Gender Metaphysics 102: Digging Deeper
Some questions and clarifications
In my previous article ‘Gender Metaphysics 101: "What is a Woman?"‘, I attempted to give a brief overview of how I understand the philosophy of sex and gender. In that article, I made lots of claims and passing comments that I feel need further explanation or clarification. I have decided to write this article separately, to keep the first one as a general introduction. I will therefore quote from and give commentary on some of the things I said previously. Before we start though, here’s a photo of a chair (if you know you know):
The Sex Spectrum
Whether one thinks sex is strictly binary, or exists on a spectrum (as some biologists think), its clear that there is such a thing as sex that the doctor recognises when they assign you ‘male’ or ‘female’ at birth.
Contra the rhetoric spilled by Dr Richard Dawkins and co, it is not obvious whatsoever that sex exists in a binary. It just goes to show how many scientists are philosophically inept when they think that categories like “sex” are fundamental facts about the world, instead of classifications created by the human mind. One can therefore talk about something like sex as binary, or as a spectrum. Much like how we say “humans have 10 fingers”, despite the existence of people who have more or less, we can similarly say that sex is binary. However, there are a growing number of biologist who would argue that the level of natural variety within human sex, justifies classifying sex as a spectrum instead.
Intersex People
Of course, its also necessary to recognise the existence of intersex people, but for the sake of brevity I won’t be diving into how this relates to gender.
I regret that I didn’t have time in the originally article just to briefly expand on this point. At least in my mind, the existence of intersex people absolutely proves beyond doubt that sex and gender are distinct and not influenced by each other. This is because there are people whose primary sex characteristics and/or chromosomes do not fit into the male/female binary, but nonetheless present as men or women. There is no way for anti-trans ideologues to make sense of this.
Gender Abolition
One could at least imagine a future where our conceptions of “man” and “woman” are radically different than they are now, or even entirely non-existent.
Gender abolitionism, or postgenderism, is the idea that gender categories can or should be eroded or set aside. Whether this includes the abolition of biological sex through technological means is up for debate, but at least theoretically, we can dissolve gender distinctions altogether. It all depends on whether one thinks that having “gendered” things is a useful social function. I certainly haven’t made up my mind. However, I absolutely agree that this can theoretically can be achieved. After all, if gender is a social construct, we can deconstruct it once again.
Gender Identity
Firstly, unlike some lefties, I don’t believe gender is entirely determined by one’s gender identity. That idea is resting upon post-modern presuppositions that I don’t hold. I believe that one’s identity is a mix of internal and external perceptions. To put it in linguistic terms, the category “man”, must have an external referent that is beyond internal perceptions. Otherwise there is no point on “man” or “woman” being social categorisations.
I don’t mean this to be disparaging or dismissive, but I simply can’t get on board with a strict self-ID conception of gender. I don’t think that one is something because one identifies as said thing. This is why in my definition of the 3 genders, I included “embodying” attributes as well as “identifying” with them. I think most people would actually agree with me on this point, otherwise, changing one’s gender expression and physical characteristics would not be as an important part of one’s transition as it is for most people. But again, if this is not how you experience your identity, I’m not here to tell you otherwise!
Essentialism
The big problem with essentialism is that it is always reductionistic.
To give an essentialist definition of something is to set a group of attributes as being essential to for that thing to be itself. It might be helpful to use the Aristotelian distinction between ‘substance’ and ‘accidents’ here. Substantial properties are those things that if changed make something no longer itself, whilst accidental attributes are those that can be changed whilst the thing remains fundamentally the same. For example, a car can be both blue or red and remain a car, but if a car doesn’t have any engine, then its not really a car anymore (according to essentialists).
The problem with this kind of metaphysical reasoning is that a) it doesn’t account for the complex and wide ranging ways language is used to define things, and b) its inherently reductionistic. If something has essential properties you are asserting that it is only these properties that make something itself, hence reducing something down to said set of properties. Maybe you think this is okay, but this isn’t how we interact or experience the world. We see accidental properties just as much as we see substantial ones.
The Moral Imperative
This becomes even more important when there is a moral imperative to do so. Maybe a platypus wouldn’t have cared whether they were included in the category “mammal”, but a trans-woman does care whether they are included in the category “woman”.
I think this is a really important consideration in this conversation. The current usage of the words “man” and “woman” are not morally neutral. If we fail to categorise people properly, this can have a real impact on their mental health. With this in mind, its important to note in linguistic debates, that definitions are descriptive not prescriptive.
