Transactivism 3
All in the Mind?
In Transactivism 1 I proposed that Bettcher’s argument for first person authority over ascriptions of gender identity should, in line with our interest in the idea that there’s a specific trans right (TR), be viewed as proposals for the elimination of the concepts wo/m/an “in favour” of wo/m/an*:
EEB What people used to call “women” and “men” (people with a specific confederacy of genitalia) are (really) women* and men* (people who have a particular mental state).
In Transactivism 2 I indicated that to be successful (EEB) must meet two conditions:
(i) The candidates for the right-hand side of the explication-elimination schema say something that can be true or false: they have “normatively evaluable content”.
(ii) There is sufficient continuity of function to rule out both a change of subject and a “simple” or “good riddance” elimination.
Emphasising the more general concerns raised by (ii), I concluded that piece by pointing out that such explications come in two flavours. Type-I versions assume that the general way of talking or “vocabulary” in which we identify what “really” exists is fixed in advance. Although these have their origin in mid-20th Century philosophy of science, I noted that it needn’t be assumed that the privileged way of talking is “materialese”, nor conceive of explanation in a specifically scientific way. But the prior commitment to a specific way of determining what is and is not real makes the satisfaction of (ii) much easier to establish.
This “monistic” model is clearly of limited use when the precise method for establishing what really exists in the contested domain is what is at issue. Consequently, Type-II versions require that we evaluate proposals like (EEB) without making any prior assumptions about which vocabulary or which set of persons gets to say what is or is not real. This “pluralistic” conception invites us to broaden the context for evaluating proposed changes in a way that promises to make them more relevant politically. Necessarily, the broader the canvass and the bolder the theoretical brushstrokes the more difficult it becomes to devise a compelling explication. But as noted in Mid-Term Report, on the favoured interpretation TR is a bold proposal, intended to expand our conception of human freedom in a potentially transformative way. The greater the undertaking the greater the risks, but greater still, perhaps, are the possible benefits. And one of those possible benefits is that our eyes are opened to the possibility that there might be a different way both of investing avowals of gender identity with content (i) and of construing the authority that such gender identity-talk invokes (ii): a way that captures better what it is that talk of “innate sense” evokes in us[1].
With this in mind, let’s return to Bettcher’s proposal. As we left it this was for a shift in the structure of normative authority from the epistemic to the ethical. That in turn derived from two overriding convictions. The first is that existing usage is implicated in racism and rape, as expressed in the following claims:
(P) Terms like “woman” and “man” are used to ‘circulate information about genital status’ (p. 106).
(Q) (P) is ‘sexually abusive’ (p. 99) and underpins the ‘mechanisms that construct transpeople as deceivers or pretenders’ (p. 107).
(R) The ‘representational relation’ implied by (P) ‘is part of a larger nonverbal system of communication that works to facilitate manipulative and rape-excusing heterosexual sexuality, as well as underwriting racial oppression’ (p. 105).
The second is that whatever “edge”, epistemically speaking, a subject has when it comes to reports about the contents of their own mental states, it is simply insufficient to do justice to what Descartes was apparently really getting at with his talk of “incorrigibility”; namely, a subject’s autonomy. That’s important because if, by hypothesis, (P)—(R) are true, then a natural response might be to call for the “disappearance” of the impugned terms “woman” and “man”. Such a Haslanger-style “elimination-simpliciter” would necessitate getting rid of women and men altogether and would not therefore support that view that a new “use” was needed for the associated terms. So the thought here, presumably, is that not only is it unethical in general to say to someone that they don’t really believe what they say they believe, but that granting to people first person authority over their “status”[2] will have the specific benefit of helping ameliorate racial oppression and manipulative heterosexuality[3].
There’s a lot to be said about the proposal that folk have first person authority over what they believe, which relates to (i). For the time-being, however, let’s remain focused on (ii): the continuity question. How can we be assured that what we used to call “women” and “men” are in fact worth redeeming—strictly ethically, as it were—as women* and men*? And does the assurance that Bettcher offers constitute a Type-I or -II solution? Consider the following:
The very salience of sex as definitive with respect to woman and man derives from the underlying practices of circulating genital information through gender terms and gender presentation. (p. 106)
As characterised, Type-I eliminations indicate that what was confusingly picked out using one set of terms is better picked out using another. The assumption is that the way of talking that displaces the earlier one is ontologically privileged—it determines what sort of things the “whats” really were all along. A further example might help:
What people used to call “Zeus’s thunderbolts” are discharges of static electricity[4].
