What is a Woman?

Gender is a spectrum AND it's related to sex

In a world where disagreement over what constitutes appropriate chicken seasoning can spark a culture war, the gender debate feels grounding. What people believe about gender and how it relates to sex differences is actually important. These beliefs constitute one of the central inputs informing the clashing worldviews of conservatives and progressives. So, with the definition of sex and a summary of what drives sex differences out of the way I’ll explain how I think about gender and discuss why we see such strident disagreement about how many genders there are and who should get to inhabit which categories. But first…

A brief overview of the use of “gender”

As far as I could gather from the Oxford English Dictionary and a few minutes of googling, the term gender was originally used only in the grammatical sense, then later (later as in the 1400s) expanded to also mean “Males or females viewed as a group” and “the property or fact of belonging to one of these groups.” The trad/conservative understanding of gender is still pretty close to this. But is the answer to “What is a woman?” really as simple as Matt Walsh thinks? Do gender categories have any meaning beyond “adult human female” and “adult human male”? 

Starting in the mid 20th century, the term gender also began to be used for “The state of being male or female as expressed by social or cultural distinctions and differences, rather than biological ones; the collective attributes or traits associated with a particular sex, or determined as a result of one's sex.” (from OED, emphasis mine). This definition originated in academic psychology and sociology but the sex/gender distinction eventually caught on among feminists as well (as noted in this summary). Some second wave feminists understood this version of gender to be a tool of the patriarchy, with normative gender roles imposed on females and used to essentialize and control them. 

Also around the mid 20th century, John Money, a psychologist who later co-established the Gender Identity Clinic at Johns Hopkins and is probably best known for the disturbing Reimer gender reassignment controversy, defined the term gender role as “all those things that a person says or does to disclose himself or herself as having the status of boy or man, girl or woman, respectively.” This definition separates the gender role from sex, although the now common term gender identity didn’t come online until the 1960s. In his 1968 book “Sex and Gender” Robert Stoller, also a clinician, wrote "The sense of core gender identity...is derived from three sources: the anatomy and physiology of the genitalia; the attitudes of parents, siblings and peers toward the child's gender role; and a biological force that may more or less modify the attitudinal (environmental) forces."

Combining the gender role and gender identity definitions above would get you somewhere close to the performative theory of gender advanced by Judith Butler in the 90s, but would differ in that the reality of sex and sex differences is retained. Butler’s performative theory asserts that normative gender categories are continuously constructed through our speech and actions and that an individual’s gender is not determined by their sex but through an ongoing process that begins at birth. In this view gender identity is both imposed by others and enacted by the individual. Rather than gendered behavior being an expression of identity, the performance of gender creates gender identity and reinforces gender categories by referencing, consciously or not, conventional understandings of gender. 

Although Butler, now non-binary, is considered one of the foundational thinkers in queer theory, the idea that gender identity is constructed and not inherent is at odds with how it’s often defined by activist organizations and in law. For example, the HRC defines gender identity as “One's innermost concept of self as male, female, a blend of both or neither – how individuals perceive themselves and what they call themselves…”, similarly the Ontario Human Rights Commission defines gender identity as “each person’s internal and individual experience of gender. It is their sense of being a woman, a man, both, neither, or anywhere along the gender spectrum.” Neither of these definitions require the “construction” of a gender identity or acknowledge that the behavior or perception of other people is relevant to gender identity.

So obviously gender means different things to different people. But these definitions are not all equally valid or valuable. They do differentially well at describing reality and being inclusive.

Gender stereotypes and gender categories

Gender stereotypes are the traits and patterns of behavior we have come to associate with each sex. Many of these gendered associations are a result of evolved differences in the average expression of physical or psychological/cognitive/behavioral traits by sex while others are entirely the product of cultural and social context. I use the terms sex-dependent gender stereotypes and culturally-dependent gender stereotypes to refer to each of these categories. 

