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Ethan's avatar

I’m a black gay guy and I can personally say that my life has been much better since reading this article

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Jay M's avatar

It's not clear how many of these objections are to be persuasive to those who accept the respective definitions (presumably, that's the point of the objections).

For example, consider your objections to the self-id view, i.e. "A woman is one who identifies as a woman". I don't think these are going to be persuasive to the trans-inclusive side, i.e. liberals.

Objection (3) can be avoided by defining identification as some kind of mental state, rather than outward behavior. In fact, I'm pretty sure this is what most trans-inclusive people take identification to consist in. In my experience, trans-inclusive people are going to be fine with (2) and (4). They happily take "being a woman" to be constituted by some kind of mental state that is vaguely described as identifying as a woman. Yes, you look like a man, but so did Dylan Mulvaney and (as far as I can tell), most people who are already trans-inclusive are willing to accept that Dylan Mulvaney was a woman the second they came out.

(1) is probably the biggest problem, but the definition can be slightly modified to avoid this objection without losing the spirit of view. For example, one could just say a woman is someone who identifies with some set of roles, expectations, stereotypes, etc. that are associated with adult human females within their culture. The details are unclear, but it seems that the spirit of this view is that being a woman supervenes on having the right kinds of mental states.

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On your objections to the biological view, i.e. "A woman is an adult human female". I don't think these are persuasive to the trans-exclusionary side, i.e. conservatives.

I don't see how (1) is persuasive at all. Conservatives who accept this definition will proudly admit that trans people who "pass" are still of the gender that aligns with their sex. I think conservatives will happily admit that men can look like women.

(2) and (4) are basically the same point, which is that many people will refer to trans people who pass in accordance with their preferred gender, and even conservatives will unintentionally do this sometimes even when they know the person is trans. I don't think these observations are persuasive evidence against the biological view. These observations are not unexpected even assuming the biological view is correct, for a few reasons: (a) trans people who pass appear like the opposite sex, and people tend to use terms based on their appearance, so it would be expected that people would refer to Blaire White as a "woman" even if "woman" was defined in terms of sex; and (b) for pragmatic reasons, people (including many conservatives) will refer to trans people based on their preferred pronouns, regardless of which definition of "woman" is correct. In fact, you yourself say "even if I were convinced that some transgender person was not a woman in a purely descriptive sense, I would use the pronouns that they would like me to use".

In fact, objections (1) and (4) can also both be levied against a biological definition of "female". You could say: "doesn't Blaire White seem like a female? The biological definition of "female" denies this, so it's implausible. Furthermore, most people would probably refer to Blaire White as "female" if they were at a bar". Do these observations provide good evidence that the biological definition of "female" is incorrect?

(3) isn't really relevant. As you say in your intro, "what a woman is is different from who we should treat as a woman for many practical purposes."

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Some points on your proposed definition.

You said most people wouldn't consider you a woman if you came out. But it's not clear to me that this is true. If you stated with strong and seemingly sincere conviction that you're a woman, I think the number of people that would consider you a woman would be only slightly lower than the number of people that consider Blaire White a woman. If you limit to the subset of people that genuinely believe Blaire White is a woman (who are aware that Blaire is trans), I think basically everyone in that subset is going to accept you as a woman unless you're obviously trolling or something. Again, I think you would be treated the same as Dylan Mulvaney, i.e. conservatives would mostly reject and liberals would mostly accept your new proposed gender identity.

Lastly, I don't think the fact that most philosophers agree with the social view of "woman" is strong evidence. Firstly, it's not clear that philosophers are relying on any empirical research to figure how people are using these terms. More importantly, we should discount our trust in expert agreement very significantly if the following conditions are met:

* The agreement is on a topic that is highly morally/politically contentious, as this is when cognitive biases become most powerful.

* It's not clear that the experts are employing a reliable methodology to establish truths.

* We (non-experts) lack a clear method for assessing the reliability of the experts.

* The experts almost universally align with one particular political orientation that would bias them towards a particular answer.

One interesting finding in the link you posted is that whether an expert is a capitalist predicts very highly whether one adopts the social or biological view on gender. For example, of the experts that accept capitalism, only 52% accept the social view (140/(140+127)). But, of experts that reject capitalism, 78% accept the social view (416/(416+119)). But there's no rational reason for one's views on such disparate topics to be correlated in this way. Thus, this is strong evidence that philosophers' views on either politics or gender (probably both) are driven significantly by some kind of general cognitive bias.

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In sum, I think the vast majority of people's concept of "woman" and "man" will be captured by either the biological view (i.e. for conservatives) or some variation of the self ID view (i.e. for liberals) (I'm guessing this is the psychological view mentioned in the philpapers survey? I'm not sure). And I don't think your objections are persuasive to those adhering to either view.

Also, one issue I have with your definition is that it doesn't clearly differentiate itself from the alternative definitions. E.g. someone endorsing the biological view could accept your definition but give all the weights to various markers for biological sex. Someone who endorses some form of the self ID view could give all the weights to various psychological traits. Presumably, your definition differs from the alternative definitions in that it provides different verdicts about particular cases. But until you provide more details about the traits and specify their weights, it's not clear how it produces different verdicts. For example, when considering the case of Buck Angel identifying as a woman, you said wouldn't consider Buck to be a woman. But, then you said someone with your definition could just "adjust the weights accordingly". If anyone could take your definition and adjust the weights as they please, then it's not clear that your definition provides better verdicts than the alternative definitions in those cases where you think the alternatives go wrong.

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