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.
>No one denies there is a masculine to feminine continuum of traits
I’ll deny it right now. Why would there be a continuum? A continuum implies that two properties A and B are connected by continual variance in some third property C, or are connected such that A = !B so that by becoming 0.6 A, an object becomes 0.4 B.
But this is not even remotely how gendered behaviors work. Firstly, they’re subjective. And they’re not subjective in the sense that you think this cube is 2 inches on a side and I think it’s 1.5, they’re subjective in the sense that I think a behavior is masculine and you think it’s feminine, while a third person believes it’s neither. And further, the perception of a behavior as masculine or feminine varies enormously with the context in which the situation occurs. A man who runs away from a raging forest fire is not necessarily unmanly, but if he does so while refusing to save his injured wife and leaving her to die alone in the flames it would be very unmanly.
None of this sounds like a continuum to me. Instead it sounds like a classification/territorialization problem, where it is a socially defined definition. Now, I don’t think this means the idea of genders is baseless because social phenomena exist to reify biological processes, and humans are composed of men and women. But obviously it’s more complicated than being a spectrum. Spectra are actually very simple ways of describing phenomena. Classification is really complicated.
There is a set S of traits which are generally considered masculine. There is a set S* of the opposite traits which are generally considtfeminine. A person who has all of the S traits is considered very masculine and a person who has all of the S* traits is considered very feminine. It's possible to have a mix of traits from both sets. That's the spectrum.
That’s not the definition of a spectrum though. Spectra are infinitely continuous by definition, which means for any two given persons who are not equally masculine, we should be able to posit a hypothetical person who is less masculine than one and more masculine than the other. But since there are a finite number of masculine traits S and feminine traits S*, the set is therefore not infinitely continuous and not a spectrum.
> They are claiming that there is such a thing as "gender identity"
Gender identity is about identifying with a particular part of the continuum. The fact that people do it is an observable phenomena.
> which is an inherent feature of a person and is distinct from both biological sex and personality traits.
"Inherent" is a bit of a loaded term, but yes, we can observe that people who are classified as having the same biological sex, nevertheless can identify with different parts of the continuum. Likewise for personality traits.
Why do people identify with different parts of the continuum (or not identify with any), is an interesting question and the answer is quite complicated and we haven't figured it out fully yet. It has a lot to do with chromosomes, hormones at different stages of development, neurodiversity, socialization and probably a bunch of other things and all kind of intersections between them.
No, it isn't about identifying with a particular part of the continuum. If it were, then there would be no difference between a feminine man and a “transwoman”.
Gender identity is alleged to be distinct from a person's masculine and feminine traits. A feminine man has feminine traits and is alleged to have a male gender identity. A “transwoman” may have feminine traits and is alleged to have a female gender identity.
> No, it isn't about identifying with a particular part of the continuum. If it were, then there would be no difference between a feminine man and a “transwoman”.
Your example exactly proves my point. Identification *is* the difference. Feminine man may have the same traits as a transwoman and yet not identify with them the same way a transwoman does.
> Gender identity is alleged to be distinct from a person's masculine and feminine traits. A feminine man has feminine traits and is alleged to have a male gender identity. A “transwoman” may have feminine traits and is alleged to have a female gender identity.
Well yes. And not just alledgedly - very observably so. We can find similarly feminine people, yet some of them identify with womanhood while others do not. I don't see what is so controversial about this obvious fact.
> There is no such thing as "gender" or "identification".
Okay. It seems we have a much deeper disagreement.
Forget about gender. Are you actually claiming that you've never seen a person who has identified with anything? Like with a sport team? Or a country? Or a hobby? Or a job?
Re (2) "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." This seems like it will end up making gender categories vague, similar to height (just as it can be vague whether Tom is tall, it might end up being vague whether he's a man). But that seems problematic. It certainly won't allow us to respect self-identification, which is a major motivation for revisionary gender concepts.
More tentative point: it also seems like this *might* make gender less important than people usually take it to be: if "man, "woman," etc. are just vague terms that broadly group together people with different degrees of masculine or feminine traits, then it's hard to see why it's worth getting all in a tizzy over them (consider: we don't think it's a major social faux paus to call a person "short" when they regard themselves as "tall"). This is particularly true if there are more than two of them: the more gender categories there are, then (assuming that all they do is label particular, presumably highly-specific degrees of trait-exemplification) the harder it gets to see why somebody should care about whether they are correctly identified. By contrast, on views where gender is a more fundamental binary property, it's easier (to me, at least) to see why it should be seen as important.
