Great post. Some thoughts I have about the usefulness of gender as a category:
At the base level, male-female, men-women etc are all categories. As you point out in your earlier posts, categories are of course constructed via language by humans. We decide what to call a category and where to draw boundaries for the category. But not all categories are equal.
If you pose the question: What's the purpose of creating categories? Categories help us parse variance in the world by reducing the search space, preferably in an informationally efficient way (for example, splitting the world into two halves is much better than splitting the world into me and everyone who's not me) Useful categories also help us make relevant predictions about actors within the category. For example, assigning random numbers to everyone in the world and splitting the world into odds and evens is informationally efficient but basically useless. As you increase the quality of categorization, your predictions should get better and better. The best predictions are those that are unperpinned by robust historical models - which are stable over time. And of course, all else equal, we like robust predictions about important, conseuqential things over robust predictions about the trivial. Now, it might be obvious that biological Sex performs exceptionally well in this contest of categories.
Now ,look at gender. To start, people seem to be drawing boundaries where they want, based on their ideology. This itself massively diminishes its usefulness as a category that we ought to organize the tools of language and culture around. Someone might claim: "We do use gender, not sex, to make social predictions all the time and regulate how we interact with other people (based on how they look/present etc". This is true but it's not based on some new category called gender. When people see a woman who has more masculine body proportions and voice, they loosen their otherwise sex-informed priors. In other words, it still flows through biological sex and how much to anchor on it.
This is why, as we've already seen, emphasizing gender identity over sex just won't work. Sex is a stable, useful , predictive category. And gender is a derivative of it which people disagree over.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. I'd point out that this is exactly what I urge in the conclusion of the post - that people make an argument for why their understanding of sex/gender is the best or most useful rather than just insisting that people who don't agree are stupid or bigoted. I'd agree that sex as a category has more clear uses than gender, and since gender identities are so strongly correlated with sex you could use sex to categorize people in the place of gender in most areas without losing too much. But we don't have to be so stingy with our concepts! First of all, there are areas where gender is the more appropriate category vs. sex and its use allows for the inclusion of more people who are non-conforming and reduces mis-categorization in those contexts. But also, gender as a concept isn't only about categorizing people. The concept of gender not only refers to "The state of being male or female as expressed by social or cultural distinctions and differences, rather than biological ones;" but also "the collective attributes or traits associated with a particular sex, or determined as a result of one's sex.” It's a useful concept that allows us a shorthand to discuss the social and cultural norms relating to sex, which of them are sex-dependent vs. culturally-dependent, how they should or should not be enforced and how they affect how individuals view themselves and others.
"At the base level, male-female, men-women etc. are all categories. As you point out in your earlier posts, categories are of course constructed via language by humans. We decide what to call a category and where to draw boundaries for the category. But not all categories are equal."
Indeed -- particularly the closing statement. Apropos of which, you might have some interest in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [SEP] article on natural kinds:
SEP: "Scientific disciplines frequently divide the particulars they study into kinds and theorize about those kinds. To say that a kind is natural is to say that it corresponds to a grouping that reflects the structure of the natural world rather than the interests and actions of human beings."
Some reason to argue that the standard biological definitions for the sexes -- those that stipulate that to have a sex is to have functional gonads of either of two types, those with neither being sexless -- qualify as natural kinds. A PhilPapers article which argues that case, though can't say that I've more than skimmed it myself:
PhilPapers: "This chapter argues that the properties of producing relatively large and small gametes are causally correlated with a range of other properties in a wide variety of organisms, and this is what makes females and males natural kinds in the animal kingdom."
But that's a large part of my objection to Regan's defense of her "clinical definitions" -- they reflect only "the interests and actions of human beings". May have some utility but they ain't those foundational to all of biology.
Apropos of which, y'all might have some interest in a post by "Exulansic" and in my discussions with her where she objects to the more or less reasonable claims of tweeter, "GCs are Ontologically Stupid" -- an accurate characterization -- although you'd have to sign up for the 7 day free trial to see the latter:
Exulansic: Tweet text reads: Claiming that a person without gametes is still male or female when appealing to a purely gametic definition of sex because "they would have produced gametes if they developed properly" is a counterfactual claim which assumes that there is an objectively correct way to develop. This argument relies upon a subjective assessment about how they believe an individual ought to have developed rather than how they actually did develop, making it completely non-functional from a scientific perspective. [End tweet.] .... [Queer theorists] rely on the fact that many people cannot immediately articulate why sex categories rely on gametes but do not require gametes at all times to still exist.
