The Absurdity of “Absurdity”: Why Piers Morgan’s Argument Against Trans Identity Collapses Under Science
When broadcaster Piers Morgan announced on air, “If I can identify as anything, why can’t I identify as a black lesbian?”, he believed he had exposed the logical flaw of gender identity. It was meant to be a rhetorical mic drop, a line designed to make the concept of self-identification look ridiculous by stretching it to parody. But like most clever-sounding soundbites, it collapses the moment we apply logic and science. The very reasoning Morgan uses to mock trans people ultimately undermines his own argument.
What follows is not moral outrage. It is a systematic dissection, grounded in psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy, of why the “I can just identify as X” defence is neither logical nor scientific, and why the lived reality of trans people rests on a completely different foundation.
Identity Is Not a Label; It Is a Cognitive Structure
Morgan’s argument depends on a linguistic trick: he treats “identifying as” a gender as if it were the same as “calling oneself” something arbitrary. But identifying is not a matter of grammar; it describes a stable mental model that human beings develop over time.
From a cognitive-scientific perspective, identity arises from a self-representation system in the brain. This network links interoceptive awareness in the insula, body-ownership perception in the temporoparietal junction, autobiographical memory, and social feedback loops. Together these processes create what psychologists call the self-concept: a sense of continuity, embodiment, and agency.
Gender identity is part of that system. It is not chosen but experienced, in the same way we experience ownership of our bodies or recognition of our own faces. Research comparing cisgender and transgender people (Rametti et al., 2011; Joel et al., 2019) finds distinct patterns of brain connectivity that align more closely with a person’s experienced gender than with assigned sex. That makes gender identity a neuropsychological reality, not a passing mood or fashion statement.
When someone says “I identify as a woman,” they are describing a stable, embodied mental state. When Morgan says “I identify as a black lesbian,” he is describing a sentence. One refers to cognition; the other to rhetoric.
The Category Error: Playing With Words Is Not Living a Truth
The “why can’t I be a fox?” argument confuses semantic freedom with psychological coherence. Humans can say anything, but language alone does not produce identity. A self-concept must satisfy three criteria.
Internal persistence: it endures over time and resists contradiction.
Embodied plausibility: it corresponds with one’s lived and bodily experience.
Social interpretability: it can be meaningfully understood by others.
Trans identities meet all three. They are persistent across years, embodied through dysphoria and transition, and socially legible within cultural understandings of gender. Morgan’s “fox” claim fails all three. It is fleeting, physically impossible, and socially unintelligible. The absurdity is not in trans identity but in divorcing identity from the cognitive and social conditions that make it real.
The Psychology of Congruence
Every branch of psychology, from Carl Rogers’ humanistic theory to modern self-discrepancy research, shows that well-being depends on self-congruence: the alignment between internal identity and external life. When that alignment fails, people experience distress, anxiety, and depression.
Gender dysphoria is precisely that misalignment: the painful gap between one’s self-representation and one’s assigned or visible sex characteristics. Decades of clinical data show that aligning body and identity through transition, whether social, hormonal, or surgical, dramatically reduces distress and suicidality. The relief is measurable, reproducible, and causal. You cannot fake that pattern with whimsy or wordplay.
If Morgan genuinely identified as a black lesbian, achieving congruence would require immense effort: therapy, education, social learning, and confrontation with the cultural realities of race and sexuality. Real identities are costly to maintain because they must be enacted consistently across the biological, psychological, and social dimensions of life.
The Cost of Sincerity
Philosophers describe this as epistemic sincerity. We know a belief is genuine when someone is willing to bear cost and risk to act on it.
Trans people do exactly that. They face discrimination, family rejection, and economic hardship in order to live authentically. They undergo medical assessments, hormonal therapy, and sometimes surgery, not for fashion but for survival. The process can take years and demands extraordinary commitment to self-knowledge and integrity.
By contrast, Morgan’s hypothetical identity carries no cost, no embodiment, and no risk. It is a performative whim, not a lived truth. The absurdity, therefore, lies not in gender identity but in pretending that a casual statement equals the decades-long psychological and physical commitment of transition.
