Interesting, but I think it's important to be clear about the difference between how we use words and what's actually true about reality.
Gender isn't a concept handed down from on high. It's a term we get to choose how to define, and we should define it in ways that are beneficial for our culture and place in the world. One can vary usage of the word without corresponding changes in the underlying facts.
That's the debate to have. Which usage makes the world better.
BTW, I do think there is a perfectly cogent definition of gender. It's a culturally recognized role/set of norms and stereotypes that is closely related to our categorization of people into sexes. As such, cultures which recognize a third or fourth such role can be genuinely said to have more than 2 genders.
And yes, it's true that implies currently our culture has only 2. But it's just like that case with words. A word is a sound that the language speaking community agrees has a certain meaning. So the first time someone used "rizz" in a sentence it was true it wasn't a word. But the way you make something a word, or a gender, is just by treating it as if it was one.
Totally agree with everything here. I also think there is a cogent understanding of gender which is relatively inclusive and which doesn’t reduce to a circular statement. And as you said, the apparent debate about how many genders there are is really a debate about how we draw these categories and which characteristics are more or less relevant. I go through how I think about defining gender with some simplified examples of how one could hypothetically define categories here: https://open.substack.com/pub/reganarntzgray/p/what-is-a-woman?r=ipqw&utm_medium=ios
Interesting, I kinda think there are two different issues here which are worth seperating.
One is what is the list of things that constitute genders -- regardless of who qualifies for them. I take genders to differ from sex in that it attempts to identify the space of roles in society that act like man and woman have traditionally done in our society.
Basically we need a term that describes the set of roles in the Phillipines that includes male, female and bakla. I think the best way to use genders is as referring to those kind of things.
[As an aside, I think it's important to distinguish between people who are non-binary in the sense that they reject classification -- which seems better described as an attitude about gender than a gender -- from people who see themselves as fufilling some particular extra role]
Then there is the question of how we should assign people to these categories -- or analagously where to draw the exact boundaries of these categories -- which I think is more what you were dealing with.
But in that regard, I think it's worth asking if the way saying X is female works is really that it needs to map onto how we perceive them or any objective fact. There are people whose identity matches with their biological sex but are regularly perceived by others as being of the other sex. We don't tell them we don't perceive them as that even if that might be what we internally care about when interacting/thinking. Similarly, when someone introduces themselves as Dr. X we don't fuss over whether it's a medical degree, from an accredited institution or etc the way the Germans do.
I suspect that we tend to just see calling someone by one these titles like Dr. or Mr. or etc not as some much of a judgement that they really are -- but that it's close enough that it's not deeply misleading and us relaying how they said they would like to be seen.
Sure, maybe in private we gossip -- honestly they aren't a real Dr/I can't help seeing them as a man -- but we can make those judgements just fine without needing to tell anyone we don't really see them the way they want to be seen.
Ofc part of being nice is not admitting we are just being nice.
I think gender can technically be separated from sex, but that sex is relevant to deciding someone's perceived gender for most people. It can be overcome for me, for example I see Contrapoints and other passing trans women as a women - but I probably wouldn't see a person who looks male but acts in a feminine manner as a woman, even though I'd be happy to use their preferred pronouns. This points to the fact that I think how others perceive you is relevant to your gender; self identity is also relevant but is only a part of the way that gender is determined. When people ask for my preferred pronouns I want to say "I don't have any, call me by the pronouns that seem most appropriate from your perspective".
It's true that we should separate people who see themselves as genderless from those who see themselves as occupying a non-binary gender identity. I find it interesting that binary trans and non-binary individuals and genderless individuals are politically grouped together despite having very different implied views on gender.
Yes, I agree there is a further distinction between how people see themselves and how others see them. But, I don't see much reason to make that part of normal public discourse.
I mean, it seems analagous to calling someone reverand, father or rabbi. Ultimately, that title is a claim to some kind of religious authority which others may or may not accept. Someone from a conservative branch of a faith may not accept the ordination (rabbinification??) of women or openly gay individuals but there really isn't any need to have a seperate 'claimed rabbi' term in normal conversation since it's sorta assumed you are going to make your own judgement and it comes across as pointedly aggressive to use a different term (and it's perfectly easy to be clear in those contexts it's relevant).