The English dictionary is merely describing how the linguistic community are using certain words. If you think there ought to be prescriptive element to language, that’s fine, but it should only be for the sake of proper communication and conceptual clarity. Like it or not, transgender people are already being included in the definitions of “man” and “woman”.
If you want to say this is unjustified, you’ve got to make a compelling case that this leads to a sufficient breakdown of social communication and categorisation. Additionally, you’ve got to deal with the problems entailed by the exclusion of transgender people from those categories (please see the “Adult Human Female” section below).
Trans History
Side note: When I say “now”, I don’t mean that being trans is a new phenomenon. Transgender people have existed in most cultures throughout history. I mean “now” as in, modern Western post-industrialisation capitalist society (buzzwords much?).
Whilst the terms “transgender” is relatively modern, only appearing in the 1950’s, variation in gender identity and expression has existed in many cultures throughout history, especially before European colonialism. Now, I am no historian or archaeologist, so I can’t verify every single of these facts, but I take it on good authority that we aren’t just being anachronistic, and that identities we may now call “transgender”, have always existed. These are a few good articles on the topic;
Now to explain my buzzwords! What I mean by this is that our modern conception of gender, and in particular gender roles, has been entirely shaped by a post-industrialisation capitalist society. When we think of feminism, we think of a response to the issues that women faced in this modern period, but understandings of gender and gender roles have varied greatly throughout history. For example, before the industrial revolution, most work (by the working class) was done at home. Thus, women and men both worked and contributed to the income of the family. It wasn’t until men started going into the cities to work at the factories that the narrative of women being “home-makers” begun.
Gender Dysphoria
Gender dysphoria is when one’s personal identity and gender does not correspond with their gender assigned at birth. At least in my mind, being trans is a response to gender dysphoria. Now I know that it has become common to say that one doesn’t need to experience gender dysphoria to be trans, but I think this is rooted in a reactionary misunderstanding of what gender dysphoria is.
I said this because I think this idea comes from a narrow medicalised concept of gender dysphoria. If by gender dysphoria, one means a feeling of dis-ease, distress, or disgust with the gendered aspects of one’s body, then its true that not all trans people experience this. Often people don’t know what is causing them to feel the way they do, and only really discover this through trial and error and feelings of gender euphoria.1 I am however, taking gender dysphoria to mean the very feeling of knowing you are the wrong gender, in all the different ways this manifests. In the previous article I linked to an online document called ‘The Gender Dysphoria Bible’. In this, dysphoria is explained to manifest in the following ways;
Physical dysphoria
Biochemical dysphoria
Social dysphoria
Societal dysphoria
Sexual dysphoria
Presentational dysphoria
Existential dysphoria
For more information on this concept, I would highly recommend reading the full document, available here.
Misogynistic Questioning
Setting aside the potentially misogynistic nature of the question (because it’s super important to define a woman, but men can be whatever they want), what does it actually mean to be a woman?
This is a point that I heard Dr Judith Butler bring up when they were asked whether the question “what is a women?” had any legitimate context. They explained that an important part of the feminist movement is to resist the restriction of what it means to be a women. In history, women have been forced to be “home-makers”, “baby-producers”, “demure”, “quiet”, “mothers”, “apologetic”, “submissive”. We can’t have gender equality until we stop placing women into a box, when men are free to roam.
“Adult Human Female”
As we have discussed however, reducing people down to their reproductive parts is not only super problematic, but also excludes people that they would normally want to include in their definition (e.g. folks with chromosomal anomalies, those who have had their uterus removed, etc).
Maybe essentialism and reductionism isn’t too bad when talking about cars, but when we are talking about human beings, especially when we are distinguishing the genders, we ought to be very careful before we define people by their ability to reproduce. You also end up excluding a bunch of people from the category “female” who conservatives would be careful to include. If you want to say that by “female”, we aren’t talking about primary sex characteristics, but instead chromosomes, that doesn’t help you much either. For example, there are people that for all intents and purposes, present female (have female reproductive parts), but have chromosomal anomalies. So it seems that appealing to chromosomes doesn’t help you reduce gender down to sex. You might try to appeal to gamete type instead but this suffers from exactly the same problem.
Conclusion
I hope this has offered some more clarification and answered some potential objections. In the end, what is important here is that people’s lives are at stake. This is not a trivial or morally neutral conversation. With the rise of more hate and extremism, it’s important that counter narratives are offered. I hope that, in small part, I have done this.
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Gender euphoria can be described as the relief from gender dysphoria.