Some examples:

But how do gender stereotypes inform gender categories? In some ways analogous to the clinical definition of sex, we each have some set of characteristics, explicit or implicit, which we use to sort the population by gender. Since the evolution of gender as a distinct dimension from sex is a relatively new and socially mediated phenomenon, people disagree on which associations or traits best define these boundaries. 

For some, the characteristics used to define gender categories are related to gender stereotypes, for others an individual’s sex is the most (or only) important characteristic for determining gender, and for others it all comes down to how the individual views themself. Still others think some combination of all of those are relevant to gender. Whatever characteristics we care about, people who have “enough” of the characteristics that we associate with a given gender will be categorized accordingly. 

But again, what is “enough” and which subset of characteristics are considered the most important to decide which category you belong to will vary from person to person. For example, someone might only recognize a trans woman as a woman if she was making a substantial effort to “pass” or at least to appear and act in a feminine way. Someone who holds this view might be happy to recognize trans women as women but not if they have a beard or otherwise appear or act in a masculine way. Arguments about gender arise from disagreement around which characteristics are important (or necessary/sufficient) for assigning gender.

In terms of our own self conception as opposed to how we categorize others, I more or less agree with the understanding of gender identity as something that’s constructed rather than inherent. This isn’t to say that sex and sex differences aren’t relevant to your gender identity, but that gender as an aspect of self identity doesn’t immediately follow from sex nor does it necessarily “match” your sex (even though it almost always does). Gender identity is shaped both by how others interact with and view you, and by how you behave and conceptualize yourself, both of which are also related to sex. 

So, I do think gender is a social construct. But it’s a social construct that’s largely, constrained by the reality of sex differences.

Gender categories are based on gender conformance, gender identity and sex

Imagine that we wanted to create a gender score that could be applied to individuals. We could select some gender stereotypes/requirements and weight them based on how important we think they are to being a particular gender. Of course there’s an infinite amount of ways you could do this and all of them would be subjective (and offensive to someone) since there is significant disagreement on what defines gender. But this could look something like:

Whether an individual expresses each characteristic would probably not be binary. For example someone who cares about their perceived beauty enough to spend 30 minutes a day getting ready might score a 0.5 while someone who spends 90 minutes a day and gets regular Botox and fillers might score a 2. But for simplicity we’ll pretend they’re all binary. 

In that case, a female or male who was typically feminine or masculine in terms of all the characteristics included above would score a +12 or -12 respectively, but since not everyone is gender conforming I’m assuming that the average male or female would score only a +10 or -10 respectively. Because there’s a lot of intrasexual variance on many of these traits there’d be a much larger variance in gender scores than there was in the equivalent sex score example from my previous post. If we scored a million people using this framework and plotted the results of their scores it might look something like the below:

Then, just like with the sex score from my previous post, you could select boundaries that defined when someone had “enough” feminine or masculine characteristics to be seen as a woman or man (based on this score) respectively. Because there’s so much more variance in this gender score relative to the sex score I’d define the boundaries to be much wider, so maybe I’d put the boundaries at +/-4. Based on how I simulated the data this would leave about 2% of the population in the non-binary middle area, which matches my rough estimate of the percentage of non-binary identifying youth, (25% of LGBTQ youth identify as non-binary and 7% of the adult population identifies as LGBTQ). And, also because of the high variance, you’d have people that were male sex but scored into the feminine gender category and vice versa. 

For example, imagine how a post-op and mostly typically feminine trans woman might score:

And one more example, what about a generally masculine female who identifies as a woman:

The score as presented uses characteristics related to sex, identification, anatomy, behavior and personality to categorize people by gender. This type of score might belong to a person (like me) who considers features from all of these categories to be relevant to how I mentally assign someone’s gender. Needless to say I do not “score” anyone’s gender because that would be truly bizarre. But I wanted to see if I could attempt to simplistically represent something like the implicit algorithm that I do use to categorize people subconsciously. 

