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.)
It sounds like you're using the term "gender" to mean something like "the continuum of masculine and feminine traits". But that's not what the word "gender" meant to most people before 2012.
No one denies that there isa masculine to feminine continuum of traits.
But people who believe in "gender identities" like Ambigender are making a different claim. They are claiming that there is such a thing as "gender identity" which is an inherent feature of a person and is distinct from both biological sex and personality traits.
Just because you can conceive of gender as a spectrum doesn't make it accurate. I could define a cat as a "two legged animal with wings". There is no contradiction there but that doesn't make my definition correct.
Gender and sex are the same thing because that is the definition that is most consistent with how people actually apply the concept of gender.
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.
I think the issue here isn't really about "numbers" of genders. What it is, is that conservatives like to put things in boxes ("All biological males go in the male box, all biological females go in the female box"), and there's usually all sorts of religious baggage that goes with these boxes ("Everyone in the female box should be pretty, submissive, barefoot, pregnant, etc"). The liberal view is more about rejecting this goofy paradigm outright rather than coming up with definitive boxes of our own
I don't deny that it's sometimes "useful" to speak as if words have meaning (eg, green & red), but as soon as that use becomes oppression (as it always is with conservatives; the male & female thing is just one of many many examples of this) it's time to deconstruct
It's not merely useful to say that green and red are different colors. Green and red actually are different colors. The existence of intermediate cases does not change the fact that there are also clear cases.
What's this?? In the course of our brief exchange, you began by insisting that red and green have objective meaning, and now you're applying your rigid authoritarianism to trip space. Aren't you the Despotic Signifier! I may well be a religious nutjob, but I can only pray that I'm not a heretic, because an Inquisitor like you would prolly send me to the Breaking Wheel if you got the chance...
Many ancient civilizations didn't have a specific word for "blue". Homer’s "Odyssey", an ancient Greek poem, doesn't mention "blue". Does this mean people couldn't see blue back in the day? Probably not. I think they just didn't need a specific word for "blue" given how rare "blue" is actually in nature.
Yet green and red are many colors, bands on the spectrum.
And depending on how strict one's definition of the labels are either both ought to cover the entire spectrum or there must be a label for "neither".
Colors (the labels) and gender are social constructs, we associate a lot of things with red (love, cherry, blood, fire) and green (envy, leaves, plants, money), and similarly with men and women too.
But of course a red rose in a garden usually have green parts too. So what color is a rose? Well, we call it red, by social agreement. And of course then botanists are now breeding roses that have nothing red on them, and only green.
And similarly, if you look at a person, and you try to assign them a gender, depending on who you are, maybe you assign this, that or potentially even neither to them.
And if others can distinguish between these by observation why wouldn't people be able to observe themselves and then know what gender they are solely based on internal observation?
I think that the incel/femcel or other "dating advice" subcultures already have words that very much serve the same function as men/women, namely Stacey, Chad, Beta, Becky, Virgin, etc... and on these forums lots of people self-identify as exactly one of them.
Well of course you are. And the boxes that most people accept are the ones that stick. For example, in my household I am the authority on what is red and what is green because the color boxes I use correspond better to how most people saw things than the boxes by wife uses. (She is red-green color blind).
various cultures around the world do have a distinct gender role they conceive of as a third gender. Muxe in Mexico is one example that cleanly fits this. I think this is the strongest counterargument. (edit: the key distinction about this point is that *collectively* the community sees this role as a third gender. that's different from self-identifying.)
A small number of people in the US and US-influenced cultures identify as agender — I leave it to the philosophers to determine whether no gender is a gender.
There are other examples too. Overall, I don’t think “there are only two genders” is a viable position.
Even if I try considering the perspective of a right wing natural law bow tie guy, I think the strongest internally consistent claim is “only two genders ought to be recognized” or perhaps “male/female have a special ontological status”.
I don't see how some people making comically long lists disproves the existence of more than two genders. There are comically long and silly lists of sexualities, that doesn't mean the only two sexualities are straight and gay. There may, indeed, be people who think they are straight but are really bi or gay or ace, or people who think they are bi but are "really" pan or demisexual or whatever (in the sense of "really" where we use a sufficiently thin-sliced definition of sexuality such that bi is not an overarching category including these groups).