Unfortunately for her, by those "natural kind" definitions, it's quite true that membership in the sex categories DOES depend on the presence of gametes.
"What people believe about gender and how it relates to sex differences is actually important."
Amen to that. A fairly thorough and quite informative kick at that kitty, at that age-old question, the one that has confounded philosophers, philanderers, politicians, and pundits from time immemorial 🙂. You might have some interest in my own prognostications on the topic:
But some interesting links to follow, and I like that you more or less clearly differentiate between sex and gender -- entirely different kettles of fish, if not species from different phyla.
However, I kinda think you're going off into the weeds, again, with a largely untenable reliance on weightings to create a one-dimensional measure of gender. Rather subjective and quite idiosyncratic at best -- which you more or less concede right out of the chute which makes the exercise rather academic at best. Why you might also have some interest in my Welcome post on the topic, as well as the cogent observations by one Janet Hyde of the Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin:
Steersman: "But the foregoing emphasizes that anyone can be more masculine on some traits, on some axes of that multi-dimensional gender spectrum, while being more feminine on other traits. For example, a person, of either sex, who is very agreeable and 6 ft. 1 in. tall (185. cm) is therefore hyper-feminine AND hyper-masculine, although on entirely different axes. So a great deal of justification to argue that gender is in fact a spectrum, but it’s a seriously problematic misperception to suggest that it’s only one-dimensional. Quite an illuminating article -- 'Gender Similarities and Differences' -- by Janet Hyde on that perspective:
[Hyde]: 'Moreover, this difference or distance is along a dimension in multivariate space that is a linear combination of the original variables, but this dimension is uninterpretable. What does it mean to say that there are large differences in personality, lumping together distinct aspects such as emotional stability, dominance, and vigilance? Certainly contemporary personality theorists do not argue that there is a single dimension to personality.'
A great many sources and credible researchers -- Malone & Hyde in particular -- endorse the view that gender is more or less synonymous with personalities and personality types. However, even limiting gender to what are called The Big Five personality traits means at least 5 dimensions to gender. But one might reasonably argue that any trait that shows some differences -- on average -- between males and females -- like heights for example -- also constitutes another entirely different dimension, another axis in that multi-dimensional gender spectrum."
But I've periodically toyed with the idea of mapping that "multi-dimensional gender spectrum" onto a single one, though my math is generally not good enough to say for sure if that's possible, or how to go about it if it is. You might have some interest in some preliminary "noodlings" on that score:
“we heavily weight secondary sex characteristics in gendering people in adulthood”
MEN tend to weigh secondary sex characteristics as very important. Hence, we get male winners of women's beauty contests. Slender males with fake boobs who lack female fat distribution are considered to be better looking than actual women. If only we could get all the sexist men who can't look beyond T&A to spend their efforts trying to have sex with trans women and leave the rest of us alone...
“if we can get enough signal from visible physical characteristics, and voice, we tend to ignore the rest“
Nah. Again, men might be fine accepting other men who pass as women. But women know better. Crime statistics indicate that being transgender does NOT make a male any less prone to sexual violence.
Women evolved to have an innate sense of wariness that keeps us and our children safe from male predators. That instinctual distrust won't go away just because society insults us and transtifa attack us. There is a certain percentage of males who are despicable human beings. Putting boobs on a male chest doesn't change his propensity to violence. The more men who force their way into female spaces, the more women who realize “being inclusive” means a loss of their right to privacy, safety and dignity.
As they say, If you want to know if a male transgender is actually a woman, ask a lesbian. They're not fooled by fake boobs.
Coming to this a bit late, but enjoyed the article and thought I'd drop some thoughts in. For some context, I'm trans and found this a well reasoned and practical take.