For gender, it seems even clearer. I have no interest in dating a trans-woman and when necessary I can convey this preference without any extra terminology (or need to use an aggressive term like purpoted woman) as I'm doing now and I think everyone understands what I mean. But it's kinda impolite to go around emphasizing that judgement (just as it would be to emphasize the fact that I don't find certain body types, voices etc etc attractive in a woman). As there isn't really a need to coordinate about this I think it's fine to do the same thing we do with terms like reverand and simply use the word to describe the status claimed by the person and only clarify our own internal categories using longer descriptions in the rare cases it arises (eg someone setting us up on a date or whatnot).
--
Note that whether or not you see them as 'really' men/women in whatever categorization you find internally most helpful in understanding the world (categorizations aren't correct or incorrect just more and less useful) doesn't really track things like whether you see it as a problem for them to use female restrooms and only relatively indirectly relates to the whole sports team thing. Coed restrooms are perfectly safe so you could think it's all silly bullshit but not feel it's an issue or you could see trans-women as completely female in your categorization but believe they were still more likely to be violent for some reason.
So even going beyond dating I just don't see much of a need to bring up this question of whether you find the categorization trans people prefer tracks your internal categorization.
In short, most of our interactions are really about politeness and respect and don't have much of a literal truth component.
Some good points on a quick skim. However, this doesn't hold much water:
Regan: "Sex is a biological construct whose categories are currently defined based on genes and the presence of primary and secondary sexual characteristics. While there are people who don’t clearly fit either side of the sex binary, the vast majority can be easily classified as either male or female."
Don't think so. Certainly the definitions for the sexes are socially constructed, but the standard biological definitions for the sexes say absolutely diddly-squat about genes for the very good reason that many species don't use X and Y to produce males and females. And some don't even use genetic differences to produce those two types -- alligator eggs become male or female based on the temperature at which the eggs are incubated.
You might read what Byrne Himself wrote on the topic several years ago:
AB:"Forget Money’s many sex-related categories — what are the sexes?
The answer has been known since the 19th century. As Simone de Beauvoir puts it in The Second Sex (the founding text of modern feminism), the sexes 'are basically defined by the gametes they produce.' Specifically, females produce large gametes (reproductive cells), and males produce small ones."
Which means no gametes, no sexes -- i.e., sexless.
Though Byrne Himself is either scientifically illiterate or an outright fraud as his definitions aren't at all what reputable biological journals, encyclopedias, and dictionaries specify:
AB: "In the light of these examples, it is more accurate (albeit not completely accurate) to say that females are the ones who have advanced some distance down the developmental pathway that results in the production of large gametes — ovarian differentiation has occurred, at least to some extent. Similarly, males are the ones who have advanced some distance down the developmental pathway that results in the production of small gametes."
Absolutely none of the standard biological definitions say anything at all about "developmental pathways". They all say that, in effect, functional gonads of either of two types are the necessary and sufficient conditions for sex category membership. No gametes means sexless -- which includes about a third of us at any one time. The sexes are "life-history stages" -- like "teenager" -- and not any sort of an "immutable 🙄 identity".
Thank you for this!! I had heard people say “women are the large gamete producers” but didn’t realize that large vs. small gamete size is the defining characteristic because it is consistent across species. To your point that about 1/3 of people are sexless at any given time given that they’re not producing gametes - while that makes sense from the biological perspective you presented we still want language to classify people at all stages of life for medical and other purposes. It seems simpler to continue calling a post-menopausal woman female than to say she’s “previously female”, and it similarly seems simpler to call boys “male” based on the gametes they will very likely produce later than to have to say “sexless child that is expected to become male”. I think someone could agree to the definition you highlighted, which implies boys and post-menopausal women are sexless and that sex is a “life stage”, but still want to use the shorthand of male or female at all stages of life.
Regan: ".. large vs. small gamete size is the defining characteristic because it is consistent across species."
It's what makes the biological definitions "universal" as opposed to the folk-biology definitions -- which is what Byrne is peddling -- that fall apart when applied to millions of other species:
However, while I can appreciate the objective of classifying people and the use of male and female as a "shorthand", I think -- many other more knowledgeable people think -- that there are any number of quite serious problems with that perspective.
IF people realized that such uses were only cases of "nominally speaking, for reference purposes only", and recognized the biological definitions as trump THEN that might work. But they clearly don't and it leads to the corruption of the whole edifice of biology on which much of society depends.
No doubt the folk-biology definitions have some utility, some practical applications, but they lead to some quite risible, though rather problematic "conclusions". For examples, if we go with genitalia or chromosomes then we wind up with cases of men with vaginas or women with testicles. Can women with penises be beyond the realm of possibility!?!? 🤔🙄
Folk-biology is basically an "operational definition", no better than the use of proxies, of traits that correlate with the strict biological definitions while not being definitive themselves.