"I don't see how some people making comically long lists disproves the existence of more than two genders"
< proceeds to link another comically long list >
but more to the point, in nearly every one of those cases, the society didn't accept homosexual behavior and the "third gender" was a way to deal with those supposed degenerates. the only case I'm aware of where that is not true is the "sworn virgins" of Albania, and it's nearly the same thing. It was not voluntary, in any case.
and even more to the point, wikipedia is just about the last place you should go for an authoritative take on human sexuality. it's policy to delete statements that don't hew to current LGTBQ+ orthodoxy.
I was having a cocktail with the first transgender friend I've ever had the other day, and I was struck by how, psychologically, it really felt like I was talking to someone in between male and female. It wasn't the same experience as talking to a guy, and it wasn't the same experience as talking to a girl. So yeah, I do believe in gender as a spectrum now, but one heavily clustered.
I kind of don't understand why being non-binary is confusing to you? I think you're assuming that "male" and "female" represent specific points on the continuum when they really more represent ranges or clusters.
If you have a bimodal distribution on some continuum and you call everything in one cluster "bouba" and everything in the other "kiki", then that doesn't mean that items between those two clusters don't exist.
To elaborate on my point, having "male" and "female" be specific points on a spectrum isn't how people use it and not how you would expect the usage of words to naturally evolve, which I think would've went something like this:
People notice two clusters and call it "gender"/"sex" and the individual categories "male" and "female". Then people notice some people who are born/assigned at birth "male"/"female" transition into "female"/"male" and they decide to make "sex" refer to the physiological component and "gender" refer to the psychological component. Then people notice some people don't vibe with either "male" or "female" and decide to make a new category for that: "non-binary".
This is all consistent with a world in which gender is on a continuum.
I agree, but I don't think this is a case of BB "not understanding". I think he's just figured out that even a second rate thinker can become a somewhat distinguished philosopher simply by stubbornly defending unpopular opinions (eg WLC with the Kalam, Huemer with "It's good for cops to murder black people", etc)
I love reading the comments on blogs that are literally about argumentation and seeing the argument “this guy is bad because of something someone else said”.
But arguments are kinda irrelevant to this issue, right? When it comes to oppression, it doesn't really matter which side comes up with the fancier sophistry, it's all about dominance vs resistance. In this case, trans people are heroically using their bodies as instruments of resistance against conservative dogmatists. Most young people applaud this resistance. Turns out, BB wants to align his sophistry with the fascist side. It's something of a mystery why he turned his blog into a right-wing propaganda mill, but I think making a name for himself is a decent hypothesis. Could also be that everyone in his citation cabal is ultra-conservative and he's just doing what he's gotta do. Whatever. Maybe the Brits will fix him, but who knows
One can *can* name a third gender, neuter, as in German has three genders, masculine, feminine, and neuter.
When I looked up gender in my 1941 World Book encyclopedia its clearly said that gender has nothing to do with sex, noting that the German word for girl was neuter, and that French and Russian words for the same object had different genders. So around 1940 the common understanding of the word gender was the grammatical one, which was not obviously related to biological sex.
When I look up gender in my 1959 dictionary it gives two definitions, the first is the grammatical one and the second is a colloquial: sex.
Sometime before the 1970's gender was being used as a technical term to refer to sex-linked, (i.e. masculine vs feminine) sociocultural roles. So now there were three definitions, the grammatical one, the informal word for sex, and the technical term.
These three definitions can be found in the OED definition of gender (plus other now obsolete meanings).
Something should be said about motherhood and fatherhood as foundational for the biology and social aspects of gender. Masculinity is largely the traits and ideals associated with fatherhood. Femininity is largely the traits and ideals with motherhood. This includes attracting a partner, having and raising children. The activities associated here are of a certain type and are typical in that the majority of children experience a mother and probably a father. There are biological and social evolutionary roles associated with having and raising children; father's must protect and provide when the mother is physically nurturing etc.