The flashes in the sky are the phenomenon that we want to account for, and what the explication does is tell us that they are not really expressions of Zeus’ anger (an explanation that belong to the extended Greek God universe…) but electrostatic discharges (an explanation that belongs to the extended physical universe). In deciding that the phenomenon is something that is to be predicted/controlled we commit ourselves to the physical universe explanation as the favoured way of talking and to the implication that whatever that way of talking comes up with is what was there all along—that what people were really talking about when… etc. And of course, in doing so we may well supplement our explication by interpreting someone’s insistence that the lightning was a message from Zeus as an attempt to use their priestly function to coerce their audience.
Returning to the case in point, the phenomenon in question is “gender presentation”. As we’ve seen, for Bettcher a transwoman is constituted ethically as a deceiver or liar[5] because the phenomenon—the manner of their gender presentation—is taken to signify sex by virtue of its role in circulating genital information. In order to exculpate them (and respect their autonomy), then, gender presentations must be severed from all connection with genital information. And so the proposal is to change the use of the word “woman” from one that associates such presentation with genitalia (the concept woman, say) to one that identifies it with a mental state (the concept woman*), over which someone has by hypothesis first person authority. Considering the analogy with lightning (Type-I), we can satisfy ourselves that the continuity requirement has been met because the presentations (like the flashes of lightning) remain fixed, and so we justify the claim that what people used to call “women” are really women*. Rather than the preferred vocabulary being explanatory it is ethical: whereas Zeus-talk has limited explanatory potential (and some perhaps nasty side-effects), genital-talk is bad for autonomy; and just as static discharge talk fits in well with our emerging account of nature, gender-identity talk is ethically superior. Whereas the impugned usage (woman) belongs to the extended universe of heterosexism-inspired coercion and violence and racism, the better usage (woman*) belongs to the extended universe of autonomy-affirmation. The entities in question are not electrons but agents.
If this were plausible it would certainly constitute an exemplary justification of the existence of TR. However, it confronts several problems. Imagine that there are just two “gender presentations” (the phenomenon), F and M. The Fs wear frilly dresses, have long hair and are over-emotional and are called “women”; the Ms wear suits, have short hair and are over-confident and are called “men”. Imagine further that these presentations are hijacked by some version of what Foucault calls “bio-power”[6] and the associated terms used merely to transmit genital information. Since by hypothesis presentation is not aligned with sexual characteristics there are classes of people who are perceived as liars and deceivers; namely, the long-haired dress-wearing women* without vulvas and short-haired, suit-sporting men* without a penis. Fixing gender presentations in this way—giving them the persistency of lighting, for example—would account for the ethical concern, then, but it’s clearly nonsense. As defined, F and M are silly stereotypes, but the point is that any attempt to identify fixed “gender presentations” is a historical and cultural nonsense unless one attempts to group them in relation to an antecedent biological difference, and that would clearly be counterproductive. Indeed, we saw an example of this when looking at gender as role or performance: the classifications as-women and as-men are wholly parasitic on those preexisting differences.
It might appear that we’ve missed something here. I’m insinuating that the binary distinction that “gender presentation” talk institutes—the one that will facilitate the move from the distinction wo/m/an to wo/m/an*—has to be located in the realm of ‘fundamental biological fact’ (to quote Foucault). But the whole point of the explication is to insist that those presentations are only contingently used as signs of sex and are really mental states. Just as flashes of lightning are not signs of electrostatic discharge but the discharges themselves, to F-present is to be in a particular state. Accordingly, the binary distinction between gender presentations concerns not biological fact but mental state, and specifically—as we noted in Transactivism 2—mental states untainted by any physical component. As it stands, however, this doesn’t help. The fact that the presentations are mental states doesn’t make any more plausible the suggestion that they are fixed in the way required for a Type-I elimination. Indeed, locating the distinction in the realm of the mental where that is opposed strictly to the physical makes it difficult to understand why one would ever come to think of oneself as a man* rather thana woman* (or vice-versa) in this non-reactive sense. How or why on this conception would gender presentations have emerged in terms of a binary distinction?
Despite its appeal, then, the sort of elimination envisaged by Bettcher isn’t of the Type-I variety: gender presentations cannot be conceived of through the analogy with bolts of lightning or other “natural” phenomena (like pains, say). Of course, if gender presentations aren’t fixed in this way then we lose the simple account of the lie/deceit claim. That carried force because if presentation is a mental state then to “present” as F is to be really F even if one has a penis. But if there are no such fixed presentations then as it stands there is no determinate way of distinguishing who is a liar/deceiver from who is an impersonator and who is just wrong. The only way I see to advance here, then, is to accept that gender presentation and mental state are not the same thing. Granted this means that since we are now looking not at a Type-I but at a Type-II elimination the easy response to (ii) has to be abandoned, but we should anticipate that proposals for conceptual reform like the one under consideration are complex matters requiring consideration of divers cultural and political factors. And indeed, for Bettcher the separation of “presentation” from mental state is required in response to a very specific imperative; namely, to be maximally inclusive.
