Things that matter more than 'what is a woman?'

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• Mantelpieces,

• E-sports,

• The New Hampshire Gardening Quarterly.¹

People sometimes say, ‘But if we can’t agree on something as simple as what a woman is, how will we do anything as a civilisation?’

Answer: because basically nothing we do vis-à-vis civilisation hinges on the correct conceptual analysis of ‘woman’. Countries will continue to grow, shrink, declare war, make peace, trade, legislate, revolt, and progress, whether or not we agree on what a woman is.

Ethically speaking, there are only two things that the right answer to ‘What is a woman?’ directly matters for: the ethics of speech and belief.

In terms of speech, it is presumptively wrong to lie; as a consequence, if we think that ‘woman’ = ‘adult human female’, it may be presumptively wrong to say ‘Cassandra is a woman’ if Cassandra is not an adult human female.

But in practice, this doesn’t matter very much. First, in most contexts when people make utterances like ‘Cassandra is a woman’ and Cassandra is not an adult human female, listeners are aware of this fact, and the speaker is aware that they are aware.

Given this, ‘Cassandra is a woman’ will plausibly not be a lie even if the speaker believes that ‘woman = adult human female’, since lying nearly always (and perhaps requires) an intent to deceive; and just as a comic doesn’t lie when he opens with a claim he knows his listeners won’t believe (‘A priest, a rabbi, and a ninja walked into an Irish bar…’²), it’s probably not lying to tell a group of people who you know know that Cassandra is not an adult human female that she is a woman, even if ‘woman’ means ‘adult human female’.

Second, in interpersonal contexts, telling a group of people who don’t know anything about Cassandra that she is a woman (‘You see that woman in red?’) is at most a white lie, akin to (‘You see that man with the red hair?’) when that man’s ‘hair’ is a synthetic toupée.

If you take a hard line against telling white lies so as to not needlessly out bald men as toupée wearers, that’s one thing—but most of us are not so abstemious.

Believing, like asserting, is propositional: hence, the truth-value of the proposition ‘Cassandra is a woman’ might matter in theory for the ethics of belief, just as it might matter in theory for the ethics of speech.

But in practice, ‘the ethics of belief’ is plausibly mostly a nothing-burger in the gender context, since ethics has to do with what you can freely choose to do, and nearly all beliefs (including about what a woman is, whether Cassandra is a woman, etc.) are outside of your voluntary control. (Try believing that

Curtis Yarvin

is an impressive political theorist. See? You can't do it!)

And for the things that really matter, whatever your views about gender, you can do your duty regardless of what you can’t help believing.

If you are more trans-inclusive, you might think your duty is to make sure transwomen feel at home in society, make sure that they can use their bathroom of choice, etc., which you can do even if you can’t help believing that transwomen are technically men. And if you are more gender-critical, you might think your duty is to make sure that transwomen feeling accepted doesn’t come at the expense of biological women feeling uncomfortable or unsafe, to campaign against the admission of transwomen to women’s only spaces, etc., which you can do even if you can’t help believing that transwomen are technically women.

It doesn’t really matter whether transwomen are women or not; assuming there’s no ambiguity about whether transwomen are biologically male, the only thing ‘What is a woman?’ matters for directly is the ethics of saying and believing propositions that contain word ‘woman’; and by themselves, those dilemmas are not especially fraught.

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1. Disclaimer: not a real publication.

2. The bartender said, ‘Good to see you two!’