The point is not that you need to be a father to be masculine, but that a person with masculine traits is associating with fatherhood. There are other sorts of characteristics people can have, but of the types of classes relating to fatherhood/motherhood there are two foundational roles. I'm fine with a third class of who are nonparticipants, neither father potent nor mother potent. Is that a third gender or ungendered?
I'm pretty trad; my sister is a religious sister. Most traditional Christian saints were not parents and lived on communities that aimed to be celibate primarily with people of the same gender. Traditional Christianity is not idealizing a single way to live sexuality. Dignity and moral character are not derived from gender roles, or having kids; however a spouse and children are normie telos. Mess with normie telos at your own peril.
I find it surprising that someone your age, who apparently is familiar with youtube hasn't seen transmen youtubers who look, speak and act like men, but whom conservatives classify as women. Yet if one of these people who I (and most everyone else) would see as dudes, were to walk into the ladies' room, I'd think they'd raise some eyebrows, yet that is what women like them are supposed to do!
A liberal could argue that, since they look, sound and act like men, they are male gender, right? There's a youtuber who described themselves as gay dude, a twink specifically, who has a cis boyfriend. Yet I saw in one video that they had to take a pregnancy test, and they use birth control. Anal sex does not lead to pregnancy, so apparently, they are having vaginal intercourse. After this they started referring to themselves as bisexual. A couple of dudes screwing each other is gay as fuck! At least it *used* to be--and yet not in this case!
Can you see that a transman is different from both a cis man and a cis woman? The same thing is the case for a transwoman. If look, sound, and act sufficiently like a cis-woman does, they would use the ladies' room without anyone seeing that as off. But then do you let a rapist who identifies as a woman (you suspect to avoid getting raped in men's prison) serve their time in women's prison?
The whole trans issue is how do you deal with people born with the chromosomes of one sex who identify as the other sex and have had cosmetic surgery to more closely resemble that sex?
I submit that cis men, transmen, cis women and transwomen are different categories of people, which do not neatly fall into just two genders
Start by ignoring external biological traits and focusing on how someone would like to be treated.
Then ask, "how does one figure out how they like to be treated?"
Then ask, "how does one ask others for how they would like to be treated?"
Then ask, "how does on learn how to treat other people?"
If your answer to any of these questions is "because penis," then your answer is bad.
If your answer is "because hormone," then your answer includes practical variables related to gender, but if you stop there, your answer is still bad.
If your answer includes "hey that's really complex in a world where people wearing dresses get treated differently than those not wearing dresses, and those treating them differently aren't all like 'HEY I AM TREATING YOU THIS WAY BECAUSE DRESS AND ALSO BECAUSE PENIS AND ALSO BECAUSE HORMONE,' and then there's the fact that maybe a dress signals that I want to be treated delicately, or maybe I just like the way dresses feel, or maybe it gets rank down there without airflow, or maybe I want to feel pretty, or maybe I want to fit in, or maybe I want to stand out, or... or... or..." your answer gets less and less bad.
If your answer is "I don't know, but I bet I can put more effort into asking others how they want to be treated, and figuring out how I want to be treated, and asking others for how I want to be treated, and treating others accordingly, and maybe it isn't fair that I demand to be escorted everywhere I go by a crowd tossing me into the air and chanting my name like I just won the world championship of being a person" then I think your answer is good.
You can treat people nice/well/good/as-they-wish completely independently of how many genders there are socially.
That said gender seems to be more like qualia. The experience of being "a man" and so we put a label on it. And so far when someone said "hey what if I my experience does not seem to be like that", we looked at them and said, "meh, you are still a ____, because ____". (Which just means that anyone who said it used their own heuristic.)
But now it nice to accept that if someone feels they are not like _that_ but not like _this_ either. And so if they can be neither eventually maybe there will be more well-defined social labels.
I mostly agree, but I will mention that the label of "man," the social impetus to infer "what it is like for other men to be a man," and "what it is like for me to be a man" may have quite the muddled origin, including but not limited to "I experience social pressures that seem to converge with, and often originate from, being a man among men." And also courtship of womanfolk and whatnot.
