It’s been a while since I’ve read new papers in academic philosophy so maybe I’m out of my league here, but it kind of seems like if someone is saying “we aren’t going to give the opposing view airtime because they are XYZ-phobic”, there is a strong prima facie case that they’re engaging in propaganda, not philosophy.
Also, “conceptual engineering” is a hilariously Orwellian phrase.
Maybe I'm missing something but it seems like Mason's argument against AHF relies on assuming that *all* individuals are either male or female despite that many proponents of AHF would reject that and would class some people (0.02% to 1.7% depending on which conditions they include) as intersex. She also makes her case by "testing" the definition against edge cases and seeing if it categorizes things "correctly" but the "correct" categorization already depends on your understanding of sex/gender... as she says "[c]ases involving intersex individuals can’t be ruled ineligible simply because they are contested by proponents of AHF" but... the fact that they are contested makes them ineligible for testing since to be test cases we already have to agree that they belong in the category of "women".
Anyhow, my position is that gender and sex should not be collapsed back into a single concept because I feel that having a separate concept is useful in various ways - for example, although I don't always bother being this precise I like to be able to differentiate sex differences from gender differences, with sex differences being what we have evidence for as being based in biology vs. the differences we see between men and women as we exist within our culture.
But I guess I also come at this from a more pragmatic and less philosophical approach... I don't think there's a "true" answer to "what is a woman". I think we each have an internal algorithm for categorizing people as men or women which reflects our personal implicit definitions. There's a lot of overlap between our classification systems: most people's takes into account sex as well as appearance and behavior, others only take in sex (aka AHM), others only take in self identification (most trans activists). I think you can argue that any given definition is more or less useful based on whatever criteria that you think are relevant for testing a definition of gender - I personally promote a cluster-type of definition because I think it's both (reasonably) inclusive and is close to what most people already have as their implicit definition.
So... what do you philosophers think of my humble attempts in this area:
> Anyhow, my position is that gender and sex should not be collapsed back into a single concept because I feel that having a separate concept is useful in various ways - for example, although I don't always bother being this precise I like to be able to differentiate sex differences from gender differences, with sex differences being what we have evidence for as being based in biology vs. the differences we see between men and women as we exist within our culture.
While it's worth recognizing the different ways differences can arise, the problem I have with this is this language forces you to choose to describe a difference as a sex difference or a gender difference, thus forcing you to make a nature vs nurture claim, even if you don't have justification for this and aren't intending to claim a cause for the difference. It is frequently hard to determine this in practice, and "a mix of both" may well be the modal case. I might go so far as to claim the distinction between sex and gender is less binary than either sex or gender!
I kinda agree with you. I mean, I do think there are such things as real definitions. Now, to me, it seems easy to include transwomen or transmen or non-binary people in it. Being transgender and/or few people always not fitting into the Men or Women category throughout the history seems like a reason to think that being transgender or being non-binary is a real phenomenon.
I think gender nonconforming and people who identify as the opposite or neither gender to their sex are certainly a real phenomenon. I also think you can define gender to include them. But I don’t think many people actually see non passing trans people as the gender they identify with. Regardless I think it’s appropriate to use someone’s preferred pronouns in most cases even if you don’t really see them as that gender.
True. Passing does seem to matter. I would use whatever pronouns they like. Non-passing people will generally have a hard time being accepted. If someone is trying to pass at least but still failing, then I would accept them. But most people will have issues with non-passing people even if they are trying to pass probably.
I'm grateful that the trans awakening of the past ten years allowed me to come out as gender-fluid. I also have very little interest in reading anything published about transgender issues during that time, for the reasons you mentioned. The Rebecca Tuvel affair sent a very clear message to philosophers of gender that they would be punished for actually doing philosophy, so most stuff since then has got the message and been dumbed down. I'd rather read things from an era that wouldn't have allowed me to express myself this way: it was at least more open about allowing thought.
I agree that something being "transphobic" is not a good reason to ignore it, since academic discourse should be aimed at the truth. That being said, I'd be more sympathetic if they just said that they didn't cite that other work because they thought it was dumb and boring, which I imagine they also think. After all, it seems to me like people are *too* obsessed with responding to every tedious objection that someone might make, so I think it would be good if the norms shifted in the direction of *less* citation overall.
