Are Transwomen women? 1

The Disjunctive Solution Revisited

I’ve argued that the debate about what it is to be transgender or to have a “transgender identity” should be viewed in terms of the concept of “gender identity”, where self-ascriptions are underwritten by the “innate sense” the assigner has of their gender state. I proceeded to suggest that to do justice to the social and political significance of the debate, such a shift in semantic authority—the authority to determine what words mean—away from general and/or expert usage and towards individual subjects should be seen in terms of a rights claim. From this perspective we can readily see why the debate about what it is to be really a man/ boy/ male or woman/ girl/ female take centre-stage. Although these supposedly only number two amongst the indefinable and ever-expanding genders available, the residual attachment to linking these with biological sex is regarded as an impediment to realising the full liberatory potential of “gender identity” discourse and therefore an obstacle to human freedom. To insist that men and women are distinguished to any degree on biological grounds is to deny the existence of the human right to determine for oneself who one is. Let’s call this right “TR”. Accordingly, to deny the existence of is the hallmark of transphobia.In order to reënforce the appeal of this rights-focussed approach I want to spend this piece discussing alternatives. That will in turn offer the opportunity to develop some of the points raised in earlier pieces.

At a first pass proponents of TR believe the following (where “women” and “men” are gender concepts):

1.         Transwomen (TW) are (real) women, and

2.         Transmen (TM) are (real) men

Call those who reject (1) and (2) Realists/Gender Critics. On their account gender concepts simply lack criteria of application: there are no truths articulable using such terms. Traditionally, then, opponents of (1) and (2) would assert contrariwise something like the following:

1'.         XX is a (real) woman iff XX is an adult female human

2'.         XY is a (real) man iff XY is an adult male human

For the most part, even those aiming to support (1) and (2) concede that the majority of people in ordinary life would accept either the truth of these biconditionals^[1] or that being an adult female human is sufficient for being a real woman. That is to say, they acknowledge that customary usage (ordinary meaning: what’s on the left hand side) at least in part tracks the biological facts (the right hand side), the authority for the determination of which is now devolved to the appropriate experts. Whatever shift (1) and (2) represent, then, is not best understood as a straightforward argument about what the biological facts are. This is not to say that advocates for (1) and (2) can’t—and indeed don’t—contest the biological facts. But that can only serve to weaken the attachment to the applicability of biological criteria generally. I’ll take up this point about “shifts” in normative authority (who gets to say what’s right and wrong) below.

We’ve already seen how one way to establish (1) and (2) might proceed; namely, in terms of what we called a Disjunctive Solution. Accordingly, one can deny that the right hand side of the biconditionals express the necessary condition for XX- or XY-hood and take a disjunctive approach:

1".        XX is a (real) woman iff (P) XX is an adult female human or (Q) XX is a Transwoman

2".        XY is a (real) man iff (P') XY is an adult male human or (Q') XY is a Transman

The first question this raises concerns the nature of the facts that are expressed in the Q-statements. Now, we know that the P-statements are or would be “scientific” in nature, but what about the Q-statements? What kind of facts do they purport to represent if not scientific ones? Viewing that question philosophically there are two traditional approaches to this question: Dualism and Radical Constructivism.

According to dualism, facts fall into two fundamentally different classes and are expressed using different “vocabularies” or sets of concepts. Different objects or entities are identified and described in these different vocabularies, and the methods used to make these identifications and descriptions are also different. The most famous dualism is of course Descartes’ distinction between mind and body. Body concerns publicly identifiable physical entities that interact causally; mind “inner” objects like thoughts, beliefs, desires etc that are identified directly only by the person who “has” them. We develop the sciences to explain  those “outer” objects and employ reason to understand the inner ones. The “mental” vocabulary is used to express facts about mind and the “physical” vocabulary facts about the world of space-time.

There aren’t many card-carrying Cartesian dualists these days but the idea that there are two basic kinds of facts expressed in different vocabularies persists; indeed, we encountered a contemporary example of the dualistic view in Transphobia and Language 1, with the distinction between sex-talk and gender-talk. Sex-talk is scientific (biological; heir to Descartes “Body”) and gender-talk social or “socially constructed”, where a socially constructed fact is one that wouldn’t be a fact at all if it weren’t for the needs and interests of human beings having shaped or created forms of intelligibility. On the face of it at least, there’s nothing mysterious about this division. The sciences strive to explain things as if the particular things (us) doing the explaining don’t shape in any fundamental way the explanations themselves (they aspire to a “view from nowhere” as the saying goes). And so we would anticipate that any aliens out there with comparable developments in technology would come up with more or less the same account of the universe—they’d have something like relativity- and quantum- theories for example. On the other hand, we don’t think that our fictional aliens would necessarily have created insurance, celebrity or racism and patriarchy. If they procreate they will probably have something akin to sex, but they may not have anything like gender.