Re (3) "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." I don't see how this squares with your earlier point. If gender terms just group together people who have different degrees of masculine or feminine traits, then why shouldn't a person's gender change as they exemplify different traits?
> 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.
They are related and so its understandable, why one can mistakenly assume that they are the same. But as soon as you pay a bit closer attention to how humans are actually using these categories it becomes clear that they are quite distinct.
Consider asking parents whether their newborn/expected child is a boy or a girl. This is a pretty normal question kind of the first thing that people ask. I've also heard that USA even has a peculiar tradition of gender reveal parties, where this information is openly transmitted to friends and family and sometimes even to stragers.
But why is it normal? Suppose for a second, that the the question is indeed about the sex of the child: their chromosomes and genitals. Why on earth would people be asking that?! How is that their business whether my child has a penis or not? What kind of perverts are interested in genitals of babies?
Now notice, that actually when people are asking about whether the child is a boy or a girl, most of them are not thinking about genitals. They are thinking about a general vibe of boyhood or girlhood, whether to say that the boy is strong or that the girl is beautiful, how to mentally classify this person in their own mind, what category of cultural connotations to put them into. This process is mostly subconscious, but if you spend enough time reflecting on the way your mind works, you will notice how it's doing it.
Being a boy is associated with a color blue and being girl with color pink. This is a fact about our society that you might have noticed. Is it some logical implication from chromosomes? Of course not. It's a social convention. And so you can talk about it and study it, without even raising the topic of chromosomes. Therefore the distinction between sex and gender, just like any other distinction between social and biological.
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.
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”.
The way I see it, we have a vocabulary that talks about people, things and behaviours as either masculine or feminine, but no real third option (besides androgynous which is just the absence of both).
The Muxe seem to pretty clearly act and behave more feminine or according to female gender norms. We have no way of describing the Muxe or any other potential genders besides along the masculine\feminine dichotomy.
I can certainly envision a society that has certain behaviours and dress codes that are neither masculine, nor feminine but something unique entirely different but I've yet to see any examples.
The very concepts and masculine and feminine seem an intrinsic part of human psychology.
This factor is what makes me think there are currently only 2 genders in human society.
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.
Oh, my bad, I didn't realize you just wanted to declare all third genders don't count because the society they're in is insufficiently pro-gay for your tastes.
e: I mean, seriously, name a country that isn't a modern Western country, which is pro-gay enough that any hypothetical third genders they might have COULD be considered to count. Taiwan?
Did you miss the part about how in no case was the “third gender” a voluntary grouping? Those examples have literally nothing to do with the modern concept of gender.
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.
I didn't say anything in the article about being non-binary. It being possible to be non-binary is compatible with there being two genders-- a non-bindary person just isn't either.
What about non-binary people who still experience gender? Some people claim that they alternate between genders while others feel their gender is simultaneously masculine and feminine. In any cases the more important point here is that "male" and "female" don't represent individual points but clusters/ranges.
Sorry, accidentally posted this below, but it was meant as a reply to this comment:
I think being non-binary would be compatible with, and even very strongly suggest, the existence of a third gender. Consider these arguments, which I take to be analogous:
Argument 1:
Hypothesis: there are only two kinds of number - even and odd.
Counter-evidence: pi is neither even nor odd.
Therefore there are more than two kinds of number.
Argument 2:
Hypothesis: there are only two genders - male and female.
Counter-evidence: Person A is neither male nor female (they use the term non-binary to describe this).
Therefore there are more than two genders.
I think we shouldn't conclude that the term non-binary is the same as lacking a gender entirely. It's possible, for instance, that our non-binary person is some third gender that we simply haven't developed a word for.
(To return to our parallel with numbers: the existence of irrationals like pi doesn't lead us to say that irrationals are not numbers - rather, we expand our concept of numbers to incorporate them. Note also the parallel between the description 'irrational' (i.e. not a rational number) and 'non-binary' (i.e. not one of the binary genders). I don't tend to see many people complaining about needing a constructive list of all the possible kinds of irrational number in order to accept the existence of irrational numbers, and I'm likewise not convinced we should complain about needing a constructive list of all the different kinds of non-binary gender in order to accept the existence of non-binary people.)
Notice also the possibility that a non-binary person could constitute a singleton set re. gender.
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 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”.
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.
But should we necessarily treat people how they want to be treated? If a male wants to be treated as a woman then in some circumstances that may be perfectly reasonable, but say that male has committed a crime and receives a custodial sentence. Should they be housed in a women’s prison?