I think this assessment of the number of genders is correct, and it blows my mind that nobody seems to realize that neither trans nor non-binary people require a third gender to exist for their characteristic perceptions of their gender to be veridical. Trans people don't require it for the reasons you've stated, so I'll elaborate a bit on the non-binary claim.
To be non-binary is simply to not have exactly one and the same gender at all times. This includes being both female and male, neither female nor male, or changing one's gender(s) or lack thereof over time. All of this is compatible with there being exactly two genders!
Man and woman are labels that won the memetic competition, but in theory if we interact with enough "neither nor" people who for some reason have some very useful distinction, then it's easily possible to have new labels. (And of course it seems like an endless debate to decide if those new labels are real genders or quasigenders or pseudogenders or .... !)
That said, again, based on context/definition, it seems now there's 2 "universally accepted". But there's a lot more in certain subcultures. (Ie. incel/femcel forums, see Stacy, Becky, Beta, Chad, Virgin ... oh, see also the Dependa label, which is a very handy label. Tied to social arrangements, behavior, some of them proudly "self-identify" using various bumper stickers, etc.)
The objections to the continuum view aren't convincing. We all agree that color is a continuum, and no one calls you crazy for saying there are infinitely many colors because of this. And yet in practice, all of the colors we have words for aren't specific points in the continuum but neighborhoods of points. And no one bats an eye when you say that an apple and a stop sign are the same color even though they're technically not exactly the same. They fit into the same category of red, which is what everyone means when we say they're the same color.
So why can't gender work the same way? We have a bunch of gendered traits, each considered male or female, and each group of traits is strongly correlated such that almost everyone fits into one of two clusters in the space of these traits. We call one cluster "male" and the other "female". And we call those two clusters "genders," just like how we call clusters in color-space "colors." People who say there are only two genders believe that literally everyone fits into these two clusters. Those who say there are more than two genders mean that not every person fits into the two clusters.
> People who say there are only two genders believe that literally everyone fits into these two clusters.
No, they are saying gender doesn’t exist independently of sex. I’ll go even further and say it doesn’t exist at all at an individual level. It is simply the name for the concept that our sex-linked traits result in physical and mental differences that can be measured.
> No, they are saying gender doesn’t exist independently of sex.
That would not be the same as saying there are only two genders, though. You could say gender=sex while still believing there are more than two genders (because of intersex people), and you could consider them non-equivalent without accepting non-binary as a valid identity.
> It is simply the name for the concept that our sex-linked traits result in physical and mental differences that can be measured.
But this is consistent with there being more than two genders.
If you want to say, "There are only two clusters in gender space, so everyone outside of those two clusters just doesn't have a gender, and therefore there are only two genders," that's fine, but it's not what anyone actually means when they say, "There are only two genders." What people mean when they say that is that non-binary people don't exist, but this view accepts the existence of non-binary people.
2. Sex-based stereotypes, typical masculine or feminine traits or sex-based roles.
3. Which set of sex-based stereotypes you identify with, “the private experience of your gender role” as Kathleen Stock says. Basically, do you see yourself as a man, a woman, or neither?
So with definition 3. In mind - since that’s what you seem to be speaking about here - I’d say there are three genders: male, female, and indeterminate/neuter.
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.)
It sounds like you're using the term "gender" to mean something like "the continuum of masculine and feminine traits". But that's not what the word "gender" meant to most people before 2012.
No one denies that there isa masculine to feminine continuum of traits.
But people who believe in "gender identities" like Ambigender are making a different claim. They are claiming that there is such a thing as "gender identity" which is an inherent feature of a person and is distinct from both biological sex and personality traits.
Just because you can conceive of gender as a spectrum doesn't make it accurate. I could define a cat as a "two legged animal with wings". There is no contradiction there but that doesn't make my definition correct.
Gender and sex are the same thing because that is the definition that is most consistent with how people actually apply the concept of gender.
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.