I think I largely agree that the lived reality of being and being seen as a man or woman is more than just self identification or gender assigned at birth. Clearly there are sex differences that are readily visible, and behaviors that have evolved culturally from physical differences that inform our categorizations.
Where I think things get interesting is that there are clearly trans men and women who get categorized correctly more readily than marginal cis men and women. And the reason for that is pretty obvious, hormones and other modern medical interventions are objectively able to modify enough secondary sex characteristics. And we heavily weight secondary sex characteristics in gendering people in adulthood (if we can get enough signal from visible physical characteristics, and voice, we tend to ignore the rest)
The fact that the bulk of those changes, for passing trans people who are not intersex, come from chemically simple sex hormones, really doesn't line up with an idea of binary gender. We've all got genetic blueprints for wildly different sex expression and those remain throughout our lifetime. This whole conversation would be very different if that weren't the case (the prevalence of 3rd genders prior to modern HRT feels illustrative of a stable social order where those differences can't be ignored). I think it matters that there are a lot of binary trans people and a lot of them do pass.
Additionally, the only way to keep that population out is to dig into regressive gender expectations that are broadly harmful. It's a worse world that insists we divide all of the traits, professions and roles, and rigidly enforce that this group use those and only those, while another only use that other set.
Tying things back concretely, I think there's less work to do for many trans people to be socially legible as their self identified gender than your scoring would admit. Hormones and youth are probably enough to match cis populations. Heck, I get fewer looks in bathrooms as a trans woman on HRT for a year than a cis butch co-worker of mine with visible body hair.
Your world view resonates, I'm quibbling over the population distribution under the curve and how much we should weight self identification if those two clusters are actually quite close. Or if the "non-binary" / androgynous cluster in the middle holds a larger population of cis and trans binary people.
Great post. Some thoughts I have about the usefulness of gender as a category:
At the base level, male-female, men-women etc are all categories. As you point out in your earlier posts, categories are of course constructed via language by humans. We decide what to call a category and where to draw boundaries for the category. But not all categories are equal.
If you pose the question: What's the purpose of creating categories? Categories help us parse variance in the world by reducing the search space, preferably in an informationally efficient way (for example, splitting the world into two halves is much better than splitting the world into me and everyone who's not me) Useful categories also help us make relevant predictions about actors within the category. For example, assigning random numbers to everyone in the world and splitting the world into odds and evens is informationally efficient but basically useless. As you increase the quality of categorization, your predictions should get better and better. The best predictions are those that are unperpinned by robust historical models - which are stable over time. And of course, all else equal, we like robust predictions about important, conseuqential things over robust predictions about the trivial. Now, it might be obvious that biological Sex performs exceptionally well in this contest of categories.
Now ,look at gender. To start, people seem to be drawing boundaries where they want, based on their ideology. This itself massively diminishes its usefulness as a category that we ought to organize the tools of language and culture around. Someone might claim: "We do use gender, not sex, to make social predictions all the time and regulate how we interact with other people (based on how they look/present etc". This is true but it's not based on some new category called gender. When people see a woman who has more masculine body proportions and voice, they loosen their otherwise sex-informed priors. In other words, it still flows through biological sex and how much to anchor on it.
This is why, as we've already seen, emphasizing gender identity over sex just won't work. Sex is a stable, useful , predictive category. And gender is a derivative of it which people disagree over.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. I'd point out that this is exactly what I urge in the conclusion of the post - that people make an argument for why their understanding of sex/gender is the best or most useful rather than just insisting that people who don't agree are stupid or bigoted. I'd agree that sex as a category has more clear uses than gender, and since gender identities are so strongly correlated with sex you could use sex to categorize people in the place of gender in most areas without losing too much. But we don't have to be so stingy with our concepts! First of all, there are areas where gender is the more appropriate category vs. sex and its use allows for the inclusion of more people who are non-conforming and reduces mis-categorization in those contexts. But also, gender as a concept isn't only about categorizing people. The concept of gender not only refers to "The state of being male or female as expressed by social or cultural distinctions and differences, rather than biological ones;" but also "the collective attributes or traits associated with a particular sex, or determined as a result of one's sex.” It's a useful concept that allows us a shorthand to discuss the social and cultural norms relating to sex, which of them are sex-dependent vs. culturally-dependent, how they should or should not be enforced and how they affect how individuals view themselves and others.
