosophers should refuse the authoritative status that is globally conferred upon this historically and culturally specific document, a document which (as philosophers and theorists of disability and madness have extensively elaborated) is routinely employed to justify institutionalization, incarceration, medicalization, and drugging of socially subordinated people, especially trans, disabled, racialized, queer, and Indigenous people (which are by no means mutually exclusive groups).

Refuse the question and in doing so refuse the assertion that precedes it. Read some philosophy of disability, including trans, Indigenous, and queer philosophy of disability. Don’t merely pay lip-service to an intersectional approach that allegedly incorporates disability but rather recognize how an anti-ableist intersectional analysis would approach the question and why it would aim to thoroughly deconstruct it.