Apropos of those operational definitions, you in particular might have some interest in an essay by Paul Griffiths -- university of Sydney, philosopher of biology, coauthor of Genetics & Philosophy -- who probably coined that "life-history stage" term:
But it's also been picked up by an article in the Wiley Online Library which consequently argues that all of us are or were sexless, at least from zygote to embryo to the onset of puberty:
Part of the problem is that the biological definitions for the sexes are simply the wrong tool for the jobs that society is trying to press them into doing. Which leads to various charlatans -- like Byrne -- bastardizing them to be more "useful" -- Lysenkoism writ large.
You might also have some interest in another post by Griffiths, particularly the closing paragraphs, which elaborates on those points:
Female: born with a reproductive system organised to ovulate/release large gametes and gestate (whether the system is working or not, is not working yet or has stopped working)
I don't think the buisness about it being hard to define woman or there being edge cases is particularly relevant. When you get into the weeds it's true of almost all our concepts. For instance, it's famously difficult to give necessary and sufficient conditions for game or table.
In almost all cases, what we actually have are some clear examples we all agree qualify under the term (XX individuals who exhibit the full range of secondary female sexual characteristics for their age) and others who we all agree don't (XY individuals with full range of secondary make sexual characteristics for their age) and some agreement about the kinds of variation that should be seen as relevant (eg changes due to accident don't change sex etc).
And yah there are always grey areas. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Point is you don't need a definition. Indeed that's the unusual case. That's why LLMs work well, they can learn the complex boundaries of our practice that can't be reduced to a definition.
Well, you’re in luck! Next two posts will go through sex and gender in more technical detail with some helpful images… maybe I’ll throw in a Venn diagram as well :)
Interesting, but I think it's important to be clear about the difference between how we use words and what's actually true about reality.
Gender isn't a concept handed down from on high. It's a term we get to choose how to define, and we should define it in ways that are beneficial for our culture and place in the world. One can vary usage of the word without corresponding changes in the underlying facts.
That's the debate to have. Which usage makes the world better.
BTW, I do think there is a perfectly cogent definition of gender. It's a culturally recognized role/set of norms and stereotypes that is closely related to our categorization of people into sexes. As such, cultures which recognize a third or fourth such role can be genuinely said to have more than 2 genders.
And yes, it's true that implies currently our culture has only 2. But it's just like that case with words. A word is a sound that the language speaking community agrees has a certain meaning. So the first time someone used "rizz" in a sentence it was true it wasn't a word. But the way you make something a word, or a gender, is just by treating it as if it was one.
Totally agree with everything here. I also think there is a cogent understanding of gender which is relatively inclusive and which doesn’t reduce to a circular statement. And as you said, the apparent debate about how many genders there are is really a debate about how we draw these categories and which characteristics are more or less relevant. I go through how I think about defining gender with some simplified examples of how one could hypothetically define categories here: https://open.substack.com/pub/reganarntzgray/p/what-is-a-woman?r=ipqw&utm_medium=ios
Interesting, I kinda think there are two different issues here which are worth seperating.
One is what is the list of things that constitute genders -- regardless of who qualifies for them. I take genders to differ from sex in that it attempts to identify the space of roles in society that act like man and woman have traditionally done in our society.
Basically we need a term that describes the set of roles in the Phillipines that includes male, female and bakla. I think the best way to use genders is as referring to those kind of things.
[As an aside, I think it's important to distinguish between people who are non-binary in the sense that they reject classification -- which seems better described as an attitude about gender than a gender -- from people who see themselves as fufilling some particular extra role]
Then there is the question of how we should assign people to these categories -- or analagously where to draw the exact boundaries of these categories -- which I think is more what you were dealing with.
But in that regard, I think it's worth asking if the way saying X is female works is really that it needs to map onto how we perceive them or any objective fact. There are people whose identity matches with their biological sex but are regularly perceived by others as being of the other sex. We don't tell them we don't perceive them as that even if that might be what we internally care about when interacting/thinking. Similarly, when someone introduces themselves as Dr. X we don't fuss over whether it's a medical degree, from an accredited institution or etc the way the Germans do.
I suspect that we tend to just see calling someone by one these titles like Dr. or Mr. or etc not as some much of a judgement that they really are -- but that it's close enough that it's not deeply misleading and us relaying how they said they would like to be seen.