"At the base level, male-female, men-women etc. are all categories. As you point out in your earlier posts, categories are of course constructed via language by humans. We decide what to call a category and where to draw boundaries for the category. But not all categories are equal."
Indeed -- particularly the closing statement. Apropos of which, you might have some interest in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [SEP] article on natural kinds:
SEP: "Scientific disciplines frequently divide the particulars they study into kinds and theorize about those kinds. To say that a kind is natural is to say that it corresponds to a grouping that reflects the structure of the natural world rather than the interests and actions of human beings."
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/natural-kinds/
Some reason to argue that the standard biological definitions for the sexes -- those that stipulate that to have a sex is to have functional gonads of either of two types, those with neither being sexless -- qualify as natural kinds. A PhilPapers article which argues that case, though can't say that I've more than skimmed it myself:
PhilPapers: "This chapter argues that the properties of producing relatively large and small gametes are causally correlated with a range of other properties in a wide variety of organisms, and this is what makes females and males natural kinds in the animal kingdom."
https://philpapers.org/rec/KHAASN
But that's a large part of my objection to Regan's defense of her "clinical definitions" -- they reflect only "the interests and actions of human beings". May have some utility but they ain't those foundational to all of biology.
Apropos of which, y'all might have some interest in a post by "Exulansic" and in my discussions with her where she objects to the more or less reasonable claims of tweeter, "GCs are Ontologically Stupid" -- an accurate characterization -- although you'd have to sign up for the 7 day free trial to see the latter:
Exulansic: Tweet text reads: Claiming that a person without gametes is still male or female when appealing to a purely gametic definition of sex because "they would have produced gametes if they developed properly" is a counterfactual claim which assumes that there is an objectively correct way to develop. This argument relies upon a subjective assessment about how they believe an individual ought to have developed rather than how they actually did develop, making it completely non-functional from a scientific perspective. [End tweet.] .... [Queer theorists] rely on the fact that many people cannot immediately articulate why sex categories rely on gametes but do not require gametes at all times to still exist.
https://exulansic.substack.com/p/queering-development-and-the-quest
Unfortunately for her, by those "natural kind" definitions, it's quite true that membership in the sex categories DOES depend on the presence of gametes.
Good one. Gender dysphoria has wider ramifications which include acceptance by religious institutions like the church; legal terms in court; etc. Recently the Supreme Court of India published a handbook to discourage stereotypical legal language to encourage "gender sensitive jurisprudence". https://www.scobserver.in/journal/supreme-court-handbook-on-gender-stereotypes-progressive-but-will-the-law-catch-up/
"What people believe about gender and how it relates to sex differences is actually important."
Amen to that. A fairly thorough and quite informative kick at that kitty, at that age-old question, the one that has confounded philosophers, philanderers, politicians, and pundits from time immemorial 🙂. You might have some interest in my own prognostications on the topic:
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/what-is-a-woman
But some interesting links to follow, and I like that you more or less clearly differentiate between sex and gender -- entirely different kettles of fish, if not species from different phyla.
However, I kinda think you're going off into the weeds, again, with a largely untenable reliance on weightings to create a one-dimensional measure of gender. Rather subjective and quite idiosyncratic at best -- which you more or less concede right out of the chute which makes the exercise rather academic at best. Why you might also have some interest in my Welcome post on the topic, as well as the cogent observations by one Janet Hyde of the Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin:
Steersman: "But the foregoing emphasizes that anyone can be more masculine on some traits, on some axes of that multi-dimensional gender spectrum, while being more feminine on other traits. For example, a person, of either sex, who is very agreeable and 6 ft. 1 in. tall (185. cm) is therefore hyper-feminine AND hyper-masculine, although on entirely different axes. So a great deal of justification to argue that gender is in fact a spectrum, but it’s a seriously problematic misperception to suggest that it’s only one-dimensional. Quite an illuminating article -- 'Gender Similarities and Differences' -- by Janet Hyde on that perspective:
[Hyde]: 'Moreover, this difference or distance is along a dimension in multivariate space that is a linear combination of the original variables, but this dimension is uninterpretable. What does it mean to say that there are large differences in personality, lumping together distinct aspects such as emotional stability, dominance, and vigilance? Certainly contemporary personality theorists do not argue that there is a single dimension to personality.'