My hyperbolic example of an unreasonable request of "how I want to be treated" (escorted by a crowd of doting "fans") was meant to address that there is some limit, certainly.
As to your example, I think that circumstance is reasonable to prevent. But I will also mention that there will be many contentious cases where, in the name of protecting some "generalized" person, the law of the land will find arbitrary footing and still be better than the alternative of not being addressed in the law. For example, "legal adulthood" at whatever age is going to be somewhat arbitrary, but it must be done to protect children more generally, even though the practical result can mean a major shift in culpability depending on which side of a birthday you fall.
So I do think it is worth supporting the default of treating others how they want to be treated, and making sure we have good reason to do otherwise, even if they aren't perfect.
Love how this post - THIS post - gets so many backs up. You say many 'controversial' things, but you can't beat this issue as a véritable minefield to die in. I personally admire that.
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.
> There are *zero* genders, because “gender” is not a categorization. Again, it’s a concept.
This doesn't make any sense. "Categorization" and "concept" aren't mutually exclusive. Gender is certainly a categorization - we categorize people by it all the time. And saying there are zero genders doesn't follow from, "Gender is a concept," and it's not clear what you mean by that anyway. Obviously there are at least two - male and female.
> Non-binary and intersex have nothing to do with each other.
They do if you consider gender and biological sex to be the same thing, which is the point I was making.
That's not circular, that's just a description of how concept spaces work. If I told you that personality can be described as a multidimensional space of traits, and you said, "But that would mean that being tall is a personality trait," this would obviously be a nonsensical objection because only traits related to personality are in personality-space. That wouldn't imply that there's no non-circular way to define which traits are personality traits and which traits are not.
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.
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.
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).
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
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.)
They won the memetic competition because they are deeply reflective of biological differentiation. You would need a level is social differentiation as deep as biological sex to ground a comparable third gender. (Insert joke about memes and the Baldwin effect.)
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.
>No one denies there is a masculine to feminine continuum of traits
I’ll deny it right now. Why would there be a continuum? A continuum implies that two properties A and B are connected by continual variance in some third property C, or are connected such that A = !B so that by becoming 0.6 A, an object becomes 0.4 B.
But this is not even remotely how gendered behaviors work. Firstly, they’re subjective. And they’re not subjective in the sense that you think this cube is 2 inches on a side and I think it’s 1.5, they’re subjective in the sense that I think a behavior is masculine and you think it’s feminine, while a third person believes it’s neither. And further, the perception of a behavior as masculine or feminine varies enormously with the context in which the situation occurs. A man who runs away from a raging forest fire is not necessarily unmanly, but if he does so while refusing to save his injured wife and leaving her to die alone in the flames it would be very unmanly.
None of this sounds like a continuum to me. Instead it sounds like a classification/territorialization problem, where it is a socially defined definition. Now, I don’t think this means the idea of genders is baseless because social phenomena exist to reify biological processes, and humans are composed of men and women. But obviously it’s more complicated than being a spectrum. Spectra are actually very simple ways of describing phenomena. Classification is really complicated.
There is a set S of traits which are generally considered masculine. There is a set S* of the opposite traits which are generally considtfeminine. A person who has all of the S traits is considered very masculine and a person who has all of the S* traits is considered very feminine. It's possible to have a mix of traits from both sets. That's the spectrum.
That’s not the definition of a spectrum though. Spectra are infinitely continuous by definition, which means for any two given persons who are not equally masculine, we should be able to posit a hypothetical person who is less masculine than one and more masculine than the other. But since there are a finite number of masculine traits S and feminine traits S*, the set is therefore not infinitely continuous and not a spectrum.
> They are claiming that there is such a thing as "gender identity"
Gender identity is about identifying with a particular part of the continuum. The fact that people do it is an observable phenomena.
> which is an inherent feature of a person and is distinct from both biological sex and personality traits.
"Inherent" is a bit of a loaded term, but yes, we can observe that people who are classified as having the same biological sex, nevertheless can identify with different parts of the continuum. Likewise for personality traits.
Why do people identify with different parts of the continuum (or not identify with any), is an interesting question and the answer is quite complicated and we haven't figured it out fully yet. It has a lot to do with chromosomes, hormones at different stages of development, neurodiversity, socialization and probably a bunch of other things and all kind of intersections between them.
No, it isn't about identifying with a particular part of the continuum. If it were, then there would be no difference between a feminine man and a “transwoman”.