Sure, maybe in private we gossip -- honestly they aren't a real Dr/I can't help seeing them as a man -- but we can make those judgements just fine without needing to tell anyone we don't really see them the way they want to be seen.
Ofc part of being nice is not admitting we are just being nice.
I think gender can technically be separated from sex, but that sex is relevant to deciding someone's perceived gender for most people. It can be overcome for me, for example I see Contrapoints and other passing trans women as a women - but I probably wouldn't see a person who looks male but acts in a feminine manner as a woman, even though I'd be happy to use their preferred pronouns. This points to the fact that I think how others perceive you is relevant to your gender; self identity is also relevant but is only a part of the way that gender is determined. When people ask for my preferred pronouns I want to say "I don't have any, call me by the pronouns that seem most appropriate from your perspective".
It's true that we should separate people who see themselves as genderless from those who see themselves as occupying a non-binary gender identity. I find it interesting that binary trans and non-binary individuals and genderless individuals are politically grouped together despite having very different implied views on gender.
Yes, I agree there is a further distinction between how people see themselves and how others see them. But, I don't see much reason to make that part of normal public discourse.
I mean, it seems analagous to calling someone reverand, father or rabbi. Ultimately, that title is a claim to some kind of religious authority which others may or may not accept. Someone from a conservative branch of a faith may not accept the ordination (rabbinification??) of women or openly gay individuals but there really isn't any need to have a seperate 'claimed rabbi' term in normal conversation since it's sorta assumed you are going to make your own judgement and it comes across as pointedly aggressive to use a different term (and it's perfectly easy to be clear in those contexts it's relevant).
For gender, it seems even clearer. I have no interest in dating a trans-woman and when necessary I can convey this preference without any extra terminology (or need to use an aggressive term like purpoted woman) as I'm doing now and I think everyone understands what I mean. But it's kinda impolite to go around emphasizing that judgement (just as it would be to emphasize the fact that I don't find certain body types, voices etc etc attractive in a woman). As there isn't really a need to coordinate about this I think it's fine to do the same thing we do with terms like reverand and simply use the word to describe the status claimed by the person and only clarify our own internal categories using longer descriptions in the rare cases it arises (eg someone setting us up on a date or whatnot).
--
Note that whether or not you see them as 'really' men/women in whatever categorization you find internally most helpful in understanding the world (categorizations aren't correct or incorrect just more and less useful) doesn't really track things like whether you see it as a problem for them to use female restrooms and only relatively indirectly relates to the whole sports team thing. Coed restrooms are perfectly safe so you could think it's all silly bullshit but not feel it's an issue or you could see trans-women as completely female in your categorization but believe they were still more likely to be violent for some reason.
So even going beyond dating I just don't see much of a need to bring up this question of whether you find the categorization trans people prefer tracks your internal categorization.
In short, most of our interactions are really about politeness and respect and don't have much of a literal truth component.
Some good points on a quick skim. However, this doesn't hold much water:
Regan: "Sex is a biological construct whose categories are currently defined based on genes and the presence of primary and secondary sexual characteristics. While there are people who don’t clearly fit either side of the sex binary, the vast majority can be easily classified as either male or female."
Don't think so. Certainly the definitions for the sexes are socially constructed, but the standard biological definitions for the sexes say absolutely diddly-squat about genes for the very good reason that many species don't use X and Y to produce males and females. And some don't even use genetic differences to produce those two types -- alligator eggs become male or female based on the temperature at which the eggs are incubated.
You might read what Byrne Himself wrote on the topic several years ago:
AB:"Forget Money’s many sex-related categories — what are the sexes?
The answer has been known since the 19th century. As Simone de Beauvoir puts it in The Second Sex (the founding text of modern feminism), the sexes 'are basically defined by the gametes they produce.' Specifically, females produce large gametes (reproductive cells), and males produce small ones."
https://archive.ph/2018.11.02-073140/https://arcdigital.media/is-sex-binary-16bec97d161e?gi=c6496e21d75e
Which means no gametes, no sexes -- i.e., sexless.
Though Byrne Himself is either scientifically illiterate or an outright fraud as his definitions aren't at all what reputable biological journals, encyclopedias, and dictionaries specify:
AB: "In the light of these examples, it is more accurate (albeit not completely accurate) to say that females are the ones who have advanced some distance down the developmental pathway that results in the production of large gametes — ovarian differentiation has occurred, at least to some extent. Similarly, males are the ones who have advanced some distance down the developmental pathway that results in the production of small gametes."
