Gender Scepticism, Part II
As we saw in Gender Scepticism, Part I, the Supreme Court concluded that the meaning of “woman” intended through 50 or so years of anti-discrimination legislation is:
(A) XX is a (real) woman iff (P) XX is an adult female human
As things stand, then, expressions of so-called “gender critical” beliefs are no more than ‘a matter of ordinary language’ (¶161). That might indicate that ordinary language has for 50 years of more reflected an unexamined “biological essentialism”. But until that has been demonstrated, the Trans Realist’s claim that a commitment to the immutability and binary nature of sex is “philosophical” is both unmotivated and unprincipled. And if that latter claim sounds too strong, imagine the bitter frustration of being denounced as a “transphobe” for holding a belief that is not only “a matter of ordinary language” but also one on which the Equality Act’s protection of “transgender persons” is founded! In the next section I want to turn away from the present in order to put the Trans Realist’s radical proposal in what I shall argue is its appropriate setting. In section 2 I’ll look briefly at one attempt to make sense of that setting.
1. All Change
Recall that we are looking how the following could be true:
(TW) A transwoman is a (real) woman
(TM) A transman is a (real) man
We’ve already looked at the Scottish Ministers proposal:
(W) XX is a real woman iff (P) XX is an adult female human or (Q) ((i) XX is a transwoman and (ii) XX possesses a Gender Recognition Certificate).
And I offered another on their behalf:
(W') XX is a real woman iff (P) XX is an adult female human or (Q') XX self-identifies as a woman.
These are examples of a disjunctive approach to concept change. I want to dispense with this quickly because I don’t think it works and it’s not in any event what the Trans Realist really wants. If the charge of biological essentialism is to count for anything it is because they are committed to arguing that meeting the biological criteria for being a woman is neither necessary nor sufficient. The existence of a rival source of authority—another way of deciding what is and is not a “real” woman—is a standing threat to the legitimacy and authority of the practice based on self-identification. But if there’s nothing to be gained from evaluating (TW) using the disjunctive approach, how should one conceive of the radical proposal? Within what alternative framework might the biological facts come to be seen as absolutely irrelevant to discussions of sex?
The answer might seem obvious:
(Z) XX is a (real) woman iff XX self-identifies as a woman
One obvious problem is that as things stand this would seem to be obviously false. But a further problem exposes a bit of structure hidden in (W').
We appear to be able to make sense of what it is to self-identify as a woman in (Q') only because (P) tells us what XX is self-identifying as[1]. But in (Z) what XX is self-identifying as is wholly unspecified! We certainly can’t suggest:
(Z') XX is a (real) woman iff XX self-identifies as an adult human female
because the authority attaching to self-identification has nothing to do with how one picks out adult human females[2]. My suggestion is the following:
(TW') What people used to call “transwomen” are (real) women*.
Which amounts to the following:
(TW") There are no transwomen,
and indeed this:
(TW''') There are no women
This pair of expressions aim to articulate a perspective from which, due to changes in linguistic and other practices, what the Trans Realist is striving but failing to say when they aim to avow (TW) can in fact finally be said. Call this standpoint the future-retrospective. From the standpoint where (TW') is true, the conditions for the correct use of the term “woman” are such that no sense can be given to the distinctions between P- and Q-women because both have disappeared.
Before saying more about this proposal, let me note that I think this is the best possible way of presenting the Trans Realist’s position. The benefit of the approach in general is that it invites us to reflect on the broader commitments that would need to be in place in order to use successor concepts like women* in the way required. And since that invitation to reflection is an invitation to ponder the benefits and disbenefits of such a change I think it’s the only basis on which a genuine conversation about how to proceed politically in this area can take place.
Thinking about concept change in this way emerged from the pragmatic turn in mid-century Anglo-American philosophy of science. Here’s an example taken from Rorty.