I think the issue here isn't really about "numbers" of genders. What it is, is that conservatives like to put things in boxes ("All biological males go in the male box, all biological females go in the female box"), and there's usually all sorts of religious baggage that goes with these boxes ("Everyone in the female box should be pretty, submissive, barefoot, pregnant, etc"). The liberal view is more about rejecting this goofy paradigm outright rather than coming up with definitive boxes of our own
Are "boxes" just categories? If I say that green and red are different colors, am I "putting things into boxes?"
I don't deny that it's sometimes "useful" to speak as if words have meaning (eg, green & red), but as soon as that use becomes oppression (as it always is with conservatives; the male & female thing is just one of many many examples of this) it's time to deconstruct
It's not merely useful to say that green and red are different colors. Green and red actually are different colors. The existence of intermediate cases does not change the fact that there are also clear cases.
Wait, no. Green and red clearly exist as socially constructed categories. But beyond that, light is famously a spectrum, right?
I invite you to step outside your logocentric box. Take a couple hits of LSD, and you might think of red and green as sounds rather than colors
I see you are an insane religious nutjob.
(Also, that's not what colors are like on LSD.)
What's this?? In the course of our brief exchange, you began by insisting that red and green have objective meaning, and now you're applying your rigid authoritarianism to trip space. Aren't you the Despotic Signifier! I may well be a religious nutjob, but I can only pray that I'm not a heretic, because an Inquisitor like you would prolly send me to the Breaking Wheel if you got the chance...
Many ancient civilizations didn't have a specific word for "blue". Homer’s "Odyssey", an ancient Greek poem, doesn't mention "blue". Does this mean people couldn't see blue back in the day? Probably not. I think they just didn't need a specific word for "blue" given how rare "blue" is actually in nature.
Yet green and red are many colors, bands on the spectrum.
And depending on how strict one's definition of the labels are either both ought to cover the entire spectrum or there must be a label for "neither".
Colors (the labels) and gender are social constructs, we associate a lot of things with red (love, cherry, blood, fire) and green (envy, leaves, plants, money), and similarly with men and women too.
But of course a red rose in a garden usually have green parts too. So what color is a rose? Well, we call it red, by social agreement. And of course then botanists are now breeding roses that have nothing red on them, and only green.
And similarly, if you look at a person, and you try to assign them a gender, depending on who you are, maybe you assign this, that or potentially even neither to them.
And if others can distinguish between these by observation why wouldn't people be able to observe themselves and then know what gender they are solely based on internal observation?
I think that the incel/femcel or other "dating advice" subcultures already have words that very much serve the same function as men/women, namely Stacey, Chad, Beta, Becky, Virgin, etc... and on these forums lots of people self-identify as exactly one of them.
Do you think that words don't really have meanings?
Not in any sort of universal/objective/static sense divorced from the context of the language game they're being used in. Why? Do you??
Well of course you are. And the boxes that most people accept are the ones that stick. For example, in my household I am the authority on what is red and what is green because the color boxes I use correspond better to how most people saw things than the boxes by wife uses. (She is red-green color blind).
Overall, I think you are wrong about this.
various cultures around the world do have a distinct gender role they conceive of as a third gender. Muxe in Mexico is one example that cleanly fits this. I think this is the strongest counterargument. (edit: the key distinction about this point is that *collectively* the community sees this role as a third gender. that's different from self-identifying.)
A small number of people in the US and US-influenced cultures identify as agender — I leave it to the philosophers to determine whether no gender is a gender.
There are other examples too. Overall, I don’t think “there are only two genders” is a viable position.
Even if I try considering the perspective of a right wing natural law bow tie guy, I think the strongest internally consistent claim is “only two genders ought to be recognized” or perhaps “male/female have a special ontological status”.
I don't see how some people making comically long lists disproves the existence of more than two genders. There are comically long and silly lists of sexualities, that doesn't mean the only two sexualities are straight and gay. There may, indeed, be people who think they are straight but are really bi or gay or ace, or people who think they are bi but are "really" pan or demisexual or whatever (in the sense of "really" where we use a sufficiently thin-sliced definition of sexuality such that bi is not an overarching category including these groups).
Ok so what is the third gender?