Absolutely none of the standard biological definitions say anything at all about "developmental pathways". They all say that, in effect, functional gonads of either of two types are the necessary and sufficient conditions for sex category membership. No gametes means sexless -- which includes about a third of us at any one time. The sexes are "life-history stages" -- like "teenager" -- and not any sort of an "immutable 🙄 identity".
Thank you for this!! I had heard people say “women are the large gamete producers” but didn’t realize that large vs. small gamete size is the defining characteristic because it is consistent across species. To your point that about 1/3 of people are sexless at any given time given that they’re not producing gametes - while that makes sense from the biological perspective you presented we still want language to classify people at all stages of life for medical and other purposes. It seems simpler to continue calling a post-menopausal woman female than to say she’s “previously female”, and it similarly seems simpler to call boys “male” based on the gametes they will very likely produce later than to have to say “sexless child that is expected to become male”. I think someone could agree to the definition you highlighted, which implies boys and post-menopausal women are sexless and that sex is a “life stage”, but still want to use the shorthand of male or female at all stages of life.
👍 And thanks for the "follow" 🙂.
But this in particular is right on the money:
Regan: ".. large vs. small gamete size is the defining characteristic because it is consistent across species."
It's what makes the biological definitions "universal" as opposed to the folk-biology definitions -- which is what Byrne is peddling -- that fall apart when applied to millions of other species:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_taxonomy
However, while I can appreciate the objective of classifying people and the use of male and female as a "shorthand", I think -- many other more knowledgeable people think -- that there are any number of quite serious problems with that perspective.
IF people realized that such uses were only cases of "nominally speaking, for reference purposes only", and recognized the biological definitions as trump THEN that might work. But they clearly don't and it leads to the corruption of the whole edifice of biology on which much of society depends.
No doubt the folk-biology definitions have some utility, some practical applications, but they lead to some quite risible, though rather problematic "conclusions". For examples, if we go with genitalia or chromosomes then we wind up with cases of men with vaginas or women with testicles. Can women with penises be beyond the realm of possibility!?!? 🤔🙄
Folk-biology is basically an "operational definition", no better than the use of proxies, of traits that correlate with the strict biological definitions while not being definitive themselves.
Apropos of those operational definitions, you in particular might have some interest in an essay by Paul Griffiths -- university of Sydney, philosopher of biology, coauthor of Genetics & Philosophy -- who probably coined that "life-history stage" term:
https://philarchive.org/rec/GRIWAB-2
But it's also been picked up by an article in the Wiley Online Library which consequently argues that all of us are or were sexless, at least from zygote to embryo to the onset of puberty:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/bies.202200173
Part of the problem is that the biological definitions for the sexes are simply the wrong tool for the jobs that society is trying to press them into doing. Which leads to various charlatans -- like Byrne -- bastardizing them to be more "useful" -- Lysenkoism writ large.
You might also have some interest in another post by Griffiths, particularly the closing paragraphs, which elaborates on those points:
https://aeon.co/essays/the-existence-of-biological-sex-is-no-constraint-on-human-diversity
Thanks, will check these out before my next post :)
Female: born with a reproductive system organised to ovulate/release large gametes and gestate (whether the system is working or not, is not working yet or has stopped working)
I don't think the buisness about it being hard to define woman or there being edge cases is particularly relevant. When you get into the weeds it's true of almost all our concepts. For instance, it's famously difficult to give necessary and sufficient conditions for game or table.
In almost all cases, what we actually have are some clear examples we all agree qualify under the term (XX individuals who exhibit the full range of secondary female sexual characteristics for their age) and others who we all agree don't (XY individuals with full range of secondary make sexual characteristics for their age) and some agreement about the kinds of variation that should be seen as relevant (eg changes due to accident don't change sex etc).
And yah there are always grey areas. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Point is you don't need a definition. Indeed that's the unusual case. That's why LLMs work well, they can learn the complex boundaries of our practice that can't be reduced to a definition.
I didn't even realize all these gradations of internal conflict until you spelled it out here 😯
Yeah, I similarly feel like I could use a Venn diagram to see where they overlap..
Well, you’re in luck! Next two posts will go through sex and gender in more technical detail with some helpful images… maybe I’ll throw in a Venn diagram as well :)
I’ll take that as a vote for Regan ❤️
Really good tho not enough yelling. That said, Gordy's appearance made up for that big way.