I agree—that would’ve been fine. (Then I’d just disagree with them about the quality of the gender-critical work, some of which is obviously of quality.)
This is also why I support Nathan Cofnas and Kevin MacDonald(Kevin is a literal anti-semite) responding to each other in these journals. Academic freedom should allow for absolutely any view to be discussed. I think, that helps people get to truth and wisdom faster.
I understand using the term "transphobic" as a part of common parlance, but writing this word in academic literature (e.g., Hernandez and Bell) is self-discrediting. Using the term is subtle ad hominem, and (as you've pointed out) a way to avoid intelligent debate altogether.
Regardless, everyone should acknowledge that some of these views have lead to harm in women's sports, restrooms, prisons, etc. I appreciate this article, and I think it's sad that we can't have more honest and pragmatic discussions.
I’m still not sure why anyone thinks that “woman” is something we’ll be able to define so categorically that it will map onto our intuitive sense of “woman” with no exceptions.
We’re not talking about a Platonic category that perfectly encapsulates 50% of the population. We’re talking about an intuitive sense that biology has instilled in us to aid in reproduction. But there will always be exceptions, due to genetic mutations or statistical outliers. Gender is as porous as our concept of species.
And yet that doesn’t mean it’s malleable either. It is a useful tool that is common to all human cultures as a means of identifying humans that biology has attempted to give the ability to carry children.
The only reason there’s any confusion about this now is due to technology.
The pill has de-emphasized the role of motherhood as central to the identity of women, and gender medicine has made it possible for humans that biology did not attempt to give childbearing capabilities to change their bodies sufficiently that, in some cases, they can appear intuitively female.
We shouldn’t expect our biological intuition to be able to account for this, because it didn’t evolve to do so.
But we shouldn’t expect that intuition to be malleable enough to simply account for any individual that self-identifies as a woman.
This is just another consequence of technology outpacing our biology, and leaving us in a confused state we don’t have the mental tools to understand.
My other comment addressed the academic reality in this part of philosophy but I also wanted to express how deeply tragic the situation really is. If there was ever an important public role for philosophy to play in public life unconfusing discussions about trans issues is where it's at.
And, but for social/reputational concerns, the obvious things that should have been communicated are:
1) What is meant by woman or gender in our current language (or that of 30 years ago) has no intrinsic moral or philosophical significance and is only loosely related to what I'd call kinda technical quibbling about what concepts one could choose to use or even what the closest natural kind is to our term woman [1].
What 'woman' means in English is going to be just some boring fact that reflects a bunch of usage dispositions of English speakers with no deeper importance.
2) Wittgenstein amoung others taught us that many common terms (eg 'game') don't allow for any practical list of necessary and sufficient conditions but are instead defined by something like family resemblance and maybe archetypal instances.
So even if we do care about what the word actually means in English or even what it could mean in English we shouldn't even have the expectation that we should have a simple definition. It's entirely possible -- I think obviously true -- that terms like woman have that aspect to a degree.
In other words all this crap where people try and derive great significance because many attempts to define woman can't cover unusual cases isn't of any significance. It's totally fine to say that anyone where genetic, phenotypic and identity all coincidence is a woman and then extend it by resemblance from there (yes still a woman if horrible accident removes secondary sex characteristics etc etc).
3) Absolutely none of this answers the moral/practical question of how we should use the term woman in the future. While I tend to think that the meaning of woman -- at least as of 15 years ago -- excluded trans-women I believe we should change how we use the term because it's of little cost to us and great importance to some (and, if presented as a request to change how they talk to be nice, I believe the vast majority of Americans would go along ...but they won't be coerced).
I think it was plausibly true that "marriage" really did used to mean a union of a couple of the opposite sex we changed that for the better by just starting to use the word more extensively and we can do the same here. So it's not even true that your view about what the word actually means now even tells you how to use it when you speak.
4) Philosophers are a disagreeable bunch so I know someone will disagree with everything I said here but if the discipline had been at least willing to share some obvious first points with the public without concern they'd be attacked not only could it have helped society but I believe it could have massively helped trans people in particular.
If we aren't going to do this than what's the point of philosophy? But, sigh, I guess philosophers are people too and just as vulnerable to pressure to advertise values even when that conflicts with pursuing them.
--
1: Yes, in some cases people hold that natural kinds are especially likely to be the true meaning of a word -- especially in scientific and philosophical contexts -- but it's not contentious that words in our language don't need to refer to natural kinds.