The problem here is clear enough. If there are no fixed “gender presentations” to serve as the mental states (as there clearly aren’t) then who gets to determine—and on what authority—which ways of “presenting” count as their legitimate correlates or expressions? Or to put it slightly differently, on what presentational grounds if any might one conclude that a person who avows “I am a woman” is either lying/deceiving or deluded/incorrect? This is not a trivial requirement because although we’ve rejected the Type-I approach we still have to determine what makes someone a real woman* as opposed to a real man*. As we’ve seen, for Bettcher a genuinely revolutionary trans politics must purge terms like women and man of their ‘sexually abusive’ (p. 106) function of disclosing “genital information” and impart some other, ethically-consequential, use. And the idea is that it is to subaltern trans subcultures whose consciousness-raised members have instituted the use of the troubling terms in non-disclosing ways that we should turn for guidance. But because what it is to be a man* or woman* is contested even within subcultures, the risk is that well-intentioned groups might violate the autonomy of an interlocutor by excluding them; that is to say, by denying their claim to be a real woman* as understood by those evolving, socially-constituted “presentational” norms.
Given the requirement to be maximally inclusive, then, it cannot be the case that when members are confraternally discussing and “presenting” what it is to be a woman* they are determining the normative content of gender identity states as per (i). Their disputation concerns what Bettcher calls “metaphysical identity” but there is a ‘contrast between metaphysical and existential identity… reflected in the difference between the questions “What is a woman?” and “What does it mean to be a woman”’ (p. 111). When someone says sincerely (as opposed to for ‘tactical reasons’ (p. 110)) that they are a woman it is because being a woman is part of ‘who one is, really’ (p. 110). It speaks to the questions ‘What am I about? What moves me? What do I stand for? What do I care about the most?’ (p. 110). Crucially, it is ‘over one’s believing one is a woman’ that one has first-person authority, ‘not over being a woman’ (p. 111). Whereas statements involving (what we used to call) “women” were used to convey “genital status”, statements involving women* are expressions of ‘how [people] want to be treated’ (108) on the basis of such beliefs. From being to becoming, since (by hypothesis) one cannot be wrong about who one really is/what one really believes (Bettcher treats them as the same) the claim to an ethical-existential identity outstrips any conferral of epistemic first-person authority made on the basis of communal practices, even on the part of the subaltern group. In other words, even if you meet your community’s presentational-norm for being a woman*, it is not the satisfaction of that norm that ultimately authorizes your avowals that you are a woman* but the (sincere) belief that you are. Using the phrase “identifying as” to connote the infallibility in question, we have the following:
EEBII What people used to call “women” and “men” (people with particular genitalia) are (really) women* and men* (people who identify as women* and men*)
At this point it should be noted that for a Type-II elimination the case for it being of the “in favour” variety depends on the work done by the successor terms—here, wo/m/en*. Since there are no privileged entities (like the phenomenon of lightning) success addressing the continuity requirement (ii) will turn for the most part on what is determined in relation to (i). I’ll take up the broader philosophical significance of this attempt to see “identifying as” as imparting meaning/content to terms in a subsequent piece. In Transactivism 4, however, we’ll conclude our discussion of Bettcher’s attempt to establish something akin to our TR by considering the plausibility of EEBII.
[1] The distinction I have in mind here is akin to the one between “textualist” or “originalist”, and “pragmatist” approaches to interpreting the constitution. Whereas the former (Type-I) holds that ‘there is a single right answer to each interpretive problem’ pragmatism ‘communicates its vision not through the application of any single theory but through detailed study of cases, institutions, history, and above all the human needs that underlie them.’ (Breyer, S. “Choosing Pragmatism Over Textualism”. New York Review of Books. May 23rd, 2024: 51.
[2] As noted in Transactivism 1 (fn. 3), Bettcher thinks that as currently used “women” and “man” are gender terms. I return to this point below.
[3] Whatever else they involve racism and rape and sexual manipulation are assaults on autonomy.
[4] From Richard Rorty’s “Mind-Body Identity, Privacy, and Categories”. Review of Metaphysics 19 (19650: 24–54.
[5] These appear to be the only ways in which Bettcher thinks that someone can challenge someone’s claim to have a belief. So there’s no deception or self-delusion (because those would be epistemic?).
[6] ‘[By]… bio-power… I mean … the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of power, or, in other words, how, starting from the eighteenth century, modern western societies took on board the fundamental biological fact that human beings are a species.’ Foucault, M. 2009. Security, Territory, Population. Ed. M. Senellart. Trans. G. Burchell. Palgrave-Macmillan, p. 16.