The Virginia Department of Education recently released its updated policy guidelines for " transgender " students. Specifically, the VDOE defines a "transgender student" as a "public school student whose parent has stated in writing that the student's gender differs from the student's sex, or an eligible student who states in writing that his or her gender differs from his or her sex."

While on the surface, such policy guidelines seem both banal and harmless, the attempted implementation of such guidelines will necessarily violate the rights of all other students and faculty members, as well as make both the expression of and inquiry toward truth and knowledge logically impossible. Let me explain.

Within the philosophy of language, philosophers usually make the distinction between analytic and synthetic definitions. The first type of definition is wholly constituted by its stipulated parts, no more, no less. The second type of definition, however, points to some referent in the observable world. "A bachelor is an unmarried man" is a classic example of an analytic definition. "John is a bachelor" is an example of a synthetic definition.

Most philosophers also typically agree that language and meaning are irreducibly public. That is, for any word, its analytic and synthetic definition must, in principle, be publicly discernible and publicly communicable. In other words, an in-principle, wholly private, wholly subjectively defined meaning or term makes no logical or conceptual sense whatsoever. Yet this fundamental error is implied in the VDOE’s recent guidelines, particularly when it comes to the notion of "gender."

If we grant that the analytic definition of human male is some approximation of "an organism with XY chromosomes, possessing small gametes, and ordered, in principle, to fertilize females of the same organism," then we now have a publicly evaluable and publicly communicable definition we can use as a common standard to check whether or not synthetic claims such as "John is a male" are true. We can likewise use this common standard to discern whether or not a given person is intersex, as well as to make sense of the concept of "gender" in its meaningful and nonmeaningful senses.

That said, if what VDOE officials mean by "gender" is just a student's personal self-conception that differs from his or her sex, then they are merely describing a male or female with a false belief. If what the VDOE means by "gender" is a student’s personal, subjective prerogative with respect to the socially constructed roles, expectations, mores, etc., often associated with males and females for a given society, then they are once again just describing a male or female with a certain belief about cultural roles and expectations.

If, however, what the VDOE means by "gender" is a student’s in-principle wholly private, wholly subjective definition, and if language and meaning are irreducibly public, then the VDOE’s use of the term "gender" in this third, unintelligible sense doesn’t rise to the level of saying anything meaningful at all. Furthermore, mere relational definitions "that gender is different from sex," as well as mere circular definitions "that gender is what one identifies as," still both fail to provide any definition that is publicly evaluable and could, in principle, be determined as true or false. This is probably why transgender advocates are so tongue-tied and reluctant to answer the simple question, "What is a woman?"

Despite such complications, transgender advocates, and now the VDOE, seem to keep equivocating between these three different senses of the term "gender," treating the last, wholly private and unintelligible sense of the term as both intelligible and as a new sort of metaphysical category in addition to just males and females.

By tacitly granting that such terminology tracks a special metaphysical category of person when no such category exists and by then attempting to legislate on behalf of the special "rights" claims of such nonexistent persons, the VDOE's policy will necessarily run roughshod over the actual rights of actual male and female students and faculty members and will render the expression of and inquiry toward truth verboten.

By attempting to subordinate the publicly evaluable, analytic, and synthetic definitions of the terms male and female to the private, subjective prerogatives of certain elect speakers, the VDOE’s policy necessarily violates all other students’ and faculty members’ rights by forcing them, more or less, to go along with overt nonsense.

Language is fundamentally networked, and the definitions of male and female are absolutely fundamental to so many other of our shared and interrelated terms, concepts, meanings, knowledge claims, records, laws, policies, and institutions. So the forced introduction of this new incoherent concept can’t help but affect everything within that entire interrelated web, and everything negatively at that. There are no such things as "transgender students," just male and female students with different beliefs.