Gender identity is alleged to be distinct from a person's masculine and feminine traits. A feminine man has feminine traits and is alleged to have a male gender identity. A “transwoman” may have feminine traits and is alleged to have a female gender identity.
”
> No, it isn't about identifying with a particular part of the continuum. If it were, then there would be no difference between a feminine man and a “transwoman”.
Your example exactly proves my point. Identification *is* the difference. Feminine man may have the same traits as a transwoman and yet not identify with them the same way a transwoman does.
> Gender identity is alleged to be distinct from a person's masculine and feminine traits. A feminine man has feminine traits and is alleged to have a male gender identity. A “transwoman” may have feminine traits and is alleged to have a female gender identity.
Well yes. And not just alledgedly - very observably so. We can find similarly feminine people, yet some of them identify with womanhood while others do not. I don't see what is so controversial about this obvious fact.
You've just substituted the verb "to identify" for the noun "gender."
There is no such thing as "gender" or "identification".
> There is no such thing as "gender" or "identification".
Okay. It seems we have a much deeper disagreement.
Forget about gender. Are you actually claiming that you've never seen a person who has identified with anything? Like with a sport team? Or a country? Or a hobby? Or a job?
Re (2) "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." This seems like it will end up making gender categories vague, similar to height (just as it can be vague whether Tom is tall, it might end up being vague whether he's a man). But that seems problematic. It certainly won't allow us to respect self-identification, which is a major motivation for revisionary gender concepts.
More tentative point: it also seems like this *might* make gender less important than people usually take it to be: if "man, "woman," etc. are just vague terms that broadly group together people with different degrees of masculine or feminine traits, then it's hard to see why it's worth getting all in a tizzy over them (consider: we don't think it's a major social faux paus to call a person "short" when they regard themselves as "tall"). This is particularly true if there are more than two of them: the more gender categories there are, then (assuming that all they do is label particular, presumably highly-specific degrees of trait-exemplification) the harder it gets to see why somebody should care about whether they are correctly identified. By contrast, on views where gender is a more fundamental binary property, it's easier (to me, at least) to see why it should be seen as important.
Re (3) "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." I don't see how this squares with your earlier point. If gender terms just group together people who have different degrees of masculine or feminine traits, then why shouldn't a person's gender change as they exemplify different traits?
> 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.
They are related and so its understandable, why one can mistakenly assume that they are the same. But as soon as you pay a bit closer attention to how humans are actually using these categories it becomes clear that they are quite distinct.
Consider asking parents whether their newborn/expected child is a boy or a girl. This is a pretty normal question kind of the first thing that people ask. I've also heard that USA even has a peculiar tradition of gender reveal parties, where this information is openly transmitted to friends and family and sometimes even to stragers.
But why is it normal? Suppose for a second, that the the question is indeed about the sex of the child: their chromosomes and genitals. Why on earth would people be asking that?! How is that their business whether my child has a penis or not? What kind of perverts are interested in genitals of babies?
Now notice, that actually when people are asking about whether the child is a boy or a girl, most of them are not thinking about genitals. They are thinking about a general vibe of boyhood or girlhood, whether to say that the boy is strong or that the girl is beautiful, how to mentally classify this person in their own mind, what category of cultural connotations to put them into. This process is mostly subconscious, but if you spend enough time reflecting on the way your mind works, you will notice how it's doing it.
Being a boy is associated with a color blue and being girl with color pink. This is a fact about our society that you might have noticed. Is it some logical implication from chromosomes? Of course not. It's a social convention. And so you can talk about it and study it, without even raising the topic of chromosomes. Therefore the distinction between sex and gender, just like any other distinction between social and biological.
> What kind of perverts are interested in genitals of babies?
And the worst argument in the world makes an appearance!
No u
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.
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”.
The way I see it, we have a vocabulary that talks about people, things and behaviours as either masculine or feminine, but no real third option (besides androgynous which is just the absence of both).
The Muxe seem to pretty clearly act and behave more feminine or according to female gender norms. We have no way of describing the Muxe or any other potential genders besides along the masculine\feminine dichotomy.
I can certainly envision a society that has certain behaviours and dress codes that are neither masculine, nor feminine but something unique entirely different but I've yet to see any examples.
The very concepts and masculine and feminine seem an intrinsic part of human psychology.
This factor is what makes me think there are currently only 2 genders in human society.
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.
Oh, my bad, I didn't realize you just wanted to declare all third genders don't count because the society they're in is insufficiently pro-gay for your tastes.
e: I mean, seriously, name a country that isn't a modern Western country, which is pro-gay enough that any hypothetical third genders they might have COULD be considered to count. Taiwan?