Given that account of dualism, the basic claim of the radical constructivist is pretty straightforward: all concepts are socially-constructed, all “talk” is shaped by our needs and interests. As William James has it, in all ways of talking we find ‘the trail of the human serpent’. But if all facts are socially constructed, there’s no contrast class; so why is gender-talk consequential? On this approach, what it does is draw attention to the extent to which denying that scientific/sex/biological talk is in fact similarly “constructed” is an attempt to mask the coercive power/knowledge-grab involved in such classifications. That is to say, it is theorized that it is in the “interests” of power—perhaps exercised by the patriarchy and/or white supremacy (both socially constructed)—to “hide” its ambitions behind claims to disinterested (“scientific”) objectivity. And those insidious interests are unmasked by—in broad terms—endeavouring to show how classifications or taxonomies by sex serve power in denying to people control over their own (gender) identities and in this and other ways constrain their freedom^[2].

Since this sounds rather vague, in Trans-Theory and Gender Self-Identification I’ll discuss both a specific philosophical justification for this view and a set of political commitments (those of the UK Greens) that one can only assume is based on considerations similar to those it advances. For the time being it’s worth noting that many writers in this area oscillate—oftentimes uncomfortably—between Dualism and Radical Constructivism. On the one hand, while Dualism seems to liberate a domain of discourse for the gender-theorist it lacks resources for critiquing the authority of the rival discourse when disputes arise about the what the relevant facts are, scientific or social. That is most apparent in some responses to the Cass Report when—as in this case and others—someone wants to argue that transchildren are being denied medical treatment that they need. On the other hand, although Radical Constructivism flatters the thinker that they’re engaged in some bleeding-edge political project, there’s a degree of recognition that attempts to articulate such a global anti-realism can totter on the brink of unintelligibility^[3].

Viewed as a “merely” intellectual problem, the Realist/Gender Critical response to such instability is perhaps a natural one. On the face of it at least, however, this sceptical solution presents a number of political or ethical challenges. Firstly, a presumption of much feminist thought is that there is a probative contrast to be drawn between concepts pertaining to biological function/physical constitution etc. and those used to theorise social roles. This is not to say that this discourse cannot be reconstructed or reformulated using different resources: there were feminists long before theory became “genderised”. More pressingly, perhaps, if there’s no such thing as gender then no one has a gender identity per se and certainly no one can be “genuinely” transgender. With only the above options on the table, one can see why those who associate gender-talk with freedom, emancipation etc. are likely to recoil from this option and fall back on what have become the traditional ways of supporting it.

In terms of the options on the table, then, there are a number of ways of responding to the question whether or not—to take one example—Transwomen are real women. Taking the subscripts to designate the sort of fact the statement in question might express according the theory (“S” being scientific; “SC” being socially constructed; SC-facts being subdivided into those that are socially constructed “gender” (“SCg”) and those that are socially constructed “scientific” facts (“SCs”)), we have:

Dualism

D(i) Transwomen are Women_SC

D(ii) Transwomen are not Women_SC

D(iii) Transwomen are not Women_S

Radical Constructivism

RC(i) Transwomen are Women_SCg

RC(ii) Transwomen are not Women_SCg

RC(iii) Transwomen are not Women_SCs

Realism

R(i) Transwomen are not Women_S

As it stands there’s nothing in the way that Dualism and Radical Constructivism are defined that necessitates a particular answer to our question. Dualists might locate the concept Women in the realm of science, thus denying it to transwomen (D(iii)); or, locating it in the realm of social facts, still deny it to them because they do not satisfy the socially-determined criteria (D(ii)). Similarly, the Radical Constructivist might hold that the socially constructed facts relating to the correct identification of women are just the sort of socially constructed facts we identify with scientific discourse (RC(iii)); or even deny that transwomen satisfy those social norms that determine gender-concepts. Given these caveats, proponents of—say—(1) above who look to non-realist accounts of facts (RC(i) and D(i)) have further work to do. They must explain how or why they come to draw the line between scientific and socially constructed facts (in the case of the Dualist) or where they draw the line between the socially constructed facts we rightly label “scientific” and those we don’t (in the case of the Radical Constructivist) in such a way that the concept Woman is on the right side of the line. If these challenges could be met we would have something like the following

The Dualist option:

1"'.       XX is a (real) woman iff (P) XX is an adult female human_S or (Q) XX is a Women_SC

The Radical Constructivist option:

1"".      XX is a (real) woman iff (P) XX is an adult female human_SCs or (Q) XX is a Women_SCg

In the next piece I’ll evaluate the likelihood that one might make sense of this approach and conclude that if (1) is to be defended in the name of TR then we need a different way of thinking about what the claim involves.

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^[1] For those unfamiliar with the jargon, these are called “biconditionals”. If, for example, “A is a triangle if and only if (iff for short) A is a three-sided figure” is true then whatever the truth-value (true or false) of “A is a triangle”, the truth-value of “A is a three-sided figure” will be the same. The idea is to provide a formal definition on the right hand side of what’s on the left hand side.

^[2] This will be familiar both to readers of Foucault, and to readers of readers of Foucault like Butler.

^[3] For example, how does one know that one’s own “constructed” position isn’t itself “controlled” by interests what one isn’t aware of? Perhaps centring politics on “identity” and fetishising the individual’s freedom to “be who they are” is the most effective way of making sure they serve the interests of “power”… .