(ZT) What people used to call “Zeus’ Thunderbolts” are really discharges of electrical energy
From which it follows:
(ZT') There are no such things as Zeus’ Thunderbolts.
When people said ‘there’s a thunderbolt’ or ‘behold, Zeus’ anger!’ they were reporting on something. The thing they were really reporting on was atmospheric electrical discharge, and in discovering that we dispense with all that mythical nonsense. Or more to the point, dispensing with that nonsense means that we can now see the phenomenon as part of a unified scientific way of explaining events in the world. (ZT) is articulated from the perspective of that unified account and announces the elimination of the concept of Zeus’ Thunderbolts in favour of the concept of electrical energy discharge[3].
Viewed in this light, (TW') is a proposal for an in-favour elimination. It represents the shift that will have taken place (future-retrospectively) when people stopped calling women* “women” (biological creatures).
(EE) What people used to call “women” are (really) women*,
where “women” is the sex-based categorisation.
Given what I said about mystification we can imagine how a parallel story might run here. For the Trans Realist some combination of biological essentialism, patriarchy, colonialism, heteronormativity, ableism and capitalism would play a key role, the gods of Judith Butler etc. replacing those of Homer! I’ll return to this point in the next section when we look at what to understand by the successor concept woman*. But I’ll conclude this section by noting two more general characteristics of the proposed in-favour elimination that have a bearing on that understanding.
First-off, I said that the problem with disjunctive solutions is that they introduce distinct sources of normative authority. And these can lead to conflicts and tensions within our linguistic practices. The linguistic revision of “women” to “women*” in (EE) is different. It imagines a radical shift in the structure of authority. That shift must be such that it can be seen to pay-off in terms that we can identify from where we are now. It must speak as it were to shared values that we can see will be promoted and enhanced by it. But, crucially, it must be an in-favour elimination. There must be some sense in which the new concept is taking over from the old one and doing a better job than its predecessor. In-favour eliminations thus contrast with both “good riddance” eliminations and changes of subject. With the former we find that a concept served no useful purpose and so drop it from our conceptual repertoire (Haslanger argues for that); in the latter a new concept or concepts are introduced, but although they appear to compete with existing concepts they neither replace them nor do they bring them into disrepute.
The second point I want to make is that although this way of thinking about concept change comes from pragmatist philosophy of science it need not be restricted to the elimination of a non-scientific term by a scientific one. We can think of it in a much more pluralistic way. We might follow Wittgenstein here and talk about “language games”, or the later Rorty and use “vocabularies”, or along with Foucault et alexploit the idea of changing “epistemes”, but the underlying point is that an in-favour elimination encodes a change that takes place when we substitute one “vocabulary” for another, one complex set of discursive practices and methods for identifying what there really is with another. That is to say, when we conclude that
· What people used to call “Fs” are (really) Gs
we are (really) memorialising the successful substitution of the G-language game/vocabulary for F-language game/vocabulary.
2. No Woman Left Behind
Let me summarise the claims of the last section:
a. The most pragmatically useful way of making sense of the Trans Realist’s proposal for radical change is in terms of the in-favour elimination (EE):
(EE) What people used to call “women” are (really) women*.
b. This codifies an imagined shift in the structure of authority from the norms that govern claims like “She is a woman” to those norms that govern claims like “She is a woman*”.
c. An in-favour elimination is different from both a “good riddance” elimination and a change of subject.
And to this we can add our truism from earlier:
d. The Trans Realist’s proposal for radical change involves the idea of “self-identification”
(d) is what we need to develop the point made in (b), because the “starred” concepts are those involved in self-identification, and the authority that devolves to them is the authority of the subject that is making the identification. Avowals of “I am a woman” are true if the subject “self-identifies” as-a-women*. For the Trans Realist, the other-ascribed biological concepts woman etc are eliminated “in favour” of self-assigned “gender-identity” concepts, and the authority to self-assign is justified on the grounds that all folk have the right to self-identity. The standpoint from which (TW') is true is one from which this “trans right” (TR) is accepted as uncontroversial.