If identity were truly limitless, everyone would change theirs on a Tuesday. But people do not, because identity, once established, is one of the most stable constructs in human psychology. Its stability is precisely what gives life coherence.
The Race Analogy: Two Social Constructs, Two Different Kinds
Morgan’s analogy to race fails for a subtler reason. Yes, both race and gender are social constructs, but “social construct” does not mean “imaginary.” It means their meaning arises from human interpretation. Gravity is a natural phenomenon; kilograms are a social construct, yet still real, measurable, and consequential.
Race is primarily an external classification tied to ancestry and historical power structures. It is imposed, not internally generated.
Gender identity, in contrast, is an internal orientation, a deeply felt self-model that precedes and shapes social interaction. Changing gender aligns internal truth with outer presentation. Changing race would mean appropriating an external label and history that one has not lived. One act corrects incongruence; the other creates it.
Thus, race-swapping is offensive because it falsifies social reality, while gender transition is affirming because it reconciles psychological reality.
Science of Transition: Objective Outcomes
Gender-affirming treatments are among the most evidence-based interventions in modern psychiatry. Long-term studies show sharp reductions in depression, suicidality, and anxiety after transition. Functional MRI scans confirm changes in body-ownership networks that correlate with reduced dysphoria. The World Health Organization removed “gender identity disorder” from its list of mental illnesses in 2019, recognising gender incongruence as part of natural human variation, not pathology.
When interventions consistently relieve distress across populations, medicine calls that treatment efficacy.
No comparable data exist for self-proclaimed foxes or mock identities because no one lives or suffers as one. The data themselves falsify the “it is all the same” premise.
The Social Cost as Empirical Proof
Sociologists note that stigma functions as an authenticity filter: only deeply held identities survive sustained social hostility. Trans people persist in their identities despite ridicule from figures like Morgan precisely because the internal drive toward congruence outweighs external punishment. That persistence is observational evidence that trans identity is not whimsy but an enduring feature of selfhood.
If mocking someone’s identity could erase it, trans people would have vanished decades ago. They have not, because identity is not a choice; it is a psychological constant.
Absurdity and the Limits of Intuition
Declaring something “absurd” is not evidence; it is an appeal to intuition. But intuitions change. Homosexuality, interracial marriage, left-handedness, and heliocentrism were all once “absurd.” Science repeatedly corrects intuition by uncovering mechanisms that culture does not yet grasp.
Today, neuroscience and psychology have provided those mechanisms for gender identity. The intuitive absurdity is no longer on the side of trans people; it is on the side of those denying empirically verified human diversity.
The Logical Endgame
Let us run Morgan’s reasoning to its conclusion.
Premise: If anyone can identify as anything, I can identify as X.
Problem: Genuine identity is not linguistic freedom; it is psychological necessity.
Evidence: Trans identities meet the tests of persistence, embodiment, and costly sincerity; frivolous claims do not.
Conclusion: The thought experiment misfires because it equates performative language with lived cognition.
The absurdity Morgan believes he is exposing is actually the result of removing the psychological depth that makes identity real.
Simply put
At its root, the trans experience is not a philosophical puzzle but a human struggle for congruence, the same drive that makes us seek coherence between thought and action, heart and mind. Mocking that drive under the guise of “logic” mistakes cruelty for cleverness. Science, by contrast, recognises that authenticity, even when it challenges intuition, is a fundamental component of mental health.
When someone transitions, they are not inventing a new reality; they are aligning two that already existed: the inner and the outer. That alignment is the opposite of absurd. It is the most rational act a human being can perform.
In the end, the irony is this. Piers Morgan’s hypothetical exposes nothing about trans people and everything about our cultural misunderstanding of identity. To “identify as a black lesbian” for a punchline costs nothing and means nothing. To identify as one’s true gender often costs everything, and still people do it, because the mind demands coherence.
That is not absurd. That is humanity, verified by science.
References
Rogers, C. R. (1961). On becoming a person: A therapist’s view of psychotherapy. Houghton Mifflin.
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