They made a whole Wikipedia article about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_gender
There's a bunch of different groupings people put separate from men/women.
"I don't see how some people making comically long lists disproves the existence of more than two genders"
< proceeds to link another comically long list >
but more to the point, in nearly every one of those cases, the society didn't accept homosexual behavior and the "third gender" was a way to deal with those supposed degenerates. the only case I'm aware of where that is not true is the "sworn virgins" of Albania, and it's nearly the same thing. It was not voluntary, in any case.
and even more to the point, wikipedia is just about the last place you should go for an authoritative take on human sexuality. it's policy to delete statements that don't hew to current LGTBQ+ orthodoxy.
I was having a cocktail with the first transgender friend I've ever had the other day, and I was struck by how, psychologically, it really felt like I was talking to someone in between male and female. It wasn't the same experience as talking to a guy, and it wasn't the same experience as talking to a girl. So yeah, I do believe in gender as a spectrum now, but one heavily clustered.
I kind of don't understand why being non-binary is confusing to you? I think you're assuming that "male" and "female" represent specific points on the continuum when they really more represent ranges or clusters.
If you have a bimodal distribution on some continuum and you call everything in one cluster "bouba" and everything in the other "kiki", then that doesn't mean that items between those two clusters don't exist.
To elaborate on my point, having "male" and "female" be specific points on a spectrum isn't how people use it and not how you would expect the usage of words to naturally evolve, which I think would've went something like this:
People notice two clusters and call it "gender"/"sex" and the individual categories "male" and "female". Then people notice some people who are born/assigned at birth "male"/"female" transition into "female"/"male" and they decide to make "sex" refer to the physiological component and "gender" refer to the psychological component. Then people notice some people don't vibe with either "male" or "female" and decide to make a new category for that: "non-binary".
This is all consistent with a world in which gender is on a continuum.
I agree, but I don't think this is a case of BB "not understanding". I think he's just figured out that even a second rate thinker can become a somewhat distinguished philosopher simply by stubbornly defending unpopular opinions (eg WLC with the Kalam, Huemer with "It's good for cops to murder black people", etc)
I love reading the comments on blogs that are literally about argumentation and seeing the argument “this guy is bad because of something someone else said”.
But arguments are kinda irrelevant to this issue, right? When it comes to oppression, it doesn't really matter which side comes up with the fancier sophistry, it's all about dominance vs resistance. In this case, trans people are heroically using their bodies as instruments of resistance against conservative dogmatists. Most young people applaud this resistance. Turns out, BB wants to align his sophistry with the fascist side. It's something of a mystery why he turned his blog into a right-wing propaganda mill, but I think making a name for himself is a decent hypothesis. Could also be that everyone in his citation cabal is ultra-conservative and he's just doing what he's gotta do. Whatever. Maybe the Brits will fix him, but who knows
you think you just get to skip making an argument if you claim something is "oppression"?
> In this case, trans people are heroically using their bodies as instruments of resistance against conservative dogmatists
oh my god, shut up
One can *can* name a third gender, neuter, as in German has three genders, masculine, feminine, and neuter.
When I looked up gender in my 1941 World Book encyclopedia its clearly said that gender has nothing to do with sex, noting that the German word for girl was neuter, and that French and Russian words for the same object had different genders. So around 1940 the common understanding of the word gender was the grammatical one, which was not obviously related to biological sex.
When I look up gender in my 1959 dictionary it gives two definitions, the first is the grammatical one and the second is a colloquial: sex.
Sometime before the 1970's gender was being used as a technical term to refer to sex-linked, (i.e. masculine vs feminine) sociocultural roles. So now there were three definitions, the grammatical one, the informal word for sex, and the technical term.
These three definitions can be found in the OED definition of gender (plus other now obsolete meanings).
https://www.oed.com/dictionary/gender_n?tl=true
But if you look it up today on some online dictionaries and you find yet another sense that is linked to identity,
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/gender
So as you can see, the meaning has evolved quite a bit over a relatively brief period of time. It is anything but simple.