How are we to conceive of this proposed migration of authority towards the subject? As noted in (c), the aim is not to establish a set of “starred” concepts that despite their similar spelling bear no relation to the existing sex-based classifications. That would be no different from insisting on the “right” to be a Taylor Swift fan rather than a Billie Eilish fan. The whole point of asserting the right to self-identify is to eliminate the sex-based categorisations in favour of ones that will serve something like the same function by allowing us to talk about something like the same things. It is to maintain that sex-based categories are oppressive insofar as they acknowledge a source of authority that is external to the subject, and that the new ones are better insofar as they liberate us from (possible coercion by) that external authority. But to be better they can’t be merely changing the subject.
With these reflections in mind, let’s consider briefly what Judith Butler (2024) says:
The category of “woman” does not say in advance how many people can participate in the reality it describes, nor does it limit in advance the forms that that reality can take (34).
If we designate the non-fixed category in question “woman*” that would assimilate Butler’s position to (EE): women* are those who, exercising the ‘the rights of self-assignment’ (32), “identity-as-women”. Indeed, for Butler acknowledging that right is so fundamental to one’s political convictions that anyone who rejects it by endorsing (A) is automatically associated with right-wing conservatives and nationalists like Trump and Meloni.
What then are we to make of Butler’s statement? Consider the following:
The category of “teapot” does not say in advance how many teapots there will be, nor does it limit in advance the forms that teapots can take.
I think we can all sign up to this! Likewise, we can interpret this in in more traditional terms:
The category of “woman” does not say in advance how many women there will be, nor does it limit in advance how women should live their lives.
This is entirely consistent with (A). So whatever it is to expand the reality of the “forms” that womanhood can take evidently has to do with that all-important right to self-identify.
Butler’s suggestion on this point comes with a typically ungenerous ad hominem:
TERFs maintain that “being a woman is not a feeling,” seeking, with such a phrase, to debunk trans women who say that they feel themselves to be women. These feminists would claim that being a woman is not a feeling, but a reality. For trans women and men, though, being a woman or a man is also a reality, the lived reality of their bodies.
When one avows sincerely “I am a woman” it is because one feels that one is a woman*. And it is a right to self-identify that one is exercising thereby because to feel that one is a woman* is to partake of the “lived reality” of actually being a woman.
Now, “feelings”-talk doesn’t generally imply the authority that is required here. Stevie might feel that people are out to get him, but that doesn’t make it true. And it won’t be good for Stevie’s overall wellbeing if people treat it as if it were true. It might of course be prudent to acknowledge his feeling as part of his “psychological reality”. But even that is possible only because folk have some conception of what it is that he’s feeling, and how that is likely to affect his thoughts and actions.
For Butler, however, the lived reality that’s associated with feeling that one is a woman* is without any fixed limit. If it were limited in any way we could draw a line round who is and who isn’t a woman*. But the point of fundamental right to self-identify is to locate the requisite authority entirely with the subject so ensure that no woman* is left behind. But that raises a question. What is someone actually saying when we understand that they are uttering the words “I am a woman” because they feel that they are? If they can’t elaborate on what it “is” that they are feeling because that feeling expands the (felt) reality of being a woman*, how does their situation differ from someone using the words “I am a teapot”?!
[1] The suspicion is that in order to make sense of this we gloss “self-identifies as” a woman as “is identifiable as” a woman” or “passes as” a woman”. That is to say, we take it that what the two different varieties of “real” women have in common is how they are presented.
[2] We might add that a definition that trades on the very biological difference whose authority it seeks to challenge is unpromising. And if it’s arbitrary then why not something like (Z'') XX is a (real) woman iff XX self-identifies as a teapot.
[3] Note that it doesn’t have to be the case that discharges and thunderbolts are correlated one-for-one. Calling them “thunderbolts” might have led to misidentifications. This applies in the “women” example.