I think it's a bit more complicated than that. Having looked at the landscape of philosophy in this area it is missing the serious attempts to grapple with these questions that are willing to bite bullets but aren't wedded to reaching a particular sort of result,
Unfortunately, what has happened is that -- especially since the Tuvel controversy made it clear that even considering in good faith arguments that resemble common transphobic tropes can get you alot of flak [1]. This has left the field divided into the intentionally trans-inclusive philosophers and philosophers who -- for whatever reason -- relish, or at least don't mind, drawing the intense hate and many of whom really are transphobic -- not just in the sense of saying the wrong things but actually letting their bile interfere with their arguments.
Unfortunately, even when philosophers have tried to put together special issues or conferences covering both sides the arguments made by the biological side just kinda suck. Like they don't even make the relatively obvious better arguments they could make for their positions [2]
This makes the situation much worse because people then read the philosophers arguing for the biology side and think "ohh it is kinda dumb" since they really aren't putting forth the best arguments.
--
1: To the credit of the discipline, Tuvel reports that her career hasn't been seriously harmed and perhaps helped but most people want to avoid the stress.
2: imo bc it requires a certain personality type to jump into this role which tends to either relish trolling people, is driven by some deep internal sense of outrage (or at least becomes to feel that way) or feel they need the controversy to get attention. Often it really is some deep seated feeling that trans women somehow are an assault on their identity as women or other weird emotional resentment. None of which are well suited to the issue.
Isn’t that opinion itself philosophy, though perhaps a bit shallow? While philosophy is not immune to Sturgeon’s law, there is still a bit of baby left in the bath water.
It’s been a while since I’ve read new papers in academic philosophy so maybe I’m out of my league here, but it kind of seems like if someone is saying “we aren’t going to give the opposing view airtime because they are XYZ-phobic”, there is a strong prima facie case that they’re engaging in propaganda, not philosophy.
Also, “conceptual engineering” is a hilariously Orwellian phrase.
I refuse to cite Going Awol because I take it to be openly transphobic.
Maybe I'm missing something but it seems like Mason's argument against AHF relies on assuming that *all* individuals are either male or female despite that many proponents of AHF would reject that and would class some people (0.02% to 1.7% depending on which conditions they include) as intersex. She also makes her case by "testing" the definition against edge cases and seeing if it categorizes things "correctly" but the "correct" categorization already depends on your understanding of sex/gender... as she says "[c]ases involving intersex individuals can’t be ruled ineligible simply because they are contested by proponents of AHF" but... the fact that they are contested makes them ineligible for testing since to be test cases we already have to agree that they belong in the category of "women".
Anyhow, my position is that gender and sex should not be collapsed back into a single concept because I feel that having a separate concept is useful in various ways - for example, although I don't always bother being this precise I like to be able to differentiate sex differences from gender differences, with sex differences being what we have evidence for as being based in biology vs. the differences we see between men and women as we exist within our culture.
But I guess I also come at this from a more pragmatic and less philosophical approach... I don't think there's a "true" answer to "what is a woman". I think we each have an internal algorithm for categorizing people as men or women which reflects our personal implicit definitions. There's a lot of overlap between our classification systems: most people's takes into account sex as well as appearance and behavior, others only take in sex (aka AHM), others only take in self identification (most trans activists). I think you can argue that any given definition is more or less useful based on whatever criteria that you think are relevant for testing a definition of gender - I personally promote a cluster-type of definition because I think it's both (reasonably) inclusive and is close to what most people already have as their implicit definition.
So... what do you philosophers think of my humble attempts in this area:
What is Sex?: https://www.allcatsarefemale.com/p/what-is-sex
What is a Woman?: https://www.allcatsarefemale.com/p/what-is-a-woman?r=ipqw
And my imagined dialogue where four feminists argue with me about gender: https://www.allcatsarefemale.com/p/imperfect-alliances-the-sex-and-gender?r=ipqw
> Anyhow, my position is that gender and sex should not be collapsed back into a single concept because I feel that having a separate concept is useful in various ways - for example, although I don't always bother being this precise I like to be able to differentiate sex differences from gender differences, with sex differences being what we have evidence for as being based in biology vs. the differences we see between men and women as we exist within our culture.