Something should be said about motherhood and fatherhood as foundational for the biology and social aspects of gender. Masculinity is largely the traits and ideals associated with fatherhood. Femininity is largely the traits and ideals with motherhood. This includes attracting a partner, having and raising children. The activities associated here are of a certain type and are typical in that the majority of children experience a mother and probably a father. There are biological and social evolutionary roles associated with having and raising children; father's must protect and provide when the mother is physically nurturing etc.
The point is not that you need to be a father to be masculine, but that a person with masculine traits is associating with fatherhood. There are other sorts of characteristics people can have, but of the types of classes relating to fatherhood/motherhood there are two foundational roles. I'm fine with a third class of who are nonparticipants, neither father potent nor mother potent. Is that a third gender or ungendered?
I'm pretty trad; my sister is a religious sister. Most traditional Christian saints were not parents and lived on communities that aimed to be celibate primarily with people of the same gender. Traditional Christianity is not idealizing a single way to live sexuality. Dignity and moral character are not derived from gender roles, or having kids; however a spouse and children are normie telos. Mess with normie telos at your own peril.
We should just stop using the word gender to discuss these topics.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OQUk4vgOtU0
I find it surprising that someone your age, who apparently is familiar with youtube hasn't seen transmen youtubers who look, speak and act like men, but whom conservatives classify as women. Yet if one of these people who I (and most everyone else) would see as dudes, were to walk into the ladies' room, I'd think they'd raise some eyebrows, yet that is what women like them are supposed to do!
A liberal could argue that, since they look, sound and act like men, they are male gender, right? There's a youtuber who described themselves as gay dude, a twink specifically, who has a cis boyfriend. Yet I saw in one video that they had to take a pregnancy test, and they use birth control. Anal sex does not lead to pregnancy, so apparently, they are having vaginal intercourse. After this they started referring to themselves as bisexual. A couple of dudes screwing each other is gay as fuck! At least it *used* to be--and yet not in this case!
Can you see that a transman is different from both a cis man and a cis woman? The same thing is the case for a transwoman. If look, sound, and act sufficiently like a cis-woman does, they would use the ladies' room without anyone seeing that as off. But then do you let a rapist who identifies as a woman (you suspect to avoid getting raped in men's prison) serve their time in women's prison?
The whole trans issue is how do you deal with people born with the chromosomes of one sex who identify as the other sex and have had cosmetic surgery to more closely resemble that sex?
I submit that cis men, transmen, cis women and transwomen are different categories of people, which do not neatly fall into just two genders
Try this dress on for size:
Start by ignoring external biological traits and focusing on how someone would like to be treated.
Then ask, "how does one figure out how they like to be treated?"
Then ask, "how does one ask others for how they would like to be treated?"
Then ask, "how does on learn how to treat other people?"
If your answer to any of these questions is "because penis," then your answer is bad.
If your answer is "because hormone," then your answer includes practical variables related to gender, but if you stop there, your answer is still bad.
If your answer includes "hey that's really complex in a world where people wearing dresses get treated differently than those not wearing dresses, and those treating them differently aren't all like 'HEY I AM TREATING YOU THIS WAY BECAUSE DRESS AND ALSO BECAUSE PENIS AND ALSO BECAUSE HORMONE,' and then there's the fact that maybe a dress signals that I want to be treated delicately, or maybe I just like the way dresses feel, or maybe it gets rank down there without airflow, or maybe I want to feel pretty, or maybe I want to fit in, or maybe I want to stand out, or... or... or..." your answer gets less and less bad.
If your answer is "I don't know, but I bet I can put more effort into asking others how they want to be treated, and figuring out how I want to be treated, and asking others for how I want to be treated, and treating others accordingly, and maybe it isn't fair that I demand to be escorted everywhere I go by a crowd tossing me into the air and chanting my name like I just won the world championship of being a person" then I think your answer is good.
You can treat people nice/well/good/as-they-wish completely independently of how many genders there are socially.
That said gender seems to be more like qualia. The experience of being "a man" and so we put a label on it. And so far when someone said "hey what if I my experience does not seem to be like that", we looked at them and said, "meh, you are still a ____, because ____". (Which just means that anyone who said it used their own heuristic.)