Regardless of my internal assessment of someone’s gender, I would not intentionally misgender anyone, but I might have a hard time truly “seeing” them as the gender they identify with. For example, I’ve noticed that I struggle to conceptualize non-binary identifying people as non-binary when they present extremely strongly as the gender that matches their sex (most notably with Trisha Paytas…):

And this is Trisha and Moses:

But how would the characters from my sex and gender dialogue define such a score?

Trad-Feminist Louise:

Well, this one is pretty easy… 

TERF Sheila:

Unfortunately Sheila refuses to answer what she considers to be a nonsensical question since sex is what matters and gender is a patriarchal construction not an identity… 

But if we had to force a gender definition on her that matched how she interacts with people and categorizes them socially, it would be the same as Natalie’s, entirely based on sex.

That said, while a trad and a TERF might look similar in terms of how they categorize people, there’s still a lot of daylight between a their positions on sex. Most trads think sex differences are very significant and often underweight how much variance and overlap there is between the sexes. So, they think sex stereotypes are almost always valid. Yet, when they meet a non-stereotypical female they’re just as confident that she’s a woman as they are when they meet a super femme trad female. A TERF on the other hand recognizes the reality of sex but thinks of gender mostly as a patriarchal construction of sexist stereotypes used to control women.

What about Trans-Woman Natalie:

This one is also easy… 

But to be clear I don’t think this is by any means representative of the views of all trans people, including Contrapoints who the character is based on. And it also is representative of the views of plenty of cis people.

And finally… Non-binary Judith:

This one is tougher to do, but basing it off the score I presented I think Judith would implicitly reference most of the characteristics other than “Is a male” / “Is a female”, and would increase the weight on how the individual identifies. Her performative theory would also imply including how the individual is viewed and treated by others, but because that element would be so subjective I’m leaving it out.

Judith and Natalie would also likely draw attention to the variety of non-binary identities. The previous plot I showed had pale blue and pink fading to white in the middle which would symbolically represent agender but not so much gender fluid etc. So they might want to visually represent the spectrum to show that variety as below:

So what’s the takeaway:

I think that one of the things that makes understanding gender confusing is that the characteristics that we have in mind when we stereotype men and women are often not the same characteristics we use to decide how to categorize an individual. The major positions I hear being debated tend to fall on one of two extremes: either gender is collapsed to being only about sex or it’s collapsed to being only about self identification. 

The first extreme loses the distinction between sex and gender, which I think are each useful in different contexts. In my view, there are some areas of life where sex is the more relevant categorization, like in medicine, and some where gender is, like in exclusionary social settings such as a women's book club, and some where it’s unclear and requires more nuance, like in women’s sports. 

The second extreme fails to make sufficient contact with reality, both social and biological. Many gender stereotypes are sex-dependent in that they result from evolved differences in the average expression of physical or psychological/cognitive/behavioral traits by sex as discussed in my last post on sex differences. And if gender categories are to retain any meaning outside of the purely subjective, we have to give some weight to how an individual interacts with the world and is perceived by others. But the most troubling problem with this definition is that it’s entirely circular, which is why even someone like Matt Walsh can easily expose its insufficiency in exchanges such as this one. 

In addition, many people who hold the view that gender is only about self identification don’t just argue that it’s the best way to think about gender but demand that everyone else agree lest they be labeled a transphobe. On the other hand, I do not in any way support bullying or targeting trans people, including seeking them out and misgendering them online. This type of behavior represents the same totalitarian impulse coming from the other side. Those who believe that we should collapse the concepts of sex and gender should argue for the value of that approach, not insist that individuals change how they view themselves if they want to avoid ridicule.

If you’ve made it through this long post, thank you so much for reading! The next and final topic I’m going to cover in this sex and gender series relates to the costs and benefits associated with gender norms and the direction that I think feminists (and men’s rights activists for that matter) should aim towards.