While it's worth recognizing the different ways differences can arise, the problem I have with this is this language forces you to choose to describe a difference as a sex difference or a gender difference, thus forcing you to make a nature vs nurture claim, even if you don't have justification for this and aren't intending to claim a cause for the difference. It is frequently hard to determine this in practice, and "a mix of both" may well be the modal case. I might go so far as to claim the distinction between sex and gender is less binary than either sex or gender!
This is a very good point! Thanks
I kinda agree with you. I mean, I do think there are such things as real definitions. Now, to me, it seems easy to include transwomen or transmen or non-binary people in it. Being transgender and/or few people always not fitting into the Men or Women category throughout the history seems like a reason to think that being transgender or being non-binary is a real phenomenon.
I think gender nonconforming and people who identify as the opposite or neither gender to their sex are certainly a real phenomenon. I also think you can define gender to include them. But I don’t think many people actually see non passing trans people as the gender they identify with. Regardless I think it’s appropriate to use someone’s preferred pronouns in most cases even if you don’t really see them as that gender.
True. Passing does seem to matter. I would use whatever pronouns they like. Non-passing people will generally have a hard time being accepted. If someone is trying to pass at least but still failing, then I would accept them. But most people will have issues with non-passing people even if they are trying to pass probably.
Thanks for the chat.
I'm grateful that the trans awakening of the past ten years allowed me to come out as gender-fluid. I also have very little interest in reading anything published about transgender issues during that time, for the reasons you mentioned. The Rebecca Tuvel affair sent a very clear message to philosophers of gender that they would be punished for actually doing philosophy, so most stuff since then has got the message and been dumbed down. I'd rather read things from an era that wouldn't have allowed me to express myself this way: it was at least more open about allowing thought.
The one thing you can say in academic gender philosophy's favour is that it's not as bad as philosophy YouTube, where Natalie Wynn (of all people) got cancelled merely out of guilt by association: https://www.newsweek.com/youtuber-contrapoints-attacked-after-including-controversial-buck-angel-video-1466757
I agree that something being "transphobic" is not a good reason to ignore it, since academic discourse should be aimed at the truth. That being said, I'd be more sympathetic if they just said that they didn't cite that other work because they thought it was dumb and boring, which I imagine they also think. After all, it seems to me like people are *too* obsessed with responding to every tedious objection that someone might make, so I think it would be good if the norms shifted in the direction of *less* citation overall.
I agree—that would’ve been fine. (Then I’d just disagree with them about the quality of the gender-critical work, some of which is obviously of quality.)
This is also why I support Nathan Cofnas and Kevin MacDonald(Kevin is a literal anti-semite) responding to each other in these journals. Academic freedom should allow for absolutely any view to be discussed. I think, that helps people get to truth and wisdom faster.
The hyperlink on the text "Someone is a woman if and only if..." points to a file on your C: drive.
Thanks! Fixed!
I understand using the term "transphobic" as a part of common parlance, but writing this word in academic literature (e.g., Hernandez and Bell) is self-discrediting. Using the term is subtle ad hominem, and (as you've pointed out) a way to avoid intelligent debate altogether.
Regardless, everyone should acknowledge that some of these views have lead to harm in women's sports, restrooms, prisons, etc. I appreciate this article, and I think it's sad that we can't have more honest and pragmatic discussions.
I’m still not sure why anyone thinks that “woman” is something we’ll be able to define so categorically that it will map onto our intuitive sense of “woman” with no exceptions.
We’re not talking about a Platonic category that perfectly encapsulates 50% of the population. We’re talking about an intuitive sense that biology has instilled in us to aid in reproduction. But there will always be exceptions, due to genetic mutations or statistical outliers. Gender is as porous as our concept of species.
And yet that doesn’t mean it’s malleable either. It is a useful tool that is common to all human cultures as a means of identifying humans that biology has attempted to give the ability to carry children.
The only reason there’s any confusion about this now is due to technology.
The pill has de-emphasized the role of motherhood as central to the identity of women, and gender medicine has made it possible for humans that biology did not attempt to give childbearing capabilities to change their bodies sufficiently that, in some cases, they can appear intuitively female.
We shouldn’t expect our biological intuition to be able to account for this, because it didn’t evolve to do so.
But we shouldn’t expect that intuition to be malleable enough to simply account for any individual that self-identifies as a woman.
