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Amos Wollen's avatar

None of these points are convincing:

1. *“First of all, wtf??? Why would anyone think this view is right? Who has ever used the term this way to refer to highly specific values along the continuum of gendered traits? On this picture, it’s inaccurate to say male and female are genders, because they don’t refer to highly specific values along the continuum of gendered traits.”* In answer to who has ever used “gender” this way: an increasingly wide share of Western society. In reply to the second point: all of your opponents will agree that, as in the way they use the term “gender”, it’s inaccurate to call “male” and “female” genders, though they’ll agree that there’s genuine polysemy in how gender is used (as a grammatical property, a synonym of sex, etc.) This is not a reductio.

2. *“Second of all, on this picture, just as no two people have exactly the same height, no two people would have the same gender.”* Oddly, Matthew omits the word “exactly” from the second part of this sentence, making the inference ambiguous. It’s true that no two people have exactly the same height. Still, many people are roughly the same height, in a way that lets us apply the same height designation (6,8”, 4,11” [mine and Matthew’s heights respectively]). In the same way, it’s not a bullet to bite to say no two people have exactly the same gender; we can still say they have roughly the same gender, in a way that allows us to group them under the same gender term.

3. *”Third, this view implies that everyone is transgender. The precise degree to which a person exhibits masculine vs feminine traits varies from moment to moment. When I’m in the gym pumping iron, as I often do, or reading analytic philosophy, I exhibit more masculine traits than when I’m, say, eating at a restaurant. But surely a person’s gender doesn’t change whenever they get a bite to eat.”* The sex/gender distinction does not imply that everyone is transgender. Any reasonable account of what it is to be transgender will include that the trans person’s gender identity — the one at variance with the gender identity that usually correlates with their sex — has to be sufficiently deep-rooted and stable. (If the worry is that the sex/gender distinction implies that everyone is a gender-bender to some degree… they’ll happily agree with that, and it isn’t a bullet to bite.)

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Pelorus's avatar

1. One stronger version of the multi-gender position is that gender identity and gender roles make up our view of gender, and if we look at what makes up these norms and expectations, we find it is quite different between a young British male philosophy student, an ageing Chinese eunuch, or a middle-aged Inuit hunter etc.

2. Another view is that people can be agender, intersex, non-binary etc. Societies can and do recognise various kinds of "third gender".

The boring answer is that people are using the term "gender" in different ways and insisting their definition is the important one.

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