Did you miss the part about how in no case was the “third gender” a voluntary grouping? Those examples have literally nothing to do with the modern concept of gender.
I'm not sure what you mean by "voluntary grouping." Are kathoeys in Thailand hit over the head with a brick and then forced to get boobjobs?
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.
I didn't say anything in the article about being non-binary. It being possible to be non-binary is compatible with there being two genders-- a non-bindary person just isn't either.
What about non-binary people who still experience gender? Some people claim that they alternate between genders while others feel their gender is simultaneously masculine and feminine. In any cases the more important point here is that "male" and "female" don't represent individual points but clusters/ranges.
Sorry, accidentally posted this below, but it was meant as a reply to this comment:
I think being non-binary would be compatible with, and even very strongly suggest, the existence of a third gender. Consider these arguments, which I take to be analogous:
Argument 1:
Hypothesis: there are only two kinds of number - even and odd.
Counter-evidence: pi is neither even nor odd.
Therefore there are more than two kinds of number.
Argument 2:
Hypothesis: there are only two genders - male and female.
Counter-evidence: Person A is neither male nor female (they use the term non-binary to describe this).
Therefore there are more than two genders.
I think we shouldn't conclude that the term non-binary is the same as lacking a gender entirely. It's possible, for instance, that our non-binary person is some third gender that we simply haven't developed a word for.
(To return to our parallel with numbers: the existence of irrationals like pi doesn't lead us to say that irrationals are not numbers - rather, we expand our concept of numbers to incorporate them. Note also the parallel between the description 'irrational' (i.e. not a rational number) and 'non-binary' (i.e. not one of the binary genders). I don't tend to see many people complaining about needing a constructive list of all the possible kinds of irrational number in order to accept the existence of irrational numbers, and I'm likewise not convinced we should complain about needing a constructive list of all the different kinds of non-binary gender in order to accept the existence of non-binary people.)
Notice also the possibility that a non-binary person could constitute a singleton set re. gender.
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 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”.
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
This comment section is like an insane asylum.
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.
But should we necessarily treat people how they want to be treated? If a male wants to be treated as a woman then in some circumstances that may be perfectly reasonable, but say that male has committed a crime and receives a custodial sentence. Should they be housed in a women’s prison?
My hyperbolic example of an unreasonable request of "how I want to be treated" (escorted by a crowd of doting "fans") was meant to address that there is some limit, certainly.
As to your example, I think that circumstance is reasonable to prevent. But I will also mention that there will be many contentious cases where, in the name of protecting some "generalized" person, the law of the land will find arbitrary footing and still be better than the alternative of not being addressed in the law. For example, "legal adulthood" at whatever age is going to be somewhat arbitrary, but it must be done to protect children more generally, even though the practical result can mean a major shift in culpability depending on which side of a birthday you fall.
So I do think it is worth supporting the default of treating others how they want to be treated, and making sure we have good reason to do otherwise, even if they aren't perfect.
Love how this post - THIS post - gets so many backs up. You say many 'controversial' things, but you can't beat this issue as a véritable minefield to die in. I personally admire that.
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.
There are *zero* genders, because “gender” is not a categorization. Again, it’s a concept.
Non-binary and intersex have nothing to do with each other.
> There are *zero* genders, because “gender” is not a categorization. Again, it’s a concept.
This doesn't make any sense. "Categorization" and "concept" aren't mutually exclusive. Gender is certainly a categorization - we categorize people by it all the time. And saying there are zero genders doesn't follow from, "Gender is a concept," and it's not clear what you mean by that anyway. Obviously there are at least two - male and female.
> Non-binary and intersex have nothing to do with each other.
They do if you consider gender and biological sex to be the same thing, which is the point I was making.
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.
That’s circular.
That's not circular, that's just a description of how concept spaces work. If I told you that personality can be described as a multidimensional space of traits, and you said, "But that would mean that being tall is a personality trait," this would obviously be a nonsensical objection because only traits related to personality are in personality-space. That wouldn't imply that there's no non-circular way to define which traits are personality traits and which traits are not.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.)
They won the memetic competition because they are deeply reflective of biological differentiation. You would need a level is social differentiation as deep as biological sex to ground a comparable third gender. (Insert joke about memes and the Baldwin effect.)
There are only two biological sexes. ‘Gender roles’ are another matter and differ by culture and societal material and historical circumstances.
We should just stop using the word gender to discuss these topics.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OQUk4vgOtU0