This is just another consequence of technology outpacing our biology, and leaving us in a confused state we don’t have the mental tools to understand.
It would be nice if our societies attempted to educate children on the widely useful fact that nearly all words are this way.
My other comment addressed the academic reality in this part of philosophy but I also wanted to express how deeply tragic the situation really is. If there was ever an important public role for philosophy to play in public life unconfusing discussions about trans issues is where it's at.
And, but for social/reputational concerns, the obvious things that should have been communicated are:
1) What is meant by woman or gender in our current language (or that of 30 years ago) has no intrinsic moral or philosophical significance and is only loosely related to what I'd call kinda technical quibbling about what concepts one could choose to use or even what the closest natural kind is to our term woman [1].
What 'woman' means in English is going to be just some boring fact that reflects a bunch of usage dispositions of English speakers with no deeper importance.
2) Wittgenstein amoung others taught us that many common terms (eg 'game') don't allow for any practical list of necessary and sufficient conditions but are instead defined by something like family resemblance and maybe archetypal instances.
So even if we do care about what the word actually means in English or even what it could mean in English we shouldn't even have the expectation that we should have a simple definition. It's entirely possible -- I think obviously true -- that terms like woman have that aspect to a degree.
In other words all this crap where people try and derive great significance because many attempts to define woman can't cover unusual cases isn't of any significance. It's totally fine to say that anyone where genetic, phenotypic and identity all coincidence is a woman and then extend it by resemblance from there (yes still a woman if horrible accident removes secondary sex characteristics etc etc).
3) Absolutely none of this answers the moral/practical question of how we should use the term woman in the future. While I tend to think that the meaning of woman -- at least as of 15 years ago -- excluded trans-women I believe we should change how we use the term because it's of little cost to us and great importance to some (and, if presented as a request to change how they talk to be nice, I believe the vast majority of Americans would go along ...but they won't be coerced).
I think it was plausibly true that "marriage" really did used to mean a union of a couple of the opposite sex we changed that for the better by just starting to use the word more extensively and we can do the same here. So it's not even true that your view about what the word actually means now even tells you how to use it when you speak.
4) Philosophers are a disagreeable bunch so I know someone will disagree with everything I said here but if the discipline had been at least willing to share some obvious first points with the public without concern they'd be attacked not only could it have helped society but I believe it could have massively helped trans people in particular.
If we aren't going to do this than what's the point of philosophy? But, sigh, I guess philosophers are people too and just as vulnerable to pressure to advertise values even when that conflicts with pursuing them.
--
1: Yes, in some cases people hold that natural kinds are especially likely to be the true meaning of a word -- especially in scientific and philosophical contexts -- but it's not contentious that words in our language don't need to refer to natural kinds.
I think it's a bit more complicated than that. Having looked at the landscape of philosophy in this area it is missing the serious attempts to grapple with these questions that are willing to bite bullets but aren't wedded to reaching a particular sort of result,
Unfortunately, what has happened is that -- especially since the Tuvel controversy made it clear that even considering in good faith arguments that resemble common transphobic tropes can get you alot of flak [1]. This has left the field divided into the intentionally trans-inclusive philosophers and philosophers who -- for whatever reason -- relish, or at least don't mind, drawing the intense hate and many of whom really are transphobic -- not just in the sense of saying the wrong things but actually letting their bile interfere with their arguments.
Unfortunately, even when philosophers have tried to put together special issues or conferences covering both sides the arguments made by the biological side just kinda suck. Like they don't even make the relatively obvious better arguments they could make for their positions [2]
This makes the situation much worse because people then read the philosophers arguing for the biology side and think "ohh it is kinda dumb" since they really aren't putting forth the best arguments.
--
1: To the credit of the discipline, Tuvel reports that her career hasn't been seriously harmed and perhaps helped but most people want to avoid the stress.
2: imo bc it requires a certain personality type to jump into this role which tends to either relish trolling people, is driven by some deep internal sense of outrage (or at least becomes to feel that way) or feel they need the controversy to get attention. Often it really is some deep seated feeling that trans women somehow are an assault on their identity as women or other weird emotional resentment. None of which are well suited to the issue.
😟
Isn’t that opinion itself philosophy, though perhaps a bit shallow? While philosophy is not immune to Sturgeon’s law, there is still a bit of baby left in the bath water.
Wittgenstein? Is that you?