But now it nice to accept that if someone feels they are not like _that_ but not like _this_ either. And so if they can be neither eventually maybe there will be more well-defined social labels.
I mostly agree, but I will mention that the label of "man," the social impetus to infer "what it is like for other men to be a man," and "what it is like for me to be a man" may have quite the muddled origin, including but not limited to "I experience social pressures that seem to converge with, and often originate from, being a man among men." And also courtship of womanfolk and whatnot.
I discussed the closely-related issue here, which I hope people find helpful:
https://bryanfrances.substack.com/p/are-women-adult-human-females
I think this assessment of the number of genders is correct, and it blows my mind that nobody seems to realize that neither trans nor non-binary people require a third gender to exist for their characteristic perceptions of their gender to be veridical. Trans people don't require it for the reasons you've stated, so I'll elaborate a bit on the non-binary claim.
To be non-binary is simply to not have exactly one and the same gender at all times. This includes being both female and male, neither female nor male, or changing one's gender(s) or lack thereof over time. All of this is compatible with there being exactly two genders!
Man and woman are labels that won the memetic competition, but in theory if we interact with enough "neither nor" people who for some reason have some very useful distinction, then it's easily possible to have new labels. (And of course it seems like an endless debate to decide if those new labels are real genders or quasigenders or pseudogenders or .... !)
That said, again, based on context/definition, it seems now there's 2 "universally accepted". But there's a lot more in certain subcultures. (Ie. incel/femcel forums, see Stacy, Becky, Beta, Chad, Virgin ... oh, see also the Dependa label, which is a very handy label. Tied to social arrangements, behavior, some of them proudly "self-identify" using various bumper stickers, etc.)
The objections to the continuum view aren't convincing. We all agree that color is a continuum, and no one calls you crazy for saying there are infinitely many colors because of this. And yet in practice, all of the colors we have words for aren't specific points in the continuum but neighborhoods of points. And no one bats an eye when you say that an apple and a stop sign are the same color even though they're technically not exactly the same. They fit into the same category of red, which is what everyone means when we say they're the same color.
So why can't gender work the same way? We have a bunch of gendered traits, each considered male or female, and each group of traits is strongly correlated such that almost everyone fits into one of two clusters in the space of these traits. We call one cluster "male" and the other "female". And we call those two clusters "genders," just like how we call clusters in color-space "colors." People who say there are only two genders believe that literally everyone fits into these two clusters. Those who say there are more than two genders mean that not every person fits into the two clusters.
> People who say there are only two genders believe that literally everyone fits into these two clusters.
No, they are saying gender doesn’t exist independently of sex. I’ll go even further and say it doesn’t exist at all at an individual level. It is simply the name for the concept that our sex-linked traits result in physical and mental differences that can be measured.
> No, they are saying gender doesn’t exist independently of sex.
That would not be the same as saying there are only two genders, though. You could say gender=sex while still believing there are more than two genders (because of intersex people), and you could consider them non-equivalent without accepting non-binary as a valid identity.
> It is simply the name for the concept that our sex-linked traits result in physical and mental differences that can be measured.
But this is consistent with there being more than two genders.
In this case you’re just using gender as a synonym for “personality”.
No, not at all. Only psychological traits that are actually related to gender in some way would be included as dimensions in the space.
If you want to say, "There are only two clusters in gender space, so everyone outside of those two clusters just doesn't have a gender, and therefore there are only two genders," that's fine, but it's not what anyone actually means when they say, "There are only two genders." What people mean when they say that is that non-binary people don't exist, but this view accepts the existence of non-binary people.
Gender
1. A synonym for biological sex
2. Sex-based stereotypes, typical masculine or feminine traits or sex-based roles.
3. Which set of sex-based stereotypes you identify with, “the private experience of your gender role” as Kathleen Stock says. Basically, do you see yourself as a man, a woman, or neither?
So with definition 3. In mind - since that’s what you seem to be speaking about here - I’d say there are three genders: male, female, and indeterminate/neuter.