A great many sources and credible researchers -- Malone & Hyde in particular -- endorse the view that gender is more or less synonymous with personalities and personality types. However, even limiting gender to what are called The Big Five personality traits means at least 5 dimensions to gender. But one might reasonably argue that any trait that shows some differences -- on average -- between males and females -- like heights for example -- also constitutes another entirely different dimension, another axis in that multi-dimensional gender spectrum."
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/i/64264079/rationalized-gender
https://gwern.net/doc/iq/2014-hyde.pdf
But I've periodically toyed with the idea of mapping that "multi-dimensional gender spectrum" onto a single one, though my math is generally not good enough to say for sure if that's possible, or how to go about it if it is. You might have some interest in some preliminary "noodlings" on that score:
https://medium.com/@steersmann/reality-and-illusion-being-vs-identifying-as-77f9618b17c7
“we heavily weight secondary sex characteristics in gendering people in adulthood”
MEN tend to weigh secondary sex characteristics as very important. Hence, we get male winners of women's beauty contests. Slender males with fake boobs who lack female fat distribution are considered to be better looking than actual women. If only we could get all the sexist men who can't look beyond T&A to spend their efforts trying to have sex with trans women and leave the rest of us alone...
“if we can get enough signal from visible physical characteristics, and voice, we tend to ignore the rest“
Nah. Again, men might be fine accepting other men who pass as women. But women know better. Crime statistics indicate that being transgender does NOT make a male any less prone to sexual violence.
Women evolved to have an innate sense of wariness that keeps us and our children safe from male predators. That instinctual distrust won't go away just because society insults us and transtifa attack us. There is a certain percentage of males who are despicable human beings. Putting boobs on a male chest doesn't change his propensity to violence. The more men who force their way into female spaces, the more women who realize “being inclusive” means a loss of their right to privacy, safety and dignity.
As they say, If you want to know if a male transgender is actually a woman, ask a lesbian. They're not fooled by fake boobs.
Coming to this a bit late, but enjoyed the article and thought I'd drop some thoughts in. For some context, I'm trans and found this a well reasoned and practical take.
I think I largely agree that the lived reality of being and being seen as a man or woman is more than just self identification or gender assigned at birth. Clearly there are sex differences that are readily visible, and behaviors that have evolved culturally from physical differences that inform our categorizations.
Where I think things get interesting is that there are clearly trans men and women who get categorized correctly more readily than marginal cis men and women. And the reason for that is pretty obvious, hormones and other modern medical interventions are objectively able to modify enough secondary sex characteristics. And we heavily weight secondary sex characteristics in gendering people in adulthood (if we can get enough signal from visible physical characteristics, and voice, we tend to ignore the rest)
The fact that the bulk of those changes, for passing trans people who are not intersex, come from chemically simple sex hormones, really doesn't line up with an idea of binary gender. We've all got genetic blueprints for wildly different sex expression and those remain throughout our lifetime. This whole conversation would be very different if that weren't the case (the prevalence of 3rd genders prior to modern HRT feels illustrative of a stable social order where those differences can't be ignored). I think it matters that there are a lot of binary trans people and a lot of them do pass.
Additionally, the only way to keep that population out is to dig into regressive gender expectations that are broadly harmful. It's a worse world that insists we divide all of the traits, professions and roles, and rigidly enforce that this group use those and only those, while another only use that other set.
Tying things back concretely, I think there's less work to do for many trans people to be socially legible as their self identified gender than your scoring would admit. Hormones and youth are probably enough to match cis populations. Heck, I get fewer looks in bathrooms as a trans woman on HRT for a year than a cis butch co-worker of mine with visible body hair.
Your world view resonates, I'm quibbling over the population distribution under the curve and how much we should weight self identification if those two clusters are actually quite close. Or if the "non-binary" / androgynous cluster in the middle holds a larger population of cis and trans binary people.