Miscellaneous thoughts on the philosophy of gender

some takes are hotter than others

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

1. In “Does trans-inclusive philosophy have an echo-chamber problem?”, I Substack’d of a concerning trend in the analytic philosophy of gender: the brave refusal of some trans-inclusive philosophers to cite their gender critical colleagues in a powerful exercise of “citation justice”. Since I wrote that article, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — which publishes articles that are supposed to give novices an understanding of the main ideas, right or wrong, that feature in the various subfields of academic philosophy, and which is normally fantastic at doing this — released an entry on “Trans Philosophy”, the “subfield of philosophy that concerns trans experiences, histories, cultural production, and politics”. Guess which philosophers don’t appear in the bibliography…

2. Suppose that “man” and “woman”, in ordinary English contexts, are sex terms. That is, suppose that when a competent speaker utters the word “woman” in a non-stipulative, literal way, the word picks out all and only adult human females. If, like me, you think it would be morally better if “woman” and “man” were not sex terms — since that would make trans people happier and help satisfy some of their deep-seated desires (e.g., a trans woman’s desire to be able to utter “I am a woman”, and for that utterance to come out literally true) — you’ll probably think the right course of action is, if possible, to engage in a project of linguistic and conceptual engineering, where we gradually change the meaning of “man” and “woman” in English, as well as the extension of the underlying concepts — MAN, WOMAN — that they’re attached to. Some philosophers seem to think that, to engage in this process of linguistic and conceptual engineering, we need to come up with a philosophically precise redefinition of “man” and “woman”, and then, I guess (?), promulgate that definition far and wide until the English words “man” and “woman” latch onto it. I’m probably just being stupid, but I don’t see why we’d need to come up with a precise redefinition at all.

3. Here is the pattern as it plays out in the literature. Trans-inclusive philosopher X suggests a redefinition of “woman” that’s more trans-inclusive than the biological definition —> trans-inclusive philosopher Y out-wokes X by showing that X’s redefinition leaves out certain trans women who, morally, we ought to refer to as “women”, or includes certain trans men who we ought, morally, to refer to as “men” —> Y proposes a new redefinition of “woman” —> trans-inclusive philosopher Z out-wokes Y because Y’s redefinition is either too under- or over-inclusive to be morally acceptable —> and so the cycle continues.

4. I find this all very puzzling (again, this is probably just me being stupid). Why is it important to come up with a precise re-definition? No member of the public is ever going to learn any of these definitions, because they’re all like a paragraph long and contain a billion epicycles. Surely the right move — the move which circumvents the endless cycle of out-woking I described above — is just to start referring to the individuals who we think we morally ought to be called women as “women”, and refer to all the individuals we think morally ought to be called men as “men”, and encourage others to do the same? No redefinitions needed!

5. After all: the reason there’s no consensus among trans-inclusive philosophers about which trans-inclusive redefinition of “woman” is best is that, for each redefinition that’s been proposed, most trans-inclusive philosophers think there are paradigm cases of people it either includes or excludes that, morally speaking, it shouldn’t. Why not skip the theorising and refer to those individuals in the way you think they should be referred to?

6. Since the the meaning of a term hinges on how it’s used, if enough people do that with “woman”, the meaning of woman will change in the morally desired ways. Moreover, it’ll change in ways that are more morally desirable than if we all just started referring to people as “women” when and only when one of these fancy philosophical redefinitions of “woman” tells us to. After all, for each redefinition that’s been proposed, it’s widely agreed by philosophers with enlightened, trans-inclusive moral sensibilities that the redefinition is morally deficient because it gets the wrong result in various paradigm cases. Well, the particularist approach I’m suggesting doesn’t ‘get the wrong result’ in any paradigm cases! Whenever there’s a paradigm case of someone who you ought, morally, to refer to as a woman, my approach recommends that you call her a woman! No definitions required.

7. Maybe the reason we need a definition is for legal purposes. But… do we? What would be wrong with the following legal definition?: S is a woman, for legal purposes, if and only if her legal documents have the word “woman” in them. This wouldn’t be circular, since — although the word “woman” appears in the definition of woman — the word appears in quotation marks. As a result, the definition is no more circular than if I coin the term “fogelbee” and define a fogelbee as “anyone who has the word ‘fogelbee’ written on their forehead”.

8. This legal definition is compatible with making it very hard to change the gender classification in one’s legal documents from “man” to “woman”, if that would be morally desirable. It’s compatible, say, with imposing a large tax on anyone who wants to change the gender classification in their documents from “man” to “woman”, to deter Matt Walsh from switching casually as a joke or to deter sexual predators from trying to acquire temporary legal status as “women”; it’s also compatible with making it easy for the State to strip the legal stamp of womanhood from a biological male if he somehow abuses whatever legal affordances apply to legal women; it’s compatible with basically any TERF-ish law you might want to impose. All that matters, for the point I’m making, is that you don’t need to enshrine some philosophically highfalutin definition of “woman” in law. (Again, I’m not a lawyer, so I’m probably overlooking something very elementary here. But what?)

9. In a couple of weeks, compadre of the blog

   Bentham's Bulldog
   will debate the theologian Chris Date on the question: “What is a woman?” Bentham will defend the social-role definition of “woman”, according to which one permissible English use of the word “woman” is non-biological, making it true that some trans-women really are women. Be sure to set a reminder!

10. This next take is way too spicy, so I’m hiding it behind a paywall. Sorry. :p